When I read Friedman’s piece “One Country: Two Revolutions” my response was as follows:
Interesting piece. Friedman is giddy about the potential of a new wave of technologies to empower and connect individuals and groups, helping them to create value for themselves and society more broadly while avoiding the old middle-men and traditional barriers-to-entry. I share that same hope, and am cautiously optimistic (on a 10-year time frame).
That said, it seems problematic that he doesn’t commit even one sentence to acknowledging that the record of Silicon Valley in the past 10+ years, has been mixed at best. I suspect that the net effect to date of many of the technologies and trends he cites, has been job loss and significant wealth concentration.
And as many commenters on the op-ed point out, Silicon Valley’s most successful ventures (almost by definition) create very few net jobs compared to their valuations (even when you consider their broader value-creating ecosystems).
Maybe we need to go a little bit beyond the “salvation through entrepreneurship and tech” mantra, and actually put some parameters around what sorts of entrepreneurial activities are “socially productive”, perhaps even going so far as to account for the robbing of talent and mindshare by things that are frivolous (as many Silicon Valley produced products are) from things that are essential.
Reading Rodnitzky’s piece in Tech Crunch today “Here In Silicon Valley, Are We Killing Jobs And Making The Rich Richer?”, I couldn’t help but think that, like Friedman, he comes across as a little out of touch in his exuberance. To his credit he spends half his words outlining how the businesses that have made Silicon Valley rich have, so far, mostly destroyed jobs and concentrated welath:
Think about it. The success of most tech companies’ products is predicated on delivering scale and efficiency, also known as the ability to do more with less. That “more” typically means more wealth generated. And that “less” typically means with less and/or less expensive labor. In other words, the primary export for many Silicon Valley companies can be simplified down to labor substitution. In the near term, there are a variety of unfortunate ways in which this is manifesting itself as a social fabric-eroding, wealth-concentrating job killer.
In the second half of the editorial, however, he sounds much the same note as Friedman does, arguing that in the longer term these companies decentralize, dis-intermediate and put more competitive, wealth-creating power back in the hands of individuals and small businesses over large corporations. This paragraph sums up the core of his argument:
Professionals whose jobs were eliminated due to automation and outsourcing can now outsource themselves on automated marketplaces. Many of these skilled professionals are finding new homes as independent knowledge workers connected to a broad base of smaller organizations via evolved crowdsourcing marketplaces like oDesk and Trada. Once again, this is creating employment and redistributing wealth back into more hands.
The problem is that in the short term, these technologies and business models empower some narrow swatch of pretty highly educated/skilled knowledge workers (people like me and Rodnitzky) but leave the broader American workforce out. And the “short term” is probably something like five or ten years, which leaves a lot of people struggling for a long time. Further, in the long term, it is not at all clear that we’re preparing workers to compete in this new economy.
