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Last summer, I read something that has been bothering me ever since. It was in New Scientist and the link is Here.
It's been bothering me, I think, because of the way that manufacturing was abandoned in the early '80s in favour of financial services. Borrowing from Peter to pay Paul is not an economy. Now that the causes of the global crash have come to light, that much is certain. What's also certain is that the people with the most liquid wealth (not lines of credit but money in the bank) are the ones who actualy make things and save the profit.
Monetarism, plus the stupidity to trade potentially bad debts in the hope that they'll only go bad after you've sold them on and screw whoever bought them, has brought us to this sorry state. It's been the dominant doctrine in the West for 30 years. It has led us to finance a lifestyle that gives us the illusion of being wealthy, when all we really are is in debt. I know someone who was made redundant a year ago, and despite having a potential pot of £20,000 sat on the drive in the shape of a 4x4, wouldn't part with it because of what the neighbours might think. It's a mark of how deeply we as a culture have come to believe our own illusion.
Meanwhile, the Chinese, for all their faults, now have the fiscal wherewithal to bail out (perhaps "buy out" would be a better word) whole countries. They, with their traditionally lax attitude to intellectual property and copyright, have made and sold us things, while we've borrowed from each other in the scramble to afford those things. We've been chumps chasing shiny things to extend the illusion.
The illusion isn't working. If what you're doing isn't working, the sensible to do something else, right? Isn't it time we started manufacturing again and generating wealth ourselves? I think it is. This brings me back to the the article I linked to above. We're about to begin the third decade of life online. Buy a domain name, customise a free web template, open a PayPal account and you're a business. But how do you manufacture things to sell? Can you write? There are places, like Lulu.com, that will publish books on demand. You upload the manuscript, someone buys it, Lulu prints and sends the finished book. Can you design an object? Again, there are 3D printing shops that will print out and send your design to the customer. Got an idea for an app? Find a free programming course online and write it. Need to publicise your idea? What else are Facebook and Twitter all about? Exploit them.
OK, these are simple and obvious examples that sprung readily to mind, but the point is that there's a robust, mature, global infrastructure already in place with all the services and people you need to know to get an idea off the ground, and which you can use at minimal or zero cost to simply see what happens. If your idea doesn't work, fine, you've lost nothing but the time you would have spent servicing or increasing your debt. But if it takes off, wow! Be kind, socially aware and pay something back in thanks - along with your taxes.
Isn't this approach better than worrying about whether you can make the mortgage payment this month and keep the credit card companies off your back? Just add ideas and some belief in yourself.
