The pain and the awfulness are real and widespread. And not confined to the automotive industry. The newspaper business, once my own industry, is suffering radical customer withdrawals. The Internet scratches customer itches that, for some, no printed source can hope to address. In response, newspapers are desperately reinventing themselves by downsizing payrolls, redesigning the product or -- in some sad cases -- dumbing down.
Bad or good? Both, really. Bad for those who see their expectations blunted and their jobs lost. Good for consumers who end up getting -- as is conventionally the case in these revolutionary contexts -- more for less. And good for the quick and ambitious who, seeing the train pulling out of the station, jump aboard.
For all the pain, we rarely find ourselves living in economic ruins. New skyscrapers are perpetually on their way up. We call it, following the Austrian-born economist Joseph Schumpeter, "creative destruction." An old model dies; a new one rises, Phoenix-like, from the rubble and debris.
Turnover in a dynamic capitalist society is perpetual, like it or not. Perpetual and painful -- one of those paradoxes that life insists on flaunting. Companies that come back have to die a little in order to live again. The dreams, the hopes, of ordinary people get slammed, but in time, new ways of doing things -- and new things that replace old things -- create new jobs and new opportunities.
A second consolation: If capitalism can hurt -- which it can, unmistakably -- think how slight is that pain compared to the mediocrity, the stupor, the gritty grayness produced by every experiment ever conducted under the gospel of regulated "success."