The New Weasel Driven Economy

Via Brad DeLong aka the other economist I found this article.

And it's got great news! According to the article we are currently transitioning into an economy driven entirely by Weasels! What are the hallmarks of a Weasel driven economy? We'll get to that later. Right now we want to talk about jobs and we want to talk about jobs because Monday yours is going overseas!

Why? Short answer: Weasels.

Longer answer: You have to read the article. That or trust us not to quote it completely out of context. Ha ha ha. No seriously you can trust us. The article says that :

...not just manufacturing jobs but a large number of service jobs will be performed in cheaper climes. Indeed, only hands-on or face-to-face services [will be] safe

If your a janitor, a crane operator, a divorce attorney, or a prostitute congratulations you're still going to have a job on Monday. All the rest of you should start hating the foreigner now because when the weekends over their going to steal your job.

"But why!?!" You ask. "Why are those greedy foreigner going to steal my job?"

Short Answer: Again Weasels.

Longer answer :

nothing short of a radical reordering of our economy will suffice if we're to save our beleaguered middle-class majority. Every other advanced economy -- certainly, those of the Europeans and the Japanese -- has a conscious strategy to keep its most highly skilled jobs at home. We have none; American capitalism, dominated by our financial sector, is uniquely wedded to disaggregating companies, thwarting unionization campaigns and offshoring work in a ceaseless campaign to impress investors that it has found the cheapest labor imaginable.

Or, to put it in plainer English, our economy is being driven by a bunch of greedy, short sighted weasels.

What can you do to save your job from the new Weasel driven economy? The article has 3 suggestions:

• We need to entice industry to invest at home by having the government and our public- and union-controlled pension funds upgrade the infrastructure and invest in energy efficiency and worker training.


• We need to unionize and upgrade the skills of the nearly 50 million private-sector workers in health care, transportation, construction, retail, restaurants and the like whose jobs can't be shipped abroad.


• And, if America is to survive American capitalism in the age of globalization, we need to alter the composition of our corporate boards so that employee and public representatives can limit the offshoring of our economy.

We suggest you also buy a rocket-launcher.