a sense on the scale of this effort, consider that last year users collectively spent about 200 million hours each day just on Facebook, much of it creating content for other users to consume.13 That’s ten times as many person-hours as were needed to build the entire Panama Canal.14 None of this is counted in our GDP statistics as either input or output, but these kinds of zero-wage and zero-price activities still contribute to welfare. Researchers like Luis von Ahn at Carnegie Mellon are working on ways of motivating and organizing millions of people to create value via collective projects on
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Ahn, creating user work force
