The economy is in transition.  Many of you think we’re headed straight downward, but there’s always a chance that better times lie ahead.  But what will the next economy look like?  Barataria has always taken a punt on this, stating that no one can possibly know what the Free Market™ will do.  But over time a few trends have become clear and we can be sure that a few changes are coming.

Why does this matter?  Because the sooner we can prepare for the next economy the sooner we can master it – and make the next business cycle one of prosperity for everyone.  There is work to do, but we have only started to do it.

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You wake up, go to work, put in your 8 hours and go home.  If that is the numbing grind you want to break out of, you might want to consider yourself lucky.   Millions of Americans have taken on a series of part-time jobs that add up to something like a living as they juggle their schedules.  But for an uncounted many, work comes one assignment at a time as they scramble constantly to find the next small job that will take them to the next mortgage payment or even the next meal.  These are the millions of workers in the Gig Economy.

How many?  It may be as much as a third of the workforce, but no one is really sure.  Uncertainty defines this trend from the daily routine right up to the future of the economy as a whole.  Managing any aspect of this emerging world is made much more difficult as a result.

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Labor Day is a celebration of American work. It sometimes seems like an anachronism, a holdover from a day long gone when people worked in factories and churned out widgets with mechanical precision.  That image often comes to people in dirty sepia tones like a faded old photograph of grandpa at his bench.  Yet those days were more than grime and hard work, they were times when the US was at the height of its power around the world.  No matter how you want to look at what we celebrate on Labor Day, scorn or longing, hard work went strong arm and arm with the power of this nation.

The accelerated decline of manufacturing in the last decade shows how our current unemployment problem has a lot to do with the simple fact that we stopped making stuff.  It’s not a big leap to see that our power and prestige has gone away with those jobs.

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