Purposive Drift

Where is the light?

Over the past few weeks I have been submerged in the flow of bad economic news. The optimism of my posts like, "Was I wrong?" has become very subdued. Here are three good accounts of how we got into this mess to reinforce the gloom:

Jonathan Ford's "A greedy giant out of control"

Michael Lewis's "The End"

Karl Moore's interview with Henry Mintzberg "A Crisis of Management not Economics"

And for UK readers Willem Buiter really puts the knife in:

"Could the UK face a sterling crisis, or are we in one already?"

However, despite the tsunami of gloom and some personal circumstances that ain't that great I still wonder whether the gloom is being over done. I think back a few day to a piece wrote about Gillian Tett, "Listen for the silences", where she says:

"... one of the things I learned as an anthropologist is that to understand how a society works you need to not just look at the areas of what we call 'social noise' - ie what everyone likes to talk about, so the equity markets and M&A and all the high-profile areas everyone can see. But you need to look at the social silences as well."

May be now, more than ever, we ought to be looking for the light in the silences rather than being overwhelmed by the noise of the sky falling in.