ARTS & FARCES internet

One of the gospels of the dot.com boom was Peter Schwartz, Joel Hyatt, and Peter Leyden’s The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity, which—like an alarming number of similar works—actually started out as a Wired article. The technological, fiscal, and political revolutions of the last two decades of the previous millennium would reshape the world as we know it, according to the authors.

Unfortunately, the “revolutions” never really happened, and while technology continues its march to wherever it is that it’s going, the fiscal and political arenas are more corrupt and inhumane than ever. Looking back on The Long Boom, three short years after publication, it reads like a Panglossian fairy tale of what could have—should have—been, had this been the best possible of all worlds. To the authors’ benefit, and likely a result of Schwartz’s experience as a future scenario planner (Schwartz’s The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World is one of the most important business books ever published), the premise of The Long Boom is presented not as prediction, but rather as vision.

And make no mistake. With two glaring exceptions, the authors’ 10 guiding principles are as useful and effective mileposts now as they were then:

1. Open up
2. Let go
3. Always adapt
4. Keep learning
5. Value innovation
6. Get connected
7. Be inclusive
8. Stay confident

Eight for 10 ain’t bad, and the two exceptions—go global and grow more—were ill-conceived from the start. Globalization is among the most oppressive problems facing the developing portions of the planet. Incessant, unrelenting corporate growth is a problem getting larger by the day. Incessant, unrelenting growth is a working definition of cancer. Contrary to what the free market libertarians would have us believe, affluence is not spreading; it’s consolidating in the hands of the few at the expense of the many.

It’s suddenly become unfashionable and probably unpatriotic to lament the state of the U.S. economy. After all, using our whacked-out gross domestic product (GDP) measuring stick, the U.S. economy grew almost 6% in the first quarter and already the pundits are talking about the mild recession that was.

So it’s fitting that, in anticipation of the continuing Boom, Salon would sit down for an interview with Peter Leyden, one of the unrepentant co-authors of The Long Boom. Leyden, a former journalist who’s now part of Schwartz’s Global Business Network, believes that the ongoing layoffs we’re seeing—enormous as they may be—are merely signs of “confusion,” nothing more. I think it’s safe to say that someone who works for an organization that charges annual membership fees of US$40,000 may see a somewhat different reality than the rest of us.

That said, Leyden’s remarks are clearly steeped in extensive research and applicable to the situation within which most organizations currently find themselves. His point with regard to the 11 September attack, that we’ve collectively managed to withstand an enormous systemic shock, is especially lucid.

A countervailing view is provided by Thornton Parker in his What If Boomer’s Can’t Retire: How to Build Real Security, Not Phantom Wealth. Parker—whose credentials are as impressive as The Long Boom boys; he’s served as a Department of Commerce staffer and in the Executive Office of the President—defines phantom wealth as “the returns from corporate stocks that are based on market prices” and real wealth as “work, earnings, and solid accomplishments, instead of just hopes.”

Phantom wealth, Parker holds, has been created in America over the past two decades as baby boomers have put trillions of dollars into retirement plans. The retirement plan managers were pressured to show growth and passed that pressure on to the corporations whose stock they owned. The corporations responded to the pressure in socially harmful ways: downsizing, moving jobs offshore, demanding more productivity and longer hours from their employees, reducing employee health care, abandoning communities, and all the rest of the litany of abuses with which we’ve become painfully familiar.

The result, according to Parker, is that the stock build-up of the last 20 years will abruptly switch to a sell-off as boomers retire. The problem is obvious: who will buy all the stock that will have to be liquidated to fund the boomers’ retirement. As evidence of this trend, Parker points to the fact that from the Depression through 1981, dividends provided more income for the owners of stock than capital gains. From 1982 through 2000, the situation reversed: capital gains provided more income for stockholders than dividends.

Parker believes that the boom identified by the authors of The Long Boom and others with a similar outlook was nothing more than the baby boomer stock build-up and that declining stock prices will surely ensue during the quickly approaching sell-off cycle.

What’s most interesting about these two points of view—that of The Long Boomer authors and that of human-centered economists like Thornton Parker—is the broad regions of overlap in their perspectives. The logic of the two viewpoints is AND, not OR. Leyden in his Salon interview, for example, attributes the mild recession not to consumers reducing their consumption, but rather to “business cutting off its spending because it had overbuilt and inventories were built out….”

Parker holds out the hope that business organizations will find a whole new raison d’être, starting with treating employee compensation and community service as outputs to be maximized instead of costs to be reduced. And whaddayaknow, that brings us full-circle, back to the good Dr. Pangloss.