The long perspectives.

“Foreman says those jobs are going boys, and they ain't coming back,” Bruce Springsteen, My Hometown

“Those jobs aren't coming back.” Steve Jobs in response to Barack Obama’s question as to why the I-Pad couldn’t be made in America.

Where Marxists see capitalism as riven by crises due to the essentially unstable and contradictory dynamics of the system itself, Austrian and Neo-classical economics prefers to think of “cycles”, human history a kind of progressive spiraling upward of productive forces and standard of living in which the downsides, the recessions and depressions are the corollary of the period of growth and advance, as Schumpeter paradoxically puts it, “the only cause of recession is prosperity”. The Cyclical fears of the Seventies are ameliorated in Being There and Stay Hungry by the certainty that Spring will arrive again or that night will turn to day ( it is morning in America), that a certain amount of creative destruction must be allowed to occur for the economy to regain its health again (the dead wood must be pruned away etc) or that the curse of the third generation has been broken.

One of the long cycles popularised by Schumpeter, is the Kondratieff wave. K-Waves are tied into periods of technological growth and resource exploitation and when they recede, in tandem with the “normal” fluctuations of the business cycle, we enter a period between epochs, a time when the old regime of meanings, arrangements and objects is displaced but the future has yet to arrive, “a time without ideas”. The term, using a naturalistic metaphor is the Kondratieff Winter (and as one film title of the time had it, Winter Kills). The Age of the Automobile and the production line is over, the age of high automation and information technology is about to begin and the fear is that America is not prepared.

The future is in Japan.