I'm sure you must have heard the usual
Freidmanite drivel about why markets should be unregulated, and outsourcing is the surest road to better productivity in a flat market... so on and so forth. However, outsourcing doesn't work primarily because a labour camp sweatshop in China can produce an
iPod quicker, faster and cheaper than American production lines. It is because of the fact that Steve Jobs, sitting in his Manhattan perch, can call up the Chinese contractor and say, without having to worry about putting on a straight face, that he wants another 100,000 pieces by the end of the week.
Now, hold on. I am not talking about the things that people like Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein and
Arundhati Roy write about. Sure, the contractor probably has to slave work a few hundred Chinese peasants to death. I need to emphasize that I, on the other hand, am referring to, the straight face, or the lack of any necessity for it, in orders from another continent.
Think about it. If your manager wanted you to stay back the whole weekend (without any extra pay) and labour to finish some report out in time for the client meeting on Monday, he'd go about it with circumspection. He'd probably dangle some reward of a distant raise in front of you. Or drop hints about some recommendation to a vacancy that might come up as a result of your immediate superior
Suryakantvenkataramanulu's (why should it
always be Bob, Jim or Joe?) resignation. He might also, if we were anything like me, resort to pointing out gaffes that you let slip in your report all week long, so that by the end of it, you are so crushed and pliable, eager to regain his confidence, that you offer to stay back and finish the aforementioned report.
This is where outsourcing comes in. If you had a back office with some hapless young assistants, you don't need to worry about all that effort. You just call them. Tell them crisply that you want the report by Monday. Then you hang up. Problem solved.
Ofcourse, clever entrepreneurs have already realised all this. For
eg. take for instance,
this site which already does things like break up with your
GF/BF for you. Again, note, what's being done away with is not the inefficiency in doing something... its the Thespian effort needed to say that terrible thing right, the need to put on your poker face... and all that sort of thing. The oldest outsourced activity in fact is another case in point - assassinations. Heck, if you wanted to kill your own king, you'd need a tie up with
Assasins Inc. in your neighbouring country.
In fact, if the Greeks had discovered outsourcing back then, we'd have had no need for terms like 'Herculean task'. Poor Hercules. If only he had known that we Indians were around even then, and kicked ass at math and spreadsheets, even back then; he wouldn't have had to bother with all his... well,
tasks. He'd have simply sent a parchment through his half brother Apollo (whom we worshiped back then, still do) that read:
Aryabhat, We are in need of a positional arithmetic system based on the decimal system that we can use instead of the clunky system we have now to show the Egyptian delegation visiting our home office. Also, as a secondary objective, we may want you to explore the possibility of incorporating some method to indicate null or void quantities. If you could mash that up with your number system, which we'd like by Monday, that'd be great. Also, Archimedes is calling in sick next week. So I need you to stand in for him next week, on the 'Move Mount Olympus' project. Apparently, he was talking about something about being able to move earth itself. Please look at the project mail archive and figure out what he meant.Regards,Hercules(Half) GodOlympus Corp
