[projectvrm] System D

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Anybody ever heard of System D?

It's the underground economy. Off-grid. Big in places where commerce is 
personal and taxes are avoided. "Unlicensed bazaars," for example.

See here: <http://bit.ly/tEXJhL> An excerpt:

> 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.

Sounds VRM friendly to me.

More:

> ...System D is on the rise. In the developing world, it's been increasing 
> every year since the 1990s, and in many countries it's growing faster than 
> the officially recognized gross domestic product (GDP). If you apply his 
> percentages (Schneider's most recent report, published in 2006, uses 
> economic data from 2003) to the World Bank's GDP estimates, it's possible 
> to make a back-of-the-envelope calculation of the approximate value of the 
> billions of underground transactions around the world. And it comes to 
> this: The total value of System D as a global phenomenon is close to $10 
> trillion. Which makes for another astonishing revelation. If System D were 
> an independent nation, united in a single political structure -- call it 
> the United Street Sellers Republic (USSR) or, perhaps, Bazaaristan -- it 
> would be an economic superpower, the second-largest economy in the world 
> (the United States, with a GDP of $14 trillion, is numero uno). The gap is 
> narrowing, though, and if the United States doesn't snap out of its current 
> funk, the USSR/Bazaaristan could conceivably catch it sometime this century.
> 
> In other words, System D looks a lot like the future of the global economy. 
> All over the world -- from San Francisco to São Paulo, from New York City 
> to Lagos -- people engaged in street selling and other forms of unlicensed 
> trade told me that they could never have established their businesses in 
> the legal economy. "I'm totally off the grid," one unlicensed jewelry 
> designer told me. "It was never an option to do it any other way. It never 
> even crossed my mind. It was financially absolutely impossible." The growth 
> of System D opens the market to those who have traditionally been shut out.
> 
> This alternative economic system also offers the opportunity for large 
> numbers of people to find work. No job-cutting or outsourcing is going on 
> here. Rather, a street market boasts dozens of entrepreneurs selling 
> similar products and scores of laborers doing essentially the same work. An 
> economist would likely deride all this duplicated work as inefficient. But 
> the level of competition on the street keeps huge numbers of people 
> employed. It liberates their entrepreneurial energy. And it offers them the 
> opportunity to move up in the world.


Thoughts?

Doc