Things have changed considerably since 1980 when I completed a major in economics. For the past 37 years, the rage has been all about GDP. Many economists, however, believe that is passé.
Lorenzo Fioramonti is one such economist who believes that nations should be looking at alternative indicators and new technologies to create welfare economies.
Human well-being is tied more closely to the health of our environment and ecosystems than to large-scale production and economic growth per se.
In his book, Wellbeing Economy, published just over a year ago, Fioramonti states on page 80: “Not only do our societies blissfully neglect the massive costs of commercial processes, but they also cheerfully subsidise them, as if such behaviour deserved an additional reward.”
In his view small businesses and localised economies can become very competitive using 3D printers to manufacture “a wide range of gadgets, from jewellery, small toys and wearable objects to household utensils”. He notes that a Chinese company in 2015 “successfully printed a five-storey apartment block”. It beggars the imagination!
New terms that we will soon become familiar with are “prosumers” instead of consumers, and passive consumers will become “active change makers”.
Fioramonti envisages that “the intersection between new technologies in the field of software and hardware (will have) the potential to affirm the wellbeing economy as the dominant paradigm of the 21st century”.
As far as I am concerned, that is what the future heralds. The ANC’s radical economic transformation is looking back rather than forward.
The EFF’s policy, likewise, wants to bring everyone to the same starting line, which in effect is going to be a static line.
At our recent Cope policy conference we proposed that every school-leaver should pass a suitably graded computer competence examination so that the learner can become self-
employed or highly employable if further education is not desired.
Political parties and their supporters who are constrained by stasis in their thinking of economics are going to remain perennially behind and perennially unhappy.
The change in the field of economics that is going to happen will require a different mindset than that which
prevails today.
It will require a willingness to look straight forward towards the unknown where new technologies are birthing as we speak.