Going Global

According to Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar.

On globalization and outsourcing he says

You might think that the Pope would hail this as a great development for humanity. Instead he has parroted the bogus claims of the white labour aristocracy.

His encyclical says, “the so-called outsourcing of production can weaken the company’s sense of responsibility towards the stakeholders---namely the workers, the suppliers, the consumers, the natural environment, and broader society---in favour of the shareholders, who are not tied to a specific geographical area and who therefore enjoy extraordinary mobility.”

The racial implications of this leave me dumbstruck. The Pope has posed the issue as one of stakeholders versus shareholders. But are white stakeholders the only ones that matter? When IBM shifts 80,000 jobs to India, 80,000 Indian stakeholders replace American ones. Are the rights of 80,000 Indian stakeholders any less than those of the American ones they replace? When Chinese suppliers outbid American ones in supplying hardware to IBM, are the Chinese lesser stakeholders than the Americans they replace?

The Pope’s moral blunders on outsourcing (August 02, 2009)

The outsoucing debate has spread far and wide and been repeated over and over. But it hasnt curbed the wave of globalization that triggered it into somewhat of an unstoppable force. Needless to say, the pope's comments sparked intense outrage in the intellectual class of India, the worlds leading supplier of outsourcing services in the most advanced sectors.

The comments made by the pope appear somewhat misguided as he may have been only looking at the whole affair from one point of view. Whereas in business and economics there is nearly always an opposing view point. A benefit to one may be a disbenefit to another. The only way you'd be against such a thing is if you were indeed biased in some way. But that way lies the road to politics. And the Pope being theoretically in support of one united world, has come under fire for apparently 'racist' remarks.

But it took an economist to figure it out. And hey, you don't need to be an economist to get to the top of the vatican they tell me, so perhaps the pope deserves the benefit of the doubt. Another thing you don't need to be an economist to become is president.