The real culprit is false accounting. If it's awkward to put on a spreadsheet, it doesn't get counted as being valuable. There's an episode of This American Li

The real culprit is false accounting. If it's awkward to put on a spreadsheet, it doesn't get counted as being valuable. There's an episode of This American Life about IIRC a sausage factory that gets moved, and the sausages for some reason do not taste the same. The tacit knowledge embedded in the old factory is an example of this effect. You think you know how something works, so you make decisions based on that, and it turns out your spreadsheet was wrong. The same thing is the case with your example. It's easy to count the salaries and the cost of the new site, along with the expenses for the machinery. Outsourcing is another one of these things, and problems are compounded when it's not just counting the costs/benefits correctly, but doing do at an appropriate time. You send your multi-year coding project abroad, spreadsheet costs are lower, manager who did it gets promoted, project falls apart.