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Computers, Unemployment and Wealth Creation

Posted by Hemos on from the the-big-questions-of-life dept.

Andy Oram writes "Anyone who writes programs or plans system deployment should start thinking, "What can I do to bring average people back into the process of wealth creation?" A few suggestions."

4 of 948 comments (clear)

  1. Good grief... by CommieLib · · Score: 4, Informative

    Yet another cry out that changes in technology are going to "historically" destroy jobs.

    I'm too bored with this line of thinking to even trot out the buggy whip analogy. Please save me the effort and just read this:

    Creative Destruction, again

    This has happened a thousand times before, but somehow, this time is different. Whatever.

    --
    If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
  2. Overtime by Councilor+Hart · · Score: 3, Informative

    Want to give more people a job. Then stop forcing them to work overtime. That way, more people will have jobs and more time can be spend with the family, or doing a hobby.

  3. Re:The same thing everybody else should do by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 3, Informative

    1. Most corporate executives are known for giving preferred treatment to people with ties.

    2. From working in the private healthcare industry, I can tell you that it has a huge overhead and a good chunk of your insurance premiums are wasted.

    3. There are a large number of hypochondriacs who abuse every health care system at everyone else's expense.

    I've worked in Federal government health care, city government health care, and private health care. The quality of service, overall, was about the same in all three. But IMO, overall efficiency declined in the order I've listed them.

    --
    The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
  4. THIRTY TWO HOUR WORK WEEK by broward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Gee whiz, why can't anyone figure this out?

    Historically, industrial revolutions have reduced the average workweek by 15-20%. Damn, for the geeks here, you can model the macro-economy as two linear equations like this -

    Each person has 112 waking hours ( 16 hours x 7 days ), on average.

    That time is spent consuming (C) or producing (P) products. So C + P = 112.

    Using the 40-hour workweek as a base, we have
    40 X rateOfP = ( 112 - 40 ) X rateofC.

    Got it?
    What happens as rateofP increases?

    As productivity increases....

    You get more production, and your equations won't balance anymore, you get overproduction and falling prices.

    The ONLY way to re-balance the equation is to shrink P and increase C.