Jeremy Rifkin: The Zero Marginal Cost Society
by Jeffrey Barg
October 14, 2014
Picture yourself sitting in your home 20 years from now. Your television is powered by the solar panel on your roof. You’re hungry, so you decide to go to the store. You step inside your 3D-printed car, which runs not on gasoline, but on its own electrical energy, which is constantly renewed throughout the drive. You sit in the passenger seat playing on your smartphone, because the car is doing the driving for you.
This isn’t something out of a science fiction novel. This is just a normal day in the world that Jeremy Rifkin sees materializing in the near future. Mr. Rifkin, President of the Foundation on Economic Trends and senior lecturer at the Wharton School’s Executive Education Program at the University of Pennsylvania, spoke on this idealized future at the 15th Annual World Knowledge Forum in Seoul, South Korea,
“We are now moving toward a third Industrial Revolution,” said Mr. Rifkin. “We can see this in our forms of communication, energy, and transport.”
Mr. Rifkin characterized the first industrial revolution by the telegraph, coal energy, and trains. The second was characterized by the telephone, oil, and the automobile. “What we see now is a convergence of communication, energy, and transport,” he said. “It’s three internets in one system, what we call the Internet of Things.”
This super connectivity “connects everything with everyone across the planet.” Mr. Rifkin went on to elaborate this connection, illustrating that solar energy can charge the electric car, which will be driverless, and be guided by GPS, which will be automated and connected through the Internet of Things.
The economy is moving toward what he branded a Zero Marginal Cost structure, where goods are shared rather than owned, and produced for next to nothing. “It started with Napster in 2000,” said Mr. Rifkin. “Now we have YouTube, open online courses. All produced for near-zero marginal costs.”
All of this data sharing has occurred on what Mr. Rifkin labeled “the collaborative commons.” While the prevalent economic system of the past century has been a capitalist exchange economy, he argues that a new system is developing as a result of a massive exchange of data, ideas, and goods.
The sharing economy was further illustrated with the example of a toy website, where toys are loaned for the duration of childhood, but then are returned and shared again.
“We are beginning to glimpse the outline of the sharing economy on the collaborative commons,” he said. Mr. Rifkin surmised that the future economy will move toward a hybrid of the exchange economy and the sharing one.
Climate change, according to Mr. Rifkin, is the single biggest issue facing our society, and one that he believes can also be improved by moving towards a Zero Marginal Cost structure. He did offer hope for change, saying, “Zero marginal cost is the single biggest metric for reducing our ecological footprint.”
Through minimizing the use of Earth’s resources and reducing our own costs, we can build towards “the democratization of economic life,” said Mr. Rifkin. Therein lies the singular best reason to change to more renewable, environmentally-friendly resources and reduce personal production costs.
Mr. Rifkin put it simply: “The Sun does not send a bill.”