Author Archives: admin

Jan 30 2013

Not Ribbit, ‘Scuse Me and a 2 by 4

Half of your EVERY income tax dollar gets spent on death and destruction!

Maybe as a semi-wrathful frog I should start by flailing a 2 by 4?  Would a grabber like “Half your EVERY Dollar!”  be better than the eyelid-closing title of my previous post, which everyone should read and think about, “Military-Industrial Complex”?

In any case, I must do a better job with Categories so it’s easier to find posts.  Inciting y’all to read the posts in the first place is not the same as helping you find potentially interesting ones from the past.  Already, I’m having trouble finding posts about specific topics from the fairly recent past.  I’ve forgotten what content went with some titles.

What the title of this post tries to suggest is first, especially when I’m in semi-wrathful frog mode, I always try to write something more worth reading than “ribbit”.  There’s so much non-fact-based, not-thought-through ribbiting around.  I try hard not to add more.  The third part of the title, “2 by 4”, I already explained.  “Scuse me” refers to the culture in which I was raised where 2 by 4s were frowned upon.  If you had something worth saying, the expectation was that in most circumstances you would have the grace to keep it to yourself.  If it really had to be said, you should do so with minimal fuss.  So, as an example, here’s a true story from a Brit friend.

Early one morning when my friend was playing in a nearby gravel pit, he found a metal canister.  It looked quite old.  What could it be?  He broke off some of the corrosion with a rock and exposed a plate with strange writing.  Maybe his dad would know what it was?  He took it home.  “I don’t know,” said his dad.  “I have to go to work in a minute but give it here, I’ll take it in the shed and buff it up a bit.”  Dad went out and had a go with his grindstone.  After he got home from work that afternoon and had his tea, he put the canister in a cardboard box, strapped it on the back of his bicycle and peddled off then waited patiently in line with the box under his arm until it was his turn.  When it was, he said: “Erm… ‘Scuse me…” to the policeman on the other side of the counter, “My boy found this.  Looks like German writing.  Thought it might be an old bomb, like.  Thought I’d best bring it here.”

Jan 29 2013

The Military-Industrial Complex

In The Federal Budget and GDP and The Canary and the Colly Bird I said I’d take a flashlight, calculator and canary to investigate the “Military-industrial mine-shaft that keeps us in a ruinously costly perpetual state of war”.  There’s a lot of camouflage but my flashlight shed some light on the business results of what I’ll call Military Operations Inc (MOI).  The canary was distressed at times but it’s OK now, maybe because I didn’t yet take it very deep.

What I mean by camouflage in this context is none of the numbers I found so far can entirely be trusted.  As the Congressional GAO repeatedly says: “serious financial management problems at the Department of Defense make its financial statements unauditable.”  Nonetheless, the following numbers are sufficiently OK to show relative sizes. To set them in context, DOD spending is 20% or more and DOD plus non-DOD military spending 30% or more of federal spending, i.e., around half of total estimated Federal tax revenues.  Military spending grew 9% annually since 2000, much faster than GDP, and now accounts for 5%-8% of GDP.

Our stated military spending, which exceeds the next 20 nations combined, is actually a lot higher than the $711B for 2011 shown below.  That number is said to include War on Terror spending but I doubt all those costs are included.  Additional spending on defense-related programs, e.g., Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security, and nuclear weapons maintenance brings the total above $1T and even to $1.4T with interest on debt incurred in past wars.   We have military bases in at least 150 countries, almost 1.5M active military personnel, an additional 100K DOD personnel and substantially more than 100K contractor personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan.

US and Other Nation Military Spending 2011

Spending dropped after the collapse of the Soviet Union but greatly increased following the 2001 terrorist attack that killed 3,000 US civilians.  The canary was distressed to learn that the War on Terror response to that attack, recast by the Obama administration as Overseas Contingency Operation, has so far resulted in over 6,500 US military personnel killed and 50,000 wounded.  The bird may not have recovered if I’d been able to find dependable counts of Iraqis, Afghanis and others killed and wounded.

Although the canary sees ratios, it is fundamentally innumerate.  It recovered while I returned to my calculator.  The numbers in the chart below are understated, as noted above, but they do correctly illustrate the spending pattern.  A 2011 Congressional report estimates the total cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars will be $1.8 trillion.  An academic report the same year that includes other areas of related spending estimates $5.4 trillion.

Total US Defense Spending since 1947

The canary showed new signs of distress when I examined the spending rationale.  When President Bush declared war on terror he said it “will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.”  The canary was troubled because:

  • Such a war can never end
  • The justification for the first big operation was false – satellite images said to be of Iraqi factories for enriching uranium were not
  • That operation was followed by ones the public barely questioned in Afghanistan, the Philippines, Somalia, Trans Saharan Africa, Pakistan and Yemen
  • We are repeatedly told to be prepared for future actions against North Korea and Iran

The canary recovered while I looked at more numbers.  We can’t know for sure where the money goes, but the next chart gives a sense of the breakdown.  Pay and housing for military personnel fluctuates fairly closely around $100B.  Spending on weapons and procurement increased steeply during the Vietnam War, again toward the end of the Cold War and again from the start of the War on Terror.   Spending on war operations, in other words MOI’s revenue from conducting war, which also grew during the Vietnam War and Cold War escalation, increased dramatically in the past decade.

Defense Spending Composition since 1962

Defense R&D spending remains relatively consistent.  I’ll come back to this another day because it yields some civilian benefits, e.g., the Internet.  Most of the $700B to $1T we spend on defense is simply a burden on income tax payers, a tax whose only rationale is to prevent the possible occurrence of negative things.

What, then, have I learned on Day 1 of this exploration?  MOI’s Overseas Contingency Operation (OCO) product line is yielding greatly increased revenues.   The obvious next question is the OCO product line’s longer term potential in the “negative things” market.   How much further can OCO revenues be grown and for how long?  To approach answers, I will next explore OCO product strategy in the context of MOI’s overall business strategy and organizational structure.  I’ll carefully watch the canary for signs of distress.

Jan 27 2013

The 2nd and 3rd Amendments

We should periodically review assumptions that direct our beliefs.  The world may have changed so they are no longer accurate.  We may need to make structural changes to direct new behavior.

Businesses that don’t update their assumptions fail.  My 1980s minicomputer consulting clients no longer exist.  They were ex-pioneers who imagined their competition was still each other.  They were aware of networked microprocessor-based systems but not the implications of a competing technology with a cost advantage that was already tenfold.  Their customers were little harmed because they could simply switch to new suppliers.

A nation’s customers, its citizens, can be greatly harmed, however, because it’s not easy to switch to a new one.  Nations keep going where they’re headed like giant cruise ships whose passengers were happy enough for long enough so the captain assumes they always will be happy.  He’s still happy.  He doesn’t notice the passengers’ distress now they’re in Antarctic waters in summer clothes.

Just as businesses degenerate slowly then collapse when their structure is not kept up to date, so it is with nations and empires.  The structure of GM, for example, where each brand (Chevy, Buick, Cadillac, etc) was targeted to a distinct market segment within which it battled competitors later ossified into baronies whose leaders fought each other.  Our Congress in the USA has similarly degenerated into warring factions whose eyes are closed to new realities.

The problem is in part institutional.  Our direction is governed by a Constitution established two and a half centuries ago with no requirement for periodic update.  Let’s consider two Constitutional Amendments to illustrate this issue.

The 3rd Amendment decrees that: “No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.”  That is just about as useful today as prohibiting an elephant from being quartered in our house without our consent.  Citizens once needed such protection.  We no longer do.  This Amendment is now so completely irrelevant that must people are unaware it even exists.

The USA 3rd Amendment echoed the English Bill of Rights 1689 that prohibited the monarch from “raising and keeping a standing army within this kingdom in time of peace without consent of Parliament, and quartering soldiers contrary to law”  and was in response to 1760s and ’70s British Quartering Acts that required American colonies to pay the costs of British soldiers here and colonists to provide space for them to live.

The English Bill of Rights was passed when Protestant William and Mary were invited by parliament to replace Roman Catholic King James II and become joint sovereigns of England.  It set limits on the powers of the crown and among other things reestablished the right of Protestants to own firearms.  James II had tried to disarm Protestants and maintain a standing army.  Civilians were at that time required to help suppress riots.

So the English Bill of Rights was also the basis for the 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution as one of our Bill of Rights which decrees that: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”  It was adopted on December 15, 1791, along with the rest of the Bill of Rights and, interestingly, is the only amendment to the Constitution that states a purpose.

There was at that time substantial public opposition to a standing army from both Anti-Federalists and Federalists.  On May 8, 1792, Congress passed an Act decreeing that:  “every free able-bodied white male citizen of the respective States, resident therein, who is or shall be of age of eighteen years, and under the age of forty-five years […] shall severally and respectively be enrolled in the militia…[and] every citizen so enrolled and notified, shall, within six months thereafter, provide himself with a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints, and a knapsack, a pouch with a box therein to contain not less than twenty-four cartridges [and etc] and shall appear, so armed, accoutred and provided, when called out to exercise, or into service”.

The purpose of the 2nd Amendment, to provide for “the security of a free state“, has for many years been met in a different way.  We now have a standing militia armed with weapons whose power could never have been imagined in the days of muskets and firelocks.  Unlike the 3rd Amendment, however, its provisions are still relevant but are applied to a different purpose.

It would be better to retire both the 2nd and 3rd Amendments and draft new legislation suited to the purpose today.

People still want successors to muskets and firelocks for some of the same reasons left unstated in the 2nd Amendment, to hunt animals for food, defend themselves if police are unavailable, or just recreation.  It would be far easier to establish broadly acceptable legislation specifying who could own what firearms if we were now drafting legislation specifically for that purpose.

Jan 26 2013

The Purpose of Education

The 1925 Butler Act in Tennessee decreed:  “That it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normals, all other public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, to teach any theory that denies the Story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.”   It remained on the books until 1967.

What was the purpose of education in the USA in 1925?  The nation was primarily rural.  A high percentage of the population worked on small scale farms.  Others did low skill jobs in relatively unmechanized factories.  It was similar to life in Nepal in the very recent past.  The skills children needed were learned in the fields or factories not schools.  What parents wanted kids to learn in addition to practical skills were the beliefs on which their culture depended.  That’s why the 1925 Butler Act became law, so children would not be taught to question the Bible’s teachings.

The 1944 Butler Act in the UK promised every child would in future have secondary education, and it would be education best suited to their abilities.  The economy would be supplied with intellectuals, technicians and general workers, each with the necessary training.  Before 1944, some local governments provided secondary schools but most were tuition-funded.  To prosper in the aftermath of WW2, every British child was to get secondary education either in a Grammar school with an academic curriculum for intellectuals, an equally respected Secondary Technical school with a curriculum for future scientists, engineers and technicians, or an equally respected Secondary Modern school focused on training for less skilled jobs and home management.

That plan collided with both economic reality – the UK economy was devastated by WW2 – and cultural reality.  Grammar schools got all the prestige, few Technical schools were established, and Secondary Modern schools were inadequately funded.  To promote a more egalitarian society, Comprehensive secondary schools were later established for children of all abilities and social classes.  There is now a mix of the two systems.

But it was not just that there was a form of caste in the UK with land-holding families looking down on merchants who looked down on laborers and so forth.  There was also a profound division within Britain’s intellectual class.  Education in Britain traditionally focused on study of the human condition via history and the arts, not reasoning from the outcome of scientific experiments.

In a famous 1959 lecture, British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow said Western education had split in two, the sciences and the humanities, and he later wrote: “A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated … if I had asked [them] ‘What do you mean by mass, or acceleration?’, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, ‘Can you read?’ not more than one in ten would have felt that I was speaking the same language.  So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.”

Snow wanted two things, an end to the contempt for scientists among “gentlemen” educated in the humanities, which in the USA we call social sciences, and for everyone who would have an impact on future society to know the fundamentals in all fields of knowledge and be trained to use all available thinking tools.

The Dalai Lama recently advocated essentially the same thing: “The great benefit of science is that it can make a tremendous contribution to the alleviation of suffering on a physical level, but it is only by cultivating the qualities of the human heart and transforming our attitudes that we can begin to address and overcome our mental suffering.  We need both, since the alleviation of suffering must take place on both a physical and a psychological level.”

In summary, the purpose of education is to motivate and enable us to take better action.

What, then, are the implications for public education in the USA?  What are our existing problems, our future challenges, potential solutions, and likely obstacles?

I’m exploring our greatest new challenges in other posts.  In summary: (1) Capital is over-represented relative to people as a guide to government policy, (2) Extremists too easily thwart government action, (3) Our citizens are poorly equipped to understand what government action is appropriate, and (4) We have not recognized the implications of globalization and information technology for our economy.  Also, we still face all the same challenges guiding our behavior with each other as all civilizations have throughout history.

Because our government at all levels is elected, our most serious obstacle would be if many of our citizens are poorly equipped to differentiate between fact and fiction or use reason.  The world has changed greatly since I was in school and the pace of change has greatly accelerated.  We should prepare our children for a world whose characteristics we can only intuit, not know.  The better they can understand how that world works the better able they will be to thrive, and the better trained they are in controlling their minds the better they will behave with each other.

We should not allow our children to be taught as factual theories about the world that we know are false.  What we should teach them is how to gather the facts, how to differentiate between facts and non-facts, how to reason and experiment, how to develop intuition and know how to use it, and how to communicate effectively.

Unfortunately, I do not know enough about how education is directed in the USA, the respective roles and authority of the Federal, State and local governments, school districts and individual teachers to propose a solution.  The intentional division of power makes it hard to steer.  We must worry in a different way about what my brother-in-law who advises new national governments about education policy pointed out:  “You and I want education to develop people’s ability to think for themselves, to find the facts, analyze them, come to a conclusion and act accordingly.  That is not necessarily what heads of government want people to do.”

Jan 25 2013

“If You Really Want to End Suffering,

it’s very simple,” Shugen Sensei told us at the start of our week of Zen Buddhist meditation: “Stop creating it.”  I’ll come back to that in a moment.  Just notice he did not say it’s easy.

Thinking why I blog reminded me of what Steve Jobs said is the secret to product development “Start somewhere”.  Just starting has always been my path.  Only later, sometimes much later, if what I started still feels worth doing, do I try to understand why.  The urge to figure out the why of Himalayan exploration, Buddhist practice, economic and governance research and blogging has now arrived.   To my surprise, it centers on ending suffering.

It all started ten years ago in the Himalayan mountains.  It wasn’t my idea to go there and I had no specific objective.  What happened was I found myself among people who appeared to be living with dignity, not aggressively, not hurriedly, and happily without the nice things we take for granted.  Could it be true?  Did they have a recipe my society might learn from?  So I kept going back.

I began to wonder if Buddhism was part of the recipe.   When we visited Buddhist temples our crew always lit lamps and prostrated.  But later, when we visited Hindu temples and the dwelling places of animist spirits, they showed reverence there, too.  I’d done some Buddhist reading by that time and was trying to meditate.  That’s why I went to the Zen monastery.

By the end of the first day I was pretty sure I’d made a mistake.  It was so hard to do nothing, sit completely still, just notice my thoughts, make no judgments, not reject or follow them.   By the end of the day I was exhausted although I’d “done” nothing.  I fell instantly asleep.  In the morning I thought, “I’ll see how it goes until breakfast”.   After breakfast I thought, “I’ll see if I can hang on ’til lunch”.  At day’s end I thought, “Maybe day three will be better“.   It was worse.  Day four was a little better, though, and so it went.  I’d suffered a lot by the end of the week but I’d also had glimpses of the truth of what Shugen Sensei told us at the start.  I was bringing my suffering onto myself.  That felt worth knowing.

Before I could go to the Himalayas I’d forced myself to retire.  It was hard because from then on, investments would have to support us.  With more time to worry, I realized my ignorance of how the economy works meant I had little confidence we’d made good investments.  So, when I wasn’t in the Himalayas I studied investment and economic theory.  The Great Recession arrived just as I was starting to feel I had the theories sufficiently clear.

Now I had to understand why our economy collapsed.  I studied governance and saw some parallels with the paralysis of government in Nepal.  That’s when I started blogging.  The US economy is embedded in the global economy.  There are so many moving parts in the system.  I had to start recording facts and analyses to get a holistic picture.  Charts and writing are my best tools for thinking and I hoped for critical feedback.

It’s only recently that I began to sense all these activities are related and they all start where Shugen Sensei was pointing.  They’re all aimed at happiness and stopping the creation of suffering.

The historical Buddha taught that we will only become truly happy when we work to end the suffering of others.  It must be so because we are not separate from others.  If they are unhappy we will also be made unhappy.  Communities were small two and a half thousand years ago.  People made each other happier or not with face to face interactions.   Today we also interact via nation-state and global systems that impact both us and future generations.  That’s why I care about governance.

Jan 23 2013

Rejection or Ignorance of Science?

In summary, Gallup writes:  “almost half of Americans today hold a belief, at least as measured by this question wording, that is at odds with the preponderance of the scientific literature.”  What are they talking about?  “The 46% of Americans who today believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years is little changed from the 44% who believed this 30 years ago”.

Gallup poll Origin of Humans.jpb

The existence or not of the creative entity we call God is unprovable.  Many folks are encouraged by their belief in God to do good.  Some throughout history have felt justified to torture others who do not share their belief.  Fervent belief is the problem.  That can lead to believing others should be forced to the same belief.

It is not necessarily a problem that: “78% of Americans today believe that God had a hand in the development of humans in some way“.  It is a serious problem that so many Americans reject “the preponderance of the scientific literature”.  This is not the only science being rejected.

How can it be that almost half of all Americans reject tools for understanding the world?

Our educational system is failing disastrously and I do not at all understand why.   I’ve joked about its pretensions but there was after all some merit in my alma mater, “Richard Hale’s Free Grammar School for the Deserving Sons of Impecunious Gentlefolk, Founded in 1608” and there must be something different about the schooling of my fellow citizens who do accept facts and believe in reasoning.

I’ll try to say what was good about my school experience.  The British school system drove students at an early age to study either science, popularly considered to depend on reasoning, or arts, defined as nonscientific knowledge.   I was fortunate because I resisted being driven in that way; I studied both physics and literature.  I was also fortunate not to resist my English teacher’s insistence that I understand both what I read and how the language worked.

And, although physics did not yet cover quantum theory (matter and energy have properties of both particles and waves and physical systems can only have properties like energy in discrete amounts or quanta) I did get enough of an overview to see how science progresses.  Imaginative leaps verified by experiment enable theories that don’t explain all the facts to be replaced by ones that explain more.

I was taught how to use all humankind’s thinking tools.  I learned to value reason, inference and intuition.  I learned not to imagine any theory to be a final explanation.  I was encouraged to question all theories and evidence.  I was taught, in other words, how to investigate, how to learn.

Also, my parents taught me to work hard, practice and be persistent.  No question, it would have been better to try harder but that’s a different issue.

Jan 20 2013

The Federal Budget and GDP

I’ve come to think of charts like the ones in this post as cave paintings.  We must study them carefully to see what they reveal and also what their structural assumptions obscure.

The bar chart shows we are financing  an enormous amount of Federal spending with borrowing – almost one third.  The line chart shows we spent more than revenue for most of the last half century and why the current imbalance is so enormous – the Great Recession.  As in previous recessions (indicated by darker bars), revenue fell starting in 2007/8 because incomes fell, and spending increased because unemployment increased.

federal-budget-2012

The line chart also shows revenue now heading up and spending down as in most post-recessionary times.  But here we start to wonder what we’re measuring.   It doesn’t feel like we’re out of recession.  Corporate profits are at an all-time high, the unemployment rate is a bit lower, it’s good news federal revenue and spending are heading in the right direction, but we don’t feel good.

The line chart also raises a question.  Spending fell after the early ’80s and early ’90s recessions.  Why did it increase before the most recent recession?  Largely because of a very costly unfunded new program initiated at that time, the War on Terror.

The bar chart shows only a little of what we need to understand.  A commercial enterprise with multiple lines of business (LOB) reviews each LOB’s revenue and spending individually.  This chart shows, or seems to show that for only a single Federal program, Social Security.  Since Social Insurance revenue at $841B is greater than Social Security spending at $768B, it looks to be in good shape.  But does what’s labelled “Social Insurance” revenue include Medicare as well as Social Security payroll tax?

Additional research would show that Social Security revenue is in fact greater than spending.  Digging deeper would show when that will reverse as well as the past and potential effects of adjusting the formulas that govern its revenue and spending.  As I noted in a previous post, it would, for example, show that raising the maximum wage on which S/Sec tax is withheld to its traditional real level would eliminate half the future imbalance.

The bar chart shows that the Federal Government’s borrowing costs at 6% of the total are relatively affordable at this time.  It also shows they will not be so if total spending continues to exceed revenue by such a wide margin, currently 32%.  We added $1,158B to our total debt in 2012 on which we paid $220B interest.

Questions the charts provokes but does not illuminate include:

  1. Why is Medicare/Medicaid spending so high at $804B and 23% of total spending, how much is its revenue, how can they be balanced?
  2. Why is Defense spending so high at $669B and 19% of total spending, how and by how much should it be cut?
  3. What makes up Non-Defense Discretionary Spending, are we over- or under-spending there?
  4. What makes up “Other” spending, are we over- or under-spending on elements of that?
  5. How can we best increase revenue to pay for spending we choose not to eliminate?
  6. Can we fix the federal spending/revenue imbalance with economic growth?

The next chart suggests the possibility of a positive answer to question 6.  Since our real economic growth in the most recent decade was at by far its lowest rate since the decade of the Great Depression, after which it grew rapidly, we could hope that experience will be repeated.

GDP Growth by Decade 1790 - 2009

The primary drivers of post-Great Depression GDP growth were spending on WW2 and on post-WW2 recovery programs including the GI Bill and mortgage subsidies.  Fortunately, WW3 seems unlikely in the near future so we need other ways to increase economic activity.  We must also answer at least the first two questions above, healthcare and defense costs.  The data is visible in cave paintings down those mine-shafts so we’ll take a flashlight and calculator as well as a canary to investigate.

Jan 18 2013

Why Nepal?

A happy-making and thought-provoking side-effect of this blog is it’s re-establishing friendships from long ago.  One such friend recently wrote: “I’ve been reading your blogs trying to understand your fascination with Nepal”.  I’ve tried many times to understand that, too.

First it was the mountains.  But why was I susceptible to their allure?  My mom once worked as nanny for an Italian noble family and vacationed in Switzerland.  By the time I knew her, her life was utterly different.  She never spoke about the past and kept almost nothing.  One thing she did keep was a Swiss mountain scene that she put on my bedroom wall.  Maybe it fascinated me because it was so mysteriously different.  I never asked about it but it had a lasting impact.  I still have that picture.

Fall 2010 867

So, when an opportunity presented itself, I went to the mountains in Nepal.  They were even more beautiful than I’d imagined.  The light is strong and always changing, so the mountains’ appearance is different from moment to moment.  The effort required to climb and descend triggers bliss-producing endorphins.  And it’s peaceful in a way we rarely experience, no TV, radio, cellphones, internet or chatter, just the undistracted opportunity to notice.   One thing I noticed was how differently the mountain people behaved.  I saw no aggression.  They were respectful both of place and people, often playful, and seemed happy though they had barely enough to survive.  And like the mountains, the people, too, tended to be beautiful.

Fall 2010 818

Back home in the USA I studied the history of Nepal, trying to understand what shaped its culture, and found it has many different cultures.  It’s similar in the mountains to the culture of neighboring Tibet.  In the southern lowlands where there is no geographical boundary with neighboring India, the culture is Indian.  In the middle hills and Kathmandu Valley are diverse blends of the two.  Why are those cultures different?  I studied the history of India and Tibet, which led me to the history of Tibet’s neighbor, China, and I began to see the underlying force of geography on history and therefore culture.

Back in Nepal again, and its neighbors Tibet, Sikkim and Bhutan, I began to realize these people who fascinated me were not so very different from me.  Can you tell the difference?

Fall 2010 955

And that led me to Buddhism.  The great majority of people in Nepal’s mountains are animist, respectful of place because there must be spirits everywhere.  How else to account for what happens?  Those with questioning minds and some education retain that foundational belief while practicing Buddhism.  It offers an established discipline for respectful practice.  It is also, as the most intelligent, thoughtful and educated Buddhist scholars say, a logical and practical guide to happiness in a universe we don’t control.  It’s much more apparent up in the mountains that while we can learn to control our mind, we cannot control the universe in which we exist.

Fall 2010 972

I never imagined we could control the universe.  I did hope to learn how to increase happiness and kindness for me and everyone I meet.  It seems not quite so difficult to work on that learning among beautiful mountains and beautiful people even though, or maybe even in part because, they are so much at risk of natural disaster and so bedeviled by centuries of corrupt administration and selfish government.

Jan 16 2013

The Canary and the Colly Bird

Colly birds are unexpectedly thought-provoking.  Learning that colly comes from the Old English col led me to the history of coal and other energy sources, how power shifts when it’s abused or new technology arrives, and differences between resource-extracting and self-sustaining economies.

Colliery work was very dangerous.  Workers who were not killed by mine shaft collapse, flooding, or explosive gas accidents died later from black-lung disease.  Mine owners in 19th century British held all the power and invested little in safety.   The workers could get no other jobs but they organized as the 20th century approached.  They balanced the owners’ power by striking and they got safer conditions.  In 1947 all mines were bought by the government.  The miners’ and other unions continued to gain power and make more demands via work stoppages that peaked in 1979 when over 29 million working days were lost.  In 1984, the miners stopped work for a year.  That cost the economy well over $2 billion but the government refused to negotiate and broke the unions’ power.  Stoppages were below 2 million working days by 1990.   The number of mine workers fell even more precipitously from over 700,000 in the 1940s to around 12,000 in 2002.

So, excessive power was abused first by the mine owners, then  the workers’ unions, then government gained the upper hand before re-privatizing the mines.  Union leaders got power when the workers were roused to desperate protest, then lost it when coal began to grow scarce and new technology eliminated the miners’ jobs.

UK Coal Production

While UK coal production fell from 112 million tonnes in 1980 to 9 in 2006, coal consumption fell only from 123 million tonnes to a low of 59 million in 2000 after which it grew to 67 million in 2006.  The growth in demand for coal came from power stations that accounted for 86% of all UK coal consumption by 2006.  The drop in UK coal production was balanced by increased imports.

UK Coal Consumption

Overall UK energy use grew from 205 to 232 million tonnes of oil equivalent since 1980.  Oil use was roughly constant, coal dropped and use of natural gas doubled.

UK Energy Use

In the USA, where I found longer term data, there is much higher dependence on oil, coal still is as important as natural gas and, as in the UK, although production from renewable sources is increasing, it is still only a small fraction of the total.  I’ll return in a future post to energy use and its implications for economies and societies but first, why did I mention the canary?

US_historical_energy_consumption

Canaries were used in British coal mines from 1911 to 1987 as an early warning system.  Carbon monoxide, methane and other toxic gases in the mine shaft would kill a canary before affecting the miners.  Its signs of distress alerted the miners to escape.  It occurred to me that our house was heated by coal when I was a kid and I liked that but I knew nothing about conditions in the mines.  Could there be  mine-shafts in our economy now where great wealth is being extracted and toxicity is building up?  I felt I should take a canary to investigate.

And why colly birds again?  Because they and other birds in the song were rich folks’ food.  The audience for and singers of the song were being promised those things.  We tend to overlook toxic by-products of rich folks’ things because we like to imagine that we, too, could be rich.  That makes us vulnerable to contemporary equivalents of the Monty Python pet store salesman who insisted the deceased Norwegian Blue parrot he sold was not dead but resting, pining for the fjords or momentarily stunned, or the 4th century Greek man complaining to a slave-merchant that his new slave died who was told: “When he was with me, he never did any such thing!”  Those jokes work because we really are vulnerable to such nonsense.

We should always, but rarely do, consider incentives.  To understand a business’ sales results, understand its sales folks’ comp plan.  To understand a society, understand the basis of its economy.  Resource-extracting endeavors like coal mining encourage owners to make their one-time harvest as fast and profitably as possible.  Self-sustaining enterprises like Nepali hill farms that require terraces to be maintained for food this year also enable them to raise crops next year, and their descendants in future years.  The different bases of the two economies drive short-term-only or short-and-long-term-optimizing behaviors.

Coal mining and subsistence farming are illustrations.  I’m no romantic about village life.  My sheep needed care every day; care in bad weather, intensive care in lambing season, care when I was sick, care that must be expert or they would die.  It’s hard and stressful work that never ends and sheep die in disasters no matter what.  There are much easier ways to support oneself.  All I’m saying is we should notice negative side-effects of the way we live and consider if there are better ways.

So, in future posts I will take a canary down some jointly-owned, private-public mine-shafts that are disproportionately rewarding for their owners and harmful to others.  Four that seem especially problematic are the:

  • Miilitary-industrial mine-shaft that keeps us in a ruinously costly perpetual state of war
  • Washington-Big Oil mine-shaft that keeps us in a military trap in the Middle East and keeps climate change off our agenda
  • Washington-healthcare industry mineshaft, our largest at 17% of GDP, which costs us twice as much as in any other rich country and makes us the only one without universal healthcare
  • Washington-Wall Street one that supplies almost every US Treasury secretary and paved the way for financial crisis, mega-bailouts and not a single prosecution of criminals.

I will also explore the economic and social impact of technology.   The UK coal miners who improved their lives by increasing their relative power later lost their livelihood to new machines.  New technologies like that can greatly increase capital returns by replacing human labor, which increases unemployment and pushes down wages.  That cuts society’s ability to pay for the newly automated products and services, and everything else.

I will try to shed light on how governments can respond to:

  • A great imbalance of power in part of the economy
  • New technologies that will have disruptive economic and social impact.
Jan 15 2013

A Semi-Wrathful Frog

Frogs are not cuddly but each could be a prince.  Today, the transformation is triggered by a princess’s kiss.  In Grimm’s version it’s when the princess disgustedly throws the frog against a wall.  In other cases the frog had only to spend a night on the princess’s pillow.

Setting fable aside, a sad fact about frogs is that one sitting in a pan of water will not notice the gradual change if the water is heated.  It will remain unaware until it dies.

A frog that touches hot water, however, will immediately jump away from the danger.  I say this because although no form of attention from a princess will transform me into a prince, I do try to notice and point out water that’s getting hotter.

A couple of days ago, someone I greatly respect asked: “Your posts seem a bit angry; do you feel that way?”  I was surprised.   “I don’t think so…  I hope not…  Hmmm, I do see what you mean.  Maybe they do sound that way.  It’s true that I very much want some things to change.”

My posts are on disparate topics but most are sparked when I notice something and feel like a frog sensing hot water.  Wanting to alert my neighbors to the danger, I probably would be semi-wrathful.

What does semi-wrathful mean?  Tibetan Buddhists use images of deities with peaceful, wrathful and semi-wrathful appearance.  Meditating on them helps practitioners see the origin of their emotional habits and misguided concepts as they work to slowly gain control of their mind.

These deities do not experience emotion as we do.  They do not feel attracted, repelled or indifferent.  They simply recognize what is good and not good behavior, speech and thoughts.

Peaceful deities help calm the crazy spinning of the mind.  Wrathful deities help destroy its passions, anger, desire and indifference.  Semi-wrathful deities help those of us who sometimes need gentle calming and sometimes more urgency to do better.

Aspiring to be a semi-wrathful frog is better than the goal many of us are given, to be lion king of the jungle.  That has three defects — lions do not live in the jungle, it is not possible to control the jungle, and above all, it’s selfish.

Selfishness makes everyone unhappy.