What you would do if were you starting again as the designer of everything today? If you had a magic wand charge to 100%dffd

As chief architect of the world with the tools available now, would you really set up an economy as we currently have it?

Who thought it a good idea to turn those who learn into products Harvard and Standford get to sell for 60,000 a year?  Which of us decided everyone needs to check our smartphones every five seconds?  And when will enough stuff be enough stuff?

Start again and make money a resource, like water.

Once a upon a time . . . back in the days before “back in the day, ” manufacturing supplied jobs. Cars were expensive, yes, but at least building them put the world to work. The money mostly went to the owner of the car factory, but some rain fell on the rest of us too. Enough to make The West rich, anyway. We grew a middle class to the benefit of all.

But today the car is expensive and puts robots to work.  And all the rain falls on one guy’s garden in Silicon Valley or Wall Street. And the people who can best act like machines, the excellent sheep, fight over the jobs that turn them into sheep-machines. They get rich and unhappy. The rest of us work at Starbucks and Wal-Mart.

If that view is cynical, it is not hallucinogenic.

For sure it is not the would you would build if you were starting again today, with 100 year plan to put the world together.

So what about this . . .

Scatter around the factories with the robots.  Let them crank out the basics: shirts, chairs, Ikea stuff. Give as many people what they need as cheaply as possible.

After that, you would want as many jobs as possible centered around doing the kinds of work that calls to people’s souls, which often includes making things by hand. Making a chair at an Ikea factory makes few but the investors and owners happy. Making a chair in your workshop can become an obsession and a life-long pursuit.

The same is true for shoes and bags and guitars and art and pursuits the economy tends to de-value.

Except, we can choose what to value and even do so together. We are all connected by such choices.  That is something the internet allows us to do, become a community of value-ers

Hand made things are often more expensive already. But they should be wildly overpriced. Imagine their value not based entirely on rarity or excellence, but on how many people they put to work.

Yes, ten thousand euro/dollars is a lot to pay for a pair of handmade shoes, especially when the robot factory makes shoes for five euro/dollars. But if 1000 goes to the maker, 9000 to nine other apprentice makers or folks nearby, that’s a good purchase.

Will this convert the Military Industrial Complex into a mechanism for making cupcakes?

Will the anger that fuels marches in Charlottesville or motivates shooters of guns at cafes in Paris thus be extinguished.

Nope.

By next year, is, as ever, year one.