Category Archives: economics

Shirky/Pink in WIRED

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Ok, so apparently I’m not the only one to connect Clay Shirky’s recent talk about “cognitive surplus” with Dan Pink.  Wired had an article a while back where the two converse about motivation and collaboration.  It’s a pretty good read (though suffers a strange overly-polished tone), but it won’t hold any revelations if you’ve watched the two TED talks I just posted.

There is one aspect of this that bothers me, though.  Early on in the dialog, Shirky says that if we, “… start thinking of [our free time] as a social asset that can be harnessed, it all looks very different. The buildup of this free time among the world’s educated population—maybe a trillion hours per year—is a new resource.”  Of course he’s right.  It’s a wonderful new resource that is already being harnessed.  As they mention, this “cognitive surplus” is being used to create serious open source projects like Linux and Apache, great resources like the Wikipedia, and even all the dumb Youtube movies and LOLcats you could ever want to see.

Still, I’m wary of thinking of our free time as a “resource” for achieving new levels of productivity.  Shirky says of free time:

People have had lots of free time for as long as there’s been the industrialized world.  But that free time has mainly been something to be used up rather than used, especially in postwar America, with the rise of suburbanization and long commutes. Suddenly we no longer lived in tight-knit communities and therefore we spent less time interacting face-to-face. As a result, we ended up spending the bulk of our free time watching television.

This observation wouldn’t bother me at all if Shirky were bemoaning the loss of tight-knit communities and face-to-face interaction, but instead he seems to be advocating converting all of that television-watching time Wikipedia-editing time.  There’s something disturbing in this.

Does this mean that, when we’re done with a full day’s work, we’re supposed to come home and ignore our communities while working for several more hours, this time for free?  Is it too much to expect a few hours of rest and socializing?

In fairness, I haven’t yet read either of their books, so I don’t know if they address this problem better.  Still, I think this is connected to the niggling question I was trying to put together in my last post: Shirky seems eager to exploit the resource of free-time, but doesn’t seem to ask the question, what does this mean for our work-time?

Our society tends to take for granted that we must all suffer the sometimes absurd effects of economic inequality, and we accept this because using money as a motivator is the only way to create a productive society.  Shirky and Pink argue that money is often a terrible motivator and can actually have adverse effects on productivity, and then they continue on as though they haven’t noticed that they may have knocked out our society’s underpinnings.

Here’s my parting thought: Clay Shirky presents Ushahidi.com as a triumph of “cognitive surplus” because it was made by developers in their spare time.  Might it instead be a shortcoming of our economic system that these developers were forced to do such important work in their spare time?

(Sorry if this is muddled, but this is a product of my cognitive surplus, and not of my work life– i.e. I’m tired.)

Edit: I suppose I’m not arguing with anything Pink/Shirky are explicitly saying.  I’m worried that people might be looking at these discoveries about human motivation and thinking, “This is great!  You mean, not only can we get people to work their normal crappy 9-to-5 job, but we can use new motivational tricks to get them to go home and keep working for free.  Now, if we could only keep people from sleeping, people could work 24 hours a day!”

To me, the story shouldn’t be “people will work for free” but instead “coercing people to work under threat of homelessness and starvation might not be necessary.”

Work/Reward

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Clay Shirky has made yet another interesting and hopeful TED talk.  I’m not going to rehash the things he talks about, but instead jump straight to the niggling half-formed question that I can’t quite shake: what happens if the most beneficial and important things we will do are not things we’re financially compensated for?

Admittedly, that doesn’t immediately sound like a bad thing.  People are doing important work for free, out of love for the work or out of concern for the consequences of that work, and we all benefit.  However, I always thought that the purpose of our economic system was to support and reward useful contributions to society.  There are certainly people out there who will claim that, for any useful endeavor, there must be a business model capable of supporting that endeavor.  You’ll hear an argument like, “If there is enough demand that people are willing to pay the required price, then a business can flourish.  If there is not enough demand for a product or service, then it must not be worth providing.”  But that’s not true, is it?

With all the things the poor need, there’s plenty of demand; there just isn’t any money to meet the need.  Further, there might be projects or even whole industries that are impossible to turn into conventional businesses that must be run at a profit (or even required to break even).  Setting aside the example of open source software for a second, you have more conventional businesses like the record and movie industries, which cannot exist without government protection of copyright.  Even more concrete, you have the building and maintenance of vital infrastructure, which must be run “at a loss” even though the benefits to society often outweigh the costs.  There are, of course, many charitable organizations who solicit donations, and even software that’s funded through donation.

So if the purpose of our economic system was to support and reward useful contributions, what does it say about our economic system when so many useful contributions are not supported by it?  There have always been great contributions to society that have gone unrewarded.  That isn’t new.  There have been influential artists and writers and scientists and great thinkers who have died in poverty.  But I wonder, what if the balance shifts, and more of our contributions are collaborative and can’t be monetized?  Would we then need to change the way we think about money?

Sometimes these thoughts seem like far-fetched naive idealism, but as Shirky points out, the realities of financial penalties and rewards don’t actually work the way we expect.  His example of the day care instituting a fine is by no means the only example.  Dan Pink gave another TED talk on the topic, explaining how incentives do not necessarily improve performance.

Anyway, I don’t have a solution to propose.  These ideas puzzle me, and I’m not really even convinced that this is a new problem.  The economics of online collaboration and open source software start to make the problem more obvious, since there arises a natural conflict between open source and closed source competitors.  However, I wonder if it may be that our economic systems never worked as well as we imagined.  Can we structure our economy so that we support all of the work that needs to be done?