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America’s Dazzling Tech Boom Has a Downside: Not Enough Jobs
- abysmallyideal 10y agoThe "American dazzle tech boom industry" is a scam and a hoax. It is a government protected endeavor by government protected and connected organizations.
- collinmanderson 10y agoI know, I know. Paywall. Ohh well.
- denzell 10y agoNo paywall, but rather video ad!
- graton 10y agoClick the link near the top of this page which says "web". Basically does a Google search and then you can get in if you click the first search result.
- collinmanderson 10y agoI never saw that before. Thanks.
- randcraw 10y agoWhat browser does this work for? Not Firefox.
- anupmm 10y agoAvoid Paywall through GN: https://www.google.com/search?q=America%E2%80%99s+Dazzling+Tech+Boom+Has+a+Downside%3A+Not+Enough+Jobs&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8#q=America%E2%80%99s+Dazzling+Tech+Boom+Has+a+Downside:+Not+Enough+Jobs&tbm=nws https://www.google.com/search?q=America%E2%80%99s+Dazzling+T...
- jrockway 10y agoThis is why I think I'm in favor of basic income. With robots doing all our labor, "a job" is not how we can support basic needs like food and shelter. (Money still changes hands with robots doing all the work, so we can tax that and use it to fund basic income for everyone.) This assumes that people want a job because they want the income, not because they want to do something rewarding all day. Not sure how to solve that problem.
- elcct 10y agoBasic income will become new zero. People are creative and for sure will find themselves ways to earn bread.
- duaneb 10y agoZero is a number, not just "small". If you can't buy anything with BI it's worse than worthless.
- bduerst 10y ago>If you can't buy anything with BI it's worse than worthless. That's their point. There are goods and service that have income-elastic pricing. A chief example of this is housing. As income increases, so do housing prices, which is why welfare programs are typically tied to specific goods and services (food stamps, medicare, etc.)
- jfoutz 10y agoThe Milton Friedman model gave you a tax deduction twice as much as the BI check. So, if you're getting $500 a month in BI, but you decide to work a little, up to $1000 dollars in taxes is deductible. The idea is, you always make more money by working. So maybe you sell a painting for $500, 20% taxes would be $100. At the end of the month, you wind up with $450 from BI and $500 from the painting (because you can deduct all the taxes at a 2 for 1 rate). So maybe you're a fancy doctor that makes $10000 a month. to keep things simple taxes would still be 20%, $2000. You get to deduct $1000, from those taxes, because you didn't take any BI benefits. One of the things i think is great about it, it provides a soft launch for anything you might want to do. (I think you know this, but some people sort of miss the "it's better to work" part of BI)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- baron816 10y agoFor all of human history, people have had to deal with a scarcity of resources. Yet in the last few years, that has changed. Our problem is not that we can't make enough stuff for everyone to be happy, it's that we're still acting like that is the case. The age of inflation is over because producers in nearly every industry (there are a few notable exceptions) can absorb almost infinite demand for their products. The sooner governments and central banks accept this, and the sooner we move past the notion that a "job" is not an end but a means to an end, the sooner we can end poverty, achieve high levels of growth, and overcome our fear of globalization and technology.
- NhanH 10y agoCan you elaborate how inflation is connected with scarcity of resources?
- baron816 10y agoPrices are driven up when there is too much demand competing for a limited amount of goods. When a company can scale infinitely, they don't have to raise their prices. Lower prices keep demand up, so producers tend to want to keep their prices low.
- WalterBright 10y agoInflation has nothing to do with scarcity. It is the result of the supply of money increasing relative to the value in the economy. It's supply & demand, which applies to money just like everything else. Scarcity does raise prices, but that is not inflation, because if X's price rises, you spend more on X, but you have less to spend on Y, which lowers that price.
- jomamaxx 10y agoScarcity changes the price of something. Inflation can really be thought of as expansion of the money supply while all other things remain steady - stuff just arbitrarily gets more expensive. Central Banks target 2% inflation so that we don't fall into a deflationary trap. It's like keeping the treadmill running just a little bit, to force the person to run forward. Austrian school economists basically equate inflation with money printing - to them it's the same thing. But most things increase in price due to a) better quality product and b) regular dynamics of business c) currency. So when the beer gets more expensive it's: a) Better beer (at least in the eyes of the consumer), i.e. longer brew times, better taste, better ingredients b) More expensive input costs c) Currency issues with imports etc. Those are not inflation, just price fluxuation. Inflation is when the exact same thing gets costlier, all other things being equal.
- Alex3917 10y agoThe amount of fossil fuels it takes to produce each calorie of food is increasing exponentially over time, so many scientists expect that eventually we'll need to start replacing machines with human labor. While this will probably happen to some extent, I also suspect that AI will soon make urban permaculture viable. E.g. the main reason why all the trees in our cities aren't edible fruit and nut trees is because they make a huge mess and attract rodents when they fall on the sidewalk. But if you were creating a new city today then it would make sense to heavily incorporate edible landscaping, and in twenty years when it's actually at peak productivity we'll have inexpensive autonomous robots to clean up the mess and periodically check the soil for contaminants or whatever.
- dsfyu404ed 10y agocitation very much needed
- Alex3917 10y agohttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12178986 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12178986
- Animats 10y agoThat's from 1993. Needs an update. Agriculture has been reducing their inputs in recent decades. With precision farming and a lot more data collection, farms use less of everything. Using lots of water and fertilizer is out. It looks like we're not going to run out of energy. Solar and wind have now become Big Solar and Big Wind, and fight it out with Big Oil and Big Gas. (Big Coal went bust.[1]) Electric cars aren't a joke any more. We can still do nuclear if we have to. We're more likely to have metal shortages than energy shortages. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/04/13/coal-titan-peabody-energy-files-for-bankruptcy/?utm_term=.003968a26f35 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...
- dredmorbius 10y ago
- lvs 10y agoIt has another related downside: it's not a strong driver of economic productivity, as the President recently pointed out [1]. [1] http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21708216-americas-president-writes-us-about-four-crucial-areas-unfinished-business-economic http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21708216-americas-pre...
- jupiter90000 10y agoDoes WSJ writer get to decide how many jobs should be 'enough' for an industry? Weirdly written article, in my opinion... and the writer seems to cherry pick anecdotes, 'see now there are robots doing things in Amazon warehouses! Now we can't have enough slave labor sweatshop type jobs in the US to go around!'
- ocroso 10y agoI agree, I kind of feel like they aren't in tune with the actual reality of the industry. In my experience, there are tens of thousands of jobs out there, just not enough people with the qualifications to fill them.
- ocroso 10y agoI disagree with this entire article. Every company I've worked for in the tech industry has had incredible difficulty finding talent/people to fill the roles we had. Also, there are more software companies than Google and Facebook. Also, I don't see salaries dropping anywhere for these jobs, I see them going up. Sure, help desk is the new car mechanic, but that happens in every industry. Now, you probably want to be a developer or DevOps guy to make what help desk made in the 90's. The real issue seems to be exploding cost of living making earning more feel like earning less. And I believe companies that are willing to allow remote work are helping combat that by giving workers the freedom to move somewhere cheaper.
- notfromhere 10y agoA software company employs infinitely less people than a manufacturing plant used to and doesn't provide the same mix of high skilled and low skilled labor. That's the problem that many areas of the country are dealing with: that the economic boom is becoming a lot more concentrated than it used to, which only increases income inequality.
- adwn 10y ago> A software company employs infinitely less people than a manufacturing plant used to "Infinitely less"? Would that be zero or -infinity? Either way, this is obviously wrong. (I realize this was not your actual point, so I didn't downvote you)
- walshemj 10y agoBack when I worked for a large telco my division(SE ie the heir to the part of the GPO that built colossus) had over 60K FTE most of which where managerial and professional.
- wvenable 10y agoI agree but I also disagree. We have a fair amount of difficulty finding talent to fill our tech roles when they come available. However, much of my job is to automate away other people's jobs. I've literally taken more than handful of good paying / medium skilled jobs out of the market with my software. If the trend continues, and it is, more and more of these jobs will go away. There is, in my opinion, a limit -- you can't run a company with nobody. But historically my company hired large amounts of people to do jobs that have now been obsolete for decades because of technology.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- mc32 10y agoSaying tech doesn't create jobs is like saying Petroleum is only about fuel for cars. It creates ancillary jobs [people making apps, people selling phones and data plans] but also improves the aspects of many other jobs [like addressing disasters with up to date information, or ability to monitor a protest which could turn violent, or facilitating access to education for people who would not have had the chance, otherwise] There are a lot of benefits elsewhere... That said, automation in many fields will finally claw away low skills jobs from people. I don't think we, as a society will dodge that bullet this time. We may come up with job substitutes, but we won't be able to do "value-add" indefinitely. And, eventually, this will filter down quickly to poor countries too [unless they close the borders to technological change, but I don't see that happening, their oligarchs will make sure they also can bring that tech in-house]
- jomamaxx 10y agoIt's very fair to say tech does not create as many jobs as other industries. Also - tech removes a lot of jobs via automation. I never, ever talk to a person at a bank unless I have to. 'Mortgage Loan Officer' is almost becoming a thing of the past, so automated these days.
- 1_listerine_pls 10y ago> Saying tech doesn't create jobs is like saying Petroleum is only about fuel for cars. It referred to net jobs... > finally claw away low skills jobs from people Not a predictor. There are highly skilled jobs that can be automated more easily than low skilled jobs.
- rajacombinator 10y agoNot enough jobs is not a consequence of tech, it's due to globalizing low skill labor. Which is great.
- CodeSheikh 10y agoI feel like the author stressed too much on the word "Tech" without differentiating much between the very basic nature of SW-Tech and HW-Tech. In hardware assembly lines you need more workersa and bodies, let them be in the USA or China or Taiwan. But for SW once you have developed and refined your algorithm, routine or process it does not need to have multiple people handling, managing or maintaining it. It can be replaced but let's be honest such replacement does not happen for quite some time at enterprises, in some case it takes years. My point being, yes big SW companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter etc did not create enough jobs because they produce and maintain software, not actual physical products (Google until recently). Yet they have sucked a large portion of money from the economy (Think of ecoonomy as a shared pot with fixed $ coins in it). The problem is with the financial and employment regulators for being short sighted and not predicting this trend lets say 15-20 years ago. It is a bad unbalanced financial "equation" when weight on one variable is too much and on the right one it is too low. A company with $X amount of positive revenue must invest a certain portion back into the economy. In this way we can maintain a economically balanced society. Also, people need to start getting serious about continuing education. Skills learned and obtained in the 80s or 90s is not necessarily going to be employable in the year 2016.