"The Economy" Verses Economies
Jan. 26th, 2011 05:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peristaltorListening to the talking head blather lately has been rubbing me the wrong way. They keep talking about people needing to spend more, lest this recession continue. Worse, they keep talking about "the economy."
Here's a quote from John Michael Greer to set up my train of thought:
Just replace "technology" with "economy" and you get my angle. What everyone is calling The Economy™ is really nothing but the sum total of all of us living our lives and doing our business in our own personal economies. If "we" need to spend more, it reflects badly not on us, but on those who fail to realize that the businesses who flourished yesterday might be up Shit Creek tomorrow, and that the reason they are failing is not because of anything their customers did wrong. It might be that the products these business of The Past have nothing to offer us in the present, or that we can simply no longer afford them because, gee, there is simply less money available to spend.
Sadly, business plans have to be based on past business experience to be worth anything. That's going to be more and more difficult as the aggregate changes we are starting to experience start to add up and multiply in their interactions. That doesn't mean failed business men and women get to blame their customers for failing to fulfill those outdated notions filling those plans, or that their shills in political power get to blather and grovel in their pathetic attempts to persuade people to go deeper into debt to save The Economy™.
Everything has changed. Suck it up, Cupcake.
Here's a quote from John Michael Greer to set up my train of thought:
It's crucial to remember . . . that there's no such thing as "technology" in the singular, only technologies in the plural. The notion that technology is a single, monolithic thing is a convenient bit of mystification that is used to hide the fact that our society, like all others, picks and chooses among available technological options, implementing some and neglecting others. This fact hiding because most of these choices are made by influential factions of America's political class for their own private profit, very often at the expense of the rest of us.
(John Michael Greer, The Long Descent, New Society Publishers, 2008, p. 192.)
Just replace "technology" with "economy" and you get my angle. What everyone is calling The Economy™ is really nothing but the sum total of all of us living our lives and doing our business in our own personal economies. If "we" need to spend more, it reflects badly not on us, but on those who fail to realize that the businesses who flourished yesterday might be up Shit Creek tomorrow, and that the reason they are failing is not because of anything their customers did wrong. It might be that the products these business of The Past have nothing to offer us in the present, or that we can simply no longer afford them because, gee, there is simply less money available to spend.
Sadly, business plans have to be based on past business experience to be worth anything. That's going to be more and more difficult as the aggregate changes we are starting to experience start to add up and multiply in their interactions. That doesn't mean failed business men and women get to blame their customers for failing to fulfill those outdated notions filling those plans, or that their shills in political power get to blather and grovel in their pathetic attempts to persuade people to go deeper into debt to save The Economy™.
Everything has changed. Suck it up, Cupcake.