Professor Kerem Alkin and I have different perspective towards life. It’s always been like this even when we were little kids. Although we disagree about a lot of things, we have one thing in common: We never stand up for anything we don’t believe in.
Surely, most of my followers find my opinions to be true and that’s exactly why I stick up for them, because I believe them to be true as well. The same thing goes for Professor Alkin. He can’t persuade me to his point of view as I can’t persuade him to my point of view. Recently, however, we experienced a miraculous event under moderation of Artunç Kocabalkan.
Incredibly, my brother and I actually agreed on a couple of things when we were discussing economy at Dr. Kocabalkan’s YouTube show. One of them was about the international institutions’ excessively negative opinions of the world economy as well as Turkish economy. “Everyone says that you’ll soon fall into a pit. But, no one knows exactly how deep the pit is. They always give us an approximate figure since they are not curious enough to measure the depth of the pit” I highlighted our common ground.
The fact that Alkin brothers have finally managed to find common ground reminded me of Rumi’s words:
Our feast, our wedding
Will be auspicious to the world.
God fit the feast and wedding
To our length like a proper garment.
That is to say, no country in the world can neither grow nor shrink greater than its own original scale. Even though I can sympathize with the develop countries’ concerns for the future of Turkish economy, I don’t exactly believe that our economy will shrink by 5 percent.
“Better avoid being trapped in a web of averageness”
Another thing Professor Alkin and I happen to agree upon is the fact that the government presents its economic targets as an average combination of good and bad scenarios. If the figures seem not be to people’s liking, the economy administrators find a way to quickly improve them. This ongoing situation makes it difficult for economic authorities in Turkey to make a correct decision, because these targets appear to be unachievable. As Turkey fails to reach its economic targets, people’s trust in governments keeps decreasing every day, which compels each sector to set their own targets.
Therefore, government always present a “baseline” scenario, aka “if everything goes well” scenario, and a “if something goes wrong” scenario. We burst out laughing when a friend of ours suggested, “”Why don’t we calculate an average of both scenarios?” Well, that’s what we are afraid of, isn’t it? Calculating an average of two scenarios drawn up on the basis of different parameters doesn’t exactly take us in the right direction.
I think economic units operating under the President’s Office should be responsible for presenting Good and Bad Scenarios, not the Ministries. Since Ministries only provide “if everything goes according to the plan” scenarios, President’s Office must make it public that they have a “just in case” scenario to help restore trust in government.
