SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
The technology revolution has delivered Google searches, Facebook friends, iPhone apps, Twitter rants and shopping for almost anything on Amazon, all in the past decade and a half.
What it hasn't delivered are many jobs. Google's Alphabet Inc. and Facebook Inc. had at the end of last year a total of 74,505 employees, about one-third fewer than Microsoft Corp. even though their combined stock-market value is twice as big. Photo-sharing service Instagram had 13 employees when it was acquired for $1 billion by Facebook in 2012.
Hiring in the computer and chip sectors dove after companies shifted hardware production outside the U.S., and the newest tech giants needed relatively few workers. The number of technology startups fizzled. Growth in productivity and wages slowed, and income inequality rose as machines replaced routine, low- and middle-income, human-powered work.
This outcome is a far cry from what many political leaders, tech entrepreneurs and economists predicted about a generation ago. In 2000, President Bill Clinton said in his last State of the Union address: "America will lead the world toward shared peace and prosperity and the far frontiers of science and technology." His economic team trumpeted "the ferment of rapid technological change" as one of the U.S. economy's "principal engines" of growth.
The gap between what the tech boom promised and then delivered is another source of the rumbling national discontent that powered the rise this year of political outsiders Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.
[...]
Eventually there'll be only decent jobs for maybe 20% of the population: What economic system is needed for that??
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday October 17 2016, @04:43PM
"Even the "moron" is more valuable to employ now than they've ever been."
Citation needed. I run a small machine shop. If a worker isn't intelligent and attentive they'll do more harm than good. The intellectual barrier to entry has been rising steadily.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday October 17 2016, @04:52PM
Citation needed. I run a small machine shop. If a worker isn't intelligent and attentive they'll do more harm than good. The intellectual barrier to entry has been rising steadily.
Are all jobs in small machine shops? Further, I appropriated the term from the following phrase:
Completely ignoring that they'd gone from hiring hundreds of morons to repetitively stick biscuits together
That still required attention to detail, reliability, etc. Maybe you wouldn't have them operating heavy equipment (though I suspect there was a lot of that in their jobs), but they have proven work habits and such that still would make them valuable today, just not as valuable as the elevated costs of employing them.
(Score: 2, Informative) by tftp on Tuesday October 18 2016, @05:40AM
Are all jobs in small machine shops?
No; but the remaining jobs for less-than-geniuses are, basically, in fast food restaurants, janitorial services, and escort services. Everything else requires brains - more and more every single day. Efficiency of individual labor increases proportionally. Fifty years ago a hundred people were employed; ten years ago ten people were employed; and today one person is employed to do the same amount of work. That one person is pretty smart, but the other 99 workers have no job (no matter how smart they are if there are too few vacancies.)
they have proven work habits and such that still would make them valuable today, just not as valuable as the elevated costs of employing them
Being "not as valuable as the elevated costs of employing them" translates into "unable to hire" and "useless." Businesses are not mutual appreciation societies; workers, even if they co-own the business, have to earn enough to keep the lights on and the food on their dining tables. If someone produces less than he is consuming, that person is drawing from the pool. If that person is your relative, you may be OK with it. If that person is a worker in your business, you may want to replace him - even if you run the purest co-op on Earth and there is no greedy capitalist who is taking all the profit from you. If you (a manager) will not do that, your workers will tell you to get rid of the bum - he lowers their income, and he is not their elderly father to subsidize. This had happened regularly in socialist USSR (бригадный подряд [wikipedia.org]).
(Score: 0, Redundant) by khallow on Tuesday October 18 2016, @01:48PM
No; but the remaining jobs for less-than-geniuses are, basically, in fast food restaurants, janitorial services, and escort services.
And a bunch of other job categories you didn't mention in your comprehensive list.
but the other 99 workers have no job
Yet somehow we don't have massive unemployment (more than half unemployed).
Being "not as valuable as the elevated costs of employing them" translates into "unable to hire" and "useless." Businesses are not mutual appreciation societies; workers, even if they co-own the business, have to earn enough to keep the lights on and the food on their dining tables. If someone produces less than he is consuming, that person is drawing from the pool. If that person is your relative, you may be OK with it. If that person is a worker in your business, you may want to replace him - even if you run the purest co-op on Earth and there is no greedy capitalist who is taking all the profit from you. If you (a manager) will not do that, your workers will tell you to get rid of the bum - he lowers their income, and he is not their elderly father to subsidize. This had happened regularly in socialist USSR.
For example, I'd eliminate minimum wage requirements altogether as well as public pensions and replace it with a need-based basic income.