Someone's always buying, someone's always selling, and the hustle is about trying to be in the middle of that whole thing. None of it was legal. Nobody knew where anything came from. The guy who got us Nikes, did he really have a "staff discount?" You don't know. You don't ask. It's just, "Hey, look what I found" and "Cool, how much do you want?"
Trevor Noah, Born a Crime.
Trevor Noah captured the insanity of bad governance and its’ consequences in his autobiography Born a Crime. Bad or inadequate governance forces people to get what they need to survive through what we call “informal” means. Noah called it “the hustle” – and that captures it almost perfectly. Everyone is just trying to hustle to stay alive or get what they can to pull themselves up just a little bit. The important distinction we need to make from Noah’s description of “the hustle” is that in the way we think of it, “hustling” includes both legal and illegal activities in the informal economy.
As long as you are caught in the hustle, you can’t get far. As Hernando de Soto noted -- you don’t own what you own. The hustle isn’t about Confucian or Protestant values – you don’t get into or out of the hustle because of your beliefs. Beliefs have nothing to do with it. The hustle is the natural human state in the absence of functioning sets of rules and institutions.
The study of how humanity escapes the hustle is often referred to as global development. One of the best resources on global development is the Gapminder Foundation (gapminder.org). Gapminder breaks the world into four income levels and shows pictures on their Dollar Street website (dollarstreet.org) of what life looks like in different countries at the different income levels. Each “figure” in the graphic below represents one billion people, and the graphic illustrates roughly how many people in the world today live at different income levels.
Level 1 is “extreme poverty” – people living on less than $2 per day. In the early 1970’s, one out of two people in the world lived in extreme poverty. Half of the global population of humans was malnourished and miserable. Now that number is down to roughly one in ten.
The shift of the global population out of extreme poverty, beginning to escape the hustle, is extraordinary. Forty percent of the population of the world is moving up to higher income levels and hopefully on their way to joining the global consumer economy as a result. In the graphic, the upwardly mobile forty percent is represented by the 3 billion people currently in Income Level 2 – or people living on between 2 to 8 USD per day. To offer a more complete picture of global development, Gapminder has created their “map of the world” – shown below with 2015 data:
The map offers another useful view of the data. The details of development in each country are messy and confusing – but the near universal fact is that most of the world is on the march toward longer life spans and greater wealth.
It is useful to keep in mind that 40% of the global population is on the way to the global consumer party but haven’t arrived yet. Those 3 billion or so people will be arriving in the next two decades. Fewer than 3 billion people are in the consumer economy today (those in Level 3 and Level 4), so the number of people at this “party” will more than double in the next twenty years.
CLOSING
So how will these people escape the hustle and be able to build material wealth? The specifics will differ for each person and in each country, but you won’t be able to find out the details from sitting behind a computer screen, it will take hustle.
You have to go out and ask different forms of the immortal question: “How’s business?”
And then sit back and listen.