Princetom Professor Alan Blinder discusses outsourcing



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Mr. Alan Blinder is a big free-trade proponent. He is perhaps rethinking his position, partly because free-trade could see the eventual outsourcing of some 40 million American jobs. I just want to emphasize that, because it is so many. Blinder is professor of economics in Princeton University and former vice-chair of the Federal Reserve.

Professor Blinder, it’s an honor to have you with us. Thank you very much.

Pleasure.

I, I was reading, uh, the story the WallStreet Journal wrote about you this morning. And that number is, is truly what made our jaws drop here at CNBC, ah, that 40 million American jobs could be outsourced. As a percentage of the current number of American job, that is 25 percent of American jobs.

Right,more. Could I just clarify that one moment?

Yes, please.

The 40 million is an outside estimate of the number of jobs that might conceivably be threatened by competition from abroad, so potentially offshorable.

So all like either send us off shore or lost? (Not in yet, not.)

Yep, but well, that would come into competition with foreign labor. But that not all of those would go off shore. For example, think about the tax on the automobile and steel industries now in America. All of those workers are in competition, fierce competition with foreign workers. But a lot of those jobs are still here in the United States.

Alright, so we are getting, you may lose your job or down with pressure on wages, benefits the whole process.

Yes, exactly.

So, so where did you see this ,this being focused? This job loss or, or wage decrease that Americans are going to find.

Yeah. I think the interesting part of it is that if you look back in the, in past history, it’s been concentrated of course in manufacturing industries like those that I just mentioned, but I think as you look forward, one of the dominant forces, if not the dominant forces, it’s gonna be the electronic delivery of services, including upper-end services, computer programming, manuscript editing, science, accounting, all kinds of things like that that can come from foreign countries and be delivered over the internet or by telephone or other electronic ways.

Alright, I, I, we have invited Jaqdish Bhaqwadi. I know you know him very well on the program. Unfortunately, he, he was unable to join us, but he was quoted in the Wallstreet Journal today as saying this about your estimates.

I saw.

I know, right, so you’re chackling. Here’s we said, if we do a real balance sheet, I have no doubt that we are creating far more jobs than we are losing.

I am, first of all, very dubious if that’s the case now, although as just, uh, your statement suggests we don’t have any good datas, so we do gain some jobs from this process as we do lose some. My guess is the balance is negative now, but I am not so sure about that. But what I am trying to call attention to is what’s likely to happen as the technology includes all for the next ten years, twenty years.

You are talking about the future.

I am.

And he is talking about the present. Alright, I hear you want * now. But does this change what is considered the Bible of the economics and that is, tariffs are a bad thing, subsidies are a bad thing. Does that change any of that? Should we be putting trade protections in place to protect American jobs?

I don’t believe so. Now I don’t think it changes that aspect to that Bible at all. Does a bad chapter of the Bible that often gets ignored, which is that trade creates winners and losers and the proper functioning government ought to do something to help the losers.

How do we do that? How do we, how do we solve this problem of losing 40 million jobs, a quarter of the workforce, whether we lose them, we have wages fall. I mean that would cause a revolution. That happen.

Potentially, that is why I am calling attention to it, also the answer to your question, none of which are great. I don’ think we have any fabulous answers to this or things that can prove the social safety net. We have something called trade adjustment systems. These programs are very small, not so good. They don’t function that well. A lot of people don’t know about them. Beyond that, we have the broader social safety net of unemployment insurance. There are some new promising ideas like wage-lost insurance for those cases that you were just deluding to of people that, ah, lose in their wage evidence, uh, lose their jobs. portability of healthcare, portability of pensions, earning context credit, a whole bunch of things like that that we could do better in the United States than we do.

Alright, Professor Blinder thanks very much for joining us.

You’re most welcome.

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