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...
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