I would go further to say that the current system is disadvantaging rich countries immensely. I typical person without a college degree is likely to think he shouldn't even attempt to seek work such as IT (it's for those college educated types), and instead heads into the local service economy (further depressing wages there), instead of earning money for the country in globally based economy.

The certification system he's talking about would massively accelerate global outsourcing of US jobs.

ISO 9000 certification in the 80s and 90s played a huge role in sending US manufacturing overseas. People were reluctant to believe that factories in various second and third world countries could be just as good. Then the certs proved pretty well that they were!

Same deal now with personnel. Employers are sometimes reluctant to believe Indians or Vietnamese are on par with a four year American college grad. Sufficiently standard tests would prove they are.

In other words, the US has coasted on reputation in a lot of ways and empirical approaches can damage that reputation.

But you're assuming outsourcing is bad for individuals in the US, whereas most indications are the opposite, it increases their wealth. The point about the nongrad IT worker is that he would be able to create more wealth than he would as a local service worker (in the same way as offshore workers do). Increasing production (and hence wealth) from all workers, whether offshore or in US is better for society than allowing inefficiencies and protectionism to prevail.

"But you're assuming outsourcing is bad for individuals in the US, whereas most indications are the opposite, it increases their wealth."

Evidence? I'm curious, mainly because I always hear about the Rust Belt and how it's been screwed over by outsourcing.

The rust belt was not sustainable. From about 1945 until the 70's, the US had an unfair competitive advantage over the rest of the world: our industrial capacity wasn't blown up. This led to an artificially large manufacturing sector in the US (we were exporting goods to the rest of the world). Once they fully recovered (roughly the 70's), there was no need for this.

If you want to bring back the rust belt, you'll probably need to start a large war in Europe and Asia...

The decreasing cost of manufactured goods, increase in quality of them, and the increase in GDP that has occurred over the past 30 years. (You can argue much of this can be attributed to technology, but a large share of it is due to outsourcing - most things in dollar stores and walmart are not due to technology but outsourcing).

The rustbelt is caused by their inability to compete with the better quality Japanese cars (and Japanese salaries are higher than in the rustbelt, you can't make the cheap labour for that).

Real median wages are flat or down in the US for the last 30 years.

You can talk about the theoretical upsides to global free trade all you want. I'm a believer. But 2 billion people jumped into the labor pool and the reality in the US is that they made a wave that drowned a lot of people. Real wages are depressed. That's not to say there's any real alternative to full open participation in the global market, but your free-market cheer and pom-poms don't capture the full reality from a US worker perspective.

I don't think you can blame globalization for that, -technology has eliminated many jobs -companies have become more efficient at "desklling" workers into more narrowly defined roles (and so paying lower wages)

if you want to attack free markets, why not go further and advocate barriers on inter-state commerce within the US.