Creative Class

Once upon a time on a distant planet there was a nation that looked a lot like ours – we’ll call it Autopia. They were indeed much like us, only with some things backwards. Autopia’s car companies looked and acted like our Wall Street, while Autopia’s financial companies acted a lot like our car companies.

In Autopia, the car industry did just fine for many years. It was a good industry and many people worked hard and got reasonably wealthy. But then a fundamental change of viewpoint took over the entire nation. This new and pervasive viewpoint dictated that all companies and this included the auto companies, had only one goal: To earn as much profit as possible. To a very large extent the companies came to care less about product quality, the fate of the middle class, and the overall state of the country. Instead it became accepted and even mandatory to measure everything solely based on profit …

Highly Compressed Garbage was created by taking ordinary household garbage, condensing it in a high pressure compressor, and spray painting it. It looked and felt like metal and it was cheap, cheap, cheap. It really paid to introduce HCG into cars … There were a few truly golden years. Profits at the car companies soared to unprecedented heights … The stock prices of the car companies soared, and very few people even noticed that all this wealth and happiness was based on an investment in garbage …

Car companies always had considerable political influence in Autopia, but during the golden years their influence became immense …  So when the HCG crisis hit, the political investments of the good years turned to solid gold.