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Business news summarized a MarketWatch article thusly: "One reason growth is not faster is because technology is helping customers more than companies." As a technocrat, I thought that was the whole idea.
"Two roads diverged," Robert Frost wrote in what is perhaps the most popular poem of all time, "The Road Not Taken." Frost's opening words keep playing in my head every time an economic indicator is released, a global macro forecast is revised, or financial markets take a tumble. In all cases, the bulls and the bears find enough ammunition to support their diametrically opposed views on the U.S. economy.
Rarely have two roads diverged so dramatically for so long. It took six years for mainstream economists to come around to the notion that no, this is not your grandfather's economy; and no, real economic growth isn't going to accelerate to 3% next year, the perennial forecast. Trend economic growth of 3% or 4% is a thing of the past, constrained as it is right now by anemic productivity and labor-force growth.
Even the 2.1% average growth [in] real gross domestic product since the Great Recession ended in June 2009 is a source of controversy. The economic bulls maintain that the price of information technology is being overstated, which means real GDP and productivity growth are being understated. For this group, the low level of both jobless claims and the unemployment rate is telling the true story of a robust economy that isn't being captured by the statisticians.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Hyperturtle on Sunday May 01 2016, @03:03PM
I concur.
I am having a hard time even imagining what world this author lives on.
It is hard to accept his premise, knowing that companies like Uber -- horse carriage driver assignment for the 21st century -- are presently investing the profits made from their non-employees-without-benefits to design and replace them with robot cars.
It'd beyond buggy-whip manufacturer verus automated carriage piloting, with worries about how the street cleaners no longer have to scoop up road apples. No, it's about undercutting local industries, breaking local laws, lobbying to get new ones, spying on people, tracking people, gossiping about the good looking or famous people and posting it online or getting hacked because they didn't have good security people, and then abusing that relationship further to help drive costs down to eliminate the horses that made their carriages great to begin with -- inexpensively paid labor.
Horses, of course, were not known to have championed their own cart dragging services. They were fairly autonomous, though, and few ever rioted for more pay. They got used to the working conditions and mostly were fine with it when replaced (provided they didn't get turned into meals and glue, but I guess if that happened then few of them spoke up afterwards to complain about it).
For the uber drivers, they helped undermine and disrupt the existing system -- accepted getting lower pay, no benefits, and a continual downward spiral of compensation as the service became more and more popular.
And now, the sacrifices they made are the revenues used to fund the development of their intended replacements.
I suppose we could say that this level of investment is both consumer AND corporate friendly -- it's too bad the people that made the service what it is today are treated so hostilely by the people that they helped treat them this way.
Perhaps the real complaint is that in our plutocracy, the real issue is how to best use the technology to make money for everyone? These uber jobs have been the best paying jobs some college grads I know have ever had, and they hate it. "make as much as you want" is really just code for "always on the clock looking for rides with no time to reskill onself without having to shop for a new apartment or cheaper everything else because the college debt bills don't pay themselves and Uber barely does".
That said, I haven't even used the service myself as a paying customer, or sharing a ride with someone who hailed an Uber driver.
I did not write this to particularly single out Uber. They seem to be a good example that acts as a counterpoint for the author. If there is a company that isn't a tech firm themselves, that embraces many areas of modern computing culuture and technologies -- Uber is one that both impacts the virtual world we live in and the physical one we move about in, dependent on all sorts of technologies to make those worlds smoothly interact.