31 ms·

9.2% Unemployment? Blame Microsoft.

• redthrowaway 15y ago
  >And we can communicate with our outsourced help, wherever they are, more quicker and easier than before. This, and quite a few grammatical whoopsies like it, has reminded me of one thing: blogs.forbes is not forbes. It doesn't have any editorial oversight (or at least not much), so you can't ascribe to any story you see on it the kind of gravitas or respect you would give a story in forbes. It's an opinion page, very much like huffpo. While I largely agree with the article, it's important to realize that its placement on blog.forbes is no more credible than on x.blogspot. It may be reliable, or it may not be, but it should in no way be thought of as having undergone the kind of editorial oversight that its domain suggests.
• jvandenbroeck 15y ago
  One of those articles that just waste your time, catchy title but nothing really interesting or new.
  • Locke1689 15y ago
    Nothing that gets posted is ever really new, but this article does point out something very important: manufacturing output in the US is at an all-time high in the US, while manufacturing employment is low. While I've been predicting this for quite a while, the actual realization is quite interesting and the societal consequences are enormous.
• lukesandberg 15y ago
  Good article, though i disagree with his conclusion that natural unemployment is going to fundamentally change. He is arguing that the economy is in a state of change and the losers in this creative destruction are those in low skilled jobs. so that explains the currently high unemployment, but to argue that we are at a new natural level doesn't seem justified. As the population (albeit slowly) retrains to participate in the higher skilled labor market employment will rise. This is somewhat similar to the classic dismal science (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dismal_science http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dismal_science) argument. Even though there is high unemployment now arguing that the economy cannot find a use for these people seems very short sighted.
  • cachemoney 15y ago
    The economy could certainly find use for them, but perhaps not at a price above minimum wage.
  • xiaoma 15y ago
    Modern industries take a lot more training than those of a century ago. At the very least, the time to retrain will be longer than in the past. That alone would lead to higher unemployment. More importantly, there are more people who, for whatever reasons, just aren't capable of becoming good engineers, scientists or business people.
• slimshady 15y ago
  incorrect and stupid article especially the title
• xal 15y ago
  Everyone who thinks this is thought provoking needs to read http://www.thelightsinthetunnel.com/ http://www.thelightsinthetunnel.com/ ( free ) to really understand the magnitude of this problem.
  • mtgentry 15y ago
    I second this, great book. Here's the author's blog: http://econfuture.wordpress.com/ http://econfuture.wordpress.com/
• guildchatter 15y ago
  I skimmed the article and it says in at least two places: "And it’s not just Microsoft who you can blame." "It’s not all Microsoft’s fault."
• nagnatron 15y ago
  I have a policy of not reading the article when it has such a BS linkbait title.
• deleted 15y ago
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• PaulHoule 15y ago
  Technological unemployment is part of the picture, but there isn't a 'magic bullet' to avoid it. We need Scientists? Ask the 1800 surplus Physics PhD's that get produced every year. It's clear that the academic system uses young and smart people, but not that it produces desirable or permanent employment for them. A wise person wouldn't get involved, unless they've got one (or preferably two) parent(s) that are already in the field who can pull some strings for them. As for programmers, I wake up every morning with the mission of putting myself out of work.
  • jfoutz 15y ago
    Scientists are just like Machine learning pixie dust. It's fun to say, but you'd be hard pressed to find a small business that needs an astrophysicist. I don't mean to pick on astrophysicists by the way, pick any random phd, a small business probably doesn't need that.
    • J3L2404 15y ago
      Well as Aaron Hillegass says in one of his books, a degree in astrophysics may not be all that practical, but it helps you overcome challenges where doubt might creep in about having the intellect to take on a difficult problem. 1) I am having trouble solving this problem, I must not be smart enough. 2) Wait, I have a degree in astrophysics, so I am smart, this must be really hard.
    • juiceandjuice 15y ago
      Maybe I'm biased because I did research in Particle Astrophysics and now work as a developer for Particle physics experiments, but the problem with most small businesses is not that they don't need any random PhD, it's that they lack the foresight to understand what a person trained in particle astrophysics can actually bring to the table. In modern day terms, a degree in astrophysics is a degree for the polymath. The valley and wall street are a bit different... people are willing to give you a shot at almost anything in any seemingly unrelated field because they think you'll probably be able to handle it, because you've solved hard problems that are often similar in scope. Predicting the market is pretty similar to reconstructing a collision, folding proteins, or predicting molecular orbitals. Cloud computing isn't that different than grid computing. Statistics are statistics and models are models, and companies are finding out new ways they can benefit from information processing by utilizing the people who pioneered it. I do agree though... the Main Street small businesses, the ones that I think the GOP often fantasizes about, aren't going to usually need someone with a PhD in whatever.
• pat2man 15y ago
  This could have been said about the industrial revolution, invention of agriculture, etc. Each time in our history when a new technology has made our lives more efficient some people have lost their jobs. In their place more jobs have been created that would never have been thought of before. Improvements in efficiency always lead to more wealth not less. As new tech companies start making money on their improvements on society new jobs will be created all over the world. Yes checkout clerks will no longer exist just as many manufacturing jobs have disappeared. In their place we will see more software developers, consultants, entertainers and artists.
  • mcantelon 15y ago
    >Improvements in efficiency always lead to more wealth not less. More wealth, yes, but not necessary wealth that gets distributed (as productivity in the US has increased, real wages have decreased). http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/bp195/ http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/bp195/
    • Locke1689 15y ago
      This is irrelevant because our economy is currently in the middle of the "retooling" phase (c.f. Luddite, Industrial Revolution). The wealth will be fundamentally unevenly distributed until new skilled work takes hold.
    • Symmetry 15y ago
      Real wages may have decreased, but total compensation has been increasing steadily, at least on a per worker basis instead of a per-household one. A lot of that has been increases in the cost of health insurance paid for by employers, but some has been more vacation time, 401K matching, etc.
      • mcantelon 15y ago
        I think that may be true for a minority of the workforce, but not the workforce at large.
• deleted 15y ago
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• barista 15y ago
  Upvote for anything that blames Microsoft! ;)
• ojbyrne 15y ago
  So looking at this article - http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/census/2011-01-06-us-population_N.htm http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/census/2011-01-06-us-pop... - my quick calculation shows that the US population is growing at about 1.3% annually. Which means there's somewhat more than 7 million new Americans since 2008 (back of the envelope produces a number of 8 million). Which, combined with the fact that GDP has barely recovered since 2008, kind of invalidates the article - i.e its reasonable to assume that the number of jobs has not actually decreased, but has stayed static, and that that is most likely due to the depression.
  • thyrsus 15y ago
    This chart shows that there are now 5% fewer jobs than there were at the peak of employment 34 months ago - the lines are scaled relative to prior peak jobs, not relative to population. http://cr4re.com/charts/charts.html#category=Employment&chart=EmployRecessAlignedJune2011.jpg http://cr4re.com/charts/charts.html#category=Employment&...
  • Symmetry 15y ago
    I noticed the same thing (and posted as much) before finding this chart saying that the total quantity of jobs really is way below peak. http://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet?request_action=wh&graph_name=CE_cesbref1 http://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet?request_action=w... It was really sloppy of the article to use those number like that, but his point isn't invalidated.
• deleted 15y ago
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• billybob 15y ago
  "I know you want to be hired full time by me. And I want to be doing my part. But please understand: I’m running a business. I want to make profits. And these tools are letting me make more profits by employing people only when I need them rather than carrying them on my payroll." This is why every time I hear a politician talk about "creating jobs," I grimace. A business will hire someone if and only if they think that person's output will make more money than it will cost to employ them. Period. Government cannot create jobs. It can make the cost of doing business less expensive by lowering taxes, or it can make the profits of a business higher by providing incentives. But for your average small business, those kinds of changes add up to much less than one person's salary, so it makes very little difference. Government can create a good climate for businesses to exist, with laws, infrastructure and education. But those are long-term investments. Short-term, anything the government does to affect the economy is a shell game. You can't sign a law and magically make workers productive.
  • Splines 15y ago
    There's a great podcast about this exact topic by Planet Money: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/04/05/135151990/the-tuesday-podcast-how-do-you-create-a-job http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/04/05/135151990/the-tues...
    • georgieporgie 15y ago
      One of the best Planet Money episodes I've heard. Summary (from memory): the one and only way government can create jobs is to invest in infrastructure. Everything else is hot air.
  • ZachPruckowski 15y ago
    >Government cannot create jobs. It can make the cost of doing business less expensive by lowering taxes, or it can make the profits of a business higher by providing incentives. But for your average small business, those kinds of changes add up to much less than one person's salary, so it makes very little difference. It can also use monetary and fiscal policy to stimulate demand, increasing the amount of work that needs to be done and resulting in more hiring.
• Symmetry 15y ago
  Comparing the unemployment rate (still bad) to the recovering GDP is sort of comparing apples to oranges, since total employment has to keep increasing in order to keep up with a growing population. Its easy to imagine a situation where our employment levels have tracked our GDP perfectly, and our high unemployment is due to a recovery that took too long rather than a shift in the economy. However, the actual data is consistent with his thesis, as shown by this graph he should have used: http://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet?request_action=wh&graph_name=CE_cesbref1 http://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet?request_action=w...
• yason 15y ago
  Jobs are just one way to distribute wealth. Technology has made many jobs unnecessary: it doesn't mean distributing wealth has become unnecessary. We will eventually have to come up with other, possibly less fair, ways to do the distribution; the reason for that won't likely be because it might be considered ethical by some but because it'll cause much more trouble to not redistribute that wealth.
  • perfunctory 15y ago
    > Jobs are just one way to distribute wealth. Technology has made many jobs unnecessary: it doesn't mean distributing wealth has become unnecessary. Good point.
• j_baker 15y ago
  From what I've heard, the consensus among economists is that the high unemployment rate isn't about lack of money or lack of will to hire. It's about lack of consumer spending. Right now, Americans are actually starting to pay down their debts and save money. This is a good thing in the long term, but makes companies hesitant to hire in the short term. I have difficulty believing that hiring is slow due to technology. The fact of the matter is that you don't climb out of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression overnight. We just need to have patience. Some economists have estimated that it will take 10 years before our economy is fully back on track.
  • Jach 15y ago
    You might enjoy reading: http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/robotics-software/economics-of-the-singularity/0 http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/robotics-software/economic...
• michaelperalta 15y ago
  Is this the new natural unemployment rate? No. Is the unemployment rate ever going to return back to 5-6%, highly unlikely. Yes, similar things were said after every revolution like the industrial revolution or the invention of agriculture but what you have to realize is that once we got over those job issues they didn't simply vanish. With more and more efficiency from these revolutions comes more and more difficulties for the common worker who has no particular skill set. The real issue that this latest recession displayed is that people who are running these small businesses and even large corporations alike have learned what running "lean" really means. They have now realized their most bare essentials to make it through these hard economic times and now that the bar has been set it will be incredibly difficult to lift it to the previous level. I had a discussion with a Fixed Income Desk Manager when I visited MorganStanley a few months back about this very issue and we both agreed that companies will never return to the previous level of employment. The job market is fundamentally changing and this idea that everyone has that jobs are around the corner I feel is naive. Could their possibly be an uptick in highly skilled areas of the market? I think so but besides those areas I think unskilled laborers are in for a difficult time. There will always be room in the economy for people that can do hands on jobs because somethings cannot be left up to technology alone i.e. construction or landscaping but beside these things we are moving towards a more skilled society and I think the only way the economy improves is if older unskilled workers eventually leave the job market and make way for younger more technologically savvy employees.
  • xiaoma 15y ago
    > I think the only way the economy improves is if older unskilled workers eventually leave the job market and make way for younger more technologically savvy employees. I'm not sure I follow you here. In general, older employees are more skilled, even in technological areas. It's true that younger people skew towards tech, but you'll find few 20 year-old googlers with the skills of an average 40 year-old googler. As someone with experience hiring people, I'd say that the main advantage in hiring younger people are lower salary expectations, possibly more idealism, and a small chance at them developing into a talent and while still staying loyal to the company.
    • 15y ago
• natmaster 15y ago
  This is why I'm so against the luddite regulations of liberals - they stagnate innovation. Obsession over jobs is a terrible mentality - restructuring is extremely healthy and necessary part of economic growth, and trying to stop it is only going to hurt things. People should be learning skills that are actually useful instead of doing robotic tasks all their lives. Robots will soon be replacing robotic people.
  • jameskilton 15y ago
    Your statement is disjointed and impossible to follow. Both parties are obsessing over jobs, and both parties have different ways to "fix" this problem. If you want to discuss regulations, lets discuss how the lack of regulation led to the housing bubble and the near collapse of our entire economy. If you want to talk about "robotic" jobs, please discuss how this is supposed to change? Do you want the government to persuade people to take more skillful jobs (and if so, doesn't that go completely against the conservative ideals?)? Do you want people to want to be in more skillful positions? How do you deal with the manufacturing workforce that had stable jobs for 30 - 50 years and now have nothing? What is it you are actually trying to say here?
    • natmaster 15y ago
      No straw men please. I don't care about political parties, why is this suddenly a political discussion about what the government should do? I said the government should stop stifling innovation, not stifle it in a different manner. If people don't want a job that's their problem, not mine. I don't see why I should be worrying about people not interested in their own prosperity. And wow, way to make blanket statements that are backed by the same hokus pokus logic that lead to the housing bubble. Maybe instead of listening to the loonies that said our economy was doing great, you should listen to the people that actually were trying to stop the housing bubbled before it happened: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I0QN-FYkpw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I0QN-FYkpw
      • clebio 15y ago
        >I don't care about political parties, why is this suddenly a political discussion... Probably because your first half-sentence of your original comment was itself a political discussion: "This is why I'm so against the luddite regulations of liberals..."
• arghplus 15y ago
  I hate when people use graphs like the one in that post "U.S. Manufacturing: Output vs. Jobs January 1972 to August 2010" and lead reader to the conclusion that the significant drop in jobs will not adversely affect the output. If you try, you can also see that output, despite the recent jump pictured, has on average started to stagnate and likely is on its way down. Now, I'm not a full-on naysayer. Like the author, I also believe that good things will come, but our economy is not out of danger and the answer is not just retraining of the unemployed to become developers, which is one of the dumnest things that I've heard lately. Our world is basically mostly f'd right now. The economy is f'd. Jobs are f'd. Politics and even war and the military are f'd. But- things will eventually get better.
• pak 15y ago
  grellas, you're the man when it comes to assiduous comments on legal topics, but why this article? It's just a bunch of hard-nosed Valley boardroom hot air that namedrops from the NASDAQ-100 and tells middle america to suck it up. The only salient point was that the government has no easy way of producing more jobs, but there's no solution offered and it's buried in a sea of other BS. "Hey poor and struggling unemployed Americans, you need to find new skills?" Seriously, Forbes needed to run a whole article dedicated to this? A much better take would be an examination of why our education system churns out so many college grads with few marketable skills. Or something that balances it with their viewpoint: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/16/growing-up-then-going-home/ http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/16/growing-up-t... This submission is just a pile of inflammatory linkbait that offers nothing new to the people that would agree with it, and enrages those who disagree by using such caustic language.
  • WalterBright 15y ago
    >A much better take would be an examination of why our education system churns out so many college grads with few marketable skills. Queue the recent discussion about rampant cheating in college. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2774254 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2774254
    • derleth 15y ago
      > Queue I'd understand this better if people didn't always pick the longer word when the short one would be correct.
      • john_b 15y ago
        "The most important principle on HN, though, is to make thoughtful comments. Thoughtful in both senses: both civil and substantial." "Empty comments can be ok if they're positive. There's nothing wrong with submitting a comment saying just "Thanks." What we especially discourage are comments that are empty and negative—comments that are mere name-calling." http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
• JeffL 15y ago
  Could we be trending towards a future where 99% of people are unemployed, but the 1% that is employed are so productive that there is plenty for everyone? I guess that's basically the same as saying that robots will do everything.
  • iqster 15y ago
    Sadly, that is not the way captialism works. The 1% of people will have everything and the remaining 99% will starve. I'm paraphrasing one of my favorite quotes: "Capitalism is the best system we have for creating wealth. It is a lousy system for the distribution of wealth." I suspect I will make some flack for this comment. I'm not arguing big govt. Rather, I'm pointing out that in a world where a small number of individuals CAN produce the majority of wealth, we need a better system for redistribution to avoid a dystopian society.
    • knieveltech 15y ago
      "The 1% of people will have everything and the remaining 99% will starve" It's been tried: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution In the US, you try for a wealth distribution anything approaching what you're discussing and what you'll actually end up with is 1% of the population under a constant barrage of sustained small arms fire. Parents aren't going quietly watch their children starve. Incidentally, I agree wholeheartedly that we need a better redistribution system.
      • sanderjd 15y ago
        It will be interesting (and terrifying! don't get me wrong, but also interesting) to see what happens if we get to this point - there is no Bastille for the masses to storm, throwing out the entirety of the democratic government would accomplish very little in terms of wealth redistribution, and the military now has the literal capability, though hopefully not the strength of will or weakness of conscience, to kill every member of the starving horde. Our distribution of wealth may not be as skewed as pre-revolutionary France, but our concentration of might is far higher.
• chriserin 15y ago
  This is an argument that the unemployment problem is structural rather than cyclical. Paul Krugman points out constantly that if the unemployment problem was structural, we'd see wages rising in areas where there is demand, but wages aren't rising for anybody that makes less than 400,000, though for those above they've increased 23% since 2008. The structural unemployment argument is a trope to insist that the government can't do anything to encourage employment, because stupid people just can't do today's jobs. Its politics disguised as economics.
  • sixtofour 15y ago
    If there are many job openings, but little actual hiring, then there is no real demand. If there were real demand, businesses would actually be filling those supposedly open jobs and figuring out how to make use of who they hired. Cherry picking with open job ads does not in itself show demand. If wages are rising for people who make more than 400K, it's because demand for people who fill those jobs is real. That may be because businesses have decided that maxing out on employees who almost literally make money is better business than maxing out on the people who are effectively tools for the 400K+ crowd.
    • lotharbot 15y ago
      > If there are many job openings, but little actual hiring, then there is no real demand. Or there is demand but inadequate supply. I've heard several people on HN talk about their companies having openings, getting 10 times the resumes that they did in 2007, but seeing significantly fewer qualified applicants overall.
  • yummyfajitas 15y ago
    Your post is self invalidating. Paul Krugman points out constantly that if the unemployment problem was structural, we'd see wages rising in areas where there is demand,... A testable prediction of (one version of) structuralist theories [1]. ...for those above [400k] they've increased 23% since 2008. It looks like reality fits the structuralist predictions - wages are rising for some people, and falling for others. [1] Not all structuralist theories predict this, however. Krugman's version of structuralist theories is based on assumptions of interchangeability of labor, no delays in price adjustment (i.e., no sticky wages or sticky prices), and several more. It's strange how Krugman believes in sticky prices/wages when pushing Keynesian theories, but believes them to be false when bashing structuralist theories.
• danfried 15y ago
  Sounds like the dawn of a post-scarcity society to me: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_scarcity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_scarcity
  • Apocryphon 15y ago
    The article sounds like the opposite, really.
• BadassFractal 15y ago
  It's good to be a software engineer.
• knieveltech 15y ago
  "New developments in flooring, painting and construction are resulting in longer use of our homes." I know that this is at best tangential to the OP's point but this poked me in the eye. Can the OP really be this naive about modern construction materials and practices? 150 years ago it wasn't uncommon to build a house out of hardwood planking, with a stone foundation. Post in beam construction using 2ft square timbers was also fairly common. This kind of construction is built to last and it does. By comparison the largest driving factor in material selection on your average home construction project is cost. That's why you get vinyl siding, soft pine 2x4's, and the cheapest interior hardware money can buy. So in this instance innovation is a euphemism for selecting poor materials. Great. How many people really think their stick built McMansion is going to be standing in 150 years? I mean, really?
  • zwieback 15y ago
    Materials are much better now than in the 60s or 70s but not as good as in the more distant past. My house was built in the 40s and looks better than 10 or 15 year old houses in the area. On the other hand, insulation was crap or non-existent then and furnaces were less efficient.
    • damienkatz 15y ago
      Survivorship bias. Poorly built houses from long ago are no longer here, reminding us how poorly they were constructed, only the best examples survive. In 150 years, only the best houses built today will still be standing, and people then will be compare these houses with flimsy mass produced homes and say the same things.
      • knieveltech 15y ago
        Your assumption being poorly built houses from long ago haven't survived due to some flaw in construction. I'm not so convinced. 80 year old barns cobbled together from rough planks with no foundation to speak of aren't exactly rare in this corner of the world (Southeast US), and I'm pretty confident folks paid more attention to the construction of their homes than their barn. In population dense areas old houses have a tendency to get torn down to make way for new construction.
• jarrett 15y ago
  The question of whether automation causes unemployment to rise in the long run is addressed in detail here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_of_automation_to_unemployment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_of_automation_to_u... TL;DNR for the Wikipedia article: People have worried about machines putting humans out of work for centuries. But the unemployment rate has not risen steadily over the same period even as technology has constantly grown. The long term trend (measured since the beginning of the industrial revolution) has been that new jobs are created as old ones are destroyed. But, nobody knows if this trend will continue indefinitely. There may be some threshold at which technology is so advanced, companies no longer come up with profitable ways to use humans. To take an extreme example, imagine if we had robots that were smarter, stronger, and in every way more capable than humans. One can imagine a lot of different outcomes in that case. Widespread, permanent unemployment is one of the less favorable possible outcomes. This doesn't mean the Terminator has to be invented before that technological threshold is reached. Some say we've already reached it, but it's way too early to say with certainty. In short, technology has improved most lives without harming overall employment throughout the last few centuries, but that doesn't mean the same logic will always hold. The Wikipedia article is a really good read with a lot more detail.
  • kalid 15y ago
    I'm probably missing something, but I don't see how driving the marginal cost of human necessities (food, shelter, clothing, health care, education) to zero is anything but a good thing. Is the world worse off because we have innumerable, self-replicating automated "robots" (plants) which, for free, convert carbon dioxide back into oxygen? Should we prefer a universe where humans must do this themselves? Now what if rice harvested itself and walked to your door every morning? Would that be a bad thing? My thinking: if we have robot farmers, delivery drivers, tailors, doctors, etc. we've reached the Star Trek universe where the replicator eliminated all scarcity (maybe not with a molecule-by-molecule copies, but a robot which can build anything we need cheaply). My hidden premise is that people do "work" (labor they don't enjoy) to ensure their survival. There are other issues like status, prestige, satisfaction, etc. but I'm talking about the basic fear of unemployment ("unemployment is bad because you could starve and die"). If the survival cost is 0, then there should be no fear of unemployment. You'd have 100% leisure time for art, study, etc.
• muhfuhkuh 15y ago
  IMO, the problem is much more than just automation and advancement in technology. It's actually far graver, and maybe inexorable at least in the short term. Hate the man or his policies (or both), but you can't deny President Obama's observation that training education is the real problem in the so-called "jobless recovery". America as it currently stands has a total, almost prideful disregard for education (public and higher) and technical training. NPR and WSJ report that there are two million open jobs in the US. That's right, up to 2,000,000 jobs are currently open in places like manufacturing in the US. The problem? No one knows how to do the things that fill those positions. Extra tragedy: There aren't enough schools that train in these "manufacturing 2.0" jobs and there aren't enough people that care to learn those skills. So, the more these jobs languish unfilled, the more productivity slows, the less likely the economy flourishes, and the more the currently unemployed will stay that way unless they remediate or accept jobs beneath their experience/education/skill level. My personal pet theory, however, is that we don't have a jobs problem, we have a Business-with-a-capital-b problem. Entrepreneurship is still seen by many in two extreme ways that I feel actually turn people off to it. First, people see entrepreneurship as some mystical, romantic idea reserved only for the rich, connected, and intellectually elite. You can't be successful in business without being (or knowing) rich, come from the Ivy League, or just dumb luck. None of those are in large supply, thus the trappings of success go to those who either know better (like we on HN?) or actually fall into the aforementioned groups. If not the former, then starting a business is an action plan of last resort ("well, I've been unemployed for awhile now, may as well start that new business I wanted to do while I was wasting away in my cubicle for 10 years polishing slide decks and pushing papers." It's seen almost derisively ("Oh, you're starting a business. Couldn't find a real job, eh?"). Pie-in-the-sky solution? $10 Billion every year for 10 years on prime-rate or lower, long-term, guaranteed SBA loans. Create a federal credit union for this purpose, run by participating states, backed by the NCUA, to manage small-biz eligibility determinations, disbursements and repayment. Eligible business borrowers must have a business plan with 5-year revenue projections as well as application that are analyzed and "scored" using a points system like they do in Canadian immigration applications. Then, open medicare enrollment to small businesses (below 99 or fewer employees) and self-employed persons and their partners/dependents. Base price on current per-capita cost on a sliding-scale to ensure no deficits or taxpayer burden. Then, tax credits for every domestic job created. Full disclosure: I'm a liberal.
• ColinDabritz 15y ago
  Isn't this a variation on the 'broken window' fallacy? It's true that at the moment it means less people employed, and that's certainly a problem. In the long term, though, this means less work that has to be done, which means more available labor for doing interesting new things. It's similar to how the food (farming etc) industry used to employ 50% of the population, and now employs closer to 2%. The answer isn't to try to find ways to re-employ 48% of the population in the food industry. Perhaps it's time to start investing that surplus in the future.
• MatthewPhillips 15y ago
  We're seeing the beginnings of a transition back towards an economy of self-employment. We don't need people to operate the hamster wheels any more. Over the next 100 years more and more people will go into business for themselves, having all of the tools necessary to do services for others cheaply.
• rapind 15y ago
  I have to take issue with one of the statements; "Things are lasting longer and working better." This is absolutely untrue in my personal experience. Maybe he's making the comparison using different dates than I am, but I've definitely experienced shoddier product quality and customer support within the last few year than I ever have before.
• forgotAgain 15y ago
  Could be I'm having a bad day but I found the tone of the article to be extremely condescending.
• sixtofour 15y ago
  In a reply elsewhere here, I said "people do need to suck it up and learn new skills." How many people know how to learn new skills, or are able to recognize quickly that they need to do so? Is that a missing element in our education? You spend 12 years drinking what they're selling, and then suddenly you're expected to know how to re-tool yourself. Shouldn't education be structured in part to teach and reinforce self re-tooling, and even grade on that ability?
  • samlevine 15y ago
    > Is that a missing element in our education? The missing element may be learning itself. If you don't come out of college with an ability to learn new things on your own or with the help of others you may have missed the point. I've spent a significant amount of my adult life teaching people how to use Microsoft Office products (i.e. I've done tech support in some fashion or another for a while now). Some of them have been seasoned office workers, others have been older folks and still others bright young people that know how to pilot a browser but are confused by a 2 paragraph e-mail (with pictures) on how to connect to the corporate network via VPN. Almost no one I've ever supported wants to know how to do something differently. Everyone is mad that things are changing and the thing that they've done for several months, years or decades, no longer works for some inscrutable reason. The time they've spent learning is real and the changes they see seem arbitrary at best and frequently counterproductive. I've supported people that were fine with e-mail, but thought that wikis weren't a good use of people's time. Others can figure out how to google things and look through forums, but most have difficulty sorting noise from useful information. I've supported people with PHDs that are incapable of reading any error messages because they have been trained not to read them by crappy software. We have so many, many tools available to us today and we're not using them in many businesses, even when they've already been purchased. And even more businesses are still using paper and duplicating effort into multiple spreadsheets (and using Excel as a CRM, etc).
    • sixtofour 15y ago
      "The missing element may be learning itself. If you don't come out of college with an ability to learn new things on your own or with the help of others you may have missed the point." Fair point, but I was focused more on K12, particularly if the idea that more people should go to votech and less to college catches on.
• perfunctory 15y ago
  If the premise of the article was true, then high unemployment would be a problem in all developed countries. This is apparently not the case.
• sskates 15y ago
  I feel the downvotes coming, but this article is unbelievably tone deaf. Who's the audience for the article? People who are unemployed and put out of work because of technology that's displaced them? What's their reaction to this supposed to be? "Oh I guess the author uses some valid reasoning to demonstrate why I'm unemployed because I lack skills." Yeah right.
• ldar15 15y ago
  FTA: "GDP is as high as it was in 2008". Without government debt spending, GDP has been flat for 15 years. http://www.johnmauldin.com/images/uploads/charts/050911-01.jpg http://www.johnmauldin.com/images/uploads/charts/050911-01.j... Its like saying that your annual income rose from $100,000 to $150,000 because you count the $50,000 you spend using credit cards. This is absurd. Your income is still $100,000, (oh but now you spend $12,000 a year in interest too). There's more to write about the changes in society, but this GDP fallacy must be corrected.
• eurohacker 15y ago
  one would think that unemployed people would be motivated to study engineering to get a job, but that does not seem to be the case ..
• americandesi333 15y ago
  The article does a great job highlighting the stark reality of today's labor market. I was at the unemployment agency in silicon valley doing some research, and they informed me that even though unemployment rate is around 9-10%, there is this whole category of 'under-employed' and they make up 20% of workforce population in silicon valley. Therefore, there are around 30% workforce that are looking for jobs... One part of it is training, but most urgent is the need to recognize value of 'informal' learning; thats learning outside the university structure. The ever increasing costs of degrees has made it difficult for common Americans to pursue or even justify college education. As a result, these people are not developing skill sets through traditional means. These are the ones that need help. Once we start recognizing continuous learning (certifications, workshops, books, events) as a medium to build a skills portfolio and get jobs, this skills 'gap' will start diminishing. We in the tech world can create tools to help answer these challenges. Help people create their informal learning, let them track progress and share that progress with the rest of the world. Thats what the unemployed need and the employers will value.
• gasull 15y ago
  Unemployment happens because: 1. Producing in China is cheaper, so companies move production and jobs there. 2. China sells to the US while the US sells nothing to China but dollars. 3. This is possible because the US can print as many dollars as it pleases. 4. And that is possible because we left the gold standard in 1971 and unemployment has been growing since then, along with our trade and fiscal deficit. If we had gold standard: 1. The US wouldn't print as many dollars as it pleases. and we wouldn't carry a trade deficit. 2. China wouldn't be able to sell so much to the US without buying something back. 3. Production and jobs would move back to the US because without trade imbalance it wouldn't be possible to export so much from China.
  • ldar15 15y ago
    It gets better. 3. The Chinese use the money we give them to buy gvt bonds. 4. The gvt bonds are spent by the gvt. 5. This spending is added to GDP. 6. GDP appears to have gone up. Without gvt debt, GDP is the same it was in 1998.
  • william42 15y ago
    If we had gold standard: 1. There would be deflation. 2. Deflation would mean that rich investors would hoard dollars instead of spending them, meaning that very little investment would be done. 3. China wouldn't be able to produce as much, meaning that they wouldn't be able to build many factories, etc. 4. China would be a subsistence farming economy. America would be the source of computer manufacturing, but only the rich could buy them.
  • jonknee 15y ago
    > 2. China sells to the US while the US sells nothing to China but dollars. The US sells plenty to China. Besides the odd cases like Chinese-made Apple products that are sold for a premium in China (after being shipped back and forth to the US), there are tons of things like cars, planes, food and medical equipment that add up to over $90b annually. They're one of our largest trading partners.
• ldar15 15y ago
  Imagine a future society where food and shelter are essentially free. A single person can farm hectares of land and produce food for thousands. Food is distributed automatically. Shelter is built once and lasts for hundreds of years. Humans spend very little doing things they dont want to. I have thought a lot about this. My first question was, how do we get there from here? With 9 billion people. With the poorest and least educated pumping out babies as per genetic programming. Then I had the realisation: We are already there. The problem is for those 8.9999 billion on the outside of it. I've been looking at the poor immigrants living a few miles east, and their eight kids, and thinking that they are the problem. In fact, my two kids are just as much a part of the problem. If all of us making less than $5,000,000 p.a. would stop reproducing, we'd have our utopia in a generation.
• thisuser 15y ago
  Capital Vol. 1 has a pretty good explanation for this phenomenon
• goldmab 15y ago
  Seriously? Everyone here agrees that unemployment is so high because of technology? Nobody remembers that the financial system nearly collapsed three years ago?
• Hyena 15y ago
  This article seems pretty off-base. It's true that established businesses more rarely need to hire people because technology has eliminated a lot of clerical jobs, but the flip side is that there are lots of smaller companies now as well which only exist because they don't need to hire three secretaries and a file clerk. More importantly, though, the major problem in unemployment is that only 35% or so of the population have a college education. For them, unemployment is closer to 3% right now. Most of that 9.2% is out of work because demand is weak. People's skills didn't suddenly become obsolete at the stroke of midnight sometime in 2008. They were all formerly employed doing the exact moderately skilled work they'll be doing again when-and-if demand recovers the trend. They'll be doing it for precisely the same reason that an astrophysics Ph.D. is not in itself all the useful: most jobs are nebulous, ill-defined and require people to obtain new skills as they work. That is, the rest of the economy runs like the picture of the Valley HN likes to paint but with different skill and problem sets (and pay scales). That means an economy with lots of specialized workers, sure, but it also means lots of "office hackers" who just find ways to get things done as they come up. They'll be employed again, to do ill-defined jobs once demand recovers enough to start needing people who can just make things happen.
• bitwize 15y ago
  I hate those self-checkout things, but for a different reason than the lady in the article. The bottom line is we haven't gotten the tech right yet. The machines measure several different variables in order to keep shoppers honest: the speed of the scanning and bagging steps, the weight of the bagged item (compared against a database of acceptable weights), etc. The problem is that false positives are all too common, and it's impossible to back out of a false-positive scenario without help from an attendant. I find the results deeply unsettling, like a science fiction nightmare scenario come true in miniature, and these machines have become like miniature versions of GLaDOS from Portal: hostile, paranoid, seeking to catch you out and make you feel bad with their irrefutably friendly female computer voices. It's telling that when I committed the unforgivable offense of putting something in with a different measured weight than the database said the scanned item should have, the attendant came over and said "Sorry about that. She gets a little sassy sometimes." That's my sign that the future we've dreamed of and feared is here. We're putting computers in charge of formerly human-mediated decisions, but people tend to forget they're not humans so they frequently get it wrong and you can't argue with them like a human. I would love to see business processes streamlined by machine. But keep humans on the job until the machines stop sucking, please.
• guelo 15y ago
  The current unemployment is caused by a lack of demand. It is ridiculous to think that a new unsolvable structural issue with the workforce showed up all of a sudden in the last 3 years. Businesses have money, there is plenty of capital, taxes are low, interest rates are low, etc. This is not a supply side issue and it is not a "structural" unemployment issue. If there was demand there would be full employment again.
  • wladimir 15y ago
    Well maybe the 2008 recession pushed companies to automate the jobs to cut cost, and made that people that were barely holding on to their jobs now are jobless. The underlying structural issue didn't show up all of a sudden - it was there all along - but the recession was the final straw, so to say. Social inertia and all... they simply got a push to do what they were already going to do.
• pmr_ 15y ago
  Isn't the main point here that we can sustain growth without actually 'working'? Is that due our definition of 'work' being flawed in that is not actually tied to the real value of an economy or because we are approaching post scarcity? If the first was true millions would slave away every day without producing anything of value at all and what we see now is just a society telling everybody that you simply 'ought to have a job'. In the second case we should worry about how to make such a society actually work (distribute its wealth better).
• bugsy 15y ago
  This is the second coordinated propaganda article this week claiming that the economic collapse is to be blamed on software engineers and inventors. Don't be fooled. The lack of decent paying manufacturing jobs in the US is because of the lack of tariffs regarding imports from countries with despotic labor conditions and no enforced environmental laws. Microsoft does not make the stuff that WalMart sells which is imported from China. But that is nothing compared to the money the government has thrown at speculators calling themselves bankers who have committed the fraud of the millenium, and then bailed out for their losses to the tune of twelve trillion dollars. This is another massive hit to the economy. Resources squandered on non-productive sociopaths and parasites.
• stretchwithme 15y ago
  If technology is the cause of unemployment, obviously the solution is get rid of all technology. In fact, all unemployed people need to do is go to where there is no technology. I'm sure they will find plenty of work to do. The fact is that technology creates wealth. Cheap goods and services delivered by technology raise quality of life even for the poorest way beyond even the top dog in a technology-free society. The availability of technology make it possible for work to produce a lot. And the availability of capital makes it possible for workers to earn high salaries. Workers can borrow money and buy the same technology and compete with their former employers. So you have to pay them much more than you would if there were no technology. Technology gives everybody more options. Today, anybody can find enough money lying around to match the average standard living people enjoyed 200 years ago. All you need to do is collect bottles. Unemployment is a problem in the labor market. In markets, prices go up and down so supply and demand equalize. There are many things in the labor market preventing this. The costs of hiring and later firing an employee are too high. The labor market for low wage workers won't function properly until these costs are addressed. But many people think the solution is to make employers pay even more. Too many people don't realize how markets work.
• misterbee 15y ago
  Forbes is not hacker news.
• jpr 15y ago
  > We know this is true in our own lives. Things are lasting longer and working better. Is this guy living in some parallel universe where planned obsolescence of overly complicated and fragile products isn't the norm?
• denysonique 15y ago
  Technology and startups which make people redundant is very good, as this way new resources can be easier produced and jobless people are forced for example to start their own businesses/startups and solve other problems, making the world an easier place to live in. Evolution
• loup-vaillant 15y ago
  I feel obliged to quote Robert F. Kennedy here (a few weeks before he was shot): "[…] Our gross national product […] counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. "Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. […]" In short, the GNP doesn't measure what we would really like to optimize, but we optimize it anyway, because it is easier to measure. Just like we would search for our keys under the lamppost, instead of near the car where we lost them. Unemployment rate is similar. We don't want everybody to work full time. Most jobs are boring and tiring anyway. No, the goal should to reduce mandatory work. Blame Microsoft? Actually we should thank them. The problem is everyone needs a job, or else they grow broke and eventually homeless. Sure, we could try to give a job to everyone, but this is a suboptimal short-term solution. A better way would be to further reduce boring work (technology can do that), and lower the need for jobs at the same time (I don't know how to do it). I think most HNers understand this: you're most free when you don't need to waste your time "making" money. So let's maximize free time instead of employment.
• kds 15y ago
  "No humans. Are you starting to see the picture? I know you want to be hired full time by me. And I want to be doing my part. But please understand: I’m running a business. I want to make profits. And these tools are letting me make more profits by employing people only when I need them rather than carrying them on my payroll." The Systemic Risk (grossly oversimplified): ------------------------------------------------------- A. -> all businesses in all sectors strive to maximize profits while... B. -> ...employing less and less people nationwide with shrinking incomes (part-time jobs, smaller paychecks, etc). A. + B. => Economical collapse in a longer term: you can't have profits (esp. growing profits) out of population being slowly reduced to poverty by increasing pressing trend of partial or full unemployment. P.S. No way I buy this article and its arguments from a guy who runs 10-person consulting firm and just writes occasionally. Most consultants (in any disguise) I've met were charlatans - the proverbial borrow-your-watch-to-tell-you-the-time - who were after a fat check for dubious services from a far bigger company with real production, capital, management, and workforce. Sorry, but Joseph Stiglitz is far more knowledgeable on the matter. And, by the way, just saying "we use this, we use that" and listing some on-line applications and platforms is not convincing in itself. P.P.S. "I know you want to be hired full time by me.." Well, this is already delusional.
• vegai 15y ago
  Most of the things he listed as "good technologies" are actually horrible. Has anyone been to a webex training that was even remotely useful? Salesforce? Process management software?
• joshwa 15y ago
  Am I the only one who read that as "Blame Minecraft" ?