Craftsman v. Gardener

If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible. He will therefore have to use what knowledge he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants. There is danger in the exuberant feeling of ever growing power which the advance of the physical sciences has engendered and which tempts man to try, "dizzy with success", to use a characteristic phrase of early communism, to subject not only our natural but also our human environment to the control of a human will. The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men's fatal striving to control society - a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals. The Pretence of Knowledge

Nobel Laureate Freiderich Hayek , author of the tract above (taken from a speech made in December 1974, 35 years ago) recognized the limits of even his level of insight, skills, talents, and experience - and notably, the limits of his colleagues and the entire science of Economics. Isn't that a good definition of "wisdom," recognizing one's limits? As in "Fools rush in, where angels fear to tread."

It could be argued that there are two competing worldviews among leaders these days. One view says that man is capable of all things and can master anything if only we work together, feed technology and innovation, and do things the right way. If only we can learn to avoid our human pitfalls (no need to elaborate those, you know them all too well). Call this the Craftsman View. 

The Gardening View says we are more like gardeners, subject to forces beyond our will, from the vagueries of the weather to the various "pests" of the animal kingdom that compete to consume what we grow before we've reached our objectives. Complete mastery may not be attained, but that's OK, because the goal is more Harmony than it is Victory. 

The Gardening perspective recognizes natural cycles and laws and accommodates them, working around them with strategies to bend, so as not to break. Gardening teaches humility, patience, cooperation. Gardening is about co-existing. Mastery submits a task to the will of the ... task master. The goal is to break the task to one's will, to defeat the problem with a clever solution. Mastery reinforces pride, efficiency of time, and competition. Mastery is about winning.

There's room, of course, for both mastery and gardening. We can blend them, mastering skills while growing our garden. This would, I guess, be treating life as an art rather than a science (but that's a subject for another post).

As I master a craft, I marvel at my skills and how they're developing - or as is more often the case, I marvel at the difficulty of the task and how slow I am at it, how puny compared to the masters who have succeeded where I only seem to fail. Some prefer those crafts that are quickly mastered, providing as they do rapid feedback of success. It feels good, instant gratification. But as I grow older, I appreciate those tasks and crafts that take a long, long time to master. What is hard earned is more appreciated. What good is it to master a simple task that anyone could do? Better to set the bar high then work long and hard to get over it. 

So, I've come to enjoy tasting wine - I sometimes despair that I will ever master the nuances of smelling the wine and discerning subtle scents - is it plum, or cherry that I smell? Then, swirling the wine over the tongue and trying to identify the taste elements. After twenty years of trying, I still feel as a novice when I read tasting notes. It's the same with golf. I'm still hacking away, just a little better than I was thirty years ago when I picked up a club for the first time. The equipment has gotten much better, the golf courses more fancy, the fairways more fair. But the game and its player are still the same. It's still a matter of applying myself, enjoying the game, and taking from it what it will give me.

Gardening, while altogether different than a craft, still takes lots of hard work, just as mastering a task does. But the outcomes from gardening are forever beyond our grasp. Dependent as gardening is on events that lie beyond our mastery, we do our best and hope for good outcomes. We can't control the weather, after all. But we can get good at the skills involved with gardening, which have more to do with accommodation than control. 

39 years ago

Big Yellow Taxi

I'm Greener than You Are - Wanna Bet?

We should be competing with each other to see who can be most virtuous. It's the flip side to who can consume the most. Xtreme Saving. See Utilities Turn Their Customers Green, With Envy.

Donald Kelley, executive director of the BrainShift Foundation, said the conservation outcomes of the competition had been far greater than he had predicted, with households reducing consumption up to 66 percent.

“As Americans, we are good at entertainment and competition,” Mr. Kelley said. “It’s why on ‘American Idol’ they get 40 million voters. It’s the part of this culture that people really understand, and we should be harnessing it.”

2009, A Saving Odyssey

In Back to Walton's Mountain, novelist Douglas Coupland avers that an across the board reduction in consumer spending, foisted unwillingly on us all like some medicine we knew we needed but hate the taste of, is here to stay. And that means we're suddenly jettisoned off the edge of familiar territory, off a cliff, sailing out into the future without a parachute. Call it "2009, a Saving Odyssey." Key the music.

Right now, it seems almost impossible to imagine ever spending more on things except, maybe, gasoline. And yet the prospect of less consumption fills us with dread. It’s not the having less part that is frightening — people are generally happy as long as everybody’s in the same boat. What’s frightening is the fear that our system can’t handle less, and it’s not as if there’s some other system out there shouting: “Try me! Try me!”

We’ve finally spiked over the edge of the chart — we’re at the place we couldn’t see in social studies classes, when late 20th-century trends like population and raw material consumption and pension indexes were extrapolated along the x- and y- axes into infinity. In my mind we were never really in the future until we hit that edge — and now we have — and because of this, everything we sense in 2009 is going to be new, but that’s what the future was always supposed to be about.

Day One, BOE

Will change be as significant as I believe it will be? Must be? 

Today is Day One of the Barack Obama Era - BOE. He ran on Change, he promised us Change, we desperately need Change. 

I've known Change in my life, and it has never, ever been mentioned in the same sentence as Easy. It is always Difficult. Going through difficult times requires a leader who keeps us focused on vision, the Why for what we must do. Going through difficult times will also require a manager, a person who will assemble a team and administer a plan to acheive the vision. Someone who will keep us focused on the What, the How, and the When. 

Today is an exciting day, an historic day. While everyone will trumpet the fact that Barack Obama is an African American, the first of someone with his background and skin color to ascend to this position of leadership, I'm intrigued by what's inside his head and his heart. He's got a different outlook than any president we've had, and he grasps the moment in history and the magnitude of his task. He knows that more of the same will not work, that the old ways are gone. 

God Bless Us, God Bless Obama. We are walking out into the fog, but doing so with confidence. 

With Efficiency, We Need Price Hikes, Not Cuts

If the goal of an efficiency program is to curtail the amount of resource consumed, then we need to provide both the means to curtail - the tools for the job - and the incentive: a price hike. It's counterintuitive to raise prices in this economy, but by using a tax to raise the price to change behavior, we can help ourselves. 

The NY Times lead editorial today, the day before the Inauguration Day, or COE Day 1 (Common Obama Era), highlights the importance of efficiency. 

The plain truth is that the United States is an inefficient user of energy. For each dollar of economic product, the United States spews more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than 75 of 107 countries tracked in the indicators of the International Energy Agency. Those doing better include not only cutting-edge nations like Japan but low-tech countries like Thailand and Mexico.

True, energy efficiency has improved, especially in states like California. But American drivers, households and businesses still use more energy than those in most other rich countries to do the same thing. The United States spends more energy to produce a ton of cement clinker than Canada, Mexico and even China. It is one of the most energy-intensive makers of pulp and paper, emitting more than three times as much carbon dioxide per ton as Brazil and twice as much as South Korea.

Per-capita carbon dioxide emissions by households in the United States and Canada are the highest in the world — in part because of bigger homes. And the energy efficiency of electricity production from fossil fuels is lower in the United States than in most rich countries and some poor ones, mainly because of the higher share of coal in the mix.

It wasn't always this way. Gradually over the course of two generations, we got SuperSized - we were sold a bill of goods by our leaders. The illusion of improvement was that our lives were getting better as our waistlines expanded. By getting more, we thought we were doing better. The logic is thus: if one is good, two is better, and ten is great. But it doesn't work that way in reality - there is a law of declining returns at work. Somewhere along the way, we passed a line and the curve of improvement started to work against us. 

If efficiency programs only serve to make things cheaper, then efficiency will work against us. We have been trained to consume more and we need to learn a new way of consuming. We must work with what we have, and what we have is a nation that consumes based on price signals. So, if we need to consume lot less - and we do - then efficiency programs must be accompanied by mechanisms to keep prices high and use taxes to fund other structural improvements that will take us where we need to go. 

Right now, we are without money to consume and we are taking advantage of liquidation sales and distressed retailers. As that wave passes, we need to shift to getting used to having less. We've had bigger challenges, after all. We can do it.

Happy Birthday!

Today is a significant day in the Cooper household and in our nation. On this day 13 years ago, my son was born. On this day in 1706, Benjamin Franklin was born. As I sit and ponder what it means for my son to turn 13 - that is the age we deem as the start of the teenage years, an age many societies have considered a rite of passage, as a boy turns into a young man - I'm wondering about the parallels between my son's life and that of Benjamin Franklin. 

I watched a PBS documentary on DVD about Benjamin Franklin a few weeks back - it left a lasting impression. What a life! More on that in a minute. Back to my son and his special day.

As he turns 13, my son is in the middle of the 7th grade, the middle grade of Middle School, what we used to call Junior High. His days are wrapped up in school, homework, karate classes, basketball practices and games, Boy Scout events ... kids are very busy these days, it's a full childhood, rich in opportunities, and as I realize today, it's over way too fast. In contrast, back in 1719, Benjamin Franklin celebrated his 13th birthday in his first year of apprenticeship to his brother, a printer. No school for boys his age, it was off to work and if you were lucky, to learn a trade as an apprentice. 

Benjamin Franklin did so much with the gift of life. Most notable for me was his awareness and curiosity. He seemed to accept no bounds and saw the world as exapansively as he could. He saw problems as opportunities to investigate, applying practical wisdom and hard work to overcome them. He was not bound by convention, leaving his apprenticeship at 17, taking a common law wife and moving his illegitimate son (of another woman) into the new household, striking out for England at a tender age of 20 on an entrepreneurial adventure...he demonstrated the values of good hard work and practicality, but also the value of breaking rules. He was a man for his time and we would all do well to emulate his values and way of living. 

I hope that my son will take inspiration from this brilliant man who shares a birthday with him. And I hope that we all can draw hope and seek wisdom for these troubled times from the man who even after he became famous around the world and was referred to as Dr. Franklin, continued to sign his name as "Benjamin Franklin, Printer."

Letting go of ineffective behavior

Let's let go of War. Hard Military Power doesn't work. Witness the Israelis in Gaza, the Americans in Iraq. Here's Francis Fukuyama in Is America Ready for a Post-American World?

This weak-state world has a lot of implications for American power. We need to consider this very perplexing fact: The US spends as much on its military as virtually the entire rest of the world combined. And yet it is now five years and counting since the US invaded and occupied Iraq, and to this day we have not succeeded in pacifying it fully. That is because of the changing nature of power itself. We are trying to use an instrument—hard military power—that we used in the 20th century world of Great Powers and centralized states in a weak-state world. You cannot use hard power to create legitimate institutions, to build nations, to consolidate politics and all of the other things that are necessary for political stability in this part of the world.

It's time to turn swords into plowshares...it's not just that we spend more than everyone else - it's time to recognize that we don't have an inexhaustible supply of money to burn and spending so much on hard military solutions has become ineffective and wasteful. Defense spending sucks up nearly half of our budget, corrupts our politics, and doesn't get us that much.

I'm not saying we get rid of military spending altogether and go bare, facing real threats with daisies in our hands, but what if we were to scale back to oh, say half of what we currently spend? It would still be a gargantuan amount. This is not to mention that all that money buys solutions that are no longer appropriate to the threats we face - which is, quite frankly, dumber than dumb. We are busy remodeling our Maginot Line while a blitzkrieg is preparing to go around it. Would we really be less safe if we quit wasting money that we don't really have? Aren't our economic threats at least as great as our military ones?

In short, we face a world in which we need a very different set of skills. We need to be able to deploy and use hard power, but there are a lot of other aspects of projecting American values and institutions that need to underlie a continuing leadership role for the US in the world. The Clinton administration’s efforts in the Balkans, Somalia and Haiti to do nation building were criticized as “social work.” The critique was that real men and real foreign policy professionals don’t do this kind of nation building or deploy soft power, but rather deal with hard power with military force.

The problems that the US face are really ones that are we ourselves have created. None of the problems and challenges that the US faces are insoluble. The problems are really political and institutional ones.

There are three particular areas of weakness that the US must remedy if it is to get through the set of challenges I’ve outlined. These three are, first, the diminishing capacity of our public sector; second, a certain complacency on the part of Americans about understanding the world from a perspective other than that of the US; and third, our polarized political system that is incapable of even discussing solutions to these problems.

Neither the Left nor the Right has had the political courage to suggest raising energy taxes, which has been the obvious way of dealing with foreign energy dependency and encouraging alternative sources of energy. And so the political culture that we have created as a result of this kind of politics is incapable of making the decisions that we need.

These are serious times that call for serious discussion. If we are broken, we should acknowledge the facts and start talking about what to do about it. And by everything I can see, we are broken. We should start our national conversation by acknowledging some basic facts. One is that we can't spend like drunken sailors on shore leave any more. The second is that banging our head against the wall is not an effective strategy. Shoot first and ask questions later just gets you a bunch of dead innocents and pissed off natives.

A New Kind of Shock and Awe

In Inaugural Hope, but America is in Shock, Nathan Gardels (really smart guy), editor of the New Perspectives Quarterly, states what I believe is an important point, perhaps overlooked by many: America, we are, collectively, in shock, sleepwalking through current events in a daze. All the blood has left our limbs and is heading for our trunk, focused on corporeal survival. Someone should lay us down and raise our feet up above our hearts. (I was a Boy Scout).

These are, to put it mildly, unprecedented times.

In the space of a few short months, we have morphed from the citadel of free-market capitalism and freewheeling consumerism -- from a land of high-flying hedge funds, Hummers and homes that doubled as ATMs -- to a system in which the banks, insurance companies, mortgage industry and auto manufacturers are quasi-socialized. Adding to that shock is the fact that middle-class investors have seen their portfolios, upon which they depended for retirement, diminished nearly by half.

The tax-and-spend epithet that defined America's partisan politics for decades has been replaced overnight with a bipartisan mantra calling for a nearly trillion-dollar fiscal stimulus. No sooner had Milton Friedman been laid to rest (he died in 2006) than John Maynard Keynes was resurrected. Amazingly, even the historical aversion to state-guided industrial policy in the United States has yielded to urgent demands for political oversight of private enterprise, starting with the Big Three automakers in Detroit.

The year 2008 is thus likely to go down in American history as an even more pivotal one than 2001, when the 9/11 terrorist attacks occurred, because the life of the average American is going to be shaped far more by the consequences. We're not talking about the inconvenience of lining up to go through metal detectors at the airport. We're talking about the transformation of the American model itself. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz was not exaggerating when he quipped to me earlier this year that "the fall of Wall Street is to market fundamentalism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was to communism." Just like that, we're in a different era.

For those born after oh, say 1970, the fall of the Berlin Wall may not seem so remarkable - something else to learn about history. But for those of us who grew up in the Cold War, it seemed as if that wall would be there forever, a glaring symbol of the pain of a world divided between Free and Communist. It was THE SYMBOL of the oppression of Communism. Then one day, the guards just up and left their posts and there they were, those young people in their European clothes, sitting up there on top, breaking the wall apart piece by piece with hammers. Amazing.

Similarly, one must wonder about the fall of Wall Street. The demise of the capital of Investment Banking - those powerful, rich dudes that knew everything and had all that power - here was an industry, here was the symbol of our economy, in free fall, with dramatic events falling down one on top of the other, all over a mere 1-2 months. Giants like Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch, built up over decades, came down in days. AIG, Citibank, GE, GM - struggling to stay afloat...

I'm in shock, I'll freely admit it. But I wonder how many of you, my fellow Americans, realize the truly awesome moment we are living through. We have gone through the looking glass, when it comes to economics, and we don't know what lies ahead in this Alice in Wonderland world we now inhabit.

Soon It Will Be Spring

Winter wears on you, the cold and the dark hurt the soul and damage the psyche. Hibernation Blues does a good job of connecting real winter with the political winter we are just now coming out of, connecting the real climate of Washington State with the political climate in Washington, D.C.

As a country, we’ve been through a long winter – endless, in some regards. Our departing president told us to shop in a time of war, to spend what we didn’t have, to act as if sacrifice was no longer a national character trait.

During that long winter, when everything was supposed to be sunshine, we bought homes we could not afford. We invested in funds that could not sustain themselves. We made hits out of television shows in which we watched other people lose weight – virtual virtue.

Our leaders fostered a certain amnesia about our history, trying to get us to forget that we don’t torture, that we don’t hold people without trial, that we were founded by rebels demanding basic human dignity.

That winter will soon be gone, leaving us with a terrible toll. The federal deficit is now projected to be $1.2 trillion this year, even without a stimulus package. New jobless numbers on Friday will make us shudder. It will take years to sort the mess and lift the gloom.

Soon it will be spring. In a matter of days, we'll have new political leadership, which is bringing with it new hope. The depression and gloom of Winter, which led man to create holidays like Saturnalia, Yule, and Christmas will break out into the glory and rebirth of Spring, and its own holidays like Mother's Day, Passover, and Easter.

As sure as the sun will rise each morning, we can count on the seasons. Spring will always be there to replace Winter. The winter solstice, the root of our darkness and consequent holidays, will give way to the vernal equinox, itself a cause for celebration and its own holidays. The plants and animals adapt to the seasons with their own mechanisms, we human animals created holidays to nurse us through our dark times, and politics to accomplish the art of getting along in society.

Both our psyches and our politics mirror our climate - we can celebrate that Spring is coming, and with it rebirth. Winter is finally, finally about to be over.

Be The Change

The last few pages are flying off the calendar. It can't come soon enough for me.

Less than 2 weeks now until we begin a new era.

This is going to be one helluva ride, and I think we are all underestimating the changes that we will see, the things that will be asked of us.

Our collective ox is in the ditch and it will take all of us to pull it out ... together.

Roger McNamee has a great post where he tells it like it is - we need something far greater than we've ever needed in the past, so great is the hole that we are in. In Obama Needs to Think Bigger About Infrastructure...

We need to stop thinking about infrastructure as an economic stimulant and start thinking about it as a strategy. Economic stimulants produce Bridges to Nowhere. Strategic investment in infrastructure produces a foundation for long-term growth. Imagine a twenty-year plan to upgrade our power grid, public education, transportation systems, and other infrastructure. The longer the time horizon, the easier it will be to align interests between those doing the work and those paying for it. President-elect Obama has a brief window of opportunity to align the country around an economic Manhattan Project. I hope he seizes it.

I think we'll get there, I hope we will that is, and I hope it will look something like the digital infrastructure stimulus in three parts (broadband, health IT, and smart grid) described in this article: A Stimulus Package We Can Believe In

ITIF released a report today that finds that a $30 billion investment in our IT network infrastructure would create almost 1 million jobs. The report looks at a $10 billion investment in each of three technologies: broadband networks, health IT, and the smart power grid. It finds that by spurring or supporting this level of additional investment would create or retain 498,00 jobs from broadband, 212,000 jobs from health IT, and 239,000 jobs in the smart grid. Approximately 525,000 of these jobs would be in small businesses.

Investing in these IT infrastructures has a number of benefits. For one, IT jobs are generally higher-skill, high-paying jobs from telecommunications line installers, to software engineers, to electric utility workers.

In addition, these types of IT infrastructure enable a whole host of innovations and new industries that a comparable investment in physical infrastructure would not. For example, broadband has spawned entirely new industries -- from Internet search to online retail -- creating employment not just in the new firms in these industries (e.g. Google, E-Bay) and the new occupations needed to support them (e.g. user interaction designers and online experience managers) but also through jobs created by individuals leveraging or using these technologies and services. To take but one example, Ebay has found that more than 724,000 Americans report that Ebay serves as their primary or secondary source of income. While obviously these are not all full time jobs (though many are), this lone example demonstrates the powerful ability of digital infrastructure to create jobs from this "network effect." These are new jobs being generated far upstream from the direct jobs associated with the initial investment to lay fiber optic cable, purchase hardware, or develop new software that supports health IT or a smart electric grid and the ensuing indirect and induced jobs.

See also A Broadband Stimulus Plan and the original ITIF report, The Digital Road to Recovery: A Stimulus Plan to Create Jobs, Boost Productivity and Revitalize America - here.

Back to "Normal"

This weekend marks the end of the holidays. I've taken down the external Christmas decorations, helped my mom remove and pack up her decorations, and now we're looking at the Christmas tree coming down today.

In our household, the end-the-holiday weekend will extend to tomorrow night. The UT Longhorns play in the Fiesta Bowl tomorrow night, and the kids go back to school on Tuesday morning. Bad combo.

While I mostly worked through the holidays, they brought the satisfaction and normality of an annual holiday season to what turned out to be a truly hellish year. For a month or so, we had the rituals of the season to distract. Now, it's back to normal life, and while I'll welcome the increase in free time that letting go of the holidays brings, I'll miss the distractions.

We are now less than 3 weeks away from the Obama inauguration, so we can expect an increasing drumbeat in the press about that historic day. Maybe normal won't be so normal over the next month. Maybe, with all the changes in store for us, we won't even recognize "normal" after six months.

This blog is about adapting to a new "normal." We'll all have to get better at adapting going forward. It's a new year, and about to be a new era. Dare I say, "Bring it on!"

A Year of Financial Darwinism

The best I could sum up yesterday in looking back is that 2008 is dead. Thank God.

And apparently we shouldn't hope for better any time soon. This is what it will look like when the worst economic year in decades is followed by ... yet another really really bad year. Struggling companies succumb, eaten up by more healthy ones, in what one prognosticator termed, "Financial Darwinism" (see Worldwide, a Bad Year Only Got Worse).

Philippe Gijsels, senior equity strategist at Fortis Global Markets in Brussels, predicted that 2009 would be “the year of the big shakeout, a year of financial Darwinism, where the weak get weaker and the strong get stronger.”

This is the season for looking back and looking forward. If you didn't like what you see looking back, you're sure not going to like the view ahead, according to this article.

Nouriel Roubini, an economist who call the 2008 market disaster correctly, argued in a recent commentary that in 2009, global recession “will morph into a stag-deflation, a deadly combination of economic stagnation/recession and deflation.”

Whatever combination of ugly economic terms you string together for what lies ahead, going through this transition is all the more difficult when you consider both the open-ended nature of it (we don't know when it will end) and the challenge to our current economic system itself (we don't know what the future will look like when this period ends). Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the train coming at you.

We would all do well to spend this slow down in deep introspection. What do we want the future to look like? We can invent it if we try.