Gotham Diary:
Mortmain
Over the weekend, I said to Kathleen that I think that this summer, this summer of 2010, is the point from which we’re going to date the beginning of a very bad economic time, something at least as bad as the Great Depression of the 1930s. The crickets have stopped assuring us that this would/will never happen again, which corresponds at last to what we’ve been seeing right in front of our eyes.
I’d like to think that, having stopped worrying that it’s coming, we’ll do something about making it not so bad. But what? What can one do? I can’t even find the old entries that scolded Barack Obama for not speaking up against the ethnic cleansing of New Orleans after Katrina. I know that I made a few; I also know that I muffled them a bit, kept them as low-key as I could without completely castrating my point. Mr Courage, eh? That was the most that I could do — words! I complained that Barack Obama was a savvy politician who would pick his fights shrewdly. Now, of course, I only wish that that were true. If he’s picking his fights shrewdly at the moment, then he must be so savvy that nobody else has the faintest idea what we’re in for. And perhaps we don’t.
“Structural unemployment.” Philip Greenspun wonders if today’s unemployed human beings aren’t the “structural equivalents” of the Nineteenth Century’s draft horses. Now, there’s an idea that will warm Middle America’s heart toward the élite! Have a look at something that I wrote in 2006, in response to a brief article in Foreign Affairs by Alan Blinder. What good did that do, my prescience about the outsourced economy? The structurally superfluous economy.
When I was young, the battle cry was “Don’t trust anyone over thirty!” It would be music to my ears to hear that now. Nobody over forty has a single good idea. (Except for me, of course; and what I’ve really got is a lack of bad ideas — I hope and pray! Oh, and my friend Joe Jervis.) Let me know if you encounter an exception.