Virginia Postrel has written an intriguing piece at Bloomberg that some dill-weed of an editor gave a really unfortunate, and misleading, headline. Her piece suggests that quality of life, in this instance measured by something as seemingly trivial as entertainment options, is increasing even as other standard economic markers of well-being stay flat or dip […]
Blogger Michael O. Church (don’t click if you can’t stand f-bombs) says that it isn’t just automation that is putting our economic future into jeopardy. Rather, it is is a deadly cocktail of automation taking up all the subordinate jobs combined with an employment model that has made most of us — naturally — subordinate. Per […]
According to Harvard Business Review, the sexiest career these days is data scientist: Goldman is a good example of a new key player in organizations: the “data scientist.” It’s a high-ranking professional with the training and curiosity to make discoveries in the world of big data. The title has been around for only a few […]
The book Abundance talks about the important leverage that incentive prizes can provide. Describing the prize that inspired Charles Lindbergh to cross the Atlantic, Kotke and Diamandis write: Nine teams cumulatively spent $400,000 to try to win Orteig’s $25,000 purse. That’s sixteenfold leverage. Now some businesses are getting in on the act. Shopify used a […]
I’ve spent the past few months making my own humble contribution to adding an analytical layer to a job search site which we’ve also been working on making more interesting and social networkish. These initiatives have given me some time to think about how rapidly the process that we call “job hunting” is changing, both […]
Tyler Cowen has written a short book entitled, “The Great Stagnation.” Pretty downer subject, right? The lengthy subtitle gives a little hope: “How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better.” Here, briefly, are some of the subjects covered. Productivity is usually best accomplished by reaching for […]
Over at my other blog I have some thoughts on the shift from push access of content to pull, and how that is contributing to the emergence of a prosumer economy. We’ve talked recently about how the prosumer model might play a role in replacing traditional employment should radical restructuring of our economy occur. Turns […]
Image by Robert S. Donovan via Flickr Google just set a new record with 75,000 job applicants in a single week. Is this good news or bad news? Well, it ought to be good news for Google, anyhow, as they are planning to hire 6000 new employees in 2011 and these numbers say something about . But […]
Image by Christopher Chan via Flickr Well, not exactly nothing. I direct your attention to the Year in Virtual Goods,where we learn that in the year 2010, people worldwide found a way to spend more than $7 billion real dollars on virtual stuff. Maybe this shouldn’t be surprising, what with 80 million people playing Farmville, […]
Image via Wikipedia We’ve talked about the idea of a jobless recovery leading to a long-term lack of jobs, but how about something even stranger — a jobless boom. Our buddy Alvis Brigis lays it out in a piece that is somewhere between blog post and manifesto. The salient points, neatly summarized by Alvis: American […]