The deuxième economy

The thing to remember about the so-called "postindustrial" economy is that it isn't just post-industry, it is actually post-human—and I don't mean that in the positive sense that the "Transhuamanists" use the term, i.e., for super-intelligence and 2001-style Star Children. Rather, I mean that the new economy is actually post-people. It doesn’t like people, or, really, need them.

Increasingly, it doesn't want them as workers. Labor is ever more performed by machines, or by contractors in China. And, increasingly, it doesn't want them as customers. More and more, large businesses do business with other businesses—B2B, as it's called.

In a very real sense, then, the traditional drivers of the economy, the great corporations, have ascended into a higher order of existence, leaving us behind. The most pressing issue for the nation -- and, indeed, for the whole of the West -- is what to do about that.

My suspicion is that we shall create a second level of economic activity, one that is "below" that of the big corporations. This other, second level — I call it "la deuxième" in an attempt to remove the nuance of lesser importance—will be what provides employment, services, health care, education, products, and just about everything else to those of us who are not in the favored 1% of the population that controls so much of the world's wealth.

And what will the deuxième be like? I'm guessing it will be a welter of smaller economic entities, limited in scope, local in effect, and coming in a thousand different flavors of ownership—partnerships, family businesses, sole proprietorships, co-operatives, non-profits, communes, corporations of the sort that the British call "Community Service Corporations" and Americans call "Low-profit Limited Liability Corporations," and many others as well.

And, yes, as you've already guessed, there is nothing radical in this proposal. It is precisely what people have done whenever large businesses found them to be unprofitable. It was to Co-ops that farmers turned in the Middle West during the Gilded Age. It was to Credit Unions and Savings and Loans (before S&Ls were demolished during the Reagan Years) that ordinary men and women went for mortgages and home loans.

Indeed, in a strange way, it may be that the deuxième economy will be the most conservative of all economic developments. It is a return to the small-scale enterprise of a hundred years ago.

On China

Wonders of Wall Street

Hi, everyone,

Well, I'm still not posting here as often as I'd hoped. And I still haven't completed my last entry on the New Mexico series from the summer.

But, like I said before, things are complicated. I'm working on four different book projects, teaching three classes, doing some freelance, and, occasionally, just as an exercise in futility, looking for additional jobs.

Which brings me to my topic for the evening. I've been fascinated by the way that the financial establishment has responded to the economic meltdown…which, by the way, was almost entirely its fault. The bankers and gurus and Wall Street wonders all plunged us into hell, and we've had to pull them …and us… out of the abyss with tons of money and lots of effort.

And, by the way, to keep the system running, all us normal people had to take major hits…which is why so many of us are out of work, and many more of us are under-employed, and we none of us are really happy about it.

The kinky thing? Go talk to some of the people who aren't working, and you'll probably find they blame themselves. God damnit, we say, if only we'd been smarter or worked harder or whatever, then we'd still have a pay check.

Which, of course, is absurb…because we didn't have anything to do with the crisis.

But, the people who did get us into this mess? The bankers and gurus and Wall Street wonders? The people who put us on the unemployment lines and destroyed a lot of lives and careers? The people who were at fault?

How do they feel about it?

Why they're just happy as a clam, thanks, and they're taking big money bonuses at tax payer expense and "economizing" by going to St. Tropez for only six weeks this year.

So…

To help me deal with my feelings regarding these people, I have made a little clay figure to represent them. See it?

Now, here's my response to their behavior.

SQUISH!

There we go. I feel much better.

Don't you?

Onward and upward.


Copyright © 2010 Michael Jay Tucker