Dateline Delhi.

• Author: Ehrenreich, Barbara
• Position: Flip Side - Viewpoint essay

The world may be flat, as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has written, but I always liked to think I was standing on a hill. Now comes the news that pasadenanow.com, a local news site, is recruiting reporters in India. The website's editor points out that he can get two Indian reporters for a mere total of $20,800 a year--and no, they won't be commuting from New Delhi. Since Pasadena's city council meetings can be observed on the web, the Indian reporters will be able to cover local politics from half the planet away. And if they ever feel a need to see the potholes of Pasadena, there's always Google Earth.

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Excuse me, but isn't this more or less what former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair was fired for--pretending to report from sites around the country while he was actually holed up in his Brooklyn apartment? Or will pasadenanow.com be honest enough to give its new reporters datelines in Delhi (or wherever they live)?

I should have seen it coming. In the '80s, U.S. companies began outsourcing the manufacturing of everything from garments to steel, leaving whole cities to die. Education was the recommended solution for the unemployed, because in the globalized future, Americans would be the world's brains, while Mexicans and Malaysians would provide the hands. Let the low-end, repetitive jobs scatter to the ends of the Earth, we were told--the intellectual and creative work would stay right here.

So no one really complained when the back office and call center jobs migrated to India in the '90s: Who needed them? We would still be the brains of global business. When the IT jobs started drifting away, we were at first assured that only the more "routine" ones were outsourceable. As for all the laid-off techies, they were smart enough to develop new skills, right?

But no one can pretend any longer that we have a global monopoly on intellect and innovation. Look at the "telemedicine" trend, which has radiologists in India and Lebanon reading CT scans for hospitals in Altoona and Chicago. Or (and this was never supposed to happen) the growing outsourcing of R&D, with scores of companies opening labs in India or China--"Chindia," as they...