Travelling Light

Adaptation to the failure of the intermediate economy of big infrastructures and services which will follow the breakdown of the market. The scale and consequences of the loss of these essentials will be shocking. The long-term task will be to build lean, small-scale, elegant, sustainable-resilient replacements. The Lean Economy will travel light. And there will be a major gain, since local enterprise such as hospitals and farms, can—relative to their giant equivalents—afford a greater flexibility and attention to detail; they can expect better morale, closed-loop waste management, a sense of community, of being somewhere. The loss of the intermediate economy, though catastrophic at first, will release local enterprise from a commitment it can no longer afford, and open the way to the land-, labour- and materials-efficiency of lean thinking.

Travelling light, then, is about coping without the burden of giant infrastructures, which will fail, however much we might regret their passing. The heavily-burdened present will be separated from the travelling-light future by kaikaku—by voluntary and/or involuntary shock. The Lean Economy that emerges from it will have the advantage that, unlike its obese and tottering predecessor, it could have a future.

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Touch-Down.