The Production Model Paradigm

Today, minding my own business, I read the front page of the Sacramento Bee.  A local interest article was there, dealing with the slow recovery of the housing "industry" in Sacramento.

Like most communities, Sacramento's housing "market" was devastated by the housing bubble. 

California, unfortunately, like many states, loosened mortgage rules and regulations, allowed many "liar loans" and suffered severely from the busted housing bubble.

I was struck by the language used in the article. "Industry", "inventory", "production"; etc., were used by real estate representatives to describe their production of the product of selling or buying a house.

I could accept using these terms some, if they were only talking about  building new houses and selling them.  A new house is a product, I suppose, like an automobile; it is property to be bought and sold.

But, the trade of real estate, buying, selling, fitting people to locations , I cannot link to industrial production.

It seems to me, we are suffering from a paradigm identification problem. Where is the basic anthropology of human beings? 

The industrial revolution was a monumental change in the human condition.  Millions of people moved from the agrarian lifestyle, to cities, and worked on assembly lines.  Industries grew almost overnight, fossil fuels were discovered and harnessed, and production and consumption defined the economic paradigm for over a hundred years.

There was very little consideration for what this ultimately would do to the human condition; and sweatshops, child labor, and slavery (in the United States) was an indirect result.  People were poor when then worked as peasants in the agrarian society, they were basically slaves when they joined the industrial revolution. 

There was, and is, a paradigm modality that glorifies production of goods, and their consumption.  Modern economics still uses industrial revolution terms to describe economic activity.

And that is the problem.  The world is now in a post industrial paradigm.  No longer do great masses of workers sit on assembly lines for ten hours a day.  Robots do that work.  No longer is assembly line work that common.  Technology has pushed industry into a  post assembly line paradigm.

But production and consumption still goes on.  The technological revolution is still in full force, as we move from rust belt type production, to innovation, communication, and "information" age economics.

But we still use industrial revolution language.  The paradigm is stuck with us, even though very few people actually produce anything anymore.  Most workers, in post industrial economies, manipulate data, innovate using technology, but don't produce a real product.   

Housing is a good example.  I can still remember the 50s and 60s, when the baby boom was created, and millions moved from the cities to the suburbs.  The automobile fueled this shift, from the industrial worker based economy, to the suburbanite.

Unfortunately,  cities sprawled, but real estate was still depicted as a product, with inventories, production goals; etc.

But most of those terms, and the associated economic behaviors they support, no longer apply to the new economic and social paradigm.

They really never have!  People are not widgets!

I would suggest this is one major reason for the housing bubble and economic collapse it engendered.

Lewis Mumford wrote in the thirties and forties, he analyzed urban developments, and their social, economic, and even psychological ramifications.  He warned that urban sprawl and the suburban lifestyle ran counter to basic human anthropology; especially relative to the need for human beings as primates to have complex social contacts to survive.

And he was right.  The suburban paradigm has resulted in housing bubbles, a real estate and connected financial industry that quite frankly has lost their legal and moral compass.  It also produced a massive reduction in basic human community.

Where people live and how they interact with others is a most human thing, not an industrial model.  People are not widgets, that get turned out by an assembly line.  To refer to real estate as an industry is ludicrous. 

Everyday we see the incredible damage this lack of community does.  Today "consumers" buy the "inventory" of houses, with profit and money the primary motivator of the "industry" that is perpetrated on all of us.  Housing developments follow the industrial model, stacked on top on one another, or spread out; creating castles of loneliness and despair. 

Mortgage Banks simply ripped off hundreds of thousands to reduce their "inventory" of houses.  Financial behavior similar to bank robbers was the norm, as millions lost everything, without a pang of remorse by the "industrial bosses" of the mortgage "industry".

The middle class in America was just about destroyed by this massive shift of wealth; many losing their homes, their families; and are now homeless.

And what is the paradigm's reaction, why, it is just good industrial behavior; just like child labor was over 100 years ago.

And what is the result for the happiness  of "consumers"?  The misery index of the country is at an all-time high.  Those who were wealthy enough  to survive the housing bubble, live in massive homes, behind gates, and drink or dope themselves in their loneliness.

 The middle class is busted, and the American Dream is in tatters.

Lewis Mumford warned us...