Formerly attributed to Xu Daoning (ca. 1000-after 1066)
Autumn river in the rain and clouds
(16th century- China)

"We seem at least obligated to deal with this world as it is,…"

Economics works in mysterious ways, and doesn’t always seem to work at all. Prosperities can rise and fall with startling speed, partly because they do not move linearly. Both Prosperity and penury can fool the eye that expects straight-line predictability. Both require systems thinking even to begin to comprehend, and even then they might still seem mysterious. Ruinous change can seem to occur faster than instantly, especially for those who can’t register nonlinear variation. Beneficial shifts can occur just as seemingly erratically, probably because both Prosperity and Penury tend to operate as Cascades. Their values do not travel via thin, straight wires, but through wilder splashes, as if they were water racing through a rocky ravine. So much apparently random variation litters their courses that accurate prediction seems unlikely, if not impossible. This might be why they both just seem to happen.

Accounting for both Prosperity and penury might be best attempted after the fact, once a period of insulating time has passed. Then, the differences in elevation, for instance, might be finely measured without needing to consider the detail course the Cascade must have taken to end up where it did by the end of that period. Those details might get lost in this accounting, but they might also have proven genuinely unimportant. We often ask after the wrong questions, seeking a linearity in the responses that couldn’t have possibly existed in practice or actually explained anything useful. This might explain why Prosperity so often seems to appear as if by magic. Somebody somewhere might possess sufficient knowledge and observation skills to muster up explanatory details, but almost nobody else should even attempt to produce such accounting. Gratitude or remorse likely won’t be any different if we could somehow cross-foot our analysis. Prosperity either is or it isn’t. Penury, too, similarly concludes.

Our latest fall from Prosperity, our current ProsperityLost, seems breathtaking by any sober accounting. I do not need to detail the individual policies that led us to our current precipice to comprehend the depth of the canyon we teeter over or the difference between where we started as the envy of the world and where we find ourselves today, teetering. The Cascade was breathtaking, or would have been, had we noticed the details as they unfolded. We didn’t, of course, and not just because so few of us ever received training in perceiving such shifts. We anticipated terrible, but not nearly as terrible as what must have actually happened. There might never be any conventional accounting to show the actual gradient of the fall, just a tangled pile of pieces that disconnected through apparent malice or inattention. It seems unlikely that anybody actually ever sat down and designed this latest Cascade from behind what might have been a carefully crafted facade. It seems most likely that studied ineptitude produced this result. There couldn’t possibly have been any army comprised of King’s men and horses that took Humpty Dumpty apart like this, just like there could never be any King’s horses and men that could come close to succeeding at putting old Humpty back together again. Humpty’s broken.

Considerable contention complicates our response. As usual, the Old Status Quo prefers to take his time considering even the most urgently necessary changes. Our response will be guaranteed to be slower than ideal, but when have we responded in any way but hesitantly? We speak glowingly of seizing days, but we most often let them slip away in another Cascade racing to some unimagined pool nearer some bottom. I have faith that we’ll find the handle on this crisis, too, but not because I know how we’ll ultimately manage to succeed. That’s why I need faith to believe. If I had proof, I wouldn’t need to have faith to bolster my flagging optimism. I can’t even explain what just happened, let alone imagine how we’ll ever manage to pick up those casually tossed pickup sticks again. My future Prosperity apparently must rely on some form of magic to manifest. It’s that magic, not God, that I trust. I anticipate Cascades I cannot quite explain.

We live in a Do It Yourself world, one where, like the Mythical American Cowboy, those of us well-entrained to our culture firmly believe that we can and rightly should be capable of being our own benefactor. It’s not just that we’re supposed to be self-made; we’re also supposed to maintain whatever it was that we made all by ourselves. In fact, none of us ever managed to produce much without assistance. The Mythical American Cowboy was a Marlboro Man, and he died of lung cancer at an alarmingly young age. He was handsome for a remarkably brief period before the Cascades got him, and he went permanently nonlinear. Our American Prosperity Experiment emerged from certain uncertain Cascades and never left. It’s recently turned disarmingly nonlinear, and we’ll have to stick together and battle the Mythical American Cowboy within ourselves if we ever hope to successfully resurrect our Lost Prosperity again. We seem at least obligated to deal with this world as it is, rather than as we might have believed it was supposed to be forever and ever. Amen.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Prosperity, #PureSchmaltz