10 ms·

Silicon Valley doesn't create jobs; it's wiping out middle-class jobs

72 points by antisocial 12y ago

LaneRendell 12y ago
Wheeler is chronically uncharitable to technology, and generally comes across a techno-phobic. He's a journalist (and journalism professor) so it's not surprising that he tends to have issues with technology in general. Does he raise valid points? Sure. Some tech companies are just as guilty as Walmart is of exploitative labor practices, but one can't help but take his commentary with a grain of salt, as he slams "crappy automated phone systems" he ignores all of the benefits of new technologies.
- kokey 12y ago
  It's destroying traditional middle class jobs of his peers, like teachers, doctors, architects, etc. but I think he has missed the fact that the new middle class jobs are things like developers and data scientists.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
lstyls 12y ago
I am so sick of articles like this which make some broad moral judgement about the new tech economy. This one is even worse than most because the author doesn't even attempt to give some statistical merit to his argument. Instead he takes the lazy route of quoting some quasi-anecdotal BS about how all the young millennials are making their way to SV to develop the next big app as if they're the Oakies of the dustbowl heading west to pick oranges. The fact is, tech has fundamentally restructured the labor market. Some classes of people will do well, and some will lose out. It is not good or evil. What will really determine whether we win out as a society will be how we invest in things like education and infrastructure. Arguments that attempt to write off tech full cloth as evil are useless, as are the pollyanas who think tech will solve everything.
- loup-vaillant 12y ago
  > Some classes of people will do well, and some will lose out. If he's right about the automation part (I think he is), and if we're as stupid as we were in the 1930s, then the class of people who do well is likely to be quite smaller than the class of people who lose out big time. Automation is wonderful. Destroying jobs is amazing. For most jobs, anyway. The only awful thing about that is the loss of revenue. And the stigmatization of the unemployed. With technology that destroys more jobs than it creates, we don't have many solutions. We could generalise the 4 days work-week. Then 3 days… Or we could try unconditional basic income. Both, maybe? Or, we can wait until we're all deep in the poo, such that we get an increasing number of violent uprisings, leading to revolutions or fascism. Again.
  - lstyls 12y ago
    > Automation is wonderful. Destroying jobs is amazing. For most jobs, anyway. Right. Increasing efficiency is a double edged sword, and we will have to walk a very fine line if we want to make this ongoing tech revolution work for the greater good.
  - michaelochurch 12y ago
    I wish more people saw this the way that you do. You're right. Destroying "work", that is no longer needed, benefits society. It's a widespread loss of income that causes everything to go to hell. The two don't need to be correlated.
    - TeMPOraL 12y ago
      Or as someone wrote on HN once, and which is also probably my favourite quote from here, "No job is the goal. No money is the problem.". EDIT: 'nostromo @ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8987008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8987008
    - loup-vaillant 12y ago
      I once searched for a catchy phrase to capture this. Something that could catch on even in a time where politician supposedly "fight unemployment". Something like "Systematic Annihilation of Unwanted Work".
ld00d 12y ago
That title is horrible. Where does Silicon Valley send any message to any generation?
- sctb 12y ago
  We updated the submission title to a more informative subtitle from the article.
jeo1234 12y ago
I'm betting that people like Wheeler where the same ones who were crying out that the industrial revolution would bring only suffering and mass unemployment to most of society.
- loup-vaillant 12y ago
  Oh but it did. All our ancestors had to do was failing to guide the economy through the tremendous productivity gains offered by mass manufacturing. To paraphrase Jacques Fresco, they had empty factories and starving unemployed. This makes no sense!
- sre_ops 12y ago
  The really funny part is that this garbage is written on a computer designed in the SV by a dirt bag using a phone and software designed there and published on a website that can be accessed only because of the SV.
- sre_ops 12y ago
  The really funny part is that this garbage is written on a computer designed in the SV by a dirt bag using a phone and software designed there and published on a website that can be accessed only because of the SV.
eli_gottlieb 12y ago
Speaking as a "millenial": that was painfully stupid and irritating to read. Look: I don't want "jobs", not as an abstract commodity produced because someone decided everyone has to have a job, and that's that. I want a job that matches my skillset (it's reasonably good), compensates me well, and lets me actually contribute to human progress. If human progress has advanced so far that even someone with my skills is mostly unnecessary, I want a means of supplying for myself that minimizes the personal burden of labor on other people (note: not robots, not corporations, people), and enables me to get on with my life and have fun -- there's more to the world than careerism. Yes, the sharing economy has been built on the extreme precarity of its workers. Yes, technology destroys "jobs". But overall, the problem here is not technology: it's capitalism.
- grayfox 12y ago
  Excellent response!
- lstyls 12y ago
  I agree to a point, but would qualify this to the problem being unfettered capitalism in a vacuum of social investment. The growth in the knowledge economy has such a huge potential to level the playing field - but it can only do so if there is fair access to good education. Here in the US, only those with means have a decent chance of getting the kind of education that enables them to join in the new class of workers, which results in a feedback loop and a widening income gap.
- jkoudys 12y ago
  It's a problem with capitalism insofar as under capitalism, the most successful companies will directly influence their government to protect their existing business model. You had a prime opportunity to rethink the entire auto-market, yet the US government instead gave massive bailouts to your big-3 auto makers, and your streets continue to be full of single-passenger Ford F-150s. In spite of massive regulatory resistance, companies like Uber, or Tesla (which yes, get some environmental tax credits, but it's a drop in the ocean compared to being considered "too big to fail") have still managed to grow. It's not that there aren't jobs that need to be done. Instead, your laws and economy are structured to give an advantage to those who used to offer jobs that are no longer valuable.
jkoudys 12y ago
I remember being a kid, and thinking that CNN must have some really intelligent, mature writing, that I was simply too young to understand. Now, they post these sensationalist headlines (I was expecting it to be a play on words, e.g. it was an article about funeral planning or life insurance), and fan the flames of idiocy with writing like this: "And if you think your own job is safe, think again. New research predicts that nearly half of all jobs are susceptible to automation over the next two decades." So silicon valley is bad _because_ they find more efficient ways to do things? Should we also be upset with anyone who sells a refrigerator, for making all those poor iceblock-expeditions and milkmen obsolete? Does the "\"sharing economy\"" (my quotes around their quotes, for how much they quote that term) mean that by using our cars, homes, tools, etc. more efficiently, and buying less new stuff, we're actually saying "drop dead" to the people who would have manufactured new things? If there's a large number of people who hold degrees, who don't need the degree for the job they have, isn't that a fault with our education system? What about that bizarre arrogance that so many had in the 80s, where they thought their kids must have a degree so they don't end up in a "blue collar" job? So many would be earning good money now if they'd just gone to a trade school, and learned welding, plumbing, carpentry, HVAC, etc. instead of training for one of the office jobs which software has now made largely obsolete.
- lstyls 12y ago
  > I remember being a kid, and thinking that CNN must have some really intelligent, mature writing, that I was simply too young to understand. Now, they post these sensationalist headlines Ironically, we can attribute the flourishing of trash articles like these to the new media landscape that has arrived due to the emergence of new technologies...
  - jkoudys 12y ago
    I don't think so. When I go back and watch TV shows or read headlines from around when I was born, they weren't any better back then, I was simply too young to realize how ridiculous they all were. Case in point, the mass hysteria around daycare sexual abuse and satanic rituals: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMartin_preschool_trial http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMartin_preschool_trial
neaanopri 12y ago
So all the dunces are in confederacy against Silicon Valley?
bko 12y ago
People often forget that paying someone to do something is an expense, not a benefit. Sure, people need jobs, but not jobs that can be done by cheaper and more effectively by machines. Employment opportunities are not a means of themselves. This (IMO flawed) economic thinking is best captured by economist Keynes: "If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing." [0] [0] Book 3, Chapter 10, Section 6 pg.129 "The General Theory.."
- jiggy2011 12y ago
  The concern is about what happens to people who are no longer employable if we cannot create new jobs for them? Will everyone be happy when a majority of the population depends entirely on charity and hand outs?
  - bko 12y ago
    Honest answer, I don't know. But I wouldn't have known what would happen to the ~30% of the US population that worked in farming 100 years ago or the 90% that were working as farmers in 1862 [0] Jobs aren't really created by a central authority. They just kind of appear as people find better things to do with their time/talents. The future may not follow the past, but so far we've been okay. [0] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/trouble/timeline/ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/trouble/timeline/
    - pm24601 12y ago
      And they are destroyed when wall street financiers are permitted to outsource jobs. Society can choose to allow or not allow society to be destroyed by creating a large class of underemployeed. We are choosing a tax structure that allows jobs to be outsourced.
beat 12y ago
They need to retitle that article "Old man yells at cloud". The intellectual vacuum of this article can be summed up by the fact that the author chose a fictional character as his Silicon Valley CEO strawman. At least point to a real villain!
- lstyls 12y ago
  Its so ironic that the author is a journalism professor. This article would make for a perfect Journalism 101 case study on cheap rhetorical tricks: appeal to anecdote, straw man, etc.
  - beat 12y ago
    Reminds me of seeing Neil Postman speak oh so many years ago. I got there late, and met a friend (still a friend, he's my patent attorney now) leaving. Asked him how it was, and he was like, "Neil Postman is a cretin". Totally anti-tech reactionary. He was railing about how word processors were going to destroy literacy, and we should all write with pencils like a Real Journalist.
Apocryphon 12y ago
"We have no problem taking Wall Street executives to task for decisions that leave American families financially devastated" Right off the bat- do we? Or do we just give them slaps on the wrist and then big bonuses once the news cycle's over?
- beat 12y ago
  By "taking them to task", he means "complain ineffectually". He can complain ineffectually about Silicon Valley just as loudly as he can complain ineffectually about Wall Street.
themark 12y ago
"Only 36% of college grads have jobs that pay at least $45,000... after adjusting for inflation" ! 45k? And here I thought my 30K job in mid 90's after college was a windfall.
- pachydermic 12y ago
  http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=30&year1=1995&year2=2015 http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=30&year1=1995&y... $30k in 1995 is around $45k now adjusted for inflation. One important factor to remember is that the cost of education has risen a lot (even in real terms) since the 90's. A student graduating today is way more likely to carry a substantial student debt so that money just doesn't go as far as it used to once you factor in wealth.
  - themark 12y ago
    I think there is a a general feeling of entitlement today as well. Since you mentioned it, I wonder how much the percentage of graduates that actually had to take out loans has changed.
    - bwb 12y ago
      I don't think there is anymore entitlement than in the past. I think that is just something old people say about the next generation :) College has increased in price so much compared to inflation. My parents paid for all their school bills while working part time, you can't even pretend to do that now.
      - themark 12y ago
        I just remember most entry level jobs being well under 30K in the mid 90s. College degree, major city, etc.
qiqing 12y ago
Relevant: Luddite (noun) : one of a group of early 19th century English workmen destroying laborsaving machinery as a protest; From Wikipedia : The Luddites were 19th-century English textile artisans who protested against newly developed labour-replacing machinery from 1811 to 1817. The stocking frames, spinning frames and power looms introduced during the Industrial Revolution threatened to replace the artisans with less-skilled, low-wage labourers, leaving them without work.
michaelochurch 12y ago
Semi-correct but terribly argued. First, Silicon Valley sucks but it's not the fault of "technology". The Valley has been successfully conquered by the mainstream business elite. They've won, we've lost. It's not our territory anymore. The corporate elite has been wiping out jobs for generations and, to be fair, that's not always a bad thing to be doing. The crime isn't that jobs end. It's that these corporations won't pay to train people up into the new jobs that are created, dodge their taxes and therefore emasculate the government, and lobby for an economic status quo that is harmful to most people. Second, "technology" (as a force) generates wealth but doesn't distribute it well. There are a number of reasons for that, but one is that engineers don't care enough to change the distribution of newly-created wealth from what it is. If the engineers who build technology are at fault, it's through inaction rather than malice. We'd rather be curing cancer than helping businessmen unemploy people, but when you look at the current socio-political structure of society, it's only set up to go one way on that.
- bwb 12y ago
  Very well put, so what do you see serving as a force to distribute the wealth?
  - michaelochurch 12y ago
    I think that the solution human societies will come up with is a basic income. I tend to hope for that, because lightweight government is typically better.
bwb 12y ago
Well, that was a weirdly written article... I do think we need the US government to do more for Labor/People in this country. At this point Labor/People are so unrepresented in the political process they are just getting screwed left and right. Unions are a nightmare and keep a lot of bad people in jobs that shouldn't be there, but without them nobody is pushing for fair pay. Why can't the US government pass a plan to push us slowly to a real living wage instead of a minimum wage? Why can't we push for a $12 to $15 an hour living wage across the board and tie it to future inflation? Not enough to be crazy, but enough that people are not stuck in a perpetual trap of poverty.
jolan 12y ago
This article is written from the perspective that everyone is guaranteed a place at the table of the hyper-efficient capitalist economy when no such guarantee has ever been made. If these kids went to college, then surely they learned how to learn, so why not adapt to the market by learning new skills that the market values more? Better than sitting on your ass waiting for the market to adapt to you. Or join the military, file for disability, or get a second crappy job since your free time is likely spent watching netflix and playing games. As alluded to in the article, even the low skill, low paying jobs will be going away soon so the time to act is now.
nickodell 12y ago
When I read the URL, I was initially worried because I thought Tom Wheeler was saying this. >As anyone who's talked to an automated system on the phone lately can attest, "automated" usually means "worse." He does have a point there. It takes me much longer to buy my groceries using self-checkout than it does to go stand in line for a human to ring up my purchases. Using an automated phone system is similarly pretty irritating.
- QuercusMax 12y ago
  But why does it take longer? There are some stores where I'm just as fast to self-checkout as a human cashier, and others where it takes a ton more time, because the machine is super laggy. (Or deliberately made sluggish?) You're literally doing the same thing as a cashier, using the same equipment - as long as you don't suck at scanning things, it should take exactly the same amount of time.
geebee 12y ago
The article starts with a magnificent exercise in false equivalence: "We have no problem taking Wall Street executives to task for decisions that leave American families financially devastated, yet we give Silicon Valley billionaires a pass when they do the same thing". No, they don't do the same thing. If I automate in 5 minutes with software a process that used to take three people with pencils and erasers four months, I have not done the same thing as taking out insurance policies against bad mortgage securities that only I know are bad because I'm the one who took the good mortgages out and replaced them with bad mortgages because the fine print allowed me to do this. Yes, both do eliminate some jobs. One because those jobs can now be done more efficiently by machines. The other, because massive amounts of wealth was destroyed by financial trickery. It's so hard to get past that point that I almost didn't read the more sensationalistic presented but nonetheless worthy of consideration issues that followed. Yes, social media and other internet behemoths are doing alarming things to privacy. Yes, we need to be concerned if we send millions out of work, with no clear path to employment. Yes, we should be concerned about the intense concentration of wealth in a winner-take-all economy. All kinds of interesting ideas have been presented (minimum basic income, for instance). But you won't find any discussion of them in this article.
- balabaster 12y ago
  Yes, but if you dig a bit deeper, the wealth was created by massive amounts of financial trickery too. Most of the paper that supports the stock market is really just a fabrication of an illusion - people mostly selling virtual pieces of paper that suggests you own a right to buy and/or sell something if a hypothetical scenario ever occurs. So to say that the wealth was destroyed by financial trickery isn't the whole story... it was created by that same trickery. All the wealth you see in the real world (the big mansions, flashy cars, accumulation of stuff, that nice secure feeling you have because of all the money you have in your bank account, your ability to purchase stuff) is built upon an illusion that only exists in a virtual reality. While companies are allowed to fabricate wealth pretty much out of thin air, what can you expect? Not that I'm disagreeing with your larger point. In comparison to Silicon Valley, Wall Street is a city of charlatans.
  - 12y ago
deleted 12y ago
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72 points by antisocial 12y ago

Wheeler is chronically uncharitable to technology, and generally comes across a techno-phobic. He's a journalist (and journalism professor) so it's not surprising that he tends to have issues with technology in general. Does he raise valid points? Sure. Some tech companies are just as guilty as Walmart is of exploitative labor practices, but one can't help but take his commentary with a grain of salt, as he slams "crappy automated phone systems" he ignores all of the benefits of new technologies.

kokey 12y ago
It's destroying traditional middle class jobs of his peers, like teachers, doctors, architects, etc. but I think he has missed the fact that the new middle class jobs are things like developers and data scientists.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

lstyls 12y ago

I am so sick of articles like this which make some broad moral judgement about the new tech economy. This one is even worse than most because the author doesn't even attempt to give some statistical merit to his argument. Instead he takes the lazy route of quoting some quasi-anecdotal BS about how all the young millennials are making their way to SV to develop the next big app as if they're the Oakies of the dustbowl heading west to pick oranges. The fact is, tech has fundamentally restructured the labor market. Some classes of people will do well, and some will lose out. It is not good or evil. What will really determine whether we win out as a society will be how we invest in things like education and infrastructure. Arguments that attempt to write off tech full cloth as evil are useless, as are the pollyanas who think tech will solve everything.

loup-vaillant 12y ago
> Some classes of people will do well, and some will lose out. If he's right about the automation part (I think he is), and if we're as stupid as we were in the 1930s, then the class of people who do well is likely to be quite smaller than the class of people who lose out big time. Automation is wonderful. Destroying jobs is amazing. For most jobs, anyway. The only awful thing about that is the loss of revenue. And the stigmatization of the unemployed. With technology that destroys more jobs than it creates, we don't have many solutions. We could generalise the 4 days work-week. Then 3 days… Or we could try unconditional basic income. Both, maybe? Or, we can wait until we're all deep in the poo, such that we get an increasing number of violent uprisings, leading to revolutions or fascism. Again.
- lstyls 12y ago
  > Automation is wonderful. Destroying jobs is amazing. For most jobs, anyway. Right. Increasing efficiency is a double edged sword, and we will have to walk a very fine line if we want to make this ongoing tech revolution work for the greater good.
- michaelochurch 12y ago
  I wish more people saw this the way that you do. You're right. Destroying "work", that is no longer needed, benefits society. It's a widespread loss of income that causes everything to go to hell. The two don't need to be correlated.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    Or as someone wrote on HN once, and which is also probably my favourite quote from here, "No job is the goal. No money is the problem.". EDIT: 'nostromo @ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8987008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8987008
  - loup-vaillant 12y ago
    I once searched for a catchy phrase to capture this. Something that could catch on even in a time where politician supposedly "fight unemployment". Something like "Systematic Annihilation of Unwanted Work".

ld00d 12y ago

That title is horrible. Where does Silicon Valley send any message to any generation?

sctb 12y ago
We updated the submission title to a more informative subtitle from the article.

jeo1234 12y ago

I'm betting that people like Wheeler where the same ones who were crying out that the industrial revolution would bring only suffering and mass unemployment to most of society.

loup-vaillant 12y ago
Oh but it did. All our ancestors had to do was failing to guide the economy through the tremendous productivity gains offered by mass manufacturing. To paraphrase Jacques Fresco, they had empty factories and starving unemployed. This makes no sense!
sre_ops 12y ago
The really funny part is that this garbage is written on a computer designed in the SV by a dirt bag using a phone and software designed there and published on a website that can be accessed only because of the SV.
sre_ops 12y ago
The really funny part is that this garbage is written on a computer designed in the SV by a dirt bag using a phone and software designed there and published on a website that can be accessed only because of the SV.

eli_gottlieb 12y ago

Speaking as a "millenial": that was painfully stupid and irritating to read. Look: I don't want "jobs", not as an abstract commodity produced because someone decided everyone has to have a job, and that's that. I want a job that matches my skillset (it's reasonably good), compensates me well, and lets me actually contribute to human progress. If human progress has advanced so far that even someone with my skills is mostly unnecessary, I want a means of supplying for myself that minimizes the personal burden of labor on other people (note: not robots, not corporations, people), and enables me to get on with my life and have fun -- there's more to the world than careerism. Yes, the sharing economy has been built on the extreme precarity of its workers. Yes, technology destroys "jobs". But overall, the problem here is not technology: it's capitalism.

grayfox 12y ago
Excellent response!
lstyls 12y ago
I agree to a point, but would qualify this to the problem being unfettered capitalism in a vacuum of social investment. The growth in the knowledge economy has such a huge potential to level the playing field - but it can only do so if there is fair access to good education. Here in the US, only those with means have a decent chance of getting the kind of education that enables them to join in the new class of workers, which results in a feedback loop and a widening income gap.
jkoudys 12y ago
It's a problem with capitalism insofar as under capitalism, the most successful companies will directly influence their government to protect their existing business model. You had a prime opportunity to rethink the entire auto-market, yet the US government instead gave massive bailouts to your big-3 auto makers, and your streets continue to be full of single-passenger Ford F-150s. In spite of massive regulatory resistance, companies like Uber, or Tesla (which yes, get some environmental tax credits, but it's a drop in the ocean compared to being considered "too big to fail") have still managed to grow. It's not that there aren't jobs that need to be done. Instead, your laws and economy are structured to give an advantage to those who used to offer jobs that are no longer valuable.

jkoudys 12y ago

I remember being a kid, and thinking that CNN must have some really intelligent, mature writing, that I was simply too young to understand. Now, they post these sensationalist headlines (I was expecting it to be a play on words, e.g. it was an article about funeral planning or life insurance), and fan the flames of idiocy with writing like this: "And if you think your own job is safe, think again. New research predicts that nearly half of all jobs are susceptible to automation over the next two decades." So silicon valley is bad _because_ they find more efficient ways to do things? Should we also be upset with anyone who sells a refrigerator, for making all those poor iceblock-expeditions and milkmen obsolete? Does the "\"sharing economy\"" (my quotes around their quotes, for how much they quote that term) mean that by using our cars, homes, tools, etc. more efficiently, and buying less new stuff, we're actually saying "drop dead" to the people who would have manufactured new things? If there's a large number of people who hold degrees, who don't need the degree for the job they have, isn't that a fault with our education system? What about that bizarre arrogance that so many had in the 80s, where they thought their kids must have a degree so they don't end up in a "blue collar" job? So many would be earning good money now if they'd just gone to a trade school, and learned welding, plumbing, carpentry, HVAC, etc. instead of training for one of the office jobs which software has now made largely obsolete.

lstyls 12y ago
> I remember being a kid, and thinking that CNN must have some really intelligent, mature writing, that I was simply too young to understand. Now, they post these sensationalist headlines Ironically, we can attribute the flourishing of trash articles like these to the new media landscape that has arrived due to the emergence of new technologies...
- jkoudys 12y ago
  I don't think so. When I go back and watch TV shows or read headlines from around when I was born, they weren't any better back then, I was simply too young to realize how ridiculous they all were. Case in point, the mass hysteria around daycare sexual abuse and satanic rituals: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMartin_preschool_trial http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMartin_preschool_trial

neaanopri 12y ago

So all the dunces are in confederacy against Silicon Valley?

bko 12y ago

People often forget that paying someone to do something is an expense, not a benefit. Sure, people need jobs, but not jobs that can be done by cheaper and more effectively by machines. Employment opportunities are not a means of themselves. This (IMO flawed) economic thinking is best captured by economist Keynes: "If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing." [0] [0] Book 3, Chapter 10, Section 6 pg.129 "The General Theory.."

jiggy2011 12y ago
The concern is about what happens to people who are no longer employable if we cannot create new jobs for them? Will everyone be happy when a majority of the population depends entirely on charity and hand outs?
- bko 12y ago
  Honest answer, I don't know. But I wouldn't have known what would happen to the ~30% of the US population that worked in farming 100 years ago or the 90% that were working as farmers in 1862 [0] Jobs aren't really created by a central authority. They just kind of appear as people find better things to do with their time/talents. The future may not follow the past, but so far we've been okay. [0] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/trouble/timeline/ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/trouble/timeline/
  - pm24601 12y ago
    And they are destroyed when wall street financiers are permitted to outsource jobs. Society can choose to allow or not allow society to be destroyed by creating a large class of underemployeed. We are choosing a tax structure that allows jobs to be outsourced.

beat 12y ago

They need to retitle that article "Old man yells at cloud". The intellectual vacuum of this article can be summed up by the fact that the author chose a fictional character as his Silicon Valley CEO strawman. At least point to a real villain!

lstyls 12y ago
Its so ironic that the author is a journalism professor. This article would make for a perfect Journalism 101 case study on cheap rhetorical tricks: appeal to anecdote, straw man, etc.
- beat 12y ago
  Reminds me of seeing Neil Postman speak oh so many years ago. I got there late, and met a friend (still a friend, he's my patent attorney now) leaving. Asked him how it was, and he was like, "Neil Postman is a cretin". Totally anti-tech reactionary. He was railing about how word processors were going to destroy literacy, and we should all write with pencils like a Real Journalist.

Apocryphon 12y ago

"We have no problem taking Wall Street executives to task for decisions that leave American families financially devastated" Right off the bat- do we? Or do we just give them slaps on the wrist and then big bonuses once the news cycle's over?

beat 12y ago
By "taking them to task", he means "complain ineffectually". He can complain ineffectually about Silicon Valley just as loudly as he can complain ineffectually about Wall Street.

themark 12y ago

"Only 36% of college grads have jobs that pay at least $45,000... after adjusting for inflation" ! 45k? And here I thought my 30K job in mid 90's after college was a windfall.

pachydermic 12y ago
http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=30&year1=1995&year2=2015 http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=30&year1=1995&y... $30k in 1995 is around $45k now adjusted for inflation. One important factor to remember is that the cost of education has risen a lot (even in real terms) since the 90's. A student graduating today is way more likely to carry a substantial student debt so that money just doesn't go as far as it used to once you factor in wealth.
- themark 12y ago
  I think there is a a general feeling of entitlement today as well. Since you mentioned it, I wonder how much the percentage of graduates that actually had to take out loans has changed.
  - bwb 12y ago
    I don't think there is anymore entitlement than in the past. I think that is just something old people say about the next generation :) College has increased in price so much compared to inflation. My parents paid for all their school bills while working part time, you can't even pretend to do that now.
    - themark 12y ago
      I just remember most entry level jobs being well under 30K in the mid 90s. College degree, major city, etc.

qiqing 12y ago

Relevant: Luddite (noun) : one of a group of early 19th century English workmen destroying laborsaving machinery as a protest; From Wikipedia : The Luddites were 19th-century English textile artisans who protested against newly developed labour-replacing machinery from 1811 to 1817. The stocking frames, spinning frames and power looms introduced during the Industrial Revolution threatened to replace the artisans with less-skilled, low-wage labourers, leaving them without work.

michaelochurch 12y ago

Semi-correct but terribly argued. First, Silicon Valley sucks but it's not the fault of "technology". The Valley has been successfully conquered by the mainstream business elite. They've won, we've lost. It's not our territory anymore. The corporate elite has been wiping out jobs for generations and, to be fair, that's not always a bad thing to be doing. The crime isn't that jobs end. It's that these corporations won't pay to train people up into the new jobs that are created, dodge their taxes and therefore emasculate the government, and lobby for an economic status quo that is harmful to most people. Second, "technology" (as a force) generates wealth but doesn't distribute it well. There are a number of reasons for that, but one is that engineers don't care enough to change the distribution of newly-created wealth from what it is. If the engineers who build technology are at fault, it's through inaction rather than malice. We'd rather be curing cancer than helping businessmen unemploy people, but when you look at the current socio-political structure of society, it's only set up to go one way on that.

bwb 12y ago
Very well put, so what do you see serving as a force to distribute the wealth?
- michaelochurch 12y ago
  I think that the solution human societies will come up with is a basic income. I tend to hope for that, because lightweight government is typically better.

bwb 12y ago

Well, that was a weirdly written article... I do think we need the US government to do more for Labor/People in this country. At this point Labor/People are so unrepresented in the political process they are just getting screwed left and right. Unions are a nightmare and keep a lot of bad people in jobs that shouldn't be there, but without them nobody is pushing for fair pay. Why can't the US government pass a plan to push us slowly to a real living wage instead of a minimum wage? Why can't we push for a $12 to $15 an hour living wage across the board and tie it to future inflation? Not enough to be crazy, but enough that people are not stuck in a perpetual trap of poverty.

jolan 12y ago

This article is written from the perspective that everyone is guaranteed a place at the table of the hyper-efficient capitalist economy when no such guarantee has ever been made. If these kids went to college, then surely they learned how to learn, so why not adapt to the market by learning new skills that the market values more? Better than sitting on your ass waiting for the market to adapt to you. Or join the military, file for disability, or get a second crappy job since your free time is likely spent watching netflix and playing games. As alluded to in the article, even the low skill, low paying jobs will be going away soon so the time to act is now.

nickodell 12y ago

When I read the URL, I was initially worried because I thought Tom Wheeler was saying this. >As anyone who's talked to an automated system on the phone lately can attest, "automated" usually means "worse." He does have a point there. It takes me much longer to buy my groceries using self-checkout than it does to go stand in line for a human to ring up my purchases. Using an automated phone system is similarly pretty irritating.

QuercusMax 12y ago
But why does it take longer? There are some stores where I'm just as fast to self-checkout as a human cashier, and others where it takes a ton more time, because the machine is super laggy. (Or deliberately made sluggish?) You're literally doing the same thing as a cashier, using the same equipment - as long as you don't suck at scanning things, it should take exactly the same amount of time.

geebee 12y ago

The article starts with a magnificent exercise in false equivalence: "We have no problem taking Wall Street executives to task for decisions that leave American families financially devastated, yet we give Silicon Valley billionaires a pass when they do the same thing". No, they don't do the same thing. If I automate in 5 minutes with software a process that used to take three people with pencils and erasers four months, I have not done the same thing as taking out insurance policies against bad mortgage securities that only I know are bad because I'm the one who took the good mortgages out and replaced them with bad mortgages because the fine print allowed me to do this. Yes, both do eliminate some jobs. One because those jobs can now be done more efficiently by machines. The other, because massive amounts of wealth was destroyed by financial trickery. It's so hard to get past that point that I almost didn't read the more sensationalistic presented but nonetheless worthy of consideration issues that followed. Yes, social media and other internet behemoths are doing alarming things to privacy. Yes, we need to be concerned if we send millions out of work, with no clear path to employment. Yes, we should be concerned about the intense concentration of wealth in a winner-take-all economy. All kinds of interesting ideas have been presented (minimum basic income, for instance). But you won't find any discussion of them in this article.

balabaster 12y ago
Yes, but if you dig a bit deeper, the wealth was created by massive amounts of financial trickery too. Most of the paper that supports the stock market is really just a fabrication of an illusion - people mostly selling virtual pieces of paper that suggests you own a right to buy and/or sell something if a hypothetical scenario ever occurs. So to say that the wealth was destroyed by financial trickery isn't the whole story... it was created by that same trickery. All the wealth you see in the real world (the big mansions, flashy cars, accumulation of stuff, that nice secure feeling you have because of all the money you have in your bank account, your ability to purchase stuff) is built upon an illusion that only exists in a virtual reality. While companies are allowed to fabricate wealth pretty much out of thin air, what can you expect? Not that I'm disagreeing with your larger point. In comparison to Silicon Valley, Wall Street is a city of charlatans.
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