Cheap has a price

As a family, we used to play the board game risk. When things weren’t going to plan, one of the children would just fold the board up and throw all the pieces in the air. 

It feels a bit like that now.

“How did you go bankrupt? Gradually, then suddenly”

The sun also rises. Ernest Hemingway.

Gradually

Technology has enabled, over the last fifty years, our ability to disaggregate the elements that made the industrial revolution so commercially effective and reassemble them in an economically efficient way. 

First we outsourced production to low cost economies, then on the back of that, basic services then more advanced services, and finally much of our innovation efforts. 

We were able to reduce costs far more than prices, and create a small group of phenomenal winners, a large group of marginal winners in the developing economies that dramatically reduced poverty, and another large group of losers in the developed economies who saw incomes and living standards stagnate.

We are now looking to c…