The world acts today as if governments still lived in the good ol’ days of powerful national economic policy.
That’s just obsolete.
The crisis in the Euro zone shows that economies are truly interconnected, even between continents. We know that there will be soon a dollar crisis as there is currently a euro crisis (the same causes, debt, necessarily causing the same effects). The rest of the world can’t just watch doing nothing. We are too interconnected today.
This extremely interesting piece of research about how interconnected private companies really are gives another highlight. Unfortunately the “Big Brother” pitch of the article is I believe, wrong. It is not that a small number of companies would control the world; it is that a limited number of companies are central nodes in the network through the quality and density of their connections. In the terminology of Gladwell, they are ‘mavens’.
The big economic powers of the previous century are not really economic power in the sense of imposing their will; they are well connected nodes in a worldwide economical network.
Our governments must stop behaving as if we were 50 years ago. The solutions to the 1929 crisis won’t apply today.
We are all interconnected. We not only need an economical coordination at the European level, we need one at the Global level. The Fourth Revolution will change forever the balance of power from the Industrial Age; adjustments will be difficult but necessary. Only with the right coordination of economic policy will their effects be more smooth, avoiding deep, damaging crisis.
Ladies and gentlemen in government, the Fourth Revolution is here. Be proactive. See that we are all interconnected and act in consequence. Will you?
