Call it the post-employee economy: The digital revolution is creating billions of dollars of wealth in a second world without people



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When the disappointing jobs numbers were reported last week (employers added 120,000 jobs in March, about half the number reported in the two previous months), analysts tripped over themselves looking for an explanation. Of course, jobs numbers are bound to vary, but in my view the long-term trend calls for more jobs to disappear, and the reason is clear as day: the exploding Second Economy.

The Second Economy -- a term the economist Brian Arthur uses to describe the computer-intensive portion of the economy -- is, quite simply, the virtual economy. One of its main byproducts is the replacement of low-productivity workers with computers. It's growing by leaps and bounds, brimming with optimistic entrepreneurs, and spawning a new generation of billionaires. In fact, the booming Second Economy will probably drive much of the economic growth in the coming decades.

Unfortunately, the Second Economy will not create many jobs.

Arthur's article in the McKinsey Quarterly, titled "The Second Economy," does a wonderful job of explaining it. His Second Economy is made up of large swaths of corporate America, especially the service areas that are being replaced by transactions over the network where -- in many cases -- computers talk only with other computers. Arthur uses the airline check-in process to illustrate the point:

Twenty years ago, if you went into an airport you would walk up to a counter and present paper tickets to a human being. That person would register you on a computer, notify the flight you'd arrived, and check your luggage in. All this was done by humans. Today, you walk into an airport and look for a machine. You put in a frequent-flier card or credit card, and it takes just three or four seconds to get back a boarding pass, receipt, and luggage tag. What interests me is what happens in those three or four seconds. The moment the card goes in, you are starting a huge conversation conducted entirely among machines. Once your name is recognized, computers are checking your flight status with the airlines, your past travel history, your name with the TSA (and possibly also with the National Security Agency). They are checking your seat choice, your frequent-flier status, and your access to lounges.

Nobody knows how big the Second Economy is, and there is no rigorous way of defining it. But in estimating it, I would use fairly expansive parameters for what to include. For example, I would count Amazon's total sales. In the case of Walmart, I would include all of the online sales plus the value added when computers talk to other computers to manage the supply chain, payables, and receivables and inventory. In the case of the airline industry, I would count not only the check-in process Arthur describes but things like the online reservation and ticketing process and the value added by automated systems in running airline operations.