Posted on 03/22/2015 9:12:40 AM PDT by artichokegrower
It’s now possible to sell a new product to hundreds of millions of people without needing many, if any, workers to produce or distribute it.
At its prime in 1988, Eastman Kodak, the iconic American photography company, had more than 145,000 employees. In 2012, Kodak filed for bankruptcy.
The same year Kodak went under, Instagram, the world’s newest photo company, had 13 employees serving 30 million customers.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Their logic is flawed. The redistributionist logic has always been flawed.
The rich can only make money off the poor if the poor have money. The rich have to compete with other rich in the marketplace, for the money of the poor. Stagnation and monopoly are naturally selected against. A dynamic market will always persist/evolve, so long as government stays out of it.
Ok...let’s start with the Clintons and Feinsteins!
[T]he left really defines the word “rich” as “anyone with anything the government wants to take.” John F. Di Leo http://illinoisreview.typepad.com/illinoisreview/2014/12/josef-stalin-and-the-problem-of-political-opposition.html
debt obligations for unfunded pension and benefits owed public service employees”
We called these SLAVE CONTRACTS when I was a kid!
Another stupid remark from Shorty.
Minolta and Canon didn’t have film as their primary product. They made cameras, and just switched from film to digital types.
Kodak’s main product just went away.
Fugi as well
I love how soo many songs from the 1960’s and 70’s are politically applicable today.
I admit that with a lot of the songs you may have to reorient your thinking and listen as if the artist’s are being sarcastic.
Reich is an economics liberal ignoramus (sorry for the redundancy).
As his idiotic example points out he believes that all the employees that used to work for Kodak were not able to find any other job and that they’re either on the dole or starving to death.
About 100 years ago 95% of the people worked on farms. Today it’s about 4% - and mostly imported labor. Are 90% of the people unemployed and starving?
Robert Reich would have us trying to do selfies with a film camera then trying to post it on Facebook.
“As long as we as a society refuse to give the former slaves much more than they need to survive, in an effort to be humane, then we CAN and WILL continue on this path for ever. BUT if we listen to this liberal idiot and give them to much the whole economic system will collapse and EVERYONE will then be equally miserable. “
Problem is that no matter the level of welfare they get, their primary function is using their sex organs, the one thing that the appear to be successful at doing. Figure out where that takes us!
This has been tried in the Soviet Union. Everybody gets poor except the distributors. However I do see most of that system in place in America today. Now all they have to do is follow this Reich for the final solution.
I’d be interested in seeing some intelligent discussion of what the man actually said.
Look it is intensely obvious that productivity is increasing. Productivity can be defined as the amount of human effort needed to produce goods and services, also known as stuff. As productivity increases, there is more stuff per person. Wealth of the society and of most though not always all individuals goes up.
But continue that curve. By definition, at some point infinite stuff will be produced with zero human input. Or, if that’s taking the curve too far, at some point a great deal of stuff will be produced with very little human input. IOW, there will be little economic demand for whatever input most people are capable of providing.
300 years ago most human input to the economy was via their muscles. Even ships often moved by muscle power. People of low intelligence were just as much in demand for such jobs as the world’s greatest genius. The Industrial Revolution came along and human muscle power became increasingly irrelevant. Productivity and wealth soared, after thousands of years of stagnation.
Today most people work at desks, with their minds. The problem is that those jobs are increasingly being done by computers and robots. This process of course still creates new jobs, but with very few exceptions the new jobs require intelligence quite a ways over on the right side of the Bell Curve. No Lefties Need Apply. This is not an issue of education or training. The taxi-driver laid off because the new taxi is driven by a computer will simply not build a new career writing apps for Android.
The process for a couple hundred years now is that new and better types of jobs are created faster than the old ones are destroyed. Net, net society comes out ahead.
But that’s a historical pattern, not a law of nature.
I’d like to discuss options for handling things if Reich is right, in his prediction if not his prescription.
Is there any way to run a world in which there is very little economic demand for services most people are capable of providing other than redistribution by the government?
Instead of ranting about the iniquities of redistritubion, with which I agree, BTW, what are the alternatives?
First, Get Shorty’s Wealth.
the only man to whom reichhhh measures up is yassar arafat and he is dead
Clearly Kodak didn’t make the transition to a digital world.
I put that failure on very shortsighted leaders.
Xerox, on the other hand is interesting. They are responsible for much of the digital economies beginnings and yet failed to embrace the work of their research teams.
Xerox has survived but not without a long and difficult nearly complete restructuring.
My nephew is a robotics engineer. He was visiting a few months back. He works remotely, usually, and was working from my house. He's an intense guy and was working 12-14 hour days in this zone of complete, intense concentration.
It made me think that we ARE reaching a time when there will not be enough "work" for everyone. But, guys like my nephew will still be needed.
We are seeing the creation of a large entitlement class already. People who will and have never really worked. People who have left the workforce who will never return. We are seeing the beginnings of those people being sustained by a guaranteed income by the "state" or the ever smaller group of taxpayers.
How's that work? How and why do guys like my nephew continue to do what they do?
The difference was, Kodak literally invented the digital camera.
Too bad they didn’t have the foresight to capitalise on this breakthrough...
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