Crisis over thanks to the G20
31 March 2009
Today is the day! The world's leaders are going to pluck an unlikely victory from the jaws of despair as they aim to tackle and resolve our global economic malaise.
I have every reason to be optimistic about the future. Electronics is in virtually everything and the long-term trend for any product is only going to be of increased sales. Will Gordon Brown and his peers bring this long-term trend forward to alleviate the current global downturn? I doubt it.
There will be some fine words by the end of the week, declarations to work together, cast iron promises that will be conveniently forgotten in time, and amounts of money will be bandied about of such staggering proportions as to become meaningless. But will anything really change?
The reason it won’t is because our glorious leaders have never deviated from the capitalist model that they have inherited from previous administrations. What is important to all governments is to support big business. This is not a bad thing as long as there is a bigger picture that this support is only part of. The bigger picture at the moment should not be difficult to work out. There are parts of the world where the populations live in constant poverty and where any individual’s ability to improve his/her situation is virtually zero. Equally we are told, albeit with varying degrees of alarm and scepticism, that we are creating an environmental disaster for generations to come. It could therefore be argued that it is imperative that we invest in both education and infrastructure for affected parts of the world, most notably Africa of course, and make real inroads into tackling our environmental responsibilities to the planet. These things will be outlined as ‘collective goals’ for the G20, but in reality little will really change, which is a shame because both of these major initiatives are heavily dependent on the electronics industry.
However, instead there will be some agreed method of tinkering with the way that individual countries try to stimulate their own faltering economies – even though, in the long term, this will not matter. Consumer spending will rise again and the dark days of this recession will become little more than a political milestone (or gravestone for some).
On a similar vein, last week I wrote about how the recession was squeezing the electronics out of cars, Is the age of auto electronics dead? . A number of readers picked up on the environmental aspects of the automotive industry and the role that electronics has to play in this. The argument goes something like this: it is all very well having complex engine management systems that allow a car to run at 50 mpg rather than 40 mpg, but when that new engine management system breaks down it needs to be replaced. Long gone are the days when people would learn how to fix their own cars, these days its the garage as soon as something goes wrong – too much of the way a car operates is dependent on unfathomable electronics. The cost of going to a garage is considerably more than the DIY option and so the cut off point, at which it becomes too expensive to keep a car, comes a lot sooner.
As one of my correspondents put it: “Electronics make cars difficult and very expensive to repair. That is bad for the environment if it shortens the useful life of vehicles. I have a 50-year-old car which is still repairable. I guess my real concern is the turnover of valuable raw materials that is ultimately unsustainable. If anything we seem to be making this worse with "green" legislation.”
This reader assured me that he didn’t really think the demise of automotive electronics is a good thing, but it is an example of how a bit more thought shows that there is a bigger picture, and that bigger picture is not being seen by the G20.
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