The boom years of Silicon Valley will not be returning. Thriving new companies will be founded there, but they won’t create many jobs, because so many white-collar jobs are now being outsourced to India. In future, these jobs may also go to China, Russia, or other countries that have technically-educated workers willing (so far) to work for lower wages than their US-based peers.

To take a typical case: Technical support has long been a problem for high-tech companies. It’s something that customers complain about when it’s bad, but don’t appreciate when it’s good – at least, they rarely appreciate it enough to want to pay for it. Profit margins on software and hardware tend to be slim, and a single support call can eat up the entire margin on a sale. At Silicon Valley salaries, it’s hard to provide support cheaply. But you can’t pay people there less, because they can’t afford to live on less in that very expensive part of the world.

Long ago, discussing with colleagues the costs and difficulties of providing technical support from Silicon Valley, I suggested having email support done from India, which has a huge pool of people who write better English than the average American. (At the time I assumed that phone support could not be outsourced to India, because Americans often have trouble understanding Indian accents.)

A few years after my (then radical) suggestion, this was exactly what began to happen at many companies, for both email and telephone support. Indian third-party support companies solved the accent problem by training their people to speak with American accents and even chat about American topics (discussing baseball from Bangalore? weird). Basic nuts-and-bolts programming has also been shipped off to India – cheaper than the previous solution of importing Indian programmers (on H1 visas) to the US.

By sending jobs offshore, American companies are simply doing what businesses are supposed to do: reduce costs and increase profits. This keeps companies healthy and stockholders happy, and reduces the cost of goods and services purchased by Americans in America. Attempts to “protect” American jobs are likely to – and should – ultimately fail. American businesses are part of a global economy, and will stand or fall by their ability to compete globally. Forcing them to compete on unequal terms, with companies who can obtain essential high-tech services more cheaply, would hamstring them in that battle.

How do we reconcile this with jobs for American workers? Individual American workers are part of a global job market, in which we compete for jobs with people who have lower salary expectations, and often better education, than we do. We can compete by lowering our salaries, or by improving our education.

American education at the highest levels is doing just fine: the scientific and technical programs at American universities are the best in the world. But American citizens are proportionately few in the top-flight PhD programs in physics, mathematics, computer science, etc., because few Americans are adequately prepared at the primary and secondary level to pursue these subjects higher up. Other, much poorer, countries manage to provide such preparation for many of their citizens. How is it that the wealthiest country in the world fails to do so?

The American system of public education has long been cause for shame, and the consequences are now becoming clear: we are failing to prepare our children to compete in the global economy. One of the issues of this presidential election is likely to be offshoring jobs; the first moves towards protectionism are already being made. I’d like to see a presidential candidate address the underlying issue that may ultimately save or ruin the American economy: education to global standards, for all of our citizens.

Unfortunately, some parts of America are heading stubbornly in the opposite direction:

Georgia may shun ‘evolution’ in schools – Revised curriculum plan outrages science teachers, By MARY MacDONALD , The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Georgia Takes on ‘Evolution’ By ANDREW JACOBS, January 30, 2004, The New York Times: “Sarah L. Pallas, an associate professor of biology at Georgia State University, said, “The point of these benchmarks is to prepare the American work force to be scientifically competitive.” She said, “By removing the benchmarks that deal with evolutionary life, we don’t have a chance of catching up to the rest of the world.”

May 3, 2004

The New York Times provides the follow-up to this one: U.S. Is Losing Its Dominance in the Sciences By WILLIAM J. BROAD, May 3, 2004

Also see a New York Times column by Thomas Friedman.

A recent article in the Economist also talks about the globalization of innovation (you may not be able to reach this story unless you are an Economist subscriber – which I heartily invite you to become! It’s one of the world’s best and most internationally-balanced news sources.)

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Ross and I went to see the film “Thirteen” last week, and found it deeply disturbing, as I expected. At intermission (there is always an intermission in Italian cinemas), Ross said “It seems exaggerated,” and many of the critics agree with her. “Well, thank god I don’t have to worry about most of that stuff in small-town Italy,” I thought to myself.

Ross was most puzzled by the scenes of the protagonist cutting herself. I couldn’t explain it, so when we got home I looked up “self-mutilation” in Mary Pipher’s “Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Lives of Adolescent Girls,” which I probably need to re-read now. Pipher says that this is a new phenomenon (as of the 1990s), and postulates that it’s a way of releasing powerful emotions that teenage girls don’t otherwise know how to channel.

Then Ross told me she knows someone who does it. For privacy reasons, I won’t go into details, but I can understand why it happens in this particular case. I just wish I knew how to get this girl help.

Ross has an instinct to help people, to be kind, and to offer loyal and supportive friendship. She worries about people in trouble. I understand this: even when I was an outcast geek myself, I wanted to help other outcasts, make friends, be kind, show them that the whole world wasn’t against them – even when, sometimes, I didn’t particularly like them, either. But Ross is facing far scarier problems than I ever did. Was I just oblivious, or is the world really that much worse than it was?

There were drugs when I was a kid – my yearbook from the International School Bangkok for 1971 has an “In Memoriam” page listing about 15 kids, all drug overdoses. Some of my peers began having sex at age 13, though the American norm for my generation seems to have been closer to 15 or 16. So I’m not surprised to hear that some of Ross’ classmates who are dating older boys are feeling pressured to have sex when they’re not ready for it. Fortunately, the Italian average for the “first time” is around 16 or 17, and condoms are very much the norm in Italian culture.

But there’s worse. In 6th and 7th grade, Ross had a classmate who ended up on the street one night. Her parents were divorced, her mother had a relapse into some sort of addiction, and turned on her daughter, threatening her. The girl ran out into the street, snatching up (thank god) her cellphone, from which she was able to call another classmate for help. But that wasn’t the first time. She admitted that there had been several other incidents where she had wandered the streets at night for hours, but had been too ashamed to tell anyone. The mother of course lost custody, but the father didn’t want the girl, so she ended up in an orphanage.

Situations like this are heartbreaking; how is a sensitive, caring teenager like Ross to cope? How do I advise her to even try?

Interesting comment on “Thirteen:” “when i saw this film, i said ‘holy shit’. i’ve been an Evie since i was eleven, my parents were never around so i had to get my attention somehow, you know. god only knows how many girls i’ve ruined. the film is raw, everything in it is possible when you’re eleven or twelve. the only thing bad was that they didn’t show the truth about evie: girls like us always end up alone.”

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“Polls suggest that acceptance of gays in the United States, the most religious industrialized society in the world, extends only up to the chapel steps.”

“I know a lot of people who want to give all the rights and privileges to gay couples that married people have, but they don’t want to change the traditional meaning of the term marriage,” said Norval D. Glenn, a professor of sociology at the University of Texas who specializes in the demography of the family. “We’re more traditional in how we define marriage in this country than is the case in most of the Western world.”

From “Why America Has Gay Marriage Jitters” By ELISABETH BUMILLER, New York Times, August 10, 2003

Oh, get over it!

“Traditional” marriage as defined by most Americans is “one man, one woman.” Add 2.5 kids, and you have the traditional nuclear family. If you’re American, tell me: how many people do you know who actually grew up in a traditional nuclear family? At age 10, I was one of the first on my block to have divorced parents. But, by now, I hardly know anyone of my generation whose parents didn’t divorce; America has the world’s highest divorce rate. So much for the “sanctity” of marriage. Are the straights worried that the gays might be better at staying married than we are? They might well be. It seems to me that, when you have to fight most of the culture around you and city hall to obtain something, you’re more likely to make it work.

Dec 3, 2003

In the New York Times op/ed page, Nov 26, Harvey Fierstein wrote: “What is it with you people, anyway? Are you so insecure about the way you handle marriage that you’re scared gay folk will show you up? Trust me, we will make as much of a mess out of matrimony as you do. Just give us a chance.”

May 3, 2004

Mike L. tells me about the Netherlands: “Gay marriages have official status since a few years. Gay couples can get married in the town hall just like hetero couples. The difference between “just living together” and being fully married aren’t that much anyway. Only real differences are that when you have kids, the father has to explicitly go to town and officially “recognize” the kid, otherwise the offspring will receive the mother’s last name instead of the father’s, and when one dies, the other may not be the only beneficiary so that you’ll have to make arrangements (usually a will or a living-together-contract) for your partner. (In our case, the house automatically becomes property of the one who lives longest, and most of the mortgage will be paid by the insurance when one of us dies).

The tax office never cared much about marriage anyway, you can just check a box on the tax form in order to have the tax office treat you as ‘partners’ (so you can share expenses and income which will in general save money).”

This pragmatic approach to human relationships seems to me a good solution. It allows every couple, straight or gay, to determine their own terms of commitment, both personal and financial, with a flexibility that realistically meets the needs of today’s rapidly-changing society

Some wise words

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Amazon is great, but to discover something new, it helps to have a real (independent!) bookstore with a discerning owner. Thanks to one such, in an airport of all places (La Guardia, I think it was), I discovered Ted Chiang. In a ten-year career (so far), he has only written a few short stories, winning a Nebula Award with the very first, and most of them are amazing. It’s a rare writer who has challenging ideas and writes about them extremely well. Very highly recommended.

Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang – Amazon UK

One thing to be said for forced bed rest: I’ve had lots of time to read. First was a collection of Philip K. Dick short stories, including “The Minority Report.” As has happened with a number of Dick stories, the author’s initial idea was intriguing, but the movie was actually a better story.

I have read a lot of science fiction in my lifetime, from the early classics on. It’s interesting to consider the trends and technologies happening today that early sci-fi writers never contemplated. For example, there are lots of stories about gigantic central computers going mad, killing people, taking over planets or spaceships, and occasionally being useful. But I don’t recall a single story featuring personal computers as the ubiquitous tools that we all use today.

Most of the authors even more glaringly failed to consider the cultural changes likely to take place within their own lifetimes, let alone over several centuries to come. Feminism completely escaped Philip K. Dick (even though it was well underway before he died); most of his female characters are secretaries and/or wives, who spend their time tucking the children into bed and making coffee for the men.

One author who has demonstrated real foresight is Norman Spinrad. In “A World Between,” published in 1979, he described the World Wide Web, and even called it ‘the Galactic Web.’ “Little Heroes” (1987) is about the music industry’s final solution to the problem of dealing with temperamental artists: computer-generated stars. Now that we’ve seen what can be done, with Gollum in “The Two Towers,” this doesn’t seem very far off. “Pictures at 11” (1994) is about a gang of terrorists taking over a TV station in Los Angeles; that, too, seems likely to come true any day now.

David Brin is perhaps the greatest science fiction author alive. His Uplift series is set in the far future, when dolphins and chimpanzees have been genetically ‘uplifted’ to be man’s sapient peers, in a universe populated by hundreds of similarly uplifted species. Brin is literally a rocket scientist, with a PhD in astrophysics, yet he does not fall into the Asimov trap of being far better at science than characters. One of the joys of the Uplift novels is that Brin creates and describes alien cultures which are completely non-human, yet convincingly motivated by their own biologies and cultures (my favorite example is the exploding priest).

I have re-started reading Brin’s “The Transparent Society,” published in 1998, subtitled “Will technology force us to choose between privacy and freedom?” This is non-fiction. Though I haven’t read it all the way through yet, Brin’s thesis seems to be that the privacy genie is already out of the bottle: governments and corporations have a great deal of private information about us stored in databases (where it’s subject to pilfering and abuse), and we are increasingly in the lenses of security cameras wherever we go. Brin suggests that the best defense is an open society, where we citizens can in turn oversee governments and corporations, to ensure that our data is not abused.

Norman Spinrad’s site

Buy from Amazon:

UK: Norman Spinrad, David Brin, Ted Chiang

US: Norman Spinrad, David Brin, Ted Chiang

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