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We Can All Become Job Creators

nytimes.com

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Re: We Can All Become Job Creators

#61

Post by dkrich »

I love the idea. Mainly because one of the biggest problems in our country (the US) right now is a complete breakdown in consumer confidence. People with money are sitting on it, afraid to spend or invest because they are afraid at any moment that the bottom could fall out.

Getting people to invest in micro-amounts at a large scale could unlock a lot of credit for small businesses that could use it to grow. I don't necessarily think that it is going to turn the economy around, but thanks to Howard Schultz for making a concerted effort to do what he can to help.

Re: We Can All Become Job Creators

#62

Post by dkrich »

dkrich wrote: post #61

I love the idea. Mainly because one of the biggest problems in our country (the US) right now is a complete breakdown in consumer confidence. People with money are sitting on it, afraid to spend or invest because they are afraid at any moment that the bottom could fall out. Getting people to invest in micro-amounts at a large scale could unlock a lot of credit for small businesses that could use it to grow. I don't n…

I also think that it is an incredible marketing opportunity for Starbucks. For $5 million, they (rightly so) are viewed as patriots, and people (myself included) feel compelled to support them over their competitors.

Re: We Can All Become Job Creators

#63

Post by anon808 »

prostoalex wrote: post #44
Goladus wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We need to stop talking about "job creation" and start talking about "wealth creation". It's more than wealth creation, though. People must also be paid fairly for the wealth created. Wealth creation is happening, the problem is that the rewards for it are all being skimmed away and those in the middle are being squeezed-- squeezed out of their homes, out of their cars, and out of their educations. The housing boom…

>>> Wealth creation is happening, the problem is that the rewards for it are all being skimmed away and those in the middle are being squeezed Those whose compensation is unfair usually run for another employer (that another employer sometimes being themselves). Money is simply a proxy for the value of the goods/services they produce for the society.

"Money is simply a proxy for the value of the goods/services they produce for the society."

If that's true, explain drug money.

I'm being serious.

Money is a decent proxy, but not perfect. It's important to remember that. It's good at measuring quantity, not quality.

Re: We Can All Become Job Creators

#64

Post by eru »

nostromo wrote: post #52
hugh3 wrote: post #3

We need to stop talking about "job creation" and start talking about "wealth creation". It's easy to create jobs -- e.g. I can go round breaking windows with rocks and create jobs for glaziers. But creating jobs that create wealth -- that is, to create an opportunity for someone else to join their labour with my capital in order to build something that someone wishes to pay for, thus enriching all three of us... well…

Your comment reminds me of my own personal frustration with our governance and current economy. I have a modest sum of money in various forms. The central bank in the US is basically said to me, "stop saving!" because interest rates are so low and inflation is likely to be high in the future -- there's no point. Saving is out. (You think we would have learned something...) So, let's look at possible investments. Real…

> So, I could find property to buy outright, but it seems that wouldn't being taking advantage of any real leverage.

Why are you looking for leverage? Isn't 50% quite a lot of leverage?

Re: We Can All Become Job Creators

#65

Post by ticktock »

muhfuhkuh wrote: post #26
randomdata wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main reason businesses aren't hiring is that they're not convinced that putting extra people on staff will actually be profitable. I believe it is deeper than that. If we look to agriculture, there is a short expiration date on the job. If you don't get the crop off in a timely manner, you are quickly going to be out of business. I hear farmers constantly complaining how difficult it is to find good people, but t…

"If you make a product and don't make any changes to it in several years, people will continue to buy your products anyway" Tell that to Microsoft. They sat stagnant on WinMo 6.x for nearly 5 years before rewriting and releasing Windows Phone 7. Their marketshare eroded to dust while iOS and Android (and, by that point, even Blackberry OS, Symbian, and WebOS) ran circles around it. So, yes, there is a shelf-life. Not…

Mr. Muhfuhkuh, (great name btw) I just want to touch on your point about the "neurosurgeon with the most gifted hands". The medical industry is rife with such professionals making large amounts of money; I propose this is part of problem. Of course surgeons have enormous amounts of knowledge and training, but in the end their customers are sick humans being operated on one at a time. How does this scale? and How is the ROI of the work determined? What if the customers were mostly coal miners making 40k per year? What I'm getting at is society places to high of a value on human life and this throws certain industries out of whack which society pays for in the end (or we "import" them from places that have a lower value on human life).

Re: We Can All Become Job Creators

#66

Post by achompas »

AJ007 wrote: post #58
hugh3 wrote: post #3

We need to stop talking about "job creation" and start talking about "wealth creation". It's easy to create jobs -- e.g. I can go round breaking windows with rocks and create jobs for glaziers. But creating jobs that create wealth -- that is, to create an opportunity for someone else to join their labour with my capital in order to build something that someone wishes to pay for, thus enriching all three of us... well…

Thomas Friedman had a column in the NYTimes about a week ago. While I did not agree with the specific, this quote was gold: "We cannot bail or tax-cut our way to prosperity. We can only, as Jobs understood, invent our way there." Measuring GDP, inflation, deflation, the unemployment rate, all of these numbers are not a reflection of quality of life. Prosperity is a quality of life issue which is solely improved (or d…

If you're going to listen to a Friedman talk about economics, make it Milton. Quoting Thomas Friedman is an exercise in pop sociology and buzzword-dropping.

Invention is not a necessary or sufficient condition for prosperity. You can arrive there via many paths (thriftiness or wise investment, service provision, etc.).

Re: We Can All Become Job Creators

#67

Post by lupatus »

anon808 wrote: post #63
prostoalex wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> Wealth creation is happening, the problem is that the rewards for it are all being skimmed away and those in the middle are being squeezed Those whose compensation is unfair usually run for another employer (that another employer sometimes being themselves). Money is simply a proxy for the value of the goods/services they produce for the society.

"Money is simply a proxy for the value of the goods/services they produce for the society." If that's true, explain drug money. I'm being serious. Money is a decent proxy, but not perfect. It's important to remember that. It's good at measuring quantity, not quality.

I'll bite.

Drug dealers/producers produce products that provide the user with exotic and novel experiences and which may increase the user's sociability. Similar to the travel industry and a personal life coach in a small form factor, drugs are good/service that many people seem to want.

Re: We Can All Become Job Creators

#68

Post by randomdata »

nordsieck wrote: post #51
randomdata wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell that to Microsoft. They sat stagnant on WinMo 6.x for nearly 5 years before rewriting and releasing Windows Phone 7. That highlights my point. Until the competition arrived, there was no real force driving them to continue working on it. The money was rolling in regardless of what they were doing to it. Microsoft could have went down to the unemployment line and set all of those people to work on the product, bu…

"Tech companies can wait for the best of the best. Why aren't those software companies hiring that guy who lost his manufacturing job for $9/hr instead? It is because they don't need to. They can wait for the one who is great at the job." That's not true at all. A crappy farm hand might harvest at 1/2 or 1/3 the rate of a great one. A crappy developer will actively damage a project. It is simply not possible to incre…

A crappy developer will actively damage a project.

A bad farmhand will damage equipment worth far more than most pieces of software, destroy crops and animals, the list goes on and on. I can say from experience in both that farming is significantly more challenging than programming.

Even a small farmer will have several millions of dollars worth of equipment that is easily broken in the wrong hands. Like good programmers, good farmhands can be paid quite well because they bring a lot of value to the business.

If a bad programmer gets into your codebase, it is trivial to revert their work. It is much less trivial to replace a $500,000 combine because of an minor operator mistake.

Re: We Can All Become Job Creators

#69

Post by Skillset »

tomjen3 wrote: post #46
9999 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hold your horses. Tell us more about this rock throwing, window breaking, glass making job creation plan of yours. This has been the most viable job creation plan I've heard of to date.

His plan is good but it only creates a limited amount of jobs and it is not especially environmentally friendly. My plan will create at least an order of magnitude more jobs, jobs for those with no education, jobs for the illiterate, the literate etc. It is simple to. Nothing needs to be broken. All you have to do is to outlaw electricity, gasoline and diesel as well as any other method of generating power except by…

It would also solve obesity, because they'd all be human-powered. I actually imagine a future where we could basically have gigantic power generation stations stocked with complex exercise machines.

Re: We Can All Become Job Creators

#70

Post by hugh3 »

FD3SA wrote: post #54

Unfortunately, the issue is not so simple. The the labor market is under assault from every front. Illegal immigration and offshoring depress skilled labor wages, while at the same time robotics and software progress to automate as many skilled jobs as possible. Laborers turn to college degrees, which burden them with massive student loans, only to graduate with unimproved employment prospects due to the saturation o…

Maybe, but let's be realistic. We're talking about 9% unemployment rather than a "full employment" value of 5%. The US economy is perfectly capable of finding productive work for another fifteen million people, just like it was three years ago, and eventually will be again.

People have been predicting the end of work ever since the first mechanized... whatever. In the past 150 years, we've managed to mechanize the hell out of agriculture and manufacturing and we've hugely increased labour force participation by encouraging women to work. And yet, at every point along the road, unemployment rates always seem to stabilize at about 5% in good times, and shoot up to 10% in bad times (Great Depression excepted, but that was due to some zany government interference).

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