Now it’s been weeks since day in day out, we’ve been told about bombing attacks and killings in Israel and Palestine. We’ve gotten used to them, even hardly noticing what’s going on. Meanwhile the people of Gaza are dying, not least children.
Indeed we’ve gotten used to the litanies about the deaths of civilians. In fact they’re dying in greater numbers than military personnel... if that is a meaningful comparison to draw. The death of any person, no matter who he/she is, happens irreversibly.
Still as people get accustomed to the “event”, more so apparently when there are lots of deaths happening, it all becomes like a normal affair which just needs to be integrated into a statistical matrix. In this context, there was an ironic feel about the complaint of Ukrainian President Zelensky that the Israel-Hamas war was making the world forget about the war in his country. Yet, we had gotten used to following statistics about deaths in the Donbass (he seemed to be saying). Now we’re forgetting them because of the death statistics coming out of Gaza.
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THE NEW AND THE OLD
In the competition between the new and the old, the popular belief is that the new will always win. But as a matter of fact, this does not really happen, even if ideally it would be preferable. For the new is more likely to be familiar with the contemporary conditions that define our world and therefore better prepared to adapt and face them. That at least is theoretically what should happen.
An instance of how the old frequently retains the upper hand is the ongoing presidential race in the US. Astonishingly, upfront there are two candidates who no matter what one thinks about them, all must agree to consider as quite elderly. And they are running again in a political race that they were through together four years ago. Would Americans be in a better place if they were facing a different choice?
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THE BUILDING INDUSTRY
Recently I took part in a public discussion about the construction industry in Malta given the framework of the current economic model within which it has developed. Apart from the price levels of apartments on sale, or the environmental concerns the industry arouses, for me the fundamental problem in this discussion was (still is) that the construction sector is discussed in a financial vacuum. When economic aspects are brought into the picture this is only done with reference to the macroeconomic data appearing in statistics related to Gross Domestic Product.
However if the discussion is going to be clearly set, it should also cover the financial dynamics that determine how the industry operates. What is its profitability? How does it generate the funds needed for its operations? What are their sources and uses of such funds? How are cash flows utilised? What does a typical balance sheet of companies which have reached a certain size in the construction sector look like?
Lacking this kind of information, it is difficult to explain how and why building operations are managed in a certain manner, not differently. So decisions that one reads about do sound irrational, like for instance the announcement that a big new hotel is going to be built when everything indicates that today we have many more hotels than we really need, or so it is said.