LAST week, I was reminded how fortunate I was that I live only just over a kilometre from my book-shop.

I was doubly fortunate that afternoon because my car, running on empty, prompted me to pull into a gas station, and not a gridlock of cars was in sight. Back at my computer, what? Petrol prices up. But didn’t the Prime Minister himself just the weekend before mumble something about looking at a hike in September? Nah, cannot be, must be my failing memory. First thing to be jettisoned that evening were plans for dinner anywhere. The road in front of the complex at eight o’clock was chock-a-block with unmoving cars farting hot carbon. The wife was at the apex of a traffi c snarl just a few hundred metres from our home. For the fi rst time in our 11 years in that neighbourhood, the presence of a petrol station was a curse. At 11pm when it looked like the same cars were still fuming in front of the complex and my wife didn’t love me enough to venture out for a rescue mission, I walked home – in a brisk 28 minutes I am proud to say. While walking, I thought: How many millions of vehicles, say from fi ve in the evening, of the many fi nishing work and prompted by SMS, were queuing up to save a few ringgit, till midnight? How many barrels of oil went up in smoke in that tedious wait, and mad scramble? Not to mention the many vehicles that just wanted to get home but that got jammed into the nationwide fuming session too. Yes, I bet a lot of the drivers and passengers in lots of cars all over the land were fuming, in spite of the air-con. So, how much was burnt up to save how much? Only voodoo economics has the answer, I suppose. Voodoo economics? Yeah, you know, the macro fi gures giant brains feed us to make us feel good, like last year’s GDP being 6.3 per cent, that the poverty rate is down to a much regretted but still commendably low 3.6 per cent, that from 2004 to 2007 the average household income had increased from RM3,249 to RM3,686. Yeah, a 13.4 per cent increase in three years, but how many per cent increase is it for petrol? What’s the percentage increase in electricity tariffs? What about the 34.9 percent and the 31.4 percent weight given to food and non-alcoholic beverages in the Consumer Price Index for the years 2000 and 2005 respectively? Does this mean I’m eating 3.5 percent less? Not bad, I supposed, considering the price of mee and meat and fi sh and… The newspapers have been so helpful. Pages everyday advising me how to change my lifestyle. I must persuade my wife to give up her plants on the tiny balcony of our apartment, replace them with vegetables. Instead of shooing away the pigeons, we should welcome their daily barrage of crap. Since we don’t use airconditioners, the space could be used to hem in a couple of hens, and if anyone kicks up a stink at the residents’ association meeting, we can retaliate about those residents whose dogs pee and poo in the lifts. On the walk back that night, I was reminded of Malthus, a gothic footnote when I fi rst studied Economics in Sixth Form. Then the teacher wanted us students to be keen on Keynes. Economics was a rational science with piegraphs and intersecting curves of supply and demand determining price, the whole edifi ce premised on growth. So, Malthus with his cataclysmic clash of growing numbers of people with diminishing natural resources, should be regarded as an overwrought imagination. More voodoo economics? We have been warned that by 2014, we will be an oil-importing country. Petronas, poor thing, is scraping the bottom of the barrel, we are told. Bite the bullet. Tighten the belt. Take the medicine. We will ride this out… said the bus-driver as he explored a ravine. ● Former editor and leader writer Thor Kah Hoong would like to change his lifestyle, but he can’t afford it.

Source: Malay Mail – June 10, 2008