Jesse Jackson, Jr. Pins US Job Losses On iPad 628
theodp writes "Illinois Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. went on an anti-technology rant on Friday on the floor of Congress, blaming the iPad for eliminating thousands of American jobs. 'Why do you need to go to Borders anymore?' asked Jackson. 'Why do you need to go to Barnes & Noble? Buy an iPad, download your book, download your newspaper, download your magazine.' Jackson continued: 'What becomes of publishing companies and publishing company jobs? And what becomes of bookstores and librarians and all of the jobs associated with paper? Well, in the not too distant future, such jobs simply will not exist. Steve Jobs is doing pretty well. He's created the iPad. Certainly, it has made life more efficient for Americans, but the iPad is produced in China. It is not produced here in the United States."
Why go to Barnes & Noble (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, this made me sick to read. Rep. Jackson needs to keep his mouth shut on subjects he knows nothing about.
Evolve or get out of the way (Score:5, Insightful)
Evolve or get out of the way for those who are willing to move into the future.
Not anti-tech necessarily (Score:5, Insightful)
His rant can also be interpreted as against globalization instead of against technology. All the people who will become lose their jobs now that more and more brick-and-mortar stores are being obsoleted by websites, they're not getting jobs in electronics factories, since the electronic devices are almost all made in low-wage countries these days.
Barnes and Noble Nook (Score:4, Insightful)
Save the horse whip makers! (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Though jobs for some brick and mortar retailers are lost, the loss is due to a structural change in the market induced by increasing digitization rather than through any one product. Horse buggy makers went out of business when automobiles came out, and much the same rhetoric was spewed to attack the manufacturers of cars.
2) China makes the iPads. True, but manufacturing is no longer a $40+benefits job with enough seniority. Gone for the foreseeable future are high paying manufacturing jobs that we as a nation want to focus on. The success of the IPad has spurred other technology companies to push their own tablets onto market. What does that mean? The tech companies hire more mechanical/electrical/computer/systems engineers, computer/materials scientists, programmers, designers, and production line developers. Those workers produce far more "value" to an economy than a factory worker in a mass production line. Ask a Foxxcomm worker (the guys who make iPads and iPods) if they'd rather be working in a Chinese factory or at the Apple headquarters, and guess what? They'd rather be an engineer.
3) Librarians aren't useful because the buildings they're in have information. They're highly useful because they can advise us where to find the relevant information. The librarians at my university aren't there to restock books or charge late fees. They're hired because they can help students track down critical papers, research vital bits of information, and educate them about how to find the right kind of sources. Brick and mortar stores are useful because they offer a tactile shopping experience that online systems can't seem to replicate yet. Same idea: physical locations and people offer have value added characteristics.
4) There are many things to blame for the job market pains in the United States. I don't think anyone is educated enough to really understand the "true" driving factors, but you know what? I sincerely doubt that stiffing innovation, creativity, and technological development is the way to go.
Actually sorry, I'm wrong. On behalf of the *IAA cabal and the Chinese Council for American Advisement, I suggest that we focus all of our governmental energy on stopping piracy of songs and movies instead of nurturing markets and funding basic science. If we can stop all illegal firesharing, we can save up to $13 trillion a year in damages!! That's several times more than the technology market makes in a year!
Re:Even more strange (Score:5, Insightful)
He's a politician, he says what benefits him the most in that moment.
But his complaints are not totally without merit.
If he were smarter his point would be that all jobs have life cycles, and we need to develop and innovate so that we can place people in jobs that are ahead of the curve instead of behind.
It's like everyone clammoring to bail out GM and save a bunch of low skill jobs that are going nowhere but overseas in the future anyway. It's a losing battle with the wrong objective.
But from the left, his policies are reactive rather than proactive. Proactive would be getting out in front and stopping things that stifle innovation, like hostile business environments. Instead, he wants us (if he could expand, I'd wager) to outlaw things and restrict things and tariff things after the fact.
Should we want to be one step ahead, or one step behind?
Re:Print media is going nowhere (Score:4, Insightful)
I think it's more likely that the bookstores will downsize or close. Retail shelf space has a cost, and they need a certain amount of turnover to pay that cost, going down the tail isn't going to help when you have a very limited amount of space. You need a lot of niche market spending to make up for the loss mass market volume, it's not impossible, but it is hard.
Re:Why go to Barnes & Noble (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because we've moved from brick-and-mortar distribution to digital distribution doesn't mean ANY jobs were lost, they were just MOVED.
Uhh... moved where?
The number of people required to run a datacenter 24/7 is a fraction of those required to run a bookstore, much less the supply chain that feeds the bookstore.
The bookstore industry is facing a serious contraction/consolidation.
They aren't going away, but there won't be as many bookstores around.
anti-science - what does he expect? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'm sorry Mr. Jackson (Score:5, Insightful)
"There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back." - Heinlein, Life Line, 1939
(Actually read that story yesterday. On real paper.)
Re:Evolve or get out of the way (Score:5, Insightful)
To me, the BIG disadvantage of an e-reader is this:
When Amazon goes belly up in a few (or 45 years) where will my books be? Next to me I have a 1887 4 volume edition of Les Miserable and I am confident that no matter what happens to the Little, Brown and Company publishing house, my book isn't going to go poof on my nightstand while I'm brushing my teeth.
Re:Why go to Barnes & Noble (Score:5, Insightful)
Uhh... moved where?
At best, you're making a "broken windows" argument. Perhaps we could make book distribution even less efficient, requiring more people to be involved? Would that be positive?
But even that's missing the point. The important job, the one we should focus on here, isn't "clerk at bookstore", it's "author". Because books are costly to produce, because money from sales has to be divided among so many, and because there is limited shelf space at a book store, very few people can make a living as an author. With e-books, there's the potential for many more authors to find niches, and I think the total money value of the industry could grow significantly as the breadth of subject matter, sales logistics, and means of discovery improves.
Jobs generating ideas are the future, and having an efficient, vibrant market for books is great for that.
Re:I'm sorry Mr. Jackson (Score:5, Insightful)
Simplistic lecturing (Score:5, Insightful)
Thanks for simplistic high school level economics lecture. You are conveniently omitting the factor of scale. One or two orders of magnitude of manufacturing jobs are lost for every "mechanical/electrical/computer/systems engineer" job created. Also, manufacturing jobs can be made attractive again if you slap punishing tariffs on chinese dumping and corporations that facilitate it.
I don't think anyone argues about complete halt of technological progress, but making it orderly and less harmful to society is certainly needed. Instead of blindly throwing people on the street by the million and giving them the moronic advice to "adapt", we should provide those people with a few years of social support and "useful" job training, paid for largely by the companies doing the firing. We are supposedly living in a human society and not in the jungle.
Re:Why go to Barnes & Noble (Score:5, Insightful)
yup. moved.
overseas.
THAT was his point. and as much as I dislike the guy, he was right, on that point.
if we don't help ourselves, no one else will.
the overseas labor game is one we can't win and the terms are not fair yet we continue to try to play using fair rules. we lose every time. gee ....
Re:Even more strange (Score:3, Insightful)
Should we want to be one step ahead, or one step behind?
First, we need to keep in mind that proactive strategies aren't inherently better, if your understanding of the future is flawed enough or if it's just an outright bad decision. Being one step behind (as opposed to a zillion steps behind) means someone else can make some of your mistakes for you while you retain most of the advantage of being cutting edge (since you are almost cutting edge).
Second, the stuff you refer to (such as bailing out GM) wasn't bad because it was reactive, but because it had no long term benefit and abused US law. Similarly, there's no societal benefit to what appears to be a shakedown of Apple (apparently, this politician was extolling the virtues of iPads in the classroom recently so I see this sudden about face as an indication that he wants something from Apple).
Re:As fanbois queue in the dark, Jobs makes millio (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only that, but anyone with the leisure to sit around posting leftist drivel on their very own 3000 MHz computer is very "rich," from the perspective of several billion people.
Someone who incites a class struggle in the US would have to be delusional to think that they'd actually come out ahead if such a thing came to pass. The GP may picture himself among the oppressed masses at the bottom of the pyramid of capitalism, but he's standing on the shoulders of a lot of little people, himself.
Re:Evolve or get out of the way (Score:4, Insightful)
The scribes' union really hated the printing press, let me tell you...
Re:Even more strange (Score:5, Insightful)
It's like everyone clammoring to bail out GM and save a bunch of low skill jobs that are going nowhere but overseas in the future anyway. It's a losing battle with the wrong objective.
Actually that's not true in two ways.
First, I always think it's remarkably arrogant that we label manufacturing jobs "low-skill". My grandfather was a toolmaker in an aeroplane factory in World War 2. Imagine a job swap between us and see think which would be the bigger disaster: him trying to do some academic research and put a paper into a conference, or me trying to actually physically build an aeroplane good enough that your life could depend on it while the luftwaffe try to shoot you down. But for some reason it's his job that would be classified as "blue collar" and "low-skill".
The second is that labour costs are much less of an impetus for moving "low-skill" jobs than they used to be. Wages in China have risen such that many companies have thought about moving manufacturing away to lower-wage countries like Bangladesh, etc. But the skills and infrastructure needed to run serious industrial scale manufacturing are not present there making business to difficult. It's no longer worth the saving. As globalisation equalises costs of living, the factories are going to stop playing musical chairs with countries, and start sticking where the capacity and infrastructure has been built up. And right now, regardless of costs, that is China because the US has been slashing and burning its manufacturing skills and capacity.
The world is not run by dumb people. (Score:5, Insightful)
> I don't think people, overall, are that smart. the world seems to be run by 'the people of walmart'.
Some people are good at what they're trained for. A lot of people are "smart," or at least effective, in at least a few specific tasks. And don't make the mistake of assuming people working or shopping at walmart aren't intelligent, sometimes in their own way at their own tasks, sometimes like Dilbert's great garbage man.
The world is definitely *run* by smart people. They may not be as smart as engineers--it depends on the particular "runner" and the engineer--but they are much smarter than your average bear. The people on the Hill and in the White House were in the top 10% of their high schools. A lot of them are assholes. A lot of them are nice people. They all have learned certain skill sets. The elected ones have to develop skill sets that make them seem stupid to smart people. They also, mostly, have do mean things because empirically, mean things WORK. Lying to the public--spin--works. Going negative in campaigning works. If you don't do it, you're at a huge disadvantage. Without consensus not to do it, pretty much everyone does it.
Businesspeople vary in intelligence. The best are usually quite intelligence. Again, they can be good people or not. They tend to think differently than you or I.
"People, overall," don't run the world--they accept the world, or they rise up. Their needs have been catered to for millenia by those running things. The Romans for control of the senate--panem et circenses--the nations following the infantry revolution at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, and the gunpowder revolution.
There are also thugs. A lot of thugs in power. Warlords, torturers, thieves and brigangs and thugs who somehow have nations behind them. Not so much in the West. But in Africa, in Chechneya, many places. And of course local crime lords.
Some of them are quite personable. Some are quite intelligent. Others are puppets of other people who are intelligent. They may not have formal schooling, or they may. And of course, sometimes they're just a bully. But it usually takes a bully with intelligence to get a nation behind him. Even a crappy nation.
Re:Why go to Barnes & Noble (Score:5, Insightful)
Rather ask WHY is it more commercially viable for American companies to actually produce *almost everything* in {some random foreign country}.
Because everyone knows and no one wants to discuss it. The number one cause is environmental/safety regulations. Want lead in your toys? Lead in your water? Because that's what happens when there are no regulations. And that's a large part of the cost of manufacturing in the US. Labor counts, but not as much as you'd think. Automation can correct for much of that, but automation isn't needed as much in areas where the cost of labor is small enough. But all those numbers are well known. In fact, the answer is as simple as one simple law. Just tax imports for the cost of the externalities in the US that aren't accounted for in the country in question.
Re:Even more strange (Score:4, Insightful)
So are you saying that you don't understand a need to keep low skill jobs in the US? Sounds like you need a tour of a local high school to understand that not all students are destined for upper management these days. Maybe if you said the days of high paying low skill jobs are not sustainable anymore, that would make sense. But to say this country doesn't need a lower level working class seems to indicate you have little grasp of what our economy needs.
Even high-tech companies need janitors. OPs point is still sound though he left himself open for confusion. The goal is to fight to stay cutting edge, since every technical job will create a few non-technical jobs. It's not about the class of labor, it's about a constant treadmill of technology that allows one to stay ahead of the game as a country.
For instance, consider textile jobs as a class of job that was once high-tech - during the time of the original Luddites, I believe. Over a couple of hundred years, that industry went from high-tech to relegated to the third world. Mindless factory work has been following the same trend. What we want to do is develop the Next Big Thing and keep the people who invented it here, train more people to do the work, and develop that Thing into a growth industry that provides jobs to people of all skill levels. After all, it still takes people to push the paper, build the buildings, clean the floors, assemble the new technical widgets, etc.
The way to do that is to maintain the things that have kept the US (in my case) prominent in that game: invest lots of cash in higher education, allow students from all over the world to come here, and then let them stay. At the same time, provide an environment in which good ideas can easily find capital. These are the ingredients that create places like Silicon Valley.
Re:Energy is getting expensive (Score:3, Insightful)
Only briefly.
The root of the problem is that machine intelligence is eating away at jobs by IQ. Sure the high level strategy jobs are secure for some time since AI isn't very good at inventing a new product but manufacturing automation has certainly reduced our need for manufacturing.
Web services are displacing many service based jobs. For most of the population that might have used an H&R block or such their website is far more useful and efficient and I doubt the website employs as many people as the thousands of tax professionals.
I buy almost everything on Amazon now. Amazon has a few thousand employees but they can offer lower priced goods because they require less employees. As the politician said it takes less workers to run a datacenter than it does to staff thousands of stores across the nation.
Every industry is becoming more efficient through use of technology. Eventually there'll only be a handful of positions which can't be done better through software. And I'm sure the people who manage and write that software will be handsomely payed. But what do we do about the rest? If we had 75% unemployment but a larger GDP we still have a problem. Even if the net GDP is greater than now but only 25% can enjoy that luxury while the 75% starve then you have a broken society. We're going to face this problem in the not too distant future. Most jobs aren't terribly difficult and most jobs can be displaced completely by Artificial Intelligence.
Look at the last recession. Our GDP is higher now than before the recession... and we have less jobs. Welcome to the Future, it's only going to get worse. Software is going to get better. And unemployment is only going to go up. You can cut taxes all you want but it's not going to drive up unemployment since these companies simply will realize they don't need very many employees anymore.
I'll give an example from my own industry: advertising. As companies consolidate they need less marketing. If you have 4 companies which consolidate into 2 companies they'll probably cut their advertising since you can only air so many commercials per day. It might not be linear but they'll gain efficiency since they don't need multiple agencies anymore.
And you can reach far more people now with far less effort. You don't need 100 different book stores in a city. Amazon is good enough. You don't need 100 gamestops--you have steam. That's not a case where one industry is supplanting another. You can't retrain these employees from working in gamestop to work in VRShop. The demand for low-skill labor is simply evaporating. And energy increasing in price will simply further increase the demand for efficiency. It's more efficient to stock an Amazon warehouse than it is 100 different shops. It might shift to the customer going to a neighborhood pick-up center instead of using Fed-Ex but that pick-up center could scan a credit card and automatically dispense your package.
My final example is RedBox. RedBox displaces an entire Blockbuster store. I think about the jobs I applied to highschool:
Call Center, Blockbuster and Bookstore.
Future IBM Watson, Red Box and Amazon.
The future is massive unemployment and Welfare or Make-Work jobs. It's time to start thinking about these things.
Re:Energy is getting expensive (Score:4, Insightful)
Not that many people lie on their deathbed wishing they had worked more over their lifetime. The fact that demand can't keep up with capacity means we're leaving the age of scarcity.
There are two solutions to that problem; either 25% work, and we tax them 'til they scream and divide that wealth, as there is no demand for more work.
Or everyone works 25% and we enjoy the free time.
There are of course various other variations on that theme, like indentured servitude for the majority (the 'services' economy), or make-work ('keynsian') economy where the 25% productive work is taxed and redistributed through undesired jobs instead of directly, etc.
But the least painful and wasteful way to deal is to cut down and distribute work less inequitably.
Re:Even more strange (Score:4, Insightful)
Speaking of textile jobs, the company I work for started out over 100 years ago as a textile mill. Today they make head-mounted "augmented reality" displays. Those who are able to change and adapt will survive over the long term; those who do not will find that they've become obsolete. This applies equally on the small scale (as an individual keeping your skills current is the only true long-term job security), the medium scale (as with my employer), and on a national scale.
IMO the rise of Wall Street as the dominant force in our economy is a big part of the problem. Putting our "best and brightest" to work figuring out new and creative ways to skim profits off of people moving money around is not a good recipe for remaining an economic superpower in a global economy.
Re:Datacenters use lots of energy (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, all those things are getting cheaper per productivity. That's the measure that matters. The total expense rising is a reflection of the return on investment of that expense rising, which justifies the higher initial expense.
The oil supply curve is starting to go down the slide. But its curve to date was pulled by very wasteful consumption. At best 25% efficient internal combustion engines. At best 50% efficient building insulation, 80% efficient heaters, 3% efficient lighting. The majority of the population using those engines for over 15% of their work/commute hours between the (work) buildings more efficient during the lower consumption (day) period and the (home) buildings less efficient during the higher consumption (night) period.
Meanwhile other energy sources are rising steeply in their supply curve. They're more efficient, and indeed many are sustainable rather than merely peakable. While consumption is finding dramatic efficiencies in use and reduced use (telecommuting, CPUs instead of ICEs, electric vehicles, mass transit).
And while the people supply is increasing, the rate at which they can do something useful for anyone else in the world is increasing. Education and telecom also makes more of them more valuable. The distribution of value is making the tide go out on some people: unhelpful people in the Euramerican world too long propped up by White Privilege. But overall people are becoming more valuable, as Asia, Africa and South America sees many of its people become valuable to more than just their immediate families for the first time in centuries, or ever.
It's tempting to see redistributions both geographically and into the near future, that underlie overall increases in total value, as a net loss. But when you see the big picture, you can take part in the growth. Or the nearsighted pessimism can lock you out of it, and self fulfill itself.