He suggests at the end that we need a lot more entrepreneurship. This is similar to what PG has been saying for a long time. PG says we need startups so hackers can reach their potential. Fred says the economy needs entrepreneurship. We've talked a lot about PG's ideas, but is Fred right?
22 years of job creation wiped out in a day
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Re: 22 years of job creation wiped out in a day
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMHO, solving the problem will be much harder than that. US is highly based on a plan of idealized life through media. A typical lifestyle of the suburbs: * Multiple cars per family and doing heavy commuting. * Huge houses with high bills and maintenance. * Consumerism based on filling those houses and cars with non-essential disposable items. All those millions living with that mindset apply those same rules at work…
Wich also means that America has a confortable margin to improve. Their own genius lies in pragmatism, I wouldn't bet against them when necessity joins the game.
Indeed! US was a beacon of freedom before the Bush administration, together with France. Making an analogy to free software, US is BSD and France is GPL. For example France forces its citizens to be free, like a recent case denying citizenship to a very submissive Muslim-traditionalist woman as she was admittedly waiving her rights for her husband's.
Also US has a gigantic human capital with well educated population. It is a bit hard, but IMHO the change has to start with media. Perhaps applying existing laws against the advertisement cartel. But this is the French-style of freedom. I don't know.
Re: 22 years of job creation wiped out in a day
#23What about the jobs VCs destroy? VCs fire 2/3 of founding CEOs.
while getting booted sucks for sure, those guys are usually in a great spot and can parlay that success into a new venture or join another successful startup / company at a C level.
Re: 22 years of job creation wiped out in a day
#24Fred is probably underestimating the number of jobs created by companies he funded. Companies always also create jobs in peripheral industries-- in their suppliers, for example, and in industries that use whatever tools they're building. The latter was particularly obvious to us at Viaweb. Lots of people based businesses on our software.
Re: 22 years of job creation wiped out in a day
#25Fred is probably underestimating the number of jobs created by companies he funded. Companies always also create jobs in peripheral industries-- in their suppliers, for example, and in industries that use whatever tools they're building. The latter was particularly obvious to us at Viaweb. Lots of people based businesses on our software.
You can't inflate one number that way one without doing the same for the other. I suspect there are more peripheral jobs created per startup-job than are destroyed per manufacturing-layoff, though.
Re: 22 years of job creation wiped out in a day
#26Fred is probably underestimating the number of jobs created by companies he funded. Companies always also create jobs in peripheral industries-- in their suppliers, for example, and in industries that use whatever tools they're building. The latter was particularly obvious to us at Viaweb. Lots of people based businesses on our software.
There is also the pressure on the other side that many disruptive technologies require less jobs. For example when manufacturing machines took over previous manual work, or MSN Encarta and Wikipedia affecting the number of door to door encyclopedia salesman.
I think job creation/destruction should be looked at independently from innovation.
Re: 22 years of job creation wiped out in a day
#27That's the least accurate headline ever written.
Re: 22 years of job creation wiped out in a day
#28On the flip side, that is one guy that created 40 000 jobs in his career so far? that is really quite amazing. If that was me I would sleep very soundly with a smile on my face. He should just get up, and do it again.
Re: 22 years of job creation wiped out in a day
#29It should at least be mentioned that an out of work wal-mart greeter is not equal to an out of work surgeon. This never seems to be brought in in the "lost x jobs" debate.
Re: 22 years of job creation wiped out in a day
#30>Well, what if there are no openings come this May--literally none. No job postings. No on campus interviews. No job fairs. This isn't a fantasy. It's happening right now.
Been there when I was in school in the late 70's and early 80's. it sucks but it didn't last forever (that time anyway).