We are, we are told, in the midst of a ‘recession’. In the States, John McCain’s retooled campaign has come up with the canny idea of hammering home his economic credentials; as money hits people everyday, it is now an even bigger issue than the war. The sight of the government moving in to bail out struggling US mortgage giants must be even more alarming to Americans – whose popular mythology celebrates the successful salesman – than it was to Britons when Northern Rock was nationalised.
McCain’s campaign is not known for being on-message, and meandering chats on board the Straight Talk Express have favourably disposed many journalists toward the Republican hopeful. He recently made the Freudian slip of ‘exploiting’ rather than ‘exploring’ off-shore oil reserves, something that won’t endear him to Reagan Democrats. His current problem is Phil Gramm, the camp’s economic supremo; he was reported to claim that Americans are a ‘nation of whiners’ and that theirs is a ‘mental recession’ – not meaning that it was particularly bad, but that it was all in the minds of people ‘experiencing’ it. In some ways, he is right. Economics has at its roots a series of assumptions about human behaviour that unavoidably brands it as a social science, no matter how many graphs and equations you throw at it. Things are talked up and talked down. Markets have characters because they are swayed by herd instinct, and arrogance plays its part; of course some of it comes from the mind. But financial specialists being bailed out is news not to make light of, never mind the lack of two negative quarters‘ growth.
The real problem was that Gramm was perceived to have insulted the American people – not so, it was the leaders I meant, he said. No one minds if you complain about the person in charge, or the one whose asking something you don’t want to give – which is partly why Obama’s flip-flop on retrospective immunity for the phone companies in wiretapping operations caused such consternation.
The market, like life, is resilient (as are candidates, to a certain extent). Take the Capricorn beetle, thought to be extinct in the UK until it was discovered minding its own business on a pavement in Gloucestershire. Perhaps it was the first line of intergalactic reinforcements, sent from an alien world to learn what happened to all the beetle spies they deployed in the country years ago. Perhaps the beetle had only just landed when a human spotted it, picked it up and whisked it off to the Butterfly Farm in Statford-upon-Avon, where it will silently rage at children from behind its glass prison. Oh, the indignity. Either that, or it came to the country from the continent on some wooden pallets. Pick whichever explanation you prefer – but it doesn’t mean that, before someone saw it, the insect was not extinct in Britain.
Further insect amusement was recently provided by the Natural History Museum, whose experts failed to identify a bug on their grounds despite the institution holding 28 million other examples. The bug has been shipped off to Holland in an effort to determine its identity (perhaps it is a commando). The NHM has a history of unusual occurrences in the key of life: during World War II the museum was struck with incendiary bombs and the fire brigade, as they are wont to do, used lots of water to put the ensuing fire out. Among the drenched were the museum’s collection of aged seeds, some as old as 400 years. Remarkably, some of them began to germinate*. The green shoots of recovery, anyone?
*Nods to the Guardian science podcast for that gem.
News hour, with Jerry Caesar 