In 1990, the UN announced Millennium Development Goals, the first of which was to halve the number of people in extreme poverty by 2015. It emerged this year that the target was met in 2008. Yet the achievement did not merit an official announcement, presumably because it was not achieved by any government scheme but by the pace of global capitalism. Buying cheap plastic toys made in China really is helping to make poverty history. And global inequality? This, too, is lower now than any point in modern times. Globalisation means the world’s not just getting richer, but fairer too....
Let it not be thought, however, that the laws governing Hippie Capitalism are somehow kinder, gentler, or more renewable, than that of Republican Square Capitalism. To most everyone’s surprise it turns out that the laws of economics, being laws of nature, apply to all equally. The law of supply and demand, like the law of gravity, applies to Progressives as well as conservatives. (This is a fact mostly unnoticed, or at least unforgiven, by Progressive policy makers.)
Some years ago, Kvistad noticed that international suppliers were beginning to sell chimes almost as good as Woodstock’s, and more cheaply. The necessary response, as it turned out, did not involve redeploying to the city dump in search of more discarded lawn chairs. “We had always manufactured our chimes right here, near Woodstock,” Kvistad told me. “It was very gratifying to be able to provide work to skilled artisans here in my home town. Yet it was clear to me that if we continued to make them here we soon would be out of business and providing no jobs at all. So I sought out and found reliable, high quality, ethical suppliers — in China and Indonesia — and… between natural workforce attrition, people moving on or moving away, and retraining my team to handle the complexities of managing an inventory built abroad, I was able not only to keep jobs here in America but to generate more highly skilled, better paying, jobs right here. It was a positive, not a negative, sum game. (Emphasis added.) We also sell in Europe, Canada, and are opening up a distribution center in the UK. All of that goes to create more American jobs.”
Kvistad’s action provides empirical proof, as if more were needed, of Tamny’s Law (named for the editor of Forbes.com Opinion who has reiterated this observation ad infinitum, and, one hopes, will continue to do so until the policy elites come to grips with reality): “Technology erases unnecessary work so that we can constantly migrate toward more productive pursuits. We destroy jobs to create better ones.”
Michael Saylor Channels Joseph Schumpeter In His Vision Of An Abundant, Cyber Future - John Tamny
Saylor writes of an agricultural revolution that was thousands of years in the making, and that smothered productivity for so much individual effort geared toward growing and finding food. The United States used to be very much an agrarian society, yet Saylor writes that agriculture workers as a percentage of the U.S. labor force today are less than 1%. Put simply, the mass destruction of farming jobs allowed for the redirection of precious human capital toward more productive, higher value work.
So while Americans were the certain beneficiaries of farming advances that freed up their labor, Saylor writes that 36.7% of the worldwide labor force is still stuck in agriculture. That sad number is about to shrink, however. As Saylor puts it, “I believe that mobile computing is the tipping point technology for the larger Information Revolution.” In our pockets in the form of smartphones is increasingly powerful software that will drive “an explosion of start-up companies that will enter markets that previously had high barriers to entry.”
