My girlfriend is setting up her own business. It is something
she had always wanted to do, but her being laid off in the wake
of the current economic downturn – as we have come to call what
might very well the new economic normality – kicked her into
action. She is hardly the only one in this situation. All over
the country there is a flurry of new business creations. In
normal times, this would bode well for a country which has
indeed coined the word "entrepreneur" but had forgotten it quite
a long time ago. We are not in normal times however, and this
unprecedented wave of entrepreneurship tells in fact of an deep
economic insecurity which can only increase with the coming
energy descent. It also announces the end of an economic
arrangement which had shaped the western social landscape for
nearly a century : the wage system. Wage labor has become so
common, so "normal" in today's society, that we have forgotten
how marginal -– and despised -- it was before the Industrial
Revolution. In agrarian societies wa