Economic and financial experts are intoxicated by the narrative
They are often wrong, sometimes for good reasons. So it is not uncommon for our economic and financial experts to tell us the opposite of what will happen. But we forgive them because sometimes they have extenuating circumstances, like in 2022, for example. Who could have foreseen the arrival of aliens and Russians in Ukraine?
The economic consequences of armed conflict will always be inaudible in the face of the inexplicable. Nevertheless, these results are no less useful for clarifying certain facts. For example, then we can attribute the second wind of inflation in Europe to the tension in energy prices (oil and gas from Russia). The second wind of inflation will take the European Central Bank to its limits and the markets to the bottom of the hole.
But the world did not expect Putin to be unpredictable
He was already a long time ago. So much so that we couldn’t explain it after the fact. Even after the incident, it remained incomprehensible. From a certain point of view, then, we’ll say that pundits are just as bad at forecasting (the art of predicting tomorrow) as they are at retro-diction (the art of predicting yesterday).
It’s all right. The expert is not one to be discouraged. He may not be an expert in futurology, but he has nothing else to prove in narratology. It’s about the art of storytelling, the ability to say everything, but not everything. Things you want to hear. Moreover, if what is said is not devoid of style, then we are not far from the ultimate goal, which is the only truth an expert can hope for. Understandably, predictably, the expert will never do better than a wet finger or coffee grounds.
say It shows itself. It’s not that easy. For example, ChatGPT, a revolutionary chatbot, is quite capable of telling stories. But it never occurred to him to “say that to himself”. To be honest, the ambition of the expert is sometimes more modest. He does not always limit the need to listen to his own speech. Sometimes its purpose is simply to occupy the space, the sound space.
The expert therefore wants to wage war with silence
In a perfect world, stupid or useless words are blocked by the good sense of the one who refrains from saying them, and all this then creates what is called dumbness. silence. It is time to recall the only intelligible aphorism of the Treatise of the philosopher or logician Wittgenstein:
“We should be silent about what we cannot talk about. »
Unfortunately, in our world, the speaker does not have a common sense reflex. He believes that being able to speak alone justifies his logorrhea, or verbal diarrhea. He said, maybe everything should not be thrown away? Indeed, in the abundance of extraordinary tales handed down to us by storytellers, we may end up falling for them. true a story, or at least a story that makes sense.
Christian Salmon, Mr. Story Telling, has just shared his thoughts on the art of mastering silence (the “art of silence”). In particular, he suggests that we distinguish between “storytellers” and those who tell ONE story. The first is background noise, elevator music, or even ambiences that create a form of tinnitus. Others are acoustic, sound experts, as if they are whispering something to us with their little inner voices. Ambientists cannot stop themselves from replacing silence with noise, acousticians force themselves to speak only if what they say is more beautiful than silence (Seneca).
Obviously, our economics and finance experts are (most of the time) ambivalent.
The intoxication of the moment
Inevitably, this is when the silence is greatest, because the event is so overwhelming that the ambientist plays and talks more. He is then stripped of his uniformstory drunkennesswe owe this phrase to the writer Camille de Toledo (“the history of vertigo”), who had some doubts about the amount of words we choose to convey to the world.
Today, it seems that we are in this type of moment where uncertainty and the unknown come together. A moment that prefers to fight for a form of restraint, silence, a silence that is not confused but reflective. As if this silence was a search air lock to understand the event. But instead, economics and finance experts have never been so talkative, they prefer a different strategy, to talk as much nonsense as possible (witness how surprising or contradictory the antagonistic scenarios are) in the hope of finding something that makes sense.
