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To understand the distinction, suppose the best, hardest-working construction worker could lay one thousand bricks in a day while the tenth-best laid nine hundred bricks per day. In a well-functioning market, pay would reflect this difference proportionately, whether it could be attributed to more efficiency and skill, or simply to more hours of work. In a traditional market, someone who is 90 percent as skilled or works 90 percent as hard creates 90 percent as much value and thus can earn 90 percent as much money. That’s absolute performance. By contrast, a software programmer who writes a
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networks can create ‘demand side economies of scale’ that economists sometimes call network effects. We see them at work when users prefer products or services that other people are flocking to. If your friends keep in touch via Facebook, that makes Facebook more attractive to you, too. If you then join Facebook, the site becomes more valuable to your friends as well.
“We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come—namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economizing the use of labor outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labor.”
Keynes
If you can give precise instructions to someone else on exactly what needs to be done, you can often write a precise computer program to do the same task. In other words, offshoring is often only a way station on the road to automation.
In other words, we believe that employers now and for some time to come will, when looking for talent, follow the advice attributed to the Enlightenment sage Voltaire: “Judge a man by his questions, not his answers.”6
tracked more than 2,300 students enrolled full-time in four-year degree programs at a range of American colleges and universities. Their findings are alarming: 45 percent of students demonstrate no significant improvement on the CLA after two years of college, and 36 percent did not improve at all even after four years.
study hard, using technology and all other available resources to ‘fill up your toolkit’ and acquire skills and abilities that will be needed in the second machine age.
seek to be an indispensable complement to something that’s getting cheap and plentiful.
digital labor becomes more pervasive, capable, and powerful, companies will be increasingly unwilling to pay people wages that they’ll accept and that will allow them to maintain the standard of living to which they’ve been accustomed.
the value-added tax (VAT), which companies pay based on the difference between their costs (labor, raw materials, and so on) and the prices they charge customers. A VAT has several attractive properties—it’s relatively straightforward to collect, adjustable, and lucrative—but is not currently used in the United States. In fact, America is the only one of the thirty-four nations in the OECD without one.
We found them by posting a request for help with the task to TaskRabbit,
What challenges and opportunities do citizens of nations like Norway and the United Arab Emirates face when they have access to enormous wealth as a birthright via sovereign wealth funds?
