Historically, the only three non-physical things that people will pay for are time, knowledge, and experience. Everything else can be broken down into one or more of those. For example, your average person working at the local Burger Shack or Wendell’s Widgets factory is trading his time (in the form of unskilled labor) for money. He’s an easily-replaced cog in the wheel of commerce; he can’t charge much for his work, because there are almost always other people willing to do it for less.

(As an aside: that’s the primary reason for the way such jobs are designed. Such employers don’t want skilled labor that could then charge more, they want interchangeable warm bodies to do the simple — to a human — tasks that can’t cost-effectively be automated.)

(Another aside: unions were created to address this lack of individual power on the part of unskilled or low-skilled factory workers. They were a great idea to curb the worst abuses of employers in the Industrial Age, but the idea had gotten less and less relevant in the last forty or fifty years, until the recent Wisconsin teachers union was very publicly attacked by their governor. When unions get too much power, their primary purpose seems to be to blackmail employers into paying skilled-labor money to often patently unskilled people. But when they get too little, or are abolished or outlawed, you’re back to the worst excesses of the Industrial Age. There is a happy medium here, folks.)

Raw knowledge is also cheap these days. Since the explosion in popularity of the Internet in the mid-nineties, the cost of obtaining general knowledge on essentially any subject has dropped to near zero. It’s pretty much just the time that it takes a person to learn it now. I’ve picked up plenty of useful knowledge from the ‘net that would have been very expensive (in both time and money) to track down pre-Internet. Assuming it was even available then; a lot of stuff wasn’t worth the time and effort for someone to write a book about, or wasn’t of enough general interest, so it was just passed from mentor to student and was completely unavailable to anyone without access to such a mentor.

At one time, you could make a good living solely by raw knowledge. For example, merely by knowing where things were in a big city with lots of foreign visitors, you could set yourself up as a guide and earn a decent wage for life. But because it is so easy for anyone to obtain now, very few people can get by solely on their raw knowledge anymore.

But experience (and its more developed form, expertise) is a different beast entirely. It can only be obtained by spending time, effort, and other personal resources on a subject. It can’t be passed around like raw knowledge; once a person earns it, it can’t be bought, taxed away, stolen, or passed on to his heirs. And if it’s in a subject that there’s some demand for, that person can charge a great deal for exercising it. Lawyers and doctors are somewhat artificial examples of this, because they have to be licensed in order to practice in their fields, but there are a growing number of other fields where it also applies. Simply knowing the secrets of karate masters, software developers, or stage magicians, for example, won’t make you a karate master, software developer, or stage magician.

If you’re looking for a new field to get into, it would behoove you to tackle something that requires experience as well as knowledge — the more, the better. Otherwise the next casualty in the Information Revolution might be you.