Economists Suggest Silicon Valley Startups Aren’t Really Creating Many Jobs

Re:Economists Suggest Silicon Valley Startups Aren’t Really ... by rorykoehler on Tuesday December 08, 2015 @08:45AM (#10696260)

I thought this was obvious. Why else would they be worth so much unless they were more efficient than traditionally structured firms. Silicon Valley got rich through automation of previously manual processes. Automation is about removing people from previously man-hour heavy processes. Less man hours equals less jobs. Productivity is now almost totally decoupled from man hours. It's not rocket science.

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Re:Economists Suggest Silicon Valley Startups Aren’t Really ... by Scarblac on Tuesday December 08, 2015 @08:47AM (#10696273)

That's a shame isn't it, if all they do is do existing things more efficiently?

One would hope there would be more startups that made entirely new things possible, things we couldn't do before.

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Re:Economists Suggest Silicon Valley Startups Aren’t Really ... by rorykoehler on Tuesday December 08, 2015 @09:19AM (#10696424)

We stand on the shoulders of giants. Everything is a iteration of something old. Sometimes a pretty big one, which we call innovation. That's not to say that they aren't on an order of magnitude better and more efficient than previously but that's exactly the point. We do way more with way less these days. I do believe new industries will emerge from the ashes of old ones but there will inevitably be a transition period where things will not work very well for those not working on the cutting edge of tech.

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