Maintenance as a Basic Time Arbitrage Function

Time arbitrage includes a crucial maintenance role. Why might this be so important?

For one thing, witness the growing inability of private enterprise to extend marketplace access (production and consumption roles) to all citizens, even as firms grow more reliant on the additional budgetary burdens of government subsidies. This private sector reliance on government assistance, makes it even more difficult for governments to preserve revenue space for basic maintenance functions. Potential revenue sources wouldn't be such an issue, were it not for the fact that aggregate organizational capacity is now too thin for governments to rely on broad citizen majorities for public support, via taxation. For historical context, past civilizations ultimately failed, after losing their ability to coordinate the necessary care of earlier wealth creation - in its many forms - among all citizens.

How might we ensure a fuller range of maintenance preservation, in the near future? Even though maintenance is often thought of as mostly involving simple skill sets, many of society's maintenance roles have actually become quite intricate. Oftentimes, societies lack the ability to improve productivity and long term growth, unless populations are fully involved in the maintenance of wealth generation which has already taken place.

Maintenance roles are vital, across a full range of knowledge and skill capacity. By no means do they include just the care of individuals, buildings and physical infrastructure, for they also directly support the knowledge and skill which societies advance. Nevertheless, today's knowledge use patterns are organized in ways that don't encourage their broader dispersal across societies in general. Citizens are now in need of platforms which more closely echo the knowledge generation of the past, when individuals could still stand "on the shoulders of giants" for the advancement of knowledge and skill. Whenever knowledge is siloed and protected, it tends to be more readily lost, in the inevitable setbacks that civilizations ultimately face.

The time arbitrage of knowledge use systems would include maintenance functions at all skill levels, as a core purpose of organizational capacity. As a horizontal (symmetric) wealth generation structure, time arbitrage would give new life to maintenance functions which both private and public endeavour have become less able to provide, via the centralized nature of asymmetric compensation. Maintenance functions would be particularly important in areas such as these:

- Knowledge use storing and dispersal, for vast backlogs of preexisting useful and experiential knowledge.
- Research and development which private enterprise can't generate due to lack of profits, and which governments now lack the revenue to provide.
- Preventative care for both individuals and a wide range of existing social/physical infrastructure.
- New infrastructure means which are more closely aligned with local (current) resource capacity and global ideas for innovation.

New communities, organized as knowledge use systems, could focus on particular areas of knowledge and skill application that are important to the original participants, who in turn would seek broader participation for a full range of related activities for individuals and families alike. Each chosen primary knowledge function, serves as a focal point of framing, by which a multiple range of skills capacity can be coordinated in a year's time. Individuals and families alike could enter and exit these flexible communities as lifestyle needs gradually change. The result would be a more complete template for economic continuity, especially to preserve vital forms of non tradable sector activity which are presently restricted to upper income levels. There's also an equilibrium corporation group motto: Steadfast in knowledge, strength in mobility.

Only recall that in the past, firms extended partial templates for wealth creation in environments which also benefited from a full template of societal coordination that was only partly economic in nature. It's easy to forget, how many of those earlier broad templates for societal coordination have been lost. Time arbitrage could help to restore the broader societal coordination, that makes it possible to once again advance the possibilities of long term growth and prosperity.