Here we are then, still in the midst of the worst economic mess since the bottom dropped out of the gold market during King Midas' reign and no end in sight. I think we've established that the twin causes were democracy and "fashion" (or the herd instinct if you like) with many governments keen to buy votes and many others copying them ("if it's good enough for the USA it must be good enough for Greece", etc). But one unanswered question is, how come none of these planet-brained economists saw it coming? Well I did and let me tell you how.
During the late nineties and early noughties, the UK government was spending money it didn't have on goodness knows what. Old one-eye Gordie Brown was very good at coming out with all sorts of bon mots to impress the electorate that he knew what he was doing. He was aided in this by Ed "neo-classical endogenous growth theory" Balls: when people come out with impressive phrases like this, it's hard for your average bloke like you or me to argue - surely these people know what they're doing?
Well of course Gordie did rather give the game away by claiming to have ended the cycle of "boom and bust". Whoops. Not since King Canute tried to turn back the waves had one of our leaders succumbed to such a serious dose of delusions of grandeur. But before this, you could just see how things were going pear-shaped if you looked around you.
One of the many areas on which the government lavished oodles of other people's cash was schools. When I was a lad, teachers wrote on blackboards with chalk. This seemed to work pretty well as a means of communication and had the added benefits (for the teachers) of giving them ammunition, in the form of chalk and blackboard erasers, to throw at unruly pupils. All good fun. But Gordie and his mates decided that this was very old-fashioned (note that word "fashion" again) and decided that the good old low-tech blackboard should be replaced by shiny high-tech interactive whiteboards. Oh dear.
This kind of thing is expensive. Not only do they cost a lot to buy in the first place but you have to train the poor old teachers to use them and then you have to have a maintenance contract so a spotty lad can come round and turn it off and then on again when it goes wrong. Plus you will no doubt want to subscribe to software updates and then fork out for hardware updates when an even shinier version of your new teaching aid comes along. And as you're a school and don't know much about money, the whole kit and caboodle will probably have been bought on some sexy finance deal which sounds cheap until you see in the small print that you're paying an effective APR of 83% (on this last point, recent press reports refer.)
The response to this is not to be seduced by wordy justifications of the "neo-classical endogenous growth theory" variety but to go with your gut instinct, viz it's a waste of money. I remember hearing tales daily of this kind of malarkey, typified by interactive whiteboards. There were many other examples of course, some much less susceptible to the common sense rebuttal: how about PFI schemes, AKA government off-balance sheet financial smoke and mirrors (the results of which are now coming home to roost) or "Agenda for Change" which amounted to paying NHS staff more to do less (NHS foundation trusts are now seeing who has the balls to be the first to tear this up.)
I said to myself (and anyone else unlucky enough to be in the vicinity), how can we afford all this? Is the country really that much richer than a few years ago? My conclusion: we were not richer and therefore we couldn't afford it and, at some point, it would all end in tears. Sure enough, aided by the catalyst of sub-prime lending and other banking stupidity, it did.
So don't let yourself be fooled by fancy words from people who are supposed to know more than you do. Look at the euro for goodness sake (don't get me started.) If something looks stupid, it almost certainly is. Let common sense prevail. Stop sniggering at the back or I'll throw my interactive whiteboard user manual at you, it's even more deadly than a blackboard eraser!
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