their availability for work can be such that it 's a few hours today maybe i can work tomorrow but i don 't know if and when yet
and it 's extraordinarily difficult for these people to find the work that they so often need very badly
which is a tragedy because there are employers who can use pools of very flexible local people booked completely ad hoc around when that person wants to work
imagine that you run a cafe it 's mid morning the place is filling up you 're going to have a busy lunchtime rush
if you could get two extra workers for ninety minutes to start in an hour 's time you 'd do it but they 'd have to be reliable inducted in how your cafe works they 'd have to be available at very competitive rates they 'd have to be bookable in about the next minute
in reality no recruitment agency wants to handle that sort of business so you are going to muddle by understaffed
at this level of the labor market what you need is a marketplace for spare hours they do exist here 's how they work
so in this example a distribution company has said we 've got a rush order that we 've got to get out of the warehouse tomorrow morning show us everyone who 's available it 's found thirty one workers everybody on this screen is genuinelyavailable at those specific hours tomorrow they 're all contactable in time for this booking
they 've all defined the terms on which they will accept bookings and this booking is within all the parameters for each individual and they would all be legally compliant by doing this booking of course they 're all trained to work in warehouses
you can select as many of them as you want they 're from multiple agencies it 's calculated the charge rate for each person for this specific booking and it 's monitoring their reliability the people on the top row are the provenly reliable ones they 're likely to be more expensive
let 's make it personal imagine that a young woman base of the economic pyramid very little prospect of getting a job
what economic activity could she theoretically engage in well she might be willing to work odd hours in a call center in a reception area in a mail room she may be interested in providing local services to her community babysitting local deliveries pet care
she may have possessions that she would like to trade at times she doesn 't need them so she might have a sofa bed in her front room that she would like to let out she might have a bike a video games console she only uses occasionally
and you 're probably thinking because you 're all very web aware yes and we 're in the era of collaborative consumption so she can go online and do all this she can go to airbnb to list her sofa bed she can go to taskrabbit com and say i want to do local deliveries and so on
but i believe we can go a step further and the key to that is a philosophy that we call modern markets for all
markets have changed beyond recognition in the last twenty years
but only for organizations at the top of the economy
if you 're a wall street trader you now take it for granted that you sell your financial assets in a system of markets that identifies the most profitable opportunities for you in real time executes on that in microseconds within the boundaries you 've set
it analyzes supply and demand and pricing and tells you where your next wave of opportunities are coming from it manages counterparty risk in incredibly sophisticated ways it 's all extremely low overhead
what have we gained at the bottom of the economy in terms of markets in the last twenty years
basically classified adverts with a search facility
so why do we have this disparity between these incredibly sophisticated markets at the top of the economy that are increasingly sucking more and more activity and resource out of the main economy into this rarefied level of trading
and what the rest of us have a modern market is more than a website it 's a web of interoperable marketplaces back office mechanisms regulatory regimes settlement mechanisms liquidity sources and so on
and when a wall street trader comes into work in the morning she does not write a listing for every financial derivative she wants to sell today and then post that listing on multiple websites and wait for potential buyers to get in touch and start negotiating the terms on which she might trade
in the early days of this modern markets technology the financial institutions worked out how they could leverage their buying power their back office processes their relationships their networks to shape these new markets that would create all this new activity
they asked governments for supporting regulatory regimes and in a lot of cases they got it
but throughout the economy there are facilities that could likewise leverage a new generation of markets for the benefit of all of us
and those facilities i 'm talking about things like the mechanisms that prove our identity the licensing authorities that know what each of us is allowed to do legally at any given time the processes by which we resolve disputes through official channels
these mechanisms these facilities are not in the gift of craigslist or gumtree or yahoo they 're controlled by the state
and the policymakers who sit on top of them
are i suggest simply not thinking about how those facilities could be used to underpin a whole new era of markets like everyone else
those policymakers are taking it for granted that modern markets are the preserve of organizations powerful enough to create them for themselves
suppose we stopped taking that for granted
suppose tomorrow morning the prime minister of britain or the president of the u s or the leader of any other developed nation
and i think i can see a few eyes rolling politicians in a big complex sophisticated i t project oh that 's going to be a disasterwaiting to happen
not necessarily there is a precedent for technology enabled service that has been initiated by politicians in multiple countries and has been hugely successful
national lotteries let 's take britain as an example our government didn 't design the national lottery it didn 't fund the national lottery it doesn 't operate the national lottery it simply passed the national lottery act and this is what followed
this act defines what a national lottery will look like it specifies certain benefits that the state can uniquely bestow on the operators and it puts some obligations on those operators in terms of spreading gambling activity to the masses this was an unqualified success
but let 's suppose that our aim is to bring new economic activity to the base of the pyramid could we use the same model i believe we could
so imagine that policymakers outlined a facility let 's call it national e markets nems for short think of it as a regulated public utility so it 's on a par with the water supply or the road network
and it 's a series of markets for low level trade that can be fulfilled by a person or a small company
and government has certain benefits it can uniquely bestow on these markets it 's about public spending going through these markets to buy public services at the local level it 's about interfacing these markets direct into the highest official channels in the land
it 's about enshrining government 's role as a publicist for these markets it 's about deregulating some sectors so that local people can enter them so taxi journeys might be one example
and there are certain obligations that should go with those benefits to be placed on the operators and the key one is of course that the operators pay for everything including all the interfacing into the public sector
so imagine that the operators make their return by building a percentage markup into each transaction
imagine that there 's a concession period defined of maybe fifteen years in which they can take all these benefits and run with them and imagine that the consortia who bid to run it are told whoever comes in at the lowest percentage markup on each transaction to fund the whole thing will get the deal
but it could be very different
because having access to those state backed facilities could incentivize this consortium to seriouslyinvest in the service because they would have to get a lot of these small transactions going to start making their return
so we 're talking about sectors like home hair care the hire of toys farm work hire of clothes even meals delivered to your door services for tourists home care
this would be a world of very small trades but very well informed because national e markets will deliver data
so this is a local person
potentially deciding whether to enter the babysitting market and they might be aware that they would have to fund vetting and training if they wanted to go into that market they 'd have to do assessment interviews with local parents who wanted a pool of babysitters is it worth their while should they be looking at other sectors should they be moving to another part of the country where there 's a shortage of babysitters
this kind of data can become routine and this data can be used by investors so if there 's a problem with a shortage of babysitters in some parts of the country and the problem is nobody can afford the vetting and training
but it 's very informed safe convenient low overhead and immediate some rough research suggests this could unlock around one hundred million pounds worth a day of new economic activity in a country the size of the u k does that sound improbable to you
that 's what a lot of people said about turbo trading in financial exchanges twenty years ago
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