Unlike most pathological pessimists, Winnie-the-Pooh’s friend Eeyore was endearing in his gloom, but it’s beginning to seem as though the depressive donkey’s philosophy is the most adaptive to cultivate these days.
However terrific something might seem, there’s always a dispiriting flip side. Just ask the Swedes, who were so excited to have Beyoncé perform earlier this year that their exuberance fuelled a significant increase in inflation. The joyful activity of attending a pop concert turns out to be fiscally damaging ‒ on a continuum with war, a pandemic or sharemarket plunge.
Central bankers are still so preoccupied with the Beyoncé liquidity effect, given persistent post-Covid inflation, that you can’t rule out the World Bank warning governments against issuing further visas to the performer.
Eeyores will accordingly greet the Rolling Stones’ – generally rapturously received – new songs with dismay. Will Mick’n’Keef also be so socially irresponsible as to tour, prolonging the cost-of-living crisis in the developed world? Shouldn’t these inflationary pop stars stay home tinkering with train sets and fixing potholes like Rod Stewart?
And let’s not overheat our economies with good news, either. It’s all very well looking forward to the life-improving benefits of the new anti-obesity drugs, but there will be suffering. Fisher & Paykel Healthcare is among many listed companies already buffeted as realisation dawns that global demand for products such as sleep apnoea equipment will likely plunge. Along with the kilos, sales will be shed and sharemarket indices slenderised.
The new drugs regulate people’s blood sugar to such a degree that their appetites decrease. Will no one think of the food manufacturers, the takeaway chains – not even the school fair cake stalls? Who will eat all the pies?
Then there’s the higher uptake of electric vehicles (EVs), which silly, unimaginative optimists think will simply lower greenhouse gas emissions and reduce air pollution. Fine, if you like that sort of thing. If you’re a finance minister, it’s rather provoking. Countries such as Singapore and soon Britain are having to tax EVs because their supplanting of polluting vehicles has caused serious domestic revenue deficits. The political cost of punishing virtuous EV drivers is high, so an alternative under consideration is treating car travel like phone calls: log all mileage and charge accordingly. The technology’s there and can be calibrated to favour EVs and off-peak travel.
Naturally, pessimists pelt this apparent solution with further repressive, but annoyingly cogent, “Yes, but …”, the obvious being, why need any country shell out for a new car-tracking system when the Chinese already have one tracking all of us? Cue the next Jeremiah: if we ask China nicely to share its data on us, it will launch into a diatribe about Five Eyes watching it, and a mere domestic revenue issue will become a geopolitical ruction.
Then there’s the fact that outside Scandinavia and a few other onto-it territories, EV chargers are so scarce that EVs can’t travel nearly as far or as often as polluting cars, so there’ll still be a nasty revenue deficit. The optimist foolish enough to chirrup, “Well, let’s put in more chargers”, will be wearily reminded that many countries can’t yet generate enough electricity for the demand – certainly not without coal and gas. And anyway, as the pessimists would have it, the world might be only one Ed Sheeran or Taylor Swift tour away from a mass currency collapse.
Short of locking down any performer grossing more than an Abba tribute act, the best antidote to the Moaning Minnies, when they seem to be so depressingly right, is to reference the contrasting doctrine of Eeyore’s colleague, Tigger: “It’s not about how fast you run or how high you climb, but how well you bounce.”
