I went to the London School of Economics last night to listen to a lecture by Professor Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate and one of the most-cited economists in the world today. He is well known as a critic of many aspects of globalisation, though the lecture last night was actually about the immense cost of the war in Iraq – as Stiglitz has just published a new book on the topic.

I’ve been thinking a lot over the past few days about some of the more damaging aspects of offshore outsourcing. First, a student emailed me asking for some help with a dissertation that explores the pros and cons of outsourcing, then I had to think about it once more as I am putting together a TV documentary and it will include some analysis of both sides of the coin.

Of course, going to see Stiglitz speak just galvanised some of my thoughts and I’ve got a lunch planned this week with fellow blogger Peter Skyte, at the union Unite. An interesting thing regarding Stiglitz’s new book though – and considering that he is usually viewed as pretty much left-of-centre and critical of everything – is that the military veterans of the Iraq war are very supportive of his analysis. That fact alone does make it sound like a lot more than just left wing tub-thumping.

For all the arguments that developed nations can enrich developing nations by purchasing goods or services, there are many counter-arguments from the detractors. I was in India recently and I was sitting on a bus next a guy from Belgium who worked in the IT sector in Europe, but had never been to India before.

He was completely shocked at the absolute poverty in the streets of Mumbai. It brought me back to my own reaction the first time I took a taxi from Mumbai airport to my hotel – I couldn’t get into the hotel fast enough after seeing the slums. My Belgian friend had internalised a vision of India as the technology companies present it; gleaming offices, smart well-paid staff all with phone-book length CVs, opulent hotels.

The reality is far from what we see on the corporate web sites, like the old holiday brochures that failed to mention your holiday resort is still under construction. And in a sense that is a good analogy, because a place like India is still under construction, and things are still a mess around the edges of the more developed industries.

When I was in the Philippines a couple of weeks ago, they were talking about IT outsourcing being worth 11 per cent of GDP within the next 2 years. It’s clear that our industry is of phenomenal importance to developing regions. All you need is a broadband link, some reliable electricity, some smart people and you are in business. This means that the opportunities for enriching the lives of billions of people is a genuine reality – because every industry now relies on IT – so demand for IT services can only increase.

But in our rush to advance economic enrichment and the redistribution of wealth from the north to the south, it’s worth also considering some of the genuine social issues. We know about the fears on our side of the equation, people fear their jobs will all vanish offshore, junior roles will all be offshored leading to a problem with the career path as people can’t gain experience on a real career ladder, constant uncertainty about the future.

What about on the other side of the offshoring story too? Taking India just as an example, the newspapers are full of stories of sordid scenes at nightclubs, rape, murder, drugs, drinking, and the arrogance of very young people earning far more than their parents. It’s not directly the fault of the outsourcing industry, but by default we have created immense clusters of young well-paid people with markedly different values to the generation that preceded them.

If we can export values such as gender equality then that’s great, but a problem of exporting cultural values is that you don’t have much control over which ones are exported and adopted. India has such a rich and diverse national cuisine, yet the kids at most call centres seem to be wolfing down curried pizza from Pizza Hut, or lamb burgers from McDonald’s…

I was asked to write a a book about this a couple of years ago and I just never had the time to put it together, but no one else seems to have written a book that looks at both the way our jobs are changing and the way work and society is changing in the places we work with. Maybe I need to think again about the offer from that publisher.

On the whole, I’d suggest that it is of extreme value to work with those regions that are less wealthy and less developed. It’s almost a moral imperative these days, and the moment some serious technology-related work starts getting outsourced to African nations then we will really start being aware of what is possible. However, we need to keep our eyes open to the social as well as the economic changes, in our own countries along with those we choose to work with.