Re:We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going t...
by tomjen3 on Friday August 05, 2011 @06:07PM
(#2851988)
I am not sure I agree with the author, but it seems to me that previous progress have chiefly made things faster (travel), cheaper (e.g mass production), lighter (computers), more accurate (measurement instruments) and more durable (steel versus iron versus stone).
Right now the IT industry is mostly making things cheaper and to some degree faster (you no longer have to wait until the next days paper to get to know what happened yesterday) however most of what is produced are final goods and there is only so much of the which can be consumed; whereas the amount of steel you might use if it were free is likely to be many thousands of times higher than today (since manufactures would use it everywhere they could) you aren't going to read even 50 newspapers a day if they were free -- you don't have that much time.
The same is the case with games and television -- you don't have the time to play more than a few hours a day at most so it doesn't matter whether Farmville is much cheaper than going to the chinema.
So the only way it seems different to me this time around is that today most of what is produced falls under my self created economy of final goods whereas previously much of the innovation and improvement has happened earlier in the value chain.
One notable exception to this seems to be open source server software (and computers in general, although they now seem to be much faster than the average person needs) which makes it much cheaper and easier to start a tech company (indeed patio11 famously spend $60 on bingocardcreator.com) but at the same time these companies also typically makes a lot less money than the companies they disrupt.
Right now the IT industry is mostly making things cheaper and to some degree faster (you no longer have to wait until the next days paper to get to know what happened yesterday) however most of what is produced are final goods and there is only so much of the which can be consumed; whereas the amount of steel you might use if it were free is likely to be many thousands of times higher than today (since manufactures would use it everywhere they could) you aren't going to read even 50 newspapers a day if they were free -- you don't have that much time.
The same is the case with games and television -- you don't have the time to play more than a few hours a day at most so it doesn't matter whether Farmville is much cheaper than going to the chinema.
So the only way it seems different to me this time around is that today most of what is produced falls under my self created economy of final goods whereas previously much of the innovation and improvement has happened earlier in the value chain.
One notable exception to this seems to be open source server software (and computers in general, although they now seem to be much faster than the average person needs) which makes it much cheaper and easier to start a tech company (indeed patio11 famously spend $60 on bingocardcreator.com) but at the same time these companies also typically makes a lot less money than the companies they disrupt.