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Comment by cyxxon | Hacker News Reader

Some days ago I read an interview with one of the more important politicians in Germany's conservative party, where he complained about millenials not buying into consumerism as much, and also about his political opponents not protecting ye olde businesses enough from this trend. All I could think of was buggy whips: if your industry is not dying because someone invented a better and cheaper way to meet demands, but because there is no longer as much demand (if at all!), then, sorry, no, you do not deserve to be saved, or bailed out even.

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Reminds me of the 2008 crash where people weren't buying cars. "Oh, awesome! They'll have to cut prices, so those who run a prudent budget will get good deals for not going along with the car-buying hype" -- no. Instead, the auto industry gets special attention and demand-propping, like Cash for Clunkers.

Privatize the profits, socialize the risks. Of course those with power will push for the most beneficial possible scenario for themselves, hypocrisy be damned.

"It's all laissez-faire until shit hits the fan."

I feel the same way whenever people & news fixate on jobs, especially with regard to jobs being lost with the closure of large factories or other big employers. No, they do not exist to produce jobs. No, we shouldn't pour money and effort into unprofitable business just for the sake of jobs...

I agree and I disagree at the same time. The problem is we did not find a solution yet to cope with the challenges of the next industrial revolution and the global competition.

The way the economy is interconnected is so fragile that it really scares me.

Economy is really a scary game especially in the age of behemoths and we do not really know how to deal with the wealth inequality. An entire nations might find themselves in a position of not being able to compete with large international conglomerates. Smaller nations are less likely to have more than 1 or 2 large corps of their own and what happens if 1 collapses / gets out-competed / bought by the competitors. We have already seen what had happened in Finland with Nokia. Sure the situation is not that bad at first. Finland is still one of the richest nations. But it hit them really hard. Their economy is "stagnating" and the unemployment rate increased.

> We have already seen what had happened in Finland with Nokia. Sure the situation is not that bad at first. Finland is still one of the richest nations. But it hit them really hard. Their economy is "stagnating" and the unemployment rate increased.

I concur -- as a young, unemployed finn from a region that has scored among the nation's worst places w.r.t. youth unemployment and unemployment in general.

But it's not just Nokia. That might have made a big dent on the economy as a whole but at the same time it shouldn't cause other companies in other industries to struggle (which has happened).

Even as they go down, we can't fixate on jobs for the sake of jobs. Sure we could be shoveling sand from pit A to pit B, but that isn't going to help us in the global economy, even if it had some local effects.

But maybe the "problem" is the global economy itself. Is it really worth it to transport cheap chicken meat across the globe ?

> just for the sake of jobs

It's not fun trying to sell stuff to people without good stable jobs (or even worse, without any jobs), trust me.

And if you can't sell it you're not gonna do it at all, unless you can start with the high-end version, Tesla-style. Which doesn't work for all things, or tends to not work so well if you're not Elon Musk...

Factory jobs are usually a bit different, as a lot of them are just being moved overseas. It's not that it's unprofitable to have the factory in X western country, it's that it is more profitable to have it in Y developing country where wages and regulations are often a lot lower.

It is an interesting problem for some nations / companies. With the USA and their companies China is one of the only viable markets out there to actually show any real growth (I am now excluding the domestic US market and EU). With that said China demands from the companies to set a joint ventures on its soil and produce locally. Without a trade way there is no way to keep the factory jobs in the US and sell in China.

Until it happens to be your job.

Believe me I do have sympathy for those left without a job. I'm without a job right now, and I would very much prefer not to be.

But that doesn't mean I believe in work for the sake of work.

If your job isn't producing something of value, why should you be getting paid? I realize that's harsh, but it's true.

Well, because if someone else doesn't offer a job, long term contributes to degradation of society and eventually increase in crime rates.

It is easy to say to just get a job when one is young and lucky to live in prosperous regions. Outside those criterias one can spend years trying to get something, even just a couple of hours a week.

And the people in those regions continue to vote ever more stubbornly for the people who created that situation and refuse to help.

> if your industry is not dying because someone invented a better and cheaper way to meet demands, but because there is no longer as much demand (if at all!), then, sorry, no, you do not deserve to be saved, or bailed out even

...wait, WHAT?! so you'd imply that bailouts are instead for industries "dying because someone invented a better and cheaper way to meet demands"? so kinda like "let's use bailouts to discourage innovation instead?!" wtf.

Not that I like the "saving dying industries" idea much, but if there's any way it would make sense to apply it, it would be to pump-up/resurrect demand for things for which people may have temporarily lost taste for due to a recession, but now the recession is over, things are back up, so it's a good idea to accelerate growth by encouraging people to consume more of the expensive stuff they lost taste for!

(Though some kind of Universal Basic Income would be the most sensitive way to increase consumption imho: cover the needs of the poor a bit, and also give more to those who already have more than enough so they can burn the extra cash and accelerate economic life...)

P.S. Oh, and one of the lessons that millenials should be thought imho, would be that, paradoxical as it may seem, on the collective level, by spending less you're making yourselves poorer! Of course, the "on a collective level" is the part most people fail to grok...

I kind of agree with you, but there is the big question what to do with the employees of such industries, regarding re-qualification and employment opportunities.

Specially here where without a whole set of Zeugnis we are apparently unable to do a certain tasks.

That is a big question, sure. I did not mean to handwave that problem away. I do not wish unemployement on anyone.

Still, the industry itself does not need to be saved just for the sake of saving the industry. In that particular interview one of the key points was the automotive industry, with the diesel scandal. If millenials don't want to buy these cars, maybe sell electric cars and invest into infrastructure projects, or invest more into car sharing (which they already do with DriveNow etc). All better than just using public funds to keep producing the same old cars, in this example.

The problem is not finding a thing to sell. The problem is a sustainable growth model and revenue. You need to actually earn money to be able to re-invest.

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