It's emergence, stupid

So I was laid off December 1, 2008. After 20 years in the same office. The company changed around me several times in the past couple of years (acquisitions, name changes, restructurings), my job changed and expanded to take on new things, but I was working among basically the same group of people performing essentially the same mission.

Until the economy forced a restructuring and I was no longer needed.

And the company did all it could to ease the impact. I can't go into the details of the severance package, but there is one, which is why I still have a computer to write this blog and a roof over my head as I do so.

But as I listen to the news reports about the economy, as I think about letting the woman who cleans my house every two weeks go (and chicken out, hoping against hope I won't have to, especially after she told me about her own children returning to Poland because there is no work here), as I receive discount flier after discount flier from Banana Republic (a company name that looks more prophetic than could ever have imagined), I can't help thinking about emergence--the hive mind.

“Emergence” is an idea that Robert Krulwich and Jad Abumrad discussed in a 2005 episode of Radio Lab. It's how insects seem to act in concert. It's how if you have a group of people guess at the number of jelly beans in a jar their individual guesses will diverge wildly, but the average of their guesses will be remarkably close. And, yes, it's Adam Smith's Magic Hand, setting prices in that sweet spot where supply and demand converge. But it's also Christmas shoppers tampeding and killing a worker at Wal-Mart.

My company let me go because they predicted that the world financial crisis would reduce our customer base, which means I am constricting my spending--in all sorts of places, including the sorts of companies that our customers worked at. And when I let my housekeeper go, she will have to reduce her spending, as will the people and comapnies she buys things from.

We like to think we are in a world where bad things can be blamed on particular individuals. It's easy to hurt a Bernie Madoff--a bad actor who probably would have escaped detection long enough to die, had it not been for the economic downturn. But that's looking at the wrong end of the telescope: The economy is a chaotic system, and we've tried to tame it. The result is a lot like what happened in the 1980s after years of forest management where the directive was to avoid forest fires at all costs. When the fires finally did come, they were wild fires. Better, we learned, to have smaller, regulated fires over time.

Will the stimulus be enough to stanch this fire, avert this economic Katrina?

Will I still have a house, a computer and a blog in six months?

Switching be3tween the macro view and the local is always dizzying and more than a little disorienting.

I am cautiously optimistic.