New jobs in traditional industries isn’t really the point, so much as new industries is the point.

This is exactly my point though – the “new industries” we are seeing do not seem to come anywhere close to replacing the jobs they’ve destroyed, much less creating enough to deal with the numbers of new jobs that are needed every due to simple population growth. I.e., the jobs are being destroyed much faster than they are being created, new industries or not . I can’t think of a new industry in the last 10-20 years that even comes close to filling this category. The video game industry isn’t even coming close – 2010 stats indicate that the entire US industry (which is the lion’s share) only employs about 120,000 workers directly or indirectly. From what I understand, the US adds at least that many new workers to the workforce every month due to simple population growth, so this isn’t going to dent job loss, much less the inflation in the workforce from population pressure. Video games are massively profitable – but that simply backs up my assertions that we just don’t need all the workers we have anymore.

…lots of jobs are being creating through globalization, though not really in North America…

This, I think, is conjecture. The research I’ve done indicates that the jobs being “created” are primarily the jobs of expensive “first world” workers suddenly opening up to be done by workers elsewhere. I’m just not seeing that globalization is requiring anywhere near the millions of new workers that are available now every month due to global population growth. There is some amount of work being created simply to take care of the population as it grows, but there simply aren’t massive new industries anywhere that require millions of workers, which goes back to the original point of my article. Maybe we’ll see it in fifty years or something, but I’d bet on war or natural forces reducing the population pressures long before we see any industries form that somehow suddenly need human intelligence (rapidly becoming inferior to artificial intelligence for most productive, non-creative purposes) or strength (our advantage now is solely in finesse, but we are losing that to robots by the month). I could be wrong, but so far I don’t see a huge risk of it.;)

I agree. This is what I’m driving at. Especially when the “goal” of change is some idea that is deeply embedded in society, quiet education is going to be much more effective than protest in the long run. It’s hard to dismiss the idea as coming from a bunch of dirty hippies when it’s just encountered as rational conversation in a social context, or as simple practice in a business or community organisation. I think leading by example still works; while shouting about injustice is useful for getting ideas into people’s faces, that sort of direct confrontation is also a good way to get people to harden their positions. It carries risk, especially when the demands are diffuse and the threat scale and target (a few thousand protestors vs. tens or hundreds of millions in an entire population) is laughable. That’s not to say it should never be used, but it should certainly not be the only (and not necessarily the first) tool in the arsenal of change.

Strongly agree.

I think that it’s a very difficult argument to make that the internet and the associated economic activity have actually helped in creating jobs. It seems like if that were true, North America would have a glut of jobs [...]

Well, creative destruction implies that innovation both creates and destroys jobs — so not having a glut of jobs is expected. I guess the real question would be net jobs — is the total number going up or down?

(Though could be more complex too, e.g. the standard job of the 1950s might have been lifelong and enough to provide for the wife and kids, whereas a more temporary job in today’s world where it’s harder for many families to survive on a single income is quite different.)

Basically, the internet proved that the potential labor market was much bigger than the number of opportunities. And I’m hard-pressed to think of obvious examples offhand where the internet has created new jobs in traditional industries. Instead, I see boosted efficiency trimming off entire industries (content middlemen being the obvious ones) without providing a correspondingly large increase in new job opportunities elsewhere. Fewer people can easily do the same work.

New jobs in traditional industries isn’t really the point, so much as new industries is the point. Take the all-too-often-used example of entertainment… from live theatre to movies to home video to the internet, you have a constant process of competition, of creative destruction, of the emergence of new industries and transformation or destruction of old ones… musicians aren’t necessarily needed to play music live in the theatres anymore, but all sorts of new opportunities for music have emerged through 20th and 21st century media… entire massive industries, like the video game industry, didn’t even exist half a century ago… etc., etc.

The notion of efficiency reducing the total number of jobs suggests a kind of static world or closed system, that new industries or new jobs — beyond our present imagination — might not be enabled by improvements in efficiency elsewhere. Another perspective is that efficiency allows us to move on, to automate certain things so that we can focus on other things, and that’s part of what makes the economy “grow” or quality of life improve…

(Re: globalization, I agree with the difficulties in competition, but not sure if it’s necessarily a problem in the long-term… lots of jobs are being creating through globalization, though not really in North America, so depends what the scope is we’re talking about… and with outsourcing reducing costs, goods becoming cheaper, that can enable other growth and development (e.g. if computers cost two or three times more to make, that’d affect their affordability for business, costs for those businesses, efficiency all around)… lots of ripple effects with globalization, not sure that’s a clear case of jobs being destroyed.)

Fundamentally, I’m saying we’re nearly twenty years into this “new world,” and the trend is not the birth of huge new industries. A trend isn’t factual, and only hindsight will tell the full story on this one, but I’m not optimistic that we’re going to think of some new thing to do that actually requires millions of workers unless it’s simple manual labor.

I guess I’m just not convinced it’s a fundamentally new world. I see the accelerating technological progress accelerating other processes, like that of innovation or creative destruction. What might have taken centuries in the time of the printing press may take several years or less nowadays, but I’m skeptical that things are fundamentally different in the sense that we’ve reached some sort of a ceiling. But it’s interesting to consider that possibility.

As for revolutions and social change, I think that they’ve almost all involved actual bloodshed. When enough protesters get hurt or killed, my guess is that 1) it’s usually embarrassing to people in power that they couldn’t handle it more discreetly, and 2) there is a general sense of “it could happen to me” that spreads even among non-protesters that makes them more supportive of the underdog cause. ( I’m guessing you saw this article about the tipping point for the spread of ideas? They suggest that “[w]hen the number of committed opinion holders…grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame.”) It’s not enough to simply have some portion of the population be uncomfortable, I think. People can live with uncomfortable but they can’t live with starvation or genocide or brutality , so I think these tend to be the breaking points. And, of course, I think change on that scale is a bit of a wild animal – nobody really knows what happens when it gets unleashed. There’s just madness for a while and a new equilibrium emerges. I don’t think that anybody planned out the French Revolution or the Arab Spring or the civil rights changes in the US, etc. But I’d still argue that the street protests were more symptomatic of a need for change than they were a mechanism for change in itself.

To me, it seems like street protests are more effective when combined with other methods, e.g. having an educational campaign to inform minds, change hearts, and staging demonstrations in the streets to draw attention to the issue, build the movement, etc…

I agree. This is what I’m driving at. Especially when the “goal” of change is some idea that is deeply embedded in society, quiet education is going to be much more effective than protest in the long run. It’s hard to dismiss the idea as coming from a bunch of dirty hippies when it’s just encountered as rational conversation in a social context, or as simple practice in a business or community organisation. I think leading by example still works; while shouting about injustice is useful for getting ideas into people’s faces, that sort of direct confrontation is also a good way to get people to harden their positions. It carries risk,especially when the demands are diffuse and the threat scale and target (a few thousand protestors vs. tens or hundreds of millions in an entire population) is laughable. That’s not to say it should never be used, but it should certainly not be the only (and not necessarily the first) tool in the arsenal of change.

Are you saying it’s a closed system? I mean, it seems obvious to me that the economy can grow, looking at say the last 5000 years. The question remains as to whether there’s ever a point where it stops growing, but I’m not convinced that this is some utterly unique period in human history.

For example, why does it look like we’re at a breaking point now? Why is this such an utterly unique period in all of human history? Does the future really look that difference from 2011 than it did during the 1930s, or the medieval period after the collapse of the Roman empire?

I am not really sure what you mean by “the economy can grow.” The point of my article isn’t that I don’t think that we can continue to make productivity gains or that there won’t be new forms of employment. I’m arguing that the necessity (and utility) of human participation in that productivity is going to decrease faster than the rise of new forms of employment.

Very few, if anyone, would have been able to predict that the destruction of phone operator jobs and the introduction of automated switching would have laid some important foundations for the Internet and all of the economic activity it has enabled.

Right, but I think that it’s a very difficult argument to make that the internet and the associated economic activity have actually helped in creating jobs. It seems like if that were true, North America would have a glut of jobs; instead, all we have are companies arguing that we “don’t have enough workers” purely for the purposes of depressing wages. Productivity and economic activity have increased, I’m not denying that. But I’m not sure it’s a coincidence that the wealth gap has grown by leaps and bounds since then, or that it’s harder to find jobs for the average person, or that the notion of working the same job for a lifetime is now more or less dead. At the same time the internet broke ground for new jobs, it made the labor market for those jobs effectively global. Try finding web-related or programming jobs online these days (or even art or writing jobs). You’re competing with firms claiming that they can build an entire website for $200, or build an iPhone app for $1000. The going rate for a 500-word blog article is less than a dollar. You might get paid $5/hour to do website graphics or design. Basically, the internet proved that the potential labor market was much bigger than the number of opportunities. And I’m hard-pressed to think of obvious examples offhand where the internet has created new jobs in traditional industries. Instead, I see boosted efficiency trimming off entire industries (content middlemen being the obvious ones) without providing a correspondingly large increase in new job opportunities elsewhere. Fewer people can easily do the same work.

Fundamentally, I’m saying we’re nearly twenty years into this “new world,” and the trend is not the birth of huge new industries. A trend isn’t factual, and only hindsight will tell the full story on this one, but I’m not optimistic that we’re going to think of some new thing to do that actually requires millions of workers unless it’s simple manual labor.

I’m just raising some ideas, more than making an argument. To me, it seems like street protests are more effective when combined with other methods, e.g. having an educational campaign to inform minds, change hearts, and staging demonstrations in the streets to draw attention to the issue, build the movement, etc…

I’ve always been skeptical of the notion that wealth can be “created” in any form, since what we consider wealth (in economic terms) is primarily a reduction of systemic entropy through the application of work that produces “order.”

Are you saying it’s a closed system? I mean, it seems obvious to me that the economy can grow, looking at say the last 5000 years. The question remains as to whether there’s ever a point where it stops growing, but I’m not convinced that this is some utterly unique period in human history.

For example, why does it look like we’re at a breaking point now? Why is this such an utterly unique period in all of human history? Does the future really look that difference from 2011 than it did during the 1930s, or the medieval period after the collapse of the Roman empire?

To address “creative destruction” directly, this seems to be a variant of the “Luddite fallacy” fallacy, where the assumption is that there will always be something more important for freed-up workers to spend their time on.

Yeah, I wouldn’t say variant so much as an attempt at explaining the Luddite fallacy, the how behind the fallacy.

The notion of creative destruction suggests that innovation and growth happens through a process of creation and destruction. It’s incredibly hard to predict what kinds of new jobs can and do emerge through innovation and technological progress. I mean, the classic 20th century example is manual phone operators. Very few, if anyone, would have been able to predict that the destruction of phone operator jobs and the introduction of automated switching would have laid some important foundations for the Internet and all of the economic activity it has enabled.

I think that the “destruction” of jobs happening now is really indicative of a fundamental shift in human evolution where we just have to think about the possibility that the way forward might actually look scary to a world that has grown up equating your right to eat with how much of a workday you put in.

I agree, that just because something was true in the past doesn’t mean it was true in the future, but you also have to look to the past and understand that rarely could anyone imagine, looking forward, what kinds of new jobs, new industries would appear.

I don’t see how the present time is a special case, just because we can’t foresee the future. That’s been the norm for all the past examples of creative destruction.

When you say, “short of utterly useless service jobs like everyone having a personal hairdresser or a maid, I don’t really foresee there being enough jobs ever again,” it sounds to me like a variant of “everything has already been invented.”

I’d say, I can’t foresee what kind of jobs or industries there will be, or how difficult or easy it might be through any number of transitions, but I don’t see any evidence to suggest that this time round is different from the rest.

Ghandi’s protests were in a different era and focused on a specific target. Looking at it from the lens of threat analysis, the protests he led were able to focus Indian emotions and sentiment against a British occupier on a very large scale. Clear target, clear implied threat, clear demands (“leave!”).

As for Occupy, which I’m presuming you are referring to by “we,” there is no clear target and no clear demands, only a clearly identified “common grievance” where there is a recognition of inequality at the expense of the “99%.” This leads to the movement as a whole not really presenting (currently – I’m not saying that this can’t change) any credible threat and leaving many potential supporters uncertain as to whether or not they want to endorse a movement that could eventually turn out demands that they disagree with. When you say “win” – what exactly is it that Occupy hopes to win? What’s the end game?

If you read my prior post, you’ll know that I think this ambiguity is part of the brilliance of the Occupy Movement, and I am willing to admit that it has at least inspired dialogue. What I’m uncertain of is whether or not it will actually lead to change itself, or merely go down in history as yet another abortive attempt on the road to real solutions (or a collective lemming-leap off the figurative cliff). I think that the environment it exists in means that other, more local options are likely to prove to be more effective than hoping for the 1% (or the protesters who are out in the parks) to hand us anything that actually matters.

(Personally, I’m not really a huge Gandhi fan. His questionably racist attitude towards Africans and his odd sexual attitudes and practices and attitudes toward women, at least according to some sources, have left me with a less-than-heroic impression of the man. Time has been kind to him, I think.)

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

They went through the first two in less than two weeks. Now the elite are fighting. The fight will probably long and escalated. But the result will be the same – we will win.