Prometheus 6   

Editorial Run

White Collar Blues
Government and the rich win and educated workers lose when jobs go offshore
By David Friedman, David Friedman, a contributing editor to Opinion, is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation.

News that major U.S. technology companies, among them IBM, plan to export thousands of high-skill jobs overseas indicates that worrisome trends in the U.S. economy will probably strengthen. Optimists contend that such "workforce flexibility" guarantees that something new — the Internet, biotechnology — will turn up to create similar high-paying jobs and carry the economy forward. But rather than triggering real economic development, moving white-collar jobs offshore underscores how reliant the U.S. economy has become on inflating high-end wealth and paper assets to compensate for large-scale job losses. If this pattern holds, the next boom may quickly mutate into another unsustainable bubble, further limiting America's industrial options.

America's habit of revenge
(By James Carroll)

''ALTHOUGH THE WAR did not make any immediate demands on me physically, while it lasted it put a complete stop to my artistic activity because it forced me into an agonizing reappraisal of my fundamental assumptions.'' These words were spoken by Thomas Mann in his Nobel laureate speech in 1929, a reflection of the broad psychological rupture inflicted on the European mind by World War I. But just as war can lead to the ''reappraisal of fundamental assumptions,'' it can do the opposite, reinforcing assumptions to the point of shutting down debate. That seems a more American story.

Everything Is Political
By PAUL KRUGMAN
The erosion of the Treasury's intellectual integrity is exemplified by its denial and deception on the subject of tax cuts.

Cartoons


Tom Toles (you know, I'm getting sick of him being on point every day) on critical research by Big Pharma.
Steve Sack on the engine that drives the US Economy.

posted by Prometheus 6 at 8/5/2003 08:24:23 AM |