Supermassive Black Hole

Everything I know about economics to this point hangs on the stumpy, worn, rounded peg of my high school senior-year econ class. It was, I think, one of the last of my required core courses to meet the minimum California public school high school graduation curriculum standards along with Government, American Literature, PE, Extended Lunch and Going Home After 5th Period. No one from my school went to Harvard.

I've had to take it upon myself to learn something about how the the economies of polities great and small function, alone and in concert. Reading is an option, sure, but I find it to be the slowest one and the one least likely to be sandwiched between drawn-out, unnecessary sequences of vampires fucking werewolves. Yes, like most obscure, complicated, and civically-crucial things, I turn to HBO to show me what I need to know as a first resort. It had already taught me that I haven't been nice enough to really old people and that the American Revolution is totally more interesting if you took out all the battles and people you may have otherwise heard of. So of course I was happy to let HBO teach me the most crucial things I needed to know about the current world financial crisis which are, in order of precedence: 1) Although it takes an incredible amount of effort on the part of screenwriters and the director, it is in fact possible for Paul Giamatti not to be interesting on screen; and 2) It isn't actually possible to understand economics.

The last part I don't say because the movie itself relied on the relaying of crucial information at crucial times to dramatically recreate the events as they happened, 100% of which I failed to follow. I did what I could with the music cues and facial expressions of the actors, but with William Hurt in the lead, I was playing with both emotional arms tied behind my back. He's actually a really good actor, but I'm convinced all of the direction came to him in the form of similes about glaciers and/or thousand-year-old trees.

If even HBO can't fill in the gap for me, I don't really know what else a civic-minded person like myself can be expected to do. Commentators complain that the Occupy Wall Street et al. movements lack a discernible focus, but in that case, I think the approach perfectly fits the problem. It's like watching smoke fight a cloud.

Instead of actually understanding the roots of the issues in play, I've decided to watch the responses of the players and extrapolate from that knowledge of some kind. From what I can tell, there are three approaches to macroeconomic crisis.

1) Don't do anything. Be angry. And I don't mean as a legitimate reaction to negative stimuli, I mean in as broad a sense as possible. Everything presented as a solution is only worse. How could it not be? This is an economic problem and every "solution" also involves money. Meet all attempts at discussion with volume. Loud, loud, loud. And because there's no clear answer, any move must necessarily be either a) wrong or b) the thin end of the communist wedge. Now, if some of that reckless spending happens to fall on you, yeah, you'll pick it up, but the goal is to sit absolutely still, fight every attempt at action and keep your money safe until the Second Coming of Reagan-Jesus happens, rapture style, and this all sort itself out.

2) Do everything. Why cut spending with a scalpel when you can do it with an abattoir? Colleges are overcrowded and too expensive? Stop educating children so they won't qualify and price out the ones who can. Healthcare of the poor is burdensome and offers no return on investment? Pull away the nourishing Teat of State. If you get that life expectancy down to 65 or even 60, you won't have only have solved most of the healthcare problem, you've done more than your bit to make a dent in the Social Security obligation. No one will mind as long as you never, ever publicly refer to it as "early retirement."

3) Extortion. Very slowly and definitely on the sly, Europe has become a Bond villain. First it was the totally not innocuously named Super Collider capable of killing the world by creating a black hole or something. Now they've got plans to build, and I'm not making this wording up, a laser capable of tearing holes in space. It's all been so sly and in-the-name-of-science so far, but notice these things are ramping up in Europe just as the whole continent teeters on the brink of economic disaster. Hm, plenty of money for the billion-dollar Death Star beam, no trouble finding that cash at all... Maybe because of the potential return on investment? How long before we get a note cobbled together from letters cut out of magazine ads demanding a trillion dollars in Chinese loan money or the fabric of spacetime gets it right in the neck? And then we get an envelope filled with severed, singed bits of dark matter so we know they're serious.

I've seen that movie. And this time, there's no Delroy Lindo to pull us out. At least I don't think there is. I haven't checked his IMDb page in a while. Maybe he's free? I feel a little better.