The Cost Of Offshoring

An important article came out while I was on my blog vacation this summer and I want to go back for a minute and draw some attention to it. It's a topic near to my heart.

I have become increasingly frustrated with the way we measure our economy. The extreme neoliberal economic policies of the last few decades have injected so many variables into our economic equations that the old formulas no longer compute. We need to integrate those variables into a new set of metrics to get an idea of what's really going on. We've been sailing along with a false sense of confidence, like the captain of a ship who doesn't realize his compass is broken. One can't help but feel sorry for the hapless crew who, laboring away day after day, assume the captain knows where he's going... until they all end up adrift somewhere unpleasant.

It's not that I have something against prosperity (hellooooooo, I'm a hard working consumer who likes to consume) but I do have an interest in making sure that the prosperity is real and sustaining to me. At this point I have a pretty strong opinion that it's not.

Anyone who's ever wondered why wages are depressed while unemployment is at a historic low, or who can't understand why the market is raging while job growth sags, or questions why GDP keeps increasing while we're gutting manufacturing, knows what I'm talking about.