U.S. may feel global squeeze Comments: This message did not originate from the Sender address

Wednesday, March 08, 2006 By SANDRA E. CONSTANTINE

SOUTH HADLEY - A Harvard economist says that as the world moves toward a more global economy we can expect more compebreastion for jobs from foreign-born and foreign-educated people.

Richard Freeman, the professor, made his remarks last Friday at a conference at Mount Holyoke College.

Freeman was the keynote speaker for the two-day conference "New Global Realities: Winners and Losers from Offshore Outsourcing" that addressed such issues as job flight overseas in manufacturing as well as outsourcing.

He stated that as the U.S. has moved much industry to China and India, the result has been a total reduction in global poverty, particularly in those countries, which are home to one-third of the world's population.

Freeman noted that the market place for labor has become global.

In 2004, China had 463,000 graduates with bachelor's degrees in engineering, while the U.S. had only 60,000 and another 40,000 with bachelor's degrees in computer science, he said. Freeman stated that in 1975 the U.S. generated 50 percent of the doctorates in science and engineering, a figure that fell to 22 percent by the early 2000s.

He predicted there will be a loss of good jobs in this country until developing countries catch up economically.

"I don't think we should be banging heads with India and China," Freeman said, suggesting instead the three countries agree which ones will specialize in various technologies.

He suggested that bad economic policy could cause unemployment, which the government should alleviate with a better social safety net.

He noted that in Britain the unemployed are buffered by rent insurance.

Asked what his advice would be for a humanities major, Freeman said: "Write your books in Chinese. A billion people will buy them. ... People in the humanities have never done very well economically, but it won't get any worse for you."