For the past year I’ve been writing a book on prosperity, by which I mean widespread affluence. It’s been slow going, not because I don’t believe I know the general technical requirements of prosperity (I do, if I didn’t, I shouldn’t be wasting anyone’s time, including mine, writing the book), but because the real problem isn’t the technical details like eliminating bottlenecks, or redistributing income, or setting up positive feedback loops, or avoiding fraud, or stopping financialization, or any of the dozens of other subjects I either visit at chapter length or touch on briefly. The problem as with, say, stopping smoking, isn’t so much what to do, it is how it comes that we do it. When do we make the decision we’re willing to do what it takes, sufferer the negative consequences of getting to a better place, and then push ourselves through those consequences?
This is a huge problem in individuals, as the weight loss, addiction, psychology, psychiatry and self-help industries attest. There is, generally, more money in not solving a problem, as drug makers with their palliatives understand, than in solving it. The people who have power and money and influence in the status quo are not sure that in a new world, with a new economy, and the new ethics which must undergird that new economy, they will be on top. They are right to believe so. They are creatures of the current world, and in being created, have created the world they are unsteady masters of. Their ethics and morals, their way of business, of living, of apportioning power and influence and money must go if there is to be widespread affluence. Their methods have been tried for 40 odd years now, and if measured against the human weal, have failed. They will not, they cannot adapt, not as a group. They were not selected for the skills it takes to create a new type of affluent society, they have not even been able to maintain the mass affluence of the old society, and not just because they have not wanted to. They would be a different elite, made up of different people with different ethics, talents and skills if they did want to.
Ordinary people also have the wrong ethics, the wrong morality. Much is written about why consumerism is bad, but the ultimate problem of consumerism is not how it makes us feel but that the consumer passively chooses from a menu created by others, not to fill the consumer’s real needs, but to benefit those who created the menu. Such a passive people cannot understand that choosing choices without creating choices is not choice, it is the illusion of choice.
So while my book has a lot of general principles of the sort which books on prosperity often have, such as about trade, and productivity and technological change, that isn’t the most important part. The part that matters isn’t about the technical requirements of prosperity, it’s about why and when people do what is required to achieve prosperity, and when they don’t. And when, having obtained it, they throw it away.
Our society is ours. A tautology, but one we forget too often. As individuals we often feel powerless, as a mass, we have created our own society. There are real constraints, physical constraints on what society we can have, based on the resources we have, the technology we have mastered and what we understand about ourselves and our world, but those constraints are not, right now, so tight as to preclude widespread affluence, to preclude prosperity.
They are, however, tight enough to preclude continuing to do the same thing, led by the same sorts of people, and expect anything but decline, repeated disasters and eventual catastrophe. We can be affluent and prosperous, we can spread that affluence and prosperity to those who do not have it now, but we cannot do it if we insist on keeping the current forms of our economy, including our current forms of consumption. This does not mean doing with less, it means doing with different things, valuing different things. Those new values will be better for us, objectively, they will make us both happier and healthier, just as most addicts are happier once they’ve broken their addiction, or rather once they’ve gone through withdrawal and rebuilt their lives.
We can choose not to do so. We have, in certain respects, already chosen not to do so, as with our refusal to do anything about climate change until it is too late (the two problems are combined, climate change is a subset of the political and economic problems we have). We can, also, choose to make the necessary changes, not only to avoid the worst catastrophes (disasters are now inevitable, there are consequences to failure, stupidity and greed), but to create an actual, better, world, a world in which the vast majority are healthier, happier and doing work they care about.
The monster facing us, as usual, is us. The monsters are always us, our brothers and sisters, and the one in the mirror. And it is those monsters I’ve been wrestling this past year.
Christmas is named after Jesus. What have you done to Jesus this year?
34 Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:
35 For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:
36 Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.
37 Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?
38 When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee?
39 Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?
40 And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
41 Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:
42 For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink:
43 I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.
44 Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?
45 Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.
Notice the part about prisoners. Every “Christian” who thinks prisoners should be mistreated is not a Christian, and Jesus will not recognize him or her as such. Yes, Clarence Thomas, I’m talking to you.
The law of the Jesus of the New Testament is of love, and that love includes works. If you are a Protestant who thinks works don’t matter, only faith, you are not a Christian. If you are a Catholic who thinks anti-gay doctrine is more important than ministering to and being loving to gays, then you will not be recognized by Jesus as one of his.
Jesus did not die in agony on the cross so that those who claim to follow him could be bigots, torturers, greedy selfish bastard who want grandma to eat catfood, or people believe the sick should not be ministered to. If you want to be evil, follow the old Testament minus the rest of the Torah. If you want to be good, remember that the New Testament overrides the Old one. And understand that the Church is neither God nor Jesus.
Do unto others as you would they do unto you in the same circumstances. That is the whole of the law. All else is commentary.
I’ve waited a bit to weigh in on this, but I think it’s time.
The two most important things to understand are that gun control would reduce harm significantly, and that gun control is a palliative for a sick culture. The US does have more guns than anyone else, but countries like Finland have a pile of guns and people don’t kill nearly as many innocents with them. Likewise every military age male in Switzerland has an assault rifle, and they don’t have killing sprees.
The first point first, China has people who go on sprees with knives. In fact there was one just recently in a school, 23 students were injured. That’s sad, but not one of them died. Not one. Guns make violence far, far more deadly. Reducing gun availability won’t stop attacks. It will reduce how deadly they are.
The key points of leverage on harm reduction are reducing clip sizes, getting rid of automatics and semi-automatics and radically restricting ammunition purchases. Likewise soft-target ammunition – bullets intended to fragment, and hollow point ammunition need to go away. These bullets have no purpose but to kill civilians. You don’t use them against military or paramilitary targets because they suck against body armor. As such they have no place, even if you believe in a 2nd Amendment “fight the government” argument. If you’re fighting the government, you’ll want ammo that can pierce body armor.
The second point is that America has far more of these attacks than anyone else. This is because America:
1) is under economic pressure. The more people who are in economic trouble, the more attacks.
2) has jobs which are intensely unpleasant, with the asshole boss being the norm. Don’t tell me otherwise.
3) has a startling rise in diagnosed mental illness, and a startling rise in the use of psychoactive medications whose effects we don’t really understand. In particular, there has been a massive increase in the drugging of young children (males are who we care about in this context) with amphetamines and dextro-Amphetamines, officially starting as young as 3 years old, and unofficially, earlier. Long term use of amphetamines is associated with psychotic breaks and violence, this is not in question, we have a TON of historical evidence. You cannot keep people constantly on amphetamines and not expect these sort of eruptions.
4) The increase in mental illness and medication is in large part because life in America is extraordinarily unpleasant. You live in a militarized surveillance society with no guaranteed health care and with a job market that doesn’t provide enough jobs for those who need it, allowing bosses to treat those who do have jobs like shit, and executives to take virtually all productivity gains for themselves. The economic model is to pile debt on consumers to create rental streams, but constant debt payments put people under major psychological pressure, all the time.
5) People are suffering an epidemic of chronic physical diseases on top of this.
You cannot have a pressure cooker society which is also militarized and swimming in guns. You simply cannot.
First step, enact gun control. Second step, stop treating your fellow Americans like shit and stop medicating young children (and everyone else) with record amounts of psychoactive chemicals. There are only two possibilities: either that many Americans really are mentally ill, or they aren’t. In either case, the solution isn’t to medicate them. It is to figure out what about your society is making them ill.
Actually, the truth will be somewhere between. More people are mentally ill because of your society, but not as many as are medicated. People have to be medicated to function in American society because it requires unpleasant and unnatural behaviour, virtually all the time. School and work both require people to act in ways that normal, healthy, unmedicated individuals find hard to sustain. Add to that the fact that social ties have, over the last 60 years, absolutely collapsed, leaving most people with almost no friend or close family, and people need to drug themselves to get through their day. They are sicks, scared and lonely. And at the very edges of this, the occasional person cracks, goes ballistic and kills a lot of people.
The Reagan play, in the last period of high oil prices was this: crush the economy and bring new sources of hydrocarbons online.
This is also Obama’s play: fracking and other unconventional hydrocarbon sources are being ramped up massively, while austerity crushes resource demand. China is buying a lot less resources.
I called for falling oil prices before and was wrong about when it would happen, but I remain convinced it will happen. The hardest thing to do is to predict not what, but when.
This does not mean that hydrocarbon prices in the long run are going to drop, they aren’t. But in the mid terms, for a few years, they will.
This won’t do much good for ordinary Americans, because they won’t see almost any of the gains, their lords and masters will take most of it.
This crash will lead to challenges for many countries, most interestingly South American countries like Venezuela and Argentina which have been riding the resource boom and engaging in resource socialism. They need to diversify their economies. I doubt Venezuela will manage it, Argentina may, if the people running Argentina learn some humility. This will also hurt the oil patch up here in Canada (primarily Alberta) and upset the political calculations of our Conservative party. Russia, various Middle Eastern countries and so on will also have their problems.
All resource booms end. All of them. The question is only when. The widespread slowdown, and especially the Chinese slowdown (which is hitting S. America hard), indicates we are likely close to the end of this boom period.
My interview on Virtually Speaking is now up. If you missed it and would like to listen, it can be found here.
We talked about kindness in public policy and about the economics and politics of global warming.
I’ll be talking with Virtually Speaking’s Jay Ackroyd tonight at 9pm EST. Current plan is to discuss kindness as the base prescription for policy and then talk about the implications of Bill McKibben’s 3 numbers on global warming, but if past episodes are any guide we’ll probably cover more ground.
If there is one policy point I’d like to make it isn’t a policy point, it’s an ethical one: default to kindness.
Or try kindness first.
In policy terms, the kind thing to do is usually the right thing to do. I’d go so far as to say, almost always.
Treating prisoners with kindness nets Finland half the recidivism rate the US, with its punitive prisons gets. That is, only half as many prisoners, once released, commit a crime in Finland.
Single payer or comprehensive universal healthcare has costs about a third less than the US system, and produces better results.
Not committing war crimes makes people much less interested in killing you. Not torturing enemies means they are far less likely to torture your people.
Helping other nations improve their standard of living makes them less likely to kill us, and better trade partners.
Happy employees are more productive and produce more profit, yet we deliberately treat employees horribly in the assumption that we get more out of them that way, despite reams of evidence to the contrary.
High minimum wages do not decrease employment, there is even some evidence that they may increase employment.
Torture does not get useful information out of people compared to regular interrogation. It is extremely unreliable, this is understood by most professionals in the business. You torture to send a message, and that message is “we torture”.
The first thing you should do, in any policy situation, is ask “what would the golden rule have me do?” Most of the time, this will be the correct policy, which will produce the best results. People who are treated with kindness, in general, reciprocate and are productive. Yes, there are exceptions, but they are just that, exceptions.
Further, kindness is the default position even with the worst people. If you allow rapists to be raped, you become a rapist. If you torture torturers, you are now a torturer. You do not, in the old phrase, sink to their level. That doesn’t mean being a pushover, it doesn’t mean no justice, it does mean that the State has no business seeking revenge and that the rules, which should default to kindness, apply equally the worst people and the best. This is not just the right thing to do, it is the only thing to do, because the State often decides the best people are the worst people, as even a cursory examination of history will attest, and it very often makes mistakes, as the many errors in capital cases have brought to light. But, again, even if someone is the worst of the worst beyond even the shadow of a doubt, they must be treated with kindness even as they are incarcerated, not just because it is the right thing to do, but because doing anything else degrades those who do it. Torturers are always corrupted by torturing, occupying armies always become weak, corrupt and brutal. You cannot do evil and not be, yourself, scarred by it.
Be kind, and remember, what you insist on your government doing to others changes your government, and will effect its treatment of you.
is about the value of human life.
When I was a child, my father once threw some Christian evangalists off our property.
They had said, “everyone who doesn’t believe in Christ will go to hell.”
Now my father had a temper, but the way his voice dropped to a whisper, and the step he took towards them screamed incipient violence and they virtually ran.
I didn’t ask why, but he told me.
“I lived in Bangladesh, Malaysia and other Muslim countries for years. Anyone who tells me that the good people I knew are going to burn in hell, can go to hell. I’ll have nothing to do with any God who does that or people who believe that.”
I always remembered that. Truth be told my father was slightly racist himself, he was of that generation. But he was ashamed of it, he knew better, and he fought it. What he understood was something simple: every human life has the same value. Any moral system which places one life above the other is not ethical, it is evil.
We in the developed world, and in America and Israel in particular, don’t believe that. We don’t even, any more, give it lip service. And we especially don’t believe that a Muslim life is worth the same as an American life, or an Israeli life, or well, pretty much any non-Muslim life. When Madeline Albright can say that half a million dead Iraqi children is a price worth paying for the sanctions, even before 9/11, we’ve become inhumane.
Osama bin Laden once asked, rhetorically, if Muslim blood was red, and if Muslim children were worthy of life as much as American children.
Israel is doomed. The generation of young American Jews do not have the loyalty to Israel, no matter what it does, that older American Jews, as a group, have. The world is coming to see Israel as an apartheid state, which is what it is. The demographics are against it, and at some point America will cut Israel off, and Israel’s economy is not sustainable without the US.
And more to the point, somewhere, alive today, is the person who believes that losing Jerusalem is an acceptable price for wiping out Tel Aviv. That person has been created by Israeli policy, by Western policy and by Saudi policy. Israel is a small country. It will not exist in 50 years. It may be destroyed in an apocalyptic terror attack, it may be destroyed in military action, it may be destroyed by demographics, it may fall apart economically. Its military advantage is already going away. Hezbollah took away Israel’s armor advantage, straight up defeating them in their last invasion of Lebanon. The Israeli air force was unable to substantially dent Hezbollah’s missile force, despite complete air supremacy. If Hezbollah had had the good missiles, it could have wreaked much more damage.
Right now Hamas has rockets. They look like something out of the 15th century. They are pathetic. It won’t stay that way forever.
All this before we get to the fact that Israel’s military is incompetent. They are no longer the Israeli military of 68, they are an occupation military, and occupation militaries are only good at fighting weaklings, they always become corrupt, brutal and weak themselves.
Israel faces a stark choice: the two-state solution is no longer viable, there is not enough water and arable land, and too much population. It can no longer work. Israel can either become a secular single state, giving a vote and rights to everyone, it can ethnically cleanse out all Palestinians and become a pariah state, or it can cease to exist (option 2 and 3 may both occur). Its end, moral or physical, may occur through terror, demographics, war, economic collapse, military decline or more likely, some combination, but it is as close to any historical process comes to inevitability.
Israel is acting like a monster, killing vastly disproportionate numbers of Palestinians. But the grave it is digging, in the not so long run, isn’t that of the Palestinians, it is its own.
W.H. Auden once wrote the line that applies to Israel, and to the Palestinians, for that matter: Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return.
I can find no joy in this, no happiness, but it is what it is. If Israelis, not Israel the religious-ethnic state, want to avoid catastrophic destruction, their only solution is simple: stop doing evil, and start doing good.
People will dismiss that as naive, but it is the hardest of hard headed pragmatism, and as such, is advice unlikely to be taken.
Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return.
They seem to be moving to change protected works (so called IP) laws, to make them less punitive. I didn’t expect this, but it makes sense:
1) Hollywood is a Democratic bailiwick, and IP is how they make their money.
2) Libertarians took a couple percent in a lot of states, sometimes more. Something that can peel back some of that support makes sense.
3) It’s something they can do which appeals to the young, who hate the current regime of protected works.
4) It is fairly populist, and when Dems vote against it, as they will, it will demoralize the Democratic base, again.
Republicans aren’t doing this for any good reasons, but if they do get serious about it, I’ll support them on the issue.
The Democratic party is so right wing now that left flanking the party on some issues makes sense for the Republicans. And in a sense, this isn’t even all that left, 19th century conservatives hated patents and copyright, and for good reason.
Here’s what I expect from Republicans
1) Immigration reform. They want it, they need it. If Boehner is smart (and he’s not stupid, despite what people think), he’ll tie it to the Grand Bargain. Some money for southern States and municipalities. A hard lean on Republicans in states which have passed anti-immigrant bills, a sudden rediscovery of the freedom of immigration, and a lot of talk about farmers. Latinos aren’t innately loyal to the Democrats, who have treated them awfully and Republicans need it to go back to a 60/40 split. If they’re smart they’ll have Republican legislators stand up and start making statements about how America is land of immigrants, framing it as a matter of principle.
2) No more rape comments. Many Americans don’t like people justifying rape, that much is clear. They’ll still be anti-abortion, but not pro-rape (at least, not in public).
3) The presidential candidate in 4 years will be a tea-party type who isn’t connected to the nasty anti-immigrant stuff, and who hasn’t made really offensive comments about rape. He will run on jobs, jobs, jobs (Romney tried, he wasn’t credible), and will be pushing fracking, while trying to reassure suburbanites that won’t mean flaming water for them. He will be going after the working class, hard, who will be desperate for a good economy by then.
This will represent a move slightly to the left on social issues though they’ll still be so far to the right they’re in danger of going off stage. It will not mean a move to the left on economic issues or security state issues.
