I’m enjoying having my kids at home. I’m learning a lot.
This week, for example, I learnt that Joe Wicks is overwhelmed by the level of interest in his new PE with Joe YouTube channel. He’s gone from a new beginning to appearing in the living rooms of millions of kids around the world in one week. Wow!
An instant global phenomenon, no doubt partly propelled by the interest of many school teachers who’ve been enjoying his virtual company as much as the kids.
Joe is a pinup model example of adaptation to life in pandemic times, but it has not been so exciting for everyone.
Let’s come back to Joe in a bit, but first let’s take a look at some other interpretations of what’s going on.
Shakedown
It’s interesting to note who is most fearful about the economic implications of the pandemic. It strengthens my suspicion that we’ll see changes in social order this year.
An argument is going around that COVID-19 is no more serious than the flu. The flu kills thousands each year, and we’ve never been very worried about it. Therefore, since we never stop the economy for flu, we shouldn’t stop it for COVID-19. In short, lockdowns are madness, and we should end them.
What kind of people are making this argument? The simplistic answer is that they’re rich people, who can afford excellent healthcare, and who want the working class back at work. Reality is a little more subtle.
Many people, not necessarily wealthy, sit somewhere in the middle of a complex financial web. Finance formalises and records obligations amongst people. It’s sufficiently sophisticated that huge numbers of people can survive within the web, quite distant from the satisfaction of basic needs. People who are savvy enough to follow the threads are often well informed about how the web works. They’re so well informed, that they understand the longer term implications of what’s going on: their position in the network of mutual obligations we call society is at risk of being disturbed.
They understand that if we’re to weather this storm, we may have to bunker down for a couple of months, and to sustain ourselves for that time, we may have to drawn down financial resources that some had been hoping to use for themselves. And in order to start doing that, we’ll have to ask and answer some fairly deep questions about distribution of wealth. I sense that some people are uncomfortable with these questions being asked.
Even lockdowns of a few months are sufficient to plant seeds of change. As soon as the lockdown exhausts anybody’s savings, they’ll be forced to look for new ways of making a living. Few people have saved enough to bridge a two month gap in work. That implies we’ll see a substantial number of people re-inventing themselves. Once they’ve done so, why would they bother going back to where they were in the web?
The new winners
Some people will do well out of the re-weaving. Many will deserve their newfound success. What kind of people?
Hundreds of thousands of people, out of necessity, are scrambling to take their work online. Many, like Joe, are gobsmacked at how successful this has been for them. They’re beneficiaries of the winner takes all phenomenon.
When the world’s best practitioner in a field is available to everybody, that practitioner is handsomely rewarded. People who excel at their craft will be the winners. Even somebody who is slightly better than the next best will be preferred, if they’re both equally available.
This dynamic is not new. In music, for example, the best performer (relative, of course, to your personal taste) has been available globally through recordings. Even in live performance, a single entertainer has been able to capture a whole market through huge shows in stadiums. Where otherwise a city would need thousands of pub rock gigs to keep the punters happy, a stadium show can entertain the entire market in one go.
Winner takes all applies in an obvious way to sport, too: the best tennis player, racing car driver, or swimmer, even if they’re consistently just a whisker better, reaps outsized rewards.Independent of the fear that robots will take our jobs, the winner takes all dynamic has been stalking the working world for years. Now it may take its chance to pounce.
The ground is fertile for stories like Joe Wicks’ to emerge in fields as diverse as industrial design, software, logistics, medical consulting, dance teaching. A context has been created pushing both consumers and producers online, and into a global marketplace.
People have honed their skills over years or decades in front of small groups of students or clients or audience, and grasp now for the first time that they can serve a wider group. When their skill, or some other attractive characteristic, translates through a webcam, or a website, word spreads fast. As word spreads, rewards appear.
Some who were in despair a week ago, are being set up for success beyond their wildest dreams.
The rest of us
Joe Wicks doesn’t stand on his own, though. No doubt he’s worked hard and been focussed. But he’s also the beneficiary of the vast network that is the education system in the anglosphere. He’s the beneficiary of a readymade audience of school kids and school teachers, pre-aligned to need PE once a day. He’s part of a system.
This is an important pattern, that we’ll see more and more, and which we should understand. Frequently, a single person or a single business will appear as the figurehead of some success, or some breakthrough. With certainty, though, they’re just a convenient way to label something that has been produced by a system.
A team of researchers at the Peter Doherty was the first to replicate the SARS-CoV2 virus in the lab. They worked incredibly hard, but also in collaboration with researchers around the world. SpaceX was the first successful proponent of re-usable rockets, but is also the beneficiary of a century of global experimentation in rocketeering.
It’s now possible to share the best solution to a problem worldwide at almost no cost. A method for replicating a virus can be distributed and used in labs around the world with virtually no delay. A PE teacher who has great rapport with kids can keep millions of them engaged at once.
It’s in our interests to create systems that can find and share the very best solutions. In doing so, it’s important to consider how we reward the system producing the solutions. A system in which thousands of people make a contribution, but only the figurehead reaps the rewards is not sustainable. It won’t efficiently motivate all the component parts. Finding a solution is a reward in itself, but every searcher needs to be secure in the knowledge that they’ll be taken care of. If not, they’ll leave the search and get back to worrying about looking out for themselves. That hurts the search. It reduces the probability that we’ll find the best solutions.
We ought to embrace winner takes all, and we ought to embrace it with open eyes. We need to understand that producing a winner is a communal activity. All of us need to share more equitably the risks and rewards. Not evenly. But more optimally than what we’re doing.
I’m not sure what the model should look like - just that we should give it some thought. One interesting possibility, neatly demonstrated by Joe Wicks, is that we share our work at low or no cost. This idea, pioneered in some sense by open source software, is gaining traction. People collaborate to produce something, and that something is then shared freely or very cheaply with all who can use it. A design for something to be 3D printed. A piece of software. A course in accounting that’s been fine-tuned over years of classroom teaching. A new best practice in microbiological research.
Research, here, I consider to be simply search: any search for a better way of doing something, whether it be teaching PE, or launching satellites into orbit.
What we need now, I think, is a model for rewarding all the participants. We have a system that in principle can share the fruits of a research outcome with the world, but will still need a system that can support with a living wage all the work that goes into producing that outcome. And all the work that goes into educating, over a lifetime, the people who become researchers. And all the people who support the researchers, by providing childcare, energy to keep the lights on and so on, so the research can take place.
As the economy takes off like a rocket in a few months time, we should all hope that it will be an economy that’s better at producing real winners.