On Needing

Suppose I believe I need you to support me economically.  There are two ways this can happen.  You could directly provide me with those means of satisfying my needs which I believe I need, or you could give me money to buy them.

But what if I don’t trust you to freely give me the means or the money without getting anything in return?  What are my options?

I could offer to sell you some means of satisfying your needs (goods, services, and/or my labor), and hope that you will choose to buy from me.  But this is less than satisfying.  If you choose to not buy, my predicament may be no better than if I do nothing – and might actually be worse.  It may not be possible for me to re-allocate the time and resources I invested in acquiring that which I cannot sell, towards a more fruitful investment.

Thus I would much prefer to convince you that you need to buy the means of satisfying needs which I am selling.  Then I need not fear I will not have enough money to buy those means which I believe I need.  If you are not otherwise compelled to buy my wares, my welfare will rest on your belief that you need to buy them.

What, then, about compulsion?  One possibility is to convince (a) third party to oblige you to buy enough of what I am selling for me to acquire sufficient income to buy what I believe I need. 

Another possibility is to convince (a) third party to exact monies from you and disburse them to me, and not concern myself with offering you anything in exchange.

In any case I will consider any factor which might disrupt my dependence on you to be an existential threat.  I will lash out if anyone calls my wares “unnecessary” or “frivolous”.  I will protest vehemently if sufficient monies are not spent, credit not lent, or taxes not levied.  I will strike back if enough projects are not funded, positions not kept open, or wages not paid.  I will rise up if promised entitlements are not dispensed, benefits do not accrue, or aids are not maintained.

 

Who among us does not think along these lines?  Are they any less applicable to teachers and snow-plow drivers than roadbuilders and construction workers?  What about business owners and politicians and paid environmentalists?  What about Social Security and Medicare recipients?

Econ 101

(1) With regard to individuals, modern economic theory does a fairly good job of describing the behaviors of those of us who fairly consistently choose to behave in ways that are predicted by modern economic theory.

(2) Modern economic theory also tends to reliably describe the aggregate behaviors of groups of people who fairly consistently choose to behave in ways that are predicted by modern economic theory.

(3) Modern economic theory tends to more accurately describe the aggregate behaviors of groups of people who choose, as a rule, to believe that people behave in ways which are predicted by modern economic theory…than groups of people who choose, as a rule, to believe that we can choose to behave in ways which are not predicted by modern economic theory.

(4) One of the great attractions of modern economic theory is that it justifies our behaving in selfish ways.

(5) Another great attraction of modern economic theory is that it provides us with excuses to not expect or demand unselfish behaviors from others.  If economic science proves that “people” behave like self-optimizing automatons, what is the point of trying to convince any person (our self included) to behave like a father or mother, neighbor or citizen, public servant or soldier?

If I Am a Teacher

If I am a teacher, I will never so much as whisper that that more education might not be The Answer to all of the world’s problems.

If I am an auto worker, I will never ask people to drive less – or not drive at all.

If I am a construction worker, I will never admit that Wisconsin can’t afford to maintain our current inventory of highways, much less construct more of them.

If I build houses or shopping malls, I will vehemently deny any suggestion that we already have far more residential and commercial space than we need.

If I am a machinist at an arms manufacturer, I will never ask people to disarm.

If I work for the Department of Transportation, I will never recommend downsizing my department.

If most of my customers drive to my business, I will fight anything that might impede their driving.

If I work for a fossil fuel company, I will never urge people to wean themselves from coal or oil or natural gas.

If the shut-down of fossil fuel companies would decimate the value of my pension fund, I will fight any law or policy that threatens their profitability.

If the end of Economic Growth would shrivel my Social Security and Medicare payments, I will close my eyes to evidence that Earth cannot sustain Business-As-Usual for much longer.

 

If I am Hans Noeldner, I will not ask you to not listen to me…or not support the causes which burn in my heart.

I too am afraid of not being chosen.  Are you?

"Street" defined

Street: A covenant among users of a public thoroughfare that the greatest deference and encouragement shall be shown those who move slowly, those who share, and those who travel with modest amounts of personal tare.  Good engineering and infrastructure are necessary but not sufficient for proper functioning.  The real foundation of “street” is commitment to human access.  Accommodations for the movement and storage of automobiles and other bulky private property rank a distant second in allocation of space, time, and the hearts of the people.

Scarcity of Will

The most pressing scarcity we face in the United States today is not a scarcity of things – energy, food, natural resources, or manufactured items.  It is, rather, a shortage of will: of willingness to allocate a sufficient portion of our discretionary spending[1] to labor inputs into the production and delivery of goods, services, and infrastructure.  This lack of will is manifest in a shortage of employment opportunities for those among those of us who require employment income to purchase the necessities of life.

Needless to say, our ongoing adoption of labor productivity[2] only makes matters worse.  Highway spending, for example, does little for local employment when the lion’s share of spending goes to fuel purchases and payments on giant earth-moving machinery.  Yet we consistently describe ourselves as unwilling and/or unable to resist labor productivity[3].

Persisting unemployment leads to social unrest, and high levels can lead to societal breakdown and violence.  Therefore we believe we must increase acquisition of wealth, consumption of luxuries, construction of infrastructure, emissions of wastes, and aggregation of military power at a cumulative rate which matches or exceeds the rate at which we adopt labor productivity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Lebow

I see little evidence that this is recognized in our contemporary political discourse – and to the extent that it is, it is invariably drowned out by the heated rhetoric of opposition-blaming.  We-the-people cannot yet imagine the power inherent in choosing the labor of a man over the work potential of a gallon of gasoline.  It does not yet occur to us there could be too much of a good thing called “productivity”.

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[1] Including taxes, credit, and money creation

[2] By labor productivity I mean technologies, methods, and inputs of non-anthropogenic energy which reduce or eliminate human labor input per unit output). 

[3] For some persons this is true: no corporation engaged in producing commodities in competitive, price-driven markets can afford to employ people for the sake of employing people.  But many working-class Americans – and virtually all in the middle-class and above – have significant discretion to choose more labor-intensive goods and services over capital- and non-anthropogenic-energy-intensive ones. This even includes choices to use one’s own labor for such things as walking and bicycling (rather than driving), entertaining one’s child (rather than using TV), pushing a human-powered lawnmower (rather than sitting on a motorized one), growing some of one’s food (rather than employing 300 HP tractors and 200 HP harvesters

Damage Report

Yesterday when I was getting some coffee in downtown Madison, I saw a flier about two Progressive/Leftist friends who had scheduled a debate on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. At issue: whether Capitalism or Imperialism causes more damage. I thought about going, but somehow I was not in a receptive frame of mind. So I pedaled home instead, and thought about what bothered me along the way. It’s about 12 miles to my house in nearby Oregon (Wisconsin), and that allows me a bit of time to think.

One thing I pondered was all the damage I see right in front of my eyes every time I ride my bicycle in the suburban and exurban municipalities which surround Madison. Very few people in these locales walk to go from “a” to “b” if the distance exceeds one or two blocks. Almost no one rolls a wheelchair, or pushes a baby stroller, or rides a bicycle as a mode of transportation either. We have school bus service for children, but other than that there is little transit. Our public thoroughfares are dominated by motorists and most land uses are configured to make life as easy as possible for people who drive. When I bike and walk outside of downtown Madison I am painfully aware that I am not part of a 99% – indeed it is seldom that I am part of a 1%.

When I am in this frame of mind, the recent eruption of middle-class outrage against a privileged 1% rings hollow in my ears.

If one is (in) a car, this “ecosystem” says, “Welcome! Our streets are wide; our highways are uncongested, and there is plenty of free parking everywhere you go!” If one is not (in) a car, this ecosystem says, “You don’t belong.” And yet within my own municipality – the Village of Oregon, population 9,231 – I suspect it is not the distances or a lack of pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure which are the primary deterrents – it is the lack of other people! It feels terribly alien to be a small, slow, unarmored biped in most places most of the time.

I do not claim that anyone here intended this – indeed, I sincerely doubt anyone did. However, in the final analysis intention doesn’t matter: it “happened”. But most here seem loathe to acknowledge it – and it is this I find inexcusable. (More on this below.)

I believe this man-made state of affairs is grossly discriminatory; perhaps no less evil than Jim Crowe and other forms of institutionalized post-Reconstruction racial discrimination. Moreover it’s stupid, if for no other reason than that it cannot possibly continue. Earth will never sustain 7 billion people living as we do here, and the chances are remote that 6.7 billion other Earthlings will much longer tolerate 0.3 billion of us helping ourselves to the outsized share of Earth’s dwindling resources we “need” to keep our tanks full.

I also cannot imagine that a functional representative democracy can be founded on “consumers” speeding by one-other, each shut off from his community within his own motorized suit of armor. I am convinced that the physical isolation and socio-economic segregation we have managed to establish with our automobiles are inseparable from the cultural alienation and political bipolarization which afflict our times.

Yet when I consider the conversations which prevail among my friends and acquaintances – especially during this "Year of Our Walker" (footnote 1) – I see no will to meaningfully grapple with the evils of automobile addiction. If we can’t blame the Right; if we can’t blame corporations or capitalism; we ain’t gonna talk about it!

I am coming to the conclusion that the prevailing narratives among liberals and progressives about causality and power are a severe impediment, especially as regards automobile dependence.

Here is another kind of story we might tell ourselves – one which could prove far more effective in producing results.
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Our instinctive reactions to the presence of other motorists in our midst, repeated countless times over many decades, have added up to what systems engineers would call an enormously powerful “positive feedback loop". Stated in layman's terms, the more that we drive, the more that we force driving on everyone else who lives in our community. Thus does a highly coercive phenomenon emerge from a great many "small" actions of ordinary people.

No conspiracy, no planning – indeed! No malicious intent – are required to produce a state of affairs very few among us desire and many now wish to remediate.

We-the-people will get precisely nowhere by continuing to indulge narratives which lay the blame for our automobile addiction on the shoulders of transportation department bureaucrats, zoning boards, and municipal officials; architects, real estate developers, and highway builders; auto companies, tire companies, and oil companies. Truth be told, most of these guys are either dead or have long since retired, and many of the businesses (GM, Chrysler) and institutions have gone bankrupt or are now defunct.

The inconvenient truth is that we drove ourselves into this mess – and we will have to do something other than continue to drive everywhere to get out. The solutions are waiting…on the other side of the windshield. All we need to do is…start…stepping…out.

(1) I refer to Scott Walker, the highly contentious governor we elected in November 2010.

Solidarity

If the consumer has not the will to make common cause with the worker – specifically, the willingness to spend more in acquiring less when such transactions are necessary to ensure that workers are able to earn sufficient wages to feed and shelter their families – then no other force on Earth can protect labor. A poverty of self-governance is no foundation for a popularly-elected government to build the onerous restrictions on business and trade that would be needed.

Is there any other delusion so cruel as imagining that reform of democracy – or worse, revolution – could compensate for a so basic a failure of brotherhood? Perhaps yes: the belief that free markets among selfish men might yield a condition of virtue.