NAFTA, Outsourcing, and Chips Ahoy!!

It is disturbing that our high profile economists, not to exclude Ben Bernanke, that I was beginning to respect, can craft their words to exude positive meaning from our current economic situation. I am still in the fify page Chapter IV, America after Reagan. It is amazing how the ironic simultaneity of NAFTA in 1993 and the silicon wafer outsourcing revolution that began in earnest thereabouts have contributed to a rapid shift in our import-export balance. It is scary that we have been willing to outsource our prized wafer technology to developing companies. Granted the labor economies of scale, it almost seems foolish to argue that this could be detrimental to long-term economic metrics for our country, as it unlocks American shareholder value and brings the cost of information and communication technologies (ITC) down to ranges that eliminate the prohibitive cost barriers for most American businesses and families as well. This, you would think, would contribute to an overall accelleration of productivity. But an acceleration of what? Our economists numbers our skewed by failing to offset these improvements for the changes in the constants that are not constant at all.