various analyses and recommendations I've been reading. Whether it's
Doug Henwood on Behind The News and his always-provocative guests or
George Soros
as explained in the New York Review of Books, even Paul Krugman
(sometimes), I keep finding myself in agreement with them over how I
understand the situation and possible remedies, only to come up short
when I ask myself to put in my own words just what it is that they are
saying.
I feel a little like I imagine my children must feel as they sometimes
read aloud to us from books that are slightly above what they can
readily grasp. They pronounce the words correctly, only they don't
seem to quite understand what they all mean when put together, let
allone what the words are also implying.
I wonder how many people feel this way, like a child in a roomful of
adults, wanting so badly to understand and add something to the
chatter all around but always missing the point in some crucial way.
Let's hope we can grow up faster than we'd probably like to so to act
like the grown-ups we truly need to be right now.
1 comment:
The reason it's so confusing is these are built upon layers and layers of abstractions. A CMO is a thing, that is a bunch of mortgages, that represent a bunch of payments people make as they sit in their kitchens staring at the electric bill and the gas bill and the cell phone bill and the mortgage.
Same with the market. Can we predict the impact of the behaviors of millions of people? I doubt 1 in 10,000 people knows what the DOW actually represents -- it's just an abstraction of some economic activity, itself an abstraction of what millions of people in 30 large companies are working on.
So don't worry if you don't understand it. It's not understandable. We've been building mechanisms to help comprehend behavior, mechanisms we think we understand. Clearly, we don't.
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