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Rise of the Creative Class Worked a Little Too Well

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Re: Rise of the Creative Class Worked a Little Too Well

#51

Post by scientistem »

WalterBright wrote: post #24
hkmurakami wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have thought something similar as well. If you have one Bill Gates and everyone else making $80k, then Bill Gates has a pretty low upper limit on consumption of scarce assets, and thus goods and services are not bid up. But when a larger and larger number of people make more than their peers, then you start to have a bidding war for scarce goods (ex: housing, education, etc). Hats what you have in the Bay Area. Mor…

Industries that have government heavily involved in (health care, education, housing) have seen huge runups in prices. Ones government is not involved in (such as software) have seen precipitous price declines.

I would not describe government as heavily involved in health care. The prices you see rising are from lack of meaningful competition and transparency allowing providers and insurance companies to dictate prices virtually arbitrarily and certainly irrationally to the consumer using the services.

Meanwhile, government is the only meaningful access many have to healthcare and education.

Re: Rise of the Creative Class Worked a Little Too Well

#52

Post by scientistem »

michaelchisari wrote: post #48
scientistem wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually intepreted that as the jobs require a very low level of skill and provide low compensation—exactly what you’d expect from making a job “blue collar”.

You can make very good money as a consultant in the PHP/Joomla/Drupal world if you are professional, reliable, and write solid, bug free code. Nothing you make will be particularly interesting, but you will make an excellent living for yourself.

That is true, but you’re focusing on the php part rather than the median php position part, which is the relevant point to the discussion.

Re: Rise of the Creative Class Worked a Little Too Well

#53

Post by michaelchisari »

WalterBright wrote: post #25
justinator wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google, Amazon (for example), are building large work centers in desirable places to work, which are raising the cost of living of everyone else in the town that may not have a six figure income. Google is moving to Boulder, CO as we speak; Denver was on the shortlist for Amazon. It's the same problem with kicking out artists in a dilapidated warehouse area, and moving in boring professionals to live in lofts built o…

> kicking out artists in a dilapidated warehouse area, and moving in boring professionals So artists are wonderful, interesting people, and professionals are boring and unappealing? Wow.

Speaking as a boring professional, yes, artists may be insufferable in plenty of ways, but boring they are not and their presence is important for establishing and growing a local culture, whereas professionals are good for growing an economy and both are needed for a healthy, vibrant city.

Re: Rise of the Creative Class Worked a Little Too Well

#54

Post by WalterBright »

thewarrior wrote: post #44
nostrademons wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The complex design work goes into creatively gluing these APIs together to form new product categories. If you don't need to spend time worrying how to fit bits on disk, you can spend that mental energy searching for and solving problems that would've been too complex without the APIs. Smart programmers move up the value chain as needed so that they're still doing work that can't be done easily with an existing produ…

Good point . So that begs the question , what are some of the things that are right now higher up the value chain ?

Writing a better compiler :-)

Re: Rise of the Creative Class Worked a Little Too Well

#55

Post by nickpp »

scientistem wrote: post #51
WalterBright wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Industries that have government heavily involved in (health care, education, housing) have seen huge runups in prices. Ones government is not involved in (such as software) have seen precipitous price declines.

I would not describe government as heavily involved in health care. The prices you see rising are from lack of meaningful competition and transparency allowing providers and insurance companies to dictate prices virtually arbitrarily and certainly irrationally to the consumer using the services. Meanwhile, government is the only meaningful access many have to healthcare and education.

The very lack of meaningful competition and transparency is caused by and a symptom of heavy government involvement.

Governments corrupt markets.

Re: Rise of the Creative Class Worked a Little Too Well

#56

Post by ghaff »

WalterBright wrote: post #22
Animats wrote: post #6

Don't worry. Programming is becoming a blue collar job. Being an "electrician" in 1880 was a big deal, the high technology job of its day. By 1920 it was a union blue collar job. That's programming.

An electrician in 1880 did a lot of design work. One of 1920 (and today) does it by rote - they just follow canned rules and procedures already worked out. It's all coded into regulations, too, so there's little flexibility. An electrical engineer, on the other hand, does design work.

>they just follow canned rules and procedures already worked out

To a degree. I get the contrast you're drawing and don't really disagree. But an electrician (like plumbers/contractors/etc.), especially working in an older building, has to deal with a lot of unexpected circumstances that have to be dealt with. There's a lot of problem-solving involved.

Re: Rise of the Creative Class Worked a Little Too Well

#57

Post by xapata »

justinator wrote: post #9
rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #4

Before industrialization, land that mattered was farmland. Then as industrialization took hold, urban land became more important as the grouping of people together allowed for economies of scale in manufacturing. But then the petrochemical revolution put things in reverse, as people could live anywhere and travel by car. Suddenly, open space was economically desirable, as it made more sense to build a factory in supe…

Google, Amazon (for example), are building large work centers in desirable places to work, which are raising the cost of living of everyone else in the town that may not have a six figure income. Google is moving to Boulder, CO as we speak; Denver was on the shortlist for Amazon. It's the same problem with kicking out artists in a dilapidated warehouse area, and moving in boring professionals to live in lofts built o…

Or we could just pay service-workers more. If you'd like to have a cool bar where the employees can afford to live in the neighborhood, then create one. Charge enough per drink to pay the rent and advertise why. I'm curious if it'd succeed.

Re: Rise of the Creative Class Worked a Little Too Well

#58

Post by WalterBright »

michaelchisari wrote: post #53
WalterBright wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> kicking out artists in a dilapidated warehouse area, and moving in boring professionals So artists are wonderful, interesting people, and professionals are boring and unappealing? Wow.

Speaking as a boring professional, yes, artists may be insufferable in plenty of ways, but boring they are not and their presence is important for establishing and growing a local culture, whereas professionals are good for growing an economy and both are needed for a healthy, vibrant city.

I know some artists, and many of them are definitely boring :-) Just because someone decides to be an artist and sticks seashells on a model house doesn't make them interesting. And why would, for example, playing a trumpet well make you intrinsically more interesting than mastering complex mathematics?

I'd rather have lunch with the mathematician. In fact, Feynman is at the top of the list of people I'd like to have lunch with, and it's not about his bongo drum playing.

(P.S. I learned to play the trumpet in my youth.)

Re: Rise of the Creative Class Worked a Little Too Well

#59

Post by WalterBright »

scientistem wrote: post #51
WalterBright wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Industries that have government heavily involved in (health care, education, housing) have seen huge runups in prices. Ones government is not involved in (such as software) have seen precipitous price declines.

I would not describe government as heavily involved in health care. The prices you see rising are from lack of meaningful competition and transparency allowing providers and insurance companies to dictate prices virtually arbitrarily and certainly irrationally to the consumer using the services. Meanwhile, government is the only meaningful access many have to healthcare and education.

About half of health care spending in this country is done by the government. That's heavily involved by any metric. Secondly, the amount of regulation of it is very, very heavy.

The price rises are due to this. See

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-ame...

Note how prices for Lasik eye surgery, which has little government involvement, have trended down dramatically.

Re: Rise of the Creative Class Worked a Little Too Well

#60

Post by jpindar »

ng12 wrote: post #10
falcor84 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see that happening; there's no sense for large companies to hire lots of blue-collar programmers, when they could just automate any of the routine repetitive work.

What happens when we eventually train AI to write code for us? Then "programming" would be a lot more like data entry than creative work.

That's what the people who created Fortran thought. Instead, the types of programs people wrote became more complex once they didn't have to write them in assembler.
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