Specialisation – is it making stuff better and cheaper but ruining our quality of life?

Even at school I learned that one of the things that set Man apart from other creatures was the division of labour. We don’t all have the same talents, I am a better engineer than horticulturalist or painter, whereas others probably paint better than design electronics or software. So it make sense I stick to the engineering and others to the painting, growing food etc.

That all works really well up to a point. Can it go too far? When I was sat school I believe that a town’s football team was drawn mainly from kids in the county. I’m not totally sure of that since I was never that into football, but let’s run with it.  These were trained up, and as a result there was a wide variety of football clubs playing at various levels.

Now they are basically businesses rather than football clubs – the pool of footballers is global, and more and more money chases fewer and fewer players. Obviously this optimises the quality of the football at the top  – it’s probably miles better than it was decades ago. However, it also makes it more inaccessible and remote – there’s probably a much lower chance of the football-mad kid across the road getting a chance to make a living wage playing football. That has been swapped for a very remote chance of him getting richer than Croesus playing football if he happens to be that exceptional.

That seems to be the general problem with our economic system – it is trending towards a winner-takes-all world, one of outrageous competition and stupendous rewards, or nothing, rather than one where there is a range of opportunities where most people can find a living that matches their aptitudes.

This winner-takes all seems to apply across talent ranges and even geography. In more self-sufficient times Britain was more evenly settled, but the modern economy is concentrating jobs and people more and more into the south-east. In itself that wouldn’t be so bad, but it inflates house prices unreasonably, and stretches transport infrastructure.

It is one of the dreadful ironies that just as information technology gets to the point that remote/home/tele working becomes practical and economic, we comprehensively reject the whole idea and concentrate our industries into specific parts of the UK. The M4 corridor for your engineering companies, Cambridge for advanced IT and software and biotechnology, London for finance and lots of other things.

The corollary of this is that you can either live where you can get a job but then you can’t afford to buy a house, or you can live where you could buy a house but there aren’t any jobs there, so you have to spend a fortune commuting. That will start to go up as oil prices increase, and it’s not going to a good place at all.

Globalisation has taken this pathology to a whole new level, as President Obama called out in his State of the Union address recently.

At some point, hopefully soon, we will have to ask ourselves what is our economy for? Is it to make as much stuff as possible for as little as possible? Or is it to give as many people as possible a good quality of life? I don’t claim to be an expert, but I suspect the economy we will end up with in the former case will look very different from the one to realise the latter. And at the moment we are running down the first path.