Only a few of us have hope. Perhaps these are the people with the glass half full—even if it has but a dram of water and its rim is laced with cyanide. All the others hear damn voices in their heads. Where does the Economy stand? What suffering or succor will the IMF visit upon us? Where do we go from here?

There are no easy answers.

Technocrats and their corporate yuppie fans tell us that Pakistan’s problems are easy to solve. All the government has to do is make more money and spend less. That is their magic pill for the extended disco version of our fiscal crisis.

When you start trimming the fat, the forces of politics, culture, religion, society will stay your hand. The FBR is unable to raise revenues fairly because the politics of taxation won’t allow it. Religious-minded folks think Zakat is the only tax the State can justifiably collect. State institutions and their interest groups want all others to be taxed except themselves since they alone are of national importance.

We could sell the family scrap in garage sales to keep our head above water. But we can’t do that either. Nobody wants to be in the doghouse because they fired all those workers. Plus, so many of us still see that scrap as the family silver.

Perhaps we could tighten our belt? Only by now it is evident that politics won’t allow it. Some expenses are too important to trim—such as those incurred to win elections—and some are essential to maintain sovereignty (even if the state is fast losing what it takes for any state to claim sovereignty: a monopoly over violence, trust in institutions, a currency called certainty).

Technocrats would like us to believe that all we have to do us to export more, attract more foreign investment, cut imports and raise loans from abroad. But exports are difficult to grow in the right numbers since Pakistan is an inefficient producer from cotton to cork. We produce much less per labour and capital employed than peer economies.

Foreign investors aren’t interested in Pakistan any more since they are fed up with the circus whose acts have kept making headlines for at least a decade. Even friendships taller than the Himalayas have borne no fruit when it comes to private investment. So we live like brothers but do business like strangers.

Then there is the lot who says we need to import less dog food and micellar water. They are forgetting that unless Pakistan can produce what Pakistanis need, imports will be critical for the work an economy needs to do.

The country’s economists (mostly macroeconomists who think mathematical models = economics) want to solve these problems (like inflation) through subsidies, endowments, and handouts. They want to do this just as they have done for decades without much success to show for. They want subsidies along with cash handouts to the poor. This kind of economic management is lazy governance because it keeps the client-patron relationship intact between the babus and politicians on one end and society on the other.

An IMF bailout or help from a friend may help Pakistan crawl out of this hellhole. But it will be painful on the knees. Deregulation and liberalization will have to jolt the system into action. This will have to be followed up with reforms, the skill and will to see through are wanting in both the public and private sectors.

If Pakistan’s economy is to grow and develop, it will need clear rules of the game, investment in competitiveness, science and technology, universal education and health, the judicial and law and order system. It will need a professional bureaucracy.

However, serious reforms on these fronts are not being made, nor are their seeds being sown for a later harvest. Forces beyond economics stymie them. The elite bargain to heal and nurture Pakistan beyond immediate CPR isn’t happening because in a bargain, you have to give and not just take, which no one is willing to accept let alone do.

Meanwhile, a sea of uneducated, unskilled, poorly fed, unhealthy young people will be upon us. In ten years, their numbers will swell. Their hopes and aspirations will be pinned to a developed world—their reality will look more like a third world turning into a fourth.

So far, the poor have been tamed through the opiate of religion and an undying patience for a miracle or messiah who will lead us to salvation. But by now many have realized that the messiah is not coming. It is this realization that is propelling those who can to execute Project Exit Pakistan.

Those who cannot exit will put up with the clowns who are running this circus. There is a growing realization that neither of the leading parties (PML-N, PTI, PPP) with or without their puppet masters have been able to deliver. Nor have the puppet masters themselves delivered when they were cracking the whip for over 30 years.

Unless the miracle of elite bargain is struck, something will give soon. Perhaps change will happen when the grey-haired leaders leave this earth, following which coalition politics will pave the way for a healthy bargain. What is more likely, however, that the change will look like more chaos, since the constitutional seeds of the democratic bargain are not being sown. They are instead being plucked like weeds.

When countries reach this point, usually three things happen:

a) They get back up on their own with strong resolve, which Pakistan and Pakistanis seem to be lacking at this point

b) They crumble and collapse and are relegated to the dustbin of history; or

c) Some multilateral organization or country lifts them up because they are too important to fail (a card Pakistan has played)

I wager that Pakistan’s fate lies somewhere between b and c. It is important enough not to be left out to die but not that important to be brought back to life.

So we may not fall into the abyss but will remain just on its edge, in a kind of slow constant state of suffering before succumbing. Yet even in the face of these odds, there some among us who won’t leave, despite being capable of it. We are either still waiting for a messiah or are among the innocent ones who confuse suffering with redemption.

Mr Tambourine Man is the title of a song by Bob Dylan