Since that semester in high school that introduced me to George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984, I’ve been a huge fan of anti-Utopian literature - books that imagine the ills of our present spiraling out of control, creating such dark, dismal (and devastatingly plausible) futures that the reader can’t help but be jolted into thinking: why didn’t we see the signs? Why didn’t we stop it when we still could have?
In this week’s New York Times, columnist Thomas Friedman points, rightly, to the miserable state of education in North America as a major contributor to the unemployment crisis and the likelihood it will persist in spite of an economic recovery. (If you think this sounds vaguely oxymoronic then clearly you still have’t grasped that the “economy” and the “real economy” are two very different concepts).
Tom Friedman, who worships at the altar of globalization, has concluded that in an increasingly globalized world, it’s not enough to be a lawyer - or even a great lawyer - but it’s a lawyer’s talent for hustling and trolling for business that will count. It’s not the dude who can build the sturdiest home, but the one who can do that and sell you on a fabulous open-concept kitchen that will be the envy of the neighbors who’ll get the job.
In this future Friedman envisions, creativity and arithmetic come together - like water for chocolate - in perfect synergy in service of that most sacred of goals: making money.
And what of those who are lacking in either the creativity or arithmetic departments (or - shudder - both)?
Friedman leaves that to the reader’s imagination, as if those unfortunate souls may be gobbled up by some highly evolved monster with little tolerance for imperfectly solved equations and no interior decorating sense.
I’m sure Tom knows this but a reminder wouldn’t hurt: the “economy” exists to feed people. People have never existed to feed the economy (until very, very recently in our evolution). The economy doesn’t have feelings. It is not its own entity, independent of human beings. We made the economy, and we can unmake it if we damn well choose to.
And unmake it we may very well do, if the economy stops feeding us and starts feeding on us.
Margaret Atwood’s wonderfully imaginative 2003 dystopian novel Orynx and Crake imagines a world split along “word people” and “numbers people” lines (not unlike our own) where numbers people have access to far more wealth and privilege seeing as their skills are so much more in demand (people with neither skill are relegated to wastelands).
It seems that every time the economy runs into a snag it is people who are asked to adapt, not the economy.
Not very long ago, having any education at all was something special, reserved for elites. But when nearly everyone could read and write, things like having a high school diploma, then a college degree and beyond, became a must if you aspired to own an ipod, a car, a house, or participate in the modern economy at all.
Now it seems even that isn’t enough. We are all entrepreneurs, hustlers, fighting for scraps. Some of us are born entrepreneurs. But what becomes of those of us who are not? Will the question that Friedman does not dare answer in his column - what happens to those of us who cannot adapt - be realized through Margaret Atwood’s apocalyptic vision, or will we ever live to see a different sort of economy, one truer to its roots, one that actually exists to feed people?
