Gates does not consider India and China "threats"
Who should young people listen to when it comes to truths about the world economy?
Bill Gates, the man behind the multi-million dollar Microsoft computer empire, told students at the University of California at Berkeley that the United States has nothing to fear from India and China as economic competitors.
The following statement was taken from the official interview of Bill Gates by Richard Newton, Dean of the College of Engineering:
...it's a little scary to me to see people thinking of this as a zero-sum game. It's not like war where you have one winner and one loser. Is it bad for the United States that China would be rich? Take as an extreme that India and China were as rich as the United States is. Now, on a relative basis in terms of political power and percentage of economic wealth, on a relative basis the U.S. would be worse off, but in any other value frame we'd be way better off just in terms of the living conditions in those countries, their ability to come up with better products, to come up with better services; that's a good thing.
And so we're starting to see we're at the start of a process where the whole world is getting into this virtuous cycle of the higher income, better living standards, all of those things.
And so it's a little scary to me to see some people in the U.S. saying, no, we need to put up walls and make sure that, Oh, they're getting good jobs; no, no, no, there's a finite number of those, let's hold that back.
Gates proceeded to say that it is important for the United States to stay on top of the game, to continue to compete in the global market.
The students' reactions to this interview are mixed. Some are concerned that the core problem of offshore otusourcing was not addressed.
Ali El-Annan, a student at Berkeley, said "I was sort of surprised. They can't really create jobs there while leaving jobs here... There is a lot of concern about that among students."
Gates told the students that they "can't go wrong with computer science," and emphasized the advantage that comes with mastering programming and other technical skills.
One would say that the negative reaction that many of the students is understandable, given the way outsourcing is being portrayed as an evil entity in the US today. But Bill Gates, idol of many youths worldwide, may have just lit a flame of understanding, which will help the acceptance of offshore outsourcing along. We will be able to tell in the very near future.
related stories, by category:
