Forgotten People

 Marx is noted for his identification of the lumpenproletariat, the outcasts of society, consisting mainly of the homeless, the long-term unemployed and criminals. But Marx, like many others, thinks mostly of the group, not the people in it.  “Call me Ishmael”, the narrator of Moby Dick begins, and its epilogue starts with a quote from Job, “And I alone am escaped to tell thee.”  He no longer has a name, for he is an orphan on the open sea. That is the fate of outcasts, and that is possibly their greatest loss.  They count only as statistics, not as individuals.  According to a recent report by Fareed Zakaria, there are 46 million of them in America today.

Zakaria notes that the growing concern about income inequality focuses mostly on the flattening of income for the middle class, a good and proper concern, but that to grow the middle class as a factor able to change society requires doing something to improve the lot of the forgotten poor.  That is in fact the most potent way to begin raising the fortunes of the middle class and improving our economy.  .  They must be enabled to become members of the middle class, individuals we know and name as friends, and neighbors about whom we care.

Rand Paul was shedding crocodile tears when he said he was voting against continuing aid to the long-term unemployed because he did not want to encourage growth of a culture of accepted permanent unemployment.  I suppose it’s his own small contribution to solving the obesity problem.  As a consequence of his and other conservative votes, 1.3 million people have just lost the benefits that keep them afloat in very rough seas.  While short-term unemployment is falling, long-term unemployment is higher than it has ever been at the end of a strong recession.  He should have been, but wasn’t, ashamed, for in his role as senator he should know that a large factor in that long-term unemployment is corporate dumping of older, more expensive workers for younger workers willing to work cheaper with less use of corporate health benefits.  They will find no other employment at anywhere close to their former income and skill level.  Yet 80 percent of corporations no longer provide defined pension benefits.  The 401(k) retired workers must eventually rely on will be totally inadequate to their needs; the average size of a baby-boomer retirement account is projected to be $100,000, nowhere near enough to sustain a comfortable retirement.  The Institute for Retirement Security estimates that for Americans aged 55 to 64, the average household is $113,000 short of what will be needed for retirement. Collectively, all workers face a shortfall of at least $6.8 trillion.  But unemployed or minimum wage workers do not save the money needed for retirement.  We face a future of countless numbers of the elderly poor as baby-boomers are “retired” by their former employers.  Many will become homeless.  The upper limit of the “working age” population is being unilaterally lowered by corporations anxious to reap profits as older workers are removed from their rolls.  To the corporations, the health care, housing and feeding of their former workers have become externalities; there are no more guarantees of watches and golden years at retirement. 

The farther down the socioeconomic ladder you go, the more severe becomes the problem.  The University of California Berkeley Labor Center and University of Illinois released a study in October that said 52% of families of fast food workers receive assistance from a public program like Medicaid, food stamps, the Earned Income Tax Credit or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.  Wal-Mart puts out donation baskets to solicit donations for its workers, while simultaneously fighting tooth-and-nail against raising the minimum wage many of them work at.  Other corporations fight equally hard for tax breaks at the expense of governmental care of the poor.  Responsible treatment of employees is becoming an externality, the easily forgotten concern of others, and we are busily growing a new American lumpenproletariat.  Such forgotten workers do not save for a better future; their personal tragedies are permanent. The sad thing is that we are no longer naming them as our friends and associates; they are becoming statistics.

The problem is not just an American one.  World-wide, there's a race going on between declining working age populations and increasing productivity through automation and robotization.  At the same time as aging populations are providing fewer young workers, automation and robotics are lowering the demand for them.  A new balance must be achieved.  Done right, it can lead to positive gains for people; done wrong, we create a new global lumpenproletariat.  China, for example, is facing a future where a declining population of younger workers will no longer be able to sustain China’s current role as factory for the world, and it must retool itself for a different sort of polity and economy.  They have begun doing that with their recent changes in their one-child policy and with their shift toward internal consumption rather than exports.  But what must not be forgotten is the fate of the displaced.   Many emerging nations will be facing revolutions of rising expectations as the jobs and prosperity their people looked forward to begin to fade away.

Countries will deal with the issue in a variety of ways.  In America we must deal with it in a culture of corporate capitalism, in which corporations generally consider former employees as externalities to be the responsibility of others, combined with a Protestant Ethic which undervalues the worth of the unemployed as people and an empathy gap induced by a mythology of frontier individualism.  We overvalue work and undervalue workers.  We have a lot to overcome in treating the issue seriously.

Many concerted actions are required.  The idea being floated about is a good one to reinstate long-term unemployment benefits as re-employment benefits that include funding for training in new occupations.  Raising the minimum wage is needed.  Incentives to reintroduce defined pension systems are needed.  A national health care system is necessary more than ever.  Job creation through stimulating introduction of new technologies is urgent.   The idea I’ve suggested before might work, of setting up ways for workers to invest in operations such as pension funds that lease robotics to small businesses, and thereby reap their own benefit from the robots that may replace them.  The $6.8 trillion shortfall I've mentioned cannot be met by either government or the private sector working alone.  We are all in it together.  In short, a retooling of the economy is needed with the explicit goal of providing for those displaced by the new productivity gains with part of the profits of those gains.

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The greatest need however is to remember not just the statistics, but the people included in them.  Before 1950, 50 percent of the elderly lived in poverty, often alone, forgotten, with no one left to call them by name.  We, and they, are better than that.  But we are turning again toward the same kind of situation.  It is becoming one of the defining challenges of the 21^st century, and we must meet it with grace.   

Avoiding Unforeseen Consequences

The most dreaded word for a patient facing surgery is perhaps “Oops!”  It could signal something terribly unforeseen by the surgeon, from slicing an artery to discovering he had just removed the wrong kidney.  Fortunately, that is why surgeons spend hours rehearsing procedures in advance and studying just what to do in the event of an oops! situation, so bad consequences are rare.  We know the charm of the oops stage of a toddler’s development, but the charm comes with careful supervision by parents, so it, too, doesn’t usually turn out bad.

Unfortunately, public policy, domestic and foreign, is loaded with oops situations, and they often produce really rotten results.  And there are no watching parents to prevent the pain.  Take for example the current scene in Ukraine, where an almost done agreement with the EU was aborted in favor of a $15 billion offer from Russia to become cozier with them.  That is a major setback in the EU’s long-term foreign policy of creating a bigger buffer against incursion by Russia into EU affairs, a geopolitical goal obviously not considered by the framers of austerity policy.  For that foreign policy blunder can be seen, with hindsight, as a direct result of the EU domestic austerity policy, which also produced at the other end of Europe the rise of neo-Nazi groups in Greece.  The policy confined itself only to the needs of the bankers and the markets, and even there, did not do a decent job.  The less robust the EU economy, the more tempting became Russian offers, and the more likely the rise of rabid extremists in Greece.  And that less-robust-than-need-be EU economy undoubtedly affects the closeted negotiations going on between the EU and America over a cross-Atlantic trade treaty.  The economists who sought to nurse the EU through a bad stretch on a diet of gruel and cold water had forgotten, or never realized that foreign and domestic policy are inextricably mingled these days.  The old days when one could argue whether Metternich even had a domestic policy other than keeping the masses at home quiet while he maneuvered abroad are long gone; as are the times when China’s foreign policy was nonexistent in its quest to keep its internal affairs stable.

Closer to home, the Washington Post today reports the growing restiveness of the contracting community and the displeasure of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a major business lobbying force, that the Bureau of Indian Affairs is making only small partial payments to Indian tribes of reimbursements owed them for schools and social services. The Supreme Court has twice ruled that the reimbursements are legitimate and should be paid.  The BIA says it lacks the funding to do so because of the sequester, Congress’s austerity policy, and is paying all it can with the funds allocated to it.  But the tribal obligations are not just grants that can be changed at a Congressional whim.  The tribes have the status of nations, with whom there are treaty obligations, and they are not buying the BIA argument.  The business community is concerned that the BIA argument, if replicated elsewhere in government, could have serious ramifications for doing business throughout the government.  Once again, Oops!

The EU bankers and economists who framed the European austerity policy seem never to have considered seriously that markets operate within a framework of geopolitical considerations, and the American Congress seems never to have thought about it at all.  One problem is that economics does not operate in a vacuum; it is embedded always in a society that has far more to consider than just clearing a market.  Ignoring those external considerations is a hazard which produces “unforeseen” consequences.  They were not unforeseeable if thought had been applied.  The European problem comes about from “trained incompetence”, otherwise known as “if your only tool is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail.”  It is a failure occasioned by reliance on outdated economic theory and curable by bringing European bankers into a 21^st century world.

The American problem runs deeper.  To become a professional diplomat requires passing one of the most difficult exams in the world, the Foreign Service Entrance Exam, just as becoming a surgeon requires years of medical school and advanced training.  Both sets of requirements are appropriate, for the actions and decisions undertaken when entering those fields are dangerous and have serious consequences.  Yet an American could be elected to Congress while not even qualified to graduate from high school.  Age and citizenship are the only requirements.  A member of Congress can make assertions about the Constitution without ever having read it and vote on budgets which seriously affect the lives of millions without ever having read them.  He or she can cast votes drastically affecting American foreign policy without half the understanding of the issue possessed by a Foreign Service intern.  That is a relic of bygone days when decisions had nowhere near the complexity they do now.  It has always been an American maxim that “experts should be on tap, not on top.”  But at least enough expertise to recognize the seriousness of the issues voted on enough to explore them with experts before voting is desperately needed.  One of the characteristics of the “Tea Party” mentality has been its contempt for the “inside-the-beltway gobbledygook” of knowledgeable experts, and its effects show more and more each day.  A big reason for that are the gerrymandered districts which produce candidates qualified only by how loud they shout the part line.

We make oops moments in surgery relatively rare by demanding the surgeons be properly trained and follow exacting procedures in preparation.  Not to do so would constitute malpractice.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could rely on the professionalism of our congressmen the way we rely on our surgeons?  In the American system, the only way to do that is at the ballot box.

Foolish Consistency

I will never forget Daisy.

At the time I was a young trainee in a Social Security office in a moderately large city in the Southwest.  Daisy was a veteran claims representative, her graying hair, exquisite manners and charming Carolina drawl placing her back in the Old South and almost masking the lively mind behind those alert blue eyes.  Daisy had a unique role in the office.  When derelicts (and there were many of them) came to the office, Daisy was always called to interview them and resolve their problems. 

The derelicts were not easy to work with.  Stumbling in only half-sober, reeking with unwashed clothes, used alcohol and vomit, they often were almost incoherent in their complaints, forgetful of the facts and willing to invent any story that would resupply their drinking money.  Frequently their smell was so stupefying that desks were pushed together to permit interviewing at a distance far enough to prevent gagging. That often involved interviews conducted in a semi-shout.  Daisy interviewed them not from being drafted, but by her own choice. 

Daisy was angelic in her interviewing.  Compassionate, patient, struggling to understand and resolve the problems that had brought them there, she provided those derelicts a caring presence that their mother would have had difficulty matching.  Watching her in action, one knew one was witnessing someone who truly identified with and cared for the troubled people she was there to help, an enlightened person signaling a new future for the old South.

Nothing could have been further from the truth.  In casual conversation back in the employee lunchroom, Daisy’s language and opinions were those of a genteel redneck.  Frequently employing the n-word to describe her mostly African-American clients, she made it clear that she viewed them as little more than incompetent children, incapable of any intelligent action in their own behalf.  Her opinions on the social issues surrounding her clients were those of her slave-holding grandparents.  Yet it was clear watching her in action, that her solicitude for their wellbeing went far beyond the limits dictated by her upbringing and professed views.  In short, Daisy’s actions and her beliefs were inconsistent in major ways.

I thought of Daisy recently when I remembered a “daily aphorism” in the local paper:  “Don’t judge a man by his opinions, but by what his opinions have made him. — G.C. Lichtenberg”.

My first reaction was puzzlement followed by disagreement.  Are not people the sum of their opinions?  How can we distinguish between the man and the opinions he holds?  Right action and right view go hand in hand.  Then I remembered Daisy.

As human beings faced with complex choices we favor consistency.  Consistency has many strengths.  A presumption of consistency enables us to infer many effects and relationships from certain knowledge of only a few.  Presuming consistency eases our moral choices by enabling us to see our enemies as all bad, our friends as all good.  No one looks for good in Hitler or evil in Ghandi.  Even Emerson, proud excoriater of consistency as “the hobgoblin of little minds”, was nonplused when Thoreau accused him of inconsistency for not joining him in prison for civil disobedience. 

Inconsistency confuses us.  It violates our deepest moral sense.  Good people should do good things consistently; evil flows from evil consistently. Justice is based on the search for results consistent with causes.  In some ways consistency constitutes our deepest value.  An inconsistent universe is one based on whimsy, not Justice, on unfathomable fragmentation, not rational wholeness.  We cannot understand an inconsistency that violates our sense of wholeness, our belief in an underlying unity of Being.  Belief in an underlying Consistency knits together our science (the quest for “a general unified theory”) and our theology (God as the ground of all Being).

It is in our theology that the “consistency imperative” gets us in the most trouble.  Consistency requires that God be all Good or else senselessly arbitrary – a construct we find repugnant.  To be not only Good, but Perfect in every way is the measure of a monotheist’s God.  By definition God is the best of everything, and anything less cannot be worshipped.

The ancients faced no such problem.  Odin had one eye, Hephaestus limped, Zeus was a cruel philanderer, Loki a trickster, Apollo the Patron of thieves.  Even Jahweh as a tribal God was subject to jealous rages that He later regretted.   Jahweh once threatened to kill Abraham, even though he had already identified him as father to countless peoples.

Mark Twain remarked that Wagner’s music was much better than it sounded.  He may have been right as well as funny.  Perhaps that’s why I celebrate people like Daisy, whose actions are much better than their words, however inconsistent they may be.  And why I appreciate people like John Boehner, who finally got upset enough to be inconsistent and seek compromise.  He may revert to foolishly consistent obstructionism, but for awhile at least he was wisely inconsistent with his principles.  Sometimes, consistency is the foolish course.  Keep up the good work, John.

Another Merry Christmas to George!

It’s time once again to wish George Will a Merry Christmas and a strong glass of syllabub.  I was worrying about him.  He’s become so shrill lately that I thought increasing loneliness was beginning to bother him.  In his recent diatribe against raising the minimum wage he even resorted to self contradiction, actually indicating a preference for the government transfer payments he has reviled so frequently, in the form of tax credits to the poor. Perhaps, I thought, since Marley’s, err, Milton Friedman’s, death, he begins to hear the soft clanking of chains.  But bah, humbug, the dead no longer contribute to profits, so why should he be bothered by that?  Watch out, George, the closer one gets to that bottom line, the louder the clanking.  But on reflection I realized that the wealthy pay little in taxes anyway, so tax credits to the poor merely constitute a silly act of generosity by the moderately poor toward those worse off than they are.  Let them eat their cake together. 

Besides, he seems to have been joined lately by a junior partner, Robert Samuelson.  Samuelson is still junior in his thinking and style, not yet displaying the philosophical grandeur of libertarianism or the tricks of specious argument regularly demonstrated by George.  He simply sticks to practicalities like his perceived impossibility of combating the budget deficits he abhors by actually raising taxes on the rich.  His is yet a simple argument compared to George’s elegant complexities, so easily confused by what Stephen Colbert refers to as “the liberal bias of reality.”  George is never bothered by reality.  But I’m sure Samuelson will learn.  For example, today’s headline is that Cisco is spending $15 billion on buying back its own stock to increase profits for its executives and shareholders, more than 2½ times what it spends on research and development and more than its annual profits, while at the same time laying off 4000 workers.  Such tactics simply add to lowering demand, thereby creating a vicious cycle of lower demand leading to lower profits which must be shared by fewer people to maintain their current wealth leading to more buybacks, making them hard to defend by simple logic. But at least, thanks to the kindness of Senator Paul’s concern for the wellbeing of the unemployed, Samuelson won’t have to worry about the budget impact of paying long term benefits to those laid off. Such liberally biased reality simply lies beyond the reaches of Samuelson’s arguments, requiring George’s grand libertarian indifference; a few arguments ad hominem, like this one, might help, too.

Perhaps, on second thought, I should wish strong syllabub for the whole firm of Friedman, Will and Samuelson, though it would be a stretch for Friedman.  But that syllabub should be drunk quickly.  The Ghost of Christmas Present is beginning to look more and more like Christmas Future each day, at least for the poor.  Merry Christmas, George!

Controlling Violence

I run the risk of over psychologizing an already sad situation, but here goes.  The Greeks had a word for it, the Dionysia, the Romans, Saturnalia, the Germans, October Fest.   In Latin countries, it’s Carnival, in New Orleans, Mardi Gras.  In just about all orderly societies, under the sponsorships of differing gods, mythic histories, whatever, we have an annual celebration of unbounded spontaneity, venting the spleen, “the world turned upside down.”  It enables the society to live at relative peace with itself the rest of the year.  Some societies do it in subtler forms.  One of the foundation papers in social anthropology is about such a role for cockfighting in Borneo.  In South Africa, Mandela used soccer to help turn a nation around.  The Greeks wrote their tragedies to provide Catharsis; in addition to Saturnalia, the Romans used “bread and circuses.”  They are all ways of finding socially acceptable ways for venting and dissipating the violent streak in all of us that comes from our animal past.

I see in the papers and on TV about yet another shooting in a high school, about 91 children age 10 or under killed in 2012, 37 of them by family members, about random killing and tire slashing and beatings of total strangers, and ask Why?  Part of the answer of course is our clinging on to the frontier mythology of keeping weapons handy to fight off a dangerous world.  But Australia and Canada have had equally recent wild histories and discarded them for modern life.  We have to explain why we cling to our own wild history so desperately that we create our own modern libertarian mythology and are willing to sacrifice children to do so.  Part of the answer is racial strife, our inability to adapt to each other, a third generation punishment for the sin of slavery.  But that does not explain white teenagers in mostly white high schools shooting each other.  Part of the answer is the totally out-of-hand commercial exploitation and glorification of violence by our media, from video game makers to professional sports; we have our own gladiators and circuses, violence made easy.  One excuse is that now there are just so many of us that bad things are bound to happen, but that does not explain why our per capita violence rate is so much higher than elsewhere, including in countries with far higher populations or higher population densities than ours.

Part of the answer may be found in W.H. Auden’s poem about grey citizens living grey lives, and that may speak to the deeper issues.  We pile inequalities onto inequalities, more and more deeply stratifying our society into lives of grey drudgery and frustration that lead to what sociologists call anomie, a sense of alienation. We are busy creating an underclass of grey drudges by our rapidly falling social mobility.  But we are not worker ants, and, forced to live like ones, we grow angry and frustrated.  Left with no vent, sometimes people snap.  At all levels of society, we teach and provide our children no other outlets to their frustrations but violent ones, and when they act out that violence we are shocked.

It has become obvious that gun control is desperately needed, and that gun control by itself is not enough.  The conditions that lead to the anger and frustration being acted out violently must be addressed. Income inequality and low social mobility must be tackled by redistribution of wealth through the tax system.  Unemployment must be eased both through extended unemployment benefits and through jobs creation promoted by government.  Education must be reformed to enable people to live out their dreams through their own skills.  Our health systems need better ways of recognizing and treating the emotionally ill.  The media needs, on moral grounds if for no other reason, to shift its focus away from killer winner take all competition.  No one thing can make the violence go away.  Together many things can.  We owe it to our children.

Family Virtues

One of the problems in economics these days is that economists have forgotten, or never learned, the original meaning of economics.  I found out years ago that you can’t really grasp what a science is actually about simply by analyzing its equations.  I got that partly from reading the essays of Einstein, who described equations as merely the shorthand footnotes at the bottom of the page for the flow of the ideas expressed in the main discourse.  Imagine expressing travel, like a leisurely drive through scenic byways followed by a jet flight from Washington to Paris, as d = rt, and thinking that fully described it.  Einstein wrote that forgetting that fact contributes to the practice of teaching a science or mathematics backward, so that its conclusions are reached only by putting together the equations, instead of having the equations flow from the ideas.  It’s easier to teach that backward way, but leads to students unable to understand how science really progresses.  He added that he knew the truths of General Relativity for ten years before he could express them mathematically in equations. 

It was Aristotle who first coined “economics”, meaning the management of a family or a household for the good of the whole.  By that is meant the relationships, productive and otherwise, between all its members. It used to include things we’d likely include under other disciplines, but now it’s limited to things expressible by that big dollar sign.  Some things to remember: households are fluid, not static; babies are born and old folks die; relatives move in and out; proportional compositions change as sometimes it’s mainly adults and other times lots of kids and then grandparents move in. And nowadays, kids move back in.   Garrison Keillor described home as “the place that when you have to go there, they have to accept you.”  Through it all, it has to be managed so that under changing compositions everyone still gets fed and clothed and sheltered.  Sometimes that means times are hard all around, other times that affluence and enjoyment reigns; i.e., just as composition is not static, total household income is fluid also.  In other words, it’s a lot like society at large.  It’s not by accident we call our country our homeland.  In America, the Constitution prohibits exile, which in a way is more home-like than home itself.

Robert Samuelson, writing in the Washington Post, seems to have forgotten, or never learned, that.  He disavows any connection of home with national economics as not fitting the equations of economics.  He unilaterally declares a class war between young and old, stating that care for the elderly deprives the young.  He cites in support of his view the fact that the proportion of elderly has grown significantly, forgetting he's comparing it to the baby-boom era when there were surpluses of children and massive school construction was the norm. He remarks that many elderly are now self-supporting anyway, meaning it’s no longer the case that 50 percent of the elderly live in poverty.  He’s impervious to Michael Gerson’s admonition that responsible capitalism requires virtues that it does not produce, in this case sharing for the common good.  Beyond that, he seems to forget the fluidity of composition that society exhibits.  At times elders dominate; at other times, as during the baby boom era, children do.  Times change.  And he has forgotten that whatever the income currently available, families share it.

Ways of doing so are the government transfer payments he detests.  He begins to rival George Will in his libertarian indifference. I’d like to think Samuelson is an isolated case, but in today’s Post, Charles Lane and Harry Holder, former chief economist in the Labor Department, both beat upon raising the minimum wage to at least the poverty level as unwise.  Holder worries that increasing the minimum wage might cause a loss of jobs among the young, forgetting the responsibility of government to stimulate the economy to create jobs through promoting new technologies.  Lane and Holder further illustrate the dangers of leaving economics to economists.  They become so enamored of the beauty and power of their equations that they forget the dynamism and powers of the society behind them.

We all need to keep in mind that rich and poor, old and young, and all those in between, are in this together.  It’s time to discard the old class warfare chants.  Anyway, as Warren Buffett noted, that war is over and the rich have won.  It’s time to focus again on that virtue of sharing.  That’s how you manage families.

Into the Future, Gradually

A plethora of reports is coming out these days on climate change and its impacts, as floods of research data become available.  They come from groups like the American National Research Council (made up of members of the National Academy of Science, a distinguished group indeed) and a variety of international groups, including the U.N (some not yet officially released).  While the details differ, they share common conclusions about major changes underway on ocean, air and land.  The terms of art now seem to be amelioration versus adaptation (significant changes are now inevitable, so prevention no longer shows up), tipping points (not point), a variability of consequences depending on the part of the world you live in, and incremental versus all-out responses.  While the details increase in complexity, the big picture becomes ever more clear and simple.

The reports now downplay, but do not totally rule out, likelihoods of major changes from shutting off ocean currents or from methane bubbles, but raise the likelihood of large dead ocean areas from acidification and oxygen deprivation killing off entire species of sea life, and large releases of carbon into the atmosphere, which might in turn create a vicious cycle of hotter and hotter temperatures from decaying vegetation and forest fires.  Deserts will experience enlargement as drought increases (it’s happening in China now), while low-lying coastal areas and high latitudes will drown.  Crop yields in some parts of the world will severely decline while increasing elsewhere, but overall there’s a significant likelihood of devastating impacts on the hungry of the world as yields drop sharply below increasing demand.

Multiple tipping points, when large changes happen suddenly, are possible on both land and sea.  Sea levels can sharply rise while a vicious carbon cycle begins in the atmosphere.  The danger appears to increase when temperature rise exceeds 2 degrees Celsius, a point we seem approaching with some certainty now.  And environmental change can trigger political and social conflict.  The 21^st century may become the age of water wars and revolution.  At the least, there will be major migrations and frictions arising from the differing ways climate will behave in various parts of the world.

In the face of all this, what’s one to do?  Political resistance remains strong from the “Don’t blame my SUV” crowd and the pace, though not direction, of change is still uncertain.  The popular response from the scientific community seems to be to propose incremental responses as the data gets worse and worse.  That’s probably the most practical approach politically, and saves scientists from egg on their faces as the pace of particular changes varies from what was predicted.  But it seems to me like an adoption in advance of a “too little, too late” philosophy, which brings inherent major risks.

The incremental approach, while comfortable to the cautious, raises alarming prospects of always staying behind nature.  Building 6 foot sea walls when 10 foot walls are eventually going to be needed simply delays inevitable catastrophe.  Attempting to clean coal instead of eliminating its use altogether does the same. Limiting your actions to only those on which everyone can agree is a recipe for disaster.  And the approach ignores the argument that an all-out effort to manage climate change is actually good for the economy the naysayers are so worried about.  Worrying about economic damage is the province mostly of entrenched interests who resist any sort of change at all.  New technologies, new materials, new infrastructure, new jobs are all the natural consequences of tackling new sorts of environmental issues.  The bolder the better is the watchword needed.  It’s time to stop seeing crises and start seeing opportunities.