What Lutchmeenaraidoo Must Do, Fast

Increase top tax rates for individuals and for corporates in the next budget. So energy prices can come down to levels that reflect international conditions. And government can start help the economy humming nicely again. In a sustainable fashion. Smart Cities which are more like glorified IRS will not take us anywhere good. They are like the wrong type of FDI we've been getting since 2005: they don't help our young knowledge workers contribute their skills to push Mauritius forward but only make sure that another whole generation is buried. Alive.

Or Lepep and Vishnu -- who can't seem to tell the difference between a Black Swan and a White one -- stand to lose a lot more than bragging rights about delivering a second 'miracle'. They will inevitably be thrown out of office and voters will finally experience an aha moment when revisiting the 'first' one.

Not A Black Swan Event

Sithanen on the next-to-last page of his additional stimulus package document said that Mauritius was experiencing a Black Swan Phenomenon and has been repeating this lie along with a string of others quite often since December last. Nothing could be further from the truth because for an event to be classified as a Black Swan it must not only have a big impact but it must also be highly improbable.

The mess Mauritius got itself into was highly predictable (we've been writing about this since 2005) and has been essentially the work of two little men: Sithanen who has been collecting blunders on a hugely toxic scale and Navin Ramgoolam who has demonstrated languid leadership at best in failing to stop the bean-counter.

Black Swan event? No. Black Paul event? Yes.

Celebrity Meltdown

No matter how hard reality bites the theology of laissez-faire, its blind disciples will cling to it. But when Alan Greenspan, one of its high priests, is gripped with agnosticism, it means that a paradigm shift is definitely in the air. Why has the former Federal Reserve chairman acquired divine status in the first place? Why do we cannonise fellow human beings so promptly today?

Taken in its most ruthless representation, the technology-driven era seems to offer few alternatives: embrace it or ignore it at your own risk and peril. Excess breeds excess. There seems to be no room for the middle path. To meet new spending patterns of consumers for whom time seems to fly, markets started promoting prêt-à-porter. Then came prêt-à-manger. And now, enter prêt-à-penser. Celebrity models, chefs and experts rule our world. The general trend for the last decades has been an obsession with pet theories. Worse, deprived of adequate contextual research, most parts of the developing world have simply internalised what are in fact aberrations. As like-minded people tend to flock together, they end up confusing repetition with self-evident truth.

William Easterly's White Man's Burden and Ha-Joon Chang's Bad Samaritans should provide the elusive hindsight to those who feel fooled and let down. For an even better taste of vintage "lateral thinking" and "thinking outside the box", Nassim Taleb's Black Swan might well be the ultimate pick. There is indeed a heavy price to pay when we let wizardry and punditry cloud our reasoning.