Skills Arbitrage is Linear, Time Arbitrage, Non Linear

As skills arbitrage became increasingly important for reliable employment, employment possibilities in turn, were more driven by linear relationships. These realities affect societal decision making for skills use patterns, and also aggregate income expectations. For that matter, 20th century transportation systems made many of these linear divisions of labour expectations feasible - not just in terms of highly defined work roles, but also the broadly spread population densities which these institutional workplaces came to rely on.

While linear organizational patterns have contributed greatly to the productive agglomeration of the present, they are no longer sufficient to maintain either long term growth or economic stability. This is slowly becoming evident, since productive agglomeration and its associated economic complexity, is no longer well dispersed across diverse regions. Even though linear workplace organization can be simpler to control and manage, its extensive use now constrains not only aggregate growth capacity, but also the dispersal of productive knowledge use patterns.

Fortunately, time arbitrage could provide non linear options for new growth, through differently aligned workplace patterns and relationships. Non linear patterns feature in what are termed complex adaptive systems. How might one envision such systems? Wikipedia explains their nature:

A complex adaptive system is a system in which a perfect understanding of the individual parts does not automatically convey a perfect understanding of the whole system's behavior. The study of complex adaptive systems, a subset of nonlinear dynamical systems, is highly interdisciplinary and blends insights from the natural and social sciences to develop system-level models...They are complex in that they are dynamic networks of interactions, and their relationships are not aggregations of the individual static entities.

In a recent post Ian Hathaway notes that "startup communities are examples of complex adaptive systems", and adds:

Linear thinking works in individual sports like tennis or golf, but not in sports teams like baseball, where the integration of the pieces (the players) can be more deterministic of the outcome than the sum of the parts (the combined talents of the individual players).

How to think about the difference? When groups work to create product or outcomes which benefit from specificity, linear approaches can be appropriate. However, many forms of time based product need not be quite so skill specific, at the individual level of providers and recipients. In these circumstance, often neither participant expects or desires a universally defined product or outcome - even though institutions may choose to impose standardized outcomes, so as to maintain control and reduce costs.

Time arbitrage could coordinate a more diverse range of skills and knowledge use possibilities, so that many services would ultimately function more effectively as free markets. Likewise - as Hathaway emphasized regarding startup communities - time arbitrage, in contrast with skills arbitrage, would "focus on the interactions between the people involved".

Coordinated team effort as an ongoing process, is a good way to envision time arbitrage potential. Group participants would align mutually desirable activities so as to create a more flexible range of services product, thereby making the process more relevant for all concerned. While we don't always associate greater autonomy and personal challenge with the nature of today's time based product, the digital era gives us an excellent chance, to reduce what is often unnecessary hierarchical organization in these sectors.