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One of the big shiny things that collapsed in 2001 was the economy.
First the dot.com's imploded at the beginning of the year (bringing
a flood of cheap Aeron chairs for sale) and then the economy sagged.
After over a decade of sustained growth, here comes a hangover.
We've been in a recession since March. Unlike other recessions,
this one has touched every state and nearly every sector of the
economy (health care and housing being the odd exceptions). Unemployment
is rising and you probably know people who've lost their jobs. Try
planning a ski trip with your buddies this year and some of them
will probably decide they can't afford it. Maybe they're between
jobs or maybe they're silently distressed at how low the numbers
can go on a mutual fund. A lot of the unemployed in California are
casualties of the Silicon Valley's latter day gold rush, wandering
around with a dazed look in their eye and a bad taste in their mouth
every time they hear the words 'stock option'. There's a whole generation
of us who have never had to deal with this sort of downturn. I didn't
even know what a recession was until 2001, when I had to look it
up.
2001 also demonstrated what happens when the precarious balance
between supply and demand is thrown out of whack. Normally, these
sort of soft factors duke it out with each other without bringing
undue attention to themselves: they go out back and come back when
it's all sorted out. The worst-case scenario used to be skyrocketing
gasoline prices, such as we saw last summer when doom-and-gloom-sayers
predicted a $3 gallon of gasoline that never happened. Supply and
demand got up in each other's faces, someone got hit, then they
shook hands, and now I can fill my tank for about $10 again. But
2001 saw a messy supply and demand crisis of nearly theological
proportions when the phrase "rolling blackouts" entered
the vernacular.
There's something almost religious about electricity. You can't
see it and you don't know how it works (you engineering students
shut up; I'm trying to make a point). But it's there when you need
it. You can count on it. You flick the switch and it courses through
your television, your kitchen lights, your garage door opener, no
questions asked. In electricity we trust. And then last summer electricity
left the state of California for hours at a time and for reasons
many of us still don't understand. Energy is as big, shiny, and
mysterious as God and it collapsed on a few occasions in 2001. Consider
that this year also saw history's largest bankruptcy when the $60
billion energy company Enron shut its doors and put 21,000 employees
out of work.
A new kind of villain
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