The Bruce Report

The nostalgic yearning for hard times is the sort of spiritual pornography that appeals only to those among us who’ve never had to scrub a toilet for a blue plate special in the greasy spoon that was once the fine dining room of the world’s economy.

There’s nothing instructive or ennobling about wretched poverty, unless, of course, you happen to be a celebrated professor of doom, whose tenure in the public eye depends on your ability to wax bittersweetly about a past that’s best left interred.

And so, it’s no great surprise as the planet lurches from one debt crisis to another, the vocabulary of destitution is making a comeback in the charmed antechambers of academia where, also predictably, incomes remain high.

“The risks ahead are not just of a mild double-dip recession, but of a severe contraction that could turn into a second Great Depression,” New York University economist and talking head Nouriel Roubini recently wrote in Business Day. “Wrong-headed policies during the first Great Depression led to trade and currency wars, disorderly debt defaults, deflation, rising income and wealth inequality, poverty, desperation, and social and political instability and eventually the rise of authoritarian regimes and the Second World War. The best way to avoid repeating such a sequence is bold and aggressive global policy action now.”

He may be right, of course, but the sub-text of happy self-fulfillment in his prophesies is unmistakable. After all, it whispers breathily, wouldn’t all of us we be better off for having spent a few agonizing years on the breadline?

Well, not all of us, perhaps. Not Roubini’s partner in gloom, Harvard historian Niall Ferguson, who merely predicts a “slight” depression in the years ahead.

According to a Reuters analysis published in October, he told poo-bahs of an international private bank that western governments “may have stopped another ‘Great’ depression but not a depression and what for many was the most profound lesson of economic history may turn out to be wrong.”

Meanwhile, other worthy prognosticators are dredging up a word, dripping in deja vu, from the 1970s to depict the shape of things to come: stagflation.

Explains Stanford University professor Ronald McKinnon in a Wall Street Journal commentary: “(It means) persistent high inflation combined with high unemployment and stagnant demand in a country’s economy. The term was coined by British politician Iain Mcleod in a speech to Parliament in 1965.”

In fact, no less an influential body than Moody’s bond rating service has already applied the portmanteau, with almost sentimental fondness, to Atlantic Canada’s economy. “Persistently high unemployment has encouraged outmigration and discouraged investment, limiting long-term growth prospects,” reports Mark Hopkins, a Canadian economist with the organization, in a recent dispatch. “As a result (the region) faces an increasing threat of stagflation, with rates of unemployment and inflation among the highest in the country.”

Again, he and the others have a point. But that point becomes blunted when their dire warnings suggest that our problems are intractable, not solvable – that we are not only doomed to repeat history; we deserve what we get.

Such useless self-indulgence is all the more irritating for its provenance: men who, it is almost certain, will never face the appalling dislocation their various books of revelations promise for everyone else.

Most people in this part of the world know what they are up against. And slowly, inexorably, they’re beginning to comprehend the hard choices their governments must surely make to avoid a European-style economic meltdown.

The City of Saint John has slashed its annual spending by $9 million. The cuts affect almost every department, including previously untouchable ones, such as fire and police. There’s nothing nostalgically nourishing about this – just lamentably necessary.

The Government of New Brunswick is set to bring down what some expect will be the toughest budget in more than a generation. Prince Edward Island Premier Robert Ghiz is preparing to follow suit.

We don’t yearn for hard times of a bygone era to guide us. We’re too busy dealing with our own.

Alec Bruce is a Moncton-based writer on politics, economics and current affairs. Check out his other blog here at Atlantic Business Magazine (ABMOnline): The Uneasy Chair.

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