Computers, Unemployment and Wealth Creation 948
Andy Oram writes "Anyone who writes programs or plans system deployment should start
thinking, "What can I do to bring average people back into the process
of wealth creation?"
A few suggestions."
Or.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Basic economics (Score:2, Interesting)
"the vast majority of those folks that lost their jobs over the past three years shouldn't have had a job doing what they were doing in the first place and the (lack of) success of the companies that they worked for and the "products" they produced showed that.
The amount of fly-by-night IT "professionals" that were born in the dot-com days was retarded. And now that companies are no longer hiring just to fill slots so that their company could break the 1000 employee mark in 30 days or less or so that the manager above them would be happy that they filled a position with "someone", people are looking for answers.
As with any bad situation, there has been plenty of collatoral damage, with good IT folks getting the boot. But the vast majority of so called "technolgists" that are out of work really don't belong in the industry in the first place.
Your article trying to "find a new place" for these folks is a sad attempt at trying to make them feel good about their situation. Maybe if they really want a job in the IT industry, they should build some real skills." -anonymous
Wealth creation? (Score:5, Interesting)
Over 50% of my income goes to taxes of one form or another. I'd say that's subsidy enough for the other guy.
Commie bastards. 1/2:)
Re:Jobs instead of efficiency? (Score:3, Interesting)
It might work; it might not. Neither model--capitalism or any kind of backward capitalism--has been proven to work, but capitalism is the rules of the system we're currently in. An issue is that it *is* the survival of the fittest, and in a capitalist world those who care and are willing to sacrifice their own needs-fulfillment for the needs-fulfillment of another should lose and die. They don't deserve, by the rules of the game, to pass on their genes.
But it's a healthy dynamic to have those who buck the system. Everyone can't be a winner. Maybe the non-capitalists *will* survive as the fittest; maybe capitalism is here to stay and the wealthy will live at the top of the heap. I've made the decision that my time and resources are best served helping other help themselves (not *just* helping others); others should and will make their own personal decisions about the resources appropriately. I can generate sufficient wealth to succeed in the system, but I can also generate sufficient (unquantifiable) personal wealth in terms of goodwill, friendship, gratitude, and loyalty through my sacrifice--and these are elements of a "morality" that makes me happy. Perhaps this morality is weak, and so I'll die off and my genes will disappear. But it doesn't hurt to try.
Re:wealth creation (Score:5, Interesting)
If there was a software package that helped restaurants with inventory, ordering, advertising, etc. that helped them get the business end right, that would keep more waiters, cooks, etc. employed more of the time.
This is probably true for lots of small businesses; if there was an open-source software solution that helped you run the business effectively, lots more people could get a business of that type up and running, and keep it running.
Re:The same thing everybody else should do (Score:4, Interesting)
1. Most government officials are known for giving preferred treatment to people with ties, which means that you still cannot guarantee equal care for everyone. Let's say that Joe and John both need a new liver. Joe is a huge contributor to several government officals. I'm willing to bet that Joe will get the liver before John.
2. From serving as an intern for a state rep, I can tell you that the government has a huge overhead and good chunk of tax dollars for the healthcare will be wasted.
3. There will be a large amount of people who abuse the system (such as hypochondriacs) at everyone else's expense.
Not to mention that while I am willing to give a hand to people who are in the bad situations due to circumstances out of their control (like being born disabled), I am against giving help to people who put themselves in a bad situation (like frying their brains due to drug use).
Re:Basic economics (Score:3, Interesting)
Granted, though, Greenspan played a hand in creating the bubble in the first place. When you see high purchase levels of stock with P/E ratios of 200+, it's time to bump UP the interest rate.
Tax cuts now will not solve the problem, except to create a larger debt burden. This country, both government and populace, is debt-strapped. Also tax-cuts at the federal level often affect more directly porrer states, since federal aid tends to drop and either services drop, local taxes go up, or both. Look at how well Alabama's educational system is faring under the current federal schema. That's selling the future short, and education is a key infrastructure for a functioning capitalist society that is orienting itself more around knowledge workers than manufacturing.
While the author may have political motivation, the premise that helping small business is good is still true. If we had more small businesses, we might have a more stable economy in the long run, with people less tied to major corporations in dependency.
Re:Or.... (Score:5, Interesting)
You could fit 6 billion people into Texas, and it would be less densly packed than Tokyo, Japan.
Word of advice... (Score:3, Interesting)
A manager sat me down and explained that the company had had software for 20 years, and throughout that time the headcount had grown, because extra technology across the market had meant that companies launched more and more different and diverse products, and more people had been needed to support them.
If the world stood still, this would be a problem. Instead, people are needed for the new jobs and a myriad of support jobs. Think of mobile phones - how many people are involved in support, development, sales and marketing of phones and the infrastructure of phones, the legislating of phone companies, the sales of pointless clipons.
The more serious problem is that (in the UK) there are areas of deprivation where there is now generational unemployment - children grow up without working parents and see no opportunity. Where areas of central Wales are like deserts - because companies won't move in there.
Not so fast pal. (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, you know as you get older you start to fall apart in little ways and I had a bad tooth upon coming back to the States one year from where I lived in this little country called Taiwan that has socialized medicine.
I didn't have insurance and my tooth was hurting while I was in the States on vacation. So wanting to take care of my own affairs, I told my Dad I was going to wait and have my tooth done in Taiwan. But both of us were a bit concerned about how safe it really was. The ol' man insisted I go to my childhood dentist and ask him what he thought first.
So, I go in and this good ol' American dentist says yep you waitied too long. It looks like you're going to need a root canal. It'll cost about $1300. I can do it this week.
I told him my plan to go back and have it done in Taiwan and boy oh boy did he tell me some horror stories. Well, I don't remember all the exact details, but the sum of the story was that I was risking my life. If I insisted on doing this insane suicidal act, the least he would insist on is giving me clean needles because it was well known that those Taiwan doctors were notorious for re-using their needles to save costs!
Dear God. My father was so depressed that his son insisted on certain death, but after hearing that line of crap coming out of that old fucker's mouth, I was determined to see how bad it really was.
Well sure enough, I went back to Taiwan and had my root canal for thirty bucks. I got the same titanium post they use in the States. I got the same artsy fartsy thing where they send out the blank to be custom sculpted to match your other teeth and best of all it was almost completely painless. This is contrast to a root canal ol Dr. Lying bastard had given me as a kid when I busted one on the sidewalk. That sonofabitch let my novacaine wear off and gave me the ol Dustin Hoffman treatment.
The moral of the story is, you're full of shit. I'm an American and I can testify that I've gotten way better medical service outside of the US and was lied to by American physicians when I suggested I would try such a thing.
I also happen to know that the people struggling to get to American often ARE doctors. They're dying to get on the goddam gracy train.
You are misinformed.
Re:Jobs instead of efficiency? (Score:2, Interesting)
The argument is in the context of the article, asking whether you, as an individual, should prioritize helping out others in a manner that doesn't provide for your own personal needs-fulfillment.
In modern capitalism, most people profit from fulfilling needs of others--that's how demand is created. But there's an understanding that no *sacrifice* is made--it's a generalized quid pro quo. In the context of the article, there is no quid pro quo.
Famine is usually not caused by your economic system. It's usually environmental. In America, we don't have famine, but we do have people starving--in large percentages--due to the dog-eat-dog criteria of capitalism. There are many artifical methods that our govenment still employees to ensure that the capitalism around farming stays alive: such as government subsidies, which work into the capitalistic model, but muck around with the basic supply/demand model. They're props and kludges because the capitalism *didn't work*.
Pure-bred capitalism is also a cultural thing. We're good at it--others are not. Look at the history of economic bubbles and see how they almost destroyed nations. It's arguable whether capitalism is working in Southeast Asia or in regions of Africa. Our hope is that after time, things will "even out" and things will start working, but we're not sure because we actually haven't seen anything that has lived up to what our ideal as to how capitalism should be--yet.
The main current problem is distribution (Score:3, Interesting)
Does it really seem fair to you that a PHB should be paid twice what you are paid? If so, then ignore what I say. My position is basically an anti-monopolist position, with the term "monopoly" significantly generalized. And it's not on an all or nothing basis.
The way in which wealth is distributed is basically determined by power politics. Fairness doesn't have very much to do with it. But even given this system, NOBODY should be able to earn over, say, 1,000 time what a minimum wage job earns. The 1,000 is an arbitrary number, and I know of no decent way to assign it a value. But the larger the value, the less democratic the society will be. When wealth is centralized, then power will be centralized with it. And the power will be used to ensure that the wealth remains where it is. Similarly when power is centralized, then wealth will be centralized. It's a simple feed back loop operating off of self-interest.
In Athens slightly before the time of Xerxes the factor of difference in income between the wealthiest citizen and the poorest was about 50. This is probably somewhat related to population size, so a significantly larger civilization should probably expect a larger difference in income. But the relation should be less than linear, as what we are dealing with here can be modeled as the ability of a hierarchical pyramid to structure the relative importance of people at various levels. The narrower the angle at the top, the more weight each individual at the bottom must support. (I.e., the greater the proportional difference in income.)
future utopia (Score:3, Interesting)
Frankly, I think it's health care that stops that vision from becoming reality. It seems like the best health care will always be expensive...I could almost see robots building me a humble paradise, but knowing by accepting a lowerbudget lifestyle I was denying myself the best in life preserving and extending technologies would be a fly in that ointment.
Uninspired and underdeveloped... (Score:1, Interesting)
Translation: Instead of paying for software, use that money to hire in-house developers...
Translation: Go work at Microsoft or Intel, who are the only ones who have money and resources to work on this. Everyone else is either unmotivated or cash-strapped.
Translation: In other news, Bruce Schneider and countless security gurus laid down in the middle of their offices and wept...
This could have been a more interesting article if it were better thought out. Instead, it looks as if this was someone's first draft that had been written on a cocktail napkin.
It's going to get worse (Score:5, Interesting)
We're still in very bad shape.
Zero-sum hand-wringing (Score:3, Interesting)
Why shouldn't we put everyone out of work? We need neither the vindictiveness of mercantilist gouging under cover of the label 'capitalist', or the lazy poverty of diggers masquerading as 'socialist'. Both these factions are merely taking out their S&M neuroses on the rest of us. Like moths to the flame, both assume that the wealth they see is all that exists, and the game is thus zero-sum - what feeds the capitalist barracuda must bleed the poor children (won't someone please think
There's enough nuclear energy blasting down over time to support 100 billion spacefaring Earthlings (or to fry them all), and enough information in the planetary DNA library (5G years of research into no-holds-barred competition/collaboration) to keep us in Phd papers and lobster-flavored luaus indefinitely.
Halliburton
It all depends on what we want. Employment? What would a world of geeks do with the galaxy of hi-tech toys it would take to support the above, besides improve it all day for free, especially if it produced paradise in the process?
This post brought to you by some old hippies, Timothy Leary, and several thousand doses.
+5: Decrying Slashdot 'Unintelligentsia' (Score:4, Interesting)
How do you suggest that we 'create' money? Hmm? Press our own? Make gold from lead? The invention of money and through it capitalism rests in the laws of scarcity, as someone said. There are inherent problems with any economic system, but in any one of them, it comes down to the idea of ownership (even the disallowing of ownership acknowledges the concept fo ownership). In the case of US capitalism, each dollar is owned by someone, the simple act of wealth creation dictates in and of itself that the source be from another individual or group capable of ownership.
Granted the original poster might have been zealous in his defamation of corporations, but when you have large groups capable of ownership, the capacity is there for them to hoard scarce resources (scarce as in limited), thus removing them from the total amount of recources available to the populace. That's bad enough, but if efficiency enables a corporation (or similarly large group) to simultaneously accumulate more resources and displace workers, you've just exacerbated the problem by increasing the pool of those in need, and decreased the pool of available resources. That can be reduced to simple algebra.
Cry all you might that corporations will not exploit that, but look back into history, it happens all the time. Company A might hold their moral ground, but if Company B does it, their pool of resources will grow beyond Company A's, and they will eventually surpass them, if not crushing them along the way. Note that I'm not an advocate of socialism, but I am quite fed up both with the opportunism of corporate policy and with those who defend it under flimsy or false pretenses.
Free/OS Software and Complementary Currencies (Score:2, Interesting)
Overall, Bernard Lietaer really convinced me that complementary currencies will provide valuable solutions to the ever pressing problems of jobless growth, monetary instability, aging population, and environment protection. The only problem: just like free and open source software is a challenge to the way software is currently owned and controlled, complementary currencies challenge the way money is owned and controlled. To me, CC are to finance what F/OSS is to the IT industry. Watch this space!
Software: Good and Bad Productivity (Score:3, Interesting)
The long-term impact of software is less clear. Software has the unqiue ability to replace human mental labor. All that ERP, supply chain, and workflow software means companies need a bunch fewer workers to crunch the numbers, keep all the customer orders straight, etc. Rather than hire or train a bunch of experienced people, you put in a software system that uses Ph.D level logistics algorithms to run your company. I'm not saying that the software is perfect, but then neither is the average middle manager.
The point is that software is helping to engineer humanity right out of its claim to fame -- the ability to perform mental labor. Nobody was too upset when horses replaced people for carrying stuff nor when motorized drills replaced hand drills. The automation of physical labor seems uplifting to all but a few die-hard communists. By contrast, the automation of mental labor has more sinister potential.
It all comes back to the two types of productivities. In the long-term does a particular bit of software enable people to really do something qualitatively better or different than they did before. Or does it merely help them do the same stuff, but with fewer people.
I'm not saying that companies should eschew software that lets the do the same job with fewer people. Companies that free up resources in one area (by firing workers) can apply the savings to other innovations or forms of competative advantage. But if all that software can do is provide efficiency, then I fear that this could lead to the further stratification of society.
If you really want to create software that makes a positive difference, then create software that helps people do something that they never could do before. Mere efficiency or cost improvements (i.e., free versions of existing software) are not going to lift people out of poverty -- giving them a new way to create new forms of value will.
Re:Or.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Take NYC, an environment more familiar to most slashdotters than Tokyo, and apply that landscape to the entire state of Texas. Maybe I'm just not a city boy, but that scenario sounds miserably depressing to me. I like being in incredibly urban environments, but only if I can get when I need to. As the urban sprawl spreads, those places of sancutary will only become more exclusive, affordable only to those with abundant resources.
Capitalism is good, but IMO, it depends on there being somewhat at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Capitalism is a system based on inequality, and I think that's okay for a temporary system for the human civilization. It only works on with a civilization in rapid growth (techonologically, culturally, etc.); when our civilization begins to stabilize in 300 or so years, I just don't think capitalism is going to be satisfactory.
There is a long precedent supporting my opinion. Look at the history of nations. In chaos, a dictator rises and creates order. After the chaos has settled, the people are no longer happy with the dictator. The dictator either subdues the populace with force or gets replaced with democracy or some semblance thereof. Obviously, I believe capitalism is that authoritarian system useful in a time of chaos, and I don't think humanity has discovered the correct economic system for the plateau. Maybe it's some form of socialism or communism, but I don't really know.
The REAL Problem (Score:4, Interesting)
I think I know what the real problem is. But before we get to that let's talk about what the problem is not.
The problem is not captialism, not Western Culture, not HMOs, not PPOs, not private health care, not the military, not global warming, and not Microsoft.
The problem is that slashdot readers in general watch too much Star Trek
Do you remember the episode where the people from the past (20th century) show up on the Enterprise? (I think they were dethawed or something, but I don't remember exactly. It doesn't matter for this discussion anyway). Remember the cowboy-ish guy, who wants to know where his land is, where his money is, who works for him, etc. And Picard gives him the lecture about how "we're past all that now" and "it's about bettering yourself, etc.", essentially saying, "Stop being a greedy bastard."
The problem is that people really believe that can happen. You'd think after 10,000 years of recorded history people would figure it out, but then you would underestimate hope (that attribute the Architect aptly described as simultaneously the source of greatest strength and greatest weakness, but I digress).
Systems such as socialism/liberalism/etc. are all predicated on the belief that people will generally lookout for the good of the common man. And the proponents of these systems constantly tell everyone else that the reason they're poo-pooing these systems is because everyone is a bunch a greedy bastards. Well, I have news for you, YOUR ALL GREEDY BASTARDS YOURSELVES.
Face it, humans seek after their own interests first. You do it every day. Sure you go into work and bitch and moan about how Bush is screwing over the world and the captialist bastards are ruining your life and you're being held down by The Man, etc, etc. Then you drive home and you cut off the person you're pissed at on the Freeway. You gossip about your co-worker who's doing a better job than you, you keep the $20 bill you found in the bathroom at the movies, you steal towels from the hotel, you eat a dozen grapes at the grocery store you never pay for. Tomorrow you'll lie to your boss about why the report isn't done. You'll spend an hour surfing instead of writing code. And then you'll go home and bitch about how braces cost $3000 and how you can't afford it, all while sitting on your couch watching Monday Night Football on your big screen TV. I know you're selfish. And I am too.
Socialism puts all the power into the hands of a few good liars who are able to convince the masses that they will look out for their good. Simply bull. They'll be the same selfish, greedy, bastards you will be, but now they have permission to screw over more people.
Free-market captialism is the only system that can handle the selfishness of humanity in a way that gives the most people the most opportunity. Sure, capitalism will make a few people very rich this year. But you know what? Those people may be the very poor next year. And the very poor this year might be the very rich next year. Every day is a new opportunity. You're held back only by your own ambition (or lack thereof).
Do some people need an extra hand in life? Sure. And that's what charities are all about. Groups who get together specifically because they care about the interests of others. So give to charities. Or start one. But face it, at the end of the day, we're all selfish greedy bastards looking out for ourselves. No one owes you anything. Now get out of your holodeck and readjust your worldview.
Lots of BS here - take my 2 cents: (Score:3, Interesting)
Thats utter rubbish. War is the only way to fix things *in this current system*, which isn't capitalisim, but more a pseudo capitalisim. If this system were to work right, we'd need a stronger degrading of moneyvalue than inflation offers.
The way it is now, all goods if not sold lose value, only money increases in amount more than it loses by inflation. That's what has to be _corrected_. Not changed or overthrown completely, but corrected.
Then further on:
Productivity has something like quadrupled in the last 100 years. Actually my very job is to increase productivity by an average of 20% in the information shifting business - I do lot's of data migration automation and stuff. While my job is just to find methods to cope with the plain pointless information overload (lucky me it's there) there is one thing that has to be done to cope with massively increased productivity:
Robot taxes. That's right: Robots paying taxes.
The other one is a society problem: We need to grasp the value of services and custom craftsmanship again. Which actually *does* have a real value. Actually OSS is all about moving Software development away from a 'childs game' to engineering to real solid traditional craftmanship. Just like the plumber that fixes your pipes when they've rotted after 20 years of use. You could do it yourself, but you pay the expierienced guy 'cause he does it faster and you've got less fuss. And Pipes and Putty are the least you pay for. Usually.
World Problem Solution (TM), Bottom Line:
1.) Turbine Tax and improved Money Rot for money just lying at the bank and not fed back into he money cycle. Yes folks, we've got to much of it and to few are getting more and more just by leaving the most universal good on the shelf. That is *NOT* the concept of capitalisim. Trust me.
2.) Robot Taxes. Robots paying taxes. It's really that simple. Make that Microtaxes, if that makes you feel better. BTW: Count computers doing automated tasks (and not acting as books or TVs or stuff) as robots.
3.) Society shifting to a 98% service orientation. And a 98% self-employed society, where required tasks can be dealt with in a flexible manner.
At least Germany still has a long way to go in both of these.
As I said: My 2 Eurocents.