The Christmas Bookcase.

Christmas is almost here!  At least, that is what I see at my neighborhood Lowes.  The hardware chain seems to be suffering from schizophrenia as it features large displays of both Halloween and Christmas decorations.  Neither holiday display motivates me to purchase anything, since what few decorations we put up have been up for years.  As I write this, there are still stockings hanging from the mantle: we’ve decided to leave them there until somebody puts something in them.

There is one Christmas decoration that I have long wanted, one that I used to unsuccessfully lobby for:  the Christmas Bookcase.  Every Christmas, my wife, The Doc, would demand a live Christmas tree, which come January, we would plant in the yard.  Over the years, we planted so many trees in the yard that even though we live in New Mexico, we can only see the sun for about a half hour a day.  Our house is in the middle of a self-imposed forest.  (In hindsight, planting pine trees around a pool is an act of incredible stupidity.  Fishing the needles and pinecones out of the pool is damn near a full-time job.)

“Instead of a tree, why not put up a new bookcase for Christmas,” I argued.  “It’s made from wood, we can still decorate it, and instead of putting the presents on the ground where the cats will unwrap them, we can put them on the shelves.  Then, after Christmas, we can push it up against a wall and put all the books we read this year on it.”

My annual holiday suggestion was always rejected out of hand, and yet another tree was planted in our yard.  Neighbors look at our shadowy mini-forest and mutter, “They love darkness rather than light for their deeds are evil.”  

The idea of a Christmas Bookcase may yet come true, though.  While I’m probably never going to have one of my own, the tiny country of Iceland may come to love my idea, since they are more than halfway there already.  In the incredibly wise and civilized country of Iceland, books are exchanged as Christmas Eve presents, then the recipients spend the rest of the night in bed reading them and eating chocolate.  This tradition is called Jolabokaflod, which evidently translates out to “The Christmas Book Flood”.

Jolabokflod is a relatively new holiday for a country already rich with Christmas traditions.  Thirteen days before December 24, the children of Iceland leave their shoes by the window so that the 13 Yule Lads, the elves who are the sons of mountain trolls with impossible names desperately in need of vowels, can fill their shoes with presents.  There are the usual Christmas trees, the exchanges of presents, and family feasts, but during the partying, you have to keep an eye out for Jólakötturinn, the giant Yule Cat who lurks around the holiday parties, snatching up and devouring anyone who has not received new clothes by Christmas Eve.

To show the true genius of the Icelanders, they split New Year’s into two separate days, Old Year’s Day for the last day of December, and New Year’s Day for the first day of January.  Both days are celebrated with parties and fireworks.  Then, thirteen days after Christmas Eve, there are bonfires and more celebrations, so everyone can say goodbye to the elves until the next Christmas.  These are people who clearly understand the value of a good party.

With all these rich traditions, why would the people feel the need to add a new one, one that involved books?  The answer, like the unfortunate answer to so many history questions, is “war”.  

At the start of World War II, Iceland was still more or less part of Denmark and recognized King Christian X as the head of state.  When the war started, Denmark declared its neutrality, as did Iceland.  Germany, however, ignored such claims, occupied Denmark and was clearly interested in having a military presence based in Iceland.  Britain, which could not possibly survive the war without sea trade with America, tried desperately to pressure Iceland into joining the Allied cause as a co-belligerent.  When this failed, Great Britain invaded the neutral island nation with both British and Canadian troops.  By the summer of 1941, these troops were replaced with American troops, who would stay in Iceland until the end of the war.  Despite the occupation, Iceland remained neutral and declared itself an independent republic in June 1944.

During the war, Iceland continued to export fish to England, but imports of manufactured goods to the island slowed to a trickle, and those of luxury goods stopped completely.  By the second year of the war, some restrictions were lifted, particularly those for paper products.  Iceland, already a highly literate society, promptly began producing its own books.  This sudden availability of books after years of wartime privation made new books the perfect Christmas gift (with a little help from Hobson’s choice).  By 1944, Iceland began publishing the Journal of Books, a list of all the new books available in Iceland.  The publication is freely distributed each year in the months just before Christmas so that everyone can select the books they want to read and the books they want to give as gifts to their friends and family members.

Today, in part because of this new tradition, Iceland is the third most literate country in the world, ahead of both England and the United States.  Even more surprisingly, Iceland is one of the most creative societies that has ever existed, where artists and authors abound.  One out of every ten adult Icelanders has authored a published book.  One in four adults works as a creative artist of some form.  The island has almost no crime, a very high standard of living, and consistently ranks the safest country in the world.  (Mothers let their infants take unsupervised naps outdoors!)  Perhaps, this is why the island nation has been ranked as one of the five happiest places to live on earth

Iceland is by all accounts one of the most civilized, free-thinking, and creative places on Earth.  I’m confident they will understand and accept my idea of the Christmas bookcase.  If it weren’t so damn cold, I might move there.

For the Record

Back in the 1970’s, the only form of entertainment available to The Doc and me were a rather small collection of records (almost exclusively hers) and our stereo.  We spent long hours listening to the Beatles, Cat Stevens, Rick Wakeman, Simon and Garfunkle, and The Mamas and the Poppas.  We loved those records and still have most of them.

By the end of the eighties, though we still had those old records, we seldom listened to anything but our newer, and better sounding compact discs.  Today, another few decades later, just as compact discs are inevitably going the way of 8-track tapes and cassette players, The Doc refuses to give up her CD player.  And even more strange, What’s-His-Name, our son, has become convinced that the best music comes from those age-old vinyl records.

By the end of the eighties, CD sales had passed those of records.  Twenty years later, the few records still being produced were almost a novelty item.  Then, suddenly, in 2007, the demand for vinyl records began increasing.  Misguided enthusiasts, like my son, became convinced that vinyl records with analog recordings were far superior to any digital recording method.  (I’m not going to argue the matter:  these days if I’m listening to something, it is going to be an audible book.  My iPhone has almost 300 books on it and about a dozen songs—half of which are songs from the Civil War.)

Record production is now close to 200 million platters a year, and that is just for the American market.  According to the manufacturers, the present demand is easily twice what can be produced, and the producers of such records are ramping up production as fast as they can. 

That music records are having an unexpected revival is surprising.  Almost as surprising as the fact that such records ever existed at all, since the inventor of the phonograph was absolutely certain that there was absolutely no market for such recordings.

There is some confusion as to the exact date that Thomas Edison completed the invention due to conflicting entries the inventor made in his notebooks.  Depending on which entry you want to believe, sometime late in November 1877, Edison gave the plans for a working model to John Kruesi, one of his machinists at his Menlo Park laboratory. 

“What’s this supposed to be,” asked Kruesi, as he delivered the finished brass and steel model.  Powered by a hand crank, It had a grooved cylinder, three and a half inches wide, onto which a tinfoil cylinder could be attached.

Edison replied, “The machine must talk.”

Edison recorded that Kruesi thought the idea was absurd and bet a cigar that the experiment would not work.  The inventor carefully wrapped a sheet of thin tinfoil around the cylinder, moved the needle into place, and then began cranking the machine while speaking loudly into the diaphragm:

Mary had a little lamb,
Its fleece was white as snow,
And everywhere that Mary went
The lamb was sure to go.

Edison then moved the needle back to the starting point and began cranking the machine again.  To the amazement of everyone, the high-pitched voice of Edison was easily recognized as he repeated the Mother Goose rhyme.  Edison himself was surprised that the first attempt had worked, and called the machine a phonograph, the Greek words for “sound” and “writing”.

For a full year, the phonograph was a technical novelty, frequently displayed at fairs and exhibitions, but was never used for any practical purpose due to the machine’s limitations.  The tin foil was incredibly delicate, wore out quickly, and could hold at most about sixty seconds of recorded sound.  The machine was fragile, required constant adjustment, and had to be cranked at a steady speed.  Positioning the needle was such a tedious task that even Edison admitted that only an expert could do it properly.  Edison simply abandoned the project for a year while he worked on his light bulb.

For the newspapers, Edison compiled a list of ten possible uses for his new invention:  Letter writing, audible books for the blind, the teaching of elocution, talking clocks and statues were the prominent items on the list.  While music made the list, it was fourth, behind the teaching of elocution.  Privately, Edison doubted that the machine would prove useful for any of the uses listed.  For the inventor, his newly invented device was just an offshoot of experiments to improve the telephone.

A year later, Edison admitted to a newspaper reporter that the phonograph was “a mere toy, that has no commercial value.”  The inventor believed that rival inventors wouldn’t even bother to pirate his invention, since it was little more than a scientific curiosity.  Edison abandoned work on the phonograph for a full decade while he began work on the incandescent lightbulb.

Note.  In a coincidence too wild to be believable, while writing this blog, my eight-year-old granddaughter, Bailey, called me to tell me that today was the anniversary of Edison’s light bulb.  She had no idea I even have a blog, much less that I was writing about Edison tonight.  Weird.

A decade later, Chichester Bell, the brother of Alexander Graham Bell, came to Edison a decade later with an offer to partner with Edison’s company to produce phonographs commercially did the inventor decide to devote himself once again to improving the phonograph.  Over the next few weeks, the machine was completely redesigned.  A clockwork mechanism was developed to turn the cylinder, which in turn had been improved by replacing the delicate tinfoil with a cardboard tube coated with a specially hardened wax that could hold two minutes of recorded sound.

And though Edison invited several famous musicians to come to Menlo Park to demonstrate the phonograph, he was convinced that the phonograph’s future lay in the business world, not in entertainment.  Even as Edison hired thousands of employees to manufacture and market the phonograph, the inventor was determined that it be used as a dictation device for producing letters.

Secretaries, then almost exclusively male, were so concerned that the new phonograph would cause mass unemployment in their ranks that a boycott was organized, and protests were held.  As with most protests against new technology that increases productivity (usually referred to as  creative destruction), the protests failed to prevent the machine from selling.  

Edison was adamant against marketing the phonograph for the purposes of entertainment.  “I don’t want the phonograph sold for amusement purposes.  It is not a toy.  I want it sold for business purposes only,” said the inventor.  When told that a company was selling cylinders in Germany with recordings of orchestral music, Edison refused to believe it.  

Edison was nearly deaf and had some particularly strange ideas about music.  He hated Italian and German music and he did not care for most of the music popular at the time.  Nor did he have much respect for musicians, refusing to put their name on the few entertainment recordings he allowed up until 1910.  After recording a famous pianist, Edison unflinchingly told the artist that he had played a note incorrectly.  When the musician insisted that he had not, Edison offered to play back the recording and point out the errors.  The now indignant pianist left the studio without replying.

It was only after the competing Bell Gramophone Company was sold and reorganized as the Columbia Phonographic Company (since reorganized as the Columbia Broadcasting System or simply CBS) and it began focusing on producing cylinders for entertainment that Edison changed his mind and began to produce large numbers of recording cylinders with music..  The decision to focus on entertainment came too late, allowing his competitors to capture a large share of the market.  By the end of the 1920’s, the Edison Phonographic Company had closed its doors, moving the employees to Edison’s radio production company.

I have no idea how long the current craze for phonograph records will last.  If it ends tomorrow, it will have lasted about 140 years longer than Edison thought.

I can’t resist one last story about Edison.  When the famous African explorer Henry Stanley visited Edison to see the newly invented phonograph, Stanley impulsively asked which person throughout history the inventor would most like to have a recording of.

“Napoleon,” Edison answered immediately.

“No, no, no,” replied Stanley.  “I would prefer the voice of our savior.”

“Well,” said Edison.  “I prefer a hustler.”

USS Neversink

Near as I can figure it, I live about 700 miles from the nearest large body of water.  Thanks to the Army Corps of Engineers, I live near a couple of lakes and even near a river that actually has a little water in it about six months out of the year. The rest of the desert is drier than Amarillo on Sunday.  Like many other people who live so far from an ocean, I’m fascinated with books about the days of sail.

The house fairly drips with history books about naval warfare during the time of Napoleon, mixed in with books by Forrester, Monsarratt, O’Brian, and Ransome.  Some of the best of these are those written by Herman Melville, particularly Moby Dick and Billy Budd.  There is one book by Melville, however, that—while I enjoyed it—I would suggest that you put at the end of your reading list: White-Jackets.  The fifth of Melville’s books, White Jackets is sort of a rough draft that eventually evolved into those two later books, both of which are more fun to read.

Melville is an interesting author of sea-faring novels:  his work is so thoroughly researched that what some readers think are outrageous feats of creative fiction are actually pretty accurate historical accounts.  Melville spent time in the merchant navy, sailed aboard whalers, and enlisted in the United States Navy, where he served aboard the USS United States.

The very first ship in our navy, the USS United States, was named by President George Washington, and was the first of the American ‘Super Frigates’.  At the time of her construction, frigates were fourth rate ships of the line, far smaller and less well armed that first rate ships of the line such as the HMS Victory that Lord Nelson used at the Battle of Trafalgar.  First rate ships of the line and the fleet of necessary support vessels were far too expensive for a fledgling nation to maintain, nor were we likely to need them unless we were stupid enough to declare war on a major naval power like France or Great Britain.  (Unfortunately, we did both in the next fifteen years.)

Since we couldn’t afford a ship of the line, we sort of fudged a little.  The United States and her sister ships, like the USS Constitution, were larger and carried far more armament than the usual frigate but were still small enough to be faster than larger ships of the line, enabling these super frigates to be able to run away from anything they couldn’t beat in a naval battle.  This is the same general idea as the pocket battleships used during World War II.

The USS United States fought the Barbary Pirates, she fought the French during the Quasi War, and she was the heroine of the War of 1812.  Shortly before that war started, the British captain of the HMS Macedonian wagered a beaver skin hat to his close friend, Captain Stephen Decatur, that should the two ships ever meet in combat, the Macedonian would be victorious.  When the war started a few months later, Decatur easily won the bet when the USS United States dismasted and captured the Macedonian.  I’m still not sure if Decatur ever received that beaver skin hat, but the prize commission rewarded him handsomely for adding a new ship to our navy.

A less famous (if not notorious) victory occurred in 1841.  While sailing in the Pacific, Commodore of the Pacific Squadron, Thomas ap Catesby Jones, spotted a British ship hurriedly sailing north.  Since he knew that war with Mexico was imminent, he suspected that the British ship was attempting to capture California, that was then still a part of Mexico.  Sailing northward, the USS United States captured Monterey from the puzzled Mexicans defending it, demanding the surrender of all of California.  The next day, the Commodore learned that the United States was not at war with Mexico, and apologetically gave the town back.  This might have been the end of a naval career had he not learned that the British ship had actually captured Hawaii, so he sailed there and forced the Brits to give the islands back to the Kingdom of Hawaii.  This was a few decades before we seized it ourselves and more than a century before Hawaii became a state.

Shortly after this, Melville served as a sailor on the vessel, where he witnessed the incredible harsh discipline and deplorable living conditions imposed upon the ordinary seamen by the ship’s officers.  The ship’s own log lists over 160 floggings in the year Melville was aboard.  This was the material that the author used to write White-Jacket, with many of the book’s characters plainly patterned after the ship’s actual officers.  When the book was printed, the publisher sent a copy to every member of the United States Senate.  The book was directly responsible for the Navy’s outlawing flogging aboard ships of the U.S. Navy.  (The senator who introduced the bill was the father of the fiancée to John Wilkes Booth, the man who shot President Lincoln.  But, that's a story for another day.)

When Melville served on the ship, it was already old, approaching half a century in age, which was an unbelievably long time for a wooden-hulled ship to remain in service, so the author named the ship in his novel the USS Neversink.  This was a pretty good joke at the time, but as it turned out, the ship still had a few more decades of life than Melville realized.

The navy finally retired the old ship, decommissioning her in Norfolk, Virginia, where she spent many years slowly rotting while tied to a dock.  In April 1861, the Confederate forces were moving towards the naval base and the remaining federal forces were ordered to destroy everything of value before the rebels could capture the port.  An old wooden ship more than sixty years old, left rotting for more than a decade, wasn’t even worth the bother of setting on fire, so the navy just left her tied to the dock as they evacuated ahead of the Confederate Army.

The Confederate forces, desperate for ships, recommissioned the ship, loading her up with guns and used the ship for harbor defense.  With a sense of humor not normally attributed to the Confederacy, the ship was named the CSS United States!  (Or maybe the Confederates were just superstitious, as it is considered bad luck to rename a ship.  In any case, the Union navy referred to her as the CSS Confederate States.)

A year later, when Union forces were moving to recapture Norfolk, the Confederates decided to sink the vessel in the middle of the Elizabeth River to block Union ships.  Confederate sailors destroyed a crate of axes trying to hack a hole through her hold, and finally had to drill holes through the solid hull to sink her.  The dense, hard white oak used to build these ships is the reason her sister ship, the USS Constitution, is nicknamed Old Ironsides.

Even when finally sunk, the ship didn’t stay down for long.  The federal forces easily refloated her and took her back to Norfolk Navy Yard.  In 1864, the Navy finally ordered the ship broken up and the still valuable wood was sold at auction.  Which, I guess, is better than being sunk.

Survey Time at Enema U

Enema U has declared war on classrooms again.  There are administrators who firmly believe a perfect university would be divided into two spheres, a large area consisting of administrative offices, and a smaller area consisting of dorms, cafeterias, parking spaces, and a bookstore.  The purpose of the latter area is dedicated to separating students from their money as fast as possible.

It goes without saying that all of the above is just a carbuncle on the backside of a bad football team that loses millions of dollars annually.  There is evidently no reason to have an institution of higher learning except to serve as a life support system for poor athletics.  Exactly why politicians in one of the poorest states in the union continue to pour millions and millions of dollars down a drain so the state can have two losing college football teams is still a mystery.  (Personally, I believe it has something to do with coaches in possession of photographs of certain plutocrats in bed with either live boys or dead girls.)

For years now, the administration has pushed as many classes as possible onto the internet, believing that “distance education” offers the best chance of collecting tuition while not having to actually see, hear, or speak to a student.  Or the disgusting faculty.  For a moment, putting the entire curriculum online seemed within reach…. but students started complaining about the logic of being forced to live in the dorms and buy those expensive gruel plans to use in the cafeteria if they were never going to be allowed inside a classroom.

Administrators don’t care to learn what most faculty have long since known—distance education is a piss poor way to run a classroom.   While the occasional autodidact will learn in spite of the delivery system, for the most part students will pretend to learn while the faculty will pretend to teach.  Rarely does anyone ever address the real question on everyone’s mind:  If online education really works, why would a student enroll for classes at Enema U, a poor agricultural school in a poor state?  Why not enroll at Stan-Bridge-Ford University, Incorporated?  And don’t think that idea isn’t being discussed at some large Ivy League university looking for more money to support their own losing football team.

Suddenly, students are being inundated with surveys about what they think the campus should look like.  The survey questions are carefully written to steer the responses towards the results that will support what the administration has already decided to do.  None of the questions allows the student to describe his real opinion:  rather, he is asked to pick his preference from four tiny pictures, three of which depict a pig pen on fire.

I’m not sure why the head squirrels even bother with the charade of hiring an expert—always being an out-of-town friend of someone in the Administration who will someday return the favor—to write these phony surveys.  Students get so much of this nonsense that the response rate is probably no better than the average Nigerian prince gets from his spam emails.  Nor would it matter since the results of the survey are as predetermined as a Russian election.

I have seen this charade before.  Years ago, I was selected to serve on a faculty committee to determine the design for a new classroom building.  For months, we met with architects—none of whom had ever taught a single class in any subject anywhere—who nevertheless told us that all of our ideas about what a classroom should look like were outmoded, obsolete, and ridiculous.  Since most of us wanted an improved lecture hall, we were obviously retarded.  No, the modern classroom was completely different.

“The ‘Sage on the Stage’ is dead,” we were told.  No longer would students sit in a tiered classroom watching some egghead on a raised platform lecture.  Instead, learning should be collaborative, the furniture should be on wheels to facilitate group learning, and every wall in the room should be a ‘learning wall’, which presumably meant that it would have some kind of electronic screen.  

It didn’t matter that no faculty member on the committee had ever even seen such a classroom, or that none of us believed that we would ever teach that way:  we were overruled, and a final blueprint was finally approved whose classrooms no faculty member would ever willingly use.  As it turned out, it didn’t matter, since the approved blueprint was thrown out by the administration and a completely different design was used (one with fewer classrooms and more administrative offices).

The resulting building did have something that the recent student survey really focused on—collaborative learning spaces.  These spaces, which are so very important to people who have never taught, are large open spaces outside of classrooms, where students and faculty can meet informally and discuss important matters.  Deep, deep important matters!

What horseshit.  Before a lecture, a good professor is reviewing lecture notes, checking email, and making sure the PowerPoint presentation is loaded into a computer.  After a lecture, a good professor is headed directly to his office to recover and to start grading papers.  Unless, of course, he has back-to-back lectures and must hurry on to the next classroom which is probably located in a different building.  Neither the students nor the professor has the luxury of sufficient time to lounge around those common areas and hold court.  The whole idea of ‘learning spaces’ is foolish.  If students have the time between classes to study, they are going to do it in a library, in their dorm, or in a computer lab.

For some reason, the administration does not see the obvious contradiction of its two desired goals:  How do you promote distance learning while holding on to the ideal of collaborative leaning spaces?  

Increasingly, when classrooms are built, they are crowded, smaller rooms, without tiered seating.  The old heavy furniture is being replaced with lightweight small tables and seats not much larger than those provided by budget airlines flying people unfortunate to be traveling peasant class.  While every room is guaranteed to have an expensive computer and projector, the screen is most likely covering most—if not all—of the white board.  (And damn it, provide the faculty with unlimited amounts of black dry erase markers.  Have you ever tried to read pale green handwriting on a small board inconveniently located in the far corner of a rectangular classroom?)

I suspect, but cannot prove, that most of these silly ideas come from people teaching elementary and secondary public schools.  This is an area where I have almost no experience outside of teaching a single history course one summer for high school students with disciplinary problems who had been expelled during the regular term.  (I taught it like a regular college course and after beaning a rude student with an eraser the first day of class, the rest of the summer went perfectly normally.  In total, they were much better students than you would find in the College of Education.)

The needs of teaching at a university are nothing like the needs of a third-grade classroom.  Students are required to spend the entire day in the latter while a decade later those same students have to pay to spend an hour in the former.  So, there is no reason to design a university lecture hall to look like a kindergarten classroom.  And yes, if I have only 55 minutes to explain the Protestant Reformation to 100 students who can’t spell either word, you can be damn certain I’m going to lecture because I am the ‘Sage on the Stage’.

And you better take notes on that tiny little wobbly desk, as there will be a quiz on Thursday.

If He’s Correct, the Rest of the World is Screwed

Unless you are a politician running for reelection, we are in a recession.  So is the rest of the world.  And most of us—at least those who live outside of Washington D. C—know that one of the prime reasons for the recession is a mounting rate of inflation.

The causes of inflation have been long known: there is too much money available in the market for the current level of production.  Simply put, there are too many dollars chasing too few products.  (Or as Milton Friedman put it, “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.”)

Most countries, including the United States, have a central bank that attempts to counter inflation by reducing the amount of money available, and while there are several ways to accomplish this, one of the most effective means of doing so is to raise the prevailing interest rate, making it harder to borrow money.  Given time, this will bring down inflation.  It is what our Federal Reserve is doing now, it is what the Bank of Japan is doing now, it is what the Swiss National Bank is doing now…. It is what almost all of Europe is doing. 

If this sounds confusing, picture an auction where everyone bidding has exactly a thousand dollars in their pocket.  Will the bidding go higher or lower if everyone in the audience suddenly has two thousand dollars?

There is one country in Europe that has a different idea.  Turkey is not only not raising its interest rate, Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey is lowering it.  Despite the Turks’ calling themselves a republic, since Turkey elected President Recep Erdoğan, he has been increasingly autocratic, ignoring both the desires of the central bank and the nation’s Supreme Court…And Erdogan has some “unusual”, contrarian ideas about economics.

Erdoğan received his primary education at a private Islamic academy and  claims to have graduated from a Turkish university, although no official record of his attending the university exists.  His unique theories about economics seem to be all his own creation.  The Turkish president firmly believes that the correct method of fighting inflation is to lower interest rates—repeatedly—until inflation returns to the generally accepted target range of 2-3%.

If Erdoğan is correct, the economies of the rest of the Western World will crash and Turkey is about to enter their Golden Age of Prosperity.  President Erdoğan will win a fistful of Nobel Prizes and have chapters in textbooks named after him.  If he is wrong—and I’ll bet money on it—Turkey is about to get flushed down the economic toilet while Erdoğan will get added to the long list of crackpot dictators like Idi Amin (though Uganda was landlocked Amin made himself an admiral of the Ugandan Navy) or the Congo King who imposed a tax on his subjects each time his hat fell off. 

Despite criticism from damn near everyone—that is, everyone who lives outside of Turkey—that this is the economic equivalent of trying to put out a forest fire with buckets of gasoline, Erdoğan insists on doing the exact opposite of what the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund insist is sound economic policy.  Just yesterday, he ordered his Central Bank to lower the rate, again.  Naturally, the bankers followed his mandate while praising his sage advice.  (That is good policy, since people who don’t do what Erdoğan wants tend to be arrested.  Or worse.)

Lowering interest rates will make borrowing money much easier and those rising prices will definitely make borrowing more money an attractive idea to businesses struggling to meet their obligations.  And the more money that is in the economy means prices will continue to spiral upward, making Turkish products more expensive on the world market, leading to a trade deficit and a lower exchange rate for the Turkish lira.

Erdoğan would say that everything in the previous paragraph is exactly backwards and I’m wrong.  I’m not sure what he would say if I pointed out that Turkey currently has an annual inflation rate of 80%, that the Turkish Lira has declined in value 28% against the dollar so far this year and has declined three times that amount over the last five years.

He might just say that his monetary policy simply needs more time to start working.

Unfortunately, time is not on Turkey’s side.  As the dollar rises and the lira falls, Turkey is burning through its cash reserves faster than a drunken sailor on shore leave.  (That may not be a fair comparison, since a drunken sailor will stop spending after running out of money, but Erdoğan won’t.). Since most of Turkey’s foreign debts are dollar-denominated, it will become increasingly hard for Turkey to meet its financial obligations.

Erdoğan got a brief, small reprieve via an influx of foreign currency when tourists returned to Turkey at the end of the pandemic.  The reprieve was brief because the tourist season is ending, and the reprieve was small because most of the tourists were from Russia—Turkey happens to be just about the only place that the Russian tourists could go because of the various sanctions placed on Russia in response to the war in Ukraine.

If I were to consult my crystal ball, I would predict that the next step in this drama will be for Turkey to add a night shift at the Treasury Department in order to print more lira to keep up with the rising costs.  With just a little effort, Turkey can easily move from high inflation to hyper-inflation.  Then, after a couple of years of this, Erdoğan will announce that all Turkish citizens have to exchange their “old” Lira for New Lira, that are printed in the same denominations but with a handful of zeros lopped off at the end.

As the recession gets worse, so will unemployment.  Taxes will rise, the cost of living will skyrocket, personal savings will be wiped out, and the country will undergo significant capital flight as anyone with more than pocket change will try to move their assets out of Turkey.  

Eventually, Erdoğan will probably remove the last vestiges of democratic rule and try to restart his own private version of the Ottoman Empire, as well as likely also leaving NATO in the process and realigning himself more closely with Russia.

Or the Turkish people might remove President Erdoğan while there is still time to correct what will otherwise become a snowballing economic nightmare.  Because if there is one thing I am certain about, it’s that lowering interest rates will never end inflation…anywhere.