Would you be surprised to learn that in Victorian London (the nineteenth century), the vast majority of people ate their food on the run? That ride sharing was common? Or that you could purchase everything you needed without ever leaving your house?Parrish also emphasized that since no safety net existed for many individuals, the competition to sell was fierce. Then, he continues:
Maybe ways of organizing come and go depending on time and place. When things are useful, they appear; as needs change, those things disappear. There really is no new way of doing business. But we can look at the impact of social progress, how it shapes communities, and what contributes to its ebb and flow.Is nothing really "new under the sun"? If there's "no new way to do business," I believe that may only apply in a general sense. After all, business organizational patterns which provide mutual assistance in the form of time based safety nets, are conceptually different. And if people can plan for their safety nets at the outset, they become more likely to sell the scarce time to others which they are most inclined to part with, based on their underlying priorities. Those time preferences don't necessarily follow the same patterns that employers tend to seek. Unlike the government redistribution which subsidizes time based production, this time arbitrage process would need no redistribution, for it makes new wealth possible via internal coordination.
Consider why internal coordination makes such a difference. Even in the best of circumstance: Should automation take the place of extensive workplace participation, the resulting guaranteed income would not suffice for the time based product which individuals still seek. Put simply: Redistributed revenue can't sufficiently scale to match the present day requirements of today's non discretionary consumption patterns. Which is particularly why new organizational patterns are needed, for the kinds of services many individuals would prefer not to have automated.
Why has the need for new organizational patterns not become more evident, already? Those who are empowered for decision making processes such as these, are the ones least likely to experience these kinds of time based coordination problems. Many would instead seek to redistribute income, after automation reaches a certain point of marketplace and workplace saturation. Meanwhile, policy makers have not really remembered how difficult it is for lower income levels to access a full range of time based services which others take for granted.
Also important, is the fact spontaneous resource coordination processes continue to shift upward. In some ways, this process has actually been going on a long time. For example: In the 19th century, physicians finally gained the ability to drop their lower tier of healthcare practitioners which included people from all walks of life, even as they moved their middle tier group (some education) to a level which approximated higher levels of skill. More recently, particularly since the Great Recession, mortgage availability is no longer available for those whose middle class standing has not also shifted upward. It's too easy to forget that everyone needs useful economic functions and ownership options, whatever one's level of ability may happen to be.
Expecting everyone to shift economically upward is nonsensical. The fact that aggregate income can't accomplish this for everyone, has led to many irrational outcomes. Perhaps our environments would be more rational, if the economists who argue against raising minimum wages (which does make sense for full economic participation), would also invest in non tradable sector asset and consumption opportunities for small incomes. After all, no safety net can really be effective, so long as non discretionary costs are not taken into account. It's time to organize more life patterns so as to reflect the income that many individuals actually receive.
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