The Next Global Economy

Greed? Love.

This global economy is broken. The collapse of superpowers like America and Russia into failed superstates is the effect, not the cause. So how do we fix it? Can we?

First let’s try to understand it. The last global economy, present for the last forty years or so, worked like this: Americans bought stuff. Mostly pointless stuff. McMansions, gadgets, designer diapers. I say pointless because this stuff didn’t raise their real quality of life – we’ll come back to that. How did they afford all this stuff? They couldn’t. It was financed by poor nations like China. For poor nations, lending to the American brosumer was a way to get richer.

But the American brosumer did something foolish. Instead of investing the money he was being lent in schools, hospital, libraries, education, he blew it on the equivalent of a meth driven binge at a vegas casino. He spent it on idle, fleeting pleasures instead on investing it. The result is that today the he is worse than broke. American life is simply collapsing – that’s what happens when societies don’t invest in themselves. The American Dream, such as it was, is over – and it’s taking the global economy with it.

I want to simplify all that. What was the last global economy really built on? Greed. There’s a great quote from Keynes where he says that it’s a necessary evil. And it was. But now that age is done. The next global economy can’t be built on greed because it needs the very opposite.

It needs not just one Marshall plan, but several: the planet, life on the planet, failing societies like America, the young, the average worker. Why? Not because I say so. I’m not making a political point. Because prosperity can’t happen any other way. Making people better off today can’t happen by Chinese lending Americans money to hit Walmart and buy back the goods they made. No one has the money, and the bargain never really worked in the first place.

I want to simplify that again. The next global economy should be built on love, not greed. I know that’ll be met with the cynicism this age is smugly addicted to. So let’s think about it. What does that mean?

We need, as a species, to rebuild our planet before it reclaims us. We need to safeguard and protect wildlife unless we all want to eat soylent forever. We need to tackle rising inequality everywhere unless we want more, worse Trumps. And we need to solve the problem of a global lost generation of young people if we ourselves want to be looked after in our golden years.

That’s a long over complicated way to say one simple thing. We must learn to love. The world. All life. Ourselves. Our fellow travellers in this tiny life. We must set aside our tribal differences and our little squabbles now. And really begin to see each other, instead of forever looking back. Then lift one another up on everyone’s shoulders. We must be Atlas and Sisyphus and Orpheus now.

Maybe it’s absurd to say: a global economy built on love is the way out of these problems. Maybe I am hoping from too much from the fractured human heart.

Or maybe you are hoping for too little.

Umair

July 2017