"The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament." (1999) Steve Jobs
In Rome it was the coliseum. In Peru it was Macchu Pichu. In America it was NASA. Reagan freed the Private Sector but it was a private sector who had stolen the beauty from the common and taken ownership of the higher senses for themselves. From 1900 to 2000, the Higher Arts went from 44,000 local opera houses in America, with a much smaller national population, to 210 in the year 2000. If you don't grow your consumer base and you dumb them down then you have the problem of consumers not being interested in sophisticated products because they don't know how to use them. Governments have always been the source of large public works and in the case of the large cities here they were highly innovative. Not any more. REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson Sent: Thursday, October 06, 2011 5:25 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, , EDUCATION Subject: [Futurework] Making new fortunes To my mind there is only one fundamental explanation of why we are now poised on the edge of what is increasingly becoming known as the Great Recession in contrast to the Great Depression of the 1930s. It speaks to two questions that economists don't seem to be able to answer. Why are so many very large businesses sitting on large quantities of money and not investing in something new? Why are the banks so reluctant to lend money to small and medium businesses? My answer is a simple one. It is so simple as to seem simplistic. It is that there are no more iconic consumer goods in the pipeline. By "iconic" I mean mass-producible goods that are so attractive that everybody demands them even though, initially, they are hand-crafted and so expensive that only the very richest people can afford them. As they become cheaper due to increasingly wider swathes of factory production, each class in turn works hard and saves hard in order to buy them. Examples of these goods in the past are too numerous to mention but they range from cotton dresses and shirts of 300 years ago to colour television of about 50 years ago or the personal computer/mobile phone of 30 years ago. There are, of course, many goods that the rich enjoy exclusively but they are either non mass-producible or they are in permanent short supply for intrinsic reasons. They may motivate the careers of the exceptionally ambitious among the rising young but can only remain dreams for most ordinary folk, whether they are well-paid or poorly-paid. There isn't a sharp cut-off between exclusive goods and mass goods but there's a discernible inflexion roughly between, let us say, those who can afford two or more homes (and, usually, have ample leisure time to spend in both or all of them) and those who have one. But we have now reached a steady-state. Of course, there is a plethora of consumer goods and an almost infinite variety of, and tweaks to, traditional ones but there are now no more truly iconic consumer goods. If there were -- even if there were only two or three of them in the offing -- then the largest and most technologically advanced corporations with plenty of cash-in-hand would already be making them. Banks also would be recognizing some possibilities from the propositions of millions of small and medium-sized entrepreneurs -- there have never been so many as now. Depressing though the general scene is, surely one iconic idea would have emerged by now and dared at least one bank to take a risk. However, as with previous iconic goods, say during the Great Depression of the 1930s, if they existed at all they should already be making their way with large profit margins and opening up more big sectors in the market place. Increasingly, all round the world, we're now being locked into a 'standard' urban way of life with a 'standard' range of iconic consumer goods that we have the time, energy and space to use and enjoy. Is this steady-state so remarkable? Man has become locked into previous ways of life many times in different cultures for long periods of time. It doesn't necessarily mean backwardness, nor need our present phase be permanent while China and other countries catch up. Goodness knows, we already have what amounts to a revolution going on right now in the scientific research of our genes and, increasingly importantly, epigenes. Results and developments from these will inevitably break out into the market place sooner or later. We'll have iconic new consumer goods and services that will then ease us into a different pattern of life just as the consumer products of the last 300 years have done so. Paradoxically, even during a prolonged pause period, there'll be many opportunities for entrepreneurs to make fortunes in helping us to adapt more equitably and more happily to our present way of life. Keith Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2011/10/
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