But I think the scale enabled by the net creates such profound efficiency and disintermediation. craig newmark sees himself as a philanthropist of classifieds; his (estimated) $100m business helped disrupt more than $13b in classified revenue. The funds are a dividend for the transactors so the value is not gone, but jobs are.
Look, too, to Clay Shirky's cognitive surplus. In the comments on this post at Google+, Eric Reasons brought up entertainment as an example. They get a double whammy. The people formerly known as the audience (TM Jay Rosen) now have more ways to entertain/distract themselves and can "consume" less entertainment. They also can make more entertainment, ending the scarcity and providing no end of free competition to the industry. There will be much more entertainment, but fewer jobs from it.
Look at retail. Practical necessity required there to be brick-and-mortar stores with much inventory and sales staff across the country as a channel of fulfillment. No more. RIP Borders. Now it is much more efficient, of course, to consolidate and fulfill commodity goods at a distance. Thank you, Amazon. Again, fewer jobs, which won't be replaced.
Transparent pricing in the market will lower prices and reduce the ability of retailers to benefit from pricing opacity. More efficiency. Less profit. Fewer jobs.
Even in my "trade," education, we know what's coming: open courseware will replace third-rate lectures.
Yes, I'm well aware that say, in the shift from agrarian to industrial economies, efficiency shifted jobs from farms (greater efficiency) to factories (greater wealth). The factory equivalents today -- startups -- create great wealth but with fewer jobs.
I say none of this to criticize technology. It's just reality. I will argue as I explore this topic that we must look at policy alternatives for more investment in entrepreneurial ventures and education (of both youth and displaced workers).
You reminded me of an interesting thought. The industrial revolution involved advances in information only incrementally; we went from letter-writing to (eventually) phone and television. The new mediums were very unambiguously new platforms each time.
But now we have a set of platforms(computers themselves, the operating systems, the networks, etc.) for all digitally encodable forms of information. We keep building new platforms on top of these systems; and the rate at which the platforms appear is increasing; 10 years ago you could not do the kinds of trivially focused apps that have become today's cliche.
This is a point of fundamental difference from productivity advancements in the industrial era; better machines meant more resources mined, more goods finished and delivered. And communication remained expensive throughout that period; I can recall long-distance calls still being relatively costly in my childhood(80s, early 90s).
In contrast, better information implies doing more with less, in the physical sense of time and effort. Taken to its literal extreme we have Twitter as an example - a broadcasting medium without the formality and overhead of TV or radio.
And if our advancements from here on out are mostly based on doing "less" and not "more" physically, the whole way in which our economy is measured today is going to become increasingly wrong.
I'm not sure; that's what I want to explore.
But I think the scale enabled by the net creates such profound efficiency and disintermediation. craig newmark sees himself as a philanthropist of classifieds; his (estimated) $100m business helped disrupt more than $13b in classified revenue. The funds are a dividend for the transactors so the value is not gone, but jobs are.
Look, too, to Clay Shirky's cognitive surplus. In the comments on this post at Google+, Eric Reasons brought up entertainment as an example. They get a double whammy. The people formerly known as the audience (TM Jay Rosen) now have more ways to entertain/distract themselves and can "consume" less entertainment. They also can make more entertainment, ending the scarcity and providing no end of free competition to the industry. There will be much more entertainment, but fewer jobs from it.
Look at retail. Practical necessity required there to be brick-and-mortar stores with much inventory and sales staff across the country as a channel of fulfillment. No more. RIP Borders. Now it is much more efficient, of course, to consolidate and fulfill commodity goods at a distance. Thank you, Amazon. Again, fewer jobs, which won't be replaced.
Transparent pricing in the market will lower prices and reduce the ability of retailers to benefit from pricing opacity. More efficiency. Less profit. Fewer jobs.
Even in my "trade," education, we know what's coming: open courseware will replace third-rate lectures.
Yes, I'm well aware that say, in the shift from agrarian to industrial economies, efficiency shifted jobs from farms (greater efficiency) to factories (greater wealth). The factory equivalents today -- startups -- create great wealth but with fewer jobs.
I say none of this to criticize technology. It's just reality. I will argue as I explore this topic that we must look at policy alternatives for more investment in entrepreneurial ventures and education (of both youth and displaced workers).