Crisis and numbers

Today again the crisis reached my shores, this time the beach was different but it had the same impact. I realized why i don't connect with economics, the story gets lost in a barrage of numbers, people get replaced with an inhumane term called labour market. Livelihoods lost becomes unemployment. The inability to afford what you could just days before becomes slowdown in consumer expenditure. The lack of jobs becomes company hiring plans in surveys, the postponement of someone's future plans becomes depressed consumer demand due to de-leveraging. The inability to get a job for long periods of time becomes structural unemployment.  Thousands of people having the worst day of their lives becomes headcount reduction.

A crisis driven by numbers seems to loose its impact if we only see it in number terms. Telling someone that GDP growth will be structurally depressed for the next decade doesn't quite cut it. Tell them that your families' living standard will be impacted for the next ten years.

Just like last time this time it also felt like a storm was brewing and people were scared and strangely united. I never felt more connected to every person in my office, my personal silo was invaded by a common invader. Economics takes a very human experience and dehumanizes it, making it unrelatable. Sometimes its better to know the story behind that one statistic, rather than focus on the big picture. We loose out in the big picture.