Year 9-8
Year-End Time. Prediction Time. Here is my cluster shot, bound to hit something: next year will be good, bad, excellent, depressing. 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. The professional economic forecasters were off the mark so much that even Queen Elizabeth, during a visit to the London School of Economics last month, wondered: “Why did no one see it 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 ten 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 way off the mark. 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 has increased greatly.” There’s another Titanic victim.
So is Jean-Claude Trichet, European Central Bank president, who told four newspapers in mid-July: “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 of this year (thus from April through September) and, following this, a progressive return to ongoing moderate growth.” Instead, Europe has seen conditions worsening.
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.
So where are the butterflies today? Actually there was one colossal specimen at large: cheap money, which begat liars’ loans, which begat colossal debt, which begat market –and money meltdown. Now brand-new economic measures are required to come to a new equilibrium, a crucial balance between human needs and nature’s capacity to provide.
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 2009: 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 make our own small-scale beginnings in which we can avoid the mistakes of the past.
There the primary task is to restore nature to become livable 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.