

How can startups destroy more jobs? - jamesgolick
http://danielharan.posterous.com/how-can-startups-destroy-more-jobs

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A1kmm
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. Historically, people have simply consumed more - luxury is
addictive, and people measure each other relative to what others in their
community have.

However, there is a major counterbalancing force to efficiency gains - that
there are only finite natural resources, and many easily accessible reserves
are becoming depleted. Reserves of fossil fuels and high grade ores are
declining fast, so increasingly more labour is required per unit of energy or
metal - and the cumulative effects of pollution rise with accumulation over
time and a rising population, more labour is required to prevent pollution.

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stretchwithme
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.

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

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

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danielharan
It's an unproven proposition, and usually only applied to industry. If my
refrigerator is more efficient, I won't buy a second one. A more efficient car
might give me an incentive to drive more, but that seems really marginal.

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eru
People who hadn't brought refrigerators before, might be a first one, though.
And if there are extremely efficient, we might even switch to living inside
refrigerators [1] in summer.

[1] Some people already do.

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rushabh
Yup, startups are creative destruction, that is, if the wise people allow big
corporations to be destroyed. #toobigtofail

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hsmyers
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...

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danielharan
I actually used to work in one. A couple years after I left, the center
relocated to another province. It _was_ a shit job.

As a society we're not doing a great job of helping workers move on. In any
case, it really shouldn't be up to startups to protect jobs, any more than car
companies had to compensate carriage manufacturers or nail factories helped
blacksmiths.

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wisty
As a society, we do a terrible job at helping workers move on.

You go to school for 12 years, then possibly uni for 3-7, then are unlikely to
receive more than a couple of months of formal training throughout the rest of
your life, _even if you change careers_.

Virtually nobody does a university course after graduating. I don't think
that's because university is useless (though there is room for improvement),
or that skills are easy to obtain elsewhere, but a society that tries to load
a lifetime of study onto people who don't even know what they are going to be
when they grow up.

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cabalamat
I agree. I'd make more sense for many career paths if people did maybe 1 year
university, then work for maybe 5 years, then 6 months uni, work for 5 years,
etc.

Why do all undergraduate courses last the same length of time? Not because the
amount of time it takes to master every subject is the same, but because of
administrative convenience.

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maigret
Also because it has just been so. In the old times, you used to do the same
thing as your parents, and capabilities didn't usually go obsolete during the
course of one's work life, even less if that was at a college level.

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z0r
Destroy jobs, increase supply of labor commodity, ???, profit

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trotsky
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.

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danielharan
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.

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trotsky
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"

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danielharan
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.

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rick888
"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."

The unions have prevented many jobs from being automated.

