Week 2 post – Nathan
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Timorous and Moderation, as used in Joseph Addison’s Allegory of Public Credit.
Timorousness is constant fear, or something that is always timid. As in the allegory, economy tends to be incredibly sensitive to any sort of unrest, shrinking at the fear of war or even just the hint of foul weather. Even though the economy is abnormally timid towards any perceived threats, sometimes the caution towards a dwindling commodity, such as oil, can pay off though it often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy with demand and prices shooting through the roof simply because they were predicted to.
Moderation in regards to the economy however is keeping a steady course with careful and minor adjustments to avoid disaster. Ideally an economy will remain moderate, spending carefully within its bounds and leaving fickle credit sitting on the doorstep. But since the economy is run by human beings, moderation is often just a pipe dream, driven by the ever changing and often unpredictable market.
While at first blush moderation and timorousness seem to be diametrically opposed, but caution often can be an asset. Excessive fear and excessive confidence are both deadly, though in recent years reckless spending has disrupted countries such as the United States and Greece and have begun to suffer during this economic downturn, as well as inflicting collateral damage to their neighbors. Other countries such as Germany however have tried to remain within their means and as a result have remained afloat even as the United States’ economy flounders.
I’d love to see you explore “timorous” and “moderation” with even more attention to how Addison uses them in the Vision, Nathan; but your post is useful in the way it looks at how they relate to the economy generally. Follow-up questions might include asking what timorousness means, in an economic situation — does it mean not using credit, because credit stands in for not having cash? But of course, if people don’t use credit, then what happens to the economy, and the businesses (like banks) that depend on credit being used? That leads me to my final question, and it’s one that I think *can* be approached using the texts we’ve read so far: is timorous economic behavior part of being moderate? You say that moderation is just a pipe dream, and I think (though I could be wrong) that you mean that humans are rarely content with a moderate amount of money — but I think, that if you wanted to revise this post, that you could explore that further with interesting results.
I loved the words you picked and how you compared/contrasted them. I never would have been able to see that myself in Addison’s writing, so I thought you pointed out a really interesting point. I do think that being moderate some what includes being timorous though. And the last sentence in your second paragraph reminds me a lot about what we talked about today with Mandeville’s poem.