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.
*****
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.

Treading Lightly

The quest for “sustainability” is a continuing challenge we pose to ourselves: “What shall I do – what shall WE do – to welcome those who would tread lightly on Earth into our community?”

Thus we would ask, “What do those who tread lightly need from me and my neighbors?”

First we should recognize that “treading lightly” is not merely a figure of speech – it has everything to do with how much stuff, how much land, and how much energy one demands. Indeed, “treading” is all about motion: mass, speed, size, momentum, displacement, kinetic energy. The more one takes, the faster one goes, the further one travels, the heaver the treading. There may be no better indicator of our footprint on Earth than the odometer reading in our car multiplied by the aggressiveness of our driving.

Offhand we might think those who demand little in the way of stuff, land, and energy would need little else from their neighbors, but this is not so. Why? Treading lightly is by nature a fragile undertaking – one which cannot take root and thrive where the swift, the powerful, and the heavily armored dominate the landscape. It is no overstatement to say that “Light Treaders” are an endangered species in this nation, and that we-the-people continue to degrade and destroy suitable habitat for them. If you are wondering whether this pertains to zoning codes, sprawl, self-segregation, and automobile dependence, the answer is an emphatic “Yes!”

I will end with a specific challenge. Children – left to their own devices – are some of the Lightest Treaders still extant. What, my friend, are you doing where you live to make it safe, practical, and pleasant for children to walk to school, ride their bicycle to soccer practice, run over to their friend’s house to play?

I would suggest there is nothing they need more from us than our feet…on the ground…with them.

Am I my Brother's Keeper?

I would say that two worldviews currently dominate our public discourse about political economics in these United States. One holds it is the responsibility of Government to ensure that people have jobs and that their basic needs are met. The other holds that an unfettered Free Market will provide sufficient employment (and other means of livelihood), thereby ensuring that people can take care of their own needs.

As divergent as they might first appear, they have much in common. Both assign responsibility to abstractions. Both relegate human behavior to the realm of mechanics. Both trivialize (or worse, ignore) issues of scale in human relationships. One usually demands more taxes (albeit from someone else) while the other invariably demands fewer, but neither demands much else in the way of citizenship. The difference between “The Government is my brother’s keeper” and “The Market is my brother’s keeper” pales to insignificance when compared to “I am my brother’s keeper”. Our tendencies to outsource responsibility are staggering.

One might think the tremendous political turmoil which has seized us in Wisconsin would have shifted our public debate beyond these two worldviews, but thus far I see little evidence of it. The sustainability and Transition movements are still “fringe” – and perhaps for good reason, given how new and as-yet ill-defined they are. Most on the left, many in the center, and an astonishing number on the right instinctively reject traditional religious prescriptions for the public realm. One might be forgiven for concluding that Ayn Rand and Paul Krugman span the entirety of economic philosophy.

As for me, I find myself returning to the words of Edmund Burke, which I will paraphrase here:

“We are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to our disposition to put moral chains upon our own appetites…it is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Our passions forge our fetters.”

Leaving It In The Ground

How is it possible we are not discussing how much fossil fuel we will LEAVE IN THE GROUND, just in case our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren need it for truly important purposes like growing food?

This is not merely a prudent form of insurance. Responsible stewardship – including a willingness to sacrifice present consumption – is a profoundly moral imperative. What kind of people would grab for all they can get from the Buffet Table of Life…and not give a second thought to leaving some for those who follow?

There are no guarantees that replacements for cheap and abundant fossil fuels will magically appear just because our heirs happen to need or want them. Hoping or expecting technology or market forces to “save” them is criminally irresponsible. If their inheritance from us is a continued structural addiction to oil – but not enough oil to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves – our generation will have perpetrated an unprecedented injustice.

A great deal of our current energy consumption in the United States is discretionary. We burn millions of barrels of petroleum to play, mow lawns, and blow leaves off our sidewalks. We drive and fly billions of miles for vacations. We demand uniform indoor temperatures year around. Perhaps as many as half of our high school juniors and seniors drive to school – even though school buses and transit are available. None of these are essential for civilized life.

And consider the lunacy of automobile-based access. Surely there is not enough energy on Earth for 7 billion people to drive everywhere in 2-3 ton motorized exoskeletons! Moreover, when most of us drive to most of our destinations, we make our communities unsafe, impractical, and unpleasant for non-motorists – which is to say, we force high levels of energy consumption on all who live in our midst.

What is needed? Increased efficiency is necessary but not sufficient. We need to CURTAIL our discretionary fuel-guzzling activities. Any comprehensive accounting will show the possibilities are vast. The more we curtail now, the more fossil energy we leave for a what may prove to be a difficult and lengthy transition.

Does our generation have the decency and determination to roll up our sleeves and get on with the job? Do we even have the backbone to make those who chant “Drill baby drill!” hang their heads in shame?

Alien Nation

I believe the physical isolation and socio-economic segregation afforded by the automobile are integral to the cultural alienation and political bipolarization which afflict our times. There can be no meaningful discourse among us if we spend most of our lives withdrawn into suits of armor – metaphorical or actual.

For it is not merely the shells of automobiles which separate us – it is the lifestyles and community patterns we have built to accommodate them.

I think of the tremendous joy I felt mingling with the crowds on Madison’s Capitol Square during the last few months. Then I think of how terribly lonely I felt yesterday, standing with a campaign sign along Main Street in the village of Oregon as rush hour traffic surged by. Yes, some drivers honked their horns and flashed a thumbs-up – and more than a few cursed me and flipped me the bird – but there was precious little HUMAN connection in any of it. For these motorists I did not persist; like the torrent of images on a television screen I was a phenomenon that rapidly came up before them and just as quickly vanished in the rear-view mirror.

And yet one great irony struck me amidst this fleeting interaction: how many motorists seemed to resent my imposition on their solitude – as though I was standing in their backyard peeking through their windows. Is this our expectation – that motoring is a personal and anonymous act, and that public thoroughfares are extensions of our private property?


P.S. You may ask why I chose Main Street. Because it is the closest thing to a “public square” in my village.

Will-to-power

(1) One pivotal question of our time is whether we shall commit ourselves to protecting variants of the human species whose technological will-to-power is modest from variants whose powers are great. The fact that we have chosen to idolize a Darwinian form of economics would suggest otherwise.

(2) The First World suburban Progressive with the “COEXIST” bumper sticker on his Prius may indulge fantasies of solidarity with the oppressed billions in the Third World, but the raw daily-average horsepower which undergirds his secure and comfortable way of life places him in an entirely different league. Empire is his father; Growth Capitalism is the hand that has woven the world-wide-web of extraction which daily brings hitherto-inconceivable material abundance to his quiet tree-lined neighborhood.

(3) It is much easier for those of us with secure income flows to contemplate these things. The insecure will naturally be more inclined to heed those who promise a quarter-million new jobs.

(4) If you do not grasp the ramifications of #1 in the abstract, try to exercise your right to ride a bicycle on one of Dane County’s “rural” arterial highways at rush hour.

Cheerio!

Cheerio!

Shovel-Ready versus Soldier-Ready

There really isn’t any serious debate in Washington over Keynesianism. Or there won’t be when the Tea Party freshmen get over their delusions of independence. When money has done the talking for you, it expects you to do the talking for it.

Here is the “split”.

Some of them want to throw money at “shovel-ready” highway projects…and their good friends in the road-building, car-manufacturing, and fuel-pumping businesses.

The others want to throw money at “soldier-ready” military adventures…and all their defense-contractor pals.

Whether you drop money from helicopters or “forget” to include the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the budget comes down to the same thing.

The handful of real peaceniks and budget hawks in Washington have no idea what they’d do with the staggering unemployment which would result from a 50% cut in defense spending. Somehow the prospects for renewed frenzy in McMansion-building, Escalade-manufacturing, and imported-TV-selling don’t seem all that plausible right now. As always there are a lot more jobs to be had in making stuff and then blowing it up.

What to do about it? Hmm…what would happen if we-the-people began to behave as though we valued dignified, fulfilling jobs for one-another over the lowest prices and the highest rates of return? What would happen if we stopped outsourcing so much responsibility?

To be continued…

Peace on Earth

Human legs cannot compete in communities where the majority defines Access with gasoline and automobiles.

My people are at war with Slow Movement.
My people are at war with Proximity.
My people are at war with the Human Scale.

And my people are desperate to believe war begins somewhere other than with our Way of Life here and now.

In the spirit of Christmas, imagine that Peace on Earth begins with us…occupying far less of it.
In the renewal of the New Year, resolve to become that Peace.

Greed and Growth

Greed alone does not explain the growth imperative. Given constantly-rising labor productivity (i.e. lower labor inputs per unit output), the only way to stave off rising unemployment is to constantly increase consumption. But does it make any sense to blame productivity? Should we castigate CNC lathes and imprison programmable logic controllers? That would make as much sense as flogging gasoline pumps for failing to display prices which are onerous enough to make “people” conserve. Talk about passing the buck!

No, the growth imperative is the inevitable result of a spiritual deficit: we-the-people do not behave like we want to need human labor. Our actions indicate we’d rather employ fossil fuels and motorized machines and computers than employ human sweat, human craftsmanship, and human cogitation. God help us, we don’t even want to employ our own legs to get from “a” to “b” anymore. Why? Because we can get more for less that way. In fact sometimes it seems like we’re all swept up in a rat-race to get something for nothing.

The crisis which grips us today is not (yet) one of insufficient energy and raw-material inputs for “healthy economic growth”. Nor is it (yet) one of insufficient output of material goods for people in “advanced” economies. Our waistlines and landscapes are stark reminders that we already have far more Doritos and Escalades and McMansions than we “need”.

The crisis is rooted in our failure to choose to need one-another. The crisis is rooted in our willingness to “outsource” responsibility for a fundamental human need: to be needed - to labor and create for a purpose beyond ourselves. The fact that most of us expect “government” and/or “the economy” to shoulder this duty – a duty of brotherhood – is proof of our insanity.

We are damned fools to expect corporations or bankers or the educational system or elected leaders (especially those at higher levels) to do anything about this. They are but symptoms which emerge from the disease.

Transportation Kinetics

The laws of kinetic energy for a hot gas beautifully describe our default behaviors in the complex network of interconnected “pressure vessels” we call our transportation corridors. Small things that move slowly get whacked by big things that move fast. Either the meek learn to get the hell out of the way; or they get with the program, bulk up, and shift into high gear.

It’s really not much more complicated than that. Not unless significant numbers of “molecules” choose to behave as though they are responsible for the impacts of their momentum on other molecules. And if that happens – Whoa! The changes which occur could begin to seem…well, intentional. As though something like intelligence might be at work. We might even see some respect for the little guy. But more on that later.

First, why do so many molecules want to go somewhere else so often in the first place? Why aren’t they happy being where they already are? And why are so many of the places where they want to go located so far apart? Why isn’t “a” next-door to “b” more often?

Well, that’s easy! The more kinetic energy you pump into the system, the further apart things get pushed!! (Duh.) In fact our transportation network here in the USA is a fantastic system for continuously manufacturing “needs” for more – and bigger – and longer – high-pressure pipes. Which, in turn, continuously manufactures “needs” for more energy, more machinery, more development, and more land. It’s quite the positive-feedback loop: great for investors, businesses, units of government, and employment. Tax revenues grow; the DOT and other bureaucracies swell; and politicians buy votes with the pork they deliver to the Highway Lobby. Meanwhile society can avoid balancing current expenditures with current income. You could base a whole damned economy on it. For a while, anyway.

Back to my point. For various reasons, lots of people think there are serious problems with transportation. So let’s consider some of the “solutions” that are being proposed.

(1) The overwhelming majority seem to think the way to solve the problem is to expand the high-pressure pipe network. Well, “think” isn’t really the right word; it’s their default behavior that does the thinking…and the voting. That’s why their default solution is mostly about accommodating more and more big, fast molecules. True, many people SAY they want the small and the slow to have a fair shake, but they don’t really mean it. Momentum speaks louder than words.

(2) Some people – a distinct minority – believe that if enough low-pressure pipes are added to the network, most of the molecules will have a choice as to which pipes they use: high-pressure pipes if they want to be big and fast, or low-pressure pipes if they want to be small and slow.

It’s a nice idea, but there are serious problems with it. Maybe even insurmountable ones, especially if we are at all serious about the “most” having a “choice”. Why? The existing network consists primarily of high-pressure pipes. Even if we focus on areas where molecules tend to congregate, most are places which are richly interconnected with high-pressure pipes but poorly connected with low-pressure ones. Installing new low-pressure pipes parallel to so many existing high-pressure pipes would cost a fortune. Maybe even an empire.

So who would pay for it? If you consider where the big, fast molecules REALLY like to live (exurbia), you will find damn few low-pressure pipes. Why? Avoiding the costs of low-pressure pipes is one big reason why so many big, fast molecules move there! Not only that, but most of these upwardly-mobile molecules spend most of their time “off the reservation”, congesting high-pressure pipes in places where they don’t BEGIN to pay their fair share. The system is already bankrupt, running on IOUs from children who can’t even vote yet.

Then there is the matter of proximity. Fast molecules couldn't care less about destination “a” being close to “b” – ten or twenty miles seem mighty short when you’re really truckin’ down a high-pressure pipe. But pity the slow molecules! Even if there is a low-pressure pipe running parallel to a high-pressure one (so the slow guys don’t run the risk getting whacked), the TIME it takes can be a killer. Moving slow, it feels like darn near everything is just too far away.

Last, we must not forget that all parallel pipes eventually have to intersect. And it’s a tough engineering challenge to build these intersections so that the small, slow molecules can safely cross the high-pressure pipes. Especially when you have big, fast molecules who don’t much like being restrained. You know, high momentum dudes who behave as though having to wait for slowpokes is…well…an insult! “Move over, a**hole!!” “Get the f**k out of my road!”

(3) A few people have their fingers crossed that the energy supply for the high-momentum molecules will eventually dwindle; the pressure will go down in the high-pressure pipes; and somehow the system will become more “humane” for small, slow guys. Maybe they are right. Probably they are right. It might take a while, though. And it’s sort of weird, expecting pipes to get “humane”. Like “pipes” caused the problem in the first place! Meanwhile, it’s obvious that the energy supply for the big and fast hasn’t run out yet. So many of the folks who are waiting for the dwindling conclude the best they can do right now is to buckle up themselves and their kids inside a big-ish molecule too. OK, one that’s not-so-big…but not-so-small, either! Then if they get whacked by a really big, fast molecule, it won’t be a guaranteed death sentence.

(4..?) Might there be another possibility – one which doesn’t require huge numbers of additional pipes…or…having to run out of energy? Like, what would happen if millions of molecules…just…began to choose to have less momentum more often? Hmm…maybe when we brush our teeth tonight, we could look in the mirror for clues about how to make it happen.

The Solution to Jobless Growth

The solution to Jobless Growth is:

Growthless Jobs! Now that wasn't so hard, was it? Reverse the words and Presto! The solution to all of our problems.

Really, it makes sense. Consider what we have right now in our economy. Lots of businessmen (and women) who set out with the explicit intention to sell toasters, cars, corn chips, open-heart surgery – stuff like that. Lots of investors with a laser-beam focus on getting Higher Returns. And darn near every consumer bound and determined to get More Stuff for Less.

Given these intentions, what have we got to show for it? Exactly what one would expect: lots of toaster manufacturing; profits on toaster sales; toasters in our basements, in our attics and storage lockers, on our garage sale tables. More toasters than we need…and unemployed people who have good reason to worry about not being needed.

Hmm…no need for so many toasters…not enough need for people who need to be needed. Could it be that our intentions are the problem? More precisely, a LACK of intent? A BIG lack? A black hole, in fact?

Amidst all our intentions to make and sell and profit on and acquire more toasters than we need (along with more than enough other stuff), where is our intention to need people?

Could this have something to do with passing the buck? OK, we all love to blame Government whenever unemployment rears its ugly head. Business executives with factories run by automated machines don't even blink when they scream bloody murder about how Government is preventing them from creating jobs. Even the candidates play along, making all kinds of promises about the jobs THEY are going to “create”…after (of course!) they blame the opposition party for unemployment...and every other ill in the world.

But what if the whole thing was a ruse, a huge lie we tell ourselves in order to avoid yet another Inconvenient Truth? Forget outsourcing toaster-manufacturing, what happens in an economy when darn near everyone "outsources" responsibility for making sure that people who need to be needed…are needed?

The thing that makes it really tough is this: we can get More Stuff for Less – and Higher Returns to boot! – when we outsource employment to fossil fuels, machines, and automation. Year after year, more Productivity, more “saving” labor. What the heck, who needs other human beings these days?

Oops, we still need them to consume the stuff our machines are making. So…is there some way to make machines that consume? THAT would be sweet! Cars that drive themselves to McDonalds and order high-fructose corn syrup (straight up) from serving-robots. That's right, skip the distillery, skip turning most of the corn into cow-manure (another disposal problem!), we're talking about hyper-mobile, perpetually-hungry consumers that wanna LiveGreen GoYellow, baby.

Ye-ha! Kick back and watch the DOW soar! Who knows, with the ethanol subsidy AND “smart” cars ordering corn syrup for themselves at every drive-thru in America, maybe the corn surplus would take care of itself…

Anyway, is a bit of Luddism in order here? As in, enough to make sure that we need one-another? And how about choosing to need our own labor once in a while? Instead of using our legs mostly to press accelerator and brake pedals, what if we used them more often for (Gasp!) self-locomotion? Getting from “a” to “b”?

I got a lot more to say. You want it?

The Problem of Jobless Growth

First our Leaders told us there were “Green Shoots”. Then they began to tout the Recovery. More recently they have expressed their regrets that the Recovery appears to be Jobless. And now the Recovery itself is floundering.

This is what Business as Usual delivers in 2010: Jobless Growth - when there is any Growth at all.

Meanwhile we all know about Earth’s biophysical limits – and the terrible messes we’ve gotten into by pretending those limits don’t exist. On this (still-) living, richly interconnected planet, economic Growth IS the problem!

So is this a case of “damned if we do, damned if we don’t”? Maybe not. Ready to think out of the box? I mean, REALLY out?

(Hint: sometimes the solution becomes obvious when you look at a problem from another direction. So if the problem is “Jobless Growth”…)

Give up? OK, the answer is...drum roll...

{see next post}

The Spill and You

The following is a transcript of my comments last evening to the trustees of the Village of Oregon, Wisconsin, USA. Perhaps you, dear reader, might find inspiration in it to get up on your hind legs and say something along these lines to your elected public servants...

If anything is clear to me, it is that if we fail to transform the public conversation about responsibility, we will fail period. We will never know whether seeds such as these will bear fruit if we do not plant them.


I am here this evening to speak with you about choosing a relationship to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Not just as individual citizens, but as trustees, as stewards of the public good.

So how might you choose to relate to the spill?

First, you could choose that there isn’t time to discuss the oil spill right now – you already have your hands full with urgent Village business…like budget shortfalls! As someone who has served on the Board, I would respect this choice. I mean that. But please hear me out anyway; I will give you some specific, practical recommendations in a minute or two.

So what else? You could choose that the spill, bad as it is, has nothing to do with us and how we live here. It’s a free country; it’s a free market; and people have a right to burn as much gas as they want.

You could choose that OK, the spill might have something to do with our way of life here, but it isn’t any of your business (or mine!) to tell people how to live. Who wants to rock the boat?

You could choose that if we don’t burn deepwater oil – heck, oil from anywhere else for that matter…well, someone else will. With a fungible commodity like oil, no consumer is responsible.

You could choose that the spill isn’t our fault because we get most of our oil from Canada…where they are clear-cutting forests, strip-mining tar sands, and burning a lot of natural gas to cook out crude. And you’d be right: about 80% of our motor fuel comes from Canadian tar sands right now.

You could choose to react to news of the spill like millions of busy consumers. “OMG those poor pelicans! Did you see John Steward’s spoof about BP last night? It was hilarious! Anyway, they need to nail the jerks who did this…{look at watch}…Oops, gotta go! Have to run my kid to a soccer game in McFarland… Hmm…where the devil are my car keys?”

You could choose that some “they” out there is to blame for the spill…and that “they” had better punish the bad guys…and make “them” clean up the mess…and do a better job enforcing regulations.

You could choose that advanced technology will provide us with all the clean energy we need. Cool! So all we need to do is sit back, wait, and buy an electric car when they are available.

You could choose that we have no choice but to burn gasoline. By God we need it! End of conversation.

You could choose that OK, we do have some choices here in Oregon about how much gasoline we burn…and yes, we should all do our part!...

…but realistically we don’t have that many options, and realistically, the little bit of oil that we use here (or don’t use) can’t possibly make any difference, so…

…really, what we need is a NATIONAL energy policy; we need higher prices to force people to conserve; obviously the President and Congress need to tackle these big issues. The most important thing for us to do is to elect the right candidates…and support the right legislation.


Here is another possibility. You could choose that the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has everything to do with how we have chosen to live here. You could choose that a future without such spills – without raping the landscape – without occupations and wars over oil and other resources – without deprivation and misery visiting upon our children – you could choose that all these things have everything to do with how we choose to live here tomorrow.

You could choose that as citizens we have a duty to act. You could choose that as elected officials you will seek possibilities to learn, participate and be inspired; to inform, advocate, and enact.

I promised specifics:

(1) Commit to bringing commuter transit to Oregon. Put the wheels back on the Oregon-Area Public Transit Committee and get it rolling again. Tell trustee {name of the guy who chairs the moribund committe} that you’re on board. Let the Dane County RTA board know that YOU want to help make commuter transit a reality here. Work with the RTA. Attend its meetings if you can; keep abreast of proceedings in any case. The RTA board is looking for members of an Advisory Committee – especially representatives from outside the current RTA boundaries. How about volunteering?

(2) Tell the citizenry you believe that all of us have a duty to walk lightly on Earth. Tell them you want Oregon to be a community where it is NORMAL for us to walk…and roll about in wheelchairs…and ride bicycles…and push strollers…and pull Radio Fliers – and where it is NORMAL for us to share transit. These things work best when we do them together! That is why it is so important to bring transit service here.

(3) Choose to walk and bike when you “don’t have enough time”…when it is too hot, too cold, too wet, too dark. Choose to walk and bike when the streets are plowed but many sidewalks and bike paths are snow-covered and slippery. Choose to push a stroller to the library (or pull some groceries home in a wagon) when the curb-cuts are plowed shut. Roughly a third of your constituents cannot drive, and most don’t have access to 24/7 chauffeur service. Many motorists who could walk and bike are waiting to be led and inspired. More people than you might suspect are afraid to be alone on our sidewalks and streets. They are hoping and waiting for me…and you…to take the first step. You won’t learn the first thing about getting around in Oregon without a car – from the inside of a windshield. Choose to learn.

Productivity Plunges

April 1, 2011 New York, NY

A Bloomberg poll of leading US economists found that 79% were “shocked” or “dismayed” by the recently-readjusted Bureau of Labor Statistics data showing that labor productivity in the United States plunged by 13.8% in 2010. Asked how they felt about the corresponding sharp decline in U3 unemployment – from 10.1% to 6.3% - 31% of these economists said improved employment numbers were “welcome”, but 88% considered the correlation (between falling productivity and falling unemployment) “counterintuitive” or “irrelevant”. All agreed that the top priority must be to return to increased productivity and healthy economic growth as rapidly as possible.

In addition to the improved employment situation there were other signs of progress last year. The US trade deficit fell by 18.4% in 2010 as demand for petroleum products and imported consumer goods “fell off a cliff”. Consumption of energy overall, demand for minerals and metals, and purchases of snack food products all showed steep declines, and total vehicle-miles-traveled dropped an astonishing 13.4%. Household debt fell by 15.8% as consumers saved more and spent less.

Climate scientists were delighted to announce that US emissions of greenhouse gasses in 2010 went down by 12.6% - a result which bolsters Stanford University Professor Clausius Carnot’s contention that nuclear and renewable energy sources can provide much larger percentages of US electricity usage when electricity consumption declines. Professor Carnot has generated much controversy – and elicited more than a little scorn from the Wall Street Journal editorial board – for his radical theory that climate change is being driven by “an excess of economic metabolism”.

The good news extends to health as well. “People are happier when they have useful work to do”, noted Dr. Howard Frumkin of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. “Moreover, with the steep reductions in automobile usage and petroleum consumption, more and more people are employing their legs and arms to do physical work. When it becomes normal for people to walk or bike to the grocery store and other nearby destinations, this definitely hurts the auto industry, the oil industry, the roadbuilders, and so on. Hell, it even hurts the health-care industry, because obesity is the primary engine of growth for the medical sector of our economy. So we have this weird situation where the economy is shrinking but people are better off. We’re in uncharted waters.”

But none of America’s most prominent economic thinkers is willing to concede that a mere year’s worth of evidence might disprove long-established economic theory. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times notes, “Everyone knows that the only way to grow the economy is to increase labor productivity – to grow output of goods and services per hour of human labor. And everyone knows that the only way to maintain healthy levels of employment is to increase consumption sufficiently to offset the decreases in employment per unit of output. This is Econ 101, for God’s sake.”

“So even if we presume Earth is flat, how could less employment for fossil fuels and less employment for machines translate into more employment for human beings? This sounds like the ravings of the Luddites; like Marx and his ridiculous ‘crisis of surplus labor’. Well, we are a lot smarter now; smart enough to know that such ideas are pure bunk.”