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Before Rod was Crunchy,The Economist Was
[Caleb Stegall 03/03 08:34 AM]Back in the 1980s, Nico Colchester, an editor for The Economist, wrote a very short essay called "Crunchiness" which quickly became a cult favorite. I have a vague recollection of someone at NR bringing this piece up after Rod’s original article ran. Anyway, in the piece, Colchester contrasted what he termed "crunchy" economic policies with "soggy" policies. Colchester explained: Crunchy systems are those in which small changes have big effects leaving those affected by them in no doubt whether they are up or down, rich or broke, winning or losing, dead or alive. The going was crunchy for Captain Scott as he plodded southwards across the sastrugi. He was either on top of the snow-crust and smiling, or floundering thigh-deep. The farther south he marched the crunchier his predicament became. Sogginess is comfortable uncertainty. The modern Scott is unsure how deeply he is in it. He can radio for an airlift, or drop in on an American early-warning station for a hot toddy. . . . Light-switches no longer turn on or off: they dim. Colchester's thesis was this: "Crunchiness brings wealth. Wealth leads to sogginess. Sogginess brings poverty. Poverty creates crunchiness. From this immutable cycle we know that to hang on to wealth, you must keep things crunchy." It has nothing to do with granola, but Colchester’s crunchiness has a lot in common with Rod’s. So we could switch from Rod's version to Colchester's and pretty much have the same conversation. Modernity is the process of turning crunchy systems into soggy ones.
The whole centralizing/consumerizing tendency of modern economic, political, and cultural systems and institutions is predicated on the need to keep people in a "comfortable uncertainty." Thus, they are propped up by false systems of accounting; or by what Voegelin called a “second reality.” For example, Colchester pointed to the advent of floating interest rate lending as a soggy policy. Whereas fixed rate lending is crunchy (i.e., both parties know precisely where they stand), the move to floating rates has reduced the necessity of commitment, and "the result is a need for puzzlingly high rates of interest to curb consumer borrowing." Other examples abound, from the insurance industry to health care to schooling to mass media to no-fault divorce to mass mobility to the phenomena of the 3000 mile salad. Each conceals, in a comfortable way, the true cost of its operation. Each makes a person feel that he is up or rich or winning or alive, when the reality is that he may be closer to being down or poor or losing or dead.
Clearly, as Colchester recognizes, this kind of soggy system cannot continue indefinitely. It will, in the end, lead to poverty and bankruptcy of all sorts. This is because where the true cost is concealed, some kind of capital reserve account is being depleted. And this is the current situation: all of our capital reserve accounts are being depleted by the soggy machine of modernity: natural resource reserve accounts, political reserve accounts, social capital reserve accounts, and moral reserve accounts. This will continue so long as we resolve to remain soggily comfortable and sated in our second reality. So there you have it, straight from The Economist: go crunchy.
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