editorials


Inside the bubble...

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November 2008


edito


One of the things to be expected (among others) about economic crises is that the abundant commentaries they incite are discredited nearly as soon as they are uttered. In fact, while everyone puts forward their predictions and prophecies, no one, in the end, really knows what is going on.
While liberal ideology has based its economic approach upon a sort of hypothetical market ‘wisdom’, a wisdom that would always succeed in auto-regulation (helped behind the scenes by hordes of mathematicians), economic performance still remains subject to ‘irrational’ winds. As these winds blow and swell, they transform themselves into bubbles, which then end up bursting and devastating entire territories.
But we might ask if this is as irrational as all that? The problem with bubbles is that they can only be seen from the outside. When we are calmly settled inside our own bubble, we are comfortable. We do not notice when the walls begin to stretch and distend in a very disturbing manner.
The rational warnings that are sent to us from the outside arrive muffled and muted. From the inside, we get only a blurry vision of the signs on the exterior of our bubble. We think people are greeting us when actually they are trying to warn us. But it is only a waste of their time.
Greed is blind, that is well known. Greed hampers not only the view, but it also limits the horizon, reducing it to a very short term, until finally it bangs into the wall.
Metaphorically speaking, the watch bubble, inside of which we have all been living during these last few years, has taken on the form of those watches that, season after season, have become overdeveloped. Over-developed is perhaps an understatement. They are no longer watches—they are ‘Hummers’ for the wrist. You only had to observe their evolution to know that the bubble was going to burst sooner or later. This design in testosterone—always becoming more muscular, whether in watches, cars, yachts, or CEO bonuses—certainly could not endure. “In 2006, a record year, the 170,000 employees at Morgan Stanley shared US$36 billion in year-end bonuses, with more than US$100 million going to a few of the firm’s star traders,” reports Le Monde. How could this continue? Yet, it was imbedded in the ‘DNA’ as the marketing consultants like to say.
The other day, I went to visit a dendrochronologist. This has nothing to do with any type of sect. No, no. This man is a very serious scientist who ‘reads time in the trees’. Not in their DNA—in their rings. He showed me a diagram of the continuous curve of oak tree rings going back over the last 10,000 years, without interruption. Thanks to this curve, he can date the year and the season of any piece of oak you bring him. You see, trees maintain the memory of time. They record the slightest variations. Trees know much more than humans do about the cycles of expansion and extinction.
Are we heading straight into the wall? “It doesn’t matter”, answers my dendrochronologist, who is used to a much longer time scale. “Only 10 per cent will remain, but life will continue.” Now, that is the advantage of crises. They sometimes provide an indispensable cleansing and clearing out of things. Let’s hope, however, that more than 10 percent will remain!

photo: Images obtained by Hubble Space Telescope of erupting star V838 Monocerotis on 20 May, 2 September, 28 October and 17 December, 2002.
V838 Monocerotis erupted in January 2002 when in a few weeks its brightness increased by a factor of ten thousand. This enormous amount of energy suddenly produced by the star was observed shortly afterwards as an expanding giant light bubble. The phenomenon, called ‘light echo’, is an extremely rare event. During a light echo we can see directly the motion of light as it expands away from the star and illuminates all the matter it encounters in its amazingly fast (300,000 kilometres per second!) journey.



Source: Europa Star October-November 2008 Magazine Issue