<story><title>Andy Grove’s Warning to Silicon Valley</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/26/opinion/andy-groves-warning-to-silicon-valley.html?action=click&amp;pgtype=Homepage&amp;clickSource=story-heading&amp;module=opinion-c-col-left-region&amp;region=opinion-c-col-left-region&amp;WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region&amp;_r=0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zanny</author><text>I think there is a significant confluence among those who find prosperity and purpose through jobs to conflate the concepts of employment and purpose. That to not have a job is to not have a purpose, and vice versa. If we had a planned economy built around peak employment, we would have many fewer entrepreneurs and many more, as you say, hole diggers.&lt;p&gt;Socially we already do that. We have created a gargantuan advertising industry that has zero net material gain for society, whose sole purpose is to redirect dollars already in circulation to their employers. We have dramatically expanded bureaucracy in almost every industry to micromanage risk at the cost of tremendous overhead in the time of human beings spent on it. We maintain many institutions in the service industry more-so because the marginal cost of having all the participants unemployed (and thus hungry, destitute, and dangerous) is worse than just paying them do to work nobody practically would need done if not for the negative impacts of simply dropping people out of the workforce.&lt;p&gt;But this is entirely the wrong way to approach economics. It is absolutely antithetical to the human condition to start from the presumption that people need to do something for someone else for their life to have meaning. That is where entrepreneurism comes from, and we need more of it going forward, not less, as we systemically eliminate the repetitious work in our lives through technological advancement. To aspire for peak employment is to aspire for the death of aspiration. Rather than seeing a &amp;quot;problem&amp;quot; of unemployment, when the practical cause is derived from the lack of anyone willing to pay people for their time considering the skills that they have, see it as an opportunity. If we have unemployment it means everything worth doing is being done, and we should be trying to enable those who are not needed to keep society running to improve that society through innovation than to fabricate busywork for them to do to keep all the cogs in the machine in tune with one another, even if a large segment of said cogs are redundant.&lt;p&gt;And probably the best example is how I imagine most people would read that previous sentence - but there is a ton of things &lt;i&gt;I&lt;/i&gt; want done! But practically, capitalism does not care what &lt;i&gt;you&lt;/i&gt; want, it cares about only what those with the dollars to make their voices heard want. The unemployed should be those free to listen to the wants of people rather than money, rather than those who society condemns to poverty.</text></item><item><author>luso_brazilian</author><text>&amp;gt; &amp;quot;There was room for improvement, he argued, for what he called “job-centric” economics and politics. In a job-centric system, job creation would be the nation’s No. 1 objective, with the government setting priorities and arraying the forces necessary to achieve the goal, and with businesses operating not only in their immediate profit interest but also in the interests of “employees, and employees yet to be hired.”&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Although a valid concern putting &amp;quot;job creation&amp;quot; as a goal for governments can (and in a lot of occurrences in recent history, did) backfire spectacularly.&lt;p&gt;In the most reductive analogy it creates incentive for the government to create &amp;quot;hole diggers&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;hole fillers&amp;quot; type of jobs that, in aggregate, generate very few useful work while fulfilling this basic goal of job creation.&lt;p&gt;I believe this &amp;quot;job creation as priority&amp;quot; approach is inferior to both the &amp;quot;laissez-faire&amp;quot; capitalist alternative and the &amp;quot;basic income&amp;quot; social democratic one.&lt;p&gt;As an example of its dangers it suffices to see the kafkaesque process of fund allocation (and sourcing) for the public funded aerospace industry, both the military procurement (fighter jets, bombers) and the civilian NASA one.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hitekker</author><text>I am reminded of what George Orwelles wrote in &amp;quot;Down and out in Paris and London&amp;quot;:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;  Beggars do not work, it is said; but then, what is work? A navvy works by swinging a pick. An accountant works by adding up figures. A beggar works by standing out of doors in all weathers and getting varicose veins, bronchitis etc. It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of course — but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless. And as a social type a beggar compares well with scores of others. He is honest compared with the sellers of most patent medicines, high-minded compared with a Sunday newspaper proprietor, amiable compared with a hire-purchase tout-in short, a parasite, but a fairly harmless parasite. He seldom extracts more than a bare living from the community, and, what should justify him according to our ethical ideas, he pays for it over and over in suffering.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: On a side note, I agreed halfway with what you&amp;#x27;re writing but the second half of your comment seems a bit more unclear&amp;#x2F;I&amp;#x27;m not sure what you&amp;#x27;re discussing there. Could you clarify what you mean?</text></comment>
<story><title>Andy Grove’s Warning to Silicon Valley</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/26/opinion/andy-groves-warning-to-silicon-valley.html?action=click&amp;pgtype=Homepage&amp;clickSource=story-heading&amp;module=opinion-c-col-left-region&amp;region=opinion-c-col-left-region&amp;WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region&amp;_r=0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zanny</author><text>I think there is a significant confluence among those who find prosperity and purpose through jobs to conflate the concepts of employment and purpose. That to not have a job is to not have a purpose, and vice versa. If we had a planned economy built around peak employment, we would have many fewer entrepreneurs and many more, as you say, hole diggers.&lt;p&gt;Socially we already do that. We have created a gargantuan advertising industry that has zero net material gain for society, whose sole purpose is to redirect dollars already in circulation to their employers. We have dramatically expanded bureaucracy in almost every industry to micromanage risk at the cost of tremendous overhead in the time of human beings spent on it. We maintain many institutions in the service industry more-so because the marginal cost of having all the participants unemployed (and thus hungry, destitute, and dangerous) is worse than just paying them do to work nobody practically would need done if not for the negative impacts of simply dropping people out of the workforce.&lt;p&gt;But this is entirely the wrong way to approach economics. It is absolutely antithetical to the human condition to start from the presumption that people need to do something for someone else for their life to have meaning. That is where entrepreneurism comes from, and we need more of it going forward, not less, as we systemically eliminate the repetitious work in our lives through technological advancement. To aspire for peak employment is to aspire for the death of aspiration. Rather than seeing a &amp;quot;problem&amp;quot; of unemployment, when the practical cause is derived from the lack of anyone willing to pay people for their time considering the skills that they have, see it as an opportunity. If we have unemployment it means everything worth doing is being done, and we should be trying to enable those who are not needed to keep society running to improve that society through innovation than to fabricate busywork for them to do to keep all the cogs in the machine in tune with one another, even if a large segment of said cogs are redundant.&lt;p&gt;And probably the best example is how I imagine most people would read that previous sentence - but there is a ton of things &lt;i&gt;I&lt;/i&gt; want done! But practically, capitalism does not care what &lt;i&gt;you&lt;/i&gt; want, it cares about only what those with the dollars to make their voices heard want. The unemployed should be those free to listen to the wants of people rather than money, rather than those who society condemns to poverty.</text></item><item><author>luso_brazilian</author><text>&amp;gt; &amp;quot;There was room for improvement, he argued, for what he called “job-centric” economics and politics. In a job-centric system, job creation would be the nation’s No. 1 objective, with the government setting priorities and arraying the forces necessary to achieve the goal, and with businesses operating not only in their immediate profit interest but also in the interests of “employees, and employees yet to be hired.”&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Although a valid concern putting &amp;quot;job creation&amp;quot; as a goal for governments can (and in a lot of occurrences in recent history, did) backfire spectacularly.&lt;p&gt;In the most reductive analogy it creates incentive for the government to create &amp;quot;hole diggers&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;hole fillers&amp;quot; type of jobs that, in aggregate, generate very few useful work while fulfilling this basic goal of job creation.&lt;p&gt;I believe this &amp;quot;job creation as priority&amp;quot; approach is inferior to both the &amp;quot;laissez-faire&amp;quot; capitalist alternative and the &amp;quot;basic income&amp;quot; social democratic one.&lt;p&gt;As an example of its dangers it suffices to see the kafkaesque process of fund allocation (and sourcing) for the public funded aerospace industry, both the military procurement (fighter jets, bombers) and the civilian NASA one.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ArkyBeagle</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m not sure it&amp;#x27;s an ... axiomatic ( meaning just made up out of whole cloth ) assumption that doing meaningful things for other people is part of a path to happiness.&lt;p&gt;It may have the advantage of being true.&lt;p&gt;It does not mean that it&amp;#x27;s the only condition for happiness ( it is necessary but not sufficient ) , but I know of no good assault on this idea. Adam Smith&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;to be loved and to be lovely&amp;quot; exists, and is deeply imbedded.&lt;p&gt;The advertising&amp;#x2F;media industrial complex problem is much more profound. But in order to propagate criticisms of it you&amp;#x27;d sort of need the advertising&amp;#x2F;media industrial complex to get those ideas out. Still, Adam Curtis documentaries exist, the work of Marshall MacLuhan and Vance Packard and others exist.&lt;p&gt;Of these, Adam Curtis seems to have taken the thing on most directly. And it was very funny watching &amp;quot;Mad Men&amp;quot; pull its punches.</text></comment>