20 ms·

Digital revolution has yet to fulfil its promise of productivity and better jobs

100 points by e15ctr0n 12y ago

tn13 12y ago
Let me count what is wrong with this article in brief. 1. The title "Technology is not working" is true in general for "X is not working" if your are going cherry pick the only group for which it is not working. By that sort of logic nothing really works. 2. The term productivity is not at all defined in the whole article. What we should care about is the productivity of the whole society and not some isolated group. 3. Wage growth has nothing to do with productivity in general. For example wage rates going down could also mean more is being achieved with fewer humans of the same skill which basically is productivity improvement.
jostmey 12y ago
Yes, let's blame the bad economy on technology. I mean, it couldn't have been Wall-street's fault or Washington's fault.
- rayiner 12y ago
  Wall Street was Wall Street and Washington was Washington in the 1990s and the 1950s when there were plenty of jobs. It's hard to blame the constant thing for problems that are different between then and now.
  - marcosdumay 12y ago
    No, they were not. Society was different, laws were different, both Wall Street and Washington did eat a much smaller share of the US GDP. You can't even extent your observation to the rest of the world, because almost the entire world passed through the same transformation at about the same time.
    - rayiner 12y ago
      Not really. 1950-1960 was thoroughly the modern world: http://peakwatch.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83452403c69e2017d40f40bd2970c-800wi http://peakwatch.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83452403c69e2017d40f40b.... Federal sending was 16-18% of GDP from 1952-1967. From 1995 to 2008 it was 18-22%. So a little smaller, but not "much" smaller. It spiked above that in 2008 because of the recession, but you can hardly blame federal spending that happened after the recession for having caused it.
      - me2i81 12y ago
        But the financial industry as a percentage of GDP is much higher now than in the 1950-1960 era.
mindslight 12y ago
Wat? The premise has always been fewer jobs. What our entrenched societal institutions end up doing with this change is a different matter.
jbob2000 12y ago
It's because the baby boomers don't know how to use technology, and they're still holding positions they should have retired from 5 years ago. This has many widespread effects, one of which is the 'if it ain't broke, don't fix'. People are still using Windows XP in their day-to-day jobs for christ-sake. The digital revolution hasn't happened because it's being held back by dinosaurs.
- sudowhodoido 12y ago
  This. And I'm always having to clean up dinosaur shit! (rotting corpses of processes and management hierarchies)
- lucio 12y ago
  And the productivity difference between Windows XP and Windows 8 is...? 0.01%?
  - ivanca 12y ago
    I bet is more than 10%; Windows XP comes with a lot of bad baggage.. such as IE7. And anyway, the OS was an example, it just goes downhill from there.
    - agumonkey 12y ago
      Cut that 10% in half because known baggage will trump unknown valuable capabilities.
      - ivanca 12y ago
        The problem is that we are talking about the kind of people that doesn't even know half the valuable capabilities of Windows XP.
        agumonkey 12y ago
        True, but that won't change the fact that anything better but different from that old XP will throw most users so off they won't even care.
joemaller1 12y ago
Isn't it really productivity OR jobs? A smaller number of productive workers can accomplish the same finite amount of "work" as a greater number of less-productive workers. Welcome to the Industrial Revolution.
- jobu 12y ago
  The HN title is "The digital revolution has yet to fulfil its promise of productivity and jobs", but the economist title seems more realistic: "The digital revolution has yet to fulfil its promise of higher productivity and better jobs". The problem seems to be that we haven't figured out what to do with people that are no longer relevant once their jobs are automated (e.g. factory workers). That sort of thing is only going to accelerate - take a look at this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU (Humans Need Not Apply)
  - privong 12y ago
    I guess that is a case of the 80 character HN limit making it a little difficult to write a useful but accurate title.
    - aidenn0 12y ago
      I'd get rid of "its" and "and" before getting rid of better
      - dang 12y ago
        Good idea. Thanks. Edit: come to think of it, we can just get rid of "the".
- brent_noorda 12y ago
  We need more technology, not less; specifically: more robots. Robots designed to relentlessly shop for items online, and to sleeplessly hail ride-share cars. With enough such robots, all us people will find full time employment shipping products to those robots from our Amazon warehouses, and driving those robots around in our Uber cars.
AndrewKemendo 12y ago
The article doesn't really examine productivity, it is examining wages. To wit: industrial automation has grown 6% YOY since 2003[1]. Manufacturing is up worldwide and robotic integration is exploding, not to mention software automation. The reality is that these increases are not labor productivity, but capital productivity. You also won't see these productivity numbers easily on a balance sheet because they currently take longer to find return on value when doing replacement work than scaling human labor. This is largely because it takes time to transition labor force into a new role within a company or out of the company altogether. At the end of the day though, from a labor productivity perspective, there is no raison detre to pay workers more for doing less unless they are providing more value per time period. While history has shown show that technology does not eliminate jobs, merely creates new ones, the pace at which this is occurring is increasing [2] and is arguably faster than workers can adapt. This is also not to even mention where finance is putting investments, being far from what I would consider proportional with respect to consumer goods and industrial technology base. In the end, there is every reason to believe that as capital takes more share of the work, there will be less work and thus less pay for labor. That is unless the market for labor, in places which are not yet ready for automation, grows in such a way that it can absorb transitioning workers and new entrants. I don't really see that happening without some major changes in the ethos of how we allocate "value" to labor and define "work." [1]http://www.thefinancialist.com/automation-a-trend-thats-sticking/ http://www.thefinancialist.com/automation-a-trend-thats-stic... [2] http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/515926/how-technology-is-destroying-jobs/ http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/515926/how-tec...
- sailfast 12y ago
  Very well said, and the last sentence is key for the future of society in my opinion. Given your statement regarding wages and productivity - typically the two are used interchangeably in economic conversations / calculations. I wonder if we will start to see those split more to account for the contributions of technology / capital to "productivity". Direct wages would be divided by a combination of societal value + economic value to calculate actual productivity. Perhaps somebody should create the indicator and take home a Nobel or something hehe.
- 12y ago
bluedino 12y ago
It has. People just didn't realize the efficiency of online retailers would crush so many middlemen and individual brick and mortar stores (mom and pop shops and mail-order houses), as well as entire existing companies (Best Buy, etc)
- Altay- 12y ago
  E-commerce makes up ~6.40% of US retail sales. Its certainly shaken up the landscape, but 'crush' is overstating the case...
  - cpwright 12y ago
    Its going to entirely depend on the segment, Wal-Mart gets 55% of revenue from groceries apparently (I took some time to look at what fraction of groceries would be of overall retail sales, but couldn't find it). So I think a reasonable assumption is that a large chunk of retail sales are groceries. Another large chunk is going to be automobiles, which in some metrics get excluded; which are another large part of retail sales. If you keep chopping away big parts that aren't conducive to e-commerce; the 6.40% is going to be a pretty big percentage. Small specialty stores are probably hit especially hard, to the point of being crushed; going out of business and making the e-commerce players a larger percentage of the market and thus more efficient, driving even more e-commerce in a positive feedback loop.
    - Altay- 12y ago
      If you want to see just how irrelevant E-Commerce is, just look at your neighborhood Apple Store. Their products are the sort that could easily be purchased online -- commodity technology products aimed at the supposedly tech savvy. The only visible effect of e-commerce has been the thinning of margins. The ability to check prices online leveled the playing field between retailers and customers. This has brought us closer to a real market -- one where perfect information is available to all parties.
      - bjelkeman-again 12y ago
wyager 12y ago
You have to be blind not to see the tremendous productivity and lifestyle improve improvements wrought by technology. --sent from my handheld multi-gigaflop communication device/sensorium/access point to the sum of all human knowledge, which cost less than what most people in my country of residence make in a week and was not available to even the richest billionaires ten years ago.
- bjelkeman-again 12y ago
  My wife, who is a graphic designer and has moved to latest tech all the way from photo-typesetters, now does the work of: typesetter, typist (people used to re-type the copy), pasteup artist, courier, several people at the printer (making plates, printing, packing, labelling, sending), postman and post sorting. They distribute PDF files mostly, via email marketing and a web site. Stock photography workers that would send slides, and I am probably missing some roles in there. This was indeed a productivity improvement, and a lifestyle improvement for her. But it is not clear that it was for all the others involved previously. It is correct that the expectations are higher than they used to be for the same amount of money paid (colour print, quality of design etc.), but I am not sure this makes up for the loss of jobs for those that aren't involved anymore. I know some of these roles have moved on to do other things, but as far as I can see it seems like we have what they call a "jobb-less recovery" where technology provides efficiency and productivity improvements for the few, but leaves a lot of people behind. Where I live, Sweden, people are well educated, the economy is doing well, and we have a substantial youth unemployment. I know it is a fairly complex problem as I have a hard time finding skilled developers for example, ie there are jobs to be had, but the courier and the guy working at the printer previously can probably not retrain to those jobs easily.
  - HarryHirsch 12y ago
    This was indeed a productivity improvement, and a lifestyle improvement for her. If that's the state of affairs, good for her. But talk to my previous boss, who recently elebrated his 80th birthday. He knows the times when he would write a manuscript, hand it to his secretary, who would type a fair copy, and then it would go off to the publisher, where it would go to the typesetter (a union man), and then the plates would go to the printer (printing press operated by a union man, too). A couple of years back he was invited to write a review, and he was absolutely livid for several days. The publisher had requested camera-ready copy; they gave him formatting instructions, he had to deal with the minutiae, and what he handed in did not conform to specifications, so he had to do more formatting. At the end of the day, all the labour-saving devices did not save him time, although they certainly made Springer/Elsevier/Pergamon/whatnot plenty extra bucks. Some progress.
godisdad 12y ago
See also: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/business/a-capitalists-dilemma-whoever-becomes-president.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/business/a-capitalists-dil... In particular the part about "efficiency innovations" vs "empowering innovations"
flipcoder 12y ago
The entire thing is bottlenecked. Automate the education system.
- chippy 12y ago
  The article basically mentions this. "That may be the wrong place to look for improvements in productivity. The service sector might be more promising. In higher education, for example, the development of online courses could yield a productivity bonanza, allowing one professor to do the work previously done by legions of lecturers. Once an online course has been developed, it can be offered to unlimited numbers of extra students at little extra cost."
Amanojack 12y ago
The goal of technology is to eliminate labor, not to create the need for more of it. If everyone is fishing with their bare hands and catching just enough to feed themselves (edit: say one fish), then when nets are invented and people can catch 100 fish a day, 99% of the fishing industry jobs disappear. That's a wonderful thing. That means 99% of the population can devote themselves to less urgent priorities, like building shelters, making clothes, etc. Sure, those crackerjack fish catchers who could catch 2 or 3 fish a day have lost their jobs, and might become less affluent than they were...but the few losers in every industry when technology changes the employment structure are outweighed by the vast majority who benefit greatly. And lest this seem unfair, consider that if everyone's current job were obsolete, everyone would be astoundingly better off despite losing the comparative advantage they had built in their career. The same thing has been happening since the first inventions. It's been one long history of job loss and rising standard of living, and no short term variance should obscure this fact. The more jobs made obsolete, the better. People will simply shift to less important work, and increasingly people will simply work fewer hours, as technology makes the economy so productive that prices fall to such a degree that people can live on an hour of labor a week.
- bostik 12y ago
  > technology makes the economy so productive that prices fall to such a degree that people can live on an hour of labor a week. I would say that prediction can hold true only in a world with infinite resources, infinite space for expansion (to make population growth a negligible issue), and effectively free energy. Everywhere else population, food and energy production will compete with one another one way or the other - and there will always be a lower bound in energy needs for transporting goods from where they are economically produced, to the points of consumption or use. Now if we could cover most of Sahara with efficient solar panels and transport the energy over superconducting wires anywhere in the world...
- nickthemagicman 12y ago
  I liked your post. The issue is that with modern technology,tech is not just replacing ONE job like fish catching. Tech is replacing ALL jobs..... fish catching, clothes making, accounting, medicine, programming, etc. Sufficiently advanced tech can replace just about ANY job. And do it better than a person can. So the issue is where does everyone go? And I don't think 7 billion people can all be inventors.
Htsthbjig 12y ago
The article is full of inaccuracies. E.g They put a graph of Spain and salaries growing more than 10% in the real state bubble period. What they don't add is the cost of living going up as well, specially renting a house or buying it, that went up 400% in lots of places. Now those salaries have gone down to their previous level(the graph does not include the last two years), but house prices had been sustained as much as they could with interventions like creating "bad banks" so free market could not do his job. Real state prices had gone down probably 30%, far from pre bubble plus real inflation levels. It does not matter if your salary goes up if inflation goes up higher. Productivity has increased dramatically over time, but taxes, debt and overspending by the government has grown more. About the top earners, this is what happens when you give free money to people in Wall Street. Stock goes up, and the percentage of wealth they have is enormous. But this is "paper money", and will last until stock goes down, and it will go down when interest rates go up, and this will happen soon, in one or two years.
mpg33 12y ago
This may sound oversimplified but I think people will have to become more creative and create their own jobs in the future (ie self employed entrepreneurs). Simply hoping to gain income from a job via the traditional route of applying to companies is becoming more difficult. I think the large growth in "startup culture" over the past 5 years is proof of this.
- nickthemagicman 12y ago
  90% of startups fail. These are well funded startups. There has to be an actual need for a product in the market and need is not easy to predict. Even the successful startups are succesful because of a little luck and being in the right place at the right time. Luck is not the best financial planning strategy for feeding your children.
gregpilling 12y ago
Consider welding. It is a blue collar job that can pay pretty well, if you are fast on piecework or have in demand skills like tig welding titanium. I employ two guys welding manually, and I also have a 7 axis Panasonic PA 102S welding cell. I have one high volume product that we sell, that I calculated the labor cost per part to be about 6 cents if we ran the robot at normal speed for 40 hours per week. When that part was manually welded the labor cost per part was about 50 cents per part. Incidentally, the guys were happy when that part went automated, since doing a high volume part is boring, mind numbing work. (1) In the case of this little part, because the labor cost went down, and as a factory owner I know the part is more precise and can be made in an easily calculable window (it yields 8 parts per minute now), then I was able to cut the retail price by 50% and sales tripled. We can now bid on jobs that would have overwhelmed our capacity before. So who won? I made more money, the workers job got better because some drudgery was removed, the workers income went up because we have a profit sharing program, the consumer pays less, and because the price was lower more consumers get to enjoy the product. I am no economist, and I have no well researched and linked rebuttal to the article. In my little microcosm of the world everybody wanted the automation. Me, the guys, the customer. Everybody has won. Nobody involved would prefer to go back to the old way. 1. personally I find it annoying when academics talk about labor vs automation. Some jobs suck to do (dull, dirty, dangerous), and often the worker is the happiest when it no longer has to be done by a human. The worker is usually pretty happy to have extra time to do that other thing they have been wanting to do for long time. Who on this forum misses setting up a blog the way you had to before Fantastico came along?
- waterlesscloud 12y ago
  >the workers income went up because we have a profit sharing program So in this case, labor won because they also have a stake in the capital. Unfortunately, that's the exception rather than the rule.
  - spacemanmatt 12y ago
    Last I checked, the 1%ers captured decades of industrial efficiency gains, and sent us workers a bill when they lost it in 2008.
oscargrouch 12y ago
I dont know, but i think software kind of replace, at least in part, people's labor; Technology and productivity is against labor and wages; unless you are part of the very few people needed to create the machines or softwares; probably with the advance of AI, even taht can be replaced.. I wonder why people tought that keeping replacing people with robots, and creating profit fetichism on corporations could lead to something else? This is the old Marx profecy going on; That only creative and talented type of labor could survive; anything out of this will probably be replaced by automatization Technological society didnt come to save the majority of people's lifestyle, its comming to kill the rest of it; Of course some new value, and blue oceans will come to the surface; but then the automatization and profit circle will rule again, until little to none people are needed But than, who really want to pick up the phone, deliver the sandwiches, or do repetitive and low demanding jobs? This is good, only that humanity need to adapt, have more knowledge and go for the creative types of labor Problem is 7 billion people maybe would be too much for this , so i dont think is sustainable to everyone on earth to live like that.. and people with low levels of inteligence will have a hard time living in a society like this
Animats 12y ago
Productivity, yes. Better jobs, no. Machines should think. People should work. Watch this Kiva Robotics training session: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWNuaPE4DTc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWNuaPE4DTc That's how orders are picked at Amazon now. (Also Staples, Pets.com, and many others.) All the thinking and planning is done by computers. Humans just pick up items where the light pointer tells them to reach, and put them where another light tells them. There's no possibility of promotion. They don't program the robots. They don't fix the robots. The company that makes the robots employs only a few hundred people. The inventor of this system was involved with Webvan fifteen years ago. He saw that customers wanted instant delivery, but Webvan cost too much to run, because it had too many people. If they could get rid of the people, instant delivery would work. Now, that's been done.
Tycho 12y ago
Bluntly, I guess there are smart jobs and dumb jobs. The demand for smart jobs should be practically infinite - where now you have a doctor, a lawyer, a childminder and an accountant, in the future you might also have a geneticist, a landscape gardener, tutors, designers, trainers, dieticians, researchers, risk managers, handymen... There will probably also always be a need for dumb jobs, but perhaps the difference will be that they cannot be the backbone of an entire economy.

100 points by e15ctr0n 12y ago

tn13 12y ago

Let me count what is wrong with this article in brief. 1. The title "Technology is not working" is true in general for "X is not working" if your are going cherry pick the only group for which it is not working. By that sort of logic nothing really works. 2. The term productivity is not at all defined in the whole article. What we should care about is the productivity of the whole society and not some isolated group. 3. Wage growth has nothing to do with productivity in general. For example wage rates going down could also mean more is being achieved with fewer humans of the same skill which basically is productivity improvement.

jostmey 12y ago

Yes, let's blame the bad economy on technology. I mean, it couldn't have been Wall-street's fault or Washington's fault.

rayiner 12y ago
Wall Street was Wall Street and Washington was Washington in the 1990s and the 1950s when there were plenty of jobs. It's hard to blame the constant thing for problems that are different between then and now.
- marcosdumay 12y ago
  No, they were not. Society was different, laws were different, both Wall Street and Washington did eat a much smaller share of the US GDP. You can't even extent your observation to the rest of the world, because almost the entire world passed through the same transformation at about the same time.
  - rayiner 12y ago
    Not really. 1950-1960 was thoroughly the modern world: http://peakwatch.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83452403c69e2017d40f40bd2970c-800wi http://peakwatch.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83452403c69e2017d40f40b.... Federal sending was 16-18% of GDP from 1952-1967. From 1995 to 2008 it was 18-22%. So a little smaller, but not "much" smaller. It spiked above that in 2008 because of the recession, but you can hardly blame federal spending that happened after the recession for having caused it.
    - me2i81 12y ago
      But the financial industry as a percentage of GDP is much higher now than in the 1950-1960 era.

mindslight 12y ago

Wat? The premise has always been fewer jobs. What our entrenched societal institutions end up doing with this change is a different matter.

jbob2000 12y ago

It's because the baby boomers don't know how to use technology, and they're still holding positions they should have retired from 5 years ago. This has many widespread effects, one of which is the 'if it ain't broke, don't fix'. People are still using Windows XP in their day-to-day jobs for christ-sake. The digital revolution hasn't happened because it's being held back by dinosaurs.

sudowhodoido 12y ago
This. And I'm always having to clean up dinosaur shit! (rotting corpses of processes and management hierarchies)
lucio 12y ago
And the productivity difference between Windows XP and Windows 8 is...? 0.01%?
- ivanca 12y ago
  I bet is more than 10%; Windows XP comes with a lot of bad baggage.. such as IE7. And anyway, the OS was an example, it just goes downhill from there.
  - agumonkey 12y ago
    Cut that 10% in half because known baggage will trump unknown valuable capabilities.
    - ivanca 12y ago
      The problem is that we are talking about the kind of people that doesn't even know half the valuable capabilities of Windows XP.
      - agumonkey 12y ago
        True, but that won't change the fact that anything better but different from that old XP will throw most users so off they won't even care.

joemaller1 12y ago

Isn't it really productivity OR jobs? A smaller number of productive workers can accomplish the same finite amount of "work" as a greater number of less-productive workers. Welcome to the Industrial Revolution.

jobu 12y ago
The HN title is "The digital revolution has yet to fulfil its promise of productivity and jobs", but the economist title seems more realistic: "The digital revolution has yet to fulfil its promise of higher productivity and better jobs". The problem seems to be that we haven't figured out what to do with people that are no longer relevant once their jobs are automated (e.g. factory workers). That sort of thing is only going to accelerate - take a look at this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU (Humans Need Not Apply)
- privong 12y ago
  I guess that is a case of the 80 character HN limit making it a little difficult to write a useful but accurate title.
  - aidenn0 12y ago
    I'd get rid of "its" and "and" before getting rid of better
    - dang 12y ago
      Good idea. Thanks. Edit: come to think of it, we can just get rid of "the".
brent_noorda 12y ago
We need more technology, not less; specifically: more robots. Robots designed to relentlessly shop for items online, and to sleeplessly hail ride-share cars. With enough such robots, all us people will find full time employment shipping products to those robots from our Amazon warehouses, and driving those robots around in our Uber cars.

AndrewKemendo 12y ago

The article doesn't really examine productivity, it is examining wages. To wit: industrial automation has grown 6% YOY since 2003[1]. Manufacturing is up worldwide and robotic integration is exploding, not to mention software automation. The reality is that these increases are not labor productivity, but capital productivity. You also won't see these productivity numbers easily on a balance sheet because they currently take longer to find return on value when doing replacement work than scaling human labor. This is largely because it takes time to transition labor force into a new role within a company or out of the company altogether. At the end of the day though, from a labor productivity perspective, there is no raison detre to pay workers more for doing less unless they are providing more value per time period. While history has shown show that technology does not eliminate jobs, merely creates new ones, the pace at which this is occurring is increasing [2] and is arguably faster than workers can adapt. This is also not to even mention where finance is putting investments, being far from what I would consider proportional with respect to consumer goods and industrial technology base. In the end, there is every reason to believe that as capital takes more share of the work, there will be less work and thus less pay for labor. That is unless the market for labor, in places which are not yet ready for automation, grows in such a way that it can absorb transitioning workers and new entrants. I don't really see that happening without some major changes in the ethos of how we allocate "value" to labor and define "work." [1]http://www.thefinancialist.com/automation-a-trend-thats-sticking/ http://www.thefinancialist.com/automation-a-trend-thats-stic... [2] http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/515926/how-technology-is-destroying-jobs/ http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/515926/how-tec...

sailfast 12y ago
Very well said, and the last sentence is key for the future of society in my opinion. Given your statement regarding wages and productivity - typically the two are used interchangeably in economic conversations / calculations. I wonder if we will start to see those split more to account for the contributions of technology / capital to "productivity". Direct wages would be divided by a combination of societal value + economic value to calculate actual productivity. Perhaps somebody should create the indicator and take home a Nobel or something hehe.
12y ago

bluedino 12y ago

It has. People just didn't realize the efficiency of online retailers would crush so many middlemen and individual brick and mortar stores (mom and pop shops and mail-order houses), as well as entire existing companies (Best Buy, etc)

Altay- 12y ago
E-commerce makes up ~6.40% of US retail sales. Its certainly shaken up the landscape, but 'crush' is overstating the case...
- cpwright 12y ago
  Its going to entirely depend on the segment, Wal-Mart gets 55% of revenue from groceries apparently (I took some time to look at what fraction of groceries would be of overall retail sales, but couldn't find it). So I think a reasonable assumption is that a large chunk of retail sales are groceries. Another large chunk is going to be automobiles, which in some metrics get excluded; which are another large part of retail sales. If you keep chopping away big parts that aren't conducive to e-commerce; the 6.40% is going to be a pretty big percentage. Small specialty stores are probably hit especially hard, to the point of being crushed; going out of business and making the e-commerce players a larger percentage of the market and thus more efficient, driving even more e-commerce in a positive feedback loop.
  - Altay- 12y ago
    If you want to see just how irrelevant E-Commerce is, just look at your neighborhood Apple Store. Their products are the sort that could easily be purchased online -- commodity technology products aimed at the supposedly tech savvy. The only visible effect of e-commerce has been the thinning of margins. The ability to check prices online leveled the playing field between retailers and customers. This has brought us closer to a real market -- one where perfect information is available to all parties.
    - bjelkeman-again 12y ago

wyager 12y ago

You have to be blind not to see the tremendous productivity and lifestyle improve improvements wrought by technology. --sent from my handheld multi-gigaflop communication device/sensorium/access point to the sum of all human knowledge, which cost less than what most people in my country of residence make in a week and was not available to even the richest billionaires ten years ago.

bjelkeman-again 12y ago
My wife, who is a graphic designer and has moved to latest tech all the way from photo-typesetters, now does the work of: typesetter, typist (people used to re-type the copy), pasteup artist, courier, several people at the printer (making plates, printing, packing, labelling, sending), postman and post sorting. They distribute PDF files mostly, via email marketing and a web site. Stock photography workers that would send slides, and I am probably missing some roles in there. This was indeed a productivity improvement, and a lifestyle improvement for her. But it is not clear that it was for all the others involved previously. It is correct that the expectations are higher than they used to be for the same amount of money paid (colour print, quality of design etc.), but I am not sure this makes up for the loss of jobs for those that aren't involved anymore. I know some of these roles have moved on to do other things, but as far as I can see it seems like we have what they call a "jobb-less recovery" where technology provides efficiency and productivity improvements for the few, but leaves a lot of people behind. Where I live, Sweden, people are well educated, the economy is doing well, and we have a substantial youth unemployment. I know it is a fairly complex problem as I have a hard time finding skilled developers for example, ie there are jobs to be had, but the courier and the guy working at the printer previously can probably not retrain to those jobs easily.
- HarryHirsch 12y ago
  This was indeed a productivity improvement, and a lifestyle improvement for her. If that's the state of affairs, good for her. But talk to my previous boss, who recently elebrated his 80th birthday. He knows the times when he would write a manuscript, hand it to his secretary, who would type a fair copy, and then it would go off to the publisher, where it would go to the typesetter (a union man), and then the plates would go to the printer (printing press operated by a union man, too). A couple of years back he was invited to write a review, and he was absolutely livid for several days. The publisher had requested camera-ready copy; they gave him formatting instructions, he had to deal with the minutiae, and what he handed in did not conform to specifications, so he had to do more formatting. At the end of the day, all the labour-saving devices did not save him time, although they certainly made Springer/Elsevier/Pergamon/whatnot plenty extra bucks. Some progress.

godisdad 12y ago

See also: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/business/a-capitalists-dilemma-whoever-becomes-president.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/business/a-capitalists-dil... In particular the part about "efficiency innovations" vs "empowering innovations"

flipcoder 12y ago

The entire thing is bottlenecked. Automate the education system.

chippy 12y ago
The article basically mentions this. "That may be the wrong place to look for improvements in productivity. The service sector might be more promising. In higher education, for example, the development of online courses could yield a productivity bonanza, allowing one professor to do the work previously done by legions of lecturers. Once an online course has been developed, it can be offered to unlimited numbers of extra students at little extra cost."

Amanojack 12y ago

The goal of technology is to eliminate labor, not to create the need for more of it. If everyone is fishing with their bare hands and catching just enough to feed themselves (edit: say one fish), then when nets are invented and people can catch 100 fish a day, 99% of the fishing industry jobs disappear. That's a wonderful thing. That means 99% of the population can devote themselves to less urgent priorities, like building shelters, making clothes, etc. Sure, those crackerjack fish catchers who could catch 2 or 3 fish a day have lost their jobs, and might become less affluent than they were...but the few losers in every industry when technology changes the employment structure are outweighed by the vast majority who benefit greatly. And lest this seem unfair, consider that if everyone's current job were obsolete, everyone would be astoundingly better off despite losing the comparative advantage they had built in their career. The same thing has been happening since the first inventions. It's been one long history of job loss and rising standard of living, and no short term variance should obscure this fact. The more jobs made obsolete, the better. People will simply shift to less important work, and increasingly people will simply work fewer hours, as technology makes the economy so productive that prices fall to such a degree that people can live on an hour of labor a week.

bostik 12y ago
> technology makes the economy so productive that prices fall to such a degree that people can live on an hour of labor a week. I would say that prediction can hold true only in a world with infinite resources, infinite space for expansion (to make population growth a negligible issue), and effectively free energy. Everywhere else population, food and energy production will compete with one another one way or the other - and there will always be a lower bound in energy needs for transporting goods from where they are economically produced, to the points of consumption or use. Now if we could cover most of Sahara with efficient solar panels and transport the energy over superconducting wires anywhere in the world...
nickthemagicman 12y ago
I liked your post. The issue is that with modern technology,tech is not just replacing ONE job like fish catching. Tech is replacing ALL jobs..... fish catching, clothes making, accounting, medicine, programming, etc. Sufficiently advanced tech can replace just about ANY job. And do it better than a person can. So the issue is where does everyone go? And I don't think 7 billion people can all be inventors.

Htsthbjig 12y ago

The article is full of inaccuracies. E.g They put a graph of Spain and salaries growing more than 10% in the real state bubble period. What they don't add is the cost of living going up as well, specially renting a house or buying it, that went up 400% in lots of places. Now those salaries have gone down to their previous level(the graph does not include the last two years), but house prices had been sustained as much as they could with interventions like creating "bad banks" so free market could not do his job. Real state prices had gone down probably 30%, far from pre bubble plus real inflation levels. It does not matter if your salary goes up if inflation goes up higher. Productivity has increased dramatically over time, but taxes, debt and overspending by the government has grown more. About the top earners, this is what happens when you give free money to people in Wall Street. Stock goes up, and the percentage of wealth they have is enormous. But this is "paper money", and will last until stock goes down, and it will go down when interest rates go up, and this will happen soon, in one or two years.

mpg33 12y ago

This may sound oversimplified but I think people will have to become more creative and create their own jobs in the future (ie self employed entrepreneurs). Simply hoping to gain income from a job via the traditional route of applying to companies is becoming more difficult. I think the large growth in "startup culture" over the past 5 years is proof of this.

nickthemagicman 12y ago
90% of startups fail. These are well funded startups. There has to be an actual need for a product in the market and need is not easy to predict. Even the successful startups are succesful because of a little luck and being in the right place at the right time. Luck is not the best financial planning strategy for feeding your children.

gregpilling 12y ago

Consider welding. It is a blue collar job that can pay pretty well, if you are fast on piecework or have in demand skills like tig welding titanium. I employ two guys welding manually, and I also have a 7 axis Panasonic PA 102S welding cell. I have one high volume product that we sell, that I calculated the labor cost per part to be about 6 cents if we ran the robot at normal speed for 40 hours per week. When that part was manually welded the labor cost per part was about 50 cents per part. Incidentally, the guys were happy when that part went automated, since doing a high volume part is boring, mind numbing work. (1) In the case of this little part, because the labor cost went down, and as a factory owner I know the part is more precise and can be made in an easily calculable window (it yields 8 parts per minute now), then I was able to cut the retail price by 50% and sales tripled. We can now bid on jobs that would have overwhelmed our capacity before. So who won? I made more money, the workers job got better because some drudgery was removed, the workers income went up because we have a profit sharing program, the consumer pays less, and because the price was lower more consumers get to enjoy the product. I am no economist, and I have no well researched and linked rebuttal to the article. In my little microcosm of the world everybody wanted the automation. Me, the guys, the customer. Everybody has won. Nobody involved would prefer to go back to the old way. 1. personally I find it annoying when academics talk about labor vs automation. Some jobs suck to do (dull, dirty, dangerous), and often the worker is the happiest when it no longer has to be done by a human. The worker is usually pretty happy to have extra time to do that other thing they have been wanting to do for long time. Who on this forum misses setting up a blog the way you had to before Fantastico came along?

waterlesscloud 12y ago
>the workers income went up because we have a profit sharing program So in this case, labor won because they also have a stake in the capital. Unfortunately, that's the exception rather than the rule.
- spacemanmatt 12y ago
  Last I checked, the 1%ers captured decades of industrial efficiency gains, and sent us workers a bill when they lost it in 2008.

oscargrouch 12y ago

I dont know, but i think software kind of replace, at least in part, people's labor; Technology and productivity is against labor and wages; unless you are part of the very few people needed to create the machines or softwares; probably with the advance of AI, even taht can be replaced.. I wonder why people tought that keeping replacing people with robots, and creating profit fetichism on corporations could lead to something else? This is the old Marx profecy going on; That only creative and talented type of labor could survive; anything out of this will probably be replaced by automatization Technological society didnt come to save the majority of people's lifestyle, its comming to kill the rest of it; Of course some new value, and blue oceans will come to the surface; but then the automatization and profit circle will rule again, until little to none people are needed But than, who really want to pick up the phone, deliver the sandwiches, or do repetitive and low demanding jobs? This is good, only that humanity need to adapt, have more knowledge and go for the creative types of labor Problem is 7 billion people maybe would be too much for this , so i dont think is sustainable to everyone on earth to live like that.. and people with low levels of inteligence will have a hard time living in a society like this

Animats 12y ago

Productivity, yes. Better jobs, no. Machines should think. People should work. Watch this Kiva Robotics training session: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWNuaPE4DTc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWNuaPE4DTc That's how orders are picked at Amazon now. (Also Staples, Pets.com, and many others.) All the thinking and planning is done by computers. Humans just pick up items where the light pointer tells them to reach, and put them where another light tells them. There's no possibility of promotion. They don't program the robots. They don't fix the robots. The company that makes the robots employs only a few hundred people. The inventor of this system was involved with Webvan fifteen years ago. He saw that customers wanted instant delivery, but Webvan cost too much to run, because it had too many people. If they could get rid of the people, instant delivery would work. Now, that's been done.

Tycho 12y ago

Bluntly, I guess there are smart jobs and dumb jobs. The demand for smart jobs should be practically infinite - where now you have a doctor, a lawyer, a childminder and an accountant, in the future you might also have a geneticist, a landscape gardener, tutors, designers, trainers, dieticians, researchers, risk managers, handymen... There will probably also always be a need for dumb jobs, but perhaps the difference will be that they cannot be the backbone of an entire economy.