Despair ye not... Yes, we WILL survive the Great Loo Roll Famine
IN the middle of a review of the weekend newspapers on RTÉ radio, I did something I rarely do. I turned the radio off. Halfway through a sentence quoting some economic geek who reckons we’re facing into an austerity Armageddon,
I’d had enough. It was just after 8am, and I’d already had sufficient bad news to last me for at least a day, and maybe even more given that it was such quality fare. As well as death, pestilence, and house arrest, there was the bonus serving of economic catastrophe for afters.
It was so good to be reminded that, if we are lucky enough to survive this pandemic in relatively decent fettle, we can look forward to years of depression of a kind not witnessed for a century.
Give it six months, and we’ll be praying for the days when all we had to worry about was a piddling downturn.
We’ll be looking back with misty-eyed nostalgia at a time when we thought a 15% unemployment rate constituted an economic crisis.
We’ll fondly recall the days of mass emigration, because at least in those times there were healthy and buoyant countries in which it was possible to make a fresh start.
Pessimism
Thanks, economic geeks, gurus and forecasters everywhere, I am now amply stocked with doom and gloom. I have several months’ supply of corrosive pessimism, much more than I needed. I have bulk-bought life-sapping hopelessness and despair, and have run out of places to store it.
Ominous prophesies of a post-coronavirus economic meltdown are a lot like the Great Toilet Paper Famine of early March 2020. There was no Great Toilet Paper Famine until people started believing in it.
Somebody got wind of a clamour for lavatory rolls in Hong Kong, during an early stage of the pandemic, and reckoned it would be a good idea to stock up… in Europe.
So shoppers in Dublin filled their trolleys with toilet paper.
Then other people, doing their weekly shop, noticed that toilet roll stocks were running low.
Then they remembered reading something about shortages, so they grabbed an extra couple of bales.
The next shoppers who came along found the toilet roll shelves empty, so they panicked and went to another supermarket, and promptly cleaned out those shelves.
Confidently expecting a global shortage of the stuff, dim-witted ‘bog roll bandits’ began basing their new business models on the expectation of a premium on high-grade toilet paper. Over the weekend police in the UK, where they’re a bit behind the curve on much related to the virus, posted images of seized trucks full of stolen Andrex.
Yet the reality is there was no need for a run on toilet paper, so to speak: any shortages that actually occurred were due to rumours and fears of shortages.
The parable of the Great Toilet Paper Famine teaches us that prophesies of doom and deprivation have a self-fulfilling function. The very same will prove true of predictions of economic catastrophe.
Since consumer confidence is the single biggest determinant of whether an economy – national and global – prospers or tanks, the surest way of guaranteeing a post-pandemic depression is to convince us that it is coming. And the best way to ensure that it is worse than we can possibly imagine is to tell us that it’s going to be worse than we can possibly imagine.
Before this crisis hit, not even a month ago, we effectively had full employment in this country. All boats hadn’t been lifted by the recovery, for sure, but our national fortunes were certainly heading in the right direction.
We had the luxury of voting, in unprecedented numbers, for an utterly untried political ideology and a party that had zero experience of running a country or managing an economy, just because we felt like shaking things up: how self-indulgent does the clamour for ‘change’ look now?
Cataclysm
Now, we’d be thrilled for the chance to go back to how things were a month ago, when getting rid of Leo Varadkar, Simon Coveney and Simon Harris seemed like the answer to all our ills. We wanted change, well, we’ve got it in spades.
Nobody could have foreseen this epic cataclysm. And so let us take comfort from the fact that nobody can say, with real certainty, what happens next.
There will be huge pent-up demand for goods, services, social events, in due course, and there will be opportunities for inventive and resourceful folk.
We will need people to believe in recovery, to spend, shop, circulate and socialise when all this is over, rather than hoarding their resources out of self-fulfilling fear of shortage.
We need to believe we can survive this, and thrive again: as Henry Ford put it, if you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’ll be right either way.