The truth is they don't have a clue on how to manage intellectual labor.
joanna, my friend, why is this not an elitist attitude? what is so intellectual about programming? it could be, but it doesn't need to be, and it seldom is. i.e., there are very neat solutions for proramming problems, but often brute force techniques (more CPU, more memory, etc.) solve the problem equally well, and most code, i suggest, exhibits little intelligent thought.
The "efficacy" of the capitalist model is more myth than fact.
i do not think it is due to any great strength of the capitalist model that outsourcing does and will succeed, since the proposed a posteriori capitalist/market theories state nothing more than the obvious. most of this work is boring, mundane, repetitive and trivial and is easy to replicate elsewhere.
as i said above, the work does not have to be that way. i knew people at bell labs who would come up with the most inventive counter-intuitive little algorithms to solve problems better. that's creative. perhaps even a little useful. but not really necessary.
--ravi
