So the collapse of the Soviet Union began the arbitrage of of labor,
and it ended up separating Americans from the production of the goods and
services that they consume. The economy
has been dead in the water ever since, and the Federal Reserve under Alan
Greenspan tried to substitute - for the missing growth in consumer income in
employment - consumer indebtedness. So
we had the rise in consumer indebtedness, the real estate bubble, the various
financial frauds, and the ongoing financial crisis.
Rob Kall: You also said about this being caused by the
high speed internet. How's that tie in?
Paul Craig
Roberts: Right. That's what I'm getting to now.
Rob Kall: OK.
Paul Craig
Roberts: The manufacturing goods were
produced offshore and sent in. Now. What the high speed internet allowed the
corporations to do was to offshore the production of professional services,
such as software engineering, information technology; and now, of course,
research, design. They could hire people
in India to do this work, and they could send it in on the high speed internet,
and so we have seen the employment for Americans in rapidly growing fields such
as software engineering and information technology simply dry up. The work is now done offshore and sent in on
the internet. So the consequence of
Soviet collapse was to destroy American manufacturing jobs, and to destroy
professional service jobs that had always been the ladder of upward mobility
for American university graduates.
Rob Kall: Now I've got to say, when I talk to kids
going to college, I say "Don't look for a job that can be outsourced by the
internet." Even radiologists are being
outsourced.; so if you get an x-ray, they send the results to India to have a
radiologist in India do it instead of an American doctor doing it. It's so
scary.
Paul Craig
Roberts: Yep.
Rob Kall: You wrote in your article When Truth Is
Suppressed, Countries Die - the first half of the article is mostly about
this topic, about how theorists were saying that we would be transitioning to
an information economy, and did the creative approaches and what have you, and
what you argued was that you've got to have production; you have to have
manufacturing, or if you lose that, you're in big trouble. I wanted your comment, and I just think that
it also ties into the space program, which both parties are just throwing away
and selling off and getting rid of now, and letting India and China and every
other country pick up on.
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