The demagogues and faculty who shit on outsourcing to India!

The title of the post conveys my sentiments, right?  I am ticked off!
I will stop right here before I display my fluency with colorful vocabulary!!!

I will add this much: There were two triggers for this post.  One, I heard a faculty colleague ask another, "do you really want the corporations to outsource everything?"  And then, this meme that was shared on Facebook by a friend:

The following is my op-ed that was published four years ago in The Register-Guard, August 13, 2012, during the previous presidential election cycle:

The sudden populism over outsourcing reminds me of a Chinese saying that I recently came across: “If we don’t change the direction in which we are headed, we will end up where we are going.”

Twelve years ago, when I taught at California State University, Bakersfield, I assigned a class of about 35 students the task of figuring out, through rough calculations, whether Bakersfield could compete against Bangalore, India, when it came to call centers that the local leaders were pursuing as a growth strategy.

At that time, outsourcing hadn’t entered the everyday political and cultural vocabulary, and Bangalore was unknown to most in the United States — after all, Thomas Friedman had yet to publicize these through his best-seller, “The World is Flat.”

Working in teams, the students independently arrived at the same conclusion: Bangalore will beat Bakersfield any day! My hope was that most of the class would have understood through this exercise how their economic futures could become increasingly dependent on developments in other parts of the world.

Well, we have now almost ended up where we were going — economic activities that might have generated many middle income jobs in the past have migrated to other countries that are equally, or more, interested in their development. Therefore, unemployment rates in the United States do not seem to be coming down despite all our attempts. And, yes, “outsourcing” is now a part of our lexicon and for which politicians have suddenly developed a fondness.

Yet we are not talking about outsourcing in a constructive manner. Outsourcing is being used to portray China or India as bad actors, when, in reality, they are far from any real competition to us. The average Indian earns barely 5 percent of the per capita income here in the United States. The average Chinese is in a much better position than the average Indian, but the per capita income there is only a tenth of that in the United States.

India and China are not our competitors, but they are much poorer countries where people are eager to improve their economic conditions.

Outsourcing economic activities to India or China, or any number of other countries, has made possible goods and services at remarkably low prices. From T-shirts to smart phones to customer support, we would have to pay a lot more than we currently do if there were no outsourcing at all.

It is not China’s or India’s problem that we failed to change our own direction over the years when we enjoyed the abundance of goods and services at affordable prices. Obsessed by the Internet bubble, the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and the wars that followed, and then the housing bubble, we continued to keep going without even attempting to alter our course, seemingly oblivious to how the economic structures all around the world were rapidly changing.

Should we then be surprised that it has become extremely difficult to generate gainful employment that will keep alive the American Dream for the middle class?

Outsourcing enters our public discourse only when it conveniently fits into political calculations. Sens. John Kerry and John Edwards angled for votes by referring to outsourcing and offshoring when they were on the Democratic ticket for the White House in 2004. Now, both President Obama and Mitt Romney are talking about it, but for all the wrong reasons that don’t seem to reflect in any way the Harvard credentials they both have.

Obama beats up on outsourcing in order to imply that the Chinese and Indians are taking away “our” jobs, which is a highly screwed-up interpretation. And Romney doesn’t seem to recognize that outsourcing and the globalization of the economy have not translated to real economic betterment for the middle class.

Since the Great Recession, I have increased the intensity with which I try to make students understand that any job that can be sent to a different country will be sent, and that any job that can be automated will be automated. Unfortunately, a captive audience does not always mean an attentive audience.

I suppose we seem to be bent on making sure we will end up where we are going.

The endangered conservative professors on American campuses

To the campus faculty, at least in the hallway in the building where my office is, there is only one presidential candidate who matters, and who can change the country--and, thereby the world--for the better: Bernie Sanders.

So much that the prevailing sentiment seems to be, well, let me put it this way: if you don't feel the Bern, then you are an idiot.  I don't feel the Bern, which means ... ;)

The other day, one of the Bernies told me that if Sanders doesn't win the nomination then he would even skip voting for a presidential candidate.  "Even if that means Trump wins?" I asked the colleague.  Such is the Bernie fever on campus.

Even a casual reader of this blog, leave alone this guy who has racked up quite a few frequent-commenter bonus points, knows from my posts that my campus, like most higher education institutions, is loaded with way-left-of-center faculty.  So ideological is the tilt, so out there to the left, that an independent thinking person that I am have been forced off the conversations and told to shut up.  Apparently my "input and perspectives" are met with "disdain."  And I am not even a right-wing conservative!

Given such an ethos, I am even surprised anymore when commentators bother to write about the lack of diversity of thought in higher education.  It is, after all, old, old, old, stale news.  But, they write and I, too, blog about it!

In that liberal rag, the New York Times, the liberal columnist, Nicholas Kristof--an Oregon native--complains about the lack of diversity:

Conservatives can be spotted in the sciences and in economics, but they are virtually an endangered species in fields like anthropology, sociology, history and literature. One study found that only 2 percent of English professors are Republicans (although a large share are independents).
In contrast, some 18 percent of social scientists say they are Marxist. So it’s easier to find a Marxist in some disciplines than a Republican.

Of course it is far too easy to find Marxists and Socialists among faculty.  Heck, we have two who even contested in elections as socialists!  A Republican social scientist is an endangered species.  For that matter, even the likes of the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan might be persona non grata at campuses like mine because they won't be liberal enough!

It is not only the politics, but also the closely related religious beliefs:

The discrimination becomes worse if the applicant is an evangelical Christian. According to Yancey’s study, 59 percent of anthropologists and 53 percent of English professors would be less likely to hire someone they found out was an evangelical.
“Of course there are biases against evangelicals on campuses,” notes Jonathan L. Walton, the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard. Walton, a black evangelical, adds that the condescension toward evangelicals echoes the patronizing attitude toward racial minorities: “The same arguments I hear people make about evangelicals sound so familiar to the ways people often describe folk of color, i.e. politically unsophisticated, lacking education, angry, bitter, emotional, poor.”

Over the years, I have had plenty of conservative and religious students work closely with me, confide their angsts with me, even though they know well that I am an atheist and who is largely left-of-center on many issues.  Because, I do not treat them as "politically unsophisticated, lacking education, angry, bitter, emotional, poor" and instead give them the same professional treatment that I give anybody else.  

Kristof concludes with:

Universities should be a hubbub of the full range of political perspectives from A to Z, not just from V to Z. So maybe we progressives could take a brief break from attacking the other side and more broadly incorporate values that we supposedly cherish — like diversity — in our own dominions.

Dream on!  This will never, ever happen.