The samples themselves were a small gesture; that subsidies let the company fill a warehouse with them at no cost is not: It is a big reason supply costs are so much lower in China (hence the article cited it as such.) Considering that Apple itself created a clustered supply chain in "Silicon Vally North," I suspect those subsidies are a bigger factor in outsourcing than clustering is. Were supply chain clusters the only factor they could be easily addressed (and tend to be anyway; companies were prone to centralize supplies to save money even when they did not fear outsourcing.) Federal subsidies are a bigger challenge, because crony capitalism that is Chinas norm is far more contentious in the West.

Because according to the article, despite its assertion that supply costs are outsourcings critical cause, "companies and economists" claim that "Though Americans are among the most educated workers in the world, the nation has stopped training enough people in the mid-level skills that factories need." Which might make sense if not for the fact so much of the manufacturing going overseas is unskilled entry level assembly work.


It may be difficult, but obviously not so much so that companies are unable to do it on a large scale, because they are. In the articles real world example of a former Apple engineer who wound up earning $12/hr at a call center in his old office when his job went to China, it was not because he lacked education to do his job, but simply because an equally educated Chinese worker could and would do it for far less.

Not that I dispute America is falling behind in college educated labor, or that it hurts our competitiveness, but the issue there at the moment is (contrary to the claims of outsourcers) not lacking such workers, but that those we have are now losing their jobs to outsourcing just as unskilled workers have been for decades. To a great and shameful extent I think that is why America has begun caring about a far from novel large scale labor transfer. It is similar to what happened a generation ago when middle class union manufacturing jobs began leaving the US. Younger workers then were were able to transition to the up and coming tech industry, letting their old careers be relegated to the lower class.

Now those tech jobs are leaving, too, and no fallback position exists. "Ebusiness" is cited periodically, but since that is ideally suited to outsourcing (since supply chain issues are largely irrelevant to data transmission) it is hardly a long term solution; the Third World can create the infrastructure for that in months or years rather than the decades it took to develop the infrastructure the tech industry requires.