Fifty years ago, wrote the Swiss economist Marc Farber, less than 2 percent of the giant aircraft manufacturer Boeing's products were manufactured overseas.
Today, the figure is more than 40 percent, with nearly 70 percent of its latest and largest passenger aircraft, the Boeing 787, being built outside the United States, mostly in Japan.
Farber deepens the concern by wondering about the economic consequences if IBM were to lay off 13,000 workers and replace them with 14,000 workers in India? How good for industrial America would that be? he asks.
Yet outsourcing jobs and plants has been the mantra of Wall Street and a growing segment of Corporate America ever since Richard Nixon sat down for tea with Mao Tse Tung in China in the 1970s.
SMU professor Ravi Batra is another of the economic contrarians whose concerns reflect the worries of many.
"The true fundamentals of an economy," he writes, "are wages relative to productivity. People call them supply and demand. Productivity is the main source of national supply, while wages are the main source of national demand. So wages must rise as fast as productivity to maintain supply-demand balance."
Unfortunately, that hasn't happened. As Batra and others point out, wages since 1981 have "stagnated," while productivity has "soared." The result, a dramatic wage-productivity gap worse than in 1929, and a gap now so vast as would take a substantial increase in workers' wages to even begin to narrow.
But while the wage-productivity factor is a key piece in the puzzling array of conditions that led to the current economic calamity, the larger and most important piece, Batra contends, "is the official corruption that creates the wage-productivity gap and hence the potential for economic collapse." Given the events of recent years, it comes as no surprise that such corruption, as Batra penned a year ago, "is high all over the world."
So how do we in Gloucester deal with so titanic and complex a problem? Professor Batra forecasts a revolution in the United States, "but only after a few years of economic chaos." It will start this year and take seven years to complete, he predicted, President Obama in the middle of it all, "and with the economic chaos lasting perhaps until 2012."
What Batra means by "revolution" is anything but clear, for of concern to many economists and ordinary Americans alike is President Obama's seeming attraction to the policies of what Farber calls the Zimbabwe or Robert Mugabe School of Economics.
In Zimbabwe, whenever anything goes wrong, President Mugabe simply prints more money. Then, as Farber describes it, "if that doesn't fix it, print more. And if it then goes even worse, print more."
The policies of the Zimbabwe government, which have destroyed that country with an inflation rate that has more zeros attached to it than the fingers on two hands, probably won't serve as a model for the architects of economic recovery here in America. Still, the Treasury Department should be ordered to stop, or at least slow, its printing before we all have to get used to adding the word "hyper" whenever spelling the word "inflation."
Asked during a recent MSNBC interview what advice he might have for the American people, the Asian-based Farber wasted no time replying. "Buy a farm and a shotgun," he said.
This American isn't yet prepared to go that far, the belief here being that despite all the hardships and uncertainties born of today's economic crisis, there's still much that we can do to improve life in our own community.
But what if Farber wasn't just pulling our leg with that farm and shotgun comment? What if his advice happens to be correct?
Then it's also at least possible that the storm we're all now riding out may have no easy resolution or safe harbor anywhere in sight.
Jim Munn is a regular Times contributor and boys track & field coach at Gloucester High School.
