Woodburn described the Hadzabe as having an “immediate return economy.” He contrasted this with the “delayed return economies” of industrial and farming societies. In delayed-return economies, he noted that labor effort is almost always focused primarily on meeting future rewards, and this was what differentiated groups like the Ju/’hoansi and the BaMbuti not only from farming and industrialized societies, but also from the large-scale complex hunter-gatherer societies like those living alongside the salmon-rich waters of the Pacific Northwest coast of America.

The fact that the Roman economy was sustained by what were, from the point of view of most citizens, intelligent working machines posed some similar economic challenges to those posed by large-scale automation. One of these was wealth inequality.

Those with lots of capital and lots of slaves were able to amass wealth many orders of magnitude larger than poorer Roman citizens, who had to work for a living in a labor marketplace in which competent slaves would always be the economic choice. It also made it difficult for small-scale farmers to compete with larger ones. As a result, many sold their farms to large landowners and set off to the city in the hope of making a living there. Indeed, by some calculations, during the final century of the Roman Empire, three families “may have been the richest private landowners of all time.

For an economist who taught that profit could be sustained only as a result of competitive advantage, this diversification raised a simple question. And some businessmen on the board, accustomed to a world in which profit is earned only by meeting customer needs, encountered the same difficulty.

Online retailing and the personal computer revolution would have happened even if Bezos,

Gates and Jobs had never been born. These developments occurred around the end of the twentieth century because all the necessary pieces of collective knowledge and collective intelligence were then developed. These individuals and their associates pieced together relevant capabilities. When innovative firms succeed, as Amazon, Microsoft and Apple did but most new firms do not, it is because of the distinctive character of the capabilities of their organisation and the combinations they put together.