Thinking about economic futures...

After yesterday's round-up of articles related to economic futures, I spent the early part of my morning thinking more on what the landscape of economic changes looks like today.

For those of who attended the 2012 Hawai'i Futures Summit, you will be familiar with my framing of the Infinite Economy.  For those of you who aren't, you can check out yesterday's post or the 2012 slide deck on slideshare.  The Infinite Economy looks at the full breadth of changes occurring in the world that, collectively, will shape economic life.  In this way the Infinite Economy looks much farther afield than just one or two developments, say 3D printing or renewable energy.  And in it there's a graphic that conceptually tries to see all the elements of this "landscape" (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: the Infinite Economy

In reflecting on this image this morning, I started to list some of the big trends and emerging issues that are found within the Infinite Economy and which people are discussing today.  The list began with:

• Automation
• Digital fabrication
• DIY movement
• Maker movement
• Social financing
• Alternative currency
• M2M/internet of things/ubicomp

A comprehensive list would of course be huge, but after just getting this far I started thinking in a new direction.  Switching to a layered view, I started to list some of the major trends, but also started to add some of the change dynamics that are relevant to anticipating economic futures (Figure 2).

Figure 2: initial iteration of a layered view

In starting to draft this visual I soon realized (and was reminded of) a number of things:

1. This image will need a lot more time and effort to capture enough of the different dynamics of which I think people need to be aware
2. I need to switch to my preferred 11x17 page size :)
3. Thinking about economic futures today truly requires a global perspective.  An exploration that simply focuses on, say, the American scene, will overlook critical shifts and interdependencies shaping economic life
4. And this requires a much more systemic perspective than I think we've traditionally employed when thinking about the "economy"
5. Partly because there seem to be changes occurring on so many levels and across some many domains/boundaries, employing only an "economics" viewpoint will not provide real insight
6. Considering economic futures today requires a practice of zooming in and out to see the different kinds of change dynamics underway (future iterations of Figure 2 will illustrate this point)