Archive for the ‘ Economy ’ Category

The Big Switch from Many Small Organizations to One BIG Organization

This happened after WWII, the big event that changed the world forever. The final trauma that destroyed the world – without the world knowing it at all.

I lived through this – but just barely – and now in my sunset years I can reflect on it. I am not a very bright person – but I do seem to have the special ability to notice what is going on – not that it has done me any good. No one wants this kind of person around – noticing how incompetent they are.

WWII taught us an important lesson – Bigness Matters. America won the war not because it was better – but because it was bigger – much bigger.

The rest of the world took note – and set about doing the same thing. Europe became the EU and China set about being the next big thing. But more importantly – the rich and powerful everywhere set about consolidating themselves across international boundaries. Enabled by the Internet.

They are the new power structure (the de facto world government) – and everybody obeys them instinctively. Without having the slightest idea of what is going on. They aren’t supposed to know – and therefore they do not.

In fact, they have identified with their oppressors, and have joined with them to make sure no one else is different. In what Sheldon S. Wolin calls Inverted Totalitarianism. Otherwise known as Globalization.

2013
05/24
CATEGORY
Business
Economy
History
Philosophy
Sociology
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Macroeconomic Machismo

NY Times – Paul Krugman

I don’t much like the title – but I suppose for an economist that is as about as radical a statement as he could make.

Here is the second paragraph:

It was obvious during the runup to the Iraq war that what was going on in the minds of many hawks — and not just the neocons — was not so much a deep desire to drop lots of bombs and kill lots of people (although they were OK with that) as a deep desire to be seen as people who were willing to Do What Has to be Done. Men who have never risked, well, anything relished the chance to look in the mirror and see Winston Churchill looking back.

How many Americans are going to understand all those allusions to history? It will take some serious thinking – something they almost never do – to get them to the last paragraph:

So if you like, the problem is Seriousness rather than sadism. On foreign policy, it’s always 1938; on economic policy, it’s always 1979. And the colossal muddle goes on.

Good article. Even if it does try to make you think.

2013
05/21
CATEGORY
Economy
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Us and Our Technologies

We have always been our technologies.

We have always invented technologies (the blowgun, for example) and then changed ourselves to take advantage of these technologies. We and them have always existed as part of the same complex.

And when we speak of us – we always mean us as individuals – and as societies. Which are always in the process of changing.

Right away, we are speaking of a complicated – or more accurately, a complex situation. Where everything effects everything else.

Unfortunately, we have been conditioned by Science – or at least a particular kind of Science – that could only deal with two variables at a time – cause and effect. The Law of Gravitation (for example) only involves two physical bodies – if another is added the mathematics breaks down.

This was strange, because we had been used to dealing with complex situations for a million years (more or less) but now we could only think of simple situations. But this made it easy for us to become developed – we could concentrate on one thing at a time – and ignore everything else.

This was what the Industrial Revolution amounted to – developing one technology at a time at the expense of everything else. Which allowed us to grow from an insignificant species into a world-dominating one. Which now threatens to destroy the world.

I will now describe a very short history of us and our technologies in the last three hundred years or so.

This began with the Sailing Ship. Which created a huge demand for sailors to man those ships. Mostly by brute strength. A sailor didn’t have to be very smart – in fact, it was better if he wasn’t. All he had to do was follow orders. Other people – going up a long chain of command – would issue those orders.

You may object that somewhere in this chain of command (usually at the top) some person was in control. But this is not quite true. These people had become obsessed with power - and were not really people any more.

What we had was a mechanical (unthinking) way of being - modeled on an old pattern – the Military. But with sophisticated new technologies – that made all the difference.

Let me repeat that – we had sophisticated technologies that made all the difference. They took control of us. Or, to use language more carefully – our fascination with them took control of us. We became, in effect, their reproductive organs.

There were solid reasons for this. Those who controlled the latest technology (usually not the best of people) became rich and powerful.

This fact has an ancient pedigree. This is what built the Roman Empire – and all the empires before it and since then. And I must note – all these social edifices were unstable, and eventually collapsed.

Which is exactly where we are now.

2013
05/13
CATEGORY
Economy
Psychology
Sociology
Technology
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The Business System is Not Working

And it is not working because it is not supposed to be working. It is supposed to self-destruct, and it is doing just that.

Now that I have made such an outlandish statement I must back it up – so tighten your set belts.

Everyone will agree that something is wrong with the world – but few can agree on what that is – or how serious it is. And most do not even want to try – and that, I think, is the core of the problem – the people in our world have changed fundamentally – and don’t really want to make their world work. And, in fact, are dead set against it.

It may seem at this point that I have not solved the problem – but only made it worse. But stay with me, and you will see that this very wide view is crucial for solving the problem. We have to back up and see that the problem is us – not a new observation at all.

How does business come into the picture? Because somehow, business has become our obsession – and we have turned over our lives to it. This seemed to happen just as I joined the working force – in the Sixties. People changed from being Individuals to being Organizational people. People of the Office.

The timing may seem strange to you. Were not the Sixties the time when we (or at least the young) revolted at just this development? Yes it was – but the Sixties were smashed – and smashed completely.

Business said “You may want freedom, but what you want even more are jobs. And we have all the jobs.” And all those freedom-loving young people (including me) went to work – very obediently, it seemed. But inside, deep inside, we were very indignant – and determined to destroy that which had destroyed us.

And this is still the case. The young, who have nothing to look forward too, have reacted – and are not the friendliest of people. Who can blame them?

In my working life in California high-tech (which, in retrospect, was an intense learning experience) I noticed what no one else seemed to notice. That companies were coming and going like fruit flies. And almost none of them were producing a decent product – and didn’t seem to want to. They were concentrating on something else – and that seemed to be destruction of everything in sight – including the company in question.

And I noticed something else – that no one was noticing this.

In short, people had become business people – business had become destructive – and the people in it are incapable of noticing this.

Or, to put this another way – the Business System is not working.

At this point I must make an important point. All this was happening in our unconscious – individually and collectively. This, by its nature, cannot not be viewed directly. We have to infer what is going on there by observing our actions. By forming a hypothesis that explains our actions. For some reason, this effort is strongly resisted.

People do not want to believe what they have become.

2013
05/11
CATEGORY
Business
Economy
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The Problem of Being Human

“This is a problem?” You may ask. “What else can we be?” My answer is straight-forward: “We have been, and we are, many other things. The last thing we want to be is human.”

If you are still with me, you might ask “Why not?” And this is the question I want to answer. Why do we not want to be human?

The answer must have varied many, many times. But when we became civilized (a huge, huge subject in itself) we did develop an aversion to what we had been before that – and saw that way of life as inferior. When it was not at all.

I once did a trek through the hill-tribes of northern Thailand. When I got back to my hotel, a  powerful thought hit me “When the original people are gone – we are doomed!” Those people know how to live - how to be human.  On that trek, we met an anthropologist, and I asked her how much longer they would last. “Maybe thirty-five years,” she said. And that was over forty years ago.

The situation in Thailand has deteriorated so badly since then I cannot bear to think about it. And the same could be said for every other country in the region. They have gone from bad to impossible. And American (and Chinese) intervention has only made the situation worse.

But I must get back to the subject. What happened in America in the last half of the last century? Most of the world is clearly finished, but what about us? You will not like my answer “We are finished too.” And for the simplest of reasons – because we have stopped being human.

This will take some explaining – and perhaps a whole book would not do it justice. But I will attempt an outline. The basic idea is simple – we have stopped being people and become something else.

These alternative realities (what we have become) have been a whole series of economies - the latest being the information economy. The very idea of an economy implies much more than we care to admit. One thing it implies is that people have become consumers - and have become helpless to change that.

To understand our situation, we would have to revert to being human again – something we can no longer be (and don’t want to be).

2013
05/03
CATEGORY
Economy
Philosophy
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Our Historical Nightmare

In reading a book about Foucault, I find this quote from Max Weber:

The mighty cosmos of the modern economic order..the iron cage [in which] specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart [are] caught in the delusion that [they] have achieved a level of development never before attained by mankind.

A footnote says this is from Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

I would only add that he was referring to the post-modern world – since he wrote this in 1905. However this difference would not become apparent until after WWI. And would accelerate after WWII. And eventually lead to an economic (and moral) collapse.

Which has already happened – although the full impact of this has yet to be felt.

2013
05/02
CATEGORY
Economy
History
Morality
Sociology
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A Grim Life

I marvel when I look back on my working life – how grim it was. It was focused on two things – making money and spending money! That was a grim existence.

But we were absolutely convinced that was the only proper life. Destroying the world by making money off of it. Any other kind of life was unthinkable.

Not that we did much thinking. We lived by our instincts alone – and they were all about money, in one form or another. Living for any other reason was treasonous – and was punished by a fate worse then death – being unemployed and unemployable. Which meant not being able to live at all.

Having been in that condition – and recovering from it – has been the story of my life. I am very much a person of the 21st Century – marveling at my life I led (if I could call it that) in the 20th Century. It was as weird as any life could possibly be – but to us it seemed perfectly normal.

Here I have to make my usual disclaimer – and remark on the huge difference between conscious and unconscious behavior. This, it seems to me, is the one thing we need to get clearer on. We went through a big change when we went from Modern life to Post-modern life – a change that happened sometime between the mid-19th Century and the mid-20th Century – marked by WWI and WWII.

We become a different kind of people – a kind we did not like – so we moved these people into our unconscious – individual and collective. Where they could operate autonomously – allowing our conscious selves to claim themselves innocent of their horrible behavior.

Any recovery (if there is any) will have to acknowledge this very basic fact. The fact that we have become liars on a vast scale – and have become unable to notice this.

We even have a technology that allows us to embody this – we have become our computers – a complex of hardware, software – and the Internet and the Wireless networks. And the industry that serves them – which I was in for 20 years. We have insisted that they take over our lives. Just as we had insisted that our cars take over our lives.

We have insisted on being helpless. A grim life indeed.

2013
04/26
CATEGORY
Business
Economy
Morality
Philosophy
Psychology
Sociology
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Shocking News – Congress is not Dead

NY Times  - Make Wall Street Choose: Go Small or Go Home

Senators Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, and David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, are members of the Senate Banking Committee.

In 2008, at the height of the financial crisis, the government stepped in and decided which Wall Street banks were so large and interconnected that they would receive extraordinary help from the government to enable them to survive. They were deemed, to use a now ubiquitous phrase, too big to fail. Meanwhile, smaller banks in communities across the country, including Cleveland and Covington, La., in the states we represent, were allowed to fail. They were, evidently, too small to save…

Our proposal also curtails the expansion of the government safety net for Wall Street by limiting taxpayer support to traditional banking operations. Under our legislation, financial institutions would be prohibited from transferring nonbank liabilities — like derivatives, repurchase agreements and securities lending — into federally supported banks that benefit from deposit insurance. This would ensure that the government safety net protects only the commercial bank, not the risky investment-banking arms of the megabanks. If the megabanks want to remain large and complex, that’s their choice — but Americans should not have to subsidize their risk-taking. If they fail, their executives and investors — not taxpayers — should pay the price.

We expect a full-throated effort by the megabanks to resist our proposal. The good news is that there is a real and growing bipartisan consensus around our approach. It has drawn support from key regulators like Thomas M. Hoenig, a conservative who is vice chairman of the F.D.I.C. and a former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, and Daniel K. Tarullo, a progressive regulator and a member of the Fed’s board of governors. Our banking system — and the broad economy — will be the stronger for it.

And Congress will be stronger too.

2013
04/24
CATEGORY
Business
Economy
Political comment
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Managed Democracy

We take it for granted anymore that democracy must be managed by the better kind of people.

This is not a new idea at all – the Founding Fathers were careful to establish a republic – not a democracy – which was modeled, frankly on the British model. There were some ardent democrats among them – Thomas Jefferson, for example. But economic concerns predominated – Americans became more concerned with making money than with freedom.

As industrialization became more powerful, America quickly sorted itself into the haves and the have-nots. In Marxist terms – the Capitalists and the Workers. But even here – the managers – the company men who kept the wheels of progress lubricated – were not hard to find.

But eventually – with the advent of mass communications – something even more radical appeared – the masses and their managers. The people who watched their televisions – and the much smaller number that managed what they saw on them.

The model for all of this was the Organization – Business, or the Corporation – which was a blend of a hierarchical control structure (top-down control) and total conformity – control from the bottom up.

No one found this the least bit unusual – that was just the way things were. When in fact – it was highly unusual – and should have set off all kinds of alarm bells.

Why did this not happen? Evidently, because people had become overwhelmed by too many changes – caused by too many and too powerful technological changes.

These changes were noticed – how could anyone not notice them? But their effects on people were not noticed at all. Or only by a few – and these were ignored as alarmists. People were convinced that a new era had dawned – where everything was new (and better) including them.

When, in fact – they had been managed into oblivion.

2013
04/16
CATEGORY
Business
Economy
History
Morality
Philosophy
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Public Citizens

These were people who devoted their lives to improving the lot of their countries – with an eye to improving the lot of all mankind.

In America, the Founding Fathers immediately come to mind – a breed that died out early in the 19th Century. Being a public citizen often interfered with the other parts of their lives – being a good spouse and good parent, for example.

But great leaders did sometimes occur later – Abraham Lincoln being an example. However, in the last part of the last century, they disappeared almost completely.

After these introductory remarks, I want to turn the clock back to a crucial point in American history – the Constitutional Convention. This nearly failed – which would have meant no United States of America. It only succeeded because of public citizens such as George Washington.

And no doubt because the business men of the various states could see that a strong central government was necessary to promote a strong central economy. This was no easy awareness – it involved sacrificing regional interests to the interest of the whole – or The Union. They all had to be Public Citizens – in effect.

Something now no one can imagine.

2013
04/08
CATEGORY
Economy
History
Political comment
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