Towards a new economic system (part one)
How the metamodern perspective may illuminate the outlines of a new economic system.
Metamodernism is a relatively new term, having been introduced into “mainstream” intellectualism only a mere ten years ago by left-leaning Dutch University lecturers Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin Van Der Akker (1).
Despite its newness and still relatively obscure meaning (as of the time of this writing, no “official” or objective definition of metamodernism exists) metamodernism as a philosophical term is actually highly useful as it enables those who use it to see social phenomena from a higher or deeper perspective.
Let it be said now that there are potentially dozens of different ways that one can understand a term such as metamodernism, and at this point several movements and interpretations exist around what is mainly an online intellectual phenomenon. Yet one aspect that seems to unite many of these perspectives is their attempt to gain what we may call a “30,000 foot” view of society.
The long run is what matters to a metamodernist: The deep perspective; the bird’s eye view; the thirty-year plan; the integration of multiple perspectives; the desire to go beyond what currently can be imagined and so on. These, verily, are perspectives that all “metamodernists” should be able to agree to.
My own personal interest however lies in redesigning how the economy and the modern state works. No other political sphere really has a greater impact on the lives and destinies of ordinary people. If you redesign the economy, you redesign reality.
Marx knew this. Perhaps now the rest of us know it too.
The economy — a complex beast
For as long as human beings have existed there has probably existed some form of economy. What started out as a simple system of hunting, gathering, simple manufacturing and bartering has now evolved into a highly complex system that involves the interactions of millions of people every day.
One of the key metamodern insights is that no one really knows how the economy functions. Instead, all we have are some surface explanations; a few hints and intuitions and some equally superficial tools with which to amend the economy once it blows up, which — as we know from the recurrent nature of economic crises — it often tends to do.
Human knowledge of the economy can perhaps be compared to the way we understand our unconscious mind: We don’t understand it. Instead, it simply has a life of its own, and we try to sit on top of it; doing the best we can to avoid falling down; hoping that our actions will steer us towards a better position. To some extent, this describes the way that most people understand the hyper-complex entity that is the economy; mysterious, overwhelming and ill-defined as it is.
It is no different for politicians or even economic “experts”. Such people do not really know what the economy is about either. Instead, they too approach the economic system from a mostly short-term, symptoms-managing perspective. The conservative love of cutting taxes to “boost growth” or the liberal counter-response of boosting public spending to “increase employment” are both cases in point. — Neither one will really yield a stable or well thought out economic system in the long run.
Many mainstream media outlets have praised the Scandinavian welfare models over time. Yet despite their popularity in some circles the Scandinavian welfare model has been progressively scaled down over the past forty years by both left and right administrations (2). As a result, one cannot really trust such systems to last forever. Instead, some new overarching system must be found.
Enter National Collective Intelligence
As the reader may have guessed this article has such an exact system in mind.
The system is called “National Collective Intelligence” due to its insistence on treating the people of its nation as a positive source of collective intelligence rather than a neutral body of workers who are at the mercy of whatever the economy can offer them right now.
The main philosophy of National Collective Intelligence is simply that the people in a country consciously utilize their collective intelligence to create the best economic solutions. — “How can we together — in more close collaboration — create the best country possible?” — In very brief terms that is the premise behind the new system.
The theoretical justification of the system is rather simple: It’s about the undeniable fact that every Western country already has all the products and services needed for a good life, and that it is only the management and distribution of these which is disorganized in the current system — and which therefore creates the scarcities and constraints that we experience.
Every single Western country already has an abundance of fields, agriculture and advanced machines that makes it possible for only two to three percent of the population to feed the entire country. Every Western country already has excellent roads, bridges, modern cities and airports — and all the machines and technology necessary for maintaining and repairing them. Every single Western country already abounds with houses and apartments — more than enough for their populations, in fact, if they were to end immigration. Every Western country too has almost innumerable factories capable of mass-producing goods to the average consumer with only a very low human input needed. Advanced healthcare solutions; aviation and automobile industries; cell phone technology and the list goes on. The bottom line is that Western countries already have all the means necessary for creating a life of abundance for their citizens. In fact, they have had this capability since the early seventies. So why don’t we organize all of this in a better way so that we don’t experience all this scarcity? This, fundamentally, is what National Collective Intelligence is about.
The return to “misery”
Why is such a new system needed?
Well, partly because Western countries are getting themselves deeper and deeper into an evermore “nasty” economic situation in which more and more of their citizens will experience evermore economic scarcity.
If you are born in the 1980s and later you may recognize this: A lot of millennials and later generations are and will be unable to buy a house; save up for the future; pay off their mortgage or student loans — or just in general live with their economic anxiety at a reasonable level (3). The real unemployment numbers are much higher than the official ones (4), just as there are millions upon millions of people toiling away in unpleasant “servant”-jobs that exist only because such people are dependent on a source of income to pay their rent, bills and food. The old economic adage that “our best days are ahead of us” has rarely been repeated in politics in the past many years because most people know that it isn’t true.
There are in truth several structural drivers that are slowly returning Western countries to a “1950s” situation of economic scarcity. These factors include the phenomenon of low birthrates and the resulting spike of pensioners versus workers; sustained but unproductive immigration; increasing (but hidden) unemployment due to digitalization and automation; over-bureaucratization of the welfare state; an outdated, rigid and costly societal architecture; the globalization of capital and labor and the resultant use of foreign workers at the expense of the national labor pool — and similar.
The structural and long-term nature of these factors means that an administration can’t really address them properly in the course of just four years. In fact, most administrations seem so stressed, so focused on the immediate problems and so deeply immersed in conventional ways of understanding the economy that they aren’t even paying attention to them. For the time being it therefore looks like most Western countries will continue their long descent into economic misery all the while the faith in and respect for the established system will diminish.
Transitioning to a new system of National Collective Intelligence — a system in which the people of a country cooperate to maintain and increase the common good — would however solve many of these problems.
The problem of hierarchies
One of the key concepts in the new system is that hierarchies of various kinds tend to be very obstructive to the value that human beings could produce if they were left to self-organize around the things that they are good at.
Perhaps you have noticed this yourself while working in a private or public company: Too often, various dictates tend to flow from the top of the organization to the bottom; often without making much sense, and often with the result that a lot of resources are wasted on pointless projects and practices. An entire book (more than one, to be honest) have been written about this; aptly called “Bullshit Jobs”, by David Graeber (5). What Graeber details in his book is that a lot of non-sensical, non-value adding work tend to be heavily present in modern organizations; leading of course to the phenomenon of pointless, so-called “bullshit jobs”.
As someone who has spent ten years working in various large organizations I can attest to this phenomenon: Sometimes, entire departments get created for no good reason; expensive it-systems and practices get rolled out but are completely unnecessary; endless and recurrent meetings are held but could be avoided altogether; and hours upon hours of work is of course enforced from above yet is often completely pointless. If any of the readers have ever worked in a large organization they will probably recognize such symptoms. Currently, more than one third of British people for example believe that their job is close to meaningless (6).
This recurrent and systemic problem of course stems from the fact that the top management in an organization has a built-in incentive to “control” and “dictate” what the people at the operational level do. Yet a top-level management rarely understands the practical realities of the people at the operational level which of course means that their top-down initiatives tend to be misguided. In organization after organization this therefore results in massive over-spending of resources when in fact individual teams could just self-organize instead — and thus eliminate the need for the senseless directives originating from the top-down.
Does it sound “outrageous” that teams of (good) people can manage themselves — or do we expect that a manager needs to direct and “empower” them; perhaps much like a 1950s parent directs and controls a child? Personally, I believe that a lot of the teams I have been embedded in could have run more efficiently and with less nervousness if the team manager role was done away with — and if we were allowed to have a more open and non-hierarchical conversation with the other teams that we interfaced with. No value would really be lost in such a situation as one team member could have been singled out as a point of contact for other teams, just as the former team lead could become an individual member of the team instead; thus still being able to add his or her voice to the group’s collective intelligence.
I am not alone with these thoughts it would seem: Currently, several companies around the world are experimenting and having success with reforming their organization around more self-organizing lines (7). Some such companies even number in the thousands of employees (8). A more self-organizing organization is therefore possible. It probably also is more effective.
The premise of the system
The purpose of National Collective Intelligence then is to turn this insight into a master theory or ideology for how to reshape society and especially its value production around more sane, collaborative lines.
The gist of the theory is this: What would happen if we were to consciously take control of the value production within our countries and gradually transition it to a structure of greater collective intelligence over a period of, say, twenty or thirty years?
Would we perhaps find that the overall work in our countries would flow more smoothly? Would we maybe find that many of the problems of the existing model would be done away with? Could we perhaps share the country’s workload more evenly between us and eventually achieve a twenty-hour workweek?
The answer to such questions, I believe, is a resounding yes; and I might add that working in such a new system would also be a lot more fun and less angst-inducing than our current senseless, almost autistic economic system.
Morten Overgaard is a metamodern thinker and writer. He is the author of the book “National Collective Intelligence. A Metamodern Theory of Politics. Book One”.
Notes:
(1) Metamodernism as an intellectual term was introduced by Van Der Akker and Vermeulen with their original website called “Notes on Metamodernism” launched in 2009. http://www.metamodernism.com/about-2/
(2) In Denmark, to give an example, the most famous aspect of the welfare system is the public benefit commonly known as “Day Money” (a direct translation from the original Danish “dagpenge”). The length of time on which a person can be on this benefit has been steadily reduced from seven years in the 1990s to two years today (writing in 2020): https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagpenge
(3) The retrograde forces impacting Western economies have been well described in Western media. Here is an earlier article from the Atlantic which details the plight of millennials, to give just one example: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/millennials-are-new-lost-generation/609832/
(4) When considering such a complex phenomenon as the “unemployment rate” one should factor in more elements than what the official statistics cover, such as; how many people are stuck in part-time jobs yet desire to work full-time; how many people are effectively forced to be independent contractors because there are no real jobs left for them; how many people live an (unsatisfactory) life of short-term gigs, seasonal employment and odd-jobs — yet desire nothing more than a decent stable job and a steady income; just as one should consider how many people have left the job market and the official figures entirely and are dependent on their spouse or family. The real unemployment rate, in any case, is much higher than the official one. And then we haven’t even considered the millions of people who are stuck in unpleasant, unworthy, often “humiliating” jobs — and who of course often have talents, desires and an inner human worth that go way beyond such a position
(5) Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber. 2018, Simon & Schuster
(6) https://yougov.co.uk/topics/lifestyle/articles-reports/2015/08/12/british-jobs-meaningless
(7) The book “Reinventing Organizations” (Diateino, 2014) by Frederic Laloux details the experience of twelve organizations around the world that are managed in a more self-organized and non-hierarchical way
(8) The internet retailer “Zappos”, founded by Tony Hsieh, is probably one of the more well-known large companies experimenting and having success with a more self-organized structure. The company has around 1,500 employees https://www.zappos.com/about/how-we-work
