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Is the Creative Class Engine Sputtering?
Geoffrey.landis writes "The 'creative class' was supposed to be the new engine of the United States economy, but according to Scott Timberg, writing in Salon, that engine is sputtering. While a very few technologists have become very wealthy, for most creative workers, the rise of amateurs and enthusiasts means that few are actually making a living. The new economy is good for the elite who own the servers, but, for most, 'the dream of a laptop-powered "knowledge class" is dead,' he says."
Why? Because socialism fails every time it is tried, and due to immutable human nature, always will. And make no mistake, your proposal, which amounts to forcibly taking money from the productive to support the lazy and indolent, is the very essence of socialism. As they say, if you subsidize something you get more of it; if you subsidize people to sit around and not work, you get more people not working. Then, you get the people who are working seeing more and more of their money stolen and given to layabouts; they will increasingly become bitter and resentful, either doing their jobs with less effort (and concomittant decline in quality), or giving up and joining the unproductive themselves, requiring yet more to be extracted from the workforce that remains. The inevitable result is poverty and collapse, as seen with the fall of the USSR. So no, it's not "worth a shot." It's a "cure" worse than the disease.
productivity per worker is way up
- how can I explain to you that in fact productivity of a worker depends squarely on the amount of available capital?
You see, when you own a stick, you can dig a hole with it, it will be a slow process. Once you have some more capital, you can have a shovel. That's progress. You'll dig much better and faster now.
Of-course once you have enough capital to get yourself an excavator, then your productivity will go through the roof. You see, productivity is not a function of the speed with which you move your hands around, it's a function of the capital that is available to you.
This is true with sticks, shovels and excavators, this is also true with all other types of technology, from microscopes, to computers to cars, to phones, to secretaries, everything.
Given this, I propose to you to rethink that statement. Productivity of a Chinese worker is way up, that is true.
Productivity of an American worker or a British or a French or a Greek worker is really really low. That's because the capital that is used privately in China to build factories and tools and supply chains and shipment routes, in the US and European world this capital goes into government bonds and government spending - wars, SS, Medicare, bail outs, stimulus, departments of everything, from CIA to FDA to EPA to FDIC to FEMA to whatever multi-letter department of your liking.
When a chicken processing plant can put out several million packaged chickens (raised from eggs) with only 17 employees in a town of 50k, your argument begins to break down.
- this argument is false, because if all that people wanted were chickens, then we wouldn't even HAVE an economy, because everybody would be busy growing chickens and you wouldn't need to TRADE.
Economy is about production and trade is about comparative advantage. You grow chickens and I build tables, others make fuel, airplanes, etc. We want to exchange because we don't ALL grow chickens (as a vegetarian, I couldn't care less, to me chickens are a wasted effort, but that's beside the point.)
The point is that iPads didn't exist just 4 years ago. Today they do.
iPhones didn't exist 10 years ago, and today they do.
Personal computers didn't exist 40 years ago and today they do.
Airplanes didn't exist 120 years ago and today they do.
The point is that in the past 95% of people's time was occupied growing/hunting food for themselves, and today maybe 5% of population makes ALL of the food, which is good. That's what we want - we want people's time to be freed to pursue other interests, and we want economies of scale that will absolutely free up human time and allow us to have such LOW COSTS for all of those items that are automated based on competition.
What do we get instead? Instead we get government destroying free market capitalism, mis-allocating all of the resources that could be used to create new things and we all want new things. We don't just want chickens.
If most of the people were busy growing and processing chickens, who the hell would be doing all these other things that we want? Why would you want to WASTE such a HUGE economic resource, as human time, human lives on chicken processing, when those people could instead be doing something else?
Of-course this requires FREEDOM first and foremost. Freedom from government telling you that you cannot compete. Freedom from government telling you that you must give up part of your income, that you could reuse as investment, so that the government can grow instead.
It's like this: either you grow your business or government grows. AFAIC I want as little government as possible, and any amount of growth in it is the worst possible thing to happen to our economies and to our freedoms and individual liberties.
As free people we should not want government to control us and everything we do. We should want as little government as possible. We want to create things that we like, and it's not all chickens.
You can't handle the truth.