147: The Art of the Possible

<p>“We all have possibilities we don’t know about.  We can do things we don’t even dream we can do”.  This quote from one of the pioneers of the self-help movement, Dale Carnegie, marked a major change in how people thought about the future.  Up until the 1920s, fate and God’s will were the more common explanations for what would become of us.  Psychology research in the USA began to drive the idea that we could control our futures to a much greater degree than we thought, by controlling our thoughts. Not so remarkable today, but this was a brand new idea back then.  The problem though is we still haven’t quite found the escape velocity to blast us out of our self-limiting beliefs about ourselves.</p> <p>The decline in available well paying jobs following on from the Lehman Shock on September 15, 2008 had a broad impact around the globe.  China’s ability to become the factory of the world, has meant that many manufacturing jobs have disappeared in the developed nations.  The recently discovered danger to global supply chains, from over-reliance on China, may wind this back but it will take some time to set a rebalance.  Recent research is telling us that workers are not transitioning seamlessly from one declining industry into other growth sectors. </p> <p>In Japan, companies found the banks wanted their loaned umbrellas back, at the first spot of rain after the Lehman collapse and so became fixated on having large reserves of cash and minimum borrowings.  This has proven fortuitous for many companies in order to weather the economic disruptions brought on by Covid-19. </p> <p>Even in better economic times, despite profits rising, wages did not rise. To overcome the rigidity in the labor pool mobility here, part-time jobs grew enormously, offering no great stability and no great pay for the workers involved.  This trend to keeping people as part-timers was partially being reversed, as the war for talent kicked off again, but Covid-19 put a pause on that.</p> <p>Also, because of the economic disruptions Covid-19 h