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Comment by nawitus | Hacker News Reader

Creating jobs is a strange goal. The effective, simplest and most probable solution is working inefficiently. Working efficiently, on the other hand, typically eliminates jobs.

All politicians talk about creating jobs. 99% of the time it leads to bad regulation that creates jobs through incentivizing inefficiency. People of course will vote for politicians that advocate job creation because people want jobs. The extreme form of this is ludditism.

People miss the whole point of companies. The goal should never be providing jobs but creating value. If a company could be made automatic and all it's employees jobless, then that would obviously be positive. The company would still create the same value to society, but would require less people.

The main counter-argument is that those who advocate job creation only advocate "necessary jobs or "meaningful jobs". In practise that doesn't pan out. It's simply a backwards way of trying to create more products and services.

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I also fundamentally disagree with this post. My goal as an entrepreneur is to eliminate a million jobs. I am reading a book about the Shipping container, and it massively reduced the number of jobs for longshoremen and merchant marines.

I can also say that working at a big company that is people's mentality. They want to manage a lot of people. That's their goal. Not to create value. And imho the results are often poor.

I think it would be great for society if there were less jobs and people were able to pursue more creative endeavors than menial jobs. imho the goal should be to find a way for people to meet their basic needs without needing a job. NOT to create tons of jobs.

The RFS never said one million low end jobs and specifically stated they are not looking for companies that would employ one million people. Maybe creating 1,000,000 enterpreneurs?

It sounds like they are interested in 2 sided markets, like Uber, or airbnb. I get that part, but the "jobs" part is lost on me. Wouldn't uber be cooler if it used self driving cars!!!

YC isn't in a position to invest in deep automation, and are good at building markets. And once you build a 2 sided freelancer market , you are very likely to control it when it's automated.

Uber will obviously switch to self-driving cars once that's viable, shaving the on-going cost of drivers.

I think you are confused with his proposal. YC is looking for any company that can create demand that requires 1 millions workers to fulfill it.

It is not to create a huge company. It has nothing to do with eliminating jobs. It has nothing to do with provide basic living standard.

For example, if a new technology that allow us to regrow part of organs easily, but it requires living persons to carry the organs within their bodies until organs mature to be transplanted. Those people may have a job as 'organ incubator'.

My goal would is (as an investor in Organovo) to regrow organs and it's agnostic to whether it creates, eliminates or displaces workers.

Of course you should not. But in the end, you need other people who are willing to trade something for your investment.

Your investment would be valued 0 if no one wants or needs it. And valuation is how much they are willing to pay for it.

So in the end. I think creating jobs is just a mask for 'creating demand for new things for people have no new creating wealth'. Since total aggregation of time of lives of oligarchs and their families are much limited than total populations. So it is better to create demand for consumer market.

But of course, if one day, oligarchs have technology to enable them to live forever, they will have unlimited time to live and my argument won't sustain under that condition.

This is a bizarre tangent. An oligarch could just enslave people through brute force or more subtle means of mental and psyhcological manipulation into working feverishly in a self-defeating system of exploitation.

Is that "creating demand" for labour? Or for the products?

Is demand for slave labour a good kind of demand?

It is a valid argument. If an oligarch desires to enslave the rest of human being for its own amusement. And the rest of human beings are willing to trade their precious time of lives with the oligarch by being enslaved.

But I feel if the oligarch overplays the enslavement, everyone can choose to commit suicide and having no pain anymore in their lives. Then the oligarch will have no one to play the game with.

So to keep the system working, the oligarch has to fulfill desires of people.

My main point is the most precious wealth for everyone is the time of their lives. And we all trade our time in lives with other people in either products or services. Progress in technologies has enabled us to enjoy growing purchase power of our time and enable us with more fulfillment of desires. But for the moment the whole economy system somewhat gets stuck and we are having problems to figure out what demand can we create to allow people to trade with. Even an oligarch has to trade wealth for desires.

"An oligarch desires to enslave the rest of human being for its own amusement. And the rest of human beings are willing..."

That's not how slavery works.

"I feel if the oligarch overplays the enslavement, everyone can choose to commit suicide"

Again, this is not historically aware.

=====

I will agree with you on a broader point, which I think you've left unsaid: that everything you want in life is almost always in the hands of someone else already.

For example, if you want a thing someone else has already owned it (or its component parts). If you want a friend, someone else has already been in a relationship with them (either earlier friends, or their family etc). If you want to build anything you need tools, and raw materials, and other resources that somebody else has already found, claimed, owned or handled.

And in that logical sense, "success" is nothing more than taking what (some) other people have already got.

But you've over-abstracted the point to much:

*Even an oligarch has to trade wealth for desires."

True, but this is still consistent will chattle slavery.

I may "trade my wealth" for weapons, and food, and the means to keep you chained to the cotton field. But that says nothing of the way in which the threat of violence co-erces you into doing my bidding--that type of coercive consent is an interesting but ultimately tangentially related academic rabbit hole.

While I tend to agree, there's some truth to the saying "Idle hands are the devil's playground". How do non-creative people lead fulfilling lives without being rewarded for their labor? I suppose there's lots of volunteer work to do, but if we could eliminate jobs, we might as well eliminate volunteer work.

There is plenty of stuff to do. hobbies, sports, traveling, socializing. people often do "work" as a hobby. cooking, working in the yard, hunting, fishing.

It's thought that hunter/gatherer societies only worked 15-20 hours per week.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society

We may have different definitions of "fulfilling". I view it as adding value to society. All the things you described are either creative endeavors or just improving one's own life. If non-creatives just played sports, traveled and socialized, then we have no problem. What I worry about are people who have nothing to motivate them to do those things and then resent the rest of society, or use their creativity to harm society. When you have bills to pay, that tends to preoccupy the mind.

Just because your goal is to eliminate jobs doesn't mean another entrepreneur can't aim to do the opposite. I think a lot of the types of companies that would be useful in this direction don't so much "create jobs" as they allow people to get paid to do something they enjoy/want to do. Patreon and Beacon are the two that come to mind for me.

Is creating jobs any entrepreneur's goal?

Increase customers, yes. Create a two sided market, yes. In the case of a 2 sided market the "workers" are your customers.

Uber eliminates the jobs for manual dispatcher at cab companies.

This is interesting because it might motivate some out-of-the-box thinking. If you can't think of a good way to make a ton of money while creating a million jobs, then sure, eliminate some more like everyone else is trying to do. Y Combinator might well even fund you, under their RFS for robotics or the one for levers or infrastructure or AI.

Is creating jobs any entrepreneur's goal?

Absolutely: their own job, for starters!

More broadly though: some of the most oft-cited reasons by people starting small businesses (tech included) is quite explicitly to be able to do stuff they like and be paid for it; or be able to surround themselves with like-minded people working on goals of common interest to them. Other times, family members, friends or colleagues/guild members come together to provide themselves with a steady source of income --that's how most law firms and medical practices get started, after all.

>I think it would be great for society if there were less jobs and people were able to pursue more creative endeavors than menial jobs.

The world is going to have a hard time pursuing "creative endeavors" while homeless and starving - which, if you hadn't checked, is what happens when you don't have a job and people around you support conservative economic policy.

It is not possible to hold this position without being legitimately fairytale-villain evil or a socialist.

They said "the goal should be to find a way for people to meet their basic needs without needing a job."

e.g., if someone has off-grid battery tech and solar (or whatever else), they can knock off their electricity and gas bills. If they can automate the recycling of sewage into clean water, fertiliser and leftovers, and they had water storage, they could ditch their water bill.

If they had underground (think shipping containers) and automated food production, they could cover some of their food bills and still have ground level land free for entertainment.

Of my general costs, I'm not immediately sure how we would ultimately replace council costs (roads, etc) and internet connectivity.

How would they get to own all these wonderful things, and the land to put them on, if they don't have jobs?

The shipping container certainly created one million jobs globally. I have read "The Box" also, and the job creation was in the factories around the world. The job loss was mostly the longshoremen and the break-bulk process that was wasteful in comparison.

Creating 1 million jobs might mean disrupting 100,000 others. Or maybe it will just mean removing waste in large scale processes that we currently do as a society. My friend Mo is doing this http://www.gizmag.com/infinite-pipeline/23762/ which could help bring water to places that it wasn't economical to do previously. This would change the life of those people who need to fetch water every day. Spending half your day getting water is a huge waste of human potential.

The point about the shipping container creating jobs in factories is an interesting one. The effect on jobs is complicated. Even Uber eliminates the jobs for dispatcher at cab companies.

I prefer clear goals. I want to create value and I am agnostic to the effect it has on jobs.

+1 for Mo

My goal as an entrepreneur is to eliminate a million jobs.

Surely your goal as an antrepreneur shoul dbe to provide a million people with a desirable new product/service/ The word 'entrepreneur' means 'between-taker', ie someone that carries things back and forth between suppliers and consumers, like historical traders.

Identifying economic inefficiency and finding something to remedy it is one way of identifying your target consumer, but far from the only one. In your example of the shipping container, you neglect to consider that they're only useful insofar as there is sufficient trading activity taking place to fill the containers up. Labor shortages aren't often a big limiting factor on trade.

I think it would be great for society if there were less jobs and people were able to pursue more creative endeavors than menial jobs.

So do I, but creativity and productivity are wholly different things, especially when it comes to paying the bills.

Yes, I think another way to think of the 'between-taker' idea is that an entrepreneur find ways to use existing resources in a new way that creates more value than those resources could previously create. Sometimes those resources are physical (machines, buildings, etc), but they can also be human beings.

I think it is reasonable for YC to have an investment theory that is something like 'productivity enhancements are making many talented human resources available more cheaply, a business that finds a way to use them could do well.'

But, I think the Uber example is a little unclear. It seems likely to me that driving is going to be automated away in 10-20 years. And, since so many adults drive (even those with other jobs), there is a massive incentive to find a way to automate that activity and make it safer.

I think there is a bit of a paradox - as the number of people employed in a task increases, the incentive to automate that task increases as well. I am not too optimistic that creating large numbers of long-term sustainable jobs is easy, but I think the attempt to find uses for undervalued resources makes as much sense for humans as it does for any other resource.

> Creating jobs is a strange goal.

Why? Who says efficiency should be humanity's goal? Is humanity a machine to be optimized? Are we just evolved cogs, one of nature's crueler jokes, or are we (also) agents that can put up a fight? You know, Dostoyevsky extolled the virtues of intentional self harm -- or spite -- as a person's noblest goal, asserting freedom from "laws of nature". I'm not saying spite should be a matter of public policy, but it's very important to avoid seeing some mechanistic, or even natural, process as a desirable outcome just because that's how things work (this is the naturalistic fallacy[1]). Public policy should be crafted subject to consideration and political debate.

> People miss the whole point of companies. The goal should never be providing jobs but creating value.

Says who? That's a peculiarly American view of the role of corporations. Another valid goal for companies is providing sustenance to their employees first, and "value" later. I.e. generating value is just a means to an end.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy

It also depends on the meaning of "value." In the US it looks like "value" is interchangeable with "cash-able goods," which as you point out is quite restrictive. And, on the other hand, it goes straight against most of companies' "visions" (which are usually non-monetizable).

>> Creating jobs is a strange goal. > Why? Who says efficiency should be humanity's goal? Is humanity a machine to be optimized?

I think saying that creating jobs is a goal is more accurately the viewpoint that humans are cogs.

Say there's an efficient way to do something, for example: a machine that weaves fabric.

If the goal is to create jobs, we could stop the machine and hire people to do the job. In fact, I bet we could force people to do it in a really inefficient and tedious manner that would require lots of people to replace a single machine.

The disadvantages: slower. more expensive. more error-prone. people's time-wasting.

The advantages: these people have a job so now you have a 'valid' excuse to give people an income.

I'm not arguing that one goal is better than another, just saying that goals cannot be (solely) derived from logic, because nature or logic cannot dictate what is good for humans. Deciding on common goals is exactly what politics is for.

That's a peculiarly American view of the role of corporations. Another valid goal for companies is providing sustenance to their employees first, and "value" later.

Indeed. Even stakeholder-driven commercial institutions like co-ops or credit unions are somehow culturally not-quite-corporations in the (American) usual sense.

The best way to actually, legitimately create jobs is to find a way to match a need many people have with people who can address it, in a way that wasn't previously discoverable.

Its not a strange goal at all. We have a social structure and economic structure centered on work. Its the key basis for how the production of our society is distributed. Increasing overall production doesn't necessarily do anything for the lot of the median person. In a democracy, where the interests of the majority are paramount, a policy that reduces overall production but leaves the median person better off could be rational.

Not sure how you define "improving the welfare", but it's certainly not the function of the USA govt to provide anything but what's defined in the constitution. You may disagree on a philosophical basis, but that's what the constitution is designed to do.

The Preamble to the Constitution says:

> We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

It is a fundamental misunderstanding of the Constitutional scheme to think that the Framers implemented "limited government." The federal government was indeed constituted as one of limited powers, but it was created against the backdrop of the state governments, which were conceived to have inherited all the powers of the British sovereign, limited only by their own constitutions.

You can invoke the Constitution to argue that some particular policy is better implemented at the state level than the federal level, but it is incorrect to say that this or that end is not the function of the federal and state governments taken together. We live, by design, in a democracy: the ends of government are whatever we want them to be, subject only to the limitations outlined in the Constitution.

Unless I'm an idiot but you just contradicted yourself or misunderstand-ed what you wrote. The Federal government is indeed intentionally limited in power. Why would you want it any other way?

I'm more of a Federalist--confusing name for an important concept. But I don't think that's what we're talking about. It sounds like we're disagreeing with what constitutes "general welfare" as you highlighted.

Ok, where do you draw the line in modern society? If you want to invoke the argument "what would the framers have wanted?" then what do you think they meant? Who can limit the definition of "general welfare" now. All you need is a bunch of loud people for any random issue, then it becomes a general welfare issue.

When I used the word "government" in my original post, I was referring to government generally, not the federal government specifically. Thus, your point about the limited powers of the federal government is irrelevant, because by design the state governments have almost all the powers that the federal government does not. If voters wish to achieve a particular end, the government has the power to pursue it, so long as it doesn't violate any individual rights.

There is absolutely nothing in your OP that indicates you're referencing anything other than the Federal government (given the thread's context), and it wouldn't matter anyway. How is that irrelevant? At this point I have no idea if you're even writing what you intend to--I'm not understanding it.

Yes, the state governments should have more power--I assume that was your point.

There's nothing in my OP that suggests I'm even talking about the U.S. much less the U.S. federal government. I was talking about democracies in general.

> Yes, the state governments should have more power--I assume that was your point.

No, my point is that your original statement ("it's certainly not the function of the USA govt to provide anything but what's defined in the constitution") is wrong. That might be true of the federal government, which is limited in scope, but that is not true of the state governments, which are not and were never conceived to be. The state governments can (try to) provide, almost without limit, whatever voters want them to provide.

For what it's worth, Rayiner's comments make perfect sense to me and in context of the broader thread. I wonder if you've approached them with a preconceived intent or argument and, as such, read into them?

You clearly misunderstood.

Since the State (in the academic sense of the word, with capital S) can comprise institutions at multiple administrative levels (eg state and federal), it is entirely possible to have a federal government with limited powers against a backdrop of strong state governments.

Indeed, some legal historians like William Novak have argued that many of today's widespread notions around the historicity of "limited government" and the early republic are largely revisionist myths [1].

[1] http://www.history.ucsb.edu/projects/labor/documents/TheMyth...

Before you downvote me, at least reply. You wrote It is a fundamental misunderstanding of the Constitutional scheme to think that the Framers implemented "limited government."

That is exactly what the framers wanted from the federal government. Your following sentence directly contradicts your entire point. We're talking about FEDERAL POWERS.

I don't downvote people who reply to me, and in any case HN doesn't let you do so...

In any case, there's nothing contradictory in that statement. "Limited government" is a term with specific meaning in libertarian and neoclassical circles. It refers to a society in which the government, which may be democratically elected, has a limited range of powers and can only pursue certain ends. In such a society, the majority cannot vote to pursue a particular end if it is outside the proper scope of government.

The framers did not implement "limited government" in the U.S. They created a limited government, the federal government, but only against the backdrop of the un-limited state governments. In the U.S., the "government" (between the state governments and the federal government), can pursue nearly any end that voters might wish to pursue. It is, together, limited only in scope by certain Constitutional rights. The limited nature of the federal government is just a tool to divide power between the state and federal levels.

Ok, here is my last reply. Clearly, you don't want to consider any opinion other than your own:

1. You said Increasing overall production doesn't necessarily do anything for the lot of the median person.

Prove it. Provide sources. This is contradictory to the past 100 years of civilization.

2. You said In a democracy, where the interests of the majority are paramount, a policy that reduces overall production but leaves the median person better off could be rational.

Have you ever heard of "Tyranny of the Majority"? What if the majority wanted slavery? Would you still agree with your argument? We don't live in a democracy in the US--it's a simple way to communicate public participation in society, which is needed. You seem to be mixing stats and political metaphors with no coherent point.

Finally, I'm confused with your last assertion that policy that reduces overall production but leaves the median person better off could be rational. How is that rational? Then again, humans aren't rational so maybe I'm mistaken.

> Ok, here is my last reply. Clearly, you don't want to consider any opinion other than your own:

I'm happy to consider your opinion, I just don't understand what you're trying to say.

> Prove it. Provide sources. This is contradictory to the past 100 years of civilization.

This is a purely logical statement that does not require sources to prove. Imagine a society with 9 people, and 90 units of production, each person getting 10 units. Then imagine an improvement where total production goes up to 120 units, but the extra units are distributed so that each of the top three people get 20 units. Thus, not all changes that increase overall production necessarily improve the lot for the median person.

> Have you ever heard of "Tyranny of the Majority"? What if the majority wanted slavery? We don't live in a democracy in the US--it's a simple way to communicate public participation in society, which is needed.

You've got it backwards. We don't just have public participation in society, we have rule by the will of the majority, through elected leaders. The phrase "tyranny of the majority" is not synonymous with "majority rule." Rather, it refers to the exceptional case in which the majority uses its authority to abuse minorities. In the U.S. protections exist to prevent such abuse, but those are exceptions to the general rule that the majority is in charge.

In a system of limited government, the majority can express it's will through the government only in certain limited ways. But in the U.S., the "government" (state and local together) have nearly unlimited scope. In the U.S., the majority can express its will in nearly any way it wants, limited only by certain individual rights.

> Finally, I'm confused with your last assertion that policy that reduces overall production but leaves the median person better off could be rational. How is that rational?

Go back to the second scenario above. 9 people, 120 total units of production, with everyone having 10 except the top 3 people who have 20. In the next year, the people vote to change the rules so that total production is 111 units. However, that production is distributed so everyone has 11 units, while the top three people have 15 each. Thus, you have a scenario in which overall production is lower, but six people are better off and three people are worse off than the year before. In a democratic society, this is a totally rational policy.

[That increasing overall production doesn't necessarily do anything for the lot of the median person] is contradictory to the past 100 years of civilization.

Perhaps, but if you consider the past 35 years in the US (and Britain, to a lesser extent), that's exactly what's been happening. It is quite counterintuitive and hard to fathom, but in fact median incomes and wages today have not risen at all since 1980 (!) despite all these years of GDP growth and a steady rise in productivity, which has tripled since then and previously moved in tandem with [1,2].

Put in another way: simplistically, if US household income had risen along with productivity (as it did ever since modern records began), today the national median wage ought to be around $80,000 and median family income around $150,000 (in today's dollars!); and the still ongoing personal computer revolution would have seen people's wages nearly double within a decade.

Sounds preposterous, but that is what robust economic growth typically looks like.

[1] http://stateofworkingamerica.org/charts/productivity-and-rea...

[2] http://stateofworkingamerica.org/charts/real-income-growth-f...

So great it see someone on HN who gets it. It's always about productivity, all the time. Increase productivity bad you increase wealth and quality of life.

Focussing on job creation is the wrong metric because you can do it by employing people to be inefficient, which makes everyone worse off as production falls.

It is a very strange goal, indeed. I'm reminded of David Graeber's idea of "Bullshit jobs:"

When I talk about bullshit jobs, I mean, the kind of jobs that even those who work them feel do not really need to exist. A lot of them are made-up middle management, you know, I’m the “East Coast strategic vision coordinator” for some big firm, which basically means you spend all your time at meetings or forming teams that then send reports to one another. Or someone who works in an industry that they feel doesn’t need to exist, like most of the corporate lawyers I know, or telemarketers, or lobbyists…. Just think of when you walk into a hospital, how half the employees never seem to do anything for sick people, but are just filling out insurance forms and sending information to each other. Some of that work obviously does need to be done, but for the most part, everyone working there knows what really needs to get done and that the remaining 90 percent of what they do is bullshit.

http://www.salon.com/2014/06/01/help_us_thomas_piketty_the_1...

That's the basic, economics 101 goal of a simplistic capitalist. Until a few years ago, the only people really pushing this notion were people in the resource extraction business.

Efficiency at all costs is something that's great for you to make other people do. Do you take the bus and walk to work? Do you have an padded chair in your office?

Henry Ford was uniquely smart among the "captains of industry" of the past in that he got that his ability to manufacture cars exceeded the economy's ability to consume them.

One of his business objectives was for his workers to be able to purchase his cars.

Yeah, let's imitate Ford, and pay our workers well - as long as they allow their lives to be scrutinized by the company's moral police:

The profit-sharing was offered to employees who had worked at the company for six months or more, and, importantly, conducted their lives in a manner of which Ford's "Social Department" approved. They frowned on heavy drinking, gambling, and (what today are called) deadbeat dads. The Social Department used 50 investigators, plus support staff, to maintain employee standards; a large percentage of workers were able to qualify for this "profit-sharing."

Besides, paying people well and eliminating jobs is not exclusive. Did Ford hire people he didn't need?

You missed he point completely.

Ford was a hard nosed capitalist with fascist leanings. Even so, while living in an era where workers were competely disposable and had virtually no rights, he paid people more than they were theoretically worth.

I just dislike the Ford adoration, but fair enough.

Still, my last statement stands; paying well is not incompatible with hiring few.

One goal might be to shift efficiency towards those who are most efficient. For example, does it make sense for very skilled professional to go to an establishment to get a massage or a manicure/pedicure? I could easily see those two jobs become 100% itinerant. It means that a productive customer doesn't need to travel and that all those people effectively become their own boss and maintain their own equipment. This also cuts out the cost of real estate, and allows for a reputation system where the best masseuses and manicurists do exceptionally well.

Then again, this would be a net gain of 0 jobs, since these people would presumably be leaving employment under the person who owns the real estate.

I can already imagine how the cosmetology boards would feel towards such a start up. Those owning the establishments would start pressuring the cosmetology boards just like dispatchers are the ones pressuring taxicab commissions. Do cosmetology boards regulate the establishments, the people or the people relative to the establishment with which they are associated?

Another market would be disintermediating personal trainers from the gyms they are associated with. I'm curious if personal trainers would earn more if they paid for personal memberships with the 2-4 biggest gym networks in a geographic region and then advertised which gyms they could train you at. This way customers could search for personal trainers that work out of the customer's gym of choice. Right now PT pay a portion of their earnings to the gyms, and I suspect its a large percentage, relatively speaking. This could be extended beyond personal training to sports specific training (running, swimming, cycling, rock climbing, etc.). [sarcasm]Is the domain trainr.com taken yet?[/sarcasm]

Another market could probably revolve around elections, and other regular seasonal/temporary work. Have the volunteers focus on the more valuable labor like p2p evangelism and have the paid labor work on putting up signs (and cleaning them up afterwards).

Also, is there a market for in-home caregivers (elderly, disabled, terminally ill) already and special needs caregivers? Would be great to be able to search for people in an area by reputation, experience, special skills/certifications (registered nurse, experience with children with autism, etc.).

Basically, any job that exists today where there are local establishments "pimping" out the employee (gyms, homecare companies, etc.) and taking an exorbitant cut of revenue because they have a brand name or prime real estate is ripe for disruption from an online P2P marketplace. You can literally flip through the "gigs" and "services" section of craigslist to get ideas here.

I'm also surprised that there isn't a way to hire a cheap paralegal directly to help you find a decent lawyer, negotiate a decent rate and work with that lawyer to make things more efficient. The cost of legal representation could be much cheaper if people needing legal representation could hire paralegals and recently graduated law students that don't yet have a job (tough market) to help you out. Furthermore, it helps out all those out of work law students since it gives them a way in the door with good law firms via their client's pocket books. If a lawyer is particularly impressed with the person helping their client, they may decide to hire them full time.

To truly create 1M new jobs, you'd need to make an entirely new line of work (Amazon mechanical turk type stuff), or enable 1M new people to participate in an existing line of work where previously there were barriers to entry (Uber/Lyft/Sidecar/AirBnB). The latter would have the effect of deflating that market, reducing median income so that achieving 1M becomes more difficult.

>Another market would be disintermediating personal trainers from the gyms they are associated with.

FYI, some dance instructors in the Bay Area work this way (i.e. they are independent but have relationships with various dance studios to teach and/or use the space for private classes.)

Is there a time-consuming accounting/tax/audit task that can be performed remotely on abstracted information (identifying parties removed)?

>People miss the whole point of companies. The goal should never be providing jobs but creating value.

"creating shareholder value"

Even if we're ignoring "social good" (which is a perfectly valid "shareholder value") one way to chase profit is to look for inputs that are cheap, and figure out how to turn those inexpensive inputs into expensive finished goods.

Right now, low-end labor is quite inexpensive. If you can figure out how to produce something useful using that inexpensive labor, there is profit to be had.

Well, I think you don't really know what a job is and what efficiency should be.

A job is demand that has to be fulfilled by another human being.

Demand comes from desires of human beings.

We as human beings, can have unlimited desires.

We as human beings, are limited by time of lives.

To create jobs is to create unlimited demand that need to be fulfilled with trading of time of another human beings.

Efficiency is to increase the purchase power of time. Then wealth of lives of human beings.

And wealth has to flow, otherwise prosperity won't appear.

And desires are limited by our imagination.

Beautifully, concisely put!

It is a shame though your downvoters elsewhere in this thread fail to appreciate your effort at explaining the --admittedly quite unintuitive-- demand side of the macroeconomy.

Thanks for your appreciations. It is hard for me to explain those ideas as other do. But yes, I feel the current problems is we forget the demand side of economy.

>The company would still create the same value to society

Ok, I'll bite.

It would still create the same value to its investors.

No for-profit company ever creates value to society except by employing people or by having secondary effects that result in more/higher-quality employment.

Nope. See "consumer surplus".

... And why is that valuable to society? Because then consumers have money to left over to spend on other things.

See "secondary effects that result in more/higher-quality employment."

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