The Old Tes­ta­ment book of Eccle­si­astes pro­nounces that “…there is noth­ing new under the sun.” Thank­ful­ly, how­ev­er, there are idioms and apho­risms to pro­vide new prisms through which to view today’s ver­sions of conun­drum and fol­ly. Here­with a few.

Pret­ty much every­one under­stands 16th cen­tu­ry writer John Heywood’s injunc­tion “nev­er look a gift horse in the mouth”. The world’s lead­ing fos­sil fuel pol­luters, how­ev­er, man­aged to turn it into “nev­er waste an oppor­tu­ni­ty to do so”. In response to con­sumer com­plaints and polit­i­cal crit­i­cism about fuel prices ris­ing due to a world-wide squeeze in oil pro­duc­tion (alleged­ly due in large part to the Covid pan­dem­ic), the U.S., Chi­na, Japan, India, the U.K. and oth­ers released hun­dreds of mil­lions of bar­rels of oil from their strate­gic reserves to keep prices at the pumps down.
Since alle­vi­at­ing glob­al warm­ing requires, among many oth­er things, few­er cars on the road, where’s the log­ic in wast­ing a per­fect oppor­tu­ni­ty to let mar­ket prices coerce peo­ple into dri­ving less?
Con­gru­ent­ly, oil pro­duc­tion has been slow to recov­er, in part because com­pa­nies and investors are wary of cli­mate change concerns.

It seems log­i­cal to con­clude that if less oil is pumped, the sup­ply in the ground under exist­ing fields will last that much longer. That trans­lates as less rea­son to drill for more, espe­cial­ly in places where it could have an adverse effect on the sur­round­ing environment.
How is that not a bonus?
Well, appar­ent­ly because it stokes infla­tion, which, as was high­light­ed in the Biden–FOX News “s.o.b. moment”, is a polit­i­cal issue.
How to deal with it is a sub­ject of per­pet­u­al debate among econ­o­mists, a species Cana­di­an soci­ol­o­gist Lau­rence J Peter summed up as “… an expert who will know tomor­row why the things he pre­dict­ed yes­ter­day did­n’t hap­pen today.”

                                   WHO KNOWS NOTHING BEST?

 Econ­o­mists’ advice and con­clu­sions and how they reach them depend on whose ideas they embrace. Fol­low­ers of the cel­e­brat­ed British econ­o­mist John May­nard Keynes, sup­port the tenet that gov­ern­ments should active­ly try to influ­ence the course of their nations’ economies. That’s a bit of a wor­ry these days. The hop-scotch­ing, back-track­ing, leap-frog­ging Covid ‘poli­cies’ West­ern gov­ern­ments came up with give con­sid­er­able cre­dence to Lau­rence Peter’s epony­mous prin­ci­ple that “mem­bers of a hier­ar­chy are pro­mot­ed until they reach the lev­el at which they are no longer competent”.
Adher­ents of the almost equal­ly famous Amer­i­can econ­o­mist Mil­ton Friedman’s the­o­ry that “free mar­ket forces” are the way to deal with infla­tion, caveat their pre­dic­tions with what the finan­cial web­site “Investo­pe­dia” detailed as: “…unfore­seen influ­ences may occur to derail the most suc­cess­ful fore­cast­er of eco­nom­ic con­di­tions. These would include but are not lim­it­ed to, nat­ur­al dis­as­ters (earth­quakes, tsunamis, droughts, hur­ri­canes, etc.), wars, polit­i­cal upheavals, epi­demics, pan­demics, and sim­i­lar iso­lat­ed or wide­spread catastrophes”.
Was any pos­si­ble excuse for not get­ting it right omitted?
Play­wright George Bernard Shaw famous­ly quipped: “If all econ­o­mists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.”
Despite hav­ing spent four years get­ting a degree in busi­ness admin­is­tra­tion (which I only briefly put into actu­al use), eco­nom­ics remain a mys­tery to me. The best sum­ma­tion I have read was coined by Syrus, a first cen­tu­ry slave who was freed by his Roman own­er and became a renowned and much-quot­ed author of max­ims: “Every­thing is worth what its pur­chas­er will pay for it.”                                  

                      CONFUSION IS A COVER STORY

 That may also go some way to explain­ing the oth­er­wise arcane vicis­si­tudes of the stock mar­kets. A report in the New York Times not­ed that: “Stocks swing to loss­es as mar­kets react to the Fed’s inter­est rate plans.”
No sur­pris­es there. The “mar­kets” react to every­thing and any­thing. In many ways the denizens of that arcane world have a ten­den­cy towards the men­tal­i­ty of guinea fowl. The birds habit­u­al­ly stand in the mid­dle of the road as a vehi­cle comes at them, scram­ble in last minute pan­ic to get out of the way and imme­di­ate­ly go back to the same place so they can do it all over again.
The jar­gon of stock mar­kets is designed to keep out­siders from fig­ur­ing them out, along the lines of a prin­ci­ple extolled in Elmore Leonard’s nov­el ‘Freaky Deaky’: “It does­n’t have to make sense, it just has to sound like it does.”
All the fore­go­ing can be suc­cinct­ly summed up by a line from “Adven­tures in the Screen Trade”, author and screen­writer William Goldman’s mem­oir about his time in Hol­ly­wood:  “Nobody knows anything.…Not one per­son in the entire motion pic­ture field knows for a cer­tain­ty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an edu­cat­ed one.”
But take heart, all is not as bad as it may seem. Eccle­si­astes also avers: “To every­thing there is a season…”
And if you know who turned that into a hit song, you’re show­ing your age.

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