Pandenomics

Pandenomics

For all the coverage of the pandemic, there’s been precious little if any sense of what changes are in store for our world. In most articles and conversations, the focus is on a “return to normal,” though sometimes there’s a phrase added in, like “whatever that will be.” With the advent of vaccines that are now (too) slowly being distributed, there’s good reason to be hopeful that we will finally get back to a modicum of recognizable life, including seeing peoples’ faces, embracing folks we love, and going out shopping and dining without fear of contracting the virus. I, too, am tired of Zoom meetings and need to get back out in the field. But what will that field look like? The ongoing discussions about economic recovery do little to illuminate the full scope of what lies ahead. These models of supply and demand, income and spending, tax rates and tax revenues, are generally based in a static economic model of a business cycle. Thus the recurring reference to the stock market index or quarterly growth rates in employment and consumer spending. None of that tells us what the post-pandemic world might look like. At the risk of sounding like...Read more

Call of The Wild

I love the feel of the outdoors right after a snowstorm has stopped. There’s something about the look of the snow piled up untouched, the branches bowing with their newly accumulated weight, the wind having calmed down and the light creating the kind of blue-gray shadow effect that highlights the crisp outline of everything. We got a foot overnight, just as predicted, which is just the way you want it because it’s such a letdown when all sorts of weather advisories and winter storm watches are heralded and nothing materializes. So the meteorologists got it right this time. It was the kind of morning when you just want to cozy up, wrapped in pajamas and robe, with a second pot of coffee at hand so you could catch up indulgently on all the things you wish you could normally do indoors – like doing nothing and spending extra time together, with the crossword, or playing with the cats, and knowing that the whole day will be spent digging out and going nowhere. Last night, just before the snow was slated to begin, I put out two tubular bird feeders and within minutes they had drawn activity. “They’ve remembered,” my wife,...Read more

Freelance

A year ago this week I got laid off. With everything else going on lately the last 12 months have been interesting. As if a pandemic and the turmoil of a national election were not enough on the public side, on the private side I have had to adjust to being out on my own professionally for the first time in decades. That all became a fact of life last December, when I got a professionally polite but nonetheless depressing phone call from my managers at Golf Channel/GolfAdvisor.com that they were letting me go for budgetary reasons. There’s not much you can do under such circumstances. It had been a great place to work, which made my leaving all the more difficult. All I said by way of response was that I had given up a lot to make the move to join them 20 months before. I was referring to the fact that I had been a full time staff writer and editor for a national magazine called Golfweek for 20 years and had built up a pretty good reputation for myself. The move from Golfweek to GolfChannel/GolfAdvisor.com had been voluntary and felt like a great transition in many...Read more