Silicon Valley Is Not Driving Jobs Growth

This article doesn't actually seem to provide any evidence to support its claim - the actual factoid at the heart of the article is that Total Factor Productivity (TFP) has fallen since the 90's, which is irrelevant.

The only pieces of evidence supporting the "No Jobs Growth" claim are Facebook's employee count from _2013_ (which has since grown by almost 50% to 12000 [0]), and the claim that "in 2010, only 0.5% of the US labour force is employed in industries that did not exist in 2000", which has nothing to do with "Silicon Valley" since the industry existed in 2000, too.

Remarkably low-quality reporting.

[0] - http://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/

There are so many faulty premises here

* silicon valley doesn't produce much hardware (evidence for this being true? obviously we hear a ton about software, but what about tesla, intel, nest, apple, google, etc?)

* businesses such as social networking, personal assistance services, short-term house rental services, and other saas have questionable customer value (why?)

* there will be an implosion of these saas businesses (why?)

I do partly agree with you, but there are still some fundamental things going on in Silicon Valley. On-line education, I think, has the potential to be very transformative. Self-driving electric cars could also have a very positive effect on the world as well (including solving the "last mile" problem with train travel). There's also a lot going on of course with bioengineering, and while I wouldn't necessarily equate this with silicon valley, Stanford, Berkeley, and UCSF are of course highly relevant research institutions. And let's not discount the advances in distributed computing in making all of the above possible, some of which did come from silicon valley companies.

Of course, just because these things may greatly improve the quality of life doesn't mean that they'll create jobs. They may destroy them, and while so far people have found new industries and jobs to replace the ones that become obsolete, I suppose there's no guarantee this will continue to be the case in the future.

Nothing is ever done for free by businesses (Even though it appears like it is free, you do pay for it indirectly) At some point the profit motive will drive businesses to take things too far and threshold will be crossed. This will either result in customer defections, or increased government regulation. A shakeout will ensue, and only businesses strong enough be profitable will remain.

It may be that the core problem of production is one that was already solved by hardware at the end of the industrial revolution. Software can now be used to solve the 2nd part of the problem, which is distribution.

>In technology's "invisible" world, inventors continually increase the quantity and quality of performed work per each volume or pound of material, erg of energy, and unit of worker and "overhead" time invested in each given increment of attained functional performance. This complex process we call progressive ephemeralization. In 1970, the sum total of increases in overall technological know-how and their comprehensive integration took humanity across the epochal but invisible threshold into a state of technically realizable and economically feasible universal success for all humanity

-Buckminster Fuller, Grunch of Giants

Our means of production have already served to produce a renewable surplus of all the physiological needs of humanity (food, water, shelter etc). The problem is in distributing it fairly which is why almost 50% of the world population struggles to obtain these necessities.

>The white man knows how to make everything, but he does not know how to distribute it.

-Sitting Bull