Brad DeLong has one of the best of what promises to be thousands of articles on outsourcing this year. I don’t have anything profound to add. What worries me is that the future DeLong paints, of gradual global wage adjustment that requires a strong American welfare state to absorb the blow, sounds like a best-case scenario. The alternatives, alluded to by a poster who quotes Polanyi, sound ugly indeed, as Americans turn far more xenophobic than they are today to protect far out-of-balance wage structures.