"If proposals could be judged solely by their good intentions, Jaron Lanier’s Who Owns the Future? would be a masterpiece. Unfortunately, it has to be judged on the quality of its prescriptions, and on that count this tome is a train wreck... Lanier has over the past decade become a social commentator and critic of what he sees as Silicon Valley’s anti-human vision of the future. In his new book, which has attracted a lot of media attention, Lanier frets that an advancing network economy is eviscerating the middle class. The Internet has destroyed more jobs than it has created, he writes... Yet it’s historically ignorant to obsess about the job-killing potential of technology. As the George Mason economist Don Boudreaux notes, agriculture at its height employed 90 percent of the population and accounted for more than half of GDP. Today it employs just one percent of the workforce, yet we’re all the richer for it (and we don’t suffer 80 percent unemployment). Wealth comes not from jobs, as Lanier seems to think, but from doing more with less. Jobs that don’t create wealth are a cost, not a benefit."
Posted on: Sun, 09 Jun 2013 00:35:34 +0000
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