Edward Hugh and Marcelo Rinesi write in The Straits Times:

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).

This is how individual ingenuity, cheap technology and cheap intellectual labour defeat corporate R&D and expensive technology. Any American company that insists on playing by the old new rules, using a top cadre of shut-in experts, geographically centralised operations and sub-planetary mindsets, will find itself outflanked, outsmarted and eventually outstripped by a few guys with the right network.

Politicians and losing businessmen call it ‘unfair competition’, while the businessmen that are making money out of it prefer the expression ’emerging outsourcing platforms’.

We see it simply as an extension of Moore’s Law to human beings, which can be put simply like this: The knowledge, expertise and ingenuity that you can rent for US$10,000 (S$17,300), or US$1,000, a year is rising exponentially.

David Kirkpatrick (Fortune) takes a look at the emerging, new economy – one where technology is embedded in all that we do, and efficiency and productivity are the norm rather than the exception.

No manufacturing company of consequence operates without a sophisticated enterprise resource planning software infrastructure, whether from SAP or another supplier. Increasingly these systems are linked with sophisticated supply chain and finance automation so companies know where things sit in their pipeline, how much inventory they have, and how much it all is costing them.

Ordering over the Internet has become routine. This is as true for manufacturing giants as it is for consumers. Steel beams, for example, no less than books are now ordered online–probably more, in fact, as a percentage of the total. As a result, when demand increases in one place, its consequences can be felt efficiently, and immediately, elsewhere. Wal-Mart led the way with its long-ago deal with Procter & Gamble automating shelf replenishment, but now that kind of connectivity is, again, routine. We aren’t in the vaunted real-time economy yet, but we’ve moved much closer.

Communication in general between workers inside companies and between companies is now automated by e-mail and web portals. Corporate edicts can be disseminated at unprecedented speed, as can business orders.

Meanwhile, news travels faster and more efficiently. Columns like this one can be written and published immediately, to a group that has indicated its interest. You get the information you want when you want it, whether it’s here or on MyYahoo, or the New York Times Online or Google News. How could that kind of efficiency not help an economy grow rapidly?

To keep your job in this new world, you’d better be doing something that benefits from a digitized economy. And to compound the problem, as Intel CEO Craig Barrett has lately been pointing out — we emerge from this recession with several billion more people having entered the global economy. Many of these people are willing to work hard for much less than the typical American. And much of today’s work, as we’ve discussed here repeatedly, can be outsourced abroad over the wire.