Code Economy : A Forty-Thousand Year History

Code is the "how" of human productive activity. The creation, implementation, and refinement of code have been the infrastructure of human progress from Neolithic simplicity to modern complexity. In a sweeping narrative that takes readers from the production of Stone Age axes to the invention of chocolate chip cookies, Philip Auerswald argues that the key driver of human history is the advance of code. At each major stage in the advance of code over the span of centuries, shifts in the structure of society have challenged human beings to reinvent not only how we work, but who we are. We are at one of those stages now. Auerswald offers an indispensible guide to the future, based on a narrative stretching forty-thousand years into the past.

The code economy has clearly not developed in a vacuum. Invention, innovation, and the pursuit of happiness have characterized human activities for centuries. What is changing is how societies and individuals radically value endeavors in life differently from even a decade ago, most notably away from industries organized as "command and control" systems. Philip Auerswald investigates how economists themselves have been hard pressed to gauge new economic indices of satisfaction that go beyond traditional measures. He explores how the code or "shared" economy reaches into domains such as health, where greater longevity, the popularization of medical knowledge, and the emphases on preventive care and wellness will complement the delivery of medical services. Further, living in the code economy will prompt people to orient their children's futures to more self-reliant pursuits and seek investments that truly serve them and not the institutions that have traditionally dominated the financial and economic worlds.