Where is Economic "Certainty"?

Recently, Giles Wilkes posted about a brief stint in the sharing economy at a young age, which he was all too happy to leave behind for more secure work. Indeed, a reliable occupation is what most individuals seek. And yet the marketplace only generates those certainties up to a certain degree. Why? Here's Wilkes:

You don't need to read Coase to know that there is a reason for firms to exist...Investing in your staff rather than trading them, is so often the obvious and intelligent thing to do. 

In the midst of labor market uncertainty, it's easy to rationalize that none of us should have to trade ourselves in the marketplace on a daily basis! Still, I'm old enough to remember that some individuals put up with the drudgery of a single job over the course of a lifetime. Why do we find it difficult to generate working environments between seeming extremes? Even the most sought after work tends to be externally paced, hence beyond optimal levels for mind and body. Instead of workplace challenges which leave room for work life balance, people find themselves sorted into all or nothing economic options.

Either way - when certainty disappears, it pays to look more closely. What has the marketplace not been able to provide in terms of time use balance and workplace opportunity? Can missing service components be readily defined, and if so, are they of sufficient value to provide real merit in time arbitrage settings?

For instance, there's little point in saying that free markets are the "problem", when the reality is free markets are what we are collectively willing to make them - both as providers and consumers. This is particularly true of healthcare and education, which never even had a good chance of free market definition in the 20th century. If they are not closely reconsidered, neither may have a chance to remain a substantial part of the marketplace in the 21st century.

While governments continue to throw up barricades which reduce work options, it helps to remember that private interests and individuals continue to ask them to do so. And yet we wonder where the jobs are! Instead of getting bogged down in yet another dispute over "needless" regulations - for instance - stop to consider where regulations actually make it impossible for all of community to freely participate in the workplace. Often that aspect is hidden, until the possibility of intentional exclusion is considered in a number of contexts.

How might individuals coordinate to recreate work environment certainties which have been lost? In other words, how could local communities envision the Coasean frameworks which allowed individual firms to maximize social and economic options for so long? Part of the answer involves integrating better and more complex services formations with local production potential. Some organizations have leaders who are good at finding places where everyone can fully participate: same principle, only at the level of community. In a search for coasean certainty, I found this quote:

Not merely is the division of labor limited by the extent of the market, it is limited by the predictability of the extent of the market. Organization matters, then, because various organizational forms have quite different abilities to eliminate sources of uncertainty - and therefore to support a more elaborate division of labor.

Predictability is key, and it accounts for how a firm is actually able to organize itself. Many firms were able to generate internal certainty in their labor force, so long as they could rely on dependable markets for their product. As the marketplace for tradable goods has come to rely on world markets, local economies can regain dynamism by seeking the same flexibility and adaptability which allowed their more international counterparts to thrive.

By adopting resource use diversity under common local frameworks, uncertainty can be diminished through integrated production networks. Today's automation and technology not only make it possible to bring production settings to small communities, but also the services which were once only possible to achieve in major centers. To be sure, some will continue to insist that the days of economic certainty are gone, but by no means does their reasoning need to be the final word. There's too much potential which has yet to be tried.