Earlier quoted context omitted.
> fight to win What exactly does victory in a trade war look like?
...Consumers are forced to buy your expensive product instead of cheap imported ones?
[deleted]
Andy Grove’s Warning to Silicon Valley
21–30 of 266 posts
Re: Andy Grove’s Warning to Silicon Valley
#22> "There was room for improvement, he argued, for what he called “job-centric” economics and politics. In a job-centric system, job creation would be the nation’s No. 1 objective, with the government setting priorities and arraying the forces necessary to achieve the goal, and with businesses operating not only in their immediate profit interest but also in the interests of “employees, and employees yet to be hired.”…
It can also be spectacularly successful . Although it wasn't a jobs program, WWII and its aftermath, driven by the state and centrally planned, resulted in great economic prosperity -perhaps unprecedented prosperity. Why can't we have a WWII on infrastructure, green energy, science funding, pollution cleanup, transportation, hyper-loops ?
Those are phrased too positively. Politicians need to phrase objectives in the negative in order to scare up support.
"The War on Infrastructure Decay" doesn't have quite the same ring to it as "The War on Drugs" or "The War on Terror".
Re: Andy Grove’s Warning to Silicon Valley
#23> "There was room for improvement, he argued, for what he called “job-centric” economics and politics. In a job-centric system, job creation would be the nation’s No. 1 objective, with the government setting priorities and arraying the forces necessary to achieve the goal, and with businesses operating not only in their immediate profit interest but also in the interests of “employees, and employees yet to be hired.”…
It can also be spectacularly successful . Although it wasn't a jobs program, WWII and its aftermath, driven by the state and centrally planned, resulted in great economic prosperity -perhaps unprecedented prosperity. Why can't we have a WWII on infrastructure, green energy, science funding, pollution cleanup, transportation, hyper-loops ?
Prosperity for whom? Certainly not Western Europe. And yeah, when you're the only major industrialized power not to be horrifically bombed, you may enjoy "unprecedented" economic activity in the following decades.
Re: Andy Grove’s Warning to Silicon Valley
#24Consumers will pick the best cheap gadget regardless of origin. Investors want maximal profits in a 1-3 years time frame. The system unfortunately does not afford much wiggle room for ethical and national duty when working with those constraints. Grove's outlook also colored by difficulties of semiconductor industry. Asia in addition to having cheap labor, governments would prop up barely profitable fabrication compa…
> The system unfortunately does not afford much wiggle room for ethical and national duty when working with those constraints.
This is strictly true, which is one of the reasons I think the onus of long-term thinking has sadly but rightly shifted to regulation over altruism.
Whereas in the past you might have had a titan of industry decide that dumping chemical byproducts of manufacture into the water supply of surrounding farms was "wrong", now the CEO will be voted out if he or she fails to make the profitable choice.
Re: Andy Grove’s Warning to Silicon Valley
#25There is a conflict of values to consider here:
Do we we place a higher value on preventing relative poverty in the United States or extreme poverty around the world?
"""Poverty rates started to collapse towards the end of the 20th century largely because developing-country growth accelerated, from an average annual rate of 4.3% in 1960-2000 to 6% in 2000-10... China is responsible for three-quarters of the achievement."""[1]
[1] http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21578665-nearly-1-bill...
Re: Andy Grove’s Warning to Silicon Valley
#26Germany sets a great example here with its local industrial production base and culture.
I have to wonder what other price is paid for that state of affairs. Is that the result of some sort of ... rigged game?
Re: Andy Grove’s Warning to Silicon Valley
#27If the U.S. really had a shortage of prosperity then this would make sense. The problem is that the U.S. already has more wealth than it knows what to do with, it's just that it's completely misallocated. And given the fact that sending our designs to China to get manufactured is basically the only thing stopping them from going to war with us, I'm not convinced it really makes sense to give up this benefit in order…
The article IS about the misallocation of wealth?
The concern is there will be a class of highly paid individuals in the US and a class of unemployed (replace with underemployed, low income) because we're sending all our manufacturing jobs overseas.
Grove's argument is whatever benefits you're getting for sending jobs overseas, there's a societal cost (increase inequality), as well as unforeseen future costs when innovation and technical excellence is located elsewhere.
No idea about the rest of your views.
Re: Andy Grove’s Warning to Silicon Valley
#28> "There was room for improvement, he argued, for what he called “job-centric” economics and politics. In a job-centric system, job creation would be the nation’s No. 1 objective, with the government setting priorities and arraying the forces necessary to achieve the goal, and with businesses operating not only in their immediate profit interest but also in the interests of “employees, and employees yet to be hired.”…
I think there is a significant confluence among those who find prosperity and purpose through jobs to conflate the concepts of employment and purpose. That to not have a job is to not have a purpose, and vice versa. If we had a planned economy built around peak employment, we would have many fewer entrepreneurs and many more, as you say, hole diggers.
Socially we already do that. We have created a gargantuan advertising industry that has zero net material gain for society, whose sole purpose is to redirect dollars already in circulation to their employers. We have dramatically expanded bureaucracy in almost every industry to micromanage risk at the cost of tremendous overhead in the time of human beings spent on it. We maintain many institutions in the service industry more-so because the marginal cost of having all the participants unemployed (and thus hungry, destitute, and dangerous) is worse than just paying them do to work nobody practically would need done if not for the negative impacts of simply dropping people out of the workforce.
But this is entirely the wrong way to approach economics. It is absolutely antithetical to the human condition to start from the presumption that people need to do something for someone else for their life to have meaning. That is where entrepreneurism comes from, and we need more of it going forward, not less, as we systemically eliminate the repetitious work in our lives through technological advancement. To aspire for peak employment is to aspire for the death of aspiration. Rather than seeing a "problem" of unemployment, when the practical cause is derived from the lack of anyone willing to pay people for their time considering the skills that they have, see it as an opportunity. If we have unemployment it means everything worth doing is being done, and we should be trying to enable those who are not needed to keep society running to improve that society through innovation than to fabricate busywork for them to do to keep all the cogs in the machine in tune with one another, even if a large segment of said cogs are redundant.
And probably the best example is how I imagine most people would read that previous sentence - but there is a ton of things I want done! But practically, capitalism does not care what you want, it cares about only what those with the dollars to make their voices heard want. The unemployed should be those free to listen to the wants of people rather than money, rather than those who society condemns to poverty.
Re: Andy Grove’s Warning to Silicon Valley
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
> fight to win What exactly does victory in a trade war look like?
...Consumers are forced to buy your expensive product instead of cheap imported ones?
The idea that there are "consumers with money to spend" hinges on the availability of jobs that pay good wages. People without jobs aren't good consumers (most government benefits are parsimonious or heavily restricted to certain items).
Free trade unquestionably allows companies to offshore jobs to countries with cheap labor, no environmental regulation, high corruption to enable bribes, or all of the above.
As a consequence, wages stagnate as more and more of the profit accumulates at the top. Those at the top divert a much larger percentage of their wealth into investments, driving a surplus of capital seeking return. Meanwhile wage earners' purchasing power decreases. This trend can be masked for a time, as marginal people drop out of the labor force, older people retire early, the cheap overseas labor gives wiggle room to drop some prices, and other technological advances make some goods cheaper to produce.
In the long term the consumer class is gutted. Capital is misallocated due to lack of investment opportunities, financial volatility increases, and the concentration of wealth enables a handful of people to command a vastly outsized influence on government.
For the record, this was the Gilded Age in the USA where we jumped from financial panic to financial panic and the monopolists and .01% literally decided entire elections in back rooms. The same old arguments have been reborn (free market, regulation strangles business, etc).
I'm pretty sure things will continue to get worse before they get better. It took the fear of Bolsheviks to force change last time.
Re: Andy Grove’s Warning to Silicon Valley
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
It can also be spectacularly successful . Although it wasn't a jobs program, WWII and its aftermath, driven by the state and centrally planned, resulted in great economic prosperity -perhaps unprecedented prosperity. Why can't we have a WWII on infrastructure, green energy, science funding, pollution cleanup, transportation, hyper-loops ?
Prosperity for whom? Certainly not Western Europe. And yeah, when you're the only major industrialized power not to be horrifically bombed, you may enjoy "unprecedented" economic activity in the following decades.
> Certainly not Western Europe
Certainly not? These years were known as the "Trente Glorieuses" (glorious thirty) in France.