“May you live in interesting times,” goes the old curse, and it looks like we are.
Whoever we are, whatever role we’re in, it feels harder than it’s ever been to know what to do for the best. Conventional advice that’s always applied feels as though it probably doesn’t any more, and who’s to know what the new wisdom is?
Whatever I write here will probably look laughably outdated before too long, but I was thinking this as I looked at the stock market, for one thing. Historically, investing in the stock market has been an excellent decision, almost whenever you do it, as long as you’re patient. Now, though? It looks mad, with valuations at levels that only make sense if you’re insanely optimistic and out of touch with reality. So does that make it a bad investment? Probably not, because insanity has a way of persisting, but who knows?
Then I look at the news, and the almost universal turmoil in government in most places.
Take war and defence, which is a constant rumbling. There is an increasing consensus that the world is a more dangerous place than it has been. Not universal, of course, because there are always those who say that if we simply refuse to fight there will be no war – I don’t follow their logic, but these people will presumably always exist, unless they meet others who prefer them out of the way and have nothing to stop them.
But among the rest, there is increasing agreement that any serious country should be making sure it has good defences, and the differences are more about how that should be prioritised and accomplished. A lot of talk about spending commitments.
… and that’s where a political subject becomes a good illustration. Because apparently without people noticing, not least the people responsible for the country’s safety, a budget line item has taken the place of the actual outcome we want. Which is weird, because if we were having an argument at home about how safe our house is, would anyone be happy if my proposal was to spend a certain percentage of our income on security? Not in our house, they wouldn’t. The situational analysis comes first, the specifics that need attending to second, and only after that do we judge what the costs are and whether they’re worth it.