Underpaid Genius

Three Scenarios: Umair’s Way, Stowe’s Way, and The Fall Of The West

I think Umair is right about what is wrong, but wrong about what’s right. Here’s his diagnosis:

Umair Haque, Why This Crisis Isn’t Going Anywhere—And What To Do About It

The clanking, wheezing institutions of the industrial age are beset by a titanic flaw. They overcount real benefits, and undercount real costs. What happens to an economy built on such institutions? Simple: instead of authentic value being created anew, wealth is merely transferred from party to party. Hence, corporate profits spiking—while nearly every other party in the economy stagnates. Hence, Wall St growing fat off the public purse, while the government slowly goes into illiquidity.

The real problem is this: nearly every one of our institutions is broken. Think of institutions as software for human accomplishment. So here’s the globe’s challenge for the 21st century: reimagining and redesigning the software for human accomplishment.

Because the truly poisonous effect of industrial age institutions, by undercounting real costs, and overcounting real benefits, isn’t merely that they limit us to creating fake, thin artificial value and ponzi-like hollow “profit” today—but, more perniciously, that they shatter the incentives for great achievement tomorrow. They crumple the human spirit, smash the human psyche, dull the human brain, and toxify the human heart (think I’m kidding? Read this).

An economy built on undercounting costs and overcounting benefits is one where we squander endless amounts of human potential on earth-shattering achievements like disposable razors with yet more blades, even more vulgar deodorant marketing campaigns, and gloopier, fattier “food-like products”. Needless to say, the trajectory of such a system of human organization doesn’t ascend to higher and higher peaks of prosperity—but descends into social fracture, drooling idiocracy, mass stagnation, and decline.

Hence, here’s what a nation who wants to be tomorrow’s powerhouse of prosperity really needs: a 21st century plan to reboot industrial age institutions. To reimagine and rethink the clunking, belching contraptions known as “GDP”, “the corporation”, “investment banks”, “credit ratings”, “jobs”, “government”, and more. To reimagine them as eudaimonic levers—tools that can amplify not the just “industrial output” of nations, but which can ignite and spark the highest human potential; levers that can raise people not merely into lowest-common-denominator faux-designer Jersey Shore material plenitude—but into meaningfully well lived lives. At it’s worthiest, an economy is an engine not merely for “enrichment”—but for human prosperity.

I don’t think we can continue to wait for those embedded in the broken institutions — like the world’s governments — to come to their senses. Instead, I think we need to begin to defect from the economy they have seized, to whatever degree we can.

We need to embrace the slow movement — from food to clothing to housing — and decreases our enslavement to the things we own, and break the link between our identities and the dreams that media and products have manufactured.

Most importantly, we need to start to pull what is managed in global marketplaces out of their control. We need to buy as directly as we can, as locally as we can, for the basics that make up the majority of what we need. We need to jump outside the circles of their control.

Sell your car, buy a bike, demand better mass transit. Move from edge city into urban centers, because suburbia is a trap, a no-mans-land. Find others who care about what you do. Turn off the TV. Make things. Grow some tomatoes. Plant an apple tree. Join the food coop.

At core we need to turn our attention and funds away from what they are selling. They won’t listen to us, but they are tracking the money.

At the same time, I don’t believe that Umair or my recommendations will turn enough people away from the course we are headed on.

Umair won’t get the oligarchs to change their plans: they are happy amassing wealth while everyone else is failing. They don’t even really care if the US defaults: it might make them more powerful.

And I won’t get millions of Americans to opt out of the treadmill that American life is now supposed to be: work like a dog, commute two hours a day, watch entertainment on television, shop for things we don’t need, or pursue mindless ‘fun’ with friends. And do the same thing tomorrow.

I think there are only three general possibilities:

Umair’s Way — The Oligarchs Opt Out - In this scenario, and for whatever reason, the powerful and wealthy come to believe that they need to undertake fundamental change. They invest money into new, sustainable ways of doing things, and fundamental, global, positive change takes place. The economy eases, and a new global prosperity — defined by new metrics — dawns.
Stowe’s Way — The People Step Out - Disenfranchised and increasingly poor, millions of people in America and elsewhere begin to step outside the industrial era lifestyle. Slow becomes the new fast. Urbanization accelerates as more leave edge city sprawl, and where density makes cooperation lower cost. Slow production grows: urban and regional food production increases, while regional production of clothing and other artisanal goods grows. New associations create new sorts of living space, and the suburbs are mined for building materials. People spend less time in ‘jobs’ working only for cash, and more time in ‘projects’ that yield the basics of life.
Today’s Way - The Bottom Drops Out - The economy continues to sputter, and because of political ideology, we fall into a true global depression. The combination of mismanaged global finance, inept political leadership, and mounting climatic disasters lead to unprecedented levels of war, famine, and drought. The Water Wars begin in earnest, with hundreds of millions of people displaced from drought-plagued areas, and border wars begin fought over 1/3 of the rapidly drying globe: east and north Africa, middle east, and south Asia. Indian and Pakistan exchange nuclear weapons in the most recent of their wars. Trade populism sweeps the world, arising like the Arab Spring, but in industrialized countries of the West, including most Western nations. Political systems are usurped by ‘emergency councils’ and hastily scheduled calls for new governments. The working and middle class find common cause, along with the unions, military, and intelligentsia. Trade barriers are erected to end global ‘free’ trade, and nationalistic and protectionist political parties take control, who immediately raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations, and step down all investments in the military. The European Union is dissolved. The China Model — a top-down, closed, and controlled state economy, tied to major businesses, and using the the monetary system as a weapon — becomes the de facto mode of government, worldwide. This is the end of the Western convenant, the end of free trade and laissez-faire markets: the Fall of the West.

I hate to say it, but I am afraid I put the greatest stake in the last scenario, the Fall Of The West. The greed and stupidity of our ruling class — theoretically run by elected officials with our consent, but in fact run by powerful interest blocs with little or no regard for our needs — is the abiding fact of the current economic crisis, which has been going on for decades. We cannot expect them to take actions that are harmful to their own interests, even if it means running the whole world off the cliff.

So, although I advise people to my course — go slow in all you do — to some extent I do so because it will make the landing softer if and when Today’s Way continues to its inexorable crash. It’s better to be closer to the earth if the Fall comes, living in denser and more resilient communities, and disentangling ourselves from a present that might soon be the good old days.

And Umair’s Way? Wouldn’t it be nice if they’d heed him. But he’s just a Jeremiah, a prophet warning the powerful of impending disaster, and one who hopes that they will change their ways in time. But, just as in the old testament, I don’t believe that they will. And like Jeremiah, who was freed from prison by Nebuchadnezzar after the defeat of the Hebrews, I am sure that Umair will be considered a prophet by the new rulers thrown up by the Fall Of The West.

And he is preaching a Jeremiad, in that sense: he still has faith that the current rulers and leaders can come to their senses and avert disaster if they only turn aside from the way they have chosen. But they won’t, alas.