You are a bundle of traits (through nature, nurture and their interaction). Empiricists can measure your muscle, math problem solving ability and your personality traits. The competitive labor market values each of these traits and offers you a payoff ($) for each of them (this function does not have to be linear). Over time, this payoff function changes. The tractor meant that farming required less muscle. The computer compensated for your inability to match von Neumann's output. So, moving forward --- our comparative advantage is our personality. Those who are "people persons" might have an advantage in the new economy. This piece of optimism is discussed in the NY Times today and in David Deming's recent NBER Paper. A few thoughts about the "friendly" economy.1. Suppose that tasks are becoming more ambiguous. Let me explain by counter-example. Producing a pizza isn't ambiguous. There is a clear recipe and if you follow the steps --- a pizza emerges. But, suppose that a team has an ambiguous task such as "improving Microsoft Window's next version". If there are cranky people in this team, chaos may emerge as the team starts falling apart when inevitable bad times occur in the uneven process of designing a "new thing". In such a setting, social skills may play a key role here of encouraging effort. Empathy may play a key role here to diffuse yelling and screaming and keeping the group focused on the possibility that a happy ending may ensue.2. Permutations --- Paul Romer discusses the permutations of combining different ideas but a necessary condition for these interactions to occur is for people to feel comfortable and eager to share these ideas with each other. Personality and social skills "reduce the price" of interacting with others. If you are a cheerful person who doesn't shoot down all ideas brought to you then more people will bring you ideas and the permutations and possibilities increase. I realize that if you are a cheerful moron then your cheer is unlikely to create magic.3. Tit for Tat games. In Matt Rabin's theory of fairness work -- kindness is reciprocated. In such settings such social capital facilitates interacting with more people.4. Don't forget Gaspar and Glaeser's key paper. They argue that the Information technology is a complement of face to face interaction. Knowing that if you make a new friend (from face to face interaction) that you can permanently find them again through text messaging and the Internet email --- encourages you to make more friends and more connections. This rising network of connections not only helps in finding jobs (think Linkedin) but also in exhausting the permutations of ideas.G and G's abstract"Will improvements in information technology eliminate face-to- face interactions and make cities obsolete? In this paper, we present a model where individuals make contacts and choose whether to use electronic or face-to-face meetings in their interactions. Cities are modeled as a means of reducing the fixed travel costs involved in face-to-face interactions. When telecommunications technology improves, there are two opposing effects on cities and face-to-face interactions: some relationships that used to be face-to-face will be done electronically (an intuitive substitution effect), and some individuals will choose to make more contacts, many of which result in face-to-face interactions. Our empirical work suggests that telecommunications may be a complement, or at least not a strong substitute for cities and face-to-face interactions. We also present simple models of learning in person, from a written source, or over the phone, and find that interactive communication dominates other forms of learning when ideas are complicated."