Events large and small have gotten some thoughts about globalization and its consequences, good and bad, rattling around in my head. From the crisis in the financial markets and the amount of debt and liabilities our corporations and government owe to foreign governments, to the bombing in Pakistan that headlines today's news, to some humorous but melancholy interactions with young, recent immigrant workers in stores in downtown Manhattan, to the changing demographics of New York's outer boroughs, even to this video ostensibly about violence among ghetto youth in France. Since nothing particularly coherent or insightful has yet formulated, I'll only share some photos from a Flickr search, tagged with 'globalization.'
An interesting article from Stanford Magazine, if slightly Stanford-centric, on the demographic changes that have shaped the American West in the past 140 years from Stanford professor David M. Kennedy, whose classroom lectures I would occasionally sneak into, not being a history major. The key themes of the article, briefly summarized: since the symbolic act of completing the Union-Pacific railroad, and more strongly pronounced since the onset of World War II the American West has undergone profound growth and demographic changes that act as both a model for an increasingly heterogeneous world and fundamentally relocate the centers of influence and power within the United States. A couple of minor notes:
- Kennedy suggests the immigrant mix of the American West as a potential model for other parts of the world (Sweden, Ireland) unaccustomed to the challenges of diversity. But is the American West, with an abundance of available land and a lack of centuries-old and strong cultural traditions, really a good model for the challenges of Europe and other nations trying to integrate new populations?
- Kennedy notes that in 1960, the last time an American president was elected from somewhere other than the South and the West, California had 32 electoral votes to New York's 45. Currently, California commands 55 votes, with New York's share having diminished to 31 -- and further, states that lie west of the 100th meridian cast 200 of the necessary 270 votes to elect a president. Kennedy speculates that, should demographic patterns hold, the West as a voting bloc may be able to elect American presidents on their own. Will the 200 year old precedents in the constitution hold under such drastic demographic changes?
- The environmental scarcity, particularly of water resources, that have always shaped the economies of the West (read Marc Reisner's excellent Cadillac Desert) will continue to determine the future of the West. With the growing economic influence of California, specifically, and the West's ability to foster and embrace large-scale technological change, perhaps one of the enduring legacies of the West will be in re-shaping the way large, demanding populations are able to thrive under environmental and resource pressures -- surely an enduring global challenge.
Photos above and below from a Flickr search for 'California.' Interesting, I suppose, that California in our imagination is still about the Pacific and mountains and expansive, magical vistas, and not the strip malls and subdivisions populated by the small shops owned by the Vietnamese and the Indians and the Mexicans and the huge, box-store malls where all the money goes. Or, as Thomas Pynchon envisioned it:
San Narciso lay further south, near L.A. Like many named places in California it was less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts: census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway. But it had been Pierce's domicile, and headquarters: the place he'd begun his land speculating in ten years ago, and so put down the plinth course of capital on which everything afterward had been built, however rickety or grotesque, toward the sky; and that, she supposed, would set the spot apart, give it an aura. But if there was any vital difference between it and the rest of Southern California, it was invisible on first glance. She drove into San Narciso on a Sunday, in a rented Impala. Nothing was happening. She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth; and she thought of the time she'd opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. There'd seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out); so in her first minute of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding. Smog hung all round the horizon, the sun on the bright beige countryside was painful; she and the Chevy seemed parked at the centre of an odd, religious instant. As if, on some other frequency, or out of the eye of some whirlwind rotating too slow for her heated skin even to feel the centrifugal coolness of, words were being spoken. She suspected that much.
Two fundamental concepts of economics that have always frustrated me are the following:
1. An economic choice is fundamentally a value decision made by an individual. An economic actor is making an observable choice, revealing their values and preferences.
2. A market (or the market) uses price as a mechanism to efficiently allocate resources, based on supply and demand, fundamentally driven by the sum of the collective individual preferences of each of the actors in the market.
That may be an oversimplification, and it has been a while since I've taken an economics class, but the gist is right.
So, what's vexing? Well, two things. First, while so many of us claim to believe in one set of things (say, environmental responsibility, or justice, or equality) our revealed preferences show a clear priority in valuing a different set of things (say, comfort, or convenience, or entertainment).
Secondly, while we may truly believe in one set of things, we generally do not feel that our economic choices actually can influence the behaviors of "the market." While we are all supposed to be economic agents, who's behavior, in sum, matters, we feel a complete lack of agency, as far as our ability to make choices that will actually change markets.
With these two points running around the back of my head, I comment Carrotmob, both as an ingenious embodiment of these core economic principles, and as a very cool and innovative approach of connecting the individual economic choices that we might make with real world impact. While my understanding is that Carrotmob is just getting off the ground, I fully recommend taking a look at the organization, which has the potential to be a powerful and exciting change agent, and has, at its core, a possibly sustaining business model (probably not making anybody a millionaire, but perhaps sustaining the platform for change that Carrotmob may grow into...)
Michael Pollan with a wonderful essay in the New York Times arguing for the importance of personal choice in making a difference in the face of climate change (and an argument that can easily be extended to a wealth of other environmental, social, and economic factors). Pollan's essay touches on issues that have long troubled me. Among the positives are framing environmental responsibility as a fundamentally moral choice (albeit, in the positive sense of moral, not the finger-wagging, school-marmish sense) and framing environmentally responsible acts as pleasurable (for me, living in a city, for Pollan, planting a garden and growing your own food). More vexing is how to convince people to embrace personal change when confronted with the overwhelming sense that the problem is too large to impact, or when faced with concerns of developed countries somehow falling behind in a consumer arms race with their counterparts in China (the traditional bogeyman) or elsewhere. And kudos to Pollan for re-raising the profile of Wendell Berry, an essayist who deserves a much wider following. Read on:
For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we’re living our lives suggests we’re not really serious about changing — something our politicians cannot fail to notice. They will not move until we do. Indeed, to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money and grand schemes, to save us from our predicament represents precisely the sort of thinking — passive, delegated, dependent for solutions on specialists — that helped get us into this mess in the first place. It’s hard to believe that the same sort of thinking could now get us out of it.
Thirty years ago, Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer and writer, put forward a blunt analysis of precisely this mentality. He argued that the environmental crisis of the 1970s — an era innocent of climate change; what we would give to have back that environmental crisis! — was at its heart a crisis of character and would have to be addressed first at that level: at home, as it were. He was impatient with people who wrote checks to environmental organizations while thoughtlessly squandering fossil fuel in their everyday lives — the 1970s equivalent of people buying carbon offsets to atone for their Tahoes and Durangos. Nothing was likely to change until we healed the “split between what we think and what we do.” For Berry, the “why bother” question came down to a moral imperative: “Once our personal connection to what is wrong becomes clear, then we have to choose: we can go on as before, recognizing our dishonesty and living with it the best we can, or we can begin the effort to change the way we think and live.”
For Berry, the deep problem standing behind all the other problems of industrial civilization is “specialization,” which he regards as the “disease of the modern character.” Our society assigns us a tiny number of roles: we’re producers (of one thing) at work, consumers of a great many other things the rest of the time, and then once a year or so we vote as citizens. Virtually all of our needs and desires we delegate to specialists of one kind or another — our meals to agribusiness, health to the doctor, education to the teacher, entertainment to the media, care for the environment to the environmentalist, political action to the politician.
As Adam Smith and many others have pointed out, this division of labor has given us many of the blessings of civilization. Specialization is what allows me to sit at a computer thinking about climate change. Yet this same division of labor obscures the lines of connection — and responsibility — linking our everyday acts to their real-world consequences, making it easy for me to overlook the coal-fired power plant that is lighting my screen, or the mountaintop in Kentucky that had to be destroyed to provide the coal to that plant, or the streams running crimson with heavy metals as a result.
Of course, what made this sort of specialization possible in the first place was cheap energy. Cheap fossil fuel allows us to pay distant others to process our food for us, to entertain us and to (try to) solve our problems, with the result that there is very little we know how to accomplish for ourselves. Think for a moment of all the things you suddenly need to do for yourself when the power goes out — up to and including entertaining yourself. Think, too, about how a power failure causes your neighbors — your community — to suddenly loom so much larger in your life. Cheap energy allowed us to leapfrog community by making it possible to sell our specialty over great distances as well as summon into our lives the specialties of countless distant others.
Here’s the point: Cheap energy, which gives us climate change, fosters precisely the mentality that makes dealing with climate change in our own lives seem impossibly difficult. Specialists ourselves, we can no longer imagine anyone but an expert, or anything but a new technology or law, solving our problems. Al Gore asks us to change the light bulbs because he probably can’t imagine us doing anything much more challenging, like, say, growing some portion of our own food. We can’t imagine it, either, which is probably why we prefer to cross our fingers and talk about the promise of ethanol and nuclear power — new liquids and electrons to power the same old cars and houses and lives.
"The city air makes you free, they said in Renaissance Germany" - Stewart Brand, making the case that the trend to urbanization in developing countries is empowering the poor, enabling upward social mobility, helping to control population, and creating wealth. Certainly touches on a few interesting trends, and trends that won't reverse, but it seems a bit of a starry-eyed appreciation of human enterprise in poor, urban environments, rather than a real argument that squatter cities are actually a good thing...
CES has no shortage of displays. And when MAKE offered us some TV-B-Gone clickers to bring to the show, we pretty much couldn't help ourselves. We shut off a TV. And then another. And then a wall of TVs. And we just couldn't stop. (And Panasonic, you're so lucky that 150-incher didn't have an active IR port.) It was too much fun, but watching this video, we realize it probably made some people's jobs harder, and I don't agree with that (Especially Motorola). We're sorry.
TechCrunch ran an article yesterday about BigThink, a new website where, um, "thinkers," get to share their opinions on subjects (presumably within their expertise). Although it rubs wrong some tiny classicist streak in me that thinks we should be reading about big ideas (or at least, listening for them on the radio), I do have to admit to being a big fan of the TED lectures (and continued big ups to my current giggers, Method, for designing the site!), and further, find video on the web to be a very consumable medium for engaging with big ideas. It is also nice (maybe even revelatory) to see the person presenting the idea. It makes it easier for me to judge them.
PS - I have no idea who David Patrick Columbia is, but apparently he is an "expert" qualified to answer the question "What is the most lavish party you have been to?" His answer kind of sucks, and in perusing the sight further, a lot of the experts kind of suck, and seem unqualified to answer the questions posed to them (Tommy Thomson on the Road to Iraq?). I'd rather see CC answer the question "What is the most lavish party you have been to?"
PPS - Dear BigThink, you should work on the ability of your embed code. Very hard to copy/paste, and I have neither the time nor the energy to actually inspect your code and figure out why Blogger thinks that the embed tag is not being closed properly...
Two topics of long abiding interest relating to India, which I may explore in greater depth in 2008:
1) Why does there not seem to be a counter-culture in India? Or, specifically, why isn't there a purely cultural counter-culture, a sex/drugs/rock 'n roll/art/fashion counter-culture, whose purpose it is to strike a pose of rebellion? This may seem like a ridiculous statement, but in my limited but not irrelevant experience with India, this seems to be true. There are deeply politicized "counter-culture" movements, steeped in issues as varied as sexuality and gender, to poverty and anti-globalization activism, to regional heritage. But, unlike Latin America, or Eastern Europe, or China, or Japan, or even to some extend, West Africa, in India, there hasn't been an abiding embrace of the global counter-culture (most keenly felt in art, music, and movies) that has maintained a long and evolving monopoly on "cool" (and, therefore, deeply influenced the shape of both mainstream cultural and consumer trends) since the end of WWII. Why?
2) The emergence of a new, influential class of people in the world has been surprising well documented in the media in the U.S. This class of people is the young, independent, technologically-adept, status-savvy young Indian professionals who are in the ascendant in Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata, and on and on. Much richer than their parents ever were, aware (through cousins, travel, and television) of Western style, luxury, and mores, independent and increasingly feeling entitled, the notion that this class will be influential in the next 50 years, and that their influence will be felt globally, has been asserted. What they care about (beyond professional success and status) and how they will exercise their influence is much less certain -- and again, in my experience, the political and social agendas (beyond, simply, success) of these, my counterparts in India, has been underdeveloped. For a middle class that ranks 250 million strong, their values, politics, and engagement will be crucial in positively or negatively influencing issues like poverty alleviation, environmental sustainability, and public health, both within India, and, since India accounts for a billion people, globally.
I raise both of these issues partly to set the table for further investigation on my part, and partly because, until recently, I have found very few avenues for sounding out these issues. But a new website, www.blogbharti.com, holds the promise of being a locus for opinions from young Indians and non-resident Indians (NRIs), and warrants a few looks...
Who would've imagined, twenty years ago, that a thing called "the Indian blogosphere" would exist? Who knows, twenty years from now, what the relevance of that set of people might be ~ on global politics, on consumer trends, on innovation... that's where I'm going with this!
I recently watched Eugene Jarecki's feature Why We Fight on DVD (trailer here), a documentary that attempts to trace the reasons for America's engagement in armed conflict, and the associated rise of the military industrial complex (a term popularized by no less than President Eisenhower). The basic premise of the film is that there are a lot of personal reasons for supporting or engaging in war, ranging from noble goals like "spreading freedom," to vengeance, to providing life with purpose, that there are a lot of national reasons that a country might go to war, including those above, as well as political interest. The film also asserts that there is a set of commercial and political interests (again, call it the military-industrial complex) that will drive a nation to war, by focusing the personal and national mood of the country into compliance with, if not active support of, a war agenda.
While Why We Fight traces American militarism in the last sixty years, the film's focus and the deepest resonance lies in our current war in Iraq. While I don't know that the film successfully answers the question "Why We Fight?" (the three common answers seem to be "I'm Not Really Sure" from individuals, political bromides like "For Freedom" from politicians and individuals, and "because the political and commercial interests which require war for their own self-preservation seized an opportunity for war and manipulated political and public opinion to allow for that war to be made" representing the film-maker's opinion), the three questions continually surrounding (and never discussed in simple terms) the Iraq war are raised in the film. How did we get in to this war in the first place? Why are we fighting the war? How do we know when we've won the war? (i.e., How do we know when we've accomplished what we expect to accomplish in this war?)
While the film doesn't lay these questions to rest (and I hope that the details surrounding the first question are re-examined with the election of a Democratic president, and the second and third firmly resolved by the actions of the new administration), it does a good job of surfacing them, and providing some historical context. In fact, the revelation of the entire documentary may be President Eisenhower's farewell address, which I had not previously read and will excerpt in parts:
Eisenhower addresses how to promote and maintain American ideals in an increasingly militarized and turbulent world. The rhetoric from fifty years ago sounds not so far removed from today (when we hear it coming from the more articulate and less jingoistic of our politicians:)
We now stand ten years past the midpoint of a century that has witnessed four major wars among great nations. Three of these involved our own country. Despite these holocausts, America is today the strongest, the most influential, and most productive nation in the world. Understandably proud of this pre-eminence, we yet realize that America's leadership and prestige depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches, and military strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment.
Throughout America's adventure in free government, our basic purposes have been to keep the peace, to foster progress in human achievement, and to enhance liberty, dignity, and integrity among peoples and among nations. To strive for less would be unworthy of a free and religious people. Any failure traceable to arrogance, or our lack of comprehension, or readiness to sacrifice would inflict upon us grievous hurt, both at home and abroad.
Progress toward these noble goals is persistently threatened by the conflict now engulfing the world. It commands our whole attention, absorbs our very beings. We face a hostile ideology global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. Unhappily, the danger it poses promises to be of indefinite duration. To meet it successfully, there is called for, not so much the emotional and transitory sacrifices of crisis, but rather those which enable us to carry forward steadily, surely, and without complaint the burdens of a prolonged and complex struggle with liberty the stake. Only thus shall we remain, despite every provocation, on our charted course toward permanent peace and human betterment.
Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small, there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties. A huge increase in newer elements of our defenses; development of unrealistic programs to cure every ill in agriculture; a dramatic expansion in basic and applied research -- these and many other possibilities, each possibly promising in itself, may be suggested as the only way to the road we wish to travel.
But Eisenhower proceeds to warn against, in surprisingly explicit terms, the influence of the military industrial complex. It's amazing how, from Washington to Teddy Roosevelt, to Eisenhower, there are a legacy of prescient speeches reflecting on American power, and how fundamentally our current leadership and their intellectual influencers, have chosen to ignore:
Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense. We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States corporations.
Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet, we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades. In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present -- and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system -- ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.
Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society's future, we -- you and I, and our government -- must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.
The entire address can be found here. I would also highly recommend reading Christopher Hedges' War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning for anyone interested in this topic, particularly in trying to understand our impetus to war, in general (i.e., not as closely focused on the current mess we've made in Iraq).
At TM's invitation, I went to see a sweet movie, Tocar y Luchar, documenting and promoting Venezuela's nation-wide program of using orchestral music lessons to engage youth, particularly poor, under-served, and at-risk youth. While I had not heard of the program previously, apparently the ascension of the young conductor Gustavo Dudamel to celebrity circles has brought the program to prominence. A brief description of the program (and link to full article:)
Somewhere around 250,000 children from all over the country, 90 percent of them from impoverished backgrounds, now participate in to El Sistema. Considering the country’s total population of 27 million, it means that one in every 100 citizens plays in an orchestra. Venezuela now has nearly 60 children’s orchestras (for children between 2 and 12), more than 150 youth orchestras (for players between 12 years old and young adulthood), 30 adult professional orchestras, more than 120 local núcleos (training centers) and countless chamber ensembles.
The program, started in 1975 by Jose Antonio Abreu, is compelling and seems like a feasible approach to development that can be applied on larger or smaller scales in many countries (and seems, in that it shares models with many athletic programs, that it might be extended to disciplines other than orchestral music, as well). Of course, the current political context in which Venezuela is seen as an outsider to broader political dialogues makes it a bit hard to see through some of the commentary on this program, both positive and negative. While the movie is both sweet and inspiring, it does not tackle these political and pragmatic issues in much detail. Which leaves a host of questions, some practical, some philosophical, in the air:
How is the success of this program measured, in terms of development goals? The movie does an excellent job illustrating cases of poor, at-risk, and even disabled children who are empowered by the program, but the cases are necessarily a select few. Is the program successful in creating greater skills among the students, and opening up opportunities for advancement (outside of those super-achievers who get selected through the system to play in orchestras)?
What happens to the kids when they become adults? Does their training in music have any material impact on their well-being? Particularly, what happens to those kids who participate in the program, but aren't successful at progressing through the ranks?
Does having a population raised on orchestral music do anything in a grander sense to Venezuelan culture? Does the culture have a greater engagement and appreciation of music and art, writ-large, due to the experience of these children?
More questions abound, but the program is certainly inspiring and interesting, for what it has already accomplished, both in engaging at-risk youth, and re-invigorating the classical music world, in Venezuela and beyond.
If I had seen Chak De India, starring Shah Rukh Khan, in an American theater, with an American context, I would have walked out. Structured somewhere between The Mighty Ducks and Miracle, Chake De India relates the story of a disgraced, Muslim ex-captain of the Indian men's field hockey team (who is disgraced for allegedly throwing a World Cup championship game to Pakistan), who returns after eight years in exile to coach the under-funded and under-appreciated women's field hockey team as they attempt to compete in their own World Cup in Australia. Predictably, the women's field hockey team is comprised of a motley cast of characters - the jaded veteran, the strong, mean, fat girl, the brawling defenders, super-talented, aloof rich girl, the hard-luck, scrappy forward. What makes this film interesting is that, beyond embodying these sports film archetypes, each of these girls also represents a regional stereotype from within India. And one of the film's strongest motifs/morals is that, in order to succeed, each of the women must learn to play for India, and their unified identity as the Indian national team, rather than the regional identities which they more strongly identify with.
I write about this film not to recommend it. It's not a good movie. But it is interesting as an example of how social mores, even simple ones, can be advanced through film. Since, in India, film and television are such popular media, dominating so much of the popular cultural landscape, film and television become important conduits for conveying political and cultural messages. By embracing an essentially feel-good, nationalist story, starring one of the biggest stars of them all, Chak De India is able to broach questions of regionalism (particularly against the poorer and more backwards states), bureaucratic inefficiency, Hindu-Muslim prejudice, and sexism. All in one movie! All while India's women's field hockey team improbably wins the world championship! With the climactic scene, where the young women overcome their differences and recognize that they are more alike than dissimilar, taking place in a McDonald's!
Is such a movie successful in changing people's opinions about India? It isn't a particularly insightful or subtle treatment, but I'm not sure insightful and subtle are the ways to sway popular opinion in India. And, of course, it's hard for me to tell, sitting in New York.
An article from the New York Timesa few weeks ago, about a growing gap in "happiness" between men and women, caught my eye. An excerpt:
Alan Krueger, a Princeton economist working with four psychologists on the time-use research team, figures that there is a simple explanation for the difference. For a woman, time with her parents often resembles work, whether it’s helping them pay bills or plan a family gathering. “For men, it tends to be sitting on the sofa and watching football with their dad,” said Mr. Krueger, who, when not crunching data, enjoys watching the New York Giants with his father.
This intriguing — if unsettling — finding is part of a larger story: there appears to be a growing happiness gap between men and women.
Two new research papers, using very different methods, have both come to this conclusion. Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, economists at the University of Pennsylvania (and a couple), have looked at the traditional happiness data, in which people are simply asked how satisfied they are with their overall lives. In the early 1970s, women reported being slightly happier than men. Today, the two have switched places.
Mr. Krueger, analyzing time-use studies over the last four decades, has found an even starker pattern. Since the 1960s, men have gradually cut back on activities they find unpleasant. They now work less and relax more.
Over the same span, women have replaced housework with paid work — and, as a result, are spending almost as much time doing things they don’t enjoy as in the past. Forty years ago, a typical woman spent about 23 hours a week in an activity considered unpleasant, or 40 more minutes than a typical man. Today, with men working less, the gap is 90 minutes.
I don't have much to say about the article itself, except that I found in generally interesting and I thought it rendered the challenges of achieving happiness a little too simplistically (not in a deeply philosophical sense, but in terms of achieving basic life goals, and as expressed through the necessary activities that men and women need to do). But the article did re-raise an interesting question that I had thought about in the past, although not much recently.
How can we measure happiness, and how can we make it useful as a way to make choices, and measure the impact of those choices? Can we make happiness a useful notion both for guiding personal decisions as well as political decisions? Or is it to subjective and ephemeral a notion?
Darren McMahon's Happiness: A History, a philosophical and historical investigation into what happiness means is an interesting launching point for this discussion, but one which I will avoid (see this brief review) except for a) recommending his book, and b) citing it as a reference for the otherwise obvious point that 'happiness' as a defining goal of human existence has been important through all of documented history, pretty much, although the relative meaning and importance of 'happiness' has not been held constant.
More recently, two attempts to measure happines, at varying degrees of quantitative precision, for use as a high-level indicator of human progress are interesting and worth checking out. I'll link only to the basic resources, and may revisit this topic in the future. But in the meantime, check out the Gross National Happiness indicator, put forth by the strange and progressive kingdom of Bhutan as an alterntive understanding of how a society is progressing, and the more economically viable Genuine Progress Indicator, created as an alternative to GNP which tries to properly value economic externalities (like environmental impacts) and 'negative' wealth (like the economic activity created by crime or ill health [think insurance company premiums increasing]). See also the World Database of Happiness, which I'm still trying to figure out, and a dense white paper from the OECD on the use of happiness as a political/policy metric of value. And perhaps another post to follow.
Photos from a Flickr search for 'happiness.' (Although you might get the impression that happiness is disproportionately the province of children...)
Quick question: can anybody point me to a good history of what happened to the left in the Middle East? I know it was a casualty of the geo-political struggles of the Cold War, at some level. But isn't a fundamental political issue we should be concerned with the fact that the poor and disenfranchised in the Middle East (or in the Islamic world, more broadly) have no one to speak for them but the Imams?
First, enjoy a light-hearted moment courtesy of SNL, before the copyright police make them take it down. Let it go, Richard D. James!
Next, a couple of random thoughts. KS is giving me a hard time about a previous post, so let me try to re-cast my thinking on this one:
In 2003, there were two trains of thought that I could follow on why it would make sense to invade Iraq. Again, let me iterate that I did not buy into either of these. But I could trace the arguments from end to end and understand how, for someone with a fundamentally different set of values and beliefs about how the world works (call it a more "optimistic" outlook), these arguments might lead you to believe that an invasion of Iraq was a viable enterprise which might achieve real strategic goals.
The first rationale was the Saddam is a Bad Man rationale - which bundled the threat of WMD, the state-sponsor of terrorism classification, and the Saddam is a murderer and a danger to his own people indictment into an argument that essentially boiled down to, Saddam is a Bad Man who may potentially be dangerous and we need to remove him at any cost. This argument half-embraced a moral/humanitarian-imperative for the war, and half a defensive/strategic rationale. Neither really stood up at the time (why not apply more diplomatic pressure? wasn't containment working?), but were arguments that could be embraced broadly, across party lines in the U.S., palatable by heads of states of foreign governments. It's the floppy rationale that Christopher Hitchens still so lamely props up.
The second rationale, which was rarely engaged at the level of public policy, was a new application of the Domino Theory. Basically, we had an opportunity to rationalize an invasion of Iraq, we believed it would be easy to win the invasion and maintain a peace. There was a willing population in Iraq who would work to build a stable, pluralistic state that would be enriched by oil revenues which would (conveniently) flow to the West. In essence, we were rolling the dice in hopes of achieving the dual strategic goals of securing access to one of our major energy sources and fundamentally changing the political dynamics of the Middle East. I think this approach was strategically flawed to begin with, but its a moot point, since we've undermined any strategic opportunity through botched tactics.
What concerns me about the recent posturing with respect to Iraq (by the current Bush administration, by the Republican front-runners, by the lack of ferocious disavowals by certain leading Democrats, by resonant comments by certain Western European leaders) is that neither of the rationales provided above, nor any other discernible rationale, warrants a military engagement with Iran (or anybody else). War has not been effective in disrupting terrorist activities, not from the perspective of diminishing the consequence of terrorism on Western lives (in the sense of dying), not from the perspective of making our lives less full of terror (in the sense of being paranoid), not in winning hearts and minds of future terrorists or non-terrorists, not even in disrupting the flow and organization of terrorist networks. War has not been effective in changing the short-term or long-term political dynamics in the Middle East. So what rationale could such a large collection of people have in posing such a fundamentally unsound strategy?
What I reject, and to short-circuit KS's reply, is that this is driven by the power and greed of a handful of cronies. I don't think this explains the behavior of such a wide swath of people engaging in this debate, and if it does, then either all people in power or corrupt, or the corrupt people have so much power that it makes any concern or action about the issue irrelevant. So we'll just walk past that particular argument.
What concerns me more is a deeper line of thinking that basically says the population growth of Islam, both in terms of international demographics, as well as within many western countries, is an alarming force that we (leaders of Western countries) are in no position to stop. There is nothing within the fundamentally pluralist/capitalist view of the world that would allow us to squelch this growth. Moreover, Islam is fundamentally incompatible with our pluralist/capitalist view of the world. This is why, even though we are worried about the demographic shifts posed by India, China, and Latin America, we are not worried as concerned about those trends -- India, China, and Latin America have proven that they can embrace a pluralist/capitalist view of the world. We can work with those people. We can compete with those people on common terms.
So the issue here isn't racism, per se, or even a religious conflict, in terms of Christianity vs. Islam. But what it also isn't is a narrow war on terrorism, or on radicalized Islam. It is an effort to fundamentally destabilize any strong or coherent Islamic identity -- because if we cannot slow the rate of growth of Islamic populations, perhaps we can weaken the influence of Islam over those populations.
That's my crack-pot theory.
But it maybe explains nutty commercials like this one from the Romney campaign, which purposefully and cravenly conflates varying aspects of Islam -- setting the table for a us vs. them conversation not far off in our political future.
I read Seymour Hersh's October 8th story in the New Yorker warning of an ascending view within the Bush Administration that a confrontation with Iran is a possible, even necessary, strategic initiative. An excerpt:
In a series of public statements in recent months, President Bush and members of his Administration have redefined the war in Iraq, to an increasing degree, as a strategic battle between the United States and Iran. “Shia extremists, backed by Iran, are training Iraqis to carry out attacks on our forces and the Iraqi people,” Bush told the national convention of the American Legion in August. “The attacks on our bases and our troops by Iranian-supplied munitions have increased. . . . The Iranian regime must halt these actions. And, until it does, I will take actions necessary to protect our troops.” He then concluded, to applause, “I have authorized our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran’s murderous activities.”
The President’s position, and its corollary—that, if many of America’s problems in Iraq are the responsibility of Tehran, then the solution to them is to confront the Iranians—have taken firm hold in the Administration. This summer, the White House, pushed by the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney, requested that the Joint Chiefs of Staff redraw long-standing plans for a possible attack on Iran, according to former officials and government consultants. The focus of the plans had been a broad bombing attack, with targets including Iran’s known and suspected nuclear facilities and other military and infrastructure sites. Now the emphasis is on “surgical” strikes on Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities in Tehran and elsewhere, which, the Administration claims, have been the source of attacks on Americans in Iraq. What had been presented primarily as a counter-proliferation mission has been reconceived as counterterrorism.
The shift in targeting reflects three developments. First, the President and his senior advisers have concluded that their campaign to convince the American public that Iran poses an imminent nuclear threat has failed (unlike a similar campaign before the Iraq war), and that as a result there is not enough popular support for a major bombing campaign. The second development is that the White House has come to terms, in private, with the general consensus of the American intelligence community that Iran is at least five years away from obtaining a bomb. And, finally, there has been a growing recognition in Washington and throughout the Middle East that Iran is emerging as the geopolitical winner of the war in Iraq.
There is no level at which I understand such a set of actions as being a good idea, and at a personal level, if America were to act out against Iran without material provocation, I believe that I would have to leave the country, as the government's behavior, and our complicity in its acts, do not reflect any value or ideal that I cherish about America.
I say this as someone who, in 2003, could at least intellectually rationalize the invasion of Iraq as a massive geo-political gambit - one that has clearly failed. Not that I ever supported or believed in the war -- I thought it was wrong to begin with. But the "domino theory" at play in the build-up to the war, however divorced from reality, could, at least, be sophistically pursued to a logical end.
Not so any action against Iraq. We are militarily incapable of sustaining an engagement with Iran, and more so, I would expect opening a second front for our current armed forces might materially impact our capacity for preserving our national security (of course, I'm not expert in this). Strategically, attacking Iran will do nothing to dismantle the terrorist networks who may actually act out through violence in the short term. In the long term, entering a conflict with Iran will only reaffirm the impression, through the Muslim world and well-beyond, into much of the developing world, generally, that America is a capricious and violent power which carries neither logic nor empathy into its engagements with the non-white rest of the world. As has happened in Iraq, it will beget more antipathy for America, and "create" more terrorists. While saber-rattling may be happening in France and the UK, as well, such actions will no doubt strain the credibility of the US with the other international actors who are growing in importance, like China, India, or Brazil. Truthfully, these exercises in short-sighted bravado will leave a legacy of distrust, which we had only recently come close to mending in the aftermath of Vietnam and our fiascos in Latin America.
So what drives this? Honestly, I am confused, and, although this is rampant speculation, I am reminded of a conversation I was party to with some Indian relations and their friends in an out-of-the-way rental hall (for a baby shower) one afternoon last month in New Jersey. In this conversation, a lone young man, eating a plate of Indian food, rattled on about how "the Democrats were all corrupt," and "Bill Clinton was an idiot, would you rather live under Clinton's presidency or Bush's!" and "George Bush is the only guy who has the fucking balls to stand up to the Muslims!" All of this fairly insane ranting was informed, as far as I could tell, by an over-healthy dose of right-wing talk radio, a misguided machismo, a belief that Republicans were more likely to not tax this guy's money, and rooted in the very complex relationship that some Indian Hindus have with Muslims, derived from the particular political and cultural experiences of India. From this incoherence, one theme struck me, in the form of the somewhat apocryphal argument that became a reprise: "Do you know what the number one name for a baby in Engalnd is? Mohammmed!"
Is this the rub? Are we really enacting a war of civilizations? Is there a fear at work, at some conscious or sub-conscious level, of a Muslim world? Are we not at war with "the terrorists," or "radical Islam," but simply the whole of Islam itself? Not because we are in opposition to it, or it to us, but simply because it is not us?
Rampant speculation, I know, but as the perversity of our political discourse heightens, and as a truly fateful political act looms, I don't really know what else to think...
On Friday night, I went to the Director's Guild of America theater to listen to Errol Morris and Phillip Gourevitch discuss Abu Ghraib as part of the New Yorker Festival. Errol Morris is apparently making a documentary centered on the photographs that exposed the Abu Ghraib scandal, which, after watching a few clips of footage and listening to the talk, I think is much needed. The discussion itself wasn't terribly enlightening, but I found three points engaging:
1. Errol Morris raised a particular interest in the inability of photographs to convey the truth of the scenario they depict, because the focus on the subject matter within the frame of the photograph, and the lack of context for what is taking place outside of the frame (both literally, who is outside the frame, and more figuratively, in the sense of, how did this scene come to take place). While this is philosophically an interesting line of inquiry, it is drawn into sharp focus in the case of Abu Ghraib, where the seven soldiers, the seven "bad apples," who were brought to task for the photos at Abu Ghraib as a result of the photos they took and were captured in, while very little else about the system of torture and administrative neglect that apparently exists and is endorsed in our current war has really resonated in the culture, broadly. In fact, for much of the horror depicted in the photos, many of the seven soldiers wre directly involved. They only happened to get caught, by virtue of the photos they took and leaked. And as Morris highlighted the irony: these same photos, taken not by a low-level enlisted soldier, but by a photojournalist, would have been cause for international recognition.
2. The more compelling takeaway, for me, which was effectively, if implicitly, forwarded by Gourevitch during a couple of impassioned rhetorical flourishes in their conversation, drew attention to how truly deep the moral stain of the "interrogation" techniques employed by our government when considered against our self-image as a nation. And a greater sin than the actual acts of physical and psychological brutality and wanton and reckless policing that is enforced in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, and elsewhere in the name of our defense, or perhaps a sin that simply inculpates us more broadly, is our refusal to really acknowledge these acts of torture for what they are. The case made by Gourevitch and Morris is not only that the seven soldiers responsible for the photos were essentially scapegoated, deflecting scrutiny from the military policies and governance that allowed the scenes of torture to become real, but that the media, and the public, in focusing on those photos which showed these seven soldiers acting out stupid acts of ugly Americanism, further tainted with revolting/fascinating sexual overtones, failed to look hard at all of the other photos released at the same time, which were simple documents of brutality. Our fixation with the sensational allowed us to glide right past the real issue -- that we're (once again) enacting random and inhumane violence against helpless people (not good people, just helpless).
Watching this program on a Friday night, I found myself not necessarily learning anything new, but simply being reminded about how low we've fallen as a nation, and in terms of our national conscience, how little we seem to care.
If you are reading this and find yourself wondering what you missed through the week-long sensationalist coverage of Abu Ghraib that's faded into the background, check out the photos on Salon (some of which I've posted as an unwelcome but necessary reminder as part of this post), as well as the Wikipedia posting, which provides a number of useful references on the scandal.
As a coda, I post a video from TalkingPointsMemo, where the White House press secretary engages in the current political standard of prevarication, non-statements, and circular definitions as a smokescreen to avoid engaging in meaningful discourse. While the political actors and institutions drift further into meaninglessness and immorality, I am only left wondering how each of the individual's acting out these absurd roles manage to continue. What happened to shame?
Advertising is on the march. Yes, if there is one thing that is on the march, it is advertising -- far out-pacing anything else that might be on the march. From the subway to the bus shelter to the elevator to your mailbox to your e-mail box to your Google search results to your blogs to my blog, there it is, another opportunity to sell. So no wonder we've run out of ideas, of how to sell, of what to sell, and advertising has, once again, embraced the absurd.
Unfortunately, I can't vouch for the artfulness of this go round with the absurd. I just wanted to mention two recent offenders that have caught my attention.
If you ride the subway in New York City, you cannot avoid Windorphins. Brightly colored signage adorning the insides of cars, in bus shelters, on billboards - showing happy-looking Pokemon-like characters and bearing slogans that mean absolutely nothing. Nauseating? Yes. Cynical? Absolutely. Effective? Totally. I don't know how many subway cars I've been in when some young New Yorker asks, in that ever-flattening accent that young New Yorkers are increasingly seeming to have, "What Are Windorphins?" to which his/her friend might respond "I think we learned about it in class," and a third says, "Let's look it up on the Internet when we get to so-and-so's apartment." So, winner for Ebay. And, of course, I did come home one night to look up exactly what it is. So cheers to whatever ad agency fucker came up with this annoying campaign.
Next, the more charming and less invasive woot.com. What is woot? A website, that apparently sells only one product a day that popped up in the modest banner above my Gmails one day. Reluctantly, but unfailingly, I clicked on it. And, apparently, selling one product a day is an effective way of doing business. Per Woot's own site:
Woot.com is an online store and community that focuses on selling cool stuff cheap. It started as an employee-store slash market-testing type of place for an electronics distributor, but it's taken on a life of its own. We anticipate profitability by 2043 – by then we should be retired; someone smarter might take over and jack up the prices. Until then, we're still the lovable scamps we've always been. But don't take our word for it: see what the online community has to say at this Wikipedia article.
So, I guess the engine of innovation chugs on, fueled increasingly by banner ads and billboards. To badly appropriate a morbid Townes Van Zandt track, well, I guess its better than waitin' around to die...
Ignore for a moment that the clip above is an advertisement for Sky Movies, and focus on the small distortions in the landscape present throughout - no billboard advertisements. Empty canvases throughout Sao Paolo. As described in Businessweek:
A city stripped of advertising. No Posters. No flyers. No ads on buses. No ads on trains. No Adshels, no 48-sheets, no nothing.
It sounds like an Adbusters editorial: an activist's dream. But in São Paulo, Brazil, the dream has become a reality.
In September last year, the city's populist right-wing mayor, Gilberto Kassab, passed the so-called Clean City laws. Fed up with the "visual pollution" caused by the city's 8,000 billboard sites, many of them erected illegally, Kassab proposed a law banning all outdoor advertising. The skyscraper-sized hoardings that lined the city's streets would be wiped away at a stroke. And it was not just billboards that attracted his wrath: all forms of outdoor advertising were to be prohibited, including ads on taxis, on buses—even shopfronts were to be restricted, their signs limited to 1.5 metres for every 10 metres of frontage. "It is hard in a city of 11 million people to find enough equipment and personnel to determine what is and isn't legal," reasoned Kassab, "so we have decided to go all the way."
I want to whole-heartedly recommend the collection of New York Times essays and reporting that has been published under the title Class Matters. Ranging from fairly data-driven studies of how people's perception and the economic reality of class has changed in America over decades, to closely studied features of a wide range of archetypes that populate the current understandings of class in America. The reporting and analysis is excellent, and paired with often moving personal accounts that give weight and texture to the more abstract data, make this collection very compelling. The Times has also made much of the reporting available online, here, a site which I have not yet explored in detail. I expect to address many of the specific themes raised by different articles in the collection on their own terms, when I am a little less side-tracked by work, but definitely recommend this book - perfect subway or airplane reading, and thought-provoking through and through.
In one of history's more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission. According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate, is "an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation."
And I need to move to China. The audacity of their insane policies is a little awe-ing.
By the way, are we all agreed that if the Dalai Lama chooses to reincarnate in America, he's fucked? I mean, how is that kid going to see his way clear of Grand Theft Auto, junior high, and McDonald's. This is not the place to find enlightenment. This is the place to invent a crazy religion out of nothing.
