Dear Diary: The Use of It
This afternoon, I was reading the new issue of the London Review of Books, saving Alan Bennett’s Diary for later. Too lazy to get up, I turned the pages and settled on Anne Enright’s postcard from Recession Ireland, “Sinking by Inches.”
In the middle of 2007 a Romanian taxi driver told me he was going home to Bucharest because ‘the building site is dead.’ All his friends had already gone. He had a wife with a new baby (called Seán, as I remember), and this was why he would be the last to leave. I don’t know why nobody listened to this guy, or how we failed to understand what he was saying. In May 2007, the pre-election rhetoric dealt with worries about the economy, and each party, very helpfully, promised an increase in public spending. By summer the property market had sighed to a halt, a fact no one wanted to notice. A year later, Lehman Brothers fell, and this was so clearly not Ireland’s fault that the brief opportunity to talk about what was actually our fault was lost. I can understand the denial at the end of the boom; what worries me is the denial that made it. From 2001 to 2007 it was not possible to be off-message about the Irish economy or, especially, about the housing market. You would barely be published. Your article would end up in the middle of the supplement, unflagged.
As the publisher of a Web log that few people read, I didn’t have that problem. By the time The Daily Blague was even launched, I’d been posting “Friday Fronts” at Portico, many of which expressed discomfort with the financial laissez-faire that would lead to the Big Bust of 2008. I was reading well-publicized writers such as Paul Krugman and nodding my head, really. Kathleen and I had groaned heavily about the repeal of Glass-Steagall, in 1998; we thought that Sandy Weill was building a house of cards.
And we were right. But what’s the use of that? What good did it do Paul Krugman? Of course his reputation was burnished by the fall of Bear Stearns, and the fall of Lehman Brothers, and the near-collapse of AIG. Fine. I’m sure that he’d have preferred effectiveness to glory. If the people controlling the levers of power had listened to him, then —
Instead, against all the odds that common sense could call, Lawrence Summers and his satellites (Rubin, Geithner, and Bernanke) shine brightly in White House thinking. One wishes that Jacques Necker could rise from his grave and deliver a second compte rendu.
Perhaps you know what I mean by that. I have no idea whether most readers of this site can be expected to know about Jacques Necker and his Compte rendu au roi. (Thank heaven for Wikipedia in this regard! It spares me a lot of clunky and, in the event, unnecessary exposition.) And I’m not sure that a second accounting would be any more helpful than the first one was. The smart folks in 1780s France simply weren’t ready to hear what Necker had to say. Ditto Wall Street in the past decade — even in the flotsammy wake of Enron.
Sadly, I haven’t got any brilliant insights to trumpet. If anything, the Noughts taught me how dangerous the 20-80 curve is now that the Internet allows everyone to see it. You want to be where the action is, right? You want to be excited by the guy with the mike — and why not? There’s an app for that, and it has been processing the messy organic-chemistry equivalents of bits and bytes in our older brain structures for far longer than we’ve been human. The Noughts taught me that environmental catastrophe, awful and likely as it is, has nothing on the engines of brilliant stupidity that every day confute the ancients’ belief in our nature as rational animals.
My resolution for this the first year of my infant grandson’s life: Think twice about being cool. Keep on thinking.