Angry youth the World over dominate headlines; from Tunisia through Libya, South Africa and the UK we have seen terrifying images of feral young men bent on destroying the existing order.

 

What does it all mean? Well one of the things it signals is the death of economics as we know it; the seemingly age-old but in actual fact little over two centuries fight for supremacy between Capital and Labour is over.

 

As is all economic analysis science that seeks a nineteenth, either capitalist or Marxist (labour- unionist) based solution to our present economic malaise because, put simply the labour side of the equation is history and thus the protagonism between the two is also history.

 

And it is not that capital has won, rather the application of capital and science to the human mind has developed a new super intelligent hybrid “knowledge-intense” human that by the application of focussed knowledge has rendered both traditional Labour and Capital, and the supposed conflict between the two invalid.

 

The great new businesses of today often grew up in garages, in a spare bedroom and grew without either labour or capital in any traditional sense.

 

We must therefore stop looking backwards looking for nineteenth Marxist solutions or equally old-fashioned “Capitalist” solutions of throwing bucketfuls of money at each and every problem.

 

What then is the solution and where will we find it?

 

Let’s go back to the feral youth; angry, uneducated according to any meaningful degree, cast aside without even the earlier generational possibility of a mindless factory job, they are light years away from being even bit-part players in any knowledge-intense future; they feel angry, let down – why were we not told that the golden future we grew up glimpsing on television was never intended for us?

 

So what is “the ticket” into this future, but the future of course starts today, World? Sadly the bar is very high; whether we like it or not, we only need the top 25% of the highest intellects, trained to tertiary degree level and beyond.

 

That is 25% globally – a little more in those countries that have already meaningfully invested for this future over many decades, and rather less to the more challenged, and much slower out of the blocks countries like South Africa.

 

But this is not fair I can hear you thinking; but fairness is an outcome not a starting position, and without recognising this we are embracing a lowest-denominator future for us all – equal yes, but equal in its poverty and dearth of opportunity.

 

We must stop thinking in clichéd nineteenth century terms; put behind us the notion that the World begins and ends at our South African borders and therefore success achieved by coveting, and taking, or if we can’t take it then break it, our neighbours oxen.

 

We must lift our eyes, look beyond the old mantras and feed the minds and imaginations of our youth, and enable and inspire them to be the entrepreneurs of the future be that in nano-science, molecular biology; what we do know with certainty is that the industries that they will nuture and excel at are beyond our present understanding.

 

Knowledge, curiosity, a desire to know and naked intellect are the building blocks we should be polishing and nurturing.

Tags: #Capital, #Labour, #Marxist, #South Africa, #Tunisa, #UK