01.07.11
Make s— for the rich or die
One of the recurring topics here is obviously my obsession with deindustrialization and the pipedream that this country will regain greatness through a DIY economy. In other words, when all Americans adapt to making something unique and which can’t be underpriced or replaced by an overseas good or service — something which will sell in the plutonomy.
The idea that a country the size of the United States could be rebuilt to be a pro racing car crankshaft/chocolate-covered truffle/$180 harmonica maker and regain any type of mojo is a stupefying one.
The entire labor force cannot be adapted to it. Individuals — everywhere, not just in the US — are not particularly suited to splintering into very small units of innovation providing consumer goods for the global wealthy. That’s just humanity.
It’s a calamitous model, one increasingly rationalized by rhetoric that condemns US labor for costing too much. Gallingly, it comes from Wall Street, from the class that destroyed the economy using a series of systemic frauds — financial instruments. not too-expensive material goods.
As if the cost of living in the United States is the same as it is where labor is much cheaper. Or that, in some way, because it is expensive here relative to elsewhere, that a vast segment of the populace not capable of relocating to a global cheap labor zone deserves whatever bad fate befalls it.
Two recent items from the “artisanal services are the future” economy meme.
First, a letter from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 4:
Barb O’Brien may not know it, but she is in the vanguard of an exciting new employment trend, which can be called either ‘artisanal services’ or ‘catering to the rich,’ depending on your point of view.
Ms. O’Brien, who owns Kirkwood’s Silver Garden, was featured in an article by Aisha Sultan in Tuesday’s Post-Dispatch.
Ms. O’Brien puts up holiday decorations for people with more money than time. For a few hundred bucks, she’ll come to your house, make it look splendid for the holidays, and then come back in January to put all the stuff away.
That puts her squarely in the middle of a trend described by economist Andrew Caplin of New York University in last Sunday’s New York Times: artisanal services. In an era of growing income inequality, he said, clever people will figure out new ways to serve the wealthy.
This trend is not actually new – the wealthy have always had butlers, maids, landscapers and the like. The trick is to figure out a new service that wealthy people don’t yet know they need. England’s Queen Elizabeth II, for example, has a guy who plays the bagpipes under her bedroom window every morning.
Hey, it’s a living.
And, prior, from a Sunday edition of the New York Times on how to fix the economy (note — most of the reprints around the web on artisanal services all point back to Caplin and this source):
How about a cheap technology that our mortal minds can’t currently fathom?
A decade ago, who could have imagined that more than a million people would pay $1 for a portable phone video game in which you slash watermelons with a Japanese sword? Who, in other words, could have envisioned the Fruit Ninja app?
”That’s a pretty wispy hope,” said Gar Alperovitz, a professor at the University of Maryland.
……..
Perhaps we are entering the era of the self-starter. Prof. Andrew Caplin of New York University thinks so. He begins with the premise that in the coming global economy some people will succeed and others will not, and income inequality will grow. While it’s noble to focus on how to spread wealth around, he says that it might be wiser to think of ways the poor and middle class could cater to the economy’s biggest winners.
”Unfortunately, there will be income inequality,” he says, ”but enough people will make money that those who don’t would do well, in as much as they understand the needs of that group.”
He says he expects a rise in what he calls ”artisanal services,” like cooks, nutritionists, small-scale farmers. He sees services emerging that aid the wealthy at the intersection of health and genetic science. He imagines a rise in technology services, too — experts who keep clients current about technology which can advance their interests in business, in the media, on search engines and so on.
Professor Caplin worries that this concept might be caricatured as ”cater to the rich.”
But he suggested that this country could use a lot more non-judgmental thinking about the future of the United States economy.