Comment by chubot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chubot | Hacker News Reader

edit: To answer my own question, I guess it has to be a "job platform" like EBay or Uber, and not a company (as sama is saying). Otherwise the economics are quite challenging.

There is the distinction that EBay sellers get most of the revenue; EBay just takes a cut and thus doesn't have to have a huge amount of revenue itself.

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Doesn't this mean the company has to make more than $50 billion in revenue? Assuming a $50K wages a year, 1M jobs takes $50B to pay for.

Do the jobs have to be in the US?

Seems like an interesting idea, but my first thought is that you would want to find some way NOT to pay $50B a year... that would be a lot of profits. More profits than the vast majority of companies make.

It seems risky because it's hard to imagine getting to 1M jobs in less than 10 or 20 years. But in 10 or 20 years, computers will have gotten a lot better at the things that they are currently poor at. It's very hard to predict, but it will change rapidly.

Did EBay create 1M jobs? i.e. a significant number of people have made their entire living on Ebay. I think it might have been on the order of 1M, but not sure.

edit: http://investor.ebay.com/releasedetail.cfm?releaseid=170073

Ebay in 2005 claims 724K as primary or secondary source of income. If I had to guess it would be more like 72K "jobs", as 1/10th of those people might have Ebay as their primary source. That was 2005, but I don't think the order of magnitude has changed in the last 9 years.

Did EBay create 1M jobs?

This is pretty difficult to determine, if you want net jobs created, not merely people who currently make a living selling via eBay. For example, when a consignment store closes and that business moves to eBay, those are jobs shifting from one location to another, not really net-created jobs. Figuring out how to net that out is pretty complex, and I'm not sure solid enough data is available to determine to what portion of eBay's business are new transactions, versus existing merchants shifting sales channels.

This is perhaps even more clear with Amazon Marketplace, which has a number of booksellers making a living selling used books full-time there, but probably a number actually amounting to fewer employees than have been displaced by the same Amazon's impact on brick-and-mortar used book stores. Many of the full-time sellers are even direct continuations of such used-book stores, which have laid off most of their staff and "gone virtual", transitioning from meatspace to online storefronts. (This isn't to say that Amazon Marketplace doesn't produce other advantages, but creating net new jobs in the used-book sector is probably not one of them.)

To further complicate things, you also have to count the _customers_ of the firm in question. Amazon made certain things cheaper, and there are probably at least a few marginal businesses out there that can exist because of it.

A similar argument goes for eBay -- there are probably entrepreneurs out there who make a living in part because they can use eBay to buy things. This includes obvious stuff like resellers, but also less obvious stuff like a business that just uses eBay products as one of many inputs.

Unfortunately, the historical way to create 1M jobs is with bullshit jobs[1] which by themselves produce no value.

[1]http://www.salon.com/2014/06/01/help_us_thomas_piketty_the_1...

Perhaps it can be done with leverage? Finding a way to empower others to create those jobs. Perhaps this is via capital, advice, networking, or some combination.

I live in Europe, baltic country. you can get a lot of workers to work for 10k/year. for 20 it can be almost top level workers.

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