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Also, let's not forget that there's a huge class of people who aren't old enough or wealthy enough to retire, but whose current jobs are going away quickly. Those folks aren't going to be working as programmers at startups in the brave new world.

Creating "good" jobs then becomes something more like "creating good jobs that can can keep the current population employed". I don't hear many people talking in those terms anymore.

I suspect we'd be better off if we invested in education for these folks and retrained them to do something people actually want nowadays.

They might not be working as programmers at startups but there's still a lot of worthwhile tasks we could get these people doing with the right preparation and support.

"I suspect we'd be better off if we invested in education for these folks and retrained them to do something people actually want nowadays."

Problem is, evidence suggests that retraining doesn't work very well.

Here's a heartbreaking series of stories about furniture workers who were laid off when their factory outsourced their jobs. The reporter followed them as they took a community college training program, and tried valiantly to get jobs at the Google data center opening nearby:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1215161...

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1215673...

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1215767...

Unsurprisingly, virtually none of the people got jobs at Google, and the ones who didn't ended up doing things like working at WalMart at much lower wages.

It's a myth to pretend that we can re-educate enough blue-collar workers to make a dent. We're going to have to find another way, and my suspicion is that it's going to involve a resurrection of trade barriers until older workers can retire.

Thanks for the articles.

I'm not sure, however, that the examples cited within them are entirely fair - they took middle aged furniture workers and tried to get them jobs at Google after a few years retraining. Of course a guy who's had six weeks of classes in Linux isn't going to get a job at one of the most technical companies in the world.

What I was thinking was more along the line of retraining them to do useful blue collar jobs - for example HVAC maintenance - which can't be easily offshored and still is useful to society.

It's a myth to pretend that we can re-educate enough blue-collar workers to make a dent. We're going to have to find another way, and my suspicion is that it's going to involve a resurrection of trade barriers until older workers can retire.

I'd be reluctant to do this, as it's essentially a tax on everyone else to support them and essentially surrendering to the fact that we can get very little value out of these workers.

" Of course a guy who's had six weeks of classes in Linux isn't going to get a job at one of the most technical companies in the world. What I was thinking was more along the line of retraining them to do useful blue collar jobs - for example HVAC maintenance - which can't be easily offshored and still is useful to society."

Well, yes...the story is tragic because they never had a chance. But I wouldn't be quick to assume that this is a story specific to Google. You'll note that a lot of these people end up doing menial work, even after their re-training program. One presumes that if it were possible to find better jobs, these people would have found them -- they certainly sound like dedicated workers. Instead, they're working double-shifts at WalMarts and prisons.

"I'd be reluctant to do this, as it's essentially a tax on everyone else to support them and essentially surrendering to the fact that we can get very little value out of these workers."

That's one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is that we've consistently exploited cheaper labor markets to undermine our own, without building non-US markets for our own products. Moreover, many of these foreign labor markets have been playing currency games to ensure that US workers can't possibly compete. It's a system that's rigged against US production, and taxing it is one way of reintroducing balance.

One presumes that if it were possible to find better jobs, these people would have found them -- they certainly sound like dedicated workers. Instead, they're working double-shifts at WalMarts and prisons.

I suspect if it were possible to find better jobs in Lenoir, N.C (Pop. 16,000), they would have found it. In fact, they probably would have found better jobs anywhere in the Hickory-Lenoir-Morganton statistical area (Pop. 360,000).

On the other hand, there are plenty of data center technician jobs in Newark and other parts of northern NJ. I don't see any reason to believe the people in this story made any effort to seek them out.

If you read the articles I posted, you'll find that they talk about that point. The comments also discuss it extensively.

The problem with that argument is that while you're almost certainly right, there are a lot of reasons that people get stuck in one place -- poverty, houses they can't sell, sick family, etc. -- and it's fundamentally unrealistic to expect everyone to move to find a job at a data center. Few work forces are as mobile as a 20-something programmer with no kids.

Also, given that the cost of living is quite a bit higher in New Jersey than Lenoir, North Carolina, one has to carefully examine the risk/reward of the decision to move. Maybe it would work out, but for a lot of these people I suspect they'd be no better off than working at WalMart in Lenoir.

> Another way of looking at it is that we've consistently exploited cheaper labor markets to undermine our own, without building non-US markets for our own products.

That's a fairly zero-sum way of looking at it, and I'm not sure it's accurate. Germany is a big exporter, for instance, and they're certainly not China in terms of how they treat their workers, tax companies, and so forth.

Germany has a culture which considers engineering to be something important. The UK has a culture which considers engineering something unimportant (relatively, you see it easily in the language use, in the UK an "engineer" is often what you and I would call a technician).

In Anglo-saxon countries sales and marketing seems to be considered more important than engineering. And most sales and marketing people aren't in a position to innovate in traditional engineering sense, so they do what they can. Create killer marketing and compete on price. Whereas engineering culture led organisations compete on features and new tools. Compare German car companies and US car companies.

You could easily create jobs by cutting welfare and offering all of it's former recipients government jobs paying $50/day to dig holes, but this would not be a positive outcome.

Call me crazy, but I suspect that we'd be much better off with a situation like this. Imagine the boost in motivation to improve your career prospects after spending a few weeks doing work like this. And surely we can find some use for a bunch of holes in the ground.

In contrast, I know an awful lot of folks who got laid off in the last 18 months who decided to just take some time to find themselves because they were getting unemployment.

Replace "digging holes in the ground" with "repairing decaying bridges and highways." Remember that bridge collapse in Minnesota? Remember the spate of news articles about how many other bridges were in similar danger over the next decade? And then silence!

He's got a line in there arguing in support of bankers.

As I read it, he's complaining that the government views VCs as bankers. I think it's legitimate to consider the differences between the traditional loans/bonds/etc of banking and the investments VCs make.

The way to create the jobs needed in the US, is to take them away from someone else. The real problem is that technology (communication, transport, accessibility of buyers) has leveled the playing field for billions of foreign workers to compete in the US market. This means that if your job is to assemble widgets by hand, you better be ready to have the same kind of pay and living conditions and income as a billion foreign workers. That was the past, but now we keep arming the foreign countries with progressively higher level jobs by shipping the howto there. Years ago you would get your product electronics assembled in a box offshore. Now, you not only have the electronics made there, but also the ICs, and even much of the basic design work is done offshore.

So if this guy has a start up that creates a competitive technological vector away from the foreign countries' abilities, it's most positively the RIGHT way to create jobs. Do not count on the large companies doing this. Their way of creating efficiency and reducing economic drag is to ship the jobs off shore so their stock holders are happy (most of which are probably foreign anyways so they dont give a rats what effect this has in the long run).

The more technology and the progressively higher ability jobs you ship offshore, the higher and smarter jobs you need to have left in country.

It's simple...if a few billion people offshore can do the same job as you, and there is absolutely no transportation or communication barriers to have that job done offshore vs. in the US, guess what...it's done by the person that does it for less. If those jobs are assemblers, designers, engineers, you pretty fast run out of things all the American folks can do that others can't.

> The way to create the jobs needed in the US, is to take them away from someone else.

The way to create jobs is to get people producing things that other people need and want and are willing to exchange things for. This could be through lower pricing or better quality in an existing industry, or it could be through creating a new industry. As long as any human needs or wants are unfulfilled, there's a possibility for a new jobs to created filling those needs and wants.

That's it, bring back manufacturing by creating higher quality products than the Chinese. Surely most of those jobs would be higher level support to robotic assembly lines. But the Chinese have set a wonderfully low bar for quality. Furthermore higher quality products are "green".

I'm fed up with purchasing crappy products. I want a store that charges 50% more but guarantees purchases for life (kind of an anti-walmart (except for the profit part ;)).

You do realize that China is also losing manufacturing jobs as well right? Most manufacturing jobs are lost to robots not China.

Regarding "a": I don't see a refutation of the idea anywhere in your response.

Regarding "b: No. But driving the competitor out of business assumes that you're doing the same task more efficiently (with fewer people), which is theoretically better for the economy as a whole, since it means that the same goods/services are produced at less cost, and frees up labor for other things.

Regarding "c": How exactly would we be worse off as a society in this context? Replace "dig holes" with "pick up litter" or some other menial but necessary task, and it looks like a net win to me. You expend the same money, but actually get some small societal return on your investment. Can you actually argue that welfare recipients _ought_ to be idle?

Regarding "d": Aren't higher taxes and greater difficultly in obtaining starting capital "drags on efficiency"?

Regarding "e": Imagine you have a brilliant idea on how to produce, market, and sell widgets. To get started, you need new equipment, a storefront, and some working capital. How do you obtain these things? If someone lent you the capital to get started, and you created a new business as a result, are they not (at least tangentially) engaged in a 'productive' activity?

Replace "dig holes" with "pick up litter" or some other menial but necessary task, and it looks like a net win to me.

If there are already people employed by state or local governments to pick up litter, they won’t be happy to see former welfare recipients being given the same job for a much lower pay.

OTOH, one thing the current stimulus package did was give money to state and local governments, so that they didn’t have to lay off sanitation workers (or teachers or police officers or etc.) for lack of money. Recessions are particularly hard on state governments because most state constitutions require balanced budgets, but recessions cut into their tax revenue at the very same time that demands on government services increase.

Regarding c), the crappy government jobs digging holes probably would be a positive outcome.

People on welfare can sit around watching TV, playing sports or engaging in other recreational activities [1]. This is probably more pleasant than getting a job. If we replaced recreation with hole digging, people on welfare would have a greater incentive to find a job.

Regarding d), this is only true if additional education and infrastructure provide a greater benefit to the economy than their opportunity cost (e.g. the cost to business and consumers of the taxes paid to support education/infrastructure). It's not by any means clear that this is the case.

[1] Based on obesity rates among the poor, I suspect watching TV is much more common than playing sports.

I would bet that in some poor neighborhoods, watching TV is safer than playing sports.

I'm not sure of that.

In the US, obesity causes about 112,000 deaths yearly [1]. 14,000 or so people were murdered [2], mostly by people they knew [3].

This doesn't give relative risks in any given neighborhood, of course, but it is suggestive. Also, personal experience: Harlem is extremely safe, but you see lots of obesity and very little sports activity there.

[1] http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&cluster=...

[2] http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/offenses/expanded_informatio...

[3] http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/offenses/expanded_informatio...