[efalcao]

It's very interesting to think about cases where digital darlings have "killed jobs."

Before: Thousands of jobs all over the country working for the classified section of a newspaper. Marginally profitable business.

After: Craigslist destroys that whole market. Tons of jobs lost and the revenues shift to one company. Hugely profitable business, but probably a smaller total market than used to exist with just newspapers.

Should we feel bad about it? Hell no. Are we marginally worse off? Maybe?

[bryanlarsen]

I think part of what Rushkoff is saying is that the transition from classified ads to Craigslist should be a win for society without caveats.

People placing ads are better off -- they don't have to pay to place the ads, and their ads are more widely seen. People responding to ads are also better off -- they don't have to buy newspapers, and have much better search and scan capabilities, et cetera.

But thousands of people have lost their jobs in the newspaper industry, and thus are worse off. Yet the Craigslist transition has not taken anything away from society. Those that lost their jobs are not now contributing less to society -- their jobs would be glorified make-work in a post-Craigslist society. It should now be easier for society to feed, clothe, house & entertain these people than it was before, yet they are not getting fed, clothed, housed and entertained as well as they were before. It's also hard to argue that they do not deserve to be fed, clothed, housed and entertained.

It is a failure of capitalism. Markets are about the distribution of scarce goods, but do not work so well when the goods are not scarce. Capitalism is still better than every other system we're aware of, but I believe that there is a better system out there yet to be found, and Rushkoff is one of those helping to search for it.

[tsotha]

>Those that lost their jobs are not now contributing less to society -- their jobs would be glorified make-work in a post-Craigslist society. It should now be easier for society to feed, clothe, house & entertain these people than it was before, yet they are not getting fed, clothed, housed and entertained as well as they were before. It's also hard to argue that they do not deserve to be fed, clothed, housed and entertained.

>It is a failure of capitalism.

I don't see how that can be considered a failure of capitalism. On the contrary, this is capitalism functioning the way it's supposed to function. These people aren't "not getting fed, clothed, housed and entertained" on a long-term basis. They need to find jobs doing something the rest of us are willing to pay for.

[MatthewPhillips]

If there was no scarcity we wouldn't have a problem.

[ojbyrne]

You're not considering the second order effects. Multiple competitors appear to compete with craigslist (either head to head or picking off the most attractive niches). Market grows, profits fall.

Are we better off? Just look at the service. Before we had tiny little text ads in the back pages of newspapers, now we have pictures, directions, the ability to search and sort, etc... clearly the service is better.

And I think once you take into account the second order effects, and the fact that there's significantly less friction around transactions, you end up with a larger total market, and probably close to a comparable number of jobs.

[jbooth]

There's no way that there's a comparable level of jobs. You know how many people the newspaper industry used to employ nationwide? Craigslist had substantially less than 100 last I heard (maybe they've grown a bit), pushing a way larger volume of classifieds, without any expensive correspondents or any of that news crap.

As the original commentator stated, bringing their jobs back would be silly make-work now that they're obsolete, nobody's suggesting that. But it does present a problem.

[ojbyrne]

Kijiji, AirBnB, Cars.com, etc. etc. See http://thegongshow.tumblr.com/post/345941486/the-spawn-of-cr...

I think you didn't grasp the phrase "second order effects."

[jbooth]

There should really be a Godwin-like rule when it comes to accusing someone of not knowing how to read.

How many people does AirBnB employ, again? I've never even heard of Kijiji.

Add up all those companies and you're around the level of a single 100k city newspaper. Maybe 2-3 of them. Did you know that newspapers actually employ a lot of people who's whole job is to get stuff printed out on paper and delivered to everyone's door?

Again, nobody's arguing for going back to stupid inefficient gray-paper classifieds. They're just pointing out that efficiency has eliminated more jobs than it's created this time around (see also manufacturing), and there doesn't seem to be an obvious next step for those unemployed if they can't learn programming.

[AppSec]

This can be taken to an extreme.

How many corporations make/made printing presses? How many corps make/made network devices, monitors, keyboards, mice, smartphones.

You can go third to fourth order all day long and you'll end up with the same statement:

The only thing that is constant is change. People have to be willing to change and willing to learn or they will be left behind.

[r00fus]

As the friction of the transaction decreases, the "jobs" are the less the "classified owners/workers" and now people who can make their living buying/selling on the far-more-fluid craigslist.

[thedaveoflife]

Are we marginally worse off?

No. We now have access to cheaper and superior classified advertisements and the people who used to work at newspapers are now free to continue on to other jobs.

[ig1]

The revenue didn't shift to CL - for most categories CL is still free, the users of it are the ones who got to keep the money.

[learc83]

Exactly, and now those users are free to use that money to buy other goods or invest, creating more jobs to fill the vacuum left by newspaper layoffs.

[tommorris]

Yeah, and Wikipedia destroyed the generalist encyclopaedia market. But it created some value for tons of people in the tech business: there's a whole stack of apps on your average smartphone which let you tap a button and get a definition from Wikipedia (or Wiktionary), which makes the phone more useful (and the connectivity packages offered by the telcos more valuable etc.)

Having a useful (for some value of useful) page rather than a spammy viagra-ad-laden page from some low-rent content farm for a few million common queries must make Google happy too.

Value can mean efficiency, and making the market for encyclopedias or classified ads more efficient opens up new opportunities and saves the users of the inefficient services money.

[nextparadigms]

You're thinking of industries in terms of how many people each employ. If one tech paradigm changes one industry from employing 1 million people, to employing just 100,000, does that mean we are worse off? Not really, because when that happens there are usually more markets and businesses created adjacent to that industry.

The Internet did bring Craiglist, which did end up killing a major part of the newspaper industry. But does that mean we're worse off? No, because the Internet also brought us many other things. So it's good to look at the bigger picture, rather than how many people each industry employees over a period of time.

[MrFoof]

I think the issue is the pronounced effect of market disruption.

In your example, if an industry is disrupted to where it now employs 100K instead of 1M people, the problem that arises for the short term is up to 900K people will be without employment for some duration. Eventually new jobs will be created and we'll be back to relative equilibrium, but that takes time.

In an ideal situation, these dips could be more quickly counteracted, but realistically the market isn't so efficient in which that would ever be possible, so other systems need to exist to support individuals until the market reaches equilibrium again.