My last post was about money. This post is, too. The
6 big Canadian banks have just released their yearly earnings and have made a combined profit of 19 billion dollars in 2006. That would be a record. And what a record! It shredded the old mark of 13 billion like it was tinsel hanging out of a cat's butt! I'm glad that our banks are making such a huge profit. It makes me feel good that the nickel-and-diming I receive everyday from them is at least amounting to something.
Forgive the cynicism. Must be early Douglas Coupland popping through. Or Kurt Vonnegut. I just finished reading Vonnegut's
Player Piano and
Jailbird, novels that deal with the structure of the economy. I've also been reading Pierre Bourdieu, a sociologist who studies just that very thing. My faith in structure is currently jaded, although I think humanity involves certain things worth believing in.
The smartest thing economists ever did (and this is me talking, although I'm sure I've been influenced by others' ideas) was convince the world that humans have nothing to do with economics. Why do prices go up and down? It's supply and demand. No one ever mentions that stock numbers do not magically appear; someone, somewhere, has to say "This number has now become that number." And thus it becomes fact.
If asked, an economist will say that something is worth more than something else because it is both valued and valuable. And why is it valued? What makes items like land and diamonds so bloody expensive (pun intended)? Economists will tell you that it is valuable because humans want it. Supply and demand. What makes these certain items more valuable is that humans want it, but there's only so much of it to go around. The demand is so high, the supply so low, that prices inch ever higher. Diamonds are worth more than common granite because there are hardly any diamonds but a whole crapload of granite. This is a given.
A 'given' is considered commonsense, and lately I've come to regard with suspicion anything considered commonsense. Diamonds are worth more because there are less of it. Why do we think this way? Why are rare items considered more valuable than ordinary items? This seems like a stupid question. The question is treated as if it has a universal answer. But it is worth pointing out that rare items are worth more because humans at one time decided that rare items should be worth more. There is no 'invisible hand'; humans make the rules of economics, everthing from complex legal law right down to the simplest of assumptions. Sure, there are plenty of rational reasons why a rare item should be expensive, but I'm making the point that that's not always the case. Why can't common items be worth more? What if the rare item serves absolutely no purpose and stinks like slimy fish tacos? Who the hell would buy that?
My point is that economists tell us that the market is out of our hands. And that is true, only in that the market is very peculiar about which hands are controlling things. That isn't meant to sound conspiracy-theory crazy, just belligerent. In other words, I don't like the current state of affairs.
After all, there is an item that we see everyday, touch all the time, play with constantly -- yet is considered quite valuable in the grand scheme of things. This item is also fluid, in that humans treat it both as a rarity or a commonality, depending on the person's mood or level of drunkeness. I am talking, of course, about the dollar.
