Light, and dark, reading for tough economic times

Heather Mallick
CBC.ca
October 10, 2008  

There's a new store in London called The School of Life, which sells books according to likely customer problems, i.e. books to read when you can't cope with your recalcitrant children, or have fallen in love, presumably with someone other than the offspring's father.

For $100, a helpful assistant will choose books specifically for you. Like a personal trainer, except this time it actually works. But this is the CBC and you're already paying, so here's your free bibliotherapy, the new "shelf help." (Sorry, someone else's joke.)

Today's problem is your personal trip to the poorhouse as the dollar falls and the stock market collapses and changes your life even if you didn't have a cent invested in the market. What should you be reading in this difficult time? You need knowledge, strategy and then comfort.

Humans get depressed when they feel they have no control over their lives. But knowledge – understanding the stock market and being informed enough to know when Jim Flaherty and Henry Paulson are talking absolute bollocks – is a weapon, a form of control.

Reading list

You first should read the new book by Kevin Phillips, the American seer who came up with the Southern strategy that gave Nixon his triumph in 1968, the economic warning that Bill Clinton rode to victory in 1994 and then wrote in his magnificent 2006 American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century, that the U.S. was filling itself with poison.

His book, Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism was published earlier this year. It explains the way Wall Street gamblers were already slicing up the bad debt salami, without government health checks, and giving the world economic listeria. Remarkably, the book explained it all just before it happened on a large scale. Phillips's book got almost no attention at the time.

Read Canadian economist Jim Stanford's Economics for Everyone: A Short Guide to the Economics of Capitalism. It's an excellent primer on how the economy we live in actually works (or fails to). Plus, it has cartoons. Ignore the Naomi Klein blurb on the front; Stanford will not change your life, merely smarten you up. Nor will he leave you feeling idealistic, merely skeptical, but skepticism is always a good thing.

Start the press

Coverage of the financial crisis has been appalling. One U.S. morning show used foam dominoes to illustrate how money stuff can make other money stuff fall over. ABC News actually made its own cartoon and ran it as a news report. I remember sitting in a cinema age five watching a Walt Disney cartoon explaining capitalism to pre-schoolers. "It's got to circ-u-late, circ-u-late, travel around " went the song. Was this a 1964 version of Bush's "Go out and shop?"

Now they play it for grownups.

So don't watch TV, go online. Robert Peston's blog on BBC is very good. Andrew Leonard's How the World Works on salon.com is terrific, as is Slate.com's coverage. Their raison d'etre is intricate explanation; they do it well.

As for comfort, Margaret Atwood's new fortuitously timed essay on debt Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth will at least give you context. She's doing a Northrop Frye (the Bible as the basis of literature) or a Lewis Hyde (his famous study of the "gift" economy) on debt, and if it makes you feel better to know that the ancient Greeks didn't like getting stiffed on a debt either, Atwood is your ma'am.

Novel approach

The best novel about the boom-and-bust economy of our era is Michael Bracewell's 1992 The Conclave. It may be one of the best novels ever written. The idiocy of boom and the horror of bust, as seen in the story of one aspirational British couple are painted in blood. This blood is apple-green. Drawing room paint colours are key in boom times, as we know. Bile green is what leaks in later. Ironically (and the Nobel people are right - North Americans do not read books by foreigners) it is out of print. I can't find a review and you will have trouble finding a copy. Try ordering from www.amazon.co.uk.

For strategy on how to live in a severe recession, I won't recommend books on how to live frugally; there will be a flood of those this Christmas telling you how to strain homemade jam through old pantyhose.

For people thinking farther ahead – and that's everyone who has read this far; haven't you learned that it can still get worse? – read The Long Emergency, James Howard Kunstler's book on surviving in the years ahead when the global economic collapse will make us nostalgic for crises that are possible to solve. If you don't read it, just remember one thing. Never buy a condo above the sixth floor. When the electricity grid gets dodgy, you won't want to climb 54 storeys to get home.

As gloomy as it might sound, I didn't say I would provide false comfort. The truth is comforting. You know where you are with the truth.