The advent of programmable machine tools may accelerate this tendency. Fifteen years ago industrial engineers developed machine tools that could be programmed to reproduce a variety of shapes. Today a typical Japanese machine tool can make almost 100 different parts from an individual block of material. What does this mean? Erich Bloch, director of the National Science Foundation, believes manufacturing “ will be so flexible that it will be able to make the first copy of a product for little more than the cost of the thousandth.” “ So the ideal location for the factory of the future” says Patrick A. Toole, vice president for manufacturing at IBM, “ is in the market where its products are consumed.” So in summary, when we analyze the foundations of the free trade doctrine in the light of present day realities what do we find? Price is no longer a reliable indicator of comparative efficiency. Comparative advantage has lost much of its validity. Economies of scale are suspect. It now appears that we could miniaturize our economies with little economic penalty. And we would have the immeasurable benefit of preserving our loca l commun ities and cultures. A Globe of Villages Let me now explore the possibilities and strategies for a new kind of world economy, one whose metaphor would be a globe of villages, not a global village. It would be a planetary economy that emphasizes community and self-reliance. But not self- sufficiency. As biologist Russell Anderson suggests, self-reliance is “ the capacity for self-sufficiency, not self-sufficiency itself.” It would give us the capacity to survive if cut off from suppliers by natural or manmade intervention. It encourages us to maintain a diversity of skills within our societies and to localize and regionalize productive assets. It is a strategy that welcomes “ foreign” capital but not at the expense of local ownership and promotes competition but also encourages cooperation. It is a society that promotes satisfaction rather than consumption. I should emphasize here that I am not promoting national self- reliance. The United States has by far the largest domestic market in the world. We are among the top nations in population and size and natural resources. The United States could easily be self-reliant and even self- sufficient. But doing so would provide no lessons for a world where most people live in small countries with relatively few natural resources. Thirty-four members of the United Nations have populations of below 1 million and another 31 have populations of between 1 and 5 million. The doc tr ine of loca l self- reliance if applied only to the United States could easily degenerate into what my British friends call “ local selfish sufficiency.” The challenge is to create an economy that allows us to produce most of what we need from our own local resources — natural, human and capital—within our more densely populated economies. To do so would be to develop the organizational forms and technologies compatible with the needs of much of the world. Consider for example that the country of El Salvador has about the same population density as the Twin Cities metropolitan area or that the municipal budget of New York City is greater than the gross national product of Chile. We will always be blessed with the advantages of a highly skilled work force, widespread technical capacity, and a peace that many countries can only envy. But to develop a model for the world we must concentrate on m in ia tu r iz ing our own na tiona l economy. The state of Minnesota may represent an excellent laboratory to test a new development path. Half our 4.5 million people live in an urban center, a similar demographic picture to many developing and smaller nations. If we could achieve a balanced, locally owned and mostly internally- generated economy we would provide a model for both the developed and developing world. I also want to stress that I’m not preaching parochialism. Just the opposite. Localism isn’t isolationism. Progress comes from sharing the fruits of invention. Robert Green Ingersoll, the great orator of the last century, accurately described commerce as “ the great civilizer. We exchange ideas when we exchange fabrics.” But today we need not exchange ideas by exchanging fabrics. We can exchange ideas directly. We do not need a few traders travelling to distant shores to bring back news. We have news networks and many of us can travel to d istan t places ourselves. It would be difficult to prove that the enormous expansion of planetary trade in the last century or even in the last twenty years has brought greater understanding between religions and cultures and races and nations. One reason may be that much of the information that moves around the world is useful to the planetary economy Clinton St. Quarterly—Spring, 1988 I f present trends continue we may have less leisure time in the 1990s then in the 1790s but not to localities or small economies. The data does not flow from community to community but among planetary corporations. The sheer amount of information thrown at us is astounding. But such data does not inform us. For example, when is the last time you learned from the media of another culture that does things in a better way than our own does? In the United States there is nothing more parochial than the global village. We hear of England when there is a sale at Harrod’s, of Thailand when a hotel fire breaks out, of Ethiopia when famine strikes. Think about what we know of Russia. We have grown up hating and fearing Russia. We have spent a trillion dollars since 1980 alone, largely to defend ourselves against Russia. But what do we know about the Russian people, her history, her culture, her geography? No, the planetary economy has not brought us understanding. A globe of villages could transfer information horizontally, from community to community. And in so doing could pave the way for a new kind of economy. Electronic highways are q u ite d is t in c t from co n c re te highways. Already one of the fastest growing segments of our economy is computers, and one of the fastest growing sub-segments of that industry is software. Although the development and manufacture of computer chips requires relatively large organizations and production facilities, the creation and dissemination of software programs such as VisiCalc or Hypercard was done by a very small group and via telephone lines. In a globe of villages production will be regionalized and planetary trade will increasingly consist of electronics, not materials; ideas, not products.
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