The world of freelance experts

In the age when employment tenures have lost their relevance, and even full-time employment is no longer an aspiration for many, a significant proportion of the global elite workforce are effectively free-lancers. They have had an important and hardly noticed role in shaping the global agenda and trends in many areas. 

They provide consultancy, advisory, advocacy, documentation, evaluation, and other services across several areas. They juggle multiple very well-paid individual consultancy and advisory assignments, and are part of Committees and Panels. 

They are part of niche universes, elite clubs. Each such universe consists of the primary actors (the businesses or agencies concerned), their support services (the consultants, advisors, etc), and the disseminators or influencers. Each of these worlds are largely globalised and its participants are right to consider themselves global citizens to this extent. Global clubs consisting of global citizens! 

There are numerous such universes of elites, spanning the worlds of the various international development sectors, private capital finance, public private partnerships, infrastructure financing, environment, gender, fintech, impact investing, and so on. The inhabitants of these global clubs set the agenda and influence governments, as required, to frame the rules of the game. It is also a feature that most of the end-users or clients or customers of these worlds are rarely represented in these elite worlds.

So the poor people (and their countries) who are the targets of development, the retail investors and borrowers who depend on the world of finance, the various governments who bid out infrastructure projects, the poor people for whom the environmentalists and gender activists claim to work, are rarely heard and even rarely represented in the conferences and workshops, often at exotic locations, where the decisions that impact them get taken. The supreme irony of the disenfranchisement, most often in the name of empowerment and development, cannot be lost. 

There are a few features of the free-lance service providers of this universe. They are all highly educated, often coming from a small network of universities and colleges, and very articulate. They are all globally mobile, having lived and worked across the world, and like to travel and experience diversity, even if only at a superficial level. They consider themselves global cosmopolitans. Most such, but not all, clubs are remarkably gender equal or neutral. In terms of values, they are mostly liberal and espouse (with what depth is a matter of debate) progressive causes like gender equality, environmental conservation, animal rights etc. It's surprisingly rare to find such global clubs as a whole being largely conservative.

The free-lancing nature of their work in turn means these elites need to be constantly in search of opportunities and also creating networks that appreciate their value proposition. Also, despite all talk of global citizenhood, the worlds they operate are typically niche and limited. As Dani Rodrik has written, virtue signalling on global citizenhood comes with national shirking. More importantly, it's a world where members are largely familiar with each other. Social media and LinkedIn helps. This also means that they are subject to the rules of repeat games.

As Larry Summers brilliantly described to Yanis Varoufakis, they have to remain 'insiders' or be subject to the ostracism threat. So, notwithstanding professions of liberalism and diversity, individual behaviours broadly conform to the norm. This deep underlying dynamic also lends a level of adhesion to the elite collective in each of the clubs. This is true of each of the different worlds mentioned earlier.

This is not to say there is no discordance. In fact discordance exists and is even celebrated in high-profile enough manners, but strictly within implicitly understood boundaries. Most often the discordance is led by some super-elite opinion leader who, for a variety of possible reasons, has come to assume significant influence. They have their small factions with followers within the club. But even these leaders understand the boundaries and rules of the game and largely abide by them. 

The handful who occasionally fall out, get slowly marginalised. They are not invited to those conferences or meetings of important people, or not offered consultancies and advisory services, or not made part of Committees and panels. These mechanisms that have been evolved by these clubs are powerful enough to keep discipline and achieve conformity.

In simple terms, while freelancing may be empowering to people individually, the aggregate impact of the trend may not be so benign. Someone should write a book that peers inside this labour market.

Alongside consultants and managers, freelancers form the troika of opinion makers, ideologues, and even enforcers for those plutocrats who hold the purse strings in the world economy today.

There are the rich plutocrats (the global 0.05%) who own the economy and sets the rules of the game. They are serviced by an executive level managerial elites. The credibility for the edifice constructed by both of them is provided by the various kinds of opinion shapers and ideologues - academics, consultants, media commentators, global cosmopolitans etc. The politicians merely pretend to be in charge of the political system whose rules are laid down by the plutocrats. Dismal. Isn't it? The endurance of this whole thing is comparable to the never-deflating bubble that equity markets today appear to be. Both will pop.