Global finance, a coda: Continuing to explore why we view economics as both boring and terrifying.

So, we were discussing why economics is viewed as boring, when it's really pretty fascinating stuff -- and we were thinking about how to put the life back in it, how to re-imagine this discipline which has gone stale.

Re-imagining the entire discipline of economics may fall on the shoulders of the media. Alas, there are institutions that have a stake in presenting economic information in a certain way. An ignorant populace is an easily manipulated populace.

I am not claiming a conspiratorial "they" that consciously controls these media images, but the fact remains that the way the subject now is presented (boring, in the realm of "professionals") is very useful to the people presenting it-- the corporate media, etc. Economics news coverage is pretty interesting in that it's alternately presented as some incomprehensible mess of numbers, or it's presented in a way to incite fear: two very different reactions to the economic news. Either it makes your eyes glaze over, or it terrifies you. Isn't it possible to learn about what's going on economically in a way that's measured, yet engaging? Apparently, not when the people hired to inform you have an interest in you being bored or terrified about the economy.

Let's look at the Money section of USA Today.
We've got "'Shocking' slump: Industry pros see Detroit steering into a skid." We've got "Stocks extend losses in bruising volatile week as Dow drops 4.2%". And we've got "German man torches his car to protest high gas prices." Bruising? Metaphorical car crashes? Torching? It's looking violent, and scary. They take the humanity out of economics, conceptually, and insert it back in how they choose: in the language of pain & injury. I mean, really read into this stuff sometime.

But the blame for our bored/fearful state doesn't rest just on the media; we have our own psychic filters when it comes to economics. I mean, we have a way of thinking that kind of glazes over it and tunes it out. If you don't get what I mean (I've phrased it a bit imprecisely), go and observe the reactions of people when economics gets brought up in conversation. If people do get excited about it, they don't usually relate it to their own lives, or look at it as concerning moral issues. This is partially because our ways of thinking have habituated us to a certain kind of economic environment where we take certain things as given.

John Maynard Keynes: "The power to become habituated to his surroundings is a marked chracteristic of mankind. Very few of us realize with conviction that the intensely unusual, unstable, complicated, unreliable, temporary nature of the economic organization by which Western Europe has lived for the last half-century. We assume some of the most peculiar and temporary of our late advantages as natural or permanent and to be depending on, and we buy or plan accordingly."

He wrote that in 1919, by the way: uncanny, no?
However, I think this is changing: that economics (and oil) are starting to come to the attention to the middle class, and thus the media. Increasingly, we will see economic matters viewed as public issues (more so than before) now that they are starting to affect people in a measurable way. But how will we see them? I think it will be through the lens of fear, again. It gets scary when the middle-class becomes poor... (to the middle-class anyway, most of the world just deals with it) because they thought they were invincible, a few decades ago. Like the tone of this CNN piece on an older woman who lost her condo and now has to live in her SUV. "'She added, "The way the economy is going, it's just amazing the people that are becoming homeless. It's hit the middle class."" As if the middle-class was some sacred, untouchable thing-- There are psychic markers with gas prices, too-- Then reality shifts, and a new norm is adapted to. It is interesting to watch how reality shifts, because this is where possibility comes in. (This is the psychic premise of economic "shock therapy", but I've always argued that reality shifts can be used to positive ends, if we were as smart as the financiers to take advantage of them).

How did we get so accustomed to a certain way of viewing economics and the world? Charles Derber in Corporation Nation attributes it to what he calls the corporate mystique; "the main recipe for how to think, and live in a corprate world ... an ideology, which for decades has effectively disguised the rising power of corporations in our lives." Pointing out that "the personal identity of today's worker, consumer, and citizen is becoming a corporate construction," he asks where we get our dreams and opinions... in great part, they are subtly given to us by corporations. They have a huge part in manufacturing our very identities. This works at a very subtle level, even for those of us who think we are aware of it.

"It is impossible to underestimate the extent to which one's own moral integrity and sense of self-respect stem for how one is situated in that world, and the extent to which most of us are involved as both agents and targets of corporate power."

So, in great part, we are the ones manufacturing our own limitations. Furthermore, as Derber points out, we see corporations as the source of our creature comforts, so we often view them in a positive light... as benefactors.

We are psychically tied up and invested in this corporate economic system, even when it is working to destroy us, and the planet. (I know that last sentence sounded melodramatic, but I mean it quite matter-of-factly.)

Who makes the information you get on the financial system? All the headlines are manufactured by corporate media conglomerates. This is a huge issue, because so much of what goes on in economics is about mood and confidence. If they manufacture a certain mood, things either glide on when they logically shouldn't, or things fall precipitously. Who controls the mood controls reality: few other fields actually work this way, but economics seems to. Right now the mood is anxious: Derber calls the middle-class "the anxious class."

But consumer confidence fell more than expected in June, hitting another 28-year low as surging prices and mounting job losses contributed to a bleak outlook, according to a survey Friday.

"Moreover, gas prices have risen to an all-time peak, food prices posted the largest increases in decades, home prices have fallen faster than any time since the Great Depression, and there has been widespread distress associated with foreclosures," the report added.

Distress. Falling confidence. Bleak outlook. Mood. The phrases above are from a USA Today article on the economic stimulus checks, but I could manufacture an article just as easily off the top of my head & convince people it was true. All you have to do is use words like "worried", "turbulent", etc. a bunch of times. At this point I sound like I'm just bitching, but really: there are implications to constantly being exposed to fear-formula news.

How will this anxiety be eased?

There's a very powerful psychological mechanism at work to simply trust in the corporate world, in the world of global finance, that everything will be sorted out.

But why trust them? It doesn't even seem like these guys are very smart. If you look at what they are doing, it is not very smart. In fact, it is like children. In deregulating the futures system in the way that they have, and running up the national debt like teenagers with credit cards, and failing to invest in alternatives to oil, both our politicians and economic experts have displayed an extreme lack of discipline and maturity.

Childhood is when you think about the short-term; you have your mother to step in and regulate your candy consumption because she knows in the long term it will be bad for you. Maturity is when you are able to plan for the long-term, and disciplined enough to follow your plans. As a society, we are quite immature, and we will be forced to grow up fast. It's looking like a painful adolescence.



The Final, Short List.


What does one do, in 2008, when faced with global economic difficulty ahead?

the most important thing -- is to truly assess your needs -- find worth, value, in meaning in things that are free -- break the mental shackles.

We control our moods; we don't have to accept the mood given to us by the media.

I think the individual psychic work to be done is just as challenging as the practical work. It will help immensely to have other people around you who are thinking as you do: only through group shifts in thinking can we really re-imagine economics on a scale large enough to do something about it.

smart things to work toward, practically:

-- figure out a way to make your voice heard on financial policy
-- get out of debt
-- put yourself in a situation where you don't rely on auto transport
-- put yourself in a situation where you can produce your own energy needs and grow a portion of your own food
-- become part of a community that shares expensive items, like cars or lawnmowers or kitchen appliances or whatever

Maybe it is a good idea to move towards this now, or at least continue to educate yourself on what's really going economically, so you can face these weird news reports without the fear they're intended to produce: information is, to some degree, confidence.

Granted, most of the ideas above are just common-sense provisions for damage control once the whole economic system is already really screwed up. As far as being able to influence the policy decisions to keep things from being totally screwed up... I honestly don't know the best way to do this. I've been basically arguing this whole time for greater citizen involvement, but I suspect it won't come quickly or easily, given that the people profiting from the status quo don't want citizen involvement. Persistence and ingenuity, I guess: if you have any ideas on this problem, comment.