

The Origins and Decline of the Wage System - daniel-cussen
http://www.inteldaily.com/news/173/ARTICLE/12898/2009-11-27.html

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rgp
The essay is well written and has historic base. Nevertheless I did not like
the pessimist conclusion.

1) I believe that a economy with an increasing number of startups in the long
run is going to grow. 2) The people that try but fail, is going to have
entrepreneurial experience that is going to be attractive to the successful
startups and companies in recuperation.

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darien
Interesting but opinionated and dated. "Wage slavery" became an acceptable and
necessary trade-off after the move from an industrial to service economy. This
was possible in the US due to the rise in immigrant population (population
boom of cities) and the automation of agriculture.

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wisty
Interesting and opinionated - good summary.

But there are plenty of owner-operators in the service industry. One person
can run a small cafe single-handed. 2 founders (a head cook, and a head
waiter) can run a mid-sized restaurant. They still need a few kitchen hands
and waiters, but they don't need to hire any managers.

Once the whole management structure can be manned by founders the wage system
has been undermined.

The point isn't that everyone will be an owner-operator or contractor. The
point is that all the good jobs will be. If you want to scrub floors, that's
OK, but everyone else will be a manager or a hired gun.

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barrkel
To take your example, a restaurant, the most important factor in success is
how well the kitchen works. That requires a solid head chef. How well will
that chef run a business when he or she's also running a kitchen? That
requires them to specialize in _two_ domains, rather than one.

There's a reason why corporations are more efficient than coalitions of self-
employed singletons operating in a free market. The transaction costs kill
you. In order to specialize with sufficient depth to compete in pretty much
any non-local market, you necessarily must either work for someone else, or
hire many other people to work for you - and thereby make your specialism
planning, coordination and managing, rather than anything else.

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d4nt
That may well have been true for a while but I think the information
revolution will eventually make it so easy to organise, collaborate and
outsource that the managerial overhead of a corporation will put big companies
at a disadvantage.

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rgp
In wired:

[http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-06/n...](http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-06/nep_essay)

Chris Anderson wrote broadly about the topic.

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nazgulnarsil
here is some actual scholarship on the subject rather than opinionated garbage
in the original link.

<http://szabo.best.vwh.net/synch.html>

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DenisM
pg also wrote about it if memory serves.

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richardburton
In the UK there is a chain of stores called John Lewis.

 _"John Lewis is a co-operative; all employees have a stake in the profits and
all workers are called "partners". The staff turnover is well below the
national average and assistants get to know their beat and their customers
well."_

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3657242/Spare-John-
Lewis-...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3657242/Spare-John-Lewis-from-
the-retail-revolution.html)

It's amazing how well you're treated any of the staff at all of their stores.
From the cleaners to shoe-fitters, they all seem to work that little bit
harder to make the experience of buying in John Lewis as enjoyable as
possible.

It's an interesting case study of a hybrid between ownership and employment.

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snewe
If we each owned our own business, we would rarely reach the economies of
scale that have increased standards of living for the last 200 years.

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enki
these economies of scale are often based on lower transaction costs at scale.
information technology already has managed to lower or eliminate many
transaction costs - and while doing so made a lot of previously unviable small
business, viable.

it's hard to say how many of these transaction costs are to stay with us over
the next decades, but it's quite safe to say a lot of them will go. i have no
answers, but i'm really curious how this will change society.

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known
hiring is obsolete <http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html>

