Power-Curve Society

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* Report: Power-Curve Society: The Future of Innovation, Opportunity and Social Equity in the Emerging Networked Economy. By David Bollier. Aspen Institute (Communications and Society Program), 2013

URL = http://as.pn/powercurve

Description

The Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program today released a report that offers a sweeping look at how technological innovation is restructuring productivity and lays out the social and economic impact resulting from these changes.

Power-Curve Society: The Future of Innovation, Opportunity and Social Equity in the Emerging Networked Economy, written by David Bollier, addresses the growing concern about the technological displacement of jobs, stagnant middle class income, and wealth disparities in an emerging €œwinner-take-all economy. It also examines cutting-edge innovations in personal data ecosystems which could potentially unlock a revolutionary wave of individual economic empowerment.

The report derives from the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program'€™s 21st annual Roundtable on Information Technology, held in Aspen last August. It includes insights from MIT Media Lab Director Joi Ito, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski, Ciscoâ€'s Padmasree Warrior, MIT Economists Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, Reputation.com CEO Michael Fertik, and Khan Academy President and CEO Shantanu Sinha, among many others.

â€Power-Curve Society€ considers the broad implications of a globally networked economy that allows greater ease of transactions but relies less on human workers to carry them out. In this emerging technologically accelerated economy, wealth increasingly concentrates in the hands of a few rather than spreading itself out across the larger population (i.e., the traditional €œbell curveâ of normal distributions). The Report explores the mechanisms of this phenomenon and its suspected role in €œhollowing out€ the American middle class. It also questions contemporary measurements of equality, well-being and value in the digital age; and it surveys the ways that cloud computing, Big Data and collaboration are redefining work and commerce.

Along with examining the historical relationship between innovation and productivity, Power-Curve Society€ assesses the increasing speed by which new technologies are outpacing social and institutional capabilities. It then presents groundbreaking new frameworks for rethinking entrenched notions of jobs, learning, skills, entrepreneurship and public policy to better brace everyone, rich and poor, for the unrelenting future.

€œThis report lays out some of the gravest issues that face us,€ said Charlie Firestone, Executive Director of the Communications and Society Program, “and the solutions and insights gathered by David Bollier come from some of the brightest minds leading the charge.

âPower-Curve Society: The Future of Innovation, Opportunity and Social Equity in the Emerging Networked Economy” is the result of a three-day Aspen Institute dialogue that convened venture capitalists, economists, management gurus, technologists, and innovators in business, education, philanthropy and government to address the topic. A complete list of participants is in the Report." (http://www.aspeninstitute.org/policy-work/communications-society/power-curve-society-future-innovation-opportunity-social-equity)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword, Charles M. Firestone

Introduction

The Innovation Economy

The New Economy of Personal Information

The Power-Curve Phenomenon and its Social Implications

Jobs in the Power-Curve Nation

The Social Implications of the Power-Curve Economy

Government Policies and Leadership Responsibilities

Conclusion

Roundtable Participants

About the Author

About the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program


Excerpts

Introduction

David Bollier:

"It is now nearly twenty years since the World Wide Web exploded, helping to insinuate the Internet and countless digital technologies into all aspects of the economy and everyday life. Yet even as businesses struggle to come to terms with this revolution, a new set of structural innovations is washing over businesses, organizations and government, forcing near-constant adaptation and change. It is no exaggeration to say that the explosion of innovative technologies and their dense interconnections is inventing a new kind of economy.

Although the new technologies are clearly driving economic growth and higher productivity, the distribution of these benefits is skewed in worrisome ways. Wealth and income distribution no longer resemble a familiar “bell curve” in which the bulk of the wealth accrue to a large middle class. Instead, the networked economy seems to be producing a “power-curve” distribution, sometimes known as a “winner-take-all” economy. A relative few players tend to excel and reap disproportionate benefits while the great mass of the population scrambles for lower-paid, lower-skilled jobs, if they can be found at all. Economic and social insecurity is widespread.

This report provides a sketch of the emerging “power-curve economy” and its far-reaching economic and social implications. We start by giving an overview of contemporary trends in technological innovation and their economic implications. We then continue with an assessment of a major component of this new economy, Big Data, and the coming personal data revolution fomenting beneath it that seeks to put individuals, and not companies or governments, at the forefront. Companies in the power-curve economy rely heavily on big databases of personal information to improve their marketing, product design, and corporate strategies. The unanswered question is whether the multiplying reservoirs of personal data will be used to benefit individuals as consumers and citizens, or whether large Internet companies will control and monetize Big Data for their private gain.

Why are winner-take-all dynamics so powerful? We next examine why networks often produce power-curve distributions, and how these dynamics appear to be eroding the economic security of the middle class. Is this an inexorable structural trend, and if so, how might its impacts be mitigated? A special concern is whether information and communications technologies are actually eliminating more jobs than they are creating—and in what countries and occupations.

Finally, this report looks at the broader social implications of the emerging economy. How is the power-curve economy opening up opportunities or shutting them down? Is it polarizing income and wealth distributions? How is it changing the nature of work and traditional organizations and altering family and personal life? Although there are obvious benefits from the wealth creation that stem from innovation and growth, many observers fear a wave of social and political disruption if a society’s basic commitments to fairness, individual opportunity and democratic values cannot be honored. An important question, therefore, is what role government should play in balancing these sometimes-conflicting priorities. How might educational policies, research and development, and immigration policies need to be altered?

To address this complex mix of issues, the Aspen Institute Communications and Society program convened a diverse group of twenty-eight experts from the worlds of information technology, venture capital, economics, government policymaking, philanthropy, academia and management consulting, for three days of discussion, from August 1-3, 2012, in Aspen, Colorado. Charles M. Firestone, Executive Director of the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program, moderated. This report is an interpretive synthesis of the highlights of those talks." (http://www.aspeninstitute.org/policy-work/communications-society/power-curve-society-future-innovation-opportunity-social-equity?)


How the power-curve dynamic works

David Bollier:

"A profound change is occurring in both the global and national economies as more commerce migrates to networked platforms. This change is the rise of a power-curve distribution of wealth and income as network platforms reduce the friction that previously impeded economic productivity in the old economy. A power-curve embodies the principle of what is known as a power law distribution, in which a small number of people reap a disproportionate share of the benefits of a market (or other network-based activity) while the bulk of participants receive very modest gains. This is sometimes referred to as a winner-take-all or 80/20 rule, in which 20 percent of the participants reap 80 percent of the gains, and 80 percent of the people receive 20 percent of the gains. Power-curve distributions are entirely predictable in many physical and biological contexts, but they also appear to describe structural inequalities produced on human networks, particularly on the Internet.

The conference devoted a session to this issue as a result of several email exchanges months earlier between Kim Taipale, Founder and Executive Director of the Stilwell Center for Advanced Studies, and Bill Coleman, Partner in the venture capital firm Alsop Louie Partners. The lively exchange was provoked by a March 6, 2011, column by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman about the loss of American jobs to automation and globalization; one response that Krugman urged was a restoration of bargaining power for organized labor.

In reading Krugman’s analysis, Taipale saw evidence of a power-law distribution in the network-based markets that are transforming more and more segments of the U.S. and global economies. Taipale asked: How will power-law distributions affect jobs creation, incomes, and wealth in the future? Will social inequality and instability result if nothing is done about the growing disparities of rewards from the emerging network-based economy?

Below, we excerpt portions of the email dialogue between Taipale and Coleman before recounting how conference participants reacted to the arguments set forth. Taipale’s thesis can be succinctly stated: “The era of bell curve distributions that supported a bulging social middle class is over and we are headed for the power-law distribution of economic opportunities. Education per se is not going to make up the difference.” The kinds of work performed by “information creators, exploiters and decision-makers”—entertainers, artists, CEOs, entrepreneurs, technology architects, etc.—will continue to have a future, said Taipale. But the jobs of information managers who make up the bulk of the upper middle class—lawyers, accountants, programmers—are seriously endangered as new forms of software-based automation and outsourcing accelerate. There will continue to be many low-paid, relatively unskilled working-class jobs as service providers, Taipale argue, but “the spoils from the economy will be increasingly distributed on thepower-law curve.”

Existing organizational structures are being replaced by platforms or networks, said Taipale. This is significant because it is taking so much friction out of the system, and it is happening faster and faster. In the Industrial Age, when information was managed in analog form—i.e., unstructured and on paper—businesses needed lots of workers in the “middle” to manage information inefficiency, he said. That’s why General Motors had ten layers of management between the shop floor and the executive suite. It was a vast, inefficient, paper-based information sorting and distribution organization that was responsible for creating many “well-paying” middle class jobs. A great many of those jobs have been lost over the past thirty years, replaced first by computers and later by networks that allowed decisionmakers to have greater direct oversight and control over production.

This process is now accelerating as new types of “connecting platforms” and associated apps—iPhone, EC2, YouTube, the cloud infrastructure itself, among others—are deployed. These technologies are lowering interaction costs for collaboration, coordination and market-making. The shift is making markets more efficient, competitive and productive—and in the process, destroying the jobs that have historically sustained the middle class, said Taipale: “The only reason we have the middle class is because it was over-compensated for what it contributed to the system, thanks to the relative inefficiencies of technologies at the time.”

Those inefficiencies could not be automated and outsourced previously—but now they can, said Taipale. And that is introducing more aggressive power-law distributions as participation in network platforms (and thus the value of those platforms) grow. The technology-enabled efficiencies may create greater wealth and broader distributions of it, said Taipale, but not enough to maintain existing middle class standards of living in “high-cost silos” such as the U.S. A key issue here is not just the displacement of middle class jobs but the accelerated rate at which they are being displaced and thus the inability of society and the economy to adapt.

The Industrial Revolution went through a similar transformation, with old jobs destroyed and new ones created. But that transformation occurred over a period of generations, Taipale pointed out. Today, skill sets are becoming obsolete within five years, which means that systemic, disruptive changes are occurring ten times or more in a single generation. Our society is not prepared for this kind of hyper-accelerated pace of change, he said. We simply do not have the policy architectures or social organization to handle it, said Taipale, and no one in the private sector, public sector or emerging social systems are even close to grappling with what these trends imply.

The paradoxical result of network effects, Taipale noted, is that “freedom results in inequality. That is, the more freedom there is in a system, the more unequal the outcomes become.” This is because of the power-law distribution that tends to prevail on open platforms, as wealth flows to the “super-nodes,” a phenomenon sometimes called “preferential attachment.”

In the 20th century economy, wealth and income tended to be allocated broadly to the middle class in the pattern of a classic bell curve. But in the new power-curve economy that appears to be emerging, distributions are scale-free and therefore “there is no characteristic node and the average has no useful meaning.” There is no “representative” member of the whole because distributions are so skewed. For example, even though 90 percent of Americans self-identify as middle class, the mean income in the U.S. is now $63,000, said Taipale—but the median household income (in which there are an equal number of people earning more and earning less than that amount) was $50,054 in 2011. This disparity suggests the mismatch between “average” and actual income distribution; the disproportionate number of lower-wage earners reduces the mean income by a one-third, making “the average” far less meaningful. This polarization of incomes could grow worse in the power-curve economy, Taipale contends.

Although some observers tout the App Economy as a redemptive force for economic growth and social benefit, Taipale scoffs: “Even if 400,000 ‘new jobs’ are created by hiring app developers, those are not stable, middle class jobs of the sort that previously existed. Companies that would have been hiring Web developers last year are now hiring app developers for a ‘B round’ or ‘C round’ of [venture financing].” The point is that the overall distribution of productivity gains in the networked economy is increasingly subject to power-law distribution and control. Only a relatively small number at the top reap the lion’s share of gains.

In very approximate terms, said Taipale, the bottom 80 percent of app developers are making, say, three percent of the revenues. The mean revenue that a developer reaps from an app is $3,000 a year, but the median is $600 a year. That means that some people are making a huge amount of money, and the rest are not. But the cost of making an app is between $15,000 to $30,000. So what’s making up the difference? asked Taipale. It’s either venture capital money or cross-subsidization [within a company], he said. Taipale’s conclusion from this data is that “the 400,000 jobs that the App Economy is supposedly creating doesn’t necessarily mean long-term, middle class jobs for the economy.”

If power-curve distributions become the norm in the new economy, said Taipale, it could result in greater social polarization and even social disruption. It is not clear what should be done about this trend, however, particularly if it might disrupt productivity and growth. For Taipale, the vexing question is: “How do we redistribute the spoils (or opportunities) to maintain a system in which there is sufficiently widespread prosperity to avoid the problems of political distribution that Krugman proposes in his column, i.e., ‘class struggle’ by politically empowering ‘labor’ to demand its fair share.” Taipale thinks it is a better strategy to focus on devising a suitable economic architecture for fair allocations of wealth and income in the first place, rather than mandate new redistribution schemes, because the latter are far more prone to the vagaries of politics.

As Taipale sees it, there are only a few choices: “Regulate freedom—or redistribute the spoils at the backend, through tax policy. Or do nothing and live with it.” By this formulation, Taipale explained that if governments are going to intervene to address the problem of power-curve distributions, they can either constrain markets and/or the architectural design of technical systems in the first place—which amounts to a regulation of opportunities and freedom—or they can redistribute the spoils of the economy after the fact. Both choices involve some level of political choice, but the latter may be more subject to cronyism and political muscle than the former. In any case, it is inescapable that the power-law curve has social implications. The question is how far can you let those inequalities continue before the social implications become troublesome." (http://www.bollier.org/blog/power-curve-phenomenon-open-networks)


Conclusion

"The challenges of the power-curve economy are formidable indeed. In the more optimistic scenario, the coming surges of productivity, innovation and economic growth will be disruptive, but tolerable and hopeful because they will also usher in enormous efficiencies and bounties that could eradicate poverty and improve standards of living. Under this scenario, the transition we are in must be understood as something on the scale of the Industrial Revolution itself.

In a more troubling scenario, the power-curve economy poses a series of disruptions that have no easy or recognized solutions. We appear headed for a greater polarization into haves and have-nots and more acute economic hardship and unemployment. Greater social and political unrest seem inevitable if no interventions are taken to deal with the current arc of economic activity.

Clearly the discussion about how to anticipate and address the dynamics of the power-curve economy is still in its very early stages. It will take more study to reach a deeper understanding of the socio-economic and technological dynamics at play. We will need more time to see how technological innovation and network effects play out in specific industry sectors, and what general conclusions might be drawn from such developments.

The worlds of politics and public policy may have the steepest learning curve to navigate, however, because so many of its guiding narratives are based on twentieth-century economics and governance models. Much more serious attention must therefore be paid to the “edge” of contemporary technology, networks, markets and culture, where the harbingers of the future first manifest themselves before moving to the center. But even this task requires escaping the gravitational pull of established institutions and treating emergent phenomena with greater seriousness.

This report is an early attempt to do just that. But we if are to truly understand the emerging power-curve economy and its social ramifications, and if we wish to maintain a sustainable balance between innovation, opportunity and social equity, we must probe more deeply into the challenges explored in the preceding pages. It seems likely that we need to devise entirely new sorts of policy approaches and institutional systems to deal with the novel, global dynamics of the power-curve economy." (http://www.aspeninstitute.org/policy-work/communications-society/power-curve-society-future-innovation-opportunity-social-equity?)

More Information

Read it at http://as.pn/powercurve. On Twitter: use #powercurve and follow @aspencs.