APP - Isn't the solution higher taxes on the rich?

[Bill Fishlore]

The transition is just starting, and I'm not inventing new industries. But two new ones that I can think off off the top of my head are craft breweries and cannabis.

I would like to know how you think recent technology, robotics etc. has created either of these industries. The loss of mid-level jobs in data processing, information technology and recently, retail sales has been flabbergasting. To be sure, there has been a new manufacturing sector making computers, cell phones etc. but the jobs have been mostly in China -- Apple makes nothing here -- and are rapidly being automated.

There is no doubt that the Industrial Revolution created manufacturing jobs to replace the agricultural jobs it destroyed. Some people have assumed that the Information Revolution would have a similar impact. Economists have watched the matter carefully and so far there seem to be no signs that the replacement is underway. Companies like Google or Snapchat have book values in the billions but payrolls in the dozens. Nothing like it has been seen before.

 

[MAGA MAN]

I would like to know how you think recent technology, robotics etc. has created either of these industries. The loss of mid-level jobs in data processing, information technology and recently, retail sales has been flabbergasting. To be sure, there has been a new manufacturing sector making computers, cell phones etc. but the jobs have been mostly in China -- Apple makes nothing here -- and are rapidly being automated.

There is no doubt that the Industrial Revolution created manufacturing jobs to replace the agricultural jobs it destroyed. Some people have assumed that the Information Revolution would have a similar impact. Economists have watched the matter carefully and so far there seem to be no signs that the replacement is underway. Companies like Google or Snapchat have book values in the billions but payrolls in the dozens. Nothing like it has been seen before.

The creation of new industries that always occur when smart people have time on their hands. Why is this time different?

 

[Bill Fishlore]

The creation of new industries that always occur when smart people have time on their hands. Why is this time different?

The idea that new industries always occur when smart people have time on their hands doesn't seem true. There are always a percent of smart people in any society and some of them are always to be found in the leisure class, yet new industries are not created at an even rate. There are many years, sometimes centuries, in which smart people with time on their hands do not create new industries. They write poetry or they start wars.

The Industrial Revolution was started by technology developed by people such as Watt and Newcomen, both of whom were arguably smart people but neither of whom had any free time on his hands.

The technology of the current Information Revolution was created by people working for large corporations such as GE and IBM. Even the guys like Jobs and Gates, who packaged it into new products were not men of leisure.

New industries spring from new technologies, technologies often discovered by chance. Not all new technology creates new industry, nor does the new industry inevitably create more jobs than it destroys. Human history is too complex and too subtle to be reduced to such simple generalizations. At best, it is a belief, a matter of faith, not a principle of economics.

 

[MAGA MAN]

'It doesn't seem true.' To you. But history shows us otherwise.

 

[chink]

like most just bs.