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A long sullen silence

Many things in life have a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy reference. (This statement, of course, may or may not be true.)


What is true is that my employer is in the financial industry and I have been watching the "implosion" of WaMu and Wachovia (as well as our cross-town rival) with some interest. Now much of my financial news comes from the Wall Street Journal and as I read, digested and followed the events of the past weeks, a phrase from the HHGTTG kept coming to mind. Of course I wasted many, many hours in middle, high school and college listening to the series on NPR (and my bootleg recordings) and reading and re-reading the books, but apparently that wasn't enough because it wasn't until I went to the book (thanks, Karen R!) and found chapter 15 that I remembered the complete scene.

Many men of course became extremely rich, but this was perfectly natural and nothing to be ashamed of. . . .

. . . And so the system broke down, the Empire collapsed, and a long sullen silence settled over a billion hungry worlds, disturbed only by the pen scratchings of scholars as they labored into the night over smug little treatises on the value of a planned political economy.

from Chapter 15 of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams

It was "the pen scratchings" that I was hearing as I read the paper pages of my newsprint, the RSS feeds of the blogs and talked around the water cooler with my colleagues. Some of it scholarly. Some smug. Some little. Some espousing less regulation and some espousing more.

A lot of pen scratchings, though.


And now I think I am ready for a period of "long sullen silence". You see, while Douglas Adams was ultimately a funny nihilist, I have work to do, a family to lead, a boat to sail and cabinets to finish.

Update (20081104): Several readers have asked me if I really believe in "a planned political economy". I do not. I believe that free markets, when transparent enough, are the most effective ways to handle an economy. I do, however, wish for a sullen silence (or any kind of silence) these days.

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This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on October 1, 2008 8:38 PM.

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