Business Week has several good articles on the topic of China’s Economic impact including: Shaking up Trade Theory and The China Price.

In Shaking up Trade Theory Aaron Bernstein explores: “The fact that programming, engineering, and other high-skilled jobs are jumping to places such as China and India seems to conflict head-on with the 200-year-old doctrine of comparative advantage.” Over the last few years the white collar job losses in tech US have seemed to cause quite a bit more concern than the manufacturing and other job losses of the 1980s and 1990s. His article does a good job of exploring this issue within the limits of a short magazine article.

He captures the surprise economist (in the US) see because “Conversely, India, where just a fraction of its 400 million-plus workers have gone to college, should grab the low-skilled work and leave higher-end products to the U.S.” That conflicts with the data that many high skilled jobs are going to India (and elsewhere). The US Economists don’t seem to realize India is producing as many college educated engineers as the US. So India also has hundreds of millions of low skill workers that doesn’t mean they don’t also have plenty of high skilled worked (that speak English, which is, of course a huge benefit that is less true of Chinese high skilled workers).

Ok, I need to do better research but here is one source: “I know that US production of engineers declined from about 80K (in ‘85) to about 65K - but is back up to about 75K in the latest data. For context, however, the production of engineers is over 200,000/yr in each of China and India.” Wm. A. Wulf, President, National Academy of Engineering (United States) in talk entitled: Out-sourcing/Off-shoring of Engineering Jobs. - Update: see USA Under-counting Engineering Graduates
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Topic: Miscellaneous

I thought this post, from 43 folders, on writer’s block, had some good ideas. If you are suppose to be witting something and instead are reading this blog perhaps you should take a look at the ideas offered and see if they help you get back on track.

Topic: Management - Library Additions

Google Blog reported that the number of documents included in the Google index now exceeds 8 billion. “Today that number nearly doubled to more than 8 billion pages.”

Amazon.com has released their A9 toolbar for the new Firefox 1.0 browser. The A9 toolbar has a number of handy features. I am most glad to see the increasing support (which will only encourage more use of the great, free, open source Firefox browser. The Google toolbar should provide such support soon, I would hope.

Some people don’t like all the information Amazon gathers by tracking your use of the toolbar. Luckily, you can chose not to use it if that worries you. The toolbar has some nice tools, but it certainly does not contain anything that is tough to live without.