Gittins! endorses catatonic ignorance

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In a video that defines the ethos of a generation, Ross Gittins this morning comes clean with his frustration that you are interested in what happens overseas and in the future. As an alternative he endorses blind optimism (or should we call it catatonic ignorance) as the way forward for you and your family.

Please watch this video. In it Gittins! lambasts you for paying attention to the world around you. He lambasts the media for endeavouring to fathom what the future holds before providing his own predictions. He lambasts you for listening to “experts” (except himself of course, and the psychologists he cites who have diagnosed your condition as ” an illusion of control”).

He suggests instead that you just get back to buying more stuff.

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Unwittingly, Gittins! has exposed the very baby-boomer ethos of endless and pathological optimism that brought us (yes, including Australia) to its current debt-laden impasse. Decades of don’t worry be happy policy-making and media clap trap has surely pushed everyone to take on more debt than was ever sensible.

It is only fitting that such a world view end with the advice that you stick your head firmly between your legs.

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About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.