Mega-Storms and Movies

In a rather silly Harrison Ford movie that came out a few years ago, The Day After Tomorrow, the story begins with a huge hurricane forming over Scotland, then turning overnight into an icy freeze that transforms New York City into the arctic.  Ford, ever the scientist adventurer, has to rescue his daughter from a wolf pack, escaped from the zoo, before trekking off with a good part of the U.S. population, including the President, to Mexico, where they are welcomed as refugees.  As noted, the movie is quite silly, but not as silly as it might seem.  It merited a scientific analysis a few months later in Scientific American, which deals very seriously with science,  that found it contains the kernels of  some very serious science.  That science is known as tipping point theory, which describes a very controversial but possible outcome of global climate change.

The thing that made the story line of the movie just plausible enough for a movie plot, but also incredibly silly, was an overnight change in global climate which instantaneously converted NYC to the arctic.  Global climate just cannot change that quickly.  But, according to Scientific American, core drilling in the arctic ice cap reveals that temperatures have dropped by about 20 degrees, indicating the advent of an ice age, at least 4 times in our geologic history, suddenly, in a period of 20 to 40 years.  Scientists theorize a specific set of circumstances leading to such a “tipping point.”  The key is the performance of the Gulf Stream.  The Gulf Stream is a major part of the “ocean conveyer belt” which operates by convection to transfer heat between the tropics and the arctic.  Many people do not realize that Paris and London actually lie north of Quebec, Canada.  The reason there is no London or Paris Ice Festival is that the Gulf Stream keeps them, along with the rest of Western Europe and the northeastern U.S., warm enough to grow roses where in theory roses should not be.  The Gulf Stream is a heat pump which cools the tropics to warm Europe, then transfers back the cooled water to the tropics via the Polar Current. It relies on the salinity of cold water to keep it going. And that’s where the problem and the controversy arise.  Tipping point theory notes that global warming causes arctic ice masses, particularly the Greenland ice cap, to melt, diluting the salinity of the ocean at a key point with freshly melted glacier water.  That can cause the ocean conveyer to grind to a halt, putting all the burden of heat transfer onto atmospheric events like hurricanes, and leading to a period of sharp division between warming tropic areas and increasingly icy polar areas.  That period can last several hundred years, as seen in ice core samples from the arctic.  It can turn areas like New England or Western Europe into places more like Mongolia, while converting areas like the U.S. mid-Atlantic regions into atmospheric battle grounds between heat and cold that result in extreme weather events.  If it happens too fast, it can generate an ice age before a new level of stability is reached. 

Slowing of the Gulf Stream was first reported about 2004; then, in 2010 contradictory reports came out, claiming the slowing was a myth.  More recently, in 2012, the U.S. Geologic Survey published data indicating that not only was slowing of the Gulf Stream occurring, the pace of the slowing is actually speeding up.  As usual with the subject of climate change, the controversy rages on while no actions are taken.

Which brings me to hurricane Sandy, building up outside my window as I write.  Sandy is being described as a “mega-storm” involving a hurricane merging with a cold front from the west and wrapped around with an arctic front from the north.  It’s declared to be so large that it will cover the eastern U.S from Ohio to the Atlantic and from North Carolina to Michigan.  Meteorologists are describing it as a “once in 500 years event.”  I hope they are right.

The Limits of Markets

One of the dirty little secrets of purely competitive market economics is that as soon as any seller gets a competitive edge, they seek to destroy competition.  John D. Rockefeller was particularly good at that; the annoyance of everyone else at his skills is what brought on the breakup of the Standard Oil Company, the first great American monopoly.  Economists call that kind of behavior “rent seeking”, and it includes, as well obtaining a sustainable monopoly, predatory pricing, arranging favorable regulation, tax breaks, subsidies, friendly pricing (ask defense contractors about that), patent protection, and resource allocations (like federal land leases and mining rights) at heavily discounted prices.  These are some of the ways government shapes “purely competitive” markets in a laissez-faire economy.  And let us not forget manipulation of imperfect information, a favored technique for confusing buyers about what they’re really getting.  That also includes attempts at manipulating our world view so that our preferred choices are to buy the products they want to sell.

Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel-winning economist, points these out as the ways the early 19^th century idealistic farm-to-market, democratic “purely competitive” laissez-faire economy of rational economists’ fantasies has evolved into the plutocratic economy of today.  In his book, The Price of Inequality, he portrays little inequalities heaped on each other until they grew into the enormous burden of inequality we bear today.  He notes that the “Chicago School” of economics still regards these inequalities as good things, promoting market efficiencies.  But those who bear the brunt of them do not.  Stiglitz’s view amounts to  a system with five main components: you the consumer, the producers/sellers, government, social forces (which shape government) and markets.  The established sellers seek to use government to their own advantage to create the great inequalities in the market that produce plutocracy.

The other dirty little secret, though, always forgotten by the plutocrats and usually forgotten by the economists, is that the system is elastic; unbalance the markets too far in the direction of inequality, and social forces snap back.   That’s what caused the downfall of Standard Oil.  That’s how revolutions, financial panics, depressions, etc., are generated.  That’s what we’re seeing today in southern Europe, in the Occupy movements, and in the growing American unrest over the tax structure.  For “social forces” is another name for the consolidated expression of human nature, and human acceptance of unfair and manipulative behaviors has its limits.   Economists are always seeking a magic bullet to cure the unevenness of “the business cycle”; perhaps they should spend less time on econometric models and more time on acceptable human relationships.

Another author, Michael Sandel, in What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, has done just that.  He notes that the 2008 financial collapse can be viewed as a societal moral repudiation of the behavior of financiers and the financial markets.  Then Sandel lists the innumerable ways in which our contemporary economy has turned items of intrinsic value into commodities to be bought and sold for financial enrichment. Items like renting space on your forehead for advertizing, losing weight, the cell phone number of your doctor, prison cell upgrades, the right to immigrate ($500,000 gets preferred treatment), and a multitude of other things are given a price and “commodified.”  Sandel’s concern is less with Stiglitz’s worry about inequality than about the corrosive spread of a “market mentality” across our whole moral view of the world.  He sees markets as a useful tool for obtaining the things to make life better, but a tool which must be limited to its proper uses, and not allowed to take over our whole world.  At bottom, Sandel’s views rest on Emmanuel Kant’s moral principle that we should always treat other people as ends in themselves, and not simply as means to some ulterior, such as monetary, end.  That is a principle to which our humanity strongly responds; when, for example, some years ago, a little child fell down a well in Texas, it was a national cause to get her out.  The cost of doing so was not an issue.  When everything has been commodified, we have lost our humanity as well. 

I have mentioned before that laissez-faire capitalism lacks a built-in brake to keep it from collapsing of its own excesses.  The 2008 crisis was an example of that.  But perhaps at least a partial brake has always been there, lying unused.  No ethics guides the actions of our financial markets and large corporations, only doing what is legal.  Ethics is not taught as a subject in public schools, and in most colleges is limited to the philosophy department.  Ethics was always the only fully home-schooled subject; and homes differ a lot.  Our form of capitalism has become, in consequence, a bare knuckles brawl where no rules apply except survival and profit.  Professional groups in contrast, such as doctors, teachers and lawyers, have always had professional societies with ethical standards and the ethical training associated with them.  They are far from perfect, and there are many malpracticioners in each group, but they beat our experience with financiers and CEO’s by a long shot.   It is time to reintroduce our society to the need for and to the standards of ethical behavior in all areas, including finance and business.  Perhaps, when we learn how to treat each other better, our business cycles will improve as well.

The Prime Directive

One of the most difficult foreign policy issues of our times is what to do about the plight of women oppressed by ultra-traditional cultures in countries we are  allied with.  Amnesty International reports today that a young Afghan woman was beheaded by her own mother-in-law for refusing to serve as a prostitute.  The mother-in-law and other relatives freely admit it.  Last week a Pakistani girl was shot for publicly expressing her desire to get an education. These and other equally repugnant cases are known to be common, not exceptions, in areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan.  It is both a difficult moral issue and an extremely complex question about appropriate relations between unlike cultures.  Star Trek years ago invented the “Prime Directive”, the mandate never to interfere with the workings of an alien culture, no matter how repugnant, as a governing principle.  The Prime Directive places highest value on toleration.  It is also a statement that all morals are relative to the culture in which they are embedded, a much less intuitively obvious assertion.  Something in us says ”yes” to the Prime Directive, recognizing our lack of right to change without consent what another culture has worked out over centuries only because it seems wrong to us.  Yet something in us also recognizes our common humanity across cultural boundaries, and is rightly unwilling to tolerate arguable depravity.

It was easy for early Spanish Conquistadors in the new world; they abolished human sacrifice without hesitation simply on the grounds that any practice so variant from their own moral standards must not be allowed to continue.  The fact that they themselves were beating slaves to death appalled only a few. Toleration was not a part of their worldview; failure to recognize the common humanity of people of other cultures was.  Many at that time believed new world peoples had no souls.  For us, it is somewhat easy in the face of oppression to reason that the best we can do is to quickly withdraw financial aid to the oppressors and depart.  But what if doing so is in conflict with our national strategic interests?

Our traditional guiding principle – our “prime directive” - is that decided in the Treaty of Westphalia, back in 1648, that each nation has ultimate authority, based on its own religious and moral values, to determine its laws and internal behavior – “To him who is sovereign, his own religion.”  That was fine in a common European culture where beheadings for not being a prostitute were unthinkable for all.  Our world is both much wider and smaller today, and no Westphalian principles govern the many nations with which we must interact.  Yet we also know also that imposition of Sharia legal principles in the U.S., despite their being the norm among many other nations, would be alien to us; shutting an eye to perceived moral excesses elsewhere becomes the preferred norm everywhere.

We need to keep two things in mind.  First, no nation, neither we nor Afghanistan, is a monolith. Just as we share room for many widely divergent values, some of them violently expressed (a shot at an Obama campaign office?), so do other nations. Strategic interests are worked out between governments, but moral interests must be worked out between people. I’m sure many Afghanis and Pakistanis are as repelled as we are at the atrocities taking place in their homelands. Second, if we support our own legal and moral principles, we have an obligation to make it known.  Silent withdrawal is itself a form of consent.  I’ve mentioned the legal principle we have that no one can be required to serve as conduit for the free expression of another.  That principle can be broadened to the international scene.  We need to strengthen our use of public diplomacy, through the voices of diplomats, use of Voice of America, etc., to make it clear how unhappy we are with such atrocity and unwilling to support its continuance, financially or otherwise.  We need to emphasize that we believe the principle recently recognized by the U.N. of “Responsibility to Protect” extends to a nation’s protection of its people against such atrocities through passage and enforcement of laws.  But to withdraw from the scene only supports the agendas of those wishing us to be gone anyway.  There are well-intentioned people in each country begging for our support, and we need to provide it.  There are basic human rights that are beyond any particular culture, and need expression.  We owe it to ourselves and to the world to be an active voice in conveying them everywhere.

Bumps in the Road

When I was a teen, I had the usual dreams of teens about possible future occupations ranging from President to great cosmologist to historian to robber baron.  None of them included computer technology, the field in which I spent much of my life afterwards.  It had not been invented yet.  I tell my grandkids to look at fields like nanotechnology, or information ethics (I’ll wax loquacious on that some time), but I know that they, too, may find themselves in occupations not yet invented.  I try to get that across to teens and their parents I talk to, but I know it takes a lot of a lifetime to realize how drastically the world can change in a relatively short time.  That’s why I’m skeptical when anyone (myself included) starts cautioning about future “bumps in the road”, but a look ahead from time to time may still at least get us braced for the unexpected, which will always occur.

Bump One: a recent cautionary article in the Washington Post warns that European Banks, which provide much of the capital for emerging nation development programs, are severely undercapitalized and are close to retrenchments which could bring progress in nations around the world to a screeching halt.  That in turn could generate major civil unrest in countries around the world (think of the situations in Greece and the Middle East where governments are buying time to deal with the dissatisfactions of a savagely unhappy population.)  A restructuring of the global financial system is needed.  Can it be done?

Bump Two: China is facing both rapidly rising inflation and a housing bubble in an export-driven economy.  Americans tend to invest in stocks and bonds for retirement; in traditional Chinese investing, multiple houses are purchased instead, leading to an enormous pace of building that is providing far more housing than there are purchasers.  The high pace of inflation concurrently is driving up Chinese wages to a point close to where China will soon lose the competitive advantages of low wages which drive the exports on which the Chinese economy depends. A sharp decline in the Chinese export market could thus set off a chain reaction in their housing market that could wreck their economy for decades, and that in turn could have major impacts both on global politics and the world economy.  The solution of course is a major switch by China to domestic consumption, but can they do that in time?

Bump Three: the U.S. is achieving maturity in the development and use of robotic, on-demand manufacturing, just when curing the recession requires major increases in job creation.  Major manufacturers are beginning to gear up to achieve the promises of on-demand creation of products to any customer’s specification at low work-hour costs.  New jobs will be created by robotics, but they will be either the high tech sort required to support a vastly changed economy, or jobs in sectors of the economy that may not even exist yet.  Large numbers of semi-skilled workers face a lifetime of unemployment.  A vast retooling education load is about to be placed on an American educational system not yet equipped or funded to handle it. The political process, mired in 19^th century outlooks and procedures, is at an impasse that makes it virtually impossible to achieve the rapid changes that will be needed.  How rapidly can we change the ways we do business?

Bump Four:  Climate change is accelerating more each time a new report is issued, yet we remain incapable of either stopping it or living with it.  From drowning coastal cities to hurricane devastation year round everywhere to even, if there’s merit in tipping-point theory, the possibility of a rapidly approaching mini ice age, the potential hazards are everywhere while we sit on our hands.  How to get the coping process unstuck and in gear is possibly the major challenge of our age.

What all these “bumps”, and other as yet unrecognized ones, share is that they generate the need for all different kinds of people from differing political persuasions, interests, occupations, value systems and places to work together for their solution.  Evolutionary biologists claim that the major reason for humanity’s evolution into a globally dominant species is our ability to communicate with each other and to cooperate altruistically.  It’s time for us to prove it.

The Mother of Dependence

When asked about his prolific inventiveness, Ben Franklin famously replied, “Necessity is the mother of invention.”  He had invented the library ladder to reach books on the upper shelves of his own library, bifocals to address his own eye problems, the Franklin stove to more easily keep warm in winter.  As it so happens, necessity is the mother of far more than invention.  For one thing, it creates dependence.

Local leaders in Washington, D.C., have recently issued a fascinating “Food Stamp Challenge” to people to empty their refrigerators, and then provide groceries for a week for their family for $30, the typical income for those on the food stamp program.   It is similar in its aim to exercises like having to get around in a wheel chair for two days, which sensitizes the one doing it to the problems faced by those with disabilities.  It dispels myths about the easy life of the poor.  Those few who have tried it state that it has changed their entire understanding of why people are dependent on food stamps.  Said one, "I think it sends a very strong message to put us past this notion that people aspire or desire to get handouts as though one wants to be in that situation.”  A dreary, bare-bones diet of mainly starchy, canned foods – no fresh produce, no quality meats, minimal or no desserts, etc. – is all that is possible.  Food stamps enable at least a slightly less dreary way to enable the survival of your family.  And survival is what it’s all about, not preference.

I know.  When I was growing up, my mother’s income from her sweat shop job was $25 per week to support a family of four at home. That was back in the 1940’s with ground meat at 25 cents per pound, but that $25 also had to cover rent and utilities and clothes. And as a teen, I was the one who did the grocery shopping and paid the utility bills.  You walk to grocery stores all over town to find the cheapest prices, develop a necessary taste for canned beef, learn to enjoy left-over mashed potatoes as fried potato patties at the next meal, and think of swiss steak as a special treat.  Even fresh tomatoes from farming relatives in the summer get canned to help carry you through the winter.  As a kid, I dreamed of sirloin steak, but never had one until I was in college.  I was 16 when I first held my own $5 bill in my hand.  We survived fine, as have many others in similar circumstances over the years, but our life style was not based on preference.  Nor is the life style of the poor in our inner cities today.

That’s why some politicians talking of eliminating food stamps programs and similar programs for the poor because they “foster dependency” seem so tragically ridiculous.  They believe the poor have made rational choices in a rational free market, and must be “cured” of their preference for dependency. They think that the mother of dependence is laziness.  People who can say that have never gone to bed hungry.  They propose it, they say, because of the severity of the federal budget deficit.  But budgets have moral dimensions that reflect the priorities of our values, and that seems an area in which those politicians are tone deaf.  The U.S. has been continuously at war for 10 years, and this is the first time in American history that taxes on the wealthy have gone down during war.  Our founding fathers and all who followed them knew that the extraordinary expenses of wars are funded by tax increases and not by cutting aid to those in need, yet our response to “nine-eleven” was to “go shopping.”  I remember during WW2 living with rationing books and saving pennies from that $25 per week to buy “war stamps.”  Today, war deficits are funded by cuts in food stamps, Medicare, student loans and other programs for those with special needs.  We have lost our moral way.

The truth is that we are driven about by a variety of myths; they, whether containing truth or not, create the social forces that shape our government and our public policies.  Some, like the first Thanksgiving or that any child can grow up to be President unite us, while others serve only to divide.  And this myth of the poor being poor by choice because of a preference for dependency is one of the great dividers.  It is a leftover from the Protestant Reformation, when it was believed that prosperity indicated the special favor of God, labeling those who possessed it as Heaven bound. Being poor meant you were overloaded with vices, and headed down.  Its only modern purpose is to insulate those capable of helping the poor but too callous to do so from any sense of responsibility.  A “Food Stamp Challenge” might be a worthy exercise for all politicians.

Exploring the 21st Century

As a senior in college, I once was angered by what I considered an unfair and public humiliation by a teacher of another student in the class.  Vowing retribution, I waited until the next class weekly discussion session, in which we debated various esoteric topics of social history, and took the opposite point of view from the teacher on the week’s topic, about Metternich’s domestic policy.  Using every crooked technique that I’d learned in my freshman course on “how to win a crooked argument”, I thoroughly trounced and humiliated him before the whole class, even though I knew that he, an expert in the subject, was right in what he said.  I know, it was sophomoric rather than senior, but it was highly enjoyable revenge.  The next day, he called me into his office and said simply, “Mr. Ward, you have a talent for persuasion.  Always be sure you believe what you say before you persuade others to it.”  That was possibly the most important thing I learned in college.

That was on my mind as I watched the presidential debate the other evening.  The evening was filled with semi-truths and distortions from both candidates.  For example, on the subject of jobs, Obama said that he had managed to add 5 million jobs to the economy, while Romney said there were no more jobs now than when Obama started.  Both, in a limited way, were right.  Obama’s term includes a first year in which over 4.3 million jobs were lost from the financial collapse which started in 2008, over which Bush, not Obama, had presided, but since then about 4.5 million jobs have been added for a net gain of less than 200,000.  Meanwhile, a vigorous economy requires a net gain of about 2 million jobs per year because of demographic factors, and we’re not there yet.  A vigorous discussion of how best to reach a net gain of 2 million jobs a year would have been useful, but it was not to be.  And so it went, for a variety of topics.  Both candidates are smart, and undoubtedly knew that they were obscuring rather than revealing the true picture, but chose not to.  Truth was the victim in that debate, done in by both sides.  They were persuasive, but did not truly believe what they themselves said.

The small obfuscations, though, were unable to hide a larger truth, that each candidate stood in an exemplary way for a competing vision of what America is all about.  Romney has sought to be presented as a sort of solitary prairie farmer, exploring a hostile wilderness using only his own resources, and proud of it.  Laissez-faire Opportunity and Solitary Individualism have been his theme, though he was strangely quiet about that during the debate, and his background displays quite the opposite.  Obama’s vision has consistently been Community: all are needed, and all are valued.  It is an urban view emphasizing mutual accommodation and support.  Both visions are strongly attractive, and they are the choice that voters are being asked to make.  That is what tears the American electorate apart.  And both visions are caricatures of real American history; that is what must be overcome.

Americans are not solitary trekkers, but migrants, willing to put aside a former existence and brave a hostile wilderness to create a new life that provides opportunity and that rejects the values and problems of the place they started from.  They are not satisfied with old values that may work for the crowd, but do not work for them, and so they set out.  To be pioneers, they need the strength to stand alone, but also the support to provision them, the companionship to make a hard life bearable, and the assistance to aid them in times of maximum peril.  Libertarian hermits are rare, not the norm, and not the stuff this country is made of.  Pioneers in general did not travel alone, but went out in groups; even Columbus had a ship full of sometimes recalcitrant, but necessary, sailors with him, Daniel Boone established communities along the way, and mountain men spent the summers at their annual rendezvous.  Census records show my family had the same neighboring families in Georgia in 1820, Alabama in 1840, and Texas in 1880.  And similar community migration accounts for most pioneering in American history.

Not just the individual pioneer, but the pioneer community is the hero of American history and the role model for America in the 21^st century.  Our world has been transformed by the urbanization and technology of the 20^th century.  Old ways no longer work.  We must migrate.  Old sources of energy destroy our environment and must be replaced.  Old laissez-faire ways of doing business and managing health care destroy our communities and our humanity, and must be modernized.  Old rural ways of education and unrestricted behavior no longer work in an urban world, and must change.  Old ways of thinking that Connecticut, and Mississippi, and Nebraska and California co-exist in parallel universes which need not follow the same rules, when one-fourth of Americans change locations each year, must be brought up to date.  But we are, as we have always been, a migrant community travelling along hazardous paths to a new world.  We each must be able to accomplish necessary things alone; and we all share the adventure together.