It's time for Global realization not Globalization.
How to get a new economy rolling when US and European politicians try to pay for the old one.
by Tom Thorne
French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Andrea Merkel met yesterday in Paris to discuss what they can do about the European debt crisis. One notion they came up with was getting European member states to pass legislation to balance their budgets.
Naturally this idea went over like a lead balloon with most ECU members. Greece, Portugal, Spain and Ireland gulped at the prospects of a balanced budgets anytime soon. For these countries balanced budgets are fleeting at best and highly unlikely in the near future short of gutting social services and governments removing themselves completely from governing anything. It was all really public relations at the Paris meeting.
France and Germany with Great Britain are the biggest economies in continental Europe and they will have to face funding a lot of guarantees for the other debt ridden members of the ECU. However, their own economies are not in very good shape either and so whatever they do may be more window dressing than real.
What these European leaders need to do is first get away from the European focused approach to their problems and realize that they are part of a Global economy that will eventually right itself but with new economic imperatives. That will ultimately mean changing how people and politicians actually think about economics and how to generate opportunity.
Just like their American political counterparts they need to swallow their Eurocentrism and realize that along with the US that they create an annual Gross International Product (GIP) of just about $30 trillion US dollars.
Debt ridden rich people...create opportunity for the world's poor.
They need to see that they are debt ridden rich people and get a much more strategic view of the effects of Globalization and the opportunities this concept can present in the future. Besides high technologies there are some golden opportunities for much lower technology applications to create economic growth. High technologies come in phase two.
For example the world is plagued by the excesses of Africa. Millions of people on this continent need very basic services to simply survive. They need food, they need housing, they need sewage systems, they need safe water, and they need drugs to stem disease. The people need education of all kinds, they need jobs, family planning and they need safety from exploitation from thugs and criminals who claim to be their rulers. They need economic opportunity and they need to escape from ignorance.
They need to have freedom from the importations of weapons most of which come from China, the Russian Bloc and sadly also from the West. They need governments that can escape tribalism and clan affiliations. Africa in their own context has to escape old ideas and so does Europe and North America except in Africa these old ideas kill people. Africa needs to jump directly into the information-knowledge age. The West, China, India can help them do that and create positive economic activity that is mutually beneficial.
The direction is clear...seeing past old ideas is the problem.
Besides Africa there is an opportunity to provide higher quality lives to millions in China and India. China and India are growing economic powers but before they join Globalization fully they need to look after their own populations much better. China could maintain its current growth rate by domestic production alone and by eliminating domestic poverty. It should reinvest its wealth into its own population. The same is true for India.
This is the first time in history that we can really take a world view. Globalization from an economic standpoint is a natural outcome of seeing the world as one unit. A blue marble hanging in space. A finite planet that has limited resources and humans with very basic needs to be met.
Why does the current economic model operated by the most sophisticated high technologies this planet has ever seen, seem unable to grasp that the world's inequities and turn them into major economic opportunities? The new economy, in my view, is not one of accruing wealth. It is an information-knowledge economy of ecology where social good is seen as profit because it creates more opportunity. It is a complete change and an economy were wealth is reinvested for the common good. The true meaning of Globalization is a global realization of human interdependency.
Global realization comes from content connectivity and an information base that tells us what we are doing and how we are doing it now has a finite end. If it continues it will bankrupt us all. At the moment the connectivity is still processing the old forms of the have and have not worlds. It is still not escaping the old ideas of economic domination of markets and politics. There is a new idea. Dominating markets is an old idea. Serving them is our new conceptual ideas of redefining profit.
© Copyright 2011, Tom Thorne, All Rights Reserved.
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