a what jobs and industries will decline?
Anything that isn’t relatively encumbered by regulations.
For example, the software industry.
Low-capital services and businesses.
what about teaching and medicine?
Offline, it is slim pickings for jobs.
Online, there are endless possibilities.
Can you elaborate?
As a platform for commerce, the internet has arrived. Where are retail sales growing? The internet. Where are new products appearing, being reviewed and used? The internet. Where are legacy businesses looking to establish branding, presence and share? The internet. Where are press, album and news releases dropped first? Yes, you guessed it. The internet.
From herbal treatments for your dog, to digital fiat currencies, to south east asian college girls making beau coup dollars in their part time as web developers, things are moving in cyberspace and the herd is still in the corral at Facebook, scratching their inane musings on their wall (prison wall?), completely missing the stampede.
There is a gold rush and it’s only just starting.
Mercenary and farmer…
Yea, bright futures around here.
Haha.. this is great. I have always felt like Facebook was as you described. I am willing to bet it’ll bust out soon, though.
Religion and Governments, to me, have always seemed like social networking tools, and that facebook was the natural progression of this evolution. I can’t seem to think of what would be next other than to see the internet and social networking sites like myspace or facebook exploding out into the open and becomming something more than their name. If this makes any sense?
Liberty Student, what do you suggest to those of us who are utterly obsessed with Facebook? What is your problem with it? I’d love to hear your input, as I’ve been obsessed with Facebook lately. Is there something I don’t know about?
I’m living it. That’s why when people talk about teabagging at the state house, or sign waving for Ron Paul, I wonder if they are from another continent or even century.
More and more of people’s lives are moving online, and more and more of the infrastructure that props up our societies is moving there as well.
It is a voluntarists playground. The government puts up websites but they usually suck, and you can outrank them in the search engines, so you can compete for eyeballs. Even if the state has a legal monopoly, like paying your taxes and offering that exclusively online, people who wanted to promote tax strategies could again, compete directly for eyeballs. I think countries might start competing for capital that way. Hey, BLAM! Business idea.
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I saw what an equalizer the internet could be for Ron Paul. Without the internet, all of the Rothbardian strategizing in the world wouldn’t have mattered. It was several dozens of people, who worked for free, on their own time, their own dime, independent from the campaign, that pumped the heck out of Ron Paul until the movement went viral. All of that record setting fund raising was in spite of the campaign, not due to it.
We’re watching the world’s largest and most open market launch (the internet) and people are congregating on these social websites like how people used to go to the mall to kill time because there was nothing better to do. It seems sorta pointless to me.
Like going to Baskin Robbins and ordering plain ice.
Any idea as to what will be the future outcome of sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Wikipedia?
Nope. I suspect they will get too big for their britches, suffer knowledge and infrastructure problems, fail to innovate fast enough and be taken down by newer services. The net has already changed so much in the last 5 years, there is no telling what it will look like (as far as major players in the next 5 years).
I don’t know if anyone noticed, but Wikipedia used to get a near #1 ranking for every search term that it had as a page in its site. Google stopped ranking Wikipedia #1 automatically when they launched their own competing human edited database project (which flopped, I forget the name). So now most #1 rankings are back to being other websites which may or not be particularly social.
In some cases, these synergies create bubbles of attention as two forces multiply the effects of the other like Google promoting Firefox, and Firefox featuring Google as the default search. When they separate, such as Google launching Chrome, then the bubble collapses, and new players try to grab share.
If you love markets, and I looooove markets, then watching the rise and fall of websites, ideas, ideologies, information on the internet is like listening to a symphony.
Those things, and things like them will be around in the future no matter how much some people don’t like them. (looking at you, LS [:P] )
As for future outcome… who knows? If someone has some great or revolutionary idea, it’ll be implemented before you even hear about it. Anyone’s guess is as good as anyone’s guess.
Ya. My following of AMD vs. Intel is what actually got me interested in economics. I think they’re pretty good at exemplifying many dynamics of (slightly)free markets. Thank God the government hasn’t regulated the frequency of CPUs or the number of cores they’re allowed to have.
Probably the best place to work will be with the government. That’s what’s getting bigger right now, they’ll need more people to work for them.
I went to a trade show about 2 years ago where some lecturer was talking about how it was too early to start an e-commerce website. That the time to start one would be in about 5 years (from 2 years ago). I disagreed. I thought it was the perfect time to begin learning as much about e-commerce as possible.
The car industry is a sector that will go through some interesting changes. Sales in the so called West (US, EU, Japan, Australia and New Zealand) have been slowly and steadily declining since 2000 despite the “cash for clunkers” programs and other incentives while markets in the emerging world are steadily growing. India has been outperforming the US as the world’s premier car market since 2006, beating squarely even China. European, US and to a lesser extent Japanese manufacturers need to wake up to this fact and realize that one day even their “emission regulation”, which are nothing short of trade barriers, won’t be enough to keep them safe from competition. Chinese pick up trucks are huge hit here: sure a Toyota Hi-Lux is much, much better but also costs more. Not only that but the shrewd Chinese are offering an LPG version free of charge while Toyota only has diesel engines available.
Another sector to keep an eye out for is the agricultural one. The EU has been tampering with it for decades and the results are becoming more worrying each year. “Typical” products are booming because they aren’t as regulated as “mass agriculture” but the case of the Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, a high quality, high end product destroyed by questionable politics, is a stern warning of what may come if you let Big Government and Big Business into the picture. In the meanwhile Asia needs to be fed and is starting to have the cash to pay for imports. Such a huge fertile country as the US should wake up to such the fact since there’s potential for a second Green Revolution.
Indirectly this leads to a sector that was doomed from the beginning: biofuels. It was dependent on subsidies from day one and as demand for foodstuffs continue to grow they’ll be pushed out of the picture.
Finally, energy. I am very bullish about the energy sector. As the world is slowly waking up from the Cold War nightmare the words “nuclear power” aren’t taboo anymore. Of course, nuclear energy is relatively cheap to make but is very expensive and time consuming to set up. Countries like China and India are the obvious targets but don’t forget other markets. Europe has an excellent nuclear energy industry (France). Italy has already decided to get back to nuclear power (buying everything they need from the French of course) and soon Germany will also have to bow down and start building new facilities. The only other alternatives are coal and natural gas powered plants, you cannot power a steel mill using windmills. And let’s not forget about normal fuel. The quest for an alternative to fossil fuels is still on: Honda has showed fuel cell cars to be practical but there’s the problem of hydrogen. Unless there’s a revolutionary breakthrough it may prove to be a dead end. Obtaining gasoline and diesel from coal and natural gas is a well proven technology (remember the Organic Chemistry course?): of course until crude oil prices stay relatively low there’s no incentive in building more facilities. Right now only Shell, Sasol and Petronas have facilities geared up for this kind of production.
I think I’m in love with liberty student.
I built my first e-commerce site in 2002. Then I rebuilt it in 2003 because what I had built was crap and didn’t work. In less than 2 weeks I built a better store for $200 than I had received for $2000 9 months previous. Things move super fast online. I don’t think people on these big social sites see it, because they only visit a limited number of sites, whereas I am expected to stay on top of every hot trend as they happen, succeed or fail. A lot of that market testing isn’t obvious to consumers.
I don’t think stand alone ecomm shops are the future anymore. Taking the brick and mortar idea to the web, with a store that duplicates what would be offline inventory is so… 2005. Now it makes more sense to sell through someone like Amazon, that already has enormous traffic/infrastructure and you can concentrate on marketing and product development, rather than fulfillment, order processing, and returns which is really the drudgery of running a tangible goods business online.
If you’re interested or involved in this stuff in any way, drop me a PM. I love to chat about work.