Outsourcing
There are a lot of smart people in technology and politics who don't really seem to understand the driving forces behind economic growth. When I was a kid and dedicated GUI interfaced computers were just entering the market, I recall a great wringing of hands over the job losses that would result from computers replacing typists, filers, mail clerks, and so forth. It was believed that computer automation and networks would also replace laborers in factories and other workplaces, and that this was a "bad thing". Sure enough, all these jobs were lost. Nobody seems to remember that this was an issue, however, because the enormous economic growth that the computer revolution drove created millions of new, higher-paying jobs that required more education, creativity and sophistication to fill. Microsoft, IBM, Novell, Lotus, Borland, and Oracle turned thousands of middle-class engineers and middle managers into millionaires and drove billions in tech investments that created thousands of additional jobs to capitalize on the productivity increases and efficiencies computing enabled.
United States
English: Jerry Yang, one of the founders of Yahoo!
OutsourcingDuring the dot-com bubble, tech companies like the one I used to work for couldn't hire talent fast enough to fill jobs. Every college graduate with an MBA or engineering degree was spoken for as fast as they graduated. We turned to recruiting some of our talents from overseas, importing several engineers of exceptional talent that would have been impossible to hire in the United States. The U.S. government places strict limits on the number of employees U.S. companies can recruit from overseas for fear that they will steal U.S. jobs. The troubling issue about this policy is this: What would our tech economy have looked like if Andy Grove hadn't come here to found Intel? What if we hadn't let Jerry Yang into the country to found Yahoo? Why...