OUR WORLD TODAY
New Year Time. Prediction Time.
Here is my scatter shot, bound to hit something: 2011 will be good, bad, excellent, depressing. It will have inflation. It will have deflation, You take your pick, because your guess is probably better than mine.
Here’s a thought: Noah’s Ark was built by amateurs; the Titanic by professionals. Take the 2008 banking crisis, still in progress. The professional economic forecasters were so much off the mark, that even Queen Elizabeth, during a visit to the London School of Economics 2 years ago, wondered: “Why did no one see the banking crash coming?”
Good question. Although Her Majesty does not pay income tax, she too must have lost money which pains her because she is known to be a frugal lady. One of my younger brothers paid tens of thousands of euros to get a MBA in Geneva, Switzerland, but he too had no clue. So who did get it right? Apparently Pope Benedict XVI – then still Cardinal Ratzinger – was the first to foresee the crisis. His 1985 paper predicted “that an undisciplined economy would collapse by its own rules”.
Even brainy Ben Bernanke, the top financial guru in the USA, was blind to the financial future. In his Senate nomination hearing of 2005 he said that the system had already benefited from a series of crises that had reinforced its ability to cope with difficult times: “The depths, the liquidity, the flexibility of the financial markets haves increased greatly.” There’s another Titanic victim.
So was Jean-Claude Trichet, European Central Bank president. He told four newspapers, “Our baseline scenario is that we will have a trough in the profile of growth in the euro area in the second and third quarters, and, following this, a progressive return to ongoing moderate growth.” Instead it now has been revealed that European banks are still on the hook for trillions of euros owed by the PIIGS, Portugal, Ireland, Iceland, Greece, Spain, all financial basket cases.
There was a time, some 30 years ago, when forecasters prescribed magic authority to computers, visualizing that they, with ever larger processing powers, would make it easier to see what’s coming. We now know better: somewhat more humble, and maybe a shade wiser, we start to grasp that economies are complex, dynamic, non-linear systems in which faintly fathomed facts can fatally influence final outcomes – the proverbial flapping of a butterfly’s wings that causes a hurricane.
These butterflies are still flapping out there. The after effects of cheap money, which begat liars’ loans, which begat colossal debt, which begat the market –and money meltdown, are still winging their way to more wreckage. The political people in the USA and Europe are still kicking that debt-can down the road, postponing the problem as politicians are apt to do, hoping, praying that by election time, the end of 2012, magic has done its work.
However it’s not the butterflies I worry about. There are dragons out there, creatures much more fearful. These violent animals are the offspring of us carbonizing our environment, giving birth to the unholy Trinity of Peak oil, Peak Heat and Peak Food. In addition all-pervasive ‘plastic’ is playing havoc with our collective immune system to the point where, when the inevitable pandemic appears, our natural body defenses are fatally weakened.
Is that me again, always the party pooper, the killjoy, the perennial pessimist? I know that to be popular, as John Maynard Keynes has observed, it is usually better to be conventionally wrong than unconventionally right. Yet, believe it or not, I am an optimist.
Here’s where we are at. Capitalism is sunk, just like the supposedly unsinkable Titanic. With the old system under water, and nothing new on the horizon, this is the time to build on our own modest Ark. There the dragons, although at our doorsteps, can still be stopped.
So here is my wish for 2011: having learned from the erroneous notions of yesteryear, such as our impossible quest for unlimited growth, equating happiness with the acquisition of goods, and, especially, our neglect in providing a viable future for our children, we must make our own small-scale beginnings and so avoid the mistakes of the past.
Our primary task is to restore nature to become liveable for our children. That is our foremost priority. Go green. Gear down. Relax. Economize. Grow your own. Bike. Walk. Shop local. Volunteer. Start now to build your own ark, a self-sufficient refuge for family and friends.
If I read the Scriptures correctly, then I must conclude that we are approaching the time when genuine renewal is at hand. God loves this world too much to let the Unholy Trinity of the three Dragons destroy this beautiful cosmos. It’s God’s world, after all, even though Evil has taken temporary possession of it.
I admit that a different direction – following Noah’s example – will not come about easily. But if we want to be part of a new world to come, we have to be the agents of change. The current vacuum offers a once in a life-time opening to start a better system in the coming year.
Have an advent-urous year.