How to create jobs in America?

Companies can’t create jobs if the market is weak, and the market will remain weak as long as consumer confidence is low. However, consumer confidence only increases when the economic outlook improves. Is this not a classic “chicken and egg” situation? Here is a way out of this loop: Despite low economic outlook and low consumer confidence, we can still make people buy more goods by simply bringing down the cost of products and services. The market is not completely dead, it never will be. How do we reduce the cost of products and services and make them more affordable? The practical approach is to make energy cheaper, which in turn makes raw materials cheaper since energy is used in mining, processing, and transportation. The cost of manufacturing will also decrease with cheaper energy. Now, the million-dollar question is: how do we produce cheap energy? Lets us ask ourselves a question. What makes energy so costly in the first place? We all know that solar energy is free, wind energy is free, even the coal and oil resources are freely accessible earthly resources. What makes energy so expensive is the “skilled manual labor” involved in its generation, be it mining, drilling, refining or transmission. If we can automate these manual operations, energy will become highly affordable. It will not only be cheap but easily scalable, and the cost reduction will be felt all over the world. Although partial automation has shown up in oil and coal industries, full automation look very distant, as the processes are very complex and it takes time for automation to catch-up both in technology and investment. This is where Solar Energy comes in. It is relatively easy to automate and the resource is abundant. Just by going solar will not solve energy problem, it has to undergo automaton. World can’t afford another dependency on “skilled manual labor” in any future energy industry. Manual processes not only make the product expensive but the production rate will be very slow and always remain far behind the demand, keeping the cost high. Should we depend solely on existing well established companies? Not necessarily. Even the startups can invest in this mega industry. Most companies fail at startup, especially during slow global economy. However, they will succeed if they can find a product that has lot of demand and hard to outsource. Their best bet is energy. This is the only product in the world for which there is always a global demand. Market will absorb any amount of energy that we produce. Startup “Energy” companies and existing energy companies can create substantial number of jobs. They can create jobs that are needed for automation eg. research and development, assembly of machines, maintenance of machines and so on. This will undoubtedly elevate the skill level required of the average worker, and this will accelerate growth of the education system as well. Are we ready for automation in such a mega scale? The answer is yes and no. We have a mix of skilled and unskilled workers. This means we need retraining of unskilled workers to increase their skill level. This retraining effort takes time. Even the automation technology needs time to develop to meet the demands. Energy companies need not have to wait for these two resources to mature, they can start off with currently available skilled/unskilled workers and work their way up towards full automation. This will not only answer the current job crisis, but will answer the future energy demand as well. We will be much better prepared to face that mega energy crisis that is not far away when the global economy bounces back

-R.S. Amblee Author of: The Art of looking into the Future The Art of looking into the FutureFacebook page