Will There Be Any Jobs in the Future At All?

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Alex Knapp, Contributor

“You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.” – Heraclitus

Douglas Rushkoff has an interesting piece at CNN.com asking whether the economy of the future will be set up in such a way that jobs as we know it make any sense at all.


The question we have to begin to ask ourselves is not how do we employ all the people who are rendered obsolete by technology, but how can we organize a society around something other than employment? Might the spirit of enterprise we currently associate with “career” be shifted to something entirely more collaborative, purposeful, and even meaningful?

Instead, we are attempting to use the logic of a scarce marketplace to negotiate things that are actually in abundance.

In considering what an economy has to look like, Rushkoff tries to imagine past capitalism and communism into a different way of looking at economics going forward – which sort of ends up looking like the economy of the United Federation of Planets, where everyone’s basic needs are provided for but you have to do creative work to obtain status and other things you might want.



Ultimately, I’m not convinced that Rushkoff’s solution works – it suffers a little too much from what I think of as “information class myopia”, in which writers about technology, who spend most of their days involved with gadgets and electronic media while creating intellectual property for a living confuse their own experiences with universal ones. These pieces rear their heads every now and again when people ask questions like, “Why do we need a post office? I always text!” while proclaiming ubiquitous, frequently used technologies like the phone and email dead simply because they don’t use them that often as texting, Twitter, etc. Rushkoff doesn’t usually suffer from this syndrome, but I think his concept in this column does.



That said, I think Douglas Rushkoff is a pretty brilliant guy, and while I may not agree with where he’s going in this column, I do think he’s absolutely right to think about the future of our economic systems. I think he’s absolutely right to point out that now might be a good time to completely reconsider what we value in terms of work, employment, and career, and that we need to figure out what the technological and social changes of the past few decades mean for those concepts.

It’s important to remember that the economic systems that we live with today won’t last forever. As technology changes and innovation continues, so too will the very nature of what the economy is will evolve. Paradigm shifts like the rise of the corporation in the late Middle Ages, paper money, free labor and central banking, among many others, all came about as a response to particular political, social and technological pressures, needs, and problems. And as times change and different technologies and social needs come to the fore, economic institutions and rules will change accordingly – sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. Sometimes at the behest of government and sometimes whether government likes it or not.

It’s not far-fetched to imagine that the nature of employment and entrepreneurship may well be very different a century from now than it is today. Indeed, they may not even be recognizable a century from now. That’s because economic institutions and ideas aren’t natural laws – they’re practical tools that are always evolving.

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Yahoo fires chief executive Carol Bartz

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Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has told staff in an email she was fired over the phone by the chairman of the board

Dominic Rushe in New York  

Carol Bartz has been fired as CEO of Yahoo. Photograph: HO/AFP/Getty Images

Carol Bartz, Yahoo's chief executive, was fired late on Tuesday ending a rocky tenure in which she tried and failed to revitalise the online giant.

In a statement the company announced Bartz had been "removed" from her post and would be replaced by chief financial officer Timothy Morse "effective immediately" on an interim basis as the firm began the search for a new, permanent CEO.

In an e-mail sent to employees from her iPad and titled "Goodbye," Bartz wrote: "I am very sad to tell you that I've just been fired over the phone by Yahoo's chairman of the board." She wrote, "It has been my pleasure to work with all of you and I wish you only the best going forward."

The combative chief executive had been under pressure to turnaround Yahoo from the day she was appointed. Yahoo remains one of the biggest destinations on the internet but has lost gound with advertisers and audience to Google, Facebook and services like Twitter.



According to research firm eMarketer Facebook is set to overtake Yahoo this year to collect the biggest slice of online display advertising dollars in the US.

Bartz joined Yahoo in January 2009, replacing co-founder Jerry Yang who had returned to the helm of the company in an ill-fated bid to turn its fortunes around. When Bartz joined the firm its shares were trading for around $12. After news of her departure broke, the shares jumped more than 6% in after-hours trade to $13.72, from a close of $12.91 on the Nasdaq. In January 2000, near the end of the dot-com bubble, Yahoo's shares traded at more than $125 a piece.

Bartz had also fallen out of favour with Wall Street investors, unhappy with her turnaround strategy and her handling of the firm's strained relatonship with China's Alibaba Group, in which it holds a 40% stake.

In June Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock gave his public support to Bartz at the company's annual general meeting. "This board is very supportive of Carol and this management team," Bostock said in his opening remarks. "We are confident that Yahoo is headed in the right direction."

Bartz, had previously been chairman of software firm Autodesk. She arrived with a reputation as a tough talker and reinforced it early in her tenure by telling Michael Arrington, founder of the influential Techcrunch website to "f*** off" during a staged interview at an industry event.

Her management style came under fire after the company's apparent mishandling of its relationship with Alibaba. In May when it was revealed that Alibaba had handed Alipay - one of Alibaba's crown jewels - to a company controlled by Alibaba founder Jack Ma, apparently without Yahoo's knowledge. Alibaba said Yahoo was fully aware of the transaction and the two sides openly bickered about the deal.

Yahoo is conducting a strategic review of the company's options, including possible divestment of its Asian holdings. It cautioned that no decisions had yet been made.

Bostock said: "On behalf of the entire Board, I want to thank Carol for her service to Yahoo! during a critical time of transition in the Company's history, and against a very challenging macro-economic backdrop. I would also like to express the Board's appreciation to Tim and thank him for accepting this important role. We have great confidence in his abilities and in those of the other executives who have been named to the Executive Leadership Council."

The company also said its directors named five other senior Yahoo executives to an executive leadership council that is intended to help Morse, a former chief financial officer at Altera, a semiconductor makers, and at General Electric Plastics, manage the company.

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Yahoo boss Carol Bartz is fired by US internet company

Carol Bartz was brought on board to change the fortunes of the search and internet company

 

Yahoo's chief executive Carol Bartz has been fired by the internet company after two-and-a-half years in the top job. 

The company said in a statement that Ms Bartz was removed by the board of directors, effective immediately.

Tim Morse, Yahoo's chief financial officer, will take over from Ms Bartz.

Yahoo has been struggling to increase its market share as it faces increased competition from rivals such as Google and Facebook.

Yahoo shares jumped more than 6% in after-hours trading after news of the firing broke, indicating they would trade higher when Wall Street opens for business on Wednesday. Yahoo's stock price was up at $13.72, an increase of 81 cents.

Mr Morse will serve as interim chief executive and the board of directors will look for a new CEO, the company said.

No turnaround

Ms Bartz was hired to run Yahoo in early 2009, taking over from co-founder Jerry Yang.

She made significant changes to the management team and cut jobs to save on costs. She also shifted the focus of the traditionally search-oriented firm towards more personalized content.

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I am very sad to tell you that I've just been fired over the phone by Yahoo's chairman of the board”

Carol Bartz Former CEO, Yahoo

 

However, Larry Magid, a technology analyst at C-net, said the company has not seen enough of a turn-around under Ms Bartz's leadership.

"She hasn't done anything to change the company's fortunes, and they are still anxious to find a leader who can move them up," he said.

Critics also claim that Yahoo has failed to make significant strides in two of the most lucrative segments of the market; search and social networking.

"Facebook is way ahead, and now even Google is way ahead of Yahoo in social networking," C-net's Mr Magid added.

"In terms of the potential for long-term revenue it's just not there. They've got some great sites, great information resources, news, stocks, sports, but that's not what bringing in the money."

Phone firing

The news first broke on the Wall Street Journal's All Things D website, which quoted an email from Ms Bartz to Yahoo staff. The email has since been reported by other news agencies including Bloomberg and Reuters.

"I am very sad to tell you that I've just been fired over the phone by Yahoo's chairman of the board," Ms Bartz said in the email to staff.

"It has been my pleasure to work with all of you and I wish you only the best going forward."

As news of the sacking spread across the internet, Yahoo released its own press statement in which it confirmed it was undergoing a "leadership reorganisation" and that Ms Bartz would be leaving the company.

Roy Bostock, chairman of Yahoo's board, said in the statement: "On behalf of the entire board, I want to thank Carol for her service to Yahoo during a critical time of transition in the company's history, and against a very challenging macro-economic backdrop."

He added that he saw "enormous growth opportunities" for the firm.

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Europe puts its head in sand over growth crisis

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LONDON | Mon Sep 5, 2011 By Alan Wheatley, Global Economics Correspondent

(Reuters) - Japanization is shorthand for slouching toward that country's noxious mix of low growth and high debt. Euro zone governments will find it tough to keep the ugly new word out of their lexicon.

Concern is mounting over a deterioration in Europe's long-term growth prospects that, unaddressed, will make it even harder to tackle the banking and debt problems underlying the current life-or-death struggle over the euro.

The financial crisis that has been rocking the global economy since 2008 has permanently reduced trend growth across the industrial world. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris reckons the potential output of its 34 member countries has dropped by about 2.5 percent.

"A lot of countries are going to take a permanent hit to their trend rate of growth. This is not an ordinary recession and so we're not going to see countries bouncing back to pre-crisis rates of growth," said Philip Whyte, a senior research fellow at the Center for European Reform, a London think-tank.

As firms have gone bust, capacity has been lost for good. With demand subdued, profitable companies are not replacing old plants.

And as high unemployment persists, skills atrophy. This weakens productivity and shuts people out of the job market for longer and longer periods -- a danger stressed by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke at the U.S. central bank's Jackson Hole symposium last month.

Apart from sapping animal spirits and forcing governments to raise taxes or cut spending, diminished growth closes off one route for lowering the high sovereign debt to gross domestic product ratios that have locked Greece, Ireland and Portugal out of the bond markets and are unnerving investors in Italian and Spanish debt.

Against this background, and with the scope for fiscal and monetary stimulus all but exhausted, politicians might be expected to grasp the nettle and push through reforms to improve the supply side of the economy -- policies such as making it easier to hire and fire, promoting greater competition and investing more in training.

Far from it. Pier Carlo Padoan, the OECD's chief economist, says he is less optimistic about the prospects for deep-seated change than he was at the start of the year.



"I see that measures are being announced. I would like to see them being implemented," Padoan said.

With policy ammunition running desperately short, he said it was time for governments to overcome their squeamishness about confronting vested interests opposed to change. "This is a luxury that many countries cannot afford any more. The situation does not allow it."

SOUTHERN DISCOMFORT

The vicious circle of rising debt and falling growth is made worse by the fact that those countries drowning in debt on the periphery of the euro zone are also the ones that have dragged their feet on freeing up their product and labor markets or modernizing their education systems.

"They're going through some truly horrible times. I'm very worried about the whole southern European fringe, not just on an 18-month to 2-year view but looking out a decade or longer," said Whyte with the Center for European Reform.

Germany, by contrast, derided a decade ago as the sick man of Europe, is being held up as a model, at least when it comes to jobs.

"The remarkable resilience of the German labor market in the last few years, where wage moderation and flexible time accounting shielded the economy from excessive job destruction, illustrates admirably the promise of well-structured reforms," Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the European Central Bank, said approvingly in Jackson Hole.

How much are countries missing out by not pressing the reform button?

Padoan says Europe's trend growth has fallen in recent years to an average of just 1.5 percent a year, but he says some members of the 17-nation euro zone could almost double that rate with a supply-side jolt.
Italy needs to liberalize its service sector, open up professions to new entrants and improve energy efficiency, Padoan said. Greece needs to do all that and overhaul its labor market and competition policy at the same time.

POOR ADVERT FOR FREE MARKETS

Germany, too, could grow faster still if it liberalized services, which would trigger increased investment.

These policy prescriptions are well worn. Leaders of the European Union enshrined them and a host of other reform goals in the 2000 Lisbon Agenda, which they promptly ignored. The pledges have since been repackaged as the Europe 2020 Strategy, but Whyte says the havoc wrought by the near-collapse of the international financial system will make politicians more wary than ever of the social disruption that reforms entail.

"The Great Financial Crisis hasn't been a great advert for free-market capitalism," said Whyte. His research outfit publishes a booklet this week exploring how Europe could take off by embracing innovation. But in this area, too, Whyte fears the political climate means policy is likely to be increasingly hijacked by incumbent firms hostile to competition from start-ups.

Europe is not doomed to go down Japan's path of economic stagnation. Its potential growth rate is low but stronger than Japan's -- estimated by the Bank of Japan at just 0.5 percent a year because of a fast-shrinking working-age population.

But the specter of a renewed recession is a reminder for governments that, even if they can spirit away the euro zone's currency and debt woes, they have still to find the elixir for growth.

"I'm not saying politicians will implement reform, but they should," Padoan said. "Some politicians resist reform because they are captive to interest groups. Well, the price for those governments in terms of sustainable growth will be very high."

(Reporting by Alan Wheatley; Editing by Ruth Pitchford)
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