Comment by Theodores | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Theodores | Hacker News Reader

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The article blames ecommerce and Amazon for the latest decline. I don't live there, however, I believe this is not to do with ecommerce, it is simply the loss of manufacturing and what happens over time.

In the UK we had many communities thrown on the scrapheap with mines, steel and much else manufacturing gone. Initially people invest their redundancy money in things such as a new dog-grooming business, a cafe, a shop, perhaps a tattoo parlour, depending on what 'follow your passion' leads to. So these businesses go okay for a while, eventually the redundancy money runs out, or, in rare instances, the 'follow the passion' business actually meets a genuine need and a success story happens.

Around the time of this general decline my sister was trying to raise money to go somewhere fancy with her group of friends. Being skint she decided to raise some money by making things - things with beads, jewellery, that sort of stuff. These items sold 'well' but only to her friends whom she was going to be travelling with. There was no 'external market'. So rather than go on the big trip to the festival they missed out on that and spent what little money they had on beads etc. to make stuff to sell to each other. A lesson in economics was learned the hard way.

To some extent any town/city/country that does not have manufacturing and external markets will be a variant of my sister's schooldays model of capitalism. If manufacturing (or mining) jobs go and retail comes along to 'fill the gap', then it cannot last forever. Tourism can't come to the rescue either.

I believe this is not to do with ecommerce, it is simply the loss of manufacturing and what happens over time.

First they came for the farmers. Once over half the workforce, now 1.4% and dropping. Then they came for the miners, now 0.6%. Then they came for the factory workers, once 40% of the workforce, now 8.1%. Now retail, still at 10.2% and dropping. Coming up next, transportation and warehousing.[1] What's growing? Health care and social assistance, for an aging population.

This is killing small-town America, because many small towns now have no function. They were once support for surrounding farms, or had some manufacturing, but that's gone.

In the early days of the Internet, it was thought that location wouldn't matter for many jobs. Early ads for Google Fiber made such claims. With enough bandwidth, your town could prosper again. It hasn't worked out that way. If everything you do goes in and out over a wire, automation of most of your job is probably not far off.

Nobody seems to have a way out of this. Education doesn't help that much; about half of new college graduates take jobs which don't require a college education.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm

The way out of this is basic income. People don't "need" jobs. People need food, water, shelter, and preferably a decent quality of life. The number of jobs required to satisfy those needs per capita has fallen drastically, as you point out. The reason that many people are struggling is because a small number of them are capturing and hoarding most of those efficiency gains, creating an artificial "shortage" for everyone else.

It's so sad, we will have robots growing our food and building our houses and people will still complain about "jobs" when it's really just about distributing the benefits of automation.

You are assuming basic income will happen.

Why would it?

I suggested it as a solution to the so-called problem of robots taking our jobs. I don't think it will happen anytime soon, culturally we are still attached to the idea that a job is a basic requirement of life and "hell no I'm not supporting handouts to lazy people."

I do hope over time society will adapt favorably to a post-scarcity economy, but I'm not holding my breath either.

That's probably the big takeaway - "many small towns now have no function"; so they will cease to exist, and the only question is how the society will manage the elimination of these small towns. In times/places where it was efficient to live in small villages, people lived in small villages. In times/places where it was efficient to live in large but separate farms/plantations, people lived in such farms. In times/places where it was efficient to live in towns clustered around largish mines or factories, people lived that way - and when times change, people always had to rearrange, re-settle and migrate to wherever started to make sense.

Wishing for those towns to continue existing is not sufficient if there's no economic reason for them to exist at that place in that form and if spare income of the 'wishers' isn't sufficient to sustain the place as a hobby.

Trying to "save" (i.e., prolong the agony of) these towns may be actually harmful to their inhabitants - since staying there isn't a long term option in any case, and the later they move, the harder it will be with more competition from people moving off of other eliminated towns.

One strange thing about the internet though: Maintaining Eye-contact and observing body language is critical to the formation of trust between people. And trust is critical for business. But those capabilities are only available in the very expensive telepresence suites of CEO's and the like, and this breaks the key thing we know about information technology - that it is constantly becoming cheaper. That's a bit puzzling.

And sure this is not fully a tech/biz problem, this is also about culture, just notice how the most poverished means of communications, textual messages, became so common in our daily life, even instead of something like video conferencing.

But here's an experiment: take a few beautiful rural towns, with cheap land and fast internet. offer trustful connectivity(maybe packaged in a container form) to a few major metropolitans, and try to see if you can entice companies to participate and some knowledge workers to migrate to rural towns.

Maintaining Eye-contact and observing body language is critical to the formation of trust between people.

That creates the illusion of trust. Any successful con man, politician, or salesperson knows this.

Trust can be signaled in many ways. A green lock signals trust, as does logos from trusted companies.

Also the expensive telepresence you are talking about is technology and technology is continually falling in price.

Not computer trust. Emotional trust.

As for telepresence falling in price, I remember expensive telepresence room we're advertised as "being there" and there was specific design for eye contact and body language, but I haven't seen that yet in those cheaper "telepresence" systems.

Interestingly this "source of trust" with a person is exactly what I normally do not want in a commercial transaction. I want time and information to make a decision.

For salespeople figuring you out is part of the job. Knowing how to push your buttons to upsell pays well.

I can also build trust on a website. It's by selling quality stuff, in a timely manner, replacing it when needed be, etc. Actual service. That's actual trust, not being buddy buddy with a salesperson.

That's true. Salespeople carry negative value in my eyes too.

But if we're talking about work mates, that emotional trust and that human connection does carry value.

I meant emotional trust. My grandparents don't even know what an URL is (they just know to google things) but even they know that if the little lock isn't green, you don't go shopping because it is not safe.

Cooper's Law: All machines are amplifiers.

Technology doesn't erase differences, it amplifies them. If not alwaays, then frequently enough that the distinction is meaningless.

Question is, what made factory work so exceptional, in terms of generating high pay and stability? And what's changed?

(I've some thoughts, but I'm interested in others' too.)

First they came for the farmers. Once over half the workforce, now 1.4% and dropping. Then they came for the miners, now 0.6%. Then they came for the factory workers, once 40% of the workforce, now 8.1%. Now retail, still at 10.2% and dropping. Coming up next, transportation and warehousing.[1] What's growing? Health care and social assistance, for an aging population.

Then came the lawyers, then came the rules...

So-called rust belt towns like this earned their name back when steel mills first began migrating from Pennsylvania to locations having lower labor costs decades ago.

It was not so much in search of the cheapest labor, rather avoidance of the most expensive labor which was in this part of the US at the time. Almost anywhere else could provide a significant cost advantage in an increasingly competitive market.

OTOH, during the decades when the high wages were prevailing in the area, this was a unique opportunity to build a certain amount of local wealth while it lasted.

It is not from some form of strength that "retail jobs came to predominate", instead retail was all that remained after the actual wealth-creating engine had left the area.

All retail could do was extract the remaing local wealth which had been generated during the times of better-paying employment with actual wealth-generating industries.

Now that this remaining wealth is dwindling too, these jobs are becoming more unnecessary as the long tail of the middle class continues to be absorbed, their resources from above and their numbers from below.

You can't have a consumer economy without an equal or greater amount of surplus wealth in the hands of consumers, even then it is completely unsustainable unless there is an ongoing source of new value being created for consumers in excess of value being permanently consumed by both producers & consumers combined.

If producers are not a bigger part of the equation than consumers, you can not balance the equation.

> Tourism can't come to the rescue either.

It can, but unless your location is amazing, compared to the number of people that it must sustain (Hawaii, Whistler), it won't.

Tourism can create local prosperity in the form of a pure consumer economy in places where there never has even been a local source of actual wealth creation.

But tourism dollars only signify wealth that was created elsewhere and merely used for consumption at the resort.

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