[PLUG-TALK] offshoring jobs quote

[Keith Lofstrom]

An article on competitiveness and innovation:

http://eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=174910276

You don't need to read the whole thing, but this quote was interesting,
from a report by the President's Council of Advisors on science and
technology:  

"the United States also benefits from offshore R&D. The amount of
foreign-funded R&D here has quadrupled since the mid-1980s.  In fact, 
there is more corporate R&D investment coming into the United States 
than is sent out of the country."

Which you can interpret (assuming it is correct) as meaning that
the net offshoring of technology is negative - that is, the flow
of technical jobs is inbound.  But you can look at it a different
way - American investors and institutions are asking for less R&D
than foreign investors and institutions are.  This has been true
for most of my recent clients.

Of course, the statistic probably measures dollar flow rather than
job flow - a dollar flowing this way buys fewer jobs than a dollar
flowing that way.  But it also suggests that if we can work smarter
than foreigners, then we can make more dollars flow here - those
foreign companies are paying our higher rates because they get 
value for it, and increasing value would increase payment.

In the long run, I don't care if they have a thousand or a 
billion engineers overseas,  as long as we can all keep productive 
and well paid.  The latter is more a matter of broadening the 
demand for technical services than apportioning a diminishing
and restricted demand.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs