One of the big hullabaloos during the campaign was around health care – Obama wanted to essentially socialize it, making coverage available through the government and force insurance companies to bring prices down, while McCain wanted to continue using the current system but give people money to pay for it. Opposition to Obama shrieked at the idea of socialism and opposition to McCain said the amount of money he proposed wouldn't cover the costs and many people would be worse off. For all of the Republican yakking about free markets and how much better everything is when it isn't run by the government, we sure have made a mess of health care. Not a single person in this country thinks our health care system works, except maybe the insurance companies (who have made out like bandits in a bigger and more blatant scam than the current home-loan debacle). Noam Chomsky said health care has long been the number one issue of the American people but only started to get talked about when big companies began complaining about the high cost of providing coverage. There are few instances in recent history when the complaints of companies are the same as of the people and we're at a moment right now where so many things are broken that if we take the time, we can put them together right and turn a bad situation into an incredible opportunity.
One of those broken things is our consumer-based economy. 76% of our GDP is made up of spending on consumer goods and they're related like a spiral. When spending is up, the economy does better, more jobs get created, people have more disposable income and they shop more. But when spending is down, like in a recession, the economy does worse, jobs get cut and people stop spending, increasing the speed of the downward spinning. Over the past few months, we've watched our lawmakers flailing around crying wolf and begging for bailout packages and stimulus packages without any real strategy. From where I sit, and I'm sorry for this analogy but it reminds me of a guy trying to regain his erection when the moment has already past. You can spend the next half hour working to get it back only to find that your partner doesn't care anymore, or you can just go do something else. I would like to propose that we do something else. I'm tired of watching my representatives trying to pump life into the economy by throwing money at it. The money doesn't build anything that will stimulate a long-term upward spiral, it might give us a short boost but then we'll fall limp again.
The thing that everyone is talking about is green tech and for a good reason. The warnings about global warming are getting louder and louder and to anyone paying attention, they make everything else seem a little trivial. The governor of California just issued a directive to the state to start preparing for rising sea levels and a new study from the University of California shows the state losing trillions of dollars of real estate to fires. Among the other expensive disasters in store for us are drought, energy shortages, earthquakes, loss in tourism revenue and massive agricultural losses. To not change RIGHT NOW is the dumbest thing this country can do. We voted change into the White House but as Obama keeps reminding us, it's also us who will have to change. The whole world is registering the effects of global warming and so why not rebuild our economy around an industry that is not at odds with what the people need, an industry that will not only grow our economic future but will also keep us from financial ruin? We already know that there aren't enough fossil fuels in the world to meet the future energy demands of the U.S., China and India and while I'm sure we'll keep fighting over oil until every last drop is gone, why not also implement other technologies? We can't afford to wait and the acquisition and consumption of oil is largely responsible for global warming anyway.
So here's an idea. Let's do two drastic things right now to change our economy. First, let's socialize medicine and kill the insurance companies or make them work for us instead of the other way around. If we remove the burden of health care from employers, we will make huge strides towards keeping businesses here and maybe even luring some back. Second, let's level the energy playing field and create huge financial incentives for corporations to go green. If we did those two things, we could massively grow the green sector – putting new products on the market, giving unemployed people jobs, slashing emissions and pollution, promoting innovation and retaining more of our smart people – and relieve the country of the massive health care burden – putting more disposable income into the hands of Americans, increasing company profits and decreasing fraudulent behavior. President Bush says we don't have to give up on free people and free markets, and I agree. There are times, however, when we should do something else. This is one of those times.
Showing posts with label economy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label economy. Show all posts
Monday, November 17, 2008
Monday, September 29, 2008
Bailout or power grab?
I've been swimming 2-3 times per week, trying to get back in shape. I love exercising but it doesn't happen unless I have an easy to maintain routine and for the moment I've found it. Lunchtime lap swim at the community pool. It takes me about an hour to go, swim and come back and I love swimming, I grew up swimming. One of the other joys is listening to NPR there and on the way back, even though I plan to someday ride my bike (it's about two miles). I was thinking last week about what an exciting time we're living in. For better or worse, this is truly an exciting millennium so far. It's easy to get dismayed by the widening gap in ideology, lifestyle and economic status between Americans, but at the same time, these are the conditions from which great change can come.
Every day, driving to the pool, there's someone on the radio talking about the current economic situation. Every single person has a different piece of the puzzle. There is honest-to-god debate going on. The war in Iraq has been reduced, over the years, to a couple of soundbites and a position of either being for the war, okay with torture and willing to forgo civil liberties or being against the war, not okay with torture and unwilling to forgo civil liberties. But this current crisis is fresh and this time people and are not falling for the alarm bells and just handing over the keys to the store. This morning in the New York Times, there was a graphic of the Dow falling and a headline about yet another big bank consolidation. Then, this afternoon, the Dow falls even more and is blamed on the house not passing the bailout bill.
Now I understand that the banks want this to sound confusing so that we don't really understand what's happening. It's funny because I've been watching episodes of Hercule Poirot (from BBC) every day since landing at my mom's house and I now figure out the mysteries in the first few minutes. Let's look at the facts the way Poirot would:
1) The current disaster was predicted by many people over the last several years which means that the stage was being set for a certain disaster and we can only assume, either intentionally set or intentionally not averted.
2) Several big banks fail because of years of high-risk practices that have made many people in the industry very wealthy, leaving homeowners and taxpayers, high and dry.
3) The former CEO of one of the failed banks works with the Federal Reserve (a central bank created with precisely this kind of situation in mind) to devise a plan in which the federal government bails out these failed banks. They predict a massive collapse if that does not happen.
4) Nothing is done to help or protect homeowners that are losing their homes.
4) Republicans vote against the bill and the stock market crashes at precisely that moment.
There are a couple of things about this situation that are very suspicious. Hercule Poirot, a fictional character, could himself arrive from the 1930's and ask these questions:
First, if the current disaster was predicted, why was nothing done about it? The Republicans favor deregulation and do not support government run businesses. This explains why they are voting against the bail out bill and it explains why no regulations were put in place. Their policy is to allow business to operate in a free market which means if a business fails - and that includes banks - it is not the government's job to bail them out. Poirot might speculate that nothing was done to allow certain people to get very rich. In his world, almost all crime is motivated by money.
Second, the fact that it is big banks failing – banks that indulged in risky practices – instead of an overall economic collapse seems to indicate that in fact the economy is not failing, it is just these banks that are failing. But what has their demise produced? A massive consolidation of banks, increasing their financial power. The bail out plan would further empower these banks by wiping out their bad debt and giving them a superior advantage over all the other banks that acted responsibly. And who devised this plan? The former CEO of one of these failed banks. Poirot would definitely be interviewing Henry Paulson right now.
Third, the government already bailed out several institutions, promising each time that it would stop the bleeding, but it didn't. So what are the chances that Wall Street would hang on, even performing well last week and wait until this day to crash, perfectly coinciding with the rejection of the bill? It would be easy to wonder if perhaps there are people who can pull strings to make things happen, kind of like how the gas prices rise and fall to perfectly coincide with certain political movements in this country. And if that is the case, then who is to say that this entire event isn't the product of certain strings being pulled so that it will happen this way? We all know that Bush's Iraq invasion was planned and on the table shortly after he took office. He only needed an inciting incident to put the plan in place. Couldn't it be argued that this collapse is merely an inciting incident to allow a massive consolidation of power by the banking industry?
Someone commented on the article about the Citigroup acquisition that bigger, fewer banks would be easier to regulate. Is that why it was so easy to regulate them to avoid this disaster? Let me repeat a story of how I was robbed by Bank of America. Although only $1,300, it perfectly illustrates how powerless the "little man" becomes against a big bank. In a nutshell, the money was taken from my account and BofA claimed no responsibility for it, nor did they show any interest in figuring out how it was stolen. I relentlessly campaigned to get it back and eventually did, immediately moving my account to a small credit union. In the end, it really isn't about regulation, it's about power. These banks are already incredibly powerful and have more power over our money than we do. A friend of mine wrote a very interesting blog post looking at the situation not from an economic standpoint but for what it is really is, a power grab. What do you think?
Every day, driving to the pool, there's someone on the radio talking about the current economic situation. Every single person has a different piece of the puzzle. There is honest-to-god debate going on. The war in Iraq has been reduced, over the years, to a couple of soundbites and a position of either being for the war, okay with torture and willing to forgo civil liberties or being against the war, not okay with torture and unwilling to forgo civil liberties. But this current crisis is fresh and this time people and are not falling for the alarm bells and just handing over the keys to the store. This morning in the New York Times, there was a graphic of the Dow falling and a headline about yet another big bank consolidation. Then, this afternoon, the Dow falls even more and is blamed on the house not passing the bailout bill.
Now I understand that the banks want this to sound confusing so that we don't really understand what's happening. It's funny because I've been watching episodes of Hercule Poirot (from BBC) every day since landing at my mom's house and I now figure out the mysteries in the first few minutes. Let's look at the facts the way Poirot would:
1) The current disaster was predicted by many people over the last several years which means that the stage was being set for a certain disaster and we can only assume, either intentionally set or intentionally not averted.
2) Several big banks fail because of years of high-risk practices that have made many people in the industry very wealthy, leaving homeowners and taxpayers, high and dry.
3) The former CEO of one of the failed banks works with the Federal Reserve (a central bank created with precisely this kind of situation in mind) to devise a plan in which the federal government bails out these failed banks. They predict a massive collapse if that does not happen.
4) Nothing is done to help or protect homeowners that are losing their homes.
4) Republicans vote against the bill and the stock market crashes at precisely that moment.
There are a couple of things about this situation that are very suspicious. Hercule Poirot, a fictional character, could himself arrive from the 1930's and ask these questions:
First, if the current disaster was predicted, why was nothing done about it? The Republicans favor deregulation and do not support government run businesses. This explains why they are voting against the bail out bill and it explains why no regulations were put in place. Their policy is to allow business to operate in a free market which means if a business fails - and that includes banks - it is not the government's job to bail them out. Poirot might speculate that nothing was done to allow certain people to get very rich. In his world, almost all crime is motivated by money.
Second, the fact that it is big banks failing – banks that indulged in risky practices – instead of an overall economic collapse seems to indicate that in fact the economy is not failing, it is just these banks that are failing. But what has their demise produced? A massive consolidation of banks, increasing their financial power. The bail out plan would further empower these banks by wiping out their bad debt and giving them a superior advantage over all the other banks that acted responsibly. And who devised this plan? The former CEO of one of these failed banks. Poirot would definitely be interviewing Henry Paulson right now.
Third, the government already bailed out several institutions, promising each time that it would stop the bleeding, but it didn't. So what are the chances that Wall Street would hang on, even performing well last week and wait until this day to crash, perfectly coinciding with the rejection of the bill? It would be easy to wonder if perhaps there are people who can pull strings to make things happen, kind of like how the gas prices rise and fall to perfectly coincide with certain political movements in this country. And if that is the case, then who is to say that this entire event isn't the product of certain strings being pulled so that it will happen this way? We all know that Bush's Iraq invasion was planned and on the table shortly after he took office. He only needed an inciting incident to put the plan in place. Couldn't it be argued that this collapse is merely an inciting incident to allow a massive consolidation of power by the banking industry?
Someone commented on the article about the Citigroup acquisition that bigger, fewer banks would be easier to regulate. Is that why it was so easy to regulate them to avoid this disaster? Let me repeat a story of how I was robbed by Bank of America. Although only $1,300, it perfectly illustrates how powerless the "little man" becomes against a big bank. In a nutshell, the money was taken from my account and BofA claimed no responsibility for it, nor did they show any interest in figuring out how it was stolen. I relentlessly campaigned to get it back and eventually did, immediately moving my account to a small credit union. In the end, it really isn't about regulation, it's about power. These banks are already incredibly powerful and have more power over our money than we do. A friend of mine wrote a very interesting blog post looking at the situation not from an economic standpoint but for what it is really is, a power grab. What do you think?
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
The sky is falling!
About a year ago, when I was taking the bus down to San Jose every morning for my job, I subscribed to The Economist to have regular reading materials. I let my 6-month subscription lapse after noticing that every issue was filled with doom and gloom. At one point, though, I was going to blog about how little economists actually know and understand about how "the economy" works. I put it in quotes because what is it really? It's like the human body in that it's more complicated than anyone even realizes. We develop drugs to treat disease but because drugs only address symptoms, they have multitudes of side effects, some so severe that it's sometimes advisable not to even take the drug. Very little in medicine is holistic in that it addresses the health of the entire ecosystem (the body). This is how I see the economy being treated right now, like it has cancer and we're just going to give it a massive dose of chemo even though chemo has drastic side effects and, depending on the health of the subject, sometimes only makes things worse.
I had saved an in-depth interview with Ben Bernanke about the levers he was pulling a year ago. There must have been over 20 quotes that basically said that no one really knows how the whole thing works. He just either turns up or turns down the volume on various dials and sees what happens. The problem, he admitted, with that approach is that it takes time to see the results so every adjustment is followed by a period of growth or decline before another adjustment can be made. Even then, it's not reliable to assume that if raising interest rates was bad then lowering them must be good because everything affects something else. In every interview on NPR lately, I keep hearing that the system is far more complex than it used to be and "we're just discovering that now." The truth, I believe, is no one knows how it works. I wish I understood it just a little, because I feel like this whole thing is being grossly mishandled.
It eerily looks like the 9/11 scenario to me. In both instances, there were many warnings that a disaster was coming and nothing was done to prevent it from happening. I've been reading articles for a couple of years now about an impending housing crisis. These people making the loans knew there was a chance that the whole thing would blow up. They knew, but they didn't care. Why should they? There were huge profits to be made and like the Enron fiasco, some people still made out like bandits while the entire company lost their jobs and savings plans. Secondly, after the disaster, instead of investigating how it happened and figuring out how to prevent it from happening again, our leadership asked to have total control without any restrictions. This is no time for asking questions, they said! Instead, they invaded two countries, locked up hundreds of people without rights, restricted our civil liberties, skirted accountability and spent billions of dollars (not on our economy and infrastructure) and seven years later, we're still fighting the "war on terror" with no end in sight. How do we know this "bailout" won't be more of the same? I can't help wonder if this constant comparison to the Great Depression isn't just a way of scaring us into making a bad decision.
I heard the plan described as basically a way for these financial institutions to unload bad debt without any scrutiny and without having to make any promises in return about how they'll conduct business in the future. These are the same companies that have previously been treated with a "hands off" approach because the government shouldn't interfere, right? This is what we always hear about how the "free market" works and how it rights itself when unrestricted. Kind of like the explanation that when left to the market, the global warming crisis will just magically right itself without any interference from the government. So why does that approach suddenly get turned on its head when these companies, unfettered, behave badly and put everyone in a bad spot? Now they expect the government to bail them out? Bush says to just fork up the cash and not give any lectures. He threatens congress with being responsible for a total collapse of the economy if they don't ask fast enough, if they stop to ask questions or make demands, for instance. And yet no one's asking the question that should be asked which is why it's so difficult to afford a house in the first place.
There has been some speculation that Wall Street should just take the hit. People say that this could go on for much longer than we think. Bailout after bailout after bailout. Has anyone actually done an analysis on the long-term effects of this approach? Certainly, a parent could tell you that bad behavior that goes unpunished, and in fact rewarded, only encourages more bad behavior. Wasn't this the argument when last year, the government made it more difficult for individuals to file for bankruptcy? Why should it be easier for financial institutions to be bailed out while the executives make out with salaries of $10 million and more? Oh no, though, they say this is all for the taxpayer. It's to protect us from total disaster. But don't ask how it works.
I had saved an in-depth interview with Ben Bernanke about the levers he was pulling a year ago. There must have been over 20 quotes that basically said that no one really knows how the whole thing works. He just either turns up or turns down the volume on various dials and sees what happens. The problem, he admitted, with that approach is that it takes time to see the results so every adjustment is followed by a period of growth or decline before another adjustment can be made. Even then, it's not reliable to assume that if raising interest rates was bad then lowering them must be good because everything affects something else. In every interview on NPR lately, I keep hearing that the system is far more complex than it used to be and "we're just discovering that now." The truth, I believe, is no one knows how it works. I wish I understood it just a little, because I feel like this whole thing is being grossly mishandled.
It eerily looks like the 9/11 scenario to me. In both instances, there were many warnings that a disaster was coming and nothing was done to prevent it from happening. I've been reading articles for a couple of years now about an impending housing crisis. These people making the loans knew there was a chance that the whole thing would blow up. They knew, but they didn't care. Why should they? There were huge profits to be made and like the Enron fiasco, some people still made out like bandits while the entire company lost their jobs and savings plans. Secondly, after the disaster, instead of investigating how it happened and figuring out how to prevent it from happening again, our leadership asked to have total control without any restrictions. This is no time for asking questions, they said! Instead, they invaded two countries, locked up hundreds of people without rights, restricted our civil liberties, skirted accountability and spent billions of dollars (not on our economy and infrastructure) and seven years later, we're still fighting the "war on terror" with no end in sight. How do we know this "bailout" won't be more of the same? I can't help wonder if this constant comparison to the Great Depression isn't just a way of scaring us into making a bad decision.
I heard the plan described as basically a way for these financial institutions to unload bad debt without any scrutiny and without having to make any promises in return about how they'll conduct business in the future. These are the same companies that have previously been treated with a "hands off" approach because the government shouldn't interfere, right? This is what we always hear about how the "free market" works and how it rights itself when unrestricted. Kind of like the explanation that when left to the market, the global warming crisis will just magically right itself without any interference from the government. So why does that approach suddenly get turned on its head when these companies, unfettered, behave badly and put everyone in a bad spot? Now they expect the government to bail them out? Bush says to just fork up the cash and not give any lectures. He threatens congress with being responsible for a total collapse of the economy if they don't ask fast enough, if they stop to ask questions or make demands, for instance. And yet no one's asking the question that should be asked which is why it's so difficult to afford a house in the first place.
There has been some speculation that Wall Street should just take the hit. People say that this could go on for much longer than we think. Bailout after bailout after bailout. Has anyone actually done an analysis on the long-term effects of this approach? Certainly, a parent could tell you that bad behavior that goes unpunished, and in fact rewarded, only encourages more bad behavior. Wasn't this the argument when last year, the government made it more difficult for individuals to file for bankruptcy? Why should it be easier for financial institutions to be bailed out while the executives make out with salaries of $10 million and more? Oh no, though, they say this is all for the taxpayer. It's to protect us from total disaster. But don't ask how it works.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
All eyes on China
I got a request to blog more frequently. It very sweet and it made me smile but in order to do it, I’ll have to post more of my silly thoughts while I chew on those that surround my days and weeks and sometimes months, like what I’m thinking right now about China.
This month’s issue of National Geographic is all about China, every page. It's excellent. I love the timing of this magazine and I think they’re right on; in the very near future, the whole world is going to be looking at China. Not just the Chinese government that suppresses rights and imprisons those that speak out against it and not just the China that’s buying the world’s debt, investing in resources in Africa and South America and not just the China that’s hosting the Olympics.
I have yet to find someone who agrees with me but I’ll even go one further. Not only will the world be all about China and the Chinese people, soon, it will no longer be all about the United States. It’s already happening in conversations with friends, relatives and my parents. I can’t get into any conversation without someone bringing up what China is doing. All of a sudden, they’re in everyone’s country and everyone’s business.
There's a great article on WorldChanging about a collaboration between photographer Paolo Woods and journalist Serge Michel at FotoGrafia, the 7th edition of international festival of photography which runs until May 25th in Rome. Their presentation follows China's industrial neo-colonialism in Africa. The photos of Chinese running factories and building local economies and Chinese being taught by Africans in their classrooms are amazing. You can see all the photos from China's Wild West under stories, on Paolo Wood's website:
China is home to one of the oldest continuous civilizations on earth. They are by far the most populous country, making up 20% of the world’s population. There are more people on the Internet in China than in any other country, including the U.S. They are expected to overtake us as the world’s largest economy in less than 10 years. Over 30% of the population call themselves religious and that number is growing. 45% of women say they don't want to give up their careers to have children.
They are the world leaders in manufacturing, and in a few short decades, they have grown a rich class and an enormous middle class with healthy appetites for domestic and foreign goods and resources. They have quickly embraced the West’s competition for success and all the stress and malaise that goes with it. They still cannot freely surf the Internet or speak their mind but those days are numbered. As they continue to embrace technology, art and imported culture, they’ll find themselves in a much more visible role in the world struggle for human rights.
Most Chinese in school are now studying English and their English speakers outnumber those in the United States. There’s a mass migration going on of people from the country to the city and with increased wealth and population density comes a frenzy of information sharing and a demand for more freedom. I predict that in the next few years China will have a cultural explosion, exporting and importing people and culture with the same voracity that they have adopted everything else.
China is dealing with the issues we’re all dealing with, except in all cases their situation is already more dire. They need to provide healthcare for the biggest baby boomer population in the world, a generation that has less children to provide for them due to the one-child policy. They have the highest statistic for air pollution related deaths, have built more mega dams than anywhere in the world, and have deforested and leveled mountains to the point of serious environmental erosion. They’re only now beginning to embrace archeological digs and animal conservation. They’re dealing with a rapidly growing disparity between rich and poor, massive urbanization, and a serious shortage of natural resources.
Natural disasters are a constant but this time the Chinese are starting to ask questions like why so many schools collapsed in the recent earthquake. We’re already seeing a comparison between how China handled their rescue efforts compared to the disasters in the rest of the world. The incredible level of humanitarian aid offered by regular citizens has put the government in an uncomfortable position. No longer a closed society, there are at least three Flickr groups with photos from the earthquake: china 512 earthquake, Sichuan Earthquake 2008 and Just The News (were you there? - if not, don't add!)
They’ve turned the spotlight on themselves by bidding to host the Olympics and I’m afraid it isn’t going off for a while. I predict that the era of all eyes on America is coming to an end. The question is, will American eyes remain closed to the outside world or will we begin to learn by observing others?
This month’s issue of National Geographic is all about China, every page. It's excellent. I love the timing of this magazine and I think they’re right on; in the very near future, the whole world is going to be looking at China. Not just the Chinese government that suppresses rights and imprisons those that speak out against it and not just the China that’s buying the world’s debt, investing in resources in Africa and South America and not just the China that’s hosting the Olympics.
I have yet to find someone who agrees with me but I’ll even go one further. Not only will the world be all about China and the Chinese people, soon, it will no longer be all about the United States. It’s already happening in conversations with friends, relatives and my parents. I can’t get into any conversation without someone bringing up what China is doing. All of a sudden, they’re in everyone’s country and everyone’s business.
There's a great article on WorldChanging about a collaboration between photographer Paolo Woods and journalist Serge Michel at FotoGrafia, the 7th edition of international festival of photography which runs until May 25th in Rome. Their presentation follows China's industrial neo-colonialism in Africa. The photos of Chinese running factories and building local economies and Chinese being taught by Africans in their classrooms are amazing. You can see all the photos from China's Wild West under stories, on Paolo Wood's website:
China is home to one of the oldest continuous civilizations on earth. They are by far the most populous country, making up 20% of the world’s population. There are more people on the Internet in China than in any other country, including the U.S. They are expected to overtake us as the world’s largest economy in less than 10 years. Over 30% of the population call themselves religious and that number is growing. 45% of women say they don't want to give up their careers to have children.
They are the world leaders in manufacturing, and in a few short decades, they have grown a rich class and an enormous middle class with healthy appetites for domestic and foreign goods and resources. They have quickly embraced the West’s competition for success and all the stress and malaise that goes with it. They still cannot freely surf the Internet or speak their mind but those days are numbered. As they continue to embrace technology, art and imported culture, they’ll find themselves in a much more visible role in the world struggle for human rights.
Most Chinese in school are now studying English and their English speakers outnumber those in the United States. There’s a mass migration going on of people from the country to the city and with increased wealth and population density comes a frenzy of information sharing and a demand for more freedom. I predict that in the next few years China will have a cultural explosion, exporting and importing people and culture with the same voracity that they have adopted everything else.
China is dealing with the issues we’re all dealing with, except in all cases their situation is already more dire. They need to provide healthcare for the biggest baby boomer population in the world, a generation that has less children to provide for them due to the one-child policy. They have the highest statistic for air pollution related deaths, have built more mega dams than anywhere in the world, and have deforested and leveled mountains to the point of serious environmental erosion. They’re only now beginning to embrace archeological digs and animal conservation. They’re dealing with a rapidly growing disparity between rich and poor, massive urbanization, and a serious shortage of natural resources.
Natural disasters are a constant but this time the Chinese are starting to ask questions like why so many schools collapsed in the recent earthquake. We’re already seeing a comparison between how China handled their rescue efforts compared to the disasters in the rest of the world. The incredible level of humanitarian aid offered by regular citizens has put the government in an uncomfortable position. No longer a closed society, there are at least three Flickr groups with photos from the earthquake: china 512 earthquake, Sichuan Earthquake 2008 and Just The News (were you there? - if not, don't add!)
They’ve turned the spotlight on themselves by bidding to host the Olympics and I’m afraid it isn’t going off for a while. I predict that the era of all eyes on America is coming to an end. The question is, will American eyes remain closed to the outside world or will we begin to learn by observing others?
Sunday, March 30, 2008
A post I started in December
I watched Local Hero the other night, a fantastic little Scottish comedy from 1983. It was kind of a cult-favorite of my parents and for some reason I don't remember having ever seen it. I think I refused to watch it as a teenager out of some kind of protest. If they liked a movie, the only way you could get them to stop trying to get you to see it, was to watch it (and love it). I held out for 24 years but turns out, it's a great film - simple and totally ahead of it's time. A rally cry for what makes us happy in this world; it isn't money, it isn't power, it isn't prestige. It's friends, love, nature and a sense of belonging in the world.
I've never been much of a consumer. My dad was the king of what we didn't need, he actually had his priorities straight in a lot of ways. He spent money on travel and experiences for us, but we never got the jeans we wanted, the toys we wanted and we were were the last ones on the block to get a microwave, VCR and a host of other things deemed necessary by our neighbors. That dialogue ran in my head to the extreme until the last couple of years when I've let myself buy things that make my life better. But I still question my need for everything. Even things I already own.
In 1998, I made a decision that I couldn't live my life making people buy stuff. That's when I moved to LA to be an actress. One of the pinnacles of success in that pursuit is getting a commercial agent. Imagine my surprise to realize even in this endeavor, I was hoping to make a living off of selling stuff. It's nearly impossible, working in the U.S. to NOT have a job that makes people buy stuff, because that's what we do. A friend of mine sent me a short film to watch, The Story of Stuff, that while it sounds like it's made for seventh graders (and maybe it is) makes a really good point: We made this culture and this economy and we can unmake it.
Then I heard an interview on the radio with Judith Levine, who published Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping about the year that she and her husband decided not to be consumers. It reminds me of the day in Seattle, more than ten years ago, that my boyfriend and I decided to try not eating for a day. It was a spontaneous thing, we woke and up and said, let's fast! We lasted about three hours. We wandered around town and literally couldn't think of anything to do that didn't involve eating. So we went to our favorite vegetarian cafe and had our usual lunch but it tasted better that day than it ever had. See, even going without for a short period of time raises our enjoyment level when we do consume. Clearly our national hobby of consumption has not made us the happiest nation on earth.
I don't think we need to stop purchasing altogether but I do think we can should be much more conscious of what we think we "need" and recalibrate. Even "green" has become consumerized and we're being encouraged to offset our guilt by green things that we clearly don't need. It's like they've just replaced the heroin with morphine. The catch for me is that I love marketing. I think I'm good at sharing information and changing people's perceptions and behaviors and it's easier to make a living using that skill in advertising than anything else. One of these days, though, I would like to try my hand at marketing for something good.
I've never been much of a consumer. My dad was the king of what we didn't need, he actually had his priorities straight in a lot of ways. He spent money on travel and experiences for us, but we never got the jeans we wanted, the toys we wanted and we were were the last ones on the block to get a microwave, VCR and a host of other things deemed necessary by our neighbors. That dialogue ran in my head to the extreme until the last couple of years when I've let myself buy things that make my life better. But I still question my need for everything. Even things I already own.
In 1998, I made a decision that I couldn't live my life making people buy stuff. That's when I moved to LA to be an actress. One of the pinnacles of success in that pursuit is getting a commercial agent. Imagine my surprise to realize even in this endeavor, I was hoping to make a living off of selling stuff. It's nearly impossible, working in the U.S. to NOT have a job that makes people buy stuff, because that's what we do. A friend of mine sent me a short film to watch, The Story of Stuff, that while it sounds like it's made for seventh graders (and maybe it is) makes a really good point: We made this culture and this economy and we can unmake it.
Then I heard an interview on the radio with Judith Levine, who published Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping about the year that she and her husband decided not to be consumers. It reminds me of the day in Seattle, more than ten years ago, that my boyfriend and I decided to try not eating for a day. It was a spontaneous thing, we woke and up and said, let's fast! We lasted about three hours. We wandered around town and literally couldn't think of anything to do that didn't involve eating. So we went to our favorite vegetarian cafe and had our usual lunch but it tasted better that day than it ever had. See, even going without for a short period of time raises our enjoyment level when we do consume. Clearly our national hobby of consumption has not made us the happiest nation on earth.
I don't think we need to stop purchasing altogether but I do think we can should be much more conscious of what we think we "need" and recalibrate. Even "green" has become consumerized and we're being encouraged to offset our guilt by green things that we clearly don't need. It's like they've just replaced the heroin with morphine. The catch for me is that I love marketing. I think I'm good at sharing information and changing people's perceptions and behaviors and it's easier to make a living using that skill in advertising than anything else. One of these days, though, I would like to try my hand at marketing for something good.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Let's start a village
I'm going to do that mashup thing again where I look at a bunch of dots and posit whether they're connected. Here's the first dot. In the 1970's James Lovelock, a chemist and inventor, then working for NASA, published a radical theory: The earth is not a magically self-regulating planet that has always been and will always be, it is a living organism of which we are all a part. It was the first time people were asked to think about our role on this planet as something other than just beneficiaries of all it has to offer. In his latest book, "Revenge of Gaia," Lovelock declares that humans are doomed, global warming is irreversible and by the end of the century, over 6 billion people will die of droughts, floods, disease and hunger.
In an article in Rolling Stone, Lovelock talks about the ones who will survive by recalling a story about a fire on a plane. Everyone stayed in their seats as they were told, frozen, while the few that survived did so by crawling over their fellow passengers and climbing out the windows. The majority of people are going to stay seated during this crisis and die in their seats. It made me think of The Terminator and how Sarah Connor, knowing what was coming, started preparing herself for the fight ahead. According to Lovelock, there are only two ways to survive this - either by going primitive or by going super high-tech. I think it may be a combination of both but the people who can live in a more primitive way, by growing their own food and creating their own energy, will be at a great advantage.
Which brings me to the second dot. An article in National Geographic was talking about the shanty towns near Bombay and then a friend recalled the same story, something he'd witnessed in Mexico City. Enormous populations of people, hundreds of thousands, have built cities from the ground up, by themselves with no developers, no infrastructure, no government support. While poor, these communities are thriving. They have power, they have water, they've built industries and services, their places are clean and nicely kept and they are carbon neutral. These are the greenest cities in the world; everything is recycled or reused and there is no excess. If there is any kind of collapse in our energy supply or our economies, these communities will be impacted the least. Apparently one in six people lives in a squatter town and that number is expected to triple by 2050.
Then I heard one of the most exciting ideas yet in a PopTech lecture by Adrian Bowyer, a challenge to the concept of money. If every home had a small robot that could manufacture any item - a comb, a bowl, a fork - from a resin made of starch grown in the backyard (i.e. corn or potatoes) and those items went right back into the earth when we were done with them, would we have the same need for factories and therefore, money? He quotes science fiction writer Iain Banks who said that "money is a sign of poverty" to illustrate that we would be richer if we didn't need money at all.
Finally, I keep having a certain conversation with my friends about how disillusioned we are with work and its role in our life. These are people scattered all over the country who don’t know each other. They’re all about 30-45, some married, some with children, some homeowners but what we all have in common is that we grew up middle-class, we went to college and we have to work for a living. A rough illustration of who these people are:
- A single guy in D.C. who likes photography, traveling and Jazz. Works in film restoration, which he likes, but there's not much work and it pays very little.
- A recently married woman in North Carolina, about to have a baby, who works as a graphic designer. Loves designing but hates working all the time.
- A new mother and writer in Santa Monica who has to hire two nannies so that she can work when she'd rather spend the time with her baby but can't afford to.
- A single guy in Los Angeles who works a web producer. He loves computers so spends his time in front of one any way but continually has jobs that require 60-hour work weeks.
- A woman in New York working as a teacher whose job is so stressful, she couldn't do it without her live-in boyfriend helping with house work and daily chores.
- A single woman in San Francisco who has spent the last ten years pursuing a career but finds herself unfulfilled by the work.
- A bi-coastal young man, recently out of college, who's already frustrated with the fact that work takes him away from the projects he feels passionate about.
- A woman with a teenage daughter in the Bay Area who finds herself more motivated than everyone she works for and can't figure out how to dumb herself down.
- A single woman in Los Angeles who wants to help people in her native Cambodia but makes ends meet by working at an interactive agency.
We don’t have enough time to do what we enjoy because we spend our lives working and yet don’t make enough money to buy more time. In the jobs, we’re frustrated with others’ lack of commitment or in the company itself and feel that we deserve better. But in the pursuit of a better job in a better company we finally come to realize that work does not fulfill us enough to justify the time spent doing it. Most of us work to create or promote the sale of goods, goods that we use the money we earn to buy. By any measure, it’s not an efficient use of our time.
My friends are ready to quit this rat race of working and buying and are ready to move somewhere quieter, live a simpler life and grow our own food. The problem, I suppose, is that we’re all cultural people who need other people and art to stimulate us and aren’t really the kind of folk you find in rural towns. Back in April of 2007, I wrote that servitude sucks and that we've been duped because more "primitive" societies enjoy abundant free time. Now, it seems, I'm hearing the same thing from everyone: How do we get to a place where LIVING is what we spend most of our time doing instead of WORKING?
And connecting all these dots, I had an idea. A communal village of like-minded people. We want to grow our own food and learn to make our own energy and live without cars. We want to raise each other's children and imagine a society of the future and sometimes watch 30 Rock. Do you think it's possible? It would have to be in Canada, somewhere north that will be less impacted by global warming. I saw a fantastic photo in National Geographic (a similar one I found on the web is here) that shows a village in Israel, built to be egalitarian in that everyone has equal access to school, church, and other community buildings, in the center of town, but everyone also owns a piece of land, on the outside of town. It's limited as to how many people can live there, about 750, and everyone is independent and yet totally connected to each other.
It looks good. It looks real good. What do you think y'all? Ready to buy some property in Alberta?
In an article in Rolling Stone, Lovelock talks about the ones who will survive by recalling a story about a fire on a plane. Everyone stayed in their seats as they were told, frozen, while the few that survived did so by crawling over their fellow passengers and climbing out the windows. The majority of people are going to stay seated during this crisis and die in their seats. It made me think of The Terminator and how Sarah Connor, knowing what was coming, started preparing herself for the fight ahead. According to Lovelock, there are only two ways to survive this - either by going primitive or by going super high-tech. I think it may be a combination of both but the people who can live in a more primitive way, by growing their own food and creating their own energy, will be at a great advantage.
Which brings me to the second dot. An article in National Geographic was talking about the shanty towns near Bombay and then a friend recalled the same story, something he'd witnessed in Mexico City. Enormous populations of people, hundreds of thousands, have built cities from the ground up, by themselves with no developers, no infrastructure, no government support. While poor, these communities are thriving. They have power, they have water, they've built industries and services, their places are clean and nicely kept and they are carbon neutral. These are the greenest cities in the world; everything is recycled or reused and there is no excess. If there is any kind of collapse in our energy supply or our economies, these communities will be impacted the least. Apparently one in six people lives in a squatter town and that number is expected to triple by 2050.
Then I heard one of the most exciting ideas yet in a PopTech lecture by Adrian Bowyer, a challenge to the concept of money. If every home had a small robot that could manufacture any item - a comb, a bowl, a fork - from a resin made of starch grown in the backyard (i.e. corn or potatoes) and those items went right back into the earth when we were done with them, would we have the same need for factories and therefore, money? He quotes science fiction writer Iain Banks who said that "money is a sign of poverty" to illustrate that we would be richer if we didn't need money at all.
Finally, I keep having a certain conversation with my friends about how disillusioned we are with work and its role in our life. These are people scattered all over the country who don’t know each other. They’re all about 30-45, some married, some with children, some homeowners but what we all have in common is that we grew up middle-class, we went to college and we have to work for a living. A rough illustration of who these people are:
- A single guy in D.C. who likes photography, traveling and Jazz. Works in film restoration, which he likes, but there's not much work and it pays very little.
- A recently married woman in North Carolina, about to have a baby, who works as a graphic designer. Loves designing but hates working all the time.
- A new mother and writer in Santa Monica who has to hire two nannies so that she can work when she'd rather spend the time with her baby but can't afford to.
- A single guy in Los Angeles who works a web producer. He loves computers so spends his time in front of one any way but continually has jobs that require 60-hour work weeks.
- A woman in New York working as a teacher whose job is so stressful, she couldn't do it without her live-in boyfriend helping with house work and daily chores.
- A single woman in San Francisco who has spent the last ten years pursuing a career but finds herself unfulfilled by the work.
- A bi-coastal young man, recently out of college, who's already frustrated with the fact that work takes him away from the projects he feels passionate about.
- A woman with a teenage daughter in the Bay Area who finds herself more motivated than everyone she works for and can't figure out how to dumb herself down.
- A single woman in Los Angeles who wants to help people in her native Cambodia but makes ends meet by working at an interactive agency.
We don’t have enough time to do what we enjoy because we spend our lives working and yet don’t make enough money to buy more time. In the jobs, we’re frustrated with others’ lack of commitment or in the company itself and feel that we deserve better. But in the pursuit of a better job in a better company we finally come to realize that work does not fulfill us enough to justify the time spent doing it. Most of us work to create or promote the sale of goods, goods that we use the money we earn to buy. By any measure, it’s not an efficient use of our time.
My friends are ready to quit this rat race of working and buying and are ready to move somewhere quieter, live a simpler life and grow our own food. The problem, I suppose, is that we’re all cultural people who need other people and art to stimulate us and aren’t really the kind of folk you find in rural towns. Back in April of 2007, I wrote that servitude sucks and that we've been duped because more "primitive" societies enjoy abundant free time. Now, it seems, I'm hearing the same thing from everyone: How do we get to a place where LIVING is what we spend most of our time doing instead of WORKING?
And connecting all these dots, I had an idea. A communal village of like-minded people. We want to grow our own food and learn to make our own energy and live without cars. We want to raise each other's children and imagine a society of the future and sometimes watch 30 Rock. Do you think it's possible? It would have to be in Canada, somewhere north that will be less impacted by global warming. I saw a fantastic photo in National Geographic (a similar one I found on the web is here) that shows a village in Israel, built to be egalitarian in that everyone has equal access to school, church, and other community buildings, in the center of town, but everyone also owns a piece of land, on the outside of town. It's limited as to how many people can live there, about 750, and everyone is independent and yet totally connected to each other.
It looks good. It looks real good. What do you think y'all? Ready to buy some property in Alberta?
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
A new brand promise
I'm constantly amazed that world is full of hope and beauty despite overwhelming evidence that our existence on this planet – a struggle to survive despite ourselves – is about to come to an end. I know this because history has shown us that everything eventually ends although our reign here so far has been but a blip on the billion-year timeline of our incredible planet. Despite knowing this and a little else, we’re still rubbish at predicting the future. Even things that we think we know and control are beyond us. So we’re in a curious place right now, a moment in time when we’re being asked to believe two incredibly difficult things: 1) That the way we live is destroying the one place that makes life possible and 2) That we can do something about it.
An unbelievable amount of change has happened in public opinion in the last couple of years. People now accept, at least in part, that we are a complicit partner in global warning. But it is still a very ambiguous concept to most people and it is only part of the picture. The bigger picture is a shift in perception, a belief that the world gives us life and that we should be grateful for that gift. It’s gratitude not entitlement that should drive our interactions with our planet and our fellow inhabitants. I'd wish the Christian Right were half as diligent about protecting plants and animals as they are unborn children, and would like to see corporations caring at least half as much about keeping people safe as they do in raising their profits, and wish government kept half a mind on how to create a new world economy while they send people to die for the old one.
I think the big picture has not been effectively branded or marketed. The focus has been on what will happen if we don’t stop what we’re doing, the effects of what we’re doing, and how we can replace what we’re doing with something else. What I think we really need is a brilliant future to believe in. Why are we bothering to save the wretched institutions we have like cars and freeways instead of committing to high-speed rail, for example?
I swear, if I read one more article about how scientists are working around the clock to make a car that doesn’t use gas I’m going to puke. What about all the other bad things about cars: #1 cause of death for young people, huge waste of natural resources, loss of farmland to build roads and parking lots, and loud crowded cities with poor public transportation infrastructures? Even if we build a car that uses no oil, China will have to pave over their food source to drive them!
We need to think much bigger than just keeping what we’ve got because if we really can mobilize the entire planet for change, why stop at the status quo? I’d like to imagine a world where animals aren’t kept in cages for our entertainment or experimentation, where rivers are sacred and not a place to dump toxic waste, where people understood the purpose and origins of food – real food that comes out of the ground and off the trees – and grew it for themselves, where forests and oceans were considered riches as they as are and not as they can be exploited and destroyed, where people’s senses became finely tuned to the natural life buzzing around them and preferred it to loud cars, strong chemicals and a flood of artificial light.
The difficulty, I suppose, is imagining people wanting to take better care of their planet than they do themselves, or to have a more daring vision for the world than they do their life. But I think we’re a product of our environment and even though we’ve created it, it shapes us, which is why this idea is so empowering. We have the ability to re-imagine our entire universe. All we need is something we can all believe in, and just like every marketing piece supports a brand promise, every action will support our belief.
In thinking of a brand promise for this movement, I came up with this: “I believe the world is a beautiful miracle, created by God or by accident, and as long as humans are given life I believe it is our duty to care for this planet and all of its inhabitants.” Greenpeace and
the United Nations both have pretty compelling mission statements, by the way. The truth is, we probably aren’t clever enough to care for this planet but if we measure all of our actions against this promise, we can at least say that we did our best.
An unbelievable amount of change has happened in public opinion in the last couple of years. People now accept, at least in part, that we are a complicit partner in global warning. But it is still a very ambiguous concept to most people and it is only part of the picture. The bigger picture is a shift in perception, a belief that the world gives us life and that we should be grateful for that gift. It’s gratitude not entitlement that should drive our interactions with our planet and our fellow inhabitants. I'd wish the Christian Right were half as diligent about protecting plants and animals as they are unborn children, and would like to see corporations caring at least half as much about keeping people safe as they do in raising their profits, and wish government kept half a mind on how to create a new world economy while they send people to die for the old one.
I think the big picture has not been effectively branded or marketed. The focus has been on what will happen if we don’t stop what we’re doing, the effects of what we’re doing, and how we can replace what we’re doing with something else. What I think we really need is a brilliant future to believe in. Why are we bothering to save the wretched institutions we have like cars and freeways instead of committing to high-speed rail, for example?
I swear, if I read one more article about how scientists are working around the clock to make a car that doesn’t use gas I’m going to puke. What about all the other bad things about cars: #1 cause of death for young people, huge waste of natural resources, loss of farmland to build roads and parking lots, and loud crowded cities with poor public transportation infrastructures? Even if we build a car that uses no oil, China will have to pave over their food source to drive them!
We need to think much bigger than just keeping what we’ve got because if we really can mobilize the entire planet for change, why stop at the status quo? I’d like to imagine a world where animals aren’t kept in cages for our entertainment or experimentation, where rivers are sacred and not a place to dump toxic waste, where people understood the purpose and origins of food – real food that comes out of the ground and off the trees – and grew it for themselves, where forests and oceans were considered riches as they as are and not as they can be exploited and destroyed, where people’s senses became finely tuned to the natural life buzzing around them and preferred it to loud cars, strong chemicals and a flood of artificial light.
The difficulty, I suppose, is imagining people wanting to take better care of their planet than they do themselves, or to have a more daring vision for the world than they do their life. But I think we’re a product of our environment and even though we’ve created it, it shapes us, which is why this idea is so empowering. We have the ability to re-imagine our entire universe. All we need is something we can all believe in, and just like every marketing piece supports a brand promise, every action will support our belief.
In thinking of a brand promise for this movement, I came up with this: “I believe the world is a beautiful miracle, created by God or by accident, and as long as humans are given life I believe it is our duty to care for this planet and all of its inhabitants.” Greenpeace and
the United Nations both have pretty compelling mission statements, by the way. The truth is, we probably aren’t clever enough to care for this planet but if we measure all of our actions against this promise, we can at least say that we did our best.
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
"Guilt-free affluence"
I was listening to one of my Pop!Tech lectures on the bus the other morning and this guy Alex Steffen was saying what I've been saying. That environmental change will require a change in perception and a change in our model of economy. The world is merely one possible perspective but our current awareness will change the way we look at things, the earth and each other. "Things" will no longer be something to own, but something to use.
None of us, he says, wants to contribute to the denigration of the earth but we do all want "guilt-free affluence." The moment in time that we're in, while a "gigantic challenge," is also an immense opportunity to make this change. All of our challenges are political. The technology to solve all of our problems exists, but will we use it? Will we be able to change the system to adopt our new needs and desires? Watch the lecture, it's fantastic!
None of us, he says, wants to contribute to the denigration of the earth but we do all want "guilt-free affluence." The moment in time that we're in, while a "gigantic challenge," is also an immense opportunity to make this change. All of our challenges are political. The technology to solve all of our problems exists, but will we use it? Will we be able to change the system to adopt our new needs and desires? Watch the lecture, it's fantastic!
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Innovation starts on the inside
Wired and National Geographic’s cover stories this month are about biofuel. For every unit of energy used to produce ethanol from corn, it yields 1.3 units. Ethanol made from sugar cane in Brazil and other South American countries, by contrast, yields 8 units. We can’t grow sugar cane in the Midwest, though, we grow corn. Corn and soy (used to make biodiesel - yielding 2.5 units) are now our two biggest crops.
The downside: It’s not cost efficient, it uses oil to produce and it gets fewer miles to the gallon than gasoline. The government has to subside it and we need to get clever about how to reduce the harmful emissions producing it creates. On the up side, it’s a step towards reducing our dependence on oil, it’s a boon for farmers and an even bigger boon for big companies that have invested in this technology.
But it only makes a dent in our energy production, like every other alternative source, and it’s a food product. We won’t be feeding it to cows or using it to make human food, it’s going to run our cars. People are starting to get worried that we’ll be using all our farmland to make fuel. What happens then? What happens when China and India do the same thing? China is already planning to pave over a lot of their farmland to accommodate their growing hunger for cars.
Is it possible to be so ignorant that we could literally starve ourselves by driving our food instead of eating it? Another article in National Geographic about emissions get nitty gritty about what we need to change and how fast it needs to change. The article ends with a note of hope but the rest of it is pretty grim. It says we need to change almost everything about our lifestyle, our economy, our government, and we'll have to do it practically overnight, to survive. When in the history of humankind have we ever witnessed that much change? Never, really, and that’s the real gist of the article. It’s possible but not likely.
I suggested to some friends that in the future I could see the west going to war with the east over resources, after we've made all these changes and they haven’t (I say we because I hope – ha ha ha – that the US will adopt the changes Europe has been making). Our water, air and food will be at stake and we might have to fight for it, not that it will make a difference. They thought it was a grim idea and didn’t like me for saying it so I’ll defer to the "optimistic" end of the National Geographic article:
In the end, global warming presents the greatest test we humans have yet faced. Are we ready to change, in dramatic and prolonged ways, in order to offer a workable future to subsequent generations and diverse forms of live? If we are, new technologies and new habits offer some promise. But only if we move quickly and decisively – and with a maturity we’ve rarely shown as a society or a species. It’s our coming-of-age moment, and there are no certainties or guarantees. Only a window of possibility, closing fast but still ajar enough to let in some hope.
Wired tends to be more optimistic, believing that technology will save us! (I love the description of Wired on Treehugger). Their article pins our hope on cellulose technology that (if we can develop it) will tap our energy from the tiny little plants that started this whole wonderful world. An enormous amount of money is being spent on developing those solutions - ones that don't require that we change our lifestyle. But I think in this case, it's not technology but our ability to innovate and change ourselves, that will save us.
The downside: It’s not cost efficient, it uses oil to produce and it gets fewer miles to the gallon than gasoline. The government has to subside it and we need to get clever about how to reduce the harmful emissions producing it creates. On the up side, it’s a step towards reducing our dependence on oil, it’s a boon for farmers and an even bigger boon for big companies that have invested in this technology.
But it only makes a dent in our energy production, like every other alternative source, and it’s a food product. We won’t be feeding it to cows or using it to make human food, it’s going to run our cars. People are starting to get worried that we’ll be using all our farmland to make fuel. What happens then? What happens when China and India do the same thing? China is already planning to pave over a lot of their farmland to accommodate their growing hunger for cars.
Is it possible to be so ignorant that we could literally starve ourselves by driving our food instead of eating it? Another article in National Geographic about emissions get nitty gritty about what we need to change and how fast it needs to change. The article ends with a note of hope but the rest of it is pretty grim. It says we need to change almost everything about our lifestyle, our economy, our government, and we'll have to do it practically overnight, to survive. When in the history of humankind have we ever witnessed that much change? Never, really, and that’s the real gist of the article. It’s possible but not likely.
I suggested to some friends that in the future I could see the west going to war with the east over resources, after we've made all these changes and they haven’t (I say we because I hope – ha ha ha – that the US will adopt the changes Europe has been making). Our water, air and food will be at stake and we might have to fight for it, not that it will make a difference. They thought it was a grim idea and didn’t like me for saying it so I’ll defer to the "optimistic" end of the National Geographic article:
In the end, global warming presents the greatest test we humans have yet faced. Are we ready to change, in dramatic and prolonged ways, in order to offer a workable future to subsequent generations and diverse forms of live? If we are, new technologies and new habits offer some promise. But only if we move quickly and decisively – and with a maturity we’ve rarely shown as a society or a species. It’s our coming-of-age moment, and there are no certainties or guarantees. Only a window of possibility, closing fast but still ajar enough to let in some hope.
Wired tends to be more optimistic, believing that technology will save us! (I love the description of Wired on Treehugger). Their article pins our hope on cellulose technology that (if we can develop it) will tap our energy from the tiny little plants that started this whole wonderful world. An enormous amount of money is being spent on developing those solutions - ones that don't require that we change our lifestyle. But I think in this case, it's not technology but our ability to innovate and change ourselves, that will save us.
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Altruism = happiness
My yoga pal who last week asked me about happiness just sent me an interview from Shambhala magazine with Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness. The gist of the book is that we constantly trip ourselves up in our pursuit of happiness because as it turns out, we don't actually know what makes us happy. I'm not surprised. Despite the over-emphasis of our culture on our huge brains, we actually know very little. I found a couple of points from the interview to be very interesting. A scientific approach to some things we already know.
I read an article a long time ago about a woman in France who was like 120 years old. There have been a lot of theories about what makes people live longer. Colloidal minerals in the water that some tribe in the Andes was drinking sparked a new industry. There was a theory about the altitude, and we've all heard about how a macrobiotic diet and being nearly emaciated can make a person live longer (even though you'll miss out on all the yumminess of good food.) This article, however, said the single most important thing to long life was a feeling of usefulness and close bonds in the community. Antithetical to our practice of cloistering the elderly away in a home and "visiting" on occasion.
Gilbert says, in his interview:
Probably the single best predictor of a person's happiness is the quality and extent of their social relationships...a better predictor of happiness than your physical health. If you had to choose between being paralyzed from the waist down and having no friends whatsoever, you would probably be better off being paraplegic than friendless.
So it would seem that being happy makes a person live longer. Makes perfect sense. I mean, if a person were unhappy, what would be the point in living to be 120? Problem is, according to Gilbert, people don't realize this and instead pursue money and fame, indulge in sex and food, thinking those things will bring them happiness.
Not surprisingly, if our relationships with other people are the predictor of happiness, then improving those relationships make us happy. Gilbert says:
Altruism is a social act, an interpersonal act. It makes people feel good about their place in the world, good about others and it makes other esteem them.
When people give of themselves to others,and are recognized for it, they experience lots of happiness and increase in self-esteem. Interestingly, though, we've just done a study that shows that when people are offered the opportunity to do something selfish or something altruistic, they take the selfish option by and large. Culture has told them this is what they should do to be happy, but if you force them to take the altruistic option, they're much happier.
As VolunteerMatch.org demonstrates, opportunities to help others are abundant. We just have to take them. A heck of a lot cheaper than therapy! Not that we are meant to be happy all the time although I rather like the idea of a world that revolves around helping other people. It's important to recognize that unhappiness is not something to be afraid of. Unhappiness is a powerful indicator that we should pay attention to and learn from.
We are meant to be happy, and we are meant to suffer. We're supposed to suffer when we are encountering circumstances that aren't good for us.
It's like the situation we're in with the environment. Man has been manipulating the environment since we got here. There is no "going back." Back to what?
Women were oppressed, children were used like cattle, people raped, pillaged, and plundered, everybody lived to about the age of twenty-seven and had bad teeth! What we have right now is marvelous. It's far from perfect, but our job is to make it better - not to go backward, but to go forward.
Sure, we are faced with great challenges in the future but WE ARE TALKING ABOUT IT. I'm talking about it and everywhere you go, people are talking about the environment. I think it's amazing. I think it's inspiring. And not just talking, people everywhere are taking action. See, life is like sailing a ship. Sometimes we may go off course, but we keep going. Together, we steer this ship into the future. Like unhappiness, if we pay attention, we can use bad situations we encounter are navigational elements. Don't go that way!
They instructors in yoga classes always say that we become more rigid as we get older, mentally as well as physically. It seems to me that children, in addition to being more flexible, are more in touch with what makes them happy. They don't seem to have any trouble figuring out happiness. Seth Godin wrote on his blog that people get used to saying "no" for example, and even in the face of overwhelming evidence that "yes" is the right answer - the positive answer that will bring happiness to everyone - some people will still say no. So what happens to us that makes us lose touch with such basic intuition? The difference between children and adults is more than anything, our length of time in the world. Society and culture are a much larger figure in an adult's life. We're always being told what's good for us, our country and the economy. The most important thing we can do is to decide those things for ourselves.
I read an article a long time ago about a woman in France who was like 120 years old. There have been a lot of theories about what makes people live longer. Colloidal minerals in the water that some tribe in the Andes was drinking sparked a new industry. There was a theory about the altitude, and we've all heard about how a macrobiotic diet and being nearly emaciated can make a person live longer (even though you'll miss out on all the yumminess of good food.) This article, however, said the single most important thing to long life was a feeling of usefulness and close bonds in the community. Antithetical to our practice of cloistering the elderly away in a home and "visiting" on occasion.
Gilbert says, in his interview:
Probably the single best predictor of a person's happiness is the quality and extent of their social relationships...a better predictor of happiness than your physical health. If you had to choose between being paralyzed from the waist down and having no friends whatsoever, you would probably be better off being paraplegic than friendless.
So it would seem that being happy makes a person live longer. Makes perfect sense. I mean, if a person were unhappy, what would be the point in living to be 120? Problem is, according to Gilbert, people don't realize this and instead pursue money and fame, indulge in sex and food, thinking those things will bring them happiness.
Not surprisingly, if our relationships with other people are the predictor of happiness, then improving those relationships make us happy. Gilbert says:
Altruism is a social act, an interpersonal act. It makes people feel good about their place in the world, good about others and it makes other esteem them.
When people give of themselves to others,and are recognized for it, they experience lots of happiness and increase in self-esteem. Interestingly, though, we've just done a study that shows that when people are offered the opportunity to do something selfish or something altruistic, they take the selfish option by and large. Culture has told them this is what they should do to be happy, but if you force them to take the altruistic option, they're much happier.
As VolunteerMatch.org demonstrates, opportunities to help others are abundant. We just have to take them. A heck of a lot cheaper than therapy! Not that we are meant to be happy all the time although I rather like the idea of a world that revolves around helping other people. It's important to recognize that unhappiness is not something to be afraid of. Unhappiness is a powerful indicator that we should pay attention to and learn from.
We are meant to be happy, and we are meant to suffer. We're supposed to suffer when we are encountering circumstances that aren't good for us.
It's like the situation we're in with the environment. Man has been manipulating the environment since we got here. There is no "going back." Back to what?
Women were oppressed, children were used like cattle, people raped, pillaged, and plundered, everybody lived to about the age of twenty-seven and had bad teeth! What we have right now is marvelous. It's far from perfect, but our job is to make it better - not to go backward, but to go forward.
Sure, we are faced with great challenges in the future but WE ARE TALKING ABOUT IT. I'm talking about it and everywhere you go, people are talking about the environment. I think it's amazing. I think it's inspiring. And not just talking, people everywhere are taking action. See, life is like sailing a ship. Sometimes we may go off course, but we keep going. Together, we steer this ship into the future. Like unhappiness, if we pay attention, we can use bad situations we encounter are navigational elements. Don't go that way!
They instructors in yoga classes always say that we become more rigid as we get older, mentally as well as physically. It seems to me that children, in addition to being more flexible, are more in touch with what makes them happy. They don't seem to have any trouble figuring out happiness. Seth Godin wrote on his blog that people get used to saying "no" for example, and even in the face of overwhelming evidence that "yes" is the right answer - the positive answer that will bring happiness to everyone - some people will still say no. So what happens to us that makes us lose touch with such basic intuition? The difference between children and adults is more than anything, our length of time in the world. Society and culture are a much larger figure in an adult's life. We're always being told what's good for us, our country and the economy. The most important thing we can do is to decide those things for ourselves.
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Paying for nature
I was in San Francisco this weekend with a friend of mine and her 14-year old daughter. We took the coast road home knowing it would be a long drive but my friend and daughter had never seen the California coast north of Santa Barbara. It was simply gorgeous. We had nothing but sunshine glittering over the ocean.
No fog to obscure the ragged cliffs diving into the water - dramatically shaped trees clinging to their edges. Rocky mountains alternating with redwood forests and rolling plains. My friend and I must have "oohed" and "aahed" for at least an hour at one point. Her daughter in this exhausted way said "Why are you guys so AMAZED?" Because, I replied, "it is amazing."
Queen Elizabeth was just visiting the U.S. and apparently is going to pay an estimated $20,000 to offset the CO2 put into the atmosphere by her jet in one of the most high profile gestures of a person paying an "offset cost."
In the upcoming documentary The 11th Hour, David Suzuki says that one researcher estimated the value of what nature provides (in terms of how much it would cost humankind to do the same thing) as $35 trillion per year. The combined economies of the world come to $18 trillion per year. We obviously cannot afford to lose nature's generous services.
The idea of paying for what we get from nature is so profound and yet, seemingly overnight, has become ubiquitous. I think we have reached the tipping point of global environmental awareness. We have finally woken up to the idea that the world is not ours to rape and pillage, resources are not something to kill for, and money is meaningless if we haven't air to breathe, water to drink and food to eat.
I vaguely knew that Prince Charles was an environmentalist but I had no idea that he has, for the last twenty years, demonstrated to the world how an alternate life can be lead. How we ARE capable of change and how we CAN make better choices. Yes he is privileged and has choices other people don't but how many are living of us are living by example?
In this year's Green Issue of Vanity Fair, the picture of our environmental situation is bleaker than in previous years but at the same time far more hopeful. It's as if, like in Alcoholics Anonymous, the first step is admitting we have a problem. That step is so huge, in taking it we're halfway towards solving the problem.
In the introduction to the magazine, the editor Graydon Carter writes:
It could fairly be argued that Bush has been such a dreadful steward of our environment that he more than anyone has energized the green movement to the point where it is in the early stages of becoming a revolution.
Like anything you don't appreciate until it's gone, I think a lot of people never noticed the steps that have been taken on our behalf to protect our planet. By assuming that people didn't care, our current administration has incidentally prodded them to finally take notice. Bravo!
Prince Charles, with steadfast patience, scrutiny and personal sacrifice has committed himself to showing us that we MUST account for the cost we inflict upon the environment. Certainly, we all can't pay $20,000 to fly to another continent, but neither can we pay for the actual cost of our gasoline, food and Nikes. In "The Rise of Big Water," Charles Mann reports that in China, some people are ALREADY paying a quarter of their income for water.
Clearly, our current economic model will have to change.
No fog to obscure the ragged cliffs diving into the water - dramatically shaped trees clinging to their edges. Rocky mountains alternating with redwood forests and rolling plains. My friend and I must have "oohed" and "aahed" for at least an hour at one point. Her daughter in this exhausted way said "Why are you guys so AMAZED?" Because, I replied, "it is amazing."
Queen Elizabeth was just visiting the U.S. and apparently is going to pay an estimated $20,000 to offset the CO2 put into the atmosphere by her jet in one of the most high profile gestures of a person paying an "offset cost."
In the upcoming documentary The 11th Hour, David Suzuki says that one researcher estimated the value of what nature provides (in terms of how much it would cost humankind to do the same thing) as $35 trillion per year. The combined economies of the world come to $18 trillion per year. We obviously cannot afford to lose nature's generous services.
The idea of paying for what we get from nature is so profound and yet, seemingly overnight, has become ubiquitous. I think we have reached the tipping point of global environmental awareness. We have finally woken up to the idea that the world is not ours to rape and pillage, resources are not something to kill for, and money is meaningless if we haven't air to breathe, water to drink and food to eat.
I vaguely knew that Prince Charles was an environmentalist but I had no idea that he has, for the last twenty years, demonstrated to the world how an alternate life can be lead. How we ARE capable of change and how we CAN make better choices. Yes he is privileged and has choices other people don't but how many are living of us are living by example?
In this year's Green Issue of Vanity Fair, the picture of our environmental situation is bleaker than in previous years but at the same time far more hopeful. It's as if, like in Alcoholics Anonymous, the first step is admitting we have a problem. That step is so huge, in taking it we're halfway towards solving the problem.
In the introduction to the magazine, the editor Graydon Carter writes:
It could fairly be argued that Bush has been such a dreadful steward of our environment that he more than anyone has energized the green movement to the point where it is in the early stages of becoming a revolution.
Like anything you don't appreciate until it's gone, I think a lot of people never noticed the steps that have been taken on our behalf to protect our planet. By assuming that people didn't care, our current administration has incidentally prodded them to finally take notice. Bravo!
Prince Charles, with steadfast patience, scrutiny and personal sacrifice has committed himself to showing us that we MUST account for the cost we inflict upon the environment. Certainly, we all can't pay $20,000 to fly to another continent, but neither can we pay for the actual cost of our gasoline, food and Nikes. In "The Rise of Big Water," Charles Mann reports that in China, some people are ALREADY paying a quarter of their income for water.
Clearly, our current economic model will have to change.
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Servitude sucks!
I started a new job a month ago. I can barely get myself out of bed every morning to go. I roll in around 9:45 despite my intention to get there by 9:00. I'm just wholly unmotivated. On the weekends I bound out of bed with less sleep and no alarm, anxious to start my day.
The thing is, I don't want to work. I LIKE WORK. That's not the problem. I just don't like working for someone else and I resent the idea that I HAVE to work. How did we (humans) get ourselves to a place where WORK is what we have to do to survive on this planet? How totally backwards! How inefficient!
The worst part is that not everyone is in the same boat. The elite work on their own terms and are getting millions of dollars to our $50,000 to do it. The uber-rich don't work at all. Take Paris Hilton for example. She gets to do whatever she wants. I'm working all day so Paris Hilton can slut around town?
Why do we need hotels anyway? Sure, it's nice to be able to go out of town and stay at a hotel but think about it: Who's staying at the Hilton? Business travelers! People who WORK for a living. Hilton's making billions off of our indentured servitude.
Some friends of mine just traveled around the entire country by bicycle, over 10,000 miles so far, and didn't stay at a hotel. They camped and stayed in homes - some friends and some strangers. That's living! No car, no gas, no job, and no stinkin' hotels!
You constantly hear about how people "need" jobs and a company "gives" us jobs. Wait, hold the phone...GIVES US JOBS? Gee, thanks. You see? We're brainwashed into thinking we need to work and are grateful for the opportunity. It's sick I tell you.
I'm ready to give up this way of life. Grow my own food, make my own clothes, why not? Sure, there are some things about modern life I like - books, movies, music, travel - and I suppose organized society makes those things possible but with the time spent slaving, I don't have much time to enjoy those things.
What is the origin of work, anyway? I guarantee you it wasn't some democratic idea that people thought sounded peachy. I'm pretty sure it happened like this: Certain families, probably royalty, by force, claimed that land belonged to them. Who ever happened to be living on that land was kicked off or told they could "work" to stay. They were working anyway, tending the land, and they didn't have much choice, right?
As it turns out though, their two hours (say) of tending the land became four, six and then eight as the demands of the lord was not subsistence but accumulation. Excess. GREED. Make more product, sell it to people who aren't fortunate enough to be given the option to work, make money and use it to live better than anyone else. The elite families of the world can still trace their heritage back to those rich, ruling families from thousands of years ago.
The modern equivalent of that original land acquisition goes likes this: A corporation buys (or leases from the government) a small island, razes the fields, builds a factory and erects low-quality apartments. The displaced subsistence population is offered jobs and an opportunity to rent an apartment. Lucky people. Just think how much better their life is! How many times have you bought clothes made in...where the heck is Mauritius?
Supposedly, a working society offers the opportunity to invent technologies like building a space shuttle and exploring the universe. Granted, that's pretty cool, but most of what we spend our time inventing doesn't improve our quality of our life, it improves the quality of our work.
The anthropologist Pierre Clastres in Society Against The State writes that contrary to what we've been told, subsistence societies are actually quite efficient - "the average length of time spent working each day by adults, including all activities, barely exceeds three hours" - offering lots of time for relaxation, playing and higher thinking. He writes:
The Indians devoted relatively little time to what is called work. And even so, they did not die of hunger. The chronicles of the period are unanimous in describing the fine appearance of the adults, the good health of the many children, the abundance and variety of things to eat. Consequently, the subsistence economy in effect among the Indian tribes did not by any means imply an anxious, full-time search for food. It follows that a subsistence economy is compatible with a substantial limitation of the time given to productive activities.
I should say that there are incredible philanthropists in this world who give back as much as they've been given but doesn't it seem an awfully roundabout way to get back to (what is for most people) subsistence? At the risk of sounding like a hippie or a Marxist, there has to be a better (more magical, more interesting, more evolved) way to live.
I guess I'm not ready to completely drop out of society. I like not getting eaten by wild animals, being ravaged by disease or worrying about being killing by a warring faction in the middle of night, but I still don't like getting up for work.
The thing is, I don't want to work. I LIKE WORK. That's not the problem. I just don't like working for someone else and I resent the idea that I HAVE to work. How did we (humans) get ourselves to a place where WORK is what we have to do to survive on this planet? How totally backwards! How inefficient!
The worst part is that not everyone is in the same boat. The elite work on their own terms and are getting millions of dollars to our $50,000 to do it. The uber-rich don't work at all. Take Paris Hilton for example. She gets to do whatever she wants. I'm working all day so Paris Hilton can slut around town?
Why do we need hotels anyway? Sure, it's nice to be able to go out of town and stay at a hotel but think about it: Who's staying at the Hilton? Business travelers! People who WORK for a living. Hilton's making billions off of our indentured servitude.
Some friends of mine just traveled around the entire country by bicycle, over 10,000 miles so far, and didn't stay at a hotel. They camped and stayed in homes - some friends and some strangers. That's living! No car, no gas, no job, and no stinkin' hotels!
You constantly hear about how people "need" jobs and a company "gives" us jobs. Wait, hold the phone...GIVES US JOBS? Gee, thanks. You see? We're brainwashed into thinking we need to work and are grateful for the opportunity. It's sick I tell you.
I'm ready to give up this way of life. Grow my own food, make my own clothes, why not? Sure, there are some things about modern life I like - books, movies, music, travel - and I suppose organized society makes those things possible but with the time spent slaving, I don't have much time to enjoy those things.
What is the origin of work, anyway? I guarantee you it wasn't some democratic idea that people thought sounded peachy. I'm pretty sure it happened like this: Certain families, probably royalty, by force, claimed that land belonged to them. Who ever happened to be living on that land was kicked off or told they could "work" to stay. They were working anyway, tending the land, and they didn't have much choice, right?
As it turns out though, their two hours (say) of tending the land became four, six and then eight as the demands of the lord was not subsistence but accumulation. Excess. GREED. Make more product, sell it to people who aren't fortunate enough to be given the option to work, make money and use it to live better than anyone else. The elite families of the world can still trace their heritage back to those rich, ruling families from thousands of years ago.
The modern equivalent of that original land acquisition goes likes this: A corporation buys (or leases from the government) a small island, razes the fields, builds a factory and erects low-quality apartments. The displaced subsistence population is offered jobs and an opportunity to rent an apartment. Lucky people. Just think how much better their life is! How many times have you bought clothes made in...where the heck is Mauritius?
Supposedly, a working society offers the opportunity to invent technologies like building a space shuttle and exploring the universe. Granted, that's pretty cool, but most of what we spend our time inventing doesn't improve our quality of our life, it improves the quality of our work.
The anthropologist Pierre Clastres in Society Against The State writes that contrary to what we've been told, subsistence societies are actually quite efficient - "the average length of time spent working each day by adults, including all activities, barely exceeds three hours" - offering lots of time for relaxation, playing and higher thinking. He writes:
The Indians devoted relatively little time to what is called work. And even so, they did not die of hunger. The chronicles of the period are unanimous in describing the fine appearance of the adults, the good health of the many children, the abundance and variety of things to eat. Consequently, the subsistence economy in effect among the Indian tribes did not by any means imply an anxious, full-time search for food. It follows that a subsistence economy is compatible with a substantial limitation of the time given to productive activities.
I should say that there are incredible philanthropists in this world who give back as much as they've been given but doesn't it seem an awfully roundabout way to get back to (what is for most people) subsistence? At the risk of sounding like a hippie or a Marxist, there has to be a better (more magical, more interesting, more evolved) way to live.
I guess I'm not ready to completely drop out of society. I like not getting eaten by wild animals, being ravaged by disease or worrying about being killing by a warring faction in the middle of night, but I still don't like getting up for work.
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Changing the course of capitalism
I watched "The Insider" again the other night. A great, inspiring movie at the beginning of what has become a hot topic: holding companies to a higher moral responsibility. A responsibility to not cheat their employees out of their retirements, to disclose how it is that CEOs make 400-700 times the average employee and to make their products safer for consumption and the environment. It's not enough any more to simply stimulate the economy; more and more, people are demanding responsibility. Fortunately, many companies are waking up to the economic opportunities of this kind of responsibility.
Most of my career as a marketer, I've believed that selling product inherently breeds bad behavior. In order to generate more profit, companies have to produce a product more cheaply. To increase market share their product has to be more addictive and/or necessary. And to sell a higher quantity, the product has to be consumed at a faster rate. I challenge you to think of a product that can be made more profitable or increase market share without damaging the environment, the consumer or some other poor creature.
(I tried to think of something that must be innocuous, like raising fluffy little sheep and shearing them for wool. This sounds really harmless but then I read this. Yikes!)
See, sometimes companies make something a customer wants, and then have to figure out a way to make it profitable. But many times, they're making something they've deemed profitable and then hire PR/advertisers to make people want it:
When the disposable razor came along, marketers only had to show women a picture of a naked armpit to sell razors to women wanting to be more fashionable. But they had a tougher time convincing them to shave (and bare) their legs. They tried for years without success until a very famous war-time poster came out featuring a very sexy Betty Grable with shaved naked legs and women were told it was their patriotic DUTY to wear shorter skirts and sheer nylons. And off the hair came! (We're still one of the only countries in the world where women regularly shave their hair off.)
Then there were disposable diapers, not a hit for the first five years. Then the PR people hired a pediatrician and cooked up a story about how damaging it is to potty-train children too early. It would make them "anal" to be separated by their poo at too early an age. Instantly, they extended the life of their product by at least a year as anxious moms allowed their children longer diaper time. (By the way, "disposable" diapers will take about 500 years to decompose.)
Sometimes, to make a product more profitable, they have to decrease it's shelf life.
Electronics and appliances have a shorter lifespan than they ever have despite our advances. It just isn't very profitable to make a device that lasts several years. And if you make them too cheap, it isn't profitable either. A CD player now costs let's say $60, which is cheaper than the $250 I paid in 1985, but it only lasts a year. Printers are now less than $100 but only last six months to a year! Cellphones? They're practically "disposable." (Like the diapers, the hunks of junk ends up in the dump when they stop working and probably never biodegrade.)
Sometimes, to make people want a product again, they have to lie.
Cigarettes and alcohol are addictive. Fast food clogs your arteries. How can you increase your market share without telling people otherwise? French fries aren't French fries if they aren't deep fried! Tell the consumer you're using a different kind of oil that isn't as bad. Tell them the alcohol has less calories and the cigarettes don't have additives so they're less harmful. They're all lies but how else can it be done? Since only 10% of smokers start after age 20, they have to get addicted young.
Sometimes, experts are used to show how the product should be consumed.
For the last fifteen years, we've been eating a higher protein diet. We've been told it's the way to be healthy and slim. It's not true. Eating vegetables is much better for you than meat but meat is a booming industry. When it's so cheap and yummy, how can we resist? (Inhumane treatment to animals, declining nutrition of the meat, increased sickness due to bad meat and pollution that was unheard of a few decades ago will eventually turn us off). Did you know that 80% of the ocean's contaminants come from ground pollution running into rivers? Now we can't even eat (what's left of) the fish!
So, our consumerism drives the economy but these products make us sick by ruining our health and the environment. We're running at an accelerated pace towards cheaper, more disposable goods but also stopping along the way the admire a new model of goods - ethically produced, better for the environment and maybe even more desirable.
Ultimately, the consumer has to DEMAND the products we want, produced the way we can be happy about, and the corporations will HAVE TO care as much about responsibility as profit.
While hybrid cars increase in popularity, so do Hummer sales. While we are more conscious of recycling, we also create more trash. While the oil industry is stepping up to be more green, they're also illegally dumping tons of toxic waste in the ocean. Are we going in two directions or one direction that's so complex, it has yet to reveal itself?
It just may be that we're finally seeing our modern way of life as barbaric: torturing and killing animals and each other, dumping crap into the ocean, burying our trash, paving over the earth, pushing products that kill people. We're capable of so much more and I think we're just now beginning to see our potential to rise above our filthy, greedy past to save ourselves.
Most of my career as a marketer, I've believed that selling product inherently breeds bad behavior. In order to generate more profit, companies have to produce a product more cheaply. To increase market share their product has to be more addictive and/or necessary. And to sell a higher quantity, the product has to be consumed at a faster rate. I challenge you to think of a product that can be made more profitable or increase market share without damaging the environment, the consumer or some other poor creature.
(I tried to think of something that must be innocuous, like raising fluffy little sheep and shearing them for wool. This sounds really harmless but then I read this. Yikes!)
See, sometimes companies make something a customer wants, and then have to figure out a way to make it profitable. But many times, they're making something they've deemed profitable and then hire PR/advertisers to make people want it:
When the disposable razor came along, marketers only had to show women a picture of a naked armpit to sell razors to women wanting to be more fashionable. But they had a tougher time convincing them to shave (and bare) their legs. They tried for years without success until a very famous war-time poster came out featuring a very sexy Betty Grable with shaved naked legs and women were told it was their patriotic DUTY to wear shorter skirts and sheer nylons. And off the hair came! (We're still one of the only countries in the world where women regularly shave their hair off.)
Then there were disposable diapers, not a hit for the first five years. Then the PR people hired a pediatrician and cooked up a story about how damaging it is to potty-train children too early. It would make them "anal" to be separated by their poo at too early an age. Instantly, they extended the life of their product by at least a year as anxious moms allowed their children longer diaper time. (By the way, "disposable" diapers will take about 500 years to decompose.)
Sometimes, to make a product more profitable, they have to decrease it's shelf life.
Electronics and appliances have a shorter lifespan than they ever have despite our advances. It just isn't very profitable to make a device that lasts several years. And if you make them too cheap, it isn't profitable either. A CD player now costs let's say $60, which is cheaper than the $250 I paid in 1985, but it only lasts a year. Printers are now less than $100 but only last six months to a year! Cellphones? They're practically "disposable." (Like the diapers, the hunks of junk ends up in the dump when they stop working and probably never biodegrade.)
Sometimes, to make people want a product again, they have to lie.
Cigarettes and alcohol are addictive. Fast food clogs your arteries. How can you increase your market share without telling people otherwise? French fries aren't French fries if they aren't deep fried! Tell the consumer you're using a different kind of oil that isn't as bad. Tell them the alcohol has less calories and the cigarettes don't have additives so they're less harmful. They're all lies but how else can it be done? Since only 10% of smokers start after age 20, they have to get addicted young.
Sometimes, experts are used to show how the product should be consumed.
For the last fifteen years, we've been eating a higher protein diet. We've been told it's the way to be healthy and slim. It's not true. Eating vegetables is much better for you than meat but meat is a booming industry. When it's so cheap and yummy, how can we resist? (Inhumane treatment to animals, declining nutrition of the meat, increased sickness due to bad meat and pollution that was unheard of a few decades ago will eventually turn us off). Did you know that 80% of the ocean's contaminants come from ground pollution running into rivers? Now we can't even eat (what's left of) the fish!
So, our consumerism drives the economy but these products make us sick by ruining our health and the environment. We're running at an accelerated pace towards cheaper, more disposable goods but also stopping along the way the admire a new model of goods - ethically produced, better for the environment and maybe even more desirable.
Ultimately, the consumer has to DEMAND the products we want, produced the way we can be happy about, and the corporations will HAVE TO care as much about responsibility as profit.
While hybrid cars increase in popularity, so do Hummer sales. While we are more conscious of recycling, we also create more trash. While the oil industry is stepping up to be more green, they're also illegally dumping tons of toxic waste in the ocean. Are we going in two directions or one direction that's so complex, it has yet to reveal itself?
It just may be that we're finally seeing our modern way of life as barbaric: torturing and killing animals and each other, dumping crap into the ocean, burying our trash, paving over the earth, pushing products that kill people. We're capable of so much more and I think we're just now beginning to see our potential to rise above our filthy, greedy past to save ourselves.
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