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We live in, presumably, a consumer-spending driven economy. The problem I see is that in the efforts of businesses to become more efficient and to outsource, th

by rndmize 14y ago

We live in, presumably, a consumer-spending driven economy. The problem I see is that in the efforts of businesses to become more efficient and to outsource, they're creating a tragedy of the commons effect - if no one is willing to stay in the US and pay US workers highly, US consumers won't have anything to spend. I think this is fairly evident due to the continuing list of articles about jobs that make the front page here - the "skills gap" that's not a skills gap, but a problem with hiring practices; the one a few weeks ago about the manufacturer that wants to pay skilled math and science students $10 an hour and wonders why they go work in service jobs; the service jobs that are now carefully managed to the minute by software so no one is idle on the job and are 90% part-time to extract the best work from their employees at the lowest cost. Startups aren't a fix for this, they make the problems worse - how many Saas startups have a business proposition of making something more efficient (Salesforce, Workday as the biggest and most obvious) which results in a need for less people to do that work? How many people does a place like Facebook employ compared to Google, or Google to Microsoft, or MS to GE or Chevron?

takluyver 14y ago
This might make economists cringe, but here's how I see it: In the past, increasing efficiency was beneficial, because the people no longer needed for one thing could go and do something else, increasing the total amount of things being made and services provided. Most obviously, as agriculture was mechanised, people went to work in the factories (of course, early factories were nasty places to work, but that's another story). Today, we're still increasing efficiency, but - as I see it - we're running out of things we need people to do, so freeing people up increases un- or underemployment. At best, people are employed to do ever more 'luxury' things that can easily be dropped when money runs tight. I think we've reached a point where the sum of human happiness is increased not by churning out ever more stuff, and finding ever more services to provide, but by increasing our leisure time. When I was young, I imagined that robots would one day do most of the work, leaving humans to relax and pursue their hobbies. But economics locks us out of that, because having a lot of leisure time (i.e. unemployment) is something to be avoided. I wish I knew how to fix it. Looked at another way: we can produce the stuff we need without needing all the people to work. But the people who do work resent non-workers enjoying the fruits of their labour, so we almost have to keep people busy for the sake of fairness.

by rndmize 14y ago

takluyver 14y ago

This might make economists cringe, but here's how I see it: In the past, increasing efficiency was beneficial, because the people no longer needed for one thing could go and do something else, increasing the total amount of things being made and services provided. Most obviously, as agriculture was mechanised, people went to work in the factories (of course, early factories were nasty places to work, but that's another story). Today, we're still increasing efficiency, but - as I see it - we're running out of things we need people to do, so freeing people up increases un- or underemployment. At best, people are employed to do ever more 'luxury' things that can easily be dropped when money runs tight. I think we've reached a point where the sum of human happiness is increased not by churning out ever more stuff, and finding ever more services to provide, but by increasing our leisure time. When I was young, I imagined that robots would one day do most of the work, leaving humans to relax and pursue their hobbies. But economics locks us out of that, because having a lot of leisure time (i.e. unemployment) is something to be avoided. I wish I knew how to fix it. Looked at another way: we can produce the stuff we need without needing all the people to work. But the people who do work resent non-workers enjoying the fruits of their labour, so we almost have to keep people busy for the sake of fairness.