DAVOS, Switzerland -- Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, is clearly tired of modern-day Luddites complaining about the job-destroying forces of technology.
"I assume that everybody here agrees that globalization is wonderful," he said here Friday, speaking during an afternoon panel at the World Economic Forum -- certainly among the more receptive audiences on the planet for such pronouncements. He was sitting next to Tom Friedman,
The New York Times columnist whose best-selling books about globalization often seem to outnumber in-flight magazines in the first-class cabins of intercontinental jets.
The subject they were discussing was both controversial and crucial: Why has the success of innovative giants such as Google and Apple failed to directly translate into significant numbers of jobs? How do we generate large numbers of high-quality paychecks in such times?
Schmidt pushed back against the premise, arguing that while Google itself employs about 30,000 people around the globe -- a fraction of the count at manufacturing giants such as Caterpillar and Boeing -- the company has indirectly generated millions of additional jobs and trillions of dollars in wealth by offering up a valuable platform for commerce.
Its online services -- from maps to search to cloud-based word processing and email -- have made people and businesses vastly more efficient just as in another age advances such as plows and cotton gins enabled farmers to expand their usable acreage.
