How can investment in digital public services and sustainability help creating jobs and fight unemployment?
Hello everyone,
Learning from all the discussion that has gone on for the past while, and trying to get to grips with some of the implications for policy, we thought it might be good to raise one final question.
How can investment in digital public services and sustainability help create jobs and fight unemployment?
It seems that we can also link to topics that have been covered in other groups here: as mentioned by others, open public data can generate a wealth of opportunities for building new applications, etc. etc.
Who will do these, and how? Will they generate new jobs? If you have examples, raise them here!
Group audience:
Comments
I always get scared when
I always get scared when Keynesian Equilibrium -style economic thinking turns political, failing to see there are two sides in this equation.
Not better when technology hype without sufficient linking to causality turns on the dream cycle as we see with cloud, social media and to a large degree also co-creation / Digital by Default .
We need to focus on the deeper economic fact that productivity and quality, not activity, is the main problem in Europe. If you scale inefficiencies you worsen the problems.
The rest of the world has been catching up in productivity rapidly shifting manufacturing to asia and we are selling our markets to US digital infrastructure providers.
This means that we have been loosing competitivness.
But Europe are continuing to consume as if competitiveness is the same, meaning that the financial side simply collapses - incomes and growing relative internal ineffectivness cannot finance the expenses.
The response to bad economics has been debt-financed consumption to "kickstart" the economy leading to a series of ever-worse crisis ending up in first a banking crisis and then the present Contry-crisis.
Unless we focus on the real problems fast, this will be a permanentdegration of Europe as we in less than two generations (since 1990) will have lost all former strenghts now shifted overseas.
The problem is real - we need to drastically improve public sector effectiveness in order to both provide value (e.g. health, education, safety) to citizens and lowering the tax burden on the private sector (both corporate and personal taxes).
Our risk is repeating the Japaness failure who since 1990 have been running massive deficits without any impact but world record in public sector debt.
But only better effectivenes and new exports will release ressources and create jobs.
The ONLY alternative is massive drop in standards of living untill Europe again become competitive on price as we seem to be failling to compete on value created. This drop can very well be significant as in 40-50% lower real wages.
ICT is a key part of solving this.
But the problems are worsened by the way we make Digital Public Services as if we should be heading for massive increase in Command & Control economics - see eg. the debate on eidentification - this will move from the ashes to the fire through legacy, hardcoding, bottlenecks etc. Primitive "co.-creation" as in outsourcing of data entry and more Command & Control through dis-empowering Digital by Design-thinking will worsen the problem.
I will address this tomorrow in the Security Workshop and try to suggest a way to break the negative spiral through empowerment and re-orienting public sector value chains towards the demand-side.