Feb

13

Cuddly rats seem to be on offer in Ikea right now. I got a junior one for just GBP 1.99, rats probably being heavily discounted because they weren't selling well. Here in the West we think of them as plague carriers and vermin, but in China rats are considered to be enterprising and courageous little fellows. I shouldn't include all Westerners. Gunter Grass wrote a novel entitled The Rat, written from the rat's perspective.

I believe there are many good lessons here. There is a lesson in prejudice, the rat being hated despite its good qualities, whilst lazy koalas are loved despite sleeping 23 hours a day (apologies to all koalas and their federations if I have this figure wrong). Once rats are recognized as being lovable, more people will jump on the bandwagon. Woes betide anyone who castigates them as lazy, useless bastards.

There is a lesson in value, my immediate thought being to buy a shipment of rats from Ikea and sell them to China in exchange for some cuddly koalas. If I get four koalas for each rat and sell the koalas at four times what I got the rats for, that's a 16x profit potential, excluding costs.

There's also a lesson in objectivity. Why should it be that koalas are so highly valued? Nobody speaks admiringly of your child's rat, and I can speak with authority on the matter having road tested the situation in town this morning. You may hear people say "What a cute koala," but the words "What a cute rat" never seem to occur to them. There were a few wry smiles and one "Is that a rat?"

Last but not least there seems to be a lesson in speculation. Where do people's sympathies lie and do these really make sense? It seems to me that this is the essence of trading, buy the rat and sell the koala.


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