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Wednesday, March 25, 2015 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
O
P
I N I O
N
Robert B.
Reich
American Voices
Letters to the Editor…
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ters to the Editor is an open forum for the community and contains unsolicited opinions not necessarily shared by the Editor.
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To the Editor:
As a taxpaying member and a lover of the
Sisters community, I am dismayed by the neg-
ative attention directed towards what gener-
ally is thought of as a positive thing — a trail
through the woods — in this case, the trail
from Sisters to Black Butte Ranch.
While I understand property owners are
always concerned about “others” being in or
near their neighborhood, (believe me, I’ve
lived in a large city), I’m bemused by the out-
pouring of what appears to be fear — which
clearly comes across as opposition coming
from a certain sector of the Sisters community.
I also understand that some people are con-
cerned that taxpayer money has been and may
continue to be used to pay for the project and
costs associated with the project. But that’s
what taxpayer dollars are for — to pay for proj-
ects that benefit taxpayers.
I’m sorry to see that the Forest Service
has abandoned its plans to move forward on
this trail, yet I am hopeful that the commu-
nity will resubmit a proposal. I particularly
applaud Deschutes County Commissioner
Alan Unger’s outreach to Oregon Solutions —
an Oregon-based solutions finding group — to
form a committee of representatives to look
at economic, environmental and community
objectives and come to an integrated solution
that benefits all.
This takes collaboration and representation
from all concerned parties, and eliminates one
group from dominating the discussion. It also
assures that all stakeholders will be heard. I
know this and have experienced it because I
currently serve on an Oregon Solutions team.
As the representative of a small neighborhood
that sits in the center of a huge storm of fed-
eral, state, county, regional, city and port con-
cerns, we lived in fear of being overshadowed
by lawyered, well-funded public agencies and
large businesses (see Columbia River Repair
and Accreditation; orsolutions.org/osproject/
MCDD). Yet we were not. With measured and
consistent participation, we were able to voice
our concerns, relate the importance of our neigh-
borhood, and state the value of our community
in this regional matter. Individual landowners
were also heard; the process makes room for all.
I hope Commissioner Unger is suc-
cessful in his mission, and that Governor
See letterS on page 12
Sisters Weather Forecast
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Wednesday
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It’s now possible to sell a
new product to hundreds of
millions of people without
needing many, if any, workers
to produce or distribute it.
At its prime in 1988,
Eastman Kodak, the iconic
American photography com-
pany, had more than 145,000
employees. In 2012, Kodak
filed for bankruptcy.
The same year Kodak
went under, Instagram, the
world’s newest photo com-
pany, had 13 employees serv-
ing 30 million customers.
The ratio of producers
to customers continues to
plummet. When Facebook
purchased “WhatsApp” (the
messaging app) for $19 bil-
lion last year, WhatsApp had
55 employees serving 450
million customers.
A friend, operating from
his home in Tucson, AZ,
recently invented a machine
that can find particles of
certain elements in the air.
He’s already sold hundreds
of these machines over the
Internet to customers world-
wide. He’s manufacturing
them in his garage with a
3-D printer. So far, his entire
business depends on just one
person—himself.
New technologies aren’t
just labor-replacing. They’re
also knowledge-replacing.
The combination of
advanced sensors, voice rec-
ognition, artificial intelli-
gence, big data, text-mining
and pattern-recognition algo-
rithms is generating smart
robots capable of quickly
learning human actions, and
learning from one another.
If you think being a “pro-
fessional” makes your job
safe, think again. The two
sectors of the economy har-
boring the most professionals,
healthcare and education, are
under increasing pressure to
cut costs. Expert machines are
poised to take over.
We’re on the verge of a
wave of mobile health apps
for measuring everything
from your cholesterol to your
blood pressure, along with
diagnostic software that tells
you what it means and what
to do about it.
In coming years, software
apps will be doing many of
the things physicians, nurses
and technicians now do (think
ultrasound, CT scans and
electrocardiograms).
Meanwhile, the jobs of
many teachers and university
professors will disappear,
replaced by online courses
and interactive textbooks.
When more and more can
be done by fewer and fewer
people, the profits go to an
ever-smaller circle of execu-
tives and owner-investors.
One of the young found-
ers of WhatsApp, CEO Jan
Koum, had a 45 percent equity
stake in the company when
Facebook purchased it, which
yielded him $6.8 billion.
Cofounder Brian Acton got
$3 billion for his 20 percent.
Each of the early employ-
ees reportedly had a 1 percent
stake, which presumably net-
ted them $160 million each.
Meanwhile, the rest of us
will be left providing the only
things technology can’t pro-
vide: person-to-person atten-
tion, human touch, and care.
But these sorts of person-to-
person jobs pay very little.
That means most of us
will have less and less money
to buy the dazzling array
of products and services
spawned by blockbuster tech-
nologies — because those
same technologies will be
supplanting our jobs and driv-
ing down our pay.
We need a new economic
model. The economic model
that dominated most of the
20th century was mass pro-
duction by the many, for mass
consumption by the many.
Workers were consumers;
consumers were workers. As
paychecks rose, people had
more money to buy all the
things they and others pro-
duced, like Kodak cameras.
That resulted in more jobs and
even higher pay.
That virtuous cycle is
now falling apart. A future of
almost unlimited production
by a handful, for consump-
tion by whoever can afford it,
is a recipe for economic and
social collapse.
Our underlying problem
won’t be the number of jobs. It
will be, it already is, the allo-
cation of income and wealth.
What to do?
“Redistribution” has
become a bad word. But the
economy toward which we’re
hurtling can’t function.
It may be that a redistri-
bution of income and wealth
from the rich owners of
breakthrough technologies
to the rest of us becomes the
only means of making the
future economy work.
© 2015 By Robert Reich;
Distributed by Tribune Con-
tent Agency, LLC
Opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer and
are not necessarily shared by the Editor or The Nugget Newspaper.