A Funny Look at Economic Development

  DEFINITELY NOT SAFE FOR WORK.  Especially if you work in economic development for your city or region.  This clip explains how cities recruited new businesses in the Industrial Age.  Basically it comes down to massive bribes and bullshit.  Then high tech businesses emerged, and changed the game.  In 2002, Professor Richard Florida's book, The Rise of Creative Class explained that things now work much different in today's tech hub cities.  Hundreds of towns and cities worldwide sought to become "The Next Silicon Valley."  Nearly all of them of them failed, because Silicon Valley already happened.  It's like trying to become the next Lebron James.  You can't be Lebron.  What you can be is the best version of yourself.  That's what towns and cities nationwide are struggling with, shaking off Industrial Age thinking (like in the clip above), and figuring out how to become competitive in the Information Age were going into.  It's a whole different game.

The jobs picture right now in 2017

Here's economic development expert Richard Florida on the different groups of workers in today's society.

Why am I so interested in jobs and creating new businesses these days?  Here's why.

The types of workers in 2017 society:

The Creative Class (arts, entertainment, science, management, etc.)  are about 35% of the working population.  As a group, they make over 50% of the wages in the U.S.  Most are doing well.  These are the jobs least likely to be replaced by new technology.

 The manufacturing workers are only about 7% of today's workers.  When you add construction and transportation workers, it rises to about 20% of total workers.  Some make good money, most just make OK money.  Many of these jobs will definitely be replaced by technology in future years.

Agriculture only employs about 1% of workers in the U.S. these days.  Most don't make a lot of money.

Service workers make up about 45% of the current workforce.  Most of these jobs don't pay that well, and many of them leave workers in or near poverty.  Millions of people work two or more of these jobs.  Many of these jobs will also be replaced by new technology in the coming years.  This is where much of the once great American middle class now works.

If we want to keep this country strong, we will need TENS OF MILLIONS of new, good paying jobs in coming years.  The only viable way I see this happening is by millions of people starting their own businesses.  

Looking at a world beyond jobs

Those of you that know me from California know that I'm that taxi driver who falls through the trap door in this clip.  When I wound up in North Carolina years ago, right as the economy was collapsing in late 2008, I couldn't find work.  The Great Recession seemed to be the reason.  But as NC crawled out of the recession at a glacial pace, I still couldn't find a job.  That was a problem I've rarely run into, and never for a pro-longed period of time.  When I was homeless in California, I didn't have the resources to actually work a job, which kept me from working for a year.  But if I'd had the chance to stabilize my life for a while, I could have found something. 

But in North Carolina, it was different.  There were few good paying jobs where my earlier skills as a writer or video guy were helpful.  The BMX, skateboard and TV industries, where I'd worked for years in the 80's and 90's, don't exist here.  So I hit all the local restaurants, figuring my three years experience years ago would help me get by while I looked into other options.  I couldn't even get an interview in a restaurant.  WTF? 

As I looked into the larger picture of jobs in the U.S., I found that there were tens of millions of other people nationwide who couldn't find jobs either, or couldn't find good jobs.  It really hit home when I went to a job fair in Kernersville (NC) a couple of years ago.  I had a doctor's appointment that morning, so I didn't get to the job fair until 10:30 am or so.  It was held in a huge church north of town.  The local Pepsi bottling plant was hiring 100 people, and and Herbal Life was planning to move into an empty factory and was taking resume's.  I walked in and headed to the big multi-purpose room in the church.  A person in the line coming out the door snorted, "The end of the line's that way."  I followed the line of people around a corner, and into a hallway well over 100 feet long.  I kept walking, passing about 2,500 people, all trying to get hired for those 100 Pepsi jobs.  The church was huge and the line went from one end to the other, then finally into a full size gymnasium, then it wound all the way around the gym.  It was so depressing.  Hours later, I made it into the main room, and I gave my resume' to a lady at the Herbal life booth, she smiled and laid it on top of a stack of resume's a foot high.  On another table behind her, there was an even bigger stack.  Paper resume's were still accepted then.  I never heard from any of the companies I applied for that day.

As I stood in line that day, I listened to people talking about how to find a good job.  My thoughts were different.  I was thinking, "I should open up a snack bar next to the line for all the people waiting."  Years of hanging around highly entrepreneurial people in California, and my years as a taxi driver, which operates as a small business, gave me a different point of view.  Most of the people in that insanely long line kept plugging away at finding a job... any job.  I realized that I needed to create my own job. 

Ultimately, I stepped up the artwork I do, and started making money with it.  Not much, but something.  I'm still plugging away at creating my own job comprised of art and writing.  The more I looked into what was happening in the U.S., with technology replacing so many jobs, I realized that the only way we'll be able to move forward as a country is if MILLIONS OF PEOPLE create their own jobs. 

If you watch the video above, you'll see that as many as 70 million people could lose their jobs to technology in the next 20 years.  Teens are already having trouble finding jobs.  Lots of middle aged people like myself have lost jobs because of technology or outsourcing, and are having trouble finding good paying jobs.  We've all heard of the college graduates saddled with student debt that are working low paying service jobs because they can't find a good job that needs their degree.

This isn't just lazy people or drunks or unskilled people that are struggling.  There are people throughout society looking for good jobs.  Millions of them.  And there will be tens of millions more in the coming years.  The numbers are so large, that we can't visualize them.   If we take the estimate of 70 million people from the clip above, how big of a crowd is that?  There are 31 huge pro football stadiums in the United States (Remember, Jets and Giants share one).  They average a capacity of about 70,000 people.  So if all those 31 stadiums were filled to capacity, that would be about 2,170,000 people.  To equal the 70 million people that could lose their jobs to technology in the next 20 years, we'd have to fill all of those huge stadiums,with completely different people, every day for 32 days.  That's the ridiculous number of people we're talking about. 

This huge issue is what I'm focusing on these days.  As I build my own business, I'll be looking at the ways people are starting new businesses and industries, and the other aspects of this issue.  This will affect you.  It will affect your kids and grandkids.  This is big.  And the politicians are too busy arguing with each other to dive into this issue.  A lot of the top tech business people are worried about this.  While successful tech companies make a ton of money, they don't hire large numbers of people.  We've got to figure this out for ourselves.  Let's get to it.

For those of you old school BMXers checking this out, when I checked how many people looked at that first post, the answer was 43.  Good sign.