Addiction to the internet is an illness. I’ll say!*

Constant peeks at GoFugYourself and the Guardian’s minute-by-minute football coverage are making me quite ill. Evidently I have been “exhausting emotions that I could experience in the real world”. Yeah, emotions like scorn, schadenfreude, impatience with strangers… The webosphere is a bitchy place, isn’t it? In fact, I’m a bit sorry about being mean in my blog about Easter bunnies yesterday. The nice man at the petrol station gave me a free marbled egg this morning when I went on an emergency toilet roll sortie (bloody flatmates). So things aren’t all that bad.

Anyway, the good news is that I have managed to turn off the computer for long enough to learn what Keynesianism is. And anti-utilitarianism. And New Contractarianism. Marvellous(ism)! My new course in sustainable development is going swimmingly. I have been doing so much study, I am surely nearly ready to swim 25 metres with a float. No? Ah, it seems that I’m supposed to be doing eight hours a week, not eight minutes. Rats. Well, I’ll soon catch up now that I’ve found out how fascinating economics is. No, really!

It turns out that all those stories about Bear Stearns and recession and the death of irrational exuberance (again) are super interesting. Who knew? There are some particularly thought-provoking bits in the comments section of this story about chickens coming home to roost. Quite a bit of schadenfreude on show.

On the subject of debt and overspending and the like, I realise that I am not YET an international expert in economics (though surely it’s a matter of months), but I wonder if the Goings-On will change the Chinese government’s attempts to change the culture of saving in the country so that people spend more? I read about this a while ago and thought it sounded a bit shifty. Now it definitely sounds shifty, as do some of the eggings-on by the Americans and innurnashional financiers, such as:

“This parsimony now threatens to slow the country’s economic growth. If consumer spending is to keep pace with business investment, China’s middle class will need to shed its caution and learn to spend more of its income.”
McKinsey

“We certainly hope that China changes from a saving society to a consuming society. Right now, because of the lack of a safety net, many Chinese save for what we call a rainy day. What we want is the government to provide more of a safety net so they start buying more US and Australian products.”
President Bush

Well, I’m sure they know best. Blimey! Is that Arsenal one nil up?

*Not to belittle genuine sufferers or anything.