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 ...
I was at Kodak when the fatal decision was made. In short, they confused distributors with customers - they focused on serving the retail stores, ignoring who was actually paying for the products.
Very simple, in theory. The free market, which has really only existed anywhere for the last few hundred years but has spread in various forms around the world, is essentially an economy of scarcity.
People are rewarded by the extent to which they provide scarce resources others want. If the only resource you provide is one for which there is more supply than demand, you’ll make little money, if you have a job at all.
If the resource you provide is in higher demand than supply, your compensation soars. There is only one Rush Limbaugh. He makes a lot of money because tens of millions of people want what only he can provide.
Meanwhile, millions of people drive vehicles as their employment. Many of these jobs are going to disappear in the next few years. Most of the people thereby left unemployed will not be able to do the “new jobs” and in fact will not be capable of being trained to do so.
Extrapolate to all other areas of the economy.
The free market has had a hell of a run, and it’s produced enormous good for humanity. But, sadly, I expect it’s in the early stages of being counter-productive for most people.
With more and more people competing for the few jobs those on the mid to low end of the IQ scale can go, compensation will obviously drop. Supply and demand. It will correspondingly soar for those capable of doing the jobs for which demand still exceeds supply. Essentially all of which require high intelligence.
This means that more and more people will be “falling out the bottom” of the job market. No demand for anything they’re capable of doing.
This will not, IMO, mean poverty. The world of the future will be so productive there will be more than enough to go around. But do we leave control of the economy or even the political system in control of those increasingly few who are still in economic demand?
If not, it there any other other way to organize the economy other than by government redistribution?
The life of a hunter gatherer or a subsistence farmer is not very appealing. Technology definitely has its drawbacks but no one wants to go back to the past.
he also misses the point that Kodak cameras were expensive, people used to have to save up for a year to get a cheap one.
Robert Reich.
Yuk !!
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Create value through artisan craft. Cottage industries, hand-made one-of-a-kind products. When the Star Trek replicator will be able create any product from a pre-defined library of patterns and templates, the new status symbol will be a hand-distilled liquor in a hand-blown glass, neither of which you can own unless you meet their makers in person.
Reich is proposing using taxes, welfare and regulation to sabotage (a word derived from the shoes textile workers would throw into the mechanized looms to keep them from replacing the workers) production and innovation. But that will only work if everywhere in the world does it, and I expect some countries will see freedom to their competitive advantage. For a long time the U.S. was that country, but unless we can toss aside the economic ideal of Reich and Obama we will fall behind.
Good point.
Wealth redistribution: the government decides who the company is going to give money to, ie. to idiots voting for government.
It is straight up fascism
Quite right.
But what has historically happened to hunger-gatherers such as American Indians or Australian Aborigines when they are forced to settle, even with vastly more comfortable lives materially?
The lives led by those with no real role in society, whether in an American ghetto, on an Indian reservation in USA or Canada, or in a British slum, are not attractive.
People have historically gotten much if not all of their sense of purpose from filling an economic need, their job, if you will. A Comanche on the reservation today has a great deal more and better “stuff” than his ancestors did when they were Lords of the Plains. But he’ll often be the first to agree his life has a lot less purpose,
My prediction is that for more and more people there will BE no economic need they are capable of filling. How do these people find meaning or purpose in their lives? History is not encouraging in this regard.
Robert, instead of yammering about wealth redistribution all the time, you’d have much more credibility and appear to be much less of a hypocrite if you’d step up to the plate and lead by example by, say, giving away 90% of your wealth. I’m sure that would still leave you plenty and still better off than people who live below the poverty level. Until you do that, I’m afraid it appears that you are just another “progressive” hypocrite who wants to give away OTHER peoples’ money.
A free market is actually a pretty rare thing - the black market comes closest, but even it is shaped by the efforts of the government to shut it down. It isn't and never has been a choice between free and planned markets, but simply to what degree the market can be controlled for the benefit of those who intend to ride it without participating, before that control kills it.
Certainly some interference is present even in what is otherwise considered a "free" market - the Founders intended to, and did for awhile, run an entire federal government on imposts.
There is an interesting study of the overall issue by Bertrand de Jouvenal entitled The Ethics of Redistribution. Highly recommended.
Hunter-gatherers, not hunger-gatherers. Though, come to think of it...
The situation does pose a dilemma. What happens when most jobs have been automated away?
How many people are suited intellectually and by talent to become artists? You really think most people who lose their jobs as taxi or truck drivers will become artists?
I am fairly far over on the right side of the IQ scale, and if I had to make a living as an artist or musician I’d be in serious trouble.
I wouldn’t be surprised if one possibility — as an option for those who are so inclined — is a resurgence of utopian communities. Like the (real) Amish. Go be a pioneer. Be a farmer. Work hard, be self-suffient, use less technology, but not no technology.
Some folks would find it appealing. The alternative may be to live in a big city high-rise and surg facebook all day long.
When Robert and his wife start redistributing *their* money maybe I’ll read what he is writing. Maybe he should sell is expensive seats at symphony.
His seats used to be in front of mine at symphony. It was for seeing the orchestra.
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