Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
This planet has — or rather had — a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
Douglas Adams (1952-2001), The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy
I think Douglas Adams was really onto something here. The current doom and gloom resulting from the global economic climate shows just how dependent our happiness is on ‘the movements of small green pieces of paper’. We originally developed money as a means of exchange for good and services. It quickly became a means of gaining power over others. Eventually we allowed it to determine the value of the same goods and services, apparently completely beyond our control. This is due to a rationale called Free Market Economics, which humorist Mr. John Clarke has described as follows:
Free Market Economics: The belief that a beautiful day has no value if you can’t sell it.
I’m no economist, but I’d say it’s going to take a complete change of view to get us out of this one and to prevent it happening again!
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