26 April, 2005

Dang if I didn’t get a puncture in the rear wheel of my scooter. An inch and half of rusty nail went in while I was happily doing 45 km/h. Life got exciting for a few seconds as I came to a screaming halt. Spent the day getting the rear wheel off, changing the tube and getting the wheel back on again. Learned a lot about how the panels come off and which ones don’t need to come off to change the rear wheel. All very exciting.

In general, the garden got made into salad by a freak hailstorm over the weekend and the ginger beer has been bottled.

I was thinking, in the rambling sort of way that I do, recently that the Western economy works a lot like our old 5th form certificate exams used to. Stripping away all the crap and bureaucracy, essentially a certain percentage of students would fail the exams, a certain percentage would pass and a certain percentage would excel. Sounds like life to me, except that the curve on which students passed or failed was fixed and false. Even if you passed you could still fail if you fell on the wrong side of the curve and you could pass even if you technically had failed. It was a crap system and anyone who argues with NCEA should look back without the rose tinted beer goggles.

What does this have to do with western economics…well, according to my brain, we all need some basics to live – food, water and shelter. Without one of these things everything go very bad for the individual (and subsequently the community they live in). On top of this we arbitrarily set laws around the standards you have to live within, eg. thou shalt not live in a cardboard box, thou shalt not drink cruddy water loaded with heavy metals etc. All good so far, we have a standardised curve where the majority can happily live, some get shafted and some live in ridiculous luxury (yay for us). The problem, as I see it is when that curve shifts in the downwards direction. With 5th form certificate if too many people got enough marks to pass the exam the curve effectively moved down to fail some of them. I’m sure there was a great reason for doing this, some idea about ensuring all exams were equal and fair to all students – which of course means some students must fail regardless of how hard they worked. In an exam situation the effect is localised to a lot of pissed off (or really happy) students but what happens when the ‘social’ curve moves? What happens when living costs increase beyond the incomes of the majority?

My brain, reasoned that if my living costs go up I will raise my prices accordingly to suit. My price increase affects a small group of people as a living cost increase. Add all of our costs into this and all of the people who get affected and suddenly you have some chaos. If the cost of housing, clothing and food go up and we increasingly use our waterways to generate electricity etc what happens to the basic needs of people and what happens to those who can no longer afford the basic needs (within those arbitrary laws we set on the standards). I have watched house/rent prices rocket over the last 3-4 years, food has started creeping up, petrol has gone insane (for good reason) and I have watched people start to get into financial trouble with it all (not counting those who believe living in debt is an acceptable way to live). With all this in my head and the very strong feeling that we are all living a life that we simply can’t afford I can’t help but wonder if our ‘reality’ is fast diverging from the real world reality. It just doesn’t feel sustainable in any sense. I have always had an uneasy feeling that for capitialsim to work a certain percentage of people have to miss out. We’re legally not allowed to use slaves but deep down we all know that we still use them somewhere.

I find myself increasingly bartering with people as the financial economy no longer provides a correct value system for the things I do for people. I trade home brew for grapes, I trade web sites for jerseys, I swap vegetables for wine and it all feels a lot better. $400 of web design is nothing in the hand financially but if I can get a warm jersey out of it then it’s worthwhile. I guess it’s too much to hope that greed slows down and people start to realise we live on a tiny set of islands and that the only people we are shafting are ourselves. There’s only 4 million of us so it seems a bit weird that we live like a population of 40 million. The end result can’t be good but it shows no sign of slowing down.

I told you this was a rambling thought.