Is the Creative Class Engine Sputtering? 520
Geoffrey.landis writes "The 'creative class' was supposed to be the new engine of the United States economy, but according to Scott Timberg, writing in Salon, that engine is sputtering. While a very few technologists have become very wealthy, for most creative workers, the rise of amateurs and enthusiasts means that few are actually making a living. The new economy is good for the elite who own the servers, but, for most, 'the dream of a laptop-powered "knowledge class" is dead,' he says."
Re:for the retarded... (Score:0, Informative)
My wife works for a company that contracts with Chinese manufacturing; she communicates with onsite personnel frequently for product design clarification. Coworkers actually visit every few months. (I also used to examine industrial customer issues originating from China, for a major industrial materials producer.) I can assure you of two things I've learned from them: 1. Much of China's industrial infrastructure is only as reliable as its products. (You know the ones I mean...) And 2. a sizable portion of China's population lives in perpetual abject poverty.
Aspiring designers/ visionaries in India are probably better off, because corruption is the only major wall they have to get around. China has both corruption and government opposition barring personal enterprise.
Yes, I'm aware that the US is skewing towards the latter environment...
Re:Mod parent up! (Score:4, Informative)
What's not scarce are the implementations once designed. The real problem is that we don't have any way of rewarding ideas without these easily copyable implementations. Nobody so far has come up with a workable solution to this problem. Well, none more workable than copyright.
Sure we do: No software patents + 14 year copyright.
Re:Mod parent up! (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, copyright and patents, when given properly are for scarce things. Ideas are a dime a dozen. However, taking that idea and fleshing out a whole work (book/song/movie/wthatever) takes time and energy. Copyright seeks to protect that investment in order to improve society.
Patents are similar - there are tons of ideas out there. However, turning an idea into a practical machine isn't as easy, so patents seek to protect implementations of ideas.
The problem is that copyright keeps getting extended and penalties made harsher which basically destroy the original goal - to protect the real work of taking some idea and turning it into something.
Ditto patents, but mostly because software is quite an intangible that the "old laws" really cannot cope with . After all, IP laws date back many centuries, and back then, there was really nothing equivalent to software - it's something that takes an idea and is written that causes machinery to work in specific ways. Before that, a machine was a well-isolated system that had inputs, did something with it, and produced an output to accomplish some task in a specific fashion. But software can accomplish the same task in many ways, as long as it obeys the system limitations as the physical system it's in.
Then there's software that doesn't interact with any physical machine other than the computer it's running on. Or maybe not even that. And that's a problem.
Re:How about a radical suggesion? (Score:2, Informative)
I could argue that Karl Marx is correct "because he has history on his side"
- Karl Marx had NO history on his side. He didn't understand economics and his proposals were not based on history, they were specifically ideology driven. I had to study Marxism at school long time ago as a former USSR student, born there, it's unfortunate for me, what can I say.
Notice how many aristocrats lost their heads in various revolutions of the poor?
- absolutely. All of those people were effective governing force over those, who cut their heads.
This is not in any way, history that proves Marx right.
This is history that proves MY point - that over time government becomes oppressive and it needs to be decapitated. We don't really NEED to KILL people for this today, you know?
We CAN do this the right way, by learning about economics and voting for the best leader who understands that the direction of freedom and individual liberty is the same direction, as the direction of good economics.
Another thing, freedom = wealth is not necessarily true. There is plenty of wealth in non-free societies. Look at China
1. Yes, there is plenty of wealth in some places that are non-free, look at Saudi Arabia. THAT is a good example, but that again, proves my point about corruption of government.
2. No, China is not an example that you can use. China today is economically a much freer nation than USA. To start a business there you have very very little hoops to jump through. Businesses start in days without hurdles. There is real competition and government involvement is almost non-existent (of-course they do unfortunately collect some income taxes, and they are wrong about it), but again, this is MY POINT - they are allowing capitalism and they are thriving and simultaneously USA is destroying capitalism, and it's economy is on its death bed. I just left a comment yesterday about Steve Jobs.
It's not in the best of tastes, but here [slashdot.org]
As Jobs died in America and there were protests at the wall at his funeral, jobs died in America and there were protests at the Wall street at that funeral.
I was thinking something in terms of these lines, but couldn't put my finger on it. Probably because there were no buttons left to push.
"doing better and buying locations" is hardly ever possible, since the entire market is anti-competitive
- it's not the market itself that is anticompetitive. Look at all the competition that appears immediately in all the electronic gadgets market. It's the government that destroys the competition in the market, from education, to health care to energy, to insurance, to finance, to manufacturing, to utilities, to telecommunications, to agriculture and food. The government systematically destroys all competition and promotes oligopolies and monopolies.
As to rent seeking: here is my comment explaining why any investment that generates income stream can be described that way, but without these investments (like bonds, stocks, land, businesses of any type), there is no way to generate wealth that the society enjoys. [slashdot.org] The point of over-production and under-consumption is to generate savings that can be used to invest further into income generating activities, all of which can be described as 'rent seeking'. We NEED that for wealth generation, because that's the entire point of having savings and investments in the first place, and without that we are stuck working only for ourselves our entire lives, being subsistence farmers! (and even then, we are on some property, right?) Besides, property taxes are not exactly low today either and t [yahoo.com]