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Two posts ago I was remembering a prime minister’s plan for controlling “wages and prices.” Now I am again feeling middle aged.
Down the decades, I have seen how individual writers, on the New York Times bestseller list, can indeed make a difference; it just it takes a while to impact the culture.
It was in the 1980’s that a fellow who normally wrote westerns came out with an historical adventure about a European in the Middle East called The Walking Drum. As I recall, one of the chapters started with an old Arab proverb, “Kiss the hand you cannot cut off.” Another chapter proverb was “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Now, Louis L’amour’s novel was a New York Times bestseller. Since the public is not into history or social studies, I think it was L’amour’s specific book that put the proverb into our culture—but it wasn’t a good fit, I don’t think. Why not choose your friends by using your head? I have heard the proverb used since then, often with a sense of discomfort, as though the saying had come from the Mafia or something. Let’s hope I’m not racist for saying that other cultures have the right to be different from ours.
A difference in culture: The Walking Drum included a scene where the hero and a woman are traveling together, are in the bushes by the road, and a party of horsemen who know the woman and him are passing by, and he wants to cheerfully leave the bushes and hail his friends. Then the woman grabs him and whispers desperately, like Sarah Connor holding back the resistance fighter from leaving the car to confront the police, “They’ll kill you!” In Arab culture, at that time and place, it was assumed a man and a woman could not be alone without succumbing to sex. Maybe at the time men were imperious and woman submissive: And maybe today the burka still assumes a lack of self control…
It was during the Coalition of the Willing, and operation Desert Shield, that the US State Department figuratively got down on their knees and begged and pleaded with Israel not to send any air strikes or counter rockets if Saddam send a missile into Israel. Luckily, the Israelis knew that members of the coalition might turn traitor if a rocket was sent against an Arab: Such is the power of culture to keep Arabs from using their heads. (Rockets did reach Israel, Israel did not retaliate—whew!)
Meanwhile, back to the 1970’s: A fellow wrote a self help book with cartoons where he was a tortoise. A best seller. Then he wrote another best seller, this one with a blurb-praise by syndicated advice columnist Ann Landers. Now, if you have ever sang that summer camp song, Signed Dear Abby, well, Ann got there first, and was even more successful. She and Abby were sisters.
Then the tortoise, aka Robert Ringer, came out with a third best seller but this one had a “Debbie downer” title, one not so selfishly helpful, called Restoring the American Dream. (1979) But here’s the thing: He had one passage where he said something like “if this chapter is the most important chapter in the book, then this paragraph is the most important paragraph: Wages and prices do not cause inflation, they are the result of inflation….” He continues:What about things (out of my economics textbook) like M-1 and elasticity? No. Inflation is caused by inflating the money supply. To put it crudely, although Ringer did not mention the French Revolution: Without a gold standard, if, say, you magically print double the amount of dollar bills, then bread will cost double the amount of bills. As the folks in France found out right after their Revolution, the hard way: You can’t print the public into riches.
My thesis, then, is that Ringer, like L’amour, had a best seller that got the word out to the general public: By the mid 1980’s, as best I recall, some people (but not the non-reading man in the street) were admitting that government caused inflation, and that in fact, inflation was a GT: a Good Thing. Sure, today and in the 80’s we know this, but the public was NOT told this back when inflation was such a torment.
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Sean Crawford
Canada,
July, 2022
Blogs, at first unread, can have a long range impact on big corporations, as noticed by a computer expert at Amazon. Steve Yegge blogged about this, adding, “Blogging is also weird because, as it happens, the best things to write about are things you already know, or have just figured out for yourself. You’d be amazed at how many things you take for granted as “common knowledge” are actually brand new to other smart people. There’s simply too much to know in this world, and we’re all continually learning. (I hope).”
Footnote for academics and masochists: I did a much clumsier, longer version of this (conspiracy) essay back in 2013. (Link)
