24/7 Wall St. is an internet-based financial news and opinion corporation that each year publishes a list of ten brands that will disappear in the following year. They are not always perfectly correct, but they do seem to have some accuracy. Although this year is only half over, the predicted failure, bankruptcy, or takeover of MySpace, Saab, Ericsson, and A&W were forecast, and Nokia appears to be close behind.
This year's predictions of next year's failures include American Airlines, Research In Motion (maker of the Blackberry), Avon, Talbot's, and Suzuki. Many of these brands represent things we always thought would be there, old and familiar. Many of us are old enough to remember flying on Eastern Airlines, TWA, Pan Am, and Piedmont. In 1930, A & P was the largest grocery store chain and the largest retailer in the world; they were bankrupt in 2010. We shopped there frequently when I was a child.
And with the sadness of the passing of once-successful businesses and brands, we think of those who have suffered the loss of their jobs and careers. In our current state of unemployment, we have lost many manufacturing jobs, and if and when the economy recovers, some of those will be lost forever. The new and more efficient replaces the outdated. In 1800, around 90% of the U.S. population were farmers; as new and improved agricultural technologies improved the ability to produce food for a nation, we see that in 2000, less than 3% of the population now farms. Instantly available digital cameras are widely available, and so Kodak and Polaroid are no more. There are few jobs for typewriter repairmen, and I suspect in the next few decades there will be no more telephone linemen stringing up wires to carry phone calls. ( I doubt many of today's young people understand why it is called "dialing" a phone number-- the idea of a telephone dial must be quite strange.)
In Ecclesiastes, we learn that there is a time and season for everything. In economics, we call this process "creative destruction." This term was not invented by but popularized by Joseph Schumpeter. It may surprise some who think of Schumpeter as a capitalist icon of entrepenurialism to find out that he actually derived much of his thinking from Marx and the notion of capitalist business cycles. The innovative and improved pushes out the old and obsolete. Although he felt that creative destruction was at the core of the progress of capitalism, he foresaw that it would actually spell its doom as the the process eventually shook apart the machinery, leading eventually to socialism.
As painful as the loss of those jobs is for many Americans, the rest of us benefit. Existing farmers and non-farmers alike benefit from the wide availability of food and both have a higher standard of living than they did in 1800. The "smart"-phone allows us many more opportunities than being tied to a fixed, corded phone. Few of us would want to return to the vacuum-tubed television, of the type my next door neighbor repaired all of his life. Technology and progress inexorably lead to vast improvements in the quality of life for all at the expense of employment for some; I write this article on a computer where it is published on the internet at the expense of the printers and typesetters of days gone by. There is a miniscule market for medical leeches these days (although not completely absent!). And I know for a fact that one day there will be no need for cardiac surgeons, for even if technology does not replace our skills, Christ will return, and those who believe in Him will have perfect hearts.
