tl;dr: Globalization needs new meanings beyond economic growth
This year’s World Economic Forum catchphrase is ”Globalization 4.0“ and focuses on a ”New Architecture in the Age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution“. The discussions this year will not be affirmative of new technologies and optimistic about new economic opportunities. Rather a very concerned view on the new global realities dominates, especially but not exclusively:
- the rise of Neo-Nationalism and the politics of isolation and confrontation, especially in the former globalization heartlands like the USA and UK, but also in emerging countries like Brazil and core European countries like Hungary and Poland;
- the ongoing and accelerating human-made climate change that requires global cooperation for successful mitigation, not national isolation.
At the same time the WEF places special emphasis on the proliferation of mental health issues, the new global disease of the 21st century in higher income countries.
Klaus Schwab, the WEF’s founder, recently noted that while globalization produced more winners than losers, it would be high time to focus on the losers of globalization. If this message resonates with those who will most likely never see the conference rooms of Davos remains to be seen. Schwab’s sentiment is interesting though – and reveals a core problem in dealing with the aforementioned new realities. What Schwab is doing here is constructing global challenges as economic challenges. Globalization produced economic winners and economic losers, so you need some form of economic compensation to mend the problems.
The Loss of Meaning
That seems to be too simplistic and economistic. It appears to me that at the heart of all the problems the WEF is dealing with this year lies a fundamental crisis of meaning and identity in the early industrialized countries. Globalization has led to a dissolution of traditional structures, especially of structures of the industrial society: the end of standard employment relationships, the rift in the former working class between high-income and low-income service workers, the rearrangement of gender roles and sexual identities. German sociologist Ulrich Beck wrote about that over 30 years ago in his ”Risk Society“, now it has become an increasingly global reality – with political and economic consequences.
The loss of these structures is accompanied by a loss of orientation, of belonging, of identity – in brief: with a loss of meaning. Meaning can be understood as the consistent classification of what is actually the case as opposed to what could potentially be the case. In other words: the balance of your everyday reality with what you regard as ”right“. In the case of imbalance, this calls for your ability to know how to change your circumstances and make them right. Loss of meaning is then the realization that your circumstances are wrong compared to your understanding of what is ”right“ and that you have no clear knowledge how to make it right again – or that you probably just don’t know what ”right” means in the first place anymore. Loss of meaning is the overwhelming feeling to be no longer the author of your own life, a boat lost at sea in the storm, without rudder nor sail.
Economic Growth as a Problem
The rise of the new nationalists can be explained with the loss of meaning way just as the increase of mental health issues. Phenomena like the election of Donald Trump or the Brexit referendum are societal reactions caused by the loss of meaning due to the radical transformative effects of globalization on the old social order. Depression, anxiety and the increased prescription of psychiatric drugs are the individual reactions to that. And climate change? Climate change is the expression of a hyper-economic system that only knows and understands economic growth, a never-ending restlessness that can only be mended by more material production and more material consumption – but only temporarily and if the growth outlook darkens, as will be most likely the case in this year and the next, the fragility of our economic confidence becomes visible. Such a growth-oriented system reformulates a deeply societal and individual question – why and what for are we here? – as economics: to make money, to make profits, to earn a living, to consume and so forth. But if all human needs that can be fulfilled materially have been fulfilled for more and more people on the planet, what is left? More economics, more growth?
This surely is an accurate analysis for early industrialized countries and those in which a higher form of human development has taken root as expressed in the Human Development Index (HDI) of the United Nations. Taken the definition of ”very high development“ from the HDI, we are talking about 1.2bn people on Earth. If we add to them those living in countries regarded to be ”high developed”, we get 3.6bn or 46 percent of the global population. Loss of meaning is not a phenomenon for tired old Europeans or American hippies, it is a global issue. What kind of alternative is there for the 46 percent that could promise more meaning, less individual suffering and a social and ecological sustainable planet?
An Alternative Economy is Possible
There is certainly no general recipe or cure but what we can say with certainty is that business as usual is no option. As for myself, I am working within the field of postgrowth and degrowth studies with colleagues in Germany, Europe and across the globe attempting to formulate alternatives how to move beyond the current hyper-economic, growth-fixated system. My personal realizations, dealing especially with individual and entrepreneurial actors, on what needs to be done can be summed up like this:
- Reflecting the nature of growth: what does growth actually mean for you, your organization, society in general? Why grow at all and what should (should not!) grow?
- Refocusing the objectives of growth: what other forms of growth beyond the material and economic are there? How can social and ecological value be added? And what kind of performance measurement do we need? Because if we measure the wrong things, we value the wrong things and manage the wrong things.
- Meaning as the basis for economics: how can we construct new and better meaning? What does meaningful work, life, economics actually mean? And with whom do I personally have to collaborate to create something meaningful?
- Collaboration not confrontation: what forms of collaboration create meaning – in the economy and in politics, locally as well as globally? How can transnational organizations be grounded locally and create something we might call ”home“? And how to think of home in the plural?
Such refocusing of our global economic system to more than just economics, more than just economic growth, is desperately needed. To start such a debate at the World Economic Forum and to carry this debate into national and local arenas, into companies, into political parties, into civil society and into your own living room – that would be a good and meaningful sign for a more humane, a more sustainable Globalization 4.0.