>'technology gone done taken our jerbs'
followed by:
>I sometimes daydream about how big you could grow a company (in revenues) without ever having more than ten people.
Do you not see the contradiction there?
followed by:
>I sometimes daydream about how big you could grow a company (in revenues) without ever having more than ten people.
Do you not see the contradiction there?
A company with big revenues and a small staff means a very productive company - someone delivering lots of value for very little work.
Whenever you have a productivity multiplier working away, jobs are being created. The jobs might not necessarily be for the company, but the productivity benefits show up somewhere.
It's easy to employ people - just pay lots of people to do low productivity or negative productivity jobs. But to make a better society with better jobs, you need productivity to go up. This requires people to lose their current (less productive) jobs, but the forces created when this happens always create more jobs somewhere.
Case in point....before Henry Ford automates his production line, cars are built by hand slowly. It is a low productivity industry. He automates, and builds many more cars, for much higher revenue per person, than before. The price of the car drops as a result. More people can now afford cars, which means lots more people can use this new tool to do their job more productively. Eventually all this increase in productivity increases employment. There are specific cases of unemployment (coachbuilders, manure collectors) but there is a rise in general employment.
This is a matter of opinion, as none of us can predict the future, but I believe that one of the purposes and goals of technology is to replace and reduce the drudgery of human labor. If I was a VC, I would be investing in almost any labor-replacing tech startup that came across my desk because the market for the tech has already been validated (companies paying for the labor) and you are bringing a more efficient solution to that market. You believe that this process somehow results in more jobs. I believe, baring massive changes in the education and social infrastructures, that this process inevitably leads to fewer jobs.
Lots of people will no longer be employed in low-productivity jobs of driving vehicles. That is exactly what will happen.
>as none of us can predict the future
Correct. And Henry ford didn't foresee Pizza delivery.
>You believe that this process somehow results in more jobs
The process creates higher productivity. Higher productivity leads to higher living standards and more jobs in aggregate, though not for the affected workers.
> I believe, baring massive changes in the education and social infrastructures, that this process inevitably leads to fewer jobs.
For this to be true, you must explain why this time it is different.
It's not the fact that a few thousand engineers replace millions of drivers. It's the fact that the increased productivity drives down the cost of things. The increased productivity also releases human capital and actual capital to pursue new things and create new jobs. This leads to new jobs in entirely new industries. It's comment to lament and say 'what are these new industries going to be?'. But as already stated - nobody can see the future. We don't know, but we must accept that it will happen, simply by looking at all of human history. The fashionable argument currently is that you need to reform education to make this possible, but other large-scale changes in technology have happened when people usually didn't finish high school. When a person needs to learn new skills, they generally find a way of doing so.
Correct, but it doesn't necessarily result in an equal number of or more jobs than before.
>but we must accept that it will happen, simply by looking at all of human history.
This is where I think we disagree the most. I don't think history sets a good precedent for predicting the future, especially in this current environment. At no point in history have we had robots and AI. We still don't have that now, and there are no guarantees that we will fully achieve AI, but in many areas we are making humans obsolete and I expect this trend to continue. Using your eariler analogy, what happened to the horses after Ford introduced mass produced cars? They were turned to glue. In many ways, this is the issue we are currently facing.
I do agree that highly skilled and entrepreneurial folks will create new industries which could dramatically alter the economic landscape, but I am still not convinced that this is going to result in full employment. These new industries will still be taking advantage of the highly automated and efficient technologies that other industries use and lower-skilled and less educated people are going to find it increasingly difficult to find work.
Now, would this be better for the US economy in general? Maybe. Maybe not. When I was in college I spent a stint as a Political Science major (focusing in IR). When learning about Asia I remember a lot of discussion about Taiwan's economy being successful in part because of their strong small to medium sized businesses.
Taiwan's government seems to be a fan of this idea as well: http://www.taiwantoday.tw/ct.asp?xItem=127151&CtNode=429