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.

Creativity and Constraints

Much of the time when we use the word "creativity" we're actually talking about "imagination" or "originality." The difference between these terms can be found right in the word. To be "creative" you have to create. Imagination is only a first step.

To let your imagination roam free, you need to let go of your pre-conceptions, limiting beliefs and constraints. But for creativity you need to welcome useful constraints back in. The right kind of constraint can provide the framework for innovative creation. This is good news for the broke among us. Limited resources are a great constraint that can force you to be more innovative with what you've got.

Today, over at Boing Boing, is a review of the book Junky Styling: A manual for thrift-shop clothes remixers. It is written by the proprietors of London's Junky Styling, a clothing boutique that takes thrift-store finds and re-imagines and re-constructs them into one-of-a-kind fashion statements. It just goes to show that buying second hand doesn't mean you have to abandon fashion or resign yourself to being out of date. With a little creativity-- and a sewing machine-- your budgetary constraint can be the springboard to an entirely original you.

Follow the link above to read more about the store's proprietors on Boing Boing or visit the Junky Styling web page.

Worst Case Scenario?

Mother Jones published feature by David Corn on Harvard Professor Elizabeth Warren. The article dubs her the "bank buster."

Warren is pushing a proposal to create a Financial Product Safety Commission to protect consumers from abusive lenders. Mortgages and credit cards, she wrote in a 2007 journal article about the proposal, "should be subject to the same routine safety screening that now governs the sale of every toaster, washing machine, and child's car seat."

The response from the banking industry has been predictable. They don't like the idea. An industry lobbyist, Bill Himpler, says Warren's commission would "take us essentially back to the 1970s, where we had... one-third the consumer credit available that we have now."

Would having less consumer credit be a terrible thing? If I understand this treat correctly, Himpler is saying, "if you don't allow us to take advantage of a few customers now, you'll hinder our ability to allow people to get in over their heads with debt, and no one wants that."

Man Goes 9 Years without Using Money

Courtesy of Alternet:

Daniel Suelo wasn't poor, a victim of bad luck, mentally ill, or even uneducated. He just decided that he wanted to have nothing to do with money. So he gave up consumer culture altogether, and for the last 9 years, he's survived by living in a cave in Utah, and dumpster diving, foraging, fishing, and occasionally hunting for food. He spends his time in the great outdoors--and in the public library, where he blogs about it all.

Want to read it? I Know It Is Possible to Live with Zero Money

Resourcefulness Celebrated

From last night's Daily Show, an interview with a person who truly embodies the Broke is Beautiful spirit. William Kamkwamba of Malawi was inspired by a diagram in a library book to use salvaged materials to build an electricity generating windmill for his village. (It's a good thing Constantine Xios didn't live in his village.)

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
William Kamkwamba
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Ron Paul Interview

Mommy, Why is that Mean Man Shouting at Me?

Ebenezer Scrooge is alive and well and living in the Chicago Suburb of Oak Brook.

Broke is Beautiful, which could not conceivably been written without the help of librarians, includes a chapter I titled Librarians: A Love Story. (In my book, it's a real love story, not like Michael Moore's love story about capitalism.)

It was the radical Benjamin Franklin who came up with the notion of the lending library. Franklin’s Library Company, which he referred to as the “public library of Philadelphia,” was formed with an idealistic view to break down class distinctions and allow artisans to become as well-read as the well-born. It was an early manifestation of The American Dream and its ideal of a true meritocracy and social mobility.

"These libraries have improved the general conversation of the Americans, made the common tradesmen and farmers as intelligent as most gentlemen from other countries, and perhaps has contributed in some degree to the stand so generally made throughout the colonies in defense of their privilege,” Franklin wrote in his autobiography.

Constantine "Connie" Xinos is perfectly fine with class distinctions. He once successfully blocked a permit for a senior's home, stating, "I don't want to live next to poor people. I don't want poor people in my town."

As reported in The Daily Herald, Xinos, the president of the home-owners' association in a gated community, hates such socialist instutitions as libraries--He reportedly worked to elect an Oak Brook village council who would shut down the town library, which he also campaigned against-- and thinks little children should be taught a lesson in personal responsibility.

When local kids showed up at town meetings to ask that their library be left open, he is quoted as saying, "I don't care that you guys miss the librarian, and she was nice, and she helped you find books."

When he brought a little girl to tears, he was not fazed. From the comfort of his Mercedes-Benz, he later told Daily Herald reporter Burt Constable: "I wanted that kid to lose sleep that night... This is the real world and the lesson, you folks who brought your kids here, is if you want something, pay for it."

Newsflash: Consumers Angry at Credit Card Companies!

Shocking!

Consumer Reports says:

More than a one-third (32%) have paid off and closed a card since January 2008, and half of those that canceled did so in direct response to the actions of credit-card issuers, such as cutting limits, hiking rates, or imposing fees, according to a national poll by Consumer Reports.

Twenty-one percent of respondents said they were treated unfairly by card companies, and only 41 percent said they were highly satisfied with their card issuer, making credit cards one of the lowest rated services that Consumer Reports covers.

Schadenfreude Headline of the Day

Hummer drivers get five times as many speeding tickets as the average driver. Courtesy: Consumer Reports.

Word of the Day: Plutolatry- The Worship of Wealth

Did you know that there is a movement among some right-wing conservative Christians to re-translate the Bible to make its language more in line with their ideology? I learned this today via the blog Below the Beltway.

Some of the suggestions seem like fairly reasonable updates to make the text more easily understood by a modern reader such as using "register" rather than "enroll" in the census or "gamble" instead of "cast lots."

(I, personally prefer the poetry and the cultural tradition of the King James version, even if scholars are in agreement that it is probably one of the worst translations out there.)

Other changes are more contentious such as eliminating gender neutral language, getting rid of "liberal" words like "comrade" and replacing them with words like "volunteer" and pumping up references to the devil and Hell.

For our Broke is Beautiful purposes, the most interesting suggestion is number 7: "Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning."

The political right has for some time mixed conservative Christian faith with an almost equal religious faith in free markets. The concept of Free Market Fundamentalism as a religion has been recognized by economists and theologians alike.

Economics professor Richard Wolf put it this way: "an unregulated economy, with free markets and private enterprise is a magic road to prosperity and growth. Particularly in the last 30 years, that has become a mantra. It’s the Morning Prayer with which every economics department begins."

Harvey Cox, professor of divinity at Harvard University penned an article for the Atlantic Monthly in 1999 titled The Market as God. Cox argued that “there lies embedded in the business pages and entire theology, which is comparable in scope if not in profundity to that of Thomas Aquinas or Karl Barth.”

He came to this belief after observing the reverence that The Market inspired in business people. “Such is the grip of the current orthodoxy that to question the omniscience of The Market is to question the inscrutable wisdom of Providence,” he wrote. “I am beginning to think that for all the religions of the world, however they may differ from one another, the religion of The Market has become the most formidable rival, the more so because it is rarely recognized as a religion.”

Faith in Free Markets as a God is one thing, but using Christianity to support it always seemed contradictory given what I read in The Bible. Now I see my confusion may just have been the result of a faulty translation.

For example 2 Corinthians 8:9: "For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor" is really just a celebration of Free Markets when you read it right.

(For more see the Top Verses That Televangelists Won't Preach on the blog Tithe Stewardship and Church Tithing and my own entry on the irony of the prosperity gospel church selling its private jet.)


*Please excuse my font issues. I can't figure out how to make the text consistent.

Save the Environment by Wasting!

During World War II, our government distributed posters like this one to let the American public know that thrift was patriotic. (If you'd like to see more, visit Northwestern Unversity's World War II Poster Collection.)

For the past few decades thrift has taken a back seat to consuming as a show of patriotism. Remember when George W. Bush encouraged us all to go shopping after September 11?

A great illustration of this "save the nation through waste" philosophy in action was the Cash for Clunkers program. I liked the idea of a program that gave Americans both an incentive to support the auto industry-- I am from Detroit after all-- and to do so by buying more fuel efficient vehicles. On its face it sounded green and ingenious. The public loved it too. What's not to love about a great big discount on a major purchase?

I immediately changed my mind when I learned that the old, perfectly working "clunkers" had to be destroyed and crushed. With the exception of only a few components, they couldn't even be used for parts to maintain current vehicles. I could not figure out how this massive waste could really save the environment. (This is not even addressing the issue of the disposal of mercury switches in older vehicles that the pre-bankrupcy GM would have been responsible to clean up but the "New GM" insists it is not.) Surely the energy saved by the more fuel efficient cars would be offset by the energy it would take to make entirely new vehicles, and new parts for other older vehicles, rather than using existing working cars and salvage parts.

The Wall Street Journal just published an analysis of the Cash for Clunkers program and it concluded exactly that.

According to Hudson Institute economist Irwin Stelzer, at best “the reduction in gasoline consumption will cut our oil consumption by 0.2 percent per year, or less than a single day’s gasoline use.” Burton Abrams and George Parsons of the University of Delaware added up the total benefits from reduced gas consumption, environmental improvements and the benefit to car buyers and companies, minus the overall cost of cash for clunkers, and found a net cost of roughly $2,000 per vehicle. Rather than stimulating the economy, the program made the nation as a whole $1.4 billion poorer.

The basic fallacy of cash for clunkers is that you can somehow create wealth by destroying existing assets that are still productive, in this case cars that still work. Under the program, auto dealers were required to destroy the car engines of trade-ins with a sodium silicate solution, then smash them and send them to the junk yard. As the journalist Henry Hazlitt wrote in his classic, “Economics in One Lesson,” you can’t raise living standards by breaking windows so some people can get jobs repairing them.

No Such Thing as a Free Lunch

Have you ever gotten into a debate about whether it is actually cheaper to pack a lunch or to just buy something from the fast food stand in the lobby? (Incidentally, did you know that the Louvre in Paris is about to get its very own McDonald's?)

Cockeyed.com, which has also made it a mission to quantify how much is actually inside product boxes, has a handy sandwich calculator. Choose your style of bread and toppings and voila! You can see just how much that sandwich will cost you. My avacado and swiss on rye came to $1.79.

Urban Foraging in the News

Urban foraging is what you call garbage picking if you're of a high enough social class to have a choice in the matter. Liberating waste, which is one of the topics covered in the forthcoming Broke is Beautiful, is featured in an article in The Guardian with the attention getting title America is a Toxic Dump.

Sadhbh Walshe begins her article by saying some languages have no word for garbage. If you actually follow the link that supports this claim though, it takes you to a blog which features the sentence "it is said that the Tagalog language had no word for garbage." A writer rarely writes "it is said" unless they have no proof to back something up. So it's a fact that ought to be true, even if it is probably not.

Freeganism, another new-fangled term for the age old practice of liberating perfectly usable stuff from dumpsters, is big these days. You know it is mainstream when Oprah does a feature. Walshe briefly discusses her adventures on an organized foraging tour in New York.

I had intended only to be a casual observer, but when I saw the range of goodies on offer – organic still fresh fruits and vegetables, fancy olive breads, cured meats, bagels, donuts and other delectables, still sealed in non-biodegradable packaging, it seemed an awful shame to let it go to waste. Another dumpster dive led me to more durable goods like books, clothes, toys, furniture and electronic items in near perfect condition. Nothing, it appears, is too good to be discarded here.Unfortunately only a tiny percentage of the city's refuse is reclaimed by foragers. The rest (which amounts to about 4,385,000 tons a year) is gathered by collection trucks which instantly crush it into compact piles, eliminating the possibility of further salvaging.