Productivity comes unexpectedly
Alex Tabarrok, at Marginal Revolution, describes how new communications tools are changing service procedures at some McDonalds restaurants. The economic meaning of space, and the need to co-locate economic activities in space, is changing radically: "Who would have guessed?"
The economist Ronald Coase argued that business firms evolve because it's often cheaper to coordinate the work effort of different people administratively, rather than through markets and prices. Once it was less expensive for drive-thru order takers in fast food restaurants to yell the orders to the cooks; now it's apparently sometimes cheaper to transmit the orders hundreds of miles to a call-in center which then sends the orders to the cooks. The order takers and cooks don't even have to work for the same firm.
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