Technology continues to eliminate economic inefficiencies

Since technology has become part of the society it has managed to eliminate inefficiencies in the society. This in turn allowed savings of capital through the elimination of inefficiencies. These savings are of course redirected towards other, hopefully and potentially more value add activities. The most recent examples are outsourcing of jobs to India which allowed companies and individuals to obtain significant savings. As such those resources were devoted toward activities such as R&D (corporate) and various spending(consumers). In the early days of the last century it was the invention of the assembly line that allowed many workers to leave the hazardous manufacturing jobs. They in turn could focus on more value add activities such as design of cheaper and more durable products. Surely, inventions such as post-it, plastic wrap, microwave etc. all came because fewer people were needed on the assembly lines. In the internet age the impacts are much more wide spread. One of very interesting examples is the land of professional photography or stock photo business to be specific. Prior to the internet "coming to this space," it was a fairly limited business in that the relatively few agents for the photographers had high standards, were very selective etc. etc. There were of course second tier agents, but overall it was a "tribal" business that was not really well known to the wide world. Just like in any industry, excellent product is accompanied by lower quality product etc. etc. Because of the limited exposure this industry has seen in the society, many people whose products were of medium quality were participating in the marketplace that would reward them disproportionately high capital for the quality of delivered work. Since not so distant past, the digital camera ownership has been spreading wider and wider. In addition the quality of the photos coming form the digital cameras is going up and up. Some of it is due to people trying to take better photos, some of it is due to the camera makers trying to compensate for the lack of photo taking skills. This can be well observed by Nikon, Canon, Sony and others pushing professional level capabilities to consumer level cameras. All of this activity spurs a huge amount of quality photographs being available. Even a small percentage of 100M pictures taken a year is a large number of photographs that are quality enough to be considered for stock, especially when considered to mid level stuff. Put this together with microstock sites and there is bound to be inefficiency eliminated from the market. Those individuals who have been relying on their income from producing stock photos yet producing mediocre quality are now in competition with everyone out there who took a photo of one thing or another and will sell it for pennies. This is done not because of desire to make a fortune but for desire to get a recognition of how cool their photographs are. Unfortunately, this reality is causing some people a lot of "indigestion." Some of which is actually resulting in personal attacks on those individuals. This shows not only how effective the technology is at eliminating inefficiencies in the market place, but also shows the level of faith individuals have in their skills as well as the deep down held confirmation that the inefficiency did exist and as such was eliminated. A great example of this is a blog post by John Harrington on his blog. It is really rare to see this type cause and effect in real life. We often read things like this in the press, but to actually see it is of great value and significance as the $$$ in the society are redistributed.