When I was a kid, the agent who handled my parents’ (and my grandparents’, and my neighbors’) life insurance policies was the type of agent who still came around once every couple of months to pick up the premium payments from his customers. I remember one visit very distinctly, when he pulled out a laptop and mini printer and punched up a receipt for my parents right there, instead of handing them a handwritten carbon copy like usual. My mother commented on it, and I remember him saying, “Yeah, they just gave us all these things. It’s great, you just plug it into a phone line at night and it sends everything in to the company. I like it, because it’s technology that doesn’t eliminate anyone’s job. It just makes mine easier.”
I remembered this conversation because I read this article about how cellphones are revolutionizing the livelihoods of Indian fishermen, who are able to use them to increase competition between wholesalers, resulting in better prices, let the wholesalers know they’re coming, and even speed up the process of getting their boats fixed if they break down at sea.
I’ve always been a raging capitalist (I’m not sure you can be a recruiter if you aren’t proudly a capitalist pig), but also try to be conscious about the areas in which practicality prevents individuals from taking full benefit of the free market. Indian fisherman are an excellent example- it’s hard to take advantage of competition between wholesalers when your fish are going to spoil and you don’t have time to go from port to port, looking for the best price.
So it’s always fascinating to me to watch how technology alters the system in favor of empowering the little guy in the capitalist equation. Does it make a person’s job easier? Does it help them to make more money? Does it reduce their ties to a physical work location?
This is not to say that this is always the effect of technology- sometimes the efficiency it brings is by automating tasks that humans used to do- but it’s interesting to me, free market technophile that I am, to see it go the other way.
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