An article in the February 2004 Communications of the ACM by Yossi Lichtenstein says, in the hedged terms of a small sample size and an academic paper: "current outsourcing practices [contracting, not technical] may fall short of the sophistication prescribed by theories." In other words, outsourcing is being seized on as a golden bullet, while a more sophisticated analysis of costs and benefits would at least alter the terms of outsourcing if not take it off the table.
Not that this bodes well for programmers competing with cheap offshore labor, as it implies that the managers embracing the practice are those who don't stay abreast of magazines like CACM.