Ad Group Says Internet Accounts For 5.1M US Jobs, 3.7% of GDP 73
lpress writes "A Harvard Business School study sponsored by the Interactive Advertising Bureau shows that the ad-supported Internet is responsible for 5.1 million jobs in the U.S. — two million direct and 3.1 million indirect. They report that the Internet accounted for 3.7% of 2011 GDP. The research, development and procurement that launched the Internet back in the 1970s and 1980s cost the US taxpayers $124.5 million at the time — not a bad investment!" Your calculations may vary.
Why the Swiss example has problems (Score:4, Interesting)
Switzerland is a terrible example because it is a relatively small country with a large banking sector that essentially prospered in part by skimming a percentage off of huge global economic flows (including historically shielding transactions of dubious legality via their privacy laws). Such a pattern of success can't work that way for everyone, as nice a country as Switzerland may be in many respects..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Switzerland [wikipedia.org]
The central issue regardless of what jobs people do is that so much wealth has become concentrated in so few hands. This has happened in big part because the value of automated capital managed by large bureaucratic systems with monopolies over markets is triumphing over the value of individual human labor. See Marshall Brain's "Robotic Nation" article for more details:
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm [marshallbrain.com]
You can't have a "service" economy when robotics and AI is better than most people for most tasks. You can't have a service economy when most things become manufactured so well they don't need much servicing or it is just cheaper to replace them with new things fresh from the automated factory.
That said, I feel that your other points on the US/Roman comparison are insightful.