05.07.13
Yes, it’s way past time to s— on tech industry billionaires
Mark Zuckerberg has publicly yearned for more immigrant visas. But only a certain kind of worker need apply. He wants cheaper revolving door programming and development labor in the Silicon Valley. Let’s dispense with the tech propaganda and have a quick look at how his desired knowledge workers compare with other necessary workers in the great state of California.
Zuckerberg, in the pages of the Washington Post, a few weeks ago:
Today’s economy is very different. It is based primarily on knowledge and ideas — resources that are renewable and available to everyone. Unlike oil fields, someone else knowing something doesn’t prevent you from knowing it, too. In fact, the more people who know something, the better educated and trained we all are, the more productive we become, and the better off everyone in our nation can be.
This can change everything. In a knowledge economy, the most important resources are the talented people we educate and attract to our country. A knowledge economy can scale further, create better jobs and provide a higher quality of living for everyone in our nation.
Many people can grasp why this isn’t really true anymore.
In a global knowledge economy everyone knowing the same thing around the world has and does disempower huge classes of people who helped pay for the invention, development and deployment of the network that distributes it worldwide.
And how this is done is easy to see.
Where the cost of living is high, as it is in the United States relative to China or India or somewhere else, the knowledge the American workers possess — even though it may be the same as those in other countries — is more costly to employ.
Therefore, the value of our knowledge in body has crashed, even though it is the same as elsewhere. It is uncompetitive not because of lack or inferiority, but because of where we live.
And this is really what Mark Zuckerberg and others like him are about. They want cheaper educated labor, always.
However, Mark Zuckerberg is not even particularly accurate in terms of the needs of the United States. He overlooks one of the giant engines of the California economy because it just doesn’t contain the kind of people who are of any consequence to his wealth or business.
Take this bit, written by ex-California Arnold Schwarzenegger, the same week:
The [state of California] produces more than half of the fruits, nuts and vegetables grown in the U.S., with an output of $43.5 billion last year. Californians don’t rely just on the food produced by the state’s farms; they rely on the revenue and the jobs too. Agriculture employs more than 1.5 million people in California.
And who are many of these people employed in the California field, many more than employed in the Silicon Valley?
Well, they’re the brown people without the legal smartypants visas meritocratic KnowledgeStan’s Mark Zuckerbergs want. And these agricultural knowledge workers do not earn top dollar. No one in powerful American giant business stands for them in the Washington Post although it is easy to find those who hate on them. But they cannot be dispensed with, like lots of other American workers with knowledge who are deemed too expensive to employ because you still need people to go into the fields and do s— while being sprayed by crop dusters.
Silicon Valley software, programming genius, social networking, the cloud, Big Data and my new favorite phrase — “the Internet of things” — can’t eliminate the need for their work in this country.
But did you know Mark Zuckerberg and his wife solved the world problem of organ donation, just over a couple glasses of posh wine?
Of course you did. Everyone knows that!
Oh, wait. Oops! Never mind.
Then there’s the fellow who almost was able to wipe out measles and mumps. Nobody remembers his name.