MindSpinner

Oddment 1:
Fact (from this week’s Economist): “America is home to more Wal-Mart employees (1.3 m) than high school teachers.” If you had asked me point blank who outnumbers whom, Wal-Mart employees or high school teachers, I might have thought for a bit and come up with the right answer, but the fact gains a certain calculated significance in print. It holds a mirror before modern civilization at an angle I hadn’t considered. It reflects our consumerism and the size of the footprint of a giant corporation - even just one.

Oddment 2:
The footprints of corporations have outgrown the borders of nations. The well-being of a nation once correlated and contributed to the health of its corporations. But, as Ronald Grant points out in “Companies’ and countries’ prosperity: Decoupled,” national interests and corporate interests no longer dovetail. Even as workers’ incomes stagnate in countries with struggling economies, corporate profits boom.

Grant anatomizes the new reality:

First, as Stephen King and Janet Henry, of the HSBC bank, point out, companies are no longer tied to the economic conditions and policies of the countries in which they are listed. Firms in Europe are delivering handsome profits that are more in line with the performance of the robust global economy than with that of their sclerotic homelands. In the past two years, the earnings per share of big listed companies have climbed by over 100% in Germany, 50% in France, 70% in Japan and 35% in America. No wonder Europe’s and Japan’s stockmarkets have outpaced those in America, despite the latter’s faster GDP growth.

Second and more worrying, the success of companies no longer guarantees the prosperity of domestic economies or, more particularly, of domestic workers. Fatter profits are supposed to encourage firms to invest more, to offer higher wages and to hire more workers. Yet even though profits’ share of national income in the G7 economies is close to an all-time high, corporate investment has been unusually weak in recent years. Companies have been reluctant to increase hiring or wages by as much as in previous recoveries. In America, a bigger slice of the increase in national income has gone to profits than in any recovery since 1945.

Large firms now depend on global operations rather than merely national ones to achieve their record profits. Globalization enables companies to access cheap labor where it may be found and thus keeps wages in check everywhere. Companies held to keeping workers’ wages and benefits intact may well take their jobs elsewhere. According to Grant, “The only sure way to boost national economic prosperity is to make labour and product markets work more efficiently and to improve education, to make the home country a more attractive production base.”

I can see us all running harder and harder, farther and farther, for less and less the world over, until our legs fall off, so that we can remain an “attractive production base.” “Survival of the fittest” sounds now like the Darwinian future of nations doomed to serve the interests of multinational corporations whose footfalls shadow and and shake the world. Tragically, in this country we keep voting into office those who serve those corporations above all. Democracy is subverted; forces behind curtains work levers to make it speak their will - an overblown puppet mouthing pomposities like the great empty head of the Wizard of Oz.

I was hoping, truth be told, to opt for a quiet, balanced, purposeful life in a world where I might expect healthcare and a bit of a retirement when I am old, and a little house with a garden. My friend and best conscience reminds me, though, that in wanting what I want, I really want everything such a world as ours affords - a computer so well designed it’s seductive, the entire Internet, shopping with a click, ready and easy access to every modern convenience, the occasional pizza delivery, uninterrupted supplies of Coca Cola, the timely ministrations of the healthcare system and the pharmaceutical industry, uninterrupted cell phone service, and a lifetime of hopping into a car when there’s someplace I want to go. And I must confess that I shop sometimes at our small-town Wal-Mart.

For the lack of a local Target.

So the truth is that I’m a willing slave to modern civilization after all.

Aargh.

Oddment 3:
If I get to pick my penance for my complicity in our collective future unfolding, I want to make artificial ice floes for the polar bears to fish from when we’ve melted their world.

(Note: “Opening up the big box: Measuring the Wal-Mart effect” and “Companies’ and countries’ prosperity: Decoupled” may both be found in the February 25th-March 3rd 2006 print edition of The Economist.)