« Delphi High School career day | Main | Web development Firefox addons »

November 12, 2006

High school summer jobs

Paul Graham has an interesting essay about creating wealth. In it he mentioned something I told the students at Delphi High School but said it much better than I did.

Will technology increase the gap between rich and poor? It will certainly increase the gap between the productive and the unproductive. That's the whole point of technology. With a tractor an energetic farmer could plow six times as much land in a day as he could with a team of horses. But only if he mastered a new kind of farming.

I've seen the lever of technology grow visibly in my own time. In high school I made money by mowing lawns and scooping ice cream at Baskin-Robbins. This was the only kind of work available at the time. Now high school kids could write software or design web sites. But only some of them will; the rest will still be scooping ice cream.

http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html

Posted by mikel at November 12, 2006 12:03 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://WWW.mjberger.COM/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/257

Comments

Post a comment

Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)


Remember me?