Dear Dr. Bones,
While not occupied with creating the unhappiness of journalists, Dr. Pressbeater runs optimism races with Dr. Pangloss--and usually wins. Little Miss Sunshine still leads the pack overall, but ¡let her look to her laurels!
The bad news (if one may mention anything so uncongenial here at Seeper Downs), is that the foundations of Bake®i™e brand Proleptic Bliss may be less than sound. Passing over the worst problem [*] for now, let me draw attention to how this piece nicely illustrates the second-worst, as I rate it. Dr. Pressbeater--unless he is positively cheating, a thought beyond unthinkable--does not notice that the various passages of Scripture upon which he relies to announce our imminent national (re-)entry into Be‘ûlâ Land are not all equally authoritative.
Built on the rock, as it were, on the one hand, is (A) stuff like this:
| [T]he Congressional Budget Office's projections for Social Security ... show a 1.6 percentage point increase in the payroll tax would leave the program fully solvent throughout its 75-year planning period. |
Not, perhaps, PERFECTLY rocklike, yet tolerably close. Most of what is being prognosticated depends more on elementary mathematics [*] than on the former real world.
Quite different is the case with (B) the following, which Dr. Pressbeater himself introduces "by [way of a] comparison," though hardly the present comparison:
| [W]orkers[’] wages are projected to rise by almost 40 percent over the next three decades. |
One circumstance that makes that prooftext sound a little fishy (or sandy) is that it is not attributed to anybody in particular. Evidently one takes it or leaves it according as one's faith in Pressbeaterism was antecedently quick or sluggish. Mine is rather a sloth, though not quite a slug: metamathematical predictions are notoriously tricky, and especially about the future. Nevertheless, it seems to me permitted to a rational creature to doubt, always decorously and never importunately, that extrapolating the next forty years from the last four hundred with a straightedge (or digital equivalent) is bound to get it all right.
We may even be in for--¡brace yourselves and secure the horses, please!--a little dose of Economic D*cl*ne.
That is to say, all that downsourcing, and outsizing, and always adopting the preferential option for paper-pushing rather than some banausic activity that might get one's hands dirty, &c., may actually matter a little. I don't mean that the heathen Chinee will inevitably be beating poor old Sam at the _Finanzkapitalismus_ game by the end of next month, but . . . . WWNN.
Dr. Pressbeater is not unaware that such things have been going on, he even fits pieces of them into his curious system of conceptual grooves and crotchets on occasion, but these are only tiny sunspots on the face of the general Panglossianity. The skies over Seeper Downs are hardly ever cloudy at all, let alone "all day." And as for "discouragin’ words," well, I presume you can see that I act here on the assumption that that sort of thing is mostly left to incompetent newspaper employees, ignorant lay sheeps, and peanut-gallery peanuts to supply, if we have the bad taste to want such a product.
_Alio modo_, you might say that one of the main grooves in beautiful downtown Deambakerville is named "Normalcy-is-just-around-the-corner Boulevard."
But Keynes knows best.
Happy days.
--JHM
___
[*] The student may notice how "remedial 3rd grade arithmetic" puts in a cameo appearance.
[**] Philologists may compare Labour-in-vain Road , Ipswich MA 01938.
Indeed, both the name and the zipcode have a sort of vague allegorical appropriateness for a wider audience.
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