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posted by janrinok on Monday October 17 2016, @09:28AM   Printer-friendly
from the where's-the-good-news? dept.

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??


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 18 2016, @03:17AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 18 2016, @03:17AM (#415522)

    I blame Goldman Sachs and the Greek Government:

    http://business.financialpost.com/news/goldmans-secret-greece-loan-a-sexy-story-between-two-sinners [financialpost.com]

    Greece’s secret loan from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. was a costly mistake from the start.

    On the day the 2001 deal was struck, the government owed the bank about €600-million ($793-million) more than the €2.8-billion it borrowed, said Spyros Papanicolaou, who took over the country’s debt-management agency in 2005. By then, the price of the transaction, a derivative that disguised the loan and that Goldman Sachs persuaded Greece not to test with competitors, had almost doubled to €5.1-billion euros, he said.