I think Cringely is talking about a kind of vicious cycle where since you buy your apples for 1/10th the price, you fire 90% of your workforce. If everyone does this, and if there aren't new jobs to take in that redundant workforce, you could end up in a death spiral where you find that even though your apples are dirt cheap, there's no one left to buy your expensive apple tarts. So you drive yourself out of business by reducing your costs.
Obviously this can only happen if the assumption holds, that there are no new jobs to absorb the redundancies, and that this is happening across the economy.
That said, a case could be made that these assumptions are correct - what's your argument against them?
That said, a case could be made that these assumptions are correct - what's your argument against them?
There are tons of new jobs, and a whole new middle class - in India and China. Corporations do not share your nationalistic interests - IBM doesn't owe America anything. If Germany were to have won WW2, IBM would now be a great German company. As America's broken system of government slowly bleeds this nation to death, IBM will have no remorse over becoming a company focused on India/China.
There's a big difference between "hurting America" and "hurting Americans".
Maximizing societal value may mean moving industry to places where the government is less of an impediment to efficient value creation. In the long (and usually, short) run, that's good for people. But it may mean that American jobs move to India, and American workers can a) follow their jobs, b) create new jobs by starting a new company in America (and deal with whatever caused their old job to leave), or c) whine and moan until someone gives them a handout.
Move, build, or cry about it. Doesn't sound like anyone's really being hurt. It's not like IBM is stabbing their workers, they're just telling them that they can work somewhere else, or get another job. Seems fair enough to me.
Buying apples for 1/10 the price isn't the part of the cycle that is most concerning. Nor is the part about firing 9/10 of the workforce -- although that assumes the company is operating at near 0% margins, and that the employment needs of the company scale linearly with total sales in dollars. Neither of these two are that common.
The thing that concerns me most is the lack of new jobs that absorb the redundant workforce. However, my concerns are probably somewhat unorthodox in that I think this represents a number of ideological problems rooted in both the employees and the employers.
The best way to encompass all of these is by the following truism: you are only capable of one specialization, give or take, in a given lifetime. And what we've been defining as specialization has been narrowing as rapidly as specializations have been getting deeper and more involved.
To play off of the analogy above, our society would look at these people, assert that it has no further need for "apple preparation specialists," and discard this class of people into the bin of history. At best, they go through retraining in some new specialization, but that takes a long time, and they are considered entry-level in their new specialization at the end.
It is this mentality where you get the laundry-list of "key proficiencies." The unwritten assumption is that all jobs are still a matter of rote memorization and repeated execution of steps, and as the years of experience with a particular technology accrue, the unconscious memorization of these steps improves.
The problem with this approach is that it is completely wrong. We do not account for people's ability to deductively reason, and we therefore do not account for the parts of the new skillset they'll know without being told by someone. The tragedy is that people believe they can't: employers, recruiters, and even the employees. This last part is the most tragic. The rank-and-file employees who believe this philosophy are so common that I become animatedly excited when I meet one who doesn't.
So, yeah. I think it goes deeper than just saying there aren't any jobs; we should really be deeply analyzing what assumptions about the nature of skill and work ethic we've been falsely believing all this time. So far, most of the analysis I've seen has just been repetition of these assumptions, with calls that we psuh forward initatives that work around them.
Obviously this can only happen if the assumption holds, that there are no new jobs to absorb the redundancies, and that this is happening across the economy.
That said, a case could be made that these assumptions are correct - what's your argument against them?