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How can startups destroy more jobs?

danielharan.posterous.com

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Re: How can startups destroy more jobs?

#11

Post by trotsky »

danielharan wrote: post #6
trotsky wrote: post #4

Poster has confused the difference between lowering unemployment rates and the shifting role of labor, like that brought about by the industrial revolution. Hopefully he isn't secretly dreaming of firing the person who answers the phones as a triumph of the information age.

The kinds of work we've done have changed, as has the social structures in which we perform it. I'd rather see far more people being self-employed, as it was before the industrial revolution - although in more interesting jobs and with a higher standard of living.

I am struggling to understand how this whole thing doesn't boil down to "we should eliminate jobs that I used to do and hated, and get more people doing jobs like the ones I enjoy and have now"

Re: How can startups destroy more jobs?

#12

Post by stretchwithme »

A1kmm wrote: post #5

Innovations which reduce the amount of human effort needed to do things also reduce the amount of human effort that is directly or indirectly needed per unit of goods or services consumed, and so to fund the same total consumption, less work per individual is needed. There are three sides of the triangle which can move - the percentage unemployment, the number of hours per employee, or the total amount of consumption…

There are only finite natural resources if you're talking about a fixed number of atoms of each variety being available on the earth, but we don't have finite resources. We are creating new things all the time that lessen our need to consume natural resources. And if we stopped subsidizing consumption, we'd see even more such creativity.

Any natural resource that gets scarcer even as demand for it increases naturally gets more expensive. This gives people incentives to avoid its use, either by being more efficient or substituting alternatives.

This has even worked for land itself. As land gets more expensive as more people wish to live in an urban area, buildings add stories, using the same land over and over again.

Re: How can startups destroy more jobs?

#14

Post by danielharan »

trotsky wrote: post #11
danielharan wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The kinds of work we've done have changed, as has the social structures in which we perform it. I'd rather see far more people being self-employed, as it was before the industrial revolution - although in more interesting jobs and with a higher standard of living.

I am struggling to understand how this whole thing doesn't boil down to "we should eliminate jobs that I used to do and hated, and get more people doing jobs like the ones I enjoy and have now"

Lots of career paths (not necessarily jobs!) add value to society, and I'm not about to do them. Daycare worker? They should be paid WAY more given the value they provide. Even if the salary was higher than mine, there's no way I would consider that as an option.

Conversely, there are lots of dirty, dangerous and demeaning jobs I've never held which don't seem worth it. How many people die in coal mines every year? Would you want to do that?

By all means we should give those workers a decent shot at retraining, like Germany did with their coal miners. If anyone figures out how to use robots to entirely automate their job or engineers manage to make wind and solar scale up cheaply, I would say that's a net positive for humanity.

Re: How can startups destroy more jobs?

#15

Post by patio11 »

sp4rki wrote: post #7
hsmyers wrote: post #2

With regards to call centers, you might want to first ask those with a job there if they want their job destroyed. Without regard to their current job search plans, they are there for a reason...

I worked in not one but two call-centers during a very dark time of my life. I say freaking bomb all call-centers out of existence. They create crap jobs, with crap pay, and crap benefits that steal work from better qualified people. In the first call-center I worked in, I was doing financial support for customers. I was great at my job because I was studying finance at that time in my life. Everyone else on the 200+…

As a counterpoint: I had a lot of book smarts and street stupid during my later years in high school. There was an $N,000 gap between my scholarships and my family's ability to pay and the cost of the expensive private university that changed my life.

I made a few hundred dollars in off-the-books employment for a borderline psychopath who nearly killed me with a pipe to the head. Following poorly planned unemployment brought on by the pipe incident, I got a job at a call center for an office supply company (the kind that sells things like, I don't know, staples). I remember those years pretty fondly: they paid me what I was owed in a timely fashion, no pipes were thrown at my head, I touched no toxic chemicals in a hot warehouse, and it was a value-creating job which I was good at for a wee bit of time prior to going to bigger and better things.

Re: How can startups destroy more jobs?

#17

Post by sp4rki »

patio11 wrote: post #15
sp4rki wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked in not one but two call-centers during a very dark time of my life. I say freaking bomb all call-centers out of existence. They create crap jobs, with crap pay, and crap benefits that steal work from better qualified people. In the first call-center I worked in, I was doing financial support for customers. I was great at my job because I was studying finance at that time in my life. Everyone else on the 200+…

As a counterpoint: I had a lot of book smarts and street stupid during my later years in high school. There was an $N,000 gap between my scholarships and my family's ability to pay and the cost of the expensive private university that changed my life. I made a few hundred dollars in off-the-books employment for a borderline psychopath who nearly killed me with a pipe to the head. Following poorly planned unemployment…

By any chance was this call-center servicing the same country (or a country with similarities in culture and language) and where you properly trained by the company? I should have added to my comment that I meant most outsourced call-centers in which employees are nothing more than people to fill seats that either commit mischievous actions or make stupid mistakes. I have no quarrel with a call-center servicing people in the same language or high end call-centers in which people are either highly trained or only hired if they have the skill set required for a specific job.

There is also a call-center in my country that is dedicated to translation services. They are of course exempt of my contempt as they only hire translators with the capacity to translate from x language to english in a timely and concise manner. They offer pay that is considerably a lot higher than regular call-centers and they vet and test their employees before hiring. Once again I was targeting call-centers in India, Central America, and Africa that are full of thieves and morons. There are, of course, exceptions to the rule, but they are surely the minority. By a long shot.

Re: How can startups destroy more jobs?

#18

Post by tome »

stretchwithme wrote: post #12
A1kmm wrote: post #5

Innovations which reduce the amount of human effort needed to do things also reduce the amount of human effort that is directly or indirectly needed per unit of goods or services consumed, and so to fund the same total consumption, less work per individual is needed. There are three sides of the triangle which can move - the percentage unemployment, the number of hours per employee, or the total amount of consumption…

There are only finite natural resources if you're talking about a fixed number of atoms of each variety being available on the earth, but we don't have finite resources. We are creating new things all the time that lessen our need to consume natural resources. And if we stopped subsidizing consumption, we'd see even more such creativity. Any natural resource that gets scarcer even as demand for it increases naturally…

As use of a resource becomes more efficient the rate of consupmtion actually increases not decreases:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Re: How can startups destroy more jobs?

#19

Post by tomjen3 »

danielharan wrote: post #8
A1kmm wrote: post #5

Innovations which reduce the amount of human effort needed to do things also reduce the amount of human effort that is directly or indirectly needed per unit of goods or services consumed, and so to fund the same total consumption, less work per individual is needed. There are three sides of the triangle which can move - the percentage unemployment, the number of hours per employee, or the total amount of consumption…

That triangle ignores worker productivity and resource efficiency. To prevent pollution, we need workers producing LED lights instead of wasteful incandescents or mercury-laden (and ugly) compact fluorescents.

Have you actually used an LED light?

I have - and they are insanely expensive (okay thats to be expected) but what is worse is that they give very, very little light, not enough to light even a dinner table, let alone a small room.

Those compact fluorescent lights? Yeah not only do they flicker (which is bad for your eyes, even though it is not fast enough that you can see them just like the old CRT monitors) and there is some evidence that they may be linked to eye cancer, but even if they aren't they take about 30 seconds to turn on fully, which means I have to walk the corridor in the dark (what then is the purpose of lightning? fuck if I know). We don't need LED lighting, we don't need compact fluorescent lighting, we need actually useful lighting, which means incandescent light bulbs for at least the next 30 years.

Call me back in 2040 and we can try again.

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