I don't really like the fact that this article more or less accepts at face value the metric of "jobs" as being the relevant measure of "helping the economy." This might have been more or less the case when the output from the vast majority of jobs rarely deviated more than an order of magnitude from the average job, but that is far from the case these days.<p>Instead of an intelligent and creative person joining an assembly line or becoming a pit trader, they have the opportunity to create something of value from nothing and give access to it to the entire world.<p>The fact that paradigm shifts are accelerating isn't a bad thing in my opinion. Within a few generations, the idea that the world is more or less the same place when we leave it as it was when we entered it will likely not be an automatic assumption people will make about the world.
The article claims that "Over 400,000 new jobs have been created by Apple’s App store.", but that's just shoddy accounting. What about mcdonalds in europe installing thousands of touch screen replacing cashiers and the tons of other apps that replace people, does that go into that accounting ?<p>And what about the intense price competition between workers that online, global platforms create ?<p>Will those 2 million needed technical jobs cause more job losses ?<p>My problem with this article is that it tries to create a rosy picture of a big change our economy is going throught, while in reality we just don't know how things are going to turn out,whether we will have enough jobs for everyone, and how rough and long the transition period is going to be, and it does so just to sell a product(which might be valuable).<p>It's just like reading medical research done by pharmaceutical companies.
first:good job Nick (long time friend)! Also Elli, though we've never chatted.<p>I think the meta pattern of the examples in the article are in some ways examples of startups that are creating "market-like" mechanisms for more effectively helping businesses and people. Hireart's doing that from the lens of jobs/candidate search, and the education startups are allowing people to spend the coin of time into investing in their own knowledge/skills.