Post-Economy of 21st Century

Since the beginning of the 21^st century the world is in a transition, a macro-shift to a new period of history, a new era, after the postmodern period corresponding to the second half of 20^th century. An economic crisis started in 2008 and it is still not over, although with ups and downs sometimes it seems that there are several crises, but in true it is the same only one crisis yet, with different faces…

It is so because what is in crisis is the postmodern system. One can ask why something that worked very well did not work anymore. We do not know the wright answer but what we know is that history is like this, history changes anyway, despite human efforts to keep the path the was useful for decades. Paradigms do not stay strong permanently. What happens in biological, physical or chemical level that are all time changing happens also in human, social, anthropological, world, although there are physical, chemical and biological laws… And all happens in cycles also…

Anyway, now that pragmatic economic directions are not working anymore despite people try “to keep in the game…” Economy is not something only rational. The subjective side of economy emerges from time to time and maybe now is one of those moments. The market is nervous, non-confident, etc. So, numbers are not enough.

We do not know what is going to be the new economy. Maybe this kind of “post-economy” is under construction with new factors that are still arising…   

Still the same old crisis...

From time to time since 2008 it seems that a new global crisis arrives, after and before a calm period. But, if we look more carefully, we can see that it is the same crisis since those days.

Some continuity is going through the ups and downs and it is difficult to understand and read it by “economy lenses”. Maybe it happens because this kind of crisis probably is a historical crisis, a cultural crisis, a “macro shift moment” between two eras: postmodern times are ending and after-postmodern are coming. The system, that was useful once, doesn’t work anymore as it worked before. That system was truly efficient and efficiency was a capital quality of it… But that efficiency does not give answer to the new questions or solution to the new problems. It is time to find a new paradigm to bring meaning to the signals seen in day by day, or in science, or in culture. Economic problems are not alone separated from other human factors. So, maybe it is necessary to use creativity and find new languages to understand and describe the differences among economies that are trying to find some common ground to them, that are trying to find a new Ariadne’s thread to go in and out of the labyrinth…     

Migration, after-postmodern and the ship of fools

In the Middle Ages and Renaissance the stultifera navis or the ship of fools was an allegoric image of people, or maybe a society, navigating without course and without captain or guide. This symbol was used in several forms of art to usually express something more in ironic than in a dramatic way. Nowadays, in after-postmodern times, what was just a symbolic and ironic image before, now became a very sad reality in the middle of nowhere and no-country. The efficiency of frontiers as a meaning for home in postmodern times ended, and was replaced by distant hopes for not so distant lands, although very far from reaching…      

Post-antibiotic era in After-postmodern

The World Health Organization publicized information about a new report named “Worldwide country situation analysis: Response to antimicrobial resistance”. The most part of countries in the world have no measures to diminish that cited resistance in what was called “post-antibiotic era”. The postmodern era in the second half of the 20^th century was the “kingdom of antibiotics”. After penicillin, and other drugs, it was an enthusiasm about ending the major part of infectious diseases in a time of efficiency and pragmatism. In the sixties, Science established supposed years to decay of tuberculosis, malaria, et cetera, because it was success against smallpox, syphilis, and some diseases of childhood.  But in the end of the century, after HIV infections and no controlled use of antibiotics, among other factors, that certitude changed and now it is necessary to find new ways to deal with resistant bacteria and other microbial agents. So, it is one more evidence of the transition to an after-postmodern era…  

Post-crisis in After-postmodern?

For several reasons sometimes the media give “signals” that 2008’s crisis could be ending or even ended… Maybe those “signals” could mean a desire, or a vision focused in a specific point, or something else, or the end of the crisis…

As we are in a kind of “Macroshift”, as Ervin Laszlo said, maybe we are feeling waves coming and going, one of us is on an up age and other is on a down age, but the sea is full of complex and different waves at the same time.  An example of this complexity could be the market volatility. As Michael Spence wrote in Project Syndicate, sometimes the stock market seems to reveal that in a general way the economy is going better, but in true the volatility is in another baseline and so it doesn’t mean that the future is already stable.

The international economy in after-postmodern times is more complex than in any time before, and what we call “globalization” has new and variable meanings that are still in construction.  

The environmental clock is silently ticking in after-postmodern

Since the clocks have batteries they are mostly silent. Before of it, they received energy from our hands, but in postmodern times they lost that singular ticking, and that thing was a demonstration of postmodern efficiency. Now, in after-postmodern times, all that could be scientifically predicted became strange in a way that the former efficiency is not anymore sufficiently efficient… But clocks and watches are still silent and we cannot hear the ticking of the environmental clock warning for the dangers of present and future… What were only feared in postmodern times nowadays are happening more and more, and an inefficient discussion about whom to blame, the men or the nature, continues…

We are talking about time and it is about time to do something about it…

Even there is some probability of global warming to be just caused by nature itself, pollution is stronger and has its consequences. Debates are necessary but not sufficient to solve problems if nobody does anything.

People like to talk about paradigm changing, it sounds beautiful, but few walk some step ahead… and the environmental clock is silently ticking…  

After-postmodern and “metaglobalization”

Globalization of economy achieved its acme in the end of the 20^th century, although some kind of global economy existed already as we can see for example with the international crisis of 1929.

Anyway, the so much praised “globalization” was that one of the pragmatic “postmodern period” and that is “a globalization” still in some way around… Nonetheless, with the end of the postmodern efficiency and the economic crisis going on, maybe the “main globalization” is the “net globalization” under cybernetics.

At the same time, after the falling of the Berlin Wall, several countries started to divide, searching for cultural roots and links stronger than some political or even economic relations that worked under some restraint. This kind of “geocultural” transformation spread over the world and manifold people are still looking to find their “collective intersubjective meaning” that binds them. So, under the view of Complexity, we can see intersections among several factors: net globalization, conventional globalization, arising of cultural roots, “democracy” of mobile phone, global environmental crisis, etc… Maybe we could call this a kind of “metaglobalization”…