A question from Yahoo! Answers:

Have debate, need help. outsourcing.?
I have a debate this Thursday on outsourcing. I am on the team that is opposed to it. i need help. give me reasons that we should not outsource. the person with some freakin sweet reasons will get 10 big fat juicy points.

Well, it sucks to be you; it sucks to be your opponent, too… You are about to waste a lot of time debating something completely unimportant…

There is absolutely no evidence that outsourcing has had any significant impact on employment anywhere. The effects that popular press attributes to outsourcing are in fact squarely due to technology; jobs that are supposedly going to China in reality go to machines. The process is going on worldwide. As a result, China loses manufacturing jobs even faster than the U.S.; between 1995 and 2002, U.S. has lost 11.3% of its manufacturing jobs, China, 15.3%. The fastest loss of manufacturing jobs during that period was in fact observed in Brazil (19.9%)…

Manufacturing is undergoing the same transition agriculture went through. In 1910, about a third of U.S. workforce worked in agriculture; today, it’s 3%. Where did the remaining jobs go? They got taken over by tractors and harvesters… In 1962, 27.7% of the U.S. non-farm workforce worked in manufacturing; by 2002, the percentage declined to 11.5%, while the manufacturing sector’s contribution to GDP remained roughly the same, about 17%…