At 02:05 10/08/96 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote:

At 12:15 PM 8/10/96, Scottauge@aol.com wrote:

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I was watched CBS reports a couple nights ago about how all these blue collar and now white collar jobs are going across seas.

Where do I begin? First, what does "taking jobs away from us" mean? That we own these jobs? And who is "us"?

Well said. While I didn't see the CBS program , I bet the scaremongerers did not point out that programmers don't just produce software, they are major consumers as well. The growth of the software industry in other countries therefore means business for US industry, which produces most of the compilers and other utilities that programmers everywhere use. This clearly helps programmers in the US.

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So a possible way to protect jobs is to protect the knowledge on how to do them.

To some extent this happens automatically -- for instance, if you live in the Silicon valley, your knowledge levels are higher on account of higher frequency of user meets, conferences, etc. But, to the extent you use the Internet as an information source, it is available internationally. So you cannot have it both ways: use an open forum like the Internet, and hope to keep knowledge bottled in. In earlier generations of computing, monopolistic organizations such as IBM and DEC charged huge sums for information. One of the reasons that IBM was thrown out of India in the mid seventies was their practice of shipping only outdated computers from the US to India. Indian programmers were at a disadvantage, and clearly could not charge as much as American ones. But the openness of MS-DOS and UNIX changed all that, a trend that has only been strengthened by the Internet. While jobs could easily move overseas, the developing world may not be able to absorb them. To start with, such migration assumes the availability of excellent telecom facilities. These are severely lacking in most developing countries, which have about 75% of the world's population and 16% of its product, but only 12% of the total number of telephone main lines. These too are mostly in cities. While the World Bank's 1988 figures indicate that in industrialized countries, major cities have a 20-30% higher telephone density than do other areas, in a country like Ethiopia, cities have a density of about 14 times the national average. In other words, most people in developing countries have practically no access to telecom facilities. In addition, the quality of the facilities, typically provided by state-owned monopolies, is often abysmal. While low-earth orbit satellite projects such as Iridium, Odyssey, Teledisc and Globalstar threaten to change all this, little impact will be felt until the end of the decade. In any case, telecom facilities in the industrialized countries will most likely continue to be considerably superior, providing workers there with an ongoing competitive advantage. Further, as economists such as Paul Krugman point out, developing countries lack the means for sustained growth ("Which Asian Model?", Newsweek, November 20, 1995). Those economies that have shown dramatic growth, such as the East Asian, have relied essentially on low-cost inputs, rather than on their efficient utilization. Professor Alwyn Young of Boston has in fact come to the surprising conclusion that Singapore's total factor productivity (which measures such efficiency) is so poor as to be comparable to that of the Soviet Union. He points out that "at just the time that everybody was ranting about how magnificent Japan was, it ceased to catch up." Cheap inputs is not a long-term phenomenon, as companies looking for good programmers in India are increasingly discovering. Programmer salaries in India are rapidly rising. While many youngsters are keen to become programmers, India lacks adequate training facilities. Today, teachers receive poor pay, even by Indian standards. Educational institutions are hardly going to be able to raise salaries of software teachers alone, while raising them for everybody will be impossible. Consequently, there is going to be little incentive for good programmers to become teachers, and the educational institutions will continue to churn out large numbers of poorly trained students. It is suggested that universities in industrialized countries could use the Internet to teach students in developing countries, but the efficacy of this model has yet to be proven. Also, a very small percentage of Indians are fluent in English, and from it come the senior bureaucrats, managers for the private sector, the military, newspapers, educational institutions -- in short, all the important posts of the country. Unless there is to be a severe disruption of the nation's activities, not too many can be diverted to cater to export.

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Perhaps there is a larger picture in the world that the cyperpunks mailing list is missing. That cryptography is not just for personal privacy, but could involve job security also - as a matter of fact, the income base for this whole country.

I'd argue the opposite: I see no reason why companies such as Netscape have to put up with such draconian US laws as ITAR: why don't they simply develop their software overseas? If they made a highly publicised move, that might do wonders to change the opinions of US Congresspersons voting on ITAR-related legislation. My prediction is that with the blessings of the Internet, the next generation of multiracial programmers, even those that were born in the USA, will be more likely to be found on the beaches of tropical islands than in the fog of San Francisco. When you can work in the shade of a palm tree, even if you should earn less, it's worth it :-) Arun Mehta Phone +91-11-6841172, 6849103 amehta@cpsr.org http://www.cerfnet.com/~amehta/ finger amehta@cerfnet.com for public key