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I worked for Amazon in the very early days and spent some of that time in Seattle.
Seattle is most certainly “different” both then and now.
My only connection to the city was working for the company.
Anecdotally, I perceived it to have this “group non conformist” attitude that seemed to lack any real basis or purpose other than to say “I’m special”.
Having left the company long ago, I’ve kept a close eye on Amazon, e-commerce, and the tech sector.
In Amazon’s specific case, there is a rather significant problem.
For every $1 of potential profit Amazon generates(it doesn’t show much profit as it reinvests pretty much every penny), it probably destroys circa $3 of existing legacy retail profit.
The ratio of jobs gain/loss is possibly similar. For every 1 Amazon new employee it might result in as much as 3 lost legacy retail jobs. Amazon headcount is now over 566k and still growing at a circa 50% annual compounding rate.
That’s progress, but it is happening at an extraordinary and previously unseen rate.
Which will impact on local tax base(legacy biz and employee payroll taxes eliminated by ruthlessly more efficient competition).
Cities, nations, governments will need to adapt to the revolutionary and accelerating changes in commerce we’ve seen over the last 50+ years of Moore’s Law that has only become visually obvious in the last 5-10 years.
So many issues here:
More work being done by fewer(especially in the tech sector and other sectors that leverage tech). It no longer takes 100,000 workers in the car industry supply chain to generate $1 billion in profit for an innovative design, a single software engineer’s innovation can be tested and implemented to generate the same $1 billion in profit. They did build that and with far, far fewer humans involved in the supply chain. Forget the 1%, it’s really more about the apex 0.01% of the workforce who create massive value.
Continuing on with the 1% and 0.01% issue, 100 years ago the poorest and wealthiest humans all had similar amounts of time alive. This is changing with life expectancy and quality for life outcomes likely to widen, quite considerably with the growing disparity in health/fitness, nutrition(no one starved anymore), and very soon....genetic medicine.
Tech sector leaders pushing universal basic income(Finland’s experiment is ending, although it’s worth watching the privately funded experiment by Y-Combinator pending)
Rise of “sub state actor” influence/control(think 1975’s Rollerball where corporates literally rule). At what stage does Amazon(and others) become an existential national security issue?
Seattle is a strange ,strange place.
In a way it kind of reminds me of Berkeley, but weirder.
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