The confidence in our ability to survive

 

Subject: The confidence in our ability to survive.

The world of economics moves like a weather pattern, in phases. Perhaps like weather, the tiny eruptions of pressure variation which create the highs and the lows in a weather system are similar to the complex forces at work in the market place and the flighty fluidity of the money market which every so often creates a crisis of confidence.

In 2008 the banks lost confidence in each other's ability to cover the daily transactions to balance their book at the end of each day the whole system fell apart, only a massive intervention, largely by western governments, created  a massive transfer from the public to the private sector a  credit swop of taxpayers money onto the books of the beleaguered  banks so the financial sector could  continue with its business.

The 1930s Depression was due to a similar lack of confidence in the machinery of commerce this time by a steep fall  in virtually all stock market prices caused by a panic of confidence.

These cyclical adjustments which undermine confidence prove that the most regulated markets are frail and our financial markets plunged into a deregulated mess the moment Richard Nixon started the deregulatory slide by taking the dollar off the gold standard. If people loose confidence in the value of their holdings much like the glue which allows political parties to carry the people with its political promises, once that confidence is blown, so is its credible effectiveness.

The future looks grim but so it did when Covid 19 struck a couple of years ago it was for the scientists to figure out a vaccine which gave hope again. Perhaps with scientific intervention and the global warming scare we can restore that delicate CO2 balance in our upper atmosphere, not only by the finite steps to cut back burning fossil fuel but also the financial scaling down of the cost of alternatives. Carbon capture, tree planting, renewable energy through wind and solar are all now well entrenched as is the massive move from the internal combustion engine to electric. 

Perhaps  "the end of the world is not nigh" but is due to sustain substantial shocks both financial and climatic which will usher in new standards. The poor, as always will have to suck it up but reading the dreadful conditions of the poor living in Calcutta over the last hundred years one begins to understand the tenacity of humans to survive. The scale of the horror  regarding the inhuman conditions living in the 'bustee' (an Indian shanty town) is to our western comprehension  unimaginable as the people there hover between life and death living (if it can be described as living)) on the pavements. They have no hope, only the task of staying alive one more day.

The scale of the problem is unimaginable in a place like Calcutta with a density of 102,000 people per square mile compared to New York at 28,000 per square mile and with an average city density of around 3400 per square mile in the US as a whole, the logistics of living are incomparable. When the international traveller lands in Dum Dum the  airport near Calcutta, as in so many airports in the third world his gaze is diverted from the slum spilling out onto the highway by the limo sent to greet him and guide him to some glitzy hotel where again, shielded from the reality of the surrounding city they retire behind their G&T to compose his initial reactions to the meeting tomorrow. He fears no discomfort as his car passed the dystopian interposition of consumerism, blatantly proffered on the billboard an advertisement of something so removed from the people who inhabit the squalor all around.

The traffic makes the place unique, the noise and the volume, people hanging on to vehicles, even clinging on the roof, the crescendo of horns demanding a vehicles presence, the fumes get into the throat the intensity of it all get into the mind and make one uneasy and very foreign.

How will the people of Calcutta cope with global warming as harvest fail and starvation ramps up a notch. Will the scale of death not simple reassert the population to a more sustainable level, some sort of biblical remedy for our profligate nature and the angel of death reasserts the balance.

Calcutta is a long way away, as is Tripoli and Benghazi. The ills reigning down on Nairobi or Lagos, Bogota or Santiago will be reported and filed away but what of London, or Paris,  New York and Toronto or Bishops Stortford will we be as sanguine or will the uplift of humankind as it moves around to escape the drama at home  not turn our world on its head, or is this too apocalyptic. 

Perhaps the billionaires know something we don't ploughing billions of dollars into space travel and visualising an environment elsewhere. Now that's what I call forward thinking.