TED Four: "Winning the Oil Endgame"

After seeing last time that moving up in the world is closely correlated to both smaller family size and bigger carbon footprints (shoes to bicycles to cars to jets, etc, to say nothing of consumerism and increased consumption/waste), the obvious next step in the process is to look at ways of breaking the world's addiction to oil so that living standards can increase without killing the planet.

The first talk today is from Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, whom I would rate as arguably the most innovative and realistic American scientist in the field of new energy. I first learned about him by reading a profile of Lovins and his incredible house (it is entirely self-sufficient and works on biology and sunshine; he's able to pick a banana in his living room in mid-winter in Colorado) in a magazine. Incidentally, I've always gotten a chuckle out of his dead-ringer resemblance to my high school physics teacher, who also has negative electricity bills every year by virtue of the small windmill he's installed behind his house.

But that's neither here nor there. Go ahead and watch the talk, which is sort of the "inconvenient truth" of our current energy scheme.

Pretty cool stuff, right? Especially the carbon-fiber McLaren that destroyed the conventional car that t-boned it! To be sure, most of us will be buying those snap-together carbon-fiber cars, but -- if it's not too materialistic of me -- I can always aspire to the McLaren...

The big points to take away from Lovins's work and talk are similar to the ones we've seen before this week: changing our energy situation is going to require "changing our game" in the ways in which we think about energy usage; we already have most of the answers and will only see increased efficiency as technology evolves; and we're facing an immediate and global problem that will require co-operative global solutions (and yesterday).

There are two special insights that we need to take from Lovins, however. The first is that the biggest hurdles between us and the future are political rather than scientific. We already know how to engineer our way out of the current energy crisis using current technologies and energy resources, we're just waiting for national and global politicians to find the courage and commitment to implement this knowledge. It's going to require politicians to sell funny-looking cars and trucks, lifestyle changes (the technology of the bicycle is pretty old, but remains vastly under-utilized, especially in the U.S.) and some social discomfort and "growing pains" as we transition the national and global economy from fossil to future energy sources. Sure, that super-efficient truck Lovins shows in his slides looks weird to our eyes, but that's only because we're so accustomed to Macks and Peterbilts. It will take dogged political action to convince people that making transitions to odd vehicles, wind farms, solar roofs, etc is a moral, social and ecological imperative. (Pay attention, you will see this material again in Sunday's concluding talk.) The transition itself will require some real "game-changing" thinking in re-imagining the future, and especially in making the requisite investments to get there. Again, the current crisis and unemployment debacle might be a good opportunity...

Along those lines, too, keep thinking Darwin: sure, that truck looks dodgy enough. But it's really not much more than a Model T on steroids, right? Some wheels, an engine, a steering wheel, blah blah blah. The design is kooky, but the beast itself would be instantly recognizable to Henry Ford. Think about that: everyone thought we'd be living in the world of the Jetsons sometime within the last 20 to 30 years, but we're not. What happened? I'd argue that a variety of factors, mostly stemming from Conservative White Male-ism and its attendant defensiveness and political/institutional sclerosis, have basically stopped our moral and technological evolutionary curve. Far be it from me to say whether or not flying cars would be more efficient than the ones we've got now or even Lovins's super-cars, but fighting tooth and nail to prevent even taking steps in that direction just because it's not what we're used to (see: GM, Chrysler, Ford pre-2008) is no longer tenable. Think flying cars would be nuts? Imagine what the first cars (travelling at the blistering speed of 10 mph or so) looked and felt like to the buggy-drivers they shared the streets with.

The second big point we need to hear from Lovins is that the answer is biology. This has been true in every other area of human endeavor till now, and it's time we applied biology to energy production. As I saw in another talk yesterday, the basic progression of human control over nature has been from hunting and gathering to harnessing nature itself (early agriculture) to "brute-force" techniques (industrial agriculture) to practices in harmony with biology (the green revolution). Once again, that's a very quick overview that I take some issues with, but think about energy in the same way: we're now in the brute-force industrial stage of drilling deeper wells in harder-to-reach places to provide the energy needed to power our ridiculously inefficient vehicles and machines. This is the Cartesian strategy: killing nature faster and more efficiently to power our current lifestyles. Darwinism would rely on biological approaches: gosh, nature's been around for a while and turns out to be really, really good at turning sunlight into energy (think of leaves as solar panels and you'll get this idea pretty quickly), so why don't we try to co-operate with nature and emulate it instead of trying to subdue it? After we implement Lovins's ideas to break the bonds of oil now, we'll need to get really good at bio-energy to fuel the future.

Now let's take a look at the global picture. Lovins has told us that it is possible to change our game and start fixing our economy and our world, now I'll present another fun Swede, Johan Rockstrom, to tell us that we must change it. He'll sketch out the current state of the battle between people and nature and show in the most emphatic terms that "the challenges we are facing are so large that business-as-usual is not an option."

So there you have it. The world is simultaneously a scary place and an exciting one, and we've certainly got our work cut out for us in the next decade and beyond. And once again, "the unifying theme -- the red thread -- in all of this is the necessity of a change in mindset." Change your mind -- and bend the curve.

TED Two: "What about the giraffes?!"

No, it's not a tree-hugger video. It's actually on economics. But before we get to that, I'd like to engage in some eschatological humor regarding the East Coast's recent falling into God's crosshairs. First, from Grist, the destruction wrought by yesterday's quake in D.C.:

And yet weather.com runs a huge headline this morning on the East Coast's "recovery" from the trembler. Oh, please. My chair fell -- somebody call the Marines! And now the hurricane...gee, wonder what's up? Two theories: 1) Rick Perry is right! This town is such a den of iniquity, God's casting His vote 14 months early for Perry-Bachmann 2014. Vote for these acolytes of the End Times, or Washington had better get ready for them to go all "Joshua fit de battle ob Jericho" on its ass. 2) Rick Perry can't aim! The Beltway's broken, but the quake hit while both the Obamas and (most of) Congress were out of town. And it was the National Cathedral that had the worst structural damage, not the Capitol. Also, after all that praying for rain, it looks like the Response is headed for the relatively lush I-95 corridor instead of the parched plains of Texas. In fact, Irene is not even projected to enter the Gulf (thank whatever post-partisan, ecumenical, all-loving "spiritual" liberal deity you may or may not worship!).

As John Stewart would say, "here it is: your moment of Zen!" You might not have heard it over the falling chairs and breaking windows, but Fox News just acknowledged there might be something to that climate change mumbo-jumbo, after all. As Grist says, now we know it's the End Times! (Click the link. It'll take 20 seconds to read and it's hilarious.)

***

OK, time to stop crowing and start blogging. Here's Tim Jackson's "Economic Reality Check" TED talk, which I've recommended before but really want to make sure you all watch by sticking it into this week's TED-fest. Essentially what Tim's doing is taking a stab at the desperately-needed task of re-imagining the global economy. Now that we're stuck in a crisis and watching all sorts of weirdly inexplicable things (by the Wall Street Journal's reckoning, anyway) happen (liquidity traps, downgrades and non-inflation, oh my!), it seems like a good time to start calling into question the myth of perpetual growth.

I've written that before, but now stop and apply your new Darwinian intellect to that thought and break it down: does the phrase "perpetual growth" seem logical or even possible on its face? No, probably not. But do you really think -- or have you ever thought -- about an end to the perpetual growth of the world economy since the end of the Medieval "Little Ice Age?" Didn't think so. Neither had I until I read a piece on no-growth economics about a year ago. I'd seen the link for a couple of days but couldn't convince myself to click it: No-growth economics? WTF is that guy on about?

Finally, I went down the rabbit-hole...and drank the Kool-Aid. Duh! Of course we can't produce artificial growth forever! Look where it's got us, anyway: a massive, integrated, globalized super-economy that is geared entirely towards -- well, what exactly? As Tim's about to tell you, it's all about making you "spend money you don't have to buy things you don't need to make impressions that won't last on people you don't know!" Cue giraffes...

If you just watched that on an iPad, shame on you! I'm only kidding (and somewhat jealous, especially if I don't know you), but let's think about all this radical stuff for a minute. Just in case you're starting to wonder, I am not, repeat NOT, a neo-Marxist or anything like that. We saw how Communism worked out in practice: more people starved to death in Stalin's Russia than killed in Hitler's Germany; China (People's Republic of); North Korea; etc. Bad news all round. But, if possible, strip away the accumulated BS of the 21st Century and look at a couple of Marx's fundamental insights. Labor and capital do seem to be opposed to one another in the United States of Oligarchy, and we're unlikely to make a hell of a lot of progress on pressing global issues like economics and climate without allowing our dogged statism to "wither away." That's an incredibly facile re-interpretation of Marx, but bear with me for a sec.

Our society today is often described (usually negatively) as being "materialistic." But are we, really? When I returned to the front country after my NOLS expedition, the instructors read us an essay by an outdoorsman that said that society is in fact anti-materialistic: we buy loads of materials, but we don't care about any of them. He advocated practicing the original and "true" materialism of buying the right thing (at the right price) once and maintaining it over a lifetime. We all inherently know it's cheaper in the long run to buy a Mercedes than a Datsun because the Mercedes will keep going and going and going, but we're conditioned, encouraged and -- by virtue of criminally cheap credit -- enabled to purchase lots of cheap goods with planned obsolescence instead of saving for the one quality one and making some hard choices (one quality Mercedes, or a Datsun and an iPad and an iPhone all at the same time?).

But I'm a Mac -- I like having a MacBook, an iPod, an iPad and an iPhone! (And I make the most hellacious impressions on people I don't know as I juggle all four at once!) I'm not picking on Apple here: they make great products, and I aspire to purchasing a few more of them in time. But four? And knowing they'll be blown out of the water by Google/Motorola and/or Apple within a year? That's kinda selfish, and we're not even going to get into all the packaging I'm throwing away, the Chinese sweat shops I'm patronizing and the Chinese women and children who will be poisoned by the heavy metals in all those electronics when I toss them in a couple of years. (OK, maybe a little: you did know that your old electronics all go to massive dumps in western China, where they sit leaking heavy metals into the ground, water and air -- and the women who strip them for copper and other metals -- didn't you? Someday, that's your earth, water and air, too...)

As Coach Batty used to yell on the lacrosse field, "Change your game!" You might not think "cradle-to-cradle" (another TED talk) now -- How was this produced? How did it get to me? What externalities will my use of it entail? What happens to it when I'm done? -- and you probably don't think about no-growth or "happy growth," but it's time to start thinking that way. Come on, you've all the incentive in the world: you're spending money you don't have on stuff you don't need to make impressions that won't last on people you don't know, after all. And are you really any happier for it? Honestly, what's the marginal benefit of each additional Apple device you buy? They all make phone calls, take pictures, do music, organize your life and make you look pretty freakin' slick, right? But long after I've forgotten the impression your four-Apple-ness made on me, will you really be a happier person for having more Apples than I have?

I'll close with a really simple measuring stick for "happy growth" economics: an economy measured not in GDP but in dinner time. Which makes you happier: a rushed dinner from McDonalds alone with your Macs, or a home-cooked meal with friends and family and no screens in sight? (You can adjust this metric to include bed-time story telling time, exercise, recreation, whatever really makes you happy.) Think about it: all those nifty gadgets allow us to be unimaginably more productive than people could dream of being just a few decades ago, and yet we've used them merely to speed up and further automate the perpetual-growth economy of turning life into death as fast and efficiently as possible (Cut more trees! Raise animals for food bigger/faster than ever before! Etc, etc.)

And no-one's happy. We're all complaining of ADHD, aloofness, aloneness, and so forth. Meanwhile, we're starting to stretch the perpetual-growth envelope to absurdity: "growth" is no longer tangible but based on the pipe dreams of derivatives traders; human capital has now been moved to the downward side of the life-into-death cycle as we lay people off with abandon and demand ever more (technologically-aided) production of those who are left. Imagine if the West collectively decided that we had it pretty good in the 60's (example picked totally at random; you could use any decade). If we planned the economy to achieve 60's output -- which would be put towards equitable standards of living, etc (more on that tomorrow) -- think about how short your workday or work-year could be. You and just one or two Apple devices could probably churn out your allotted chunk of that production in well under a year (while enjoying family dinner every night), then recreate for the other months. Maybe I'm rooting for this because I've just entered the last week of summer vacation from school I'm scheduled to have, but maybe it could actually work if we put our minds to it.

That's changing your game. Suddenly, buying a $100 toaster from a manufacturing-based economy doesn't seem crazy because that baby comes with a lifetime warranty and service plan. If you've bought more than two or three toasters in your life so far, that's already economical. Same goes for everything else: if we paid real prices for food (un-subsidized and accounting for negative externalities of production and consumption), we'd see cheap and delicious plant-based diets in no time. Or what if we raised the gas tax so that it covered the war for cheap oil in Iraq? Suddenly, oil's not so cheap.

So there you have it. Trade perpetual growth for happiness and get the carbon cycle back to being the (Darwinian) cycle of life rather than the (Cartesian) cycle of death. Change your game, and challenge those around you to change theirs as well. After all, Coach yelled that at us mostly when we were doing something anti-team than something "bad." We've only got one playing field, people. Eventually we're all going to have to change our games to be global team players.

Tomorrow: Now that you've changed your game, Hans Rosling is going to change the way you see statistics forever. He'll also prove that the impossible only seems that way until you try...

TED Six: Got Hope?

And here it is: the light at the end of the tunnel...

Maybe.

Today, for the last planned video in this series, I bring you Robert Wright -- author, thinker, sardonic Oklahoman, cynic and possibly optimist in chief of this little endeavor. Though he's speaking from TED 2006 and the talk has a couple of anti-Bush potshots in it and predates the financial apocalypse that did of course happen just two years later, it's still a poignant and relevant talk to end the project with. But be warned: this is not "hopey-changey" smiles and rainbows. As Wright's about to tell you, "the sense in which [his] worldview is upbeat has always been kind of subtle -- sometimes even elusive," and by no means does he foresee a quick, easy or automatic evolution into the future. Yes, we have to change our game, but more than many of the other speakers you've met this week, Wright will emphasize that changing our game will mean, well, changing our game. Here's your "grim inspiration:"

"On Optimism"

A bit more subtle and elusive than "hope & change," isn't it? Perhaps, but I also think it's eminently realistic. Though politics and politicians are in the business of over-promising and allowing the rest of us to project all sorts of hopes and dreams onto others, there would probably be a lot less resentment and disappointment amongst the one-time legions of Obama if his platform had sounded more like Wright's speech. I'm not sure that Wright could necessarily get elected on that "stump speech" -- imagine how that would play in the Iowa straw poll! -- but that seems all the more reason to start re-thinking the ways in which we look at the world, our politics and our politicians, and start nominating and voting for people who have concrete if difficult plans and the explanatory ability to sell them and roll-up-your-sleeves tenacity to implement them. A far cry from the "not Bush or the Tea Party" Obama-Biden ticket vs. the Perry-Bachmann "Satan sandwich" ticket in 2012. Election fever. Catch it!

Harangue over, let's break down this last talk. It should be pretty clear why I chose to end on this note, but I'll try and draw out the biggest and most relevant points from Wright's talk -- and how they aptly sum up the sort of meta-message I've been trying to draw out of all these presentations.

1) Non-zero-sumness: voila -- the Darwinism I've been preaching all week distilled into a couple of minutes' worth of precise and imperative description. Wright also somewhat rehabilitates capitalism with his idea of "business class morality" and the wry note that we can't bomb Japan because they build our cars. Though our ways of doing business will have to fundamentally transformed and fast (cf. Jackson, Lovins and Rockstrom), there is a future for self-interest and regulated capitalism in the world. It looks like increased trade, globalization and inter-dependence are the way forward to increase welfare, happiness and security; know-nothingism and isolationism are counter-productive. And as Ann Coulter would be loath to admit, we do have to start understanding our enemies' viewpoints and offering them a squarer deal: even Rumsfeld admitted we couldn't kill or capture them fast enough; if we seek to understand their viewpoints, we can take huge strides in the direction of offering them the kinds of economic ways forward they need while killing only those who are so opposed to progress that they can't possibly be won over. By all means send the special operators after the real no-goodniks at the top of al Qaeda, but imagine what the world would look like if we got the people at the bottom of the terrorist totem pole to build us windmills or something. Sounds crazy, but think about it: jobs, clean tech and inter-dependence all in one go. Much harder to carpet-bomb that version of the Middle East back to the stone age...

2) History seems to have a non-zero-sum vector, but there's no real guarantee that the world is set up to produce positive-sum outcomes more than negative-sum ones. Human history to date has largely been a story of increased co-operation and interaction, which have in turn produced positive-sum outcomes, but we've yet to determine whether the unprecedented inter-connectedness of today's "flat" world will produce positive results or a death spiral of negativity. Though Wright doesn't get into all of this, I would say (and I think I have the thinkers to back me up on this) that our food, ecological, energy, political and financial systems (to name a few) are currently operating in death spirals more than in positive-sum ways. Wright gets to the crux, and it's almost a throwaway line: "global governance is essential, but it won't be enough." That's the hard, game-changing teleology of this globalization stuff: if we're all so inter-connected, we need to stop pretending that it's the West on one side of the net vs. the Rest on the other, locked in a zero-sum game of singles tennis. What's really going on is that all of humanity is on the same side of the net playing non-zero-sum doubles against the enormous challenges we face. Global solutions require a global society that starts moving in the direction of global governance. Time to figure out not how to avoid it, but how to do it best.

3) Salvation is not only within our ken, but in our hands. Your spiritual salvation is between you and your deity of choice, but the kind of "original-sense," societal salvation Wright talks about is up to us as a species. That's one of the really really big themes of this week: salvation is up to us. Those who listened closely might remember Johann Rockstrom casually mentioning that we're probably in a new "anthropocene" geological era, in which humans are the primary drivers of the earth's geological destiny. Let that sink in for a minute. Never before has one species controlled the fate of the earth; this is a new and terrible power that we have gained for ourselves. Think through the implications -- the obvious one is that these are only the End Times if we want them to be and that if the end does come, it's way more likely to be from the realm of the "out there" theory of climate change than from the Old Testament "Jesus is coming -- convert the Jews!" claptrap of Perry, Bachmann and the FOX lot. Another obvious one might be that we've assumed a god-like moral burden: either we choose to fight for the salvation of humanity and the earth we live on by figuring out how to all get along, or we keep doing the same stuff we've always done and roll the dice in the face of all the warnings we're getting from the TED crowd and others. I'm reluctant to feed the ridiculous religification of politics, but on some level we need to start picking our prophets: Glenn Beck et al or Robert Wright et al -- whose version of "salvation" do you want to invest in?

4) "A massive round of moral progress needs to be made." Color me a blue & gray Georgetown student, but this stuff falls pretty heavily into the domain of morality. And morality is traditionally the realm of politics (God help us!). Yes, we'll need policies and investments and advances in science and technology, but in order to bring those about, we'll need political action. We know a fair amount about stem cells, green tech and all kinds of nifty TED things, but those things are generally funded and approved by governments. Wright's statement that we as a global society need to undertake a huge moral revolution is the closest thing to a one-sentence thesis statement that I have for this project. Most of the yelling and screaming in and at politic(ian)s all over the world is the rooted in a general recognition of a catastrophic dearth of moral courage and leadership in the world right now. I'll say it: our Conservative White Male-dominated global politics is morally bankrupt. And that covers all shades of CWMs, from the orangey John "Jersey Shore" Boehner to Michele "Queen of Rage" Bachmann to Barack Obama. Yep, I'll say that, too: our crazy-liberal black president is essentially a pre-Tea Party "compassionate conservative." FDR and Johnson were liberals. Obama is a very tepid conservative made to look liberal by falling on the left side of the Reagan-to-Reactionary ideological scale that holds sway in Washington now. It's time for a new New Deal and Great Society, and we got "No matter what some ratings agency may say, we always have been and always will be a triple-A country." Those are the words of a cowardly conservative, not the kind of hard-charging moral leader who will bring about the moral-political revolution we need. (And until worldwide conservatism proves itself anything other than the last fact-denying bastion of CWMs, the leaders of that revolution are by necessity going to be liberals.)

5) "We've come too far to screw it up now." I guess that's my alternative thesis statement. We innovated our way into industrialism, capitalism, financialism and all the other shit that's killing us, and we can innovate our way out. That's winning the future. Full stop. Either we figure out how to use that remarkable stuff (gray matter) that made us unique among complex organisms, or we get wiped out by one-celled organisms. (If we screw this up, the microbes will inherit what's left of the earth.) I think the choice is pretty clear: we either engage our brains and work like hell for salvation; or we let FOX lull us into complacent, obese stupidity, denying the facts and doing what we can to make life comfortable for the CWMs as long as possible. Let's evolve!

***

And that, in theory, is that. I hope you have enjoyed following this project as much as I've enjoyed producing it (easily the most fun I've had with this blog ever), and above all I hope that somewhere between my cajoling and the subliminal messaging of all those TED videos flashing the motto "ideas worth sharing" across your screen you'll choose to engage your brain and some of your friends' brains by sharing this blog, TED itself or some fact you've learned or insight you've gained this week. Seriously, pay it forward: it's like Amish friendship bread -- if you liked this enough to email it to three people and tell them to follow suit, who knows how far we'll get. You don't even have to agree with everything I've said or that my chosen speakers have said here, but if it helps spark conversation we're making progress! At least do the little guy a favor: FOX have much greater resources and they broadcast 24/7...

Thanks again for reading, and thanks a million in advance for sharing. If you're so moved, I always encourage you to comment on any or all post(s) and/or to send me an email if this made you think about something a little differently. Extra credit if you email me a talk you find on your own that you think is worth sharing! Think "Darwin-win-win," think non-zero-sumness, think morality and salvation and above all choose to evolve by joining the conversation. Change your game!

Finally, as a sort of post-postscript, I hope this changes in some small way the way in which you view and interact with the world. Read the news, but remember what you learned about what the news is actually telling you. Try to catch a TED talk of your own choosing a couple of times a week. Hopefully you've seen how easy it is to devote 18 minutes a day to it over the course of this week and have seen some payoffs from it. It's like mental push-ups, people! If there's interest, I'm happy to make TED talks a regular or semi-regular feature in this space, but with college starting in a few days I'd encourage you to strike out on your own as well (you won't even have to read all my writing around the talks that way). There's loads of ways to search talks to find people and topics that interest you, and they each recommend what to watch next. I find it's kind of addictive! The more you take ownership of it, the more you'll enjoy it -- and the more warriors for positive-sum-ness we'll create. Thanks again, now hurry up and evolve!

TED Five: Crackonomics

I'm going to post this now to try and stay ahead of the power outages and such that are almost certainly on their way in the next couple of hours. Little bit of a different post today; I'd add to the below that you should now keep Fed Chairman Bernanke's statement from yesterday in mind as well, though he was a teensy-weensy bit stronger in his indictment of Washington than has been the case previously. Finally, if you've some extra time on this hurricane Saturday morning, I'd encourage you to read two op-eds from today's NYT. As much as I bash the NYT for not having the whole story, Charles Blow tells us why it's vital that we inject some sanity into this country's policies, and Roger Cohen warns of the dangers of nimbyism in Britain (the greatest threat to the best intentions). If you have to pick just one, please read Blow. And now, back to TED...

***

Today, Freakonomics co-author Steven Levitt is going to talk to you about the economics of crack. As with the book, the talk presents an interesting take on a topic that engenders a lot of prejudice and pre-conceived notions in the minds of us Acela corridor Volvo drivers. It's kind of a fun talk, full of social injustice and academic derring-do. I won't introduce it further so I can save the fireworks for after...

OK, I know what you're thinking: Kind of interesting, but what does this have to do with the week's themes? Two things: 1) go over the talk again in your mind, replacing the word "crack" with the words "financial derivatives" and "dealers" with "traders/CEOs/politicians." 2) Internalize the "weak and shit" hypothesis right alongside your new Darwinism.

Let's take these things one at a time. Though the talk was filmed in 2004, Levitt starts to draw the crack dealer/CEO parallel in the last minutes of his presentation anyway. It gets a lot of laughs then, but it hits a little closer to home now, doesn't it? To flesh out my parallel, think of the crack economy as a microcosm of the derivative economy that dragged us into the current economic crisis. Just as cocaine dealing was moving along but wasn't really as lucrative as it could be until crack was invented, so financial trading (over a much longer time span) has evolved from a fairly low-margin building-and-loan enterprise to the days of NINJA loans, mortgage-backed securities and "quants." In terms of both economic profitability and social destruction, I think there's a case to be made that exotic financial instruments were like crack. By the same token, the traders and -- even more so -- the CEOs and their pet politicians who happened to be around for the invention of the financial "crack" suddenly saw a dizzying increase in their wealth and power that mirrored that of the first generation of crack bosses. Sure enough, the captains of finance likewise consolidated their positions and enriched themselves as much as possible while keeping nay-sayers (young gang members?) out of the loop.

While that parallel is a little out of left field, I don't think it's too big of a stretch. Whether or not it is, though, the last 90 seconds of Levitt's talk are pure gold, and they are worth watching as many times as it takes to memorize and internalize what he's saying. It's extra-convenient that he explicitly notes that CEOs follow the gang leaders' strategy of paying themselves even in bad times, but it's his off-the-cuff sociological insights that should really shake us. First, he notes that economists aren't usually trained or prepared to see the fear of appearing "weak and shit" to the people below you as a personal motivation. Second, he acknowledges that it is, in fact, a very powerful motivator indeed: gang leaders want their Cadillacs and bling, CEOs want their bonuses and golden parachutes -- and they're going to get 'em, no matter what the little people of Main Street think.

The "weak and shit" hypothesis is the foundation of the social injustices and misunderstandings (a mis-understatement if ever there was) between the haves and have-nots in today's America (and world). The haves -- overwhelmingly the Conservative White Males that have been the subject of a pretty lively internet debate over the past month or so (Google it), and particularly the 400 people in this country that control more of the wealth than all of the rest of us together -- are pretty obviously worried that admitting things like climate change, financial system failures, the wrongness of WSJ economic policy prescriptions, etc would make them appear "weak and shit" in the eyes of the rest of us (heaven forbid!). The new know-nothingism, whether it's willed in the case of the CWM's or more or less received in the case of the FOX News crowd, is essentially predicated on the twin fears of being wrong and being removed from long-held positions of power and influence as a result of being found out to be so wrong. It's also why conservative economists refuse to recognize or react to the liquidity trap we're actually in and keep banging on about self-inflicted austerity (what Krugman calls the "Pain Caucus") and the "bond vigilantes" who have yet to appear (kind of like crippling inflation). What seems equally obvious is that we little people are going to just keep getting screwed by The (Conservative White) Man until we figure out how to break the power of his "weak and shit" fear-mongering.

Now, speaking of know-nothingism, check this out: a short talk from the director of NPR on what exactly we Americans hear about when we read/watch/hear the "news of the world." And this relates most of all to us in the Northeast -- imagine how skewed these graphs would be if we just examined FOX...

Alisa Miller: "The News About the News"

And that's why, even if you read the Times and listen to NPR, you need to expand your horizons. Otherwise, your grasp of what's going on in this world that we're trying so hard to fix will be, you know, weak and shit!

TED Three: The Wizard of Stats & Graphs

Apologies for not technically making this evening's deadline; hopefully you'll be able to catch up with me sometime tomorrow. If it's any excuse, I spent nine hours this afternoon and evening as an impromptu moving man, shifting a zillion storage boxes and fridges from a tent outside to an inside location. Though they survived the quake under the tent, we weren't so sure about the coming hurricane...

Anyway, here are tonight's talks, a double-header from Swedish uber-statistician Hans Rosling. He's funny, insightful and an absolute master of his signature digital presentations, as well as a couple of analog surprises he has in store for you here. Do watch both talks; they're both brilliant, and the second one is only about 10 minutes, so you're only really confronted with 1.5 times the normal amount of talking. As extra incentive, I'll keep my own commentary to an absolute minimum. Without further ado, be prepared to be amazed by Dr. Rosling! (Yes, I know the titles are a bit anachronistic; go ahead and watch the videos in the order in which they appear anyway.)

"New Insights on Poverty"

"Insights on Poverty"

TED Fest, Part One

OK, so now that I've a weekend on Martha's Vineyard behind me (thanks, Mom and Dad!) and just over a week till college starts up again, I think I've both cooled my jets enough about Congress/the economy to go about a project I've had in the back of my mind for a little while now: introducing my devoted readers to the joys of TED.

TED talks -- of which there are nearly 2,000 and growing at the rate of one each weekday -- are billed as an opportunity for the some of the world's smartest and most interesting people to "give the talk of their lives," presenting the great insights of their life's work in 18 minutes or fewer. The TED conference used to be private only to the smarty-pants speakers and a select few guests; now, they're posting all the official TED talks online and adding others from "TEDx" events, which are locally-hosted mini-TEDs not supervised by TED itself.

So here we go. I'm planning a five-day series, and it's going to go something like this: I'll write a short intro to each talk, embed the video in the blog (just push play, and expand to full-screen view if you like with the little icon in the top-right corner) and then offer a few concluding thoughts. I'm so invested in this that I'll actually try to keep the posts to a semi-digestible length! As you're watching/reading, I ask a few things: 1) I chose these five for a reason -- I think they kind of tell a story if you're able to make the connections between them, and they cover some of the areas of life/policy/ethics/whatever that I'm most interested in. Here's your chance to get a look at the kind of stuff that fuels my brain and this blog! 2) Please please please share these. You'll get so much more out of them if you share them with friends or, best of all, devote 30 minutes a night over the next five nights (or whenever's convenient) to watch them with your family/friends. Just like movie night, only shorter and smarter! Talk about them afterwards; you'll be amazed at how much you get out of them if you process them with others. 3) Intrigued? Visit TED.com and get watchin'! I've been banging on about adding a half-hour or so of "brain time" to your day for a while now, and TED talks are a great way to do this. Better than solitaire during your lunch break, that's for sure. There's loads of great ones out there; I highly encourage you to explore for yourselves and/or email me for recommendations...

TALK ONE: Michael Pollan, "A Plant's-Eye View." Some of you probably know Pollan from his immensely popular books on food and nutrition (The Omnivore's Dilemma, etc.). The books are indeed great, and I encourage reading them. But this talk gives a pretty good 18-minute encapsulation of his thesis: agriculture and food are fecked, and it's long past time we did something about it. After all, we've most of the answers already at hand.

But Pollan's biggest point in this talk -- and the one I want you to remember throughout the week and beyond -- is his insight that we're still stuck in this zero-sum Cartesian mind-set, and it's literally killing us. Once upon a time, we lived in a zero-sum world of economic mercantilism and scientific Cartesianism. In this mindset, you have to lose in order for me to win: my empire has to exploit the New World for gold and silver better and faster than yours, since there's only so much gold in the world; in order for me to "win" food through agriculture, it follows that nature should "lose," etc.

Think about that for a minute: although the ideas of Smith and Darwin have been around for hundreds of years, the zero-sum mind-set still persists more than we like to let on. The fundamental insight of those two gentlemen was that the world is a win-win scenario, not a win-lose one. The butcher slaughters animals, the miller grinds wheat, the baker bakes, then everyone trades and benefits by trading his best wares for his neighbors'. That's a much rosier view of capitalism than we're seeing on today's front pages, no? Meanwhile, Darwin's theory of evolution allowed us to see nature as win-win as well. This is Pollan's point: we "know" that nature likes a win-win equilibrium in the sense that we've had Darwin's work for a bit over a century and a half, but we've yet to really internalize it. Hence the "concentrated animal feeding operation" and industrial agriculture: we force nature to lose so that we may gain more and more yields from our agricultural inputs.

But what if it didn't have to be that way? What if the world could be, as The Office memorably put it, a "win-win-win" equation? Watch the talk and see what this might mean in the realm of food and agriculture:

OK. Hopefully you've learned something about food and/or Darwin, but now let's think about the wider implications of this insight. As a little personal challenge, before opening your newspaper tomorrow morning, close your eyes for a moment and think: Darwinism. Win-win-win. Corny, yes. But see how the news matches up: "Corporate cash holdings up, labor earnings down," etc. If 400 people in this country control more of our national wealth than the rest of us combined (scary but true), do we appear to be in more of a Darwinian/Smithian win-win-win utopia, or a Cartesian liquidity trap? Thought so.

To the greatest extent possible, keep thinking your corny little Darwin-thought as you go about your daily life and process the news. As it sinks in, you'll probably start noticing latent Cartesianism (bad!) more and more: business or environment; labor or capital; revenue increases or across-the-board budget cuts, etc. All of this is emblematic of the Cartesian "bigotry of low expectations" regarding our own capabilities: why couldn't we have a booming carbon-neutral or (necessary) negative-carbon economy? Instead of patting ourselves on the back with "moon shot" tropes and "we'll always be a triple-A nation" soccer-mom bullshit, why not try to envision a new and Darwinian future in which we the people of the United States can prosper alongside and in concert with they the people of the rest of the world and Mother Nature? As they say, a crisis -- particularly one of the current magnitude -- is too good an opportunity to let it go to waste: let's use the present one to imagine ourselves into a new, Darwin[-win-win]ian world order. It's the only way forward, and it's past time to nut up and start working in that direction.

Finally, keep this Darwinian insight in mind as you watch the rest of the videos in this week's cycle. The more you've internalized Darwinism, the more you'll hear echos of it in the talks to follow. Enjoy!

***

EXTRA CREDIT: Matt Ridley, "When Ideas Have Sex." Need I say more? This is a nice little look into the evolutionary history of your own mind, as well as the theory that undergirds this whole project.

The United States of Austerity

The "sugar-coated Satan sandwich" passed and will be signed this afternoon, whether we like what we see under the bun or not. I pretty much yelled myself out yesterday; here's a handful of other people's reactions that I think are noteworthy:

• The MoJo article from which I shamelessly stole the title of this post, in which Andy Kroll lays out what's under the bun of the sandwich: "Education, environmental protection, and jobs programs are just the start. An array of social safety net programs—the Women, Infants, and Children nutrition program, food stamps, housing assistance for low-income individuals, foster care money, and basic income security programs—could lose funding under the debt ceiling plan. So, too, could critical infrastructure investments in better bridges, roads, and rail transportation." (You know, the usual steal from the rich/give to the poor stuff.) All things we have to look forward to until and unless what Paul Krugman calls the "confidence fairy" swoops in to save us.
• Here's a brilliant article by the Mother Jones editors (both women) on John Boehner's real handicap. Unlike some other powerful men from all over the political spectrum, his problem (so far as we know) isn't with too much contact with women, but too little. The speaker is a member of one of 24 remaining male-only golf clubs in the country, and the editors see that as a resounding statement of the exclusivity and disconnect that mark him and his party. And it has an impact on all of us: he might be spurning girls to go play golf with the boys, "But don't feel left out, guys: The speaker's contempt is not confined to those of the female persuasion. From the glass ceiling to the debt ceiling, Boehner and the rest of the GOP brass are not only ignoring the needs of the majority of Americans, they are actively flipping all of us the bird. And that is something new."
• David Corn on "Obama's Hope-a-Dope Strategy:" maybe, despite the fury its engendered on both sides, there's some method to the lead-from-behind, fight-avoiding madness after all? I'm not totally buying this one, as you'll see from the comment I left on the story ("hoya progressive," posted at 8:17am).
• Kevin Drum explains that when it comes to getting your agenda across (and legislated), "It's the public opinion, stupid." He notes how well the Right has done at capturing the public's opinion (and its language, and its vote...) since Reagan, then correctly lays the blame on everyone on the Left who's failed to think up a captivating/intelligent/motivational-enough narrative to win the public opinion (and control of the elusive "national narrative") back. Here, Drum wonders at the teeny-tiny percentage of voters who actually favor a no-compromise Tea Party agenda and their ability to hold the whole country hostage ("According to a recent poll, only 22% of Americans consider themselves tea party members or supporters, half the number of last November. And of that 22%, two-thirds supported a debt ceiling compromise and more than half thought it should include tax increases as well as spending cuts...So who was driving the absolutist view in Congress over the past few months? If it was the no-compromise wing of the tea party, that's less than 10% of the country. So riddle me this: how did we manage to let 10% of the country bring us to the brink of disaster? It is a remarkable thing.")
• Speaking of hostage crises, Joe Nocera tells us why we did wrong to negotiate with the Tea Party terrorists, just like with the other kind.
• For a great example of what's wrong we how we think about, describe and (in the case of the mainstream media) cover the debate right now, skim or read today's NYT "Room for Debate" panel of thinkers thinking about whether the Tea Party won the debate on debt. From a legislative standpoint, they didn't just win, they crushed it: in spite of the latest Pew poll showing that 83% of Republican and Tea Party conservatives disapproved of the debt debate (incidentally, they maintained a "decidedly positive impression of [somewhat conciliatory, almost-deal-making] House Speaker John Boehner's role in the process"), the Tea Party's legislative jihad left us with the Satan sandwich du jour. Sure, they wanted twice the cuts they got, but they got a "deal" waaaaay to the right of the American public they're so eager to defend. And what do our NYT writers (nominally of varying political persuasions) have to say? Invariably, that the Tea Party won big, and in most instances they take wildly inaccurate swipes like this one at macroeconomics: "How quickly they [Obama and co.] forget the fiscal bombs they dropped on the American people with the nearly $800 billion stimulus package, “Cash for Clunkers,” so-called high-speed rail and other Keynesian boondoggles that have accelerated our bumping up against the debt ceiling while simultaneously exacerbating our nation’s economic woes" (John M. O'Hara, "Voters Will Understand" [!!]). Color me un-understanding, but where do we even begin to make sense of that brain fart? Go back and read the GDP=C+I+G+X bit from yesterday: the Tea Party won a massive legislative victory, but that isn't the point. The point is that America lost by an even greater margin. This qualifies as "upholding and protecting" the Constitution?

And a few of my own comments:

• What is Mitch McConnell on about? As quoted in the Times after the Senate passed the Satan sandwich: "“It may have been messy,” he said. “It may have appeared to some that their government wasn’t working, but in fact the opposite was true.” Legislating, he added, “was never meant to be pretty.”" In case anyone was still wondering whether he had any grounding in reality, he went on to say that "It's never, ever personal" in legislation. Um, Mitch? When you flip off 90% of the country, it borders on personal. And when you f--- over a whole generation or three of Americans, hell yeah it's personal.
• Chances of the "confidence fairy" arriving aren't looking too good. NYT headline just below the one that announces the deal: "Stocks fall again, despite debt vote." No shit. The "confidence fairy" idea, for those who haven't been reading Krugman, is that if everyone slashes spending and goes into deep voluntary austerity, the world will somehow be convinced that we're serious about our economy and will start investing. No: cutting like that convinces everyone that we're serious about austerity, which is precisely the opposite kind of economic environment to the growth-fueled kind that investors actually have confidence (and thus investments) in. This is like an obese person deciding to not only stop eating, but to start purging. That doesn't give me confidence that the person will get healthy by going into extreme caloric debt until he's made up for all his previous excesses. He'll be unhappy and/or dead long before he's skinny and healthy. Everyone knows you fight obesity with diet and exercise, not starvation. In this hypothetical, government is obese (true, but not as badly as the Tea Party would have it), self-imposed austerity is the starvation/purging plan, and "grand bargains" (for lack of a better term for smart, long-range policy) are akin to a personalized diet and exercise plan. If you were an insurer (investor) and had to bet on one treatment to save your patient (country), which would you invest in? Exactly.
• Finally, I can't hit this point hard enough: we have shamed ourselves in the world's eyes in this debt debacle. Our leaders might not read the newspaper and even our newspapers might not cover little things like the Euro-crisis and Fukushima much if at all, but the rest of the world is watching our political suicide attempt with horror (Germany's Die Welt had the U.S. debt crisis at the top of Page One and the op-eds, and they're not impressed with us). The reason shouldn't be hard to understand: the post-WWII economy is entirely predicated on the "full faith and credit" of the United States government. T-Bills are gold and we don't even pay the credit-rating agencies for our automatic AAA rating (every other country is charged a rating fee). The implication shouldn't be hard to see: if the Zimbabwean dollar collapses (it has), no-one cares because the world is still USD-denominated. If the Euro collapses (it might), Europe is in deep doo-doo, but the world economy probably pulls through, contracting to be sure, but seeking and finding shelter in the Greenback. If the U.S. economy goes over the cliff, however, the other 193 countries shackled to the dollar can't just step off the merry-go-round. To go back to Die Welt's coverage of our crisis, for example, today's articles emphasized the self-inflicted nature of our plight and how it terrifies the rest of the world, rightly made us sound completely irrational in quoting a variety of citizens from all over the country who invariably describe the Washington "theater" as making everyone involved look bad, and mentioned that foreign tourists in America were relieved that we'd averted default. A British tourist was quoted as saying (I'm translating back into English here) that "We've been waiting for a resolution. Whatever happens in the USA invariably also has consequences on Europe." We as a country fundamentally don't understand that insight, and in these days of the "hot, flat and crowded" world, that's a political, economic and moral crime. If we want to shoot ourselves in the face by, say, completely de-funding education (oh, wait, we just did that!), we're only hurting ourselves. But when we play chicken with default, it's not just our own future we're toying with. It's also the world's, and the world is pretty unhappy to see the U.S. both politically immobilized and acting with such callous disregard to the consequences of its actions. Christine Lagarde, new head of the IMF, blasted us the other day. The U.S. getting scolded by the IMF chief might be a new phenomenon, but we deserve it.
• If you don't intuitively understand the consequences of that, read that article: "Among foreign leaders and in global markets, the political histrionics have eroded America’s already diminishing aura as the world’s economic haven and the sole country with the power to lead the rest of the world out of financial crisis and recession." Understand this: the world still needs the dollar today, this week, this month because until now, no one has thought about jumping ship from it. Now that we've proven ourselves incompetent stewards of the world's reserve currency, the world can and will find ways to de-couple itself from the dollar if it feels the need. And, as Krugman wrote yesterday, "the idea that a temporary disruption would permanently damage faith in US institutions now seems moot; if you haven’t already lost faith in US institutions, you’re not paying attention." That's called playing with fire, people, and we're so myopic we don't even understand what we're doing. The dollar hasn't always been the world's currency, but we act like it has -- and always will be. Don't think for a second that the world won't figure out a different solution if we prove that the inmates are running the asylum; if that happens, we're in for a nasty re-education in what it's like to be on a dependent currency, not the world's dominant currency.
• OMG! I think I've finally developed "the conscience of a liberal!" Krugman's post this morning:

Macroeconomic Folly

All of a sudden, people seem to have noticed that policy is moving in exactly the wrong direction. We’re getting headlines like this: Debt Deal Puts U.S. on Austerity Path as Economy Falters.

I’ll need to write up my thoughts here at greater length, but let’s just say for now that what we’ve witnessed pretty much throughout the western world is a kind of inverse miracle of intellectual failure. Given a crisis that should have been relatively easy to solve — and, more than that, a crisis that anyone who knew macroeconomics 101 should have been well-prepared to deal with — what we actually got was an obsession with problems we didn’t have. We’ve obsessed over the deficit in the face of near-record low interest rates, obsessed over inflation in the face of stagnant wages, and counted on the confidence fairy to make job-destroying policies somehow job-creating.

It’s a disaster – and maybe not only an economic disaster.

Fears of far-right rise in crisis-hit Greece

ATHENS, Greece — They descended by the hundreds — black-shirted, bat-wielding youths chasing down dark-skinned immigrants through the streets of Athens and beating them senseless in an unprecedented show of force by Greece’s far-right extremists.

In Greece, alarm is rising that the twin crises of financial meltdown and soaring illegal immigration are creating the conditions for a right-wing rise — and the Norway massacre on Monday drove authorities to beef up security.

The move comes amid spiraling social unrest that has unleashed waves of rioting and vigilante thuggery on the streets of Athens. The U.N.’s refugee agency warns that some Athens neighborhoods have become zones where “fascist groups have established an odd lawless regime.”

Got that 30s feeling, all the way.

A "deal" that will live in infamy

First off, the Tweet of the Decade, brought to you by Rep. Emmanel Cleaver II (D-MO):

"This deal is a sugar-coated satan sandwich. If you lift the bun, you will not like what you see."

I don't have Twitter and I've never heard of the Representative before, but that's the best use of 140 characters to come out of Congress in the last decade. Referring to the deal as merely a "shit sandwich" (as MoJo's Kevin Drum just did), though accurate, doesn't hold a candle to that turn of phrase. But that's enough complimenting Congress for one day. On to the juicy stuff.

***

I woke up this morning feeling two unfamiliar and extremely disheartening things. First, I finally internalized last night in a way that I've never done before that my generation (and likely the next one) is the first to have been sentenced to live shorter, unhealthier, less-prosperous lives than our parents. And there is virtually nothing we can do about it: even if we instantly re-imagine our economic, agricultural, environmental and political systems such that starting this afternoon we live in a no-growth, happiness-based, organic-locavoric-flexitarian-slow food-eating, carbon-scrubbing, functionally-governing la-la land, I'm not sure we can beat the spread. Some of us -- namely us Hoyas who have money, time and leisure to watch TED talks, stay fit and eat organic/local/flexitarian/slow food -- will surely benefit, and we'd all be able to re-start the American dream for our kids. But can we safely assume that we could rescue all of today's kids, about a quarter of whom are overweight or obese before they can even vote, from the final destruction of the American dream as we knew it this past year?

Second, I awoke today deeply, deeply shamed and embarrassed to be an American. I'm not a blind believer in the exceptionalist gospel, I'm not much of an Americapologist and I've already noted in this space that I can admit that we as a nation are full of shit to about the same degree as everybody else. But this debt-ceiling crisis has left me profoundly disillusioned about our nation's ability and/or desire to be a global citizen. To a frightening degree, these past weeks have shown how unwilling or unable we and our elected Representatives are to acknowledge and accept that we do not exist in some kind of global vacuum. As a good little SFS-er, I've always been for engagement with the world, but after experiencing the wider world for myself in the way that only study abroad can do, the combination of Tea Party myopia and Obama's "lead from behind" doctrine in world affairs now appears so morally and politically broken to me I'm at a loss for words. Though we've enjoyed great security thanks to our relative physical isolation, it is obscene and shameful that we still entertain ideological and emotional isolationism in today's hyper-connected/"flat"/free-trade world. Especially given that the world economy is predicated on the U.S. serving as the global buyer of first and last resort, it is absolutely unconscionable to flirt with committing economic seppuku before the rest of the world's horrified gaze. These days, it's not just our own future we're sacrificing. It's theirs, too, and they've every right to be repulsed by our callousness.

I stand by yesterday's points regarding political grandstanding if the "sugar-coated satan sandwich" passes tonight (anyone who dares to pat him- or herself on the back for getting a deal done at the price of the American dream and American credibility should be pilloried). I'd also like to remind our jilted-lover-in-chief that he's not the only one feeling a little let down these days. You know something, Mr. President? Despite my cynicism and better instincts to the contrary, I decided to buy into your idealism, hope and change. You were the first president I voted for, and when you won, I thought "we'd" won. I ran down to the White House to celebrate your victory on election night. I stood in the freezing cold to catch a tiny glimpse of you at the pre-inaugural concert and at your historic inauguration. I actually thought that the country's first 21st-century "progressive" candidate might bring about a 21st-century progressive politics. Sorry for being so stupid. I've tried to cut you as much slack as I could over the past few years, but leading from behind while the crazies kill the American promise is neither hope, nor change, nor progress nor inspiration. As Paul Krugman wrote immediately after the "deal" was announced, you've "surrendered." And that's what I can't forgive. You can belay the sniffling press conferences already. Your time's already over. Mine's just beginning, and it's already stolen. Sorry it didn't work out between us, but you'll start drawing Social Security in just over a decade. Don't come crying to me about your raisin in the sun of a presidency.

And to the Republicans: at long, long last, have you no sense of decency, sirs and madams? I sincerely hope you are prepared to spend all eternity derided in the history books as the Hoovers of the future who killed the Dream for fear of looking weak. We still vilify Hoover today for feeding cattle while people starved as he doomed the country to the Great Depression. When the Great Recession and its fallout are in the history books, "Don't be John Boehner/Sara Palin/a Tea Partier!" will have replaced charges of Hoover-ism 80 years from now. I hope you all are satisfied with yourselves. And I hope you are secure in the knowledge that the Baby Boomers, offspring of the "Greatest Generation" and originators of the cultural revolution that was going to save the world, have betrayed both the legacy of your parents and the future of your children and your children's children. Look back on your words and actions in this time and know shame.