(2011-11-03) System D

Robert Neuwirth: What happens in all the unregistered markets and roadside kiosks of the world is not simply haphazard. It is a product of intelligence, Resilience, Self Organization, and group solidarity, and it follows a number of well-worn though unwritten rules. It is, in that sense, a system. It used to be that System D was small -- a handful of market women selling a handful of shriveled carrots to earn a handful of pennies. It was the economy of desperation. But as trade has expanded and globalized, System D has scaled up too. Today, SystemD is the economy of aspiration. It is where the jobs are. In 2009, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a think tank sponsored by the governments of 30 of the most powerful capitalist countries and dedicated to promoting free-market institutions, concluded that half the workers of the world -- close to 1.8 billion people -- were working in System D: off the books, in jobs that were neither registered nor regulated, getting paid in cash, and, most often, avoiding income taxes. (Gray Market for the Network Economy?)

Charlie Stross ponders how it relates to Greece assuming that it drops out of the EU.

Dec18: RobertCapps interviews Neuwirth, who has a new book The StealthOfNations ISBN:037542489X out on this. There’s a French word for someone who’s self-reliant or ingenious: Débrouillard. This got sort of mutated in the postcolonial areas of Africa and the Caribbean to refer to the street economy, which is called l’économie de la débrouillardise—the self-reliance economy, or the DIY economy, if you will. I decided to use this term myself—shortening it to System D—because it’s a less pejorative way of referring to what has traditionally been called the informal economy or black market or even underground economy. I’m basically using the term to refer to all the economic activity that flies under the radar of government. So, unregistered, unregulated, untaxed, but not outright criminal—I don’t include gun-running, drugs, human trafficking, or things like that.

May'2012: see also Misfit Economy.