India: ìHey! Iím insourcing here! Iím insourcing here!

ìLow-Tech or High, Jobs Are Scarce in Indiaís Boom,î by Amy Waldman, New York Times, 6 May, p. A3.

Article is big misleading: itís not that Indiaís boom isnít creating jobs, itís just that the number of young people entering the work force every year is just so darn huge that itís never enoughóthat with an economy growing at 10 percent.

Whatís the big culprit if the software and service-call industries are booming? Simply put, the government isnít employing people like they used to. That push to privatize is what attracts the foreign direct investment, but once you go down that road, you just canít stop, you have to keep attracting more and more in order to create jobs for all those people the government is no longer willing toóin effectóunderemploy, meaning they hire them but hardly have them do any work.

That was one thing I noticed a lot of in India. It reminded me of growing up in my small hometown in Boscobel: obvious situations where companies hired more people than they needed, paid them all below standard wages, and then never seemed to have enough work for them, so a lot of standing around resulted. Still, to have a job was to have a job.

My point in citing this article is this: donít expect India to get any less aggressive about working to insource more jobs from the Old Core economies anytime soonóChina either. The numbers of new jobs each needs to create is stunning. So American workers better plan on ìmoving on upî the production ladder, because there are plenty of Indians and Chinese scrambling up the ladder behind us.