Friday, July 6, 2007

Summary and Response to “Why the rich are getting richer, and the poor, poorer”

The article “Why the rich are getting richer, and the poor, poorer” by Robert Reich is about the Why the economic gap between the rich and poor is growing larger. He states that all Americans are in different boats, one sinking rapidly, one sinking more slowly and the third rising steadily. Reich states that the boat that is sinking rapidly contains all the routine producers. He claims that routine producers are losing their jobs due to American outsourcing jobs to 3rd world countries. People in these countries would gladly get paid a fraction of what Americans get paid, which saves businesses a lot of money. Then he states various examples of outsourcing such as AT&T looking to employ people in Singapore to assemble phones rather than hiring people in Shreveport, Louisiana. Reich continues by stating that the second boat that was sinking slowly held in person servers such as cashiers, banks tellers and car washers. He states that these jobs are slowly being replaced by robots and other automated machines. Reich writes that the third boat contains the symbolic analysts. These people are America’s smart people such as scientists, artists, politicians and other people of this sort. Reich also states that the gap is growing due to better world communication. In the 1990’s, the American corporations started to fall which lead to the producers and servers to become less paid and the “White Collar” workers to get higher paid. He concludes the article by stating that the corporations failing and good world communication was the beginning of outsourcing
This article had its pros and cons. I liked the fact that he explained why the gap between the rich and the poor is growing very well. I didn’t like the fact that this article was really long due to the fact that Reich kept giving unnecessary examples. I did not like the ending because it was really hard to follow. I did like the fact that it explained outsourcing. I myself had an experience with outsourcing. My wireless internet was down and I had to fix the router, so I called the router company and it seemed that the companies calls were outsourced to India because every time I called I would get a person with an Indian accent. I had an neutral feeling about this article.

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