Category: Capitalism

Approaches to ‘growth’.

Some thought-provoking articles on the need, or otherwise, of continued growth.

Intellectually, most people, if they stopped and thought about it, would not challenge the absurdity of the notion that a finite rock in space, Planet Earth, can handle an infinite increase in the demands and resources of that finite planetary body, our home in space!

Yet the reality is very different.  For many complex reasons, way beyond the competencies of this writer to fully explain, we, as in the peoples of Planet Earth, continue to behave as though there are no limits to the resources of this beautiful planet that is home for all of us.

Here are some extracts from some recent items that have passed across my ‘in-box’.

A piece from the CASSE website:

What If We Stopped Fighting for Preservation and Fought Economic Growth Instead?

by Tim Murray

Seriously.

Each time environmentalists rally to defend an endangered habitat, and finally win the battle to designate it as a park “forever,” as Nature Conservancy puts it, the economic growth machine turns to surrounding lands and exploits them ever more intensively, causing more species loss than ever before, putting even more lands under threat. For each acre of land that comes under protection, two acres are developed, and 40% of all species lie outside of parks. Nature Conservancy Canada may indeed have “saved” – at least for now – two million acres, but many more millions have been ruined. And the ruin continues, until, once more, on a dozen other fronts, development comes knocking at the door of a forest, or a marsh or a valley that many hold sacred. Once again, environmentalists, fresh from an earlier conflict, drop everything to rally its defense, and once again, if they are lucky, yet another section of land is declared off-limits to logging, mining and exploration. They are like a fire brigade that never rests, running about, exhausted, trying to extinguish one brush fire after another, year after year, decade after decade, winning battles but losing the war.

Just read again the sentence, “For each acre of land that comes under protection, two acres are developed, and 40% of all species lie outside of parks.” Powerful ideas.

Anyway, do read the article in full and see if it changes your attitude.  Here’s how it ends.

Sir Peter Scott once commented that the World Wildlife Fund would have saved more wildlife it they had dispensed free condoms rather invested in nature reserves. Biodiversity is primarily threatened by human expansion, which may be defined as the potent combination of a growing human population and its growing appetite for resources. Economic growth is the root cause of environmental degradation, and fighting its symptoms is the Labor of Sisyphus.

The next article is from The Christian Science Monitor writing about how scientists are getting a new idea about the rate of loss of polar ice.

The seasonal cooling effect of light-reflecting snow and ice in the Northern Hemisphere may be weakening at twice the rate predicted by climate models, a new study shows, accelerating the impact of global warming.

By Pete Spotts, Staff writer / January 18, 2011

A long-term retreat in snow and ice cover in the Northern Hemisphere is weakening the ability of these seasonal cloaks of white to reflect sunlight back into space and cool global climate, according to a study published this week.

Indeed, over the past 30 years, the cooling effect from this so-called cryosphere – essentially areas covered by snow and ice at least part of the year – appears to have weakened at more than twice the pace projected by global climate models, the research team conducting the work estimates.

This is a well-constructed article, easy to read with obvious conclusions.  Towards the end, the author writes:

Snow appears to have its maximum cooling effect – reflecting the most sunlight back into space – in late spring, as the light strengthens but snow cover is still near its maximum extent for the year. Sea ice in the Arctic Ocean has its biggest effect in June, before its annual summer melt-back accelerates, explains Don Perovich, a researcher at the US Army Corps of Engineers Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Hanover, N.H., and a member of the team reporting the results.

The final article that I want to include is one from the website Foreign Policy. I’m going to take the liberty of reproducing it in full because it strikes me as an extremely intelligent commentary on where mankind is in terms of our attitudes to growth.

Thomas Homer-Dixon
ECONOMIES CAN’T JUST KEEP ON GROWING

Humanity has made great strides over the past 2,000 years, and we often assume that our path, notwithstanding a few bumps along the way, goes ever upward. But we are wrong: Within this century, environmental and resource constraints will likely bring global economic growth to a halt.

Limits on available resources already restrict economic activity in many sectors, though their impact usually goes unacknowledged. Take rare-earth elements — minerals and oxides essential to the manufacture of many technologies. When China recently stopped exporting them, sudden shortages threatened to crimp a wide range of industries. Most commentators believed that the supply crunch would ease once new (or mothballed) rare-earth mines are opened. But such optimism overlooks a fundamental physical reality. As the best bodies of ore are exhausted, miners move on to less concentrated deposits in more difficult natural circumstances. These mines cause more pollution and require more energy. In other words, opening new rare-earth mines outside China will result in staggering environmental impact.

Or consider petroleum, which provides about 40 percent of the world’s commercial energy and more than 95 percent of its transportation energy. Oil companies generally have to work harder to get each new barrel of oil. The amount of energy they receive for each unit of energy they invest in drilling has dropped from 100 to 1 in Texas in the 1930s to about 15 to 1 in the continental United States today. The oil sands in Alberta, Canada, yield a return of only 4 to 1.

Coal and natural gas still have high energy yields. So, as oil becomes harder to get in coming decades, these energy sources will become increasingly vital to the global economy. But they’re fossil fuels, and burning them generates climate-changing carbon dioxide. If the World Bank’s projected rates for global economic growth hold steady, global output will have risen almost tenfold by 2100, to more than $600 trillion in today’s dollars. So even if countries make dramatic reductions in carbon emissions per dollar of GDP, global carbon dioxide emissions will triple from today’s level to more than 90 billion metric tons a year. Scientists tell us that tripling carbon emissions would cause such extreme heat waves, droughts, and storms that farmers would likely find they couldn’t produce the food needed for the world’s projected population of 9 billion people. Indeed, the economic damage caused by such climate change would probably, by itself, halt growth.

Humankind is in a box. For the 2.7 billion people now living on less than $2 a day, economic growth is essential to satisfying the most basic requirements of human dignity. And in much wealthier societies, people need growth to pay off their debts, support liberty, and maintain civil peace. To produce and sustain this growth, they must expend vast amounts of energy. Yet our best energy source — fossil fuel — is the main thing contributing to climate change, and climate change, if unchecked, will halt growth.

We can’t live with growth, and we can’t live without it. This contradiction is humankind’s biggest challenge this century, but as long as conventional wisdom holds that growth can continue forever, it’s a challenge we can’t possibly address.

Thomas Homer-Dixon is the CIGI chair of global systems at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Canada.

As Rob Dietz of CASSE wrote in a recent email to me, “I’m a big Thomas Homer-Dixon fan.  His book, The Upside of Down, is outstanding.”

“Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either lead into freedom or constitute a proof for its existence” Hannah Arendt (1906-1975).

 

Well said, Hannah!

Power of social networks in the area of finance

“The nature and reach of social conversations in the investment arena.”

The above sub-heading is from a recent Post on Naked Capitalism that rather spookily comes hot on the heels of one of my recent musings.  Here’s what I published on the 12th January although I wrote it on the 9th.

In the past opinion and commentary has been in the hands, more or less, of the giant media moguls.  But technology has changed that.  Now more than ever a huge people have access to the Internet.  Indeed, a quick Google search reveals that of a world population of 6.85 billion people, just under 2 billion (29%) have internet access.  In North America that percentage is 77.4% (226 million) and in Europe the percentage is 58.4% (475 million).  I.e. nearly a billion people in just North America and Europe!

My point is that, in a manner never before experienced in human history, the vast majority of us have the ability to read, learn and muse about the critically important issues facing us today, coming to conclusions that carry political weight.  We have almost infinite choice as to where and how we form opinions.

Thus having access, via the internet, to the scribblings of so many wise people may end up giving democracy the boost it really needs in the face of overwhelming powerful plutocratic forces.

Coincidentally, also on the 12th Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism published an article entitled, The 20 most influential blogs in financial media.  You can find that article here.  Here’s a flavour of what was written.

Thanks to Minyanville for publicizing this study by MindfulMoney on the nature and reach of social conversations in the investment arena. But even bigger thanks go to loyal readers and contributors for their frequent comments, leads, and critiques. The success of a blog depends on its community and I am very grateful for all the input so many of you have generously provided.

Perhaps the most interesting finding (boldface ours):

The research confirms the existence of a network of investment super-connectors with extraordinary media influence and reach. These super-connected new influentials are, for the most part, not well established voices in the media but individual bloggers who fiercely champion their independence….In the US, the network functions as the unofficial voice of Wall Street & the US federal bank with no mainstream media players at the centre of the network.

Given how many of these top blogs are critical of the status quo, this map may be hopeful sign that the blogosphere is beginning to become a important channel of discourse outside the reach of the PR machinery of major corporations and government entities.

And rather than publish all the top 20 names, you can see that list here, the top 10 are as follows:

1. Naked Capitalism
2. Infectious Greed
3. The Big Picture
4. Jesse’s Cross Roads Cafe
5. Zerohedge
6. Mish’s Global Economic Analysis
7. Calculated Risk
8. Paul Krugman’s Blog
9. FT Alphaville
10. Ludwig von Mises Institute

Anyone interested in downloading the original report as published on the MindfulMoney website can go to the article here; the link to the pdf, requiring prior registration, is towards the end of the article.  The article opens thus:

Most investors would acknowledge that social media is playing an increasing role in their investment decisions. Yet no-one has mapped the emerging network of influence likely to be playing a crucial part in those decisions.

Until now that is.  MindfulMoney’s ‘Social Finance: The New Influentials” report is aiming to better understand what this network looks like and to see if a number of super connections, so beloved of writers like Malcolm Gladwell, exist.

The research indicates that they do.

As I said, to download the article you need to register first – that link is here.

It’s a very interesting new world that we are living in and one, I pray, that is returning real power to the electorates.

 

 

 

 

Or a song or three?

A few days ago I published an article that had first appeared on the CASSE Blog site entitled Top Ten Songs for a Steady State.  A long-term contributor to this Blog, Per Kurowski, then added a comment to that post that I thought deserved being made into a separate item on Learning from Dogs.  Here it is.

This is also a contender:

Where Do the Children Play?
Cat Stevens, Tea for the Tillerman (1970)

Well I think it’s fine, building jumbo planes.
Or taking a ride on a cosmic train.
Switch on summer from a slot machine.
Yes, get what you want to if you want, ’cause you can get anything.

Chorus: I know we’ve come a long way,
We’re changing day to day,
But tell me, where do the children play?

Well you roll on roads over fresh green grass.
For your lorry loads pumping petrol gas.
And you make them long, and you make them tough.
But they just go on and on, and it seems that you can’t get off.

Well you’ve cracked the sky, scrapers fill the air.
But will you keep on building higher
’til there’s no more room up there?
Will you make us laugh, will you make us cry?
Will you tell us when to live, will you tell us when to die?

By the way the following song should also classify as a contender… though excuse me if when I also use music to keep sane… I might drive others insane

http://ayearofsongs.blogspot.com/2010/06/color-of-wind.html

Thanks Per!

Essence Of The Civilizational Crisis.

A guest Post from Patrice Ayme.

(Well I say ‘guest’ in the sense that Patrice has very kindly allowed me to publish a post he recently published on his own Blog. It’s very much appreciated. I should add that the minor changes that I have made, in my editorial role, are gently to improve the clarity of this fine piece of work, not in any way to amend meaning. Ed.)

THE PRIVATIZATION OF MONEY CREATION IS THE ENGINE OF PLUTOCRACY.

To understand the present financial and economic crisis, we need the clarity of deep philosophy.

The situation is actually simple, in its grossest outline. To create public money, the money everybody uses (be it cash, electronic transfers, swaps, whatever) we use a private system, with proprietary money creating devices inside (say subprime, or derivatives). Civilization has never worked this way before, as the state previously was careful to stay the one and only money creator.

Now society, worldwide, uses a privately-managed public-money ‘system’ creating what is known as a fractional reserve system. [Wikipedia explanation of fractional reserve system, Ed]

That puts huge power in the hands of underground private individuals we don’t even know the names of. Those cloaked powers in turn corrupt the visible political socio-economy, from below. The whole metastasis is not even described, because intellectuals would have to do so, but most are paid by institutions subservient to the present global corruption.

We saw a similar situation in the Roman empire, when the intellectual class was at its richest, but its critical ability had been corrupted.

The modern banking system is a Faustian bargain (as in a deal with the Devil) with the bankers; in exchange for the immense powers the private bankers were given with money creation, they were supposed to loan it back to society for its development.

This worked reasonably well in the Nineteenth Century. But in the Twentieth Century, bankers observed they could support fascism regimes, and get away with it (only Dr. Schacht, one of the “Lords of Finance”, sat in Nuremberg tribunal, and he was exonerated). Now bankers think they can engineer a depression, and get even richer from it: just keep the profits, and make taxpayers pay for the losses.

By Patrice Ayme

Note 1: Paul Krugman observes, with many others, that the crisis of the West needs “intellectual clarity” to be resolved, and, meanwhile we are “overmatched“. I made preceding comment in answer to Krugman’s cogent remarks. (The New York Times had the kindness to publish what I wrote within two minutes! )

Note 2: HOW THE FINANCIAL CRISIS IS TURNING CIVILIZATIONAL:

China just established another train speed record for “unmodified’ train sets (481 km/h). OK, some will claim China stole a lot of Japanese and European technology. And some French engineers have sneered that the very high speed system in China is not as high performing as it looks (France has much higher average speeds, the highest in the world). However, this is not the point. The point is that China is trying very hard to progress and improve. Meanwhile some of the colossal technological edge of the West is eroding away quickly. The result will be world war, or global plutocratic peace (as plutocracy furthers its deal with China).

How does China improve so much and so fast? Because Chinese banks, the largest in the world, operate according to the fiduciary duty, the Faustian bargain, that the fractional reserve system ought to impose, and used to impose in the West.

Top Chinese bankers know all too well that if they cheated, they may end up with a bullet in their skull. China is led by scientists and engineers who turned to politics, but know that they cannot make mistakes in their calculations. Mao made many mistakes, and dozens of millions died.

The history of China, in the 26 centuries before that, was spoiled by a well meaning, but meek philosophy, which left too small a place to deliver progress of the material, and intellectual kinds.

Civilization is not about “leaving it at that”, the way Confucius mostly had it. Civilization is also about the dream, and implementing it. Indeed, civilization cannot stand still, anymore than a biker can stand still, because resources run out always (as Rome and the Mayas found out). Thus moving on is the price of sustainability. Progress is the price of sustainability.

Note 3: It may seem a curious thing that Karl Marx did not make a strident version of the preceding critique (instead he modestly accused tangentially bankers of “monopoly” powers).

But this Marxist discretion proves the point I alluded to above, namely that bankers were better behaved in the 19C. So Marx talked about other things.

Ironically, early American presidents had perfectly well seen the danger bankers posed, and worried more about them than Marx himself! And let no one call Andrew Jackson a communist: that would be serious mistake…

In the 21st Century, by capturing the states (USA, EU), and various institutions above them (IMF, World Bank, BIS), the bankers have established a monopoly of power early American presidents rightly feared (and Jackson, wounded at 13 by an English sword, later a proud carrier of several bullets, and a general in the field, feared very little). The wise know what to fear. The mentally simple just smile, thinking only about themselves, as they can’t think much further than that.

*********************************

From the Ed.

Dear Readers, I really hope that you read Patrice’s post in full and in a quiet place where you could reflect on the meaning and underlying implications of what Patrice is saying.  Those in the UK may have been able to watch a typically fabulous BBC Television series, Ancient Worlds.  It’s still available on BBC iPlayer.

What comes out from the message of mankind over the centuries is that wonderful French expression plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose – the more that changes, the more it stays the same thing.  But where we are as we approach the New Year of 2011 A.D. is possibly at a cross-roads – and I intend to write a little more on this idea over the coming days.

The Madoff Link?

Anyone see any connection?

From the UK Newspaper The Independent:

Bernie Madoff was able to con thousands of extra investors by using a British bank which “looked the other way” and ignored repeated warnings that he was engaged in a sophisticated fraud, according to the man charged with recovering their losses.

HSBC and its staff were accused of receiving “kickbacks for looking the otherway while legitimising BLMIS (Bernard L Madoff Investment Securities) through their name and brand, making it attractive to investors”.

SNIP

“Had HSBC and the defendants reacted appropriately to such warnings and other obvious badges of fraud … the Madoff Ponzi scheme would have collapsed years, billions of dollars, and countless victims sooner,” said Mr Picard. “The defendants were wilfully and deliberately blind to the fraud, even after learning about numerous red flags surrounding Madoff.”

Mr Picard wants to recover the $9bn from HSBC and a network of international funds that acted as “feeders”, enticing investors to place money with Madoff’s investment company. It makes the bank the biggest defendant so far, eclipsing lawsuits already filed against the Swiss bank UBS and America’s JP Morgan. Other defendants named in the HSBC suit include the Italian bank UniCredit and Austria’s Bank Medici.

The accusations levelled against HSBC will come as a huge embarrassment to a company which has become increasingly controversial, having threatened to quit London for Hong Kong should the Government seek to impose too heavy a levy against banks or attempt to break it up after the Independent Commission on Banking, set up by the Chancellor, reports next year.

However, suits against more European banks are likely to follow. The lawsuit, filed in the US Federal Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan, is the latest move by Mr Picard who has filed more than 100 lawsuits over the last few days in a bid to recover funds from those institutions which he claims enabled the fraud or those who received “false profits” by getting their money out of the scheme before it collapsed. Mr Picard faces a deadline of Friday – the two-year anniversary of Madoff’s arrest – to file everything.

and from the BBC News:

Questions have been raised about police handling of tuition fee protests after a car carrying the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall was attacked.

A window was smashed and paint thrown at the vehicle as the royal couple made their way to a central London theatre.

Violent demonstrations spread after MPs voted to increase university tuition fees in England.

SNIP

The National Union of Students (NUS), meanwhile, said the violence had overshadowed the story it wanted to see in the newspapers.

Shane Chowen, vice-president of further education, said: “Not the headlines I wanted. I wanted to see the fact that the coalition government have just trebled tuition fees, sentencing a generation of students to record student debt.”

A more peaceful version from March 2010

By Paul Handover

Fairness in society

Very difficult times ahead but a fairer social order could be one outcome.

As is so often the case, a number of different lines of thought come together once again to highlight the pressures on society and my belief that we are in the ‘zone of change’ between the last 40 or 50 years and what is ahead for western societies.  There is no question that these are very difficult times as, I presume, all phases of change have been over many centuries.

On the 28th October there was a Post on Learning from Dogs about the recent book from Will Hutton, Them and Us.  That book masterfully articulates the core issues in British society arising out of some fundamental economic policy errors and the very difficult times that are being experienced right now.

The British are a lost tribe – disoriented, brooding and suspicious. They have lived through the biggest bank bail-out in history and the deepest recession since the 1930s, and they are now being warned that they face a decade of unparalleled public and private austerity.

As if to underline the fact that the economic situation is far from recovery, despite what is being promoted, here’s a recent article from Washington’s Blog. Almost impossible to take an extract that conveys the essence of this powerful (and scary) article – so just go here and read it.  Or if you haven’t the time here’s a taste:

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 2010

It’s Not Just the “Peripheral” European Countries … Financial Contagion Could Spread to “Core” Eurozone Countries and the U.S.

CNN notes:

Americans will not be spared if there’s a recession in Europe, even if U.S. bank exposure to European government debt is relatively limited.

SNIP

The European Union is the second largest market for U.S. exports, behind only Canada. The EU bought about $175 billion in U.S. goods in the first three quarters of this year. That’s up about 8% from a year ago.

So worsening problems in Europe will clearly be a drag on the U.S. as well.
Niall Ferguson, Marc Faber, and SocGen’s Edwards and Grice predicted 9 months ago that the European debt crisis would eventually spread to America.

But the question of what country the “contagion” might spread to next is really the wrong question altogether.

The real question is whether the wealth of the people around the world will continue to be shoveled into the bottomless pit of debts held by the big banks, or whether the people will prevail and the giant banks and bondholders will be forced to take a haircut. See this, this and this.

So back to the issue of fairness.  There is no escaping the consequences, still playing out, of the ‘spend now, pay tomorrow’ culture of the last 30 or 40 years so then the main issue is how do we mitigate the consequences for those who are most exposed to some of less prettier aspects of modern life.  Ponder on that question while you read this recent piece from Open Democracy.

Fairness and the cost of life for the poor in Britain

Brian Landers, 26 November 2010

Most Britons had “never had it so good” despite the “so-called recession” declared Lord Young of Graffham.  His words were immediately disowned by David Cameron, who fired him. But in reality Young was only articulating what he and his circle are experiencing and privately believe.

For example, on the BBC’s Sunday morning Broadcasting House on 21 November, Lord Charles Powell who was Margaret Thatcher’s advisor, complained, “unfortunately he said the wrong thing. In terms of fact what he said was probably right, with interests rates low people are not particularly badly off at the moment. But some people are very badly off and it is insensitive, I suppose, to suggest that everyone is not doing too badly at this time. It does show that you can’t speak the truth in politics anymore you have to defer to what is politically correct”.

Well, there is another truth: that for thousands of pensioners and not just “some” of them, negative real interest rates on their savings are becoming a disaster. Even though for the heavily mortgaged wealthy, low interest rates do indeed make them much better off.

What Young’s comments illustrate, therefore, is that when we consider equality and inequality we need to look at expenditure patterns, which can be just as important as differences in income.

Historically debates on social equality focus overwhelmingly and inevitably on inequalities of income. We read, for example, that according to a study by Incomes Data Services chief executives of the UK’s 100 largest companies are now paid on average 88 times the pay of typical full-time workers and that this ratio is getting worse. Last year the multiple was 81 times and ten years ago top bosses took home 47 times the average wage.

But in addition to their income being a lot lower the poor also suffer more because life costs them more. There are two issues, one obvious, one less so.

The primary issue is one of fairness. Three for the price of two supermarket offers are great value only for those who can afford to buy two; those who can only afford one end up paying 50% more per unit. Is that fair?

Another supermarket example which received widespread but soon-forgotten newspaper coverage earlier this year is more subtle. Tesco owns three convenience store brands in this country: Tesco Express, Tesco Metro and One Stop. An enquiry in 2006 found that the corporation was charging more than 20% more for the same products in its One Stop stores than in its Tesco branded stores. Tesco responded that it was bringing prices down in One Stop but in 2010 further research showed that One Stop prices were still 14% higher than prices for the same product in the rest of Tesco. One Stop typically operated in less attractive (that is poorer) areas where there was no competition from other mega-corporations and where therefore significantly higher prices could be charged. Again that raises issues of fairness.

If such unfairness is somehow familiar there is a further layer that goes beyond fairness: we live in a society where in many tiny ways the poor actually subsidise the better off through the way patterns of expenditure are organised by the market place, (i.e., not just by providing cheap labour).

Consider for example the cost of owning a car.  Bernard Jullien of the University of Bordeaux analysed published data on household expenditure and trade data from car distributors (See Competition and Change 6, 2002). He showed that richer consumers were being cross-subsidised by poorer consumers. Distributors in France (and almost certainly elsewhere) were following a conscious policy of keeping new car prices lower to increase their market share. Then then marked up the prices of spare parts and maintenance to maintain their overall profit levels. Jullien found that the unintended consequence was that well off customers, who were more likely to buy new cars, ended up being subsidised by less well off customers who typically bought second hand cars that needed more frequent repair.

There are more examples if the term “well off” is extended to include corporations. The cost of producing and distributing the electricity needed to power a light bulb is the same whether the bulb is in a private house or in the office of a mega-corporation – and yet the corporation will undoubtedly pay far less. Quantity discounts typically reflect the purchasing power of the buyer rather than any scale economies for the seller.

What are apparently rational pricing strategies have the unintended consequence of ensuring that poor people pay more than the well off in ensuring the overall profits corporations need.

Then there is time. Time budget surveys have shown, for example, that the poor take much longer per mile to get to work than the rich because the forms of transport they use are typically much slower. Similarly the poor have to devote more time to food shopping and a host of other activities.

There is nothing conspiratorial about the way that the poor fare worse than the rich. Often it is just the accidental by-product of perfectly sensible business decisions. Indeed in some cases there may even be wider social benefits. Improved stock control with Just-In-Time inventory techniques and Call-Off procurement contracts has ensured that waste in many industries has been sharply reduced; it is unfortunate that in food retailing one consequence is that end-of-day price reductions on perishable products are now less common, again hurting the poor more than the rich.

What can be done to mitigate these expenditure inequalities? First, they deserve to be highlighted, if only because, like so much else, they are beyond the experience of the multimillionaires in and around the cabinet. Second, and especially if we are going to talk about Big Society and us being ‘all in it together’, we need to think about economic models that build into their measures of success their consequences for all of us.

[Published with the permission of Brian Landers and openDemocracy.net under a Creative Commons licence.]

By Paul Handover

Whoops, just on the phone!

The unacceptable side of mobile (cell) phones.

Recently, I saw something come in to my in-box that just held my attention for sufficiently long to get me to move from scan reading to actually thinking about what I was reading and how it made me feel.

The US government may require cars to include scrambling tech that would disable mobile-phone use by drivers, and perhaps passengers.

“I think it will be done,” US Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood said on Wednesday morning, according to The Daily Caller. “I think the technology is there and I think you’re going to see the technology become adaptable in automobiles to disable these cell phones.

No, this is not some other form of Government interference in areas of our lives that are irrelevant to the real world.  This is serious stuff:

Believe it or not, I wasn’t always so outspoken about the dangers of distracted driving. Like a lot of folks, I just didn’t give a lot of thought to it.

But that all changed as I met people from coast to coast who told me about the loved ones they lost in senseless crashes caused by texting and cell phone use behind the wheel. And it was their stories–of dreams shattered and lives cut short–that turned the fight to end distracted driving into my personal crusade.

These people have had a profound effect on me. And I think their stories will have a profound effect on you.

SNIP

Just last year, nearly 5,500 people were killed and 500,000 more were injured in distracted driving-related crashes.  But, these aren’t statistics. They’re children and parents, neighbors and friends.

So this really does deserve thinking about.  As The Register article puts it:

The problem is that the average driver doesn’t think that he or she is an average driver: nearly two-thirds of drivers think of themselves as safer and more skillful than a driver of median safety or skills — a statistical impossibility, of course.

When faced with the prospect of automotive mobile phones being disabled, we’d be willing to bet that most drivers, suffused with confidence in their own skills, will think in terms of personal inconvenience and a restriction on personal freedom.

Perhaps it might be better to think of the guy texting in the lane to your left, or the gal yelling at her ex on her iPhone in the lane to your right, and think not of your own inconvenience, but of some distracted dolt killing you.

Remember one unassailable statistic, as explained by the late, great George Carlin: “Just think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize half of them are even stupider!”

LaHood may be right. Disabling mobile phones in cars should not be looked at as a way of protecting you from yourself, but instead as a way of protecting you from the stupid.

Quite so!

By Paul Handover

Future for Societies

The glass is filled half-way.  Is it half-full or half-empty?

This is a rhetorical question, of course.  It is what comes to mind as I write this simply because of a small half-full/half-empty experience in the last 10 minutes.  Let me explain.

I had started watching a video on TED.com.  This one was entitled Jared Diamond on why societies collapse.  Within a few minutes I started drifting to the comments, and read:

Jared Diamond talks of how societies choose (unwittingly) to collapse. William McDonough with his Cradle to Cradle concept also talks about choices and provides ‘Love of all children of all species for all time’ as a positive conscious choice.

With goals or missions in place (for example profit for businesses) humans have achieved amazing things.

So what would happen if all groups, families and individuals followed a mission of ‘Love of all children of all species for all time’?

I rather liked that.  We always have choices. A positive conscious choice is always better.

So I stopped the Jared Diamond lecture and found the William McDonough one, also on TED.com, and conveniently shared on YouTube.  It’s just 20 minutes long, so settle down somewhere, perhaps with a glass filled half-way with something!

By Paul Handover

More on Them and Us

Will Hutton’s book continues to impress me; greatly.

On 28tTh October, I wrote an article about Will Hutton‘s impressive book, Them and Us.  I had got to page 120 or thereabouts and could resist no longer the urge of reading the book to the end before commenting on Learning from Dogs.

Now I am reading through page 260 and, again, find myself incapable of waiting until the book is completed before offering further thoughts!

Despite being very optimistic about the long-term future, I sense that the period that we have been in since 2008 may turn out to be one of the darkest in recent history – I touched on this aspect in a recent post called Faith in a (new) future.

One of the things that strikes me is the complete lack of openness from the British Government about the likely growth scenarios over the next decade.  Here was how the latest ‘growth’ figures were presented a couple of weeks ago, “The economy grew by 0.8% in the three months to September – double the rate that had been predicted by analysts.”

UK output increases by 0.8 per cent 4Q 2010

But here’s Will Hutton,

Britain is going to be much poorer than it anticipated just a few years ago.

and a couple of sentences later talking about economists Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff,

They paint a sober picture of prolonged loss of output, high unemployment and depressed asset prices, and warn that there is no precedent for what happens after the kind of global crisis through which we have just lived. (My italics)

Hutton says that growth would need to accelerate to 3.25 per cent in order for output to reach its predicted level if the recession had not taken place.

He then says that a more plausible scenario if growth remains at 2.75 per cent (average level in recent years leading up to the credit crunch) “then it might never recover sufficiently to converge with the old trajectory.”

Hutton continues,

However, even that may be optimistic.  The reality is that between the economic growth troughs of 1991 and 2009, growth in Britain actually averaged just over 2 per cent.

That would lead to a cumulative loss of output of more than £5 trillion!

It could be even worse.  The economics team at Barclays believe that is it perfectly plausible for growth to average just 1.75 per cent for the first half of the current decade.

And all of this before the huge budget cuts announced by the UK Coalition Government start to bite!

So the reality is that we are a long way away from any form of real recovery, despite what the politicians are saying!

What is so impressive about the book is that Will Hutton is meticulous in his research (there are 23 pages of referenced notes at the end of the book) and from Chapter 9 starts setting out how Britain “has the opportunity to put things right fast.”  So this is a book from a well-respected author that sets out carefully and logically the cause of the recession and then presents some powerful options for change.

The bottom line is that Britain has to be a much more fairer society. Not just Britain.  Here’s an extract from a recent posting on Tom Engelhardt’s Blog. Tom is the author of the book, The American Way of War.

I’m no expert on elections, but sometimes all you need is a little common sense.  So let’s start with a simple principle: what goes up must come down.

For at least 30 years now, what’s gone up is income disparity in this country.  Paul Krugman called this period “the Great Divergence.” After all, between 1980 and 2005, “more than 80% of total increase in Americans’ income went to the top 1%” of Americans in terms of wealth, and today that 1% controls 24% of the nation’s income.  Or put another way, after three decades of ”trickle-down” economics, what’s gone up are the bank accounts of the rich.

In 2009, for instance, as Americans generally scrambled and suffered, lost jobs, watched pensions, IRAs, or savings shrink and houses go into foreclosure, millionaires actually increased.  According to the latest figures, the combined wealth of the 400 richest Americans (all billionaires) has risen by 8% this year, even as, in the second quarter of 2010, the net worth of American households plunged 2.8%

Change is definitely overdue.

By Paul Handover

And a reply to Patrice Ayme

This is a guest post from an old regular (as in frequency, not age!) contributor to Learning from Dogs, Chris Snuggs.  He has written in response to the guest post from Patrice himself that was published on the 31st October.

Patrice AYME – WOW!

First, an amazing post – lots to talk about. Secondly, (get the bad news out of the way first) the fact that you warmed to Brown when he became Prime Minister worries me, principally because the man was at best totally incompetent and at worst a moron, having totally messed up almost every aspect of British life one can think of but in particular the economy. It is only the fact that we started out from a better position that prevented (or prevents) us from “doing a Greece”. The waste and delusions were humungous; the basic management skills non-existent. I note that Mr Brown is going to make a speech in the House of Commons soon; I wonder if he is going to apologize for the appalling shambles he left behind or whether he is going to accuse the new government of not spending enough. His finest hour came when “saving the world” by encouraging governments everywhere to borrow vast amounts of money to save money. Had the overall consequences of his previous policies not been so disastrous this could almost have been funny. Well, it was funny for the banks, who of course were laughing all the way not only to the bank but at it.

CHINA: I’ve been to China – (wonderful people) the problem (if there is one) is not their economy per se but the fact that it is a dictatorship. There have been and indeed are worse dictatorships, but it is one nonetheless. As their economic power increases so does their sabre-rattling. Have there ever been any cases where mighty economic power has not been followed by territorial expansion? Patrice will know this; his overview of history in these matters is extraordinary. N° 1 Satan the USA may be, but without their umbrella free, democratic Taiwan would most likely already have been invaded by mainland China.

The YANKS? Humans are – in my humble opinion – often extremely conservative. Americans have been used for decades if not centuries to believing that their country is “the greatest in the world”. (they are not the only guilty ones, the French and Chinese run them close). It is going to take them some time to realize the junk value of that particular belief. While they are slowly internalising it we should be patient, remembering that they did save us from Hitler and/or Stalin. No doubt of course for their own selfish reasons, they did the same in Kosovo, too, (the Europeans – except those anti-European, Anglo-Saxon Brits of course – having done SFA) though I’m still trying to work out why – perhaps EXXON had geological surveys indicating vast oilfields around Pristina?

To save the US it will take someone with a lot more steel than Obama; that is the problem, and WHERE is this person coming from?

FRANCE: If there is any country mired in self-delusion apart from the USA it seems to me to be France ….. I am NOT anti-French – far from it. I lived and worked there for ten years ….. however, Patrice’s observation that most French people understand the need for change but most also support the strikes is revealing. This is the crux – they cannot make up their minds what they want – for too many in positions of power the status quo is too good – a bit like in the USA with the plutocrats. Thus they stagger about getting into a worse and worse situation, much like Britain did under Gordon Brownosaurus.  The STATE in France is TOO BIG and SELF-IMPORTANT. Sarko realizes this, but his attempts to rein it in (forced by budget constraints) have been feeble and in any case the inertial resistance is stupendous. The phrase “reality-check” comes to mind.

THE EU: As for “STATE TOO BIG”, the EU is overreaching itself, having just committed to spending over €5 BILLION on a fatuous new diplomatic service run by a nonentity earning TWICE as much as the British and French leaders and which will give the EU FORTY-SIX “diplomats” on the island of Barbados. Nothing against the Barbadians – jolly good chaps and chapesses – but are they REALLY that important to the EU taxpayer? We’ll also have over 50 in that economic colossus of the universe, Madagascar. Meanwhile in Brussels, a new building is to be leased at a cost of a piffling £10,000,000 a year. It is said by the great and good in Brussels that this new diplomatic service is needed to “compete with the Chinese and Indians”.  Absolute rubbish of course. The idea that a black-African country will trade with the EU and not the Chinese just because we have fifty odd “diplomats” in a spanking new building downtown is ludicrous. What the Africans want is good value (i.e. cheap) and reliability. Europe is getting past the stage of being able to offer much of those, bogged down as it is by 100,000 pages of European Law and mindless regulations designed à la française to improve the lot of “workers” but which in fact gradually destroy all their jobs.

I personally think the EU is doomed; destroyed by greed, arrogance and self-delusion. The British are already very anti-EU, NOT because we are anti-European; we are just anti venality, greed and overweeing self-delusion. However, in true EU spirit, we are denied the referendum we were promised on the Lisbon Treaty. Anyway, in the EU if you vote “No” in a referendum you just keep getting referenda over and over again until you say “Yes”, so what is the point?

EU TREATIES? A tremendous FARCE of course. Did you know that it is ILLEGAL for members states to bail each other out? But what happened with Greece? And now they have a NEW cunning plot to bail out the next failing economies: Spain, Italy, Portugal and Ireland must already be licking their lips at the thought of getting free German money. So, bailouts are ILLEGAL, but not apparently if we actually want to do it. So they are only illegal in THEORY then? So it seems. Now Frau Merkel and the usual stitch-up-the-rest suspects (France) have worked out their plan there remains the niggling little detail about it being ILLEGAL. So what is the solution? The humungously-overpaid and fatuous EU President (has he got his presidential jet yet?) has been asked to look at the problem and “see if he can find a way to bail the countries out legally.”

Of course, despite spending thousands of man-hours on the problem he won’t find a way that will stand up in court so the increasingly-fragile and erratic Frau Merkel is talking about “amendments to the Lisbon Treaty”. More hilarity – this took ten years to thrash out, agree and pass and yet she wants to muck about with it already. I find all this both hilarious and criminally venal, treating the European taxpayer with contempt. How do they get away with it? VOTER INERTIA – the same problem as in the USA, where they have a POOR choice of parties and lurch from one dinosaur to the other without ever seeming to explore alternatives. EUROPE? Do YOU know who your MEP is? Does he or she LISTEN to what you say? With Europe in the midst of the biggest financial crisis since WWII when EVERYONE in the real world (not Wayne Rooney of course) is cutting back, jobs are going, projects abandoned the MEPs voted for a 6% INCREASE in their budget. One wonders who their PR people are, but in truth they don’t have to bother much about PR since their accountability is about zero.

The EU initiatives are INSANE – power-mad. It is so transparent as to be laughable. As the British learned from “Yes Minister”, the bigger your budget the more important you must be and therefore the more you must pay yourself. This is the rational for EU top-brass being paid double what NATIONAL LEADERS get.  (Oh, and for the “inconvenience” of living abroad of course, even though they get a whole raft of vast expenses including free schooling for their kids). Cameron knows it, but the Brits are so used to being slagged off by the Continent (especially statist France, which is always very glad to get its bills paid by someone else  – will the Germans bail out France when their economy collapses?) that Cameron has to tread a tricky line. At heart, the Brits are FREE MARKETERS and NOT willing to be an outpost of The United States of Europe, which is of course what they want over the Channel. France wants that because it believes it can control it;, they could be deluding themselves – monsters one creates often become uncontrollable. And the Germans of course are kept on a leash because France still plays on German guilt for WWII, but is that ploy now looking a bit sick? It certainly can’t last for ever so milk it while you can, eh?

THE EURO: The recent EU jolly came up with a plan to “save the euro”; they were all happy as sandboys about this, but do they REALLY believe that Greece can EVER repay its debt without MORE vast donations from Germany? Do they think Germany will continue to bail out the feckless Mediterranean countries (plus Ireland …)? Some of these countries shouldn’t BE in the euro, unless of course the EU can control their economies. AHA, THERE WE HAVE IT! That is the agenda of course … more central control = more power and in particular more “harmonisation” of taxation. Don’t you just love that word; it sounds so PC. ‘harmony’ = balance, peace, contentment ….. all the right marketing vibes … but what it means of course is “harmonisation” UPWARDS to match the preposterous tax levels in Germany and France. The Germans are so efficient that they seem to get by with such high taxes, but they are crippling France. Despite their fatuous 35 hour week  – introduced to create more employment (why didn’t they make it 10 hours per week – surely that would have created even MORE employment?) – their unemployment rate is still way above the average, and this for DECADES.

Well Patrice, I agree with much of your analysis of the USA, but I suspect Yanks will be up in arms. (the “greatest country in the world” syndrome). I am reminded of the importance of education; is it SO difficult to learn from the past? Apparently so – humans are so deep-rooted in the immediate present and so few take a long-term view, especially in our “democratic” systems of government where Obama has only been going for two years yet is effectively starting the next election campaign. And as we know, British politicians will do and say anything to gain power and having done so very often ignore much of what they promised. I myself do not remember the British Labour Party promising to ruin the country in 1997, yet that is what they have done in many areas.

Where I disagree is with the impression I have from your post that Europe is doing much better than the USA. I don’t think we are. I think we are in a tremendous mess and have NOT yet understood what faces us – see strikes in France for a start. One bright light? the economic performance of Germany, the only “serious country in Europe – apart from those magnificent Scandinavians of course. Another bright light? The performance so far of the British Coalition, at least having the courage not to take the easy but long-term catastrophic path of “Spend, spend, spend” so honed and perfected by the previous bunch of charlatans.

By Chris Snuggs