ANTICIPATING THE NEW HIGH.

Walter Russell Mead sees, amid the ashes of the Postwar Consensus, the road to the sunny uplands.

Capitalism marginalizes those who do not understand the world and how it is changing, and gives opportunities to those who do. No one knows what our economy will look like in twenty years time, but those who can think about the world intelligently now, recognize new opportunities, and seize the initiative, can grow into global leaders down the road, fundamentally changing our politics, businesses, and way of life.

And on a more practical note, they will invent the jobs of the future and build the careers of the future.

The fundamental fact about the emerging new economic order is that it is going to be a much richer world than the old blue social model could ever offer.  The vastly enhanced efficiency of manufacturing, energy use and organization that the information revolution brings with it means that human beings will spend much less energy and time on fulfilling their basic biological needs, and much more time exploring and fulfilling more complex and personal goals.  As a species, we will spend less time in the coal mines and more time in the theater, less time chopping cotton and more time writing novels.

Reshaping our social institutions and our mental habits to capitalize on the vast and unprecedented opportunities of the information revolution is going to take a lot of time, energy and creativity.  The pain and drama of the shift will absorb our political system — and painful as it will be in the US, it is likely to be still more disruptive and difficult elsewhere.

But unless we get it profoundly wrong, these are birth pangs, not death agonies.  The millennial generation will build a new world, and it will be an extraordinary place.

That is, if we aren't all frazzled by the demands of the information economy that we be on all the time.

But as I read that passage, it twigged a memory about hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, and posting after the Brewers win.

Division of labour and private property are, moreover, identical expressions: in the one the same thing is affirmed with reference to activity as is affirmed in the other with reference to the product of the activity.

Further, the division of labour implies the contradiction between the interest of the separate individual or the individual family and the communal interest of all individuals who have intercourse with one another. And indeed, this communal interest does not exist merely in the imagination, as the “general interest,” but first of all in reality, as the mutual interdependence of the individuals among whom the labour is divided. And finally, the division of labour offers us the first example of how, as long as man remains in natural society, that is, as long as a cleavage exists between the particular and the common interest, as long, therefore, as activity is not voluntarily, but naturally, divided, man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him. For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now.

That's Karl Marx, "The German Ideology," in 1845.  The information economy Professor Mead envisions is one in which, on the one hand, the variety of means of livelihood might become more diverse, and more individuated, but on the other hand might preclude any individual from becoming accomplished in more than one endeavour.