After completing the last post, I continued thinking about robots, automation, and the vast differences in the organizational patterns they are intended to augment. In many respects, the automation of knowledge based skill, is a completely different form of wealth than the robotic components which have contributed so much to tradable sector output. Particularly since a fair portion of knowledge based skill continues to be utilized as derivative and asymmetric compensation - which in turn means reliance on already existing wealth.
A basic problem for much of today's automation - given the dominance of services over manufacture - may well be a lack of redistribution potential. One could even say (in terms of secondary market labour substitution): other than the obvious contributions to balance sheets and budget priorities, sometimes there's no "there", there. Thankfully, robots and automation benefit us all, especially when they augment the production of tradable goods and the redistributive potential associated therewith. But otherwise, robots and automation are increasingly becoming a stand in, for what was already a prior redistribution for time based labour. Unfortunately, further automation in an already derivative marketplace, does not necessarily equate to additional output.
Consequently, the automation which is intended to alleviate budget constraints, makes any further redistribution of 21st century wealth a complicated matter. Robots (whether they include public or private "ownership tags") which ultimately help to alleviate government budgets, aren't traditional wealth. Rather, they provide assistance in reducing government costs via the only way possible: addressing the negative side of the ledger. Many high incomes (some still "untouched" by robots) which occasionally appear ripe for revenue targeting, are also caught up in the investment requirements of these budget constraints. Until now we have been conditioned to expect greater efficiency - in spite of the occasional aggravations of digitized automation - to create additional output and economic growth. Alas, this is not always the case.
Fortunately, some of the organizational capacity of secondary markets could eventually be moved towards the real marketplace gains of a primary market position. "Commodity" time as a measured component of economic output, would help to alleviate today's problem of stagnant output and reduced employment capacity (in spite of recent wealth creation). Commodity definition for time value, is simply means to allow marketplace entry, via symmetric compensation as a common price for the scarce - but real - time at our disposal.
By bringing primary and secondary market patterns into better balance, more wealth would not only be possible, it could take place via easier to access terms. The actual time component (of knowledge assisted time product) would not be intended for production or consumption outside participating groups. Further, knowledge use assistance and permissions on the part of today's professionals, would reduce their long term budget pressures. How so? By helping those with limited means to pay for useful services, gradually learn how to assist one another more directly. Through contributions to knowledge use systems as primary market capacity, today's professionals would gradually become better able to reserve (their own) knowledge based services for customers who can reciprocate on their preferred terms.
While the time based product of secondary markets will continue to augment wealth creation, markets are so saturated with asymmetric compensation (of time based product), this organizational pattern is not longer well positioned to contribute to output and employment. So long as employment and gains in output remain lackluster, economic stagnation leads to conditions in which "Fortune and family now depend on how regulations get drawn up and how problems get defined.
More room is needed for economic access. A marketplace for time value could help to provide that room, with granted permissions to use knowledge in ways capable of growing the economy from the bottom up. If time based product is to meaningfully contribute to marketplace output, it needs the organizational capacity of a primary market position. Mutual employment would allow wealth creation to take place, in context which need not rely on already existing revenue or further debt formation. With time based product as a primary market position, new growth would not only enhance wealth, but output and employment potential as well.
No one need settle for the zero sum world that has become excess secondary market formation. Valuable though it is, to gain compensation for one's own extensive human capital investment, the result is now an incomplete economy. More important, is the fact that when we rely solely on asymmetric compensation, economic stagnation can also mean the loss of economic freedom, for activities that are important to us. Symmetric compensation could eventually do much to restore our economic freedom, in part because it reinforces the work of one's mind as a first mover marketplace position.
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