We have just a couple of questions.

One older; one new

Firstly…

Some economists get paid a lot, we assume, at least the “guru”-type ones who appear on television and write books.

What do they get paid for exactly?  To divine the future, supposedly, with their charts and their intuition.

So with so many thousands of highly-paid gurus sharing their wisdom with the world for huge fees, how come only perhaps a handful had any idea whatever of the reality of the economic situation we find ourselves in today?

Yes, it’s true that a very few economists predicted it. But with several thousand economists making such a broad range of predictions a few have to get it right, or luck out.

The ones who did have become instant celebrities. And Satyajit Das is the darling of the ABC across the board.

You might wonder how they get away with it. To us [pace Nicholas Gruen] there is no noticeable difference between economists and, say, astrologers, or witchdoctors, or fortune-tellers, with their secret-mystic language, their rattling bones, their scattered entrails, their magical scrapings in the dirt, their dramatic show of divine inspiration and their theatrical gravitas.

But now here they go again, unbowed and unashamed, wise after the event, explaining what happened and how and, for yet more money, rattling their bones about what is yet to come.

As if they had any idea!

The real question is:

how have we let them get away with it?

Secondly…

We are told that a fiscal stimulus is all the go. In fact, if we put pink bats into every roof in the country for a mere several billion dollars, we will produce a greenhouse gas reduction equal to removing 1 million cars from the road. Our paltry greenhouse target — of, what is it, 5% ? — would be achieved in a minute, about ten years ahead of schedule or something; after which we could start really getting serious about it.

The question is:

if it was always this easy why was getting the government to come at even the measliest reduction so bloody difficult? You would have thought the entire government was getting a bikini wax, one hair at a time.

The screaming!

The struggling!

The biting and kicking!

Or like root canal therapy without an anaesthetic.

The fact appears to be that this current “emergency” is relatively — and hopefully — time limited (but who knows? — it’s economists who are telling us this…).

Global warming is a much greater emergency, will last thousands of years longer and affect billions more people, not to mention other living things. If you were willing to go into deficit for something, this ought to be that thing.

[Clarification: Sir Roger does not wear a bikini or have personal experience of waxing, but once assisted with a home-based procedure. He still has the fingernail scars to prove it. He did, however, suffer an excruciating anaesthetic-free root canal treatment and thinks he would prefer to give birth to a horse.]