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Ad Group Says Internet Accounts For 5.1M US Jobs, 3.7% of GDP
lpress writes "A Harvard Business School study sponsored by the Interactive Advertising Bureau shows that the ad-supported Internet is responsible for 5.1 million jobs in the U.S. — two million direct and 3.1 million indirect. They report that the Internet accounted for 3.7% of 2011 GDP. The research, development and procurement that launched the Internet back in the 1970s and 1980s cost the US taxpayers $124.5 million at the time — not a bad investment!" Your calculations may vary.
So does that mean my Adblock Plus/NoScript combo is killing jobs?
If so, I'm too satisfied with my ad-free internet to really give a damn.
So the employment is much larger than the movie and music industries.
And the video game industry is also larger than movies and music.
Why is the tail always doing the barking for the dog again?
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
This is just indicative of how our society is going downhill. America cannot be viable long term on a service-based economy. We must do more manufacturing. Those that own the means of production have the ability to rapidly innovate. If we don't stem the tide of partisan corruption and sending manufacturing overseas, the United States is going to go the way of Rome and our future will be studying us in textbooks much like we study Ancient Rome.
Like the music industry, the advertising industry is using jobs numbers to imply that they are inherently good. Like the music industry, there is an ideal level of their product -- the level at which it maximizes the long-run GDP growth rate. Beyond that point, increasing employment in their industry harms GDP growth by applying resources (labor in this case) beyond the efficient allocation level.
The music industry has a government granted monopoly in copyright. When that grant becomes too powerful, the industry consumes more resources than is efficient and is a net drag on the economy. Their employment numbers climb while their net contribution to the economy becomes negative.
Advertising, at its worst, distorts consumer behavior and causes unearned cashflow. This unearned cashflow causes corporations to focus their product development on features that advertise well even if they do not result in genuine customer satisfaction, resulting in a net drag on the economy. A portion of the distorted cashflow is channeled back into advertising to keep the distortion running despite negative customer experieneces. As employment in advertising rises past the efficient level, each additional job represents a net cost to the economy.
In any industry, not just those two mentioned, there is a GDP maximizing level of employment. Going beyond that point costs us all in the long run. In traditional industries, that point is defined by the guns versus butter balance. But that is only an upper bound. In industries that have a structural inefficiency, like government granted regulatory monopolies or the potential to distort consumer behavior, the balancing point is reached at a lower level. In those industries, using employement as a measure of societal benefit is particularly perilous.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
how much have you paid to slashdot today?
Slashdot is well known and popular because of its users -- people come here to read comments and have discussions, to the point where they need to be reminded to read the articles. Slashdot does not need to pay people to write things, moderate, etc. This is an online community, not some curated experience.
slashdot requires 16 web servers, 7 db servers, 2 db read-only servers, 2 load balancers, and 3 misc systems.
I manage that many computers in my spare time, and unlike the systems I voluntarily deal with, Slashdot only needs a handful of applications to work (you might even say Slashdot only needs one application to work, but I suspect this is divided into several parts). Slashdot has a high load to deal with, but you are not talking about users running arbitrary applications.
If anything, I would say that Slashdot-style websites would be the winners if everyone installed ABP. Websites where the only operating costs are keeping a handful of servers online are websites whose costs can be covered by other means if necessary -- micropayments, merchandising, etc. If that is impossible, then the web needs to start being decentralized, users participating in serving the websites they visit (a P2P revival, built right into your browser).
So yeah, the users support Slashdot, because if we were not commenting on articles and arguing with each other then nobody would visit Slashdot.
Palm trees and 8
Switzerland is a terrible example because it is a relatively small country with a large banking sector that essentially prospered in part by skimming a percentage off of huge global economic flows (including historically shielding transactions of dubious legality via their privacy laws). Such a pattern of success can't work that way for everyone, as nice a country as Switzerland may be in many respects..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Switzerland
The central issue regardless of what jobs people do is that so much wealth has become concentrated in so few hands. This has happened in big part because the value of automated capital managed by large bureaucratic systems with monopolies over markets is triumphing over the value of individual human labor. See Marshall Brain's "Robotic Nation" article for more details:
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
You can't have a "service" economy when robotics and AI is better than most people for most tasks. You can't have a service economy when most things become manufactured so well they don't need much servicing or it is just cheaper to replace them with new things fresh from the automated factory.
That said, I feel that your other points on the US/Roman comparison are insightful.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.