梦见杀狼见血他还看你:2012: A Year of Choices (4)

There’s No Going Back

The problem is that there is another type of path, one that we cannot retrace. After we choose that sort of path, the way back is blocked, and we must go on dealing with the consequences of our chosen path. We may come to forks in the road and vary our directions on the path, but we can’t turn back, no matter how much we would like to. We can choose other paths into the future, but the past will always be there.

If we make a bad investment, we will lose money. I can’t ask the market to give me back my money if the stock I picked goes down. If I own a business that is dependent on one customer and I lose that customer, I am out of business. If a bank lends money to someone who can’t pay the money back, it is going to take a loss (unless it is a subprime mortgage and they can find some pension fund in Europe to buy it because Moody’s say a whole bunch of bad loans are now suddenly AAA).

If you are eight months pregnant, you can’t go back to being just four months pregnant. It is better to make the wise, if harder, choice as soon as you can.

And then there is yet another category of paths, the ones that are chosen for us, whether by family, circumstances, or fate; and once on them we don’t know what we may have missed on alternative ones. Parents move to a different town and take the kids with them. A “chance” meeting becomes a new business endeavor. A torn muscle forces a promising athlete into another career. War erupts and changes the plans of young men. Accidents happen.

Let’s look at an example of a seemingly small choice that had large consequences much later. In 1953 some CIA types, with the blessing of senior US and British administrators, decided it would be a good idea to replace the elected prime minister of Iran with the Shah, who would more or less do what we asked and keep Iran from turning communist, which was a big deal in Western government circles at the time. And who really cared? We were focused on the Korean War and Russia and China, nuclear threats, and all sorts of other “distractions.” It was a different time and culture. We trusted our government to do what was right to keep us safe. There was barely a mention of Iran in the papers.

And eventually (1979) we got the Iranian revolution and the rise of the Islamist parties, with Iranian support, throughout the Mideast. Fearing that an Islamist revolution might develop in some of its republics, Russia panicked and invaded Afghanistan. An otherwise low-profile Democratic Congressman from Texas named Charlie “Good Time” Wilson (he did like to party) decided to make the Afghanistan rebels his personal cause, and “traded” all sorts of favors to get what became massive secret funding for the Afghanis, who not only succeeded but turned into the Taliban and helped train and arm a young Saudi named Osama bin Laden. And then along came 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Could any of that have been foreseen in 1953?（蝴蝶效应） Is there a path-dependent link? You be the judge. What would have happened if we had not meddled? Perhaps things would have been better, or they might have been worse. We will never know. All we know is what did happen (or at least what we have been told).

We all have a lot of stories about the paths that we chose or the limits of our choices. The good choices we take credit for and the bad choices we blame on circumstances or find some way to rationalize them.

The “invisible hand” of the market is millions of people making their own individual choices. Do we choose to rent or buy a house because one choice is better for the national economy? Why do some companies or unions support trade barriers and tariffs? Because they know that given a free choice individuals will buy the products of companies from “foreign” sources, and they persuade politicians to limit the choices of consumers to protect their own incomes, either by forcing them to pay more for foreign products or to buy inferior, locally made products. “We need to protect our jobs, don’t we?” Even if it means we all pay more for products.

And our choices add up. They become cumulative and create an economic tide. （行为产生了累积效应）Policies and practices that initially seem small in the grand scheme of things can become much more significant when taken together and given a little time.（政策同样产生了累积效应）