8 ms·

This is a tremendously simplistic analysis of the situation: a) The sentence "You create jobs by helping grow existing businesses and helping create new busine

by philk 17y ago

This is a tremendously simplistic analysis of the situation: a) The sentence "You create jobs by helping grow existing businesses and helping create new businesses." is practically a tautology. b) "Creating jobs" is a complicated issue in the first place. If I start a new company with fifty employees but drive a competitor who used to employ sixty employees out of business, have I created any jobs? c) "Creating jobs" is not the problem. "Creating good jobs" is closer to the problem. You could easily create jobs by cutting welfare and offering all of it's former recipients government jobs paying $50/day to dig holes, but this would not be a positive outcome. d) Creating good jobs in the long term is largely a problem of improving productivity. This means investments in education and infrastructure, and reducing drags on efficiency. e) He's got a line in there arguing in support of bankers. Banking, like tax preparation or law is a a field that is more "administrative overhead" than a productive industry. Unless we are providing these services to foreigners these fields provide little benefit to the country. In conclusion I'm not really sure what the point of his article is to do except complain that the government isn't helping him enough.

timr 17y ago
Also, let's not forget that there's a huge class of people who aren't old enough or wealthy enough to retire, but whose current jobs are going away quickly. Those folks aren't going to be working as programmers at startups in the brave new world. Creating "good" jobs then becomes something more like "creating good jobs that can can keep the current population employed". I don't hear many people talking in those terms anymore.
- philk 17y ago
  I suspect we'd be better off if we invested in education for these folks and retrained them to do something people actually want nowadays. They might not be working as programmers at startups but there's still a lot of worthwhile tasks we could get these people doing with the right preparation and support.
  - timr 17y ago
    "I suspect we'd be better off if we invested in education for these folks and retrained them to do something people actually want nowadays." Problem is, evidence suggests that retraining doesn't work very well. Here's a heartbreaking series of stories about furniture workers who were laid off when their factory outsourced their jobs. The reporter followed them as they took a community college training program, and tried valiantly to get jobs at the Google data center opening nearby: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121516133 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1215161... http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121567306 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1215673... http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121576791 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1215767... Unsurprisingly, virtually none of the people got jobs at Google, and the ones who didn't ended up doing things like working at WalMart at much lower wages. It's a myth to pretend that we can re-educate enough blue-collar workers to make a dent. We're going to have to find another way, and my suspicion is that it's going to involve a resurrection of trade barriers until older workers can retire.
    - philk 17y ago
      Thanks for the articles. I'm not sure, however, that the examples cited within them are entirely fair - they took middle aged furniture workers and tried to get them jobs at Google after a few years retraining. Of course a guy who's had six weeks of classes in Linux isn't going to get a job at one of the most technical companies in the world. What I was thinking was more along the line of retraining them to do useful blue collar jobs - for example HVAC maintenance - which can't be easily offshored and still is useful to society. It's a myth to pretend that we can re-educate enough blue-collar workers to make a dent. We're going to have to find another way, and my suspicion is that it's going to involve a resurrection of trade barriers until older workers can retire. I'd be reluctant to do this, as it's essentially a tax on everyone else to support them and essentially surrendering to the fact that we can get very little value out of these workers.
      - timr 17y ago
        " Of course a guy who's had six weeks of classes in Linux isn't going to get a job at one of the most technical companies in the world. What I was thinking was more along the line of retraining them to do useful blue collar jobs - for example HVAC maintenance - which can't be easily offshored and still is useful to society." Well, yes...the story is tragic because they never had a chance. But I wouldn't be quick to assume that this is a story specific to Google. You'll note that a lot of these people end up doing menial work, even after their re-training program. One presumes that if it were possible to find better jobs, these people would have found them -- they certainly sound like dedicated workers. Instead, they're working double-shifts at WalMarts and prisons. "I'd be reluctant to do this, as it's essentially a tax on everyone else to support them and essentially surrendering to the fact that we can get very little value out of these workers." That's one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is that we've consistently exploited cheaper labor markets to undermine our own, without building non-US markets for our own products. Moreover, many of these foreign labor markets have been playing currency games to ensure that US workers can't possibly compete. It's a system that's rigged against US production, and taxing it is one way of reintroducing balance.
necro 17y ago
The way to create the jobs needed in the US, is to take them away from someone else. The real problem is that technology (communication, transport, accessibility of buyers) has leveled the playing field for billions of foreign workers to compete in the US market. This means that if your job is to assemble widgets by hand, you better be ready to have the same kind of pay and living conditions and income as a billion foreign workers. That was the past, but now we keep arming the foreign countries with progressively higher level jobs by shipping the howto there. Years ago you would get your product electronics assembled in a box offshore. Now, you not only have the electronics made there, but also the ICs, and even much of the basic design work is done offshore. So if this guy has a start up that creates a competitive technological vector away from the foreign countries' abilities, it's most positively the RIGHT way to create jobs. Do not count on the large companies doing this. Their way of creating efficiency and reducing economic drag is to ship the jobs off shore so their stock holders are happy (most of which are probably foreign anyways so they dont give a rats what effect this has in the long run). The more technology and the progressively higher ability jobs you ship offshore, the higher and smarter jobs you need to have left in country. It's simple...if a few billion people offshore can do the same job as you, and there is absolutely no transportation or communication barriers to have that job done offshore vs. in the US, guess what...it's done by the person that does it for less. If those jobs are assemblers, designers, engineers, you pretty fast run out of things all the American folks can do that others can't.
- lionhearted 17y ago
  > The way to create the jobs needed in the US, is to take them away from someone else. The way to create jobs is to get people producing things that other people need and want and are willing to exchange things for. This could be through lower pricing or better quality in an existing industry, or it could be through creating a new industry. As long as any human needs or wants are unfulfilled, there's a possibility for a new jobs to created filling those needs and wants.
  - bsaunder 17y ago
    That's it, bring back manufacturing by creating higher quality products than the Chinese. Surely most of those jobs would be higher level support to robotic assembly lines. But the Chinese have set a wonderfully low bar for quality. Furthermore higher quality products are "green". I'm fed up with purchasing crappy products. I want a store that charges 50% more but guarantees purchases for life (kind of an anti-walmart (except for the profit part ;)).
ryanwaggoner 17y ago
You could easily create jobs by cutting welfare and offering all of it's former recipients government jobs paying $50/day to dig holes, but this would not be a positive outcome. Call me crazy, but I suspect that we'd be much better off with a situation like this. Imagine the boost in motivation to improve your career prospects after spending a few weeks doing work like this. And surely we can find some use for a bunch of holes in the ground. In contrast, I know an awful lot of folks who got laid off in the last 18 months who decided to just take some time to find themselves because they were getting unemployment.
- iron_ball 17y ago
  Replace "digging holes in the ground" with "repairing decaying bridges and highways." Remember that bridge collapse in Minnesota? Remember the spate of news articles about how many other bridges were in similar danger over the next decade? And then silence!
abscondment 17y ago
He's got a line in there arguing in support of bankers. As I read it, he's complaining that the government views VCs as bankers. I think it's legitimate to consider the differences between the traditional loans/bonds/etc of banking and the investments VCs make.
yummyfajitas 17y ago
Regarding c), the crappy government jobs digging holes probably would be a positive outcome. People on welfare can sit around watching TV, playing sports or engaging in other recreational activities [1]. This is probably more pleasant than getting a job. If we replaced recreation with hole digging, people on welfare would have a greater incentive to find a job. Regarding d), this is only true if additional education and infrastructure provide a greater benefit to the economy than their opportunity cost (e.g. the cost to business and consumers of the taxes paid to support education/infrastructure). It's not by any means clear that this is the case. [1] Based on obesity rates among the poor, I suspect watching TV is much more common than playing sports.
- sethg 17y ago
  I would bet that in some poor neighborhoods, watching TV is safer than playing sports.
  - yummyfajitas 17y ago
    I'm not sure of that. In the US, obesity causes about 112,000 deaths yearly [1]. 14,000 or so people were murdered [2], mostly by people they knew [3]. This doesn't give relative risks in any given neighborhood, of course, but it is suggestive. Also, personal experience: Harlem is extremely safe, but you see lots of obesity and very little sports activity there. [1] http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&cluster=2169145441962801940&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=qmZ1S6CqIpS0tgfSvaG_Cg&sa=X&oi=science_links&resnum=1&ct=sl-allversions&ved=0CBAQ0AIwAA http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&cluster=... [2] http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/offenses/expanded_information/data/shrtable_01.html http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/offenses/expanded_informatio... [3] http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/offenses/expanded_information/data/shrtable_10.html http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/offenses/expanded_informatio...
ja30278 17y ago
Regarding "a": I don't see a refutation of the idea anywhere in your response. Regarding "b: No. But driving the competitor out of business assumes that you're doing the same task more efficiently (with fewer people), which is theoretically better for the economy as a whole, since it means that the same goods/services are produced at less cost, and frees up labor for other things. Regarding "c": How exactly would we be worse off as a society in this context? Replace "dig holes" with "pick up litter" or some other menial but necessary task, and it looks like a net win to me. You expend the same money, but actually get some small societal return on your investment. Can you actually argue that welfare recipients _ought_ to be idle? Regarding "d": Aren't higher taxes and greater difficultly in obtaining starting capital "drags on efficiency"? Regarding "e": Imagine you have a brilliant idea on how to produce, market, and sell widgets. To get started, you need new equipment, a storefront, and some working capital. How do you obtain these things? If someone lent you the capital to get started, and you created a new business as a result, are they not (at least tangentially) engaged in a 'productive' activity?
- sethg 17y ago
  Replace "dig holes" with "pick up litter" or some other menial but necessary task, and it looks like a net win to me. If there are already people employed by state or local governments to pick up litter, they won’t be happy to see former welfare recipients being given the same job for a much lower pay. OTOH, one thing the current stimulus package did was give money to state and local governments, so that they didn’t have to lay off sanitation workers (or teachers or police officers or etc.) for lack of money. Recessions are particularly hard on state governments because most state constitutions require balanced budgets, but recessions cut into their tax revenue at the very same time that demands on government services increase.

by philk 17y ago

timr 17y ago

Also, let's not forget that there's a huge class of people who aren't old enough or wealthy enough to retire, but whose current jobs are going away quickly. Those folks aren't going to be working as programmers at startups in the brave new world. Creating "good" jobs then becomes something more like "creating good jobs that can can keep the current population employed". I don't hear many people talking in those terms anymore.

philk 17y ago
I suspect we'd be better off if we invested in education for these folks and retrained them to do something people actually want nowadays. They might not be working as programmers at startups but there's still a lot of worthwhile tasks we could get these people doing with the right preparation and support.
- timr 17y ago
  "I suspect we'd be better off if we invested in education for these folks and retrained them to do something people actually want nowadays." Problem is, evidence suggests that retraining doesn't work very well. Here's a heartbreaking series of stories about furniture workers who were laid off when their factory outsourced their jobs. The reporter followed them as they took a community college training program, and tried valiantly to get jobs at the Google data center opening nearby: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121516133 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1215161... http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121567306 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1215673... http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121576791 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1215767... Unsurprisingly, virtually none of the people got jobs at Google, and the ones who didn't ended up doing things like working at WalMart at much lower wages. It's a myth to pretend that we can re-educate enough blue-collar workers to make a dent. We're going to have to find another way, and my suspicion is that it's going to involve a resurrection of trade barriers until older workers can retire.
  - philk 17y ago
    Thanks for the articles. I'm not sure, however, that the examples cited within them are entirely fair - they took middle aged furniture workers and tried to get them jobs at Google after a few years retraining. Of course a guy who's had six weeks of classes in Linux isn't going to get a job at one of the most technical companies in the world. What I was thinking was more along the line of retraining them to do useful blue collar jobs - for example HVAC maintenance - which can't be easily offshored and still is useful to society. It's a myth to pretend that we can re-educate enough blue-collar workers to make a dent. We're going to have to find another way, and my suspicion is that it's going to involve a resurrection of trade barriers until older workers can retire. I'd be reluctant to do this, as it's essentially a tax on everyone else to support them and essentially surrendering to the fact that we can get very little value out of these workers.
    - timr 17y ago
      " Of course a guy who's had six weeks of classes in Linux isn't going to get a job at one of the most technical companies in the world. What I was thinking was more along the line of retraining them to do useful blue collar jobs - for example HVAC maintenance - which can't be easily offshored and still is useful to society." Well, yes...the story is tragic because they never had a chance. But I wouldn't be quick to assume that this is a story specific to Google. You'll note that a lot of these people end up doing menial work, even after their re-training program. One presumes that if it were possible to find better jobs, these people would have found them -- they certainly sound like dedicated workers. Instead, they're working double-shifts at WalMarts and prisons. "I'd be reluctant to do this, as it's essentially a tax on everyone else to support them and essentially surrendering to the fact that we can get very little value out of these workers." That's one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is that we've consistently exploited cheaper labor markets to undermine our own, without building non-US markets for our own products. Moreover, many of these foreign labor markets have been playing currency games to ensure that US workers can't possibly compete. It's a system that's rigged against US production, and taxing it is one way of reintroducing balance.

necro 17y ago

The way to create the jobs needed in the US, is to take them away from someone else. The real problem is that technology (communication, transport, accessibility of buyers) has leveled the playing field for billions of foreign workers to compete in the US market. This means that if your job is to assemble widgets by hand, you better be ready to have the same kind of pay and living conditions and income as a billion foreign workers. That was the past, but now we keep arming the foreign countries with progressively higher level jobs by shipping the howto there. Years ago you would get your product electronics assembled in a box offshore. Now, you not only have the electronics made there, but also the ICs, and even much of the basic design work is done offshore. So if this guy has a start up that creates a competitive technological vector away from the foreign countries' abilities, it's most positively the RIGHT way to create jobs. Do not count on the large companies doing this. Their way of creating efficiency and reducing economic drag is to ship the jobs off shore so their stock holders are happy (most of which are probably foreign anyways so they dont give a rats what effect this has in the long run). The more technology and the progressively higher ability jobs you ship offshore, the higher and smarter jobs you need to have left in country. It's simple...if a few billion people offshore can do the same job as you, and there is absolutely no transportation or communication barriers to have that job done offshore vs. in the US, guess what...it's done by the person that does it for less. If those jobs are assemblers, designers, engineers, you pretty fast run out of things all the American folks can do that others can't.

lionhearted 17y ago
> The way to create the jobs needed in the US, is to take them away from someone else. The way to create jobs is to get people producing things that other people need and want and are willing to exchange things for. This could be through lower pricing or better quality in an existing industry, or it could be through creating a new industry. As long as any human needs or wants are unfulfilled, there's a possibility for a new jobs to created filling those needs and wants.
- bsaunder 17y ago
  That's it, bring back manufacturing by creating higher quality products than the Chinese. Surely most of those jobs would be higher level support to robotic assembly lines. But the Chinese have set a wonderfully low bar for quality. Furthermore higher quality products are "green". I'm fed up with purchasing crappy products. I want a store that charges 50% more but guarantees purchases for life (kind of an anti-walmart (except for the profit part ;)).

ryanwaggoner 17y ago

You could easily create jobs by cutting welfare and offering all of it's former recipients government jobs paying $50/day to dig holes, but this would not be a positive outcome. Call me crazy, but I suspect that we'd be much better off with a situation like this. Imagine the boost in motivation to improve your career prospects after spending a few weeks doing work like this. And surely we can find some use for a bunch of holes in the ground. In contrast, I know an awful lot of folks who got laid off in the last 18 months who decided to just take some time to find themselves because they were getting unemployment.

iron_ball 17y ago
Replace "digging holes in the ground" with "repairing decaying bridges and highways." Remember that bridge collapse in Minnesota? Remember the spate of news articles about how many other bridges were in similar danger over the next decade? And then silence!

abscondment 17y ago

He's got a line in there arguing in support of bankers. As I read it, he's complaining that the government views VCs as bankers. I think it's legitimate to consider the differences between the traditional loans/bonds/etc of banking and the investments VCs make.

yummyfajitas 17y ago

Regarding c), the crappy government jobs digging holes probably would be a positive outcome. People on welfare can sit around watching TV, playing sports or engaging in other recreational activities [1]. This is probably more pleasant than getting a job. If we replaced recreation with hole digging, people on welfare would have a greater incentive to find a job. Regarding d), this is only true if additional education and infrastructure provide a greater benefit to the economy than their opportunity cost (e.g. the cost to business and consumers of the taxes paid to support education/infrastructure). It's not by any means clear that this is the case. [1] Based on obesity rates among the poor, I suspect watching TV is much more common than playing sports.

sethg 17y ago
I would bet that in some poor neighborhoods, watching TV is safer than playing sports.
- yummyfajitas 17y ago
  I'm not sure of that. In the US, obesity causes about 112,000 deaths yearly [1]. 14,000 or so people were murdered [2], mostly by people they knew [3]. This doesn't give relative risks in any given neighborhood, of course, but it is suggestive. Also, personal experience: Harlem is extremely safe, but you see lots of obesity and very little sports activity there. [1] http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&cluster=2169145441962801940&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=qmZ1S6CqIpS0tgfSvaG_Cg&sa=X&oi=science_links&resnum=1&ct=sl-allversions&ved=0CBAQ0AIwAA http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&cluster=... [2] http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/offenses/expanded_information/data/shrtable_01.html http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/offenses/expanded_informatio... [3] http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/offenses/expanded_information/data/shrtable_10.html http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/offenses/expanded_informatio...

ja30278 17y ago

Regarding "a": I don't see a refutation of the idea anywhere in your response. Regarding "b: No. But driving the competitor out of business assumes that you're doing the same task more efficiently (with fewer people), which is theoretically better for the economy as a whole, since it means that the same goods/services are produced at less cost, and frees up labor for other things. Regarding "c": How exactly would we be worse off as a society in this context? Replace "dig holes" with "pick up litter" or some other menial but necessary task, and it looks like a net win to me. You expend the same money, but actually get some small societal return on your investment. Can you actually argue that welfare recipients _ought_ to be idle? Regarding "d": Aren't higher taxes and greater difficultly in obtaining starting capital "drags on efficiency"? Regarding "e": Imagine you have a brilliant idea on how to produce, market, and sell widgets. To get started, you need new equipment, a storefront, and some working capital. How do you obtain these things? If someone lent you the capital to get started, and you created a new business as a result, are they not (at least tangentially) engaged in a 'productive' activity?

sethg 17y ago
Replace "dig holes" with "pick up litter" or some other menial but necessary task, and it looks like a net win to me. If there are already people employed by state or local governments to pick up litter, they won’t be happy to see former welfare recipients being given the same job for a much lower pay. OTOH, one thing the current stimulus package did was give money to state and local governments, so that they didn’t have to lay off sanitation workers (or teachers or police officers or etc.) for lack of money. Recessions are particularly hard on state governments because most state constitutions require balanced budgets, but recessions cut into their tax revenue at the very same time that demands on government services increase.