Job creation: Where are the startups?

And, to be clear, one viewpoint I mostly agree with in terms of society right-now-this-instant.

I've normally dismissed the idea of post-scarcity economics as some unrealistic utopia. While there is an undeniable trend of a smaller and smaller percentage of the economy devoted to basic survival necessities, it was never clear to me that that number could get close to zero.

But when I step back and take a clear headed look at it, I think maybe it could.

We're not there now, and we won't be tomorrow, but we will be someday. I'm coming to believe in that conclusion.

We could get there in a decade or so if we pulled out all the stops and chased it at damn-the-torpedoes speed. We'll likely be pretty close in a few decades no matter what we choose (barring self-destructive paths, always possible of course).

So then, now that I'm coming to accept the outcome, I've started thinking about what will make it happen as quickly as possible. Why drag the transition out? It's going to be painful, but it's better to get the pain over with. The band-aid philosophy- rip it off all at once.

What are the obstacles to the transition? How can they be mitigated or avoided? What can we, as engineers and entrepreneurs, do to make it happen faster and smoother?

Even if you DON'T accept the inevitability of the post-scarcity economy, it's worth taking some time to pretend you do, imagine what that world is like, and how you would get there from here.

Certainly more value than in just insisting that the system we have will live forever. Even a casual reading of history makes it clear that absolutely will not happen.

Your entire argument is underpinned by two basic assumptions :

1. Human labor will always be required to develop goods and maintain infrastructure

2. The number of individuals required to fulfill #1 equals or exceeds the global pool of working age individuals

Neither of the above are certainties.

>>In short, what you're trying to describe is some type of utopia - a vision which has lead to the death and suffering of millions. It's dangerous thinking and I would urge you to become more educated in this area.

Your line of reasoning is reactionary. While I too am quite the fan of free market capitalism, this doesn't mean it is the only possible sustainable system of human growth & cooperation. It's a current economic reality, not a religion.

Dreaming, even naively, of a utopian future is dangerous only to the ones who control our dystopian present.

However, taxes are legitimate and have been around forever. I imagine that you regard this status quo as slavery. Also, limited work-weeks have been around forever. I gather that you regard this as freeloading. And these things ultimately provide for public goods, without any Stalinesque genocides being perpetrated against 'job creators'. At the same time, taxes do not get collected without legally accountable economic activity.

Indeed, as productivity increases, we should see benefits such as people not being forced to immediately begin starving in the street because their job became economically unnecessary, and people not being forced to work 80-hour weeks to provide for the profit of somebody else. If overall productivity increases only come with less social security and more compulsory work for one class, that is because another class is applying coercion to steal labor, which is not morally any better than stealing capital.

This observation does not require one to be a Bolshevik, nor does it entail that any mass killings will occur. Nor does it involve revolution. The status quo of several decades in the western world is already something of a balance between workers and capitalists. Now you are peddling the idea that this arrangement has been unfair to the capitalists who have been tremendously enriched by it.

That isn't correct. It is in the interests of capitalists not to kill and overwork the people whose time is required to produce anything, and not to strangle the average consumers whose spending power drives the economy. The problem is that short-term thinking and ideologues such as yourself are working to convince capital holders otherwise, that they should cash out as quickly as possible without regard to the social impact of what they are doing.

That's dangerous thinking and I urge you to become more educated in this area.

It might seem logical, but it isn't true.

The Luddites were people who were frightened of the introduction of machinery, and used to go around attacking factories, thinking there would be no more jobs.

In reality, whenever automation provides benefits through lower prices, what this does is reduce the amount of hours labor a person needs to spend in order to fulfill that need. If you have a cow, it will take a person a couple of hours to obtain a gallon of milk, and then you have to house, feed and look after the cow. Instead, with automated and factory-produced milk, the average person spends a fraction of that time - maybe 10 minutes - to earn the money to purchase that milk at a convenient location.

And so it goes with everything - whenever a product is automated and the jobs (hours) required to produce that thing is reduced, then the cost of the product falls. The consumer then has a surplus of cash, which is really just a surplus of their time spent, to either keep for themselves, or spend on something else.

As human needs and wants are essentially unlimited (most of us want to go to the moon if it was possible) then, for each good that falls in price, demand will shift to other goods. As automation lowers the cost of each additional good, a person is able to consume more of that good or more additional goods.

Now, you might say that 'consumption' is bad - but consuming a good might also mean consuming a service, like a movie, a local band, or an art gallery, which is still consumption, but not in the 'using up resources' manner (although nearly every consumption save for walking to a tai-chi class on the local beach uses up some kind of resources)

This curve of increasing standard of living is intrinsically linked to increases in productivity, which roughly means the amount of goods + services produced for the given input of working hours.

Thus increasing amounts of automation will never, ever reduce the supply of jobs, because each automated thing that frees up human time for something else, in itself creates activity which generally means creating more jobs.

You don't get an iPhone 5 to buy unless farmers can milk a herd of 150 cows singlehandedly. And so we'll never have tourist trips to the moon unless there is increasing automation amongst industries that are currently labour-intensive. This has been going on for a millenia, and there is no tipping-point or transition point, as it is a very smooth curve. Yes, it can be disruptive for small pockets of workers who become no longer required - there are no more pools of typists - but at the macro level the transition is relatively smooth.

In reality, though, this is not as intuitive a leap for people to make as he thinks. If there's no jobs available at existing companies today, that doesn't mean that there won't be some tomorrow; and starting a new business involves navigating a big thicket of complicated issues most people have no experience dealing with, like forms of legal organization, raising capital, state and local regulatory compliance, taxes and accounting, insurance, etc.

Social factors are also important: if everyone around you makes a living as an employee, the idea that you can start your own business might never even really occur to you, because you have no role models for that kind of behavior. If you go ahead and do it anyway, you risk looking like the odd man out in your social group -- constantly having to explain your decision to people who don't really get it. And of course there's the non-trivial risk of failure, which potentially exposes you to scorn ("I told you opening that shop was a dumb idea, but you wouldn't listen," says your mother-in-law).

Given the choice between checking the job listings again tomorrow and taking on a radical change in lifestyle that requires learning a whole bunch of new skills, it's understandable that just sticking to the job listings as long as they can is the more appealing choice for lots of people.