Donald Trump was elected on a pledge to bring more jobs to more Americans. He pitched his deal-making skills as the key to job growth.
But anyone who has been paying close attention to the economy for the last 20 years knows that those jobs are not going to come from traditional manufacturing. Since 2000, America has lost 5 million manufacturing jobs, and there’s little to nothing Trump can do to bring those jobs back. No amount of tariffs or tough talk on trade is going to make American manufacturing cheaper than foreign manufacturing; like it or not, we are living in a global economy.
Although the majority of the tech industry (aside from Peter Thiel) completely rejected Trump’s candidacy, Trump’s presidency could present it with a golden opportunity. As the future of employment skews largely digital, the tech industry must now step up and show how technology can generate a more expansive economy, creating more, better jobs in the coming years.
Technology innovations have always spurred our economy in the past. From a recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle :
“In the 1950s, average annual GDP growth topped 7 percent, thanks to a booming population and robust automobile sales. From 1996 to 2000, GDP grew at about a 4 percent clip, fueled by personal computers and the Internet; in the 2000s, the best performance came in 2004, when broadband connections started taking hold.”
Recent tech innovations have focused on the consumer experience or making small improvements to existing technologies. The personal enterprise economy is booming thanks to companies like Uber, Airbnb and Thumbtack supporting a vital new period of entrepreneurship.
