Who will offer the world more than a dead end?
Consider: Walmart is the biggest employer in America.
The typical Walmart “associate” (sorry—I meant Highly Exploited and Vulnerable Person With No Access to Healthcare, Job Security, Or Other Benefits, All of Which Are Subsidized By the Public Purse, Who’s Sometimes Locked in the Store Overnight) earns the princely sum of about fifteen and a half thousand dollars a year.
Fifteen thousand five hundred dollars is less than the average income…in Botswana. Other countries with higher average income than the typical Walmart employee earns? Lebanon, Malaysia, Gabon, and Barbados.
Perhaps, you protest: but not everyone in the US works at Walmart! Why, the nation’s full of super brainiac quantum rocket scientists! Who—justifiably deserving of their riches—are cracking tough, vexing problems, tackling noble, grand endeavors! Undertaking world-changing work! Like…like…ah, inventing highly leveraged synthetic financial products, finding better ways to deny healthcare to the elderly, creating the next housing bubble, making gigantic talking billboards, creating“sympathize” buttons for those awkward occasions you have to display real human emotion, and dreaming up reality TV shows that are even more stomach-churningly grody than the fast not-quite-food advertised in them.
No wonder heading to the office instills most of us with a heady, spine-tingling sense of dread, horror, resignation, and regret.
What’s happening to us?
Yesterday’s noble paragon of prosperity—the USA—isn’t finished. But what you might call its model of growth—its how and why of prosperity; what it means; why it counts; and where it is found—sure is.
America’s Way—or at least what it’s devolved to in the last decade or three—is a dead end. It’s a cul de sac—one that we’re driving around and around in…endlessly.
You know the endless “debates” the talking heads have had on cable news, every night…for the last thirty years…about the same topics…taking the same sides…offering the same failed ideas…over and over and over and over again…until most of us would rather eat our own socks than turn on CNN? You know how you know exactly what every major newspaper columnist is going to write…before you even read it…before you even open your laptop…before you stopped bothering to read the paper? You know how both “left” and “right” at this point seem like deviously not-quite-different brand names for two treacly flavours of high-fructose-corn-syrup-society-substitute that are actually marketed by the same McGovernment-Lobbying-Complex? You know how middle class incomes haven’t risen in decades…while people are working harder than ever…while their kids are deeper in debt, their prospects less stable, their opportunities quietly winking out?
You know how you probably wake up, blearily punch your alarm clock, curse your stars…and head to a “job” that—if you’re lucky enough to have one—makes you want to gnaw your own leg off, beat your boss over the head with it, and do a victory dance, because you can’t bear the thought of even another microsecond of another totally pointless meeting about a utterly useless product whose only purpose is to earn yet a few more pennies for brainless robo-shareholder-bots …every single day, over and over and over again?
That’s what I mean by a cul de sac. That’s what I mean by a dead end. America used to set an example for the world. But that example today? It’s a nowheresville of prosperity. A Potemkin Town of plenitude. A twilight zone of human possibility.
And nations today should be mortally, lethally afraid of getting stuck in it. More worried, in fact, about getting stuck in it than they are about marveling at how pretty the tree-lined boulevards approaching it are.
Many, it seems, are choosing to bypass the neighborhood entirely. China’s “capitalism”—more properly, a kind of mercantilism—seems designed to thumb its nose at America’s failed model entirely. Dubai’s a neofeudal kingdom built on modern-day indentured servitude, brushed under the glittering spires like so much worthless sand. Singapore? A benevolent technocracy, which bears little resemblance to a liberal democracy. And so on.
The point isn’t that these nations are, as though the global economy were a horse race, “surging ahead”. Indeed, they may not be at all. But the economy isn’t a race. It is an act of exploration—and then, of creation. And so: their erstwhile paths forward may equally well prove to dead ends—and I’d bet many already are.
And so the great question this decade, for the smallest of all human concerns, at least—the political economy—is this: who will offer the world more than a dead end? Who will pioneer a way forward—past the barren exurbs America’s stuck in? Who will offer the world—its teeming billions, its hungry slums, it’s crowded, surging masses—a future?
Are we—yes, you and I, each one of us—up to that challenge? I don’t know. Here’s what I do know.
I wouldn’t pay someone fifteen and a half thousand bucks to shove boxes of disposable junk around a warehouse. It wouldn’t free them. It would shackle them; and obligate us to jealously guard the key. And so it would not just be unfair to them—it would be unfair to the people both of us could andshould be, at our fullest, truest, noblest, worthiest, highest.
And if that’s all America can offer to the world’s billions, then, well, they can—and rightly should—stop looking to America as the globe’s shining flame of prosperity.
The future’s made of us. And so, from now, until the end of time; it is nothing less than the only power we—fragile, small, brief—might be said to have.
The power to laugh at fate. And create the future.
UMAIR HAQUE
Umair Haque is Director of Havas Media Labs and author of Betterness: Economics for Humans and The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business. He is ranked one of the world's most influential management thinkers by Thinkers50. Follow him on twitter @umairh.
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