Was the economy littered? Let's defragment it!

A man in a baseball cap "The economy continues to suck" has a crazy plan to improve the efficiency of the economy without the use of mass shootings. Nearly.

Who is he? This is Andy Kessler , anlitik and an investment banker who wrote the book “Eat People” (which was translated as “Radical startup. 12 rules of business Darwinism”) about the rules of survival for business. And he shared his thoughts on one of the lectures at Digital October.
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Andy reminds about the crisis of 2009: then people joked that they would work for food. During the previous crisis, there was really not enough food, and people lined up in long lines for bread. Andy believes that the main problem now is the productivity of the economy. Simply put - the economy has become quite “littered” with unnecessary actions, damn heavy and clumsy. And Andy has a plan to defrag this industry. Somewhat bold, somewhat unusual, but quite specific. In short - you need to study the list of professions for unnecessary ones, which could be easily abandoned and somehow, at least, optimized.

There used to be a wonderful profession in banks: vacuum tube operators. If someone wanted to open a deposit in the bank, you could just drive up by car and arrange everything. The money would be sucked into a special capsule, and the girl worker would process this capsule. It's clear that now this profession is useless: a woman was taken out, a machine gun was set.

Eloi and Morlocks

Andy identifies 2 types of professions: there are people who create benefits (designers, designers, designers of microcircuits and others). Further, there are attendants, for example, people who cook, clean or wash clothes. It is assumed that they unload the time of the first category and perform fairly routine actions. Their work can and should be optimized due to the same automation. Politicians, by the way, to some extent can be attributed to this group: they do not create good, but create the conditions for their creation. Under the abbreviation.

The next category is those who move in the space some objects, goods, for example, storekeepers and carriers. A large number of modern warehouses are fully automated. In order for them to function normally, just a few people are enough. Remember the Amazon remote center: most of the functions are automated. Just recently, Amazon bought a company engaged in robotics: and this is just to replace a few more living people with glorious robots.

The latter category is “thieves,” those who exist to the extent that they exist. In the states, every city is now probably the only cable TV company, and in fact has a monopoly.

Accordingly, every year these bastards raise prices for their services. At times higher than inflation. And in order to watch a couple of sports channels and SPN + discovery or Animal Planet, you will pay tens of dollars per month. Obviously, network services like Netflix and others should put an end to this outrage. Cellular companies, too, of course, went too far. Their main innovation over the past 50 years is to replace disk phones with push-button phones, there were no others. Skype came up with video conferencing, Google also has excellent service. I do not understand why TNT other similar companies did not offer me a similar service 150 years ago? It would seem that it’s so easy to combine all my devices with the same number, so that I can speak the same number with anything, where it’s convenient. As soon as the state protection is canceled, these companies will disappear, because there is no point in their existence.

It seems that the rejection of such professions can greatly simplify and improve the economy. In fact, defragment it. The ideal task is to remove all unproductive work. It is clear that this is difficult for many reasons, but this is the way to improve the efficiency of the economy.

As for the "heartlessness" of such automation - and so much more and most of our lives we spend opposite the screen. For example, a complete rejection of teachers is impossible, but some of the functions of the school can be automated.

By the way, an important advantage of the digital environment is that it creates additional transparency: for example, there are countries in which data on the incomes of officials and their families are published or data on who pumped up how much money into the election budget is published. And in fact it means reducing the resistance at the stage of “throwing out” unnecessary guys from the market.

Designed in California, assembled in China

With all the utopian ideas of Andy and some "magic" terms of their application, there is a very real example of a phenomenon similar in scale - the re-profiling of the US economy. When cheap Chinese facilities opened, almost all production work moved there. Once again: all service functions (second class of professions) are outsourced. Automation can be another such “black box”: after all, in this example, the United States designs, then simply gets embodied.

Links

• Lecture in two languages
• Andy Kessler website
• Book: ISBN 978-5-9614-1730-2

PS It may seem that formally Andy is wrong: as noted in the comments, the economy is a self-regulating system that can cleanse itself of unnecessary professions. In practice, it’s about the fact that there are whole groups of people who find it unprofitable: the “familiar” business of telecoms, various lobbies, a network of trade unions and so on. It is clear that his statements now sound in the spirit of Captain Obviousness: but, perhaps, situations are still permissible when compulsory “defragmentation” is really needed.

A more specific example: is it possible to reduce the burden on system administrators 10 times, if you make some serious changes in the processes, software and work organization? It is clear that, in theory, yes, yes, but in practice, the changes will be inhumanly huge and will require large resources. Andy argues that in many areas (even medicine) such resources are easier to spend once than to pay with inefficient labor.

PPS I invite you to the next lecture about implanted neural systems and assembly of cyborg beetles. Lecture is free.