Daily Times

The highpoint of most people’s presence happens when they visit their family and friends in a brand new vehicle or when they invite them to their new house. Or when they buy a new gadget and show it off to their friends, colleagues or neighbors. Most of this show off is now made easy by the social networking websites such as Facebook. Putting up a new photo on Facebook for showing off the hangout at some expensive place is ever easier than it was before. People even don’t mind invading others’ privacy by sending photos from inside an airplane with strangers easily visible in the frame, just to drop a hint of their being jet-set. People too like to mention where they are shopping these days. Is this all appreciable? Do I appreciate such show offs. Frankly my answer is in negative.

Buying a new car is not an achievement but manufacturing it sure is an achievement which is basically of someone from some first world country. I also don’t feel inspired by people when they show me their new iPhone but instead I search for our very own Steve Jobs. I also don’t press the ‘like’ button on the Facebook when I see others’ shopping at Metro Cash & Carry. In those pictures I only see cash heavy non-productive consumers who don’t know how these items that they were buying were innovated overseas.

The purchasing power that these consumers thrive on may come from various sources ranging from legal to illegal means such corruption or inheritance. None of these sources makes one eligible for applause. No matter if the money is clean or not one thing is obvious — we are a consumer nation. A dominant example of this is that last year, over 3 billion dollars were spent by Pakistanis to buy real estate in UAE; these were those people who looted the money of this nation and flew away insulting the motherland.

A marked difference between us and the developed nations is their ability to innovate. This innovative and entrepreneurial skills that the first world countries have does not come without (in Malcolm Gladwell’s words 10,000 hours or)hard labor. Entrepreneurship that has made the first world countries so advance is praise worthy. One has to be constructive, inquisitive, excellent innovator and curious to be the competitors to these entrepreneurs and maintain high standards in what is done.

A matter of concern for us today as Pakistanis should be not to raise our children to aspire to be the consumers; we must raise them to be the entrepreneurs. Our children are too much involved in consumption from their early life which suppresses their ability to be the innovators. Innovation creates jobs that our nation badly needs. World Economic Forum forecasts that 65 percent of future labor will work on those jobs that are yet to be invented. Trends have shown that technology is fast replacing the humans with the machines, although automating too need humans but in very small number. With the rise of machines, human resource is ever more freely available.

A nation can sustain this transition only with the creation of micro-scale entrepreneurship opportunities. Such micro-scale enterprises can easily grow into a large company. However our ‘consumer children’ lack the skills to be the entrepreneurs; the society is equally responsible for this. A failure to teach the entrepreneur skills to our children, will lead our nation to the instability. One must not forget that a large number of jobs are expunged for the middle-income class, with people pushed down into lower-income jobs.

Pakistan largely has middle class population living in cities which makes it important to ask if we are ready for this transition. We must transit from a core consumer society to an innovative society. What has to be remembered is that what we possess don’t reflect our advancements. There is no harm in acquiring what we can but we must also be productive enough to be remembered as innovators.

The writer is an Assistant Professor. He tweets at @Prof_MKShaikh