12-30-2016, 04:54 PM
(12-30-2016, 12:41 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: How about jobs like mine, wherein the information revolution is changing my company from a travel agency to a manager of travel data? What is so unstable about that?
It all comes down to the end consumer. GDP is essentially net sales of the economy. It is a small share of total sales, because much of a firms revenues comes from other firms and so serves and inputs into other company's cost structure. You entire firm is such an input, it is a cost entry in another company's books. You exist because they got ride of some other cost element. A big chunk of tech is supported by advertising. As long as advertising remains a fixed percentage of GDP all this sort of tech is a zero sum game, jobs gains by tech workers are offset by job losses elsewhere. The only way that advertising-linked tech would be a growth center would be in advertising grew as a % of GDP. But in this case you would have the cost of the stuff being marketed go up with not actual increase in quality or utility. It would be artificial.
As far as I know this has not been happening in advertising, growth in online media is offset by decline in old media. There is one sector in which this HAS been happening: higher education. The productivity of college instructors (the functional workers in this case) has gone up dramatically even though their has been no change in their tangible output (they still educate the same numbers of students as before) but in dollar terms the price for this education has risen. Staff aren't getting paid any more, many colleges use the same lecture halls today as they did in the past. Colleges are mostly non-profit so the extra revenue that comes from the higher price isn't flowing into profits. So where's it going? Into the burden. Colleges have many positions that either did not exist or were much smaller 40 years ago. Some of them are counselors, mental health specialists, and assistance for non-traditional students, but the biggest chunk is IT. Higher education maintain a lot of IT infrastructure that costs a lot to support. Is this burden increasing the value of the college's product? No, graduates earn no more relative to per capita GDP than they did a decade or two in past. So students are paying more for the same value, which generates extra revenue that produces jobs for folks like you.
A similar thing has happened with finance. A certain amount of financial services are need to serve consumers. Most of it is for business and so in a cost input, as is what you and I do and the rest of the burden. Some of this is necessary and serves to enhance output, like the work of process improvement specialists (inventors, product/process entrepreneurs, scientists, engineers, designers etc) have done over the last century. Others are not. A level comes where further effort in finance is counterproductive as described here.
A similar effect (but to a lesser extent) is present in healthcare.
Now, this is not some sort of conspiracy. It is not intentional, not some sort of welfare for highly educated people. The same is true of the platform company. It is simply something that has happened. But the soaring costs of higher education and healthcare have been revealed as problems. The costs of excess financialization have become clear. Is further burden expansion is these areas going to be feasible? How long can this continue. This is what Dave is noticing. He's not completely right. You made an excellent point on how burden expansion has prevented much of the job loss so far. But he's not completely wrong either.