The modern economic goal of efficiency which was the holy grail of the industrial revolution, is the altogether wrong goal for an advanced economy. It was inevitable that the overriding goal of efficiency would lead to mass unemployment, colossal profits for the few, a corporate oligarchy, and environmental degradation on a massive scale. It puts quantity over quality.
It also arbitrarily separates production from consumption a concept that has become the central tenet of modern economics. We buy from one locale and sell in another while ignoring the accumulating imbalances. Globalization reproduces the very similar colonial model of extracting resources from one set of countries, labour from others, with final goods "packaging" in the parent country. It very "efficiently" commodifies all factors of production - especially labour, to the benefit of the ever-fewer.
In a world of finite resources and infinite labour, the model was inevitably going to lead to environmental degradation and mass unemployment. Supply and demand can't be divided up across national boundaries, "clearing" the market with accumulating debt aka. trade deficits. Under globalization, markets never reach true equilibrium.
The Globalized disposable model throws off massive "externalities" in the forms of debt, pollution, unemployment, and social disintegration that are borne by the broader society, while the profit is borne solely by the corporate arbitrageurs. That this model would ultimately self-destruct, is a matter of commonsense and 3rd grade arithmetic.
The overspecialization of labour dumbed down society, as corporations reduced complex functions down to singular tasks. 0% capital and colossal scale are the handmaidens to the mass unemployment of a redundant workforce possessing no differentiating skills whatsoever.
Efficiency led to an all-consuming preference for quantity over quality, culminating in frankenfood and crop monocultures to sustain an oversized population on the verge of being made wholly redundant.
The answer is simple and imminent - disaggregation of the economy via incentives to small business and balanced trade policy.
Leveraged stock buybacks have made the impending implosion of the major corporations, the easy part.
In 2008, GDP dropped -3% (red line), profits dropped -50% aka. 17:1 leverage. Saving the bloated and unsustainable profits, is not a trick that today's psychopaths can duplicate:
Globalization is just human history's largest "going out of business" sale
