My Half Workday as a Turker
I think this is a perfect example of how money today is worth more or less than it actually is.  Another way of saying that is that money is nonlinear or even non-constant.<p>For example, say you are broke and wandering the streets of a big city and really want to buy a bus ticket to another city for $20 or whatever.  No matter how much your net worth is, you can't get that $20 easily.  You could try asking various businesses to do some work for cash, you could try a song and dance routine, etc, but your choices all amount to various forms of begging.<p>Meanwhile you can be sitting in an office somewhere and make that money in less than 3 hours even at minimum wage, even if you do little or no work.  You can even sell something on craigslist if you’re home.  I suppose in desperation you could sell blood plasma, but that’s one of very few lifelines.<p>Nobody thinks $20 is worth much, but when you don’t have it, it’s very expensive indeed.<p>To me, the root of the problem is whether you are resource rich or resource poor.  So the web, by virtue of being intangible, is almost quintessentially resourceless.  The trend seems to be lower and lower wages for increasingly onerous labor.  In other words, if you have money, you get a real world return greater than the value of your money.  But if you don’t have money, then getting it requires an expenditure of resources and effort larger than the value of the money itself.<p>At some point in the near future, acquiring money will be so expensive from a labor standpoint that it will be cheaper to simply do things yourself and live outside of mainstream society by bartering goods and services.  This really bothers me, because that shouldn’t be the goal of progress.  The paradox is that even though every new fiverr and mturk create more jobs, they lower the value of work.  Right now this is affecting developing countries by creating a race-to-the-bottom economy, but the futurist in me looks all the way to the end and sees how so many jobs today (especially the non-production ones like administrative/clerical work) will eventually be automated by technology and thereby make the purchase of capital through labor even more expensive.<p>Does anyone see a way out of this?  Did I miss something fundamental?