You know you're not in America anymore when you turn on the evening news, as I did last night, and see a panel discussion with the title "Capitalism: An Outdated Model?" I don't think you'll see that on World News Tonight with Charlie Gibson.
There is a saying I've heard that is applicable to the economic news du jour: everyone wants to go to heaven, but no one wants to die. We enjoyed cheap credit, but we didn't want to have to pay for it. Well, eventually the budget deficit, the trade deficit, the weak currency, the oil shock, creative accounting, the real estate bubble, and credit card debt were going to exact their revenge. The problem is I'm fairly sure not all of those excesses have come home to roost yet. In 5 years, collapses like Fannie Mae and Lehman Brothers will be seen as necessary purges to put the economy on firmer ground. It doesn't feel so great now. I know -- I just looked at my 401(k).
When I think of my current gig, what has really happened is that I am a recipient of an outsourced job. Just as there are a lot of call center operators in Bangalore these days, there are a lot of lawyers in America. The advice I am providing my client could be given by a French lawyer or a UK lawyer. What I am doing does not involve US law. I have some experience with similar issues, which is largely why I am here, but there are certainly UK lawyers with similar experience, and probably some French lawyers too (and they probably speak better French than I do). But there isn't a surplus of French lawyers, and since the hiring and firing process is a bit cumbersome here, it was easier to import a US lawyer on short notice to advise on a discrete issue. Plus, I think they were all expecting someone straight from a script of Boston Legal. It's popular here, but unfortunately I have failed to provide them with any Shatner-esque buffoonery.
More to the point, given the state of the dollar, I'm cheaper than a less experienced UK lawyer. In fact, this is the second assignment I have had in a year where I worked on a European matter at least partly because it was less expensive for the client to use a US lawyer (although the other matter did not require travel). You can judge for yourself whether it's a good thing that the US has so many lawyers that it now exports them to the rest of the world. I, however, am doing my small part to essentially earn money overseas and bring it home. And our trade deficit just shrank by 0.00001%.
2 comments:
A society like ours has, by virtue of its stability, slowly acquired a lot of economic barnacles: barriers to entry and the like that stymie productivity, and so bright young people become lawyers and not entrepreneurs or innovators of some other kind. Eliminating, or severely curtailing, one reliable and unadventurous path to the upper-middle-class will force at least some ambitious young people, born and raised in the most affluent, long-lived civilization the world has ever known, into becoming more adventurous. I can't see how that's a bad thing.
Fabien Cordiez
http://www.solicitor.fr
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. Undoubtedly, some people become lawyers for the wrong reason, but it can still be a noble profession. Events of the last week also demonstrate that perhaps too many bright college graduates are becoming investment bankers. I think that will be changing, and I don't think that's a bad thing.
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