Space Time Anomaly

I recently read "Prosperity Without Growth" by Tim Jackson. My library copy, I got my hands on the first edition which must have been published some time in 2009. 

In 2009 I had started my Economics & Finance degree. Part of it was an insatiably stupid curiosity as to whether the Economics profession would show any contrition. Whether my lectures would be delivered in any kind of panicked uncertainty. I even posed the question to one lecturer, as to whether Economics was in crisis, he related an anecdote about another economist being asked the same question and saying "no".

I would grow disillusioned with what impressed me as Economics (& Finances) performative natures. From the hip-hop duo Black sheep lyric, I began to describe myself as a "certified fool" the Global Financial Crisis was unlike the War on Terror which had dominated the previous 7 years of the Bush Administration and largely defined the political climate of Y2K, though a mostly abstract war it had ended the "end of history" period of the 90s, and while the Berlin Wall did come down in my lifetime, I was too young to bestow any significance upon it. I would grow a little older in the early 90s and be more salient of the first gulf war in Iraq's outbreak taking over broadcast television and depriving me of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and whatever else I wanted to watch at the time, and the first I can recall my mum ever being interested in television.

More annoying were the 92 Barcelona Olympics, which I had no interest in beyond the mascot and some brief European buffoonery at the opening ceremony. I was shocked and appalled by what it did to the television schedule for two whole weeks and said so in a one page essay I had to write for school which displeased the teacher immensely and I realized school intruded upon subjective opinion. A child was not allowed to dislike the Olympics, and that was a year I had a cool, good teacher.

Princess Diana died, then the Twin Towers came down after the planes were flown into them by terrorists a few years later.

That changed things. And weirdly, it changed things even though it was directly inconsequential. On globe sporting 6ish billion at the time, those attacks killed people in the thousands, which is very deadly and it was disturbing and gruesome. But not as deadly as the 2005 Kashmir earthquake which also displaced 2.8 million people. 

The "war on terror" itself was much deadlier, just for US soldiers, cost trillions of dollars, destabilized the Middle East particularly Iraq and Afghanistan and beyond changes to Air flight safety making a second attack of that nature impossible as of September 12th, 2001 I don't think the world is any safer from Islamic violent extremism than it was before the US and "coalition of the willing" retaliated.

Yet it changed things, changed religiosity, changed discourse, changed media, changed immigration it changed a lot.

The Global financial crisis did not. It impacted just about everyone, everywhere albeit to differing degrees. Australia for example managed to insulate pretty well, and in turn in some ways suffers the most for being the odd one out with no market corrections. 

But you know people lost a bunch of their retirement savings, people in other countries lost their houses, I had friends that lost their jobs.

If you will, because I have planes on the brain though, the Global Financial Crisis, the Subprime Mortgage Crisis, the Global Credit Crunch (all the same thing) did not change things, despite the massive impact it had on people everywhere.

So it was like watching a plane go down after its engines, wings and landing gear fell off, the fuselage caught on fire and killed all the passangers overnight, then watching governments as an extention of society scramble to put it all together again so that same plane we had just watched catestrophically fall apart could get back up in the skies.

Creating a localized space-time anomaly.

The Anomaly is This:

If you aren't still stuck in 2008, you are living in the past. 

Tim Jackson's book "Prosperity without growth" 1st edition, is an interesting artefact because to suggest to the author in 2009 that society would not scrutinize the economic paradigms we have been living under (Neo-classical economics, neo-liberalism) he would be incredulous. 

It's actually what needed to happen.

I also have planes on the brain, because I think of how Dave McRaney explained "Normalcy bias" using a real life example of people sitting in a plane waiting to be taxied back to the terminal to disembark when the fuselage roof was torn open and a massive fireball singed peoples head hair off, most people remained in their seats. Apparantly to survive you had just a few seconds to pop your seatbelt (the seatbelt sign was gone) jump onto the wing, run along it and then jump off onto the grass or something. 

Now, I should explain that I tend to use "the economy" as a synonym for "what people are doing with their lives" I have not yet figured out how to talk about the economy, but people are notoriously myopic.

Your life, admittedly, might be about your family. Everything you do is for your family, to raise your children to give them the best chance of fulfillin their hopes and dreams.

Most people will be doing this, by working hard for some business in order to create access to food, shelter and education for their own children.

They may tell themselves a story about giving their kids opportunities, but we know, many parents don't want their children to take the "experiment with drugs, sex and poetry" opportunity presented to them, which would not have required their parents to work as hard, and are actively or passively aggressively shoving their kid toward doctor-lawyer end of the opportunity spectrum.

Someone can also fulfill this life-mission, by, for example, working in a tech-start up. Or not even, being an entrepreneur-accelerator where according to one guy on a podcast he comes up with an idea in his head and then sells it to someone else to get venture capital to start the business. 

It is true, that venture capital disproportionately finance the minority of investments that generate the vast majority of profits, but they have done so by borrowing $$$ at 0% interest and giving it out to a person who wants to make an app that converts any recipe to quantities suitable for a gold-fish he call "Phish Phood" and when that fails they write off $$$ against their taxable income.

So you could have been handed borrowed money carrying no risk by someone who knows that so long as 1/30 of their investments turns a profit and doesn't go bust they are in the money because they only have to beat 1% and they won't be paying any tax, and you buy a house and enrol your kids in a ritzy school on a salary you pay yourself to be CEO of a tech startup developing an app that will never work and will never sell.

And that's kind of the good part of any developed economies. If you are a CEO of an Automotive company, you have been one in a long line of people that have basically been running these 20th century companies into the ground since the late 70s. You've worked really hard to get to a point where you can work really hard on prolonging the death of your company.

Add to that, the Ponzi schemes and you pretty much have neo-liberalism.

The economic ecosystem that allows this all should have been stripped down, examined, discussed, redesigned, tested and evaluated in 2009 and we should be leading very different lives.

But instead, we rushed to live "normal" lives again, but normal doesn't work. We saw it fall apart. If you want to relive the last 16 years in under 5 minutes (give or take ad blockers) watch Beavis feed Butthead cheeseburgers and force him to run round the block after his heart attack.

The linked clip has one of those annoying edits, where they show you something coming up in the clip for 15 seconds, then start the clip which includes the first 15 seconds in it, making it an apt metaphor because this normalcy bias happened again with the Global Pandemic that kicked off this decade. 

By far the most depressing thing about humanity, was its collective rush to get back to "business as usual" literal business as usual. But it is not it's own space-time anomaly because the 2009 one supercedes it. We were already stuck living in the past.

It's weird, isn't it. If you are stuck in 2009, you are still living in the future, but 2010 onwards is stuck in 2007.