Alan Blinder's Will Your Job Be Exported?

“Will Your Job Be Exported?” Summary As a professor of economics at Princeton University, Alan S. Blinder has had many publicized writings, including several books and textbooks, as well as, various newspaper and magazine columns. In recent years, Blinder has become known for his writings on the topic of “offshoring” (441). In his article titled, “Will Your Job Be Exported?”, he discusses this topic of offshoring and how it could vastly affect the future of America. Blinder begins his argument by describing how the labor market has changed over the past few decades. Today, a college degree is something that is considered necessary for getting a good and well-paying job. In contrast, thirty years ago, many jobs were filled with high school graduates or even high school dropouts. Blinder states that this shift is thought to be a main cause of income inequality, which means that now, the lower skilled and uneducated workers face a big disadvantage (441). During
Blinder gives three reasons to support the claim that eventually, the amount of service jobs offshored will surpass that of manufacturing jobs. The first reason is that there are simply more service jobs to be moved than manufacturing jobs. Secondly, the technology required to make service job offshoring possible will continue to advance, and finally, the number of foreign workers that are capable of working these jobs will most definitely grow. At this point, the only jobs that have been offshored are manufacturing jobs and low end service jobs, but looking into the future, it is easy to see how many other service jobs could be offshored. One example that Blinder gives, is that computer code can be written in a different country and easily emailed back to the United States