Sourcing: Doing the Old In-Out, In-Out

Others have already blogged it, but this is a point that bears repeating: Foreign outsourcing to America outweighs American outsourcing to foreign countries, at least with respect to white-collar jobs.

Aside on language usage: In a couple of places, I’ve heard people call outsourcing by foreigners “insourcing.” It sounds intuitive, but actually “insourcing” already has a meaning. It’s what we do when we don’t outsource: we make something in-house or, in the international trade context, buy domestic. And we also already have a different term for what Americans do when foreigners outsource to us. We call it “exporting” (which often, in the modern era, takes the form of “service exporting”). Let’s stop this particular linguistic confusion before it really gets rolling, okay?