Famous economist: 40 million jobs at risk

Princeton economist and former Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Alan Blinder says the current one million jobs lost from offshoring is the "tip of the iceberg". In a page 1 Wall Street Journal article this week, Blinder says as many as 40 million American jobs could be shipped overseas in the next decade or two.

"A New Industrial Revolution" is the scale of change this nation faces, analogous to when workers left farms en masse and migrated to cities. This change set off massive shifts in "how and where people lived, how they educated their children, the organization of businesses, the form and practices of governments."

The changes we face in the coming generation are of this scale. We must recognize the dimensions of the problem and begin to prepare ourselves for it.

He says the most important divide is not, as commonly argued, between jobs that require a lot of education and those that don't. It's not simply that skilled jobs stay in the US and lesser-skilled jobs go to India or China. The important distinction is between services that must be done in the U.S. and those that can -- or will someday -- be delivered electronically with little degradation in quality. The more personal work of divorce lawyers isn't likely to go overseas, for instance, while some of the work of tax lawyers could be. Civil engineers, who have to be on site, could be in great demand in the U.S.; computer engineers might not be.

Our educational system must adapt. A college degree will not offer a worker protection if they have worked hard only to master a skill that is easily outsourced offshore.

Bottom line: jobs with person-to-person contact will survive; many others will not. The janitor's job is safe. But all you computer programmers...oh, well.