Christine, you are entitled to hold your own opinions.
Personally, I don't feel that I have to have opinions about everything, especially about matters in which I have little or no expertise.
Let's take international finance, the subject that we were discussing. It is a very complex subject. To master it, you need, among other things, a knowledge of advanced mathematics, knowledge that I lack.
But my middle name is curiosity, and so I try to keep informed about such matters as the current world financial crisis, the activities and policies of the IMF, etc. I listen to what knowledgeable people have to say about such matters, and I weigh what they say when they disagree with one another (as they almost always do). Sometimes logic, or common sense, or my own experience, will suggest to me that Mr. X is probably closer to the truth than Mr. Y., or that the truth may lie somewhere in the middle.
So, if the subject comes up in conversation, I may express what I would call a tentative judgment. It is not an "opinion" I am prepared to defend with facts, not a "conviction." I couch it in qualifiers, like "maybe," "perhaps," "it seems to me," etc. My remark about the world financial crisis, for example, was prefaced by the words - "my guess is.." And if somebody challenges that tentative judgment, gives me more information, or presents a novel and convincing argument, I may indeed change my mind, because I am not committed to a particular position.
Now -- why do I think that the present financial crisis is (or may be) atypical? Because the world financial system (if it can be called a system!) appears to have changed drastically in the last decade or two, partially because of computerization, partially because of the emergence of new developing markets, etc. Never before have we had such massive free flows of capital all over the globe, never before have we had such large-scale speculative operations with national currencies, never before have so many countries participated in the global market (you will recall that the countries of the former Soviet Union, for example, began entering it less than ten years ago). And so forth.
Thus, since the global financial situation right now is unprecedented, it would seem to me that the crisis affecting it probably is too.
But I could be wrong, of course. And if so, it won't bother me. And maybe some day I will develop a firm opinion on this subject. Maybe.
jbe |
