What you might call business processing

The evidence of the past few years suggests that we either didn't have enough information on financial derivatives, risk management, excess aggregate demand, and/or we didn't take heed. That's why the world's in a hole, and some governments are still digging, shovelling debt remorselessly.

I was reminded of the need to impart and identify necessary information very precisely the other day while waiting at an airport in the region. The Tannoy was playing over and over so that the huddled masses could barely think, dulled by the unceasing cycle of clipped, factual content. One message was repeated like a mantra as if to inculcate us all into acceptance and submission. "This is the final call for Jeddah, flight number ‘xxx'. All remaining passengers are requested to go to gate number ‘xxx'."

Trouble was, whereas the flight number was given audibly, the gate number (and only that) was continually emitted like a scrambled radio signal, sounding, it seemed to me, very much like a high-pitched alien might pronounce the word ‘brie', as if that was his preferred sustenance upon arrival in our world.

Such was the insistence of the playback that I couldn't get that image out of my mind for quite a while. I even found myself waiting to hear it time and again. I wondered whether anyone else was. In fact, everyone around was staring ahead in that unique form of stupor that is manifested in airport waiting areas.

To some, of course, the information deficiency mattered. Where should they go to catch their plane? Among governments, there may be a similar, critical void. A certain blaring political consensus seems to have omitted the supply side dimension, which actually produces the prosperity to be disbursed, while concentrating mindlessly on pumping artificial demand, until exhaustion. It is entirely coincidental, and uncontrived, that this also is a matter of ‘exit' strategy. (Oh, wow.)

It struck me too that the said flight's destination was Jeddah, which was soon to host a regional economic conference. Having been recently to one in Hong Kong, but managed to avoid Davos, the opposite issue occurred to me, of information overload. What would they say there, on the global economy and the crucial topic of China, that would not be repetition?

Then there can be too much of actually the wrong information, like that (need I say ‘arguably'?) from the global warming lobby. In that case, ironically, clearly we do need more summits like Copenhagen. The more that Al Gore and his thousands of cosseted comrades travel and add to emissions, the better our chance of dealing with the global cooling danger which is stalking the planet.

It seems to me that if, in the general scheme of things, you don't recognise the really important bit (perhaps an inconvenient untruth), then you are doomed to repeat or incur costly mistakes, just as politicians routinely do, unlearning the lessons of history.

For instance, some seem barely to have cottoned on that state-owned entities often suffer from lack of competition, and you won't get supreme service from them as monopoly providers. I discovered that on the same day in the same airport, as I read a columnist declare that he had only now been converted to this realisation, referring to an airline, some 30 years on from the Thatcherite revelation and revolution of the 1970s and 1980s. That's pretty sloppy processing of information — readily available in both theory and practice — if you ask me.

There's a lot of thinking time available at airports, so it happens, which can be put to (semi-)productive use interpreting marginal information. Which was not the case with my next dilemma, one all too instant and meaningful, rather than idly abstract. Namely, what to do with 22 Bahraini dinars?

The problem was one familiar enough: the residual sum in my wallet was an amount not completely inconsequential, but not enough to worry about; not to spend for the sake of it, but otherwise to be donating a transaction cost to a money-changer at some point: cutting-edge consumer finance.

Of course, the solution might have been to have dropped it in a charity box. But I confess I liked the idea of a bargain purchase, however slight in itself, raising my spirits, given the delayed flight departure — for which, incidentally, there was a typical dearth of information.

Browsing duty-free outlets, like any shopping zone in fact, it never ceases to amaze me the number of things I don't want. Except that I was sorely tempted by a surf-boarding, miniature camel in a yellow liquid contained in a plastic keyring. Precisely 22 of those could be acquired for 22 Bahraini dinars. Alternatively, a camel in liquid on the side of a radio, retailing at four Bahraini dinars.

That's because I'm the type who takes more pleasure from a very modest acquisition than from lavish consumption. I have dozens of tacky trinkets assembled from travelling in various parts, none of them worth anything much except as mementoes (but quite possibly all of them made in China — noted as anecdotal research information).

Fact is I don't buy luxuries; must be something to do with a deep-seated inferiority complex. Anyway, I bought one camel keyring, leaving 21 Bahraini dinars to be changed. But, as information goes, I can be fairly sure that that's too much of it.