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Lower search and transaction costs mean faster and easier access and increased efficiency and convenience.
ignorance protected inefficient or lower-quality sellers from being unmasked by unsuspecting consumers, while geography limited competition from other sellers.
Production in the second machine age depends less on physical equipment and structures and more on the four categories of intangible assets: intellectual property, organizational capital, user-generated content, and human capital.
the trend reflects a significant reallocation of who is capturing the benefits of this growth, and who isn’t.
By definition, skill-biased technical change favors people with more human capital.
Creativity and organizational redesign are crucial to investments in digital technologies.
increase the returns to capital owners over labor,
Rational people would rather look for another gig, and look, and look, and look, than depend on a near-zero wage for their sustenance.
job growth decoupled from productivity in the late 1990s.
The lesson from economics and business strategy is that you don’t want to compete against close substitutes, especially if they have a cost advantage.
offshoring is often only a way station on the road to automation.
These activities have one thing in common: ideation, or coming up with new ideas or concepts.
Ideation in its many forms is an area today where humans have a comparative advantage over machines.
We predict that people who are good at idea creation will continue to have a comparative advantage over digital labor for some time to come, and will find themselves in demand.
Computers and robots remain lousy at doing anything outside the frame of their programming.
So ideation, large-frame pattern recognition, and the most complex forms of communication are cognitive areas where people still seem to have the advantage, and also seem likely to hold on to it for some time to come.
