One World. Cheaper telecommunications means more exporting and importing of services, writes James Burnham in a recent study published by Washington University’s Center for the Study of American Business. Jobs that involve standardized skills–like software writing and routine document processing–may be done more cheaply in Ireland or India than in Ravenswood. And xenophobia may even speed up the process: “Competition between countries is likely to be even more intense if barriers to the physical movement of workers from lower income to higher income countries continues to increase, as has been the case in recent years. Staying at home and providing the services via the telecommunications ‘highway’ becomes a substitute for migration to the higher income country….
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Mastech, a Pittsburgh company, recently raised over $50 million in the U.S. financial markets. A sizable portion…will be used to build and staff several large facilities in India for their programming workers. The decision was motivated in part by pressure from American professional associations against bringing foreign pro-grammers into the United States.”
“The westward invasion of the gypsy moth is now threatening Indiana and Illinois,” according to the “Illinois Natural History Survey Reports” (November/December). But “the potential defoliation by gypsy moths in the Chicago area is relatively modest, ranging from 14% in Chicago and suburban Cook County to 26% in DuPage County….Less than one-tenth of one percent of the total number of trees in the entire Chicago area are predicted to die because of gypsy moth defoliation during a two-year outbreak.” Most threatened are rural and natural areas, where “local controls may be necessary.”
