I'm not directly opposed to outsourcing and offshoring. Companies are working within the system to make the most post-tax profits. I think it's a crummy idea to outsource parts of a corporation, but I suspect it will take at least five years for Wall Street to see the errors of outsourcing overseas, longer than that for the MBAs who thought up outsourcing to give in and see the problems with it and longer yet for the U.S. government to figure out how to discourage offshoring without destroying business.
Like it or not, offshoring and outsourcing have changed the structure of the labor market and therefore the economy of the United States. It will undoubtedly change again as nothing is more constant than change, but it has undeniably made things harder for laborers and new college grads. Those who are experienced or highly skilled have less to fear from it, in my opinion.
Are you still with me? Am I wrong here?
Fed Vice-Chair Ferguson sure doesn't see it that way:
However, I think that important weight should be given to idiosyncratic features such as the causes of the preceding recessions and the occurrence of additional shocks after the recessions ended that exacerbated the economy's problems. This view implies that monetary policymaking probably does not need to be altered in a systematic way to accommodate a new sort of business-cycle dynamics. On the contrary, the fact that the two most recent recoveries have involved slow job growth in their initial stages may best be attributed to chance rather than a new structure of the economy.
That's right. It's idiosyncratic. It's chance. Setting aside the points I've made above about labor, we could consider the changes (massive increases, really) in debt loads on consumers and governments and the derivatives complex. But the changes in the economy are just random occurances.
Maybe they should leave monetary policy up to chance too.