Optimists argue that the solution to the US's sky-high unemployment and income inequality is more companies like Apple--the resurgent tech company that has revolutionized the digital industry and become one of the most valuable companies in the world.
Apple has not not only created amazing, beloved products. It has created enormous profits, vast shareholder wealth, and more than 60,000 jobs. If only America produced more companies like Apple (and Amazon, and Google, and Facebook, et al), the story goes, the country's problems would be fixed. America could retrain its vast, idle construction-and-manufacturing workforce, and our unemployment and inequality problems would be solved.
It is true that having more companies like Apple would certainly help the US. But we would need a lot more companies like Apple to make a dent in our unemployment and inequality problems. Why? Because Apple also actually exemplifies some of the reasons why we have such huge unemployment and inequality problems: "Digital" businesses like Apple employ far fewer people (per profit) than traditional manufacturing businesses.
Apple's 60,000+ jobs are not just in the US--they're spread around the world. Apple's extraordinary ~25% profit margin means that the benefits of its success accrue primarily to a relatively small group of (rich) shareholders rather than a broad base of (middle-class) employees… To put this in context, the Economist recently noted that Apple, Amazon, and Google together employ 113,000 people--which is less than 1/3rd as many as a single American success-story from the prior generation, GM, employed in 1980.
wAIT, WAIT...There's more. Find it at: http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-new-data-center-north-carolina-created-50-jobs-2011-11
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