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June 09, 2005
Another look
When I wrote about Tantrums, you could imagine the mail I sent to Mom and Dana. I've got no problem with folks in India getting good jobs. More power to them. Let's hope they quickly arrive at European income levels. Let's hope we can all still breathe when that happens.
So I agree with Melanie, who used to work here at Sun in Grenoble, as Tilly chronicles in her blog.
It hardly makes sense to disagree with Friedman's analysis that our system is ever more winner-take-all. Sure, we see more and more of that.
I do however disagree that this particular instance of the system is inevitable, as if there were no point it attempting to fix it. If we consider this system inevitable, our obvious conclusion is that we must win at all costs. Or if we're really feeling charitable, we may help out some of the losers. Maybe that strategy pays off for people who read the New York Times.
But you can do better than that. It's been about 25 years since Buckminster Fuller wrote Critical Path and we're still stuck in scarcity mentality. Scarcity. That's why we compete in the economic sphere. Look it up. Economy comes from the Greek meaning "household management."
The reason we need New York Times columnists to write hagiographically about the movers and shakers of aggressive household management is that if they didn't stoke the fires, people would eventually get sidetracked, look at each other, wondering, "What the heck were we competing at that for? And with such high stakes!"
Posted by Mark at June 9, 2005 09:02 PM