Harvard economist Lawrence Katz thinks that when the economy shifts, those who lose out experience “retroactive unemployment” in pursuit of jobs that no longer exist; however, he anticipates a bright future for men in the new economy. As an expert in the ways technology affects the middle class, Katz predicts the rise of the “new artisan” as a substantial trend in middle-class employment.
His theory holds that technology will commoditize and cheapen products in all industries but that artisanal workers will offer a superior interpersonal experience coupled with unique goods and services, commanding premium prices in turn. Men, he notes, are especially well suited to such roles.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen. This sounds like something straight out of Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, except that Katz’s vision strikes me as more fictional.
One business model I imagine is the ‘hinterland luxury day-trip experience’. You could have an ‘artisinal outlet shopping mall’.
The trouble is that the demand for many artisinal services is in the city, but the rent is too damn high – so high in fact that rent is now the dominant contributing factor to the cost of in-city services. But browsing and window shopping around a lot of artisinal stores and restaurants in a hip area and finding things by chance is a great joy of urban living.
So sole-proprietorship artisans should cluster together and offer their services in a location that can maintain extremely low land prices. There are franchise-dominated malls like this in many suburbs, but the artisans need to make their own version. In the past, there were always some low-rent neighborhoods that were pretty easy to gentrify, but those are running out, for a multitude of reasons.
All fiction is not false.
Being “more fictional” is not “more false.”
(nor less true?)
“This sounds like something straight out of Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age”
Exactly — maybe Katz’s ‘new artisans’ will live in a place called ‘Dovetail’:
https://goo.gl/H1fjdf
Yeah, my guess is that the Etsy-fication of the male economy won’t move the numbers by much.
There are a lot of reasons, some of which include:
– A lot of the men who do this were probably doing okay. Ie, these artisans are burned out software programmers, not the machine lift operator who’s been collecting unemployment for a year.
– Like the other guy said…..you can only generate enough demand for these things in dense urban areas where you have skyrocketing rents, making a living very hard to come by.
– How much is the purchase of these things a zero-sum status game? That’d make the expansion of the sector inherently difficult.
– The people who are wired to be good artisanal craftsmen are probably not wired to be good marketers and businessmen, making it very difficult for these guys to earn a decent living, even if they’re really good at it.
– That last point could lead to a further division of labor where there are new services to help these guys out, but then you have traditional businesses, just with smaller dollar amounts attached to them.
More fictional and more frictional.