A Grand Theory of Economics

When I capriciously chose my subjects at University I didn’t realise I was setting myself up to become a revolutionary economist, though for the next fifty years I’d stay reticent about my constant breakthroughs.  I studied Economics as well as English and Social Anthropology because it seemed a business-related sort of thing for an arty chap to balance his credentials with.  No real thought.  But English showed me that good writers do all sorts of strange things with words and stories.  Social Anthropology demonstrated that people base their whole lives around wildly different and even misguided beliefs.  Thus, though Economics was hideously ill-taught, insofaras I understood it at all I understood it subliminally through the filters of the two sharper subjects.

Now, there are no laws of economics, just convenient, temporary and often strange myths.  And the thing is: the financial and commercial world doesn’t have to be the way it is.  You can use economics to a fruitful end.  There’s no scientific reason why it should always be construed to the advantage of a few selfish people.  And the terminology of economics and commerce need not be reinvented frequently for complexity’s sake.

Just now everyone is saying that something or other is “unacceptable”, by which they mean morally wrong, but it’s deemed unfeasible to make changes this particular year because of opinion polls.  But what is morally right?  In fact, there’s only one game in the town: limiting climate change and the associated devastation of our species, along with that of all the other creatures – and all environments.  Everything we do should be directed towards stemming this ruin.

Some courses of action are obvious, like cutting down on plastics – so let’s do it.  Others are equally obvious, but ignored.  Huge ships cross oceans carrying items from one place to another, sometimes the same type of thing going each way (eg cars), sometimes things that undercut in price perfectly adequate things we once made ourselves (eg clothes), sometimes things we’re replacing long before we need to (cars, electronics, furniture, clothes); sometimes things we don’t need at all (well, take your pick); sometimes it’s food out of season; sometimes – oh, you get the idea.  The solution is obvious, though the means of applying it tricky: a massive tax on all fuel and at all ports.  Quite consistent with free trade, or any other creed, except greed.  And lots of revenue to spare for health and care and museums – and more jobs created. 

The markets are hugely and fatally distorted not only because we punters are irremediably irrational and comprehensively ill-informed and utterly lazy.  No, they’re distorted – nay, dominated – by gamblers in the stock markets and by “sophisticated” economic instruments the original purposes of which are long gone.  With will that could be changed instantly by the long-ago-suggested wee levy on every transaction, the profit from which to go to undeveloped countries.

Money need not be spent on mass-produced consumer products.  A car will last 600,000 miles, if suitably maintained (the extra garagists boosting employment), a well-made fridge fifty years, a smartphone ten (sans fallow aps).  Less landfill and leaching into the oceans.  Meanwhile, indulging in the arts isn’t usually harmful. 

Last but not least, but almost impossible to accomplish (as trying to replicate our flawed selves by having children is the instinct that keeps us hoping), we need to tackle overpopulation.  Really tackle.  Other species, whether they be the dinosaurs of yore, rats, half the non-indigenous creatures anywhere (but most obviously in Australia) and even lemmings, never cottoned on, so why should we?  Because we’re wiser?  The solution is to make universal one-child families, the alternatives (which will probably happen) being brutality towards desperate and enterprising migrants, catastrophic famines, pandemics, wars.  We’ve known this for some time but as the danger grows so we deny it the more loudly, often won’t allow it even to be spoken of, especially in those lands where the immediate danger is greatest.

All best brought in slowly as big changes are hard to accommodate without hurt and more wastage – but no time for that.

Empathy

One is told to put oneself in others’ shoes.  What does this mean during the time of Trump and little Englanders and hatred of foreigners and directionless rage?  (I’ll leave short attention spans and ignorance out of it because they’ve always abounded.)

Basic rule: assume our first response is emotional and that we go on to rationalise our reaction with more or less sophistication.

So I am a white man from Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.  I loved the country and later found that I could no longer live there, which makes me angry.  This is also the starting point of my alter ego, Clone.

Clone likes many individual black Zimbabweans – who could fail to? – but he thinks they cannot en masse run anything bigger than a village or perhaps a rural bus company.  There’s lots of evidence for his view: look at Zimbabwe now, look at its neighbours (corrupt South Africa mismanaging its resources or dirt-poor Mozambique).

Clone looks deeper into history and he finds that before the British came to Zimbabwe its wealthy rulers, centred on the Great Zimbabwe complex, had long lost control of their country and it had broken into smaller provinces.  The powers in the land were ruthless warlords, some half-Portuguese, some black.  He might have read about early European traders and hunters or even heard that at one stage the Shona tribes were well organised – mixed farmers with irrigation systems and some stone buildings, alluvial goldminers, ironworkers. 

And, being a reader, he would certainly have read that the land was terrorised by several waves of offshoots from the Zulus, who’d taken over large parts of the east and south – and that not long before Clone’s grandfather came on the scene.  These invaders were horrifically cruel.  Moreover, slavery was still practiced in the north.

Clone’s family was originally English and he knows that for better or worse the Germans and Belgians and a renewed Portuguese state were trying to take over today’s Zimbabwe.  Rhodes pre-empted them with an audacious plan to bring order and commerce to the country, part of a grander plan to build a railway from Cape to Cairo, extending the vision.  Even the British Government, consistently averse to taking on more colonial responsibilities, backed him, if reluctantly.

Clone’s parents and their generation, after a sticky beginning, did ensure that Rhodesia became peaceful and productive, with flourishing farming and mining sectors and a spot of secondary industry.  A system of land apportionment insured that, unlike the peasants in Britain itself, the black people could carry on farming in traditional ways and they became the best-educated Africans (though only to a certain level) and by far the healthiest, on the continent. 

Then the British lost their nerve, handing over Zimbabwe to African rule; Clone and his kind were made unwelcome.  The country descended into ruin.  Clone now despises blacks and the British.  Being a Rhodesian, he is enterprising and energetic but everywhere he feels like an alien.

In what way is Clone different from me?  In only one, the extent of his rationalising.  I cannot rationalise away the fact that, though my kinsmen did so many good things, they tended to treat their black countrymen as something less than human, would not give them a fair share of the land, would not give them a proper chance to build the country together.  They made some moves in the right direction, but far, far too late.  Clone passes over that.  I cannot.

Clone is a nice chap but the fact he did not sjambok his servants was not enough.  And history is history but it’s only as good as its last generation. 

Hope

I said: “Emmerson Mnangagwa has got me hoping against hope.”  I use the italicised phrase rather too often.  The “hope” here, implying it’s futile, is plain enough; it’s a saying and people know what you mean.  Even I know what I mean. 

But when I think about it, I realise it’s one of those superfluous words, fillers in conversation as much as “so to speak” or “like” or “um” and “er”.  When it comes down to it, what the hell is “hope”?  Things are as they are and you do your best, or your third best, and you get on with things, like all creatures do, because the only way to live is to strive.  Some people happen to be optimistic so, in the sense that they really can’t deal with thoughts of the worst, they have “hope”.  Pessimists just plug away.  But that’s as far as you can go.  The end result’s the same. 

There is a whole great two-day conference I’ve been invited to on the theme of hope, and the assumption is that it’s a commodity and there isn’t enough of it about.  But what can the participants say?  I know already that to venture forth Polyanna-ishly or Micawberishly isn’t very satisfactory.  On the other hand, having a plan might be, and to adopt a Stoical frame of mind is positively sensible.

I fight a losing battle against redundant words.  “Spirituality” is another, a vague word, a vague notion likely to blend into feyness, while, say, “sensibility” or “wonderment” or “intensity” or whatever, according to context, should be used instead.  Next, “faith” is a word that should be actively avoided, especially in places where “wilful blindness” might be more accurate.  (People of faith can be fine folk, like anyone else.  My beef is that there are insolent people who assume people of faith to be morally superior to rational people, as if any old belief is better than healthy doubt.  Discrimination against rational thinking is settling into a trend, the emotions vaunted, investigative reporting reviled, Richard Dawkins transformed into a hate figure.  Ah, well....  End of side-rant.)

But we live particularly dangerously, in these dangerous times, when whole books are written on the theme of hope and it’s seen as necessary instrument for living.

Stoicism: I was beguiled by Marcus Aurelius just when I began questioning the convoluted creeds I’d inherited.  I fear I haven’t changed much since.  Perhaps I should think about that. 

Perhaps I should set myself a modern task and sum this up in 140 characters.  I’m told you can use 280 now but that’s cheating. 

Think before you speak

We are all mimics.  I’ve even found myself saying “Oh, my God!” (though not, fortunately, “OMG”), which should be uttered only by very young women.  No, that’s not being sexist.

Thus I can’t blame new graduates with cloth ears for the deteriorating quality of 20th century historical TV scripts, any more than I can blame young actresses playing posh girls in Victorian dramas for saying “yee-ew” instead of “you” – they get everything else right but they haven’t noticed the contemporary minor vowel shift.

However, I can blame the producers for not employing old fogeys like me to give the scripts a once-over.  They’re as meticulous as you could reasonably expect over dress, décor, the skyline – even things I know a bit about, like cars.  (The cars are in period; the choice of car is good – the staid old banker in a Rover 75, maybe, the flash young executive in a Zephyr, the struggling dad in a Hillman Minx.)

But the US invasion ­– which has been going on for a couple of hundred years but has recently shifted up a gear (see, they say “shifted”, not “changed”) – is now swamping English stories set in the 1950s and the 1980s alike.

Car terms I notice especially: gear lever / gear shift; change gear / shift gear (American “shift” serves as noun and verb; bonnet / hood; hood / top (“hood” is now confusing); mudguard or wing / fender; windscreen / windshield; boot / trunk.  The English usage is disappearing, as with racing car / racecar, aeroplane / airplane.  As streaming and smartphone replace reading.

More glaring are all those extraneous American prepositions that (to transition between my themes) park up after words.  Inside of or outside of your house.  Listen up.  Up what?  Now I’ve mentioned it, please collect examples.

And alien to me are the prepositions that have vanished before verbs.  Write your Congressman, just as you used to write to your MP.  Appeal instead of appeal against your lengthy sentence.  The English usage is lost, the US sometimes vague.  Appeal for mercy. 

To get back where I started.  I’m told that only incorrigible pedants notice these things, but I think viewers are better than that – they would notice, albeit subconsciously, that in-period language was being used correctly, would absorb the feel of it and profit.  After all, we appreciate the odd expression that the scriptwriters have researched and casually dropped in – usually appropriately – and we pick up on the sound of the background music or cunning use of light or camera angle or whatever, even without analysing it.

Everyone tries hard to get the music right.  To widen the argument, when I argue the same for precision in language (or beauty or balance) I am told by modern linguists that language changes and we should accept it without question.  Is that a fair summary?  But polish matters.  If it matters that you hit the right note in a song, it matters equally in speech.  I fear I may wish to return to the topic.  I feel the need to, as they say now, push back (just as in the past I used to want to retaliate). 

UK immigration crisis

I don’t think it can be considered even mildly controversial to assert that the British government today is the most monumentally incompetent since the 18th century.  Mean-minded, inflexible, incurious, contradictory, unethical, kneejerk reflexive, uncoordinated, arrogant....  Never use more than seven adjectives.  There are plenty of examples verifying this truth in all spheres from Brexit (whichever side you’re on) to climate change to defence policy. 

Here of course I speak of the current lash up on immigration.  Briefly, for faraway readers, Theresa May when in the Home Office stated she wanted to create a “hostile environment” for overstaying illegal immigrants and set targets for packing them off back where they came from.  Amber Rudd, who replaced her, was a liberal soul but she determined to toe the party line and like most liberals trying to act tough she got it all wrong.  A scandal erupted when the capricious “public”, who for so long were thought to be rabidly anti-immigrant, switched to acting scandalised when, in particular, Caribbean immigrants brought over in the 1950s, believing implicitly in the British Commonwealth of Nations, to fill jobs Britons couldn’t bear to do, now solid citizens, were being sent home because their paperwork wasn’t perfect.  The government, having, employing the cunningest of records managers, recently destroyed the best evidence of who went where when – their landing cards.  Poor Amber denied knowing about targets.  Leaks showed she did know.  She resigned.

A coincidence, of relevance to Zimbabwean immigrants: Amber Rudd is distantly related to the lawyer after whom the Rudd Concession is named – which will mean something only to old Rhodesians.

But the unkind treatment of immigrants is nothing new.  Choose your own example.  Mine is: in the 19th century my grandparents and great-uncles and great-aunts, dutifully following the injunctions of the government, which had lashed up agricultural policy resulting in rural poverty and unemployment, went forth bravely to populate Empire, and some turned up in Rhodesia.  The British government gave Responsible Government to white Rhodesians with minimal protection for blacks.  Then the British government mishandled the clamour for independence that bubbled up in the 1950s and 1960s.  Rhodesia collapsed slowly into war.  The Rhodesian government declared unilateral independence.  And from this point it was I who was not welcome in Britain, despite the fact that I had opposed the Rhodesian outlaw government....   It’s a long, tedious story.  But at least we know that the British Government is ever expedient and ever nasty to whites as well as to blacks. 

Travel bug at two

At the age of six I was taken in a Morris Eight Series E (1939 model, four-door, to export specification, dark blue and black) the 1500 miles from Bulawayo to Cape Town, and have ever afterwards wanted to recreate the feeling of excitement and freedom that opened up with each new horizon.  An emotion snatched at again as an adult driving through Israel or New Mexico....  But can one ever recapture the awe of a child?  Of course not, for one learns to anticipate and to worry and to doubt and to censor.  Once I experienced pure excitement – what’s round the corner... and the next... and the next....  And thereafter life became a quest to recapture that exhilaration, the dream of a beacon shining ahead – even now, when my neurotic dread of travelling has to be overcome with (crumbling) teeth gritted.

I must have contracted the bug as a two-year-old when my mother checked the car over (1938 Morris Eight Series II Tourer) and said: “We’re going to go and stay with Aunt Rhoda.”  We’d have driven out from Umtali* (my birthplace), wheezing over Christmas Pass, bumbling along the narrow strip road through Rusape and Marandellas for the 170 miles to Salisbury, every now and again pulling over for an oncoming car (most definitely not playing chicken) so that the right wheels were on the left tarmac strip, picking a place where there wasn’t a hole to crash into... and perhaps there’d be a spurt of dust, or we’d pull over courteously for a big, swaying American car, to overtake – a dust-brown Chevvie Fleetline or a green Ford V8.

The first time I wholly remember such excitement was in late 1947.  Before the holiday I’d contracted measles; my father took the car down and Mother and I went by train a week later; but we came back by car.  Then in 1949 (going both ways) and 1951 and 1953.  We’d come down from Bulawayo through Gwanda and West Nicholson, stop perhaps (if we’d started late) at Tod’s, with its thatched rondavels and oil-engined lighting plant – the lights flicking to the plod of the single cylinder – and onward over Beit Bridge (enduring the rude and resentful Afrikaans customs men), through the Transvaal, unfamiliar foreign territory....  Messina, Wylie’s Poort (sit on the verandah of the hotel at the top, looking over the escarpment at the dead straight dusty ribbon of a road across the plain and over the horizon), Louis Trichardt, the Adam & Eve Motel, Pietersburg, Potgietersrus, Nylstroom, Naboomspruit, Warmbad, Pienaarsrivier, Hamanskraal.  The sheer music of those names!  At one of these meccas the electric fuel pump shorted; there was a circus in town and we saw to our amazement elephants wandering down the street (fancy! elephants in Africa!), the only thing to relieve boredom as we waited four hours for new points and diaphragm, my father lying on the dusty gutter (why put the damn thing down there beneath the frame?).  Another year – which? – we stopped at an old hotel at one of the dorps beginning with P and there was a white-and-blue jug and basin for washing, the bathroom itself down the lino-ed passage; it was better than the hotel with a bizarre shower, surrounded by plastic curtain, in the middle of the bedroom, leaking, smelling of mould, their first stab at an en suite. 

Yes, how to recapture that excitement!  The Nile, Petra, the bus to New Delhi, the view across the bay from Sorrento towards Mount Vesuvius?  Forget it.

Twenty and thirty years later I moved to Australia and to England.  Not quite the same dynamo of excitement – just considered planning.  Soul unwilling in the first instance, clouded with apprehension in the second.   But I am very lucky to have lived three lives and pity (for the most part) those with but one.

Oh, and after Hamanskraal Father would insist on grinding around east of Jo’burg, where he dared not venture (congested concrete jungle), so another litany: Benoni, Boksburg, Germiston, Randfontein or Springs, Brakpan, Nigel – we must have used different routes.  Oh, Potchefstroom.  Don’t forget Potchefstroom.

And don’t forget the cars.  I am an expert on 1949 American models, each one imprinted on the eyeball, Plymouth, Dodge and De Soto; Buick, Pontiac and Oldsmobile; Mercury; Studebaker, Willys, Kaiser Fraser, Packard, Hudson.... 

I want a Hudson, a wide, floating Hudson.

A reader, too, can travel, enjoying new vistas and perspectives in print, and make sense of it.  I am a reader still. 

* I’ve used the old names.  You can match up Mutare, Marondera and Harare, and take my word that the other Zimbabwean ones are unchanged.  Then tell me what the South African ones are.

National identity

I read that Australians (we Australians) are having an Identity Crisis.  Not another one!  We were having one when I lived there in the late 1970s and early ’80s.  We Aussies had, as I understood it then, been pretty well grounded during the 19th century, quarrying a distinctive role in the great British Empire, little Aussie battlers.  Decades passed; then giant corporations toppled Gough Whitlam from power and we rolled over and submitted to American hegemony and of course we were soul-searching again.  There’d been various straws in the wind: for example, a film from after the Whitlam era, Gallipoli, attempted to stir up ancient grievances (even as it tweaked history) – a sure sign of introspection.  However, by the time I left Australia in 1983 we seemed to be sorting ourselves out.  (This despite having, after a referendum – an ill-timed arbitrary glimpse of opinion, like all referenda – adopted our own National Anthem.  To my mind the wrong choice, but that’s another matter). 

What’s the latest Crisis about?  Rolling over to Chinese hegemony?  I guess I’ve lost, through my exile, any right to pontificate.

Yet Identity Crises follow me around.  For some time after the loss of Empire the arrogant English (we English, I should say, now that I’ve got citizenship) seemed to avoid contracting one – no call for such if you’re top dog.  For decades we carried on as if we still ruled the world blandly (perhaps because it’d always been a conjuring trick).  In point of fact, we were suffering from memory loss.  And now we English (I won’t say British) feel we need an Identity again.  All sorts of bizarre myths have been constructed but, because they’ve little basis in history (and because we’re such a divided bunch anyway), they feel strained and where they do take root they bloom as petulant prejudices.

No, I don’t think we’re unique.  Our addled attitude is merely an exceptionally tawdry case of a widespread Western ailment.

Now the Rhodesians of yore (we Rhodesians) couldn’t afford the luxury of an Identity Crisis.  Go-getting, careless, we sailed along merrily (an odd but aptly unrealistic metaphor for a landlocked and beleaguered culture), until abruptly, in the space of twenty years, we didn’t have a country to identify with any more, because someone else was shaping it and we’d missed the chance of sharing in the enterprise. 

All this is irrelevant in the era of individual identity.