Computers, Unemployment and Wealth Creation

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."

Comments

Or....

[crumbz]

How about reducing the population? The Economist magazine had an apropo cover story a few months ago entitles, "Can the World Afford 500 Million Americans?" The article went on to explain that by 2060, the U.S. population would exceed 500 million and given current consumption trends, what that would mean for the rest of the world. Not to bash Americans, but what is the optimal population (or carrying capacity) for the Earth? A rhetorical question, sure, but one that needs more serious study than the oft neglected WHO reports.

Re:Or....

[Xerithane]

Not to bash Americans, but what is the optimal population (or carrying capacity) for the Earth? A rhetorical question, sure, but one that needs more serious study than the oft neglected WHO reports.

You could fit 6 billion people into Texas, and it would be less densly packed than Tokyo, Japan.

Wealth creation?

[winkydink]

The only person I'm interested in creating wealth for is yours truly. If others get wealthy in the process, good for them.

Over 50% of my income goes to taxes of one form or another. I'd say that's subsidy enough for the other guy.

Commie bastards. 1/2:)

Re:Jobs instead of efficiency?

[hardpack]

It might work; it might not. Neither model--capitalism or any kind of backward capitalism--has been proven to work, but capitalism is the rules of the system we're currently in. An issue is that it *is* the survival of the fittest, and in a capitalist world those who care and are willing to sacrifice their own needs-fulfillment for the needs-fulfillment of another should lose and die. They don't deserve, by the rules of the game, to pass on their genes.

But it's a healthy dynamic to have those who buck the system. Everyone can't be a winner. Maybe the non-capitalists *will* survive as the fittest; maybe capitalism is here to stay and the wealthy will live at the top of the heap. I've made the decision that my time and resources are best served helping other help themselves (not *just* helping others); others should and will make their own personal decisions about the resources appropriately. I can generate sufficient wealth to succeed in the system, but I can also generate sufficient (unquantifiable) personal wealth in terms of goodwill, friendship, gratitude, and loyalty through my sacrifice--and these are elements of a "morality" that makes me happy. Perhaps this morality is weak, and so I'll die off and my genes will disappear. But it doesn't hurt to try.

Re:wealth creation

[mengel]

Well, take for example the fact that most restaurants go out of business in the first few months. Often this isn't because the food is so bad at the restaurant, it's because the folks running the restaurant know how to cook, but not how to do accounting and run a business.

If there was a software package that helped restaurants with inventory, ordering, advertising, etc. that helped them get the business end right, that would keep more waiters, cooks, etc. employed more of the time.

This is probably true for lots of small businesses; if there was an open-source software solution that helped you run the business effectively, lots more people could get a business of that type up and running, and keep it running.

Re:The same thing everybody else should do

[Bull999999]

I may go for public health care if the government officials who run them are not corrupt, it is run efficiently, and no one abuses the system. The problem is that;

1. Most government officials are known for giving preferred treatment to people with ties, which means that you still cannot guarantee equal care for everyone. Let's say that Joe and John both need a new liver. Joe is a huge contributor to several government officals. I'm willing to bet that Joe will get the liver before John.

2. From serving as an intern for a state rep, I can tell you that the government has a huge overhead and good chunk of tax dollars for the healthcare will be wasted.

3. There will be a large amount of people who abuse the system (such as hypochondriacs) at everyone else's expense.

Not to mention that while I am willing to give a hand to people who are in the bad situations due to circumstances out of their control (like being born disabled), I am against giving help to people who put themselves in a bad situation (like frying their brains due to drug use).

Re:Basic economics

[Cyphertube]

Granted, though, Greenspan played a hand in creating the bubble in the first place. When you see high purchase levels of stock with P/E ratios of 200+, it's time to bump UP the interest rate.

Tax cuts now will not solve the problem, except to create a larger debt burden. This country, both government and populace, is debt-strapped. Also tax-cuts at the federal level often affect more directly porrer states, since federal aid tends to drop and either services drop, local taxes go up, or both. Look at how well Alabama's educational system is faring under the current federal schema. That's selling the future short, and education is a key infrastructure for a functioning capitalist society that is orienting itself more around knowledge workers than manufacturing.

While the author may have political motivation, the premise that helping small business is good is still true. If we had more small businesses, we might have a more stable economy in the long run, with people less tied to major corporations in dependency.

Not so fast pal.

[ahfoo]

Okay, I'm an American born and raised. Grew up with full insurance and as I got into my twenties I worked overseas.
Well, you know as you get older you start to fall apart in little ways and I had a bad tooth upon coming back to the States one year from where I lived in this little country called Taiwan that has socialized medicine.
I didn't have insurance and my tooth was hurting while I was in the States on vacation. So wanting to take care of my own affairs, I told my Dad I was going to wait and have my tooth done in Taiwan. But both of us were a bit concerned about how safe it really was. The ol' man insisted I go to my childhood dentist and ask him what he thought first.
So, I go in and this good ol' American dentist says yep you waitied too long. It looks like you're going to need a root canal. It'll cost about $1300. I can do it this week.
I told him my plan to go back and have it done in Taiwan and boy oh boy did he tell me some horror stories. Well, I don't remember all the exact details, but the sum of the story was that I was risking my life. If I insisted on doing this insane suicidal act, the least he would insist on is giving me clean needles because it was well known that those Taiwan doctors were notorious for re-using their needles to save costs!
Dear God. My father was so depressed that his son insisted on certain death, but after hearing that line of crap coming out of that old fucker's mouth, I was determined to see how bad it really was.
Well sure enough, I went back to Taiwan and had my root canal for thirty bucks. I got the same titanium post they use in the States. I got the same artsy fartsy thing where they send out the blank to be custom sculpted to match your other teeth and best of all it was almost completely painless. This is contrast to a root canal ol Dr. Lying bastard had given me as a kid when I busted one on the sidewalk. That sonofabitch let my novacaine wear off and gave me the ol Dustin Hoffman treatment.
The moral of the story is, you're full of shit. I'm an American and I can testify that I've gotten way better medical service outside of the US and was lied to by American physicians when I suggested I would try such a thing.
I also happen to know that the people struggling to get to American often ARE doctors. They're dying to get on the goddam gracy train.
You are misinformed.

It's going to get worse

[Animats]

I'm on record as having predicted the dot-com collapse and named which companies were going to tank and when. It was blindingly obvious if you knew any economic history.

We're still in very bad shape.

• Personal bankruptcies are up, way up. More people will go bankrupt this year than will graduate from college.
• The stock market is still far overpriced, by a factor of 2 to 3, based on historical price/earnings ratios. There isn't going to be a stock market recovery. Look at Japan. The bubble there peaked in 1989 and still hasn't recovered. It was at 39,000 then; it's around 10,000 now, fourteen years later.
• Manufacturing is only 12% of US employment. That number was 16% a decade ago, and around 35-40% half a century ago. Most of the high-paying jobs for low-skill people are in manufacturing. That's where the good working-class jobs went. Any job that involves large numbers of people doing the same thing repeatedly under direct supervision in a fixed location is a prime candidate for automation. Most of those jobs have already been automated. Technology continues to push manufacturing employment down.
• Median income per hour worked in the US peaked in 1973. Yes. 1973. Best year ever for the working class. For thirty years, things have been getting worse. Slowly enough that there haven't been riots.
• 30 years ago, housing ate up about a quarter of income. Now, it eats up about half. And not because the housing is better.
• Schooling is far more expensive than it used to be. The decline in the public school system means that people go to great lengths to move to areas with better schools, or put their kids in private schools. This is part of the driver behind housing costs. Higher education is also far more expensive, and less subsidized.
• The "race for the bottom" effect dominates public policy. Jurisdictions compete to offer lower taxes, and even lower wages.
• From a pure economic perspective, workers should be paid just enough to keep them alive and working. That's where we were around 1850 or so, and that's where we're going today. Most of the world lives just above the survival level. The Western world avoided that for much of a century, but now it's coming back.
• Technology won't help. This is a fundamental result of unrestrained capitalism. Increased productivity does not inherently increase wages. In a free market, wages will decline as productivity improves, because the labor pool will become bigger as more people are unemployed. Total buying power doesn't increase unless wages do, so there isn't inherently a market for more stuff. An economy with a big pool of permanently unemployed or underemployed people dragging wages down is economically stable. Most of the third world is stuck in that mode. THe US is headed there.

Zero-sum hand-wringing

[AkkarAnadyr]

Why shouldn't we put everyone out of work? We need neither the vindictiveness of mercantilist gouging under cover of the label 'capitalist', or the lazy poverty of diggers masquerading as 'socialist'. Both these factions are merely taking out their S&M neuroses on the rest of us. Like moths to the flame, both assume that the wealth they see is all that exists, and the game is thus zero-sum - what feeds the capitalist barracuda must bleed the poor children (won't someone please think .. never mind), and that what feeds the munching masses must bleed those who apply themselves and produce.

There's enough nuclear energy blasting down over time to support 100 billion spacefaring Earthlings (or to fry them all), and enough information in the planetary DNA library (5G years of research into no-holds-barred competition/collaboration) to keep us in Phd papers and lobster-flavored luaus indefinitely.

Halliburton /Brown & Root can drop a functioning military CCC outpost anywhere in the world in 5 containers and 24 hours. What if that horrid poison pill contained indefinite sustenance for 30 people instead? Most of the strife involved in our rich/poor dichotomy involves centralization that the Net has shown us we no longer need. Let's bag scarcity and concentrate on getting the robots to serve us properly, and stop creating piles of resources we don't know how to mine ("landfills" and "atmospheric CO2"). The greed and testosterone poisoning which suckers us into blood sports is a dead end; far better we raise a world of curious hackers who value the richness in material complexity that we call wealth (and eschew the gadgets of bullying that one might call "illth").

It all depends on what we want. Employment? What would a world of geeks do with the galaxy of hi-tech toys it would take to support the above, besides improve it all day for free, especially if it produced paradise in the process?

This post brought to you by some old hippies, Timothy Leary, and several thousand doses.

+5: Decrying Slashdot 'Unintelligentsia'

[Marc2k]

"How sad is it when people are encouraged to take other people's wealth instead of create their own?"

How do you suggest that we 'create' money? Hmm? Press our own? Make gold from lead? The invention of money and through it capitalism rests in the laws of scarcity, as someone said. There are inherent problems with any economic system, but in any one of them, it comes down to the idea of ownership (even the disallowing of ownership acknowledges the concept fo ownership). In the case of US capitalism, each dollar is owned by someone, the simple act of wealth creation dictates in and of itself that the source be from another individual or group capable of ownership.

Granted the original poster might have been zealous in his defamation of corporations, but when you have large groups capable of ownership, the capacity is there for them to hoard scarce resources (scarce as in limited), thus removing them from the total amount of recources available to the populace. That's bad enough, but if efficiency enables a corporation (or similarly large group) to simultaneously accumulate more resources and displace workers, you've just exacerbated the problem by increasing the pool of those in need, and decreased the pool of available resources. That can be reduced to simple algebra.

Cry all you might that corporations will not exploit that, but look back into history, it happens all the time. Company A might hold their moral ground, but if Company B does it, their pool of resources will grow beyond Company A's, and they will eventually surpass them, if not crushing them along the way. Note that I'm not an advocate of socialism, but I am quite fed up both with the opportunism of corporate policy and with those who defend it under flimsy or false pretenses.

The REAL Problem

[Dr. Transparent]

I think I know what the real problem is. But before we get to that let's talk about what the problem is not.

The problem is not captialism, not Western Culture, not HMOs, not PPOs, not private health care, not the military, not global warming, and not Microsoft.

The problem is that slashdot readers in general watch too much Star Trek

Do you remember the episode where the people from the past (20th century) show up on the Enterprise? (I think they were dethawed or something, but I don't remember exactly. It doesn't matter for this discussion anyway). Remember the cowboy-ish guy, who wants to know where his land is, where his money is, who works for him, etc. And Picard gives him the lecture about how "we're past all that now" and "it's about bettering yourself, etc.", essentially saying, "Stop being a greedy bastard."

The problem is that people really believe that can happen. You'd think after 10,000 years of recorded history people would figure it out, but then you would underestimate hope (that attribute the Architect aptly described as simultaneously the source of greatest strength and greatest weakness, but I digress).

Systems such as socialism/liberalism/etc. are all predicated on the belief that people will generally lookout for the good of the common man. And the proponents of these systems constantly tell everyone else that the reason they're poo-pooing these systems is because everyone is a bunch a greedy bastards. Well, I have news for you, YOUR ALL GREEDY BASTARDS YOURSELVES.

Face it, humans seek after their own interests first. You do it every day. Sure you go into work and bitch and moan about how Bush is screwing over the world and the captialist bastards are ruining your life and you're being held down by The Man, etc, etc. Then you drive home and you cut off the person you're pissed at on the Freeway. You gossip about your co-worker who's doing a better job than you, you keep the $20 bill you found in the bathroom at the movies, you steal towels from the hotel, you eat a dozen grapes at the grocery store you never pay for. Tomorrow you'll lie to your boss about why the report isn't done. You'll spend an hour surfing instead of writing code. And then you'll go home and bitch about how braces cost $3000 and how you can't afford it, all while sitting on your couch watching Monday Night Football on your big screen TV. I know you're selfish. And I am too.

Socialism puts all the power into the hands of a few good liars who are able to convince the masses that they will look out for their good. Simply bull. They'll be the same selfish, greedy, bastards you will be, but now they have permission to screw over more people.

Free-market captialism is the only system that can handle the selfishness of humanity in a way that gives the most people the most opportunity. Sure, capitalism will make a few people very rich this year. But you know what? Those people may be the very poor next year. And the very poor this year might be the very rich next year. Every day is a new opportunity. You're held back only by your own ambition (or lack thereof).

Do some people need an extra hand in life? Sure. And that's what charities are all about. Groups who get together specifically because they care about the interests of others. So give to charities. Or start one. But face it, at the end of the day, we're all selfish greedy bastards looking out for ourselves. No one owes you anything. Now get out of your holodeck and readjust your worldview.