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: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.

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.