Those were the days

I remember giving a speech back in ninth grade on inflation. (Yes, I was that type of nerdy student. A partner and I later did a project on the gold standard. This was all for an English class. Lucky I'm a girl or I surely would have been beaten up regularly.)
The speech is still pretty clear in my mind because I hated giving speeches and because this one went well with the use of a visual aid to keep my hands busy.
Since this was before the days of PowerPoint, I made a poster with a circle on it. It was really pretty simple. As my little taped man moved around the circle, I'd talk about supply and demand, wages and prices. As wages went up, demand went up, and as demand went up, prices went up until supply caught up. If it didn't, then there'd be pressure on wages to go up again.
It was the first time I thought that I got how the economy worked.
I look back wistfully on that day, because if one thing is clear, I'm completely at sea in the new world of global economics.
In early 2009, I used to watch the stock market, hoping it would be a predictor of how things might go for my family. Surely, if there were jobs and a healthy middle class with wages steady or rising, then this would be a good thing for demand and for business, right?
But I found that the stock market seems to be an entity to itself, operating in a planet on the far side of the sun from where I sit. When jobs come back, that's a bad thing because business will have to pay more for labor or treat their workers better. Good consumer confidence, or a surge in retail sales--that's a good thing, right? Well, maybe, but a stronger dollar ruins everything.
In fact, nowadays the stock market only seems to affect my life if it's on the downswing. The big crash of '08? We felt that right away. The big rebound of the ensuing months? Not so much. True, our savings were regained, But then we weren't doing anything with that but trying to save for old age and college. Our everyday life didn't change like it did when we took the pay hit.
So I've been hitting the books. Recently, I read three economics books back to back: The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations?, by Ian Bremmer; Diary of a Very Bad Year: Confessions of an Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager by Anon, N+1 and Keith Gessen; and IOU: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay, by John Lanchester.
Result: I understand a bit more about state capitalism and derivatives, but I don't like them any better.
Other result: It's becoming increasingly clear that--just like global warming scientists--the people who know the system best are not going to be listened to, and we'll all suffer for the stupidity and short-term greed of the majority.
Harsh, I know. But the more I read, well...
Lanchester, an English novelist whose book is both as fun to read as Diary, but still manages to explain the complicated financial terms, was the most dour.
"Looking back, it turns out that we've just lived through an economic golden age. It turned out to be a fake golden age, one based on debt and on an unsustainable credit bubble and underpinned by a financial system which was, it turned out, taking crazily miscalculated risks--but we didn't know that at the time. In fact, most of us had no idea it was a golden age; we didn't know that we were living through what for many of us will turn out to be the best economic times of our lives. I wish someone had told us...."
In the time right after the first big corporate collapse, he says, Westerners had a chance to reflect on why ever increasing riches don't seem to make us any happier. "We in the West can do something that no people in history have done: we can show the world that we know when we have enough."
But he also says he doubts that will happen, because we don't really feel all that rich, even though by world standards, we are. And we are all about to start to feel poorer, because we're getting the bill now for the excesses of the past.
Sad, but true. But, when you've spent all your life as an outlier, paying off your credit cards, living in an older home that you can afford, shopping from the used and unfinished furniture stores (and sometimes the trash bins!) to keep from overspending, this assessment is a little hard to take.
But oh well. There's very little we can do about it. Except maybe quit playing the worker ant and saving for a happier tomorrow that will never come.