Adventures in Global Finance [Part V]

What the Future Holds

the future a cradle, holding / the future soil, holding . . . life? / the future a used mine, holding nothing? / the future a hand, holding . . .


...actually, everything written in the posts prior to this was just a prelude to the really interesting questions ahead.

But first, an important note: none of this is trying to be prophetic. I'm someone who looks at the evidence I can find-- from the best sources available-- and extrapolates conclusions from it. I encourage you not to believe anything I say, but to do your own research & extrapolate your own conclusions, so you can make the best decisions for your life-- decisions which take into realistic consideration the future facing you, your family, your country, your planet. My main argument to this whole piece, if there is one, is that we should think about and understand global finance. We should make educated financial decisions on a personal level, and elect people who actually have economic intelligence and solutions.

I think there has been a semi-deliberate attempt to obscure understanding of our financial system.

It's surprising that we consider ourselves educated people, yet we don't understand the basic workings of finance. We can have advanced degrees and explain deconstruction, and do fancy stuff with computer programming, yet most of us don't know that the financial system was deregulated, and couldn't give the definition of a futures contract. But which of these things affects our ability to buy food?

Why do we view a system that's so vital to our very lives as something peripheral and boring; why do we pay it little attention? This is, at first glance, very strange.

Part of this economic ignorance can be attributed to how we think about economics: we think of it as existing within the realm of experts who somehow know what they're doing.

I would like to re-imagine how we think of economics. These "experts" we let handle the whole thing are not experts, but experimenters, who are playing a vast game with our entire society (often much to their own benefit). And there are moral consequences to that. When people in Haiti are scouring garbage dumps for food, that's a moral issue.

There's an example in The Shock Doctrine that I think back to, when Margaret Thatcher goes to Thailand and comments on the sad, immoral situation of child prostitution... yet it was economic shock therapy contrived by economic policies, where the Thai baht fell and the IMF intervened, that resulted in the child prostitution. It didn't exist on that scale before.

We need to see economic decisions in context, linked with morality. And, as many have called for, a different way of measuring economic figures which takes into account environmental and social costs [see the Genuine Progress Indicator, etc.]


So, that's a brief look at how we think about global finance: boring, mathematical, disconnected to us, with little awareness of the moral implications of policies. But the question remains: why do we think about it this way?

To a great extent, why we pay so little mind to finance has to do with the way the information is presented to us. The public school experience does little to get us excited about economics, and the current media presentation of it is terrible in many regards. What's your reaction, when you think about the business section of the newspaper? What's your reaction when the business news comes on the TV? Think about it; now think about why you have that reaction.

Economics takes place in a whole other discourse community that not everyone is allowed to access. The language used is specialised, and most people aren't initiated to what the words even mean. And the imagery is equally exclusive: look at any business media, and you'll see a lot of men in suits. If you're not a man in a suit, you learn that this is the province of men in suits. Furthermore, it happens in the "business" section. I'm looking at the cover article in the business section of the Globe and Mail, which is on "The Cost of the Next Barrel." But the subject matter covers an issue that affects everyone in innumerable ways-- it's not just about "business".

We have this image of economics and finance being boring -- but really, what is boring about this stuff? Figuring out how we are going to move and eat this century is fascinating. Figuring out how people around the world can live in a healthy, sane way is the most interesting challenge our species has faced. These things are basically about economics: its finance that determines so much of the changes in our societies, in our environments, etc. And yet we've left these fascinating challenges up to a few not-that-smart guys, because they sold us the image of it being boring.

Finance is boring because it has had the life drained out of it. As living beings, we are much more attracted to things that have life and color and energy than we are to things that have the life sucked out of them.

Of course, it was draining the life out of economics that enabled the system to be the way it is. Reducing matters to numbers, instead of human issues. We don't say, people in country X are suffering and they slave away in factories to produce our cheap goods. We say, the average annual income in country X is $1261. If you go to these guys and put it to them like -- your social security policies are ensuring that your children will have worked their whole lives and not see a dime of the money, and you are spending the credit of your children -- even if they're evil schmucks, they won't say -- Oh, that's okay. But we don't put it in those terms, even though those terms are true. We put it in numbers and specialized language that the average person doesn't understand. In this way, finance is separated from life. What we need to do is put the life back in it; reconnect it to the whole. Economics should not be some distant branch of knowledge: economics comes from eco, as does ecology, from home. It is truly at the heart of things.

[To be continued...]