System D: The Shadow Superpower
November 3rd, 2011Via: Foreign Policy:
Forget China: the $10 trillion global black market is the world’s fastest growing economy — and its future.
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You probably have never heard of System D. Neither had I until I started visiting street markets and unlicensed bazaars around the globe.
System D is a slang phrase pirated from French-speaking Africa and the Caribbean. The French have a word that they often use to describe particularly effective and motivated people. They call them débrouillards. To say a man is a débrouillard is to tell people how resourceful and ingenious he is. The former French colonies have sculpted this word to their own social and economic reality. They say that inventive, self-starting, entrepreneurial merchants who are doing business on their own, without registering or being regulated by the bureaucracy and, for the most part, without paying taxes, are part of “l’economie de la débrouillardise.” Or, sweetened for street use, “Systeme D.” This essentially translates as the ingenuity economy, the economy of improvisation and self-reliance, the do-it-yourself, or DIY, economy. A number of well-known chefs have also appropriated the term to describe the skill and sheer joy necessary to improvise a gourmet meal using only the mismatched ingredients that happen to be at hand in a kitchen.
I like the phrase. It has a carefree lilt and some friendly resonances. At the same time, it asserts an important truth: 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, System D 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.
Kids selling lemonade from the sidewalk in front of their houses are part of System D. So are many of the vendors at stoop sales, flea markets, and swap meets. So are the workers who look for employment in the parking lots of Home Depot and Lowe’s throughout the United States. And it’s not only cash-in-hand labor. As with David Obi’s deal to bring generators from China to Nigeria, System D is multinational, moving all sorts of products — machinery, mobile phones, computers, and more — around the globe and creating international industries that help billions of people find jobs and services.
Interesting. Kind words for the informal economy straight from the pages of Foreign Policy, the unfiltered media arm of the Council of Foreign Relations.
I’m torn. It’s hard to disagree with the general sentiment of the article, which is an excerpt from a larger book surveying the subject of informal economies in a global context.
On one hand, regulation, bureaucracy and taxation DO stifle economic behavior. Channeling favor and power as required/requested by their hierarchy.
On the other hand, it is also a not-so-veiled marketing pitch for laissez faire economics and ongoing global deregulation.
That said, in the interest of full “disclosure”, I/we personally participate in Systeme D, primarily in a rural context. Fresh organic eggs for raw honey and that sort of thing, for the sake of clarity.
In addition, the small business efforts I have recently started making are rooted in the less formal and often social relationships that often shape the natural communication channels in so much of System D’s day-to-day operations.
And like David Obi, the courageous Nigerian David in the article creating direct business with a manufacturer China, the end goal is creating something WORTH moving to the realm of “legitimate” business.
Of course, this is quite often not the case. Let’s not forget that the more-or-less gray areas between System D and the “black market” are in reality vast plains populated primarily by the planet’s less fortunate simply seeking to survive on the fringes of the monetized modern world.
Ultimately, transforming energy and effort into economic reality is the very essence of entrepreneurial endeavor. And in the end isn’t that what ALL business labors to achieve, official or otherwise?
Kind words for the informal economy straight from the pages of Foreign Policy, the unfiltered media arm of the Council of Foreign Relations.
Foreign Policy is not published by the CFR. Foreign Affairs is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Affairs
Quite right Kev. Brain fart on my part.
Foreign Policy is the Huntington rag. Published under the Washington Post’s flag if memory serves.
Thanks for the fact check.
The “D” in “System D” actually comes from the colloquial verb “démerder”, where the root is “merde” = “shit”. It is reflexive and translates literally as “to unshit oneself” or “to get oneself out of the shit”.
Yes, it has a certain sort of undeniable charm.