
Silicon Valley doesn't create jobs; it's wiping out middle-class jobs - antisocial
http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/18/opinions/wheeler-silicon-valley-jobs/index.html
======
jkoudys
I remember being a kid, and thinking that CNN must have some really
intelligent, mature writing, that I was simply too young to understand. Now,
they post these sensationalist headlines (I was expecting it to be a play on
words, e.g. it was an article about funeral planning or life insurance), and
fan the flames of idiocy with writing like this:

"And if you think your own job is safe, think again. New research predicts
that nearly half of all jobs are susceptible to automation over the next two
decades."

So silicon valley is bad _because_ they find more efficient ways to do things?
Should we also be upset with anyone who sells a refrigerator, for making all
those poor iceblock-expeditions and milkmen obsolete? Does the "\"sharing
economy\"" (my quotes around their quotes, for how much they quote that term)
mean that by using our cars, homes, tools, etc. more efficiently, and buying
less new stuff, we're actually saying "drop dead" to the people who would have
manufactured new things?

If there's a large number of people who hold degrees, who don't need the
degree for the job they have, isn't that a fault with our education system?
What about that bizarre arrogance that so many had in the 80s, where they
thought their kids must have a degree so they don't end up in a "blue collar"
job? So many would be earning good money now if they'd just gone to a trade
school, and learned welding, plumbing, carpentry, HVAC, etc. instead of
training for one of the office jobs which software has now made largely
obsolete.

~~~
lstyls
> I remember being a kid, and thinking that CNN must have some really
> intelligent, mature writing, that I was simply too young to understand. Now,
> they post these sensationalist headlines

Ironically, we can attribute the flourishing of trash articles like these to
the new media landscape that has arrived due to the emergence of new
technologies...

~~~
jkoudys
I don't think so. When I go back and watch TV shows or read headlines from
around when I was born, they weren't any better back then, I was simply too
young to realize how ridiculous they all were.

Case in point, the mass hysteria around daycare sexual abuse and satanic
rituals:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMartin_preschool_trial](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMartin_preschool_trial)

~~~
lstyls
I 100% agree that there has always been sensationalism in journalism - that's
nothing new. But back then the volume of print media was limited by physical
factors - it was expensive to get an article in print. The new economics of
media has fundamentally changed the business models. There was no print
equivalent of Buzzfeed for example.

My point is that the barrier to entry for shoddy journalism is so low that
articles like this are flooding the medium more than ever.

------
lstyls
I am so sick of articles like this which make some broad moral judgement about
the new tech economy. This one is even worse than most because the author
doesn't even attempt to give some statistical merit to his argument. Instead
he takes the lazy route of quoting some quasi-anecdotal BS about how all the
young millennials are making their way to SV to develop the next big app as if
they're the Oakies of the dustbowl heading west to pick oranges.

The fact is, tech has fundamentally restructured the labor market. Some
classes of people will do well, and some will lose out. It is not good or
evil. What will really determine whether we win out as a society will be how
we invest in things like education and infrastructure. Arguments that attempt
to write off tech full cloth as evil are useless, as are the pollyanas who
think tech will solve everything.

~~~
loup-vaillant
> Some classes of people will do well, and some will lose out.

If he's right about the automation part (I think he is), and if we're as
stupid as we were in the 1930s, then the class of people who do well is likely
to be quite smaller than the class of people who lose out big time.

Automation is wonderful. _Destroying jobs is amazing._ For most jobs, anyway.
The only awful thing about that is the loss of _revenue_. And the
stigmatization of the unemployed.

With technology that destroys more jobs than it creates, we don't have many
solutions. We could generalise the 4 days work-week. Then 3 days… Or we could
try unconditional basic income. Both, maybe? Or, we can wait until we're all
deep in the poo, such that we get an increasing number of violent uprisings,
leading to revolutions or fascism. _Again_.

~~~
michaelochurch
I wish more people saw this the way that you do. You're right. Destroying
"work", that is no longer needed, benefits society. It's a widespread loss of
income that causes everything to go to hell. The two don't need to be
correlated.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Or as someone wrote on HN once, and which is also probably my favourite quote
from here, "No job is the goal. No money is the problem.".

EDIT: 'nostromo @
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8987008](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8987008)

------
bko
People often forget that paying someone to do something is an expense, not a
benefit.

Sure, people need jobs, but not jobs that can be done by cheaper and more
effectively by machines. Employment opportunities are not a means of
themselves.

This (IMO flawed) economic thinking is best captured by economist Keynes:

"If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at
suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface
with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles
of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained,
of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need
be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real
income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a
good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to
build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical
difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing." [0]

[0] Book 3, Chapter 10, Section 6 pg.129 "The General Theory.."

~~~
jiggy2011
The concern is about what happens to people who are no longer employable if we
cannot create new jobs for them? Will everyone be happy when a majority of the
population depends entirely on charity and hand outs?

~~~
bko
Honest answer, I don't know. But I wouldn't have known what would happen to
the ~30% of the US population that worked in farming 100 years ago or the 90%
that were working as farmers in 1862 [0]

Jobs aren't really created by a central authority. They just kind of appear as
people find better things to do with their time/talents. The future may not
follow the past, but so far we've been okay.

[0]
[http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/trouble/timeline/](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/trouble/timeline/)

~~~
pm24601
And they are destroyed when wall street financiers are permitted to outsource
jobs.

Society can choose to allow or not allow society to be destroyed by creating a
large class of underemployeed.

We are choosing a tax structure that allows jobs to be outsourced.

------
geebee
The article starts with a magnificent exercise in false equivalence: "We have
no problem taking Wall Street executives to task for decisions that leave
American families financially devastated, yet we give Silicon Valley
billionaires a pass when they do the same thing".

No, they don't do _the same thing_. If I automate in 5 minutes with software a
process that used to take three people with pencils and erasers four months, I
have not done the same thing as taking out insurance policies against bad
mortgage securities that only I know are bad because I'm the one who took the
good mortgages out and replaced them with bad mortgages because the fine print
allowed me to do this.

Yes, both do eliminate some jobs. One because those jobs can now be done more
efficiently by machines. The other, because massive amounts of wealth was
destroyed by financial trickery.

It's so hard to get past that point that I almost didn't read the more
sensationalistic presented but nonetheless worthy of consideration issues that
followed.

Yes, social media and other internet behemoths are doing alarming things to
privacy. Yes, we need to be concerned if we send millions out of work, with no
clear path to employment. Yes, we should be concerned about the intense
concentration of wealth in a winner-take-all economy.

All kinds of interesting ideas have been presented (minimum basic income, for
instance). But you won't find any discussion of them in this article.

~~~
balabaster
Yes, but if you dig a bit deeper, the wealth was created by massive amounts of
financial trickery too. Most of the paper that supports the stock market is
really just a fabrication of an illusion - people mostly selling virtual
pieces of paper that suggests you own a right to buy and/or sell something if
a hypothetical scenario ever occurs. So to say that the wealth was destroyed
by financial trickery isn't the whole story... it was created by that same
trickery. All the wealth you see in the real world (the big mansions, flashy
cars, accumulation of stuff, that nice secure feeling you have because of all
the money you have in your bank account, your ability to purchase stuff) is
built upon an illusion that only exists in a virtual reality. While companies
are allowed to fabricate wealth pretty much out of thin air, what can you
expect?

Not that I'm disagreeing with your larger point. In comparison to Silicon
Valley, Wall Street is a city of charlatans.

~~~
geebee
I completely agree with you that when measuring losses, you have to consider
the fact that much of the wealth lost never existed in the first place. There
is still a tremendous amount of collateral damage, but a proper accounting is
important.

I remember thinking along similar lines during the enron scandal. Evidently,
employees moved all their retirement account money into Enron stock, and lost
everything when the company tanked. There was an article about a couple who
had lost $500,000. At the time, I do remember thinking - did they contribute
$500k in principle, or was 500K the peak value of their 100% enron portfolio
before it all fell apart? If it's the latter (and it probably was), then it's
entirely possible that they contributed no more than 50k (perhaps even
considerably less) to the account.

~~~
balabaster
...and that's probably the same for 90% of everyone's retirement portfolio.
The "we lost everything we had" line could be as meaningless as having someone
say "well, I put all my life savings in this slot machine because the guy at
the casino said he'd been keeping track of it and it's been paying out over
the odds for months, and at first, it seemed to be true... until I put in my
last dollar and it blew up."

Not that this makes anyone feel any better about losing their life savings -
but risk is risk... and betting all your life savings on something as fickle
as an illusion carefully sculpted by financial giants to pad their coffers,
protected by bills carefully designed by lobbyists to protect what might as
well be fraud, all buoyed up by public opinion of those chasing the dream of
endless wealth [which about sums up the entire financial market], is a gamble
no matter how you look at it. What did we learn about gambling in school? The
odds _always_ favour the house... and unless you're the house [which you're
not, because the house is the conglomerate of banks that propagate this mess],
you're extremely unlikely to win.

------
LaneRendell
Wheeler is chronically uncharitable to technology, and generally comes across
a techno-phobic. He's a journalist (and journalism professor) so it's not
surprising that he tends to have issues with technology in general.

Does he raise valid points? Sure. Some tech companies are just as guilty as
Walmart is of exploitative labor practices, but one can't help but take his
commentary with a grain of salt, as he slams "crappy automated phone systems"
he ignores all of the benefits of new technologies.

~~~
kokey
It's destroying traditional middle class jobs of his peers, like teachers,
doctors, architects, etc. but I think he has missed the fact that the new
middle class jobs are things like developers and data scientists.

------
bwb
Well, that was a weirdly written article... I do think we need the US
government to do more for Labor/People in this country. At this point
Labor/People are so unrepresented in the political process they are just
getting screwed left and right. Unions are a nightmare and keep a lot of bad
people in jobs that shouldn't be there, but without them nobody is pushing for
fair pay.

Why can't the US government pass a plan to push us slowly to a real living
wage instead of a minimum wage?

Why can't we push for a $12 to $15 an hour living wage across the board and
tie it to future inflation?

Not enough to be crazy, but enough that people are not stuck in a perpetual
trap of poverty.

------
beat
They need to retitle that article "Old man yells at cloud".

The intellectual vacuum of this article can be summed up by the fact that the
author chose a _fictional character_ as his Silicon Valley CEO strawman. At
least point to a real villain!

~~~
lstyls
Its so ironic that the author is a journalism professor. This article would
make for a perfect Journalism 101 case study on cheap rhetorical tricks:
appeal to anecdote, straw man, etc.

~~~
beat
Reminds me of seeing Neil Postman speak oh so many years ago. I got there
late, and met a friend (still a friend, he's my patent attorney now) leaving.
Asked him how it was, and he was like, "Neil Postman is a cretin".

Totally anti-tech reactionary. He was railing about how word processors were
going to destroy literacy, and we should all write with pencils like a Real
Journalist.

------
Apocryphon
"We have no problem taking Wall Street executives to task for decisions that
leave American families financially devastated"

Right off the bat- do we? Or do we just give them slaps on the wrist and then
big bonuses once the news cycle's over?

~~~
beat
By "taking them to task", he means "complain ineffectually". He can complain
ineffectually about Silicon Valley just as loudly as he can complain
ineffectually about Wall Street.

------
jolan
This article is written from the perspective that everyone is guaranteed a
place at the table of the hyper-efficient capitalist economy when no such
guarantee has ever been made.

If these kids went to college, then surely they learned how to learn, so why
not adapt to the market by learning new skills that the market values more?
Better than sitting on your ass waiting for the market to adapt to you.

Or join the military, file for disability, or get a second crappy job since
your free time is likely spent watching netflix and playing games.

As alluded to in the article, even the low skill, low paying jobs will be
going away soon so the time to act is now.

------
jeo1234
I'm betting that people like Wheeler where the same ones who were crying out
that the industrial revolution would bring only suffering and mass
unemployment to most of society.

~~~
loup-vaillant
Oh but it did. All our ancestors had to do was failing to guide the economy
through the tremendous productivity gains offered by mass manufacturing. To
paraphrase Jacques Fresco, they had empty factories and starving unemployed.
This makes no sense!

------
qiqing
Relevant:

Luddite (noun) : one of a group of early 19th century English workmen
destroying laborsaving machinery as a protest;

From Wikipedia : The Luddites were 19th-century English textile artisans who
protested against newly developed labour-replacing machinery from 1811 to
1817. The stocking frames, spinning frames and power looms introduced during
the Industrial Revolution threatened to replace the artisans with less-
skilled, low-wage labourers, leaving them without work.

------
nickodell
When I read the URL, I was initially worried because I thought Tom Wheeler was
saying this.

>As anyone who's talked to an automated system on the phone lately can attest,
"automated" usually means "worse."

He does have a point there. It takes me much longer to buy my groceries using
self-checkout than it does to go stand in line for a human to ring up my
purchases. Using an automated phone system is similarly pretty irritating.

~~~
QuercusMax
But why does it take longer? There are some stores where I'm just as fast to
self-checkout as a human cashier, and others where it takes a ton more time,
because the machine is super laggy. (Or deliberately made sluggish?)

You're literally doing the same thing as a cashier, using the same equipment -
as long as you don't suck at scanning things, it should take exactly the same
amount of time.

------
themark
"Only 36% of college grads have jobs that pay at least $45,000... after
adjusting for inflation"

! 45k? And here I thought my 30K job in mid 90's after college was a windfall.

~~~
pachydermic
[http://data.bls.gov/cgi-
bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=30&year1=1995&y...](http://data.bls.gov/cgi-
bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=30&year1=1995&year2=2015)

$30k in 1995 is around $45k now adjusted for inflation.

One important factor to remember is that the cost of education has risen a lot
(even in real terms) since the 90's. A student graduating today is way more
likely to carry a substantial student debt so that money just doesn't go as
far as it used to once you factor in wealth.

~~~
themark
I think there is a a general feeling of entitlement today as well.

Since you mentioned it, I wonder how much the percentage of graduates that
actually had to take out loans has changed.

~~~
bwb
I don't think there is anymore entitlement than in the past. I think that is
just something old people say about the next generation :)

College has increased in price so much compared to inflation. My parents paid
for all their school bills while working part time, you can't even pretend to
do that now.

~~~
themark
I just remember most entry level jobs being well under 30K in the mid 90s.
College degree, major city, etc.

------
neaanopri
So all the dunces are in confederacy against Silicon Valley?

------
ld00d
That title is horrible. Where does Silicon Valley send any message to any
generation?

~~~
sctb
We updated the submission title to a more informative subtitle from the
article.

------
michaelochurch
Semi-correct but terribly argued.

First, Silicon Valley sucks but it's not the fault of "technology". The Valley
has been successfully conquered by the mainstream business elite. They've won,
we've lost. It's not our territory anymore.

The corporate elite has been wiping out jobs for generations and, to be fair,
that's not always a bad thing to be doing. The crime isn't that jobs end. It's
that these corporations won't pay to train people up into the new jobs that
are created, dodge their taxes and therefore emasculate the government, and
lobby for an economic status quo that is harmful to most people.

Second, "technology" (as a force) generates wealth but doesn't distribute it
well. There are a number of reasons for that, but one is that engineers don't
care enough to change the distribution of newly-created wealth from what it
is. If the engineers who build technology are at fault, it's through inaction
rather than malice. We'd rather be curing cancer than helping businessmen
unemploy people, but when you look at the current socio-political structure of
society, it's only set up to go one way on that.

~~~
bwb
Very well put, so what do you see serving as a force to distribute the wealth?

~~~
michaelochurch
I think that the solution human societies will come up with is a basic income.
I tend to hope for that, because lightweight government is typically better.

------
eli_gottlieb
Speaking as a "millenial": that was painfully stupid and irritating to read.

Look: I don't want "jobs", not as an abstract commodity produced because
someone decided _everyone has to have a job_ , and that's that. I want _a_ job
that matches my skillset (it's reasonably good), compensates me well, and lets
me actually contribute to human progress. If human progress has advanced so
far that even someone with my skills is mostly unnecessary, I want a means of
supplying for myself that minimizes the personal burden of labor on other
people (note: not robots, not corporations, _people_ ), and enables me to get
on with my life and have fun -- there's more to the world than careerism.

Yes, the sharing economy has been built on the extreme precarity of its
workers. Yes, technology destroys "jobs". But overall, the problem here is not
technology: it's capitalism.

~~~
Animats
_" But overall, the problem here is not technology: it's capitalism."_

Right. Capitalism is designed to maximize shareholder value. A higher standard
of living for workers was a side effect. Was.

No other country has a working solution. Japan had their real estate collapse
18 years before the US, and never fully came back. Japan is an innovative
country, yet they couldn't crack this problem. They tried heavy infrastructure
spending to pump up the economy, and it helped a little.

The golden age for American workers coincides with the Communist period in
Russia. That's not coincidental. From the 1920s to the 1970s, capitalism had
competition. There was real fear among capitalists that if capitalism didn't
deliver the goods to workers, the workers would vote to socialize industries.
Britain did that, with the government running the coal, steel, railroad,
airline, electric power, and telecommunications industries. It wasn't an
unreasonable fear.

So the US had the New Deal under Roosevelt, and strong unions. After WWII,
unions worked to keep wages high. There were explicit arrangements in the auto
industry requiring wages to track productivity, so workers kept up. The auto
and steel industries set the pattern for the rest of the economy. In the 1950s
and 1960s, the USSR started to look like a serious economic competitor. The
USSR built an atomic bomb, H-bombs, nuclear submarines, and a space program.
Communism as a system looked like a threat.

That ended in the early 1980s, as the USSR stopped believing in its own
"workers paradise". With fear of competition gone, capitalism could take a
much harder line on its workers. It took a while, but now employers can do
pretty much anything they want to without fear of retribution.

~~~
Tiksi
I'd say China and India today are just as big of a threat, if not bigger, as
the USSR was. Why don't we see this same competition now? Is it because it's
not sensationalized? Because no one takes it seriously for some reason this
time around? I honestly don't know, but if what we need is a worthy
competitor, there are two just waiting for a slip up.

It seems especially dire when you consider that the western world's main
export isn't a physical good, and it basically all hinges on the fact that the
smart and able are allowed to succeed and produce "value", where as the smart
and able in poorer countries don't have those opportunities. India and China
make up half the world's population, an order of magnitude larger than the
"western world", so I expect that they have far, far more able and smart
people there just waiting to take the opportunity if it's given.

I think that when (if?) those countries catch up to our "modern standard of
living", they'll quickly leave us in the dust.

At the same time I'm not sure it's quite as possible in such a connected world
to have a competitor as isolated as the USSR was. The economy is far more
global and intertwined than it was, maybe we'll all just boost the worldwide
standard of living with cooperation instead of competition?

I honestly don't know what's going to happen down the road (and hold no strong
ideas of what might, all outcomes seem equally as likely/unlikely to me), and
neither does anyone else, but I wouldn't be surprised if the world doesn't
change all that much. Factories have closed down, jobs were lost, and people
ended up in a different kind of factory, now sitting at a desk staring at a
computer instead of a machine on an assembly line.

Many people (here on HN especially) seem to think that jobs will disappear and
not be replaced. In 1930, no one could have accurately predicted the world 100
years later. When machines started replacing factory workers, I doubt anyone
would have expected us to all be staring at glorified tv screens and while
banging away on our typewriters as a job, and that the some of the biggest
companies around wouldn't actually sell anything physical, yet here we are. So
who's to say that the next step is indeed something like basic income, instead
of yet another version of the same factory? What if the next change in type of
employment seems just as ridiculous and unimaginable today as today's world
would to someone 100, even 50, years ago? Job Opening: Virtual Reality Tour
Guide, must have at least 5 years experience in navigating
WorldBook.com's(Facebook's VR world, launched 3 years ago) .

Well this got really off topic towards the end.

~~~
12thr0wit
I'd agree easily that China and India are at least a big of a threat to the US
position as top economy. There's nothing, other than inertia and maybe
cultural influences, maintaining the status quo. I say maybe, because I don't
know a lot about Indian and Chinese culture.

I feel that there's not a lot of concern here about the possibility of falling
behind, because we're all entertained to a degree where we just don't care. So
many people are always entertained by television, radio, music, sports,
infotainment, and as a result they barely take their education, families, and
work seriously, let alone global balance.

If we lost the 24/7 entertainment, we'd see a shift in perception and an
increase in competitiveness and motivation.

