January 22, 2009
Economic Grief - Healing Process
The pain that the current Global meltdown has caused financially is well known, well covered by Main Stream Media and well documented, but the grief it is continuing to inflict on our collective psyche, is little understood.
Today, on NPR I heard about Virtuous Recession. Apparently, most companies are even capitalizing on this. The advertising, PR and marketing machinery of Fortune 500 companies are in high gear selling it to Americans.
Presumably slumps are good. Recessions enable correction. As Paul Krugman, the nobel prize winning economist once wrote, slump is part of the economic healing process. The excess capacity gets worked off, prices and wages fall from their excessive boom levels, and then the economy will eventually rebound.
True, maybe its all part of the healing process. But if you ask me, Are there any virtues to a recession at all ? NO. Its always painful.
Anybody who knows the classic 5 stages of grief and has realized Kubler-Ross model understand that the process goes through phases of Denial, Anger, Negotiation (Bargaining), Depression and Acceptance. DANDA (people who know Hindi will certainly remember this model) in short.
What the story on NPR taught me was that the collective psyche of certain parts of our society, are in the phase of “Negotiation or Bargaining” with the current condition the economy is in. Saying all these bad things are good, its a cleansing system and correction phase, are all consoling ourselves. “Virtuous Recession” is nothing but a figment of our imagination. Its a behavior similar to this.
During this Economic Grief, there are probably many who are still in denial mode, some are angered by what is happening, many more are already in depression and people like me have long accepted that we are in a pretty bad shape. Are there any virtues to such man made catastrophes ? An emphatic NO. Its just that we are all in different stages of our healing process and that manifests itself as funny behaviors.