Slowing Down

I was at a Chanukah party recently wolfing down the potato latkes and watching the world’s most adorable 4 year old finger painting on her iPad. Taking all this in, I drifted off into a reverie of the future: “When she’s my age she’ll reminisce with her friends about how cute and antique it was that once upon a time you actually had to touch the screen with your finger to do something rather than just think about it via the microchip implanted in your cerebral cortex.”

Anyway, as I was dreaming away, a friend who I hadn’t seen for a while came up and said two things:

1. “Good to see you again!"
2. "Hey, your blog posts are slowing down!”

In response I immediately had two reactions:

1. That sense of surprise I always have when I realize there actually are people out there who might be reading what I’m writing.

2. The realization that he was right. My blog posts are slowing down… which may, ahem, also mean I’m slowing down. Yikes!

So, being a good little analytical Virgo type, I started thinking about why this might be the case. Several theories immediately sprung to mind:

• “Bidness” has been better lately, and thus much more time consuming – for which I am profoundly grateful (as are my creditors!)

• We re-financed on our house (which was only slightly less irksome and all absorbing than asking Comrade Stalin for the required papers to leave Mother Russia at the height of the Great Purge.)

• Beatrice has been in France for the last three months helping her folks – so there’s just been more on my plate in terms of the day-to-day stuff involved in administering our… ahem… “estate”… (I was going to say “dacha” – not that we have one – but just because I kind of like the term…. Very Chekhovian.)

• Our koi pond sprung a leak! And if there’s ever a multi-dimensional challenge, involving digging ditches, employing inductive/deductive and reductive reasoning, as well as engaging in intense sessions of prayer and contemplation, it’s trying to troubleshoot and fix a leaky koi pond!

Before moving on though I’d just like to say how much help I received from our neighbor, Brice Hansen, on fixing the koi pond. He was so incredibly generous with his time and physical labor and troubleshooting smarts. What a guy!

After considerable brooding, I’m now leaning to the conclusion that the real reason for my “slow down” is that I’m simply feeling overwhelmed by things… • There’s also seems to be a “wintry feeling” in my heart which may have something to do with the season, a sense of waiting for Spring perhaps, and an overall malaise about the direction that life and the world is taking.

… which brings me back to my last blog post on John Maynard Keynes…

So perhaps I’ll wind up 2010 with a few last thoughts on why Keynes is such an attractive figure to me now. Largely I think it’s because he realized:

1. That the ultimate purpose of studying economics was to provide as many people as possible with what he called “the good life”; e.g., to live “wisely, agreeably, and well.”

2. How uncertain and crazy the future is and that “markets” are not driven by people who possess perfect information and behave rationally but who are often driven by terror and folly.

3. That a horrible gap exists when “self-correcting markets” are lurching towards some kind of pre-ordained “equilibrium” between supply, demand, and full employment and that during those gaps some rather unpleasant things such as… Well… err… fascism… can occur.

4. That everyone should have a basic understanding of economics just as they should know about all other areas of human discourse (religion, science, the arts, philosophy, morals, etc.)

5. That, as a result, economics should be written as clearly and simply as possible and not hide its insights beneath impenetrable “professional” jargon and a blizzard of mathematics.

6. That we are all victims of the “paradox of thrift”; e.g., we start to cut back on spending and want to hoard our gold in times of economic crisis. Of course this is precisely the behavior that will result in the crisis deepening as the demand for goods and services (and thus for employed workers) goes over a cliff. And thus we have the need for the government to step in as the actor of last resort and do a little of that good old stimulating “deficit spending” when everyone else is hiding their money under the bed.

7. That money isn’t simply a convenient means of exchange for getting good and services but rather is a measure of our feelings about the world we live in; e.g., “our desire to hold money as a store of wealth is a barometer of the degree of our distrust of our own calculations and conventions concerning the future. It operates…. at a deeper level of our motivation. It takes charge at the moments when the higher, more precarious conventions have weakened. The possession of actual money lulls our disquietude; and the premium which we require to make us part with money is the measure of the degree of our disquietude.”

“Disquietude” being another way, as I reckon, to say “lending freeze” or “credit crunch” – no matter how much money we may throw at the Financial Services Industry.

Well, that’s just my take. If you’re interested, there is a wonderful short book about Keynes and his relevance to the modern economic crisis. It’s written by Robert Skidelsy, who also wrote a massive three volume biography of JMK for those who really want to take the “deep dive.” Anyway, the shorter book is called:

Keynes: The Return of the Master: Why, Sixty Years After His Death, John Maynard Keynes Is the Most important Economic Thinker for America

You can find it here:

http://www.amazon.com/Keynes-Return-Master-Robert-Skidelsky/dp/158648897X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1293743276&sr=1-1

Meanwhile all best wishes for a wonderful 2011 to everyone out there still reading! Hopefully, we'll all pick up speed as we head into a lovely and bountiful 2011!