Oh, Henny Penny!

IF you have been reading the current press you can hardly have missed those full-page advertisements showing the face and shoulders of a stern-visaged man who shouts that financial, fiscal, and economic doom is just around the corner. The only way to forestall the consequences of this imminent horror, you are told in the advertisement, is to subscribe to the forecasting “services” or buy the book of this particular Cassandra. He, having powers of prescience not available to the rest of us, will reveal for your $25 or $150 or whatever that you must fill your basement (if you live on the 11th floor of a Manhattan apartment building, you had best move and get a basement) with powdered eggs and similar tasty comestibles, plus various other necessities. Although I have never finished reading the advertisements, and although I never got beyond the first page of one of the doom books, I presume the point is that you must be entirely self-sufficient for a period of one, two, or more years while the French Revolution is reenacted here.

The doom-criers are not as stupid as they sound. They probably are not stupid at all, because they must make a lot of money to pay for full-page advertisements. But they are no more credible than the man with the frayed jacket and holes in his shoes who sells hot tips at the race track. Even a superficial anal- ysis of the doom-criers’ forecasts will make it evident that they are worthless, because they purport to tell their suckers what will actually happen in the future.

About the Author

Robert Clark

Robert Clark is a fellow at the Yorktown Institute and has worked at several national-security think tanks in London. He served in the British military, completing multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and has advised the British government.

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IF you have been reading the current press you can hardly have missed those full-page advertisements showing the face and shoulders of a stern-visaged man who shouts that financial, fiscal, and economic doom is just around the corner. The only way to forestall the consequences of this imminent horror, you are told in the advertisement, is to subscribe to the forecasting “services” or buy the book of this particular Cassandra. He, having powers of prescience not available to the rest of us, will reveal for your $25 or $150 or whatever that you must fill your basement (if you live on the 11th floor of a Manhattan apartment building, you had best move and get a basement) with powdered eggs and similar tasty comestibles, plus various other necessities. Although I have never finished reading the advertisements, and although I never got beyond the first page of one of the doom books, I presume the point is that you must be entirely self-sufficient for a period of one, two, or more years while the French Revolution is reenacted here.

The doom-criers are not as stupid as they sound. They probably are not stupid at all, because they must make a lot of money to pay for full-page advertisements. But they are no more credible than the man with the frayed jacket and holes in his shoes who sells hot tips at the race track. Even a superficial anal- ysis of the doom-criers’ forecasts will make it evident that they are worthless, because they purport to tell their suckers what will actually happen in the future.

About the Author

Robert Clark

Robert Clark is a fellow at the Yorktown Institute and has worked at several national-security think tanks in London. He served in the British military, completing multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and has advised the British government.