Reply To: Physics Nobel to Big Bangers

[Brian H]

Lerner wrote: Focus fusion could create jobs, but only with the right public policy shifts. By radically reducing energy costs, it would radcially cut the costs of development generally. If the thrid world debt were written off, the US and other industrializzed nations could export huge amounts of machinery to the majority of the world that needs to build more housing, clean water, schools, hospitals etc.

Public policy also needs to resume the trend towards hsorter work hours that was interuppted 50 years ago. What is the point of having automation if it does not make our lives easier?

and

Aeronaut wrote:

Aeronaut brought up an important point — the jobs which could be created. In my small town of 30,000, we would need perhaps twenty generators for electricity and several more for water purification. Someone would have to build them, and I would imagine a good manufacturing location would be in a state with idle factories and skilled people needing work. Someone else would have to install these facilities, and others run them. This is a good time to be pitching jobs.

Won’t work. For every job created, two are lost – or take any other arbitrary multiplier. Could be 2 like in this example, 5, 10, 0.5, -2, or whatever, depending on the agenda of the speaker.

Two or five jobs are lost in other energy programs (such as wind or fossil fuels) my be more apt if I understand it correctly. Considering that training the regulators, engineers, technicians, even those teachers, is going to be a huge industry if FF works, I’d look for manufacturing to end up as a smallish sized piece of the pie.
The “job loss ratio” is only for government funded jobs; the money for them sucks investment out of more productive private uses.
And there is no “big picture” worry about FF causing job losses; the economic explosion of activity that cheaper power will enable will create them out of thin air, in far greater numbers than any displacement losses. Consult a good modeling economist on this if you don’t believe me. Just tell him to plug in a sudden source of energy at 1/20 current prices.