aaron evans

We are living in a remarkable time when leaders of the world face problems of immense scale and pundits have a diversity of opinion regarding the appropriate course of action to take. When the present becomes past we will likely forget this debate and simply accept the present as it is with its own set of problems. Remember the debate about a ‘crash landing’ versus ’soft landing’ in the housing sector? Remember the debate about whether Apple could successfully enter the cellphone market?

I find it unfortunate that we forget these debates when their outcomes are no longer uncertain. I think a consequence is that we don’t ever improve at identifying “real” debates in society or even understanding what debates are the right debates to be having. If we seek to become better at public discourse then we should certainly look at our experience with past debates as informative of present debates.

Having said that, I’ll take a stab at outlining some of the current debates regarding the economy:

• the DOW is at 6500; can the DOW go to 5000 or are we nearing in on a bottom?
• deflation or inflation? some say we’re headed toward a deflationary cycle while others say we’ll see high inflation in 2010 or thereabouts
• recovery in 2009, 2010 or later? The Obama administration expects a recovery in the second half of 2009; other say 2010, others say later
• let the banks/insurers fail? The Obama administration followed the Bush administration’s lead and continued to give money to AIG, Citibank, and other banks while Republicans argue for letting some of the banks fail.

For some of these questions, the future may not shed any light on what the right course of action is. Others may prove more interesting (I’m curious about inflation and deflation).

This entry was posted on Monday, March 9th, 2009 at 8:39 pm and is filed under Economy, Me. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.