One of my LinkedIn connections shared this Salon.com article, “Will the Great Recession Lead to World War IV” on LinkedIn. Since LinkedIn constrains responses to too few characters, I’ll continue here. To appreciate, please breeze through the salon article. If you’re used to this type of article, topic sentences will be fine. My response:
I think the article is written by a politico, so it’s not operating at the optimal level of abstraction. IOW, political parties mean little except to politicos like this writer (Lind). What’s far more relevant is people and what motivates them (politcal parties mean little). Lind never gets to the real issues, some of which are:
1) for the first time, man discovers that s/he lives on a VERY small planet with finite resources; there’s no distant summit to scale anymore. If we’re not careful, that means zero sum, war and destruction. (superficially that could mean a shift to the right, but no political party currently offers a solution because they are all too legacy).
2) “rich” economies are headed for a drastic change in life expectations. The Industrial Economy created immense wealth, but we’re now between s curves, and most people will be forced to downgrade their life standards from a material perspective. The good news is, this need not affect spiritual or emotional quality of life, but it will drastically affect material standards of life. That could serve to create anger and resentment, but it could also produce spiritual cleansing. Personally, I don’t observe that consumerism or materialism have improved mankind’s lot; they tend to lead to a rather shallow existence.
3) the Industrial Economy’s ability to create immense wealth by fabricating things, by harnessing physical power to transform raw materials into goods, has run its course. Like the Agrarian Economy before it, it is now merely necessary, it serves as “non-production inputs” into the new economy, which I call the “Knowledge Economy.” In the mid nineteenth century, agricultural production, which had driven the expansion of human societies since the birth of the neolithic revolution, was superceded by the waxing Industrial Economy’s ability to create more value. In the same way, the Industrial Economy has now become a merely a non-production input: necessary but not creating much value. The highest level of human value is now in the Knowledge Economy, which is based on information, human experience and emotion. Overproduction reigns in every industrial sector, leading to commoditization. Industrial products are now largely commodities, and this will remain so.
In the Global Human Capital Journal, i have written hundreds of pages about this shift.
4) the positive thing about the shift to the Knowledge Economy is that the most value is created by information, not materials. Food and products are needed to live, but they do not represent the highest value add. Materials are zero sum, but knowledge is not. Therefore, the WW IV scenario is one alternative but not the probable one.
A more useful dialog than the Salon article would deal with the fact that “rich” countries are living far above their means, and how can leaders break the news to their constituents and help them feel good about it? I believe that people will discover than 90% of their consumption was over the top, and they won’t miss far less; a huge portion was keeping up with the joneses and created no real value beyond that. If you would like some references of what I’m talking about, see the Global Human Capital Journal’s twitter feed.
I believe that humanity will be confronted with itself. We will be forced to collaborate or die (or our populations will be significantly reduced). Since the Agrarian Economy began 10,000 years ago, man has adopted an exploitative attitude toward the Earth. To survive, we will have to *collectively* change this attitude. We have unprecedented power to create and destroy, and we will have to work together to survive.
To close, political prattle is part of the problem, it serves as a distractor. The real potential lies in people connecting with each other, increasing transparency, but getting to what’s really important. If you want to anticipate what the 21st century will be like, look at the 19th century, in which the Industrial Economy disrupted European society at all levels. We are headed into a similar level of disruption and change, and current political ideas will also evolve quickly.