(Not) Learning to live better on less

A book that made a massive impression on me was "Living Better on Less". I came across it during the Age of the Yuppie and it played a (small) part in persuading me to take a vow of voluntary poverty - one I have kept.

When the economy really started to fall apart recently I thought: "This is my chance - my chance to write a sequel, perhaps with the title 'Living (Even) Better on (Even) Less.'" For a moment it seemed as if the crisis might prompt a kind of globalised soul-searching and lead to a fundamental change of values, with people not just resentfully trying to get by on a falling income but embracing the idea of actually living better on less, warming to the idea of, for instance, darning a few socks instead of immediately binning them and buying new ones. People, it seemed, would soon find a pleasure in not having to buy so much, and in not having to work so hard to buy so much that just ends up on the scrap heap. With a forced halt to over-consumption, wouldn't people inevitably sit down and rework their old, unthought assumptions about the Good Life?

But I have just heard on the BBC world business report that HMV reports that although its book sales are declining, the meltdown has had no effect whatsoever on sales of electronic games. Figures are also out from Play.com, which, apparently, is reporting that this will be its best festive season ever for sales. With this my hopes are dashed. Global soul searching and the hoped-for rethink of the Good Life would require a little more reading (not much, but enough to give booksellers a bit of a lift in these hard times). Instead, people are flocking to the bright, pixel-lit world of digital distraction to take their mind off things while the economy bottoms out.

Conclusion: Nothing will change and I will be wasting my time writing the above-mentioned sequel.

Unfortunately I do not remember any of the poem by Holderlin except the fragment "von Klippe zu Klippe", which appears in his description of a terrible waterfall cascading down a hillside and crashing horribly from one rocky ledge to another (if I remember the image correctly). What a perfect depiction of our failure to learn absolutely anything whatsoever from mistakes made in the past.

The Meltdown and Fordist Nostalgia

Does anyone really understand credit default swaps? "Arcane" is really an understatement, and yet it seems that the market in credit default swaps rose to something like three times the U.S. gross domestic product. From what we can gather, credit default swaps are effectively a way of betting that a company will go bust.

Then there is the degree of leverage. Everyone, it seems, speculating with huge sums of borrowed money. Why just invest the thousand dollars you own when you can borrow another 99 and play the tables in the capitalist casino with $100,000? Apparently, this kind of leverage ratio (around 100:1) was behind the collapse of the two largest companies in the mortgage business in the U.S. (Fanny May and Freddie Mac - and who chose the names by the way?).

Trying to make sense of this huge parasitic economy almost makes you nostalgic for the old image of the capitalist who built a real business with bricks and mortar and employed people (even if there was a questionable extraction of surplus value) to manufacture real things that could go in a showroom or on a shelf. Heck, that almost seems like an idyllic state of affairs in comparison to the crazy business of pure speculation where there is no commitment to the kind of real economic activity that creates jobs and keeps communities together.

Suicide

Suicide rates were used by Durkheim as an indication of levels of anomie (if I remember correctly). Now that the economy is collapsing, aren't levels of anomie rising? Shouldn't a small percentage of players in the leveraged lido of speculative capitalism feel some of that anomie?

In the media, at least, I haven't come across any reports of suicides. Wall St, it seems, is a long way from India, where we heard of the farmers who had taken out loans (miniscule by Western standards) to buy new GM produce from Monsanto promising an unprecedented yield and invulnerability to pests - crops that were then destroyed by pests, plunging the farmers into debt - a debt which was so shameful for them that they chose to drink lethal quantities of pesticide rather than contintue to live.

Does no one in the credit default swaps business feel like drinking pesticide? Is it just impoverished Indian farmers who have a sense of honour?