Mixed Media
Measuring Change
By Sylvia L. Mayuga
INQUIRER.net
First Posted 02:52:00 07/20/2008
Filed Under: Economy, Business & Finance
“Humanity has not been down this road before. There are no precedents, no guideposts,” our revered media elder Juan Mercado quotes pointedly from the book, Urban Future 21, a Global Agenda for Twenty-First Century Cities, in a column.
As progressively unlivable urbanization à la Metro Manila spreads all over the country, Mercado bemoans “the notorious palusot (easy way out) syndrome (that) drove Congress last year to elevate 18 towns” to cityhood status in untimely fashion, and for reasons notoriously lacking in thought.
Many will agree with his conclusion: unless Filipino officialdom radically overhauls its prevailing mindset, we’re in for more of the overcrowded chaos and crime-ridden misery in the trail of major global changes impacting on the world’s cities:
“Leaders of our ‘new cities’ stubbornly cling to yesterday. They should read the chapter, titled ‘Visions Are Lacking’ (where) the ADB notes that ‘country and city life are now archaic concepts as urban and rural economies interlink…We have now possibly embarked on the third wave of globalization.’”
High time to read up, government officials and assorted local politicians – starting with the term “third wave” popularized by the futurist Alvin Toffler in the ‘80s to refer to the “knowledge revolution” that some of you might recall from sound bites of the Aquino, Ramos and Arroyo administrations on the “information superhighway.”
According to Toffler, that “third wave” succeeded the “second wave” of industrial revolution 300 years ago, following the “first wave” that began with the domestication of agriculture 10,000 years ago. Recall that domesticated agriculture eventually became a coin of international trade and the basis of wealth in now “developed” countries.
There’s a lot of painful colonial and neo-colonial history between those lines. But for now, consider the most striking thing about the so-called third wave’s dominant factor – “the right knowledge in the right head at the right time able to substitute for all other factors of production.”
True enough, today we find ourselves under daily bombardment from infomercials masquerading as news on YouTube, 3G and iPhone. Here’s a useful capsule review of that knowledge revolution’s impact, both broad and deep, on all our lives.
And here’s the big “however” to all that – an ongoing planetary space walk “without precedents or guideposts,” where first, second and third waves clashing and crashing into one another defy easy categorization in many countries.
Nor is there a lack of doomsday pronouncements on the slow-motion collapse of American hegemony as the most dramatic phenomenon in this new situation – from religionists exorcizing Western decadence to realists naming basic misconceptions underlying our present multiple global crises.
It all begins in thought, as this illustrates: In “the collapse of assumptions that have dominated our economic debate for three decades,” where “free-market clichés have passed for sophisticated economic analysis…even conservatives recognize that capitalism is ailing,” E.J. Dionne writes in Truthout.
“Reaganomics,” they called this collapsing economic model whose main idea was that “Regulation is the problem and deregulation is the solution. The distribution of income and wealth doesn't matter. Providing incentives for the investors of capital to ‘grow the pie’ is the only policy that counts. Free trade produces well-distributed economic growth, and any dissent from this orthodoxy is ‘protectionism.’”
Sound familiar? It is. Those were the ruling mantras of the Aquino and Ramos governments’ efforts to rebuild the Philippine economy from the shambles of the Marcos regime. But the experience of global crisis now compels the pendulum to swing back, and Filipinos are warned: time has come to challenge that holdover imported premise in the present Arroyo government.
The reason cannot be emphasized more strongly: “This is the third time in 100 years that support for taken-for-granted economic ideas has crumbled. The Great Depression discredited the radical laissez-faire doctrines of the Coolidge era. Stagflation in the 1970s and early '80s undermined New Deal ideas and called forth a rebirth of radical free-market notions. What's becoming the Panic of 2008 will mean an end to the latest Capital Rules era.”
Here’s that think-piece whole for your consideration. The Philippines is not quite where the subprime mortgage crisis and military adventurism have brought America today, but its bull’s-eye relevance to the Philippines under Arroyo & Co. is spelled out in no uncertain terms: "’Free trade has increased wealth, but it's been monopolized by a very small number of people…’The coming debate will focus not on shutting globalization down but rather on managing its effects with an eye toward the interests of ‘the most vulnerable people in the country.’"
Those italicized words come neither from a wild-eyed Marxist nor a gun-slinging liberation theologian but from Massachusetts’ Rep. Barney Frank, Democrat chair of the U.S. House Financial Services Committee. Is the world finally coming full circle?
Equally striking is how so-called post-industrial societies like America and countries stuck somewhere between pre-industrial and semi-industrial– like a Philippines in the lethal vise of rule by its self-serving elite – are beginning to find more in common in the multiple crises than previous social science categories have allowed.
New vision and fresh approaches have always been the way out of the dark tunnels humanity has regularly wandered into throughout history. Pause now for fresh news from a teetering superpower. Click and read for a big fat dose of hope from the American grassroots, for a change.
"This goal is achievable, affordable and transformative," is how Al Gore summarized a sustainable energy future to a cheering audience in Washington, D.C. the other day. Those words also sum up the value and promise of human creativity in the related crisis of food, fuel and the world economy.
Utopia or Oblivion, the title of one of the visionary philosopher Buckminster Fuller’s first books, also described the choice he saw building up to confront the world four decades ago. It’s upon us now, but who knows – we may finally be glimpsing a fourth, far kinder global wave rising from nowhere else but people power, a.k.a. the grassroots.
Respond to: slmayuga@yahoo.com
|
