"What is an innovation worth?"
April 26, 2013 7:16 AM   Subscribe

 




It's rather startling to consider how few employees Google, Facebook and Twitter have compared to their respective "reach" in culture and so on.

In the case of Google, they've made it possible for people like me to earn a living through online marketing/advertising, and Google has also made it possible for small businesses to compete cheaply and efficiently. So there's that.

But it does seem to me that innovation is radically reducing the number of jobs out there, and I wonder how my kids will do in 15 years or so when they enter the workforce.
posted by KokuRyu at 7:52 AM on April 26, 2013 [1 favorite]


every North American now behaves, thinks and often looks like an obese and overbearing 19th century slave owner.

I'm more of a John Bull, stuffed full of the jolly roast beef of England.
posted by KokuRyu at 7:59 AM on April 26, 2013 [3 favorites]


But it does seem to me that innovation is radically reducing the number of jobs out there

That's a Cartesian view of things. The "innovation" of Google could not have happened without the "innovation" of the WWW which could not have happened without the "innovation" of TCP/IP and so forth. It's innovation all the way down. Innovation is an expanding sphere and more likely to create livelihood on the crust for ever more people than to put everyone out of work.
posted by three blind mice at 8:02 AM on April 26, 2013 [2 favorites]


I wonder how my kids will do in 15 years or so when they enter the workforce.

What's a workforce?

...wait, did you mean the Servitors? Aren't those just manufactured at some plant in Ghana using components from criminals and Recalcitrant Social Escapees? No, no, no need to go into detail, thanks though.

Well, anyway, it's been nice to chat, but I've got a Class IV Party I need to attend. Have your Servitors clean up the mess, will you?

Why are you crying? What the hell? It's not like that Servitor is built from your children or something.

Creep.
posted by aramaic at 8:04 AM on April 26, 2013 [4 favorites]


| But it does seem to me that innovation is radically reducing the number of jobs out there

The purpose of innovation is to reduce the number of jobs out there. The problem is that our culture isn't capable of dealing with the consequences of that.

As a computer programmer, the proper form of my work is to make manual tasks obsolete by automating them. My job is to reduce labor, which removes potential jobs for people who would have done those manual tasks. Since I program on the support side of things, this is usually me making my own tasks easier for myself, so in a way, I'm making myself obsolete. Except that my goal is to move on to something more interesting once I've eliminated the boring work.

In a utopian world, innovation should result in people working fewer hours and enjoying more luxury, but this doesn't actually happen because Labor is a constant. Being employed is an end in itself, which is backwards. We should be trying to put everyone out of work so they can enjoy their lives.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 8:15 AM on April 26, 2013 [9 favorites]


In a utopian world, innovation should result in people working fewer hours and enjoy more luxury, but this doesn't actually happen because Labor is a constant. Being employed is an end in itself, which is backwards.

This is a titillating example of how values are attached to our concept of capitalism. What's the word I'm looking for? I think it's "sharing".

As someone said earlier, the problem is distribution.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 8:21 AM on April 26, 2013


> This is a titillating example of how values are attached to our concept of capitalism.

Correlation is not Causation.

Socialism traditionally falls into the same trap: consider Marx's Labor Theory of Value. I think this line of thought comes from something deep and primal in human psychology, and Capitalism is merely the current embodiment of it.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 8:31 AM on April 26, 2013


Actually, innovation has transformed my hometown of Victoria BC into a tech hub over the past twenty years. There are about 15,000 jobs here that didn't exist 20 years ago, and $2 billion in revenues generated by the sector that weren't there when I graduated from university, at the height of the recession. People (like me) were lining up to get jobs cooking in restaurants, and it's one of the reasons why I left. The tech jobs that have been added to Victoria are sustainable, since the companies here are "lifestyle" companies, with slow growth. No one's looking for the big payout that has been so destructive in other cities. We're also not a service centre, so, unlike Vancouver, while the jobs aren't quite as cool, there are not regular massive layoff (like EA does from time to time).

Looking at technology from a US-centric perspective is probably missing the point. In reference to three blind mice above, "the world is flat", and we're not used to competing with Indians for technology jobs. It's uncomfortable for us, but Indians deserve work as much as we do.
posted by KokuRyu at 8:41 AM on April 26, 2013


I wonder how my kids will do in 15 years or so when they enter the workforce.

Obviously they'll be peddling bikes to supply toast and lights to the Bill Gates of the world.
posted by happyroach at 9:05 AM on April 26, 2013 [1 favorite]


We should be trying to put everyone out of work so they can enjoy their lives.

I'm not so sure I agree with this. There is a great satisfaction in doing work--especially physical labor. Some of the best days of my life have been pouring concrete, digging post holes, bucking hay, mowing lawns, moving/branding cows--hard, dirty physical work that didn't pay well, but gave me a chance to physically stretch myself and enjoy a job well done--and maybe a beer--afterwards. My livelihood wasn't tied to these jobs, and I didn't have to do it repeatedly, day in and day out, for years, but as summer work, it was OK. Sorting paper was always worse than blue collar work.

Other jobs I've had have stretched my mind, not my muscles, and some jobs were a challenge socially. I've never had a 'career' other than being a mom, and I don't want one (and at my age, I'm not likely to get one, either.) I'll probably have at least two or three more jobs in my lifetime--fortunately I can come and go as I please, because my husband will be employed/retired, and there'll be enough to live on. If I'm not working for pay, I'll be working with a large garden and doing other physical things to be productive.

Work is good. Shitty pay and lack of respect are what poisons the concept. Seems to me a good society is not one where work is eliminated, but one where work is celebrated, where people like to flex their muscles and their minds, and where everyone has enough to live on, without being forced into a blue or white collar mold.
posted by BlueHorse at 9:21 AM on April 26, 2013 [3 favorites]


Work is good.

For you, sure. For me, it's a means to an end, but one that also constantly interferes with that end.

If scarcity were solved, I would not miss work.
posted by spaltavian at 9:35 AM on April 26, 2013


If scarcity were solved, I would not miss work.

Humans are hard wired to create and/or serve. Call it work or not if you wish, but without it, we go crazy.
posted by tommyD at 9:48 AM on April 26, 2013 [1 favorite]


BlueHorse:

I didn't do a good job of making a distinction between "Work" and "Employment" because admittedly I use those terms interchangeably. I think the key point is, like you said, that your livelihood did not depend on it, and the amount of time you spent doing manual labor was probably not long enough for the novelty to wear off and chronic back pain to begin.

You can get all that endorphine satisfaction of doing physical labor through sports and other exercise, and you would get a lot more satisfaction from it because it is an act of luxury, not an act of survival.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 10:01 AM on April 26, 2013 [1 favorite]


Actually, the post doesn't describe Google in 1998. It describes Alta Vista in 1998.

In order to get to Google in 1998, the librarians would need to apply the PageRank algorithm. Basically, Librarian Smith would need to consult with every other librarian to find out how many pages link to each one of Smith's pages. The pages that have the most inbound links are the ones that the editors would then propagate upwards to the higher-level editors.

This was Larry Page's key insight that made Google a superior search engine (PageRank is named after him, not after generic web pages). He thought it might work because there is a parallel in academia: most-cited papers are considered more valuable.

(It generates new problems, like shady SEO types who are paid to promote certain pages and do so by building link farms with tons of bogus inbound links to pages, but there are ways of dealing with them and Google has been fairly effective at doing so.)

Instead of Librarian Smith doing this work, we could also hire Librarian Jones to communicate with other librarians about inbound links to Smith's pages, and outbound links to other librarians' pages. Regardless, it would probably drive up the cost and make Google worth even more workers.
posted by A dead Quaker at 10:11 AM on April 26, 2013


Socialism traditionally falls into the same trap: consider Marx's Labor Theory of Value.

Marx's "labor theory of value" isn't really Marx's — he took up the term from the other political economists his work was in dialogue with, specifically because the idea was already in such common circulation. The idea behind Capital wasn't "hey, hey guys, I've found the source of value: labor!" If it had been, no one would read Capital; we'd just read Ricardo and Smith. The point of Capital is instead that the abuses associated with capitalism (filthy cities, early mortality of workers, radically unsafe work conditions, terrible schools for the children of workers, severe overwork and severe unemployment side by side, etc. etc.) aren't perversions of the capitalist system, but instead features baked into the system itself — that the problem isn't that the rich are horrible because they fail to follow the rules, but instead that the rules, when followed to the letter, both let them commit and encourage them to commit acts of barbarity and terror upon us.

Derail aside, the point is, Marx isn't about the labor theory of value, and it's weird that that's the thing he's become so associated with.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 10:19 AM on April 26, 2013 [4 favorites]


I've been a teacher, but can't find work in my field because of the demographic shift in Canada that has caused declining enrolment. I've worked in government, but got laid off at the end of the last resource supercycle, with oil and gas royalities to government tanked, providing an opportunity to get rid of government workers.

Thanks to Google and similar web technologies, I've been able to reinvent myself. We compete with traditional ad agencies that have ten times the overhead we do - is it really providing value to customers to have individually-designed office space with designer furniture in a heritage building while being unable to prove ROI?

So I'm thankful for the innovation that has occurred.
posted by KokuRyu at 10:21 AM on April 26, 2013


There is a great satisfaction in doing work--especially physical labor. Some of the best days of my life have been pouring concrete, digging post holes, bucking hay, mowing lawns, moving/branding cows--hard, dirty physical work that didn't pay well, but gave me a chance to physically stretch myself and enjoy a job well done--and maybe a beer--afterwards. My livelihood wasn't tied to these jobs, and I didn't have to do it repeatedly, day in and day out, for years, but as summer work, it was OK.

The last sentence is the crux of the matter. I dug post-holes once. yeah, it was a hard day's work and I enjoyed it. Doing it every day, all year long? Fuck that. That's the kind of life style where you retire at 60 because you're physically broken. I'll take sitting in my chair and punching buttons any day.
posted by GuyZero at 10:25 AM on April 26, 2013 [1 favorite]


In fact, I want to make a general point of this matter. Sports is to Labor as Art is to Manufacturing.

That summer camp experience was a sports camp. Sports is what happens when Labor loses the survival component and becomes an act for its own sake, a form of luxury.

People would still do science, math, and other creative activities if they didn't require them as a means of survival. And they would probably be better at them, because they wouldn't have to spend as much of their resources on grant/patron-seeking.

When I was young, I loved programming. My mom warned me "You'll love it until you're payed to do it." I still love programming, but only because I've been very lucky in aligning my personal interests with my professional ones. That is a luxury, and other people I know (Especially those who went into web development rather than backend data work) have not been so lucky, and I've encountered the truth of my mom's warning many times.

You get the job that is available to you, not the one you want to do. I don't think it is normal to be able to do the work you love.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 10:33 AM on April 26, 2013 [1 favorite]


But people derive a lot of their sense of self-worth--and personal satisfaction--from having their work be what sustains them. It helps people feel more autonomous, independent and personally-satisfied to know that they are able to survive by the fruits of their own labors.

I think the goal should be a system that makes it easier for people to take pride in doing work they enjoy and feel well-suited to while at the same time making it easier for people to achieve financial independence through that work.

After all, aren't we all better served by having people be in a position to do the kind of work they're capable of doing best on a sustainable basis? Don't people take a great deal of personal satisfaction in knowing they are doing work that benefits others? Most people I know feel that way at any rate.

I think the idea we can just decouple work from people's sense of self-worth and identity is a big part of why we're having so many problems today. People often only seek their careers as a means to an end: to make money. A more harmonious approach would empower people to do the kinds of work they love on an economically sustainable basis.
posted by saulgoodman at 11:15 AM on April 26, 2013


Oh god, someday I'm going to have to break myself of the habit of getting into "let's fix the world" conversations, and by so doing revealing what a huge crank I am.

But that day is not today.
After all, aren't we all better served by having people be in a position to do the kind of work they're capable of doing best on a sustainable basis? Don't people take a great deal of personal satisfaction in knowing they are doing work that benefits others? Most people I know feel that way at any rate.

I think the idea we can just decouple work from people's sense of self-worth and identity is a big part of why we're having so many problems today. People often only seek their careers as a means to an end: to make money. A more harmonious approach would empower people to do the kinds of work they love on an economically sustainable basis.
So here's what I think. Capitalism is a fantastic method for harnessing that impulse to help others so that it can be used more effectively, by people working together to help others instead of wasting their effort on disorganized individual projects. Unfortunately, the capital behind an enterprise typically has the final decision on what the enterprise does, and as such we end up helping specific others way, way more than most. We help specific named families (like, say, the Waltons) all the time, providing them with the resources, tools, and setup help they need to live all their wildest dreams. On the other hand, we help families without famous names — say, families consisting of a single mom and a couple of kids — almost not at all.

Most people who have that desire-to-work-to-benefit-others as part of their core identity would probably prefer to manifest it doing something other than helping the Walton kids get the resources they need to throw big parties, but helping the Walton kids party is frequently the only option available.

The thing is, we typically don't think of what we're doing as helping the Walton kids, or those gross wall street guys who buy "bottle service," or whoever, amass the income they need to party in the style they're accustomed to, even when it's what our labor is primarily going to. Instead, we think of our labor as service to people immediately around us; the students we're teaching, the customers we're serving, the people who'll use the stuff we're making.

Slacktivist, some time ago (while the newspaper he used to work at was going through wave after wave of layoff, with each wave followed by a drop in the quality of the product itself), put up a post where he indulged in a bit of speculation about why things aren't all entirely terrible, even though our economic system incentivizes us and our masters to put out half-assed products. Here's the full thing, but these are the payoff paragraphs:
Some lady working on the assembly line at the Acme Rocking Chair Co. hasn't seen a raise in eight years and her boss keeps telling her that she's got to increase the product-units-per-hour beyond all reasonable expectation of quality. Every incentive, every instruction Acme Rocking Chair is giving her demands that she lower her standards for quality and accept that it is now her job to crank out crappy chairs.

But somehow she has got it in her head that she doesn't really work for the Acme Rocking Chair Co. The way she thinks of it, she works for the person who will one day sit in that chair she's making. And unlike the Acme Rocking Chair Co., that person has never treated her badly. It strikes her as wrong somehow — morally wrong — to provide a crappy chair for that person.
The part of our self-worth and identity that work generates comes from the satisfaction of knowing that you've done a moral right. You've made a good chair, or whatever, and people like it, and the world is better. This part of work — call it "making good chairs" — is not what capitalism maximizes for, even though capitalism is surprisingly good at making chairs. Capitalism optimizes for epic parties for the few, not satisfying chairs for the many. Fortunately, most of us are decent to each other (we have to be), and so we make good chairs even when we shouldn't.

Like all cranks, I've got a one-shot fix for every societal problem. Mine is the guaranteed minimum income. It removes from capitalists the ability to threaten workers with starvation and death from exposure unless they work for the capitalists. It gives everyone the breathing space they need to do good work, undertake risk, and potentially innovate, instead of reserving that breathing space for a privileged few.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 12:13 PM on April 26, 2013 [10 favorites]


In short, in response to:
A more harmonious approach would empower people to do the kinds of work they love on an economically sustainable basis.
I say "yes, and the best way to empower people is with free money."
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 12:15 PM on April 26, 2013


Humans are hard wired to create and/or serve. Call it work or not if you wish, but without it, we go crazy.
But people derive a lot of their sense of self-worth--and personal satisfaction--from having their work be what sustains them.
Perhaps we could put the excess labour to work gathering citations.

I would like to join the Buick Party
Guaranteed Minimum Income or we eat the Walton's kids.
posted by fullerine at 3:04 PM on April 26, 2013 [4 favorites]


Humans are hard wired to create and/or serve. Call it work or not if you wish, but without it, we go crazy.

Speak for yourself. In Utopia, you are welcome to do all my busywork.
posted by spaltavian at 11:25 AM on May 1, 2013


Well, here's a citation that strongly suggests lack of job is highly-correlated with reported unhappiness, but obviously, there could be a lot of social and cultural baggage behind those numbers.

I'm partly speaking for myself here when I say, I like to work, actually, and derive a lot of personal satisfaction from testing myself and demonstrating competence--but I'd prefer to work on things I believe in and to feel that my work is not only providing me with necessary income but also contributing to the improvement of the world in general.

Is it really reasonable to doubt that, for example, master bakers in France derive a great deal of social standing and self-esteem from the role they play in their communities?

As it is, that's not even a distant dream most of us feel like we can indulge anymore, and I think that's a shame, but I'd personally be a lot happier if the goal of our system was to help people find ways to occupy themselves that help them realize their potential and contribute their best to the world, without the threat of starvation and economic disenfranchisement being viewed as the best (or even only) mechanism for encouraging such outcomes.
posted by saulgoodman at 12:25 PM on May 10, 2013 [1 favorite]


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