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Cowen bluntly predicted what he called “wage polarization.” The increasing ability of computers to perform ordinary tasks will inexorably transform America into
by recuter 13y ago
Cowen bluntly predicted what he called “wage polarization.” The increasing ability of computers to perform ordinary tasks will inexorably transform America into an income oligarchy in which the top 15 percent of people—with skills “that are a complement to the computer”—will enjoy “cheery” labor-market prospects and soaring incomes, while the bottom 85 percent, that is to say, 267 million out of America’s 315 million people, will be lucky to find Walmart-level jobs or scrape together marginal “freelance” livings running $25-a-pop errands for their betters via TaskRabbit (say, picking up and delivering a pair of designer shoes from Nordstrom) or renting out their spare bedrooms (if they have any) to overnight lodgers via Airbnb. That is, if they’ll be working at all. “There are many other historical periods, including medieval times, where inequality is high, upward mobility is fairly low, and the social order is fairly stable, even if we as moderns find some aspects of that order objectionable,” Cowen writes in his new book.
In other words, what is coming is the “new feudalism,” a phrase coined by Chapman University urban studies professor Joel Kotkin, a prolific media presence whose New Geography website is an outlet for the trend’s most vocal critics. “It’s a weird Upstairs, Downstairs world in which there’s the gentry, and the role for everybody else is to be their servants,” Kotkin said in a telephone interview. “The agenda of the gentry is to force the working class to live in apartments for the rest of their lives and be serfs. But there’s a weird cognitive dissonance. Everyone who says people ought to be living in apartments actually lives in gigantic houses or has multiple houses.”
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So? Hypocrisy is hardly a new phenomenon. People really are ought to be living in apartments, even if it is suggested as part of some supposed agenda. I really don't understand all the anxiety that pops up on HN every once in a while with regard to some imaginary utopia that is decades away if it will ever come at all - Inequality is entirely secondary to the Median, the article describes a high quality of life all around with the upper echelons of society a sort of step-function above "everybody else". That's supposed to be horrible?
What about the inequality between the US and the rest of the world? I guess hypocrisy is not exclusive to any one tax bracket either.
- nraynaud 13y agoI guess they are pointing the fact that as soon as West Coast got access to the power through money, they did what the East Coast did: protect themselves from the plebe and create a new nobility with barriers to entry instead of using it for greater motives than simple personal accumulation.
- mattgreenrocks 13y agoAnd this is exactly why SV is not anything revolutionary, despite the insistence of PG and co. There is no Golden Age, just a bunch of old guys accumulating wealth by exploiting youthful naivete by cranking out a steady stream of technological toys designed to hook us, rather than serve us.
- seiji 13y agoI liked this sidenote in the article: "made their founders billionaires (New Economy founders typically retain large blocks of their own stock)" Histoically, founders gave up most of their equity to investors. "A" round? Investors take 50% for $3 million and set aside another 20% for an employee pool. "B" round? The founders end up with 4% of the company. I think pg helped everybody realize "Hey, us founders have the power here. We're not giving up shit. In fact, pay us out at each round too. We need to be millionaires sooner than any possible 5-year-out exit."
- mrobot 13y agoIsn't it different because those toys are part of our new people-as-a-product economy? To me it seems like this and the public-private-partnership blur factor make this different, and the walls are going to get a lot higher than in similar situations in the past.
- FedRegister 13y agoYet you'll still hear many people parrot the line that SV is a "meritocracy".
- nraynaud 13y agoI see a lot of articles about how you need to be connected to find some capital and that the decision makers always rely on sergeants for introductions, so I guess the meritocracy soundbite is slowly coming to a rest. But criticizing SV is still not finding a good way to conduct our life that would make us happy and avoid having a negative impact on the society in the long run. This is a negative feeling.
- JVIDEL 13y agoI think the real news here is stuff like this: According to figures collected by Joel Kotkin, the dotcom crash wiped out 70,000 jobs in the valley in a little over a single year, and since then the tech industry has added only 30,000 new ones, leaving the bay region with a net 40,000 fewer jobs than existed in 2001.
- UweSchmidt 13y agoIf it's true that anyone who could say "HTML" in 2001 was called a "programmer", then that year is not a good baseline for tech job statistics.
- 7Figures2Commas 13y agoIf it's true that anyone who can say "Ruby on Rails" in 2013 is called a "programmer"...
- dpritchett 13y agoRuby is an actual programming language that runs on most platforms, what's the problem? Do you have a specific flavor of Real Programming that you prefer?
- 7Figures2Commas 13y agoRuby is a programming language. Rails is a framework. I guarantee that you can, in 2013, find "Ruby on Rails programmers" who wouldn't know what to do if you took the Rails away.
- woah 13y agoI'm sure you could also find a lot of C programmers who wouldn't know what to do if you took the compiler away. Talentless amateurs.
- 13y ago
- walshemj 13y agoand compared to central London and the UK a 5 mill dollar house isn't that expensive. In my little commuter town in the UK on the same street as my doctors surgery there is a house going for just under 1.6 Million dollars
- cgore 13y agoLondon is always going to be a worst-case scenario. You guys don't just have the journalist-making-a-hyperbolic-statement sort of royalty, you still have the for-real kind.
- walshemj 13y agoBut the sort of houses they are calling sv crowd out for buying in the best location in SV are no where near the same as the equivalent location in the UK.