How bountiful 2014?

Wilberne Persaud, Financial Gleaner Columnist

You read this as 2014 begins its tenth day, actually.

While I wish for you, all my readers, a successful, nay, bountiful new year, we know there are predictable bumps in the road, but where? At what point in the journey?

Our expectations, over three decades in formation, in a sense guarantee the dollar shall continue its periodic but inexorable shifts, shuffle and slide while policy and economic managers will fight to avoid measures - openly acknowledged or not - of deflation or austerity much loved by the IMF.

Even as we try to counter them: the curse of our youths bleaching; officially condoned or ignored use of extrajudicial lethal force parallel to a crime rate we cannot live with but appear unable to live without; a widening gap between rich and poor, employed and unemployed; relatively poor returns to capital investment; trade imbalances with both CARICOM and the rest of the world; looming conflict over environmental and developmental goals; debilitating corruption - this ballooning incomplete list shall confront us in 2014.

Shall we in this new year, with national election due in 2016, mount concerted efforts to put them right? Shall we choose a priority group for immediate attention? There's no doubt we can. And we have a perfectly well-known Jamaican template to use as blueprint.

I refer of course to the world-class, disproportionately demonstrated successes of our track athletes, nurtured and trained right here at home.

Yes, some endeavours require special circumstances for success. We may see this as a variant of the nature/nurture/environment nexus. What genetic make-up and aptitudes do people possess? How are they brought up and trained? In what environment does this take place? These are all highly relevant issues determining outcomes.

Environment important

Put simply, genes and nurture apart, becoming a Mozart requires a piano, a Pele requires a team and competition, a Usain Bolt requires motivation, focus on hard work, some facilities and a dedicated cooperating team.

Our track athletes have demonstrated conclusively for us that a goal once chosen, a training and competition regimen followed without slip, pays tremendous dividends - ranging from spiritual to the material.

Absent the motivation, none of this is possible. My question therefore is, do we have the motivation, the political will to tackle apparently intractable problems that shall continue to plague us in 2014? Calendar months change and bring us a new year. The change, though, doesn't alter established mechanisms and relationships that have been years in the making.

There's a slogan made popular in Jamaica's high-profile tourism spots: 'Jamaica, No Problem!'

I want to suggest this is real. It is real in a good, benign way and a bad debilitating way, a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it describes an attitude that remains undaunted in face of adversity, providing the strength to 'push on through'. On the other, it describes a lifestyle which exhibits an understanding of the benefits of stress decompression and the difference between GMT and JMT - Greenwich mean and Jamaica time; a knowledge that even if you win the rat race, you're still a rat!

Part of this mettle derives from a strong, fundamentally brave, unconquerable spirit defining us: at once defiant of exploitation and chock-full with deep moral underpinnings. This spirit can be identified among the Maroons, recognised in 'day-for-day' among rural small farming folk sometimes called the peasantry. It is evident in the audacious 'upstarted-ness' of Marcus Garvey. This deep moral underpinning of the society struggling to avoid the strange word 'zeitgeist' at large presents a supreme, perhaps inexplicable irony. Fact is, alongside morality and feeling of empathy towards others and the group, corruption exists and thrives as it infects economic relations within the society, distorting what would be efficient paths to growth.

Appreciation of this contradiction present in human desire and drive has been recognised by early philosophers and students of politics from Machiavelli to Mill, and beyond.

Our task: generalise our athletes' formula for success and consciously harness the society's moral underpinnings for infusion across the economy and society. Difficult, but not impossible.

In the meantime, pardon the cliché: Happy New Year!

Wilberne Persaud, an economist, currently works on impacts of technology change on business and society, including capital solutions for Caribbean SMEs.