The Online Price Crunch

For the last few years or so, the main focus has been on our country’s economic problems. Most are referring to it as “The Great Recession.” However, Thomas L. Friedman sees a second problem, which he calls “The Great Inflection.” Basically, because of the recession, people are being forced to cut costs and expenditures as much as possible. It also seems that more and more business is being done online versus face to face. Nearly anything you could ever want can be found online, and with multiple sources, you can find what you need at a much lower cost than would be expected offline. While this may be a good thing for the buyer, it is taking away job opportunities. Rather than pay someone a set price to do the work for you, you can find someone online willing to do the same job for a fraction of the price. It starts to feel like we are receding back to previous years in which people only worked for themselves. Because jobs were not available, people were forced to start their own business or find a means to make money. We saw that doing that eventually worked for the country, and we came out of that era financially stable as a country. However, it is hard to know if those same prospects can apply to today, because of the other factors we have now. The homelessness rate is much higher than it ever has been, we have a national debt much larger than previous decades, and we are in the middle of a costly war. The conditions seem too great to be recovered from.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/13/opinion/13friedman.html?ref=opinion