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."
for the retarded... (Score:5, Insightful)
it's called "patent trolling," "eternal copyright," and "software patents."
Mod parent up! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's easier (and more lucrative) for existing companies to use lawyers to bankrupt anyone with a creative idea that might threaten those companies.
The moment you try to capitalize on your idea, you'll be looking at cease-and-desist letters and lawsuits claiming some kind of infringement.
The entire system needs an overhaul.
Re:Mod parent up! (Score:5, Insightful)
I highly recommend thus book. The problem stems from the definition of property. It's main characteristic is that it is scarce. Real goods are property. Ideas are not. The problem with patents and copyrights are they are trying to make a non scarce good artificially scarce.
http://mises.org/books/against.pdf [mises.org]
Re:Mod parent up! (Score:4, Interesting)
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You perfectly illustrated why patents are evil: it is impossible to avoid violating them, you can only wait to see if anyone sues you.
If you have an idea and implement it you could spend vast amounts of time searching patent databases, but that is unrealistic for most people. Furthermore you might fall foul of patents that are not in the database yet but only come to your attention in the future, after you put in lots of work in your idea.
I have yet to hear of a single instance where patents were vital for
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You perfectly illustrated why patents are evil: it is impossible to avoid violating them, you can only wait to see if anyone sues you.
This has been a growing problem with copyright, too, especially during the past couple of decades as society's information has moved online. You can see this clearly in music, where what used to be a routine "performance" can lead to prosecution as a copyright violation.
One way I've found to express it is to ask: If I have a tune in my head, and want to perform it, how can I discover whether it's copyrighted, and if so, who owns the copyright? I've asked reps of a few music publishers this question, a
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When I am developing software - I'm just trying to solve problems for my customer. In the quickest and easiest, and most-sane way I can imagine. Sometimes that's based on something I was taught. Sometimes, it's based on something I've seen someone else do, in the past (but - I'm not going to copy/paste verbatim, of course.). Sometimes, it's just what makes sense, and I do it. I don't imagine for one second that with millions of others who have gone before me, that I'm the first one to solve problem x in t
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: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:for the retarded... (Score:5, Insightful)
If China is smart, they'll tell software patents to go to hell. When they then leave USA in the dust, it will be clear our system is foobarred.
In theory patents are supposed to encourage people to spend more resources coming up with good ideas. Instead they do the opposite because good ideas in software for the most part just pop into one's head while pondering a problem to solve and are not the result of thousands of hours of planned lab toil.
Thus, they are rewarding accidents that would happen anyhow. There are exceptions to the rule, but the rule overwhelms them in numbers.
Further, software patents dissuade mix-and-match because of the many patents involved in mixing.
Re:for the retarded... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:for the retarded... (Score:5, Insightful)
India made a choice of building what is essentially a colonial economy without the colony part -- they produce things (call center "service", software) they can not possibly use at home, and rely on exporting them abroad, then (supposedly) using money to buy things abroad for local consumption. It builds no infrastructure, provides very distorted demand for education, and keeps large fraction of population in perpetual poverty.
China, on the other hand, develops economy in a way that builds industrial infrastructure that can produce products directly usable locally.
Re:for the retarded... (Score:4, Interesting)
India made a choice of building what is essentially a colonial economy without the colony part
I wasn't actually there, but I don't remember India making a choice. I recall it being made for them.
China, on the other hand, develops economy in a way that builds industrial infrastructure that can produce products directly usable locally.
China, on the other hand, is in a boom-bust cycle that will make what the USA is going through look like happy fun time. Or did you not notice they're producing whole cities no one wants to buy? I mean, Japan has kept it down to cars, and we mostly just build houses, but China has built enough needless, wasted, rotting cities to house what percentage of our population?
Re:for the retarded... (Score:5, Insightful)
The use of the word "colonial" is what you are protesting but, the original poster is correct. They chose to a "colonial" style economy. If they hadn't they would have 50% unemployment and a revolution on their hands. We in the west make the mistake of seeing India as an emerging western style economy. The are not. They are an emerging Indian style economy.
Re:for the retarded... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm old enough to remember when people said the same thing about "Made in Japan".
Re:for the retarded... (Score:4, Insightful)
India doesn't have software patents (http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2005/04/4837.ars) and we can see clearly how Indian software has left our patent encumbered western system in the dust with its amazing innovations.
How long did it take Japan to go from producing cheap and okay to producing first class goods?
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More time than it took China to do the same. Growing up I hated the cheap matchbox cars that would always break, and everything from China was junk. Now I want a Lenovo computer and nearly every apse product is made in Dina (BUT DESIGNED IN CALIFORNIA).
China is much more similar to Japan than India, as I have yet to purchase any good that ever came from India. As China develops, however, it will make more and more sense to open factories in India and India will go through an even bigger revolution than it h
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an AC wrote:
>China is much more similar to Japan than India, as I have yet to purchase any good that ever came from India.
Poke around a bit.
Since the kids have taken over, there's been better quality control at Harbor Freight Tools and there have been some surprisingly nice things showing up from India:
http://www.harborfreight.com/no-33-bench-plane-97544.html [harborfreight.com]
Discussion of it here:
http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthread.php?173650-Harbor-Freight-quot-33-quot-Bench-Plane-I-like-it.-Especially-for-less-than- [sawmillcreek.org]
Re:for the retarded... (Score:4, Interesting)
And then it will spread to the middle east when europe, the US, China, and India all need a place for cheap manufacturing. And then it will make more sense to produce in Africa. Eventually (In a hundred or so years) every major region of the world will have had an industrial revolution.
No it won't, because there aren't enough people there to do that without significant automation. And if you have almost fully automated factories then labor is no longer the primary cost of production and it makes more sense to build them near where the consumers are and save yourself the shipping costs.
Also, China is very different from previous countries that have done this. They have a billion people, and they aren't a democracy. That makes it very easy for them to have an underclass with a population larger than the entire United States which, by applying a little automation to get some (but not all) of them out of the factories and into a middle class, can make enough goods for both the foreign and domestic markets. Then they can use central planning to implement greater automation at a rate that can slowly increase the size of the middle class, but never in a way that would cause significant unemployment.
The end result is going to be that China will be the last country to employ a large labor force in manufacturing. We could already automate half the stuff that they manufacture by hand there, the only reason we don't is that China doesn't want high unemployment and is more than willing to undervalue their currency and cause their population to work for slave wages in order to keep them working rather than starting an uprising. The second China can get any of those people into a middle class job (or, more realistically, the second any of those people dies or retires and is replaced by a young person with a better education), there will be a machine doing that work instead of a person.
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How long did it take Japan to go from producing cheap and okay to producing first class goods?
if you seriously are asking, I would guess about 20 years. it was not overnight and the going joke was 'made in japan' (meaning, very cheap and undesireable). I'm 50 and was alive when 'made in japan' meant negative things.
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Japan is a much smaller country in terms of land mass, population and language groups. India has a similar problem to China in that they're the two largest countries by population and have dozens of languages with which to contend. China does have somewhat of an advantage in having one written language to cover the country, although that tends to be rendered moot by the fact that the people being attracted to the factories aren't likely to be literate in the first place.
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Re:for the retarded... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you are stepping on motorist/pedestrian problem: when you are behind the wheel, pedestrians are crawling evil creeps that solely exist to slow you down. When you are crossing the road, motorists are reckless obnoxious power-tripping assholes that solely exist to intimidate you down to a crack between pavement tiles.
Creative mind wants to freely use all the intellectual baggage of the humanity internalized in his head. He also wants others to pay dearly for every singe use of his contribution to the aforementioned baggage.
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Which is the perfect setup to keep out small businesses ...
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It doesn't matter. You forget that China's growth is export-driven; they don't have the local demand base to support those industries (since the bulk of the population still can't afford to buy it). And if they're not honoring the copyrights/patents/trademarks of other countries, they can't sell to *any* of those countries, since the laws are now interlocking.
Today is not like the old Cold War, where the West and the Soviets could say "fuck you" to each others patents because neither economic bloc traded with the other. China's only competitive advantage right now is cheap manual labor; if they lose this, the entire foundation of their growth so far turns to mud and the whole thing collapses.
By the time their export destinations stop buying stuff, they will have big enough local demand to compensate. China will probably come into position of post-WW2 USA within the next decade or two, except that this time around, it'll be US economy that'll be wrecked like Europe after the war.
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China will probably come into position of post-WW2 USA within the next decade or two, except that this time around, it'll be US economy that'll be wrecked like Europe after the war.
I disagree. After WWII, Europe rapidly rebuilt itself (with help from the USA and its Marshall Plan of course), so fast that within 20 years you couldn't tell that a massive war had been fought there.
The USA is going to look a lot more like the aftermath of the Roman Empire. Remember, after the Roman Empire fell, it never was r
Re:for the retarded... (Score:4, Interesting)
Bingo!!
How much money is currently being wasted on litigation and licensing?
That money would fund a STAGGERING amount of new product development, research, or advancement of current products, but its being WASTED on lawyers working for patent trolls.
All the politicians want science, technology, and engineering jobs, but then they pass laws that destroy and hamper innovators and creators.
Software patents should be completely illegal. Patents on computer hardware should have a term of 12-18 months. Copyright on anything should be 20 years or less, a generation of protection for a work should be enough.
The absurd length of copyright and the extreme vagueness allowed in modern patents is killing the innovation we will need for the economy to actually improve.
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Re:for the retarded... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Also, China is a horrible example, and thinking for a second that it makes for a valid comparison shows gross incompetence. They have very little protections for the civil liberties, they have a very different culture and governance, and their GDP
Re:by the retarded... (Score:2, Funny)
It would also put doctors and nurses out of work.
It's not that hard. (Score:3)
I seem to making a decent living designing chips and I know lots of other people in a similar situation. If you're a 'creative worker' create something that people need.
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According to the article, you are not a "creative worker" since you actually produce a physical product (eventually).
Their spin on the phrase is more of artists, website writers, newspapers, film makers, and for some reason software writers (don't get that one, myself). This includes the distribution channels of the previous people- physical newspapers are dying, music and book stores are closing, movie rental shops are nearly dead. One of the themes was that the internet was going to open up more avenues
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Still sounds cynical to me.
The problem with competing on the internet is that you're literally competing with the entire world.
If you've started something online, and it's not panning out... try something else.
Since the barrier is so low, mistakes aren't as costly.
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I agree with what you say. The price of doing things on the internet is now nearly zero, discounting your time. I am of course not talking about big commercial endeavors. The other side of that is, like you said, you're competing with a whole lot more people now. Same ol', same ol', keep plugging away and you'll find your spot.
By the way, love your sig.
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In my particular field, I compete an awful lot with Indians, and rank amateurs. It's been this way as long as I can remember. In fact, when I started, I was a rank amateur. I was just really good at selling myself. That was fifteen years ago.
I'm not saying this to brag, but times are better for me than they have ever been for me. I'm making more money than I ever have, and this last time I was unemployed... I found a new job in six days.
My average is about three weeks in the present job market.
If you feel l
terrible whiny article (Score:4, Insightful)
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Seriously, since when did more than 10% of novelists or musicians or journalists etc. ever make tons of money? Most of them toil in anonymity, eventually either giving it up and getting a day job or doing whatever it takes just to scrape by for however many years. This guy obviously ne
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Correct- the 'creative class' is confused with journalists, programmers and coffee shop employees. Timberg speaks of the "laptop-powered "knowledge class"" ... what the heck is that? Are you talking about the texters and Facebook failures who are steeped in trivia? Do these people ever have an original thought or quiet time to develop one?
There are creative individuals, there is no creative class. Great artists, writers and composers are not part of any 'class'. They do not follow the beat of the social med
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The problem that the author does a horrible job of addressing is that the market has been expanded from your small locality to the entire globe.
If you write a song or create a film instead of playing a coffee shop you can now sell your work to billions of people.
The problem is that the coffee shop is now there is no need for the 'local creatives' since remote performance (and web-hosted performance) allows billions of people to find the top performers.
If someone was a really great blogger then instead of a
Re:terrible whiny article (Score:5, Interesting)
These people need to understand the technological revolution of the last 20 years has changed the value equation for content creators. When anyone can blog, the value of a journalist drops. When anyone can film on their phone and post it to YouTube, a studio has to work harder (competition), and the value of a movie distribution system drops. When anyone can write a story, make an ebook and sell it on Amazon or the Apple Store, then the value of a writer goes down.
"Everyone can be super! And when everyone's super, no-one will be." -- The Incredibles
He is using strange definitions (Score:4, Insightful)
The author puts "book editors, journalists, video store clerks" into that creative class. It's hard to see why a video store clerk (what is a video store?) is a creative persona. He is merely shining the scanner on your purchases. He can be illiterate for all practical purposes.
Musicians? Well, those that are good are doing OK. The rest... perhaps they are in the wrong business. Same applies to "aspiring novelists" - there is always ten graphomaniacs for one semi-decent writer. Good writers are even more rare.
Computer programmers are also like that. Those who write simple, boring code - but lots of it - will lose to their Chinese and Indian competition. Those who write difficult code remain in business. I personally specialize in microcontrollers, hardware, FPGA, real-time and high speed stuff. There is plenty of work in this area.
To summarize, if you are truly creative in what is in demand then there will be always someone willing - and desperate - to pay you.
Re:He is using strange definitions (Score:4, Insightful)
> Musicians? Well, those that are good are doing OK.
Gimme a break. Making music and making money are completely different skills. There are plenty of wonderful artists creating beautiful things that have to make their living doing something else.
Re:He is using strange definitions (Score:5, Insightful)
Making music and making money are completely different skills.
That's true everywhere. Writing a good, fast code in C and assembly is in no way related to smooth-talking a client into signing a contract to develop the abovementioned code. Many programmers who are capable of the former in their sleep can't do the latter if their life depended on it.
The musician in your example (talented but poor) needs to either learn how to develop his business or hire a manager. A talented programmer can develop business skills to manage his own business (contracts, ISV like iPhone/Android) or he can join someone else's company; then business opportunities will be taken care of by someone else (along with the lion's share of profits.)
It is not easy for a programmer to gain businessman's skills. I'd guess it's equally hard for an artist. But that's what the money is paid for. If you don't want to touch that, you are still free to code (or compose music) in your parents' basement. Only don't expect anyone to know about you or want to pay you.
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Exactly. Take a quality coder, a guy who spend all his time in his mom's basement making new projects, and introduce him to HR. It is a culture clash. One guy spends all his time working with people, the ot
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Here here. I get more work than I know what to do with doing freelance programming on the side, and I'm competing against those same dirt rate Indian programmers. Why? Because people still pay for quality. I don't know how many times I've seen clients get stuck with crappy code from these guys. In my case, I'm even benefiting from another creative person who created an entire new industry that I'm working in. That person? Steve Jobs. iPhone programming on the side basically paid for my new house. Thanks St
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More importantly there is the "people person" aspect of it. A significant part of the job isn't writing code, but figuring out what the hell your boss/client really wants as opposed to what they say they want (lets be honest, not everyone is technically inclined, if everyone were we wouldn't have a job).
Some ideas don't translate so well over the phone as well as a finger next to the screen saying, "No, we want that kind of thingy, you know, like that thing, that does that stuff".
"You mean one of these?"
"Ye
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What exactly constitutes "difficult"?
First, as you suggested, it can be simple code that requires specialized knowledge. For example, a customer walks into a bar and says "Hey, can anyone here code me something for Renesas R5F2136CSDFA?" If you are not already familiar with at least basics of the IC you need too much time to become efficient. There are hundreds of just Renesas MCUs, and there are tens of MCU Manufacturers (Microchip, Atmel, Analog Devices, TI, etc.) - so this is a very steep (or wide) le
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So things are difficult if you haven't done them before? I think you proved elucido's point.
Exploiting creativity is what makes $ (Score:4, Insightful)
No-one makes money from 'creativity'. You make money from what economists call 'rent-seeking' from creative output, be it yours or someone else's. The people who get rich (or even just make a decent living) are those who are good at rent seeking, and those people aren't necessarily the same people who are good at 'creating'. Hence Disney inc still aggressively rent-seeking from the creative output of illustrators, animators, voice artists etc 70 years after the creative act, and you can bet those creatives or their descendants aren't making any ongoing money from it.
Being able to work at home or from your local cafe on your laptop doesn't magically free you from the need to either have a lot of capital to promote and exploit your creative output, or alternately the need to sell your creative labor to someone who does, it just frees those with that capital from the need to supply the infrastructure of an OSHA-compliant workplace.
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The question is, if the creative industry is largely rent-seeking instead of producing, where is the money coming from to pay them? Its not like western economies manufacture enough to feed the 'knowledge economy' beast on their output alone.
The answer, I think, is resources. The dirty little secret of modern economies is that the largest determinant of our output is our input of resources. The notion that we shape our own fate through our ingenuity is largely a fable, told to justify a blatantly unfair eco
Race to the bottom (Score:4, Insightful)
The creative class as a driver of the local economy was always a big stretch. If a guy (or girl) sitting in a coffee shop in Seattle can do something for $X, it's likely that a guy (or girl) sitting in a coffee shop in Estonia can do the same thing for a fraction of $X. Smart people that make up the creative class are evenly distributed across the planet. There will be places where you can support yourself on a creative class income, but it's not likely to be most of the places that people read /.
Economics... (Score:2, Insightful)
Until recently the 'creative class' would be distributed between struggling (70%), getting by (25%) and going great (5%). This applied to photographers, artists, writers, glass workers, a whole swathe of people. But with the rise of the internet all but the last one are being undermined financially by virtually free distribution of material from amateurs, as well as the effects of digitial copying.
Economics suggests that the price of an item will tend towards the marginal cost of production, particulaly wit
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What about all the Hackers? (Score:2)
The first thing I thought about after skimming the article is, "what about all the hackers making a dime these days." It seems that folks like Lady Ada [adafruit.com] and some of the folks over at iFixit [ifixit.com] are making a decent shot of it. I have no idea what their finances are, but their sites and offerings continue to grow. It looks to me like they are making some decent and honest money based off of the industry of others.
Jonathan Coulton [jonathancoulton.com] of Code_Monkey [youtube.com] fame is doing alright. I heard a pice on NPR about him recently.
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And there's always radiohead. Everyone's holding them up as the howto example related to how to do this without a label, and no advertising.
Oh, you mean those people? (Score:2)
Video store clerks. Go figure. Who really thought these types would be thriving in the new economy? They're failing and going back to school or pairing up with friends / family and trying again. Because they're mostly entry-level employees. Give them some time, they know how to enrich themselves and indeed have a natural instinct for it.
Shortsighted (Score:3, Interesting)
Its not the creative class that's failing, its the middle class.
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Yeah. See, the problem lies on both sides. People graduating from college are expecting to receive exceptional salaries for incomplete skills. Now that the workforce is mobile (you can, and probably will, change jobs every 3-5 years), it's hard for a business to justify paying $40-50,000 a year so that they can reduce the productivity of a truly worthwhile, $80,000-$100,000/yr senior person to train you for two years so that you can become useful.
At least in engineering, even the best schools are not prepar
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Zombies ate them too (Score:5, Funny)
Machines made manual labor a cheap commodity, and offshoring made brains a cheap commodity. There's fewer and fewer new organs to economically milk. Maybe our yankers will give us another decade or two.....if you have a good one.
The so-called "creative" market is saturated. (Score:5, Insightful)
The true creative class is the people who are willing to put forth the hard work to study particle physics, microbiology, colloid science, differential equations, managerial accounting, and parallel algorithms. Their dedication is what makes carrying out their creative dreams possible. As the article states, they're doing well, as there's still scarcity in that market. Their competition in overseas diploma mills that teach to the test do not produce the same results.
What this article is referring to is the so-called "creative class" who thought they could start a grunge band by learning power chords, buy a Canon EOS and become a professional photographer, or become a psychologist because they were interested in their bad teenage relationships. They are the types who thought they'd win the lottery and become rock stars without the serious learning required to invent, build, and deploy something new.
Those people in the so-called "creative class" locked in an entitlement mentality are a dime a dozen.It may have worked in the 1990s when they and their friends were given unlimited subsidy by coddling baby boomer parents, but these days, you're on your own and actually have to know your shit. Universities today aren't full of ambitious engineers who will take full advantage of their $50K in student loans, they're full of future waitresses and customer service reps with a piece of paper.
A better article would be "Why did 17 million people go to college?" -- http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/why-did-17-million-students-go-to-college/27634 [chronicle.com]
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Indeed. And that probably also explains why we are spending ever more money on education with nearly no marginal return.
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Indeed. And that probably also explains why we are spending ever more money on education with nearly no marginal return.
That's not actually true - per work hour productivity has been increasing steadily in the last 20 years. Efficiency and capacity utilization has been edging up consistently too.
What has not increased in the last 10 years were wages - in the last decade the true creators of value, the 99%, got paid in "take up this cheap mortgage, it will be fine, house prices only rise" promises.
Re:The so-called "creative" market is saturated. (Score:4, Insightful)
What you said about "buy a Canon EOS and become a professional photographer" is definitely true. In the past 10 years, the number of "professional photographers" has about quadrupled, easily, based on attendance numbers at professional photography conventions and local business listings. And it is mostly 23 year old girls with doctor hubbies who pay for their gear to give them something to do to keep them out of trouble, or it's guys who work in IT looking for a weekend hobby they can make some extra money at. But they're not actually "making a living" at it...they're living off their husband or their real job.
In the meantime, though, all of these part-timers are putting a serious hurting on the former full-time photographers. The mom-and-pop studios that have been around forever. As their businesses dwindled (death by a thousand cuts), they've had to close up or get part-time jobs themselves to make ends meet. So there's more photographers, more "creatives" than ever before...but fewer and fewer of them are actually making a living at it. The article is dead-on about how this is a story not being told, and how it's the corporations who ride on the backs of these creatives that are actually making money. "The Industry," ie, the camera makers like Canon and Nikon, software companies like Adobe, the "professional organizations" like the PPA, WPPI, and the magazines trip over themselves to blow smoke up everyone's asses about how great and wonderful it is to be a professional photographer, and champion "success stories" (which are mostly untrue), because they don't care how many photographers there are or whether they're making any money or not. Every new schmuck who opens up shop has to go buy thousands of dollars in camera equipment, software, websites and services, and the corporations make bank. So in a time when fewer and fewer photographers are making enough money to get by, you would never, ever know it listening to the industry.
Anyway, the article is spot-on. The corporations are winning, the people who "own the server farm" are winning. Blogs using crowd-sourced cell-phone pictures for news stories: winning; photojournalists: losing. istock.com and Getty Images selling stock images for $1 and paying the photographer a few cents: winning; editorial photographers: losing. Camera makers, software vendors selling $$$$$ in gear to housewives: winning; portrait and wedding photographers: losing.
The moral is, if you want to make money in the "creative economy," don't be a creative, sell stuff to creatives.
Not even worth a commentary (Score:2)
"The 'creative class' was supposed to be the new engine of the United States economy"
Does that even merit comment?? If it does, the comment is "Be more cynical, young man."
Creative Class (Score:2)
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so many starving artists/musicians/actors/etc.?
Because you think that creativity automatically confers wealth. That's not true. Wealthy musicians/artists/actors have a combination of acting skills as well as a great deal of luck in "getting that part" that everyone wanted that resulted in the breakthrough etc etc etc. Not everyone can be at the top of the pyramid at the same time - there is simply no room. But being at the top is easy. And not everyone at the bottom sucks, a lot of them are simply not at the right place at the right time to move up the
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Not everyone can be at the top of the pyramid at the same time - there is simply no room. But being at the top is easy. And not everyone at the bottom sucks, a lot of them are simply not at the right place at the right time to move up the pyramid.
Next time you are near a street musician or some street theater, or are listening to some unknown band in a bar/club, stop a while and pay attention to the talent. Yeah maybe the singer is a little off but the guitarist is really good, etc. There is talent everywhere.
I think that more frequent recognition of this fact is critical to driving innovation and cultural evolution. Right now, I feel like we're saddled with the myth of the market. The American narrative states that anybody with talent and drive will make it to the top if only they work hard enough. I agree with what you've said, however; that narrative is untrue. Yes, hard work is required but it's observation bias to assume that just because most people who made it to the top worked hard that it was the ca
Startups (Score:2)
I'm the CTO for a tech startup. We've been operating for almost a year on angel funds. We're well along and getting traction with large customers, and everything looks good.
But here's the thing: while we're stretching "laptop powered knowledge workers" as far as we can by being very flexible with skilled people working from home and whatnot, there's still a tremendous amount of office work to be done. We've been successful so far in large part because the CEO and the sales guy have been kicking in doors
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If I had mod points I'd mod you up. You're absolutely right. The unsexy stuff is what creates the substance to a business - and you need to be in one office to get it going.
Having said that, if you have good comms you can often give people the option to work from home - office hours don't always work and the traditional commute eats time as well - but that takes people that can indeed *WORK* from home. In my experience they are rather exception than rule. It's much easier to switch to "work" mode with a
of course not! (Score:2)
Of course they aren't making any money. They spent all their money on the equipment that you need to be creative: MacBooks, iMacs, and all that.
How about a radical suggesion? (Score:3, Insightful)
So, the problem highlighted is that 'creative' people - and lets for the moment give them the benefit of the doubt on the level of their creativity - cannot find paid employment that allows them to produce new the new ideas and culture that keeps a society from stagnating.
My question is, why does everyone have to work?
We are trapped by absurd, outdated Protestant work ethics. Failure to bust your gut 50 hours a week is a sign of moral weakness, according to our leaders (most of whom have only ever worked through choice, not necessity) and our newspapers - sometimes even our teachers and parents.
This ethic is reflected in a society that is structured in a way that survival is next to impossible without work. Don't fool yourselves - even social safety nets here in Europe are specifically designed to make lack of full time employment unsustainable over the long term. What we need is to provide people with a decent living regardless of what they do, and make anything earned through work a bonus.
Maybe its time to stop blindly forcing the square pegs of our society (and everyone else) into the round hole of clock punching, just to serve some ancient disgust at the supposed 'fecklessness' of those who don't like the 8-6 run (I think its safe to say 9-5 is mostly a fantasy in the west now)
Its a valid question of how to pay for this; but not actually a difficult one. The simplest is to go after the rent-seekers; money earned by not doing anything can't possibly be created due to an incentive for the person earning it to do anything, so lets have it. Start with the Earth's natural resources - I have always considered the notion of a creature with a maximum lifespan barely over 100 years claiming that part of a 4 billion year old planet is his and his only to exploit.
Might it not work? Sure. But considering the current economic order is grinding to a halt, it is certainly worth a shot.
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You incorrectly assume that providing everyone with a decent standard of living automatically, means that nobody will be paid for doing anything.
Plumbers are always going to get paid. You certainly do need to compensate people for doing jobs that might be considered unpleasant - but that isn't a huge portion of our economies. When was the last time you heard the UK chancellor talk about sanitation?
My personal experience of the British economy is of shuffling papers around offices. There is a lot of busywork
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Plumbing does pay well and is, if you pardon the allusion, regular work ;)
But I'm not convinced money is the only reason why people go into plumbing or . Maybe some people never get into academic subjects at school, but they are decent problem solvers, and have good spatial awareness and manual dexterity. They might want to do a job that Slashdotters look down on because it fits their skills, and will make them useful and respected.
Also, there is just the possibility plumbers are making a rational choice to
Re: (Score:2)
Re:How about a radical suggesion? (Score:4, Insightful)
...and the above poster demonstrates why western society is absolutely doomed.
I didn't mention socialism. I certainly didn't advocate the bringing back the USSR. I said nothing about regulating the markets (not a bad idea at all, but one not actually connected to my suggestion.) Yet you invoke some inane, pop-economic truthiness and claim you can predict exactly how people will act, and that this makes any suggestion counter the the current economic order equivalent to Soviet socialism.
You also suggest that anybody who isn't working is a layabout. To support this stupid statement, you would have to conclude that the recession currently going on has coincided with a great increase in laziness over a very short period of time...
Re:How about a radical suggesion? (Score:4, Insightful)
your proposal, which amounts to forcibly taking money from the productive to support the lazy and indolent, is the very essence of socialism
It's interesting to learn on Slashdot that Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek were socialists...
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I'm slightly concern that you have just admitted that, for you personally, being forced into paid employment is the only thing that stops you living a life of inactivity and producing children you support. You are like a Christian claiming that fear of God is all that keeps people moral - you are essentially revealing you have no internal ethics whatsoever.
Speak for yourself!
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No, he's partly right. There are lots of places to live where $10,000 a year is enough to survive. For someone in the creative class, with a solid foundation in a technical or artistic field which can be performed mostly via remote, can certainly make that kind of money in a 10 hour work week.
The problem is that most people don't want to live where $10,000 can be stretched for a year, nor do they want to live in a manner which requires they stretch $10,000 to last for a year. The problem is compounded in th
Value system (Score:3)
Only the best ideas win and they don't employ many (Score:5, Insightful)
In the old days, most new ventures failed. Only a very few people could be at the top when an idea exploded. That wasn't a big problem. Fully exploiting those ideas required hiring lots of people. And thats how most people made their living. They didn't have to make a big win themselves. They just needed to be useful those who did.
Enter the economy of today. Most new ventures still fail. Occasionally, one still wins. But when it comes time to hire all those people to exploit the idea, they don't. Either the need for large numbers of employers never materializes due to automation and the non-physical nature of the work or, if they really must hire, they hire overseas.
The myth of the creative class was created out of need to believe we had an out. It was obvious to anyone that the American dream could no longer be supported by manufacturing. And I don't think anyone really believed that retail and burger flipping was an option. There needed to be something that was productive but different from what goes on in the emerging world and, therefore, safe. Well, it isn't all that different and it isn't safe. Employment security in the info economy didn't even survive beyond the business cycle in which it was born.
Sorry, but... (Score:3)
Unfortunately, as we have seen, our economy has been (so far) too full of old greedy curmudgeons who will exploit anybody, including the government and the innocent, to keep the old economy going for just a few more years so they can continue to line their pockets.
Doing it yourself doesn't have to break the bank (Score:3, Interesting)
I have homebrew business ideas that I've been developing and I wanted to own my own servers and learn how to rack and manage them. I could have rented time on a cloud or PHP hosting site or whatever. But I figure that controlling my server infrastructure means controlling my costs. I consider that to be like owning my means of production if you wanna get all marxist about it.
I'm no sysadmin, but I know enough to get around Linux. I'm not doing an awesome job of it, and I have a big meltdown failure once every two years or so. Usually just a harddrive failure that I can recover from, but sometimes it's more serious. My sites haven't earned enough popularity to get sustained intense internet traffic yet; so far, my boxes have done okay with the occasional big burst of traffic for my sites ( https://clubcompy.com/ [clubcompy.com] and http://cardmeeting.com/ [cardmeeting.com] ) that I get from Slashdot or some random blog.
I negotiated my costs as a fixed $150/mo for 4U and throttled monthly bandwidth. And I'm not alone, in the colocation facility I rent at, I see a lot of homebrew rigs racked up with google and yahoo-owned servers (obviously not in the same rack and not as well cooled, heh.) I had no idea what I was doing, and the techs at the facility were totally cool and taught me how to rack my boxes and helped hold them up for me while I mounted them to the rails. The server and network hardware that I have probably totals about 4K and I built them up over years. I've still got 2U free for future expansion. I use only mini-ITX form factor mobos because I want to rack them in teensy enclosures so I can max out my rackspace, and those motherboards run cool so they go for years without any failure - heat kills. I buy passively cooled MB's whenever they're available and still meet my requirements. I have found Intel Atom boards to be extremely reliable in 24/7 operation. CPU-wise they stink, and I wish I could go 64-bit with more RAM, but I just need cheep life support for SATA and ethernet at this stage. I've had DIMM's die before motherboards, I don't mind spending extra for the best manufacturing quality there.
If you have a steady, good paying job and you're a developer, you should have a homebrew project that you hope/wish/dream will someday blow up and become your livelihood. No excuses about cost if you have even a couple hundred dollars a month of discretionary funds to burn. If anything, do it for fun and chalk the costs up to hobby expenses and do it to learn new things. Make it a long term project - over years - and you can pay for it yourself. You don't need magical silicon valley angel vc startup capital to do very cool things on the internet or in wireless apps.
Dave
The real problem ... (Score:3)
The real problem is that creative people often lack business skills, and marketers have found a way to exploit that by marketing other peoples' products without actually paying for the product that they market.
I don't know whether to blame this on the ignorance of creative people or the greed of sales people. I'm inclined to blame the latter because this has been an ongoing problem (e.g. music publishers) and we can't be specialists in everything (e.g. most people are good at producing content or good at marketing, but few are great at both).
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So an industry sector was made obsolete due to more innovative ways of distributing content. And?
This is why History and in particular U.S. Economic History needs to be taught more.
Things change. Industries die, new ones are created. Markets shift. New markets created
Get the fuck over it.
Or, you could go Occupy something a whine that you can't fine a decent job with your Liberal Studies degree.
Re:Shut the fuck up (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is the new markets don't always fulfill the economic needs of the country as well as the old ones.
One trend with technology is that it allows more to be accomplished with less labor. But the labor force is still there and needs something to sustain it. We no longer need a factory worker to put a door on a car, and another to put the hood on, and another to do the windshield. We just need one to supervise the robot that does all of this. You can't just expect a large portion of the population to commit suicide because there's no longer an economic use for them. Or maybe, as you suggest, they should just 'get the fuck over' the fact that they have no job and no money and are only alive because of food stamps.
If only someone had warned us. Oh, wait, Kurt Vonnegut did when he wrote Player Piano half a century ago. Bill Joy did when he wrote Why The Future Doesn't Need Us a decade ago. Ray Bradbury with Fahrenheit 451. Each of these warnings were brushed aside as implausibly dystopian. Of course, there are no easy solutions and none of them involve 'getting the fuck over it.'
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Ferriers
Blacksmiths
Typesetters
Lamplighters
Elevator Operators
Milkman
Stables
etc.
I don't recall any mass suicides when each of these occupations were rendered obsolete.
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"Laptop powered knowledge class"? Sounds like a disgruntled hipster. The creative class isn't about "content" on servers, it's about creating stuff not just talking.
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Well, you know man, I had a laptop before it was cool.
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Well, you know man, I had a laptop before it was cool.
I've still got one now it isn't cool any more you insensitive clod.
Disgruntled hipster? (Score:2)
Whenever I hear people complain about "hipsters," I think of this comic strip [thepunchli...chismo.com].
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Ob (Score:2)
Agreed, there's absolutely nothing to instantiate it at all.
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Solution: govt provides a basic income (get the money from the Fed, the way financial institutions got $16 trillion), and encourages innovation with challenges, while leaving biz alone to innovate in its way. As long as we produce enough innovation that others want the currency remains strong, like Japan.
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Or you could always hold your breath.
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The irony of course is that people will be saying that global warming was manufactured by Exxon and other big corporations to distract us from the far more severe problem of the contraction of meaningful wages.