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It feels like we're moving away from jobs that are purely productive, to jobs that are more creative. I don't mean arts etc, but 50 years ago a company like Fac

It feels like we're moving away from jobs that are purely productive, to jobs that are more creative. I don't mean arts etc, but 50 years ago a company like Facebook/Snap/Gaming/Any digital entertainment really, could not exist because people were occupied work that was required for society to function. Now humans can start focusing on spending their day building things for the entertainment of other humans, and also choosing careers based on what they feel is fun/satisfying for themselves.

crc32 9y ago
Maybe. On the downside; maybe those jobs won't be available to everyone because there is a skills gap or there aren't enough of them. If there are people who are left behind; what do we do about it?
- announcerman 9y ago
  As long as it isn't profitable to help the people left behind there won't be much done. Hopefully the people left behind will start making it unprofitable for the elites to ignore them. Probably won't happen though due to the vast amount of surveillance we're subjected to along with possible robotic police force in the future.
  - crc32 9y ago
    Yes. What is being suggested by the zeitgeist is that we are in a transition period; and that the scale of the problem is going to be so large that it cannot be ignored. That is, if 75% of the population has no job in 2150 you have a huge ethical and societal problem.
    - gt_ 9y ago
      This article is about unemployment rates, but wage drops in lower paying job sectors is already a huge ethical and societal problem. It can already not be ignored. It is, nonetheless, still being ignored.
- erikrothoff 9y ago
  In my mind large corporations like Facebook are a good example, because not all of their 25,000 are programmers or "high skilled workers". Their will always exist an ecosystem around large groups of people that are diverse enough to satisfy most types of people. I'm not saying that this is the end-all solution to the larger problem described by the article, but I do feel some hope that it will work itself out. However, the advent of self-driving cars will be interesting to follow, considering how many people work in human transportation. But I'm optimistic!
abusoufiyan 9y ago
>also choosing careers based on what they feel is fun/satisfying for themselves. I don't think this is ever going to change in human society. If a job is fun to a large group of people, then it will pay poorly because many people will want to do it. And poor pay decreases the satisfaction one gets from such a job. The only people who win here are those who find a job fun / satisfying that most other people cannot handle. There's a reason professions like doctory, investment banking, and consulting pay so much, they involve lots of sacrifice and/or job unhappiness that you have to pay people a lot to get them to commit to the job.
- elgenie 9y ago
  Lots of people would love to play in the NBA and would find it fun and satisfying. It's just that very few of them are 6'8", absurdly athletic, and skilled at shooting a basketball. However, if something like nanotechnology made it possible for all those people to play basketball at that level, then the entertainment and spectator aspect would fall away and the desirability of that occupation would go away as well.
  - abusoufiyan 9y ago
    Exactly. Lots of people don't want to play in the Eastern European basketball league. They specifically want to play in the NBA. It's not about basketball, it's about the perks. Sidenote: Other than the height, the absurd athleticism and skill at shooting ball are grown over a long period of hard work. Nanotechnology cannot substitute for hard work and years of learning the strategies and techniques of playing the game...
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      > Nanotechnology cannot substitute for hard work and years of learning the strategies and techniques of playing the game... Of course it can. You don't even have to go nano. Give me a team of people from Boston Dynamics for a year, and I guarantee you they'll be able to make me a wearable exoskeleton that is better at throwing the ball on-target than the best NBA player. It's just, like GP said, with such tech allowed, "the entertainment and spectator aspect would fall away". Sport disciplines are designed to ensure scarcity of good athletes.
ghostcluster 9y ago
Those kinds of jobs are only sustainable when the audience is 100-1000x + the size of the pool of creators. It's not a broad panacea.
- zanny 9y ago
  Just look at patreon. It is fairly unreasonable to expect even your fans to spend more than $1 a month on you, so if you want a reasonable income (and I'd consider reasonable to be peak happiness if you want success in life) than you want around 100k USD in yearly earnings. Take out the 40% self employment tax, the 3% Patreon takes, and you need roughly 12,000 people giving you a dollar a month to "succeed" in terms of income happiness as a creator on Patreon. Now, some of your audience are going to be whales that have vastly more money and are willing to treat $100 like $1. But you also have a huge portion of your audience that pays nothing, by nature of the default state of Patreon being a free main product with only supporter bonus content rather than paywalling your main focus (because how are people going to discover your stuff if its paywalled?). I imagine the best conversion ratio is like 20% and that is wildly optimistic. Twitch subscriptions are comparable, where most streamers float around 20% of their average viewership as subscribers. So you need 60,000 fans, at least, to make happiness income creatively. Now, each fan would probably support more than just one creator per month, and there are additional revenue sources including ads, merch, cons, kickstarters, etc. But no matter how you subdivide this economy the ratio of creators to consumers has to be drastically biased towards consumers over creators.
elgenie 9y ago
Facebook/Snap/Gaming/Digital-Entertainment don't employ all that many people. I'd be surprised if the ratio of entertainers / audience is much different than it was for, say, stars of silent movies 100 years ago, even though Charlie Chaplin wasn't doing something that could be termed "needed for society to function".
- builditand 9y ago
  Ah, but he did. See [The Great Dictator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Dictator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Dictator) for example. For us to function we need people like Chaplin to show us (in a way or another) what's going on in the world.
  - mrob 9y ago
    The Great Dictator is one of the few films with obvious value beyond entertainment, because it's a vaccine against Triumph of the Will. Triumph of the Will is a skillfully made propaganda film, and if you have no awareness of how it works then it would be easy to leave with positive feelings about the Nazis, even if only subconsciously. But once you've seen The Great Dictator it becomes a joke. E.g. the low camera angles don't make Hitler look powerful, they just remind you of the extending chair scene. His exaggerated gestures no longer project confidence, and instead make you think of slapstick routines. John Cleese's silly walk had the same effect on the goose-stepping scenes. It's art that makes people more rational, by transforming emotional manipulation tricks into comedy. It's beneficial even if you don't agree with all of the politics of it (e.g. Chaplin's call for open borders).
- rubidium 9y ago
  Oh, that's an interesting question. I've seen a graph of (US) advertising spend vs GDP which seems to hold constant over the last 70 years. But to lump all FB/snap/twitter into entertainment+advertising and get % of the population working for those companies would be interesting.
  - mseebach 9y ago
andyjohnson0 9y ago
> Now humans can start focusing on spending their day building things for the entertainment of other humans, and also choosing careers based on what they feel is fun/satisfying for themselves. How long before we get to a situation where this is a realistic proposition for many people? Most people on HN live in a comfortable bubble. The reality right now is that the vast majority of jobs are not creative, fun, or satisfying for the people that perform them. Shop work, changing car tires, cleaning roads/offices/windows/people, mining, warehouse work, digging holes, erecting scaffolding, checking invoices, data entry, driving trucks, painting houses. Dull and exhausting: that's the reality of work for most people right now.
- mistermann 9y ago
  Or worse. At least those dull and exhausting jobs could formerly afford you a reasonably content middle class lifestyle with a modest home, but that is increasingly out of reach of even some of the most successful in society at least in some countries, if you'd like to live where there are actually jobs. As we continue down this road to a winner takes all society, I'm not so sure this is what I'd call progress, and I'm easily in the top 20% of income.
  - barry-cotter 9y ago
    Both a middle class lifestyle and a modest home are moving targets. People eat out a lot more than in the 70’s, they have larger homes and smaller families, they have safer and more reliable cars, they live longer. As far as being able to live where the jobs are this is a problem caused by NIMBYs. This is not a problem they have in Japan.
    - lotsofpulp 9y ago
      The root cause is fewer desirable jobs. Fewer businesses with a larger share of the market, in fewer and fewer places.
      - barry-cotter 9y ago
indubitable 9y ago
I'd like to see numbers here. There are huge industries that have been built around entertainment and recreation forever: sports, hunting, movies, television, books, music, etc. I expect, as a ratio, we're collectively spending far less on e.g. baseballs and far more on video games. It'd be interesting to see the net real change in society's total non-essential expenditures. I would be quite surprised if it was all that large especially if we do not consider ultra-high end recreation to account for the fact that there are far more upper class and rich individuals now a days, so their recreational spending could make it look like all of society is spending that much more - when that's certainly not your hypothesis. And Facebook complicates the matter even more. They do not make money by "building things for the entertainment of others". They make money by building one of the most effective datamining and human profiling systems in existence, enabling companies to pay money access the product of this by precisely targeting individuals to compel them to either buy things or be influenced by their brand. It doesn't really answer the question of where money is being spent. Those companies are giving Facebook money because you give those companies your money. What is the distribution and gross effect of that spending?
dalbasal 9y ago
There can be a substantial difference between what the company and the employee "do." I walk by a twitter building every day. Probably about 500 people, maybe more. What are they doing in there? They sell ads, manage ad accounts, moderation, data protection audits... stuff that David Graeber wold call BS jobs. Now... I'm not in the same camp as him entirely. I think it's rash to just write off 70% of modern, white collar work as "paperwork" that could just go away.... but I'm not entirely not in his camp too. Either way, that building is full of "marketing and social media" graduates doing stuff that doesn't need to be done for twitter to be twitter. Twitter was twitter before they had all those people. You could call what twitter does creative work. That resonates with me. They invented a communication method with all sorts of cultural impact and value. That's creative. But, extending that to the median employee... I think we might divert here. I think you have your finger on an interesting point, even if I don't know how to articulate it. A generation ago, a lot of the ecoomy could be measured in stuff with value that one could reason about. Cars, tothbrushes, haircuts, podiatrists.... You can count and weigh and value that stuff. Media was always more abscure. The tv viewer mightn't be the customer. The purpose of a paper might be do get a classifieds insert into your hands. Once you throw in social/user-generate services make the picture more messy. Once you go to Google/FB territory, it's all very obscure. Half of what they do doesn't have any direct economic benefit to them, it's more a way of keeping them in a massively powerful position. I'm not sure creative is the right word, but here's somethign going on. Ever increasing (already majority) sections of the economy are producing very ethereal things, with obscure business models...
- xtrapolate 9y ago
  Twitter was twitter before they had all those people. Sure, but it can't scale without them. How exactly is Twitter supposed to pay the bills? People use this platform because, for the most part, the basic premise is entirely free. How else can they fund the infrastructure/R&D costs?
  - dalbasal 9y ago
    scaling...it did. That is it had a ton of users using essentially the same product with a much smaller team, at one point. Paying the bills.., IDK. Presumably they've determined that these people are useful in this regard. Otherwise, why have them? But from a first principles reasoning, it seems possible to sell add without thousands of ad sellers.
djrobstep 9y ago
No, we are moving from jobs that are actually productive, to bullshit jobs. Advertising doesn't produce anything useful in itself, it simply shifts and amplifies demand, and yet, Google, Facebook, and a vast slice of the rest of the economy is dedicated to producing ads. Even companies which are nominally dedicated to producing things of importance (eg pharmaceuticals) are mostly focussed on marketing. Then there's the entire middle management strata of the the economy. Mostly a useless but noisy zero-sum jockeying for a rungs on the socio-economic ladder. The economy is already large enough to produce plenty for everybody, guarantee food, housing and healthcare for all, and with shorter working hours at that. Unfortunately we're trapped in this bizarre economic system that works us to the bone in pointless jobs we hate, and can't even guarantee us the basics.
- paulpauper 9y ago
  This bullshit job argument has never made much sense to me, but I see the argument a lot. If companies care about maximizing productivity and profits, and given America's hyper-competitive economy and super-fickle stock market where the difference between meeting the earnings estimate versus missing it by a penny can make the difference between a stock being up 10% or down 10%, why would a company waste money on jobs that are bullshit. Obviously, they (the company) derive value from these jobs or else such jobs would not exist (or at least not for long).
  - tonyedgecombe 9y ago
    Yet large companies often have hugely bureaucratic and wasteful practices. When I was contracting I would go from one business with an IT department of 100 to another employing 1,000. They were broadly similar organisations, yet there was plenty of variance in their efficiency.
  - eeZah7Ux 9y ago
    Companies are far from all-knowing and perfectly rational agents. They are made of people. Also, growing from a lean company into a too-big-to-fail behemoth (which happens all the time) is very valuable to CEOs & co. It what makes you graduate from billionaire to billionaire with political power.
lmm 9y ago
I wonder if farmers looked at the rise of manufacturing jobs the same way - a move away from jobs that are producing the food that's required for society to function, to jobs that are producing entertaining novelties. Perhaps Facebook/Snap/... will one day be seen as just as vital to the proper functioning of society as manufacturing is today.
ThomPete 9y ago
Problem is that most of the people in the new industries make no money. Whether you look at the app economy or you look at the influencer economy few people make most of the money.
coldtea 9y ago
>It feels like we're moving away from jobs that are purely productive, to jobs that are more creative. Yes. Those + unwanted human surplus (most of us in the future) or some UBI scheme.
canaanical 9y ago
While I believe industrialization has certainly improved in the last 50 years, it feels that there has been a trend towards displacement of the vital work/product generation towards under-powered regions of the world. Potentially only very fortunate humans may now pursue careers in a more ethereal environment that is both profitable and emotionally fulfilling.
FilterSweep 9y ago
> Now humans can start focusing on spending their day building things for the entertainment of other humans, and also choosing careers based on what they feel is fun/satisfying for themselves. In this sphere, there are winners and losers, and the amount of losers is vastly understated and the amount of winners is vastly overblown. Take youtube, for example. Most are not clearing more than a few hundreds per month but there isn't a week where BusinessInsider isn't writing about some youtube celebrity.
- JoeAltmaier 9y ago
  So what? If you have a place to live and food, then satisfaction is next on the list. Is the youtube life not satisfying?
  - FilterSweep 9y ago
    For the vast majority of content creators, one cannot live off youtube wages alone.

crc32 9y ago

Maybe. On the downside; maybe those jobs won't be available to everyone because there is a skills gap or there aren't enough of them. If there are people who are left behind; what do we do about it?

announcerman 9y ago
As long as it isn't profitable to help the people left behind there won't be much done. Hopefully the people left behind will start making it unprofitable for the elites to ignore them. Probably won't happen though due to the vast amount of surveillance we're subjected to along with possible robotic police force in the future.
- crc32 9y ago
  Yes. What is being suggested by the zeitgeist is that we are in a transition period; and that the scale of the problem is going to be so large that it cannot be ignored. That is, if 75% of the population has no job in 2150 you have a huge ethical and societal problem.
  - gt_ 9y ago
    This article is about unemployment rates, but wage drops in lower paying job sectors is already a huge ethical and societal problem. It can already not be ignored. It is, nonetheless, still being ignored.
erikrothoff 9y ago
In my mind large corporations like Facebook are a good example, because not all of their 25,000 are programmers or "high skilled workers". Their will always exist an ecosystem around large groups of people that are diverse enough to satisfy most types of people. I'm not saying that this is the end-all solution to the larger problem described by the article, but I do feel some hope that it will work itself out. However, the advent of self-driving cars will be interesting to follow, considering how many people work in human transportation. But I'm optimistic!

abusoufiyan 9y ago

>also choosing careers based on what they feel is fun/satisfying for themselves. I don't think this is ever going to change in human society. If a job is fun to a large group of people, then it will pay poorly because many people will want to do it. And poor pay decreases the satisfaction one gets from such a job. The only people who win here are those who find a job fun / satisfying that most other people cannot handle. There's a reason professions like doctory, investment banking, and consulting pay so much, they involve lots of sacrifice and/or job unhappiness that you have to pay people a lot to get them to commit to the job.

elgenie 9y ago
Lots of people would love to play in the NBA and would find it fun and satisfying. It's just that very few of them are 6'8", absurdly athletic, and skilled at shooting a basketball. However, if something like nanotechnology made it possible for all those people to play basketball at that level, then the entertainment and spectator aspect would fall away and the desirability of that occupation would go away as well.
- abusoufiyan 9y ago
  Exactly. Lots of people don't want to play in the Eastern European basketball league. They specifically want to play in the NBA. It's not about basketball, it's about the perks. Sidenote: Other than the height, the absurd athleticism and skill at shooting ball are grown over a long period of hard work. Nanotechnology cannot substitute for hard work and years of learning the strategies and techniques of playing the game...
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    > Nanotechnology cannot substitute for hard work and years of learning the strategies and techniques of playing the game... Of course it can. You don't even have to go nano. Give me a team of people from Boston Dynamics for a year, and I guarantee you they'll be able to make me a wearable exoskeleton that is better at throwing the ball on-target than the best NBA player. It's just, like GP said, with such tech allowed, "the entertainment and spectator aspect would fall away". Sport disciplines are designed to ensure scarcity of good athletes.

ghostcluster 9y ago

Those kinds of jobs are only sustainable when the audience is 100-1000x + the size of the pool of creators. It's not a broad panacea.

zanny 9y ago
Just look at patreon. It is fairly unreasonable to expect even your fans to spend more than $1 a month on you, so if you want a reasonable income (and I'd consider reasonable to be peak happiness if you want success in life) than you want around 100k USD in yearly earnings. Take out the 40% self employment tax, the 3% Patreon takes, and you need roughly 12,000 people giving you a dollar a month to "succeed" in terms of income happiness as a creator on Patreon. Now, some of your audience are going to be whales that have vastly more money and are willing to treat $100 like $1. But you also have a huge portion of your audience that pays nothing, by nature of the default state of Patreon being a free main product with only supporter bonus content rather than paywalling your main focus (because how are people going to discover your stuff if its paywalled?). I imagine the best conversion ratio is like 20% and that is wildly optimistic. Twitch subscriptions are comparable, where most streamers float around 20% of their average viewership as subscribers. So you need 60,000 fans, at least, to make happiness income creatively. Now, each fan would probably support more than just one creator per month, and there are additional revenue sources including ads, merch, cons, kickstarters, etc. But no matter how you subdivide this economy the ratio of creators to consumers has to be drastically biased towards consumers over creators.

elgenie 9y ago

Facebook/Snap/Gaming/Digital-Entertainment don't employ all that many people. I'd be surprised if the ratio of entertainers / audience is much different than it was for, say, stars of silent movies 100 years ago, even though Charlie Chaplin wasn't doing something that could be termed "needed for society to function".

builditand 9y ago
Ah, but he did. See [The Great Dictator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Dictator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Dictator) for example. For us to function we need people like Chaplin to show us (in a way or another) what's going on in the world.
- mrob 9y ago
  The Great Dictator is one of the few films with obvious value beyond entertainment, because it's a vaccine against Triumph of the Will. Triumph of the Will is a skillfully made propaganda film, and if you have no awareness of how it works then it would be easy to leave with positive feelings about the Nazis, even if only subconsciously. But once you've seen The Great Dictator it becomes a joke. E.g. the low camera angles don't make Hitler look powerful, they just remind you of the extending chair scene. His exaggerated gestures no longer project confidence, and instead make you think of slapstick routines. John Cleese's silly walk had the same effect on the goose-stepping scenes. It's art that makes people more rational, by transforming emotional manipulation tricks into comedy. It's beneficial even if you don't agree with all of the politics of it (e.g. Chaplin's call for open borders).
rubidium 9y ago
Oh, that's an interesting question. I've seen a graph of (US) advertising spend vs GDP which seems to hold constant over the last 70 years. But to lump all FB/snap/twitter into entertainment+advertising and get % of the population working for those companies would be interesting.
- mseebach 9y ago

andyjohnson0 9y ago

> Now humans can start focusing on spending their day building things for the entertainment of other humans, and also choosing careers based on what they feel is fun/satisfying for themselves. How long before we get to a situation where this is a realistic proposition for many people? Most people on HN live in a comfortable bubble. The reality right now is that the vast majority of jobs are not creative, fun, or satisfying for the people that perform them. Shop work, changing car tires, cleaning roads/offices/windows/people, mining, warehouse work, digging holes, erecting scaffolding, checking invoices, data entry, driving trucks, painting houses. Dull and exhausting: that's the reality of work for most people right now.

mistermann 9y ago
Or worse. At least those dull and exhausting jobs could formerly afford you a reasonably content middle class lifestyle with a modest home, but that is increasingly out of reach of even some of the most successful in society at least in some countries, if you'd like to live where there are actually jobs. As we continue down this road to a winner takes all society, I'm not so sure this is what I'd call progress, and I'm easily in the top 20% of income.
- barry-cotter 9y ago
  Both a middle class lifestyle and a modest home are moving targets. People eat out a lot more than in the 70’s, they have larger homes and smaller families, they have safer and more reliable cars, they live longer. As far as being able to live where the jobs are this is a problem caused by NIMBYs. This is not a problem they have in Japan.
  - lotsofpulp 9y ago
    The root cause is fewer desirable jobs. Fewer businesses with a larger share of the market, in fewer and fewer places.
    - barry-cotter 9y ago

indubitable 9y ago

I'd like to see numbers here. There are huge industries that have been built around entertainment and recreation forever: sports, hunting, movies, television, books, music, etc. I expect, as a ratio, we're collectively spending far less on e.g. baseballs and far more on video games. It'd be interesting to see the net real change in society's total non-essential expenditures. I would be quite surprised if it was all that large especially if we do not consider ultra-high end recreation to account for the fact that there are far more upper class and rich individuals now a days, so their recreational spending could make it look like all of society is spending that much more - when that's certainly not your hypothesis. And Facebook complicates the matter even more. They do not make money by "building things for the entertainment of others". They make money by building one of the most effective datamining and human profiling systems in existence, enabling companies to pay money access the product of this by precisely targeting individuals to compel them to either buy things or be influenced by their brand. It doesn't really answer the question of where money is being spent. Those companies are giving Facebook money because you give those companies your money. What is the distribution and gross effect of that spending?

dalbasal 9y ago

There can be a substantial difference between what the company and the employee "do." I walk by a twitter building every day. Probably about 500 people, maybe more. What are they doing in there? They sell ads, manage ad accounts, moderation, data protection audits... stuff that David Graeber wold call BS jobs. Now... I'm not in the same camp as him entirely. I think it's rash to just write off 70% of modern, white collar work as "paperwork" that could just go away.... but I'm not entirely not in his camp too. Either way, that building is full of "marketing and social media" graduates doing stuff that doesn't need to be done for twitter to be twitter. Twitter was twitter before they had all those people. You could call what twitter does creative work. That resonates with me. They invented a communication method with all sorts of cultural impact and value. That's creative. But, extending that to the median employee... I think we might divert here. I think you have your finger on an interesting point, even if I don't know how to articulate it. A generation ago, a lot of the ecoomy could be measured in stuff with value that one could reason about. Cars, tothbrushes, haircuts, podiatrists.... You can count and weigh and value that stuff. Media was always more abscure. The tv viewer mightn't be the customer. The purpose of a paper might be do get a classifieds insert into your hands. Once you throw in social/user-generate services make the picture more messy. Once you go to Google/FB territory, it's all very obscure. Half of what they do doesn't have any direct economic benefit to them, it's more a way of keeping them in a massively powerful position. I'm not sure creative is the right word, but here's somethign going on. Ever increasing (already majority) sections of the economy are producing very ethereal things, with obscure business models...

xtrapolate 9y ago
Twitter was twitter before they had all those people. Sure, but it can't scale without them. How exactly is Twitter supposed to pay the bills? People use this platform because, for the most part, the basic premise is entirely free. How else can they fund the infrastructure/R&D costs?
- dalbasal 9y ago
  scaling...it did. That is it had a ton of users using essentially the same product with a much smaller team, at one point. Paying the bills.., IDK. Presumably they've determined that these people are useful in this regard. Otherwise, why have them? But from a first principles reasoning, it seems possible to sell add without thousands of ad sellers.

djrobstep 9y ago

No, we are moving from jobs that are actually productive, to bullshit jobs. Advertising doesn't produce anything useful in itself, it simply shifts and amplifies demand, and yet, Google, Facebook, and a vast slice of the rest of the economy is dedicated to producing ads. Even companies which are nominally dedicated to producing things of importance (eg pharmaceuticals) are mostly focussed on marketing. Then there's the entire middle management strata of the the economy. Mostly a useless but noisy zero-sum jockeying for a rungs on the socio-economic ladder. The economy is already large enough to produce plenty for everybody, guarantee food, housing and healthcare for all, and with shorter working hours at that. Unfortunately we're trapped in this bizarre economic system that works us to the bone in pointless jobs we hate, and can't even guarantee us the basics.

paulpauper 9y ago
This bullshit job argument has never made much sense to me, but I see the argument a lot. If companies care about maximizing productivity and profits, and given America's hyper-competitive economy and super-fickle stock market where the difference between meeting the earnings estimate versus missing it by a penny can make the difference between a stock being up 10% or down 10%, why would a company waste money on jobs that are bullshit. Obviously, they (the company) derive value from these jobs or else such jobs would not exist (or at least not for long).
- tonyedgecombe 9y ago
  Yet large companies often have hugely bureaucratic and wasteful practices. When I was contracting I would go from one business with an IT department of 100 to another employing 1,000. They were broadly similar organisations, yet there was plenty of variance in their efficiency.
- eeZah7Ux 9y ago
  Companies are far from all-knowing and perfectly rational agents. They are made of people. Also, growing from a lean company into a too-big-to-fail behemoth (which happens all the time) is very valuable to CEOs & co. It what makes you graduate from billionaire to billionaire with political power.

lmm 9y ago

I wonder if farmers looked at the rise of manufacturing jobs the same way - a move away from jobs that are producing the food that's required for society to function, to jobs that are producing entertaining novelties. Perhaps Facebook/Snap/... will one day be seen as just as vital to the proper functioning of society as manufacturing is today.

ThomPete 9y ago

Problem is that most of the people in the new industries make no money. Whether you look at the app economy or you look at the influencer economy few people make most of the money.

coldtea 9y ago

>It feels like we're moving away from jobs that are purely productive, to jobs that are more creative. Yes. Those + unwanted human surplus (most of us in the future) or some UBI scheme.

canaanical 9y ago

While I believe industrialization has certainly improved in the last 50 years, it feels that there has been a trend towards displacement of the vital work/product generation towards under-powered regions of the world. Potentially only very fortunate humans may now pursue careers in a more ethereal environment that is both profitable and emotionally fulfilling.

FilterSweep 9y ago

> Now humans can start focusing on spending their day building things for the entertainment of other humans, and also choosing careers based on what they feel is fun/satisfying for themselves. In this sphere, there are winners and losers, and the amount of losers is vastly understated and the amount of winners is vastly overblown. Take youtube, for example. Most are not clearing more than a few hundreds per month but there isn't a week where BusinessInsider isn't writing about some youtube celebrity.

JoeAltmaier 9y ago
So what? If you have a place to live and food, then satisfaction is next on the list. Is the youtube life not satisfying?
- FilterSweep 9y ago
  For the vast majority of content creators, one cannot live off youtube wages alone.