Alaska’s Economy: Authored by Lemony Snicket

Lemony Snicket, for anyone who has been avoiding children’s literature the last twenty years, is the pseudonym for Daniel Handler. Snicket has written a highly successful series of thirteen children’s books with the master title, A Series of Unfortunate Events.

And that describes Alaska’s economy, doesn’t it? The decline in crude oil production as Prudhoe Bay is exhausted. The COVID-19 epidemic that has maimed the tourism industry. That same pandemic has shut down most local businesses. The collapse of oil prices that has damaged the fossil fuel industry and, as a consequence, Alaska’s government, which is chained in very unhealthy ways to the price of crude oil. The laughably inept state legislature – if anyone is still laughing – that has squandered irreplaceable resources and reserves and kowtowed to the businesses it is supposed to tax and regulate. The history of Alaska’s last ten years has certainly been a series of unfortunate events, compounded in the last 60 days.

Of course, in A Series of Unfortunate Events those “incidents” always turn out to be the machinations of evil Uncle Olaf, who is out to get the fabulous inheritance of the protagonist Baudelaire children by any means necessary. In Alaska, the role of Uncle Olaf is played by a majority of the Alaska electorate, who have kept choosing the same state legislators and, most recently, elected one of them as state governor. The fate of the State of Alaska is dire, indeed.

SPOILER ALERT: The three Baudelaire children defeat Uncle Olaf; well, probably. In the very end they sail off into the sunset, their eventual fate unknown. Whether the Alaska electorate will save the day or not is an open question.

Okay, it’s an analogy, and analogies always break down. But Alaska voters, desperately clinging to their permanent fund dividends while a lot of what makes (made) Alaska wonderful collapses around them, need some face time with a mirror. Or there will almost certainly be more “unfortunate events.”