Posts about wef

Efficiency over growth (and jobs)

The hook to every song sung at Davos is “jobs, jobs, jobs.” The chorus of machers on stages here operate under an article of faith that growth can come back, that they can stimulate it, that that will create jobs, and then that all will be eventually well.

What if that’s not the case? I am coming to believe, more and more, that technology is leading to efficiency over growth. I’ve written about that here.This notion is obviously true in some sectors of society: see news and media, retail, travel sales, and other arenas. But how many more sectors will this rule strike: universities? government? banking? delivery? even manufacturing?

As I write this, I’m watching a WEF panel moderated by Reuters’ editor, Steve Adler, with Larry Summers and government and business leaders. They’re discussing growth strategies and so far we’re hearing the same notions we hear elsewhere in Davos, the complete trick bag: spend money on infrastructure, be nice to business, regulate less, reform taxes, reform immigration. OK and OK.

“The problems of job creation are more complicated than that. They are more complicated than wealth creation,” says one of the panelists (operating under Chatham House Rule, so I won’t attribute*). “This is a group that understands wealth creation better than job creation.” He says “there are inherent limits” to the number of people employed in various sectors.

I haven’t heard any strategy yet that reverses the trends underway in the transition from the industrial economy to the digital economy. What will offset the shrinking of vast industries? New industries? Well, we have new, digital industries, but they are even more efficient than restructured old industries. Compare Google’s staff size to GM’s, even now. Facebook serves almost a billion people with the staff the size of a large newspaper. Amazon employes far fewer people than the bookstores it put out of business did. So those new industries will bring growth, profit, and wealth, but not many jobs.

“There are fewer jobs for regular people because those innovations happened than there would have been if those innovations hadn’t happened,” the panelist says. It would be “a delusion” to think that encouraging this innovation will increase jobs.

So what if the key business strategy of the near-term future becomes efficiency over growth? Productivity will improve. Companies will be more profitable. Wealth will be created. But employment will suffer.

I’m hearing no strategies focused on this larger transition in a gathering about the transition. I think that’s because the institutions’ trick bags are empty. They ran an industrial society. That’s over. And the entrepreneurs who will create new companies but also new efficiency aren’t yet in power to solve the problem they create.

I ask the panel whether all this talk of jobs, jobs, jobs is so much empty rhetoric. I ask whether there are other tricks in the bag.

The panelist I’ve been quoting says that there are two sets of economic issues: In the short term, for the next five years, we are dealing with demand and macroeconomic policy. “Employment today has nothing to do with the Kindle,” he says. “It has everything to do with the financial system, deleveraging, and macroeconomic policy.”

It’s in the long term that the issues I’m addressing here come to bear. “For the longer term, we don’t have nearly as good answers as we would like to,” he says. “We are going to have to embrace the idea that we are going to have growing numbers of people involved in the provision of fundamental services to other people, services like health care and education. We’re going to need to make that work for society.”

That is to say, health and education don’t directly create wealth; they are services funded in great measure by taxes of one sort or another. Employing people in those sectors amounts to a redistribution of wealth with the fringe benefit of providing helpful services. Is a service-sector economy the secret to growth? Who pays for that when fewer people have jobs in the productive economy? I still don’t see an answer. This is not an economic policy so much as it is a social policy.

Another panelist says that we will have fewer people and we will need to retrain people throughout their lives for new jobs. I agree. But that doesn’t create jobs (except in schools); it just helps fill the ones we have.

One more panelist, from Europe, suggests that nations here will end up making stuff for the growing economies and consuming middle classes of China, India, Brazil, etc. In a globalized world with maximum price competition, I’m not so sure that’s a strategy for growth, only survival. I’d hate to place my strategic bets on continuing — or returning to — the industrial economy. And at some point, that strategy bumps up against the question of sustainability: is there enough stuff to go around?

Indeed, in a globalized society, we need to look at total jobs, the sum of work and productivity and demand, not country-by-country. The question is: Will jobs on the whole increase in this digital economy?

If instead efficiency increases — and with it, again, productivity and profit — then great wealth can be created: see Google, and the technology economy. But that means the disparity of income and capital will only widen yet more. And it’s just wide enough today to cause unrest around the world. That’s much of what #Occupy_WEF et al is about. That’s what is causing such tsuris and uncertainty on the stages of the world (Economic Forum). That’s what is causing the institutions represented here to fear, resist, and regulate technology in the hopes of forestalling the change it is bringing. There is the root of the disruption we’re witnessing now even in Davos.

* I saw Summers later and he gave me permission to quote him by name. He is the quotable panelist.

Davos, disrupted

I’m among the disrupted of Davos. Outside, there’s an #OccupyDavos encampment in igloos (really). Down the road, someone will be giving out an award to the worst company of the world. But the disruption is no longer outside. That’s what I sensed in past years; that’s what they wanted to believe here. Now the disruption is inside. Every institution is challenged. Every.

The World Economic Forum issued a list of global risks (though Google’s Eric Schmidt countered on his Google+ page that he’s optimistic; that’s because he’s a disruptor). I’m sitting in a room here with a debate on capitalism about to begin. Even the sacred science is disrupted. I’m having conversations and sessions about disrupted banking and retail and education and media, of course.

I began this trip to Europe with my pilgrimage to the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz (blogged earlier). I recall Jon Naughton’s Observer column in which he asked us to imagine that we are pollsters in Mainz in 1472 asking whether we thought this invention of Gutenberg’s would disrupt the Catholic church, fuel the Reformation, spark the Scientific Revolution, change our view of education and thus childhood, and change our view of societies and nations and cultures. Pshaw, they must have said.

Ask those questions today. How likely do you think it is that every major institution of society–every industry, all of education, all of government–will be disrupted; that we will rethink our idea of nations and cultures; that we will reimagine education; that we will again alter even economics? Pshaw?

Welcome to Davos 1472.

LATER: Thanks to Andy Sternberg, here is a Storify of my tweets from an opening session at Davos, a Time debate on the future of capitalism (sorry for the long link; having trouble with the WordPress app on my iPad; also can’t get the embed code from Storify on the iPad; will fix it later): http://storify.com/andysternberg/jeff-jarvis-tweets-from-davos?awesm=sfy.co_W6q&utm_campaign=&utm_medium=sfy.co-twitter&utm_source=direct-sfy.co&utm_content=storify-pingback

The disruptors arrive at Davos

Last year at Davos, I said I was among the disrupted when I preferred to be among the disruptors.

The disruptor arrived last night. Daniel Domscheit-Berg, former spokesman for Wikileaks and founder of the competitive OpenLeaks, came to a dinner about transparency at which I was a panelist, alongside the Guardian’s Timothy Garton-Ash, Human Rights Watch’s Ken Roth, and Harvard’s David Kennedy, led by the NY Times’ Arthur Sulzberger.

Sad irony: the session on transparency was off-the-record. I asked for it to be open; Sulzberger asked in turn; no go. Fill in your punchline here.

But Dan Perry of the AP was there and interviewed the hyphenates, Domscheit-Berg and Garton-Ash, on the record. Under Chatham House Rule, we can summarize the talk without attributing it.

In truth, there was little disagreement — until we switched from transparent government to transparent business.

About government, the speakers put forward the expected enthusiasm about forcing more transparency upon government with the expected hesitation about potential harm resulting from incomplete redaction and about making government more secret rather than less. No surprises. One person in the room — a journalist I’ve heard here before who inevitably supports power structures — actually opposed transparent government (preferring mere accountability … though how one gets to the latter without the former, I have no idea).

About business, we did disagree. The question was posed: is secrecy a competitive advantage? Most of the panelists and the room said it was. I disagreed as did one other person you might expect to disagree. I argued that transparency is not about just malfeasance but also about a new and necessary way to operate in collaboration with one’s customers and public. Old, institutional companies will miss another boat as new, transparent companies take advantage of the age of openness to do business in a new way.

What I see is that when corporations are subjected to leaks, the reaction will be different. They’ll have more defenders from the power structure. They’ll too rarely see the opportunity in operating as open companies. But it won’t stop the leaks and the march of transparency.

Tomorrow, I’m going to an awards ceremony held by PublicEye.CH, naming the worst corporation in the world (you can still vote) and there, Domscheit-Berg will present OpenLeaks. This is the counterweight to the congregation of the Davos Man.

* Note also that one of my entrepreneurial journalism students at CUNY, Matt Terenzio, just launched Localeaks, which will enable any newspaper in the U.S. to receive leaks from whistleblowers. Very cool. More about it here.

Davos: Too little content

The one interesting thing I’ve heard so far at Davos this year is that the world doesn’t have too much content. It has too little. So says Philip Parker of INSEAD, who is doing fascinating work with automatic creation of content. He’s not doing it for evil purposes: content farms and spam. He is doing it to fill in knowledge that is missing in the world, especially in smaller cultures and languages.

Parker’s system has written tens of thousands of books and is even creating fully automated radio shows in many languages, some of which have never been used for weather reports (they don’t have words for “degree” or “celsius”). He used his software to create a directory of tropical plants that didn’t exist. And he has radio beaming out to farmers in poor third-world nations.

I’m fascinated by what Parker’s project says about our attitudes toward content: that we in the West think there’s too much of it (we’re overloaded); that content is that which content creators create; that content has to be owned; that it has to be inefficient and expensive to be good and useful.

In the U.S., there already is a company that automates the writing of sports stories (another straight line). Thomson Reuters has been automatically spitting out formatted financial stories since 2006. So this is nothing new, except that Parker is putting the notion to new use.

I’m intrigued by the potential uses of Parker’s content extruder. For example, I am on the board of Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic, and I imagine this technology could be used to deliver content, especially more current content — aurally — to its clients, whom I say don’t have learning disabilities but who learn differently.

Now tie that notion to the third world and we can even come to define literacy differently. If we can inform and educate people in their own languages through listening — rather than insisting on reading text — then haven’t we expanded the world of the literate greatly? Don’t we have better-informed nations and economies?

Academics from the University of Southern Denmark say that we are passing through the other side of the Gutenberg Parenthesis, returning to oral exchange and distribution of knowledge. Parker can serve that shift with his audio content.

He also helps us expand the reach and use of content, for his technology can gather bits of information from here and there that fit together and put them in a new form that is newly usable. It’s the Wikipedia worldview. Indeed, I suggested to Parker that he could help Wikipedia meet one of its key strategic goals — creating deeper content in more languages — through the automated generation of the first draft of articles, paving the way for editors.

Parker looks for content that is formulaic. That’s what his technology can replace. He studied TV news and found that 70% of its content is formulaic. No surprise. Most of it could be replaced with a machine.

That’s not just my joke and insult. The more efficient we make the creation of content, the less we will waste on repetitive tasks with commodified results, and the more we can concentrate our valuable and scarce resources on necessity and quality. Certain people will likely screech that such thinking and technology further deprofessionalizes the alleged art of creating content. So be it.

The Flip dance

At the Google party at Davos, I was enticed into doing the Flip dance with none less than Sir Tim Berners-Lee:

Another Sir Tim video from a session on social media. The first half of this 3:44 is him talking about the need for authority signals i social networks. In the middle, he takes pains to correct people who say that he invented the internet or created the web (no, he invented the web). The last half is his intriguing call for academic study of the web:

And, yes, it was a thrill to meet the man. I was wonderful seeing people come across him, spy his name tag, and gasp with glee and gratitude.