What's the Future of Work?

Chapter 10. The Game of Business: It’s Time to Rewrite the Rules

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Modern economics likes to think of itself as a science, and too often, its practitioners have attempted to uncover its “laws,” as if they were modern Isaac Newtons uncovering the laws of motion. But many of the laws of economics are far more like the rules of a game than like the laws of nature. Some of the rules represent what appear to be fundamental constraints—the availability of resources, say, or the absorptive capacity of the environment, or even the behavioral patterns of human nature—while others are arbitrary and subject to change, such as tax policy, government entitlements, and minimum wage requirements.

An economy has untold possible outcomes. Its complexity comes both from the near-infinite variety that can come from permutations of simple rules, and from the fact that billions of humans are playing the game simultaneously, each affecting the outcomes for each other. Many of the rules are written down nowhere, controlled by no one, and constantly evolving. Individuals, businesses, and governments are all players, and none of them can know the full consequences of their decisions.

Even the simplest and most definitive of the “rules” of an economy are far more complex to apply than they appear on paper. As an Internet wag noted many years ago, “The difference between theory and ...