The is The Economist's cover today:
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appropriate for sure,
but what I find a little odd is that air travel hasn’t been reduced as radically as you’d imagine,
https://www.flightradar24.com/54.37,-29.51/2
I’ve been taking a peek daily and it’s been pretty constant,
I hope you’re not feeling too grim Richard, the weather has been pretty glum so you’re not missing much outside,
what’s rather interesting is an emerging public consensus that we just couldn’t manage without shop staff, truckers, utility workers, health workers, public transport employees etc. who are all keeping everything running while we hide,
I tip my hat to the Tesco’s staff, coach driver, building society counter staff, the nice Polish girl at the chip shop and Southern Rail guard who made my day possible today,
thanks guys!
I am told by someone at Stansted that they’re running at 10%
sure, in this particular local/regional respect, over Italy looks pretty quiet.
but when you look at this graph for flights tracked per day over the last 90 days…
https://www.flightradar24.com/data/statistics
it doesn’t look that grim on a global scale,
I appreciate that commercial aviation has pretty narrow margins between a state of profit and loss.
You know it’s only in the last week airlines were allowed to stop flying to keep their airport slots?
Many were flying empty
It’s the only thing that particular Neo-lib mouthpiece has ever said that I agree with.
I’m getting this feeling that although plenty of alarming things seem to be happening now, the real crisis has only just started,
the global economy hasn’t stopped, it’s stalled, it’s still in motion but will now start slowing and possibly eventually grind to a halt,
everything economic & financial seems configured to only work if it’s constantly growing, everything has to be continually accelerating for the sums to add up,
in the new economic vocabulary ‘slowing’ seems to mean ‘not accelerating as much as before’
maintaining a steady speed is a zombie state where the entity is dead yet appears alive,
a decrease in speed is instant fiscal death,
there seems no leeway in the current system to accomodate a concept like ‘de-growth’
it’s just keep growing or die, TINA
it appears impossible to solve this connundrum using the thinking that created it.
Agreed
So now we need new thinking for AC (after coronavirus)
The world may be in partial shutdown with people suffering all over the globe but the greedy, obnoxious parasites are seeing it as opportunity. Since this started I’ve had quite a few scammers (many more than usual) on the landline, mobile, email and text purporting to be Paypal, HMRC, my bank, Amazon and Microsoft. I think that they believe panic will drive out all rational capacity. With things as they are I wonder if there should be a temporary statute that doubles any judicial penalty for anyone found guilty of using the emergency as cover for criminal activity or profiteering.
Of course that will happen
So we have to fight for a better world instead
I’d prefer not to ‘fight’ for a better world but will always argue that there are better ways of managing the worlds affairs,
it’s a process of tirelessly chipping away at a wall of stubbon, short-sighted, narrow viewed ignorance,
ignorance being a lack or denial of knowledge not a lack of intelligence,
it’s rather like a feather wearing down a mountian,
more feathers would speed up the process!
so AC (after corona)
do we limit ourselves to ideas that come from the last 150 years of the industrial era?
I rather think that would box us into using the thinking that created this problem in the first place,
we do however have a pretty good idea about how humanity has managed it’s economic affairs across recorded history which goes back to the early millennia of the establishment of complex civilisations,
Michael Hudson has done some excellent work going back to the earliest known written records in Mesopotamia and reconstructing the evolution of economics and finance from back then up till now,
if you’re prepared to look back beyond our current era then the concepts of debt jubilee’s and prohibitions against usury are not unusual,
in fact fiat currencies and fractional reserve banking become noticably unusual, a recent fad that seems to have quite quickly backfired and trapped us within a Gordian knot,
for degrowth to become an actual possibility it would seem that the creation of money from nothing by private banks and the charging of interest can’t happen,
maybe only money issued and backed by the nation state can exist,
investors would not be able to lend purely to reap interest payments, they would have to lend as equal partners with the borrower hoping for a share of the profits but understanding that they would have to share in any losses should they occur,
essentially lenders would have to have some skin in the game too!
now we are past the rapid period of growth afforded us by a temporary yet copious supply of very cheap energy it is time to return to a much older and more traditional way of doing business?
Discussions I had with colleagues on sources today ranged over more than 150 years…
We are working on AC thinking
Somewhat off topic but didn’t know where to post it. Just to lighten the mood! Maybe you’ve already seen it – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ia0bfWbOLjY
In not dis-similar vein: Coronavirus: Survival of the Richest! – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aox7CeOdmOY . Listen out for the line ‘it’ll create more bankruptcies than deaths’…
Now a blog…thanks