The global economy is great for everyone who jumps at it.
Somewhere in Europe, a developer decided to purchase an advertisement on an app-centric blog to feature his app, and paid his fee in Euros to the blog’s Australian-based headquarters. That, in part, paid for an article written on that blog, and was paid to the writer on that blog in US Dollars — still the common denominator in international transactions. That writer transferred his funds from US-based PayPal account to his Thai bank, and days later pulled out Thai Baht from an ATM down the street from his house. He took that cash to the Scandinavian furniture giant IKEA, and bought drawers and dishes that’d been made in China.
And that’s just a day in my life.
I used to joke that I’m the American who came to Asia to find the outsourced jobs, but the truth is, we’re all working in a global economy. No matter where you work, where you shop, and where the stuff you buy is “from”, odds are a very large percentage of the money you make and use isn’t only made and used locally. In fact, odds are that if there weren’t people in Sweden or Singapore or some unknown village buying the products your company makes or producing some tiny part of the things you buy, your job and stuff simply wouldn’t exist.
It’s not a bad trend, and it’s not even a trend. It’s reality.
It takes a village. A global village, that is.
We all know how the economy works, on a basic level. We each make something that someone else needs, then we all give each other money for those things so we can each by the other things we need that we don’t make. Theoretically, it all works out.
Realistically, the economy is much more complex than that, but at the end of the day, that doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you need people to buy the things you make, so you can buy the things you need. Easy enough, right?
Long ago, that would have meant building a store and selling things in your hometown. If there weren’t enough people in your town to support your widget business, you’d have to find something in higher demand.
But today, the world’s your hometown. You can sell anything you want to anyone, anywhere. The App Store’s everywhere, as is the internet. You can make something today, in Canada, and tomorrow someone in China could buy it. That’s a huge change, one that’s definitely for the better. If there’s not enough people buying your widgets in Hometown USA, there’s surely enough people around the world that’d be interested in your widgets to make it into a business — or at least a small side-venture.
It’s the change that has let Foxconn be the assembly company of choice
Hello, neighbor from around the world
Of course, you’re not the only one out there that can do this. There’s 7 billion of us that can sell stuff online. We can all undercut you — a global economy in many ways will eventually mean that wages around the world will have to even out more — or make nicer widgets or ship faster or offer customizations. You’ve got 7 billion competitors, as well as 7 billion potential customers. And what would be a low income for you just might be a very good income for someone on the other side of the globe, so they’d be more than willing to undercut you. Others around the world might be better at the job then you, charging more but offering more exclusive products and services.
We’ve already seen this in action. Factory workers in China’s wages are going up fast enough that global corporations are looking to outsource production cheaper economies, while wages have been stagnant for years in the US and EU. It’ll be a long time until average wages around the world have evened out entirely, but I happen to think that’s exactly the eventual end result. It’s again not bad, per se — it’s great to see parts of the world come out of poverty, and a rising tide should eventually raise all ships — but it’s sure going to take adjustment, and it’s hard to say where the new average will up.
It’s a bigger market, with more supply and more demand than ever. It’s global, interconnected, and flat. But it’s far from dismal.
Creativity is the new Black
In fact, it’s so far from dismal that it’s crazy to think how worried people are about the future. Just imagine living in the middle ages as a peasant in the middle of nowhere in Europe. You work hard, sunrise to sunset, on your sustenance farm. Perhaps you can paint or carve, or perhaps you’re a brilliant chef. But even if you manage to find time to pursue your hobby, how in the world could you become world famous?
Now, think back to how many creative, original ideas you’ve come across online over the past year. Things from far-flung places around the world that you would have never possibly seen even a century ago, now can become a Twitter trending topic hours after they’re shared with the world. There simply weren’t trending topics and viral videos even a couple decades ago.
Today, though, anyone can at the very least get their five minutes of fame online. That five minutes of fame could be over a funny picture. Or a pithy statement on Twitter, perhaps. Perhaps it’s a redesign of iOS 7 you made and shared on Dribbble, that gets picked on top Mac blogs and then gets accidentally used by CNN when they’re telling the world about iOS 7.
And that’s what’s so exciting. Not getting on CNN, perhaps, but the fact that anyone, anywhere, can get noticed. That’s your opportunity. That’s all of our opportunity. You’ve just got to do something that can get noticed by enough people to support your work, which is where creativity comes in. Creativity is the absolutely critical part of this new equation.
We’ve seen it with Etsy, the App Store, and the web in general. We see it — perhaps without thinking about it — with the successful indie businesses all around us. Creativity is driving any meaningful change we see today. It’s the crucial element. It’s what makes those intricately beautiful apps worth downloading, what makes the Tesla Model S so genuinely exciting: creativity and uniqueness and ingenuity.
But you don’t have to go invent a new electric car. You can start smaller. You could start a WordPress theme company from Cape Town, or sell handmade chocolates from Hometown, USA. You can design cuter iPhone cases and sell them at your local mall, and on Etsy to the locals around the world that are your newfound neighbors. And when you’re looking for something new, you can expand your own horizons and find creative products from others around the world, things that are nicer than you could have ever found in the stores. You can find a nicer place to stay than the local hotels, thanks to the flatter-world options like Airbnb, or find writing about the things that interest you in indie blogs and books.
Sure, the world’s getting flatter. I happen to think that’s a good thing. And I happen to think that we can all make the very best of it.
It’s sure an exciting time to be alive.
Originally published on August 20th, 2013 in Techinch Magazine Issue 4