Directory:Akahele/The State of the Human Economy
Digging through a few conference notes from the <a title="CTAM" href="http://www.ctam.com" target="_blank">CTAM Research Conference</a> of February 2007, I uncovered a few things I had jotted down while listening to <a title="Biography of Shari Swan" href="http://www.futuredesigndays.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=96:speaker-5&catid=39:speakers-2006&Itemid=102" target="_blank">Shari Swan</a>, founder of Streative Branding and former global marketing executive at Reebok. Swan simply presented a timeline of human economic history, but I found it provocative enough then, and still enough now to share with you today.
Let me present my graphic version of the timeline (Swan’s didn’t look like this), and after you give it some thought and consideration, we can then discuss it:
<a href="
"><img class="size-full wp-image-1197" title="Timeline smaller" src="" alt="Timeline of economies" width="432" height="197" /></a>
Tribal Economy
I don’t recall that Swan went into detail about the earliest phases of human development, but my cursory knowledge of civilization between 100,000 and 10,000 BC would evoke images of <a title="About Neanderthals" href="http://www.ecotao.com/holism/hu_neand.htm" target="_blank">Neanderthal</a> men, women, and children using stone tools to fashion crude stone weapons – most significantly the spear tip. The society would be organized around an extended family or perhaps a close-knit handful of families that we would now call a “tribe”. The tribe would have a self-contained economy, and the most common interaction between tribes would be of a defensive or violent nature. Food would be gained through the “hunt and gather” technique, and homesteads would not be permanent structures because wild game migrates with the seasons. Sitting in our comfortable, heated homes with full refrigerators, it is very difficult to even imagine human life in the Tribal Economy.
Rural Economy
Then, around 10,000 BC, a revolution in civilization transformed the economy. People <a title="The Neolithic Revolution" href="http://history-world.org/neolithic.htm" target="_blank">learned to grow crops</a> that could be consumed, stored for off-season consumption, or traded to another tribe to keep them from attacking your tribe or to obtain some surplus product they had in their possession. This was the Rural Economy.
Industrial Economy
At about the time the crude steam engine was being made more practical and efficient (the years between 1700 and 1775), we can say mankind’s economy was transformed once again. Mechanical turning of wheels and milling tools was no longer dependent on horses walking in a circle or the <a title="About water wheels" href="http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi105.htm" target="_blank">cascading water of a mill race</a>, so industrial manufacturing and processing could be located closer to centers of labor, resources, and distribution, and thus was born the Industrial Economy.
Consumer Economy
Swan suggests that after 200 years of the Industrial Economy’s accomplishments, manufacturing things that couldn’t be made by hand under the Rural Economy (railroad tracks, locomotives, automobiles, airplanes, and hydroelectric dams, to name a few), civilization graduated to a Consumer Economy, all about the household or the individual acquiring things that made life easier or symbolized status. This was the age of television sets, <a title="TV dinners, by the Library of Congress" href="http://www.loc.gov/rr/scitech/mysteries/tvdinner.html" target="_blank">frozen dinners</a>, Barbie dolls, and annual stylistic alterations to automobiles so that consumers would just have to buy “the new model”. It’s important to understand the Consumer Economy (and don’t turn to Wikipedia for help – <a title="Wikipedia struggles with Consumer Economy" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Consumer_economy&oldid=323722345" target="_blank">its article</a> about the Consumer Economy is abysmal), not only because it has so indelibly shaped our present urban and suburban culture, but because we are arguably still in it. More on that in a moment, though.
Human Economy – are we there yet?
Swan’s talk at the CTAM conference was not so much focused on this overall timeline upon which I’ve expended so many words taken from my crude understanding of each era, but rather Swan spent most of her presentation elaborating on the characteristics of the most recent stop on that timeline: the Human Economy. I wish I had taken better notes, however, it was clear that Swan characterizes the Human Economy as placing a capital and cultural emphasis on bettering and enriching the person. (Again, you will be lost if you turn to Wikipedia for <a title="Wikipedia lacks article on Human Economy" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_economy" target="_blank">a definition of “human economy”</a>, which is a quaint irony, if you ask me.) Symbols of the Human Economy might include a fully booked yoga class at the local YMCA, the ever-increasing popularity of “continuing education” programs for adults and seniors at a community college or via distance learning, and of course, volunteer efforts that assist those less fortunate than they who provide the helping hand.
There’s more to it than just this, though. From what I can tell over the past 5 or 10 years, the phrase “human economy” has become inextricably intertwined with the concepts of “sustainability”, “green living”, and the “human ecology”. With wind energy fields springing up in the marketing nexus of Atlantic City, New Jersey, and solar energy farms sprouting up in erstwhile oil-rich Texas, one would be hard-pressed to argue that we are not in the midst of an economic shift of some degree. But, is it transformative? Would we be correct to say that the Consumer Economy (or, for that matter, even the Industrial Economy) are fully behind us, even in the most advanced American urban centers like San Francisco, Boston, or Portland? I would argue not. In other words, I am here to say that Shari Swan may have prematurely placed our society into a Human Economic era that we have not yet truly entered.
I’m willing to be called a curmudgeon or a cynic for saying this, but I do not believe that a significant number of us are dedicating our time and resources toward “bettering and enriching the human”. Though many of us would like to be doing this (or imagine ourselves to be doing so), the Consumer Economy still has us trapped – more than ever – in debt, in paycheck-to-paycheck budgeting, and indeed in federally mandated bail-outs of entire consumer-driven industries. I think we’re still mostly stuck in the Consumer Economy, and we need look no further than the sub-prime lending fiasco, or the debacle of the Iraq War which went off with nary a protest from American citizens who might bother to ask how we’d pay for such a war, or the fact that Craigslist.org is now most notorious for <a title="Thomas Dart v. Craigslist" href="http://www.docstoc.com/docs/13676359/Thomas-Dart-v-Craigslist" target="_blank">enabling sexual prostitution</a>, possibly even of minors – and our legal system is forced to exempt that website from punishment or even self-restraint, thanks to a <a title="Section 230 of Communications Decency Act" href="http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/47/230.html" target="_blank">1997 law that our Congress passed</a> without really understanding that the Internet is just another channel of publishing.
The proof is in the Internet
In fact, I think the Internet is the best proof that ours is still a Consumer Economy and not a Human Economy. If you look at the 10 most popular websites, four are devoted to ad-supported search and e-mail communications (Google, Yahoo!, MSN & MSN Live); and three are devoted to consumer transactions (eBay, Amazon, and Microsoft); leaving just three that could be described as oriented toward the Human Economy (Facebook, YouTube, and Wikipedia). Take Facebook. It has surged over the past two years to become the # 3 website by including more and more folks of my generation rather than the Britney Spears generation, bringing together long-lost high school classmates and former co-workers to talk about what’s important to them. But, what seems to be actually important to them? Apparently, the current rage is playing viral marketing games like Mafia Wars , FarmVille, Farm Town, and Sorority Life, where enterprising code developers are capitalizing on the unwitting willingness of consumers to <a title="Social gaming revenues" href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/26/social-games-how-the-big-three-make-millions/" target="_blank">open their wallets</a> to feel connected. Sorority Life offers the following for your human betterment:
“Create the perfect look for your avatar. Hit the mall for the latest fashions. And get a job to pay off your shopping obsession.”
Farm Town’s value proposition to the consumer?
“Design, grow and maintain your farm and even send gifts to your friends. Play now and share the fun with everyone!”
This is not a return to the Rural Economy, folks.
What are your thoughts? Have we entered the Human Economy phase of civilization? Are we still in the Consumer Economy? Is the Human Economy something we should be striving for? Or, is there a better way to model our human timeline? I look forward to your comments below.
