Continuations

I recently listened to a talk by David Autor about employment and technology. He praised the high school movement as being incredibly forward looking for addressing the rapid decline in farm employment. When asked about what the equivalent would be today, David answered “vocational schools.” Now as it turns out my Dad was a teacher at a vocational school in Germany where the apprenticeship system has been maintained throughout the Industrial Age. I learned a ton from my Dad about technical dr...

I have been writing a lot about the impact of technology on the labor market, arguing that we need a Universal Basic Income. My basic premise is that technological progress is making it harder and harder for people to earn enough to cover their basic needs. Across these posts I have encountered a set of objections to the idea that technology can cause under- or even unemployment. While I have addressed these elsewhere in separate posts I thought it would be a good idea to pull them together h...

In part 3 of this series I argued that the changes in employment are the main driver behind the massive rise in inequality in the US. That inevitably brings out a number of responses for how to address inequality, none of which I believe will actually work. At the end of that post I already showed a graph that debunks the notion that this can be solved through better education (at least of the traditional variety). Similarly we now have calls for better labor organizing and higher minimum wag...

Earlier this year I had a blog post about how writing software applications in-house is making a comeback. I was reminded of this when I attended the HackNY hackathon at NYU over the weekend. I was there to help Susan with representing Ziggeo, her startup, which provides an API for video recording and playback. The number of APIs and open source projects out there that do amazing things is simply staggering. Watching some other NY based startups present their APIs and feeling the excitement a...

In venture capital we come across startups all the time that are building something that has been tried in the past and failed. It would be very easy to dismiss these opportunities based on a naive “pattern matching” approach to investing. Instead at USV we always ask ourselves “what is different now?” to understand whether the lessons from the past do in fact apply or something profound has changed. This is important because things that failed in the past tend to eventually succeed due to ch...

There was a fun Twitter convo about strong AI between Patrick Collison and Marc Andreessen. I also love speculating about this topic but before I engage in that I want to point out that from an employment perspective this is a red herring. A car is not a horse. And yet cars replaced horses in transportation. A tractor is not a horse. And yet tractors replaced horses in agriculture. A tank is not a horse. And yet tanks replaced horses in war. It is irrelevant from an employment perspective as ...

On Twitter this morning I received a link to a Guardian piece titled “In the digital economy, we’ll soon all be working for free – and I refuse” by Suzanne Moore. What caught my attention was not so much the piece itself, which has many arguments that I have been making on Continuations for some time about technology being the driving force behind income inequality and the disappearance of work. Instead I was intrigued by the “I refuse” part. There is, unfortunately, not much elaboration on t...

This is the third post in my mini series on employment. Part 1 illustrated how agriculture and manufacturing, the two historically large areas of employment, have collapsed over time. Part 2 drilled into the services sector which today accounts for the bulk of employment to show that many categories there have stopped to grow and are under pressure from the twin forces of automation and globalization. Why does all of this matter? My overriding argument is that we have not found a new source o...

About once a year there is a headline like this one from Forbes “The Surprising Truth About Where New Jobs Come From” that points to a study showing that most job creation is in startups. Now the only thing that is in fact surprising is that this would be considered a surprise. Why? Because this should be our baseline statistical expectation in any economy that has been around for a while. Any collection of “things” that has a cycle of starting small, then growing and eventually declining and...

Yesterday I attended MIT’s Roundtable on the Digital Economy. It was a gathering convened by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, the authors of Race Against the Machine, to discuss “Work and Value in the Digital Economy.” The gathering brought together an interesting mix of academics, startups, investors (yours truly) and policy experts. I don’t have time this morning for more detailed thoughts, but I came away with a clearer grasp of some of the central questions: 1. Is work actually dimini...