Cake 2 Bread

Morality v. Economy

2009-02-23T06:47:00.004-06:00

To the Editor:
David Brooks’s assertion that “our moral and economic system is based on individual responsibility” is an excellent example of his ability to turn language inside out.
There is no system that is both moral and economic. Individual responsibility in a moral system is based on ethics and good behavior. Individual responsibility in an economic system is based on financial success. The amorality of our economic system, with its indifference to the social consequences of its actions, is the problem.
Donald de Fano
Somerset, Mass., Feb. 20, 2009

This letter to the editor was so succinct and captured so much of what I try to say in this blog, that I thought I'd share it here. David Brooks in an earlier OpEd made the mistake of conflating morality and economy and this letter writer sets him straight.

Morality adheres to principles of human behavior based on equity and what one should do with a focus on how to get into Heaven, or be One with the Universe. Economy is about getting the most for the least, optimizing outputs based on inputs, securing a good deal in the short term, or financial security in the long term. Economy begins and ends here on earth, bound by the gravity of finance. as much as physical gravity. Morality aspires to loftier purposes.

Cake2Bread is about a return to focus on Morality after a long, distracting time spent focusing on Economy. My argument is that by returning to Morality, we will find Economy and financial security - but it may not be the financial success we seek. It may be, for instance, the security that comes from the embrace of a loving community, that intervenes to keep a roof over a family's head (but not to make that family rich). The road we take at this fork may ultimately lead to salvation, just not the salvation that comes from a large house, fast car, fat bank account, closet full of designer clothes, etc., etc., etc.

In the end of his muddled argument, David Brooks stumbles upon a pearl of wisdom - we are in this together. Because the economy is a system that all participate in, we all have a stake in its outcomes, and too many people falling through the cracks creates bigger holes that can consume us all. We can't afford to let things unravel (I wish the Republicans were listening). In the end, if we begin to see the nation as a very large community of which we all are a part, then we will begin to discern wisdom. As a wise man once said in response to a question, "Am I my brother's keeper? Yes, you are."

And they [Obama adminstration] seem to understand the big thing. The nation’s economy is not just the sum of its individuals. It is an interwoven context that we all share. To stabilize that communal landscape, sometimes you have to shower money upon those who have been foolish or self-indulgent. The greedy idiots may be greedy idiots, but they are our countrymen. And at some level, we’re all in this together. If their lives don’t stabilize, then our lives don’t stabilize.

Whistling Past the Graveyard

2009-02-06T06:56:00.003-06:00

I wonder if we, starting with our leadership and moving down to our communities, are in collective denial about this economic challenge, just as we have been about climate change, and indeed, about our own mortality. The phrase that is the title of this post comes from our discomfort with fear and our attempts to tell ourselves not to be afraid.

I think that's what we find with the Republican and Blue Dog Democrat attempts over the past several days to curtail spending that is in the Stimulus Package. Thinking we could continue with the same approach employed by Bush and the Republican Congress that got us into this mess - Tax Cuts - and somehow get a "stimulus" effect is wishful thinking on their part, or worse, a cynical attempt to play to their conservative base, regardless of the consequences. Sink the Stimulus and Save the GOP? What the Hell are they thinking? President Obama laughed in the clip last night that I saw, as he explained (I paraphrase): "No to Spending? What do you think Stimulus means? It means Spending!! How can you have a Stimulus Bill without Spending??"

Paul Krugman, always wise, is getting more and more serious. In On The Edge (as in "edge of the abyss"), he writes today:

A not-so-funny thing happened on the way to economic recovery. Over the last two weeks, what should have been a deadly serious debate about how to save an economy in desperate straits turned, instead, into hackneyed political theater, with Republicans spouting all the old clichés about wasteful government spending and the wonders of tax cuts.
It’s as if the dismal economic failure of the last eight years never happened — yet Democrats have, incredibly, been on the defensive. Even if a major stimulus bill does pass the Senate, there’s a real risk that important parts of the original plan, especially aid to state and local governments, will have been emasculated.
Somehow, Washington has lost any sense of what’s at stake — of the reality that we may well be falling into an economic abyss, and that if we do, it will be very hard to get out again.
It’s hard to exaggerate how much economic trouble we’re in. The crisis began with housing, but the implosion of the Bush-era housing bubble has set economic dominoes falling not just in the United States, but around the world.

It's time to call a Spade a Spade, put lofty post-partisan goals back in the closet, and kick some conservative rear ends. Let's force the Senate Republicans to put on the adult diapers and stand in front of the cameras on the floor of the Senate and be shown for what they are - Hoover obstructionists and reality deniers. Let them take public responsibility for putting the brakes on the stimulus package and enjoy the consequences. Even if we don't get a package, maybe in our abject misery in 2010 we can then elect overwhelming Democratic majorities and move forward.

It is a far worse crisis that awaits us if we don't pass the stimulus package, than if either a) we have some wasteful spending buried in the stimulus bill - GOP ARGUMENT; or b) we have a failed bipartisan approach out of the gate - EXEC BRANCH ARGUMENT - let's face it Mr. President, they don't want to play in your sand box, they are having too much fun throwing sand in your eyes. I say don't fight back, banish them from the playground. They're not worth your time and you only lose ground trying to get them on board. Recess is over. It takes two to move into post-partisanship, and they've told you "no thanks."

Time to Go Bigger and Bolder

2009-02-03T07:19:00.002-06:00

Building on my previous post, here is Arianna Huffington challenging our leadership to step out and lead.

"I support the stimulus package," Van Jones, author of The Green Economy, told me. "But when I look at it in its entirety, I fear that we may soon look back and say that we missed a huge chance to go bigger and bolder. After all, there were three flaws with the old economy that has crashed: it favored consumption over production; debt over smart savings; and environmental damage over environmental renewal. Some parts of the stimulus package seem to be more of the same -- trying to prop up the old, failed economy. That strategy simply won't work -- but we could waste a lot of money and time trying. Instead, we need a new direction for our economy. You can't jump halfway across a chasm -- you just end up falling into the abyss."
Rick Levin, president of Yale and an economics professor, echoed Van Jones' call for "bigger and bolder": "First of all, there's a question of magnitude. The overall stimulus is about 6 percent of GDP. We did not exit the Great Depression without a stimulus that amounted to about 25 percent of GDP -- we called that World War II... The second problem is with the mix... Only $335 billion worth goes to job creation -- that's about 3.5 million jobs, about $100,000 a job. Three-and-a-half million jobs is only two percentage points on the unemployment rate. That's not enough. I would get rid of the tax cuts and use the entire package for job creation... There are lots of great public works projects that would be well worth supporting. And, in the near term, what about CCC-type activities that put people to work right away, cleaning up public parks, weather-stripping homes, offices, schools, government buildings? Stimulus Package: If You Jump Halfway Across a Chasm You Fall Into the Abyss

Are We a Society, or a Group of Individuals Out to Get While the Getting Is Good?

2009-02-03T06:51:00.003-06:00

When did we become such a timid nation? We have become politically inept, ruled by fear that comes in many flavors, our leaders unable to govern our nation in the face of overwhelming facts that indicate a change, dramatic change is needed. We elected Barack Obama and gave him the mantle of change. But he seems to be cowtowing to get consensus from the most backward of our other elected officials, rather than driving change and using the power we gave him. Perhaps I'm not giving our new president enough leeway.

But I'm with NYT Columnist Bob Herbert when he says that collectively we are Risking the Future by not putting 21st century infrastructure front and center in our plans to change.

The society gave the nation’s infrastructure an overall grade of D and said it would require an investment of $2.2 trillion over five years to get it back into decent shape. When you juxtapose this tremendous national need with the wholesale destruction of employment that has occurred over the past several months (and that is expected to continue for some time), you have to wonder why President Obama and Congressional leaders are not moving with extraordinary quickness to put together an infrastructure investment program that is both vast and visionary.

Instead, we have infrastructure spending in the Democrats’ proposed stimulus package that, while admirable, is far too meager to have much of an impact on the nation’s overall infrastructure requirements or the demand for the creation of jobs.

Among those who have expressed their concerns publicly is Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania, a Democrat and persistent advocate of infrastructure investment. Just prior to President Obama’s inauguration, Mr. Rendell said of the stimulus package being considered by the House: “Anybody who thinks — if the president-elect thinks, or the team thinks — that this is the answer to America’s infrastructure needs is in a different universe.”

The big danger is that some variation of the currently proposed stimulus package will pass, another enormous bailout for the bankers will be authorized, and then the trillion-dollar-plus budget deficits will make their appearance, looming like unholy monsters over everything else, and Washington will suddenly lose its nerve.

Bankers get far too much attention and care these days. Bankers, who started out as clerks who minded our money and moved it back and forth between those who would save and those who would invest - valuable middlemen, mind you, but never the most important. Somewhere over the past several decades we came to focus exclusively on the money, always the money and the fascination with getting rich and spending - so that we forgot that money, and getting money, was simply a means to an end. And that end that we should all hold up as a collective goal is building a future that is sustainable, that has a firm foundation, and that provides good jobs and a rising standard of living. Too many label that as Socialism and look away.

Somewhere along the way, we became focused on trying to live like millionaires, rather than trying to live like human beings in communities. I think these two trends are tied together, focusing on money and finance, and focusing on trying to live like millionaires.

If we are to pull out of this nose dive we're in (for we are really going down fast, when you stop and open your eyes), then we'll have to recognize reality when it hits us across the face like a 2x4. Our lives as individuals and our collective lives as a society depend on making investments in ourselves and working together. That means: 1) collectively spending on the infrastructure that is the foundation of our modern economy, which benefits us all - roads, water/wastewater systems, the internet, and the electric grid; and 2) collectively spending to create jobs that keep us all in sound financial health, not just a few lucky ones (that means you, Wall Street!).

Craftsman v. Gardener

2009-01-31T07:46:00.006-06:00

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

2009-01-31T07:15:00.003-06:00

Big Yellow Taxi

I'm Greener than You Are - Wanna Bet?

2009-01-31T06:18:00.002-06:00

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

2009-01-28T06:26:00.004-06:00

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

2009-01-20T06:58:00.002-06:00

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

2009-01-19T07:06:00.002-06:00

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!

2009-01-17T08:09:00.004-06:00

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

2009-01-09T06:54:00.002-06:00

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

2009-01-09T05:54:00.004-06:00

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

2009-01-08T06:26:00.003-06:00

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

2009-01-07T21:00:00.003-06:00

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"

2009-01-04T08:26:00.002-06:00

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

2009-01-02T06:35:00.009-06:00

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.

I'm with Ina

2008-12-31T06:51:00.004-06:00

This Letter to the Editor in the NY Times this morning caught my eye.

We consumers are getting contradictory messages about spending. On the one hand, we are told that our overconsumption is polluting and cluttering up the earth with garbage, using up resources and showing insensitivity to all the needy people in the world. On the other hand, we are told that until we start buying more goods and services, the economy will be in the dumps and we will leave many of our fellow citizens jobless, homeless and hungry.
Something is wrong with that picture. I personally don’t feel like buying much of anything, and my life is a lot less cluttered.
Ina Aronow
New Rochelle, N.Y., Dec.
24, 2008

Personally, I'm adjusting to spending a lot less, and it doesn't bother me that much. It is simpler and as I get used to it, less stressful. What happens to the economy when we all start to feel this way? Economists have a term for it. "Recession. " What happens when this feeling of simplicity catches on? We don't know, but this question must be addressed. Simply getting the economy "back on track" is not the answer when the track is going in the wrong direction!

Recycling Policy Needed

2008-12-27T10:00:00.002-06:00

In an economy that is overbalanced with Supply and too little Demand, the costs of New Inputs compete with the costs of Recycled Inputs...we need not only a policy on gasoline tax to keep the price high in order to drive the purchase of smaller cars and trucks (see here), but also a policy to keep up the price for recyclables so that we can turn the economy away from consuming all these new resources. If we are to succeed at adjusting to new environmental needs, we'll need new economic policies. The Economy and our Ecology are inextricably linked.

See my new site detailing this: www.ecomergence.com.

Retailers to consumers: "Thanks for nothing, jerks!"

2008-12-27T09:45:00.001-06:00

On comedy site 23/6, more re lack of consumer spending... ha ha ha...

Global Boiling

2008-12-27T09:26:00.003-06:00

Ughh. Lots of bad news, but no use hiding from it, eh? Global Boiling: Rising to the Threat - Or Not challenges our responses as a species to a trend that is getting harder and harder to doubt, though many are strong in their denial.

Good questions here about how to "message" this bad news...how do you act when nobody is listening - get louder, more shrill? or get smarter, change the message?

Our Economy a Ponzi Scheme?

2008-12-27T08:58:00.003-06:00

Ponzi Schemes: The Haul Gets Bigger but the Fraud Never Changes, Eduordo Porter in today's NYTimes...(this will be the last today from the NYT, I promise).

And Mr. Madoff’s strategy doesn’t just recall that of snake-oil peddlers of yore. It is strikingly similar to that of the brokers and the financiers who built lucrative legal businesses convincing investors that something — Internet stocks, American homes, Dutch tulips — would appreciate forever for some superspecial reason.
What’s a Ponzi scheme but an illegal ruse to entice the gullible with the promise of too-good-to-be-true returns in arcane investments using an intimidating cloud of abstruse financial lingo? Ponzi frauds have the defining characteristic that returns to the first batch of innocents are paid from the money invested by the second batch. That sounds a lot like today’s American real estate market.
And Ponzi frauds often have similar ends to our increasingly frequent bubbles. Not only do they both usually collapse, but so many rich and influential French investors were taken by John Law’s fraud in the 18th century that the government felt compelled to bail them out. According to Utpal Bhattacharya, a professor of finance at Indiana University, it exchanged the investors’ worthless stock for bonds secured by Paris’s municipal revenues.
There are, of course, important differences between fraud and standard financial practice. Crucially, bubbles are powered by fools of increasing gullibility, who are willing to pay an even greater price to buy an asset from the fool that bought it in the preceding round. Ponzi schemes only require that their investors be foolish.

Stop Being Stupid

2008-12-27T08:44:00.005-06:00

Start living within your means. So says NYTimes columnist Bob Herbert.

Now that the reality of a stunning economic downturn has so roughly intervened, we at least have the option of being smarter going forward. There is broad agreement that we have no choice but to go much more deeply into debt to jump-start the economy. But we have tremendous choices as to how we use that debt.
We should use it to invest in the U.S. — in a world-class infrastructure (in its broadest sense) to serve as the platform for a world-class, 21st-century economy, and in a system of education that actually prepares American youngsters to deal successfully with the real world they will be encountering.
We need to invest in a health care system that improves the quality of American lives, enhances productivity, puts large numbers of additional people to work and eases the competitive burden of U.S. corporations.
We need to care for our environment (if long-term survival means anything to us) and get serious about weaning ourselves from foreign oil.
And, finally, we need to start living within our means and get past the nauseating idea that the essence of our culture and the be-all and end-all of the American economy is the limitless consumption of trashy consumer goods.
It’s time to stop being stupid.

The Times is full of such wisdom this morning. "The rules have changed." "Stop being stupid." and now here's an editorial on The Gas Tax, with more on the Supply v. Demand meme I wrote about in the previous post, but with a twist. "Quit driving big cars."

Who will buy all the fuel-efficient cars that Detroit carmakers are supposed to make?
The danger is that too few will, especially if gasoline prices remain low. Therefore, it might be time for the president-elect and Congress to think seriously about imposing a gas tax or similar levy to keep gas prices up after the economy recovers from recession.
Americans did not buy enormous gas guzzlers just because Detroit marketed them relentlessly. They bought them because they wanted big cars — and because gas was cheap. If gas stays cheap, Americans would be less inclined to squeeze their families into a lithe fuel-efficient alternative.

A bitter recession is not the most opportune time to ratchet up the price of energy. But if the Obama administration is to meet its twin objectives of reducing the nation’s dependence on foreign oil and cutting its emissions of greenhouse gases, it needs to start thinking now about mechanisms to curb the nation’s demand for energy when the economy emerges from recession in the future.
This also would serve as a signal to American automakers and American drivers that the era of cheap gasoline is not going to last.

The problem with our automobile policy (wrapped in with the gas tax policy) is that we don't have one. If for no other reason than to combat global warming, we should invoke a gas tax to drive consumers to consume smaller, more efficient cars. This is monumentally basic math.

Too Much Supply Chasing Too Little Demand

2008-12-27T08:18:00.006-06:00

NYT today, After a Season of Discounting, Stores Sweeten Discounts

Retailers have no choice but to find creative ways to clear their store shelves, because they have to make room for spring merchandise. And persuading consumers to take their goods off their hands is increasingly their only option, since other avenues, like discount Web sites, already have full inventories of their own.
After all, retailers had one of the worst holiday shopping seasons in decades, with sales falling by double digits in nearly all categories, including apparel, luxury goods, furniture and electronics and appliances, according to SpendingPulse, a report by MasterCard Advisors that estimates retail sales from all forms of payment, including checks and cash.

I'm reminded of the desperation scene in a hospital drama where the crew works on a crashing patient (my favorite take on that scene is the Levi's Tainted Love commercial - YouTube video here).

How will the various actors in this drama react to falling demand? What will desperation come to look like? The scenes at the stores yesterday (I had to go out with my son to spend some of his holiday cash) were telling - lots of folks out buying, from the mall to the Sam's Club to the Outlet Mall. Or at least they were out shopping.

More from the NY Times article.

“Many of the senior executives we’ve talked to are worried about how we retrain the customer to pay full price,” said Joseph Feldman, a retailing analyst with Telsey Advisory Group, an equity research and consulting company.
Indeed, on Friday, Phyllis Gagliardi, 56, of Trumbull, Conn., was unimpressed with the $29.99 price tag on a cashmere sweater at the Ann Taylor Loft in Times Square. “They should be lower than this,” she said.
Matthew F. Katz, a managing director in the retail practice of AlixPartners, a restructuring firm, estimated that it would be “several quarters, at best, before consumers go back to a more normal shopping psyche.”
Consumers are becoming so accustomed to stunning discounts that even liquidators are rethinking their pricing strategy. Typically, retailers wait about eight weeks before putting merchandise on sale, but analysts said that given the economy, this spring they may wait only about two or three weeks. “There is no more patience,” Mr. Cohen of the NPD Group said. “The rules have changed.”

Yes indeed, the rules have changed. It will take time, but this may be what a restructuring looks like. With less money to spend, consumers become more selective on how they spend it. The economy, revved up to meet a consumer demand that seemed to never stop growing will have to adjust and retool to meet a shrinking demand.

Boxing Day is for Giving

2008-12-26T08:02:00.004-06:00

Boxing Day, formally the first weekday after Christmas, is a day of giving, especially a day of remembering those less fortunate and taking care of those who serve you throughout the year. Check out Boxing Day is for Giving by Judith Flanders to learn the history of this interesting British holiday, which we don't really celebrate here in America, where the day after Christmas is about ... you guessed it, After Christmas Sales. More stuff.

The New Face of Advertising ... Good

2008-12-25T11:36:00.002-06:00

I like it - can we call it Entertainvertising? Advertainment?

JC Penney: Beware of the Doghouse

Watch it...fun.

Virtue V. Vice

2008-12-25T09:34:00.002-06:00

This theme is stuck in my mind, as I kick around Christmas morning, waiting for my teenage daughter and my wife to wake up and come out to the living room. My teenage son has gone through all the stockings, built a fire, and Jimmy Neutron - one of my favorite forms of modern art - is on the tube. As soon as everyone is up, we can kick this holiday into high gear. In the meantime, I'm sitting here reading the Times on my laptop and musing on the meaning of Christmas.

It's a Wonderful Life was finally over about midnight last night, so the story is fresh on my mind. Here's an interesting essay exploring the film's themes - Wonderful? Sorry George, It's a Pitiful, Dreadful Life. Essayist Wendell Jamieson explores the relative values of virtue and vice in the film.

Now as for that famous alternate-reality sequence: This is supposedly what the town would turn out to be if not for George. I interpret it instead as showing the true characters of these individuals, their venal internal selves stripped bare. The flirty Violet (played by a supersexy Gloria Grahame, who would soon become a timeless film noir femme fatale) is a dime dancer and maybe a prostitute; Ernie the cabbie’s blank face speaks true misery as George enters his taxi; Bert the cop is a trigger-happy madman, violating every rule in the patrol guide when he opens fire on the fleeing, yet unarmed, George, forcing revelers to cower on the pavement.
Gary Kamiya, in a funny story on Salon.com in 2001, rightly pointed out how much fun Pottersville appears to be, and how awful and dull Bedford Falls is. He even noticed that the only entertainment in the real town, glimpsed on the marquee of the movie theater after George emerges from the alternate universe, is “The Bells of St. Mary’s.”
Now that’s scary.
I’ll do Mr. Kamiya one better, though. Not only is Pottersville cooler and more fun than Bedford Falls, it also would have had a much, much stronger future. Think about it: In one scene George helps bring manufacturing to Bedford Falls. But since the era of “It’s a Wonderful Life” manufacturing in upstate New York has suffered terribly.
On the other hand, Pottersville, with its nightclubs and gambling halls, would almost certainly be in much better financial shape today. It might well be thriving.

What I find compelling is that we all get to choose how we go through life. The long-term value of Virtue only becomes more plain as I grow older. There's no discounting the short-term value of Vice - vice is fun and immediately gratifying, that's why its so popular. But it too often comes at a high cost. It seems that its only with age and accompanying wisdom that we begin to see the reality emerging from behind the veil of fantasy. Vice masquerades as Good but is a chimera in the end. Virtue comes across as Less than Vice, but it is the tortoise that ultimately defeats the hare. Slow and plodding, much more boring, but ultimately better.

Much of wisdom is about cultivating a taste for Virtue and learning to deny the false promise of Vice. Christmas is a time to ponder these things and It's a Wonderful Life gives us a great vehicle to structure our pondering.

Doing Well by Doing Good

2008-12-25T08:17:00.007-06:00

Because we live in a world of dualities, we tend to prefer the straightforward clean approach of this v. that. Over the course of time, we have divided our economic world into two primary segments: For Profit and Non-Profit. "Any endeavor should be either business or charitable," we say, by the way we've set up our systems, rules and regulations. But many of our problems lie in our simplistic approach to a complex world. Black and White rules create gaps in the infinite sea of Grays that is the real world.

For profit businesses left untended get too greedy and leave out things that get in the way of their profitability. They hurt people and cause damage, making messes that the rest of us have to clean up. They solve the easiest of problems and leave the most complex for others to deal with. We need look no further than the headlines dominating our newspapers over the past few months to see in gross excess the fruits of this approach to doing business. In staggering amounts, we are transferring the wealth of society over to bad managers who created vast damage with their hubris and failure. But the best and brightest of businesses have certainly figured out over time how to do things efficiently, from meeting market needs to processing inputs and outputs to organizing people, processes, and tasks.

Non-profit organizations too often tend to flounder under the weight of too much responsibility and too few resources. They can lose their way not only through such inadequacy, but also through inefficiency, indifference, and their own versions of corruption and greed that plague the for-profit segment as well. They start with good intentions but then lose their way. But when non-profits get it right, they do so by shining light on neglected problems and segments of society, bringing attention and resources to address the worst problems of society. They organize and stimulate progress by demanding more from our collective better selves. They may not be as efficient or have access to talent and resources like the for-profits, but they are certainly doing what needs to be done, the best of them, that is.

NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, the social conscience of the Op/Ed page, in his column The Sin in Doing Good Deeds, highlights a new book titled Uncharitable, where author Dan Pallotta argues that we put too many constraints on our non-profits. Too high expectations combined with the shackles of non-profit result in inefficient and ineffective behavior, where we all end up the losers. We should be looking for Win/Win - that is rational - but our prejudices about the definition and rules of a "non-profit" give us Lose/Lose - that is irrational.

Yet there’s a broad recognition in much of the aid community that a major rethink is necessary, that groups would be more effective if they borrowed more tools from the business world, and that there is too much “gotcha” scrutiny on overhead rather than on what they actually accomplish. It’s notable that leaders of Oxfam and Save the Children have publicly endorsed the book, and it’s certainly becoming more socially acceptable to note that businesses can also play a powerful role in fighting poverty.

I would argue that the way we define the problem limits our set of possible solutions. What if there were a third, middle way, where something called a Social Corporation could be organized and run like a for profit business but have two primary objectives, equally weighted? What if we could pursue both optimization of shareholder benefit and solving a social problem in a single organization? We are moving there, but too slowly for my tastes.

Coming from the for-profit side, we see companies like Starbucks, Google and Whole Foods, which are most definitely all about making profits, but at the same time are conscious about how they make those profits, adjusting their processes to maximize the social benefits and minimize the social consequences of their business activity, way beyond the typical business approach (donate to charity in exchange for tax breaks, most often giving only as an afterthought after maximizing shareholder benefit - call it a "guilt tax").

Coming from the non-profit side, we see well-run non-profit organizations all around that have effective boards and administrators who routinely apply lessons from the business world to get the most bang for their donors' bucks.

And then right in the middle, pointing the way to the future, we see Grameen Bank, which started out with a very clear intent to solve a social problem - Third World Poverty - but did so by using sound business principles borrowed from the for-profit sector. Founder Muhammad Yunus even won a Nobel Prize in 2006 for his efforts and success.

From modest beginnings three decades ago, Yunus has, first and foremost through Grameen Bank, developed micro-credit into an ever more important instrument in the struggle against poverty. Grameen Bank has been a source of ideas and models for the many institutions in the field of micro-credit that have sprung up around the world.^[29]

On December 10, 2006, Mosammat Taslima Begum, who used her first 16-euro (20-dollar) loan from the bank in 1992 to buy a goat and subsequently became a successful entrepreneur and one of the elected board members of the bank, accepted the Nobel Prize on behalf of Grameen Bank's investors and borrowers at the prize awarding ceremony held at Oslo City Hall.^[30]

Grameen Bank is the only business corporation to have won a Nobel Prize. In a speech given at the presentation ceremony, Professor Ole Danbolt Mjøs, Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, mentioned that, by giving the prize to Grameen Bank and Muhammad Yunus, the Norwegian Nobel Committee wished to focus attention on dialogue with the Muslim world, on the women's perspective, and on the fight against poverty.^[31]

I think/hope we'll get there, but I think we'd get there much sooner if we were able to let go of the rules and structures that hold us back. Our potential as human beings is mostly limited by the shackles we put on ourselves. The human condition is one of struggle, but mostly, I think we get it right.

This Christmas, in the words of Tiny Tim, "God Bless Us Everyone."

Listening to the Message

2008-12-24T23:01:00.005-06:00

Forty three years ago A Charlie Brown Christmas was released as a prime-time animated Christmas special and an instant classic was born. I watched that one on VHS two days ago. Later that night, my daughter put in How the Grinch Stole Christmas, itself an animated prime time special in 1966, one year after Charlie Brown's debut. Both shows had a clear message: "Christmas is Not About the Presents."

Charlie Brown asked poignantly about the true meaning of Christmas and was pointed to the story of the Nativity. The Grinch saw his plot to spoil Christmas for the Whos in Whoville by stealing all their presents go down in flames, as the Whos just held hands and sang. "Christmas is about God, hope, fellowship"...this message was deemed important enough to be the theme of two prime time specials, two years in a row, five decades ago. And where have we gone since? For many, we've gone in the opposite direction, and now its time to look at an alternative approach.

At this moment, I'm watching It's a Wonderful Life (released just after WWII ended, in 1946 - 62 years ago!) and that putz Old Man Potter is trying to take over the Bailey Building and Loan - greedy bastard! - and George Bailey keeps on standing up to him, he just keeps on doing the right thing. Gotta love him. You all know how this one ends up - Hark the Herald Angels sing as a room full of friends and family line up to help George out in his time of need (and I choke up every time). The clear message: "Life - and Christmas! - is NOT about material wealth and success - its about friends and fellowship and making a difference through acting in community."

Perhaps the media that started the holiday moralizing in the modern era was Charles Dicken's A Christmas Carol, a simple story of material greed v. relationships, and ultimate epiphany leading to redemption and spiritual correction that has been made and remade into so many memorable films and TV stage plays over the years since its original launch in the week before Christmas 1843 (165 years ago). The clear message: "It's not too late to get back to the true meaning of Christmas, which is NOT acquiring wealth and material goods, but celebrating our family and friendship relationships and our blessings."

And yet we hear constant updates about shopping and gift giving, and this year, the failure of the economy and the "worst retail season ever." Good thing or bad thing? As with everything in life, it is neither black or white, but a mass of gray.

With Christmas about to tick over in less than an hour, I want to wish anyone reading this message a wonderful Christmas. Together, we can conquer fear, together, we can restore hope. We've always known this, but we get all hornswaggled when it comes to money and consumption, especially when our lifestyles are threatened, and unless we're careful, we start looking out for our own and say "to hell with everyone else!" Watch out, gifts and getting are tempting!

The NY Times editorial page gets it with When Christmas Comes.

You may be finding a way to a new and simpler Christmas this year, but that was once the usual kind of Christmas. What it comes down to, perhaps, is saving Christmas from the idea that Christmas will save us — that the shopping we do this season will keep the economy afloat or give us the buoyancy we need for the coming year.
But, really, Christmas needs no saving. It does not exist apart from what we make of it. And, on its own, it cannot save us, though it contains the gestures of generosity and thankfulness that are halfway to being a better person, a richer community. Christmas is all the better for being a simple place, nothing more, perhaps, than two red cardinals, male and female, against the backdrop of a snowy field. They are there every day. The only difference is that today it feels like Christmas.

Jamie Lee Curtis wrote a great piece in the Huffington Post It Is a Wonderful Life

At the end of It's a Wonderful Life, George Bailey is shown, kindness, love, support, familial bonds strengthen and deep, abiding friendships flourish.

As we head out of the darkness of the Bush and into the promise of a new day that Barack Obama has offered us, remember, "we" exist. "We" can help each other, " we " can lead our governments, businesses and institutions to change. " We" can do it. " We" can reach out, spare the dime, dollar, meal, roof.

"We" can scare the shit out of the land companies. "We" can and will and have and will again!

Peace and love to you and yours this holiday season.

I'd second what Jamie Lee said there, and add "Here's to Charlie Brown, Cindy Lou Who, and George Bailey, and all those who keep the spirit of Christmas alive for us all." Let's see if we can't carry this spirit with us throughout the trying times coming up in 2009.

Putting Toothpaste Back in the Tube

2008-12-22T08:58:00.006-06:00

Over the coming year, we'll see our society divide between those who desperately long for a return to "normalcy" and those who believe such a return is impossible. The nature of a paradigm shift / epiphany / new perspective - whatever you choose to call it - is to rock your world and make you see things through new eyes. If you don't like what you see, well, you can always go back, but to do so means to invest ever more energy into denying a new reality and crafting a false world. To go back to the old ways is to live a lie and settle for something that is less than authentic. For a paradigm shift to have any value, it must be processed and incorporated into one's world view.

That's why I enjoyed Paul Krugman's column today in the NY Times (I always do, what a combination of wisdom, insight, and good writing) - I urge you to take a moment to read Life Without Bubbles and come back for a little discussion.

In fact, however, things can’t just go back to the way they were before the current crisis. And I hope the Obama people understand that.
The prosperity of a few years ago, such as it was — profits were terrific, wages not so much — depended on a huge bubble in housing, which replaced an earlier huge bubble in stocks. And since the housing bubble isn’t coming back, the spending that sustained the economy in the pre-crisis years isn’t coming back either.
To be more specific: the severe housing slump we’re experiencing now will end eventually, but the immense Bush-era housing boom won’t be repeated. Consumers will eventually regain some of their confidence, but they won’t spend the way they did in 2005-2007, when many people were using their houses as ATMs, and the savings rate dropped nearly to zero.
So what will support the economy if cautious consumers and humbled homebuilders aren’t up to the job?
A few months ago a headline in the satirical newspaper The Onion, on point as always, offered one possible answer: “Recession-Plagued Nation Demands New Bubble to Invest In.” Something new could come along to fuel private demand, perhaps by generating a boom in business investment.

We've become addicted to Bubbles - economic gimmicks that give us giddy hills of good times to ride up on, but inevitably are followed by depressing hills of bad times to tumble down. Those of us who long for gently rolling plains are boring, generally shouted down by the proponents of the "next big thing," inevitably a bubble of some kind that is unsustainable, inevitably to be followed by a let down of some kind.

But the bubble proponents don't care about what will follow, because they got theirs during the good times - "Eat Dessert First!" they shout, "Because Life is Uncertain." On that point, they are wrong, as anyone with eyes can see. They are deluding not just themselves, but all the rest of us to boot. By now we should all have learned what we might call the Law of Bubbles, which states "All Bubbles Must Burst At Some Point."

When the bubble bursts, the rest of us are left to pay for the party with our own hangovers. Why anyone would want a hangover without a party is beyond me, but that is what most voters and societies are doing when they support a bubble - an irrational pursuit of an unsustainable economic model that benefits a few disproportionately, but that then demands that all pay for its consequences. When society follows leaders, either political or business, who promise the unsustainable and deny reality, they are being willfully ignorant - "Detroit Shall Rise Again" was my favorite promise from last year's Michigan primary (see The Party Never Ends ... Cartoon Lemonade - my post from last January regarding Mitt Romney's demagoguery).

The economic toothpaste is out of the tube, as far as I'm concerned. We will recover from today's economic hell, but things will not be as they were. We will have a new normal, which will be more characterized by caution. It will take a long time to restore trust, of both the political and economic varieties. In the meantime, we will find a new level of balance, a new normal, which is a better fit for a new world of limits. Sustainability must become the new norm. Forces larger than our own selfish needs, as strong as we know those to be, are driving us to moderate our habits and our lifestyles. We need not sacrifice, but we must change.

The coming debate will be between those who deny reality and want to return to the old ways, and those who see a new reality and look at the old ways with less nostalgia. Guess which side I'm on.

My Hometown Gets It, But We Have So Far To Go

2008-12-19T11:22:00.001-06:00

Follow Austin's Example -- Cut Back On Energy And Save Big (VIDEO)

Sparky Xmas

2008-12-19T09:40:00.003-06:00

Tom Tomorrow's cartoon on shopping - worth watching, good yuks AND good social commentary, as usual with this artist.

It's Gonna Be a Bumpy Ride

2008-12-19T08:51:00.004-06:00

The Real Great Depression reflects on the similarities to the Panic of 1873 aka the "Long Depression," claiming that the Panic more closely resembles the current recession than does the Great Depression of the 1930s, given its connection to overspending on real estate and consequent retraction of credit.

If there are lessons from 1873, they are different from those of 1929. Most important, when banks fall on Wall Street, they stop all the traffic on Main Street — for a very long time. The protracted reconstruction of banks in the United States and Europe created widespread unemployment. Unions (previously illegal in much of the world) flourished but were then destroyed by corporate institutions that learned to operate on the edge of the law. In Europe, politicians found their scapegoats in Jews, on the fringes of the economy. (Americans, on the other hand, mostly blamed themselves; many began to embrace what would later be called fundamentalist religion.)

The post-panic winners, even after the bailout, might be those firms — financial and otherwise — that have substantial cash reserves. A widespread consolidation of industries may be on the horizon, along with a nationalistic response of high tariff barriers, a decline in international trade, and scapegoating of immigrant competitors for scarce jobs. The failure in July of the World Trade Organization talks begun in Doha seven years ago suggests a new wave of protectionism may be on the way.

In the end, the Panic of 1873 demonstrated that the center of gravity for the world's credit had shifted west — from Central Europe toward the United States. The current panic suggests a further shift — from the United States to China and India. Beyond that I would not hazard a guess. I still have microfilm to read.

Zero Dollars and Zero Cents

2008-12-16T22:58:00.003-06:00

How does a $0.00 electric bill sound?

Japan gets it, at least some of them do

2008-12-16T22:56:00.003-06:00

Japan as ground zero for no-waste lifestyle

Mobile Storage Vehicles - MSVs

2008-12-15T18:02:00.003-06:00

History is so strange. Imagine if electricity, not gas combustion, had turned out to be the predominate technology one hundred years ago. Don't you think that we would have moved a little further along in battery storage over 100 years of automobile history if we had relied on batteries for transportation? You bet we would have. But we all know how things turned out - electric-powered cars lost out to gasoline-fueled internal combustion engine-driven autos, and the rest is history. Now here we are in 2008 wondering how we are going to move all these people and goods around when gasoline gets more and more expensive (these price drops will disappear, just watch) and when gasoline combustion produces CO2 as part of the exhaust process, which in turn heats up our planet making it ever less livable. We do indeed have a big problem.

But it's not too late to change things. One of the most amazing things about human beings is the massive brains we have (another amazing thing is how little most of use those massive brains, but I digress). When we get things wrong, we can always put our brain to work and we can fix what's broken and move on. At least, that's the way its always worked out so far. Now, however, we face a huge systemic crisis. We are debating how to back up historically bad management at three auto companies that probably deserve to fail, when we should be debating the future of the electricity and the transportation industries, which history tells us are two separate industries, but which technology and innovation could make into one.

A Paradigm Shift

What if fixing Detroit so it could make more internal combustion vehicles were the wrong thing to do? What if it would be better to reshuffle the deck of facts that we all share and develop an entirely new paradigm concerning personal transportation and electricity production, distribution, and consumption?

Let's look at our current paradigm for personal transportation.

1. Manufacture cars on spec - new models developed every year with slight modifications (even though cars are designed to last longer and longer)
2. Distribute cars to a large number of locally-owned franchised dealerships
3. Sell cars with incentives including special financing, discounts off of retail, and capital leases
4. Personal Responsibilities.
a. Qualify for car loans, arrange loans for finance companies, credit unions, etc.
b. Re-sell cars at used car lots - no, make that "pre-owned dealer showrooms."
c. Repair cars when they break-down
d. Maintain cars to keep them running
e. Fuel cars at gas stations located along roads
5. Tax fuel as public policy (or don't tax - keep it cheap - as public policy)
6. Insure private drivers against liability and property claims

Remember the excitement about getting to drive when you were about to turn 16? Remember the let down soon thereafter when you realized how expensive it was to drive? We only rebelled against the complexity and expense at the beginning, if we did at all. Later, we accept this system as the "way things are" and don't bother to challenge it.

Mobile Storage Vehicles - MSVs

But when you introduce electricity into the equation - plug in hybrids, or PHVs - it changes the situation dramatically because it opens up a new set of options, enabling a new paradigm for transportation: cars as Mobile Storage Vehicles or MSVs. If cars are viewed not only as transportation, but also as mobile storage units - extensions of the electric utility system - they gain a complementary purpose: as battery banks, they store energy and thus change the dynamics of the utility operating system. And they're rolling powered vehicles that provide an alternative to current transportation options: if the utility owns the PHVs and leases them as MSVs, then all bets are off. We are into a new paradigm. But most or all the discussion to date of PHVs or electric vehicles envisions them under the old paradigm of personal ownership.

Our electric utility infrastructure is currently under extreme duress, as growth in consumption demands more of a system that has not kept up with growth. We are a few years or months away from more dire circumstances, depending on whom you listen to. A key aspect of the electric utility system is that power is produced and added to the grid as it is consumed, to keep the grid at a constant voltage level. Electricity cannot be stored economically, so this real-time production/consumption solution has remained since the grid's beginnings one hundred years ago.

PHVs offer a potential solution as MSVs - electricity can be pumped into millions of PHV batteries at night when it is cheap to produce and then released back onto the gird in the afternoon, at peak times when it is most expensive. In this manner, PHVs offer a potentially economic storage solution that has always eluded utility planners.

But let's take this one step further. Imagine if electric utilities were to place massive orders for fleets of PHVs using their substantial credit, bolstering car manufacturers under government guidance. Imagine then if they deployed those vehicles to their electricity customers as part of their electricity service provisioning. Your electric bill would now comprise part of your transportation budget, and by cooperating with the electric company to help store and release cheap electrons as part of the usage contract, your transportation budget would shrink. And the electric bill would be subsidized as well. By redefining how we look at both electricity and transportation, we'd be making better use of our limited budgets. We need to be more creative with regard to our problems.

Assumption Change No. 1. Asset Ownership: The vehicle is no more a capital asset to be owned by a citizen than is the electric meter on the wall - its a part of the contract for electricity.
Assumption Change No. 2. Fuel Options: The vehicle no longer needs to be refueled. No more need for a gas station. The vehicle processes energy into and out of its batteries, according to the dictates of the utility. The driver keeps a net metered accounting of the energy consumed and the energy given back, in a contract with the electric utility. We would need to adjust to a new rhthym of daily vehicle use.
Assumption Change No. 3. Sales: Not owning the vehicle means no more car distributorships, no more used car lots - you simply return the PHV to the utility at the end of the contract and get a newer model in return. The old car can be reprocessed at the plant and its materials re-used.
Assumption Change No. 4. Long Distance: Rather than assume that any car can make the drive cross country, we use urban short-distance PHVs with nightly recharges and a much smaller pool of cars for long-distance road travel. For most of us, this would mean a different approach to car ownership - we might shift to driving only PHVs most of the time and then renting gas cars for infrequent long-distance travel, in which case we might get just what we like/need for a road trip. With much less use of gasoline as a fuel, we would likely see cheaper gas and it would make sense to lease big comfortable SUVs (or RVs) for those long summer vacation trips, or a more economical car for a more frequent, but shorter inter-city business trip.
Assumption Change No. 5. Massive investment in nuclear and coal plants: Right now, spending a lot of money on additional generation and transmission lines appears unavoidable because that's the only solution our current paradigm (no storage) points to. But with storage, consumption curves are smoothed out and our current amounts of generation are adequate to meet new demands of growth. All that money that would otherwise go into new power plants could go into building new fleets of electric cars. All that money currently spent on gasoline and gas-powered cars could go elsewhere.

Still think it would be a bad thing if Detroit car companies were placed under new management? I don't any more. This scenario is quite feasible, but we'd have to start looking at our old problems through new eyes. We'd have to let go of cherished delusions. We'd have to be more creative about how we solve problems. We'd have to learn to use our limited tools and our limited money more wisely. We have a long way to go, but we can still get there.

Fear or Frugality? Either Way, We're Spending Less

2008-12-14T12:01:00.005-06:00

A new normal that revolves around buying lots of stuff while bragging about our bargain-hunting skills doesn’t seem to reflect changed values. There are other possibilities that seem more considered and less reactionary: an organization called the Institute for American Values recently issued a report offering serious suggestions for cultivating a new thrift, like endorsing a public-education campaign; making the Thrift Savings Plan, which lets federal workers regularly sock a portion of their income into diversified investment funds, available to all working Americans; and even a revival of National Thrift Week.
But so far, nobody has quite reconciled the vision of a sober and repentant new shopper with the substantial government efforts to reignite consumer spending. This year’s Black Friday big-box mobs hint that perhaps bargain binges and postmaterialist values aren’t the same thing. If there’s a deeper shift in our thinking, it’s still to come. And maybe it will. After all, the mere fact that we have managed to characterize consumer shock as frugality chic offers a perverse form of hope: That whatever happens, we’ll never lose our tendency toward optimism — even, it turns out, about our pessimism. Talk is Cheap

And here's a short video on how luxury brands like Bulgari are taking it on the chin...look for lots more hand-wringing after the results of the Christmas season come in. Luxury Brands Face Slowing Economies

The Value of a Seeing Old Things Through New Eyes

2008-12-10T07:11:00.003-06:00

Looking at familiar things in new ways changes the way you think. In the face of an intractable problem, I'm in favor of doing two things.

First, I seek a paradigm shift by asking "Is there a different way to look at this problem?" Second, I probe for the underlying assumptions that drive the problem and ask "Are these assumptions still valid?"Perhaps these questions are really one and the same when, I think about it - whoops, there goes another perspective shift!

Tom Friedman said essentially the same thing in today's NY Times column, While Detroit Slept. He suggests that instead of looking at the GM "Crisis" and asking how to structure a bailout to get back to making cars, while trying to fix the problem of gasoline fuel efficiency, we should be looking beyond gas cars and Detroit to the issue of mobility - and devising a new way to deliver mobility. Electric cars beckon.

One new way of thinking about mobility, recently being deployed in Denmark, Israel, and now, it seems, in Hawaii, is to provide mobility miles. Better Place is promoting a system of car-charging stations (re-converted gas stations?) where electric cars can pull in and much like a car wash, have their depleted batteries replaced with fresh batteries while the customer waits. The stations would get their electricity from wind and solar, and customers would pay for mobility miles, much in the same way they pay for minutes on a cell phone. Friedman concludes:

What Agassi, the founder of Better Place, is saying is that there is a new way to generate mobility, not just music, using the same platform. It just takes the right kind of auto battery — the iPod in this story — and the right kind of national plug-in network — the iTunes store — to make the business model work for electric cars at six cents a mile. The average American is paying today around 12 cents a mile for gasoline transportation, which also adds to global warming and strengthens petro-dictators.
Do not expect this innovation to come out of Detroit. Remember, in 1908, the Ford Model-T got better mileage — 25 miles per gallon — than many Ford, G.M. and Chrysler models made in 2008. But don’t be surprised when it comes out of somewhere else. It can be done. It will be done. If we miss the chance to win the race for Car 2.0 because we keep mindlessly bailing out Car 1.0, there will be no one to blame more than Detroit’s new shareholders: we the taxpayers.

We should be asking ourselves - and our government leaders - a very important question: "Before we climb these walls, do we have our ladders on the right walls?" Steven Covey suggests this as the key question of Leadership, Habit No. 2 of his famous Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. In contrast, he offers up Management - setting priorities and assigning tasks based on values and vision (the building of ladders) - as Habit No. 3, which by the way, should always come after Habit No. 2.

My concern with the urgency of these bailout issues at the end of the 2nd Bush term is that we are spending valuable dollars we don't have on solutions we don't need, which will prevent fixing the problems we must fix. Instead of our current sense of urgency to get the train of our economy back on its tracks, we should be having a deep discussion about the the tracks themselves (are they still taking us places we need to go?) and indeed, whether its trains and tracks we need, or something altogether different. We need to talk about happiness, sustainability, and viability, but instead we are talking about kickstarting consumption and GDP, avoiding deflation, and how little we will need to change and still address global warming.

Next post - yet another way to look at cars, global warming and mobility.

Economy + Ecology = ecomergence

2008-12-09T12:26:00.003-06:00

I've launched my corporate website this week. Check it out at www.ecomergence.com. The website describes my consulting practice, which is based on five principles.

Economy - Respect Limits
Ecology - Try Sustainability
Community - Come Together
Emergence - Bottom Up
Econservation - Go Online

The focus of my practice is to help communities - ranging from municipalities to churches to non-profits to schools to businesses - to do better at their missions during these difficult times. Rather than the typical strategy in the face of hard times - withdrawal and reduction of services - I believe that these times call for a redoubling of our focus on our missions and outreach to each other to find new ways of doing things, ways that are both more efficient and sustainable. By simplifying and letting go, we get to rediscover the essence of our missions and the value of the communities we serve and in which we interact.

Enough: Sufficiency v. Efficiency

2008-12-06T23:52:00.003-06:00

A lifestyle based on Efficiency focuses on process - getting more output out of less input, doing more with less. This approach seems appealing when one rejects consumerism and accepts real limits in materials. Moving from Abundant Resources to Constrained Resources would seem to demand more Efficiency. Maybe it does. Makes sense.

But there's another way to look at it. Sufficiency focuses on getting enough - thinking about what you really need and stopping before you are full. This approach to life looks at the rationale for consuming before you even get to making the process more efficient. It certainly doesn't assume growth. If I can restructure my demands, I can get by with less (no matter the level of resources).

Thomas Princen's The Logic of Sufficiency is all about living in harmony by keeping the concept of Enough front and center in all decisions.

What if modern society put a priority on the material security of its citizens and the ecological integrity of its resource base? What if it took ecological constraint as a given, not a hindrance but a source of long-term economic security? How would it organize itself, structure its industry, shape its consumption?

Across time and across cultures, people actually have adapted to ecological constraint. They have changed behavior; they have built institutions. And they have developed norms and principles for their time. Today's environmental challenges—at once global, technological, and commercial—require new behaviors, new institutions, and new principles.

In this highly original work, Thomas Princen builds one such principle: sufficiency. Sufficiency is not about denial, not about sacrifice or doing without. Rather, when resource depletion and overconsumption are real, sufficiency is about doing well. It is about good work and good governance; it is about goods that are good only to a point.

With examples ranging from timbering and fishing to automobility and meat production, Princen shows that sufficiency is perfectly sensible and yet absolutely contrary to modern society's dominant principle, efficiency. He argues that seeking enough when more is possible is both intuitive and rational—personally, organizationally, and ecologically rational. And under global ecological constraint, it is ethical. Over the long term, an economy—indeed a society—cannot operate as if there's never enough and never too much.

Heading Over a Cliff: The Consumption/Conservation Paradox

2008-12-06T23:04:00.008-06:00

It's very natural to think that things tomorrow will be about like things today, that life next year will resemble life this year, that I can expect what the world will look like in six years when my son graduates from high school and we finally get to experience that "empty nest syndrome" we've heard so much about. Not so fast...

That used to be the case, but in a time of rapid change, none of those assumptions are anywhere near true any more. What we used to know as fact no longer holds true. Everything You Know Is Wrong - my favorite Firesign Theater LP from 33 years ago - so absurd and surreal back then (and today) - now describes the way I actually look at the world. These days, it seems that everything I know is wrong - nothing seems to hold true any more.

A key challenge we face is that our underlying assumptions about Consumption, Consumerism and our Economy have been systematically challenged by recent events. Fact is, we can't depend any more on consuming to bail us out: buying from and selling to each other - the very definition of our modern economy - just won't cut it anymore. For all of our lives, consumption and economic growth has always been the solution - we grow, accelerate, deal with positive growth, slowdowns in growth.

Now, as we approach this CO2 horizon, consumption itself has become the problem - economic shrinkage has become the solution. Conservation, not consumption, is how we all need to think now. And that, my friends - as John McCain would say - is a very different mindset, an altogether different way to look at things.

But most people would see such change in a negative light. Bummer. This means bad times ahead for all. A New Deal or a War Footing? Thinking Through Our Response to Climate Change does the best job yet at explaining and exploring this paradox.

What do we need? Well, there are strategies for dealing with climate change that don’t require a massive investment of fossil energies. They are, of course, unsexy in a legislative sense, mostly because they are enacted by ordinary people, and focus heavily on conservation. On the other hand, as we have seen with the shifts people are making for economic reasons, they provide immediate, dramatic paybacks, with fewer dangers. It is obviously not possible to reduce our energy usage to 0 - we will still need investment in renewable infrastructure, in insulation, and we will still need companies, perhaps car companies, to build rail cars and windmills. But the difference between a gradual build out, that takes into account the ecological and economic costs of this shift, and takes the New Deal, rather than the war as a real model - ie, it emphasizes what ordinary people can do with human energies and small-to-moderate investments and a massive build-out that attempt to keep business as usual.

Forget the sodding polar bears

2008-12-06T22:39:00.004-06:00

Forget the sodding polar bears: this is about all of us. As the ice disappears, the region becomes darker, which means that it absorbs more heat. A recent paper published in Geophysical Research Letters shows that the extra warming caused by disappearing sea ice penetrates 1500km inland, covering almost the entire region of continuous permafrost(4). Arctic permafrost contains twice as much carbon as the entire global atmosphere(5). It remains safe for as long as the ground stays frozen. But the melting has begun. Methane gushers are now gassing out of some places with such force that they keep the water open in Arctic lakes, through the winter(6).

The effects of melting permafrost are not incorporated into any global climate models. Runaway warming in the Arctic alone could flip the entire planet into a new climatic state. The Middle Climate could collapse faster and sooner than the grimmest forecasts proposed.

Barack Obama’s speech to the US climate summit last week was an astonishing development. It shows that, in this respect at least, there really is a prospect of profound political change in America. But while he described a workable plan for dealing with the problem perceived by the Earth Summit of 1992, the measures he proposes are now hopelessly out of date. The science has moved on. The events the Earth Summit and the Kyoto process were supposed to have prevented are already beginning. Thanks to the wrecking tactics of Bush the elder, Clinton (and Gore) and Bush the younger, steady, sensible programmes of the kind that Obama proposes are now irrelevant. As the PIRC report suggests, the years of sabotage and procrastination have left us with only one remaining shot: a crash programme of total energy replacement. One Shot Left

Now is the time to focus on what is important...it feels like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic time sometimes to me...

We've been getting closer and closer to the edge for years, but we had a society and ruling class in the USA that refused to look at things realistically, so now its come rushing at us all at once. That doesn't change the facts, which paint a picture that is more and more desperate.

The One Shot Left essay continues.

This approach is challenged by the American thinker Sharon Astyk. In an interesting new essay, she points out that replacing the world’s energy infrastructure involves “an enormous front-load of fossil fuels”, which are required to manufacture wind turbines, electric cars, new grid connections, insulation and all the rest(13). This could push us past the climate tipping point. Instead, she proposes, we must ask people “to make short term, radical sacrifices”, cutting our energy consumption by 50%, with little technological assistance, in five years. There are two problems: the first is that all previous attempts show that relying on voluntary abstinence does not work. The second is that a 10% annual cut in energy consumption while the infrastructure remains mostly unchanged means a 10% annual cut in total consumption: a deeper depression than the modern world has ever experienced. No political system - even an absolute monarchy - could survive an economic collapse on this scale.

She is right about the risks of a technological green new deal, but these are risks we have to take. Astyk’s proposals travel far into the realm of wishful thinking. Even the technological solution I favour inhabits the distant margins of possibility. Can we do it? Search me. Reviewing the new evidence, I have to admit that we might have left it too late. But there is another question I can answer more easily. Can we afford not to try? No we can’t.

Houston, We Have a Problem: God Save the American States

2008-12-06T20:29:00.007-06:00

I just finished watching the three disc set of the HBO miniseries "John Adams" - running over about 10 hours, this film describes the incredible life of our second US president, long overshadowed by the awful twist of fate of being in an historic position to make a difference, but sandwiched in between George Washington, "Father of our Nation," Thomas Jefferson, "Author of the Declaration of Independence," and Ben Franklin "Man of Many Talents." Tough crowd. [Note that unlike his colleagues, John Adams face is not on any currency!]

This clip is outstanding ... John Adams - God Save The American States ... watch this, then imagine a debate like that in today's Congress. Ain't. Gonna. Happen. Though we could sure use a group of leaders like they had back then, especially right about now.

Consider our current state of affairs ... we may not have Redcoats and Taxation without Representation, but folks, let's face it, times are really, really bad, and they're getting worse every day.... today, we have Economic Meltdown and Global Warming. The wheels are off the wagon and the wagon has gone off the tracks...but here is the real kicker ... even when/if we get the wheels get back on, the track is still going the wrong way...and we can't agree on what/where the new track goes yet. We need help.

Today's employment report, showing that employers cut 533,000 jobs in November, 320,000 in October, and 403,000 in September -- for a total of over 1.2 million over the last three months -- begs the question of whether the meltdown we're experiencing should be called a Depression. We are falling off a cliff. To put these numbers into some perspective, the November losses alone are the worst in 34 years. A significant percentage of Americans are now jobless or underemployed -- far higher than the official rate of 6.7 percent. Simply in order to keep up with population growth, employment needs to increase by 125,000 jobs per month......When FDR took office in 1933, one out of four American workers was jobless. We're not there yet, but we're trending in that direction. Shall We Call it a Depression Now?

AND

The trajectory both Barack Obama and Gordon Brown have proposed - an 80% cut by 2050 - means reducing emissions by an average of 2% a year. This programme, the figures in the Tyndall paper suggest, is likely to commit the world to at least four or five degrees of warming, which means the likely collapse of human civilization across much of the planet. Is this acceptable?

The costs of a total energy replacement and conservation plan would be astronomical, the speed improbable. But the governments of the rich nations have already deployed a scheme like this for another purpose. A survey by the broadcasting network CNBC suggests that the US federal government has now spent $4.2 trillion in response to the financial crisis, more than the total spending on World War Two when adjusted for inflation. Do we want to be remembered as the generation that saved the banks and let the biosphere collapse? Happy Climate Action Day. Will The Poznan Climate Summit Tell Earth “Kiss Your Poles Goodbye”?

"Houston, We Have a Problem.

Pecan Street Project

2008-12-03T21:39:00.002-06:00

In the old days, streets in downtown Austin running East/West were named after trees, then some genius thought it would be more efficient to number them...sigh, progress.

So, Pecan Street became Sixth Street. Whatever you call it, in Austin it means a party.

My hometown utility, Austin Energy, announced today an innovative approach to the myriad problems facing the electric utility industry - the Pecan Street Project. The project will harness the power of innovation and creativity that sits in some of the most dynamic groups in the country. Their task? Figure out what the electric utility of the future should look like. Austin Energy has invited them to work with the utility to figure it all out.

The challenge facing Austin Energy and any other utility in the US located in a high growth area is how to meet the long-term energy demands of residences and businesses, when the traditional way - adding more fossil-fuel-based energy supply - is increasingly infeasible. For a city as green as Austin, adding a coal-fired plant would be tantamount to treason.

The utility already is one of the greenest in the land, with a goal of having 30% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020, a scant 11 years away now. It's a stretch, but the utility intends to get there .... with a little help from its friends.

Successful Change Starts with Positive Attitude

2008-12-03T21:07:00.005-06:00

For too many of us, change is a big negative. It is seen as work, as a threat, as an inconvenience. But what about change in the face of reality? To make a necessary change is simply acknowledging reality. Avoiding such change would be pathological. But avoid it we do, because deep down we fear the unknown more than the known - "better the devil I know..."

But if you have to do something, you might as well enjoy it, shouldn't you? That's what having a positive attitude is all about. We have many changes that we know we need to make in the coming years and too many of us seem to be dreading them, instead of thinking creatively about how to turn the change to our advantage, have some fun with it...

Pat Murphy at Community Solutions has a new blog posted today (Plan C Bailout Strategy – Dealing with Cars) that talks about ground transportation and suggests that we use the bailout process to retool Detroit automakers to manufacture buses instead of cars. While I like that suggestion a lot, that's such a huge cultural leap to ride in buses instead of cars. The solution addresses the wrong problem - the problem is not that we lack buses - we lack riders in too many cases. People don't like buses when they have access to cars. In America, people who ride buses are those who don't have a car. Only in very dense urban areas do we ride buses in any great numbers .. oh yeah, and charter trips.

But those of us with some travel experience have different, fun stories about riding mass transit while abroad - "everyone does it over there and it works....huh, go figure!" Mostly, its cheap and very, very convenient, unlike here, where it tends to be cheap and very inconvenient. We come home to the States and wonder why we don't do that cool thing over here. Of course, there are lots of reasons why not, but mostly when I've had the conversation, it winds up being attitudinal, something like "nice idea, but that would never work here - it would be too hard to change everything." End of story - buses would be going backwards - less convenient.... Next!

Pat captures that attitude with his penultimate paragraph.

There seems to be a horrible fear in the American psyche of any change that can be experienced as “going backwards,” a fear of what it will mean to reject the “progress” we have made by developing Hummers, jet airplanes, nitrogen fertilizers, McMansions, credit cards, credit swaps and derivatives. The thought of going back down the ladder of so-called progress from cars to buses to bikes to walking fills us with despair. So we cling to faith in innovations – such as light rail, pluggable hybrids and government bailouts – that are already best understood as fading dreams, misguided steps toward an increasingly barren future. More optimistic people, people who never really thought that all this stuff was the core of life, have a different view. They see the coming change as an opportunity for creativity. Why not just bail out Detroit with a government bus program? Maybe growing food in the backyard with neighbors could be a source of joy. Wearing sweaters doesn’t seem all that great a sacrifice. Buses might be a way to meet interesting people. Could dealing with climate change, Peak Oil and bad debts actually be fun?

My New Bumper Sticker

2008-12-01T15:24:00.003-06:00

Ten days ago, driving 60 MPH on a trip to Dallas and back to Austin, I averaged 55.7 MPG in my 2007 Honda Civic Hybrid - the cost in time was 30 minutes each way. I would have averaged about 48 MPG at 65-70 MPH, my typical highway speed, maybe 46 MPG at 75 MPH. That's still pretty incredible compared to most cars, but over 55 MPG?? I was pleasantly surprised, both at the MPG, and at how painless it was. I passed three highway patrol cars lying in wait, with zero stress on my part.

I just Googled "55 MPH" and found this great website ... http://.drive55.org, which makes the connection between highway speeds and foreign oil consumption. If we were serious about Energy Independence and Greenhouse Gas Emissions, why wouldn't we all drive slower? I'm thinking this may be in our collective future near term, it makes so much sense.

For a vehicle traveling at high speed, reducing its speed increases fuel economy. In general, at speeds over approximately 35 to 45 mph, if a vehicle reduces its speed by 5 mph, its fuel economy can increase by about 5 to 10 percent, because air resistance, or drag, increases exponentially as a vehicle goes faster. Conversely, air resistance diminishes more rapidly as a vehicle slows down, thus increasing its fuel economy. According to existing literature and knowledgeable stakeholders, there is no single speed that optimizes fuel economy for all vehicles. Optimal speed for fuel economy for individual vehicles ranges widely, but is generally between 30 and 60 mph, depending on a vehicle's characteristics. However, a vehicle's fuel economy also depends on other factors besides air resistance. Factors that enhance fuel economy include engine efficiency enhancements (e.g., fuel injection), electronic and computer controls, more efficient transmissions, and hybrid technology. However, other factors decrease fuel economy. In general, over the last 2 decades, fuel economy gains resulting from advances in automotive technologies have largely been offset by increases in vehicle weight, performance, and accessory loads. Specifically, vehicles are heavier than in the past, because they are larger and include more technologies. Further, increased accessory loads, such as air conditioning and electronics, have also reduced fuel economy. According to EPA, from 1987 through 2004, on a fleetwide basis, technology innovation was utilized exclusively to support market-driven attributes other than fuel economy, such as performance. Beginning in 2005, however, according to EPA's analysis of fuel economy trends, technology has been used to increase both performance and fuel economy, while keeping vehicle weight relatively constant. Lowering speed limits can potentially reduce total fuel consumption.

I wonder how many people realize the really bad gas mileage they get for every mile over 55 that they drive? What if that information were put in front of them? Would they change their habits?

Over the past 30 years, we've optimized our life styles on convenience and a false sense of urgency. It's more convenient to spend less time on the road. With cheap gas, we spend gas instead of time. The fact is, few of us really have to have all of the conveniences we've come to expect - it's just that our economy and society give them to us at little to no cost, so it makes sense to accept them when they are handed to us.

I can remember the days of long car trips in the 1970s. Driving 55 MPH seemed like torture back then, but of course, I was a young man in a hurry. A little older and a lot wiser, I'm not so sure I'm in such a big hurry anymore. Usually I can leave earlier, my car is a lot more comfortable these days, and frankly, whatever/whomever it is waiting for me at the other end of the line can wait a little longer. It seems a small price to pay for gaining Energy Independence and Clean Air.

It's the little things that we can do - if we all do them - that will spell the difference between low and high impact, between mediocrity and success.

I designed the bumper sticker at www.makestickers.com. $4.95 for one of them. Want one?

Prince Charles' Take on Consumerism

2008-12-01T08:50:00.003-06:00

In a recent address to a national press group, Prince Charles (yes, the same royal highness so often criticized in the press) spoke words of wisdom. The transcript is worth reading in its entirety, but here is the money section below.

Gandhi realized that Humanity has a natural tendency to consume and that if there are no limits on that tendency we can become obsessed simply with satisfying our desires. The desire grows ever more potent as we consume ever more, even though we achieve very little of the actual satisfaction we desire. Is this not so in the Western world today? Despite such high levels of consumption, we hear so many people admitting to feeling deeply dissatisfied. Studies now show this to be the case too. A report by the Children’s Society in this country concluded earlier this year that the pressure on children, particularly those from poorer backgrounds, to have the latest designer clothes and computer games is resulting in more and more of them falling into depression. Which reminds me of that wise observation about Gross National Product made by Robert Kennedy forty years ago, that it “measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile.”

One of the downsides of consumerism, it seems to me, is that it forces us to compromise on issues that should not be compromised. I’m sure there are many people who know that it is wrong to plunder the Earth’s treasures as recklessly as we do, but the comprehensive world view which we now inhabit persuades us that such destruction is justified because of the freedom it brings us, not to say the profits. In other words, our tendency to consume is legitimized by a view of the world that puts Humanity at the centre of things, operating with an absolute right over Nature. And that makes it a very dangerous world view indeed.

It is an approach which accepts as the norm a one-sided, entirely “linear” form of progress and an extremely literalized view of the world. For some reason we have been persuaded that what we see is all we get. It is a view encouraged, I am afraid, by some of the Media, and it concentrates only on the outward parts of creation. It does not look to the whole - so much so that we happily de-construct the world around us, dismissing as unreal anything that cannot be objectively measured and tested. It is, if you like, a world of only visible quantities.

The question I would ask you to ponder this evening, then, is whether this predominantly rational, technologically driven and secularist approach to life is actually “fit for purpose” in the twenty-first century?

It is an approach which has been adopted in such a wholesale fashion that I feel many do not even realize that we have lost something very precious - what I might best describe as that intuitive sense of our interconnectedness with Nature - which includes the realm beyond the material.

Zombie Economics

2008-11-30T22:38:00.003-06:00

For a serious treatment of the serious issues we are facing - in straight-forward language, I recommend Zombie Economics: Don't Bail out the System that Gave Us SUVs and Strip Malls ... which leads by asking the very poignant question: "Why squander our remaining resources on a lifestyle that doesn't have a future?"

All this obviously begs the question: What kind of economy are we going to live in if the old one is toast? Well, it's also pretty obvious that it will have to be based on activities productively aimed at keeping human beings alive in an ecology that has a future. Once you grasp this, you will see that there is no reason to despair and more than enough for all of us to do, so we can recover from the zombie nation disease and get on with the next chapter of American history -- and I sure hope that Mr. Obama will get with the new program.
To be specific about this new economy, we're going to have to make things again, and raise things out of the earth, locally, and trade these things for money of some kind that we earn through our own productive activities. Don't make the mistake of thinking this is optional. The only other option is to go through a violent sociopolitical convulsion. We ought to know from prior examples in world history that this is not a desirable experience. So, to avoid that, we really have to put our shoulders to the wheel and get to work on things that matter, and do it at a scale that is consistent with what the world really has to offer right now, especially in terms of available energy.
In my view -- and I know this is controversial -- a much larger proportion of the U.S. population will have to be employed in growing the food we eat. There are many ways of arranging this, some more fair than others, and I hope the better angels of our nature steer us in the direction of fairness and justice. The prospects of a devalued dollar imply that we very shortly will not be able to get the all the oil-and-gas-based "inputs" that have made petro-agriculture possible the past century. The consequences of this are so unthinkable that we have not been thinking about it. And, of course, the further implications of current land-use allocation, and the property-ownership issues entailed, suggests formidable difficulties in rearranging the farming sector. The sooner we face all this, the better.

So its back to farming and gardening, eh? That might not be all that bad, when you think about it...We might actually end up happier and more fit.

I'm reminded of an old adage that went something like this..."It you want to be happy for a few hours, get drunk. If you want to be happy for a few years, get a wife. If you want to be happy for ever, get a garden."

Then, there's also this one ...

Old Chinese Proverb
If you want to be happy for a few hours, get drunk,
If you want to be happy for a week, kill your pig and eat it,
If you want to be happy for a month, get married,
If you want to be happy for the rest of your life, go fishing.

Climaticide

2008-11-30T22:36:00.001-06:00

We really, really do want our leaders to lead us to a solution on the problems associated with Climate Change.

Let the earth help us to save the earth

2008-11-30T22:28:00.002-06:00

Check out this suggested means of pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. Seems worth a try if its valid...

Click here to read all about Olivine Sequestration, in a short brief by Olaf Schuiling, Faculty of Geosciences, Utrecht University, the Netherlands.

What's So Good About Waste? Five Part Series on Efficiency

2008-11-30T22:00:00.005-06:00

The Climate Progress blog has a five part series on energy efficiency, started this past summer - an excellent primer on energy efficiency. None of these posts are overly long, and all have good comments attached. One has to wonder with such a case why efficiency is so frowned upon, or in all too many more cases, simply ignored. To date, we have tended to favor supply-side solutions over demand-side savings.

Energy efficiency is THE core climate solution, Part 1: The biggest low-carbon resource by far cites a well documented study from 2007 by consulting giant McKinsey & Co, which makes the claim that energy efficiency has the potential to account for as much as 40% of greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.

Energy efficiency, Part 2: The limitless resource documents the progress a division of Dow Chemical made in discovering efficiency through a series of ROI Contests. The author copied the process and found similar success within divisions at the Department of Energy.

Efficiency, Part 3: The only cheap power left demonstrates the absurdly low price of efficiency (less than 2 cents/Kwh) when compared to supply side solutions. And yet, incredibly, supply side solutions ranging from traditional coal and nuclear generation to renewables get far more press. Go figure.

Energy efficiency, Part 4: How does California do it so consistently and cost-effectively? A combination of building code and lighting regulations and decoupling have made California a model for all other states when it comes to efficiency. ("Decoupling" is the term for providing utilities regulatory incentives for energy efficiency programs that save consumers money - compensating them for NOT producing energy.)

Energy efficiency, Part 5: The highest documented rate of return of any federal program shows that the key to making efficiency work is good regulation and sensible legislation. Indeed, good government can produce tremendous savings when it is put into practice. Too often, politics gets in the way.

Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide

2008-11-30T11:10:00.003-06:00

The value of a bright light is that it takes away the darkness where our leaders often run to hide. For too long, we've let our leaders off the hook when it comes to addressing problems - and surprise, surprise - our problems don't go away when we ignore them! They come back bigger and stronger, more intractable.

Political courage is hard to come by these days, especially when it comes to dealing with climate change - that may be one of the things I admire most about Obama. He seems intent on tying economic recovery to investment in green infrastructure. Let's hope he keeps his spine up in the face of all those who will try to sway him this way and that, in hopes of avoiding taking the medicine they know they need.

The world has a portentous meeting coming up in Poland next month, which will be an opportunity for world leaders to demonstrate the leadership the represent.

In a recent analysis by Alister Doyle for Reuter's printed in the Toronto Star (see Economy offers excuse to avoid climate fight: But Obama's election seen as cause for hope ahead of Polish summit), we find a discussion of how political leadership is severely challenged by the need to balance economic needs and environmental ones.

"The days are gone when the EU can hide behind the United States and still look good," concluded Jennifer Morgan, of the E3G environmental think-tank.

But isn't "economy v. ecology" a false argument? Devilstower in Daily Kos thinks so. In No Dark Cloud without a Darker Lining the argument is made for rejecting any continuance of old conservative ideologies that got us into problems. It's hard to let go of cultural handholds when hanging on a cliff, but we must.

Let's face it, leadership is best demonstrated when dealing with intractable problems. Leadership in good times is easy, what many aspiring "leaders" seem to hope for when they seek the mantle of leadership. In contrast, leadership in hard times is difficult, but sublime - that's where leaders earn a place in history - by pulling people together to overcome difficult problems.

Perhaps finally, at this time in history, we will see some leaders step up to the plate instead of stepping away - perhaps now, finally, our leaders will lead the world population to do some things that are on the face, unattractive and at an individual level, unappealing. That is the crux of it - we must cooperate at a society and do things the whole of human society desperately needs - economic and environmental reform - but which the individual human finds against his/her personal best interest - in a word, our leaders need to address the Tragedy of the Commons.

In the Year 9595

2008-11-29T23:07:00.004-06:00

In the year 9595
I'm kinda wondering if man's gonna be alive
He's taken everything this old earth can give
And he ain't put back nothing

Now it's been 10,000 years
Man has cried a billion tears
For what he never knew
Now man's reign is through
But through the eternal night
The twinkling of starlight
So very far away
Maybe it's only yesterday
In the Year 2525

OK - so its a corny song, but I can still remember the lyrics and tune from back when I was a 12-year old sixth grader discovering rock and roll in 1969. Curiously, the message of ecology and man's impact on the earth is even more true today than it was over 40 years ago when this song was penned in 1964.

Here's a modern take on the same concept, A Lonely Universe Without Us, pondering whether we will last as a species.

Not altogether bummed out yet? Check out this article, which adds to our species peril yet another issue to consider, by going beyond Global Warming to something called the Holocene extinction event.

You probably had no idea. Few do. A poll by the American Museum of Natural History finds that seven in 10 biologists believe that mass extinction poses a colossal threat to human existence, a more serious environmental problem than even its contributor, global warming; and that the dangers of mass extinction are woefully underestimated by almost everyone outside science. In the 200 years since French naturalist Georges Cuvier first floated the concept of extinction, after examining fossil bones and concluding "the existence of a world previous to ours, destroyed by some sort of catastrophe", we have only slowly recognized and attempted to correct our own catastrophic behaviour. Animal Extinction - the greatest threat to mankind

Sighhhhhhh.

Shopping Shame: Consumption Chaos

2008-11-29T08:48:00.006-06:00

I was hoping this was a hoax, but it appears to be for real. Over 2,000 shoppers, some on line for over 24 hours, stormed a WalMart opening on "Black Friday," the day after Thanksgiving that marks the start of the holiday retail season and one of the biggest shopping days of the year.

Incredibly, when notified of the tragedy and asked to leave the store, some shoppers complained that they needed/deserved to keep shopping because of their time in line! Such insensitivity is competely out of line with the very nature of the holiday that purportedly drives this consumer behavior in the first place. "Peace on earth, goodwill toward men," indeed!

This tragedy can only be taken as further evidence of a national loss of all sense of propriety and values when it comes to consumers and shopping. While it remains an isolated incident, it is nevertheless indicative of a system gone horribly awry. And WalMart bears responsibility for not having better crowd control measures in place. While some may argue that such tragedy could not have been avoided, it can only be seen as criminally negligent that corporate management and local supervisors allowed their employees to be in such a position of jeopardy, having created the conditions for chaos in the first place. Without their policy of focusing shopper interest on bargains and limited supplies on an early morning opening, the crowds would not have assembled in the first place.

What will WalMart management do now to address this? Will there be a repeat next year?

UPDATE: 11/30
Apparently, others feel this way. Here is a thoughtful treatment of the whole issue of crowd deaths in Death by Shopping.

In the next few days, I expect to hear that some people involved in yesterday's tragedy in New York were swept along by the crowd and were helpless to stop. It is possible that the glass doors reported to have been broken by over-eager shoppers were actually broken by the force of the crowd, not deliberately. We may see.

I am not exonerating people in the deadly shopping crowd. If police are able to identity individuals whose behavior escalated the danger, by all means they should answer to the law. But the forces that created the crowd were not limited to the crowd, and blaming individuals in the crowd misses several larger points.

A number of commenters are blaming the disaster on greed. Greed as a force for evil is something we Buddhists can appreciate. Greed, along with anger and ignorance, is one of the Three Poisons that fuel the passions that confound and trouble us. So, yes, there is greed behind the pushing and shoving to get the best seat or the best electronic doo-dad for a Christmas present.

Our consumerist culture encourages our desires, however. Rarely are we told there is anything wrong with pushing and shoving to get what we want. There was also greed behind a business decision to encourage "door buster" shopping without hiring enough security or factoring in crowd control.

Air Going Out of the Balloon

2008-11-28T13:09:00.005-06:00

What will replace consumption in our daily lives? What will drive the world's economy when Americans' credit well runs dry, when they lose the urge to shop and they stop buying so much stuff? The jury is out. Judith Freeman: What consumes our nation's soul

[in Aug 2001] An economist on the evening news was discussing the economy, then in the midst of a serious slump. The economist looked into the camera and said, "If the American consumer packs it in, the entire global economy is in jeopardy. The American consumer better hang tough, or we're in real trouble."

I don't think I'd ever before quite understood in such stark terms just what beasts of burden we'd become. What the economist said made me realize something I'd never considered — that the entire global economy, as he put it, depended on Americans continuing to consume.

Over the years, that phrase — "the American consumer better hang tough" — has passed through my mind many times. And, each time, what those words conjure is a great herd of donkeys so loaded down with goods that they're staggering beneath the weight.
Now, of course, we're all thinking differently. It's time to pull back. The beast of burden simply can't carry any more. Few Americans have much in the way of savings. Many of us have lived beyond our means. The typical American carries credit card debt of more than $8,000, and credit is tightening. The party is over, and for many, it wasn't even that much fun.

There might be a good side to this. It's as if the consuming fever has broken, if only temporarily. We're disinclined to carry more debt or keep shopping, even if we could, even knowing that the entire global economy might depend on us getting and spending. We're all wondering where this economic meltdown is headed, and how long it might last. And will there be a time when we can hope to be relieved of our burden of hanging tough? Can there be a different kind of engine to drive the world economy other than the endless, often mindless consumption by ordinary Americans? These are the questions I'd like answered. But I'm not holding my breath.

Talking Turkey and Cold Turkey

2008-11-28T11:32:00.005-06:00

Thank You for Change...
President Bush's Last Thanksgiving Address and Obama Interview with Barbara Walters

We live in a propitious time: times are hard and getting harder...but we still control our destiny, we still have each other, we still can choose how to live. Daniel Schultz: Sharing our thanks and our plenty

Yet at our annual Thanksgiving Eve service tonight, we will thank God for our good fortune with full and grateful hearts.

We'll give thanks, too, for the ability to collect donations of food and money for grocery store gift certificates. Nobody in our congregation - hopefully no one in our neighborhood - will have to go hungry. That's a blessing.

But as we offer up thanks and praise and foodstuffs this evening, I hope that we will take a moment to consider that it doesn't have to be this way.

Don't get me wrong: Charity is a wonderful thing. But why must our economy be geared such that it produces a few winners and many losers?

We didn't have to come to this pass, after all. We chose the path to perdition, following the logic that lust for material things is good, that consumption rewards (and drives) success. Meanwhile, the consequences for neighbors and the Earth's scarce resources are what economists call "externalities," costs that need not be calculated.

It's not just the housing bubble bursting or the oil economy staggering under the weight of demand or the credit markets collapsing. It's all of it, the entire wicked assumption that we deserve to have everything we want while others go without.

The good news is the choices we made to get ourselves here are just that: choices. No law says we must live extravagantly. No rule I am aware of prevents us from living a grateful life.

But don't let the realities of economic hardship take the fun out of the holidays. We need the holidays. We need to celebrate with friends even more than we need to consume and buy stuff. Judith Levine: An alternative to shopping frenzy

Relax. People can learn to live with less — happily. I know. A few years ago my partner, Paul, and I spent a whole year not shopping. We bought nothing but necessities: basic groceries, Internet access. We forwent clothes, books, CDs, movies, restaurant meals.

The good news is, a little moderation can bring a lot of cheer.

The Year Without Shopping occurred to me at Christmastime. I'm a secular Jew, but I'd scattered $1,001 on gifts and holiday odds and ends. As my credit line grew smaller and my shopping bags heavier, I envisioned their contents, along with those of a nation, disliked and discarded — and moldering in landfills forever.

I decided to investigate the connection between the personal activity of shopping and the global problem of overconsumption. I figured that the best way to understand the draw of the marketplace would be to quit it altogether, then see how that felt. I knew that my no-shopping budget would be on Mother Earth's side. Which side would the macroeconomy eventually be on? Today it's clearer than ever that we'll have to worry about that sooner rather than later.
During our cold-turkey year, I was sometimes bored. British psychotherapist Adam Phillips calls boredom the restless state of waiting to desire. Consumption gives us myriad names for inchoate desire — and ready objects to allay it. Take away shopping, and you're left with the restlessness.

When we couldn't go out for a beer or a meal with friends, Paul and I felt lonely. When others talked about the latest movies, we sat dumb. In a consumer society, much of our social, cultural and political lives — even our identities — are cobbled together from the things and experiences we purchase.

Not shopping, we devoted more time to activism and more money to causes. I paid off an $8,000 credit card debt without really trying and haven't run it up again. I still shop less than I did. And on more or less the same income, I give away much more money than I used to.

The hiatus reminded me how sweet it is to take home the perfect pair of trousers or sit in a cafe watching the world. Unless you're a monk, material abstinence does not magnify the spirit. Still, compared either to consumption or abstention, the best soul-grower is social connection.

Which brings me back to the holidays.

What about gifts and parties? Were we going to impose our skinflintery on our loved ones? Did we have to beg off fireside get-togethers just to avoid bringing a box of chocolates?

We relish lighting up the dark days with giving. But how could we give without getting and spending? How could we celebrate without adding to the global litter?

I got a clue from the past. The midwinter holidays originate in pagan rites to seduce the sun back from the underworld. Doing that requires excess — gorging, reveling and giving.
In this spirit, Paul and I throw an annual Hanukkah Latke Bash, the no-shopping year not excepted. We load the table with potato pancakes, vats of sour cream and homemade applesauce, and plates of smoked fish. Our guests arrive with libations and load their plates. Our feast is cheap — basically the food of the shtetl. And all that's left in the end is (compostable) bones.
"You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough," wrote Blake. Now think celebration, not shopping. Because in spite — no, because — of the economic gloom, it is our duty, and can be our pleasure, to make the season as festive today as in the fattest times.

Happy Thanksgiving, All

2008-11-27T05:14:00.001-06:00

Yesterday, I received an email from a colleague in Canada, indicating that they're still working this week (they celebrate a Thanksgiving holiday similar to ours in October).

Last night, I practiced my Spanish at the local La Salsa restaurant and learned that Spanish for "Happy Thanksgiving" is "Buen día de acción de gracias."

Even though Thanksgiving is a uniquely American holiday, the idea of a harvest festival is not. We are so closely tied to this earth that many people in this long list of cultures have a tradition of celebrating a special day to give thanks for sustenance. In our American culture, we conflate the celebration of the harvest with the notion of divine deliverance in a new land.

To be blunt, Thanksgiving in America is typically celebrated by over-eating with family, indulging in the bounty of food, nestled in the bosom of loved ones. "Perhaps moderation can take a pass today," I'll tell myself, "it's Thanksgiving." It's hard not to overindulge when the feast lies before you, and its all so good. I'll be reminding myself though, of the Swedish concept of Lagom, which introduced this new blog yesterday. As it occurs to me, we might translate the strategy of Lagom in American English as "Quit while you're ahead."

Funny how football, a uniquely American sport, has joined the holiday tradition, at least in our family it has. Tonight, we'll leave our family meal and drive down to DKR Memorial Stadium to fight for a parking spot, so we can watch the UT Longhorns pound the Texas A&M Aggies, striving for those "style points" that will convince human voters to keep us at the top of the BCS polls - come on National Championship!

I'll probably lose my voice from yelling. At least, that's the plan.

What I'm Thankful For Today

I'm thankful of so many things, as I sit here in the quiet living room, with my family fast asleep. I know that many/most of the rest of the world doesn't have the peace of mind I do when it comes to family and loved ones. So of course, I'm thankful first for my family and our health. For the many communities that embrace us and give us social sustenance, starting with St. Mark's Episcopal Church, home for two decades. For the wonderful City of Austin that we call home, for the view of the Hill Country out my back yard. For the University of Texas Longhorns - 19 years now with season tickets! Hook Em, Horns! And I'm thankful that my fellow citizens elected Barack Obama, so we can hope again.

Finally, I'm thankful for the insights I've gained over the past two years, as I've come to look at the world through the eyes of an appreciative house guest. I'm thankful for my newfound sense of urgency and for this opportunity to make a difference in a critical time in history.

I'll not be here but for a short while longer - really, just a blink of an eye - at least when measured in terms of deep time that the Earth (or the God) we are thanking today can relate to.

One of the first uses of deep time in a general interest publication may have been by John McPhee in his 1981 book, Basin and Range, parts of which originally appeared in The New Yorker magazine. One of the metaphors McPhee used in explaining the concept of deep time, which was cited by Stephen Jay Gould in Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (1987), was to

Consider the earth's history as the old measure of the English yard, the distance from the King's nose to the tip of his outstretched hand. One stroke of a nail file on his middle finger erases human history.

Basin and Range was republished with four others and additional material in Annals of the Former World,^[10] a title McPhee borrowed from James Hutton's observation about the geologist's preoccupation with the "annals of a former world," the stories figuratively told by layers of rock laid down over many millions of years.

Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia (1999) is non-fiction book by Gregory Benford.

On Thanksgiving, try a new idea: Lagom

2008-11-26T08:26:00.001-06:00

Let's face it folks - the pendulum has swung too far and now its coming back the other way, accelerating on its way back down. We've over-reached as a society and now we're in the midst of a pull back. How long or how far this political /economic / societal correction goes is anyone's guess. But one thing that is not up to guessing is that this correction is now unavoidable - there's no way out, it's time to pull back in our lives, time to do what we know is right - moderation has replaced excess as the guiding principle.

I use the term Cake 2 Bread to name this blog because it describes what we are now facing to correct what happened in so many parts of our society over the past several decades. We've piled on in every aspect. If one teaspoon was good, then a tablespoon, a cup, a gallon were even better.

The fact is, more is not always better. There is indeed such a thing as "just right" - in Swedish, they even have a special word for it - "lagom." It's the word you use when you push away from the table after a good meal, content that the meal hit the spot and it's time to stop before you get too full. As you rub your stomach and ponder the meal and all its nuances and specialness, you turn to the host/hostess and say, "Det var lagom!" - "That was just right!" It's the ultimate compliment for a host/hostess to hear, and it's a new guiding prinicple that we all can start to put into practice starting tomorrow. Lagom - Just Right.

Cultural significance

The value of "just enough" can be contrasted to the value of "more is better". It is viewed favorably as a sustainable alternative to the hoarding extremes of consumerism: "Why do I need more than two? Det är [It is] lagom" (AtKisson, 2000). It can also be viewed as repressive: "You're not supposed to be too good, or too rich" (Gustavsson, 1995). The lagom mentality has been fingered as a challenge to economic growth and the reason for Sweden's apparent lack of outward patriotism.

In a single word, lagom is said to describe the basis of the Swedish national psyche, one of consensus and equality. In recent times Sweden has developed greater tolerance for risk and failure as a result of severe recession in the early 1990s. Nonetheless, it is still widely considered ideal to be modest and avoid extremes. "My aunt used to hold out her closed fist and say, "How much can you get in this hand? It's much easier to get something in this [open] hand" (Silberman, 2001). "It's the idea that for everything there is the perfect amount: The perfect, and best, amount of food, space, laughter and sadness."

The concept of lagom is similar to that of the Middle Path in Eastern philosophy, and Aristotle's "golden mean" of moderation in Western philosophy.

Let's give thanks for the bread we enjoy that gives us sustenance. Let's not mourn the loss of a daily diet of cake and champagne. Too much of a good thing inevitably becomes a bad thing, after all. So dialing back to "just right" from "too much" is not really something to grieve, rather its a cause for celebration. Let's give thanks tomorrow for this wake up call that we're experiencing, and let's give some thought to what this ongoing crisis and the pending inauguration really mean.

It's time for change, at the government level, at the economic level, at the society level, and at the individual level. Thank God!