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Comment by evo | Hacker News Reader

My contention with the idea of everyone-as-a-producer is the same forces that enable companies to produce without employees also increasingly drives winner-takes-all behavior that leaves little room for being second-best.

While the disruptions in distribution mechanisms and increasing ease of deploying web-apps has provided the appearance of it being easy to launch your own business and make money, I'd argue that it might very well be a transitory period until bigger players with deeper pockets lock down profitable sectors.

I just can't see a long term steady-state where the market is spread so thinly that everyone can simultaneously be a business-owner serving some small collection of a few hundred customers, instead of aggregating into single, monolithic companies that serve thousands or millions.

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True. While it's tough to predict the future, I'll counter that every trade isn't endlessly scalable and winner-take-all.

As a business-owner, that's where you want to be, but there will be plenty of 'jobs' serving others that will scale linearly (whether that's in relation to people, time, etc) to keep people busy.

Examples: inspecting Uber cars, community development, specialized consulting.

> Examples: inspecting Uber cars

Automated inspections aren't a particular radical application of automation, once automated its subject to the same factors that favor the biggest player in terms of relevant capital as other industries.

> community development

But where's the market?

> specialized consulting.

Lots of things that used to provide demand for specialized consulting have narrowed markets from advances in information technology (both delivery and processing); I'd expect that to continue as technology advances. There's probably some level at which this becomes are hard AI problem, though, sure.

OTOH, the market for specialized consulting is driven by the number of firms in other markets, so as other markets go winner-take-all the size of the market for "specialized consultants" narrows within the same overall economy. So, the market here looks largely winner-take-all as a second-order effect of the markets supported by consultants going that way.

>I just can't see a long term steady-state where the market is spread so thinly that everyone can simultaneously be a business-owner serving some small collection of a few hundred customers...

That's interesting, because that's how the market was for thousands of years.

The idea that there was an entrepreneurial "market" thousands of years ago is just wrong. The entrepreneur is a fairly recent social role. Thousands of years ago it was possible, without selling your labour to another person, to make your own living off of the land. This was how most people survived. The aristocratic class was created through the employment of slave labour. Life consisted not of running a business but of social life. Most people were not "business owners" in any sense of the word that would be recognizable to us. So the idea that this is somehow a return to a more ancient way of life is simply wrong.

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