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Andy Grove: How To Make An American Job Before It's Too Late

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Re: Andy Grove: How To Make An American Job Before It's Too Late

#61

Post by [deleted] »

donw wrote: post #28
Aaronontheweb wrote: post #2

Andy makes an excellent point: when we outsource the manufacturing and scaling processes to another country, what we lose in addition to jobs are the innovations and experience necessary to maintain a strong defensive econosystem with respect to our economy. However, I disagree with Andy's recommendation that we should tax offshore labor - we should focus on making labor in the United States less expensive. Neuter th…

Have you actually ever been to an industrialized country that lacks an equivalent of the EPA and OSHA? Go to Beijing, and enjoy the brown air, which is pretty unbreathable on the bad days, and just moderately smelly on the good ones. Whatever you do, don't drink the tapwater, because it'll make even local residents sick. Don't go for a swim in the river, either. Be careful near construction sites; there are gaping ho…

[deleted]

Re: Andy Grove: How To Make An American Job Before It's Too Late

#62

Post by [deleted] »

starkfist wrote: post #32
Hubbert wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And since this is YCombinator: it means high wages for YOUR CUSTOMERS to afford YOUR PRODUCT by the MILLIONS. There are only so many Senators and Hedge Fund managers, and they spend their weekends in The Hamptons, not playing with your crappy iPhone game.

Hedge fund managers do indeed bring their iPhones along to the Hamptons.

[deleted]

Re: Andy Grove: How To Make An American Job Before It's Too Late

#63

Post by rbranson »

CamperBob wrote: post #54
rbranson wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're confusing a capital investment (the robots) with cost-of-goods-sold (the widgets). Automated manufacturing systems are complex systems that require highly trained individuals to maintain and operate, while reducing the total labor cost. In addition, if more manufacturing utilized these systems, scales of economy could be reached that would allow them to be more modular and commoditized.

Automated manufacturing systems are complex systems that require highly trained individuals to maintain and operate, while reducing the total labor cost. For now. Also, keep in mind that everything I said about it being economically undesirable to employ human labor in production goes out the window when there are a billion workers available who have nowhere to go but up. There is no (natural) law that says that our…

It's all "for now." Eventually we will exhaust the Earth's resources and possibly become enslaved by a race of artificial intelligence, but I'm not pretending to even think about solutions to those problems.

It'd also be cheaper to have slaves, but we don't do that either. The ends do not justify the means. In order for capitalism to be effective at increasing standard-of-living across the board and allocate resources and capital efficiently, it must be tempered with rules that set limits on what avenues are pursued for profit.

Re: Andy Grove: How To Make An American Job Before It's Too Late

#64

Post by cageface »

Hubbert wrote: post #20
cageface wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet the unionized workers of the 1950s - 1970's somehow purchased cars, household products, and clothing like domestically-made Levis blue jeans WITHOUT slave labor from repressive countries and without borrowing trillions fro those same countries. That was only possible because that time period was a window in which our technological superiority made it possible to provide the average working man with that standard…

Uh, no. Aside from petroleum issues, it was a SUSTAINABLE CLOSED SYSTEM of trade among similarly-developed countries with similar standards. This could continue even if innovation had suddenly stopped in 1985. Far more sustainable than the present, which involves unsustainable personal debts, unsustainable trade deficits, and unsustainable federal borrowing. But please note that CENTRAL POINT OF THE ARTICLE explains…

Uh, no. Aside from petroleum issues, it was a SUSTAINABLE CLOSED SYSTEM of trade among similarly-developed countries with similar standards. This could continue even if innovation had suddenly stopped in 1985.

It's only a closed system if you ignore the resources and cheap bottom-tier labor the first world extracted from the third world at a fraction of their potential value. The U.S. in particular was very active in this time period propping up puppet regimes around the third world in order to get cheap access to their raw materials and labor. The world has never been a closed system.

Re: Andy Grove: How To Make An American Job Before It's Too Late

#65

Post by CamperBob »

mkramlich wrote: post #57
CamperBob wrote: post #35

The real elephant in the room, which Grove and practically everybody else knows very well but refuses to talk about, is that nobody starts a company to employ people. People start a company to make stuff . To the extent this can be done with fewer people, this is always a good thing from that company's perspective, with no exceptions I can think of offhand. People suck, and you don't want to deal with them if you can…

great comment! btw, do you ever think we'll reach a point where it will be common to have 99.9%+ automated factories? (robotic, possibly even full input/output lifecyle & distribution, etc.)

btw, do you ever think we'll reach a point where it will be common to have 99.9%+ automated factories? (robotic, possibly even full input/output lifecyle & distribution, etc.)

I think one way to answer this is by analogy to farming. Every year, less and less of our food is touched by human hands on its way to the market.

According to the USDA, in 1900 41% of the American workforce was employed in agriculture. If you went back to 1900 and told a farmer that fewer than 2% of Americans would be involved in the production of food in 100 years, would he believe you?

This tectonic change has gone unnoticed by most because displaced agricultural workers have been able to find gainful employment elsewhere. The whole issue here, I think, is what we'll do when most of the productive labor across all economic sectors isn't needed anymore. So yes, in that sense, whether we use 99% automated domestic factories or whether we build 99% of our stuff overseas, I think we'll reach that point.

Re: Andy Grove: How To Make An American Job Before It's Too Late

#66

Post by aero142 »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #58

There's another proposed solution to this problem in the form of tax reform - The Fair Tax proposal. IANA Tax Expert, but I like how they've completely rethought the tax system from the ground up, with the objective of making the US a tax haven for all parts of the manufacturing process - harvesting raw materials, milling into useful materials, manufacturing into products, transport, and sales. In a nutshell, there a…

I really like the fair tax, but it bothers me that it is regressive. I know it is the same % for everyone, and there is the rebate at the poverty line, but the wealthy spend a much smaller percentage of their money at the retail level. Why is buying a car taxed but buying a company isn't? I've heard different answers but I'm not convinced by any of them.

Re: Andy Grove: How To Make An American Job Before It's Too Late

#67

Post by binaryfinery »

Hear hear.

China manipulates its currency, and so does the US: to keep the rich rich. If we were on the gold standard (not that I'm saying we should be) the dollar would already be worthless and US labor would be competitive. But then Wall Street 20yos wouldn't be able to afford a ferrari.

We must either begin enforcing fair trade, and fair employment, or we must face the fact that tens of millions will be unemployed. We cannot support them either. They will not be able to buy the iphones or the xboxes that pay our salaries, and we wont be able to pay our taxes.

And do you imagine that they will just starve to death? Or is LA a testbed for containing the lawless future?

I do not know what is happening to the USA. It seems as if those who should know better are willfully ignoring the consequences of their actions.

Re: Andy Grove: How To Make An American Job Before It's Too Late

#68

Post by rbranson »

cageface wrote: post #51
rbranson wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this true? 100 years ago there was virtually nobody employed doing purely intellectual work, yet this has grown to be a huge labor market. Your ideas here kind of trail off to be "The Bell Curve"-ish. Many of these "unskilled laborers" will instead find work in service industries and the arts. For an HN-geared example: look at what Ruby on Rails, Django, etc has done for web development. It allows web develope…

There may be a net gain of IP jobs in the future but are we going to find anywhere close to 5 billion of them? Service jobs will decline over time too as more and more of them are automated out of existence. When was the last time you actually went into a bank? The number of people making a real living in the arts will remain very small. The optimistic scenario is that world population self-regulates down over time a…

I remain optimistic about the prospect for more IP jobs. We don't need five billion of them though. I think there's a limit on what types of things will make economic sense to be automated. People often far underestimate the efficiency of humans at service tasks and overestimate the cheapness and ease at which robots and computers can do things that humans find simple. History has shown us that computers and robots are often good at things humans suck at, but are often very very bad at things we find simple. Also, I think as the world becomes less and less "human," demand for personalized and human services will surge.

Your bank example is an interesting one. Have banks decreased the number of tellers due to ATMs and online banking? Not really. The tellers can also process more transactions per unit of time because of computer automation. Banking services have just become more convenient and available to a larger audience through reduction of costs. When was the last time you paid for a checking account?

There are some excellent signs that the world population will self-regulate. The more a country develops, the more reproduction falls. The elite have the most to lose in any anarchy scenario, and control the vast majority of resources that can be used to prevent it.

The real future threat is resource exhaustion, not lack of jobs, lack of capital, or robots.

Re: Andy Grove: How To Make An American Job Before It's Too Late

#69

Post by rbranson »

CamperBob wrote: post #65
mkramlich wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

great comment! btw, do you ever think we'll reach a point where it will be common to have 99.9%+ automated factories? (robotic, possibly even full input/output lifecyle & distribution, etc.)

btw, do you ever think we'll reach a point where it will be common to have 99.9%+ automated factories? (robotic, possibly even full input/output lifecyle & distribution, etc.) I think one way to answer this is by analogy to farming. Every year, less and less of our food is touched by human hands on its way to the market. According to the USDA, in 1900 41% of the American workforce was employed in agriculture. If you…

Many of them shifted into fields that didn't exist in 1900 because in 1900, food and shelter were the majority of what people in the US worked for.

Re: Andy Grove: How To Make An American Job Before It's Too Late

#70

Post by rbranson »

aero142 wrote: post #59

I find this line of thinking very disturbing. Mr. Grove follows others in believing a common fallacy, by ignoring secondary effects, and fails to see how issues in macroeconomics affect each other. Where to start... The American standard of living is higher than China. In order for a worker in the US to continue to enjoy his standard of living and salary, she must contribute to creating something of value equal to wh…

He agrees with you. You both come to the same conclusion. What you fail to realize is that we've essentially paid the capital to educate people and build infrastructure in another country. Once their wages rise and our massive capital investments no longer make economic sense, they've gained these, and we are stuck without domestic manufacturing capacity. Essentially, we are mortgaging our future.
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