Plastics Economy

 

    In the beginning scenes of Mike Nichol’s classic 1967 film “The Graduate,” Dustin Hoffman's character Benjamin is floating around his graduation party as his fathers” friends all tell him the secret to the future.  “Plastics”, they say.  It makes me wonder what the secret to the future would have been for different ages.  “Freedom” and “Survival” for the Mayflower generation.  “Democracy” for the Revolution when the wealth of nations was defined by Adam Smith as the sweat of our brow.      “Exploration” and “Fur” for the mountain men.  “Gold” and “Grubstakes” at Suters Mill and the Yukon.  “Equality” for the Civil War.  “Guns” and “Genocide” for the wild west.  “Railroads” would follow.  Then “Natural Resources” for the taconite, coke and limestone boom.  “Coal” and “Steel” for the wars.“Food” and “Farming” for the bread basket of the world.  “Cars” and “Appliances” would be next in the manufacturing age with “Energy” leading to the dam, oil and “Atomic age”.  “Real Estate” and “Risk” for the post war.  Then came the “plastics” of “The Graduate” and the “PC”, “Internet” and “Phones” as we entered global information age of the New World Order, with us being the consultants to all countries.  Finally, the magic word became “Data” and then “Ai” sweeping up all of our data and selling I back to us.  Now nothing will save us from investing more than we spent on World Warr II on The Cloud and Ai Data Centers. 

So we live in an age when the international supply chain is not so safe or robust anymore, like the late 70”s when the Mideast stopped sending us oil, and we are now retreating to a national manufacturing age when things are made at home, in the USA, despite our high wages and worker entitlements.  This leads to expense and inflation and a GDP made up primarily of Ai capital expenditures that probably won’t pay for themselves for a long time.  With an economy still reeling from Bank and Covid bailouts, the only bright spot is that the retired Baby Boomers have $100 trillion dollars’ worth of homes and assets to spend or give away.  This keeps consumption up, and while we remain constantly at war, the only missing piece of a healthy economy is unlimited cheap labor.  Without immigrants there will be more inflation for wages even though our minimum wage is stuck at $7 and hour and $2 an hour for waitresses in Utah and the US. 

This means more inflation than our 3-5 % average rate, even if you include the crazy early 80’s of double digit inflation and unemployment.  Jobs are starting to rebound, if you can trust the jobs reports from the lying feds that are constantly being adjusted and corrected.  Productivity doubles and re-doubles again but wages at the low end don’t keep up in this K shaped economy that is ostensibly about affordability.  So, Wall Street and billionaires are rocking it, and the middle class is disappearing.  Nothing is trickling down.  The rich get richer and the poor get children.  We will socialize the risk and expense while privatizing the profits and the gains.  Forget about the environment, climate and water, they are inconvenient and they don’t make us money. 

There are no more customer service or help phone lines anymore, only infinite Ai do-loops of frustration.  There are not even people at McDonalds to take your order and tell you to “have a nice day”.  Driverless Uber drones will replace the unemployed taxi drivers currently doing to steering.  Luckily Ai will figure out all our passwords, and we will get to switch to iris recognition and forget our black book of pass codes while we watch Ai take over the world.

But in the end, we will have nothing to do except fix the servers and print more money.  This will drive us back to each other, to share our wisdom and pain, humanity and spirit.  We will reconnect with each other on a quantum level, including Ai, and recognize our shared consciousness.  We will simplify our constant efforts to entertain and stimulate ourselves, that give us things to do, and we will live deliberately as Henry David told us to.  That leaves us with a new economy that could be based on words not like “fear and greed” but rather on ”empathy, wisdom and the human touch”.