Davids Beating Goliaths

There's Your Job -- Part III

We are in, what the experts are calling, a "jobless" economic recovery. All the important economic indicators are pointing up, except the one that matters most to individuals -- the unemployment rate, which continues to bounce around above 10 percent. A nagging lack of confidence among big employers, now made worse by the fear that the financial crisis in Greece and the rest of Europe might pull the U.S. back into recession, has kept hiring at a minimum throughout the nation.

Also, the giants of business have learned to do more with less people during the recession. As a result, many laid-off workers are likely never to get their jobs back. The number of people who have been out of work for a year or more is mind-boggling. Moreover, "lots of laid-off workers will never regain their former earning power," the Economist magazine warned recently. That's especially true for older people, who may have been forced into "retirement" because of poor job prospects in the hierarchy of large corporations.

They are living off their savings, pensions and fixed assets. How do they begin to rebuild lost wealth? The horizontal dissemination of knowledge, information and even commerce is one solution. Certainly, social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, have empowered the Davids of the world to take on and often beat the Goliaths of traditional industry. "We're not all going to wind up working for eBay or Amazon, but as large organizations lose the economies of scope and scale that once made them preferred employers, more people are going to wind up working for themselves or for small businesses," predicts Glenn Reynolds, in his 2006 book "An Army of Davids." Not even Reynolds, a successful blogger, could have seen how quickly the Davids would provide a viable alternative to the vertical supply chain of traditional commerce.

This blogger, for example, is now offering "An Army of Davids," along with many other titles as "bookbrokerbob" on his own Amazon.com storefront at http://www.amazon.com/shops/A38D3KMTMTXUGS. "Bookbrokerbob" got actively involved when a friend reported making about $3,000 a month by buying and selling books directly between individuals. That's a nice piece of change for a freelance writer between assignments.

Similarly, online freelancing is taking off through "the cloud," a tech-speak phrase that describes the combination of ubiquitous fast internet connections and cheap, plentiful web-based computing power, according to the Economist. "Millions of workers are embracing freelancing as an alternative to full-time employment or because they cannot find salaried jobs," the magazine reports.

May the Force be with us Davids.

And, That's That...