I wish no ill will on those who lost money in the Facebook IPO but I...

[Chan790]

15. The product is information.

Not the kind of information that anybody can have, such information is worthless; when you're on Facebook, Facebook can track what you look at, they can data-base every word you say, they know what you like...all of that is a product that is sell-able, it's a product that is scarce. (It's a commodity that can be overvalued like any other as the Facebook IPO shows.) There is a lot of money in that actually though. It's the secret that the credit-card companies have known for years: your buying habits and their records of such are worth more to them than their finance business. The information economy was always going to be the next major economic move though we didn't always know it...the "service economy" is/was a scam and some people knew it from the outset, the same people that knew the manufacturing economy was terminal, the end-throes of the Industrial Revolution. Something had to come along to be the next "age"...we didn't know it was going to be the vast commodization of information made possible by mobile-comm, internet and social-media; we knew it was going to be something...or else we were going to be in a world of shit. That something is the information economy.

If we were still a manufacturing economy, we'd be dead-stagnant globally (If you've never read Player Piano that's what we'd be approaching on if our economy was still manufacturing-centric...the future would be a grim one of low employment.) Don't get me wrong, we need domestic manufacturing and need to re-domesticate manufacturing (and end free-trade and re-engage in tariff-driven stabilization), but even if manufacturing had never fallen off...we'd be in shit creek if information as a commodity had not overtaken it as an economic-driver. Technology has been displacing manufacturing and manual labor for 8000 years. It's not China that stole the blue-collar factory jobs half as much as it's IBM's computers and GE's machines just as it was specialized tool-and-die and the assembly-line that displaced the guild craftsman and the stableboy and the small-farmer. It takes less people to make and repair the machines than it took to do the work the machines do now. There is less need for less manufacturing labor-force, globally and domestically.

Want a strong economy? Push manufacturing and information as the twin key economic drivers. Invest in technology that increases effectiveness of both. Accept that one is waxing and one is waning...and someday too the waxing will be the waning as something waxes anew in an increasingly post-capital world. Capitalism is the handmaiden of industrialism, industrialism is ending. Manufacturing is ending. There will ever be need for fewer makers of things.

20 years hence, the global manufacturing workforce will be halved again, the few will make the computers that run the machines that fix the machines that make the goods and the computers eliminating the need for ever more of the few. Nobody mourns the stonemason or livestock-harness maker or woodcutter.

Most future products will not be the things you can hold or see and the things you can hold and see won't be the valuable products central to the economy.