tus pies

tu larga historia

imposible

de no sentir

despuejado remoto claro interno, con sentimiento y debilidad como estruendo, con las sagradas limitaciones de un ser vivo y creciente, inclinado hacia un mundo de melodías todavía inconcretas : una tarde al aire libre, un baño de sal y una picadura extraña de verano, se pierde en la temporada perdida un código que espercía crípticas riquezas y sendos monumentos al destierro : lograr compartir ese sentimiento de destierro, entre el sospechoso artificio de lo que nos hacemos vivir, es la máxima intimidad a la que muchos puedan ansiar llegar, porque ni el paisaje temporal ni el recurso empático de su espíritu se prestan al abrirles otras; del desgaste de reconocer esta tendencia, se llega poco a poco a la condena de vivirlo así…

cada día, en esta temporada, me encuentro ante el proceso indefinido de evaluar la trayectoria de mi vida y los hechos y los vínculos que parecen definirla : dado el caso que en los detalles y en momentos así de concentrados y diferentes, en el jardín de la casita del Migdia de Montjuic, con suaves soplos mediterráneos removiendo los sensibles nervios de los pinos, me gustan y me alimentan, no puedo disminuir el valor del rumbo que he seguido para llegar hasta aquí, y así puedo sentir un equilibrio que fundamenta mis energías…

me doy cuenta de que el remordimiento es revisionismo vano, y que la duda existencial es una expresión de la duda que habrá siempre de si se puede confiar en que la intuición seguirá señalando un camino así de tolerable y fructífero…

y con cada voz, la hechicera acumula fuerza de encantamiento, y elasticidad : se deslizan y se recombinan elementos sueltos de cada musicología lingüística, cada cultura melódica, cada nostalgia de primeras visiones de este mundo, paisajes de nacimiento y crianza, pero que por algo empujan todas estas energías hasta aquí, la armonía extrañamente cósmica de la canción ‘unforgettable’, gustos y tensiones particulares que no descansan y que bailan enmascarados por cada recoveco del Casc Antic : la sustancia de cada momento, de cada ser humano, está preñada de los recursos de exploración, gozo y ritual, de tantos miles de años, de generaciones, de poblaciones que no se asemejan a nuestra nostalgia, sino que palpitan inolvidables en el carácter, en los ángulos de observación, en los ritmos repetidos, los gestos y rechazos, los delicados y foráneos conceptos del ser, que indican sabor, lugar, atención…

elindulnék

Concretamente : viernes, noche de leve ensueño, de incredulidad, de los absurdismos del ser humano en su habitat natural, cómo cantan los gestos y el estilo el nivel de soltura, convención o pánico profundo de la persona, El Almirall, entre sonrisas fáciles, lágrimas contenidas y crisis no citadas, horizontes, novedades indefinidas, es una noche de palabras de suave incendio, temas del alma, “la esencia de la persona no sabe que se acercan viajes, que hay fechas, simplemente se acerca a lo que le atrae” se declara, y parece de las verdades más precisas sobre estos días; me he encontrado con una tras otra persona que ha podido despertar en mí esa esencia, una suerte será, o una extensión de lo que en lo profundo estoy buscando, me doy cuenta de que siempre he abierto caminos en Barcelona, sin desear que si cerraran, y por eso, voy dejando asuntos pendientes, comportándome como si tuviera todo el tiempo de siempre, como si no me fuera : en estas encrucijadas, se puede aprender muchísimo de una sola persona, de una sola conversación con ansia de buscar, la noche sabe a pausa, a interrupción, a despedida obligatoria, exilio y cortina pesada, pero también sabe a encontrarse, a fluidez, a verse y dejarse ver…

The Dust Bowl of the 1930s resulted from a misguided atomized over-exploitation of arable land. Ancient Sumerian civilization collapsed entirely because excesses of irrigation coupled with poor planning raised soil salinity to levels toxic to agriculture. At the end of the 20th century, global industrial activity had come to far outstrip the available resources feeding into it, and our global economy had come to depend on increasing demand and increasing output to feed unsustainable rates of increasing growth, across the planet.

Something had to give. The mathematics of the whole big picture had come to rest on the assumption that already over-stressed basic resources could expand along with economic expansion. They could not. We may now be seeing just the beginning of this realignment of economic expectations, forced by circumstance.

As major resource scarcity spreads, with China losing ever more arable land to encroaching northwestern deserts and road building in the industrial east, as China’s exploding demand for petroleum, steel, copper, water, meat and grains, put pressure on world markets and pushes the cost of basic goods like food staples ever higher across the world, as the unsustainable demand for fuel moves the US corn belt to shift to cropping for ethanol —as much as 40% of world corn exports are from Iowa, which now devotes 18% of harvest to bio-ethanol—, we are experiencing the natural results of an economy that hinges on hyper-exploitation of resources. The correction, when fully upon us, may yet be far more severe than the 2008 credit-freeze crisis.

Hyper-exploitation is a doctrine: it underpins public policy, government spending, security policy and the philosophical arguments for and against deregulation and the trickle-down theory of economic growth as related to tax policy. It requires that we believe in unstated, unproven modes of natural replenishment; it is a proposition that all things can be tapped, moved, transformed and spent, infinitely, because somehow, the market will set all the right limits and excesses will never be so severe as to ignore the laws of nature.

It is, for this reason, dangerous, because it not only is a doctrine that requires us to use more of the vital resources we require than can be replaced at sustainable levels, it moves us deeper into the vice of living on borrowed time. The result is that we must periodically learn the lesson that borrowed time cannot be financed, that we must pay the full price when it comes due, and our unprecedented resource depletion will leave us, quite simply, without the level of supply required to sustain our standard of living.

Already, wealthy governments are moving to take over cropland in poor countries in order to shore up their own food supplies, as the food security crisis spreads throughout the world, affecting even the wealthiest economies. The fear is that this over-consumption now extending to land use in poor foreign states may lead to a wave of mass starvation throughout the developing world, sparking conflicts and threatening the integrity of the international system as such.

According to the Guardian’s Julian Borger:

“In the context of arable land sales, this is unprecedented,” Atkin said. “We’re used to seeing 100,000-hectare sales. This is more than 10 times as much.”

At a food security summit in Rome, in June, there was agreement to channel more investment and development aid to African farmers to help them respond to higher prices by producing more. But governments and corporations in some cash-rich but land-poor states, mostly in the Middle East, have opted not to wait for world markets to respond and are trying to guarantee their own long-term access to food by buying up land in poorer countries.

India and Bangladesh are constantly disputing river water resources that both countries depend on for basic sustenance for tens of millions of people. Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt are gripped by a struggle over control of the Nile’s water, with the river running dry at the Nile delta on the Mediterranean during some seasons. The Colorado River in the US has failed to reach the sea and is seeing its flow through the Grand Canyon significantly reduced, as states in the Colorado River Basin dispute claims on the river’s water.

Hyper-exploitation even extends to the use of natural resources like water as dumping grounds. The level of toxic chemicals and plastic polymer byproducts now found in ocean water the world over has reached alarming levels, threatening vast ecosystems and undermining the health of human beings and wildlife in most of the world. Drinking water across the US was found to be contaminated by high levels of pharmaceuticals earlier this year, raising the specter of as yet unknown potential harm to public health, over the long term.

High levels of contaminant emissions or toxic dumping are an abusive use of natural resources we often overlook —like air, land, water and forest cover— in our quest for combustible fuels, industrial-scale production and economies of scale we hope will reduce costs, even if they also increase the risk to our long-term economic and physical health and wellbeing. We are now facing a structural economic crisis, which requires us to reformulate and rebuild our economic model, at the most basic levels, a process which will be more or less painful, depending on how seriously we commit to getting it done and done right.

Seasonal photography, by Café Sentido editor J.E. Robertson, a visual essay about a season of historic, urgent & uneasy change

A “wave election”, with public sentiment clearly moving in a new direction, calling for principled governance, with a new focus on progressive aims… economic crisis, having built up over a decade, hidden in the esoteric workings of financial instruments reliant on advanced physics for mathematical proof of viability, worsened by unprincipled exaggerations and manipulations… the potential for a major swing in global opinions about the meaning of political systems… the climate is ripe for change, and we now face the problem of conceptualizing change, in order to see and understand its implementation.

We are emerging from a period of over-accustomed abundance, in which there was never supposed to be any doubt in the popular consciousness that generalized prosperity had reached a mythic level of sustainable undeniability; circumstance could not turn it back. That there was little real structural planning for sustainability was ignored. Economists, politicians, accounting firms, major banking institutions, and governments across the world, ignored the clear signs that flaws in the flow of matter and energy through an increasingly globalized economy were being obscured by convenient assumptions and poorly underpinned strategies.

Moments of exquisite beauty, of reverence for the mystery of the natural marketplace, became pervasive: the worship of plenty was so far-reaching, it seemed to be assumed that fashion icons could hold a philosophical stable center by waxing poetic about baroque ostentation. The bawdy glitz of Las Vegas, the all-at-once beaming-up of skyscrapers in Dubai, a quixotic-hubristic race to colonize the Moon, were hallmarks of the ’98-’08 balloon economy.

Meanwhile, the land of abundance was yellowing at the edges, the rich foliage of its temperate heartland was fading: the state of Ohio reached beyond 25% of the entire population officially on food stamps. Bankruptcies hit their highest level since laws were tightened in 2005. The fading of excess into a tired dream from an era of blind ambition meant we began to see that vast treasures could be diminished to a faint reserve of solace, scattered like guarded oases across the economic landscape.

Property values dropped. Oil prices soared. Banks pushed to cover unsustainable debt by 1) adding more unsustainable debt to their portfolios, and 2) using Congress to legislate against individual consumer bankruptcies. In August, home foreclosure filings again hit an all-time high —not the first record-setting month of 2008—, revealing a shocking level of underlying economic malaise. The dawn of an era of scaled-back expectations, of limited budgets, of belt-tightening and solemn fireside chats, had arrived.

As if every flaw and pitfall built into our way of functioning were invisible to even the most well-trained eyes, we basked in the golden distractions of a notion of manifest destiny, as if history were paying us its due for having imagined prosperity, suffered for it, and brought it into being. We thought nothing of the responsibility that comes with using with such endless hunger the resources available to us.

But the signs of a new “gilded age” were visible and were seeping into the consciousness of concerned observers. The problem was, however, what to do to forestall the onset of institutional chaos, an economic quagmire, the emotional unraveling of markets which had become the backbone of our projected fortunes. The political climate was calling for good news, not for good ideas, and so we collaborated in putting off awareness of what was in store.

Now, words like “depression” are on the winds of mass culture. John Steinbeck’s dustbowl epic The Grapes of Wrath is again a popular seller, not just for high-school required-reading lists. As a nation, we now face the problem of wanting to find warmth and solace, economically and spiritually, in a time of silver-cold rushing waters and a gathering storm of painful, forced change. In times of unwanted struggle, at the root of our basic humanity, we ask how much light and warmth we can derive from a bankside campfire, around which we tell the hopeful stories of a better day to come.

A thread running through those stories was the epic struggle of the 2008 election season, which began in earnest in the fall of 2006, officially during the first months of 2007, and led to an entire year of neverending dialogue about all things political, legislative, presidential and economic. The election was like a campfire culture that sprung up in cities and towns across North America and the world, in which people at the individual level, disenchanted by years, or decades, of political disappointments, began to think something new might be in the offing… an example of community-based leadership.

Yet the singular truth of the moment, related to that adage that “all politics is local” —what we learned from the need of so many to interact on a high plane of social discourse, of civic involvement— was that the individual will, the nature of one’s ability to grasp and to face difficulty, would be the root of recovery. If left on the open sands of desolation, the individual will could be strong, could be noble and definite, and yet falter; but coming together, negotiating around a campfire mentality of solemn devotion to a shared vision of liberty and prosperity, that individual will could be something more, something both brilliant and effective, part of a vibrant declaration of intent.

Admittedly, we could ask ourselves: can we direct our best efforts by way of “tried and true” mechanisms for steering the ship of state? Are the old ideas now out of touch, out of date, aged, brittle, risky? The ancient dichotomy between central planning and laissez-faire had been rusted over and abandoned; the split between social conservatives and economic progressives had withered; the logic of political confrontation was wearing thin. Something new was bursting on the scene.

As if to illustrate that a free people freely reinvents itself, and charts a new course, at will, with special vigor in the hardest of times, political strategy became a liability and complex examination of the facts and the future course of a people at last became the fashion. Clarity of thought before prejudice; hope and determination before fear and division; a sea change coming over the political culture of a deeply divided nation, struggling to find its way.

With the logic of edges, of the far edge of aspirational capitalism, the far-edge of binary politics, the far-edge of belief in ideals, combining to threaten the capacity of individuals, communities and political entities to envision a future of possibility, a logic of horizons grew up in the midst of concern and even panic. We saw that there could be a root structure deep enough to keep us from falling over the edge, into the deep of unsettled failings. We could reach the horizon and beyond.

The white of clear light, the blue of nourishing waters, the red of whole forest-scapes clamoring for a few last waves of warmth before winter: a dizzying but reassuring landscape of old growth entities, ideals and genuine concerns, informed our rudderless drift. Somehow, there might be another way, aside from sliding with the momentum of unstable ground, down into the waiting abyss; there might be the root-structure necessary for a fertile regrowth of economic and spiritual fortunes.

What may come next, what policies are precisely appropriate, what the existential value of competing political philosophies might be, if inclusion or exclusion are wise or perilous, became topics for discussion. Political discourse became a kind of heating oil to warm the spaces between living, working and fretting about impending upheavals, despite the persistent injection of wisps of hysterical fear-mongering. The space of political debate expanded into vastly divergent realms of life and culture, became a warmer, more habitable space.

As a nation, the United States of America has swelled from a band of small colonial villages to a continent-wide solid-state political union. Its history of democracy and humanist values has been fraught with dangerous threads of injustice, bias, hardship, combat and hypocrisy, yet its cultural thrust has been continually to move toward more openness, more inclusiveness, more equality and shared opportunity. The fall of 2008 was a season in which it became reasonable to most people to express concern that in fundamental ways, the nation had veered from that steady course, and needed new direction.

Like a pointilist composite of brushstrokes, the concept of new direction, together with the heat and light of economic distress, the urgency of concern about the security of one’s family’s wellbeing, the genuine worry that communities could spin apart or basic economic structures be allowed to decay, we found humanity seeking stalwart examples, straight arrows, a view of the land beyond the woody time of doubting.

Letting the old assumptions fall to earth, we seek a path to the other side. It could fairly be said there is a new atomization of the structure of society, a new decentralization of the tools of governance, in that politically, the vast center of American politics has summoned forth a style of campaign and a style of leadership that speaks to small entities across a vast narrative of history.

Local organizers moved thousands to volunteer, and the process of a general awakening about the difference between media-fomented cognitive dissonance and fact-based examination of safe passage to the spot beyond the horizon, refit the mechanisms of political discourse, and put control together with principle, in the hearts and minds of voters, citizens, actual people out across the landscape. The “conditions on the ground” became apparent, because a composite sketch of the emotional landscape, the moral and political priorities of a people, was better able to be drawn, from a debate about quality of ideas, as ideas and as practiced.

The old-model social-spending paradigm, as a way of competing with the “supply-side” fund-the-investors paradigm, shifted, and has been replaced by a complex ecosystemic mindset, which conceives of economic processes not as simple ‘expansion’, but part of a fabric of growth processes, a cultivation of longer-term potential for sustained abundance. A generative economics coalesced out of a host of strategies competing for absolute dominance of the political center.

If we could make something real and fecund out of the bewildering tangle of disappointments and excesses, if we could apply that reality like a ritual medicine to the workings of the collective mind, we could perhaps discover that amid the fallen visions and the dying embers of collapse, there is an already-existing road out of the wilderness, back to the heart of what we are as human beings. Generative economics is part of that renewed aspirational style, that desire to defy difficulty and the encroaching gloom, and seed the sustainable future, with what we have at our disposal now, in the present.

The startling array of concerns, perils, styles, ideas, crises, and best efforts, flowing together, could seem at times an unwieldy array of competing claims on our attention or our faith. But somehow, maybe because there is no other way, the future as seen from the real danger of extreme crisis comes to include illuminated approaches, that bridge gaps, heal fractures, draw from pools of shared awareness and reorient the mind to craft a more intelligent way forward.

There is a basic parallel between the growth of the individual mind, the salvage of a desolate spirit, and the process to which democracy, as a way of life and on the plane of ideals, of necessity, tends. The ability to reinvent a problem, so it can be better dealt with, to reinvent a social environment, so it can better adapt, to reinvent the meaning of government or principle or hope or failure, the ability to redefine crisis, is stitched into the process of changing a government, casting a vote for a philosophy about the future.

So, asking your forgiveness for the indulgent streak running through this essay, I return to the original question: what will this turning bring? We can see a new boldness, a feeling that somehow, it is necessary to filter the foreground from the background noise, to make a sincere effort at renewal, to put faith in actual human beings to do right by their fellow citizens.

We should see, coming into being, in coming months and years, new political coalitions, new social organizations, visions that seed the cultural landscape for improvement, working to ensure that the lessons for democracy that we now have at hand can actually be remembered, examined, and practiced. This is a time in which the aspirational and the factual can actually be seen coming together, in which we have given ourselves room to breathe, because we have trusted in the possibility of working to bring the real substance of a better day into being.

TheHotSpring.com :: To understand the relevance and virtues of Barack Obama’s economic vision, we have to look at the long history of struggle between American laissez-faire capitalism and American middle-class capitalism. We are on the verge of what is likely to be a comprehensive philosophical shift in economic policy toward generative investment, which means counting as economic imperatives the resilience and productive expansion of the positive bases of economic growth, i.e. human and environmental health and well-being, resource-density and cyclical models of resource use and reproduction.

We must also eschew, to avoid distraction, filter terms like “socialism” or “big government”, which are for many reasons, useless in the current realities of American economic policy. The government is bigger than it has ever been, and ideologically speaking, the issue is totally incoherent: the most supply-side administration in recent decades has produced the largest expansion of both spending and government power, while the social-services minded administration of the 1990s presided over the largest reductions.

The key is to understand that if the majority of consumers find cash scarce, even those businesses funded by the investor class will also find it scarce, as spending falls away. We have seen concrete proof of this fact in the recent mortgage-related credit crisis. The failure, on a massive scale, of home loans designed to help deliver equity and bargaining power to consumers unable to meet the profit-demands of lending institutions, has drained the middle class broadly of easy credit and disposable income.

Current Trends

Prices have gone up, credit has frozen, banks have closed, and ultimately, the economy sunk into “negative growth”, because the 70% of GDP representing consumer spending could not draw from those now depleted capital resources. The current climate provides us with a kind of acid-test of basic economic theories, including the assumption that “pro-business” market policy could not have a constricting effect on capital. We now see that abundance can produce economic pathologies that lead to widespread scarcity, and prolonged contraction.

The “free market” is really a market-wide conceptualization of economics that has tended to be applied always as a policy that permits the most powerful actors in a given market the maximum freedom to operate without responsible oversight or constraint. It is the misapplication of the market-wide factor —totalizing market policy and imposing harsh realities on those who can ill afford to face them, instead of recognizing the need to generate health across the entire pool of market resources— that has led to this opportunity-choking strategy.

By enhancing the “competitiveness” of the most powerful, the focus of market competition is removed to the realm of the most powerful operators; smaller economic entities cannot compete. Small family farms give way to large corporate agribusiness compounds; small “mom and pop” shops in small towns and big cities alike, are outmaneuvered by conglomerates with efficiency protocols, massive marketing budgets and economies of scale, to help them undercut sustainable local prices and reinforce their dominance.

The result tends to be a process of consolidation and the effective closing of the market under the influence of ever-fewer powerful actors. A true open market is one in which not only those who have most successfully concentrated power in their hands are free to compete, but the lone individual can find capital, establish an enterprise of just one or a handful of people, and compete for local market share in a fair and viable way.

This keeps capital moving more freely and generates a broader base of prosperity, upon which a market for goods and services can be optimized to suit the needs and interests of consumers. In such a scenario, a business achieves vast success not by exerting influence over the levers of power —usually artificially made available to them via selective deregulation—, but by best meeting the needs and interests of consumers.

That has to include doing so within a policy framework that privileges those needs and interests — for instance, protecting public health and environmental sustainability, while preventing criminal activity: three performative urgencies which when neglected serve as a serious drag on the sustainability of dynamic growth. There is nothing “socialist” in these regulatory aims, but rather the principle that a free market is a market in which all actors are enabled.

Both President-elect Obama and Sen. McCain have consistently claimed their economic policies, rooted in reforms to the tax code, put general prosperity ahead of ideology, and aim to achieve economic growth that benefits all. The question all along was how they planned to do so, and how their vastly divergent visions fit into this moment in American economic history.

A Brief Political History

Ronald Reagan and George H. Bush gave us 12 years of laissez-faire supply-side economic policy, aimed at feeding the investor class —not a permanent social “class” per se, but the group of people and institutions whose wealth is tied up in private investments— as much capital as possible, to spur investment and eventually achieve a “trickle-down” effect, where that capital reaches the average consumer. The result of that redistributive program, coupled with aggressive deregulation was a stock-market crash, banking corruption and a recession that ended the first Bush’s tenure in office.

Pres. Clinton redirected tax policy to give more breaks to working families, shift the tax burden back toward the wealthy and reduce education costs, making opportunity more broadly available. This coincided with a technology investment boom that revolutionized global society and the US economy, helping to create 22 million new jobs and swell government revenues without massive tax increases, leaving unprecedented budget surplus projections for his successor.

“Irrational exuberance” about dot-com stocks and excessive deregulation led to a dot-com correction, but the overall long-term outlook was sound. The main task of the moment was to reinvigorate the ailing “rust belt”, the industrial heartland of Ohio, western Pennsylvania, and Michigan, which was suffering serious decline in well-paid manufacturing jobs. This problem was ignored in Washington, DC, and Pres. Bush —motivated in part by ideological assumptions— implemented a $1.7 trillion tax cut, directed mostly at the wealthiest of Americans.

Blue-collar and middle class jobs, generally, have suffered major setbacks in recent years, to the extent that the average American household income has dropped $2,000 since 2001, and a common complaint of laid-off factory workers is that it would now be impossible to find any work that pays more than half what they used to earn. Fully one-quarter of the population of the state of Ohio is now on food-stamps, a very dire measure of the times, from the nation’s industrial heartland.

Overseas outsourcing, generalized deregulation and logically incoherent accounting practices, abetted by predatory financial practices, have severely damaged the spending power of the consumer class —those whose biggest contribution to GDP is consumer spending—, undermining the ability of consumer-sector businesses to continue creating new jobs. The fundamental societal ill of predatory lending has been misunderstood, because no one seemed to be paying attention to how such practices target the capital that makes a business relationship viable, extruding it and undermining long-term value.

The result is a record high in bankruptcies and home foreclosures. Over 1 million homes will be in active foreclosure by the end of 2008. In September, foreclosures were 70% more than one year earlier, and speculation continues to range between 6 to 20 million likely to be in jeopardy, depending on the viability of financial institutions, their ability or willingness to renegotiate, and other economic pressures, like mounting job losses.

Supply-side Distortions

One of the fundamental assumptions of the supply-side strategy is that the average consumer is actually and problematically “invisible”: there is no way to directly encourage or track their investments specifically and so no way to attribute growth to their behavior. This is also partly rooted in the false assumption that the average consumer is erratic, emotional and inconsistent, that his or her motivations are mysterious and impossible to predict.

This whole line of thought is absurd, of course, first of all because consumer spending is measured in excruciating detail and accounts for most of our GDP, therefore it is not at all invisible or unaccounted for, and second, because the average consumer spends what he or she can, not according to random emotion but according to the survival instinct. Here it becomes necessary to understand the constrictive nature of a supply-side vision, as opposed to the generative economics of empowering a dominant middle class, emboldened with real long-term opportunity.

We need to begin re-learning that the survival instinct plays a role in decision making, and that “demand”, as an economic force, is intimately linked to the information that instinct provides the consumer: if you have enough, spend more on unnecessary add-ons, luxury vacations or expensive schools; if you have less, make sure you can eat and have shelter first, then look at new spending. Demand may be staple demand, for life-sustaining goods and services, or it may be luxury demand, for those goods and services sought as a matter of choice or taste, because there is enough disposable income to warrant such “demand”.

The supply-side style of the current US administration has been dangerously narrow-minded and still less useful than the theories at its base: incentivizing the supply side somehow morphed into an almost paranoid notion that incentives would not be enough, the economy had to be newly engineered to virtually guarantee higher short-term revenues for certain industries, or somehow they would stubbornly refuse to follow what the supply-side theory assumes to be their own self-interest.

This distortion can be attributed to the over-active influence of lobbyists on government, but also to a fundamental lack of understanding of economics and of markets. Markets are not designed to create a permanent wealth pyramid; their nature is to make and unmake wealth, according to shifts in consumer behavior. Consistent non-volatile upheaval is the desired state of health, i.e. balance, sustainable generalized prosperity, multi-directional wealth creation, fairness and competition-based turnover in market leadership, with room for new entrants.

The Generative Response

A generative economics seeks to tap into the more democratic nature of markets, not for the concentration of wealth, but for the dissemination of prosperity. It aims to establish mechanisms for protecting genuine manifestations of conumser-oriented innovation and systems serving the public good —the status of which is itself a major economic driver—, keeping market leaders honest, preventing collusion, corruption, distorted accounting practices and non-generative (i.e. predatory or parasitic) commecial behavior.

While we are constantly warned by strict supply-siders that “this is not the time” to work on fixing problems as grave as healthcare, that we need to make sure as much government investment as possible —including tax breaks— goes to the “private sector” —read: corporate sector—, the generative approach examines in uncomfortable detail the degree to which unsustainable costs in healthcare —or energy, food or education— might be building dangerous pathologies into an increasingly inviable economic model.

That information allows us to then look seriously at what restoring economic prosperity means, and a big part of what it means is that we must in the present moment, starting from where we actually find ourselves, address the problems that are holding us back and threatening our future wellbeing. To continue building into the future of the American economic system the most basic and pervasive failures of that system is not only ill-advised and fraught with danger, it’s logically incoherent.

You cannot say the patient is in good health, if you leave his heart on the verge of cardiac arrest. There needs to be a certain amount of volatility, in order for profits to be workable, for investments to be able to find new terrain, for dynamic shifts to occur and for real individual freedom to exist alongside the freedom of capital to support a non-authoritarian structure in civil society. But the freedom of capitalist juggernauts to do as they please, without helping to bring any of the other necessary benefits of a market system, will not reinforce democracy or build a stronger economic future.

Burning finite resources in order to power expensive luxury vehicles or do long-term harm to the natural environment, within which all human activities must occur, by default, is not a generative process and requires heavy-handed protective measures to allow it to compete in a market where better ideas exist. Powering our entire economy without burning anything is possible, but lacking a generative approach that privileges wise resource use over the lust for hyper-exploitation of existing methods, we will not get there.

American infrastructure will need around $1.6 trillion in public works in order to be brought up to date and secured against collapse or failure. Global climate change is now too far along to further put off a swift transition to a clean energy economy —this must be done across borders with deliberate haste—, and is already building steep collateral costs into nearly every aspect of the standard industrial economy. And healthcare and education are reaching prohibitive levels of expense, beyond which not only will services be dangerously scarce, but what services there are will drain our economy of both health and know-how.

Building the opportunity to exploit each of these resources in a sustainable way, into our overall economic outlook, is a necessary step for bringing American democracy —and humanity generally— into the 21st century. The quality of action engaged by governments will determine not only whether such ideas are workable, but to what degree individual human beings are really free to choose their destiny in a world increasingly driven by mass crises and resources scarcity.

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