Was 2013 the Best Year in Human History?

Actually, in most ways it was.  Here are some numbers which show that although the planet is over-populated, running out of resources, and facing climate change, we humans are also less impoverished,
healthier, longer lived, better educated, and less violent than at any time in history.  Check it out:

Foggy Here Today

Santa shouted in despair,
"It's all IFR out there."
I'll call Rudolf, The Red-nosed Raindeer,
Or Pat, The Pink-nosed Bat.
Either can guide me safely,
Or I'll stay right where I'm at.

Warm Winter Day.

When you get a warm,  sunny day in December,  it's like getting a text message from Persephone---Not quite a visit, but more than a hello.

Income Inequality Worries Wall Street

     According to an article by Justin Lahart in the Nov 11, 2013  Wall Street Journal entitled "Worry Over Inequality Occupies Wall Street," Hedge fund managers are beginning to worry about the rising level of income equality in the United States.  Since they are on the receiving end of this outrageous unfairness,  why should they be concerned?   They are concerned because the last year that inequality reached the present level was 1928---just a year before the crash that triggered the Great Depression. When inequality reaches a certain point, the system breaks down and becomes unstable.  But any remedy to this instability would involve  raising working class wages, and raising taxes on the rich.    But low wages and taxes are the main reason that wealthy investors are making their present rip-off profits.  So any action to avert  a financial disaster in the long term would require the super rich to give up money in the short term.  And no matter how worried they get, they probably won't do that.
     There is a short story called "The Monkey's  Paw"  which begins with an anecdote about monkey trapping.    According to the story,  monkeys are sometime trapped by hollowing out a coconut and boring only one small hole in it.  The hole is just large enough so that the monkey can just barely put his hand through it if the palm is open. But if he is grasping something is his fist, it won't fit through the hole.  They chain the coconut in place and place a piece of fruit inside it.  The monkey smells the fruit and puts his hand in and grabs it,  but then he can't get his hand back out.  He could easily extract his hand if he dropped the fruit--but he won't ever do that.  Even as the hunter approaches to seize him, he cannot let go of the fruit once he has it in his hand---he is hard-wired to keep it.  I suspect that the hedge fund managers have the  same problem.

Do We Eat Petroleum?

            Actually, that's what we mostly eat nowadays.   A chemical analysis would not show the presence of petroleum in anything you usually eat, but in a sense, you are eating it.   Your food comes from a machine that turns oil into food.   If I could show you a black box, made such that people were pouring oil into one end, turning the crank, and food was coming out the other, would you then agree that we turn oil into food?   After seeing such a machine, you might say, "Let's test it.  Stop putting oil into it."  So the man stops putting oil into the machine, but continues turning the crank.   And before long, food stops coming out.  At that point, you would concede, "Well, I guess it turns oil into food."   Do we have such a machine?

            Actually, we do.  It's the largest machine in the world, and almost all of our food comes from this machine.   The entire food production, processing, and distribution infrastructure of the civilized world can be considered a single, huge machine, and into it we feed a large percentage of all the oil produced in the world.  And most of the world's seven plus billion inhabitants consume  commodities disgorged from this device. We who live in the developed countries consume almost nothing else.   Without it we would all starve.  But petroleum is a finite resource and will eventually be gone. We don't know just when, but the point of peak global production is already behind us.   We have already quit using oil for some of the things we used it for 40 years ago.  So--how will we eat when it's gone?  That's a good question and perhaps it is time we began thinking about it.

            We got a good wakeup call just this weekend.  All of the papers carried a piece about the delayed corn harvest.  This is the kind of headline that scares the hell out of anyone who understands the food supply.  Corn is the starting point for almost everything we eat---everything from pork chops to cooking oil to bourbon whisky---it all comes from corn.   We had a record corn crop this year, but half of it is still in the field, and no one is straining to get it out.  Why?   In order to be stored in a bin, the moisture content of corn cannot exceed 15%.  But this year, we had an unusually rainy spring, and planting was delayed almost a month all across the corn belt.  We still got a large crop, but the point in the life cycle of the plant where the seed is set and starts drying down occurred a month late---well after the hot, dry, sunny weather of late summer was past.  The corn now standing in the field has a moisture content of 19% to 24%, and before it can be put in a bin, it must be artificially dried.  Most farmers have the grain dryers  to do this,  but this year, they cannot obtain the propane to operate them.  The reason that we now have a shortage of propane is due to the unusually large amount of grain drying that has already taken place---yet half of the crop is still in the field.  Even when propane supplies are available, every wet autumn we must decide whether to let half the crop rot or buy absolutely massive amounts of petroleum to dry it.  And when we decide to buy the propane  and save the crop, which we always do, we are turning oil into food.  But what happens when the petroleum isn't there to buy?   

Ingenious Old Windmills

Ingenious Old Windmills

            Whenever I am driving across western Iowa on I-80, I try to time my trip so that I am near Elkhorn, Iowa at lunch time.  After taking advantage of the delicious and reasonably priced Danish buffet at the Danish Inn,  I always make time to take another look at the old windmill next door.   This mill was built in the early 19th century in Denmark.   Then, in the 1970s,  A group of Americans of Danish descent from Elkhorn, Iowa bought it and carefully dismantled it, numbering every piece.   They took it back to Iowa  and re-assembled it and lovingly restored it.   It stands as a museum, and it works perfectly.   For a nominal fee, you can tour the entire structure.

            If you do tour this mill, walk through the upper floors and see all of the working parts.  At  first everything looks crude, but after you think about it a while, you come to appreciate the ingenuity of the whole design.   All of the huge gears have the following arrangement:  one solid cast iron gear turning against a larger gear with wooden teeth fitted into a cast iron wheel.  The teeth have conical shanks driven into conical sockets, about like a human incisor.  They can be installed with a blow from a hammer.  If they had used two solid iron gears, sooner or later the teeth would be worn and the whole gear set would have to be replaced.  Since the larger gear would weigh several hundred pounds and be several feet in diameter,  this operation would involve tearing the top off the mill and using a huge crane.  But with hardwood teeth wearing against iron, the iron part will never wear away---all the wear would be on the wooden parts.   Any wooden tooth can replaced in a few minutes, and the miller himself can carve as many new teeth as he needs.

            Another ingenious design element is the tail wheel.  This small turbine wheel sits behind the main turbine blades and perpendicular to them. It can turn in either direction, but will not turn at all when the main blades are facing directly into the wind.   Through a deep reduction gear, (probably  with a ratio of several hundred to one )  the little tail wheel spins and slowly rotates the mill to face the into wind.  The whole top of the mill can rotate, being mounted on iron rollers and a huge bull gear.  Whenever the wind changes, the tail wheel starts spinning in whatever direction is needed to reposition the mill.   Couldn't they have just made a huge tailfin to position  the mill turret, as we do on old farm windmills?  Yes, they could have.  But if they did, then on a day with gusty crosswinds, the mill would be slamming back and forth, shaking it to pieces,  and never being pointed toward the average wind direction.    

            Another word about the Danish buffet at the Danish Inn:  I have lived in Iowa most of my life, and the traditional Danish food served at this buffet is some of the best food in Iowa,  and is reasonably priced.  For about the price of a jumbo sized fast food hamburger, fries,  and a malt, you can have the whole smorgasbord.  It's only 7 miles off the interstate.  If you are ever traveling across western Iowa,  don't pass up the chance to pig out on this buffet, or tour this fascinating old mill. 

Real Purpose of the Shutdown

The Wall Street puppet masters who invented the Tea Party and who control it are even more evil than we thought.   Consider this item in the October 11 Wall Street Journal, page 1:
"The Dow soared 323.09 points 15126.07, the biggest one-day point gain of the year, as lawmakers showed signs of breaking their impasse,"  
       How much money was made on a price spike of that magnitude for those who knew in advance it would happen, because they caused it to happen?   We have always known that the Tea Party was invented by Wall Street billionaires for their own purposes, but until now, it was not clear just what those purposes might be. By the way, we can assume that they probably shorted a broad array of stocks before beginning this scare game, so they made money on both ends.  This is a dangerous game, and things could go very wrong.  What if the puppets (who probably do not know that they are puppets) were to cut their strings?  It may be easier to start chaos than to stop it.  And it's also an unbelievably immoral thing, even by Wall Street standards,  to throw the world's largest economy into chaos just to make a quick buck on stock trades.   It's like throwing a thousand grannies under the train to win a bet that the train would be late.

THE TROUBLE WITH DIVERSITY, a book review.

THE TROUBLE WITH DIVERSITY,

 by Walter Benn Michaels;  a book review.

            I just finished reading this book, copywrited in 2006. I wish I had discovered it sooner.  It is an important book, and every American liberal should read it.  And I think every conservative should read it too.  Professor Michaels' position is that in our obsessive concern to stamp out racial and cultural bigotry of all kinds, we have turned our back on economic inequality, which may be the more urgent problem.  Whether you are poor and black or poor and white, if you are poor you're still poor, and no amount of cheerful interracial or intercultural acceptance gets you any money. And if the reason that you have no money in spite of working two jobs is that the kinds of jobs you do are systematically underpaid jobs (jobs such as farm worker, child care worker, food service work, etc) then you are not  the victim of a race war or a gender war, you are the victim of a class war. But nowadays, we don't want to talk about that.   And while it is true that blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities are statistically more likely to be impoverished than whites, about  50% of American families living in poverty are white, and most have at least one full time job in the family. Totally ridding the country of bigotry will in no way help them, since they are not victims of bigotry; they are the victims of economic exploitation, stuck in lousy jobs that pay an unfair wage. Getting rid of intolerance will not raise their wages-- nor will it raise the wages of any Blacks or Hispanics stuck in the same lousy jobs, even if  some of them may in fact have been discriminated against.  Racial sensitivity programs may make you feel better about yourself, but they don't get anybody a living wage.

            Michaels seems to be saying that we liberals may know that anti-bigotry efforts serve mainly to turn our attention away from economic inequality and injustice, and perhaps that's why we are so attracted to them. Perhaps we really want to be distracted from the fight against inequality, because it's an exhausting, depressing, and nearly unwinnable fight.  To force or cajole a major corporation to install a "cultural sensitivity"  program is not that difficult,  and everybody comes away thinking they have gained something. The corporate moguls get to feel like good guys, and get to advertise that they are the  good guys, and the social activists pushing the campaign get to feel as though they  have accomplished something--and it doesn't cost the company a damn thing.   But if you try getting them to pay a living wage, provide health care, or recognize a union, then you have taken on a  long, hard  fight that you are probably going to lose.   They will smear you in the press (they own the press),  they will fight you in Congress (they own Congress too), and they will fight you in court; and if all that fails, they might hire thugs to beat you up or kill you  (At least, that's what they did in the 30s).  Why?  Because you have ventured into the one area which they hold sacred---money.   They are like the Ferengis of Star Trek.  Their first "rule of acquisition"  is "Once you get their money--you never give it back."

            But the problem of poverty isn't about being Black or Hispanic, it's about being poor.  And the cure isn't more respect---it's more money.   But both liberals and conservatives have tacitly colluded to obscure this fact.  Liberals say, "It's all about bigotry, and we are going to put an end to bigotry."   And conservatives say, "It was all about bigotry, and we have already put an end to bigotry."  But they are both lying.  There is such a thing as bigotry, but it's mostly about money.

            Michaels points out that our elite universities have undertaken programs to ensure racial and cultural and gender diversity,  but have taken great care to avoid any action that would produce any economic diversity.  Some of those admitted are Black, some are Hispanic, and some are Asian, but all of those accepted seem to come from the upper middle class or higher.  This not only cuts off the bottom of the economic pyramid, it cuts off the bottom 80%.  With tuition and fees of over $40,000 per year,  no one except upper middle class families can afford to attend even if accepted.

             Don't these universities claim to have a "resource blind" admissions  policy?  Won't they provide financial assistance for those whose resources are insufficient to pay the tuition and fees?  Michaels claims that Harvard no longer expects families with incomes under $60,000 to pay any part of their children's college expense.  If this is true, then things have certainly changed since 20 years ago when we were trying to find an undergraduate placement for our daughter.  She had graduated from a small rural high school with very high SAT and ACT scores.  The Farm Crisis of the 80s had left us totally devastated, yet we still we applied to a number of colleges, including expensive private ones. They all made vague claims that family financial condition was no obstacle to admission, and boasted that a wide variety of financial aid schemes were available.  As they went through the motions of pretending to have a resource -blind program, they all offered some combination of partial scholarships or loans that looked generous, but still left a price tag way beyond our family's reach at that moment.  It was like watching someone trying to sell a dead cat for $500.  They go on cheerfully explaining that it is really a $1,500 dead cat, but just because they like you,  they'll knock off a thousand bucks.   Barbara Ehrenreich mentions this game in one of her essays written when she was trying to find a college for her own kids.   She describes negotiating with a hypothetical university which she called "Fleece U."  

            Michaels mentions that there is even some discussion of Harvard eliminating tuition altogether.   He doubts that this will happen, but claims that it would be of no avail to poor students anyway, since if you are poor or working class, you could never have the kind of high test scores required for admission.   This situation would probably be true in "Chicagoland"  or in the area surrounding any American metropolis.  And since Michaels sees the world from Chicago, it would seem natural for him to assume that what applies to Chicago applies to America in general:  Elite gated communities and elite suburbs where a house costs 2 million bucks, where children attend beautiful, elaborate schools that offer every advantage, and then later attend $30,000 per year prep schools---all  contrasted with dysfunctional inner city ghetto schools, and  overworked, impoverished parents and dysfunctional families.   In short, it is the economic segregation in all of our cities that destines one student to success--another to failure. 

            But not everyone lives in or near a large city.  If you were to take a night flight over the Northern Midwest, that vast area that New Yorkers and Californians call "fly-over country,"  you would notice a gazillion points of light below,  and each one is a small town.  And each town contains a school and the people, mostly working class people,  who use that school.  And in any given town, these people will not all have the same economic resources.   Suppose that you lived in Jesup, Iowa, population 2000.   If you were one of the wealthiest men in town, (say, the banker or the owner of one of the larger and more successful businesses) where would your daughter attend high school?    The answer is Jesup High School. Now suppose that you had one of the lowest incomes (perhaps you are a single mom working as a fry cook at the nearby truck stop).  Would your daughter would also attend Jesup High School?  Yes,  because  there is only one high school.

            A typical graduating class has about 50 students, and they have all spent 12 years sitting side by side in the same classrooms.  And there is also only one Girl Scout Troop, one 4-H chapter, one softball team, etc.  While Jesup may not have the best school in the state, a fair amount of teaching and learning goes on there.  The year that my daughter graduated there with an SAT of about 1500, there were half a dozen others in her class, mostly working class kids, who had scores between 1150 and 1250.   And yet for her entire time at that school,  Jesup school had the distinction of spending the lowest amount per pupil of any of the 438 school systems in Iowa.  So if Jesup can occasionally turn out a few graduates with test scores comparable to what Harvard usually demands,  it's likely that most small towns across the rural Midwest can also do so.

             So what happens to all these hardworking  kids with high test scores?   In the unlikely event that they can afford it, they attend a prestigious private collage. If not, they try for a state university.  And if they can't afford that, then they end up at a community college if they can get a Pell Grant.  If not, they end up working at a furniture factory, a slaughterhouse,  or some other low-wage, dead end job, and never see the inside of a college classroom at all.  And if Harvard and other elite universities ever open their doors tuition free, and if this opening is widely known, they will get not merely  a few smart, working class kids, they will be swamped with them.  And I think they know that.

            But they don't want 80% of their students to come from the bottom 80% of the wage ladder----they don't want any of their students to come from that bracket.  In fact, I suspect that they have an unwritten understanding  with affluent parents that no proletarian will ever enter their doors, except as servants. Why? Because when people go away to college, they sometimes meet the people they will marry.  And sometimes that's the whole idea. Send your daughter to college so that she can get an "Mrs." degree.   So how are these affluent parents going to feel if, after they have shelled out 200,000 bucks in tuition, fees, and other expenses, their daughter comes back married to some kid whose dad drives a bus or works in a factory?  Keep in mind, these parents have not only prevented their offspring from experiencing poverty, they have, through careful deception,  taken great pains to prevent them from even seeing it.   And they expect the colleges to continue this deception.  So I think that Michaels' hypothetical vision of Harvard throwing open their doors and still getting only affluent kids would not always apply.   It would apply with a vengeance to any area in or near any large American city---but at least 100 million Americans don't live in or near large cities.

            One theme throughout Michaels' book is the idea that we have started trying to explain all differences as cultural differences.  The advantage in doing this is that we now accept all cultures as equal.  There have been times, throughout history, that people killed each other over purely cultural differences, but we are moving beyond that.  Most people would agree that if I break my eggs at the large end and you break them at the small end, that's no reason we should be killing each other. In recent years, we have had good results in convincing people to not only tolerate other people's cultural differences, but to accept them and celebrate them. As an example, The Unitarian Church was originally just another Christian denomination, but today, we celebrate Jewish as well as Christian holidays.  And we teach our children enough basic comparative religion so that they are familiar with some of the beliefs and practices of other religions.  We try to teach them to respect the beliefs and practices of others, even if we do not share them.

            Many  American Progressives, being impressed with the success they have had in persuading each other to accept cultural differences,  have now begun trying to see all differences as cultural.  So we don't have black and white races anymore, we just have Black Culture and White Culture.   Well, if this works, and if it seems to be a way to trick people into getting along---great!  I'm for anything that works, and so is Michaels.  But Michaels claims that the young Black, Whites, and Asians he has in his classes all dress about the same, listen to the same music, eat the same food, and all speak English---so where is all that cultural difference? Michaels feels that it's mostly hogwash.  But getting people to see their differences as culture may serve a purpose, because we now accept that no culture is inherently better or worse than any other.

            But now we are even trying to deal with economic differences as though they were cultural.  So being poor isn't really any worse than being rich, it's just different.  And being rich isn't really any better, it's just different.   So if we could all just accept, embrace, and even celebrate our differences, then we could all get along.   But if I am poor,  I don't want you to celebrate my poverty--I want to end it.  And if you think that being poor is just as good as being rich, then try trading places for a while.  By defining  economic inequality as a cultural difference, that lets us say that the problem is not that some people are poor, the problem is that poor people are treated disrespectfully.  So if we could all just respect each other--then no one has to do anything about inequality.

             Yet once you recognize the growing economic inequality in our society for the outrageous injustice that it is, then you have to explain why you are not doing anything about it.  And many progressives simply don't have the stomach to fight anymore.   So they buy off their conscience cheaply by pretending that the economic inequality we see is simply a cultural difference.

            Michaels says that another area where defining every difference as cultural may not work is in the debate on abortion.  He observes that in the case of a 3rd trimester abortion, one need not have any religious belief whatsoever to come to a conclusion that what is being aborted is a human being.  And if the conclusion is not religious, then it can't be cultural.  So it is not likely that we will ever accept and tolerate each other's difference of opinion here, which we might if it were really just a difference in culture.

            Well, in the case of a late term abortion, I would agree and so did the Supreme Court.  With no deference to religion at all, the court ruled that in the 3rd trimester, states could regulate abortion any way they chose, to include banning it outright, except where the life of the mother was at risk.   They ruled that in the 3rd trimester, a fetus is obviously a human being---and in the first trimester it is obviously not.   

            But 3rd trimester abortions are quite rare.  Most abortions are 1st trimester, and yet vast and angry legions are mustered against the clinics who offer them.  No logic or science can lead you to conclude that a tiny speck of tissue is a human being.  That comes only from religion.  To believe that aborting a tiny speck of tissue is the same as murdering a baby, you have to have a number of beliefs, all of which are purely religious.   If you ask the protester in front of an abortion clinic why he thinks a speck of tissue is a baby, he will tell you that it has an immortal soul, which was infused at conception, and the soul is what make us all human.  But does everyone believe we have souls? Atheists certainly don't, and there are several religious sects that do not require any belief in either a soul or an afterlife.  Even among those sects that agree that we have souls, not all agree that this soul is infused at conception;  some think it happens much later, at the quickening.  So to believe that 1st trimester abortion is murder, you not only need a religious belief---but a very specific kind of religious belief. So the difference in beliefs between a doctor who runs a 1st trimester abortion clinic and the angry hoard that  routinely pickets him are purely cultural differences.  But that doesn't mean they won't try to kill him.

            I have a few differences with Mr. Michaels,  which I have noted above, but his main thesis is correct:  The problem is economic inequality, and we are not doing anything about it.  And our efforts to achieve more diversity may simply obscure the fact that we are not doing anything about it.

The New American Farm Crisis

           I recently read that farm commodity prices are now sharply lower than they have been for the previous seven years. For the next several years, corn prices are likely to remain in the $4.00 to $5.00 range, down from the $7.00 prices farmers have become accustomed to.   This will push farmers into a multi-year pattern of low profit or no profit whatsoever, which will cause farmland values to drop. But the crisis, the economic dislocation which this will cause, will be much less severe than the disaster of the 1980s.  The reason is that is the 80s were a different situation.

            In the 80s, and in the hundred years leading up to the 80s, few farmers owned their own land free and clear. Nearly all land was always heavily mortgaged.  In a good year, the mortgage would be paid down a bit, and in an unprofitable year, more would be borrowed.  A farmer's wealth was determined by his equity position--his debt to asset ratio.  But throughout the 70s, commodity prices were so low that most farms had had little or no profit for several years, and had losses for some of those years.  Yet land prices had continued to climb because of aggressive investment by wealthy speculators who, faced with high inflation, needed  a place to park their money. They needed an asset that would hold its real value as the Dollar dropped.  And Iowa farm land was their top choice.

            So although a farmer might lose money every year and need to borrow to cover his annual losses, his net worth might continue to climb because of the increased value of the fraction of his land that he actually owned.  In one decade, Iowa land went from $400 per acre to over $2,400,  with some parcels selling for as high as $4,000.  A farmer might also borrow to obtain capital to buy out his neighbor, and many of them did, since it had become obvious that "any farmer who didn't get bigger would have to get out."  But this left the average farmer highly leveraged, and when land prices started to drop in the early 80s,  many farms were "underwater,"  as the land dropped to less than $1,200 per acre.   They now owed more than the farms were then worth, and they owed this money on "demand notes."   The banks could demand full repayment at any time, and did so as soon as they realized that the money owed to them was not secured by assets worth as much as was owed.  So farmers went bankrupt and farms that had been in the same family for a hundred years were sold at a sheriff sale.   And it would be another 15 years before land values recovered to their 1981 highs.

              But that won't happen this time. This time, commodities have been at record highs for seven years, and farming has been very profitable.   Land has gone up, to nearly $10,000 per acre in some areas, but it's the farmers themselves who have bid it up to that figure, and they have done so mostly with their own money, not with borrowed money.  And though farms have continued to expand in size,  most operators have expanded their operation by renting land, not by buying it. Mostly, farmers have used the windfall profits of these high prices to pay off the mortgage.  Seventy-eight percent of Iowa land is now held free and clear, and even the other twenty-two percent is not very heavily leveraged. At no point in Iowa history has this situation occurred.  They have also used the money to make long term investments in the largest and best tractors and combines and grain storage equipment.  That's why Deere & Co has had record profits for the last 13 quarters.  So most farmers are actually well positioned to weather any storm, even if it lasts a decade. And, having made record profits for 13 quarters,  the downturn won't really hurt Deere & Co, or other implement makers.

            The real casualties will be the workers employed to build farm equipment.  Even if farm income did not drop, every farmer now already has a brand new model of everything he could possibly use, so sales cannot continue at present levels, and layoffs may be unavoidable.  Yet such layoffs, should they occur, will not cause the disaster that they did in the 80s.  To use Waterloo, Iowa as an example, in 1980, tractor manufacturing was Waterloo's main industry, and almost only industry.  The John Deere plant employed 16,000 workers in the bargaining unit, 4,000 salaried workers, and at least 4,000 employed indirectly through contractors.  And all of these workers were well paid.  When the big layoff came in 1982, they laid off  workers back to 21 years of seniority--down to less than 4,000 workers.  But today, the plant has only about 2,400 in the bargaining unit, and since the union agreed to a two tier wage some years ago, they are not as well paid, in real dollars, as workers were in the 80s. Instead of earning a total package worth $30 per hour, it's more like $15.  One  high-wage job can support as many as four other local jobs as the money is spent and re-spent across the community. But lower wage jobs support few if any other jobs.  So if reduced demand for tractors causes layoffs at Deere, it may still be a tragedy for the workers involved, but it will not paralyze the whole county for 10 years--like it did in the  80s.

The Unfortunate Vole

While mowing the weeds in my field today,

An unfortunate vole got himself in the way.

I'm sure that he winced, before he was minced.

But where do voles go when they die, anyway?

Is it Valhalla, or is it vole holer?

(Sorry 'bout that. I could have been droller.) 

Enter the Millennial Generation, Exit Reaganism.

       There is an excellent article by Peter Beinart on the Bill Moyers web page which asks,  "Will  disillusioned  millennials end the Reagan/Clinton era?"   It is a bit long, but absolutely worth the time to read it.  It is the most astute analysis of where we are and where we are going in American politics that I have ever read.

Elysium review

I saw Blomkamp's new movie, Elysium last night.   Though not, in my opinion, as good as District 9,  which was an absolute classic,  if you want an action/adventure thriller, it certainly does the job.  I think that Blomkamp is a modern day Jonathan Swift.  Both he and swift can be seen as passionate social critics, framing their criticism in strange si-fi adventures, and they both paint with pretty broad strokes.   But Swift did it with more humor and irony.  After you see Elysium, rent the DVD for District 9.

Importance of Pigs

The pig, if I am not mistaken,

Supplies us sausage, ham, and bacon.

And yet, the porkers give us more,

Like thyroid drugs, T-3 & 4.

(To list the other things from glands

Would take too many ampersands.)  

The Economy Needs More Spending

            Alan S. Blinder, a Princeton economics professor and former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve,  contributed a guest editorial to the July 8 Wall Street Journal entitled "The Economy Needs More Spending Now."  Since Blinder is a moderate, his views are a refreshing contrast to  the ultra-right-wing rants that generally fill the editorial pages of that august journal.

            Blinder says that besides politics, the chief cause of our economic policy failures is the failure to distinguish between short-term problems and long-term problems.   Different ailments require different prescriptions.  The medicine for short-term problems, used in isolation, could make our long-term problems worse.   But trying to apply long-term remedies in the short-run will only cripple the economy such that no long term goals are accomplished anyway.

            The problem with the American economy right now is a short-term problem---lack of spending.  The only remedy is to increase spending.   This could be done by either increasing government spending at all levels, lowering taxes on working people so that they have more to spend,  or giving investment tax credits to manufacturers so that they buy more equipment, etc.   This is what "The Stimulus"  did, and it worked.  The GDP would be at least 2 percentage points lower had this not been done.  And if "The Stimulus" had been twice as large, we would have gained an additional  2 points, and by now we would have full employment.  Everyone in Congress knew this. 

             So why didn't we pass a large enough stimulus to do the job?  Because everyone in Congress was also worried about our long-term problem,  which is our accumulating national debt.  The Clinton administration had left a balanced budget, but Bush began his administration with a huge tax cut, and then went on to fight two wars without increasing taxes to pay for them.  So when the market crash came in 2008, many in government felt that they had very little room to maneuver,  since they felt that we were already drowning in debt.  Yet if they had passed a large enough stimulus, everyone would now have a full time job,  social expenditures would be lower, and the increased tax collections from wages would easily balance the budget. But instead of fixing our short-term problem,  we tried to use austerity to fix the long-term problem first.  This is like letting the accident victim bleed to death while carefully building the perfect cast to put on the broken bones.  Blinder explains the difference between short-term and long- term solutions as the difference between demand-side and supply-side solutions. He writes:

            "Long-run growth is supply-determined:  it depends on the economy's ability to produce more goods and services from one year to the next. To accomplish that you need four basic ingredients:  more labor, more capital, better technology, and--if you can manage it--a better-functioning economy that utilizes these inputs more efficiently.  These four ingredients constitute the essential core of supply-side economics, and deficit reduction helps boost growth via the second:  more capital.

            In the short-run, however, output is demand-determined. The big question is how much of the economy's productive capacity is used. And that depends on the strength of  demand----the willingness of businesses, consumers, foreign customers and governments to buy what American businesses are able to produce. When demand falls short of supply, deficit reduction hampers economic growth by reducing demand even further.  "  (Emphasis mine)

            Blinder explains that a society can increase capacity by building more plant and equipment and training more workers, but if there is insufficient demand, all that new capacity would just sit idle. This is about what has happened since the beginning of the Great Recession. Blinder says that we must treat both the long-term and the short-term problems. To do this, we should not try to aggressively cut spending now, while the economy is weak and needs all the spending it can get.  Instead, we should spend aggressively today to end the recession, while passing laws today that will cut the deficit, but take effect only several years down the road, when the economy is fully recovered.  While Blinder asserts that deficit reduction today simply makes the recession worse by dampening demand, he does not go into much detail as to how it does this.   Some months ago, I posted on this blog an essay entitled, "Why Supply Side Economics Doesn't Work, " in which this is explained.  Check it out.

            While Blinder's remarks were addressed to the problems of the American economy, they would be even more applicable to the problems of the Europeans, who have used austerity even more foolishly than we Americans have.

Fear of Hard Work

            We have all heard the old joke, "I'm not afraid of hard work--I can stand there and watch it for hours!"   Is it possible that today we have bred such a generation of wimps that there are people who are not only incapable of performing hard work---but who cannot even stand to see it done by others?

            Let me tell you a story.   Many years ago, I was working as a young construction worker. I was a construction electrician, an IBEW Journeyman Wireman  doing industrial work.   One day there was a call for a crew to replace the electrical service at a new office building.   This was a long, one-story building.  We were having a heat wave---the temperature was close to 100 Fahrenheit, and the relative humidity was nearly 100 percent.   The air conditioning equipment in this new office building had overloaded the electrical service, and it had failed.

            The plan was to replace the original service entrance conductors with three 500 MCM copper cables, along with a 350 MCM cable for the neutral conductor.   A 500 MCM cable is a stranded cable about the diameter of a broom handle, not counting the insulation, and it weighs about 4 lbs per foot. We had brought one large reel of 500 MCM cable which was set up on jacks, and we were stringing out, measuring, and cutting each of the three conductors to be used.   The building had a long central corridor, and we would pull the cable off the reel which was set up at one end of the corridor.  After we had cut them to length, we needed to drag the cables further down the corridor to feed them into the conduit.   An electric winch would actually draw the cables into the pipe, but human muscle power was needed to drag the tail ends down the corridor to where they could be drawn into the pipe.

            We had four strong, healthy young men, including me, and two older guys,  One old guy ran the winch, one lubricated the cable as it went into the pipe.  But each cable had one young man to drag it down this long, carpeted corridor.   At four pounds per foot, a 200 ft (61 meter) length of cable weighs 800 pounds (300 Kg).  Even if you are not trying to lift it, even if you are just dragging it, it requires a pretty strenuous effort.  We were leaned into the work, leaned over at about 30 degrees to vertical, were stripped to the waist,  and were sweating profusely.   But we had no complaint.  We were just four healthy young guys giving our muscles a good workout.   And besides, we were construction workers.  Hard work is what we do. 

            But the corridor walls were glass from floor to ceiling, and on the other side were a hundred office workers, mostly women, at their desks.   And they seemed appalled-- even shocked at what they saw.  It was as though hard, physical labor was some form of violence, or perhaps a kind of bodily function that polite people did not do in public.  A couple of women became so upset they ran to the bathroom to vomit.   Not only had these people never done hard work--- they had never even seen it--and it upset them. 

10,000 Hits Per Month

     Setting the record straight:   When you Google "Runcible Cats Bazaar,   one of the little paragraphs that pops up is a piece that defines this website as having "300 hits per month".   I don't know where this came from, but in recent months, there has not been a single month that this site has had fewer than 10,000 visits.   Perhaps this piece was written back when The Cat first went on the net, at which time it would have been correct. Which brings up another problem about all information you find on the net:   There is no way to know if it is current.   One should always keep this in mind.
     More interesting than the sheer number of visitors to this site is where they come from.   They come from over 100 different countries, but mostly from the United States and Europe, both Western Europe and Eastern Europe.

Electric Cars--The Real Question

                  If you have spent the last several years wondering when electric cars will finally become viable, then join the club.  I have pondered this for forty years.  But the facts we would need to know to answer that question are the facts that no one is telling us.

                  We all know that sooner or later, the electric car has to happen. Petroleum is a finite resource, and it will eventually be gone.  The shale/fracking technology will buy us a brief reprieve, perhaps a decade or so, but eventually the oil will be gone.  While the day that the last barrel of oil is burned may still be far in the future, every year that we inch further toward that day the world's remaining oil will be scarcer, more expensive, and more likely to be either geologically inaccessible---or politically controlled by those who despise us.

                  Yet we also know that the wind power resources of the high plains alone could provide  a hundred times as much energy as our entire country consumes, and any three counties in New Mexico could hold enough solar panels to run the whole country.  So if replacing of our fleet of gas-buggies with fully electric vehicles is pretty much a no-brainer, why hasn't it happened yet? 

                  The news on this subject is conflicting at best.  In May, Tesla Automotive announced that it had just had its first profitable quarter ever, and that it had fully repaid its government loan.  Tesla stock gained 81% in May alone.   But priced at $62,000 to $106,000-- the Tesla is mostly just a rich man's toy.  It's only influence on the car market so far is to prove that an electric car can deliver high performance.  Tesla claims that their ultimate aim is to produce and sell a moderately priced family sedan.  Yet that goal had also been the stated goal of Fisker Automotive, which declared bankruptcy in May.   GM is offering a plug-in hybrid, the Volt, for about $39,000, less the $7,500 federal tax credit. Ford sells an all-electric Focus for about the same price. And both are selling only an infinitesimal number of cars.  So what's the problem?

                  The problem is this:  There are millions of Americans who can afford to spend $39,000 for a car. And there are millions of Americans who are being badly hurt by rising gas prices.  But it's not the same people.  Anyone who can spend $39 k for a car has probably never had to choose between filling the gas tank and putting food on the table.  And those who are forced to make such a choice have probably never owned a new car in their entire lives--and never will.  The real market for electric cars would be the market for cheap used ones.  But there can be no used ones till somebody buys some  new ones.  The people buying $40 k SUVs may complain about rising gas price, but if they really worried about it,  they would have stopped buying gas-guzzlers.   The purchasers of forty-thousand-dollar SUVs that get 20 mpg could at any time have switched to buying a twenty-thousand-dollar Ford focus that gets 40 mpg. If they have not yet done that, then they are not really worried about gas price.

                  Last year, I bought a Ford Focus. It's a plain, gas-powered Focus. It's an excellent car and I'm quite happy with it. On the highway, with no wind, I get up to 44 mpg.  After all the rebates and other incentives, the price was  $18,000.   That was the most money I had ever paid for a car in my entire life, and it scared the hell out of me. I have a reasonably comfortable retirement, and yet I found myself asking,  "Just what sense does it make for a retired person living on a fixed income to take on $18,000 of debt?"  But I bought it anyway, because I do worry about raising gas price. In my view, the target price that electric car makers will have to hit for electric cars to become viable is this:  Ford will have to sell its Electric Focus for about the same price that it sells its regular focus, which is $18 k-$22 k.  But that isn't going to happen anytime soon.  The CEO of Ford Motors disclosed last year that 1/3 of the cost of the $39 k Electric Focus is the cost of the battery.  So if the battery cost alone is $15,000, then the car cannot be sold for $18,000.  I suspect that the battery cost will have to drop to around $3,000 to $5,000 before the car price can become competitive. 

                  Of course, many will ask, "What about fuel savings?   Couldn't people afford to spend more on a car if they didn't have to buy gas?"  To compute that answer, this is what we will need to know:  How many miles will the car last?  Will the original battery last the life of the car, or will it have to be replaced after a certain number of charge/discharge cycles?  If so, then how many charge/discharge cycles will the battery last before it has to be replaced, and how many miles will have been driven by that time?  And what will be the net exchange price for the replacement battery? And how many kwh of electric power will be purchased over the life of the car, and at what price?  I cannot get any hard answers for any of these questions.

                  Some of you may protest, "Even if there is no net savings for transportation cost, wouldn't we wish to switch to electric anyway, (assuming we can afford to) because it will mean burning less carbon and importing  less fuel? Supposing we were to find that a $15,000 battery only saves $10,000 in fuel over its lifetime. Shouldn't we do it anyway?" 

                    Well, we don't even know that for certain.  To compute how much we would be lowering our carbon footprint, we would have to know this:   When $15,000 is paid for a battery, just what did this money pay for?   And how much of the price involves goods and services that consume petroleum? Supposing  that $10,000 of the cost ends up being petroleum cost?  Then we might  not be lowering the carbon footprint at all, nor lessening our dependence on imported oil.  Do I know this to be the case?  No, I don't even suspect that this is the case--but I do not know for sure that it is not the case, and neither does anyone else. 

                  In order to predict just when the day of the electric car will arrive, these are the things we will have to know.  But these are precisely the things that no one is telling us.