I came across that expression the other day and, literalist that I am, thought of the tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of small and quiet decisions that households across this nation make on a daily and weekly basis as the economic tides continue to threaten to pull so many of us under.
A non-economist acquaintance once shared 'When you're out of a job, it's a recession; when I'm out of a job, it's a depression' and I suspect there's more to that than meets the eye. I look at the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the NASDAQ every day, including days when the stock markets aren't even open, and have no idea what any of the numbers mean, in a large scale or at my personal level.
I don't think I'm alone. We all assumed or did until it turned out the whole house of cards decided to reshuffle itself, that someone somewhere knew and understood what it was we were doing for most of the last decade. Like Wimpy, offering to gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today knowing full well we would have no money on Tuesday, we just kept adding days to the calendar and hoped Tuesday wouldn't arrive.
When we got things right, we had no idea what we did to produce those positive results so, not surprisingly we couldn't duplicate them, so when things started to go south, we went with them. It's hard to not be superstitious, in times of stress we rely more on routines, they offer us the appearance of the familiar, the known, and the comfortable and serve, in their way, as a mantra against a world we cannot otherwise manage.
-bill kenny
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