Flutterby™! : Minds as commodities

John Robb pointed to Rajesh Jain's link to Edward Hugh and Marcelo Rinesi: Brain power is getting cheaper all the time. At first I was going to take on the premise:

But the 'new new economy' way - one that recognises that well-educated human minds are as much of a commodity as any standards-compatible central processing unit - involves software written by bright maverick programmers (maybe tucked away in an East European 'transitional economy'), the incredibly cheap communication infrastructure of the Internet, and literal warehouses of Indian mechanical-mental workers typing away for what to us may appear as bargain basement wages (but which are still more than they could otherwise earn).

to point out that the point of education is to do to human minds what assembly lines did for manufactured goods: Create a constant process for producing a given level of quality with some fairly standard distribution of input materials. Thus, yes, "well-educated human minds" are destined to be a commodity.

But the real point of the article isn't so easily summed up, and I'm not even sure if the authors were able to express it as well as they could: it's not that the mind is becoming a commodity, it's that your competitors are becoming better at leveraging the mind. Fall behind on that process by thinking that labor and thinking are cheap when you chase those costs overseas and you'll get tromped by someone who manages to leverage those assets more effectively, no matter how little you're paying for the people.