4 ms·

I keep seeing new articles in this type of tone. Like they know what's wrong but are afraid to say what they want for fear it won't be published. What this ar

I keep seeing new articles in this type of tone. Like they know what's wrong but are afraid to say what they want for fear it won't be published. What this article is describing is capitalism working effectively, maybe too effictively to be sustainable. Capitalsim is all about using technology to produce profits more efficiently. By building a data center in a small town Apple is efficiently using its techology to produce profits. This isn't something to be complaining to Apple for doing. Technology's effictiveness is outstripping captialisms mechanism for job creation. The unemployment problem probably cannot be fixed without drastic socio-economic reform.

AlexMuir 15y ago
I absolutely agree. And it's all well and good talking about startups creating jobs, but really, what YC startups have created any meaningful number of jobs (aside from highly paid developers (Dropbox, Heroku) or sales staff (Airbnb)? I'm not taking away from their success in any way, I just think we need to recognise that there's a fundamental problem on the horizon. I suspect the solution lies in fewer people working and contributing a greater proportion of their income. Obviously that's unpalatable to everybody.
- zerostar07 15y ago
  Do you remember that article from Mark Andreesen that "Software is eating everything"? It's a reality in the West that is often neglected and may lead to major changes in the (industrial-age) model of employment. There are other sectors with similar problems: Green energy, where people assume more jobs will be created although its obvious that it actually requires less human effort.
  - marshallp 15y ago
    it's beyond the west, china for example has a worse problem, with many 20 million factory jobs being automated out over the past decade
- thwarted 15y ago
  I absolutely agree. And it's all well and good talking about startups creating jobs, but really, what YC startups have created any meaningful number of jobs What's a meaningful number of jobs? Creating jobs is only worth doing if it creates 10 jobs? 100 jobs? 1000 jobs? 10,000 jobs? None of these jobs can be "created" overnight, it requires years of building a company to get to the point where you can employ 10,000 people, much less employ an additional 10,000 people. The US civilian labor force is 154.2 million[1]. At 9% unemployment (13,878,000 of the total labor force), 10,000 jobs reduces the number of unemployed people by 7/100ths of a percent, so even that seems like it's not good enough. The point being that every little bit helps, and we're going to have an easier time getting people employed in handfuls than trying to get massive companies (of which there are fewer, over all) employing an additional 10,000 or 100,000 people -- nevermind that an economy that has a large number of smaller employers is going to be stronger and more resilient than a small number of massive employers. A business that employs 4 people is better than that business not existing at all. [1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=employable+united+states http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=employable+united+state...
- ippisl 15y ago
  It's true that new companies create less jobs than they used to. Previously they used to create 7.5 jobs/company, today only 4.5[1]. that means 2.3 million jobs instead of 3 million. [1]http://www.kauffman.org/research-and-policy/starting-smaller-staying-smaller-americas-slow-leak-in-job-creation.aspx http://www.kauffman.org/research-and-policy/starting-smaller...
jessedhillon 15y ago
This. Every time I see articles like this -- pointing out how large full-time admin and operations teams are now replaced with smaller teams and easy-to-manage infrastructure -- I wonder if something similar will happen to software engineering. In fact, I am sure that something like this must eventually happen to engineering. The cost involved in designing and developing new services will be reduced to only that which is essential. I just dont know what form it will take. Will newer, easy-to-use libraries reduce the work of five engineers to one? Will basic application development knowledge become so ubiquitous that engineers are only needed for the harder, more obscure challenges? Will all of engineering be reduced to only the most creative work, with all the logic and plumbing provided automagically by intelligent programming environments? Probably all of the above. What's a dev to do?
- Tycho 15y ago
  Devs are used to learning new technologies regularly. Libraries that reduce the work of 5 people to the work of one are common place. Before RDBMSs, database queries had to be manually programmed on a case-by-case basis, including disk access etc. When one bottleneck has been solved, devs simply move on to other, more awesome tasks. Unfortunately most of the population does not share this constant learning philosophy.
- balloot 15y ago
  Yes, we all yearn for the days when cloud computing data centers were run by thousands and thousands of operations engineers. Sadly, those times are no longer here - mostly because they're a figment of your imagination. But don't let that stop you from assuming for no good reason that the software industry is about to die. People have been making that assumption for 10 years or so now, so you have plenty of good company.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - jessedhillon 15y ago
    http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man I didn't say that a single data center employed thousands of engineers, or that the software industry is dying. But don't let that stop you from having an imaginary argument.
politician 15y ago
In such an economy, unemployment isn't the problem - resource allocation is. With decreasing numbers of jobs, the old "get a job to get money to get food" solution breaks down. An alternative solution could be for the government to provide a base level of necessities to the entire population. For example, it is within our current technology level (the US overproduces food, and various farms lay unused) to provide a 2000 calorie per day ration to our entire population. By replacing minimum wage laws and welfare checks, which simply drive inflation, with explicit grants for necessities (food, shelter, clothing) we can maintain higher levels of unemployment without perverting the capitalism-based incentive structures in other areas of our economy. That is, we want people to be motivated to better themselves by the prospect of those traditional capitalist rewards, and we don't want a solution which simply gives raw money away because a percentage, perhaps a significant percentage, will be misspent on luxuries rather than necessities and would likely reduce motivation to seek gainful employment. TLDR: A two-tier economy based on enabling luxuries for those who work and providing a ration of necessities for all members of the society, scaled by our technology level, will enable us to sustain the higher levels of unemployment driven by technological advances.
- getsat 15y ago
  > An alternative solution could be for the government to provide a base level of necessities to the entire population. I like this idea and the idea of the post-scarcity society in general, but one thing I've never seen explained or examined is how this is actually accomplished. How is the government producing these necessities and distributing them? Could you elaborate further?
  - politician 15y ago
    Today, we have a government that distributes free money to people by spending money taken from other people -- social security moves income from the working class to the elderly, medicare moves income to the impoverished. These systems move money from haves to have nots, but money isn't the best thing to move because it's too indirect, too flexible, too fluid. The owner of money can buy food to feed their children or toys to feed their appetite for entertainment. Money can be used to acquire many of Manfred Max-Neef's fundamental human needs. That's a problem when you have a society built on capitalism where the reward is supposed to be attained by hard work and ingenuity. Welfare, social security checks, tax credits, bailouts, and minimum wage laws all share one thing in common: the creation of a moral hazard by taking money from one group and giving it to another. The moral hazard, of course, is reduced motivation to perform work, be creative, etc., and to instead become dependent on the money from the government. We see this parasitic behavior in established corporations and in multiple generation welfare recipients. We see it when the government allows itself to take advances from pension accounts or other "lock boxes". Ok, but that's not your question, you asked, "How is the government producing these necessities and distributing them?" Well, let's split your question up into three parts: 1. What is the government doing today? 2. How can the government, which produces nothing except laws enforced by violence, acquire these necessities? 3. How can these items be distributed equitably? Today our governments are wasting mind-blowing quantities of money on social programs and bailouts which transfer raw money to new owners and in the process create moral hazards which are assuaged by continuing transfers of money. The government, today, attempts to satisfy the needs of the impoverished and unemployed through programs like Section 8 rent-controlled housing, unemployment insurance, food stamps, and I'm sure something exists for clothing. Now, I suppose that if the Economist sat down and figured out how much money we've seized and reallocated it would be more than enough to buy each citizen a ration of N calories per day per year, for their lifetime. Now, that statement is true for some N (0 is a solution). Similar statements exist for clothing: N issues of outfits of some standard quality per person per year, as well as for shelter: N months of rent at some standardized housing quality. If we can define national minimum standard values for Nfood (e.g. 2000 calories per day), Nclothing (e.g. 3 outfits per year), and Nshelter (e.g. 12 months of 400sqft per person) and allow these values to scale by Real GDP/person so that improvements in the economy lift everyone's living standard and contraction reduce standards, then the government can simply pass laws enabling citizens to claim these perks from authorized vendors. These vendors must be compensated for providing these goods, so let's let them participate in a dutch auction for each geographic statistical area. Competition among vendors drives down prices for the government who then pays winners with money reallocated from existing social and corporate welfare programs. A standardized dutch auction process and participation requirements would need to be implemented and audited to protect against quality shortcuts, graft, and corruption. To recap: (1) the government is already spending all of the money necessary to do this, poorly; (2) the government can pass laws allowing citizens to claim their rations of food, shelter, and clothing from authorized vendors who themselves participate in an audited dutch auction (instead of no-bid contracts and similar corruption). The last part, equitable distribution, that is the hard part. Encouraging the states to pass uniform laws isn't hard -- just attach money as a carrot and use the 14th amendment as a stick. Obtaining the resources isn't hard -- we're already spending them. Equitable distribution is hard because you need to decide "who gets" and "have they been given enough". In my opinion, the only defensible answer to the first decision is everyone gets access to the current rations of food, shelter, and clothing. There are two groups of people in the first decision: those paying into the system and those not paying into the system due to calamity. Clearly, the system should payout to the needy. But deciding who is needy is hard and fraught with potential corruption and complexity. So just simplify and allow everyone a claim. The truly non-needy will simply forgo their claim. Up to this point, the changes necessary are straightforward and workable within our current legislative environment. However, our answer to the second decision will require a significant change in the national mood. Specially, we will need to track how much each person has received to reduce the impact of the inevitable criminal element that shows up whenever price controls are implemented -- and let's be clear, goods sold to the government for free distribution to the people are a form of price control (hence the strict limits on what is given out: only food, clothing, and shelter, only at known grades, only at fixed quantities, and only to authorized people). There are 3 possibilities: a) We trust everyone not to double-spend their claims. Let's all laugh for a moment. b) We implement a national centralized bio-metric database to track claims. It will likely be derided as Mark of the Beast stuff. c) We implement a national distributed crypto-currency for claim spends using wallets distributed by the social security administration on a per-SSN basis. Foodcoin. HN revolts. If our society can solve the last part, the rest sort of falls into place. By providing for the bare necessities freely, we create a system with far fewer moral hazards and without undermining capitalism in the other areas of our economy. Our population can choose to live with the bare necessities, or choose to attain higher rewards via capitalism. We already have the resources, we're just not allocating them appropriately for a society with high levels of unemployment. This is getting pretty long but one last point -- cultures with food safety and more education have lower birth rates. Lower birth rates are desirable as unbounded growth would quickly undermine my proposal, so clearly we would also want to provide minimum claims to education. Given that the future is a computational knowledge economy where continuous learning is as critical as regular access to food, it makes sense to offer continuing education in grants of Neducation, but I'm not sure how to standardize quality. I'm happy to hear your thoughts on these ideas, or suggestions to improve them.

AlexMuir 15y ago

I absolutely agree. And it's all well and good talking about startups creating jobs, but really, what YC startups have created any meaningful number of jobs (aside from highly paid developers (Dropbox, Heroku) or sales staff (Airbnb)? I'm not taking away from their success in any way, I just think we need to recognise that there's a fundamental problem on the horizon. I suspect the solution lies in fewer people working and contributing a greater proportion of their income. Obviously that's unpalatable to everybody.

zerostar07 15y ago
Do you remember that article from Mark Andreesen that "Software is eating everything"? It's a reality in the West that is often neglected and may lead to major changes in the (industrial-age) model of employment. There are other sectors with similar problems: Green energy, where people assume more jobs will be created although its obvious that it actually requires less human effort.
- marshallp 15y ago
  it's beyond the west, china for example has a worse problem, with many 20 million factory jobs being automated out over the past decade
thwarted 15y ago
I absolutely agree. And it's all well and good talking about startups creating jobs, but really, what YC startups have created any meaningful number of jobs What's a meaningful number of jobs? Creating jobs is only worth doing if it creates 10 jobs? 100 jobs? 1000 jobs? 10,000 jobs? None of these jobs can be "created" overnight, it requires years of building a company to get to the point where you can employ 10,000 people, much less employ an additional 10,000 people. The US civilian labor force is 154.2 million[1]. At 9% unemployment (13,878,000 of the total labor force), 10,000 jobs reduces the number of unemployed people by 7/100ths of a percent, so even that seems like it's not good enough. The point being that every little bit helps, and we're going to have an easier time getting people employed in handfuls than trying to get massive companies (of which there are fewer, over all) employing an additional 10,000 or 100,000 people -- nevermind that an economy that has a large number of smaller employers is going to be stronger and more resilient than a small number of massive employers. A business that employs 4 people is better than that business not existing at all. [1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=employable+united+states http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=employable+united+state...
ippisl 15y ago
It's true that new companies create less jobs than they used to. Previously they used to create 7.5 jobs/company, today only 4.5[1]. that means 2.3 million jobs instead of 3 million. [1]http://www.kauffman.org/research-and-policy/starting-smaller-staying-smaller-americas-slow-leak-in-job-creation.aspx http://www.kauffman.org/research-and-policy/starting-smaller...

jessedhillon 15y ago

This. Every time I see articles like this -- pointing out how large full-time admin and operations teams are now replaced with smaller teams and easy-to-manage infrastructure -- I wonder if something similar will happen to software engineering. In fact, I am sure that something like this must eventually happen to engineering. The cost involved in designing and developing new services will be reduced to only that which is essential. I just dont know what form it will take. Will newer, easy-to-use libraries reduce the work of five engineers to one? Will basic application development knowledge become so ubiquitous that engineers are only needed for the harder, more obscure challenges? Will all of engineering be reduced to only the most creative work, with all the logic and plumbing provided automagically by intelligent programming environments? Probably all of the above. What's a dev to do?

Tycho 15y ago
Devs are used to learning new technologies regularly. Libraries that reduce the work of 5 people to the work of one are common place. Before RDBMSs, database queries had to be manually programmed on a case-by-case basis, including disk access etc. When one bottleneck has been solved, devs simply move on to other, more awesome tasks. Unfortunately most of the population does not share this constant learning philosophy.
balloot 15y ago
Yes, we all yearn for the days when cloud computing data centers were run by thousands and thousands of operations engineers. Sadly, those times are no longer here - mostly because they're a figment of your imagination. But don't let that stop you from assuming for no good reason that the software industry is about to die. People have been making that assumption for 10 years or so now, so you have plenty of good company.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- jessedhillon 15y ago
  http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man I didn't say that a single data center employed thousands of engineers, or that the software industry is dying. But don't let that stop you from having an imaginary argument.

politician 15y ago

In such an economy, unemployment isn't the problem - resource allocation is. With decreasing numbers of jobs, the old "get a job to get money to get food" solution breaks down. An alternative solution could be for the government to provide a base level of necessities to the entire population. For example, it is within our current technology level (the US overproduces food, and various farms lay unused) to provide a 2000 calorie per day ration to our entire population. By replacing minimum wage laws and welfare checks, which simply drive inflation, with explicit grants for necessities (food, shelter, clothing) we can maintain higher levels of unemployment without perverting the capitalism-based incentive structures in other areas of our economy. That is, we want people to be motivated to better themselves by the prospect of those traditional capitalist rewards, and we don't want a solution which simply gives raw money away because a percentage, perhaps a significant percentage, will be misspent on luxuries rather than necessities and would likely reduce motivation to seek gainful employment. TLDR: A two-tier economy based on enabling luxuries for those who work and providing a ration of necessities for all members of the society, scaled by our technology level, will enable us to sustain the higher levels of unemployment driven by technological advances.

getsat 15y ago
> An alternative solution could be for the government to provide a base level of necessities to the entire population. I like this idea and the idea of the post-scarcity society in general, but one thing I've never seen explained or examined is how this is actually accomplished. How is the government producing these necessities and distributing them? Could you elaborate further?
- politician 15y ago
  Today, we have a government that distributes free money to people by spending money taken from other people -- social security moves income from the working class to the elderly, medicare moves income to the impoverished. These systems move money from haves to have nots, but money isn't the best thing to move because it's too indirect, too flexible, too fluid. The owner of money can buy food to feed their children or toys to feed their appetite for entertainment. Money can be used to acquire many of Manfred Max-Neef's fundamental human needs. That's a problem when you have a society built on capitalism where the reward is supposed to be attained by hard work and ingenuity. Welfare, social security checks, tax credits, bailouts, and minimum wage laws all share one thing in common: the creation of a moral hazard by taking money from one group and giving it to another. The moral hazard, of course, is reduced motivation to perform work, be creative, etc., and to instead become dependent on the money from the government. We see this parasitic behavior in established corporations and in multiple generation welfare recipients. We see it when the government allows itself to take advances from pension accounts or other "lock boxes". Ok, but that's not your question, you asked, "How is the government producing these necessities and distributing them?" Well, let's split your question up into three parts: 1. What is the government doing today? 2. How can the government, which produces nothing except laws enforced by violence, acquire these necessities? 3. How can these items be distributed equitably? Today our governments are wasting mind-blowing quantities of money on social programs and bailouts which transfer raw money to new owners and in the process create moral hazards which are assuaged by continuing transfers of money. The government, today, attempts to satisfy the needs of the impoverished and unemployed through programs like Section 8 rent-controlled housing, unemployment insurance, food stamps, and I'm sure something exists for clothing. Now, I suppose that if the Economist sat down and figured out how much money we've seized and reallocated it would be more than enough to buy each citizen a ration of N calories per day per year, for their lifetime. Now, that statement is true for some N (0 is a solution). Similar statements exist for clothing: N issues of outfits of some standard quality per person per year, as well as for shelter: N months of rent at some standardized housing quality. If we can define national minimum standard values for Nfood (e.g. 2000 calories per day), Nclothing (e.g. 3 outfits per year), and Nshelter (e.g. 12 months of 400sqft per person) and allow these values to scale by Real GDP/person so that improvements in the economy lift everyone's living standard and contraction reduce standards, then the government can simply pass laws enabling citizens to claim these perks from authorized vendors. These vendors must be compensated for providing these goods, so let's let them participate in a dutch auction for each geographic statistical area. Competition among vendors drives down prices for the government who then pays winners with money reallocated from existing social and corporate welfare programs. A standardized dutch auction process and participation requirements would need to be implemented and audited to protect against quality shortcuts, graft, and corruption. To recap: (1) the government is already spending all of the money necessary to do this, poorly; (2) the government can pass laws allowing citizens to claim their rations of food, shelter, and clothing from authorized vendors who themselves participate in an audited dutch auction (instead of no-bid contracts and similar corruption). The last part, equitable distribution, that is the hard part. Encouraging the states to pass uniform laws isn't hard -- just attach money as a carrot and use the 14th amendment as a stick. Obtaining the resources isn't hard -- we're already spending them. Equitable distribution is hard because you need to decide "who gets" and "have they been given enough". In my opinion, the only defensible answer to the first decision is everyone gets access to the current rations of food, shelter, and clothing. There are two groups of people in the first decision: those paying into the system and those not paying into the system due to calamity. Clearly, the system should payout to the needy. But deciding who is needy is hard and fraught with potential corruption and complexity. So just simplify and allow everyone a claim. The truly non-needy will simply forgo their claim. Up to this point, the changes necessary are straightforward and workable within our current legislative environment. However, our answer to the second decision will require a significant change in the national mood. Specially, we will need to track how much each person has received to reduce the impact of the inevitable criminal element that shows up whenever price controls are implemented -- and let's be clear, goods sold to the government for free distribution to the people are a form of price control (hence the strict limits on what is given out: only food, clothing, and shelter, only at known grades, only at fixed quantities, and only to authorized people). There are 3 possibilities: a) We trust everyone not to double-spend their claims. Let's all laugh for a moment. b) We implement a national centralized bio-metric database to track claims. It will likely be derided as Mark of the Beast stuff. c) We implement a national distributed crypto-currency for claim spends using wallets distributed by the social security administration on a per-SSN basis. Foodcoin. HN revolts. If our society can solve the last part, the rest sort of falls into place. By providing for the bare necessities freely, we create a system with far fewer moral hazards and without undermining capitalism in the other areas of our economy. Our population can choose to live with the bare necessities, or choose to attain higher rewards via capitalism. We already have the resources, we're just not allocating them appropriately for a society with high levels of unemployment. This is getting pretty long but one last point -- cultures with food safety and more education have lower birth rates. Lower birth rates are desirable as unbounded growth would quickly undermine my proposal, so clearly we would also want to provide minimum claims to education. Given that the future is a computational knowledge economy where continuous learning is as critical as regular access to food, it makes sense to offer continuing education in grants of Neducation, but I'm not sure how to standardize quality. I'm happy to hear your thoughts on these ideas, or suggestions to improve them.