If skillful workers exist at some companies, you might expect employers with vacancies to lure those workers away with higher pay packages. Simple supply and demand, right? A higher price should increase the supply. That doesn’t seem to be happening.
Are profit margins so tight that small businesses simply can’t pay enough to hire the skilled workers they need? Maybe so. The inflation data suggests few companies have the ability to raise their prices in this economy (the healthcare sector being a big exception).
Imagine you are one of those small business owners. You sell all the widgets you can make. You can’t increase production without more workers, but you can’t afford more workers unless you raise prices. You can’t raise prices because competing widget makers are eager to grab your customers.
This must be a frustrating situation for those owners. I’ll bet some readers know the feeling.
Detroit, Hong Kong, Hollywood (Florida), and the Cayman Islands
First, let me offer my thoughts and prayers to those of many millions worldwide, in support of the families of those murdered in Paris. The cold-bloodedness and ruthless efficiency with which these killers operated in one of the great cities of civilization is troubling in the extreme. Purposefully shooting at disabled people? These are not members of any human race that I wish to be thought as part of. We’re going to be dealing with the repercussions from these horrific acts for quite some time.
The schedule in the subhead above sounds hectic, but it’s not really. I fly into Detroit Monday and back out Tuesday, and then I’m not scheduled to fly until early January, when I will spend five days in Hong Kong. More on that in future letters. In late January I will be the keynote speaker at the big ETF conference (ETF.com), where a few thousand people will gather to talk about portfolio design in the world of ETFs. I’m really looking forward to that. Then I’ll return to the Cayman Islands for a speech in early February. I know I have to get to New York and maybe Washington DC sometime betwixt and between; but for me that is a rather sedate travel schedule, which is good, because I need to be spending most of my time researching and writing.
For the several hundred people who have volunteered to help me research my new book, Investing in an Age of Transformation, you should be hearing from us shortly. We just had to completely reorganize how we’re going to do the book, and I’m really excited about the process we’re coming up with. It has now become something of a global community project with a book tagged onto the end. I think we’re going to produce something really amazing – a tool to help everybody understand not just how technology is going to change our world but also how geopolitics, sociology, demographics, and the future of work interact with technology. And of course we’ll discuss how to invest in transformative change, so that we can all have the brightest possible personal futures.
I’ve decided to go back and read Andy Kessler’s great little book How We Got Here, which is a hilarious but very insightful take on the progress of technology since the Industrial Revolution. I’ve mentioned the book before –for technology history buffs it’s an essential read to get a complete overview of how we came from the Newcomen steam engine (which didn’t really do much and was dangerous) to the iPad. The book gives you a context for the ongoing technological transformation process. Today it’s almost as if technological progress has taken on a personality and become its own driving, self-evolving force. In an odd sense, it has been the tinkerers and inventors – who have largely been denizens of the gig economy – that have driven human progress.
This week I get to spend Friday with David Brin, Hall of Fame science fiction writer, who actually wrote a book on the importance of tinkering to the progress of science. (Well, it’s a comic book that encouragse young people to “do stuff” rather than just play video games.) And he has arranged for me to have some time with the people at Oculus, to look at what’s coming off the drawing board in the field of virtual reality. Which, come to think of it, I haven’t even thought about putting into my book yet, and how could I miss that one? It will be so big in 10–15–20 years.
My editor, Charley Sweet, just reminded me that he has been hanging out in the gig economy for quite some time. He now lives on a farm somewhere up in Appalachia with his wife Lisa, where they raise goats, chickens, ducks, fruit trees, veggies, etc. – they call themselves “budding permaculturalists” – and are more or less [less! –ed.] prepared for TEOTWAWKI (The End of the World As We Know It, for those of you who aren’t in the know on such matters). In the meantime he and Lisa (MA, English, Duke) edit for me and a bunch of other well-known writers. When I first met him online, some 10–12 years ago, he convinced me to let him edit by actually whaling on my letters week after week and showing me how embarrassed I should be. After the third or fourth go-around we worked out a schedule. He was perched somewhere up in the wilds of Northern California then, way off-grid, and was single at the time, so he could stay up late and make sure the letter got out every Saturday morning.