More offshoring pros

Another contrarian voice in the debate over shipping tech jobs overseas belongs to economist Catherine L. Mann, whose views are explored at length by Virginia Postrel for the New York Times.

Mann cites parallels between the current controversy and the 1980s hand-wringing over foreign manufacturers breaking into the memory chip market, undercutting U.S. companies. Back then, Postel notes, the conventional wisdom was that it spelled doom for the U.S. electronics industry.

The dire predictions were wrong. American semiconductor makers shifted to higher-value microprocessors. Computer companies bought commodity memory chips and other components, from keyboards to disk drives, abroad. Businesses and consumers enjoyed cheaper and cheaper prices.

Far from an economic disaster, the result was a productivity boom. As global manufacturing helped to reduce the price of information technology sharply, all sorts of businesses, from banks to retailers, found new, more productive ways to use the technology.

Mann posits that shifting software work overseas would lower costs and make advanced technology available to more domestic businesses, too:

By building the components for new integrated software systems inexpensively, offshore programmers could make information technology affordable to business sectors that haven't yet joined the productivity boom: small and medium-size businesses, health care and construction.

There will still be jobs for domestic programmers, she says, but they may be in new sectors such as health care, and might require retraining.

(Update: Embarrassing typo noted by a reader was corrected.)