I try to resist the impulse to use pop songs in post titles, but I’m only human. My disdain for Wally what’shisname, however, remains in tact. S’why I get feverish in certain airports, methinks.
So Krugman believes we are fiscally morphing into our seemingly reserved and genuflective brethren. But if you look at what is meant by the words Japanese, economic and model in the 1990’s vintage, you’ll see that what people refer to as the ‘lost decade’ was merely a decade of flat growth. Well, tell you what:
Get. Used. To. It.
Otherwise called a starting place, for most of what is going to follow. The dissonance of what’s happening in the financial economy right now, talk of recovery and longing for normal times is all due to the fact that there’s no going back. And we shouldn’t see this as a bad thing. Our pent-up imaginations have all the rough stuff shoved to the fore, and we’ve conditioned ourselves to be righteously afraid of it. But it’s just us, our dogs, cats and cattle, and back in there somewhere also is the idyllic train rides to see your lover and long walks to the park, stolen flowers, broken kisses and other things you can’t put on a price tag on without them seeming like an old lady‘s hat. The fact is old ladies are people and hats are things they wear out in the sun.
We’re trying to understand the tunnel of love from a technical standpoint and well, the two just don’t mix. You can’t say where or how we’ll come out of this, but seeing that as the fun part takes a little more than the promise of low, low prices or assembly-line built excitement. Sorry.
Technical note: I discovered posterous, and am trying to make the most out of the sweet spot of not knowing what it’s for before that, too, passes.
