01 October 2007

I Love the Modern Economy

First businesses outsourced their complaint and service departments to India.

Now customers can outsource their complaints and request for services to India as well.

The modern world kicks ass. Also, if I were the governor of one of the poorer Mexican states, I would change the official language to English, insist that all school instruction be given in English, attract businesses to set up these schools by offering cheap labor and low taxes, and reap the same kind of benefits that India has even while a world away.

Keep your culture, the Spanish language isn't the source of Mexican culture, it's part of it, but it doesn't have to be. Make the transition to English, educate your poor, and you can transform your economy and quit wasting your human resources (or outsourcing them to north of the border). If you produce citizens whose main value is as manual labor, than they will have to export themselves where the best jobs are, disrupting families, and alienating the economic migrants when they get to where the jobs are. If you produce citizens whose main value is providing intellectual services, then they can do that anywhere in the world, including smack dab in the middle of the poorest villages, and you can leverage their smarts in ways that all those manual laborers sending their paychecks back south simply don't provide.

Mexico's population is industrious, but ill educated, and limited in their value (by language) in the kind of global services that tens of millions of Indian nationals now provide. Embrace English as the language of commerce, embrace education, and you can turn Mexico into a country folks won't want to leave to the tune of 1% of the entire population every year.

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