5 ms·
The reason employers exist is they represent accumulations of capital. McDonald's provides free grills, fryers, cash registers, storefronts, uncooked hamburger
by jellicle 15y ago
The reason employers exist is they represent accumulations of capital. McDonald's provides free grills, fryers, cash registers, storefronts, uncooked hamburgers, lettuce, buns and ketchup to every employee. Not every person wants to assemble all the capital equipment necessary to sell hamburgers; those that don't can walk into a place with all the capital already provided and settle down to do what might be their optimal specialty, producing burgers. They don't get as much return, but then they don't have capital invested either.
The minimal capital investment, even for these supposed "borderless" technology jobs, is several thousand dollars. For every person in the world that doesn't have several thousand dollars (which is to say, the majority of them), employers who provide capital equipment will continue to exist.
Employers aren't going away.
- patio11 15y agoYou can provide capital to people who are not your employees. See: Uber (dispatching system + installed customer base = capital), any crowdsourcing company, and BCC (when I hire freelancers to write bingo cards). With specific regards to minimal capital investments to do knowledge work: I think that this will soon be the cost of a handset, which is lower bounded by ~$5 at the moment and has no reason to stay that high, either. (The greater problem is that in a perfectly efficient worldwide marketplace for information work, poor people in Africa -- and poor people in America, for that matter -- generally have nothing that I want to buy, at any price.)