The

 Guardian  -­‐  Friday 8 December 2017  

 

Airbnb, Uber, eBay: in this intangible

world workers must adapt to survive
 

John Harris  
 
As descriptions of capitalism go, it’s surely one of the best ever written: poetic,
urgent, and as much to do with metaphysics as economics. According to the
Communist Manifesto: “Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted
disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation
distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations,
with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away,
all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.” And then the kicker:
“All that is solid melts into air.”

Whatever their shortcomings as revolutionaries and futurologists, Marx and Engels’

vision of ceaselessly changing economies and societies seems just as pertinent now as
it did 169 years ago, with one particularly surreal caveat.

Most traditional conceptions of capitalism have been founded in some notion of

material stuff: physical property, premises, machinery, goods. But the companies at
the forefront of the 21st-century economy have a very different way of operating, as
evidenced by one of the year’s most talked-about books. It has a title that, somewhere
in the socialist hereafter, must have been greeted with mirth by the ghosts of Karl and
Fred. Written by the economist Jonathan Haskel and the innovation researcher Stian
Westlake, Capitalism Without Capital may sound like a riddle but actually makes
perfect sense.

Airbnb has revolutionised the market in accommodation but owns no property.

Chinese online giant Alibaba is reckoned to be the world’s biggest retailer but holds
no stock. Neither does that byword for modern shopping, eBay. Meanwhile, Uber has
arrived to upturn personal transport but owns no cars.

Such are the strange ways of what is becoming known as platform capitalism: a
model which took a shift that had been under way since the 1970s to its logical
conclusion. Cutting-edge capitalism is increasingly weightless. What makes
the difference between winners and losers is not physical things, but such quicksilver
commodities as ideas, knowledge, research, software, brands, networks and
relationships.

Haskel and Westlake centre their story on a shift in investment, away from “tangible”
assets to these “intangible” items. In the United States, the share of GDP devoted to
the latter is reckoned to have overtaken the former in the mid-1990s; in the UK, the
watershed was reached towards the end of that decade. In other countries – Italy and
Spain, for instance – investing in old-fashioned kit and plant still takes precedence.
But in all the statistics there is a clear implication: that as we head into the future,
intangibles will rule.

This cuts across many of the usual laws and expectations of economics. Physical
assets, in any crude understanding, can be bought and sold. But intangibles are much
more difficult entities. As the authors say: “Toyota invests millions in its lean
production systems, but it would be impossible to separate these investments from
their factories and somehow sell them off.”

Intangible assets are open to “spillovers”: the tendency of ideas and innovations to
spread, often way beyond the intentions of their inventors. As part of the same
process, they tend to have synergies with each other, often unexpectedly: “The MP3
protocol, combined with the miniaturised hard disk and Apple’s design skills, created
the iPod, a very valuable innovation.”

And, liberated from any dependence on a fixed stock of machinery, the creations of
these intangible assets can spread at speed, and quickly dominate their field – which
is why Uber has become inescapable in less than a decade and 13 years after
Facebook’s launch, Mark Zuckerberg’s social network is central to the lives of a
quarter of humanity.

The world, then, changes quickly. The physical production that companies still need
is increasingly both outsourced to distant, low-wage countries and automated. Even
employment in what we think of as “services” is looking alarmingly vulnerable to
robotics and artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, intangibles dominate not just the
business world but our everyday lives. From music through books to cars, the
centrality of physical stuff is dwindling away.

So an inevitable question arises: in economies and societies in which the intangible is

king, and having a specific skill tied to a particular activity seems much less valuable
than a generalised set of attributes, who will prosper? And who is in danger of
sinking?

As Haskel and Westlake see it, the future belongs to people who can thrive in an
ethereal, unpredictable world, and endlessly adapt – “product managers, lawyers,
business development people, design engineers, marketers, head-hunters, and so
forth”. Or, put another way, “people who combine decent data-analytical skills with
the soft skills needed to broker relationships inside and outside their own company”.

These people cluster in cities – where, as evidenced by the increasingly costly

London, New York and San Francisco, their ever-increasing presence is pushing up
property prices. The fact that their mixture of aptitudes can easily seem rare often
fosters a “cult of talent” that pushes their pay into the stratosphere. They move to
urban areas, partly in pursuit of the kind of “synergies” and “spillovers” mentioned
above, and network their heads off.

The old world is a factory canteen in a company town, full of harried workers keeping
their heads down before they graft on a production line; the new reality is symbolised
by a street-corner coffee shop full of people answerable to a mixture of employers,
who may be either working or socialising, or both.

I know this tribe of people increasingly well. Around a month ago, I spent an
afternoon at the tech division of the insurance giant Aviva, housed in what it calls a
“digital garage”. The first person I met was the twentysomething who had recently
designed all the visual aspects of its websites and apps, and came not from the world
of financial services, but the games company Activision.

A few yards away, some of his colleagues were working on a classic example of
spillover and synergy, perfecting software that will allow people to access spoken
financial advice via the Amazon Echo. That week, they were working in insurance.
The next, they might be bringing their talents to a completely different part of the
economy.

Obviously, not everybody is like that. And as consistent work involving physical stuff
increasingly falls away, it seems the clash between two very different kinds of people
will characterise the painful birth pangs of a new reality.

In a frustratingly brief section of the book, Haskel and Westlake tentatively put Brexit
and the election of Donald Trump in this context, which seems absolutely right.
Indeed, extend the notion of intangibles beyond assets and into questions of culture,
and you have a key to what is so unsettling many western societies: on one side sit
social forces loyal to such ideas as place, vocation and family; on the other is a cluster
of people happy to accede to the modern economy’s demands and reinvent
themselves whenever required, and be free of such quaint baggage.

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” says the
Communist Manifesto. The future will be too, with the kind of ironic twist that those
two 19th-century Germans would have found delicious: that taking capital out of
capitalism will probably spread uncertainty and agitation as never before.

• John Harris is a Guardian columnist

CAPITALISM WITHOUT CAPITAL

The Rise of the Intangible Economy
by Jonathan Haskel & Stian Westlake

Publisher: Princeton Univ., 2017

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/financial-services/our-insights/the-
new-dynamics-of-financial-globalization?cid=soc-web
Where Uber and Amazon rule: welcome to
the world of the platform
Powerful tech firms are altering not just the way we buy things, but could
sweep away an entire economic model

Evgeny Morozov
Sunday 7 June 2015 00.05 BST

Hardly a day goes by without some tech company proclaiming that it wants to
reinvent itself as a platform. Back in March, when South Korea banned Uber, the
company promised to let local taxi drivers use its platform – along with its matching
services.

Facebook pulled a similar trick in early May: having run into trouble with its
pseudo-humanitarian effort to provide free internet access via a project called
internet.org, it, too, promised to turn it into a platform. Now, internet.org users, most
of them in the developing world, could also enjoy free access to apps other than those
developed by Facebook.

Some prominent critics even speak of “platform capitalism” – a broader

transformation of how goods and services are produced, shared and delivered.

Instead of the tired conventional model, with individual firms competing for
customers, we are witnessing the emergence of a new, seemingly flatter and more
participatory model, whereby customers engage directly with each other. With a
smartphone in their pocket, individuals can suddenly do things that previously
required an array of institutions.

Such is the transformation we are witnessing across many sectors of the economy:
taxi companies used to transport passengers, but Uber just connects drivers with
passengers. Hotels used to offer hospitality services; Airbnb just connects hosts with
guests. And this list goes on: even Amazon connects booksellers with buyers of used
books.

The differences from the old, pre-platform model are easy to spot. First, these
companies have extraordinary valuations but suspiciously light balance sheets: Uber
doesn’t need to employ drivers and Airbnb doesn’t need to own houses. Second,
instead of adhering to a precise and rigorous code that spells out the rights of
customers and the obligations of service providers – the cornerstone of the modern
regulatory state – platform operators rely on the widely distributed knowledge of
participants in a service, hoping that the market will eventually punish those who
misbehave.
In the free-market utopia of thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek – the true patron saint
of the sharing economy – your reputation would also reflect what other market
participants know about you. Thus, if you are a nasty customer or an ill-mannered
driver, everybody else will soon discover this, and specific laws to police your
behavior are rendered unnecessary.

The good news, according to Hayek, is that once our norms change – what was
considered nasty 50 years ago might be perfectly acceptable today – our reputations
would reflect these changes immediately. Laws, on the other hand, would take quite
some time to be altered.

In reality, though, such a perfectly liquid and dynamic reputation marketplace is

nowhere to be seen. A recent lawsuit in the US highlights its absence. Uber drivers
have been accused of discriminating against disabled people by refusing to put their
wheelchairs in the boot of their car. One would think that anti-discrimination laws
that apply to taxis would also apply to Uber. Uber says it has anti-discrimination
policies – and that it’s not a taxi company, it’s a technology company, a platform.
Here, there is clearly no easy feedback mechanism to assist disabled travellers: this is
what consumer protection laws are for.

While Uber uses its platform status as a shield against lawsuits, Facebook uses it as a
publicity gimmick. Thus, it has recently argued that “internet.org” is an “open
platform”. In reality, though, it’s anything but open: Facebook still decides what
apps to accept and what conditions they should meet (no video or file transfer, high-
resolution photos).

In a culture infatuated with innovation – and ours is definitely one – Facebook’s

embracing of the platform rhetoric makes sense. The critics of internet.org could be
right about the project’s deviations from the ideals of net neutrality but, in the long
run, Facebook would like us to believe that it doesn’t really matter: a platform, at
least in theory, is a place where unplanned and unpredictable innovation happens –
and what more could we want? In a battle between justice and innovation, the latter
invariably wins.

But Uber’s offer to drivers in Seoul does raise some genuinely interesting questions.

What is it that Uber’s platform offers that traditional cabs can’t get elsewhere? It’s
mostly three things: payment infrastructure to make transactions smoother; identity
infrastructure to screen out any unwanted passengers; and sensor infrastructure,
present on our smartphones, which traces the location of the car and the customer in
real time. This list has hardly anything to do with transport; they are the kind of
peripheral activity that traditional taxi companies have always ignored.

However, with the transition to knowledge-based economy, these peripherals are no

longer really peripherals – they are at the very centre of service provision. Today, any
service provider, and even content provider, risks becoming hostage to the platform
operator, which, by aggregating all those peripherals and streamlining the experience
of using them, suddenly moves from the periphery to the centre.

There’s a good reason why so many platforms are based in Silicon Valley: the main
peripherals today are data, algorithms and server power. And this explains why so
many renowned publishers would team up with Facebook to have their stories
published there in a new feature called Instant Articles. Most of them simply do
not have the know-how and the infrastructure to be as nimble, resourceful and
impressive as Facebook when it comes to presenting the right articles to the right
people at the right time – and doing it faster than any other platform.

Few industries could remain unaffected by the platform fever. The unspoken truth,
though, is that most of the current big-name platforms are monopolies, riding on the
network effects of operating a service that becomes more valuable as more people
join it. This is why they can muster so much power; Amazon is in constant power
struggles with publishers – but there is no second Amazon they can turn to.

Venture capitalists such as Peter Thiel want us to believe that this monopoly status is
a feature, not a bug: if these companies weren’t monopolies, they would never have so
much cash to spend on innovation.

This, however, still doesn’t address the question of just how much power we should
surrender to these companies. A publishing industry ruled by Amazon and Facebook
might produce lots of innovations – but is there any guarantee that it would actually
produce any significant articles or books?

One sure way to keep the platforms in check is to prevent them from appropriating all
the adjacent peripherals. Making sure that we can move our reputation – as well as
our browsing history and a map of our social connections – between platforms would
be a good start. It’s also important to treat other, more technical parts of the
emerging platform landscape – from services that can verify our identity to new
payment systems to geolocational sensors – as actual infrastructure (and thus
ensuring that everybody can access it on the same, nondiscriminatory terms) is also
badly needed.

Most platforms are parasitic: feeding off existing social and economic relations. They
don’t produce anything on their own – they only rearrange bits and pieces developed
by someone else. Given the enormous – and mostly untaxed – profits made by such
corporations, the world of “platform capitalism”, for all its heady rhetoric, is not so
different from its predecessor. The only thing that’s changed is who pockets the
money.
El  Cronista  
04/12/2017  
 
https://www.cronista.com/financialtimes/Una-­‐economia-­‐intangible-­‐requiere-­‐un-­‐nuevo-­‐
planteo-­‐de-­‐la-­‐politica-­‐publica-­‐20171204-­‐0004.html  

 
Una  economía  intangible  requiere  un  nuevo  planteo  
de  la  política  pública  
La novedad de la economía actual es que muchas de nuestras mejores ideas son
inmateriales. La idea de hecho es valiosa, pero no toma forma física. Y eso cambia
casi todo
 

¿Qué  tiene  de  nuevo  la  economía  actual?  No  es  el  rol  que  cumplen  las  ideas  mismas.  
Las  tecnologías  que  subestimamos  la  rueda,  la  cerámica  cocida  en  horno,  el  arado  o  
la   máquina   de   vapor   fueron   alguna   vez   brillantes   ideas   nuevas.   La   novedad   de   la  
economía   actual   es   que   un   sinnúmero   de   nuestras   mejores   ideas   siguen   siendo  
inmateriales.   La   idea   de   hecho   es   valiosa,   pero   no   toma   forma   física.   Y   eso   cambia  
casi  todo.  

Ése   es   el   tema   del   intrigante   libro   de   reciente   publicación   Capitalism   without  

Capital:   The   Rise   of   the   Intangible   Economy  (Capitalismo  sin  capital:  El  ascenso  
de   la   economía   intangible),   de   los   autores   Jonathan   Haskel   del   Imperial   College   y  
Stian   Westlake   de   Nesta.   Su   argumento   central   es   convincente:   Apple,   la   compañía  
más   valiosa   del   mundo,   prácticamente   no   posee   activos   físicos.   Son   sus   activos  
intangibles   la   integración   del   diseño   y   del   software   en   una   marca   los   que   generan  
valor.  

Tal  vez  el  hecho  más  sorprendente  de  este  libro  lleno  de  sorpresas  es  lo  grandes  que  
son  hoy  las  inversiones  en  activos  intangibles:  en  investigación  y  desarrollo  (I+D),  en  
software,   en   bases   de   datos,   en   creaciones   artísticas,   en   diseños,   en   desarrollo   de  
marca   (branding)   y   en   procesos   comerciales.   Medir   esto   se   ha   convertido   en   una  
actividad   intelectual   importante.   En   EE.UU.   y   en   el   Reino   Unido,   la   inversión   en  
activos   intangibles   actualmente   supera   la   de   los   activos   tangibles.   Esto   también  
sucede  en  Suecia,  pero  no  en  Alemania,  en  Italia  ni  en  España.  

Este   hecho   es   importante   porque   las   propiedades   de   activos   intangibles   son  

fundamentalmente   distintas   a   las   de   los   tangibles.   Comprender   esas   diferencias  
puede   explicar   algunas   características   de   la   economía   moderna,   como   el   aumento   de  
la  desigualdad  y  la  desaceleración  de  la  productividad.  

Los  autores  explican  las  características  de  los  activos  intangibles  al  referirse  a  cuatro  
factores:   escalabilidad,   irrecuperabilidad,   derrames   y   sinergias.   Juntas,   estas  
características   trastocan   el   habitual   funcionamiento   de   una   economía   de   mercado  
competitiva.  

"Escalabilidad"   significa   que   una   persona   puede   disfrutar   de   un   bien   intangible   sin  
privar  a  otro  de  sus  beneficios.  Los  economistas  lo  llaman  un  bien  "no  rival".  Tú  no  
puedes  comerte  el  mismo  sándwich  que  yo.  Pero  un  activo  intangible  se  puede  usar  
repetidas   veces.   En   una   economía   donde   la   escalabilidad   frecuentemente  
turboalimentada   por   los   efectos   de   red   es   importante,   algunas   empresas  
rápidamente  se  volverán  enormes.  Estos  ganadores  tal  vez  también  disfruten  de  las  
grandes  ventajas  de  la  incumbencia.  

"Irrecuperabilidad"  se  refiere  al  hecho  de  que  los  activos  intangibles  tienden  a  tener  
poco  o  ningún  valor  de  mercado,  a  diferencia  de,  digamos,  un  terreno  o  una  fábrica.  
Tales  activos  tienen  valor  como  parte  de  la  empresa  de  su  propietario,  y  para  nadie  
más.  Esto  significa  que  la  inversión  en  activos  intangibles  es  arriesgada.  El  hecho  de  
que  las  expectativas  no  están  fuertemente  ancladas  podría  también  generar  burbujas  
en  los  precios  de  los  activos,  según  los  autores.  

"Derrames"   significa   que   una   gran   parte   de   los   beneficios   de   una   inversión   puede  
recaer  sobre  otros.  Incluso  con  la  protección  de  la  propiedad  intelectual,  gran  parte  
del  beneficio  de  la  inversión  en  una  idea  probablemente  le  llegue  a  personas  que  no  
son  los  descubridores.  La  imitación  (y  el  robo)  es  una  forma  gratificante  de  halago.  
La  presencia  de  tales  derrames  debilita  el  incentivo  para  invertir.  La  respuesta  radica  
en  los  derechos  de  propiedad  intelectual,  pero  éstos  son  inherentemente  arbitrarios  
y  económicamente  costosos.  

Por   último,   los   activos   intangibles   exponen   "sinergias".   Esto   va   en   contra   de   los  
derrames.   Las   sinergias   fomentan   la   cooperación   entre   empresas   (o   las   fusiones  
directas),  mientras  que  los  derrames  pueden  desalentarla.  ¿Quién  realmente  quiere  
darle   algo   gratis   a   la   competencia?   Juntas,   estas   características   explican   otras   dos  
características  centrales  de  la  economía  intangible:  la  incertidumbre  y  las  disputas.  
La  economía  de  mercado  deja  de  funcionar  de  la  manera  habitual.  

¿Explica   el   alza   de   los   activos   intangibles   lo   que   se   conoce   como   "estancamiento  

secular"?   En   parte.   Eso   no   pasa   tanto   porque   se   haya   subestimado   el   crecimiento.  
Pero   un   gran   tema   es   la   creciente   brecha   en   el   desempeño   entre   las   compañías  
líderes   y   las   rezagadas.   El   hecho   de   que   estas   últimas   no   se   han   beneficiado   de   la  
inversión  en  activos  intangibles,  por  sí  mismas  o  por  medio  de  otras,  puede  explicar  
parcialmente  su  débil  crecimiento  en  productividad.  

De   nuevo,   el   ascenso   de   los   activos   intangibles   también   puede   en   parte   explicar   el  

aumento   de   la   desigualdad.   Una   manera   en   que   puede   suceder   eso   es   que   los  
trabajadores   de   las   compañías   más   exitosas   tienden   a   participar   del   éxito   de   sus  
empleadores.   También   a   las   personas   con   conocimientos   relevantes   les   va  
excepcionalmente   bien.   Asimismo   y   de   forma   intrigante,   las   empresas   con   un  
intensivo   componente   de   activos   intangibles   tienden   a   agruparse   en   las   ciudades  
prósperas.  Esto  no  sólo  concentra  las  oportunidades,  sino  que  eleva  los  valores  de  las  
propiedades,  diseminando  riqueza  entre  quienes  las  poseen.  Por  último,  los  activos  
intangibles  son  móviles,  lo  cual  los  hace  difíciles  de  gravar.  

Esta  transformación  de  la  economía  exige  un  nuevo  planteo  de  la  política  pública.  A  
continuación,  expongo  cinco  desafíos.  

En   primer   lugar,   los   marcos   de   protección   de   la   propiedad   intelectual   son   más  

importantes.  Pero  esto  definitivamente  no  significa  que  estas  protecciones  deban  ser  
aún   más   favorables   para   los   dueños   de   tal   propiedad.   Es   probable   que   los  
monopolios   de   propiedad   intelectual   sean   necesarios,   pero,   como   todos   los  
monopolios,  pueden  ser  costosos.  En  segundo  lugar,  dada  la  enorme  importancia  de  
las   sinergias,   los   políticos   deben   considerar   cómo   alentarlas,   incluso   a   través   de  
políticas  en  materia  de  telecomunicaciones  y  de  desarrollo  urbano.  En  tercer  lugar,  
encontramos   que   financiar   los   activos   intangibles   es   difícil.   Para   los   préstamos  
bancarios   tradicionales   respaldados   por   garantías,   es   casi   imposible.   El   sistema  
financiero   deberá   cambiar.   En   cuarto   lugar,   la   dificultad   de   apropiarse   de   las  
ganancias   de   la   inversión   en   intangibles   podría   crear   una   subinversión   crónica   en  
una   economía   de   mercado.   El   gobierno   tendrá   que   desempeñar   un   importante   papel  
en   el   reparto   de   los   riesgos.   Para   finalizar,   los   gobiernos   también   deben   pensar   en  
cómo  abordar  las  desigualdades  creadas  por  los  activos  intangibles,  una  de  las  cuales  
es  el  surgimiento  de  compañías  superdominantes.  

Haskel   y   Westlake   han   esquematizado   los   detalles   de   una   nueva   y   desafiante  

economía.  Es  un  mundo  en  el  que  a  muchas  de  las  antiguas  normas  les  va  muy  mal.  
Tenemos  que  reimaginar  la  política,  pero  debemos  hacerlo  con  cuidado.