America’s Dazzling Tech Boom Has a Downside: Not Enough Jobs

http://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-dazzling-tech-boom-has-a-downside-not-enough-jobs-1476282355

by collinmanderson • 10 years ago

137 197 10 years ago

wsj.com

collinmanderson2• 10 years ago

I know, I know. Paywall. Ohh well.

denzell• 10 years ago

No paywall, but rather video ad!

graton• 10 years ago

Click the link near the top of this page which says "web". Basically does a Google search and then you can get in if you click the first search result.

collinmanderson2• 10 years ago

I never saw that before. Thanks.

randcraw2• 10 years ago

What browser does this work for? Not Firefox.

anupmm• 10 years ago

Avoid Paywall through GN: https://www.google.com/search?q=America%E2%80%99s+Dazzling+T...

balls1872• 10 years ago

There is a "web" link at the top of this page for that reason.

randcraw2• 10 years ago

Does nothing. Still paywalled.

jrockway• 10 years ago

This is why I think I'm in favor of basic income. With robots doing all our labor, "a job" is not how we can support basic needs like food and shelter. (Money still changes hands with robots doing all the work, so we can tax that and use it to fund basic income for everyone.)

This assumes that people want a job because they want the income, not because they want to do something rewarding all day. Not sure how to solve that problem.

elcct• 10 years ago

Basic income will become new zero. People are creative and for sure will find themselves ways to earn bread.

duaneb• 10 years ago

Zero is a number, not just "small". If you can't buy anything with BI it's worse than worthless.

jfoutz3• 10 years ago

The Milton Friedman model gave you a tax deduction twice as much as the BI check. So, if you're getting $500 a month in BI, but you decide to work a little, up to $1000 dollars in taxes is deductible. The idea is, you always make more money by working.

So maybe you sell a painting for $500, 20% taxes would be $100. At the end of the month, you wind up with $450 from BI and $500 from the painting (because you can deduct all the taxes at a 2 for 1 rate).

So maybe you're a fancy doctor that makes $10000 a month. to keep things simple taxes would still be 20%, $2000. You get to deduct $1000, from those taxes, because you didn't take any BI benefits.

One of the things i think is great about it, it provides a soft launch for anything you might want to do.

(I think you know this, but some people sort of miss the "it's better to work" part of BI)

balls1872• 10 years ago

So maybe you're a fancy doctor that makes $10000 a month.

An annual salary of $120,000 is $10,000 a month. No need to be a fancy doctor to pull that salary.

prostoalex5• 10 years ago

provides a soft launch for anything you might want to do

Similar argument gets thrown a lot when advocating a minimum wage raise, for instance, and on surface it seems clear - a person with $11 in his pocket has more buying power than someone with $10.

The question is why hasn't that previous wage increase cause a long-term boom in economic activity? The answer is that eventually it gets priced in. Whether into the cost of housing, cost of food, cost of daycare, cost of healthcare, newer car or a cable package that now has Showtime.

The retail industry is quick to anticipate any cash influx and appropriate not only immediate cash, but future cashflows as well, which explains so many "tax refund day" sales at mattress stores and car dealerships come April.

prostoalex5• 10 years ago

How much of that income would immediately go towards health/dental insurance premiums (or Obamacare penalty for those refusing to join the club)?

Healthcare is one of those things that seem to get more expensive as robotics and high-tech labs are introduced into it.

visarga• 10 years ago

Not sure how to solve that problem.

TL;DR - Instead of UBI, how about self reliance?

Instead of UBI, wouldn't be better to empower people and communities of people directly by providing financial help and technology, including automation. Each community, city or country needs to be self reliant and not need much external financial help. If a city has enough land to cultivate its food, it can build a vertically integrated economy, with everything necessary for its citizens to live by. People would be directly involved in providing for themselves, using automation as well. They would not feel robbed of their agency and self determinacy.

Practical measures to achieve that would be: to invest in energy tech such as solar, make sure automation and 3d-printing are open source and easy to employ, heavily tax imports in order to encourage reliance on local production, tax automation and AI, provide financial help for local projects, provide healthcare and education for free. With all those in place, the need for UBI would be much reduced.

If people were left with no jobs and insufficient social protection they would not simply roll out and die. They would associate to find alternative means such as self sustaining farm communities, some of them would provide professional services to others, creating a human-based parallel currency. Such communities could invest what they had before into the common pool and have their own capital. With capital they can have the ability to use automation as well. What is essential is that the entry barrier to AI and automation be made low, in order to empower everyone.

Grishnakh2• 10 years ago

This doesn't really make sense. If you give a city full of people the money and technology they need to be self-reliant, then how do you make sure a few assholes (the managers) don't take everything for themselves and leave others homeless? If you have automation doing all the actual work, how are people in this city supposed to earn money to survive? After all, who's going to own the financial help and technology that's being provided to the city? The government of course, but then how do you distribute that? Well either you make people work for money, or you give everyone a UBI.

Finally, there's no practical way any city can be self-reliant anyway. Humans have relied on trade for millennia now. Cities in the frozen north aren't going to easily be able to grow all their own food, cities in other places won't be the best place to run factories, our entire global economy is run on the idea of specialization of labor, and it's been this way since before Roman times. People specialize in certain things, they form groups (companies) that excel at doing certain things, and then they trade with each other. That's how an economy works. Hindering that isn't going to help anyone, at least until we invent replicators (and no, 3D printers are not like replicators).

A low barrier to automation doesn't work because someone has to own the automation, and whoever owns it first has the first-mover advantage and puts everyone else out of business.

baron8163• 10 years ago

For all of human history, people have had to deal with a scarcity of resources. Yet in the last few years, that has changed. Our problem is not that we can't make enough stuff for everyone to be happy, it's that we're still acting like that is the case.

The age of inflation is over because producers in nearly every industry (there are a few notable exceptions) can absorb almost infinite demand for their products. The sooner governments and central banks accept this, and the sooner we move past the notion that a "job" is not an end but a means to an end, the sooner we can end poverty, achieve high levels of growth, and overcome our fear of globalization and technology.

NhanH• 10 years ago

Can you elaborate how inflation is connected with scarcity of resources?

baron8163• 10 years ago

Prices are driven up when there is too much demand competing for a limited amount of goods. When a company can scale infinitely, they don't have to raise their prices. Lower prices keep demand up, so producers tend to want to keep their prices low.

WalterBright5• 10 years ago

Inflation has nothing to do with scarcity. It is the result of the supply of money increasing relative to the value in the economy. It's supply & demand, which applies to money just like everything else.

Scarcity does raise prices, but that is not inflation, because if X's price rises, you spend more on X, but you have less to spend on Y, which lowers that price.

jomamaxx7• 10 years ago

Scarcity changes the price of something.

Inflation can really be thought of as expansion of the money supply while all other things remain steady - stuff just arbitrarily gets more expensive.

Central Banks target 2% inflation so that we don't fall into a deflationary trap. It's like keeping the treadmill running just a little bit, to force the person to run forward.

Austrian school economists basically equate inflation with money printing - to them it's the same thing.

But most things increase in price due to a) better quality product and b) regular dynamics of business c) currency.

So when the beer gets more expensive it's:

a) Better beer (at least in the eyes of the consumer), i.e. longer brew times, better taste, better ingredients b) More expensive input costs c) Currency issues with imports etc.

Those are not inflation, just price fluxuation.

Inflation is when the exact same thing gets costlier, all other things being equal.

sjg007• 10 years ago

We support globalization to prevent war.

nickthemagicman• 10 years ago

This is brilliantly put.

So whats the solution?

baron8163• 10 years ago

UBI probably, but funding it with newly printed money.

Another way to think of what I'm saying is this: there are billions of people out there in the world who want more stuff. There are lot of companies and workers who want sell those people more stuff. And there are enough resources out there to make all that stuff for them (energy for a long time was the big limiter). Obviously, there is an economic disconnect that is limiting people from getting the goods that they want and need. What's really happening is that poor people just don't have anything to trade with. The solution is to give them something to trade with.

We don't have to do a UBI. I think we would be fine if central banks did something like give the bottom 20% of income earners a one time payment of ~$20k.

lmm2• 10 years ago

George was right. Productivity is accelerating towards infinity, and that value is being captured in land values and being allocated to rentiers rather than the population as a whole. Tax land value and distribute the proceeds.

Alex39173• 10 years ago

Our problem is not that we can't make enough stuff for everyone to be happy, it's that we're still acting like that is the case.

The real issue is that the ruling class makes their money off capital. That's why Tiny Houses are banned in San Francisco and elsewhere. Because no one really needs more than 400 square feet of (well-designed) living space, but if people were allowed to buy houses and apartments that small then they wouldn't need to go into debt.

If the basic necessities of life become free then capital itself becomes devalued, so don't expect it to be an easy fight.

mahyarm• 10 years ago

It's called the studio apartment :D

NIMBY has many reasons behind it, and one of them is trying to increase housing values. Other things are guarding precious "free" parking spaces, being old and not liking change, or being afraid of changes effecting the quality of your children's school and other things.

closeparen• 10 years ago

Uh, there are plenty of ways to get 400sqft or less living spaces in SF, just not as a freestanding structure (and tiny houses are kind of a waste when we could be building more tall stacks of several adjacent tiny apartments).

majormajor2• 10 years ago

I lived in new, modern, fairly-well-layed-out 330sqft and 450sqft apartments for four years, and you know what? It was fine, but you definitely get tired of it. I will gladly pay more to get more space. Things that can quickly make this even more urgent: pets, relationships, children, certain hobbies, a social circle that enjoys private get-togethers, working from home, etc.

I also find stuff makes me happier than experiences, so I realize I'm not representative of current fashionable lifestyles, but pretending everyone's the same or telling people "you shouldn't want that" isn't a practical policy solution.

(Or let's talk about medicine. Can we grow new livers, kidneys, etc, yet? How about when can we do it cheaply enough to easily be able to afford one for everyone who needs one?)

oldmanjay• 10 years ago

I'm sure the utopia of 400 sq ft filing cabinets will have us all looking back on these foolish times and wondering how we could be so blind.

jganetsk9• 10 years ago

Citations needed.

I don't see any fundamental change in scarcity of resources in the last few years.

Additionally... to say that nearly every industry can absorb almost infinite demand for their products is absurd. Near infinite claims need near infinite evidence. Can we produce near infinite food? Can we produce near infinite precious metals?

There are certainly some very interesting characteristics about our economy right now, but this is not the right articulation. It's more that we are stuck in a liquidity trap, and we can grow our economy without increasing demand on the labor market.

toomuchtodo3• 10 years ago

You, as a human being, can only consume so much water. So much energy. So much food. Its already within our means to feed everyone (green revolution), shelter [1] everyone, and energy? Please! Enough sunlight hits the Earth in 5 minutes to power the world for a year (you will never see the price of power go up again [2] [3], renewables are simply too cheap now, and will continue to be deployed at a rate somewhere between linear and exponential, pushing out generation sources that have a consumable fuel with marginal cost).

Surely we'll need to drive down the cost of healthcare and housing [4]; that'll be tough and expensive to solve. But everything else? Its all clean energy, automated manufacturing, and bits across a wire.

We must choose to provide for everyone not because it is easy, but because it is hard.

The economy does not need to grow further; growth is not the problem, distribution is ("The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed." -- William Gibson).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YcrO8ONcfY

[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=energy+deflation

[3] http://dqbasmyouzti2.cloudfront.net/content/images/articles/... (TL;DR Cost of energy from solar is dropping faster than Battlestar Galactica through a planet's atmosphere [3a])

[3a] https://youtu.be/JdkCpnGMyGw?t=6s

[4] https://i.imgur.com/hJewEUY.jpg

pastProlog• 10 years ago

I don't see any fundamental change in scarcity in the last few years.

I do. There have always been economies of scale, but the first shipment of Call of Duty costs tens of millions of dollars. Shipments #2 to #1000000 over the wire cost next to nothing.

A movie like The Avengers exhibits the same behavior.

Sixty years ago, a new car rolling off an assembly line of a Detroit factory was the epitome of the world economy, technology and engineering. Which was not all that different from the process of a weave rolling off a flying shuttle in 1740. This is a new thing, where piece #1 of a piece of IP is very costly, but the next few million pieces are cheap to produce.

To have a focus on the old thing of a scarcity of materials as this goes on seems to be missing the boat on what is happening. Not that I put much creedence in the scarcity focus before, but it has just become completely ridiculous.

bryanlarsen5• 10 years ago

Of course we can't produce infinite anything. We can't even make infinite copies of a piece of software.

So instead of "infinite" or "near infinite", let's say "at least two orders of magnitude".

Can we produce 100x as much precious metals? Yes.[1]

Can we produce 100x as much energy? Yes.[2]

Can we produce 100x as much food? Yes.[3]

Can we produce 100x as much living space? Yes.

1: Exercise: think of an elemental metal we're short of. Look it up in Wikipedia, look at what % of the Earth's crust consists of that resource, and compare that to current usage.

2: With enough money, we could do this with nuclear power today. I don't think we're too far away from being able to do this with solar, again given enough money.

3: Greenhouses.

Precious metals, food, energy and prime living space are very scarce in economic terms. It would cost very real and very significant amounts money to produce more. But given enough money, we could produce a lot more of them. If the world economy grew 100x too, could we increase these scarce resources 100-fold? I assert yes.

Retric5• 10 years ago

20,000 calories per day is not better than 10,000 calories per day. Thus, food has reached a point where enough no longer the problem, and if we made twice as much we probably would burn it not eat it.

As to stuff, it's content which tends to be the real limitation not the TV. And content can be unlimited we simply impose artificial limitations.

neffy2• 10 years ago

Think about a book with information in it on, oh I don't know, basic first aid principles.

1000 Years ago it wasn't available.

200 years ago, it was available only to those who could afford to go to university, and had reached a very socially expensive and scarce educational level.

Now you can download it for nothing. With pictures. Ditto music, film, etc.

The financial apparatus that you're referring to can solve more or less for the scarcity case, but it cannot solve (i.e. find prices for) the abundance case. The liquidity issues are a sideshow to what will be the main event.

eli_gottlieb• 10 years ago

There are certainly some very interesting characteristics about our economy right now, but this is not the right articulation. It's more that we are stuck in a liquidity trap, and we can grow our economy without increasing demand on the labor market.

Financial metrics can grow without substantially increasing demand for labor. Most of the nonfinancial economy, however, is stuck in recession or stagnation. The tech sector only differs in being fueled by the flood of capital into VCs.

After the Second Great Depression was narrowly headed off by TARP, we're still stuck waiting for the Second New Deal and Second Post-War Reconstruction.

dasil003• 10 years ago

The problem is that stuff isn't what makes people happy. Sure if you give a poor person money they'll be happier, but that effect doesn't work for the middle class and above where people generally want a little more than they had before, and a little more than their neighbor. Of course a lot of people realize that material wealth won't make them happy, but that's an individual philosophical point that doesn't carry a lot of weight when you feel comparatively disadvantaged.

The real problem you have to solve then, is not the quantity of stuff, but the allocation of stuff. This is very difficult one to solve, especially in America, because of the deep puritanical culture. It's going to get a lot worse too as robotics, software and automation lead to ever greater consolidation of wealth. This is where capitalism starts to break down as economies of scale push us towards something resembling a feudal society, but the problem is we don't have any other system that people are ready to accept as "fair".

WhitneyLand5• 10 years ago

The problem is wealth affects happiness more than it used to because of things like health care. Give yourself a nice middle class healthcare plan. Give me wealth. If we both get cancer I have a lot more options and more ways to guarantee the highest level of care. Wealth makes happiness if it enables you to stay alive.

Likewise with opportunities for raising children - there are lots of ways to help children thrive with wealth, but it's not what i would consider the classical "material need".

WalterBright5• 10 years ago

Distributing things equally is not possible. For example, if you need heart surgery, who gets the best surgeon? For another, who gets the dwelling with the nicer view? Even parents who try to treat their kids equally soon realize it is an impossible task.

ChuckMcM2• 10 years ago

True and not true. It is true that economists have not factored in the economics of information into their analysis of GDP yet but it isn't true to say we live in a post scarcity world or that we are even yet approaching such a world.

What is true is that we've probably reached the point where competition for programming jobs will put negative pressure on salaries. Basically Google and AWS make 90% gross margin on the electrons they convert from electrical power to search advertising or web services. They can live on probably a third of that. Today we see the excess margin being spent on speculative things (Google X as an example) but as the margins get squeezed that will go away, then excess salary will go away. We talk about ageism but really there is a ceiling on salaries for most people and if they aren't in the "special 1%" they are replaced by cheaper people as soon as their salary hits that peak. That used to be around 50 now it seems it is around 40 and has been coming down nearly linearly for the last 5 years. Basically any job that can be done by someone fresh out of college with a modicum of search skills on Stack Overflow or other forum sites is going to have zero real wage growth.

I had a really interesting exchange with senior folks at IBM talking about office space and office plans. Looking at it at the surface, saving money on office space helps increase the money you can pay the employees and keeps margins up. But when you look at it in the context of dollars of margin per employee, it makes no sense at all.

Consider a classic "widgets" company. Perhaps 5 people designing widgets, 10 engineering the parts and designing flows for assembling them, maybe 20 on a factory floor putting them together, testing them, and putting them out for shipping. All to sell thousands of $45 widgets making $15 gross margin. How much do you spend on office space for those 35 people affects if it is $15 gross margin or $10 gross margin. But when you have 3 people designing, 2 developing, and 2 testing and releasing a software product that sells millions of units at $4 with $2 gross margin, you have cut revenue per sale 10x but increased sales 1000x. And because the employees are still living in the lie about "we have to keep costs down" you get these companies pocketing billions of dollars in free cash flow that they just sit on.

The economics of information are completely different than the economics of goods and using "classic" economic analysis you get really out of whack numbers and expectations. Think about this, Google could literally lay off half the engineers in the company with zero impact on their revenue numbers.

It will be interesting to see how this settles out, I don't expect programmers to suddenly get a proportional share of the revenue from information goods, but I also think work is going to be vastly different. I can easily see the goods economy moving to large conglomerate fabricators like FoxCon which end up manufacturing anything and everything to the wishes of a handful of designers and engineers. Their forte' is electronics, LG has appliances pretty much sewn up (no pun intended), can you imagine if Ford or Toyota could create the 'foxcon of auto manufacturing' ?

Existing economic models have a bunch of ways GDP recirculates in an economy, those ways are mostly toast in an information economy leaving behind giant pools of cash. Finding a way to put that cash back into the economy will be the challenge for the information revolution.

jomamaxx7• 10 years ago

"Basically Google and AWS make 90% gross margin on the electrons they convert from electrical power to search advertising or web services."

Nobody on earth would suggest that google's margins are derived from their revenues minus the cost of 'electricity'.

They are a services company, pure and simple. Their 'gross margins' are their revenues, minus royalties to web-sites - that's it.

Their costs are R&D and Sales & Marketing - and a little bit of ops - that's it.

Agreed they could do it with 1/3 the staff, but it's not an issue of 'gross margins'.

lossolo• 10 years ago

I like what Gandhi said about resources:

'The world has enough for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's greed.'

themodelplumber• 10 years ago

the sooner we can end poverty, achieve high levels of growth, and overcome our fear of globalization and technology.

How? Curious to know more, thanks.

roflchoppa2• 10 years ago

"The age of inflation is over because producers in nearly every industry (there are a few notable exceptions) can absorb almost infinite demand for their products."

why do we need so much crap? lets roll back the consumerism.

pixl972• 10 years ago

Just say that you will keep your cell phone over a year or two and you'll get 10 replies here on why they upgrade their perfectly fine phone every year. Waste is an addiction, and it's a common one when it comes to electronics.

jomamaxx7• 10 years ago

It has almost nothing to do with raw materials.

Resource consumption is growing, but as economies have long ago shifted to services and advanced products, it's less a part of the equation.

Your mac, your iPhone, your 'Internet' your 'wireless mobile' , your Netflix, your 500 channels - these are all new services which everyone pays for and consume very little 'resources' in the classical sense.

Even as we switched from drip coffee to Lattes, from crappy restaurants to better ones - this does not affect 'resources' so much.

IanDrake• 10 years ago

I think you misunderstand inflation.

Inflation is based on a the supply and demand for a currency - not goods that the currency can buy.

Alex39173• 10 years ago

The amount of fossil fuels it takes to produce each calorie of food is increasing exponentially over time, so many scientists expect that eventually we'll need to start replacing machines with human labor.

While this will probably happen to some extent, I also suspect that AI will soon make urban permaculture viable. E.g. the main reason why all the trees in our cities aren't edible fruit and nut trees is because they make a huge mess and attract rodents when they fall on the sidewalk. But if you were creating a new city today then it would make sense to heavily incorporate edible landscaping, and in twenty years when it's actually at peak productivity we'll have inexpensive autonomous robots to clean up the mess and periodically check the soil for contaminants or whatever.

dsfyu404ed• 10 years ago

citation very much needed

Alex39173• 10 years ago

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12178986

philipkglass• 10 years ago

The muscles of humans and other mammals are only about 20% efficient at turning food into mechanical work. Overall efficiency is even worse when you consider resting metabolism during non-work times, such as when people are asleep. That profligate waste is happening on top of the inefficiency of using plants to produce human-edible "fuel" for workers; less than 5% of incoming solar energy gets stored as something humans can eat, or a bit better if you include parts that ruminants can eat.

Motors running from battery-backed solar power can do much better than that. Cheap solar modules made of multicrystalline silicon can convert 16% of incoming solar energy to electricity, and after going through a battery and a motor you can still get 80% of the original electricity back as mechanical work. A solar farm "feeding" electrical machinery is 1-2 orders of magnitude more productive on an areal basis than a plot of land feeding manual laborers with human foods. Additionally, the solar farm doesn't need weeding, irrigation, fertilizer, or fertile soil. A reversion to muscle power would be expected following a massive societal collapse, but it would not be a rational plan for a high-tech society to increase its efficiency and sustainability.

lvs• 10 years ago

It has another related downside: it's not a strong driver of economic productivity, as the President recently pointed out [1].

[1] http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21708216-americas-pre...

jupiter90000• 10 years ago

Does WSJ writer get to decide how many jobs should be 'enough' for an industry? Weirdly written article, in my opinion... and the writer seems to cherry pick anecdotes, 'see now there are robots doing things in Amazon warehouses! Now we can't have enough slave labor sweatshop type jobs in the US to go around!'

ocroso2• 10 years ago

I agree, I kind of feel like they aren't in tune with the actual reality of the industry. In my experience, there are tens of thousands of jobs out there, just not enough people with the qualifications to fill them.

ocroso2• 10 years ago

I disagree with this entire article. Every company I've worked for in the tech industry has had incredible difficulty finding talent/people to fill the roles we had. Also, there are more software companies than Google and Facebook. Also, I don't see salaries dropping anywhere for these jobs, I see them going up. Sure, help desk is the new car mechanic, but that happens in every industry. Now, you probably want to be a developer or DevOps guy to make what help desk made in the 90's. The real issue seems to be exploding cost of living making earning more feel like earning less. And I believe companies that are willing to allow remote work are helping combat that by giving workers the freedom to move somewhere cheaper.

notfromhere• 10 years ago

A software company employs infinitely less people than a manufacturing plant used to and doesn't provide the same mix of high skilled and low skilled labor. That's the problem that many areas of the country are dealing with: that the economic boom is becoming a lot more concentrated than it used to, which only increases income inequality.

adwn• 10 years ago

A software company employs infinitely less people than a manufacturing plant used to

"Infinitely less"? Would that be zero or -infinity? Either way, this is obviously wrong.

(I realize this was not your actual point, so I didn't downvote you)

wvenable• 10 years ago

I agree but I also disagree. We have a fair amount of difficulty finding talent to fill our tech roles when they come available. However, much of my job is to automate away other people's jobs. I've literally taken more than handful of good paying / medium skilled jobs out of the market with my software.

If the trend continues, and it is, more and more of these jobs will go away. There is, in my opinion, a limit -- you can't run a company with nobody. But historically my company hired large amounts of people to do jobs that have now been obsolete for decades because of technology.

abysmallyideal2• 10 years ago

It is a scam. They're not looking to fill in those positions. They just open those positions up, under no obligation to hire, then report to their gov censor that they have created x amount of jobs without the intent of filling those positions.

When they have to fill in the positions, they complain about the lack of "talent and skill" in filling the roles and then push for h1bs to fill with cheaper Indian and Chinese workers.

Every once in a while they'll fill it with a techbro "hip to the game". The entire thing is a complete hoax.

wu-ikkyu• 10 years ago

They just open those positions up, under no obligation to hire, then report to their gov censor that they have created x amount of jobs without the intent of filling those positions.

Are solicited but unfilled jobs counted in "job creation" statistics? I did not know this.

derefr• 10 years ago

Er, the article was about jobs in all the other sectors, not in technology. Technology is what is replacing all the other jobs; of course jobs in tech are rising. That doesn't mean the total number of jobs across all sectors is doing anything other than declining.

DonaldFisk• 10 years ago

If they find it that difficult to hire people with the skills they need, why don't they teach people the skills, or if they can't do it in-house, pay someone else to?

nf05papsjfVbc• 10 years ago

Usually they omit adding "at the rates we are willing to pay" after saying something like "We can't find enough qualified candidates"

mc32• 10 years ago

Saying tech doesn't create jobs is like saying Petroleum is only about fuel for cars. It creates ancillary jobs [people making apps, people selling phones and data plans] but also improves the aspects of many other jobs [like addressing disasters with up to date information, or ability to monitor a protest which could turn violent, or facilitating access to education for people who would not have had the chance, otherwise] There are a lot of benefits elsewhere...

That said, automation in many fields will finally claw away low skills jobs from people. I don't think we, as a society will dodge that bullet this time. We may come up with job substitutes, but we won't be able to do "value-add" indefinitely. And, eventually, this will filter down quickly to poor countries too [unless they close the borders to technological change, but I don't see that happening, their oligarchs will make sure they also can bring that tech in-house]

jomamaxx7• 10 years ago

It's very fair to say tech does not create as many jobs as other industries.

Also - tech removes a lot of jobs via automation.

I never, ever talk to a person at a bank unless I have to.

'Mortgage Loan Officer' is almost becoming a thing of the past, so automated these days.

1_listerine_pls• 10 years ago

Saying tech doesn't create jobs is like saying Petroleum is only about fuel for cars.

It referred to net jobs...

finally claw away low skills jobs from people

Not a predictor. There are highly skilled jobs that can be automated more easily than low skilled jobs.

abysmallyideal2• 10 years ago

The "American dazzle tech boom industry" is a scam and a hoax. It is a government protected endeavor by government protected and connected organizations.

rajacombinator• 10 years ago

Not enough jobs is not a consequence of tech, it's due to globalizing low skill labor. Which is great.

CodeSheikh• 10 years ago

I feel like the author stressed too much on the word "Tech" without differentiating much between the very basic nature of SW-Tech and HW-Tech. In hardware assembly lines you need more workersa and bodies, let them be in the USA or China or Taiwan. But for SW once you have developed and refined your algorithm, routine or process it does not need to have multiple people handling, managing or maintaining it. It can be replaced but let's be honest such replacement does not happen for quite some time at enterprises, in some case it takes years. My point being, yes big SW companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter etc did not create enough jobs because they produce and maintain software, not actual physical products (Google until recently). Yet they have sucked a large portion of money from the economy (Think of ecoonomy as a shared pot with fixed $ coins in it). The problem is with the financial and employment regulators for being short sighted and not predicting this trend lets say 15-20 years ago. It is a bad unbalanced financial "equation" when weight on one variable is too much and on the right one it is too low. A company with $X amount of positive revenue must invest a certain portion back into the economy. In this way we can maintain a economically balanced society. Also, people need to start getting serious about continuing education. Skills learned and obtained in the 80s or 90s is not necessarily going to be employable in the year 2016.

America’s Dazzling Tech Boom Has a Downside: Not Enough Jobs

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