Study Confirms That Much of US Labor Market Offshorable
Economist Alan Blinder’s 2007 working study, “How Many U.S. Jobs May be Offshorable?,” made a powerful claim about the US economy: that at least 22% of all US jobs are offshorable. A group of students at the Harvard Business School have replicated the study to validate or discount its argument. Their results largely reinforce Blinder’s findings. They are outlined in a new working paper* published by the Harvard Business School, and argue that between 21% and 42% of all US jobs are offshorable.
The very most conservative estimates put the number in the millions, and a number above 20 million seems quite reasonable.
Blinder’s findings made waves in and out of academia, but were criticized on the grounds that one person reviewed the characteristics of over 800 occupations, thus leaving the study vulnerable to personal bias. So, HBS decided to replicate the findings with 904 graduate students. Each occupation was examined by an average of more than 20 students.
The study concludes with a warning that even these findings may not cover the full scope of the US labor market’s offshorability: “A job is, in essence, a bundle of tasks that have been clumped together and assigned to an individual. There is no reason to assume, however, that tasks must continue to be bundled together in the future in the same pattern they have been bundled in the past. Indeed, some of the most creative applications of offshoring have taken historical bundles of tasks (= jobs), broken them down into component tasks, bundled them in new ways, and relocated each new bundle to the place where its tasks can be completed best or cheapest.”
*A Replication Study of Alan Blinder’s “How Many U.S. Jobs May be Offshorable?”; Troy Smith, Jan Rivkin; Harvard Business School
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