Internet Jobs Build Wealth Despite World Poverty, but They Offer No Guarantees

Poke, a creative company in London, has developed a global wealth ranking for users of their site based on the average income worldwide.  If you'd like to know how your paycheck compares to incomes around the world, visit the Global Rich List.

Yet even as we are doing exceptionally well here in the developed world, at least economically, there is a great deal of unrest.  Unemployment in the United States is still relatively high, and people remain concerned about the economy.  And now we see an interesting result of the internet revolution: individuals of minimal economic means can organize into larger groups.  And a new organization, I Need a Freakin Job, has begun a movement to shift American economic policies in favor of domestic jobs.  Among the grievances listed on their page are bailouts the companies which contributed to (or simply caused) the downturn and borrowing money from China to fund the bailout.

Although their message is powerful (and it's certainly one that I can relate to), I think they've missed the point somewhat.  For example, they state that "65% of the manufacturing jobs in America" have gone "to low wage countries over the last decade."  If this is true, we need to ask ourselves if this is a bad thing.  We need to ask ourselves what kind of jobs we want not just in the USA, but for ourselves, personally.  Do we want to be the ones working in a manufacturing plant?  Also, just because the number of jobs shifts overseas does not mean that all the manufacturing has shifted there, too.  With technology, advances in robotics have allowed us to reduce the need for human labor.  One engineer with a dozen robots can now run an entire assembly line - something that used to require a dozen men parked in a line along a conveyor belt, each one working long hours and building up repetitive stress injuries.