What’s the way out of that Catch-22 besides ‘make sure you are the winner in that competing market or invested in that winner’?

But the thing is, local production increasingly does NOT mean more jobs. Those manufacturing jobs are not coming back. Automation continuing to enter every manufacturing sector and warehouses. Not to mention retail, mining, agriculture, oil and gas, maintenance, construction, health-care, security, military, transport, the list goes on.

I don’t see us crowdsourcing or prosumering our way out of this situation.

alvisbrigis: I want to point out that in an increasingly automated world, “re-constitution of local and regional industry”, though a very good thing, does not equate to more domestic jobs. (Not sure if you were implying that.) We either have to get the money out through taxes and redistribution, or dividends through stocks, it won’t be through selling our labor to industries though.

Hmm, I’ve read similar compelling arguments, such as Juliet Schor’s belief that “Getting to sustainability will require slowing down the pace of life, which means working less.” and that social media will be key to this. But I remain unconvinced. I think economic pain will force people to participate and be very active. It’s quite possible that people will need to work more in the coming decade, to restore national productivity. Rather than being an easy solution, social media may instead point us in the direction of max value creation, much of which could be very labor and brain intensive.

damndirtyape, “Not sure how any of this prosumer stuff really creates anything new. It might result in more efficient allocation of select resources and capital, but that will have a minor impact on pure GNP output compared to say, being the world’s leader in car manufacturing and selling again (not that it will ever happen of course). Prosumer trends are not gonna accomplish that.”

Right on, for the near-term. The current generation of prosumer companies only serve to create more efficiency in existing sectors, surely dominated by Retail / Services. This is the most frequent observation by readers of my post. It will take the ongoing evolution of these models to enable the creation of new industries that meaningfully contribute to GNP. That said, it is possible, and probably in the next few years – acceleration at work. But we may not have that long before the pain builds up to a frenzy. And it may take that frenzy to reciprocally catalyze the next-gen super prosumer models we’ll need. Prosumer trends may drive real deep growth, but not in the super short-term.

“America is in a world of hurt (and debt). No easy way out from the hole we have dug for ourselves.”

Absolutely.

Final thought, inflation and rising fuel prices may contribute to a return to local manufacturing / productivity. If it becomes to costly to buy and ship goods from overseas, that’ll encourage the re-constitution of local and regional industry.

I wonder is it’s no accident that this period of change is coinciding with socio-economic pain. Perhaps the pain is a necessary driver. This would be unfortunate, but make sense from a creative destruction standpoint. (Schumpeter was one smart fellow, in addition to being a really fun guy.)

I also need to clarify about the best-case scenario I envision re: American prosumerism. I don’t think it’s likely that we’ll see a jobless boom in which we contribute value passively playing Farmville or clipping coupons. Rather, I’m imagining the next generation of prosumer companies (eg Groupon 3.0 that extends to all sorts of businesses – including manufacturing and farming, FB with micro-credits,etc) enabling Americans to scrape out a living and minimize the effects of globalization and automation. These web technologies will drive price points lower – it’s in their nature to squeeze out waste, up efficiency. And this could well be a subjectively ruthless process. Later on, once the economy stabilizes and subsequent generations of prosumer enabling tech unlock additional value, I imagine we’ll see a steady increase in income / resources flowing our way, followed by the welath explosion predicted by Hanson and Toffler, but there’s no avoiding the big near-term correction and effects of globalization and automation. We’ve over-extended and will likely need to pay the commensurate price in the near-term.

That’s an enticing scenario, but what does each CEO-company actually do or make? as in what tangible goods do they produce that other people (foreigners primarily) will buy?

What we are doing now doesn’t work. A high tech, but debt and credit based economic model is an illusion. At some point America will have to actually create real goods and services to sell to other countries to reverse the trade gap and get out of worlds largest debtor nation status.

Not sure how any of this prosumer stuff really creates anything new. It might result in more efficient allocation of select resources and capital, but that will have a minor impact on pure GNP output compared to say, being the world’s leader in car manufacturing and selling again (not that it will ever happen of course). Prosumer trends are not gonna accomplish that.

Creating a better AI driven “smart” adwords system etc. does no good if everyone in your economy is using their credit cards or phantom real estate assets to click and buy Asian made goods. The wealth leaves your own economy and your country gets poorer regardless of how many AI agents are driving the sales or doing market research or designing web pages.

Now if you mean actual full-on humanoid “robots” doing real work, as in full manufacturing and 3D printing etc.. well that’s a ways away and Asia /India will still be able to do it cheaper since their standards of living and cost of goods are cheaper. They have a had a huge lead since the 70′s on us.

America is in a world of hurt (and debt). No easy way out from the hole we have dug for ourselves.

I’ll hazard this guess: we each are less involved in our own productivity.

We already know what that looks like. Imagine each of us as CEO’s at the head of our own corporation “manned” by robots and AI’s. We delegate tasks to these underlings and are involved in high level decision making. We become figure-heads as the AI’s improve.

We spend a lot of time on the golf course.