Memenomics, by Said Dawlabani, is an enormously frustrating book, full of brash promises that it cannot fulfill. Nevertheless it offers much useful information, and a new way to think about society, politics, economics, and some of the larger problems of the world, especially Global Warming. There it stops short. Even though it refers here and there to problems of developing countries, it never addresses the fundamental problems of poverty, oppression, government corruption, and the aftermath of centuries of imperialism around the world.
The book was published in 2012, during the Obama administration, which it praises in part for showing the way forward, but calls out many points of failure in its approach and its programs.
Schematically, the Spiral Dynamics model covers eight stages of human development, from hunter/gatherer society to global integration, while leaving room for further development in the more distant future. Note that these stages overlap strongly, as different societies or portions of societies develop slower or faster than others.
These levels have been mapped to a sequence of colors, allegedly matching the Hindu chakras, which turns out to be nonsense. I omit them entirely. The descriptions given of these levels are not consistent throughout the book.
- SurvivalSense — Instinctive — hunter/gatherer; sharing, gifts, and barter
- KinSpirits — Clannish — agriculture; magical thinking; sharing. Roman Republic.
- PowerGods — Egocentric — From Empire to mass production; gold and silver coins
- TruthForce — Purposeful — From strict codes of behavior to the New Deal; strict banking regulation; safety net
- StriveDrive — Strategic — From the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution to Reaganism; deregulation; union-busting; forever wars
- HumanBond — Relativistic — Inner peace, human connections, equal opportunity
- FlexFlow — Systemic — Green development
- GlobalView — Holistic — Collective intelligence
- unknown
I am not going to try to make sense of this misch-masch. Most of the book is about trying to make plausible cases for applying these ideas to known history.
Cue the Disasters
It certainly can be said to make sense of all of the history of human wars of conquest, and then of wars provoked by religion, trade disputes, ideologies, and liberation. But this gives it no predictive value, no way to test its validity, no way to use it to plan the future.
It does not make sense of the course of global economic development, which depends on events that only happened once, with no connected sequence of causality between them. Islam, the Black Death in Europe, Columbus invading Caribbean islands, tea from China absorbing all of the silver in the world, steam engines, the Ottoman conquest of Byzantium, and much more.
It can also make a somewhat plausible case for the history of financial disasters, going back to ancient kings devaluing their own coins to finance ever more wars. We all know that the New Deal was a radical change in the treatment of money, financial regulation, and social responsibility. But see This Time is Different and A Nation of Deadbeats in this book series for more detailed analyses.
Bidenomics
With all of its faults, however, Memonomics does suggest some ideas worthy of more thought. People’s ideas of what it is to be human do change, and have influences on the foreign and domestic policies of nations, and on systems of money, from cowrie shells and other natural tokens to fiat money and ever-more-opaque financial derivatives.
We definitely need more financial regulation, including higher taxes and serious antitrust enforcement.
We definitely need to rein in corporate lobbying and the incessant demands of the ultra-rich to get ultra-richer.
It turns out that we know a lot more, and we are doing a lot more, to
- Build the economy from the middle out and the bottom up
- Bring manufacturing back to the US
- Support unions
- Bring inflation under firm control
- Get serious about Global Warming, particularly going off fossil fuels completely as fast as we can build out renewables to replace them, and develop carbon-neutral industrial technologies for steel, ammonia, and cement
- Retrain workers for new industries before the older jobs give out
- Educate the next generation for the skills needed in new industries
But too many of us do not know what we are doing in these areas. See, for example,
4/25 Good News Roundup: Do YOU Know What's in the IRA?
No, that isn’t the Irish Republican Army or a retirement account. It’s the Inflation Reduction Act.
Then we have the Chips Act, Infrastructure, aid to Ukraine and others, Shadow Speaker Jeffries…
Global Development
There is some discussion of Global Warming here, but nothing about global population, dire poverty, famines due to war, dread diseases, financial predation against developing countries, corrupt governments, coups, and other disasters that we are only gradually coming to grips with. See the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Some of us know how to solve all of these problems at vast profits, but the profits mainly would go to the people concerned, not multinational corporations, so we have not been able to summon the political will to take them on at full scale.
Well, maybe Kamala Harris will have a chance to do something about that. Should we call it Kamalanomics?
Further Reading
Clare W. Graves, The Never Ending Quest
Dr. Don Edward Beck and Christopher Cowan, Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership, and Change
The MEMEnomics Group. Speaking Gaian Truth to Economic Power