Necessity is the Mother

Necessity is the mother of invention. So how much inspiration and invention can you expect from the person who has everything? For new ideas, turn to the person who has nothing.

This is the thinking behind an Utne Reader article that suggests the economically deprived city of Detriot may lead the way as a shining example of successful, sustainable, urban farming. According to historian Mark Dowie the fact that Detroit "is home to zero grocery chains or big-box stores—leaving 80 percent of the population to get their food from convenience stores, liquor stores, and gas stations—helps position it to 'become the world’s first 100 percent food self-sufficient city.'”

Dowie meets some forward-thinking Detroiters “who imagine growing food among the ruins.” He writes about people who share visions of “chard and tomatoes on vacant lots (there are over 103,000 in Detroit, 60,000 city-owned), orchards on former school grounds, mushrooms in open basements, fish in abandoned factories . . . livestock grazing on former golf courses, high-rise farms in old hotels,” and many other adaptive farming techniques.

Read more at The Utne Reader.

Why Did the Blogger Cross the Road?

I subscribe to a number of Twitter feeds from people who blog on thrift and frugal living. An article came through today on the top five reasons to raise chickens.

It reminded me of a fun little book I recently read called Travels with my Chicken by Martin Gurdon.

I thought I'd share a couple of my favorite quotes-- Gurdon on why he doesn't eat his pet chickens:

"What do you think? Eating them before [they've died] isn't much of an option. They wriggle when they're alive, the feathers are likely to get stuck between your teeth, and the process itself might be a little distressing for both parties, so we wouldn't eat them at that point. Once they've shuffled off their mortal perches the presence of death tends to indicate that they weren't well beforehand."

And on being interviewed with a chicken on your lap:

"An interview like this is something that is done to you-- not in an unpleasant way, but you're part of a process extruded like the product of a sausage factory into people's homes. Then you step off an invisible conveyor belt and emerge back into the real world, blinking with surprise, exactly as you were before."

Selling Indulgences: God and Gold

One of the perhaps incongruous blogs that I follow is Tithe Stewardship and Church Tithing. It is maintained by a Christian website designer and self-studied expert on the subject of tithing. He believes that instead of tithing, Christians should be stewards of the earth and engage in "spirit led giving."

"We believe that God, our Creator, claims ultimate ownership of everything on the earth. God has entrusted his people with a stewardship and expects them to invest and manage the resources and talents He’s left them, in accordance to the eteral principles of God’s word."

It has become a regular stop on my Broke is Beautiful reading list. (Check out his article on Five Reasons We Need a Recession) A few days ago Jared posted a feature on materialistic church signs. The one above (originally from The Dissident Blog) he says, "will make you think that tithing and coming to church is like joining a pyramid scheme that promises their secrets will get you rich."

If that doesn't work, apparently they are not above an old-fashioned stick up:


In case they need a weapon. I know where they might be able to get one. Here's a gun shop sign we photographed in North Carolina:

After year without, family finds middle ground

After year without, family finds middle ground - Environment- msnbc.com

Along with his wife and young daughter, a man had just spent a year trying to reduce their net environmental impact to almost zero. The couple talk about their experiment and what they learned on the MSNBC web site.

Being Broke By Any Other Name...

So the VEEP has apparently declared our current financial crisis a "Depression."

"My grandpop used to say: There was a suburb of Scranton called Minooka,” Biden explained in a speech.

“He said, ‘When the guy in Minooka's out of work, it's an economic slowdown. When your brother- in-law's out of work, it's a recession. When you're out of work, it's a depression.'”

So how does Biden view it? "Well, it's a depression. It's a depression for millions of Americans, through no fault of their own," he said.

Reporters and bloggers seem to be taking this as another example of Joe Biden putting his foot in his mouth because as we all know it's really a recession not a depression and anyway, the recession is actually over.*

For example Dan Weil at Moneynews.com writes:

"Vice President Joe Biden says the U.S. is in a depression, contradicting the view of virtually all economists, not to mention his own previous statements...Certainly, the U.S. economy shrank by 0.7 percent in the second quarter. Yet nearly all economists now forecast an expansion for the third quarter. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan goes so far as to predict third-quarter growth of 3 percent... Economists, meanwhile, are coming to believe that the recession, great or not, has already have ended."

So here's my question: Do you care if it is a "recession" or a "depression"? As an individual in the economy, will it change anything if we label it with a word starting with an R or a D? And if the recession is, in fact, over has that made a difference in your personal financial situation and your life?

*A telling line in a CNN Money article on the difference between a recession and a depression written back in March explains: "Even though household net worth has fallen a record $11 trillion, or 18%, during the course of this recession, the broader economy can weather such a shock."

So the people are more broke than they have ever been since we started keeping records, but not to worry because the economy is in good shape. As long as "the economy" is happy...

"Remember, The More You Consume, The More You Can Recycle"

Now How Much Would You Pay?

Dancing Like Fred

The Great Depression also brought us what is now considered to be the Golden Age of Hollywood. Those glamorous scenes of Fred and Ginger dancing on air- she in her gorgeous feathered gown, he in his dapper tuxedo with tails-- have generally been viewed as escapist fantasy in a difficult era. But But Morris Dickstein, author of Dancing in the Dark, has a different theory as explained on On the Media.



In this report I especially enjoyed the expression "the proletariat of Oz."

Look: Broke Really IS Beautiful!

This is the song Mo Money Mo Problems by Notorious B.I.G.

More specifically, it is an artistic interpretation of the video to that song created with the help of a computer.

Thanks to Information Aesthetics.

Monopoly's Origins as an Anti-Capitalist Game

There's an article in today's Wall Street Journal about a trademark battle over the creation of an "Anti-Monopoly" game and the famous real estate game's surprising origins.

I will touch on the subject of the original “Landlord’s Game” in Broke is Beautiful. Patented by Elizabeth Magie of Maryland, it was designed to satirize capitalism and discourage property speculation. Along with familiar spaces like banks, railroads, utilities and jail there was a public park and a “Mother Earth” at one of the corners.

The change in Monopoly's theme was part of a larger shift in the objectives of board games from teaching moral and ethical values to awarding the most financially successful.

The tale of Professor Ralph Anspach's decades long trademark battle with Parker Brothers over his parody game makes for riveting reading.

Tent Cities Connect Online

I learned today that in the 21st century, tent cities have access to the web. The homeless are using their Internet access to connect and get social support. As special section for homeless people living in a Tent City was recently created in the Homeless Forums, a place for the homeless and homeless advocates to discuss matters from the political to the practical.

An Act of Imagination

Sojourners Magazine, an online publication with a mission to "articulate the biblical call to social justice," features an article by Danny Duncan Collum on a new Poor People's campaign. Duncan writes:

The campaign, made up of more than 90 organizations around the country, aims to “unite the poor across color lines as the leadership base for a broad movement to abolish poverty … through advancing economic human rights as named in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, such as the rights to food, housing, health, education, communication and a living wage job.”

...They seem to be picking up the banner of the Poor People’s Campaign that fell after Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968...

...presidents don’t change the world. People do. Presidents are pulled along behind great waves of popular uprising. That’s what happened during our last Great Depression, and Franklin Roosevelt knew it. That’s why he once famously told a group of progressive activists that he agreed with their proposal. “Now,” he said, “go make me do it.” And that’s what happened again in the 1960s when the civil rights movement forced President Kennedy to become a better man than he ever meant to be...

The Poor People’s Campaign meeting I attended this summer focused on the role of artists in a grassroots movement for economic human rights. Again, looking back at those two great periods of social change in the 20th century, they both were accompanied by a renaissance of popular art. Writers, artists, actors, painters, and photographers all had a place in the New Deal and the labor movement that fueled it. In the 1960s, African-American religion and music fueled the civil rights movement and all the ripples of social change it inspired. Acting for a better world requires, first and foremost, an act of imagination. You have to see the potential for change—in yourself and in your community...

Hobos Lullaby (2007 Remastered LP Version) - Emmylou Harris

Something to Sing While You're Waitin'

The Graffiti Grannies

From a web site called English Russia comes a feature on a team of grandmothers who were so tired of graffiti in their public spaces that they decided to take matters into their own hands.

They have covered the dirty lobbies, playgrounds and walls with flowers and verses of poetry, which they hope will be uplifting for local children.

Apparently the teenagers with spray paint are too scared to mess with the grannies. You can see some more of the grandma graffiti by following the link above.

Scary Halloween Costume Idea: The Invisible Hand

This Halloween why not go as the invisible hand of the free market?

Got this idea reading Gavin Kennedy's article "Spare Us from the Invisible Hand" at Angry Bear. It criticizes how amateur economists have used the expression and how it was really used in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.

In Praise of the Box O Wine

More good news for those of us who cannot afford a well-stocked cellar full of French wines in glass bottles. The Box O Wine is becoming the rage among ecologically-minded vino tipplers. If you associate drinking wine from a box with a college dorm decorated with milk crates, think again.

You can dress up a grown up gourmet ramen noodle dish with wine from a box and count yourself as a part of the green revolution, not the penniless and uncouth.

The Daily Green has a report on the ecological advantages of boxed wines.

“A standard wine bottle holds 750 milliliters of wine and generates about 5.2 pounds of carbon-dioxide emissions when it travels from a vineyard in California to a store in New York,” reports (Tyler) Colman, who blogs at DrVino.com. “A 3-liter box generates about half the emissions per 750 milliliters.” He concludes that switching to wine in a box “for the 97% of wines that are made to be consumed within a year” would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about two million tons, or the equivalent of removing 400,000 cars from the roads.

Now we just need someone to report on the ecological advantages of Milwaukee's Best and we'll be all set.

Another Celebration of Resourcefulness

How creative is it to simply go to a store chock full of consumer items and buy exactly what you imagine (and a few impulse items you never imagined in the first place)? Real ingenuity comes from necessity, not stuffed pockets. Here's an example from Russia Today:

Plutonomy: A Love Story

If you saw Michael Moore's film: Capitalism, A Love Story, you will be aware of the "plutonomy memo." The internal Citibank memo is presented as a smoking gun that reveals that the moneyed class is intent on sucking up all the wealth that it can (while selling the rest of us of as "dead peasants.")

The Financial Times on Friday featured an interview with the memo's author, Ajay Kapur, an analyst who formerly worked for Citi, who insists his purposes were far from nefarious or secret. Kapur is a researcher whose team was "clinical about our subject and made no moral judgments about whether [plutonomy] was a good or bad thing." Kapur has just issued a new plutonomy report.

The essential thesis is that plutonomies arise when there are factors such as “disruptive productivity gains, financial innovation, capitalist-friendly governments, overseas conquests and dopamine-heavy immigrants, the rule of law, patent protection and great complexity exploited by the wealthy of the time”.

This description has applied to countries such as the US, UK, Canada and Australia recently: in the US, for example, the top 1 per cent control almost a quarter of the wealth. And that has big implications for consumer spending or global financial flows.

For while economists tend to watch factors such as unemployment to predict consumption, Mr Kapur thinks this can be misleading because it is the elite rich – not the middle class – who tend to drive consumption.

Now as a non-plutocrat, it seems to me you have a couple of options for approaching the information that wealth seems to pool at the top. (I am making the executive decision to rule out sitting around being apathetic and dreaming of the day you will win the lottery as an option.)

You can get angry at the unfairness of this and fight for a more even playing field on which to partake of the consumer pie. (I am a professional metaphor mixer, don't try this at home.) That is, for example, the approach of the folks at Naked Capitalism who are inviting people to protest during the American Bankers Association annual meeting in Chicago October 25-27. You could run for office, write letters to your legislators and so on.

Or you can look at the 1%, and say, "Let them eat cake!" That whole consumer life is not all it's cracked up to be. Call it simple living, downshifting, being green, being thrifty. Leave the uber consumerism to the uber capitalists and focus on living your authentic life and being the best darned broke person you can be!

It's possible to mix both of these options and find your own balance. The important thing is to change your tune from "if I were a rich man," to "sha-la-la-la-la-la live for today."

Newsflash: Big Buckets of Free Money Lead to Record Profits

Never thought I'd paraphrase Rush Limbaugh, but... here's one from the "It's Your Money" file:

The New York Times today reports:

It may come as a surprise that one of the most powerful forces driving the resurgence on Wall Street is not the banks but Washington. Many of the steps that policy makers took last year to stabilize the financial system — reducing interest rates to near zero, bolstering big banks with taxpayer money, guaranteeing billions of dollars of financial institutions’ debts — helped set the stage for this new era of Wall Street wealth.

Titans like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase are making fortunes in hot areas like trading stocks and bonds, rather than in the ho-hum business of lending people money. They also are profiting by taking risks that weaker rivals are unable or unwilling to shoulder — a benefit of less competition after the failure of some investment firms last year.

So even as big banks fight efforts in Congress to subject their industry to greater regulation — and to impose some restrictions on executive pay — Wall Street has Washington to thank in part for its latest bonanza.

More Good News for Rich People!

Bloomberg is reporting that luxury spending is up!

Spending among 1,067 consumers with average annual income of $228,800 rose to $18,826 each in the three months ended in September from $14,554 a quarter earlier, the Stevens, Pennsylvania-based luxury-market research firm said today. Shoppers cut spending by 3.2 percent in the second quarter and spent $13,429 in the third quarter of 2008...

The highest-income group spent an average of $43,111 in the latest quarter and the lowest-income group tracked, with earnings of $100,000 to $149,999, spent $10,423.

Of course if you're not a rich person, the news is a bit different. The Consumerist reports that Colorado is the first state to actually decrease its minimum wage, from $7.28 to $7.24, and Social Security recipients will not be receiving their routine cost-of-living adjustment, or COLA for 2010.

In the off chance that you are more affected by the latter than the former state of the world, and you're not in a position to spend $43,111 on travel and spa treatments, the Daily Green is running an article today that will teach you how to make your own skin care potions out of stuff from your kitchen. If anyone asks why you have onions and oatmeal on your face, tell 'em you're not broke. You're eco-savvy.

Where's the News for Broke People?

Are you an investment banker? No? Then why are you regularly consuming news presented from the perspective of an investment banker?

The Pew Research Center has reviewed media's coverage of the economy during the recession and found the following:

Three storylines have dominated: efforts to help revive the banking sector, the battle over the stimulus package and the struggles of the U.S. auto industry. Together they accounted for nearly 40% of the economic coverage from February 1 through August 31. Other topics related to the crisis have been covered much less. As an example, all the reporting of retail sales, food prices, the impact of the crisis on Social Security and Medicare, its effect on education and the implications for health care combined accounted for just over 2% of all the economic coverage.

Actions by government officials and business leaders drove much of the coverage. The White House and federal agencies alone initiated nearly a third (32%) of economic stories studied through July 3. Business triggered another 21%. About a quarter of the stories (23%) was initiated by the press itself and did not rely on an external news trigger. Ordinary citizens and union workers combined to act as the catalyst for only 2% of the stories about the economy.

Fully 76% of the datelines on economic stories studied during the first five months of the Obama presidency were New York (44%) or metro Washington D.C. (32%). Only about one-fifth (21%) of the stories originated in any other city in the U.S., and about a quarter of those emanated from two other major media centers: Atlanta and Los Angeles…

The GDP or Is Consumption Gross?

Recommended reading for today is an article by Jonathan Rowe at On The Commons. I recommend it not only because it uses the word iatrogenic to describe the current systems of measuring economic growth, but because it tackles the important topic of GDP myopia. It's a subject I deal with in some depth in Broke is Beautiful.

Economists and politicians measure our nation’s economic health in terms of our Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or Gross National Product (GNP). Simply put, the GDP is the monetary value of all the goods and services bought and sold in the economy. The GNP is the monetary value of all the goods and services bought and sold by U.S. nationals, whether in the country or abroad.

Natural resources, research and development are not capital to the GDP. Education, health care and social services are valuable only to the extent that someone makes cash from them today.

Over at On The Commons Rowe sums it up this way: "This is a black hole to the conventional economic mind. Economists don't even have a language for it; the reigning vocabulary is encoded with the production imperative. An economy consists of goods and services. There are no bads or disservices – no negative products of any kind."

The article discusses the history of thinking on progress, consumption and the GDP, and links the excesses of overconsumption to many social ills, especially our growing health care crisis. (Hence the word iatrogenic)

Yet look around us, (John Kenneth) Galbraith said. If it takes the marketing sector over $150 billion a year to prop up what economists quaintly call “demand”, is it really demand in any sane sense of that word? Does it really have the urgency and unquestionable sovereignty that economists assign to it?

Recession is Over

Good news! The recession is over!

The National Association of Business Economists is declaring that the recession is over. Of course it doesn't mean that jobs are coming back any time soon. In fact, they figure unemployment will keep going up for a little while.

So what does the expression "jobless recovery" mean? The best I can figure it, it means that you don't have a job, but Wall Street sets new compensation records.

Agence France Press (by way of Commondreams.org) is reporting "US banks and securities firms could pay a record 140 billion dollars to its staff this year...Workers at 23 top investment banks, hedge funds, asset managers and stock and commodities exchanges can expect to earn even more than they did at the peak year of 2007, according to an analysis by the Wall Street Journal."

How come I don't feel like throwing a party after this great news?

Scientist Discovers the Procrastination Equation

Ok, so he published this in 2007, I meant to get around to posting it, but...

What causes a person to procrastinate? Dr. Piers Steel, University of Calgary professor in the Haskayne School of Business, came up with a formula he's dubbed Temporal Motivational Theory. That is, an equation that predicts how likely a person is to put off a task.

It takes into account factors such as the expectancy a person has of succeeding with a given task (E), the value of completing the task (V), the desirability of the task (Utility), its immediacy or availability (Ã) and the person's sensitivity to delay (D).

It looks like this and uses the Greek letter Ã: Utility = E x V/ÃD

Here's the full article from Eurekalert if you'd like to know more.

By the way, if you hope to break through your stalling by stating your intentions to the world (self-help books love to suggest this) think again. (You were kind of wanting to think again anyway, right, oh, and check Facebook a few times.)

Turns out that a number of studies show, announcing your plans to others satisfies your self-identity just enough that you're less motivated to do the hard work needed. In other words, you get enough of an ego boost by stating your intention to start working out, that you don't really need to go to all the trouble of working out physically.

Shopping is Bad for You

Here's one from the "Money is Dirty and Icky and You Wouldn't Want it Anyway" file.

Science News is reporting that your grocery receipt may covered in BPA, the estrogen-mimicking compound that is found in plastics and has been implicated in a variety of health problems in numerous recent studies. (It's the stuff that has made some people swear off plastic water bottles.)

From Making Things To Financing Things

A couple of stories today highlight the power and dominance of the financial sector of our economy, and politics. The first is an op-ed in the Huffington Post by Robert Creamer who argues that the dominance of this sector has become "a mortal danger to our economic security."

This sector, he reports, "has doubled in size over the last 14 years. During the period 1973 to 1985 the financial sector never earned more than 16% of domestic profits. This decade, it has averaged 41% of all the profits earned by businesses in the U.S. In 1947 the financial sector represented only 2.5% of our gross domestic product. In 2006 it had risen to 8%. In other words, of every 12.5 dollars earned in the United States, one goes to the financial sector, much of which, let us recall, produces nothing."

This helps to explain why, as the associated press reports, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's telephone logs show he talks with Goldman Sachs and Citibank CEOs more frequently than the chairs of the House and Senate Banking committees.

Both articles are worth a read.

And the Other Nobel Prizes...

Her story got a bit less publicity than the surprising Obama Nobel Peace Prize announcement, but the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, Elinor Ostrom, also got the good news today.

Ostrom was awarded for her work on "the commons," that is, collectively owned resources. Specifically, as reported in the New York Times:

...how pools of users manage natural resources as common property. The traditional view is that common ownership results in excessive exploitation of resources — the so-called tragedy of the commons that occurs when fishermen overfish a common pond, for example. The proposed solution is usually to make users bear the external costs of their utilization by privatizing the resource or imposing government regulations such as taxes or quotas.

Ms. Ostrom’s empirical research has shown that this explanation is “overly simplistic,” the prize committee says: There are many cases around the world in which common property is “surprisingly well-managed.” In these cases commons users “create and enforce rules that mitigate overexploitation” without having to resort to privatization and government regulation (which can both pose their own practical difficulties).

There is a very good article by Jay Walljasper at On The Commons that explains the implications of her work.

Awarding the world’s most prestigious economics prize to a scholar who champions cooperative behavior greatly boosts the legitimacy of the commons as a framework for solving our social and environmental problems. Ostrom’s work also challenges the current economic orthodoxy that there are few, if any, alternatives to privatization and markets in generating wealth and human well being.

*Image of Takaoka Kojo Park by Kahuski via Creative Commons search, available with ShareAlike license.

She Doesn't Love Money, But She Sure Loves Herself

Zombie Outbreak

Something to do while you're scanning the on-line want ads:

The Consumerist posted a link to this animation The Geography of Jobs, which shows jobs gained and jobs lost with green and red blotches. In honor of Halloween, the Consumerist suggests thinking of the red blotches as zombie outbreaks and playing scary music as you watch the blood-colored splotches take over the nation! Boo-ah-ha-ha-ha!

Anxiety Culture: How to Avoid It

Today I discovered Anxiety Culture a Webzine described as a "vast, intoxicating mixture of outsider psychology, satire, anti-work philosophy, anti-establishment rants, graphic propaganda."

This British site has a strong anti-cubicle/wage slave/consumerist vibe (see also CLAWS and the book Doing Nothing by Tom Lutz and of course the film Office Space.). If you're looking for an antidote for status anxiety with a dose of attitude, you may enjoy its advice.

Here are a few previews of some of the facts and features you'll find if you venture over there.

In 2002, the Work Foundation reported that "job satisfaction has plummeted", and that so-called "high performance" management techniques made workers deeply unhappy and failed to raise output.

(From the article Work Hell)

Within the notion of “having to earn a living” is the assumption that you don’t automatically deserve to be alive. For some reason this tends to make people feel somewhat depressed. I have it on the highest authority, however, that the only way to really earn a living, once and for all, is by being born (and I’m talking here about physical birth, not any religious metaphorical mumbo-jumbo). After that you deserve to relax.

(From the article Today's Sermon: The Truth About Earning a Living)

“Supply and demand” is a free-market cliché commonly spouted (but often misunderstood) by corporate leaders. “Demand” is defined in free-market theory as a demand made by a free, rational individual who is acting out of self-interest. But many “demands” – eg the demand for “status symbol” consumer goods – owe more to saturation advertising and social conformity than to rational, individual self-interest.

(From Your Duty to Phone in Sick)

The picture above is from the "sticker" collection on the site.

Enlightened Economics

I discovered a blog today written by Ron Robins, a British-born Canadian MBA who is advancing the cause of "enlightened economics." (The site has been added to the blog roll on the right.)

His stated purpose is to "create a discussion in formulating a practical economics that integrates consciousness, natural law, and free-market theory." In other words, he advocates a new way of thinking about economics, and how we measure our economic health as a society.

He discusses topics such as voluntary simplicity, long-term economic thinking,and retiring the GDP, and alternatives to the U.S. Consumer Price Index. He predicts that "Cultural Creatives" will dominate the new economy.

A lot of food for thought and discussion.

*Advaita (non-duality) cartoon provided by Bob Seal

Stefan Sagmeister: The power of time off

From the TED Talks video podcast. TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become broader. In this talk, designer Stefan Sagmeister discusses closing his New York studio for a yearlong sabbatical to rejuvenate and refresh their creative outlook.