I don't know. Nobody does. But there is some measure of balance to what we do. What we do has a benefit - a benefit to someone other than just ourselves. Right now I work in travel informatics. What I do empowers tens of millions of customers to make better choices about how they travel, find better prices, put more information at their fingertips, keeping them informed.
The price of this is that I'm also putting airline service agents out of work, not to mention travel agents. I've made an end run around them and made it easier to get all of this information than going and talking to a human.
Personally, I think this is a worthwhile balance. The loss of these jobs also means a massive improvement to the efficiency of travel, and the happiness of tens of millions of travelers. This isn't a clueless assumption either - the emails I've seen from users demonstrates that people are passionate about what we do. You can disagree - and you wouldn't be wrong. I am, after all, not the arbiter of what is and isn't a worthwhile trade.
There's a difference between this and what Goldman does, though. The balance is way on the other end of the scale. The artificial supply squeeze on industries benefits... what exactly, besides Goldman itself? The price is obvious - rising consumer prices, starving people who can no longer afford to eat (re: the food crisis that Goldman is also accused of contributing to), wars and revolutions caused by desperate, hungry people.
So what's the upside? What did we gain for this price Goldman has exacted?
> "Financiers know double entry accounting and they know that for every credit there is a debit, both sides of the leger are equally true."
Please name the "credit" of what Goldman has done here.
We're not idiots, we know there's a credit and a debit. The question is, this doesn't seem to be the case in situations like these, where it seems we're all paying the price, and the only "credit" is to the financier.
If aluminum becomes more scarce in the future (Goldman seems to be betting that it will be), then Goldman has done us all a favor by conserving it in the present.
If it is not more scarce in the future, then Goldman will lose money.
Except, his breed of evil is considerably more extreme than ours.
If your self-justification works for you -- great. But you're lying to yourself if you think it has to be that way or that that is the only way. Computers (& technology generally) enable new business models at the same time as they make other models obsolete, such is life. Whether you think that balance tips one way or another is your business -- but your blatant cynicism and "oh, the world has to work this way" seems like you just letting yourself off easy.
That said, i wish you the best putting those big-money financier jobs out of work :)
I suppose you could have engineers drive around with clipboards, but the amount of data collected and the frequency its collected at would suffer. In other words, that job could never exist for a human.
Is that close enough to count for your "theoretically"? I don't think so, personally, as it could never make business sense to have that job be needed for the operation of the business, so...
False.
That thing you automated? Someone who doesn't know how to program lost their job because of it, and it ain't coming back.
You'll tell yourself that you've created opportunities for two more programming jobs for someone else to enhance your automation work, but that guy with the GED is still out of work. Tough shit buddy, should have learned to program.
The difference between you and people in finance is they've stopped lying to themselves about what they do. Btw, I'm a programmer whose going into finance. Why? Because I can eliminate more jobs and make more money for myself doing that then I could eliminating jobs as a programmer. Now I'm just eliminating big money financier jobs instead of 40K grunt jobs. Hey broker dude, screw your 5% finders fee, my program will take 1% instead. Hit the bricks pal. Middle men need to eat just as much as producers and consumers.
We put people out of work for our own personal profit, the only difference is you're pretending about what you do and I'm not.
And you know the really funny thing is? We'll all be better off because the next generation of people won't have to do those silly jobs, but in the mean time people are going to be out of work.
Do you know how many researchers, secretaries, etc are out of work because of Google? Stop kidding yourself and get real about how the world works.
I could write a brilliant essay filled with bullshit about how I'm making the world a better place increasing efficiency, allowing one person to do more, and live a better life, and it would be just as true as what I just wrote. Financiers know double entry accounting and they know that for every credit there is a debit, both sides of the leger are equally true.