Mani MasoodThe state of business affairs is that we live in troubled times.
Future gazing is always a dangerous business and you’re more likely to be wrong than right. Nevertheless, after many years of industrial and commercial decline and the consequential collapse of much of our social cohesion, it might be time just to look at current trends to see what they might be telling us.
Here are a few, admittedly fairly pessimistic, views forward.
Corporate behaviors
In spite of a huge string of catastrophes arising from a mixture of crooked dealings, greed and incompetence going back to late 2007, it’s pleasing to see that nothing much materially seems to have changed and the world continues more or less as it always did.
All across the globe, for at least five or six years now we have seen governments issuing statements about getting to grips with this and changing operating cultures.
To many ordinary people, nothing substantial seems to have changed though and the same utter madness continues, albeit at a slightly reduced level due to the damage done over recent years.
Sooner or later, this is all going to blow up in our faces again unless we deal with it now.
The insane reliance on the financial world
The fragility of an economy that is overly dependent on Financial Services to generate its wealth has been shown several times over recent decades.
Although perhaps the best example was in 2007-to date, serious nightmares also arose in the early years of the 21st century, plus the early 1990s.
Once again, far too much attention and investment continues to pour into the Financial Services sector, which does generate vast amounts of money but only for a relatively tiny percentage of society.
Sooner or later, we must get back to valuing things such as innovation, manufacturing and production, if we are to generate a wealthy and participative society again.
Unfortunately, that seems a dim and distant prospect.
One planet
Although some individuals and organizations continue to do hugely admirable work in terms of distributing wealth more evenly across the planet, overall our society continues to be largely self-centered.
Although increasing numbers of people are getting the message that we are one planet and that our own economic wellbeing depends upon other countries also having healthy economies, we continue to see people around the world as dangerous economic threats rather than potential partners in realizing opportunity.
While we continue to think short-term and ‘us, us and us again’, then we will continue also to be vulnerable to global domino-effect economic collapses that have nightmare effects on us also.
Materialism
Since the 1950s, the industrialized world has been on a binge of self-indulgence and materialism.
Ultimately this leads to things such as seven year olds throwing temper tantrums if they can’t replace their still almost brand-new smart phone with the latest model that has just been announced etc.
While we continue to allow vast corporations to convince us that we must spend, spend and spend again on trivia, hugely over-stretching ourselves financially in the process, we will continue to be massively vulnerable to various forms of credit crunch crisis.
During the last five or six years of successive crises, a touch of reality has been forced back onto many of us but it is difficult not to wonder if those fundamental flaws in our attitudes are just lurking under the surface waiting for a modest economic recovery to set them going again.
Education
Even in extremely tough times when jobs are at a premium, it’s not unusual to find the relatively few employers that are still hiring complaining bitterly that they simply cannot find qualified people to take up jobs.
True, in some situations this is just an excuse to disguise slave-labor wages but it’s hard not to feel that there is something fundamentally wrong with our education system that needs to be sorted out quickly.
While many informed people accept there is a problem, not a huge amount seems to be being done to deal with it at grassroots level.
Rebalancing of wealth distribution
The old and discredited idea that phenomenally wealthy people generate wealth for others around them, at least to any significant degree, needs to be put in the rubbish bin once and for all.
At the moment, we still seem incapable of grasping, as a society, that the success of our economy and that of the wider world is driven to a significant degree by the amount of disposable income in the pockets of the bulk of the population.
A multi-billionaire increasing their personal fortune by $10 billion is not cause for national rejoicing if the money just sits in their invisible deposits somewhere on the international money markets. By contrast, $10 billion in the pockets of ordinary people will be spent and that will help get segments of the economy growing again.
We seem to be no closer at all to identifying huge initiatives to help significantly increase the wealth of the mass of the population but we remain very skilled in making the rich even richer in the hope they might, somehow, do it for us.
That is absurd naivety.
It may be that the majority of people will continue, to put it bluntly, to get poorer unless we do something significant.
Investment in the future
Finally, we seem no closer to finding ways to get the people and institutions with money to invest in medium to longer-term future developments. See above for why that might be important in a situation where a very few people control the majority of the available wealth in society.
Absolutely incalculable sums are played on the various financial markets every single hour – all in the hope of making even bigger sums to re-invest in what is effectively gambling.
At the same time, new science and innovation is strangled for investment. We are already reaping that harvest and it will get worse unless somebody does something.
Unfortunately, that looks highly unlikely. It seems probable that manufacturing and innovation that produces ‘real’ things is likely to continue to decline, as money is pumped into Finance of one sort or another.
The result? Mass unemployment and the proliferation of what a previous generation called ‘burger flipping’ jobs will become a fixed part of our society.
That’s unless, of course, someone finds a way to change the attitude of those that control the vast wealth that is currently locked away in the electronic ether.
