Dining on Top Ramen or lowering the thermostat by another degree or two - what's your strategy for dealing with the financial doldrums gripping both the global economy and your pocketbook?
Two new books offer up coping skills - one is intensely personal, while the other offers a meta-view. For different reasons, each offers worthwhile perspectives.
"Zombie Economics" would be yet another financial self-help book, except this one is lubricated with a delightfully macabre fictional additive to make the draconian lessons easier to swallow. The book's subtitle spells it out categorically: "How to Slay Your Bills, Decapitate Debt and Fight the Apocalypse of Financial Doom."
Indeed, authors Lisa Desjardins (she's a CNN reporter) and Rick Emerson (he's a Portland broadcaster) liken your journey toward financial wellbeing as an odyssey through dire economic scenarios.
"A Zombie Economy is infectious, contaminating and threatening everything it touches," they warn. "In a Zombie Economy, there is a self-perpetuating sense of doom - the feeling that there is no solution; that the sickness is unstoppable and the predator unkillable; the fear that even those in command have little idea how to fix things."
Desjardins and Emerson exhort their readers to take stringent measures to protect themselves and their household economy. Any distractions to that aim are menaces that must be vanquished as unequivocally as the zombies in a horror story - and to drive the point home, the authors concoct a gross zombie novella that parallels and illustrates their financial lessons.
While I appreciate their message of personal responsibility, their focus is on applying band-aids, not on finding the cure. This book's breezy attitude will be salt in the wound for those who've been devastated by a toxic system.
For a real breath of fresh air, check out "What's the Economy For, Anyway?" - a probing new book by Seattle writer/happiness guru John de Graaf and David Batker, executive director of Tacoma-based Earth Economics.
These authors argue that quality of life, social justice and sustainability should be the measures of a successful economy rather than our current reliance on the GDP (Gross Domestic Product), which they claim factors in pollution, crime, divorce, disease, foreclosures, and natural disasters - as positives.
This book offers a lively history of America's economic policies in the 20th and 21st centuries and includes a shudder-inducing analysis of the WaMu meltdown.
The authors also provide an overview of other economies around the globe that seem to be faring better than our own right now, and suggest why that might be and how elements of those policies could be emulated in the U.S.
Batker and de Graaf advocate for "capitalism with a human face," promoting the notion that we're all in this together and that we'd do better by rethinking the way we conduct business to reflect genuine costs and to serve real human needs.
"What's the Economy For, Anyway?" is a thoughtful book that injects a note of optimism into what has become an increasingly dispirited discussion surrounding the economy.
