snousle

Congratulations, bailout opponents: your voice has been heard, and the theft of the American treasury has been averted. Please thank the Republicans for pulling through on your behalf - sorry, it seems that the Democrats mostly abandoned you, but I'm sure you'll kiss and make up.

With the immediate cost of the non-bailout arguably twice that of the proposed bailout, it seems like a good day to reflect on the end of the world. Indeed, my whole financial life is flashing before my eyes:

Well, not mine, really - I didn't invest in stocks. This is merely the background against which I chronically and persistently failed to appreciate the fundamental strength of the American economy and its capacity for growth. After all, we were beset by crises: the Arab oil crisis, the various nightmares of the Reagan administration, the '87 crash, 9/11, and so forth. It was a great time to be bleak. The doom and gloom posture was always justified, but it came at a steep price. Who would have guessed that blind faith, in the face of all evidence, would have been so persistently rewarded? Obviously, any educated person would have known all along that the end was nigh.

(The Dow is not the last word, of course - I pay at least as much attention to the Gini coefficient, which is not quite so cheerful - but this has the advantage of being familiar. In truth, it is an absolute scandal that the ~~10-fold~~ oops, I mean three-fold economic growth I've witnessed in the past 38 years has done so little to improve American quality of life, but it is for this reason that I don't think shrinking the economy would be so bad either.)

It's funny, you know, because although it seems that I'm always hammering on the pessimists, I'm the only person I know that takes pessimistic visions of the future seriously enough to do something about them. An upcoming project, a two-year wheat stockpile, is a good example. It's wingnutty enough to raise people's eyebrows, but a sober cost/benefit analysis puts it pretty squarely in the same category as sensible, socially acceptable investments like fire insurance. And I undertake this, again, as an optimist; it's just another layer of relatively inexpensive ass-covering that makes perfect sense even if the chance of needing it is quite small.

I don't talk about this much, because when I discuss the darker possibilities, I do so with a seriousness that I feel is entirely lacking in the current culture of fear. It's as if I'm surrounded by children telling ghost stories - it's all panic and no gravity. The things that scare me, they're dull, boring things, like diseases that strike banannas, or aquifer levels in South Dakota. Unlike the ghost stories of the media, which are designed to attract and stimulate, my tales are soporific and depressing. As is so often the case, there are those who talk, and those who act, and when it comes to the apocalypse, I'm not much of a talker.

I have a rule in my life: before getting depressed over something bad, I take a little time to tally up all comparable events, and take a realistic look what I've actually lost. The chart you see above is not entirely up to date; it's missing a couple of pixels at the very end, where the graph should go down to about 10K.

Having a hard time seeing it? So am I. In order to feel really depressed, I'm going to have to get a magnifying glass. The point is that, placed in the context of a whole lifetime, the current crisis is neither unique nor notable. It is small even in comparison to current trends - recent increases in health care costs, for example, have had a far greater impact on the average wallet than this. If we follow the practice of balancing gloom with jubilation in accordance with actual events, these financial crises have been little more than breaks between songs at the worlds largest dance party.

Yes, the world might end tomorrow. I can't prove otherwise. But in the meanwhile, let's not jump the gun, OK?