Crazy situation. We've been doping the markets for a decade. A once in a lifetime became a regular thing.
In that time, massive numbers of ordinary people have ended up paid significantly less in real terms. Even before the last 12 months. In the public sector, this particularly applies to experienced teachers and doctors. The latter leave in droves. Who can blame them? The pressure on each worker has increased year on year. The services suffer disproportionately from the most able being replaced (if they are replaced) by greenhorns.
The whole situation is the inevitable result of a very long term pattern of decision making. We built massive amounts of stability in the banking and finance system, and have creamed it all off again.
People liked it and went along with it because there was a lot of money to be made in the private sector. Because the central institutions were throwing money around to prevent a slowdown. Finally, inflation bites. And you can't possibly justify any more. All that easy opportunity dries up. Watch what happens.
I reiterate. People fucking liked it. Opportunities handed our at the expense of stability. It kept going, and going. It's kept people in power. It's seen more mega rich than ever exponentially increasing their wealth, whilst the rest start to get very slightly poorer, financially, and very slightly worse off, in
No money for services, but a never ending run of funding for private enterprise with zero interest loans.
Political use of central bank policies.
That's why it's happened. We lied to ourselves. Not just us. The US. Many other places.
You can't have a modern, safe economy without a healthy environment. That's how we got here. We built healthy lives and healthy places to live and more safety and more services and more infrastructure than had ever been imagined.
Without that sort of human growth, there simply won't be the internal demand required for a balanced economy. And without constantly breaking down barriers and avoiding pointless conflict and showboating, there won't be sustained growth opportunities. The new technology thing is a laugh. Computers and phones from 8 years ago are 99% of the time exactly as useful as those from today. Energy use keeps increasing as we herd more data, but we found have no use for it apart from keeping people online and subjecting them to very ineffective advertising.
Plenty of people will tell you otherwise because of course the market knows best and the market will meet our needs. Of course it will work.
The way it is all reported and the language and phrasing used is like watching a religious sect in the latter stages of becoming a nonsensical cult. All the lies and truths mattered once upon a time. They amounted to a workable framework of belief. No one belief was wholly true. But put together, they were a lot less untrue than other versions. But then you just shift a little. Drop a couple of beliefs that apparently didn't hold out because, err, yeah, we can just keep pumping the money in apparently. But don't adjust the other beliefs! No. They must be double true now. Or something. Until you and everyone else is thoroughly out of touch.
Never mind! We did have it really good for a while. And we will again in the future. But not until all the cant and all the politically correct economic reporting is swept aside.
One day, reality says, there is no such thing as a free lunch.
Just change the narrative, so now reality is saying how this means those lunches obviously do have an essential and very real value. "They are, uhhh... the backbone of the economy." And then you change the focus again to how you aren't paying for something else. The more it obviously does cost someone, the better. The more they complain, the better. That's how people can feel the evidence of your parsimony. That's what matters. How they feel. Not what the accountants say, or would say, if they hadn't all been incentivised by deregulation into maniac scam artists creaming off the reputation for probity and honestly built by their predecessors.
And that's how everyday, you and your friends can stuff your face on gastropub grub. No shoelaces for the kids, old pans at home actually make it believable that it has to be this way. And what do you care, sat in slip ons, with a face full of toad in the hole?
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