Thursday, February 19, 2009

Quote of the day: Zoellick's question

"What started as a financial crisis, became an economic crisis, is now becoming an unemployment crisis - and to what degree does it become a human and social crisis?" Robert Zoellick - World Bank president
David Seaton's News Links
"To what degree does it become a human and social crisis?"

That is the big question isn't it and a rather stupid one, if you think about it. It is as if economic problems and unemployment problems were not occurring among human beings and were not therefore automatically social problems in nature.

That the question could be glibly formulated in this way by the head of the "world" bank is surely part of the problem itself.

In Zoellick's question it seems implicit that finance and economics are like the weather, existing outside of humanity, with laws of their own instead of being human creations that, as humans have made them, humans can remake them... and are remaking them constantly.

That separation of economics from its human component is perhaps the most transcendental characteristic of the "conservative revolution", which appears to be collapsing around our ears at the moment. DS

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Those damn humans, one day they are irrationally exuberant and the next they are brimming with deflationary spirals and negative consumer confidence. However, there is usually some vast philosophical fraud occurring at the top of the pyramid and quite a few plain vanilla criminal hustles from top to bottom. I had a client insist to me the other night that all that held the whole thing together, and what must now be re-established, is the citizen's faith in the system. These people travel thousands of miles from the "Homeland" {I find that Orwellianism sickening} to my little pueblo to explain their sad expired belief system to me. It is so pathetic. I always fix a mental image of a luge team upon my frontal lobe as I am subjected to these quaint notions. The thing is sliding down fast my friends, try not to flip over, that is so Un- Olympian. You are now upon the very slippery slope my dears, and what is at the bottom? Have faith!