I've wanted to write an entry like this for many weeks. Today an article in Yahoo Finance gave me an added impetus. It was on Kodak stopping production of Kodachrome, one of its signature films for over seventy years. See "Sorry, Paul Simon, Kodak's Taking Kodachrome Away".
Quite some time ago I read about somebody complaining about the job situation in Rochester, New York. He said that one used to be able to go to the Kodak factory and get a job right out of high school. I believe he also blamed the lack of jobs on foreign competition.
It was not foreign competition that reduced the jobs for making film; it was technical competition. The rise of digital photography led to less and less use of film cameras and thus fewer and fewer sales of film. Film cameras that cost over two hundred dollars new now sell on eBay for prices that don't justify the shipping costs. I have two working Minolta SRTs with an extra 70-185 zoom lens and an extra 35 mm lens. I hope I shoot the last roll before the sole processor of Kodachrome stops doing so. But it is so much easier to use the little digital camera that I have on my belt that I doubt I'll finish the roll in time.
I fault Obama's stimulus package for focusing on creating jobs for existing skills, thus prolonging the need for those skills. For example, the stimulus package "creates" thousands of construction jobs. We will always need construction workers, but will we need so many? What happens when all these "shovel-ready" projects are completed?
Wouldn't it be better to plan an infra-structure that helps states and communities develop a flexible work force that creates its own opportunities. In other words, we need more entrepreneurs and fewer employees.
It will be a long, slow process to shift our focus. Too many people want the supposed security of benefits rather than the security of adaptability. As long as health insurance is tied to jobs, we will have too many people who want jobs instead of becoming, even on a small scale, an entrepreneur like Steve Jobs.
