Larvatus Prodeo

A lot of commentary in the US has focused on both the politics of Barack Obama’s stimulus package and on the TARP II bailout announced by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner last week. In developments which somewhat parallel the Australian debate – such as it is – between the stimulators and the taxcutters (in truth, it might be a bit misleading to characterise it as one between Keynesians and Friedmanites), economists have lined up to give their verdicts one way or another. Perhaps it’s fair to say that no one is competely satisfied – for the stimulators, it doesn’t go far enough and much of the more immediate spending has been cut out to jump procedural hurdles Senate Republicans put in the way of passage. For the newfound apostles of fiscal discipline, it’s debt and deficit (though without the tendentious comparisons to Whitlam obviously).

To a large degree, most of this debate is highly ritualised. I thought Bernard Keane had a very interesting point to make today in a long Crikey piece where he argued that decision makers who are gleefully imposing a story or narrativising both events and their preferred solutions may be as much in the dark as the rest of us. The increased unpredictability of events, and of prescriptions as well as diagnoses in a time of crisis really foregrounds the artefactuality of sense-making work as people try to reduce uncertainty and simultaneously ensure that their preferred perspective becomes “common sense”. Aside from the really dire possibilities facing us all from a system which has precisely been characterised by distributed decision making and thus – by design – up until now resistant to centralised control, it’s been a fascinating study in both the sociology and social psychology of policy making.

It’s in no one’s interest, of course, to admit that they don’t quite know what is going on or that they’re frantically trying to impose a frame on the world economy for the intertwined purposes of politics and policy. Continue reading ‘Embedding the economy’