The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

> "The people whose job it was to regulate these markets, stop oblivious consumers from taking on a $500k mortgage on $50k yearly income? The oblivious consumers and investors themselves? The government who set a precedent of propping up failed bets with taxpayer money?"

I explicitly called out the regulators and the irresponsible consumers in my comment. Come on man, at least read what I have to say if you're going to form such a long and complex argument against it.

>What's happening now is that "software is eating the world", and displacing the existing networks of production throughout the economy. That's leading to a class system of "those who own the data" (entrepreneurs & executives of large tech companies) => "those who work with the data" (software engineers, and likely hardware engineers & material scientists in the near future) => "everybody else".

Unexplained data: $3500/month one-bedroom apartments in San Francisco. If technologists are on top of the hierarchy, why can't they get society to give them easier access to better housing?

Counter-hypothesis: because the rentier-owners of land, natural resources, and financial assets are actually still the ones on top.

> Productivity measures have been pretty screwed since services became the dominant labour form.

That's not accurate. Productivity is at its most basic a measure of aggregate output for hours worked. That works for any kind of economic activity as it all boils down to dollars vs. time/person (blending in management and administrative overhead).

> If my dog groomer decides to charge me an extra 20% then her productivity has gone up by 20% - she is now producing an extra 20% of services per hour.

That's not how it works. Presumably if your dog groomer did that, she'd either be really good, or you'd switch groomers. Or if there were a scarcity of groomers, you might choose to groom your dog less often.

The amount of money made for the hours worked has to be viewed in aggregate as part of the overall market. If all businesses in a region raised their prices by 20%, and worked the same or less hours, that would be a sign that there's been a gain in productivity, because it eliminates opportunity cost and marginal utility tradeoffs and looks at the complete domestic market for all goods and services in an area.

> I have no proof of this at all - just an anecdotal gut feel. For every content producer where I work, we have 2 agile coaches, a LEAN coach, ...

I feel you. There are countless individual cases of waste and overhead in the private and public sectors. But I think this has almost always been the case in organized human endeavours. Think about the 1960s and 70s where there were football field sized rooms of typists, or layers upon layers of "strategic planners" (GM used to have a hierarchy 21 levels deep). Or the pervasiveness of sustenance farming in the early 1900s vs. the productivity of today's farmers. It really has gotten better.

In our industry for example, where I work (Pivotal) we do extreme programming and carry that philosophy of smaller teams, customer speaks with one voice, to content and product design. We will pair on each role, one from our company and one from the customer, so on a given mobile app, web content project, or web app (and I mean real commercial ones, from brands you probably know): 2 product managers, 1-2 designers, 4 developers/ops of which one is the anchor, maybe up to 2 part time QA. Maybe some support marketing people surrounding this team, and maybe 2-3 senior execs/managers around it between the customer and our own management. That's it. We can get a lot done in a few months.

I have also seen teams of 120 people attempt to do the same amount of results of our small teams in double the time.

Productivity stats mix the both and weigh down the whole sector, but imagine when the small team approach becomes widely used? This is what we are seeing more and more with IT outsourcing where the traditional outsources are getting slowly squeezed. It'll take many years, but it's hard to unsee better ways of working.

I agree that capital and headcount represents power in many large organizations but with the appropriate competition incentive and leadership, agility and time to market and cost are usually what lead to coups to the old order.

> Meanwhile, my leisure time productivity has exploded - I consume whatever media I want in whatever form I want whenever I want. I'm at the lower socio-economic end of my tiny middle-class ecosystem but my diet would be the envy of the kings of yesteryear.

I think that statistically in the USA, leisure time is mostly flat / slow growing the past few decades, and actually shrinking for those with more education as they work longer hours . Some interesting data here: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/06/how-did-...

This seems to correlate with my theory in the OP that we have a knowledge distribution problem in the labour market. Fewer people know certain specialized things and need to work longer because of it.

> My point being is that we already have too much stuff in the world, and the existing system of trading labour for putting food on the table just encourages more stuff... But I have no idea what the solution might look like.

One person's stuff is another person's food - even if there is waste, someone does have to actually make/harvest/move/package/market the stuff eventually. But I get your point.

> I'm not sure how you claim that civil rights have improved with the uncovering and continuation of wide-scale surveillance that wasn't physically possible in the past...

Try being black, brown, red, yellow, or a woman.

> I personally don't believe that they're less willing to work hard than previous generations.

I can't argue with your personal beliefs, but my personal belief is that they are less willing. I see gen X as being less willing than the boomers, too. I'm not comparing snapshots-in-time - you can't compare 20-year-olds to 40-year-olds to 60-year-olds effectively. 20-year-old boomers were more willing to work hard than 20-year-old Xers, and in turn the Xers more than the Ys. The boomers worked less hard than the generation before them.

> There's no hard scientific proof in economics, but it seems like our society is more capable than ever, but the benefits are distributed more narrowly, while general wages are flat to declining, the risks individualized with lesser margins in the income, those all feel like fundamental reverses in important life areas.

See my earlier comment about perfection. Just because we're facing challenges at the moment does not mean that earlier generations had it easier. When I hear the usual "it's so much harder now" stuff, there's never anything like references to things like conscription. Or the stigma of daring to be pregnant in public. Or the much narrower selection of food available. Or the lesser resources available for dealing with domestic abuse. There's a lot more to life than unemployment rate.

I have not heard that tech salaries are nearly high enough to write off Bay Area rents as a negligible expense. Property-owners win again.