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Between 1960 and 2009, employment in IT in the US rose by a factor of 1.6, while the population grew by a factor of 1.7
http://lumma.org/microwave/#2010.10.17
and many women entered the workforce, so the labor pool expanded by more than 1.7.
My introduction to Rushkoff was Cyberia [1]. He's much more temperate now than he was in Cyberia. He has a great point, though. Restated, it's as follows: If we have abundance, why are we working for more, instead of sending the abundance to those who need it? He seems to fall down in the mechanisms of distribution though in this article and hand-wave through it. [1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Cyb…
This is more ground for the fact that we might not be in a bubble with major financial crash risk like the .com bubble. The fact is that engineers who are building and inventing new technologies are building a societal system (possibly unintentionally) that puts technology, rather than people, at the top of the game (especially in terms of efficiency & profitability).
While we may, as the tech industry, be relatively safe in the foreseeable future, this article really makes me question what we, as engineers, designers & general tech lovers, can invent/build that will allow future society to not only take advantage of our technologies (as end-users), but also allow individuals to make money in an increasingly digital and on-demand world.
This was such an intriguing article until he posited that our citizens who formerly worked in manufacturing could replace their aspirations of long-term employment in a stable economy with some generic digital goods production that was never elaborated on in the article. I have to assume he meant they should all make doll clothes in Second Life.
It's very interesting to think about cases where digital darlings have "killed jobs." Before: Thousands of jobs all over the country working for the classified section of a newspaper. Marginally profitable business. After: Craigslist destroys that whole market. Tons of jobs lost and the revenues shift to one company. Hugely profitable business, but probably a smaller total market than used to exist with just newspape…
The Internet did bring Craiglist, which did end up killing a major part of the newspaper industry. But does that mean we're worse off? No, because the Internet also brought us many other things. So it's good to look at the bigger picture, rather than how many people each industry employees over a period of time.
That said, I'm dubious of his suggestion that we all turn to purely creative pursuits. At least, it will be a very, very long time before automation gets us to that point. I'm more interested in what we do in the meantime. What are we supposed to do with hordes of workers that are freed up in the coming decades as menial jobs disappear at an exceeding clip?
My guess is that this is a problem the labor markets will solve on their own. That is, the solution to a disappearing amount of work is that, on average, we all simply work less. Why pay 3/4 of the population to work 40 hours a week when we could pay all of them to work 30 (then 20, then 10)? Of course, we're going to need to reduce per employee costs/benefits to make this work, but that's a good idea no matter what. Making the employer responsible for health care and retirement caused more problems than it solved anyway.
I'm not sure the Post Office's problems are related to technology. Their union negotiated a "no layoff" provision in their contract just this year. Why would you agree to that as an employer? Then there is the problem of defined benefit pensions where you end up keeping people basically on staff long after they stop working for you. The Post Office needs to go bankrupt and clear these contracts out and move forward w…