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"...As sobering as the Second Economy scenario is I believe the trend is reversible..." Ugh. Here I was thinking that the writer had at least a partial underst
by DanielBMarkham 15y ago
"...As sobering as the Second Economy scenario is I believe the trend is reversible..."
Ugh. Here I was thinking that the writer had at least a partial understanding of reality and then we get to that nonsense.
I'm not going get into this creative destruction, why-are-there-no-more-buggy-whip-manufacturers argument. It's been done to death, and if you don't understand it after hearing it a dozen times, there's not much I can do to help you with it.
But what interests me is the terms of the political discussion. Not politics -- that's mostly picking a team -- but the language that is being used to discuss employment and job creation.
Frankly I don't think politicians and economists have a clue to what they are doing when it comes to the technological and digital revolution. Not only are there less jobs, they are scattered all over the world. It's increasingly impossible to make some kind of political change, say putting in a highway, and have it directly bring in jobs of a certain industry. Jobs just aren't centralized like they used to be. There are a lot of industrial and technology parks across the U.S. that are going to remain mostly empty.
We see SV and the other startup hubs and think that all the action is there, but I remain convinced that those guys are just the tip of the iceberg. For every Instagram there are ten thousand tiny companies with a thousandth of their users. They don't appear on TV, they don't join the chamber of commerce, many of them don't even incorporate. They are invisible.
I don't see how we can have a discussion about jobs and such when all the terms and models we use don't match up to what's really happening. Watching the language of the debate evolve over the next decade or two should be very interesting.