I see him in essence telling his readers that, well, gee, sucks to be you, but it's going to have to suck a lot more because we'll never really have a middle class or a manufacturing base in America again -- and we can't have a middle class and free trade, sorry! You'll just have to get more education, even though education won't keep your prospective employer from hiring an H-1B instead anyway. (Really and truly.) And whenever anyone brings up asking for fair labor and environmental practices from companies operating overseas and selling to us, the response from him or his allies in the comments threads is along the lines of either Don't You Want Poor Chinese And Indians To Have A Better Standard Of Living You Evil Callous Person You or You Can't Dictate Or Enforce Labor Or Environmental Laws In Developing Nations.
The whole "think of the starving Chinese" angle is of course a big ol' straw man. As for the dictation question, it's not actually taking physical control of a country and literally dictating what they can and can't do. It's saying "well, you can do as you wish, but you won't be doing it with us."
But all this is moot, really, or will be quite soon. The skyrocketing costs of oil, coupled with a) the flood of polysilicon wafers soon to hit the market and b) the breakthrough in cheap "nanosolar" ultra-thin-film solar pv cells, will probably be making solar cheaper than oil inside of five years.
So, as oil (used by cars, planes, cargo ships, trains and trucks) gets more expensive, and solar- and wind-generated electricity (used by homes, businesses, and public and private transit) gets cheaper, suddenly the economics shift in favor of homebrew industries again, especially as it's easier to power up a factory than it is to power any kind of transport that can't be hooked up to overhead wires.
Why? Well, you can't extend trolley lines over the Pacific Ocean, for one thing -- nor would you want to, as the longer the distance electricity must travel, the more is lost in the transaction. Solar-powered planes exist, but they're not able to carry much in the way of cargo, or achieve anything near typical sustained jet speeds, even subsonic jet speeds; nor does it look like they ever will. And battery technology simply doesn't allow for storing the kind of power needed to push a container vessel across the ocean, much less an airplane; there's work being done to try to get around this for oceangoing vessels, but it won't even begin to show the first signs of bearing fruit until 2012 -- maybe. Here's the best we can do with battery-powered planes right now. Not exactly a substitute for conventional jet travel, is it? Not for at least a few decades, if ever.
But while this means that (for a period lasting several decades if not forever) it will once again be cheaper to make and sell stuff close to home, it won't confer any advantages on the number-crunchers. Travelling to India physically may be expensive, but there's nothing an Indian worker in Bangalore or Kerala state with a broadband setup can't do as well as any other white-collar worker anywhere else in the world -- even, say, a bond trader. Especially since that Indian worker from Kerala or Bangalore will have his or her education paid for by the state, and so won't have over $100,000 in student loans to pay off, and so won't need quite as much salary as the American bond trader.
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