Andy Grove: How America Can Create Jobs

Mr. Grove should consider, in my view, another contemporary issue that puts our society at risk: the failure of basic infrastructure and the general fragility of engineered environment.

We have centralized (and industrialized) food production. Our power grid, efficient in some ways, creates massive central points of failure. Centralization of basic retail (e.g., the "big box" stores) has gutted small-scale local manufacturing and retail. Our transportation infrastructure is optimized for cheap oil leaving us with roadways too expensive to maintain well and a neglected rail system.

His paradigm for building "scalable" industry in the US sounds as if it might be locked back in the vision of industrialism that got us into this infrastructure problem in the first place.

I suggest that the scaling we most want is not a few firms that grow very large, but rather many small business industries that better distribute and decentralize essential production. Examples: Invent agricultural equipment and supply technology in support of small forms and more labor intenstive forms of agriculture; focus on manufacturing equipment improvements for small factories; focus on distributed and decentralized power production and distribution. Such investments are more difficult to finance because there is less often just a few big winners that generate a handsome ROI -- it's lots of tiny wins. But it's tiny wins that scale "horizontally" across regions and scale up employment just fine while at the same time giving us a more robust, resilient society.

Mister Grove doesn't speak to the mistakes our leaders have been making that have led to our macro-economic mess.

They've been borrowing massive amounts of money and keeping interest rates much lower than normal. They've strived to keep the consumer consuming, rather than keep the producers producing.

When you borrow money, you are really borrowing the labor of others. And when everybody in the richest nation in human history is borrowing, we are borrowing a lot of labor from other countries.

Imports of goods and immigration of workers skyrocketed because of our borrowing. And many jobs moved elsewhere.

But we did get good at building houses. And buying and selling them to each other. But that was unsustainable.

One day, we'll stop borrowing so much and begin paying the money back. We'll pay more for imports and our own labor will cost the world less.

We'll be working hard for much less, perhaps doing it well into old age. We may have no choice.

This just sounds like the usual protectionism. Despite the rhetoric about free trade, the US has historically been highly protectionist.

The situation is of course going to become much more complicated, as telerobotics is going to make it possible to outsource physical labour to just about any location on earth. With enough hardware and bandwidth you can pipeline human intelligence on demand to where ever it may be required. The scope of jobs which can be outsourced will also widen considerably, as changes in technology and pressures on energy and resource scarcity increase the need to maximize efficiency. "Knowledge workers" will not be exempted from technological unemployment either, and white collar workers will be subject to the same displacement or replacement forces as blue collar workers have been over the last 30 years.

A non-obvious dup of: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1479687

America is going down the toilet unless it completely rebuilds its education system. Education is primary, nothing else compares.

By ground up I mean curriculum, methods, grading, classrooms, mediums, etc. Khan Academy.org is a very refreshing step in the right direction. I am learning everything in math while I eat breakfast and before going to sleep - from someone who always hated school, and was especially poor at 'grasping' math the way it was taught.

Learn how to learn, injecting a love of learning, independence. Our founding fathers would be crying if they say how schools were being run these days.

/rant

The quickest, healthiest way for our society to put people back to work is to develop decentralized agriculture.

A carefully planned network of farms around every urban area will drive the cost of eating good food down while providing an almost endless source of baseline employment.

My preferred solution is a constitutional amendment that imposes a flat tariff of 0-10% on all imports, the exact tax decided by an act of Congress. Congress has the power to impose import tariffs already, but a successful movement to use that power would result in the usual bad outcomes: industry-specific protectionism, capture by lobbyists, de facto election of legislators by foreign lobbyists, etc.

A better solution might be a Constitutionally-flat national VAT on all goods regardless of origin, using the opportunity to burn the income tax code to the ground. (Firing all the income tax workers would massively decrease the cost of labor all by itself, giving a substantial boost to manufacturing productivity.) This has no chance of being approved.