Pinterest: an example of our shiny new economy for the rich
by David Atkins
All the “serious” people love to talk about making sure that “innovators” can succeed and grow their businesses. We are assured that by taxing our “job creators” too much or enacting stricter regulations would kill jobs. Wise old men love to stress how important it is that we abandon the liberal arts in favor of engineering and programming degrees that will give us the real skills to survive in our supposedly vibrant new economy.
Presumably they mean innovators and companies like Pinterest, a online scrapbook site with 20 million users, which is now valued at over $1.5 billion dollars. That’s billion, with a “b.” Clearly this is a very successful, innovative company. The very sort of company crucial to America’s future.
So how people does Pinterest employ? The information doesn’t appear anywhere online for sure, but it would appear to be less than fifty. $1.5 billion in valuation. Less than fifty people actually employed.
But what about the secondary benefits? It’s argued that companies like this help the economy is other ways. But the problem is that those benefits are hard to assess. Does Pinterest actually serve the economy in other ways? Certainly it provides a service that people want. But that doesn’t mean it helps move the economy forward, or that more people have jobs because Pinterest exists than would have had them otherwise. Facebook is another good example of this. Sure, secondary companies like gaming giant Zynga are able to exist primarily because of Facebook. But how many people do these companies employ? And is it truly a new market that grows the economic pie, or does the money made by these companies simply cannibalize other markets? None of which even gets into the fact that these companies actually serve as another invasion of privacy, and that any prospective employer can now demand to see your Facebook account to know if you took a picture of yourself smoking pot that one time last weekend. All this, even as Facebook microtargets you for advertising to put you further in debt for products you don’t need.
A few people have gotten very rich off of companies like Facebook and Pinterest. With Facebook’s IPO they’ll get even richer. I don’t begrudge them their millions or their success. They’ve earned it.
But the “serious people” need to stop pretending that the American economy will prosper on the back of companies like these. It won’t. The rich shareholders will do very well, though. They always do.
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