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The Internet's Network Efficiencies Are Destroying the Middle Class
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Joe Nocera writes in an op-ed piece in the NYT that the same network efficiencies that have given companies their great advantages are becoming the instrument of our ruin. In the financial services industry, it led to the financial crisis. In the case of a company like Wal-Mart, the adoption of technology to manage its supply chain at first reaped great benefits, but over time it cost competitors and suppliers hundreds of thousands of jobs, thus gradually impoverishing its own customer base. Jaron Lanier says that the digital economy has done as much as any single thing to hollow out the middle class. Take Kodak and Instagram. At its height, 'Kodak employed more than 140,000 people.' Kodak made plenty of mistakes, but look at what is replacing it: 'When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only 13 people.' Networks need a great number of people to participate in them to generate significant value says Lanier but when they have them, only a small number of people get paid. This has the net effect of centralizing wealth and limiting overall economic growth. It is Lanier's radical idea that people should get paid whenever their information is used. He envisions a different kind of digital economy, in which creators of content — whether a blog post or a Facebook photograph — would receive micropayments whenever that content was used. 'If Google and Facebook were smart,' says Lanier, 'they would want to enrich their own customers.' So far, he adds, Silicon Valley has made 'the stupid choice' — to grow their businesses at the expense of their own customers. Lanier's message is that it can't last. And it won't."
The micropayments for content idea sounds familiar.
Kodak was replaced by a whole slew of companies that make components for digital cameras, cell phones, picture hosting, digital frames, etc.
It's the Internet's fault! It took ur jerbs! It is wrecking the middle class. The Internet cause the financial crisis, not unmitigated greed and stupidity.
Give me a fucking break. How did this half-wit get published by the NY times?
...do we throw our wooden shoes into the Internet?
Things are far worse for it too.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Same way Henry Ford paid for his stubborn "You can have any color you want as long as it is black" mentality paved the way for General Motors and their dozens of models and several colors to choose from.
How about writing something about how rich people are getting by developing all sorts of new efficient internet technologies and service companies?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Enough said.
Is that what I'm reading here between the lines? If so, no thanks.
This guy is a moron.
He's completely ignoring all the new jobs in the last 10-15 years that have been created over the years:
- Build and maintain networks
- Building data centres (construction)
- Network management and services (ISPs, etc...)
- IT support (hundreds of thousands of jobs and probably millions, small consultant companies and mom and pop shops)
- Research has tremendously increase
Seriously, his story is almost the same as "Robotics and Automation" is stealing all our jobs. But then they forgot the support industry for these new technologies.
Things change, its the way of things, people need to adapt and go back to school... or become salesmen :)
limited resources divided by more people = people are poorer
More efficient use of resources can somewhat mitigate this process but see Jevos paradox:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
http://steshaw.org/economics-in-one-lesson/contents.html
http://steshaw.org/economics-in-one-lesson/chap16p1.html
and these also talk to this...
http://steshaw.org/economics-in-one-lesson/chap14p1.html
http://steshaw.org/economics-in-one-lesson/chap15p1.html
http://steshaw.org/economics-in-one-lesson/chap21p1.html
You can not create economic scarcity where there is none today. Not without adding some sort of value to it. It is why many websites have failed when they decide to put up a paywall. People are used to 'free' as in 0 dollar cost (usually some sort of time cost). When you start to charge for it people may just decide it was not even worth free.
If you go thru with this plan all you will do is end up hurting everyone.
In the UK at least the middle class is the hardest hit by taxes, increasing prices, increased transport costs - everything. Those on low wages get generous benefits while the middle class get taxed. The conservatives give the truly wealthy tax breaks that others cannot take advantage of. If this will help people move out of the middle class to either of the opposite ends its doing them a favour. I'm sick of explaining to the kids that I cannot afford a PS4 for their Christmas because travel costs to work are going up and tax allowances being reduced, at the same time that kids of a single mother who works in Tesco's part time can easily afford it - and then tell us how a charity is giving them a holiday in Benidorm in the summer. I'll be lucky if we can afford a week in Southend-on-sea.
Let's say facebook has 1b active users. Let's say they have a revenue of $6b. Let's say from the $6 per user revenue, they kick $1 back to each user per year.
Yeah, still no thank you.
Here in New England, outsourcing has shipped thousands of jobs to India and other places. There used to be a vibrant software economy here; not anymore, but the tech economy in India is booming.
Here I thought the financial crisis was caused by lenders approving loans they knew people wouldn't be able to pay off and then packaging those loans together and pawning them off on other people and so on through the pyramid until the entire scheme inevitably collapsed. Nope. It wasn't greed on the part of the bankers and lenders. It was the Internet! Technology is to blame. And do you know who's behind technology? Scientists! Yup, if we'd all go back to being completely ignorant and subservient to the rich folks who tell us what to think then everything would go back to those wonderful days when everyone was happy.
[/sarcasm]
Wait... who put these extra-strength rose colored glasses on my face?
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Once upon a time 100% percent of GDP was produced by farmers but rising farming efficiency rendered many farmers unnecessary. Once upon a time the vast majority of the middle classes worked in factories but rising efficiency from automation made many redundant. Once upon a time all administrative tasks where written and calculated by hand by vast numbers of office workers. New forms of economy rise whenever efficiency pushes people out of work. But I can't pretend that I'm not a little worried. Any such new form of economic activity will need time and stability to form.
I stopped reading the summary right there - that was one of the dumbest things I've seen claimed in a long, long time.
Maybe network efficiencies caused Hurricane Sandy to hit New York, too...
#DeleteChrome
But it's only because the companies are the puppetmasters of Congress and small businesses have no way to compete.
The billionaires are destroying the middle class, by extracting their wealth; Internet efficiencies are just one means they use to do that. This is, simply put, not inevitable, and if the power structures were different, the Internet would be enriching, not destroying, the middle class.
How to change that, and the end game if it is not changed, are left as exercises for the reader.
even if the problem was not oversimplified. The problem is less that productivity increased but more that political power is more concentrated. I get micropayments for some of my content now, using Google's adsense. It's not enough to buy a cup of coffee a day and I've worked at it. Fundamentally, the problem is how society is structured and the balance between the power of labor and capital. We've seen other great revolutions in productivity from the agricultural to the industrial revolutions. When society distributes those gains more equitably, civilization flourishes and standards of living go up.
I was about to write that but you took the words out of my mouth. This also applies to other other domains as well. Replacing "jobs" with another. But I would complain if x companie shuts down to open up in a 3rd world country just to save money... now thats a different story but doesn't apply here in any case.
PC Gaming enthousiast that gives comments, opinions and reviews on Games. I'm just having fun with games while doing let
What a weird analogy to make.
Kodak produced film. They also developed film. They were integral to the entire camera process at one point.
Instagram doesn't produce anything, doesn't develop anything (digital images don't really need that), and aren't integral to anything other than Facebook.
Heck, Shutterfly would be a better (though still bad) analogy to make. And they have much more than 13 employees (their website says that they have over 1000).
How is this different than the wagon makers or whatever crying that the automobile was killing their industry? Move on. There are other lines of work.
'Kodak employed more than 140,000 people.' Kodak made plenty of mistakes, but look at what is replacing it: 'When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only 13 people.
Stupid argument. Instagram isn't what killed Kodak and Instagram wouldn't even indirectly compete with Kodak. Kodak built their business around selling film rather than around selling cameras. Kodak was a at its core a chemical company, not a consumer electronics firm. When the need for film went away with the advent of digital cameras Kodak wasn't able to shift their business model. They are a classic example of the Innovators Dilemma.
Marx barked about this back in the 19th century. This is not news. The most expensive part of a business is labour. If profit is the most important thing, then labour must be squeezed. So, if online profits are the most important thing, then online labour at no cost is perfect. Lanier is wrong - this is not a call to micropayments, this is a call to (a non-soviet form of) socialism, a socialism of organised networks based on telekommunist principles of contribution and guaranteed wages in a socialised economy.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Content creator espouses economy where content creators get money.
It did, it sucks electricity out of those power plants. In turn, those power plants when they use more electricity creates heat because of those datacenters. by creating heat the temperature of a that region shift and changes too fast which in turn changes the humidity level, the wind and lastly creating the Hurricane /sarcarms
PC Gaming enthousiast that gives comments, opinions and reviews on Games. I'm just having fun with games while doing let
That just says there are sectors that are booming. This shift has left a lot of people behind. what you are ignoring is all the lower skill jobs. Now when I say lower skill, I don't mean McDonalds; I mean any job you could do with a 2-4 year non-technical degree and on the job training.
It used to be, you go to college, prove you can read, write, and take training, and you were almost garaunteed a middle class lifestyle supporting job. The entire economy was based around the plethora of these jobs.
My favorite example is the paralegal. They still exist, yes. However, it used to be a single lawyer with a big case would hire an auditorium full of paralegals just to study case law and review documents. Those days are gone, that job is done by a small handful of people. An entire auditorium reduced to maybe 2-4 people.
That is why you are seeing people with college degrees working at McDonalds and those with less education struggle to get even the shit jobs that they used to be considered "stuck with". We have seen the huge rise of part time, low wage employment.
But yes, our sector is booming and it is great. That is partially because we empower everyone else to hire less people, and use the ones they do hire more efficiently.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
I'm sick of explaining to the kids that I cannot afford a PS4 for their Christmas because travel costs to work are going up and tax allowances being reduced, at the same time that kids of a single mother who works in Tesco's part time can easily afford it - and then tell us how a charity is giving them a holiday in Benidorm in the summer. I'll be lucky if we can afford a week in Southend-on-sea.
This sounds to me like you have chosen to live in the suburbs, too far from work. It sounds like you could afford a PS4 and more if you did one or more of the following things:
Find a job closer to home. (perhaps, Tesco.)
Moved house closer to work.
Got on the dole , like the Tesco part-timer you facetiously cited.
You're right though, from a percentage aspect and a total volume aspect, the middle class is providing the greatest tax revenue. The extremely wealthy individual is paying a lower percentage than yourself, but they are also paying many orders of magitude more actual pounds than you ever will. And, lest you forget, the middle class are also the largest consumers of said tax revenue. Roads for you to get from the burbs to work, public transport, police, fire brigade... the middle class majority consume the majority of these services. If you look at it objectively, the current system is "largely" fair.
It doesn't make you feel any better, but it does sound like you are avoiding some very logical decisions that could change your circumstance, but you choose not to.
Unfortunately there's way too much neglect in the industry right now. I drive around the city that I live in and more than half of the pedestals are cracked open, with plastic bags wrapped over the distribution blocks to keep water off of them. The cable and phone companies are neglecting their infrastructure and given the number of years that this has been a problem, they don't seem interested in hiring the staff or paying for the materials to fix these problems correctly.
As far as data centers, network management, and the like, the industry has headed toward ever smaller and more powerful machines, virtualization, and equipment that needs less knowledge to support it. Autoprogramming switches, that sort of thing. It's also becoming more prevalent to outsource instead of having staff on-hand, so that's not exactly helping to push us toward full employment either.
In short, it's all screwed up.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
These jobs require different skill sets. Retraining 10-15 years ago would have cost $1000-$2000 for a computer, many books and more importantly a lot of time.
Not everyone is suited to work in tech or understands computers.
On concentration of wealth:
Some of these jobs are also being downsized. Data centres staffing has likely been reduced over time.
Many ISPs have gone out of business in favor of major Telco operations.
I'm not trying to be an ass about your points. I know how hard it is to find work after moving back to a smaller city I know well. The quality and quantity of jobs just aren't there.
None of the things you mention provide many jobs, especially compared to the industries being replaced. It's not as simple as you seem to be making it out to be.
I don't respond to AC's.
...is that this guy's girlfriend left him for the web developer at his company.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
It's not as though this is a new problem, wealth concentrated in few hands. It can be solved the same way it was in the past. Increase the income tax at the highest levels to 75% for incomes over $1 million and use the revenue gains for public works projects. Make University level education free. Invest in research like the human genome project. Rebuild all the countries bridges and highways. Demolish ruined buildings and create public parks. The money is there and the manpower is here.
(or whatever a cup of coffee costs these days)
In Economics parlor, ever increasing productivity is destroying the middle class.
There are many enablers of the never ending productivity gains the world is seeing, including ultra low cost world wide communications (internet being just one form of that), ever advancing computers / it technology, robotics, more fuel efficient transportation.
Blaming it on the Internet shows the author has a very strong agenda against the internet. Instead of an interest in exposing the whole issue.
In both cases (digital economy/Internet and robotization) the net result is increased productivity and a smaller workforce. It is true that some new jobs are created, but they are fewer than the ones replaced.
The only solution, really, is some sort of socialist system, with higher taxes for the high-earners so that everyone has a fair share of the increased productivity. And with bigger strides in robotization, this will be mandatory, or else we'll have revolts and heads will literally roll, which would be unpleasant.
Lots of other small entrepreneurs too.
The author hasn't thought things out very well.
..don't panic
Greed is destroying the middle class.
Reading the linked Lanier article reminds me of the movie Elysium. If you didn't see it, eventually the protagonists claw their way up from the dirty world to the clean one, making everyone a citizen of the clean one, where all the wealth must be shared.
The problem with this is lack of foresight. See, if everyone lives in the same world, which will it be? It'll be the dirty one. There's just no getting around it. So instead of a world of haves and have-nots, we have a world made up entirely of have-nots.
It may be 'fair' but is it 'better'?
Same point made by the article. Instead of a world where people have skills and people need to pay for them, everyone can do their own stuff, and everyone shares the poverty of not having skills.
Another article making the argument indirectly that if only we all did things much less efficiently we'd somehow be much better off...
I think it is only one of the methods.
We might have finally reached the tipping point where there will be no new sector for all the displaced workers to migrate to.
Agriculture > Industry > Knowledge workers.. each shift seems to have required progressively less workers which is why we now have the Service sector. ie. crap jobs where people are treated like disposal items.
With the price of automation falling and the playing field internationally being so unfair to manual labour in most developed countries.. how can there continue to be a middle class? I don't see it.
Where are displaced people supposed to find jobs now when every industry has become more and more efficient with technology while using less and less people?
This smells distinctly like someone had an idea ("The internet is destroying the middle class!") and then busily started beavering away trying to jam every square peg into that round-hole of conclusion.
Kodak was absolutely NOT destroyed by the internet, not by any way. It was annihilated by digital CAMERAS. It's only with a staggering misunderstanding of recent history and a stunning lack of historical memory that someone could assert that something released in 2010 destroyed a company that was shedding jobs a half-decade before. (15000 jobs cut in 2004 alone).
To suggest that "the internet" led to the financial crisis is simply ignorant; the (most recent) financial crisis had its roots in the subprime-mortgage industry, which (depending on whom you believe, and probably your politics) was a failure of collusive non-regulation, unbridled mercenary greed, the Democrats, the Republicans, or the Illuminati. Only by a complete misunderstanding of the circumstances could one believe that electronic trading (I guess?) might have had something to do with it, but EVEN THEN fund traders don't use the interwebs, they have dedicated lines because even a 0.5 second delay would mean a massive competitive disadvantage.
NETWORKS are allowing companies of any size to compete successfully around firms like Wal-Mart and Target (who themselves destroyed small-town businesses). Networks mean everyone's competing in a flatter environment, informationally - that's a good thing, pretty much per economics 101. (Well, it's not good for the non-competitive; are they a 'protected class' now?)
Joe Nocera, by the way, is a "business" columnist/commentator who has a penchant for taking a reasonable position to silly extremes, so I guess this isn't such a surprise.
-Styopa
Ted Nelson and Jaron Lanier would like to have a word with you...
Chris Anderson is on line two...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Businesses always choose their own profit margins over the wellbeing of their customers. They consider customers are only there to be exploited, without considering the long term effects...
For instance look at outsourcing production to places like china... The cheap laborers who make your goods in china aren't paid enough to buy them, and neither are the now unemployed people in your home country. By keeping people employed back home you might have to pay your workers more, but a healthier economy would also ensure more potential customers.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desk_Set
Actually, I am sure the fear of technology taking jobs goes back way before that. Isn't that what the "Luddite" thing was about?
'If Google and Facebook were smart,' says Lanier, 'they would want to enrich their own customers.'
Isn't that what Google Rewards does?
- Build and maintain networks
- Building data centres (construction)
- Network management and services (ISPs, etc...)
- IT support (hundreds of thousands of jobs and probably millions, small consultant companies and mom and pop shops)
- Research has tremendously increase
Continued developments in server and infrastructure technology are introducing major efficiency, automation and density improvements that will significantly reduce the need for jobs in all but the last of those points. So you better start looking for the next trend now.
What the internet did is move wealth around the whole world. The US is still a very wealthy nation. Our poor are middle class compared to much of the rest of the world. Look at the TED talk on demographics and you see the standard of living around the world is improving. One of the big drivers of that is the ability to shift work to where labor is least expensive. That drives up wages in those areas and increases demand for more products many of which we make and ship around the world. Yes some in the US have suffered because instead of competing with local talent they have to compete with the world. Humanity as a whole has the highest standard of living it has ever had and that cannot be a bad thing. The internet has had some little part in helping this happen. As for wealth concentration I believe that is also a good thing. Individuals with massive wealth can create amazing things that just would never happen if wealth is widely distributed. When wealth is politically controlled it is wasted. In a free market to stay wealthy one must serve to benefit their customers. The internet is the biggest most open market for ideas ever devised. If you have a good idea it can be spread to the whole world in hours or days in the past good ideas took lifetimes to spread.
The internet is a component of that. I have a deck of COBOL cards in a box somewhere and yep, it all goes back to that. All of the clerking and moving bits of paper around jobs are gone. There are no more mail rooms in companies, no more box stacking jobs, there are no more middle managers. I could buy a car anywhere in the world using my phone in under a minute.
We're either looking at medieval rates of income disparity or much higher taxes to prevent revolution. I think what will happen is that some countries (the EU/Canada/Australia/Japan) will use the US as a dirty lab for some of the higher risk stuff of capitalism while maintaining a firewall to maintain civilization.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
I decided to log-in and repost my answer as non-AC:
In both cases (digital economy/Internet and robotization) the net result is increased productivity and a smaller workforce. It is true that some new jobs are created, but they are fewer than the ones replaced.
The only solution, really, is some sort of socialist system, with higher taxes for the high-earners so that everyone has a fair share of the increased productivity. And with bigger strides in robotization, this will be mandatory, or else we'll have revolts and heads will literally roll, which would be unpleasant.
Most of those jobs are white collar though and often require substantial investments in education which statistically pays off, but statistically works out and works out for an individual are not always the same.
There are still jobs like welder, that people can still go get hired and trained to do right out of high school but these are rapidly disappearing.
Labor saving technology created opportunities for just about everyone on; automation is creating opportunities for capital owners, and certain groups of white collar middle class workers that fall into some prerequisite conditions; but its not helping helping everyone.
Its largely leaving the jobs that are so low skill and low wage they are not worth anyones trouble to automate ( cleaning, final assembly, landscaping ) and jobs that require (or at least appear to require) intelligence and decision making we can replicate with a machine.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Nowhere near the number of jobs lost have been created. we're talking scales of 40 to 50 people replaced with a single computer which takes maybe 2 full people to manage when you consider a person is probably responsible for multiple computers. Robotics is another industry where far fewer people are employed especially since 3d printing is a real thing. You can deny it all you want, but that doesn't change the fact that there is significant evidence to show that there are far less jobs than there used to be seems to be strongly tied with the advent of machination
Not all jobs are equal. For a middle class to exist you need large numbers of workers creating things of value. that is not IT, that is not robotics repair/maintenance, and it's certainly not tech support. (yes all of those things you listed can pay well -- but at the end of the line, something somewhere of value must be created to pay for them.)
Even with the advent of the Internet, jobs in IT change. When I was in high school, the job of having media and running around reimaging PCs was a decent low-level job because it consisted of bringing a parallel port CD-ROM drive, a floppy with drivers, and a CD in its caddy with the OS. Then companies started using Ghost, and one could make a golden corporate image. However, times have changed. A reimage is done by a PXE boot in most cases, or if on a locked-down subnet, done by a USB flash drive.
Evolving and retooling is a part of life. I know that the skills I picked up in high school (AppleShare/LocalTalk file server administration and HyperCard) are absolutely useless today. The skills I learned in college (BSD/Linux/IRIX/Solaris) administration are partially useful, but that has changed as UNIX has evolved. Windows NT was on the sidelines, but come late 1990s and 2000, its successors have become a core part of the server room for better/worse.
In fact, IT has brought more jobs. Storage administrators, SAN administrators, security admins, compliance admins, eDiscovery departments, and so on.
Blame the death of the middle class on where it needs to be -- flooding markets with low cost, inexperienced H-1B workers, offshoring, and the disinterest by government in protecting industries from industrial espionage, then wondering why some foreign company has the same technology for a lot cheaper.
The central premise is not that tech sector jobs replace more than an equivalent amount of prior employment. They should as that's the entire point of technological development in a free market economy. Rather, the point is that this isn't a good thing a priori. In some cases, technological development extends the utility of a single worker while freeing up others to work in other fields/directions. This only occurs, broadly speaking, when the economy is working at sub-saturating levels of employment, which has or had been the case for most of human history. But we've reached a point of consumption/production where employment is not saturating. That wages have not risen for much too long. This leaves people unemployable. This leaves people poor and unable to consume. Technological development (some not all) in this case can make the economy less value creating. Amazon and Walmart replace low skilled workers with automation. In our current economic situation, these employees can no longer find work anywhere that matches their low skill level. They become drags on the economy reducing the effective value created. Rinse, repeat. The question isn't whether we are at this stage, but rather whether it is reversible. Can we retrain workers fast enough to accommodate the rapid pace of technological development? I am not so sure. Wetware is a bit slow on the uptake.
Which leads to the real point, I think: We should stop focusing solely on increasing economic efficiency and focus instead on providing a basal quality of life for everyone. Technology is still needed and indeed serves as the basis for the newer way of approaching the economy, but we can choose to escape the technological Malthusian cycle we've just entered, and spend more of our technological development on solving actual issues that matter to quality of life...
Wealth Inequality in America exposed:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM
This image says it all:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b3/If-us-land-mass-were-distributed-like-us-wealth.png
Also interesting:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_United_States
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
The problem is not automation (we are doing this since the industrial revolution), but the distribution of wealth.
Stop wasting time in the wrong direction FFS.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
You call the "web" increased research?
Right. That really sounds like a legitimate technofascist.
What is being described here is what we call a "productivity improvement". This is, of course, a good thing for the economy: moving from "It takes N people to produce X output" to "It takes N/10 to produce X output" gives you the same output, plus a bonus of 90% of N people who can then produce Y output. Result, X+Y.
Naturally, in the short term some of those people may have transitional problems (i.e. they won't find all new jobs, or won't have the skills to do the jobs that are required), and this may justify taking some of Y in taxes and giving it to those displaced people to cushion the blow, perhaps in the form of welfare or of re-training. However in the long run its works through: there is no reason at all to suppose the overall level of employment will drop (and it hasn't, empirically). Reasonable people can disagree as to whether (and how much) of Y should be re-distributed for this purpose.
What simply cannot be disputed is that X+Y is better than X alone. Rising productivity is why we don't all live as subsistence farmers.
To put a finer point upon it, it's 38 years of Capital keeping 100% of gains from productivity improvements and giving NONE of it to Labor.
In a non-pathaological society, government would step in to make things more fair before the hoi polloi start sharpening the machetes.
In our society, we have the GOP and Fox News to keep the rabble distracted with straw men like abortion and to accuse anyone who finally notices what's going on of "class warfare".
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
When you buy a pair of pants, of, say $100, what do you think the person (presumably in China or India) who manufactured it receives? Right, less than $1.
At the same time, all the middle-men receive the bigger part of the amount.
Do you think that is fair?
Have a look at this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM
Hint: there's something wrong with the way in which capitalism works.
In nerd-speak: if a job-scheduling algorithm distributes workload unevenly, a kernel developer will try to fix it. When income is distributed unfairly, we all stand by and do nothing.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Actually I think if you look at the number of jobs created in those industries, and a realistic picture of the number of jobs they replaced in other industries the numbers are still significantly negative.
Let me use one simple example of the old way, compared to the new way, looking only at jobs in America. 20 years ago a product built in China would be shipped here on a boat. A team of 20 or so long shore man would unload the boat. 200 truck drivers would take the goods to an importers warehouse, employing another 200 to sort them. 5 customs inspectors would go over everything on the boat and make sure it passed muster. Another 200 drivers would set out across America to middle man warehouses. Each of those 200 warehouses would employ another 200 people to unload the trucks, break down boxes, sort, pick, and build new bundles, and send them to mom and pop stores in their area. Each mom and pop store would then employ 10-20 people to stay operating.
The new way is that your iPhone is ordered online by a computer run by a fraction of personafter all a sysadmin these days can take care of a few thousand machines. It is made in China and put on a FedEx plane. A team of 3 pilots brings it to the US. 1 customs inspector spot checks a few things match the computer generated invoice. Perhaps a hundred folks at the FedEx shipping center help sort that package. Another 3 pilots take it to the destination city, where 1 loader puts it on a truck for 1 driver to drop off at your door.
That is supply chain efficiency. No inventory in warehouses, which means no warehouses. No middle men. No or limited retail stores. Handle the package a minimum number of times, don't let it sit around collecting dust and depreciating while tying up capital. It's all driven by computerized supply chain management.
And this doesn't even address the issue that many of our goods are so cheap now as to be disposable, eliminating whole industries of repair. Remember when their used to be TV Repair Shops? Yeah, those all went away when a new TV became $200.
So yes, there are millions of new jobs, but there's also no shortage of information suggesting that workers are more productive with technology, which means one new worker can do the job of more than one old-school worker. That's net negative for the job market. When we were at full employment that was good, freeing up some people to do new things, but now that we're at less than full employment it could quickly become a downward spiral as there are no new jobs, people go unemployed, lose skills, and stop contributing to the economy.
The gov't is making it nearly impossible for companies to hire full time workers. So companies turn to automation and other methods to avoid hiring them or off-shore jobs to avoid regulation. The Internet creates new jobs as it provides the means to offer new services that would be available. Saying the Internet is killing jobs is like saying the auto industry killed jobs by putting buggy whip manufacturers out of business. And how many millions of middle class jobs were moved overseas, not replaced by machines.
If you want the return of the middle class stop voting for as*wipe politicians that take away your liberties and your jobs. Already the EPA (under the direction of the Barry) has banned coal fired power plants after 2022. We will lose 43% of our electricity in about 8 years. There is no way the US is going to replace 43% of its electricity in 8 years. Third world nations will have a higher standard of living than the US will by 2022.
Also he completely ignores the motivation "Greed is good" behind using technology to gain an advantage and instead blames the technology. Technology will advance and corporations have exploited it just like they've exploited natural resources like oil. Don't blame the technology for how people decide to use it. For example, what lead to the financial crisis was the fact that everybody was chasing the next big score on Wall Street. For them that meant trading in unregulated derivatives with credit default swaps based on home mortgages. Everyone seemed to forget that housing is just as cyclical as other markets. The boom was bound to end. How was IT at fault for this? It is easier to trade electronically and more people can do so but that doesn't mean that it wouldn't have happened it was still paper trading.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
They took away all the business for the ice houses. Damn cars they took away all the business for the horse and buggy sellers.
and then you may see more people working less people pulling 60-80 weeks as is cheaper then hiring 2 people for 40 each.
Shouldn't this have been titled "Are the Internet's Network Efficiencies Destroying the Middle Class?" ?
When a process becomes more efficient, it takes fewer resources for the same amount of product.
One of those resources is quite often labour.
For the same amount of product, a more efficient process will likely entail fewer jobs.
In many cases they tend to boost production, which helps dull the impact of a lower per unit labour requirement.
You want to know why that new shiny gadget costs 30% less? Likely because it took 30% less to build it.
I disagree with your Kodak example. Kodak's downfall was due to a failure to innovate. Instagram got a billion dollars because 13 people packed more innovation from having a highly efficient agile team than Kodak's entire company. How many of those 140,000 people came to work every day and drooled at their desk as the world changed around them? Oh, can't tell me for sure, don't know? Duh. How many of the 13 people at Instagram could get away with drooling at their desk? None.
I absolutely agree with enriching customers. Maybe that is the next Facebook boom? Any volunteers want to take on the task of building a monetary based social network? Have you considered Etsy? Pretty much every service should offer a store and classifieds. Why not?
Very true. With companies not "sharing the wealth" and favoring owners over employees in almost every case, this becomes a very real problem since most people are employees first and foremost (often only).
There's plenty to go around, too - our country's GDP is booming. Its just that none of that wealth is being shared. Oddly enough, the pain when a recession comes is shared very quickly.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
There are many problems, and we aren't going to work them all out on Slashdot :)
One reason that people work at McDonald's with college degrees is that the traditional, elite "liberal arts" education is sold as a job-getter to non-elites. Sure, a wealthy man can find a job for his liberal-arts educated son. Good luck to the liberal-arts educated guy whose dad is a factory worker, or even in prison. For most people in the middle or lower classes, college should be used to develop an actual skill. A liberal-arts education is great, but it is a luxury unless one can be assured that they will attend graduate school.
With the disappearance of factory jobs, we really are leaving our high-school graduates hanging out to dry. Good paying jobs require more skill now, and I think if we want to maintain a non-college track, we should seriously consider extending free pubilc education through associates-level courses.
Massive numbers of factory jobs are gone. Probably forever. We can blame robots, China, or whatever but the reality is that they are gone. We need to be realistic about what the next generation of kids needs to have a shot at a middle class lifestyle.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Seriously, his story is almost the same as "Robotics and Automation" is stealing all our jobs. But then they forgot the support industry for these new technologies.
There's quite a lot of evidence that job creation has ground to a halt in the US.
During the Clinton administration, the average annual increase in jobs created was over 2.5% per year. With a couple of exceptions, the figure has always been over 1% at least.
Since 2000, that figure dropped to 0% and 0.21% during GWB's two terms. Obama's first term was also 0.21%. There's not much indication that his second term will create many more.
Once you factor in population growth, job growth has actually been negative for over a decade. I don't have the US figures to hand but here in the UK, there are 5 unemployed per job vacancy.
It is a problem that is largely being ignored.
the fruits of modern technology abused for corporate interests. that is a big part of what is killing classes. instead of making life better and easier for everyone its all about profits for a few lazy thiefs. ofc those in power have an interest in destroying the lower classes, else their system cant work - be it technology, silly laws, propaganda and religion.
Completely agree: the economic impact of this shift cannot be overstated. This shift is what's driving the hollowing out of the middle class: all of those white collar, skilled jobs are being wiped out by greater efficiencies. True, it's probably employing a software programmer somewhere, but that is at the expense of thousands of paralegals and even lawyers. The brutal reality is this: the system rewards the small handful of top performers at the expense of thousands of rank and file / competent but mediocre folks underneath them. Society is going to have to figure out what to do with all these people, or there will be hell to pay.
I've thought a lot about this.
What we need is a universal flat tax refund that pays out incrementally over the year and a flat tax. And then eliminate the minimum wage and every tax write-off.
Set the flat refund at whatever level allows a single woman in an average american city to raise a single child in a minimalist fashion. I'd guess around $1000 / month. So everyone in the country gets that much. Then all income is taxed at, let's say 25%. You pay 1/4 of the first dollar you make and 1/4 of the millionth dollar you make. And that's all the personal tax that exists. No FICA, no payroll. Capital gains, carried interest, inheritance, is taxed at the same flat rate as income, all forms of earning money are equal.
People who are automated out of the economy get a stipend to live on. Then the combination of a flat rate and a flat rebate effectively works out to be a graduated income tax. It provides a strong incentive to get married or for single parents to pool resources and live efficiently. And getting government assistance, whether it be the kind of assistance that used to come from the Welfare office or from an IRS return now no longer requires verification (and oftentimes lying) so there can be big cuts in the departments that give out money.
4K theaters are much better then the old film ones.
Well we've already proven we will bail out failing but critical corporations and we've proven that we have the stomach to hand them cash to pay for their infrastructure. Can you blame them?
The "middle class" has been declining for decades. Real wages and benefits have shrunk; the wealthy have continued to put into place laws to protect their capital at the expense of everyone else; poor(er) people around the world have gained a small increase in financial power; etc. And, there is only a finite pie.
"The smallest kid can build a website and business better than the largest multinational"
It all depends on how you look at it. Personally, I've bought more from tiny places I would never have known existed, and got better prices, products and service, than ever before.
The problem, I feel, is that the need for middle MANAGEMENT in such places is no longer present - and that's a real worry for a lot of people who don't actually do anything productive for their companies.
And the Kodak example is terrible.
All technocentric economies are econocentric. This guy is trying to re-invent the ideas from Future Shock.
Whose heads will roll? If the elite control all the most powerful means of destruction (robot planes, etc.) as well as the means of production, then the masses' heads will roll, not those of the elite.
Consider Detroit. What we see there is the disenfranchised class reverting to subsistence farming. Is that the wave of the future? The elite controlling all technology and everyone else growing their own food because they have no way of getting any money?
Is the future of technology (in the US anyway) the complete domination of the elite and everyone else living in 3rd world conditions?
--PM
Eh, who cares. If your job got automated, then you are not worth your paycheck.
"Such short a vision will only doom you in the future". Who knows. By then, maybe an "Internet revolution" will occur and we will go back to simpler times.
alas, when you ring a bell in the forest...
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
If the technology manages the same volume of labor demand as before, then it wouldn't be appealing as a cost saving measure. Yes, the IT industry is currently benefitting from this, but likely not as much as the postitions it is directly responsible for displacing. Now other industries may be finding things to do with that labor surplus, but I think it is silly to claim that IT is taking up all that slack.
Now that's not to say the answer is to be luddites and turn away labor saving measures. Hopefully, one day we'll find ourselves with labor supply exceeding our ambition to do something with it, and we have to figure out how to cope with that potentially very nice circumstance. For example, people assume at least 40 hrs/week of work should be done. If we only need half the labor pool, it would be catastrophic if we had 50% unemployment, but it would be bliss if the standard work week decreased to 20 hours.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
What a bunch of luddite crap. The machines are taking our jobs! Of course the internet has eliminated jobs... this is a good thing. Going back to a system where people manually distribute content, manually develop film, etc. would not add any value. This reeks of Keynes; pay the people to dig holes and then fill them back in! The only way to increase real GDP per capita is to get more value out of less workers. Whether that generated value is then distributed fairly is another matter.
The upside is that every time you automate one job, you free people up to do something else. If you want to suggest that there is simply nothing else left to do... great! Everyone must have everything they have ever wanted, and thus they don't need money anymore. Of course that isn't the case; people still die of cancer, we don't have high speed rail, space travel is still impractical, the list is endless. Why employ people doing something that adds no value when there are so many real problems they could be working on? All of these things would add real GDP, not just add dollars and redistribute wealth via inflation.
Even if there really are no more jobs to do, this job destruction (on average) tends to preserve wealth in the lower class. People tend to assume wealth=money. Money is only useful because you can buy things with it. You see, 20 years ago it was expensive to take pictures, develop pictures, to mail them. Today it is virtually free. I'd wager that the cumulative amount people save on every picture they take is much greater than the amount of money they would have earned at all of those jobs. Yes, people make less money, but they don't need to spend as much.
Just write in railroad everywhere you see internet.
It's pretty idiotic. The internet led to a massive economic boom in the 1990's. 10's of millions of new jobs created.
What we are suffering from now is the aftermath of a debt collapse that has nothing to do with the internet.
"...That is why you are seeing people with college degrees working at McDonalds..."
Bullshit.
In 1980, barely 50% of high school graduates went to college.
Now it's around 70%.
There is no reason that nearly 50% more of our population NEED a college degree, aside from (depending on who you blame) an elitist focus on intellectualism uber alles OR a giant subsidy to the most reliably left-voting demographic (teachers) camouflaged as 'increased government assistance to help kids go to college'.
Further, the reason the non-collegiate kids have shit jobs is because of the loss of industrial jobs - most of those people would have gone to work in factories that are now in China or Mexico. Again, depending on where you sit you can blame the limitless greed of corporations seeking lower-cost labor regardless of the impact to their own community, OR unions that made factory-line labor here prohibitively expensive.
In neither case did the internet have anything to do with it.
-Styopa
im pretty sure the death of the middle class was ushered in by a combination of wanton and reckless deregulation which encouraged predatory and fraudulent lending markets leading to a subprime lending crisis that precipitated massive foreclosures which in turn plunged major economic sectors into default requiring trillions of dollars of subsidies be paid to a concentrated minority of powerful multinational companies. historical analysis confirms this sharp decline was predicated by liberal trade deregulation and labor union suppression in the form of the north american free trade act and the reagan PATCO strikebusting event of 1981 as well as various lesser publicized pension reforms and right to work legislative endeavors which relegated blue collar jobs once responsible for middle class lifestyles to the working poor.
but yeah, i can see how billionaires could mistake that complex chain of events for the turbo button on their linksys
Good people go to bed earlier.
It would be an awesome first step if we could all just agree that the middle class (at least in America) is in decline from what it was one generation or two generations ago, and that that has several bad consequences, and that we should try to think of ways to reverse this trend.
I think it would be reasonable to admit that it does look as though a lot of currently-existing good-paying jobs (and even notso good) are being automated away, and that we don't really have much sense of what jobs all those displaced workers might be doing a decade or two in the future. I can easily google up lots of examples of current attempts at automating away whole classes of workers - bus drivers, teachers, care-givers for seniors, farm workers, guards and night watchmen, legal and actuarial staff. Logically, if the costs per unit output were more for these automated methods, (once the design, support, IT etc was included) than for the labor-intensive solution, then no one would be pursuing them. I don't see anything in recent economic history that leads me to believe the higher profits yielded by these automated techniques will be shared with the remaining workers. I doubt that too many of the displaced bus drivers or farm workers are ever going to be retrained as robot maintainers (or whatever new jobs are created.)
Most likely outcome: management is going to develop and use automation wherever it can, let go as many workers as the automation allows it to, and keep the profits. Productivity goes up, but the remaining workers don't get much in higher wages. Economic value (e.g. money, capital) continues to be concentrated at the top of the economic pyramid, where it is stockpiled and rendered useless.
Kodak is actually a good example.
Back in Kodak's heyday, they employed over a hundred thousand people.
All of the companies you mentioned have at most a few hundred each. So the net employment is negative.
Folks love to point out at how well Google, Yahoo, etc.. are adding to the economy, but they only have a few thousand employees.
That's the problem. More and more workers are being displaced across all industries - they are becoming permanently unemployed.
Retrain?
For what? And after retraining, how to get a job when employers are demanding experience? With a glut of experienced people out there - by the way.
That's the thing - our economy isn't adjusting fast enough to the industry changes and improved productivity. There are not enough jobs for folks to move to when they are no longer needed.
The free market is failing for these folks. Labor, at all levels, is increasingly becoming an over supplied commodity.
I think now, the only field that has any hope of guaranteed employment is as a physician.
Maybe we need cheaper / quicker schools so people can learn new skills with out the high cost and the long time that is from the old College time tables.
(WTF does Instagram have to do with Kodak?)
People have been talking about this (what's the term today? .. ah, yes ..) digital economy .. for hundreds of years, but mainly for the last three hundred. Yes, the water-powered-mill workers are taking jobs away from the guild members. We still view it as a net positive, though, BECAUSE JOBS ARE WORSE THAN WORTHLESS. Increased productivity and efficiency means you get more for less.
Do you fucking get it? Jobs are a bad thing. When a politician says he wants to create jobs, he is telling you that he wants to harm the economy and make us all poorer. He's saying, "I sure hope there's a devastatingly-destructive earthquake, so the construction workers will have something to do."
Jobs mean you are a butler, instead of the guy who has a robot butler. Jobs mean you are the guy who has to brush down the master's horse after his ride, instead of the guy with a cheap car. Jobs mean you don't know what all is going on out there, instead of clicking to start your web browser.
The average poor are wealthy. Good riddance to the middle class. I would rather be a poor person in 2014 than a middle class person in 1964 (or god forbid, 1914!!), because a poor person today enjoys luxuries that Howard Hughes never knew. Howard Hughes didn't have a web browser or a digital camera or a 2014 Toyota Corolla. His best car -- no, his best vehicle, whether roadster or flying boat or whatever -- was an unreliable hard-to-maintain uncomfortable PIECE OF SHIT compared to the third-hand 1997 Honda Civic driven by a Wal-Mart "wage slave." And the middle-class people who worked for Hughes, or who lived on the set of Leave It to Beaver, had even less. Maybe some day, if they ever moved from "middle class" to "rich", they might be able to own a car phone.
Technology (so far, barring nuclear war or nano-plague or something like that) is awesome, and it is making us richer. If we don't get to call ourselves "middle class" anymore, that's fine. Let's call ourselves "rich" instead, because I guarantee you, that anyone from 1970 who looked at our lives, would say that we are rich.
May it's time to change full time to 20-32 hours a week with an say min level of say 100K+COL to have someone on NO OT salary.
Maybe also have forced comp time / any use it or lose it use it or lose vacation policy must pay out the lost time as some people can't get the time off and or comp time goes to vacation but the work load is to high to use it all.
Which is different from our current socialist system (with higher taxes for high earners) in what way?
Our current socialist system works OK, needs some tweaks (higher exposure to taxes in the upper brackets, fewer loopholes, a reasonable corporate tax strategy that avoids stupid things like the double dutch, a couple of trillion less on the DOD and ummm...).
OK, now I'm all depressed again.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
We're getting Wal-Marted to death, and the libertarians want to argue about Kodak.
There's no convincing them. They'll be touting the virtues of the unrestrained free market right through the next depression.
I do worry about what's coming next for the middle class, and that's coming from someone who's firmly in the "knowledge worker" camp. The reality of this is that the traditional "corporate drone" job is rapidly being replaced by software automation or cheaper labor. Futurists who see a bright Star Trek-style utopia at the end of this change, in my opinion, are overlooking some very big problems:
- The loss of safe, stable corporate employment is going to cause a huge shift in people's standard of living. There are millions of people who get up, get in their car, go to an office, take a stack of input work, perform some process on it, forward it to the output queue, and repeat this 5 days a week. I think most IT people can relate -- we support lots of people doing these jobs. All of that is going to disappear. Now you're going to have a chunk of the population who is suddenly unemployed, broke, and has no way to support itself to the same standard. Think about the office environment of the 60s vs. now -- no more secretary, no more typing pool, way fewer bookkeepers, way fewer middle managers. All those workers in the 60s made enough to buy houses, cars, vacations, etc. and keep the economy running. Now most people who want to consume are forced into debt.
- There's no getting around the bell curve. It's impolite to say, but not everyone is or can be a knowledge worker. (I'm no genius either, so I'm not trying to be snobby or elitist.) We've already hollowed out the lower end of the curve by killing manufacturing jobs. Someone with an IQ of 98 is much better suited to performing a repetitive assembly line task with no independent thought. Those people used to be able to work in factories at a wage that at least allowed them a few nice things once in a while. Now, all those people are working minimum wage jobs or unemployed.
- Right now, there is no appetite for ideas like providing everyone a subsidy. Unemployment insurance in the US is a joke and the idea of a universal income will never fly with those who have more than average.
I definitely don't want to go back to a world without computers and automation, but I think we need to seriously consider the problems that complete automation of all routine tasks will create for society in general. The standard answer when anyone brings up concerns is that better, new jobs will get created. What will these be? I can't see a future form of employment that takes the full spectrum of people's abilities into account and makes everyone's lives better. When you can't even fall back on fast food, or driving a taxi, what's next??
With the advent of Global Communications, and Home Automation; money will become a one paragraph history lesson.
Wrong. Flat tax is a bullshit idea that benefits the rich the most. Money's value to an individual is logarithmic, not linear. Taxing a billionaire 10% and a homeless man 10% is NOT fair, and it's simplistic to think it is.
If you want to replace people with "efficiencies" then be prepared for, and learn to live with, a larger welfare state.
You only need so many greeters at Wal-Mart. Only so many domestic workers. Further, there is a limit to how much a domestic worker will be paid. Remember, in the England of "Upstairs/Downstairs" the domestic workers were forced to wear different bonnets to church so they wouldn't be mistaken for proper ladies. Rich people don't want poor people to live as well as they do.
We just might be reaching a point where there just aren't enough new things for people to do to make a living. So, we can either accept that we will have to have a larger, more equitable and robust welfare state, or start being willing to embrace some very ugly solutions like mass population reduction. And except for the most ardent neo-libertarians, people usually aren't comfortable with forced population reductions.
The thing you CAN'T have when people are being put out of work by efficiencies is an expectation that people work longer hours for less pay and higher productivity.
Here we are, in the 21st century, and people are working longer hours. I don't think technology was supposed to result in people working harder, and more people at the bottom. Technology wasn't supposed to result in less economic and social mobility. Technology wasn't supposed to result in a lowering of standards of living and greater economic uncertainty.
You want that increased efficiency? Then be prepared for people working fewer hours for more pay. For two or three people doing jobs that were once done by one person. And for a much stronger social safety net.
You are welcome on my lawn.
"...radical idea that people should get paid whenever their information is used..."
It's not so radical. We are currently treated like a herd of sheep, constantly being fleeced by the likes of Google and Facebook.
The only solution, really, is some sort of socialist system, with higher taxes for the high-earners so that everyone has a fair share of the increased productivity.
This is not the only solution - although you are right that we need to give more people a share in the economy. Our society needs to recognize that highly productive people work too much and would be happier if the worked less and earned less. Yes, one of the world's elite business schools says that productive people work too much.
We have become much more productive—output per hour worked increased more than fourfold between 1950 and 2012... In the United States, the average working year went from 1,963 hours in 1950 to 1,790 hours last year, a drop of less than 10%.
Research shows that highly productive people would be far happier (and still have plenty of economic security) if they worked fewer hours. If the amount of work to do doesn't change, the economy has room for more workers.
I think that a better solution to taxation changes is for the government to change employment law - no more exemptions for overtime. All employees should receive overtime pay if they work more than X number of hours in a week. Period. The X number of hours should be indexed to productivity measures so that it changes in step with the productivity levels of our economy.
Look no further than outsourcing.
The problems we're experiencing aren't a consequence of technology, they're a consequence of society. People at all levels are becoming increasingly self-centered and the labor force has become marginalized. I see it all the time; people live in big homes and drive expensive cars, but they skimp on tips at a restaurant. Companies can't afford a few extra employees but can splurge and the latest gadgets and generous salaries for management. Everyone cries poverty when it comes time to actually pay someone.
Not that this self-centered mentality doesn't affect all income strata. Work ethic in this country leaves a lot to be desired and there are a whole lot of people out there expecting a lot for nothing. But those people at the bottom aren't the ones necessarily making the biggest impact on society. I do think, however, that there's a distinct tendency to want to offload responsibility on someone else. It's always the other guy's fault, especially if that guy is higher up the chain.
So the tendency is to blame corporate executives. But I remain convinced that the single biggest problem is the middle management. There are legions of these incompetents enjoying inflated salaries managing everything corporate America does. They're the ones always spending to the limits of their incomes, who's sole existence is defined by protecting their own jobs at all costs. They stifle innovation because they don't want to rock the boat. When it comes time to evaluate performance however, they always take the easy route by cutting spending. And cutting spending never means identifying true inefficiencies, it means laying someone off.
This is not to discount the impact of Dot.com culture which continues to perpetuate the mentality that you can amass a fortune with minimal investment and a tiny, often outsourced workforce. That doesn't hold true for a lot of companies, but it doesn't keep people from trying.
I keep seeing two often repeating arguments here that irk me:
The first is that buying expensive is inherently better. Often times the expensive stuff is made in the same sweatshops as the crap at Walmart. The difference being that you're paying extra for somewhat better materials and a bit more quality control. But really, the main thing you're paying for is an inflated marketing budget. Then at the other extreme you're paying some hipster in Brooklyn to produce something in the most inefficient manner possible. There is a reasonable middle ground in manufacturing, but it's becoming increasingly rare in this country. Often times when you're paying for "made in the USA" all you're paying for is low-grade assembly. All the important components is still manufactured overseas.
The second annoyance is that a more socialist system is a panacea. Europe is suffering most of the problems we are. And China, for all it's talk of communism is even more exploitative of it's own people than Americans could ever dream of being. You haven't seen income inequality until you've been in China.
In neither case did the internet have anything to do with it.
The internet is an exemplar, not a definitive and singular cause.
It's the internet and all the things that go with it which people are talking about.
But no, there's a lot more to the college degree situation than you describe, and if there's a subsidy, it's to the financial industry who is milking the loan system to their advantage. Try following the money.
A welfare state is not the solution. Most of the problem today is caused by two things:
1) Wealth shift from Western to Asian countries. This guy's arguments don't hold up in India or China; they're doing better than ever.
2) Over-population. Improvements in agriculture and manufacturing means we need fewer unskilled laborers. Simply feeding them so they have nothing better to do but watch TV and reproduce will just dig the hole even deeper.
Every example given in the parent was people moving from one labor intensive line of work to another labor intensive line of work.
Technology is decreasing the need for labor - and by labor, I mean from the cabbage picker to the Ph.D/MD/JD.
There isn't enough places for all these displaced workers to go. The unemployment rate (official and real) proves that.
The past is just that - the past. For the first time in history, technology is capable of replacing the majority of humanity.
The Big question is, what do we do with all these unemployed/unemployable people?
If you think that because you can write code that you are safe, think again.
We simply need to change our basic economic systems to accommodate the changes in the world. Technology works! That should not be a surprise to anyone but people do not look at what technology is. All technology is designed to replace human labor. The better the technology the more human work it replaces. Often nobody even notices the displacement and tribulations of workers when it it occurs. The greatest example is what happened to the one girl office when the cell phones became common. Tradesmen always had to have a wife or girl in the "office" as they bid jobs in the field. The cell phone changed that. No longer was a girl required to take messages and deal with customers. Then bookkeeping software became convenient and all of a sudden the last excuse for having that girl vanished. The number of female office workers declined and probably in the millions. Yet the public never noticed. Business will continue even with a declining nation until total collapse occurs. The better choice is to simply pay people decent pay checks not to work. That way people will support the businesses that they enjoy or need and those businesses will pay taxes to support the idled workers. Although this sounds over the edge it becomes a lot more reasonable when one realizes that almost all human jobs will soon vanish and be absorbed by technology. The 3D printing development alone is enough to collapse the economy of industrialized nations. Printing a nice home in 24 hours can actually be done.
Governments are extracting heaps of wealth from billionaires to fund political structures that consolidate government power; all under the pretense of benefiting the middle class.
At one time a portrait painting was big money. A person could go to art school and earn a middle class, or better, living painting portraits. It was a rewarding and artful profession which employed tens of thousands. Then photography came along an destroyed this profession for all potential customers except the very rich. I like this article and its analysis, but it has a bit of a Luddite perspective.
This kind of reminds me of the book Extras, the fourth in the Pretties series by Scott Westerfeld. I takes place in a future world driven by a reputation economy. Many people have hovercam robots that take video of events to post on the internet. The more your feeds get watched the more money you earn. There are other ways to have reputation, like being famous or whatever, but the main character does the news feeds thing. The whole series was pretty cool actually. In fact, the author has many other books I ended up reading that I really enjoyed also.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
Try short-term management! The #1 correlation between the destruction of the middle class and societal trends is coincidental to the rise of the Internet.
This is what happens: A manager throws out in-house software, fires in-house programmers, buys a vertical market package, hires consultants to set it up, gives himself a bonus for saving money, and moves on. Then the company suffers for the next 10 years trying to keep the mess going and spending more and more on rare skills. The short-term savings is good, and gets the manager a bonus. The long-term cost is probably the destruction of the company, and its workforce.
Yes, it couldn't be corrupt collusion between Wall Street, Big Oil, Big Pharma, etc, etc and the 1% and their servants in Washington DC against 99% of Americans, it MUST be the Internet! By Jove, you've got it, Skippy! I mean, Joe!
Joe Nocera, may you be mocked across planet earth until your career is a smoking crater.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
I disagree, we have the best prison system in the world!
If you look at actual income distributions, you'll find that the middle class is alive and well. It has shrunk a little, mostly because some people, like software developers and engineers, have moved from the peak of the income distribution to the high end tail. But (statistically) no part of the middle class, or any part of the income distribution, has moved downwards over the last few decades.
Let's hope the middle class will continue to "disappear" like this.
Oh please, on an apples to apples comparison digital systems often require an order of magnitude less manpower. I just checked my bank (pure online bank) with 370.000 customers and they have 177 employees. Electronic deposit in, online banking + debit card + ATM out, who needs a brick and mortar bank? Granted a few might have stayed on as online customer support and loan application reviewers but by far most are just gone. The rest have moved on, but what's left after agriculture, manufacturing and services being automated away? More services? Also there's an increasing demand on skills, if you replace burger flippers and cab drivers with robot engineers and computer scientists I don't think everyone is cut out for the latter.
Personally I'm not very worried because I'm fairly sure I have skills that will remain employable, but a lot of quite ordinary people who do quite ordinary routine jobs should worry. People who've never really had a problem finding a job for anyone willing to do a solid day's work. I think you'll see it if they get autonomous cars working, it won't be just cab drivers it'll be truck drivers, delivery companies, mail services, pizza delivery, there's a vast number of jobs whose primary job requirement is to drive a vehicle.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
"The new technology will destroy civilization as we know it!!!1!!!!"
Why is this stupid article even considered news? Someone will always predict the End of Civilization as We Know It when new technology disrupts the old, Right Way to Do Things, technology.
And they are always wrong. Things change. Deal with it.
(Protip: The destruction of the middle class has nothing to do with the Internet).
If you want to get micropayments for content you create, go ahead, try to charage: if your content is good enough, people will pay. They are paying, after all, for apps, digital subscriptions, etc. The legal framework exists, all you need to supply is a product.
Charging "every time your information is used", however, is a non-starter. In a free society, being able to talk about each other freely is essential. Trying to restrict this amounts to fascism. But, then, a lot of these gurus that promise to reorganize our society in better ways are really fascists at heart, both on the left and on the right.
I don't really believe we can or should tax our way out of the problem. Taxes can do many things but they are not the be all and end all solution to systemic problems. At some point is it not the case that adding more sumps is not the real answer to the boat taking on water.
The thing is, corporations are government chartered. They recieve limited liability in exchange for meeting certain regulations, without which, they would have trouble existing and operating as they do today.
Corperate structures account for far more of the economy than the government. Simply shuttling money up through them isn't the answer, you need to fix the corperate structures to not require as much central redistribution.
Frankly, I think we need to look at funding models and how to create more independent companies that are not beholden to stock markets and venture capital. Companies built around the idea that profits are part of the means by which we do our job and put food on our tables, not the be all and end all target for their own sake.
To use a simple example. A coffee shop should be opened and chartered to provide the community with excellent coffee and atmosphere for social gathering. Profits keep it in business, and keep the owner and workers able to do it, and able to live and enjoy these things like everyone else. It is entirely backwards to look at providing coffee as a means to profit.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Guess what's coming.
When you move all the factory line jobs to other countries, the supervisor, manager, HR, payroll, operations..(etc).. jobs go with it.
It's a pyramid, when the base of the pyramid is smaller the middle part of the pyramid has to be smaller too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
When people say "fair share" what they tend to mean is "I get free stuff from rich people." Obviously, the rich will resist.
What will actually happen: Poverty will increase, and desperation will drive more people to crime. Then, they will get arrested. In jail, they will receive their "fair share." which is to say, free food, clothing, shelter, and medical. All of that will be paid for by the tax dollars on the incomes of the rich, and will be delivered to the poor free of charge.
I am not saying this is good, I am just saying this is how humans do things. The greedy will always feel justified in saying that they have earned their keep, and that they owe nothing to those who cannot or will not earn their keep. The poor will always feel justified in saying that economic barriers prevent them from earning their keep, and therefore it is ok for them to steal. And to jail they will go.
Oh we don't need to look any further than the constant concentration of wealth.
The wealthy want more. Where can they get it? From the greatest consumers of all? No. Those are the poor. Of all the people who are famous for living beyond their means, it is the poor. Mostly, that's why they are poor. So that's not it.
The middle class still believe the harder you work, the better you will be. That's an endless amount of drive. Surely they will continue being middle class even after they become poor. What's killing the middle class? Lack of working opportunities. Where are they going and why? We know these answers. What gets me are all these consumer oriented businesses who can't see they are destroying their customers and when they are gone, where will they turn?
Idiots.
Imagine we could make everything we make today with half as much work. What would happen? In a rational society, everybody could choose to work half as much, earn just as much, and enjoy the extra leisure time. Why isn't that happening? Simple: hiring two workers that each work less is a lot harder for companies than hiring a single "full time" worker: there are all sorts of costs and overheads associated with each new worker. Additionally, taxes and regulations mean that it is hard simply to exist as a part time worker, since there is a high "cost of entry" simply for existing as an independent human being in this society. The fault isn't with "rich people", it's with progressive social policies that are increasingly harmful.
What you propose, a massive welfare state, isn't the answer to these problems; half the nation working "full time" while supporting an underclass of jobless is demeaning and wrong. The answer is to remove the obstacles and to allow people to live and work more flexibly.
There is a lot more that goes into the cost of the good than just the manufacturing labour...you need to pay for material, equipment, factory space, transportation, publicity, marketing, etc.
Capitalism would be perfectly fine with that person borrowing money to buy a sewing machine and making the pants and selling them online for $50.
Arguably, from the point of view of capitalism all those middlemen are inifficiencies that should be squeezed out.
You are doing it wrong get a couple of people, share the cost of buying the PS4 and share the experience!
The internet now makes it possible to blow up industries faster than ever before - so fast we don't have time to retrain and reabsorb the people displaced by the changes.
Any one change is good for the consumer and bad/disruptive for the producers, because the particular good or service is now cheaper.
The problem comes in when everything changes at once, and all the changes make people less necessary.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
They outsourced everything to China.
This guy is just diverting attention from that fact.
You actually checked with the Kelley Blue Book or CarProof that the companies making digital phones, etc. aren't sopping up employees already discarded long before the Kodak disgorgement? This is the kind of set mapping that gives libertarianism a bad name: the vague presumption that the new necessarily has greater cardinality than the old.
In this lame conception, when the old industries fade and fail and fling off a finitude, a new industry springs up able to sop up an infinitude, and then the next neonatal industry incumbent (only in California does one encounter a neonatal incumbent) continues the aleph-upmanship and so it goes that progress Cantors along.
The middle class has shrunk somewhat, because people have been moving out of it towards higher incomes.
And the idea that there is only a "finite pie" is bullshit. The economy is labor-limited. If we make labor more effective and efficient through automation, the economy grows accordingly. In the short term, there is some disruption as people need to be retrained, but that is something we have always handled well as a society.
Only on Slashdot do people feel it necessary to add a "sarcasm" tag to posts like that! :-D
(And with good cause)
#DeleteChrome
This has the net effect of centralizing wealth and limiting overall economic growth.
No, it doesn't. Those 13 people at Instagram made out like bandits, true...but what are they going to do with that money? They're going to (a) invest it and (b) spend it. If they invest it, other businesses will benefit from it, which in turn will benefit their employees. If they spend it, whoever produces the goods and/or services they spend it on will benefit.
Using Kodak is a very poor example. Kodak had every possible opportunity to capitalize on the digital age. Instead, they felt threatened by it to the point of shunning it until it was too late. Same goes for Blockbuster vs. Netflix. Technology will always march on, and those who don't adapt will always be swept to the wayside by it...and those who do adapt will always prosper in the new order. It's been this way since the first machine put the skilled laborer out of a job. Just because we've got an Internet now doesn't mean this is going to stop. It can't be stopped without stopping progress altogether.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Kodak reference really hit home for me. My father was an immigrant and came to America with little in the way of marketable skills or education. But he worked at Kodak his whole career and made a good salary. They treated him well and even gave him a pension for all his years of hard work. My aunt - his sister - also worked there. You know what her job was? She stuffed little tins of film into little boxes on an assembly line. Not a very exciting job I'm sure but it afforded her a decent middle class lifestyle.
Those jobs are largely gone today, and with it, the opportunity for many people to reach up and join the middle class. Those of us in IT are fortunate to be on the right side of the digital divide. Not everyone is cut out to be a software engineer or a doctor or a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Who speaks for them?
It used to be only assembly line jobs that were being replaced by cheap overseas labor. Now it's moving up the chain and we're seeing IT jobs being moved to cheaper markets. We've seen it disrupt the careers of Travel Agents, Real Estate Agents and people that sell cars. I think the medical field is next. It won't be long before your annual checkup is done by a Doctor in India via Skype. All in the name of progress....and profits.
I'm closer to retirement than college now so I don't worry about me. I worry about the younger generation and what kind of world we are leaving for them.
What is our obsession with the Middle Class?
There are plenty of definitions for it, but basically it boils down to being 'better' than those in the lower or working class.
The old teacher or factory worker was middle class because they could dine at a restaurant where lower class people work. They could travel overseas to Mexico and live like kings for a week using cheap Mexican labor.
Those who focus on the income gap as a measure of the middle class will have to justify why our society NEEDS to have a lower class. In their metrics, its almost impossible for all of us to be middle class. If we all earned the same amount of money, we'd all be equally poor... as if we all earned minimum wage and you know how they rail against that.
However, we stop thinking in terms of the income gap and start thinking in terms of making sure we ALL have a decent life. That is what technology has done and continues to do.
Yes, technology and automation is going to kill mass jobs in my view. There will be jobs for innovators and some highly skilled people... but these jobs are miniscule compared to the 6-7 billion people on Earth.
The technology and social conditions (most of us aren't plopping out 10 kids anymore) in the Western world today easily allows us to all have decent food, decent housing, decent communications, decent free time.
We should be working less hours, sharing the regular jobs we have. By regular jobs, I mean jobs that are routine that people could simply train to do. They don't need to be innovative. Teaching, nursing, construction, agriculture...
We should be forcussing less on articifical markets meant to create life disparities simply for growth. Things like housing have become expensive simply so people can live in the hot area. Is this really a good use of our labor... so can outbid one another?
I don't pretend this will be easy by any stretch of the imagination. So much of our society is based on growth for both the left and right, that it will be a huge stretch to get over this. But it is where we need to be.
We're too efficient and that is a very good thing.
That's a basic tenet of running a business as it was explained to me. I'm sure the idea of people getting paid (even if it's micro-payments) for the use of the content they generate (basically, a royalty) would appeal to everyone, but I'm sure that if this became the law of the land somehow, website owners and companies would respond in two different ways:
1) "Social networking" sites like Facebook would cease to be free to use
2) Websites and companies would be constantly trying to short-change their users on micropayments, or at least low-ball them to keep profits up.
Additionally, this would more or less kill any possibility of anonymity on social networking sites or any other site that pays royalties for use of user-generated content, because they'd need legal names in order to make payments in a legal manner. It all seems like a nice idea on the surface, but once you start thinking it through you'd start to realize that this idea would completely destroy the Internet as we know it.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
As someone who has worked in the logistics industry now for about 10 years, currently pretty much everything about your post is factually incorrect.
iPhones are shipped via ocean cargoships, they are domestically warehoused, and domestically shipped primarily via truck. I know this because my previous employer handled the supply chain logistics and domestic warehousing/staffing for the iPhone.
Also, look to the trade consortiums and trade lobbies for why there are fewer customs inspectors - not electronic/mechanical efficiencies.
Until planes can carry hundreds of shipping containers worth of goods or the number of air routes is vastly increased ocean shipments are going to be vastly less expensive for all but niche markets - .ie seafood is one current market where a majority of product is air shipped.
The middle class is being killed financially by the stupid decisions made largely by people in the middle class.
- Right out of university with a load of student debt? Buy a new car!
- Want to get engaged despite still having student and car debt? Spend 15K on a ring! Awww, that’s proof you really love her awww.
- Now you need a house, great! The bank will approve you for $400K! Hooray! But you want the one that’s $450K, you can make it work.
- Kid on the way? Now I need a bigger car! And a bigger house! Got to fill that house with furniture! Line of credit!
Meanwhile rich people drive normal cars and invest in a broad range of dividend paying equities.
Yes. It was a **management** mistake based on decisions made by stock-price obsessed MBA-type leaders who were absolutely, completely disconnected from their users.
Kodak had a 'cult' favorite in the Polaroid. They discontinued it, citing the 'digital revolution', right exactly at the time when people were backlashing against digital photos and **wanted** and old-school, nostalgic analog product like the Polaroid.
Everything about Kodak's decisions was exactly backwards and wrong, and it was **MANAGEMENT** who is to blame, not some dumb notion of the internet this guy is pimping.
Article author is an idiot.
Thank you Dave Raggett
here's an idea: make an analog Polaroid instant camera that takes analog photos **AND** allows you the option to post a digital version to the social network of your choice
Thank you Dave Raggett
Taxation also depends on what is being taxed.
Are you taxing assets (e.g. real estate tax, Florida's intangible property tax, etc.)?
Are you taxing wages aka "earned income?"
Are you taxing unearned income, including realized net capital gains?
Are you taxing "wealth transfers" like gifts and inheritances?
As long as you aren't taxing assets, someone with more money than he can spend in a lifetime will pay essentially the same taxes as someone else with the same lifestyle but fewer assets, provided his assets are all non-earning and non-growth (e.g. "cash") Both pay sales taxes, auto taxes, etc. Is that fair? Some would say yes, some would say no. It's a matter of opinion/viewpoint.
If you don't tax wealth transfers, when the rich man dies, his heirs will get it all tax-free.
In theory, taxation is in large part about society deciding what the "best" way (which may or may not be the "most equitable" way) to divvy up the cost of running a government among the people.
In practice, it's frequently about those in power protecting their own interests while not seeming to be so unfair that they ruin their reputation and/or cause a rebellion from the masses. But that's a topic for another day.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
GP is an idiot. Our resources are as abundant as ever. There are enough houses to shelter every homeless person 2x over. Food production is more efficient than ever.
It is **artificial scarcity** that creates the illusion....here in the US where I live and in most modern countries.
Now, China...they *are* having an overpopulation problem, but it is due to their government's ham-fisted policies and authoritarianism. ex: One child policy resulting in a demographic apocalypse (male to female ratio @ 60/40).
Thank you Dave Raggett
Yeah. I too disagree with those who say there will always be new jobs to replace the old jobs.
I'm in the IT line and what a lot of us do is get rid of jobs. If each of those jobs we get rid of is replaced by a new job, then there's no cost savings and we aren't doing our jobs right.
Others say keep the same number of people and have them do more, but when you can replace 5 or more jobs with one job, why would you need to do five times more? The customers and sales aren't increasing five fold for everyone. Maybe a few companies might be growing leaps and bounds but most will be happy to grow just 20-30% year on year. So they'd be using the automation to cut jobs and costs. They may use it to increase production but it's not going to be 5, 10 or even 100 times.
Remarks like "there will always be jobs" without any supporting evidence are deserving of ridicule.
To back up my claims just imagine the US workers as the "humans" and Chinese/Vietnamese/Indian workers as the "robots". So where are the many wonderful new jobs for the US workers who lost their jobs to those foreign "robots"?
Now consider that FoxConn and others are already starting to replace many low end Chinese workers with robots. And there's evidence that there are Chinese workers who can do higher end jobs at reasonable quality for less pay: http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jan/17/business/la-fi-mo-man-outsourced-job-to-china-20130117
So when more robots and other automation start replacing more and more human jobs and the cheaper and more desperate humans start "climbing up the ladder", how can anyone be so confident that there will always be new jobs when there were not that many new jobs appearing when the Chinese "robots" took away the US jobs?
And when some manufacturing was brought back from China to the USA there were actually very few long term jobs created. There were construction jobs as the factories were built, but after that - those factories were highly automated and needed very few workers (and security guards).
So I'd say a form of socialism would be the lesser evil. Many are against people getting wealth for doing nothing, but when the robots have a lot of their jobs, what is there for those people to do? There's just so many FB and iphone apps the market can support. Do you want them to starve or rob and steal? We would however need to have some limits on reproduction that are linked to conservative economic projections. The robots converting the resources of the earth to products and services might be able to support very many people, but there's still no way they or the Earth can support a high exponential population growth. Not everyone wants children so some could give/trade their quota with others. The wealthier ones may have higher quotas too (since they can support more children without relying on the State), however if they don't want to have that many children of their own they could commit to sponsoring other people's children.
This is indeed evil, but I see it as a lesser evil compared to the alternatives. Show me better alternatives and back them up with sound reasoning/arguments rather than wishful thinking.
What I'm proposing won't come to pass automatically since it requires planning and preparation. If you leave things as they are gradually the rich will get richer, and you should realize that while the really rich might end up owning everything they won't need that many people to keep them happy. Unless of course supporting millions of human "pets" becomes some sort of status symbol.
But pets don't get to vote and the rich and powerful are likely to prefer to be Kings/Emperors than to hold elections.
The "value of money" curve varies by individual, and I'm not convinced that on average it's logarithmic.
For some people, the value becomes "essentially zero" after a certain point. You know who these people are because after they die (or sometimes, before, but not voluntarily) you will find out that starting at some point in their lifetime they realized they "had enough money to last a lifetime" and quietly gave away all future net earnings, and/or they made a point of "living at a certain income level, and quietly giving away the rest."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Taxing a billionaire 10% and a homeless man 10% is NOT fair, and it's simplistic to think it is.
You're right, it's not fair. The billionaire actually values the money and worked hard to get it, and contributes far more in taxes than he'll ever see back in useful services, whereas the homeless man—given the more common chronic case, which owes more to psychological issues than economics or bad luck—clearly values money very little and would receive more tax money back in public services than what he paid even if the rate was 100%.
It's not the homeless you should worry about; most of them don't have much of anything to tax in the first place. The problem is those not already in the upper class with the drive and ambition to improve their status. "Progressive" taxes on higher incomes hurt them more than those who are already rich. Once you're rich, the majority of any increase takes the form of capital gains, which you don't even have to realize until you actually want to buy something. To get there, however, requires hard work and a correspondingly high income. The more you tax the higher incomes, the harder it is for someone in the middle or lower class to improve their status.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
I sometimes wonder if the middle class wasn't a function of general inefficiencies in markets and firms that were a function of scale relative to the ability to control and manage information. Information technology generally allows a smaller group of people understand and analyze greater amounts of information leading to greater efficiencies.
Part of it was just the sheer manpower required to try to manage the volume of information about supply and labor. Without computers it took legions of people simply to keep track of supplies, inventory and labor and this created a white collar class of worker who was an "information worker" in an office. These jobs required a once-scarce commodity of general education (reading, writing, basic mathematics) and emphasized social and knowledge skills more so than brute strength or even mechanical ability. This creates a new class of worker with scarcer skills who gets paid better.
As you get more efficient information processing, it takes fewer people to manage this information because it can be more centralized and its analysis requires less manual computation and the overall volume of processing is larger because the information is accessed more rapidly (from storage media) versus physical objects (ledger books or filing cabinets).
You also make a lot better decisions about supply, labor, productivity and so forth, which also cuts a lot of jobs.
you forgot your history!
obviously it was the mass rollout of telegraph technology that caused the stock market crash and lead to the Great Depression.
everyone knows this.
[/sarcasm]
TFA author is a fucking idiot. Yes an expletive is needed to properly describe his analysis and contextualization of events like the financial crisis and their causes.
Parent has it. It was unscrupulous 'finance' types who think operate under a destructive, predatory philosophy....and the lack of proper *regulation* and *oversight* that we all know is necessary.
Greed is like water, it always finds it's own bottom. **WE** define where that bottom is, by using government to define the playing field.
In the US at least, the people can change this...we can elect leaders who favor competition of ideas not a race to the bottom of a pyramid scheme.
Thank you Dave Raggett
and the disinterest by government in protecting industries from industrial espionage, then wondering why some foreign company has the same technology for a lot cheaper.
I was thinking with more and more offshoring these other countries don't need spies, we will send the stuff to them.
mfwright@batnet.com
Those same technologies were freely available to anybody to use. If you didn't take advantage of it and, worse, didn't analyze your business processes and make them better, how can you blame those who did? Also, I now see smaller companies leveraging tech a lot more efficiently, and using open source a whole lot more than the big guys, so they are ahead of them, mainly out of necessity.
The only solution, really, is some sort of socialist system, with higher taxes for the high-earners so that everyone has a fair share of the increased productivity. And with bigger strides in robotization, this will be mandatory, or else we'll have revolts and heads will literally roll, which would be unpleasant.
And when those high earners use more crypto to evade taxes, how will we find their heads? A land tax is much more progressive, applies directly to a factor of production, and is impossible to evade.
Some sort of means of distributing the wealth available from productivity gains is necessary, whatever you want to call it. In the end, there is nothing a human does which can not be replaced by a machine. It is not right that an increasingly automated system of production should serve a handful of owners while the remaining population starves. That is especially true, given that those owners have contributed virtually none of the real work that has brought us the benefits of modern civilization. (That we owe to the hard work of many people over thousands of years...)
1) Wealth shift is a distraction; the fundamental point is that it needs to be created rather than merely concentrated for the benefit of a few. To create wealth requires energy, and the developing world recognizes this simple fact. Most of that is coming from a sharp increase of coal plants today, but they are aggressively pursuing nuclear and will reap the benefits that we are forfeiting. While the west lets its energy, manufacturing, and other infrastructure decay, the real mechanisms for new wealth creation are growing over seas while ours recede. Sooner or later we are going to discover that exporting our monopoly on ideas is not a substitute.
2) We are nowhere near overpopulated, and the universe is a big place should it ever become an issue. Regardless, the best way to curb population is to lift them out of poverty. You have this backwards; people that can afford to relax and enjoy a bit of life, will not be busy popping out kids to help with chopping down trees for fires, fetching water, farming, washing clothes by hand, etc. When people are no longer burdened by such tasks, they also have time for education and innovation. Sure, some will watch TV, but even that is better than investment banking; those are the people really digging the hole for us all.
What a completely absurd conclusion. I'm so tired of hearing about certain classes of jobs being lost, like manufacturing. You might as well be complaining about all the blacksmithing jobs that have been lost since the middle ages. There are countless new jobs that desperately need to be filled and people need to get the skills to fill them.
I appreciate your detailed knowledge but you're still wrong to put any blame on technology.
Are cell phones to blame for drug deals?
Is email to blame for employee embezzlement?
Are spreadsheets the cause of financial crisis?
of course not...it's human choice, and the planned intentional (by some) lack of proper oversight that we all know is necessary.
Thank you Dave Raggett
I don't know if you're 100% correct here.
;)
1- Build and maintain networks
2- Building data centres (construction)
3- Network management and services (ISPs, etc...)
4- IT support (hundreds of thousands of jobs and probably millions, small consultant companies and mom and pop shops)
5- Research has tremendously increase
#1 - This is true, but it's certainly a short-term item (and is basically the same as #4).
#2 - How many data centers are there? And how does "construction" even count? I mean, there will always be "construction".
#3 - Most ISPs now are cable companies, which already existed. But again, the ones that aren't cable companies, are generally some local guys re-selling cable internet via wireless - and they employ a small number of people, just like TFA points out.
#4 - This one you are correct about. I'm one of these mom&pop shops that you mention. A lot of the folks that know what they're doing in the IT field are finding self-employment more reasonable these days. And the more that get their balls together to take the first step in doing it, the easier it becomes for others to do the same.
#5 - Research has increased, but probably not added very many jobs, and much of it is involved with #1 - #4.
One thing that maybe no one is mentioning is that the Russian mob, and hackers around the world are using the internet in ways that eliminate the need for (them to have) jobs at all.
I said it a long time ago, and I'll say it again here: The internet is going to revolutionize the local farming "industry".
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
No, it's not. You want to think it's logarithmic because it's a straightforward mathematical relationship that you can use in a model. But it's just plain wrong. (We agree that it's not linear over a range that includes the middle class and Bill Gates, though.)
Its not the internet's fault, it the economic systems fault, there is nothing wrong with 13 people to replacing 140,000 peoples jobs, I know its not exactly an accurate example, but if it is true its a good thing, isn't it? It is about still providing an environment in which those 140,000 people can live, be happy, and contribute to society. Our current economic system was set up in an environment where we needed to produce more just to get the basics of life. That has changed, now we seem to be producing more for the sake of consuming more.
As we get more an more efficient and it takes less and less people to produce items (e.g. imagine a robot could replace a person) the natural result in our current economic system to concentrate the wealth with fewer people (the robot manufacturer).
We as a society need to rethink our goal as an economy, is our only goal to continually increase GDP, or is it to become a happier, healthier society. After a certain point they are not the same thing. How do we distribute wealth? I don't support just giving people an equal share, people work try hard should be rewarded, but to what level? The entire human race has contributed to the knowledge we now have, not just a few individuals. Is it fair that a few individuals can claim the rewards? I think we will loose a lot if remove the rest of the population from the people who are enabled to create/innovate, because they are reduced to just trying to survive, or don't survive at all.
I don't blame the rich, they are just doing what comes naturally with the system, trying to make themselves richer, after all isn't that what we are told is the definition of success? I think that definition of success is wrong.
I am a pessimist and i think the world is headed to two classes , middle class disappear, and we will have on the long run a quite rich class, a quite poor.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
_ALL_ innovation "costs" jobs. That is pretty much what innovation means--getting either more or better for less. As a society, we get more produced value for less cost (often as less labor)--freeing resources (i.e. labor) to make products that previously never existed.
And with bigger strides in robotization, this will be mandatory, or else we'll have revolts and heads will literally roll, which would be unpleasant.
I dunno, we could do without a few of the super-high earners. I don't give a crap about Miley, Trump, Turner, or even a few sitting in that great-white daycare on capital hill.
And it's makers! And their parents!!
Things change, its the way of things, people need to adapt
I always notice that those that parrot this line are not affected negatively by the subject matter.
Facebook and Google ARE taking care of their customers, i.e. those who advertise on their networks. User eyeballs are the product in this transaction, a product delivered by them to the advertisers.
The greed of companies, their shareholders and their owners is destroying the middle class. Not technology, not outsourcing. These are secondary to a practically unfixable problem.
Exactly. There are plenty of solutions; the problem is there is currently too much momentum built up in the idea that we must work 40 hrs a week to have a relatively high paying job, with no significant gaps in employment. It's going to be difficult for society to accept anything different.
Taking your example, we could set the full time workweek at 20 hrs. In theory, businesses would have to hire twice the people to cover 40hrs worth of shifts. In fact, many large corporations are already starting to do this with job sharing... two people split a job, each works 2-3 days a week, with one day overlapping to get up to speed. It's very popular with working moms. But these are the exception rather than the norm.
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
That is why you are seeing people with college degrees working at McDonalds and those with less education struggle to get even the shit jobs that they used to be considered "stuck with".
I'm posting as AC because, well... you'll see why.
In my anecdotal experience of going to fast food joints, retail, etc in the last twenty years or so the big difference I've seen is that those jobs, that used to be staffed by high school or college age kids are now staffed by immigrants. People who weren't born in the US and "use" English as a second language.
College educated people working at McDonalds? Hardly...
I have to admit my experience has been in the western US. I have no idea what it is like east of Denver.
My observations are merely what I've seen, not any kind of judgement on immigration or race relations, etc;
Define "fair".
Also, our non-flat-tax is so complex, that often billionaires end up paying a lower percentage rate on taxes than do low-income workers. So even if you see a flat tax as inferior to the laws currently on the books, there's some chance that it would actually achieve a more rate-progressive outcome than we currently have.
I beg you to start using "well-paying" instead of "good paying".
All these worries/complaints were made during the industrial revolution (and probably for millenia before that). Whatever the existing paradigm, some bright boy is going to look at it and say "hey, if I build a machine to do X, I can do the task with half the staff" and sooner or later, he'll build that machine.
As far as Kodak goes, the photography paradigm was rather inefficient: buy some film, take some pictures, take the film to the local processor, wait, pick up your prints. It was/is a PITA. With digital: take some pictures, immediately share them with family/friends (or print them on your own printer). Kodak had a good business model for decades, but technology blew that business model to hell and gone, and Kodak did not, or could not, adapt.
LOL, think of it as good, paying jobs. I had "good jobs" and then I inserted "paying" with grammatical tragedy as the result.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Today you see the technocrats singing the praises of robotics (there are good uses don't get me wrong here) just as you saw them sing the praises of the Internet years ago.
The most likely scenario? Elimination of workers in favour of robotics will be the end result.
"Just because you can, doesn't mean you should".
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Wrong. Flat tax is a bullshit idea that benefits the rich the most. Money's value to an individual is logarithmic, not linear. Taxing a billionaire 10% and a homeless man 10% is NOT fair, and it's simplistic to think it is.
And are the benefits received from government linear?
all the best,
drew
Exactly, there is no shortage of work to do, whether it's fixing crumbling infrastructure, doing maintenance or even just providing customer support. The problem is of course finding the money to do it. Even if the money is available, there's no incentive for a company to spend it. So what is the solution? I suppose you could try to pass a law about maintenance or quality of service, but the companies will fight it tooth and nail. And in the end, even if something like that got passed, it will cost more to the customer for the sake of maintaining a profit margin. Either way, the problem always comes down to money. As a society how do we provide an incentive to do things like this, without driving away business? I don't know that there's an easy answer
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
Make grandmother pay to see pictures of her grandkids online? Somehow, I don't think that'll work.
Keep in mind that people still need other people to help them with their lives. Now that they're no longer developing pictures at Kodak, there are other things they can be doing.
When you buy a pair of pants, of, say $100, what do you think the person (presumably in China or India) who manufactured it receives? Right, less than $1.
However before the pants factory (and others) were allowed by the PRC government, hundreds of millions of Chinese were making under $1 per DAY who now are making more than that. So even making a few dollars per day is a big step up for them.
By the way, for the quarter ending Aug. 25, 2013 Levi Strauss reported a profit of $57.1 million on revenues of $1.14 billion, for a profit margin of 5%. There is a lot that goes into selling a pair of pants for $100: marketing, transport & distribution, planning, research, etc.
Your jeans may be made from cotton grown in Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, or Turkey, woven and dyed in Italy, cut in India, then go to one of 35 countries for assembly. Not just China, but also Bangladesh, Cambodia, Dominican Republic, and Sri Lanka.
Point of clarification: The financial crisis was caused by fraud and bad debt, not technology. The government actually did convene a quiet inquiry into the crisis (the FCIC - Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission) and results were found, but no action has been taken on it because it was (and continues to be) so very lucrative for many in the political-financial complex:
1) Conclusions of Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission - home page.
2) "We conclude this financial crisis was avoidable. The crisis was the result of human action and inaction, not of Mother Nature or computer models gone haywire. The captains of finance and the public stewards of our financial system ignored warnings and failed to question, understand, and manage evolving risks within a system essential to the well-being of the American public. Theirs was a big miss, not a stumble. While the business cycle cannot be repealed, a crisis of this magnitude need not have occurred. To paraphrase Shakespeare, the fault lies not in the stars, but in us.
Despite the expressed view of many on Wall Street and in Washington that the crisis could not have been foreseen or avoided, there were warning signs. The tragedy was that they were ignored or discounted. There was an explosion in risky subprime lending and securitization, an unsustainable rise in housing prices, widespread reports of egregious and predatory lending practices, dramatic increases in household mortgage debt, and exponential growth in financial firms’ trading activities, unregulated derivatives, and short-term “repo” lending markets, among many other red flags. Yet there was pervasive permissiveness; little meaningful action was taken to quell the threats in a timely manner." -- From the summary document, page 3 actual, xvii in the document: Conclusions Of The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (PDF),
An amusing meme I've seen recently is attributing any standard of living improvement to the financial sector, instead of to the actual technology which causes the actual improvement.
Here is the crunch; Robots and their links do not pay tax. Not the way employees do. This is accelerating the trend to the corporations having more money / power than governments. If governments want to stay relavent and not go out of business they are going to have to solve these problems of where their income is gong to come from. The the other side of this coin is that Robots do not vote.
It's my personal information, I should be paid for my data. In the old days when I went into best buy, they'd ask, "what is your phone number?" I either told the cashier to piss off I'm not giving it to them, or I gave them a false phone number.
My existence isn't here to make a corporation's life easier. Corporations should make my life easier or they are unnecessary.
All the libertarians will say, "working as intended." That's why I always say, "That attitude is why libertarians don't have any asses in any government seats."
Basic truth: it just doesn't take that many people to make all the stuff any more.
In the US, 14% of the workforce makes all the stuff - that's manufacturing, mining, construction, and agriculture. 50 years ago, that number was around 40%. In the 19th century, around 90%. For most of history, the big problem was making enough stuff. Today, that's a solved problem. There are no significant shortages of anything in the developed world.
So what will people do? Here's US employment by sector. For a few decades, additional employment in service industries took up much of the workforce. It still does in the US. That's where computers and the Internet have made a big dent. Much of the middle class was doing some form of manual "information processing". Computers do much of that now, faster and more cheaply. Paper pushing is a dying industry. (The paper industry itself is in deep trouble. We passed "max paper" a few years ago.)
That's only getting started. There are many legacy sectors which still employ large numbers of people, and they're being gradually knocked off by less-labor intensive approaches. Retail is the next to go - Amazon is replacing brick-and-mortar retail. No new indoor mall has been built in the US in the last ten years. Computers even sell now - that's what all the "ad targeting" and "recommendations" do.
Employment growth is mostly in health care, leisure and hospitality, and professional services. Eventually, health care will solve its paper-pushing problem, which will downsize that sector. Most of the rest of the new jobs in those sectors are low-paying ones.
This is a great achievement. Our society has no clue how to deal with it. Where a market-based system takes us is a world with a few winners and a huge number of losers who can't generate enough wealth through work to buy much. France, Germany, and the Scandanavian countries are trying to develop policies to deal with it. Maybe they'll find something that works.
That's not true where I live, or even anywhere I've been in the last decade. So, you need to re-examine your conclusions as you've mistakenly generalized from a specific circumstance.
My last few Apple orders suggest otherwise. The tracking shows on a plane in Shenzhen China, a stop in Alaska to refuel and clear customs, a stop in Memphis to sort, and then on to my door. About 36 hours from when it left China it is in my hand.
There are also articles from credible sources that suggest Apple keeps 5.3 days of inventory on-hand, almost all in its retail stores, and that online orders ship directly from China in most cases. Other sources have documented a similar process, and suggested a Boeing 777 can carry 450,000 iPhones at a cost of $242,000 to charter, a whopping $0.56 per phone.
I'm going to bet most of your iPhones are destined for Best Buy, Wal Mart, AT&T, Radio Shack, or similar. Those vendors probably want Apple to bulk-ship into their normal supply chain where they can be sorted and intermixed with other goods going to those stores.
The author seems confused.
A person using Facebook and posting status updates is NOT the customer.
The company that is buying advertisements is a customer of Facebook.
I find the amount of 4+ modded posts about how bad things are or will be once "change" happens quite evidentiary of just how much people (not matter education level) fear "change".
Many of said posts want some sort of guaranteed safety net, showing just how fearful people are of "change".
"What will I do when change happens".
News flash: It's happened before, it will happen again, and there are no guarantees.
First, there is infinite work in cyberspace. There is no limit to the number of ways things can be done better, and since these types of improvements take very few resources there is no reason for employment not to pick up.
If you think about it, you realize that when a robot replaces a job, it *should* be making every other job the robot can't do more valuable. The issue is people need to be able to stand up for themselves and get more money for what they do as the economy becomes automated. Many of these so called bad jobs pay low because of inertia and tradition, not because the pay really reflects their true value to the economy.
A huge problem with this is that your "refund" would be a government handout program hundreds of times bigger than current Welfare, with all the inefficiencies and cheating and other problems.
I would love to see an actual logical explanation why "tax simplification" is always tied to "flat tax percentage". I see no reason. Yes, greatly simplify the rules to compute the income, but there is no reason the resulting number cannot be then taxed at a graduated rate. Conversely you could implement a "flat tax percentage" atop the current complex mess of deductions. I just don't see why it is always tied together (though I have suspicions that is has nothing to do with any technical requirement).
Also your "refund" is equivalent to a non-constant tax rate. It is 0% at the point income equals the refund, and approaches the "flat percentage" as the income approaches infinity. In your scheme it also goes to negative infinity percent as the income goes down to zero.
In theory, businesses would have to hire twice the people to cover 40hrs worth of shifts
They don't have to hire twice the people, but they have a strong incentive to hire more people - and the incentive heavily favors the employees who are giving up more of their time than they need to give up.
would describe "efficiencies" as destroying anything
ticket, so they ended up going back to cramming as many seats in the plane they could.
Many airlines give you a choice. I often fly Frontier, and for $35 Frontier will give me a legroom upgrade. So far, I have decided I'd rather have $35 extra dollars in my pocket than that upgrade, but someday I might change my mind. Having that choice available to me is the best of both worlds. Not everyone wants or needs the extra legroom, so the asset (the aircraft) gets optimal utilization by allowing each passenger to choose. If the day comes that I want to use more of the aircraft's capacity than the next guy, I'll be happy to pay marginally more money for that marginally better ticket.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Doesn't surprise me in the slightest that a post slamming "liberal arts" (fucking commies) would appear on a website that looks like utter shit. Oh btw - go fuck your cat.
people?
If Kodack rose from it's grave, I'm sure it would boost employment.... in the People's Republic of China!
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
it used to be a single lawyer with a big case would hire an auditorium full of paralegals just to study case law and review documents. Those days are gone, that job is done by a small handful of people. An entire auditorium reduced to maybe 2-4 people.
Whenever fewer people are needed to perform service X, the cost of service X goes down and people who need to purchase service X emerge in better financial shape than they otherwise would have. The bad news for people in the service X industry is far outweighed by the good news for everyone else.
There are far more people working in the auto industry than ever worked in the buggy-making industry. Every new technology creates far more jobs than it destroys. Do you imagine that there were more telegraph operators in 1905 than IT workers in 2014? No, every new technology creates far more jobs than it destroys.
Failure to grok this makes people resist innovations that drive greater efficiency, and ironically, their resistance causes unemployment to be higher than it otherwise would be, and causes the general standard of living to be lower than it otherwise would be.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
I stand corrected and offer apologies to GP.
You are right that we dealt with the big box chains, I figured we were also doing their online fulfillments since we did it for several other retailers and was very wrong.
WTF?
Walmarts profits which they pay out as dividends is made primarily by paying 850,000 employees little enough that they will qualify for food stamps and/or welfare assistance. So, Walmart's success is based on the idea that they can keep prices obscenely low by letting tax payers cover the salaries of their employees instead of paying them themselves. The result being that instead of losing $2 billion a year, they profit $10 billion a year instead. They can even afford to undercut competition who pays the same for their inventory because they make up for it by letting the government cover their profits.
So... How does the Internet have anything to do with their impact on the middle class?
No, you did not need 20/20 hindsight. It took over 20 years for it to kill the film business. They lost market after market in a fairly logical order, first photojournalist (for fast turnaround time), then the casual point and shoot market, and then the high end “artistic” market.
And Kodak new this. The would repeatable make announcements that they were going to do this or that. The problem is that Kodak was not a photo company, it was a chemical company. I am overstating my case a bit but it is to make a point. Kodak had lots of fixed assets such as plants and lots of union employees. Shutting those things down would hurt and it would not have ensured success. However it is what should have been done.
Same can be said for GM .
I feel compelled to add this link:
http://www.nbcnews.com/business/fords-pay-boost-drove-automakers-standard-century-2D11862569
It talks about Ford dramatically increasing pay to its employees. That drove down turn-over (which in turn, drove down training costs) but also increased disposable income - helping to create a middle class (though, i don't believe that article intended the reader to believe Ford's wage increase was the ONLY factor in creating a middle class).
I realize this article isn't exactly relevant to the OP's topic, but it's still an interesting read.
I'm not slamming liberal arts. I think that a liberal arts education is valuable... for the right person. It's just that your average person from a modest means is going to find it very hard to get a job with certain liberal arts degrees. College started as an elite experience, and there are a lot of leftover ideas from that time - the whole "student athlete" charade chief among them.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
This guy is a moron.
He's completely ignoring all the new jobs in the last 10-15 years that have been created over the years:
Also, he ignores the role of the philosophy that a corporation's first and only concern is maximizing shareholder value in battering the middle class with downsizing, offshoring, and squeezing every penny from the few remaining employees, and the role of the utterly corrupt banking and real estate businesses in causing the financial meltdown.
But then people who write editorials for the WSJ aren't going to call a spade a spade if it reflects poorly on unbridled capitalism.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
But the flat tax with a prebate (essentially a variation of fairtax.org) *IS* progressive. With the plan OP proposes, everyone gets $1000/month. Enough to live (depending on area), but not enough for most to not want to do better. You're getting $1,000/month or $12,000/year. At the hypothetical 25% you would have to have an income of $48,000 before your NET tax rate was even 0%. 25% becomes the upper limit of the very wealthy. A $250,000 income pays $62,500 in taxes - $12,000 prebate = $50,500 OR 20%. A person earning $75 pays $18,750 - $12,000 prebate = $6,750 or 9%. Below $48,000 you're essentially getting tax credits / welfare / scholarship / whatever you want to consider it as. It's yours to just stay out of the way and/or invest in yourself.
I know there are problems with this approach too, but it seems like a fairly good approach to me, and it completely eliminates the holes that people constantly encounter now. For instance, I know people that have deliberately sought pay cuts because their last promotion put them over the income limit and they lost financial aid for children / medical / etc. Now, despite bettering themselves and being more productive, they have taken a net loss in income that they cannot sustain. I would also rather unemployment / welfare / etc not punish people for finding work. A prior neighbor did everything in her power to avoid getting hired. Her unemployment required her to look for work, but her unemployment paid better than any jobs in the area during the recession, and was more dependable (most jobs were part time / seasonal around that time as we'd just had a big manufacturing plant shut down and flood the market with workers). As a tax payer, I'd rather her take a job at BK and keep *half* her unemployment, and we'd both win. She'd take less of my tax money AND she'd have more money at the end of the day.
This also prevents the situation of it not being worth it to work. Yes, you already have a minimal lifestyle provided for nothing, and I know people that literally want or need nothing more. But even a minimum wage, part time job that plays, for fun math, $12,000/year, still gives you a $9,000 year gain over not having done anything (in the above scenario). So they now have $21,000/year. Yes, they are taking tax money, but if that's what we do as a society to provide for those that will never and can never do better than wiping tables at McDonalds so they have enough to hopefully not feel the need to mug us in a dark ally, I think everyone could walk away a winner. Automation will destroy the jobs at the bottom, and even if we provide education not everyone can do better, no matter what your second grade teacher said. We can't all be astronauts.
It is true that some new jobs are created, but they are fewer than the ones replaced. The only solution, really, is some sort of socialist system
You couldn't be more wrong, and if there's one thing that will doom the human race it is this mentality.
The fact is, there are currently more humans employed than at any time in history. And the vast majority of them are employed in fields that did not exist before certain enabling technologies were invented, whether they be electric power, or internal combustion engines, or mechanical hair clippers (a favorite technology of my barber -- without which I would not be able to afford his services as often). Every new technology creates far more jobs than it destroys. There are far more people working in the auto industry than ever worked in the buggy-making industry. Do you imagine that there were more telegraph operators in 1905 than IT workers in 2014? No: every new technology creates far more jobs than it destroys.
The more disruptive a technology is, the more jobs it will create (and the more it will be condemned by Luddites who just don't grok how the synergistic cumulative effects of small efficiency improvements in myriad industries add up to huge improvements in humans' standard of living). If your standard of living is better than that of your great-grandparents, who likely physically toiled in agricultural occupations with not a lot of assistance from machinery, you have technology to thank. Don't dream that weak technologies, with their weak job-creating effects, are better than the really disruptive technologies.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Flat taxation beats regressive taxation, which is something we've got a lot of. I pay at least twice as much in Federal taxes as Warren Buffett does, in percentage of income. My income is almost all from the most heavily taxed category: I work for it. No (well, little) capital gains and very little tax-free bond interest. Since I'm not that far below the FICA cap, all my income is hit by FICA. Since I consider everything my employer allots for payroll that goes to the Feds to be Federal taxes, I include the misleadingly named employer's portion of FICA. (I've also contracted, and paid both parts of that.)
FICA hits everybody who earns an honest buck, although the cap means that people who make lots of money don't get hit much. The worst hit is the person on minimum wage trying to get by.
The 25% of income above $1K/month would reduce my taxes. It would mean that the poor sap working minimum wage paid less tax. The homeless man would pay no taxes, not 25%. It would increase the taxes on the rich, who get so much of their income in lower-taxed ways. It isn't ideal, but it would be a lot better than what we've got now.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I worry about the future of your industry. While this model works great for iPhones, it doesn't work for heavier, lower margin commodities that need ship/rail/truck. However, with these small, high value, high profit items being taken out of your industry a significant profit driver will be removed, making it hard to stay in business with only the low margin stuff. But that gets back to the point of the original posting, in a lot of ways technology is unbalancing various parts of the supply chain, in ways I think many people don't even realize.
Are you seriously proposing that we should intentionally introduce inefficiencies into processes, in order to boost employment?
That's not how it works. Improved productivity is what results in higher standards of living and more jobs. New technologies create disruptions, to be sure, where workers have to shift out of fields that are no longer in demand (your TV repair example) -- but in spite of this, the fact is that there are currently more employed humans than at any other time in history. Every new technology creates far more jobs than it destroys.
To introduce inefficiencies -- in other words, to intentionally lower worker productivity -- is an incredibly short-sighted idea that will doom us all to lower standards of living.
In the classic example of workers building a dam, the superficial analysis is that you'll employ more of them if you take away their heavy equipment, and force them to dig with teaspoons. But the correct analysis is that you'll employ none of them, because without the efficiencies of heavy equipment, the authority that wants to build the dam no longer has enough funds, and has to cancel the project altogether.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
This is not the only solution - although you are right that we need to give more people a share in the economy. Our society needs to recognize that highly productive people work too much and would be happier if the worked less and earned less. Yes, one of the world's elite business schools says that productive people work too much.
depends on your definition of too much, i am sure that everyone would like to work 1 minute per year and would be happiest than, its maybe even possible if robots do 99% of work but than progress of our race will stop, we will never colonize other planets or develop other cool stuff ... for our (human) race it is best if everyone worked as much as it is optimal (maximal number of hours that will not make people reduce performance because of tiredness i believe its calculated by Ford its 40 hours/week anything more and work per hour decreases more than time worked increases)
All employees should receive overtime pay if they work more than X number of hours in a week. Period. The X number of hours should be indexed to productivity measures so that it changes in step with the productivity levels of our economy.
on the contrary all overtime should be forbidden because it actually reduces total productivity, and normal time should be set to "optimal" for maximum total work done per worker, current belief is that it is 40 hours/week
also problem with unemployed should be easy solved by giving every unemployed person full minimum (livable) wage, and of course take it away if person declines any job offered to him (or her).
after if you have to much unemployment like over 3% or 5% unemployment rate just get unemployed to build new roads or bridges or buildings or internet/fiber or do whatever we need but is not provided by some company in good enough quality
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Wrong. Flat tax is a bullshit idea that benefits the rich the most. Money's value to an individual is logarithmic, not linear. Taxing a billionaire 10% and a homeless man 10% is NOT fair, and it's simplistic to think it is.
There is no such thing as 'FAIR', and it's simplistic to think there is.
It doesn't mater how cheap our energy, cars, music, or food is to make, so long as there are robber barons who set prices above wages, and hide their resulting profits away in trusts, rather then donating to schools, arts, or spending it. US GDP has never gone down, all that's changed is how wealth is being distributed.
Low cost energy, entertainment, & food can be witheld from consumers, to reap profits, regardless of technology.
Youtube has been paying the content owners of high-traffic videos for almost 5 years now. Some of the most popular users/sites are making > $1M a year on them now
http://www.celebritynetworth.com/articles/celebrity/the-25-highest-earning-youtube-stars/
seeing this now with a very successful financial company I work for.
8 years ago when they went public it seemed to be about what we could offer clients that other firms couldn't. Now I'm seeing us get in line with big firms, charging more, doing less, and generally getting MBA'd so our stock price goes up. They talk about it at the big conferences too: stock price, up, do this for the stock price, sell more mutual funds so the stock price goes up.
Companies do well when their customers are happy. I worry this is being lost over here.
What about a flat tax on wealth?
I guess when I ordered my wifes ipad a few years back and you could track its status through manufacturing and then air shipment a few days later that was "factually incorrect as well". Know it alls that generalize such as yourself are annoying.
The collection of wealth at the top removes money from the economic cycle of buy and sell and the economy shrinks a little more each time.
oh and you forgot long haul truck drivers that will be replaced by 'Google Driverless Cargo Transport Inc.' ... and next they will be building those robots to load and off load trucks. .. or maybe drones at the end to take packages from the truck to your door... :-)
Very true. With companies not "sharing the wealth" and favoring owners over employees in almost every case....
Not quite. With publicly traded companies in almost every case the corporations are favoring the executives, over the stock-holders (aka "owners"), who are in turn favored over the employees: http://www.epi.org/publication/ib331-ceo-pay-top-1-percent/
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
I don't really believe we can or should tax our way out of the problem. Taxes can do many things but they are not the be all and end all solution to systemic problems. At some point is it not the case that adding more sumps is not the real answer to the boat taking on water.
The thing is, corporations are government chartered. They recieve limited liability in exchange for meeting certain regulations, without which, they would have trouble existing and operating as they do today.
Corperate structures account for far more of the economy than the government. Simply shuttling money up through them isn't the answer, you need to fix the corperate structures to not require as much central redistribution.
The most obvious fix for corporate structures is simply to require them to pay their workers more: raise the minimum wage. This doesn't require any new mechanisms, is already widely supported by the public*, and will improve the distribution of wealth to most Americans as the floor is raised (a rising minimum wage raises most everyone's wages). Even Wal-mart is in favor of it.
*71% of adults, even a majority of Republicans support it: http://www.gallup.com/poll/160913/back-raising-minimum-wage.aspx
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Instagram itself may have 13 employees, but when you think about the datacenters they run in, the infrastructure of internet, all the devices that were created to access it and the infrastructure that enables that, along with the technology stack they used to develop the software itself. There's a pretty large web of people making it possible, and everyone in that chain is getting paid.
The car spelled doom for the buggywhip manufactures.
Latter day they might be, but whiners are still Luddites.
How many high-tech jobs were created by the new order system? How much money have poor people saved (or how much more have they been able to buy) because Walmart does it cheaper now?
By the way, for the quarter ending Aug. 25, 2013 Levi Strauss reported a profit of $57.1 million on revenues of $1.14 billion, for a profit margin of 5%.
Interestingly just six men at the top (out 10,500 employees) took home $21.5 million (actually not a complete number - deferred compensation earnings, which could be more (much more) than this figure, are excluded). If their 2012-2013 pay-outs (aka "salary") had "only" averaged a million a piece then the profit margin would have climbed to 6.4%. If we looked at more execs and knew about the deferred compensation schemes, that profit margin would climb much more.
But how can we expect a man to survive on only a million or so a year?
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
The middle class has shrunk somewhat, because people have been moving out of it towards higher incomes.
LOFL, That's got to be one of the funniest lines of read today. +1 hysterical.
PS what in the hell are you smoking?
Yeah, pretty much. TFA is like some weird rephrasing of the broken window fallacy, or something.
Nocera is correct in that, when people work more efficiently, it takes fewer people to do the same amount of work. What he's missing is that those people can then go on to do other things, meaning that more work is being done by the same number of people, and society as a whole will benefit.
The Internet is one part of a large scale shift in automating jobs that's destroying the middle class. We just don't need all these people working. The author knows this. He knows logically that if 90% of all work is done by machines that there won't be enough work left over to support a middle class composed of laborers, but he's spent his whole life having the idea that if you don't work for it it's not yours hammered into his skull.
So he comes up with silly ideas charging companies get charged large fees to use our personal information. He's done an end run around his dogmatic belief in capitalism and created socialism in everything but name. If it seems nuts that's because it is. It's double think.
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The only solution, really, is some sort of socialist system, with higher taxes for the high-earners so that everyone has a fair share of the increased productivity. And with bigger strides in robotization, this will be mandatory, or else we'll have revolts and heads will literally roll, which would be unpleasant.
The problem is the charged nature of the language. You started with 'socialist' but then jump right into 'high-earners'. Traditionally in the U.S. we have been conditioned to understand 'socialist' as a system with no 'earners', at least not of the high/low classifiable type. So I just worry that too many people reading your comment will stop at the word 'socialist'. I think I agree with your point, but it should start with "The only solution, really, is some sort of hybrid socialist-capitalist system, with a sufficient safety net for the low earners so that nobody has to walk through their downtown looking at people being left to rot and die in the streets".
funny how all the wealthiest and most powerful men and women in the world identify as 'conservative' when they bother to at all. I guess there's Warren Buffet, but he's more a freak of nature than anything else. And for all this talk he's not really active politically.
Yes, every system has entropy, but there's plenty you can do to resist change. Anyone remember the "Dark Ages"?
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when I was younger a data center needed 10x as many people and they were on site. Networks weren't fast enough for remote support. You had to pay people to travel, and that meant you had more people because some were in transit. I work in IT. I do the work of 3 or 4 techs from 10 years ago. I can fix 5 things in parallel. I used to have downtime, but now while one thing's running I move on to the next. My productivity is through the roof.
Then there's all the stuff I used to do by hand that I can automate now thanks to cheap computing power. Plus there's an entire class of programmer out of work because it's cheaper to throw more hardware at a problem then to hire more programers. I buy hardware once a year, a programmer costs money year round.
So yeah, we're losing jobs to automation. Sure, it's taking longer than everyone though to replace ppl. But just because it's slower than the boffins predicted doesn't mean it's not happening.
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a couple of well fed guys with well fed machine guns can take care of your poor. Look at North Korea if you need evidence. If it gets to that then we'll just have a 1000 years of "Dark Ages" like we did the last time it got to that. Then a plague will come along and kill off enough people that labor's in short supply again, or a big war will do the same, or both.
I'm hoping for a male birth control pill to fix matters peacefully.
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Here's US employment by sector.
This isn't a criticism of you, as you obviously linked for the purpose of the "real" (I'm sure the "real" data is also massaged, but less so than the forecasts) data in your link, but I love how full of shit those projections are. +3.1m jobs 2002-2012, +15.6m 2012-2022? Hahahaha. Goods-producing, excluding agriculture: -4.1m/+1.2m (somehow it will take more humans to produce goods than before!); Services-providing: +7.5m/+14.1m (of course services won't be made more efficient and automated; we will need far more humans than before!), Nonagriculture self-employed and unpaid family worker: -0.2/+0.5m (perhaps they have a non-fantasy/non-biased reason for this one, as it's nearly meaningless to the overall numbers). Only agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting admits that trends are likely to accelerate, giving -0.1m/-0.2m. I assume this is because nobody has those jobs anyway, so they couldn't pretend to forecast a large enough gain to really affect their overall numbers.
Waiiii!!!!!! I have bad karma!
To use a simple example. A coffee shop should be opened and chartered to provide the community with excellent coffee and atmosphere for social gathering. Profits keep it in business, and keep the owner and workers able to do it, and able to live and enjoy these things like everyone else. It is entirely backwards to look at providing coffee as a means to profit.
I love coffee. I'm probably addicted to coffee. Did I mention, I love coffee? And while in this forum, I'm likelier to retort against knee-jerk pro-leisse-faiire-capitalistic attitutes, I have to stand against your point. The problem with viewing the world like yours is that *not everyone loves coffee as much as I, err, I mean you do*. Sure, coffee is popular right now, maybe it won't be in the future (cough, probably a bad example there, but... I'm guessing you see my wider point). You can't look at the "chartered" reason for an establishments existence as the subjective and transient fact that plenty of people would enjoy it today. You have to as much or more, look at its "chartered" reason for existence under the lense of that fluctuating demand. I.e. you should have as many coffeeshops available as needed to satisfy demand. And for efficiency sake, some demand has to be sacrified. I.e. just because a few freaks like me often enjoy a double mocha at 4am, doesn't justify having a coffeeshop open at 4am just for me. Thus, the whole ferengi river-of-opportunity / traditional capitalism thing comes into play. And so as a society we agree that it's the best model so far, allowing the people who would most enjoy and relatedly are the best at delivering a coffee shops services, to be most likely to be able to pay their own bills and buy some amount of personal luxuries for themselve, in that way. But yes, between the value of the coffee shop runners making a living that way, and the value of the service being able in most appropriate level of satisfaction to those that demand it, it is... well, you know what, I can't decide which of those two is the most important reason-for-existence of the coffee shop. But what was your problem with it again? I think I need another shot of espresso.... :)
Shouldnt we be hailing this as one of the greatest acheivments of our species? Think of all those lucky people who no longer need to work their asses off to produce some good or service the rest of us need! They can now be free to contribute in other ways. Write or read some books, help people in need, become involved in humanitarian policy development.. etc etc. My point being, if you dont have classes, if you dont have a failed capitalist value system whereby if everybody isnt working (think slavery) then its suffering time.. just maybe you'd see that the lack of wealth distribution is the problem, not the efficiencies that are created by the brilliant minds. Its verbal diarrhea such as the quoted article that makes my blood boil with frustration over the level of corporate capitalist right wing brainwashing that is poisoning our culture. I may not have the answers but its time to talk. Its time for real change.
Good, wouldn't want you straining yourself. It's important to stop reading when it conflicts with your long held beliefs. Don't bother considering it. We need you in prime condition.
It's not like the guy has a book where he explains anything.
Hulfs' reply is a fantastic example of the old saying about missing the forest for the trees (and about winning a battle but losing the war).
Sure, most stuff is shipped internationally by cargo ships then domestically warehoused and trucked interstate, rather than flown by air.
Except saying it's all about ships and trucks, not planes, does the opposite of rebutting the GP's overall argument concerning supply chain advances - the ratio of people to tonnage for oceanic shipping is even less than that for air.
And since OP has been working in the logistics industry for about 10 years, OP might have noticed that shipping and warehousing is still being further automated too.
And as a slashdot reader, one might also noticed those articles about how self-driving cars (and trucks) are becoming less about "drawing boards and labs" and more about "real world testing and certifications".
I think you see McDonalds full of college degrees because most study "Liberal" arts. Or those fancy pants Ph.D. students don't want to get with the times and work in other countries if needed.
Seriously, when will this thread end? Look I grew up in the 70s and 80s with a series of doomsday scenarios including nuclear war. Believe me, the middle class isn't threatened by technology. First off, the middle class isn't anyone with a job. The middle class is classically composed of non-labor intensive skilled employment. Yes technology has replaced some of those jobs. When was the last time you raced to the bank because you needed cash for the weekend and the teller windows were closing? Does anyone want to go back? Apparently this Joe Nocera does. Look the sad truth is, most people stumble through life. Even those who see the curve in the road ahead lack the ambition to turn the wheel. It's easier to stick to what you know and tell yourself "oh they can't do away with my job." Well they can, and they will. So what do you do? Watch, listen, and most importantly learn. It's why Pittsburgh will never again be Steel Town USA, and "what's good for GM" will not be good for America.
Oh the article makes for a good heart-felt rant. It plays on our tender hearts, implores us to feels awful for the plight of our nation and the dark, hopeless future that awaits. How could our bleak future compare to the challenges of any other age!? Get over it. I'm 42 and I've changed careers three times. I grew up with regular newscasts on shows like 20/20 which told me how I might survive a nuclear attack. At one point, we thought Japan would purchase the entire United States and turn us into slaves. Guess what? I've not only survived, I've thrived. Most of us will adapt and live on, no matter what this so-called journalist says
So quit letting this NTY prophet of doom get you down and get back to building your future.
Only the dead have seen the end of War. - Plato
When the US was founded, the business of America was endless days of toiling on a farm. It was 90% of the economy. Today less than 2% of the US economy is agriculture. We aren't 88% unemployed. Other industries and pursuits have developed to fill the gaps, and our quality of life is much better than our forbears.
It is a mistake to think that efficiencies that obviate one industry, for instance buggy whip manufacturers, are overall harmful on a macroeconomic scale. Before the automobile, most people did not own a horse, and cities stank of horse shit anyway from the conveyances of the wealthy. Today there are 250 million cars on the road in the US alone (a nation of 313 million).
I wonder if you compare the size of the automobile industry to the horse and carriage industry if you will find the transition to be overall harmful to the number of workers and their quality of life, even if you compare today's auto industry.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Unless cargo ships are now equipped with warp drive, that's simply not the case. Anyone who has ever ordered an iPhone has the tracking information to show otherwise, and Apple is famous for buying so much of the FedEx/UPS air carrier capacity that it creates an impacted shipping schedule every time they release a new product.
It may well be that on the tail end, retail stores are stocked by ship once demand dies down and there's enough inventory coming off the line that the 10-12 day transit can be absorbed, and there's no question that it's cheaper, but the point still stands that automation, increased capacity, and general efficiency improvements have resulted in job loss in shipping. This is especially true since the slower speed means that it must compete solely on price vs. air carriers.
Wrong. Flat tax is a bullshit idea that benefits the rich the most. Money's value to an individual is logarithmic, not linear. Taxing a billionaire 10% and a homeless man 10% is NOT fair, and it's simplistic to think it is.
Which is why there's a flat refund element in there, so that the poor are essentially not taxed, or even given some money. This system would benefit them financially; today's Earned Income Tax Credit also benefits folks. Note that in the AC's post, there is no mention of deductions. Rich people can hire fancy tax accountants to guide them into tax-saving investment strategies with fancy deductions and investments. General Electric paid 7.4% of pretax income in taxes in a recent year; in all my working years, I've never been that low.
I'm not saying that a flat tax with a flat refund is perfect. I haven't thought thru all the ins and outs. Without the mortgage interest deduction, for one, housing prices would readjust. H&R Block and Intuit's Turbotax employees would be job-hunting too. But that flat tax would make the tax calculation, collection, and audit process a lot faster and cleaner. People could easily visualize what their taxes would be, and could use their free time to be productive, poets, painters, or just catch up on lost sleep. Which is valuable to both the poor working-class folks and the billionaires.
The only solution, really, is some sort of socialist system
Why? This isn't a new problem, the net result of technology is to reduce the amount of work needed, and thus the number of workers. 95%+ of the population used to be involved in food production, and now it's less than 3%. Electricity and the combustion engine radically reduced the manual labor requirements across virtually every sector. Globalization redistributed manufacturing jobs, effectively reducing the number in developed nations.
I'm not sure why you're jumping to socialism, this problem was successfully solved in antiquity. Unemployment lowers the price of labor, so a creative capitalist will find a way to profit from the glut of cheap workers. It's a gold mine free for the taking. (Assuming the socialists don't artificially prevent this through high minimum wages, which do little more than cause unemployment and raise the cost of living so everyone is as poor as before.)
I saw a website where there is a share value calculator. You may try it from this link http://www.drstock.org/ I want to learn if you advice this website or not. According to the video tutorial I watched from Dr. Stock’s homepage, I think the calculator gives correct results. the calculation results of stocks are very close to their current market prices. But what does it mean if the intrinsic value of a stock is close to its current market price? So how can I understand that the other calculation results
Tracking numbers are provided with every single purchase these days, and I can say with great confidence that every Apple product I've ever bought online (One iPod, two iPhones, a Macbook, and a monitor) originated in China before being shipped by air.
Maybe I'm the exception, but my experience is more closely aligned with the example of the parent poster.
Moron is right. This is just the same tired old structural unemployment argument that has been repeatedly debunked in other venues, gussied up to appeal to technologists. Lanier did a little arithmetic and figured he could be wealthy if he got micro payments every time his idiotic brain farts swirled down the intertubes. If he's getting paid anything for his thoughts at all, that's already too much.
Completely wrong. Taxes are a huge part of the solution. Government needs revenue, and taxes are how they get it. We're going to have taxes, period. If you don't like taxes, then you might as well just come out and say you don't like government at all, at which point you can be ignored as a loon. The problem is not taxes, but the structure of those taxes. Taxes should be strongly progressive. The government doesn't need more revenue, it just needs to get the revenue from the people who have the money. The amount of wealth transferred from the private to the public sphere doesn't change at all in a progressive system, it's just obtained more fairly. A fair tax isn't one that is applied equally to everyone, a fair tax is one that works to counterbalance the positive feedback effect of wealth begetting wealth, thereby helping to level people's economic opportunities by preventing extreme wealth inequality. No-one is so smart and talented that they legitimately "earn" a million dollars an hour. No-one. But that is the system we have created, and it's destroying us. We need to fix it, and fast.
Our country's infrastructure is falling apart. We're overly reliant on a finite supply of fossil fuels - we need to transition to sustainable forms of energy production. There is a LOT of work that needs to get done, but our currents systems are doing a TERRIBLE job of properly allocating economic resources so that these jobs can get done. We still need welders, and machinists, and all the other blue collar jobs people keep saying have been lost forever. Those people aren't out of work because of China or robots (not yet anyway), they are out of work because people who commute via helicopter could care less about the condition of the streets below. We need to eat the rich. They are sucking the life out of the economy, and enough is enough.
I don't buy this public/private sphere thing. The government is not public, it is instituted for the benefit of large corperations and was always for the benefit of the rich. That crap about it being public was only ever to pacify people.
I don't see where the government, especially this one, needs more revenue, they have plenty. More than enough for what they NEED to do. Just because they waste it on their bloated military and surveillance state doesn't mean they need more, it means they need less until they can show some responsibility.
That said, why are taxes the only possible solution? It just doesn't make sense to me. Why do you insist on a band-aid when organ replacement is called for?
> No-one is so smart and talented that they legitimately "earn" a million dollars an hour.
No shit. Taxes wont fix that. You need to change corperate structures so that they stop leaking from the top. Why should a company get a grant of limited liability from the government if its corperate charter allows for the poeople at the top to make unlimited sums? This doesn't, at all, require new taxes to fix.
Furthermore why should the government grant limited liability to a company whose corperate charter treats the humans who work for them as disposable resources? It doesn't take taxes to raise standards.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
... new technologies freed up labour force?
When the "People needed to get food" shrank from 100% of the population to about 90% of the population when agriculture was developed that was a great boos for society.
When the horseshoe, the heavy plow and the horse collar freed up around 50% of the agricultural workforce around 1000AD that was also a great boost for European society. The same for the steam engine and later the internal combustion engine.
I think the one thing different now compared to those times is that the "freed up" workforce CAN'T do other things, because switching jobs to REALLY NEW things is to complicated these days because of a lot of red tape that prevents it. A lot of those historic job changes also required new "barter schemes" and/or new forms of government besides the already existing ones, (like the free cities that were founded in the middle ages as a place for journeymen and masters to make their fortune, creating a whole new class that hasn't existed before ) and that is something you can't get that past the existing tax collectors and governments these days.
Maybe simplistic, but worth more analysis. It's not just tech & the Internet, but a lot of events have come together to wipe out the industrial base of the country and took the relatively high paying jobs that came with them. Sure, there's a bunch of engineering jobs out there to take some of the slack but there are far fewer concentrations of high paying tech -- and tech assembly -- jobs out there: the Detroit's and Pittsburgh's etc. that created a broad middle class. Those jobs paid enough so people could buy the stuff they made, buy a house, pay taxes to build schools and infrastructure. That's collapsed and the jobs created for too many are low-end McBurger jobs which the government actually has to subsidize by paying food stamps, medicare etc., so they can pay such low wages and still be able to survive on the margins of the economy. I'm not sure that a model where we're all paid for the information/data we provide on the Internet is viable (it would seem it would just generate more noise and reduce whatever payments might be possible -- I mean, to make money, you'd just start pushing stuff out there. How many cat videos before a critical mass is reached and the market collapses like Dutch Tulips of the 1600s?). But all of the money increasingly concentrating in the top 1% or .01% has to come back somehow -- better pay for low end jobs is probably the best. People have to be able to afford to buy stuff (useless though it may be); and have to be able to afford homes and pay taxes. That's what's collapsed and what Lanier seems to be looking for a solution to.
I used to think that engineers and scientists were smart, some are, but now I think that we live in a world of unintended consequences driven by short-term profit motive. What I read in this thread is a bunch of guilty people scrambling to justify that their good fortunes haven't come at the detriment of a vast majority of their fellows, after all who has the most to lose from criticisms of the way things are, the people that read this type of forum and who are the makers of the technology that is causing the mess.
I see most of these comments as nitpicks and evasions of the truth that most Americans have seen a loss of spending power as a result of the application of technology in the service of short-term business gain. The problem this raises for tech workers is the Google Bus problem in San Francisco and what that really means to the elites in Silicon Valley. It means that the honeymoon with tech is finally over and what that means is that ordinary people, people who don't write code, people who do not create technology are just now beginning to put two and two together and coming to the conclusion that technology may not work at all to make their lives better, that the same old failings of human nature apply and are amplified by the technology.
I have been attacked by trolls who evidently listen to Fox News mostly, who may be paid for Republican PR contractors to cruise the Internet attacking "Liberals" for daring to criticize Capitalism and the American Way, which is increasingly the Chinese way, by the way And I have no illusions that Hip Silicon Valley has always had an undercurrent of Libertarian extremism, Random Randians. But I sense fear from those quarters that the jig is up, that they know that it is dawning on many more people that the big corporations are doing evil. So, every time a mere user gets pissed off at Google targeting ads at them by reading their e-mail and search strings, or that Facebook is constructed so that they can spy on you and not protect you or your children against other users abusing you, Javascript gets a more sinister reputation, and so does many practitioners of such arcane arts.
And the stables will complain, when the Model T rolls out...
If you were to extrapolate the current growth in technology you'll see that jobs currently being eliminated through automation and efficiencies brought on by the Internet and technological innovation will eventually reach a point where the unemployed lower and middle income population will cause stagnation in the economy if not worse. 60 minutes had an entire episode about this: https://www.google.com/#q=60+minutes+technological+unemployment. Google technological unemployment. No one has still figured out how to put these displaced people to work. So yes, technology has helped many people grow but at the same time there's a sizeable and steadily growing population who are being left out at the detriment of technological innovation.
You the programmer exist because there are consumers. Well guess what, the consumers eveyone refers to are the lower and middle income people.
cost competitors and suppliers hundreds of thousands of jobs => Saved millions of man-hours labor.
> There are many problems, and we aren't going to work them all out on Slashdot :)
especially with posts that show an obvious lack of any knowledge of economics and this feel good fiction that everyone deserves something for nothing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
Casteism
Globalization is Zero-Sum.
Amend your Constitution accordingly.
Casteism
Holy Shit. Cognitive dissonance much??Yeah, Let's let's ignore the Context of how the billionaire became rich and how the homeless man became destitute. Let's steal a portion from the 4.0 GPA student because he worked hard and give it to the 1.0 GPA student even though he didn't work hard because of a bullshit "Life is unfair!" rhetoric. Somebody call the whambulance!
--> How about focusing on the cause instead of treating the symptom. <--
You are ignorant about Life because you don't understand Death:
LIFE IS 100% FAIR.
It is only your perception that makes it seem unfair.
--
"Only cowards censor"
No, greedy motherfuckers have though.
As the rollout and implementation of Obamacare continues to be a train wreck... what do to, what do to...
Pivot to income inequality, evil corporations, the middle class...
Now the FACTS are that under Obama & the Democrats, the rich have gotten richer, the poor have gotten poorer, the middle class has shrunk. But it can;'t possibly be the fault of the administrations economic policy, it can't indicate that perhaps the policy should be re-evaluated, or change, no that can't be it. So quick, let's start a propaganda war and see who we can find to blame for this.
Meanwhile, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the middle class continue to decline. So let's blame outsourcing, evil Republicans, evil Corporations, racism, globalization, Bush, Reagan, the Internet, the Weather, climate change, Universities, obstructionism, politicking, anything.... but the policies that after five years have only made things worse.
Murphy was an optimist
Calling someone a moron in your opening statement reflects poorly on you and simply demonstrates your total lack of understanding. The new jobs being created are not replacing the old jobs one to one. Even those high tech jobs you list, IT support, network management and building are dwindling due to better designed systems, self correcting systems and more centralized computing. As far as IT support goes, the cost of computing equipment is such that it's difficult to make a living repairing and maintaining computers and other digital devices. Even for salesman, because there is less of a middle class with disposable income to buy whatever it is you have to sell. As far as going back to school, that has costs just as well, and a lot of tech students find that by the time they have completed their training it's obsolete. And show me the data that research has tremendously increased. Every article I see on the subject seems to suggest that in every sector of the economy, R&D is down from the national labs, the universities and the private corporations. So let's just stop and think who the real moron is here.
The part of the middle class having office jobs dependent on things that internet and computers make obsolete.
Just as industrial revolutions made quite some "industrial" (worker class) jobs obsolete the last 100 years or so.
We would not be better off today if we outlawed industrial robotics to "save" worker class jobs some 30-100 years ago, our kids won't be better off if we insist on keeping IPs to save middle class jobs today. It would just stagnate our economy.
The internet is simply illustrating that in an extractive economic model, the 'employed' people are tools that extract resources from the ground and their own future (usually compulsorily because of debts), and the flow of resources is away from the places that need them toward places that don't need them (banks, private yachts, small groups of uber-rich). It isn't that we need to redistribute the income from this system, but that we need to stop extracting resources and start being generous to the places that support our needs. By reversing the extractive trend and establishing humans as caretakers of their own future (the planet), then those who are spread out (the working class) will be nearer the end of the line of human agency. The closer they are to the placement of efforts, in other words, the more likely they will be getting benefits from their own labors.
The idea that the 'solution' lies with some fantasized "middle" class is based on the premise that there IS such a thing as a middle class. There are only two classes: those who have to work in order to have food, and those who will never have to work for their food because they control the resources that others need.
We are at the 60 second mark in the petri dish and running out of room. Finding 3 more planets full of resources gets us only another two minutes. We have to stop being the yeast and start being intentionally useful to our own future. The problem isn't capitalism: it's consumerism. The opposite of consumerism isn't frugality or redistribution: it's generosity: generosity toward the sources of our needs.
If you don't know, whom to blame, or need to distract the people from the real political issues, then blame the internet.
So, yes, of course the internet destroys the middle class, not the bankers and gone-wild unbraked casino capitalism.
And the internet is everywhere, so there is no chance for the middle class anymore.
No chance? Wait... didn't we talked about the NSA destroying the internet, some weks ago?
Hey, yes... the internet destroys the middle class, the NSA destroys the internet, so the NSA restores the
moiddle class. Hurray!
(Of course for that reason the middle class needs to be surveillanced... just to help them...)