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I have a bad habit of reading the New York Times in the evening. Lately it's been really depressing. But tonight, as I gave up on the world and went to take a shower, I noticed that, by pure chance, I had stumbled upon what may save us all (or at least me).
I call it the Woes Index.
The idea is simple. Get all the out-of-work bankers milling around Wall Street etc. and create a market to buy and sell all our problems. I often say things like "Well, yeah, your job is awful and moralless, but at least it pays you." In the Woes Index, I could trade my awful job for someone else's awful job. And it could keep the investment bankers busy for years figuring out exactly what utility it would be for me so they could... do whatever it is that I-Bankers actually do. And it wouldn't just have to be things like jobs. Any woe whatsoever could be bundled into some kind of exotic security and traded. Think of the market for pesky, unfulfillable muses! People always have problems, and people always think that others are slightly better off. The thing would basically run itself (but we wouldn't tell the bankers that).
But that's not even the best part. See, the market right now is flooded with un-leveraged woes. Right now, we're basically inflating their value by worrying and not trading them, but, with an actual index to track these things, once the speculators and Madoffs latch on to the whole scheme THE WOES INDEX IS BOUND TO FAIL. It's going to take a few years for things to improve anyway, but think of how much better it would be for the light at the end of the tunnel to be the complete diminishment of all those things that make our lives more annoying?
I call it the Woes Index.
The idea is simple. Get all the out-of-work bankers milling around Wall Street etc. and create a market to buy and sell all our problems. I often say things like "Well, yeah, your job is awful and moralless, but at least it pays you." In the Woes Index, I could trade my awful job for someone else's awful job. And it could keep the investment bankers busy for years figuring out exactly what utility it would be for me so they could... do whatever it is that I-Bankers actually do. And it wouldn't just have to be things like jobs. Any woe whatsoever could be bundled into some kind of exotic security and traded. Think of the market for pesky, unfulfillable muses! People always have problems, and people always think that others are slightly better off. The thing would basically run itself (but we wouldn't tell the bankers that).
But that's not even the best part. See, the market right now is flooded with un-leveraged woes. Right now, we're basically inflating their value by worrying and not trading them, but, with an actual index to track these things, once the speculators and Madoffs latch on to the whole scheme THE WOES INDEX IS BOUND TO FAIL. It's going to take a few years for things to improve anyway, but think of how much better it would be for the light at the end of the tunnel to be the complete diminishment of all those things that make our lives more annoying?
