It's Not the Economy... Pt 1: What's it all for?

 This is the first in a series that I just have no hope of ever cramming into a comprehensive single post. So better to squeeze out whatever little turds I can, no matter how constipated I feel in light of the size of the subject.

I would begin priming the post with a question: What's the Australian Economy for?

If High Youth Unemployment and Colossal Public Sector Debt is so bad, why does it feel so good?

I spent a chunk of 2016 living in Genova, Italy. Fulfilling a promise I'd made to myself almost a decade earlier. I'd stumbled onto Genova and said 'I wanna live here one day.' After years spent basically failing to settle down into a respectable life, I figured the time to pull up stumps and head to Genova was now (then). 

It was ridiculous. It was cheaper than living in Melbourne, everyone was attractive, and even when they weren't attractive they were sexy. Nobody gave up. I walked out my front door to behold the Mediterranean sea, Faith No More had released their first studio album since 1997 the previous year and the track 'Sunny Side Up' had these lyrics that captured what it was like there:

Rainbows will bend for me... curvin', Honey bees will buzz for me... stingin' stingin'... 

There were sea breezes, rainbows, sunsets, swollen golden moons, reflections in the water, fireworks, big fat honeybees buzzing, churchbells ringing, gelati, bella donnas, guidos, focaccia, pizza, pasta, paradise. Walking through labrynthine laneways in the old center to discover piazza after piazza packed with friends sitting around tables drinking cocktails. 

I eventually asked the question that I don't have an answer for: If this is the result of a dysfunctional basket-case of an economy - specifically long lived, healthy happy people enjoying the highest quality of life on earth - why are Australian's trying so fucking hard? I hate tryhards.

Damn my lying eyes.

Monkey See, Monkey Do

The above question, has lead me further down the rabbit hole, along with my own basic economic literacy to begin to suspect participation in 'the Economy' is largely secured through our not understanding it. It's an old tactic, times were once upon a time that the sentence for translating the Bible into English was death. 

But this is more basic.

Guadalajara has mostly one way streets. City blocks are crisscrossing matrices of one way streets hemmed in eventually by major avenues with multiple lanes and even then the nature strips are often wide enough to fit recreational parks and even narrow Cathedrals onto.

Anyway, I was jaywalking across a one way street of no particular interest as I did numerous times every day I lived in Guadalajara, and on this occassion I inspired to senoras on the opposite side to cross as I did. The thing was the traffic was coming from my left, their right. They were on the curb along which cars parked in parallel. I could see the oncoming traffic, they couldn't. I had time to cross, they didn't.

I have a generally low opinion of humanities prowess at jaywalking. I'm quite judgemental. I'd seen people make the same error as these senoras hundreds of times before in my life, yet for some reason, their startled retreat back to the curb struck me as something profound, an unlocking of one of the great mysteries of humanity, and I have no idea why on the nth time it clicked for me.

Where I was crossing because I had gauged the speed and trajectory of the oncoming traffic as allowing me the time necessary to cross without them having to adjust their speed at all, the senoras crossed because they saw me crossing and assumed it was safe to cross.

This is probably a detailed example of the saying 'Monkey See, Monkey Do' a learning mechanism of learning through imitation without understanding. I can't conclude with any confidence that the senoras know how to cross a street safely. There's no information at my disposal to demonstrate they understand traffic. They may have gotten very far in life, while simultaneously being dependent on others to tell them when it was safe to cross, whether those others were the attractive police officers often directing traffic, red and green men in robotic light signals, or other pedestrians providing a kind of safety in numbers.

What it had me thinking about, is how much of society in general has a 'monkey see, monkey do' kind of hack underpinning their daily activities and how many actually understand what they are doing with their lives. 

I can extend a benefit of the doubt to the senoras that while I may have provided some social environmental cue to cross that they stuffed up on this occasion, had I not been there they would have done just fine. Crossing the street is relatively simple, though I'm worried if you are thinking 'yeah, wait for the green man to flash...' you don't realize that is also incorrect, you look both ways and check the traffic that it is safe to cross, then you cross.

What about something much more complicated? Like money? I began wondering, how many people understand why they can walk into a building, pick up thousands of calories of food, wrapped in even more calories expended in packaging, then hand some paper or plastic to a stranger, or tap a screen that beeps, and total strangers will let you walk away with all those calories no questions asked?

When the 2020 Covid-19 Pandemic hit and Panic Buying gripped Australia that was then exported via memes to the world, the answer became clear to me: not enough.

The senoras may have figured out a hack, that allows them to survive the streets of Guadalajara with minimal honking of horns or foreigners having to dive tackle them out of the way of an oncoming pickup truck. I suspect, to a chilling extent, that many people on this pale blue dot have similarly figured out a hack that allows them to get through their days without going hungry and without having anyone honk a disapproving horn at the very notion of their existence. They've found some niche in the economy that allows them to quietly live their lives without getting told off on a daily basis.

Unfortunately, this makes people quite vulnerable to the specter of 'The Economy'; headlines can run saying 'Australia officially in Recession' and 'Debt balloons to kajillion $$$s' and it all sounds rather serious and bad. In the meantime, flowers are blooming, birds are chirping, the supermarket prices aren't budging and people are generally calm. (This is in Melbourne, Australia, not Hong Kong or Belarus or Beirut) all rather reminiscent of Bill Hicks on CNN, what he would have made of facebook, twitter...

What scares me, a little is that in some kind of 'invasion of the bodysnatchers' type scenario where I am surrounded by people impersonating an economy. I worked for a company that touted the 'philosophy without action is useless, action without philosophy is a lethal weapon.' or something, like literally they handed us booklets and they got us to speak about the philosophy at Friday morning meetings, and then at the annual strategic retreat the MD got up and outlined his vision for the company: 'To go from a $360 million turnover company to a $400 million turnover company.' 

For this good reason, I suspect that many if not most, have no fucking idea what we're all doing, we've just generally figured out a variety of ways to do it, keeping our head down and asking no questions so long as we can put a roof over our head and food in our bellies.

This may seem ridiculous if you are like a doctor or something. You're not going through the motions, you didn't spend 8 years studying medicine to go through the motions. You know exactly what you are doing, facilitating people getting better, or telling them to get their affairs in order.

But it's like, do you understand what's happening outside the clinic? Like are you sure you aren't putting Humpty Dumpty together again, just to send him back up on that wall? Does a toaster fall out of the 'repair chute' for you to repair and drop down the 'fixed chute' every day for 40 years before you bump into the guy who's job it is to pick up all the broken toasters at the bottom of the 'fixed' chute and deliver them to the top of the 'repair' chute. All the while your manager telling you to repair faster, and the other dude to deliver faster.

I mean doctors probably do figure this out, when patients present with symptoms caused by chronic stress, chronically elevated cortisol levels, and dislike giving people steroids in order to get them back to their stressful environments. I feel I know doctors that would actually prescribe a holiday, or change of career. I don't know many doctors that would also give financial advice that would facilitate these treatment programs.

So What IS the point?

For some reason, this question prompts me to think of the JJ Abrams Star Trek reboot, where little James Kirk could look to the Horizon and see the construction of the Starship Enterprise, the ship he will one day captain and explore space. As far as I'm aware, Australia offers no such vision, nothing really that we are building towards.

Unless you are currently in the grips of an existential crisis, asking yourself the big questions; (which given the nature of 2020 is perfectly reasonable to be going through) on the individual level 'What am I for?' we are generally quite capable of answering.

You could hear it as 'what do I do?' and answer something like 'I'm the regional manager of purchasing for Woodshire Office Furniture.' or if you interpret it as more of a 'why do you get out of bed in the morning?' you might answer: 'to provide food and shelter to my family, and give my children education and opportunities.'

These are perfectly fine answers, but it gets harder when you zoom out a little. Caution: based on my personal experience, this is precisely the process of having an existential crisis. 

We don't look up into the sky and see the orbital platform being constructed that will one day serve as a habitat for our children and a space-dock for constructing intergalactic space craft that our grandchildren will use to explore. Is Australia in the space-game at all? What is the Australian project? Well we have leaders, surely they have communicated at some point their vision for the future? Isn't that what leaders do?

The vision is something like 'Stable Macro-economic growth driven by exports in the resource sector.' And it really doesn't matter which party. Of course, I'm articulating it in the most dry and academic way possible. Usually our leaders jazz the vision up a bit with their excellent oration skills to something like 'Jobs, jobs, jobs.'

Where is the lucky country headed? It is headed to work. Until the pandemic hit.

I actually feel my characterization is unfair, my feeling is, most Australians would find the question 'what is Australia for?' unintelligible, meaningless. Both of the major parties in Australia are never looking to mobilize the nation, not in my lifetime, with the sole exception of the pandemic's first wave. I would also concede, that due to the happenstance of being evacuated over the New Years break from Australia's outbreak of bush fires, I witnessed mass mobilization of our fire fighting and emergency services too.

It all proves the concept that people can be mobilized. Which disproves the hypothesis that something has been lost since the Greatest Generation went through the depression then off to WW2. All that has been lacking is vision, even terrible visions like Hitler's, to which citizens were mobilized both to realize in Germany, Austria, Japan and Italy, and to prohibit that vision pretty much everywhere else.

If I were to look at the fruits of just my adult-life (2002-2020) in the great Australian project, I'd have to ask: remember when beef wasn't angus beef? Remember when caramel wasn't salted... well, maybe it had salt in it, I don't know, but remember when they didn't tell us caramel had salt in it? Remember when salt wasn't pink? Remember when we didn't have rock salt in grinders, we just used saxa table salt? You know, back when we just used saxa table salt and didn't put it in anything, because Master Chef wasn't on TV yet and the public didn't know seasoning made food taste good?

Imagine transporting someone from 1994 into a modern household... Why it would take them minutes to adjust to the future. Possibly whole seconds to acclimatize to touch screen interfaces. For them it would be a tour of mostly minor incremental improvements to consumer products they wouldn't have thought of. We could give them the gift of Spotify on a wireless smart phone, and they could give us the gift of their music even though paradoxically we already have their music, plus two decades of mediocre 'stuff' caused by the general collapse of record labels and that our attention is commanded by algorithms.

Eric Weinstein whom I trashed several posts back, has a game he plays that he outlined in his first podcast episode with his boss Peter Thiel. It goes something like 'remove the screens from a room and then figure out how it isn't 1973.'

An economy is a very complicated thing to describe, quantify, pin-down in any meaningful way. I am mindful though of the tension between the noble goal of individuals just leading a quiet provincial life accumulating fond memories and small pleasures where they can, and the quite useless/suicidal shit this amounts to in the Macro scale.

This year started for me in the shadow of massive plumes of smoke, in the town I was evacuated to as the East Coast of Australia caught on fire, lest we forget. Thankfully, both government commissions reviewing the catastrophic bushfire season and activists determined to not log the bush that remains don't appear to have forgotten. But it's as good an answer as any to say the Australian economy is dedicated to: burning the country to the ground.

I haven't forgotten that prior to the pandemic breaking out, much of my anxiety was around climate change and our collective determination to accelerate towards our end.

The primary motivation for writing this post is my concern for the people in my community in their second, harsher lock down that are feeling the full psychological weight of the associated economic slowdown. I feel it personally, and I also feel personally that relief is closer than the eradication of Covid-19.

An Invitation to Notice GDP

This is what I'll leave you with until the next part. GDP is our proxy measure for happiness, or as Economists might call it 'Utility' - this to my understanding is like saying 'what makes people happy? Consumption.' and hence we, or at least traditional media makes a big hoohah out of economic growth.

In the abstract, we should know that this is an insufficient proxy at best. Why? Well imagine if I gave you a cheesecake (vegan cheesecake if you must) pretty happy? Now if I give you two cheesecakes, how happy are you? 3? 4? 5? there comes a point where the gift of cheesecake turns into an obligation to sell cheesecakes out the front of your house. (though this song about Cheesecakes [also incidentally from the 90s]).

Like we all know, more stuff does not equal more happiness. We've all eaten too much, or been under the financial stress of buying some unreturnable item or experience that we shouldn't have.

The main thing though, is that GDP is like the opposite of the Marshmallow test, because the mindset is who is doing well right now.

Imagine for example, if there was someone who managed to be President of the United States for 4 years, and like a bunch of pundits all clamored to figure out how he was brilliant at outfoxing the opposition and fending off attack after attack. 

Now notice over the course of the next months or years, how that narrative might change as the scrutiny that office attracts, the enmity fostered and the creditors come knocking as to whether that guy 'won' anything at all.

I don't know, but worth being mindful of, and keeping an eye on.