Beyond Blue Part Three: The Power of Infostructure

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Via Meadia:

 

Walter Russel Mead

2/5/12

 

The quest for a new social model has to start with economics. America could survive without growing prosperity and rising standards of living, but it would not flourish — and it would not be living up to its potential to create a better life not only for Americans but for people all over the world. Green dreamers and communitarians disagree, often eloquently but always futilely; the drive for economic prosperity is deeply planted in American politics and society. When the economy isn’t performing well, politicians lose their jobs while the public looks for alternative ideas.

 

The quest for economic prosperity helped make the blue social model, and the failure of that model to deliver continuing prosperity in contemporary conditions is both a symptom of and a leading reason for its decline. The mass prosperity of “Fordism” depended on economic conditions that no longer hold. High paid manufacturing jobs and many clerical and middle management positions are disappearing. Some jobs are outsourced to cheaper foreign countries; others disappear as automation increases productivity and decreases the number of people needed to accomplish various tasks. The stable oligopolies and monopolies that once dominated the American economy have disappeared in the face of heightened international competition and accelerated technological change. As formerly large and stably profitable corporations had to scramble to survive, they no longer could afford lifetime employment, friendly relations with strong unions, and generous health care and retirement benefits.

 

Economically, the decline of the blue social model presents Americans with some urgent questions: how can we generate a rising standard of living for our citizens in a post-Fordist world? If manufacturing and stable oligopolies won’t underpin lifetime employment and rising wages for new generations of Americans, what are we going to do instead?

 

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Part 1 The Crisis of the American Dream

 

Part 2 Recasting The Dream

 

 

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Beyond Blue Part Four: Better Living in the 21st Century

Walter Russell Mead

2/8/12

 

An inevitable question as we look at the demise of the 20th century economy is how shall we live? As the manufacturing that remains to us becomes more automated, reducing employment even as output climbs; as agriculture continues to need fewer hands; as outsourcing and technological change sweep through the knowledge guilds and the learned professions; and as government downsizing decimates the serried ranks of the bureaucrats and postal workers — what jobs will be left? What will we eat and what will we wear when few if any of us make stuff anymore?

 

These are natural questions and for millions of Americans they are pressing personal ones. The answers to them will do much to shape the economic structure of the 21st century and that, in turn, will heavily influence the way we re-conceive the American Dream.

 

At one level, the answers are easy. We aren’t going to starve in the 21st century. Au contraire. We will be drowning in freedom and wealth the likes of which humanity has never seen. Just as welfare recipients today in some respects live better than duchesses and dukes in 18th and 19th century Europe, so can the children and grandchildren of today’s millennials look forward to lives better and richer than anything their parents knew. Jobs are disappearing in manufacturing and the learned professions for the same reason they disappeared from agriculture 100 years ago: productivity is rising. Fewer hands were needed back then to produce the food we ate; fewer hands are needed today to make all the cars and cell phones the planet’s consumers care to buy. Fewer humans in green eyeshades are needed to do the world’s accounting; fewer typists, stenographers, clerks and managers are needed to get the world’s clerical work done.

 

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