I finally got around to this piece at The Atlantic “Why Workers Are Losing the War Against Machines”, by two MIT professors who’ve written a book on the subject. It’s a good piece focused on three disparities:

1. High-Skilled vs. Low-Skilled Workers

2. Superstars vs. Everyone Else

3. Capital vs. Labor

I want to focus on something the authors mention in #2 and make a quick point:

Technology can convert an ordinary market into one that is characterized by superstars. Before the era of recorded music, the very best singer might have filled a large concert hall but at most would only be able to reach thousands of listeners over the course of a year. Each city might have its own local stars, with a few top performers touring nationally, but even the best singer in the nation could reach only a relatively small fraction of the potential listening audience. Once music could be recorded and distributed at a very low marginal cost, however, a small number of top performers could capture the majority of revenues in every market, from classical music’s Yo-Yo Ma to pop’s Lady Gaga.

Economists Robert Frank and Philip Cook documented how winner-take-all markets have proliferated as technology transformed not only recorded music but also software, drama, sports, and every other industry that can be transmitted as digital bits. This trend has accelerated as more of the economy is based on software, either implicitly or explicitly. As we discussed in our 2008 Harvard Business Review article, digital technologies make it possible to replicate not only bits but also processes. For instance, companies like CVS have embedded processes like prescription drug ordering into their enterprise information systems. Each time CVS makes an improvement, it is propagated across 4,000 stores nationwide, amplifying its value. As a result, the reach and impact of an executive decision, like how to organize a process, is correspondingly larger.

This touches on themes I write about here frequently, and I see it as the link between intellectual property + open source, and inequality. The music example should be familiar to readers of this blog by now. Changing copyright terms could help transform a superstar market for music back into a folk or peer-to-peer market.

The software example is also amenable to more equitable IP approaches. What if the software that CVS used was open source? That would negate the winner-take-all nature of the example. I’m not recommending anything specific here, but just making the point that, given technology’s role in inequality via the creation of superstar markets, open source and intellectual property have to be part of the inequality discussion.