Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Weaving the Web

One of the things we are learning here is that we are the economy. That is, the 'economy' as the aggregate or the emergent properties (my preferred term!) of people--you and I (etc) doing the things we need to do to earn a living, house ourselves and family, feed ourselves and family, and lately (the last 50 years or so) our pursuit of leisure activities.
It's important to know that the economy is a bottom up phenomenon.. Or, as Adam Smith observed some 250 years ago, our "propensity to truck and barter". (We'll save discussions around supply and demand for another post another day) I also never tire of wanting to point out that the stock markets are not the economy, nor or they a measurement of the economy.

What happened in the United  States, and to lesser degrees elsewhere around the world, was an economy based on speculation over a period of 15 years--this so called bull run--rather than sound economic activity. Policy wonks, politicians, economic schools of thought, ad nauseum debate and fight over what to do, in a rather ironic misguided conceptual basis that we have a command economy. En mass, somehow experts while knowing better prescribe 'solutions' like a centralized authority controls or manages the economy!

Unfortunately, or fortunately depending how you look at this, it comes back down to people getting down to the hard work of making themselves more productive, and the companies they own or run, or work for, more productive. This is inescapable.

For people like us, the more we connect our own efforts to become more productive, more knowledgeable, becoming more understanding of what it means and takes to become more productive, to add more value, in the 'information age', we'll realize the enormous opportunity that exists in front of us.

There is, right now, the weaving of the web of the economic basis for a healthier economy. There is tremendous opportunity for those of us who understand enough of those dynamics to harness and network our energies.

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