*Gosh, that looks kinda constructive. "Hey – instead of roasting in our own waste, let's see if we can pool our clean-technology patents and innovate our way out of this."
*"But –" the shareholders demand – "is there gonna be a lot of money in this?" Yeah, almost as much money as one derives from not roasting to death! "But – are there any PRODUCTS? Is it GROWTH? Or is it just a bunch of rhetorical hot air?"
*You don't get the beauty of it yet. In a fully instrumented world of "smart growth," you don't
NEED products. You can grow a prosperous, booming economy OUT OF SHEER HOT AIR!
How? Be redefining all the outmoded cash-structures of crashing capitalism as *beneficial networked relationships.* Or something.
*Take it away, Umair Haque:
http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/haque/2009/01/davos_discussing_a_depression.html
The Smart Growth Manifesto
10:45 AM Friday January 30, 2009
Tags: Economy, Financial crisis, Strategy
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How to Have Chutzpah (((boy, I bet they did)))
Obama is stimulating. Davos is deliberating. C-levels are eliminating. Wall St is recriminating. Welcome to the macropocalypse: no one, it seems, can put the global economy back together again.
It's time to reboot capitalism. So where do we begin? (((With a reboot stamping on a human face, forever. No, wait, sorry, wrong scenario there.)))
Here's a suggestion for what should be at the top of agenda of every decision-maker across the economy, from Davos, to Obama, to Sand Hill Road, to the revolutionaries in tiny garages hatching tomorrow's Googles: reconceiving growth.
Why? (((Because it's really cheap! You can do it all day, it encourages the troops and it costs you nothing! That's why I'm radically ramping up MY OWN mad visionary scheming until the freakin' Depression is over, and I don't care if it takes 30 years!)))
20th century capitalism is eating itself. (((Reigniting growth requires rethinking growth. The question Davos – and most leaders – are asking is: where will tomorrow's growth come from? Will it result from oil, cleantech, bailouts, China, or Obama?
The answer is: none of the above. Tomorrow's growth won't come from a person, place, or technology - but from understanding why yesterday's growth has failed. The same growth models applied to new people, places, and technologies will simply result in the same crises, over and over again. We have to reboot growth: the problem is not what is growing versus what is not, but how we grow.
20th century growth was dumb. The central, defining lesson of the macropocalypse (((Dumb growth is unfair: it's growth that's an illusion for many; just ask the American middle class. And, ultimately, perhaps most dangerously, dumb growth is brittle: it falls too easily into collapse, reversing many of yesterday's gains; just ask Iceland.
21st century economies will be powered by smart growth. Not all growth is created equal. Some kinds of growth are more valuable than others. Where dumb growth is unsustainable, unfair, and brittle, smart growth is sustainable, equitable, and resilient. (((Great stuff, eh? Just a sec while I stir the pork-and-beans here and turn down the thermostat – I had to fire the maid.)))
Here are the four pillars of smart growth - for economies, communities, and corporations:
1. Outcomes, not income. Dumb growth is about incomes - are we richer today than we were yesterday? Smart growth is about people, and how much better or worse off they are - not merely how much junk an economy can churn out. (((I actually think this can work, ladies and gentlemen. Mostly because the richest guys I know could give a damn about their consumer junk. What they wanna do is press the f-1 function key and have exact replicas of the Babbage Difference Engine appear in their living rooms, and then the hardware painlessly vaporizes as soon as they climb into their private spaceship. I suspect that they could get their way. It might well take some kind of utterly uncanny, smart-planetized monster "eco-product patent pool," but, well...)))
Smart growth measures people's outcomes - not just their incomes. Are people healthier, fitter, smarter, happier? Economics that measure financial numbers, we've learned the hard way, often fail to be meaningful, except to the quants among us. It is tangible human outcomes that are the arbiters of authentic value creation. ((("No more cash, kid. From now on you get this digital "value scrip" that allows you five units of "happy" and three units of "healthy.")))
2. Connections, not transactions. Dumb growth looks at what's flowing through the pipes of the global economy: the volume of trade. Smart growth looks at how pipes are formed, and why some pipes matter more than others: the quality of connections.
It doesn't just look at transactions at the global, regional, or national level – how much world trade has grown, for example – but looks at how local and global relationships power invention and innovation. Without Silicon Valley's relationships powering the development of personal computing and the internet, for example, the volume of trade between Taiwan, Japan, and China, would be a fraction of what it is. Smart growth seeks to amplify connection and community – because the goal isn't just to trade, but to co-create and collaborate.
3. People, not product. The next time you hear an old dude talking about "product", let him know the 20th century ended a decade ago. Smart growth isn't driven by pushing product, but by the skill, dedication, and creativity of people. What's the difference? Everything.
Globalization driven by McJobs deskilling the world, versus globalization driven by entrepreneurship, venture economies, and radical innovation. People not product means a renewed focus on labour mobility, human capital investment, labour market standards, and labour market efficiency. Smart growth isn't powered by capital dully seeking the lowest-cost labour – but by giving labour the power to seek the capital with they can create, invent, and innovate the most. (((Pure "Red Tory" rhetoric here, minus the anti-abortion clause and the Little England maypole-dancing.)))
4. Creativity, not productivity. Uh-oh: Creativity is an economic four-letter word. Why? Because it's hard to measure, manage, and model. (((And furthermore, the guys among us who have most creativity are relentlessly persecuted because they're geeky, left-handed, myopic and gay.)))
So economists focus on productivity instead – and the result is dumb growth. Smart growth focuses on economic creativity - because creativity is what let us know that competition is creating new value, instead of just shifting old value around. (((Awesome potential American Civil Cold War here – old-value, TEOTWAWKI, gold-backed Ron Paul Red Bucks versus networked, licentious, San Francisco socialist-software Blue Bucks.)))
What is economic creativity? (((I dunno, but I'd like a quart of it, please.))) How many new industries, markets, categories, and segments an economy can consistently create. Think China's gonna save the world? Think again: it's economically productive, but it's far from economically creative. Smart growth is creative – not merely productive. (((Have you seen China's windmill installation rates? They could dictate the creation of the "Happiness Yuan" tomorrow and install this new-new-economy overnight.)))
*Man, maybe that's crazy, but that sure beats reading handwringing Recession-bloggers, doesn't it?
Yippee! CORNIFY!
