One of the many reasons I love economics
Let us take a look at the pressure building up. To start off, there is a long term rise in the cost of energy. Every time the cost of transportation goes up, employers are compelled to raise the wage accordingly. They may resist for a time, but if they want their workers to show up, they eventually have to provide a transportation subsidy. It is built right into the wage structure.
Next, the entire system f commuting implies hidden costs. Companies that brings employees to a central location wind up paying more for real estate; they pay higher taxes, maintenance costs and salaries. They often have to provide cafeterias, locker rooms, and in substantial locations, parking facilities – there is a whole infrastructure which supports the commuting process. All of the costs have been sky rocketing.
By contrast, as we all know, the cost of telecommunications and computing and video equipment and other tools for “telecommuting” are plummeting. So you have two powerful economic curves about to intersect. But even more importantly, we all worry about productivity. Without doubt, the single most anti-productive thing that we do is to shift millions of people back and forth across the landscape everyday. A waste of time, of human creativity, of millions of barrels of non-renewable fuel, a cause of pollution, crowding and god knows what else.
We worry about the human effects of home-work. But human is commuting himself? For most workers commuting is the unpaid part of the job, being isolated for hours at a time. Commuting was important when most workers had to handle physical goods in factories. Today, as the Third Wave industries expand, many workers travel to work to handle information, ideas, numbers, programs, formulas, designs and symbols and it is a lot cheaper to move the information to the worker that the workers to the information.
There are all kinds of parallel cultural and value shifts as well as that support the idea. The new emphasis on revived family life, the decentralist push-nothing is more decentralized than working at home. The resistance to forced mobility- you do not have to move your family when you change your job. Environment concern- nothing pollutes more than centralized production.
Add all these pressure together, and you understand why this transfer of certain jobs into the home seems too likely. Moreover, you have to see this development not by itself, but as a linked to the domestication of production and distribution, decentralization towards the regions, rising importance of information, the appearance of wholly new unprecedented industries, the breakdown of national tools for economic regulation or management and the rising importance of co-production and non-market production.
We are restructuring the economy on all these fronts at once. Now wonder our economic vocabulary is outdated. No wonder our economic mps no longer reflect the terrain. A new third wave economy is taking shape.
(C) JMET 2010
Next, the entire system f commuting implies hidden costs. Companies that brings employees to a central location wind up paying more for real estate; they pay higher taxes, maintenance costs and salaries. They often have to provide cafeterias, locker rooms, and in substantial locations, parking facilities – there is a whole infrastructure which supports the commuting process. All of the costs have been sky rocketing.
By contrast, as we all know, the cost of telecommunications and computing and video equipment and other tools for “telecommuting” are plummeting. So you have two powerful economic curves about to intersect. But even more importantly, we all worry about productivity. Without doubt, the single most anti-productive thing that we do is to shift millions of people back and forth across the landscape everyday. A waste of time, of human creativity, of millions of barrels of non-renewable fuel, a cause of pollution, crowding and god knows what else.
We worry about the human effects of home-work. But human is commuting himself? For most workers commuting is the unpaid part of the job, being isolated for hours at a time. Commuting was important when most workers had to handle physical goods in factories. Today, as the Third Wave industries expand, many workers travel to work to handle information, ideas, numbers, programs, formulas, designs and symbols and it is a lot cheaper to move the information to the worker that the workers to the information.
There are all kinds of parallel cultural and value shifts as well as that support the idea. The new emphasis on revived family life, the decentralist push-nothing is more decentralized than working at home. The resistance to forced mobility- you do not have to move your family when you change your job. Environment concern- nothing pollutes more than centralized production.
Add all these pressure together, and you understand why this transfer of certain jobs into the home seems too likely. Moreover, you have to see this development not by itself, but as a linked to the domestication of production and distribution, decentralization towards the regions, rising importance of information, the appearance of wholly new unprecedented industries, the breakdown of national tools for economic regulation or management and the rising importance of co-production and non-market production.
We are restructuring the economy on all these fronts at once. Now wonder our economic vocabulary is outdated. No wonder our economic mps no longer reflect the terrain. A new third wave economy is taking shape.
(C) JMET 2010
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