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Depression? Recession? No, It's the Great Restructuring

Mar. 09, 2009 2:18 PM ET47 Comments
Jeff Jarvis profile picture
Jeff Jarvis
133 Followers

It’s not a great depression, neither is it a great recession we’re going through now. At the Brite conference this week, Umair Haque called it a great “compression,” as an economy built on perceived value reconciles with actual value. This morning, The New York Times finally realized that what we’re experiencing is more than a financial crisis: “Job Losses Hint at Vast Remaking of Economy.” Well, yes, if hints were sledgehammers.

I try to argue in my book that what we’re living through is instead a great restructuring of the economy and society, starting with a fundamental change in our relationships - how we are linked and intertwined and how we act, nothing less than that.

The Times sees this play out in the loss of jobs that won’t return in their industries. That’s merely the symptom.

In key industries — manufacturing, financial services and retail — layoffs have accelerated so quickly in recent months as to suggest that many companies are abandoning whole areas of business.

“These jobs aren’t coming back,” said John E. Silvia, chief economist at Wachovia in Charlotte, N.C. “A lot of production either isn’t going to happen at all, or it’s going to happen somewhere other than the United States. There are going to be fewer stores, fewer factories, fewer financial services operations. Firms are making strategic decisions that they don’t want to be in their businesses.”

Yes, entire swaths and even sectors of the economy will disappear or will change so much they might as well disappear:

America may well not be in the auto industry soon. “American car sales have dropped to an annual pace of nine million, from some 17 million in 2007. Even if sales increase considerably, that is likely to leave a lot of unneeded auto factories,” said the Times.

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Jeff Jarvis profile picture
133 Followers
Jeff Jarvis blogs about media and news at Buzzmachine.com (http://Buzzmachine.com). He is associate professor and director of the interactive journalism program at the City University of New York’s new Graduate School of Journalism (http://journalism.cuny.edu/). He is consulting editor of Daylife, a news startup. He writes a new media column for The Guardian. He consults for media companies. Until 2005, he was president and creative director of Advance.net, the online arm of Advance Publications. Prior to that, Jarvis was creator and founding editor of Entertainment Weekly; Sunday editor and associate publisher of the New York Daily News; TV critic for TV Guide and People; a columnist on the San Francisco Examiner; assistant city editor and reporter for the Chicago Tribune; reporter for Chicago Today. He says he is at work on a book.

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