On economics

Economics has been called the 'dismal science', and is something I know nothing about. What is eminently obvious to me though, is that nobody else knows anything about it/them either, or the Crash of 1928 and the Mess of 2008-and-counting would never have happened. Would they? These wonderful bankers (the collective noun for bankers, as in, say, a 'pride' of lions or a 'gaggle' of horse-flies, is 'wunch', I'm reliably informed) kept telling us that they needed to pay each other vast amounts because you need to pay top dollar '…to get the best brains'. These 'best brains' have just applied their top dollar expertise to bringing the world's economies to their knees. How did they pull off this remarkable feat? … more in a minute.

Meanwhile, what's all this about economics being 'a science'? A science is something that deals in empirically discovered Facts, allied to a rational Hypothesis (ie, 'hunch'), which combine to produce, with luck, a Theory. This Theory will apply in all cases in all places, and is thus held to be 'true' until it is superseded by a broader more all-embracing Theory. That's the scientific method; and it works (or should do).
Economics works entirely differently. It does not work according to empirical objective Facts and sound Theory; it hobbles along from day to day, lurching to left and right at each successive minute. Science does not do that. Why do/es economics lurch and stumble from pillar to post? Because it's all based upon human decisions in the first place and natural disaster in the second. Expensive mathematicians and deluded financial brokers keep trying to devise algorithms to predict market movements, (Why? To add stability, for the benefit of all? Hmm… how about 'to make a quick killing'?) but they will never ever find one, I can predict with fine certainty. They would be literally much better off studying the weather. A typhoon in Japan flattens a factory, and thus by the 'law' of supply and demand, the price of scraggle-tweeters quadruples overnight.
Hang on, though... 'law'? That sounds a bit like science, don't you think? A proper Law, like the Law of Gravity or the Law of Conservation of Energy. But the 'law' of supply and demand is nothing like that. It's not even a 'law of moral convenience' as passed by a parliament in a civilised society for the best protection of its citizens from the mad and the bad.
No, the 'law' of supply and demand is nothing but an observation of the near-universal practice of greed and venality in the world of commerce. If something becomes scarce, traders, merchants, cornershop wallahs and Top Dollar Bankers all react in the same way: they up the price as high as they can get away with. It's not a law; it's a dispiriting reflection on the human capacity for selfishness.

And there you have it: the economics of the entire world is run not on the basis of any Law, or indeed upon rationality of any sort: it is run on the backs of just two emotions: greed and fear. They call a market 'Bullish' when greed is in the chair and everyone thinks they can steal a march over the other guy and drain some extra cash out of the public commonwealth for their own Top Dollar bonuses; and they call it 'Bearish' when fear replaces greed, and everyone judges that the risks of allowing greed full rein are too high. Best sit tight for a while, until untrammelled greed becomes possible again. This is the condition we are in at the moment. The Great Brains of banking are biding their time. They were startled that the USA didn't bail out Lehman's (they were banking(!) on the Big L being so important to The Economy that it could never be left to go bust) and now they are hiding under their collective stone, waiting for us all to forget. Then they can return to plunder us once again.

Or can they? Have we finally learned some sort of lesson? That Rampant Capitalism is no good for anyone? Have we finally learned that a civilised society is not one in which every man is for himself, and himself alone?.... the message that Milton Friedman and Reagan and Thatcher rammed down our throats, and which our public services have been shattered by ever since? (Remember Thatcher's famous 'There is no such thing as society'?)

Have we learned that enormous private wealth for the few at the expense of public squalor for the many is not a good exchange? That a vast wage gap between the highest paid ('earned' from such useless things as property speculation and currency manipulation) and the lowest paid (doing such essential jobs as sewage work and producing food) is bound to breed ill-feeling all round and to greatly diminish such things as civic pride and social cohesion, not to mention national morale?

I doubt that we have learned. We might tinker a little at the edges, and might try (unsuccessfully I would confidently predict) to appeal to the better natures of the Greed Merchants in finance and banking, but overall nothing will change. Greed and Fear will remain the Laws by which the world runs its economies. Until, one day….

… one day the Common Man will say 'enough is enough'…. And politicians will be forced to rein in the Men of Greed. Then maybe economics will slowly change from being run at the whim of personal greed-driven twitches and lurches, and begin to be run as a service to everyone on the planet: fairness will replace greed; everyone's basic needs will be addressed and met; long-term social investment will replace short-term profit rip-offs; huge wealth will be looked down upon instead of looked up to; we will honour each other instead of despising or envying each other. We will be judged by our values and not our value.
And on that day, the Fat Pigs of the City will finally learn to fly.

Until then, we will just have to remain angry at what they've done, and feel more angry because there seems to be no will to change it at the top of governement, and even more angry because we at the bottom feel powerless to change this. And that's the way it will stay until enough of the public get fed up with being swindled and decide to act.

Meanwhile, the Co-op Bank was not involved in any sleazy activity, and is never likely to be, as it is run not by Top Dollar Greed Merchants for their own interest, but by and for its own members: it's a co-operative. You might like to consider this when wondering where your money will be safe in the future.

Rant over. Back to work… Finally finished Chapter 16. About to broach The Occult: toads, newts, skinny blokes with bass guitars hanging below their knees, zombies and all….. but underneath all the nonsense there are some gems of wisdom. More later.

Types…

I spend the best part of my working day sat in front of a computer screen, reading, or if I'm lucky, writing. It can get monotonous, even though I have a big window obliquely to one side of me, which gives out onto the garden. Thus I can occasionally vary my focus and watch the butterflies on the buddleia, or the eucalyptus tickling the breeze; occasionally a scruffy ginger cat, with a dog-end in its gob and a battered trilby, looking for something beautiful to kill, or once in a while, a magnificent pheasant, strutting his technicolor stuff.

But mainly… staring hopefully at a screen, wondering whether I will ever be able to find the right way to finish the chapter I have stalled on halfway through, yet again. After several years of screen gawping I feel I'm something of an expert on how to cope with it, and would like to pass on what I think might be one or two Handy Tips on the subject of fonts.

I use three fonts for different things. For writing, like composing this blog, for example, I find Times New Roman to be unbeatable. The letters are big-bodied, meaning the ascenders and descenders (the tops of 't's and the bottoms of 'g's, for example), are relatively small. Think 'Vanessa Feltz'. Thus, you can fit a lot of easily readable text onto the screen. I use 14pt if I want a quick overview, but mainly I enlarge this to 150% when writing. At this size I never have to peer, and never feel I'm straining my eyes. I can read entire books on my 17" screen at this level of enlargement, with no trouble at all. Recently I read the Torah, the four Gospels, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita and the Dhammapada like this, one after the other. No problems.

The other onscreen font I use is Comic Sans. This is best, I find, for emails. TNR is too black and formal and in yer face. Comic is more relaxed and really pretty friendly (think Paul Merton, or possibly Joe Pasquale). It is roughly a million times better to write in and a trillion times better to read than that godforsaken and soulless Arial that so many of my incoming mails are in. A font size of 12 or 14pt seems to be about right to me. Why, I wonder, do the Arial fans also favour 1 or 2pt? It's a skinny typeface in the first place and is virtually invisible in small fonts, never mind unreadable. And why do so many of them favour pale blue as a colour? A boring, tiny, skinny font in a virtually invisible colour? Please reconsider if you are an Arial user!
Comic Sans, at 12pt, in navy blue, makes a mail a joy to read, even if it's only another attempt to flog me stuff to make my willy yet another three feet longer, so I can strap eight more counterfeit watches to it to boost my self confidence. But spam seems to inevitably arrive in boring Arial or similar. Suitable for the sad little lives spammers live, I suppose.

You may have noticed that a lot of website pages are set up in either Arial (or one of its clones) or Comic Sans. The former are tiring to read; the latter are a pleasure. Would you agree?

The third font I use is Garamond. This is wonderful for printed text, because it is of slender body, and uses about a half, or less, of the ink TNR would need. Also, TNR on a printed page is downright threatening, I find. It's the stuff of Summonses and Subpoenas. Garamond, however, leads the eye gently across the page, and never demands an effort of the reader. Think Darcey Bussell or Leslie Caron. It dates from the seventeenth century and has never been bettered for elegance and economy. I use 12pt for printing off documents as my printer needs only one pass to print a line, so it's light on ink and takes little time, and the results are beautifully readable.

A further possible Tip is that if you have, as I do, all your colours in one basket, so to speak, and don't do much colour printing on account of the outrageous cost of the ink, and when you do dare to print off a photo, you run the constant nuisance of having to replace all three colours when only one has run out… well…. maybe this will help…
You can keep your jets clean by occasionally printing off in 'brown'. As far as I know, brown is made by mixing all three primaries (it always was at primary school, anyway, so most of my artistic efforts ended up as being pictures of bears hiding in ploughland, or soldiers huddling face down in shell holes on the Somme) which means all three colours get drained at the same rate. And, surprisingly, the result is quite readable, printed in 12pt Garamond, naturally.

***

Yes, you've guessed. The reason I'm writing this now is because I've stalled, yet again, on my current chapter. It's supposed to be about Vibes, Instinct, and Intuition. Shouldn't be too much of a problem, you might say. I thought that myself until I started on it. After two days I had 2,000 words on the page. They read quite well, but there was a certain something missing. I spent an hour trying to work it out. Eventually intuition told me that I had been tackling the issue from the wrong end. Thus, my 2,000 words were not exactly irrelevant or wrong…. but would need a complete re-jig, with extra bits adding here and there, sometimes in mid-paragraph. In other words, the sort of editing I absolutely hate. Too complex to hold in my mind, and too ambiguous at too many points. What goes where? Why? Why not there, instead? But if there, what about X and even Y? And where the hell has Z got to?
At the rate my tiny mind can process stuff, there are several days of slog ahead, and even then it won't feel right because it will have all sort of rough edges and little gaps in the flow and so forth, and so will need constant re-visiting. Bah.

No butterflies out today: raining. No scruffy cat; probably off somewhere dealing dope. No pheasant. He must be in either his Winnebago or a fox.

Anyway… back to staring at my screenful of Times New Roman, wishing I was somewhere else.
It'll pass…. And the chapter will somehow get finished.

Then it will be onto the next chapter: The Occult. Oh, mercy…..