Hi Alberto,

You’ve got it precisely backwards. People who haven’t examined the economic evidence always oppose outsourcing on two seemingly opposing, yet both utterly invalid grounds: that it causes the loss of jobs or economic well-being for Americans, or that it is exploitive to the developing world. In my article, I cited a great article to disarm the former objection.

Regarding the second, the best way to fight poverty and poor working conditions abroad is, quite simply, to send money abroad, which equalizes the current disparity in the ability of people in non-developed countries to create wealth and improve their standard of living.

We must bear relative costs of living in mind as well. Since the financial collapse in Argentina, to use your example, $15 an hour is a highly respectable wage. In Bangalore, it’s positively upper middle class.

Workers who live in developing countries and do outsourcing work, especially knowledge work outsourcing, are among the best paid individuals in their communities. The hourly rate of the New Delhi team at my software development firm is more than 6.5 times greater than the average hourly wage for other workers in their same city—the capital of the nation. They prefer to have only US clients because doing so allows them to make more money. But they’ve also fired clients who have them disrespectfully. They are, quite rightly, unwilling to yield their dignity just for ready money.

What if I had to pay more for many of the services that I offshore? It’s not that I would pay more; I simply wouldn’t be able to use them. Which is the better way to combat poverty in the developing world: to give them my work at a relatively lower but still very comfortable wage, or to withhold that money entirely from their economy because I can’t afford their services or, even worse, because I wish condescendingly to refuse them my business on the grounds that I know what’s better for them?

I am confident that, in 100 years, these issues will have disappeared entirely, and developers in New Delhi will be charging higher or at least equivalent rates to those in Europe or the US. I have certainly seen that they have the capacity and will to be as accomplished and materially successful as workers in any other country. It’s just a matter of time. But they’re never going to get to that point if the rest of the world refuses to do business with them as their country’s economy struggles to mature. Nor should we fear their ascendency; wealth generation is not a zero-sum game.

Arguments like yours, while admittedly well-intentioned, are extremely damaging to the fight against poverty worldwide, not because they oppose the welfare of workers abroad but because they masquerade as valid arguments in favor of that welfare.