In the United States, just three out of ten workers are needed to produce and deliver the goods we consume. Everything we extract, grow, design, build, make, engineer, and transport – down to brewing a cup of coffee in a restaurant kitchen and carrying it to a customer's table – is done by roughly 30% of the country's workforce.
The rest of us spend our time planning what to make, deciding where to install the things we have made, performing personal services, talking to each other, and keeping track of what is being done, so that we can figure out what needs to be done next. And yet, despite our obvious ability to produce much more than we need, we do not seem to be blessed with an embarrassment of riches. One of the great paradoxes of our time is that workers and middle-class households continue to struggle in a time of unparalleled plenty.
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One way to reconcile the changes in the job market with our lived experience and statistics like these is to note that much of what we are producing is very different from what we have made in the past. For most of human experience, the bulk of what we produced could not be easily shared or used without permission...
......The creation of information-age goods is difficult to incentivize; their distribution is hard to monetize; and we lack the tools to track them easily in national accounts...
This produces a set of unique problems. To ensure that the workers of today and tomorrow are able to capture the benefits of the information age will require us to redesign our economic system to stimulate the creation of these new types of commodities. In addition to developing ways to account for this new type of wealth, we will have to develop channels through which demand for a product contributes to the income of its creator.