Interplace

Hello Interactors,

The field of economics is stuck in the past. They need to move on, and they need to do it fast. Stop standing around, get in on the bustle. MOVE, MOVE, MOVE! HUSTLE, HUSTLE, HUSTLE!

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

BE ON THE VERGE TO SURGE

I recently attended my first full length high school basketball game. The last time I saw a high school game I was playing in one. Not much has changed in thirty-seven years. But I did notice more standing around than when I was playing. Watch any NBA game these days and you see a lot of standing around. Maybe these stagnate high school players are just trying to be cool.

When you stand in one place on the court, there’s little interaction with your teammates, the player guarding you, the ball, or the floor. It easy to predict what’s going to happen. Not much. My coaches always told me to move without the ball. Later in life, when I played in adult leagues, I found myself yelling to my teammates, “MOVE WITHOUT THE BALL, MOVE WITHOUT THE BALL.” I didn’t like games where guys just ran to the corner and stood there waiting for the ball or for someone to shoot. Bor-ing.

Moving around the court without the ball brings dynamism to the game. It increases the chances of interacting with your teammates, your competition, and the ball – across various parts of the court. Coaches design plays expressly to move players around the floor in coordinated orchestration just to get players open. Only then can they interact with the ball and hopefully score.

But plays quickly break down and improvisation ensues. It’s what I love about playing and watching basketball. When players are dynamic, new situations and interactions continually emerge and they’re constantly different. But then when a player gets the ball, the attention, interaction, and players converge on that one person. And as soon as they pass the ball or shoot it, everything diverges again. These split-second cycles of emergence, convergence, and divergence are continually in motion and each intentional or random action from any player, the ball, or even the referee or crowd, can send the cycle spinning in another trajectory.

Participating in this continual transformation of conditions yields a constant flow of new sensory inputs. They serve as raw material for the brain to invent new and novel interactions. The creative capacity of any player to introduce novelty based on their knowledge of the rules, the split-second state of players interactions, the location of the ball, the time on the clock, and hundreds of other sights, sounds, touches, and smells is what makes basketball work. It’s a continual flow of interactions with people and place that is constantly evolving based on adaptations to ever-changing novel situations.

Here are three examples of different layers of interaction happening in a game of basketball. While elements within a layer interact with each other, elements between layers do too.

One is happening between the players and the structure of the game. Any one player has the potential to have influence in the game, but they also have the choice to do so. And they can’t do just anything, there are rules to the game and certain social constructs that influence their behavior.

Another is happening at a locational level; in the painted rectangle under the basket, inside and outside the three-point line, half-court, and full-court – even out of bounds or at the circles for jump balls. There’s also home court versus away within a conference, advancing post-season to play teams in a district, or even, if you’re lucky, to play distance teams in a state tournament. My sister was lucky enough to do that. She sunk a last second jumper from the sideline to win the Iowa girl’s state tournament in 1981.

A third layer are the social and interpersonal interactions and transactions that occur between competitors, coaches and their players, and between referees, coaches and bench officials. These interactions also have a spatial component. Casual banter between a player and a referee under the basket during a free-throw takes on a different timbre than a referee angerly signaling a technical foul in the face of an out of control coach on the sidelines.

And then there are the physics of the game. In high school a math nerd friend of mine and I would try to determine the equation for the parabola of our jump shots. “You need to adjust your slope to be more like -.07 if you’re going to shoot 14 feet from the hoop.”, we’d joke. Through years of practice, professional shooters like Steph Curry can dial in each variable of a jump shot, including velocity and spin, to achieve the perfect 48-degree angle needed for a swoosh.

Dribbling a basketball up and down is predictable because physics is predictable. Hold a basketball in your hand and it possesses potential energy. Rotate your hand and gravity pulls the ball to the earth. When it hits the floor, potential energy converts to kinetic energy. As the ball returns to the hand kinetic energy transforms back to potential energy. Repeat. You can even do it while running – which involves yet more physics like acceleration and velocity.

These tangible and physical aspects of the game, while mathematically decipherable and predictable, are also intuitive. A kid can learn to dribble or shoot a Nerf ball into a hoop at age two. We marvel at players who can do physical feats well not only because we know how hard they are, but because they’re easy to understand. They’re rooted in physics that can be observed and measured. And in the case of free throws, where other variables influencing the outcome of the shot are minimized, statisticians can even calculate the probability of the ball going in based on known physics and the player’s historical record of free throw shooting. My sister shot 72% from the free throw line. Impressive.

LET’S GET PHYISICAL; IT’S COMPLEX

Physics is what inspired the field of economics.

Physics was the most respected science in academia and society at the time, so economists legitimized their social science by drawing associations to physics. They borrowed language from physics and built clean, rational mathematical models to communicate their ideas. It gives the illusion economics is as predictable as physics, but it turns out not to be true. And most of them know it, but it doesn’t keep them from perpetuating the myth.

While it’s officially now basketball season in the U.S., it’s also nearing the end of the year. That means more basketball to watch, but it also means more prognosticators making predictions for 2022. Including financial predictions. And just like basketball, economists and journalists focus on what’s most intuitive and calculable. The easy stuff rooted in static statistics.

A recent New York Times article talks about how Covid has demonstrated the difficulty of predicting the future, yet Wall Street analysts can’t help it. They’re already trying to predict the state of the economy a year from now. As the article says, “It’s time again for analysts to gaze into their crystal balls.” Even the analysts have trouble taking themselves seriously.

Here’s how the head of research at one global bank, BNP Paribas, puts it, “’The numbers are meaningless in a sense,’ he said, and continued with an engaging smile, ‘Whenever I make a forecast, and I have done this for a number of years, I know it is going to be wrong.’ But, he added, “The numbers are an illustration of where things are going; And they provide grounding, he said, to ‘have a thematic discussion with our clients.’”

You’d think their clients would have clued in by now. Last year Wall Street predicted 2021 would end with the S&P 500 at 3,800. They were off by 20%. Even after taking a hit from the Omicron scare last week, it was hovering around 4,500.

These people are using the same general techniques for predicting a global financial market as those predicting whether an NBA star will make their next free throw or win their next game. And they do it knowing full well there are infinite variables and inherent complexity in the myriad of interactions in a global economy. It would be like a sports analyst predicting who will win the NBA championship and by how much at the start of the season. Some still try, but they, and we, all know it’s a lark. Yet, when it comes to making financial forecasts, most mainstream economists (and universities) lead us to believe their methods are sound and that the economy is as predictable as physics. It’s not.

That’s not to say predictions of complex phenomena are worthless. People around the world rely on weather forecasts to plan their day and their businesses. Predictions have improved greatly over the years thanks to better technology and modeling, but also because meteorology, a branch of geography, knows they’re dealing with a complex system. They recognize, as do their models, that it’s more complex, for example, than just physics and that a successful prediction requires knowledge of the initial conditions of a storm. Which is literally unknowable. So they start with what they know, observe and understand the interactions, and update their model.  Mainstream economists have yet to even admit they’re dealing with a complex system, let alone how to identify and verify initial conditions of catastrophic economic events.

The weather, the economy, and basketball are all complex systems. Weather is a natural system and economics and basketball are social systems. While they operate at vastly different scales and don’t share all the same attributes, they still have much in common.

One defining attribute is that complex systems are comprised of non-linear interactions between its parts – like elements of those layers of interaction I described in basketball. It’s impossible to fully understand a complex system by reducing it to its component parts – like just shooting or dribbling, for example, doesn’t fully explain a basketball game. And yet, that’s what mainstream economics continually tries to do as it clings to simplistic models and diagrams that try to mimic the laws of physics – like the ‘law’ of supply and demand, for example.

But the economy, like basketball, is an unpredictable system made up of decision makers (or agents in economics and players, coaches, and referees in basketball). The output of their interactions yields more than what is put into them which is what makes them non-linear. For example, a team of basketball players don’t simply stand in fixed positions passing the ball in a linear predictable fashion. They’re agents who take in a fixed set of inputs and decide how to make the most of them with the knowledge and skill they possess.

And these agents are not perfectly rational in their decision making, as mainstream economists assume them to be. Their rationality is limited, or bounded, by their capabilities, emotions, time, circumstances, or myriad of other distractions, preferences, or constraints. But they learn and adapt, often through interactions that are in constant motion and always changing. And each little micro-movement of behavior that comprises an interaction yields a new, novel, and emergent outcome that sometimes reveal patterns.

Because structure is imposed on the game (or the economy), order emerges from those micro-movements of activity creating a rhythm or pattern at a macro-level. For example, the rhythm and cadence of a basketball game that can sometimes emerge out of a fast break, or successive fast breaks. The opposing team’s coach recognizes that pattern; often times prompting them to stand up and call a time out just to disrupt the pattern. These continual sources of novelty self organize and perpetuate creating evolutionary momentum – like a hot shooter swept up in the flow of a game.

INTERACTION GAINS TRACTION

The global economy behaves much the same way and can be described by the same three layers of matrixed interactions mentioned earlier.

One layer of interaction is happening between the decision makers (or actors) in an organization and their teammates and competitors within the structure of local, state, and international law. Any one employee has the potential to be effective in the game of commerce, including the choice to do so.  And they can’t do just anything, there are rules to commerce and certain social constructs that influence their behavior.

More interactions happen at a locational level; at local, regional, national, and global scales. Even at a local level there are interactions between employees within an office, floor, or building or between buildings in larger corporations. Regional managers in large institutions interact with a network of affiliates across a diverse set of geographies who in turn are interacting locally and with other regions. Global corporations interact at a national level, but also around the globe with other states and regions who are in turn interacting with networks of countries and areas everywhere.

A third layer includes social, political, and economic interactions and transactions between people and institutions in a vast complex array spread across territories near and far. Small business associations interact with local elected officials to enact laws and regulations while CEOs of mega-corporations convene and conspire with international monetary organizations and world leaders to control and evolve world economic policies.

There are interactions occurring within and between each of these layers creating a matrix of interconnections. In basketball, we tend to be drawn to a particular player or their jump shot and not to the interactions they have had, are having, or are about to have between them and their teammates, coaches, and referees across the entire expanse of the court, over the course of the game, or across locations over the course of season.

The same is true in economics. We tend to focus on a CEO or a company’s performance or a political leader and their nation’s GDP. We’re not obsessing over the interactions occurring within and between the various relationships that interconnect corporate structures, policies at different scales of geography, or interactions between economies, societies, and their various localities.

Distinguished Professor of Geography at the National University of Singapore, Henry Wai-chung Yeung quotes two researchers studying how organizations relate and interact. He uses it to make an argument for why it’s more important to focus on the interaction between entities than the entities themselves.

“Taking a relational orientation suggests that the real work of the human organization occurs within the space of interaction between its members. Thus, the theorist must account for the relationships among, rather than the individual properties of, organizational members.”

Though Yeung also reminds us these theories too are drawn from physics. Quantum physics. It turns out there have been attempts by economists to pull away from Newtonian comparisons for also most as long as they’ve been around.

It was the British economist, William Stanley Jevons, who in 1871 devised the first ‘law of demand’ by drawing a graph that mimicked Sir Isaac Newton’s 1687 graph depicting his theories on the laws of motion. Borrowing Newton’s idea of an atom as the single foundational unit that defines the laws of motion, Jevon’s invented the ‘single average individual, the unit of which population is made up.’

It is from this oversimplification that he arrived at what he called the ‘calculating man’ — a perfectly rational human who maximizes the utility of their decisions. Jevons then came up with the ‘law of diminishing returns’ which states the more something is consumed, the less desirable it becomes. We don’t have to look far to see that is not universally true. Certainly not as true as the laws of motion.

But going back to the 1870s, I can imagine the allure of this theory. As evidenced in how Jevons’ describes markets being pulled into equilibrium just as gravity pulls a pendulum to rest,

“Just as we measure gravity by its effects in the motion of a pendulum, so we may estimate the equality or inequality of feelings by the decisions of the human mind. The will is our pendulum, and its oscillations are minutely registered in the price lists of the markets.”

But he goes on to admit that economists did not yet have the tools to measure this dynamically.

“I know not when we shall have a perfect system of statistics, but the want of it is the only insuperable obstacle in the way of making Economics an exact science.”

I suspect if Jevons were alive today, he would be scratching his head as to why more economists have not embraced complexity science to inch economics closer to an exact science. He’d be dismayed at how mainstream economists have resorted to just standing in the corner of the court arrogantly waiting for the ball to be thrown to them. He’d be screaming, “MOVE WITHOUT THE BALL! MOVE WITHOUT THE BALL!”

And they would; because he’s Jevons – one of the first economic stars in the league. And when they do, they’ll immediately experience how new situations and interactions continually emerge and how their reactions will be constantly different. And when they get the ball, the attention, interaction, and other economists will converge on them.

And then, as quickly as the moment arises, they pass to the next person and everything diverges again. These split-second cycles of emergence, convergence, and divergence of economic thoughts, theories, and actions would swirl in continual motion. Each intentional or random action from any economist, the market, politicians, or society would send the cycle spinning in another trajectory. A complex system of complexity economists lost in the perpetual momentum of the flow of the game.

And there, sitting at courtside, would be the great Sir Isaac Newton rising from his chair with his hands over his head and then sitting down. Only to rise and do it again. A single initial condition that would surely prompt others to do the same. Soon a pattern emerges as other fans join in. Pretty soon a self-organized wave propagates among the crowd and around the gym.

Each individual deciding to interact in response to a changing condition they observed in their environment constrained by the structure of the gym to forms a perpetual wave. Another complex system initiated through a set of initial conditions through the act of a single individual who decided not to just arrogantly stand there.

Hello Interactors,

As the holiday season calls on us to shop online, it’s worth considering the cost. I’m not talking about the price of the item your mouse is hovering over, but the hidden cost of getting it delivered to your doorstep.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

GETTING HIP TO A TIMELY TIP ON A CALIFORNIA TRIP

“I think you’re transporting drugs”, my cousin said casually. “Why else would they send a 20 year old kid to New Jersey from L.A. just to drive an old station wagon across the country?” “You’re the perfect foil…a 20 year old blond kid from Iowa just doing his job…no cop would ever think to search for drugs.”

It was on my mind the whole trip. Especially when I was pulled over in Nebraska for speeding. A portly County Mounty waddled his way to the car as I deftly stashed the radar detector under my seat. I watched him in my side mirror as he put on his hat while approaching the car. Cold winter wind rushed in as I rolled the window down and greeted him with the best rural “howdy” I could muster. I then asked him how fast I was going. He pulled his glasses down over his nose, looked me straight in the eye and said, “I don’t know, son, but it took me 10 minutes to catch up to you.”

He was indeed curious about the New Jersey plates and why I was headed to California, but he let me go with a warning. “Take it slow, son, I’m sure those folks out West want to see you make it ok.”

By the time I got to the California border, I was ready to be done. I decided to take the southern route into L.A. – the famed Route 66. I had hit a lot of snow in Colorado and was eager for sunny, dry roads. But that would have to wait. A massive ice storm met me in the high desert town of Victorville, California. I was barely able to find a place to stay for the night as the freeway was lined with cars in the ditch.

The next morning the roads were bare and wet as I headed west through the pass dividing the San Gabriel and San Bernardino mountains and into the vast San Bernardino valley. It was named by Spanish colonizers who took the same route in the late 1700s, then more Europeans a century later, and fellow Iowans soon after that. This valley was once home to sprawling citrus groves that attracted winter weary farmers from the Midwest. It was still agricultural when I was inching my way toward L.A. in 1985 in a blue Oldsmobile station wagon – a suspected innocent drug smuggler.

And then just last week there I was, over 30 years later, plodding my way toward L.A. down the same Interstate 10. My family and I took a trip to Southern California to visit schools for my son. A lot has changed. They paved paradise and put up parking lots, warehouses, and sprawling housing developments too. The freeways were crammed with semi-trucks as commuters blinkered their way through the lanes. They were competing for space in their hour-plus long trek to jobs in the L.A. basin.

It’s a long commute to and from what is known as the Inland Empire, but the average selling price of a home is $482,000. That’s nearly half of what you’d pay in Los Angeles ($841,000), further south in Orange county ($983,000), or San Diego ($802,000).

While four hundred grand is relatively low for Southern California, prices are climbing. The average price is already above what it was before the financial collapse of 2008. That’s when average single family home prices in the Inland Empire plummeted to under $200,000. The region was home to some of the worst foreclosure stories in the country. At one point, one in five homes in the area were in foreclosure. People were literally walking away from their homes. Even though housing is booming again, inventory is actually lower than it was before the collapse.

Wall Street backed firms like the Blackstone Group, the Lewis Group, and Oak Tree Capital Management swooped in and bought large swaths of foreclosed homes. They’ve been renting them to those who can’t afford to buy until the price of the home reaches a level they feel they can best profit by selling. Buy low, sell high and wish the struggling family good bye.

(Incidentally, the founder of Blackstone, Stephen Schwarzman, who is worth around $21 billion, was one of a handful of billionaires who continued to support Trump financially after the raid he incited on the capital. And when the Obama administration suggested Wall Street fund managers like Schwarzman pay at least as much in taxes on earned interest as ordinary wage earners, Schwarzman said Obama was waging war on the wealthy and added, “It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.” What an odd and insensitive comparison for a Jewish man to make. But, Trump has a way of attracting odd and insensitive people.)

As billionaire backed firms competed for foreclosed housing stocks, there was no chance a single individual seeking to buy a home could get in on the competition. One man in Rancho Cucamonga bid on over 200 houses but failed on all accounts. And while these outside firms were scooping up homes at $200,000 a pop as late as 2012, new housing construction was selling at $300,000 to $800,000. While this was a small fraction of the total, it incented even more developers to build more expensive homes which continue to drive up prices across the region.

WORLD HYPOXIC CENTER

But the 2008 housing crisis wasn’t the first to hit the Inland Empire. Trouble was brewing even as I lumbered through the valley in the mid 1980s in that New Jersey station wagon. In 1978 California passed Proposition 13 which altered how property taxes were calculated. The law was intended to reduce property tax burdens on residents already being forced to the more affordable periphery of desirable urban centers across L.A. The Inland Empire absorbed many of those people throughout the 80s, 90s, and 2000s – and continues to attract more to this day.

Proposition 13 also changed the financial dynamics between state, regional, and local economies as local tax revenues plummeted. Local governments had to find new sources of revenue resulting in these three primary (and familiar) outcomes;

“1. the appearance of auto malls and big-box retail stores, and the disappearance of ‘mom and pop’ shops in virtually every community in the region;

2. new relationship between land developers and municipal authorities;

3. the creation of private/public development projects as potential revenue generators.”

It didn’t help when a steel factory shut down in 1983 eliminating 10,000 jobs. Then, in 1991, as the Cold War threats diminished, George H. W. Bush shut down the Norton Air Force base and closed a nearby missile factory. Then, in 1993, the March Air Force base was also trimmed. Over 30,000 jobs were lost accounting for nearly seven percent of the area’s population.  

By the mid 1990s multi-national corporations were moving manufacturing hubs and jobs overseas. As trade imbalances mounted container ships began piling up at the Long Beach Port due south of the Inland Empire. Portside storage facilities were overwhelmed and distributors began looking to the Inland Empire for land to build new, large, modern distribution centers.

Within a decade vineyards and dairy farms were replaced with warehouses. One month residents were driving by signs advertising fresh fruit and then next a block long gray box with an Amazon sign bolted to the wall. Sketchers has a single facility stretching 1.8 million square feet and hopes to expand their footprint as part of an area wide 41.6 million square feet warehouse expansion. By the end of 2013 the Inland Empire had become the Warehouse Empire of the nation accounting for 1.6 billion square feet of distribution, logistics, and warehouse facilities.

Forty five percent of the nation’s imports are trained, trucked, or flown into the Inland Empire, unpacked, sorted, and reloaded onto trains, trucks, and planes that then fan out again across the nation. It’s like a logistics heart that pulses goods purchased with a single click through the veins and arteries of the nation’s transportation infrastructure.

The city of Moreno Valley is building what they call the World Logistic Center. It’s a 41.6 million square foot $3 billion expanse that will feature a 2,600 acre corporate campus. While they claim it will be one of the most sustainable corporate campuses in the nation, the South Coast Air Quality District estimates the project will add an additional 30,000 heavy-duty trucks to area roads per day. That’s nothing but dollar signs for some, but nothing but trouble for most.

Heavy-duty diesel trucks emit 24 times more fine particulate matter than regular gasoline engines. These are the chemical compounds that are so small they easily seep into the lungs and pollute blood streams. The State of California and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have identified more than 40 different toxic pollutants in diesel emissions.

“In 2003, the Riverside and San Bernardino counties ranked first and second, respectively, in the nation for total particulate pollution.”

Between 2000-2002 Riverside’s particulate matter concentrations were 1.75 times the federal limit and more than twice the state’s standard.

One 2007 study conservatively estimated that the “logistics industry expansion will cause 32-64 cases of excess mortality and morbidity valued at $247-455 million per year.” Those living closer to the freeways will be effected more. And because housing is cheapest along the noisiest and most polluted roadways, those most impacted will be those most vulnerable physically and financially – which historically are people of color and the elderly.

PROPOSITION UNSEEN

The Inland Empire is a regional microcosm of economic geography. It’s part of a global experiment – a worldwide economic capitalistic petri dish – that has been festering and bubbling at different scales since the 1970s. As residents were pushed out of settled areas in the L.A. basin due to rising property values, the Inland Empire became a target for sprawl. The passing of Proposition 13 cut funding for public health, education, and infrastructure forcing local governments to pursue public/private partnerships.

Proposition 13 also included special provisions for commercial development, attracting opportunistic capitalists and politicians. To this day, city and county government officials across the Inland Empire continue to be investigated, charged, and tried for bribery, corruption, attempts to destroy documents, and guilty pleas. While the gentrification attracts jobs and provides much needed housing and flows money through the region, it also increases commute distances, clogs roads, and contributes to some of the worst air pollution in the country.

That flow of capital into the Inland Empire is coming from state and national economic policies that started in the 1970s. Seeing an end to the post-war growth of the 1950s and 60s, the United States and their allies instituted financial deregulation that reoriented their capitalist economies. Globalization was on the rise at the same time the U.S. allowed for more foreign investment on American soil.

When I was living in L.A. in the 80s, it was private and commercial Japanese investors grabbing up property and high rises in L.A. Now the top three foreign investors come from Canada, Mexico, and China. And they’re largely interested in suburban areas like the Inland Empire.

The very financial regulation that created the necessary funds to build the seaports, airports, railways, and freeways that provide our economy’s circulatory system have been diminished by both parties over the last 50 years. The 1978 California Proposition 13 was a warm up act for Reagan’s failed tax-cut, trickle down theories he claimed would bring prosperity to every American. Every president since has been promising as much yet income disparities continue to grow. Jeff Bezos’ net worth has grown $65 billion since the start of the pandemic. Meanwhile, even a hint of inflation threatens to push millions more into poverty and thousands to live in their cars or on the streets.

It should be noted that the logistics business in the Inland Empire would likely not exist if it weren’t for a federally funded air force base that has since been converted to air cargo airports where streams of cargo planes land 24/7. Not to mention the federal and state funded freeways crisscrossing the valley that private heavy-duty trucks use and abuse with little to no restrictions. Trucks that are driven by drivers who continually fight for their right to organize for fair wages and healthcare. And let’s not forget the federally funded internet that makes it all too easy to click a ‘buy’ button and have a package magically arrive the next day…most likely through a sprawling warehouse in the Inland Empire.

Globalization – and the functional regulation of the world economy by select countries – has complicated the flow of capital through regions like the Inland Empire. It’s left small town governments stretched and starving for funds. They’re stuck begging for crumbs from money-rich corporations in exchange for favors. It’s led to criminal activity among conspiring opportunists – some of whom are simply trying to secure funds for schools.

I doubt I was trafficking cocaine. I was working for one of L.A.’s oldest company’s, Platt Music Corporation. They started out selling sheet music but had morphed into a consumer electronics distributor – also known as a middle-man. If you bought a TV in a California department store in the 80s, it likely went through Platt. They had just gone public a year before I started running errands for them across the far reaches of L.A. – and the country. But then big-box stores like Circuit City and Best Buy appeared and increased competition for consumer electronics. Soon department stores were forced to negotiate their own prices directly with manufacturers. Platt folded in 1987 after 82 years of doing business in L.A. Another ‘mom and pop’ shop gone. Capitalism eating itself.

CAPITAL ARREST

Geographer David Harvey put it best when he said, “Capitalists behave like capitalists wherever they are. They pursue the expansion of value through exploitation without regard to the social consequences.” And the Inland Empire, a struggling locus to distribute and focus the country’s goods, is a prime example that leads Harvey to conclude, “The accumulation of capital and misery go hand in hand, concentrated in space.”

Many economic geographers contend that both perceived and real economic and social crisis are necessary for capitalism to sustain itself. Circuits of capital flowing inside the Inland Empire interact with circuits flowing outside in ways that transform the culture and shape of it’s cities. The constant expanding and contracting creates inequities and uneven development that capitalists then exploit. We often think of capitalism as a constant that can be universally applied, but in reality it thrives off of localized geographic and economic upheaval and repair – starve one area to reduce it’s value, buy low; boost investments through private capital and governmental lubricants, sell high; then seek or create the next devalued area.

This process is sold to us as job creation. It can, but often at the expense of jobs elsewhere. Production of goods and services is a social process while the ownership of production, and the profits that come with it, are largely privately held. Unless there are laws in place to distribute portions of the wealth accumulation in support of the social process of production, streets crumble, cities stumble, and angry residents rumble. We’re witnessing how the concentrated accumulation of capital and misery indeed go hand in hand.

We humans are really good at calculating the price of convenience, but are terrible at measuring the cost. For example, privileged car owners happily jump in the driver’s seat knowing how comfortable and convenient it is. But few stop to consider how much space a car takes up on the road, how much their tire dust is floating into the mouths of fish, or how many toxic exhaust chemicals are sucked into the lungs of that kid standing on the corner.

And how many of us hesitate to click ‘buy’ knowing how nice it is to have a package delivered to our doorstep in 24 hours or less? We don’t consider the additional 30,000 heavy-duty trucks that will rumble down the local roads and freeways of the Inland Empire. Or the how local warehouse workers will make ends meet when Amazon replaces them with robots. Or what about the critters living in the foothills of the valley?

Someone is thinking of them. In 2020 the Friends of the Northern San Jacinto Valley, sued Moreno Valley over further expansion of their Global Logistics Center into sensitive areas. They settled just a few weeks ago. Six hundred acres will be added to the endangered-species reserve system in exchange for enough land to build the equivalent of 40 shopping malls worth of warehouse space. The Inland Empire really is the Warehouse Empire.

Maybe it’s time we pull consumerism over and slip on our hat as we saunter up to the speeding capitalist. And when they roll their window down asking how much damage they’ve done, we peer over our glasses and earnestly say, “I don’t know, son, but it’ll take generations to fix it.”

Hello Interactors,

Today is Black Friday. It’s one of the most anticipated shopping days of the year. In Part 1 of this two part series, I talked about how the Christmas holiday season is rooted in consumption and classism. Its origins had little to nothing to do with Christianity, but everything to do with establishing social order. Black Friday is no different.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

VISIONS OF SUGAR-PLUMS DANCED IN THEIR HEADS

American colonial settlers debated Christmas celebrations well in the 1700s. Bouts of drunken caroling, groveling, and fallacious philia raged from harvest season’s end through December. While the practice was as old as the Roman Saturnalia, Puritan settlers hoped to sever the European connection.

One Puritan, Reverend Increase Mather, “accurately observed in 1687 that the early Christians who first observed the Nativity on December 25 did not do so ‘thinking that Christ was born in that Month, but because the Heathens Saturnalia was at that time kept in Rome, and they were willing to have those Pagan Holidays metamorphosed into Christian [ones].’”

The harvest parties only increased until the colonists overthrew England’s Dominion of New England in 1689. One Connecticut almanac producer, John Tully, wrote in 1688,

“The Nights are still cold and long, which may cause great Conjunction betwixt the Male and Female Planets of our sublunary Orb, the effects whereof may be seen about nine months after…”

Tully also bravely printed Christmas Day on the 25th alongside his weather predictions.

There was not another mention of Christmas until 1711 when Increase Mather’s son, Reverend Cotton Mather (who applauded Indigenous massacres because they “brought Indian souls to hell”) wrote in his December 30th diary,

“I hear of a number of young people of both sexes, belonging, many of them, to my flock, who have had on the Christmas-night, this last week, a Frolick, a revelling feast, and Ball [i.e., dance].…”

The following year, around Christmas time, he preached from the Bible criticisms of faux Christians who used religion to veil ungodly sexual acts, “‘giving themselves over to fornication’—'ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness.’”

Despite Mather’s routine attempts to curb young people’s desire to turn religious events into parties, such at weddings or Sunday night revelry, it only increased. Population data from this time period shows a marked increase in unwed pregnancies. Records show seven month old marriages that featured an addition to the family a couple months later. Also, there’s a notable swelling of births roughly nine months after Christmas. That’s when I was born.

By the early 1700s, Cotton Mather gave up. He reluctantly accepted that Christians could be both Christmas revelers and Christian reckoners; a weakening of Puritanism and a concession his father surely would have admonished. But it set the stage for moderation as evidenced in Benjamin Franklin’s older brother, James Franklin’s, 1733 couplet:  

“Now drink good Liquor, but not so, / That thou canst neither stand nor go.”

James was the one who trained young Ben to become a printer. Benjamin Franklin is also remembered as the nation’s model of self-restraint, but perhaps less so as a philanderer. He fathered an illegitimate child before entering a common-law marriage with his housekeeper’s daughter. Perhaps his rustles in the sheets started with a little wassail in streets.

In December of 1734, Franklin wrote this in his second edition of his famed Poor Richard’s Almanac:

“If you wou’d have Guests merry with your Cheer, / Be so yourself, or so at least appear.”

Then again five years later:

“O blessed Season! lov’d by Saints and Sinners, / For long Devotions, or for longer Dinners.”

What Benjamin Franklin, and prolific almanac producer Nathanial Ames, aimed to do throughout the 1700s was to cast Christmas, through printed word, as a time to be merry – but in moderation. Slowly, by the late 1700s, Christmas carols began sneaking into America’s first printed hymnals. The Christmas celebration had finally made piece with Christianity. The Universalists were the first to hold a December 25th service in 1789.

CLOTHES WERE ALL TARNISHED WITH ASHES AND SOOT

But the dawn of a new century, and the industrial age, brought a shift in attitudes around Christmas. The elite, again, distanced themselves from the occasion. As urban cities grew and jobs shifted from the farm to the factory, winter brought new dynamics to the onset of the season. Some factories closed in the cold months as did shipyards along frozen waters.

This brought unemployment and idle time to laborers. Whereas historically wealthy farm owners were willing to amuse the working class in a societal roll reversal – through transient and theatrical wassailing – the urban elite power structures were unwilling to participate. But it didn’t stop the working class from venting.

The once faint mockery of their employers – imbued with subtle hints of revenge should they not offer them gifts, food, or alcohol – turned fierce and riotous in the 1800s. Papers in both England and the United States barely mention Christmas at all between 1800 and 1820. But that was about to change.

In the first decade of 1800, one of New York’s most influential men, John Pintard, became particularly peeved by the seasonal banditti. He reminisced on ‘better days’ when the rich and the poor got drunk together. And while he wished his wealthy friends reveled more among themselves, he grew concerned that “the beastly vice of drunkenness among the lower laboring classes is growing to a frightful excess…”

And in a familiar tone, echoed to this day by many, he feared “thefts, incendiaries, and murders—which prevail—all arise from this source.”  Which is why he helped create the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism. This was an organization that sought to curb money directed at care for the poor, but to also stop them from begging and drinking. The white elite ruling class of the 1820s –- as well as many in the 2020s – complained of what one New York paper described as, “[t]he assembling of Negroes, servants, boys and other disorderly persons, in noisy companies in the streets, where they spend the time in gaming, drunkenness, quarreling, swearing, etc., to the great disturbance of the neighborhood.”

Pintard was also hopelessly nostalgic. He founded the New York Historical Society in 1804 and was instrumental in establishing Washington’s Birthday, the Fourth of July, and Columbus Day as national holidays. Pintard also introduced America’s icon of nostalgia, Santa Claus. Seeking a patron saint for the New York Historical Society, and for all of New York City, he commissioned an illustration to be painted of St. Nicholas giving presents to children. While the icon was not intended to be seasonal, it was nonetheless printed on December 6th, St. Nicholas Day, in 1810.

He pined for the days when the rich and powerful could rule over what was becoming a burgeoning working class. In 1822, as Jefferson had just passed a law allowing non-property owners to vote, Pintard wrote to his daughter,

“All power is to be given, by the right of universal suffrage, to a mass of people, especially in this city, which has no stake in society. It is easier to raise a mob than to quell it, and we shall hereafter be governed by rank democracy.… Alas that the proud state of New York should be engulfed in the abyss of ruin.”

WHAT TO MY WONDERING EYES SHOULD APPEAR

1822 was also the year his friend, and wealthy land owner, Clement Clark Moore, wrote what was to become the most influential Christmas poem ever: “A Visit from St. Nicholas” or as it is known today, “T’was The Night Before Christmas.”

This single poem, written for the elite upper class, encapsulates the nostalgia of wassailing Pintard and his friends pined for, while making themselves feel good about themselves for ‘giving to the needy.’ Moore did this by substituting the unruly lower working class, begging for gifts from their master, with children expecting presents on Christmas morning.

He kept the gift giving mysticism of the centuries old St. Nicholas the Wonderworker, but removed the judgmental elements of a Bishop who may make them feel guilty for maintaining class divide by making him “merry”, “droll”, “rosy”, and “plump.” He also made him a lower class “peddler”. And while Santa made a loud noise “on the lawn” with a “clatter”, just as a lower class wassailer would have, he was but a small and unthreatening “right jolly old elf” who kindly left toys he had labored over for the children.

And he asked nothing in return. With a “wink of his eye” and a “finger aside his nose” (a gesture meaning “just between you and me”) Moore gave the privileged class, who were fearful of home invasions at Christmas time, assurance they “had nothing to dread.” All they needed to do, was keep their wealth within the family and buy their kids and friends gifts at Christmas time. Forget the poor, they thought, they’re as hopeless as democracy.

The vision and version of Christmas and Santa Claus that Moore provided his haughty affluent peers, in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, was soon to be read by a growing middle class and an increasingly literate lower class. That’s as true then as it is today.

And while Moore was a country squire who never worked a day in his life, and hated the gridding up of property in a growing New York City, he grew to love the money he earned selling off family property he inherited. Geographer Simeon DeWitt was chopping Manhattan into a Roman style grid to make room for a population that grew from 33,000 in 1790 to nearly 200,000 by the time Moore’s poem was written in 1822. He even included a chimney in his poem for Santa to climb down as a way for city folk to better relate to a scene he’d rather have happened in his bucolic hills of a New York of yore – an area today we call Chelsea.

What also changed was the gifts exchanged. Traditional Christmas gifts consisted of hand made food and goods forged from natural countryside surroundings. But as Christmas moved to the city, handmade gifts were displaced by store bought presents.

The first known American Christmas advertisement came from one of the country’s busiest ports, Salem, Massachusetts in 1806. Then two more in 1808 in both Boston and New York in the New York Evening Post. By the 1820s they were everywhere. In 1834 a Boston magazine wrote,

“’All the children are expecting presents, and all aunts and cousins to say nothing of near relatives, are considering what they shall bestow upon the earnest expectants.… I observe that the shops are preparing themselves with all sorts of things to suit all sorts of tastes; and am amazed at the cunning skill with which the most worthless as well as most valuable articles are set forth to tempt and decoy the bewildered purchaser.’”

It went on to warn shoppers to “’put themselves on their guard, to be resolved to select from the tempting mass only what is useful and what may do good…’”

Sounds like Black Friday.

THE LUSTRE OF MID-DAY TO OBJECTS BELOW

While there was aggressive advertising as early as the 1800s, there was a social stigma around being too showy with luxury purchases. It was a sign of European aristocracy that the colonists, of all economic strata, were keen to avoid. But Christmas time had long been a cyclical excuse to overconsume. Shopkeepers and manufacturers latched on this association tempting even the most tempered to exult in excess through advertising, promotions, and sales.

It was the Puritans who invented Thanksgiving as way to celebrate the harvest separate from the religiosity of Christmas time. The specific day on the calendar bounced around until the late 1700s when regional governors dictated it be celebrated as close to Christmas as possible. It was even held on December 20th one year.

It didn’t take long for Thanksgiving to become commercialized either. New England farmers and merchants would strategize on how to best profit from the carnival-like drunken festivals that surrounded Thanksgiving just as it did Christmas.

Once Abraham Lincoln declared the last Thursday of November to be the official day of Thanksgiving in 1863, retailers could plan their profits around a firm date. Then, in 1934, Franklin Delano Roosevelt moved it back a week during the depression to extend the Christmas shopping season an extra week so retailers could reap more profits. It was a controversial ruling and FDR’s date came to be known as Franksgiving. Happy Franksgiving, everyone!

The 1900s was also the time when the marauding tradition of parading through the streets became a sponsored event by department stores. Eaton department store sponsored the first in Toronto in 1905 and then Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade came along in New York City in 1924. These parades began an unwritten rule among retailers to refrain from advertising Christmas sales until the parade had commenced. That made the Friday after Thanksgiving the first day shops were open for business and the start of holiday shopping.

The term ‘Black Friday’ didn’t enter the picture until 1961 in Philadelphia. ‘Black days’ were customarily days marking bad events. So much like the dread of the chaotic colonial traditions of parading wassailers, the Philadelphia police came to describe the traffic, congestion, and shopping hysteria the day after Thanksgiving as ‘Black Friday.’

But retailers didn’t much like the negative association. It took 20 years before a new association was cemented. And it was, again, Philadelphia that led the charge. A November 28th, 1981 article in the Philadelphia Inquirer was the first to describe Black Friday as the day when retailers, who suffered ‘in the red’ for most of the year, could move their ledger into the ‘black’ during the holiday shopping season.

Black Friday triggers an event, just as solstice did for the Romans, that offers an opportunity for those in power, capitalists in the form of retailers, to open their doors just as the wealthy land owners did, and offer great deals to those who can’t afford various luxuries, like figgy pudding, rum spiced pie, perry, or wassail.

Just as Roman slave owners used the Saturnalia to remind slaves of their place in society, or wealthy land barons to remind peasant laborers of theirs, capitalists use the holiday season as an chance to remind us all who’s in charge. And what Pintard, Moore, and their band of wealthy Knickerbockers did was wrap it all up in a fairy tale that portrays it all as benevolence by tying it to the Christian saint known for charity – Ole St. Nick.

They feared the masses becoming educated and empowered with the right to vote. They railed against democracy sensing it would only loosen their grip on power. And here we are on Black Friday of 2021, the start of the holiday shopping season, as powerful conservatives in Washington are drooling over ways to carve up a bill that represents the biggest investment in America’s most needy since FDR like it was a Thanksgiving turkey. Pass the wassail, please.

Reference:

The Battle for Christmas. A Social and Cultural History of Our Most Cherished Holiday. Stephen Nissenbaum. 1997

Hello Interactors,

This is part one of a two part series on the role of economics in the holiday season. We’re a week away from Thanksgiving, but Christmas has already started to enter our lives. If it feels like it keeps creeping closer to Halloween, that’s because it is. Little did I know, it actually started out that way.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

HOUSE INVASION

It was 9:00 on Christmas night when four men forcibly entered the house. John Rowden, his wife, their adopted son, and a live-in helper, Daniel Poole, were all home. The four men made their way to the living room, sat on the couch in front of the fire, and starting singing Christmas carols. Clearly drunk, at some point one of the men turned to Rowden and said sarcastically, “How do you like this, father?” They demanded alcohol as payment for their ‘entertainment’. Rowden didn’t like it at all and asked them to leave.

They had heard Rowden had fine wine in his collection. They said they’d happily pay him for the alcohol later, but demanded the wine now. Rowden’s wife stepped in reminding them that their house was not a bar and they should leave. Much to their surprise, the men did; only to return minutes later claiming they had the cash to pay for the wine.

Fearing the scoundrels would break in if they didn’t take the money, the Rowden’s decided to sell them a bottle of their prized wine. But first they demanded proof that the men had the money. Rowden cracked open the door and one of the men shoved fake money in his wife’s face as the others tried to enter the house.

The Rowden’s, with the help of Daniel Poole, managed to push them back and secure the door. The four men appeared to have given up. But moments later they heard them yelling sardonically from outside, “hello.” Poole tried to reason with them. He reminded them that it was Christmas night and they should be home. They saw this as a provocation and challenged Poole to come out and make them go home.

Poole refused, of course, so they began throwing rocks at the house. They pried away siding, destroyed rockery, fences, and tore down poles. After an hour and a half of persistent vandalism, it finally subsided and the family was safe and sound. The house? Not so much. Merry Christmas.

This true story is from 1649 and took place in Salam, Massachusetts. Two of those four men were later implicated in the Salem witch hunts. These intrusions were a common occurrence in the colonies during the holiday season, but more so in England. These four men were wassailing. Today we might call it caroling, but at the time it was really more a combination of Thanksgiving, Mardi Gras, trick-or-treating, and caroling. We don’t run into many drunk carolers these days, but we would have in 17th century England and their colonies.

The Puritan settlers outlawed wassailing after colonizing. In fact, they banned any celebration of Christmas. Because the bible makes no mention of the birth of Jesus on any particular date, there was no cause for celebration. Of course, there was little cause for celebration among the Puritans at all; especially excesses of revelry, alcohol, and sex.

The Puritans tried banning Christmas in London too. It prompted a book to be written in 1686 called The Tryal of Old Father Christmas. It featured a Puritan jury made up of “Mr. Cold-kitchen”, “Mr. Give-little”, and “Mr. Hate-good.” Perhaps these characters inspired Charles Dicken’s character, Ebenezer Scrooge, 150 years later.

TRICK OR TREAT, SMELL MY FEET, GIVE ME SOMETHING GOOD TO EAT

The Rowden’s were a relatively affluent family who owned a pear orchard from which they made pear wine or cider, known as “perry”. Those four young men were of a lower class, possibly even laborers for his orchard, and they came to Rowden’s house to be merry with his perry.

It was common practice throughout Europe and England for wealthy land and farm owners to treat their lower class workers to a meal and/or gifts in late November and early December. After what must have been an intense and laborious season of harvesting, canning, slaughtering, and preparing for the coming winter months, December marked an end to a fruitful season worth celebrating. December 6th was the customary end of the harvest season in Western Europe, just a week and a half after America’s modern-day traditional harvest celebration – Thanksgiving.

To recognize and honor their hard work, it became customary for workers to exchange gifts with their masters or employers. Some exchanges were initiated from the lower class workers and other times by the upper class employers. But every wealthy land owner knew that if they didn’t so something to commemorate their worker’s labor, they risk workers taking it upon themselves to come knocking.  Just as those four men did to old man Rowden, singing,

Come bring, with a noise,My merrie, merrie boys,The Christmas log to the firing;While my good dame sheBids ye all be free [i.e., with the alcohol]And drink to your heart’s desiring…

The upper class quickly learned that it’s best to open their doors to the peasant class, feed them, entertain them, and send them on their merry way…or else. As evidenced in this little jingle,

We’ve come here to claim our right…And if you don’t open up your door,We will lay you flat upon the floor

While I’m sure there were examples of benevolent exchanges between classes, the ritual also served as an explicit reinforcement of social order. You’re down there and we’re up here. Don’t think that we’re equals. We have the goods and you come begging. And begging they did, singing,

Again we assemble, a merry New YearTo wish to each one of the family hereMay they of potatoes and herrings have plentyWith butter and cheese, and each other dainty

Christmas was a time when the poor were excused for begging. If they were not happy with what was offered, they took revenge. Again, a bit like Halloween. Give me a treat, or you’ll get tricked. The privileged class knew they could do little to stop the raucous revelers, just as there’s little to be done should some kids decide to toilet paper your trees or egg your house on Halloween.

THE POPE PULLS A TRICK, WITH OLE ST. NICK

Another hallows eve refrain was dressing in costumes. Often it was the lower class mocking the upper class by dressing and acting like them. Men would sometimes dress as women and women as men. Others would use it as a way to mock religious leaders or politicians.

And it was almost always a rowdy and drunken celebration because one of the substances the merry bands would be begging for was alcohol – usually the cidery punch known as wassail. They’d run door to door and through the streets singing this familiar holiday tune,

Here we come a-wassailing among the leaves so green;Here we come a-wandering, so fair to be seen.Love and joy come to you, and to you our wassail, too.And God bless you and send you a Happy New YearAnd God bless you and send you a Happy New Year

We are not daily beggars that beg from door to door;But we are neighbours' children whom you have seen before.Love and joy come to you, and to you our wassail, too.And God bless you and send you a Happy New YearAnd God bless you and send you a Happy New Year

This widespread postharvest behavior had been happening for thousands of years. It was so baked into the fabric of society that even the church began painting it with Christian imagery and metaphor. Because the celebrations occurred on or around the end of November and into December there were many elements of Christianity to which they could attach the events.

During Roman times, December 17th marked the day of the Saturnalia – a festival honoring the god of agriculture, Saturn. All work halted for a week as people decorated their homes with wreaths. They shed their togas to dawn festive clothes, and they drank, gambled, sang, played music, socialized and exchanged gifts. It was a celebration of their agrarian bounty and the return of light at Winter solstice. It was also a time to invite their slaves to dinner where their masters would serve them food.

One Christian Saint affiliated with early December – and the one most honored today in the form of a plump jolly man wearing a red velvet suit – is Saint Nicholas. December 6th is St. Nicholas Day. For many European countries this marked the official end of the harvest season. And even today it’s recognized in some countries as a kind of warm-up act to the more official and accepted Christmas day, December 25th.

Nicholas of Bari was a Greek Christian bishop from modern day Turkey. Also known as Nicholas the Wonderworker, he earned a reputation during the Roman Empire for many miracles; all of which, were written centuries after his death and thus prone to exaggeration. But, he was most famous for his generosity, charity, and kindness to children, the poor, and the disadvantaged. He was said to have sold his own belongings to get gold coins that he’d then put in the shoes outside people’s homes. This is the origin of the tradition of putting shoes or stockings out on Christmas Eve.

They say he also saved the lives of three innocent men from execution. He chastised the corrupted judge for accepting a bribe to execute them. You can bet St. Nick would have made sure old-man Rowden had shared his perry before things got too scary.

And he certainly would have been watching over the peasant farmers and slaves to insure they were treated fairly. He seemed to always have an eye out for inequities and justice for common people. Maybe that’s what made him a saint. Or maybe he was just born that way. After all, Nicholas in Greek means “people’s victory.”

DON’T GO HIDING, OFFER GOOD TIDING

The Puritans obviously lost at their attempts to ban Christmas. Lacking any evidence from the Bible, the Christian powers that be eventually settled on the 25th of December as the day Jesus was born. They most likely picked the 25th because that was the day winter solstice landed on the Roman calendar. And while much is made of Christmas day, a certain song reminds us there are actually 12 days of Christmas. Maybe more.

It may feel like Christmas creep when you see holiday decorations appear the day after Halloween, but historically speaking that’s when the party starts. Trick-or-treating kicks off two months of gorging on goodies, making merry with perry, and pleading, pestering, and pining for presents from parents. Just as peasants begged for bounty from their overlords.

Christmas tradition is mostly a months long after-work party that celebrates wealth accumulation while reinforcing a certain economic relationship between the haves and the have-nots. Yes, there are “good tidings to you and all of your kin” and it is a celebration from the heart that can feed the soul with some warm “figgy pudding.”

But lingering under the guise of generosity on the part of the giver is a threat of violence if it’s not shared equitably. “For they’d all like figgy pudding, so bring it out here!” And if you don’t, then “they won’t go until they get some, so bring some out here!”

Maybe think twice before feeling too smug plopping a penny in the Salvation Army’s red pot while making pleasant with a nearby peasant. If your flush with funds this holiday season, and pay people to serve you, be mindful of who you snub.

Tip graciously and share wisely. The ones who deserve it the most, may be the one’s who could do you the most damage. You’d hate for a worker’s revolt where the disadvantaged come knocking on the doors of rich people carrying a yule log, some drunken friends, a bit of angry resentment, and a nearly empty bowl of wassail.

Reference:

The Battle for Christmas. A Social and Cultural History of Our Most Cherished Holiday. Stephen Nissenbaum. 1997

Hello Interactors,

Most of you probably heard about Bill Gates’ recent over the top 66th birthday celebration. The images conjured up visions of a Bond film. It got me thinking about Bezos and Musk and how they could easily be cast as villains in a Bond film. Maybe real-life really is stranger than fiction. Or maybe they’re one in the same.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

BOND MEETS ELON

The scene opens in Monaco with the bay crowded with boats. James Bond has just climbed aboard a private mega yacht and is snooping around. With a single hand he pulls open a glass sliding door on the upper deck and steps inside an opulent room filled with fine furniture.

He glances out a window to reveal a long gray military frigate docked at shore with a helicopter perched on top. Speeding toward it is a motor boat that mysteriously vanishes under water 10 meters shy of the hard chined towering frigate.

Bond squints with suspicion. He then notices a reflection in the shiny brass compass housing just in front of the window. Somebody is approaching him from behind. He quickly grabs a towel and somehow manages to kill his assailant with piece of white cotton terry cloth fabric that he then uses to dab the sweat from his brow.

The scene cuts to a celebration on the French frigate. The military’s top brass and dignitaries arrive in chauffeured Mercedes Benz sedans as a Navy brass band plays in the background. We cut briefly to see a closeup of two identification cards being swapped by black leather gloved hands. Back to Bond on the boat and he’s just stumbled across a dead man that stiffly falls from a closet stripped of all his clothes – presumably the previous holder of one of those ID cards we just saw.

We cut back to shore and are introduced to an attractive woman who just arrived for the ceremonies. And now back to Bond who puts two and two together and jumps from the super yacht onto a high speed tender. The camera zooms in on the throttle as we’re treated to the throaty roars of a muscular V12 engine. Bond shoves the throttle forward and jets towards the celebration.

We cut to a speech by a French bureaucrat standing on the frigate. He’s spouting off the technological features of a new helicopter that is about to be demonstrated. He calls it “Europe’s answer to the electronic battlefield.” The Tiger helicopter, he says, uses “stealth technology.” It’s “hardened against all forms of electronic interference, radio jamming, and electromagnetic radiation.”

We then cut to two pilots making their way toward the helicopters below deck on the frigate. But, they’re interrupted by the beautiful woman we were just introduced to. After some flirty back and forth dialog, she raises her gun and kills them both.

Next we see her wearing one of their helmets and uniform as she’s joined by her companion Bond saw dip below the surface in the motorboat moments earlier. They make their way out onto the helicopter pad where the Tiger awaits. The announcer says, “Please welcome the pilots!” They climb in and start the propellers whirling as we cut to Bond making his way up the steps of the dock and through the crowd.

He runs toward the frigate to stop them, but is halted and thrown up against the wall of the ship by two French navy officers. A gun is held to his sun soaked face as he watches the Tiger helicopter whir away.

I couldn’t help but recall this scene from the 1995 Bond film, GoldenEye when I read reports and saw pictures of Bill Gates’ rented yacht docked in a remote bay somewhere in Turkey shuttling guests by helicopter to his beachside 66th birthday bash.

There’s no question Bill lives the life similar to those mega rich and powerful international men of mystery that Bond films cast as antagonists. He lives in a sprawling high tech compound on Lake Washington with a Bond-like subterranean garage. When he’s not around to commute by car to his nearby office, he has a barge tugged into a secluded cove where his helicopter can land. A small boat shuttles him to shore. He escapes up a mysterious private elevator in a midrise office building overlooking the lake and the Seattle skyline.

For his Turkish birthday bash, Bill paid upwards of $2 million dollars a week to rent one of the world’s largest yachts, “Lana”. One of his guests, Jeff Bezos, also rented a yacht. Some speculate he actually owns it, but the “Flying Fox” rents for over $3 million a week. It too had helicopters shuttling people to the beach party.

The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, wasn’t there but we can imagine he would not have been out done. Perhaps there was a shortage of yachts to rent. Or maybe he was in the Space X control room rattling off all the technological wonders of his new rocket perched on the platform outside.

I can imagine the scene cutting to 007 careening down the tarmac in his Tesla Cybertruck. Flying just above him, a bodacious, musclebound, blond bombshell leaning out of an unmanned drone. She’s firing rounds of thermonuclear plasma from her space pistol as the countdown clock to launch ticks toward zero. Will 007 make it to Musk in time, or will the double agent vixen sabotage the launch?

THE INDIVIDUALISTIC TRIUMPHANT SEXIST

These three men have more in common than being billionaires, they’re all science fiction junkies who pursued a path of technocratic, world dominating, capitalistic monopolies. They’re also rational egoists. They believe their selfish actions to be perfectly rational. In fact, in their estimation, any action on the part of any human is only rational if and only if it maximizes one's own self-interest.

The libertarian darling philosopher and writer Alice O’Connor, or better known as Ayn Rand, a favorite of theirs I’m sure, said “it’s not only irrational to act against your own self-interest, but it’s also immoral.”

She was a big fan of 007 books, but not the films. She didn’t like how the humor diminished the glory of individualism. She said the movies “undercut Bond’s stature, to make him ridiculous.” At least she wasn’t alone.

The inventor of the character, Ian Fleming, thought he was ridiculous too. He believed Bond as a “blunt instrument wielded by a government department who would get into bizarre and fantastic situations […] he’s always referred to as my hero. I don’t see him as a hero myself. On the whole I think he’s a rather unattractive man.”

Billionaires today are villainized as rather unattractive men. Like Bond movies, they celebrate and flaunt the excesses of mass-consumption and capitalism. We can track the rise of this behavior with the rise of the Bond franchise. From the early books in the 1950s to the most recent Bond flicks, we are offered superheroes of a technologically driven mass-consumer society.

But it’s not a society of the masses. It’s a glamorized vision of a small exclusive society that props itself up so it can look down at the rest of the world’s global population. Without whom, through their toils and disenfranchisement, the elite exclusive little society would not exist. Nor would villainous billionaires. Or maybe not as many.

Bond films divide the world into workers, buyers, and capitalists. All three of those characters are presented in that single helicopter scene in GoldenEye. Two navy pilots (workers) killed point blank by a hired villain (worker) so she could fly a technologically advanced machine built with blue-collar labor (workers) and purchased by the government (buyer) from a corporation (capitalist) using tax dollars collected largely from workers.

And it was Bond’s job to represent the public’s interest, squash the entire operation, and save capitalism.

And the audience cheers him on. The audience, of course, is made mostly of people who have a vested interest in a government secret agent protecting the laws that maintain their private ownership of property, consumption of goods, and privilege over those tasked with serving them. They give permission to Bond to do things that go against the grain of Western democracy and its Christian roots.

He’s allowed to break the law, promote misogyny, destroy property, and even commit murder. So long as the dominant social order is upheld, mass-media consumers turn a blind eye.

Social scientist, Toby Miller calls it a “popular endorsement of overt governmental processes through the publicly-ratified rule of law.” It’s exactly what many in Europe and America want.

The former New York Times movie critic, Vincent Canby, wrote in 1971 that Bond is a “steadfast agent for the military-industrial complex, a friend to the C.I.A. and a triumphant sexist.”  In 2012 the American Conservative magazine said “Bond’s Britain is relevant, wealthy, and influential, still a beacon of Western ingenuity.”

Gates, Bezos, and Musk are all beacons of Western ingenuity. But they’re also cartoons of capitalism, just as Bond is a cartoon of Western hegemony. Film critic and painter, Manny Farber wrote that Bond films are “a catalogue of posh-vulgar items for licentious living.” The former Head of Media at The Guardian and now professor, Jane Martinson said in 2012 that

“feminists were sick of a long-running multibillion-pound franchise that left a series of beautiful women as little more than roadkill in the path of the spy we never loved.”

History professor Theodore Roszak called Bond the “embodiment of technocracy.”  

These critiques could have just as easily been leveled against Gates, Bezos, or Musk and their lifestyles and beliefs. And for most of the effects of neoliberal economics for that matter.  

LORDE EDGE TAKES AIM

GoldenEye was filmed 26 years ago. Bill Gates would have been 40 years old. That’s about the same age the actor playing Bond, Pierce Brosnan, would have been. Pierce was born in Ireland. His father abandoned him and his mother at infancy. At four they moved to London where he was raised by his grandparents while his mom worked as a nurse. When they died he was put in a boarding house. He was ridiculed by British kids for being Irish. He went on to learn commercial illustration at 16, then acting, and worked as a busker breathing fire on street corners. Not exactly the path of a true 007.

Gates was born into wealth and privilege and admits to reading his fair share of science fiction. But unlike Bezos and Musk, he isn’t that interested in taking up life on Mars. His mom instilled a strong since of philanthropy in Bill as a young boy that many have benefited from today. His wealth created my own, so I can’t be too hard on him.

He’s unquestionably the smartest men I’ve been around, but he can’t be the world’s 007. He’s not that smart or ingenious. And while his giving is commendable, I can’t help but wonder if Seattle would have a homeless crisis had a larger fraction of his billions been siphoned off over the last 40 years for the public good. Maybe had the government taken more of his income to circumvent global problems, he wouldn’t have to spend as much money trying to solve them.

Bezos comes from a broken family. He excelled at math, computer science, and engineering. He built an alarm as a kid that would sound should someone try to enter his room. Sounds like a budding 007 to me. Upon graduating as valedictorian, Bezos told a local paper that he hoped

"to get all people off the earth and see it turned into a huge national park."

Bezos loves the Iain M. Banks science fiction novels, Culture series. They’re about humanoid aliens occupying artificial habitat on planets strewn across the Milky Way.

But what was lost on Bezos, a fierce libertarian, is that Banks was a committed socialist. In a recent New York Times article, Jill Lepore quoted Banks as saying the books were about “’hippy commies with hyper-weapons and a deep distrust of both Marketolatry and Greedism.’ He also expressed astonishment that anyone could read his books as promoting free-market libertarianism, asking, ‘Which bit of not having private property and the absence of money in the Culture novels have these people missed?’

Musk was born into wealth, but his parents divorced when he was nine years old and he lived with his dad. A decision he came to regret calling him “a terrible human being.” He was teased as a young boy and was hospitalized once after being thrown down a flight of stairs. He wrote and sold his first software at age 10, when on to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania with a Bachelor of Science in economics and a Bachelor of Arts in physics in 1989. He was accepted at Stanford to do a PhD in materials science, but opted to ride the internet startup wave instead.

He too was a fan of Iain Banks. Jill Lepore also noted that Musk once tweeted, “If you must know, I am a utopian anarchist of the kind best described by Iain Banks.” That makes two renowned libertarian brainiacs who somehow missed Iain Banks’ socialist agenda.

Last weekend Musk changed his Twitter name to “Lorde Edge.” The speculation is that it’s a derivative of the word edgelord which is “Someone, especially posting on the internet, who uses shocking and nihilistic speech and opinions that they themselves may or may not actually believe to gain attention and come across as a more dangerous and unique person.” It’s a character trait you might expect in a Bond anti-hero.

Pierce Brosnan saw his first Bond movie, Goldfinger, in 1964 when he was 11 years old. His stepfather took him to see it in London. I wonder what the 11 year old Brosnan thought of Pussy Galore and her band of merry lesbian aviators.

The movie ends with Bond and Pussy Galore on the ground having just survived parachuting from a plane. Helicopters are coming to rescue them, but he leans over her and says, “This is no time to be rescued” and pulls the parachute over himself and Pussy Galore as they kiss.

I can imagine Brosnan’s stepdad leaning over and whispering to the young Pierce the words of the character’s creator, Ian Fleming, “Pussy only needed the right man to perform the laying on of hands to cure her psycho-pathological malady.”

The discrepancy between Brosnan’s life and the fictional life of the character he played is metaphorical. England had long played the leading role in world power and dominance but it had been cracked by the U.S. and the fire breathing working class identity was starting to show through. Ayn Rand’s biggest fear was coming true. The grand singularly focused empire was becoming diminished by the tragedy and comedy of the commons.

The talented set designer for the Bond films, Ken Adam reflected in 2008 that Goldfinger was a time when “when the British took off their handcuffs and said: ‘F**k, the Empire doesn’t exist any longer. Now, we will take over.’” Pussy Galore not only signaled liberation, she provided proletariat comic relief.

Gates, Bezos, and Musk all play the leading role of the enterprising, multi-national capitalist. They’re protagonists to many and antagonists to most. Either way, they’re flawed and troubled humans with troubled beginnings but also brilliant and talented men who have brought much good – an allegory for neoliberal economics.

Modern neoliberal economics has brought, and continues to bring, unmatched prosperity to underprivileged people around the world. But, it’s also created historic income disparities, social strife and anxiety, and it’s destroying the planet. The real psychopathological malady isn’t in the form of lesbianism, it’s in unbridled capitalism.

Truth be told, my entire family love watching Bond movies. Pre Daniel Craig, anyway. I can’t handle the glorified violence in mainstream movies anymore. My daughter laughs at the misogyny, but relishes the moments women rule over men. My son loves the chase scenes, but is outraged by the sexism. My wife rolls her eyes at the absurdities, but cheers on the fleeting female power. I marvel at the set design and gadgetry, but wonder how my teenage kids are interpreting these messages.

My daughter summed it best when I asked her why she like Bond films. She said,

“Sometimes it’s entertaining to watch something you know is just classically bad.”

There are people outside the United States, and some inside, who think that as they watch the absurdities of American gluttony. Perhaps we’ve reached that point England did in the 60’s when the masses realized the empire doesn’t exist anymore.

Many are entertained watching Bill, Jeff, and Elon fly and float as they falter, flaunt, and philander. They are what French philosopher Jean Baudrillard would call the hyper-competent US businessman: “part James Bond, part Henry Ford.”

But what their exploits do, just as Bond films do, is perpetuate a particular cultural narrative that substantiates a societal norm. They lead most members of the dominant ruling class to believe that Bill, Jeff, and Elon’s unique individual contributions, be it corporate or philanthropic, are benefitting society as a whole when in reality they’re mostly benefitting themselves and the dominant ruling class.

Or maybe the joke’s on us and Musk really is casting himself as a real-life sociopathic anti-hero, “Lorde Edge.” After all, the objective for Bond in GoldenEye was to circumvent a space weapon that was destined to blow up the planet with an electromagnetic pulse.

Let’s hope the battery in that Tesla Cybertruck 007 is driving down the Space X tarmac doesn’t run out of juice. That rocket Elon is about to launch just may contain a space weapon he plans to aim back at the planet; fulfilling Jeff’s sadistic boyhood dream of a planet earth free of humans.

Reference

Toby Miller. Paradoxical Masculinity: James Bond, Icon of Failure. From the book The Cultural Life of James Bond.

Hello Interactors,

It’s hard to miss news about global supply chain woes these days. Between Covid, natural disasters, and strained trade relations with China it seems unlikely we’ll see anything that looks like normal for some time. But companies aren’t waiting to find out. They’re taking matters into their own hands. Or so they think.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

MARIA CANTWELL AND THE CHAIN GANG

“There are some people who are saying, ‘Look, what I need is short term because this is never going to happen again,’ ” she said. “Then there are other people who are saying, ‘This is going to happen more often than we think.’ The world is a very different place, and it’s not just the pandemic. It’s natural disasters. It’s the floods down in the South. It’s tornadoes, it’s hurricanes.”

These are the words of Ellen Kullman. She’s the CEO of Carbon Inc., a 3-D printing company. She’s also the former CEO of DuPont, sits on the board of directors for Goldman Sachs and Dell, is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a recognized leader in global science and engineering, and once chaired the US-China Business Council.

She knows a thing or two about global supply chains; which have had their fair share of attention recently. As global corporations have pushed their employees to work Harder, Better, Faster, and Stronger. They must appease shareholders demanding perpetual growth, even at the cost to people and the environment. To do so, they rely on other parts of the globe for raw materials and labor – a spatial fix.

Covid has taken a 200-year capitalism strategy believed to be immune to disruption and has created a supply chain pandemic. Just as the disease is testing our body’s immune system, it’s also testing the resiliency of networked global supply chains.

The onset of the pandemic showed early signs of vulnerability when global corporations were hit by governmental restrictions. Without notice borders around the world were closed, lockdowns prevented employees from working, and no sooner were facemasks recommended did we run out of supply. Dr. Gary Gereffi from Duke’s Global Value Chains Center said,

“China accounted for about 60% of U.S. face mask imports prior to the pandemic, but China suspended its exports of face masks worldwide as it dealt with its own outbreak of COVID-19 cases in early 2020.”

It wasn’t until late August that the supply gap was filled by U.S. producers.

Gereffi was testifying on July 15, 2021, in a hearing chaired by Democratic U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell on “Implementing Supply Chain Resiliency.” The meeting was in reaction to one of Biden’s first executive orders. It launched a 100-day review identifying vulnerabilities in the nation’s supply chains and how to address them.

The witnesses in the hearing included Gereffi from academia and five others from government agencies and the business sector. Their testimonies paint an accurate state of the country’s complicated over reliance on the global supply chain. They also had asks of the government that you might expect; more government funding, private-public partnerships, subsidies, or for the government to get out of the way. Or, in the case of Lex Taylor, a confusing mix of all the above.

William A. (Lex) Taylor III runs The Taylor Group of Companies, Inc. It was founded in 1927 as Taylor Machine Works in Louisville, Mississippi. Did I mention the ranking member and co-chair seated alongside Cantwell was U.S. Senator Roger Wicker, a Republican from Mississippi?

The Taylor Group is now a privately held holding company for Taylor Machine Works (heavy industrial forklifts), Taylor Power Systems (power generators), and Taylor Defense (remanufactured military material).

Taylor complained about the lack of resiliency in the global supply chain. He said the Association of Equipment Manufacturers (AEM) had quickly come up with a plan for how to circumvent the Covid caused supply chain conundrums called operation “Floorplan”. It was modelled after what he deemed a “successful Payroll Protection Program the Congress instituted at the Small Business Administration.” A clear nod to a government success story by a devote capitalist.

But he claimed operation “Floorplan“ failed “because of the political wrangling and failure of the government to understand the big-picture consequences of letting supply chains falter.” Yet the association seemed ok asking the government to bankroll his “Floorplan” program.

He went on about how every private company involved in his vast and deep supply chain began raising their prices to control their limited and dwindling supplies – a tried and true trick of the free-market system.

Compounding inflation among suppliers forced him to ultimately raise his prices too; all the while trying to stay afloat. He said, “we have kept our lines running but are facing 30% to 75% price increases either from our vendors or the transportation companies, or a combination of both.”

What gouged him the most was unbridled free-market pricing; a practical solution driven by the private sector. At the same time, he wanted federal dollars to fix the problem with a government subsidized “Floorplan.”

But while he and his employees benefitted from the government run Payroll Protection Program – and he wished the federal government would have funded his “Floorplan” – he would rather the free-market solve his problems. Even though the free market created the bulk of his financial pain.

In his closing remarks he said,

“My request is that this committee not act to overcorrect with solutions that may cause unintended consequences. Rather, I encourage you to support the free-market system and allow it to do what it does best and find solutions that are practical and driven by the private sector.”

Price gouging is a practical mechanism of the free-market. A solution? Maybe not.

BOEING BOEING GONE

In her opening remarks, Maria Cantwell said, “I would say, Senator Wicker, I'm not sure 20 years ago, if we would've had the same hearing.”

Twenty years ago Cantwell was in her first year as a U.S. Senator. Amassing independent wealth from her time in the software industry, she threw a lot of her own money into her campaign against the eleven year incumbent, Republican Slade Gorton. Microsoft was her biggest donor, followed by two law firms, and the fourth largest campaign contributor was Boeing.

Six months later Boeing sought their own spatial fix and announced they were moving their corporate headquarters to Chicago. By September of 2001, after being headquartered in Seattle since 1916, the Boeing corporate offices fell vacant.

Eight years later, in 2009, after the 2008 financial crisis, Boeing applied another spatial fix moving an assembly plant from Washington to South Carolina. North Charleston’s economy had been devastated by the closure of a naval shipyard and the Great Recession. They were experiencing record high unemployment rates.

So the state offered Boeing an incentive to move their factory. If Boeing could create 3,800 jobs and invest $750 million over the next seven years, the state would pitch in another $450 million.

Boeing had already been dealing with ugly union strikes in Washington. Four of their last seven contract negotiations ended in strikes. Conservatives blamed the machinists while liberals blamed Boeing. Either way, South Carolina was union free. An unorganized labor force is attractive to corporations because they can dictate the terms of pay uncontested. Some states, and nations, will even suppress or ban unions in hopes of attracting businesses to their regions.

Frank Larkin of the Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers said in 2009, “It became clear early on that the company was less interested in making a deal than they were in getting more incentives out of South Carolina…The longer they sat at the table with us, the more South Carolina offered them."

Just 2.7% of South Carolina’s labor force is unionized – the lowest in the United States. Since the plant opened in 2011, Boeing has been fighting attempts by employees to unionize. In 2017, 3,000 employees tried and failed to unionize. A year later they succeeded despite Boeing funding a widespread media campaign against it.

So, Boeing took them to court. Because litigation slows down unionization, it buys time for Boeing to continue to use their wealth, power, and strength to disrupt the momentum of organizers. It also provides opportunities to fire employees as a way of sending a message to workers.

In November of 2018 they fired air force veteran, Richard Mester and two others for failing to report a bird strike on a Boeing engine. Mester had been doing this line of work for 30 years and knows a bird strike when he sees it. The Guardian reported, “He had just bought a house and had two daughters in college when he was terminated.” Mester said, “It was easy to see it was because we were union members…Boeing has no qualms about squashing any possibility of a union down here. Unfortunately we were the result of that.”

Despite the dwindling Boeing presence in Washington state, Maria Cantwell did mentioned in her opening remarks, “I can say for me in the state of Washington, aviation supply chain is something we're very proud of. More than 150,000 people work in that supply chain that continue to innovate and create new products…[this] is where the innovation is happening in the supply chain.”

She’s referring to an insight offered in a testimony by Richard Aboulafia, the VP of Analysis at the Teal Group in Fairfax, Virginia. Out of the gate he exposed the realities of the aviation supply chain by talking about value, innovation, and vulnerability.

He said, “For a typical Boeing jetliner, 80% of the value gets added at the supplier level…When Boeing sells a jetliner…suppliers, collectively, realize more revenue than [Boeing does].”

He added, “the innovation that takes place in aviation happens at the supplier level, and not at the prime level. Boeing’s 737 jetliner [has] been in production for around half a century. But the…successful transformation of these aircraft is because of the tremendous innovation that has taken place at the supplier level.”

Perhaps this explains why Washington state has not fought to win back the union heavy airplane assembly business. As Microsoft rose in the 90s and Amazon in the 2000s, the area attracted higher paying white collar engineering talent that fed into the aviation supply industry. Washington’s aviation history catalyzed a new industrial trajectory; what evolutionary economists call path dependence.

Aboulafia continued, “As with most complex manufactured products, an aircraft production system is only as strong as its weakest link. The supply chain, crucial to industry success, is also its greatest Vulnerability.”

China is fully aware of this vulnerability. Aboulafia said, “China, notably, is not a significant source of aircraft components, even from transplant factories. In fact, at the peak level of U.S.-China aerospace trade, the trade balance between the two countries was 17-1 in the U.S.’s favor.”

This does not bode well for U.S. aviation suppliers. Aboulafia said, “The only area of serious concern, outside of Covid-19 itself, is China, the biggest single export market (and tied with the US for biggest single market). At the peak level of deliveries to China, 2018, the country took 23% of all jetliner deliveries worldwide. This has fallen precipitously, for both market reasons and due to geopolitical factors. This trade is under threat, due to slowing in-country growth rates, China’s reluctance to recertify Boeing’s 737MAX, and the U.S. Government’s decision to put Western components for China’s ambitious national aircraft programs on a possibly restrictive export list.”

Furthermore, Covid put a real dent in the airlines biggest revenue generator – international business travel. It’s forced them to ground planes and halt new orders. And while business is picking up again, the companies bringing supply chains closer to home will be taking fewer overseas business trips to Asia.

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Italian apparel company, Benetton is planning to “cut its Asia-based production by half in the next 12 to 16 months and move the work to countries on the Mediterranean.” It’s an end to a decades old reliance on Asian labor and supply chains that “requires regular visits to make sure manufacturing and materials meet quality standards and some aspects, such as production timing, aren’t under the company’s control overseas.” (1)

HOG TIED ON THE SUPPLY SIDE

Reading and watching the testimonies from Cantwell’s hearing, I couldn’t help notice the yearning for the glory days of the 20th century Fordist era when America dominated manufacturing and supply chains. The Duke professor, Dr. Gereffi, gushed over the reemergence of the furniture and textile industry in North Carolina and how his state excels at efficient pig processing.

Lex Taylor sees dollars signs with a “Floorplan” that can build more trucks, generators, and recycled military parts. And while Boeing has all but ceded the airline market to AirBus, Cantwell wants the 150,000 aviation experts in Washington state to at least be supplying parts.

Some of these aging, all male except Cantwell, boomers testifying at the hearing are of the age where I can imagine them reminiscing on the golden years of the nationalist “America First” sentiment that Trump tapped into in 2016. Wicker would have turned 16 in 1967, the end of the Fordism era.

But there were also testimonies that looked to a Post-Fordist industrial era. IBM’s Dr. Dario Gill talked about their semiconductor lab in New York and how their public-private partnership will produce new chips out of the factory in Malta, New York. Chuck Schumer, Democratic Senator from New York, helped seal that deal with the $110 billion Endless Frontier Act; $10 billion of which goes toward hubs like those in New York. The North Carolina Research Triangle hopes to get on that money as well. Dr. Gereffi talked of how North Carolina’s booming weaving loom know-how could transmogrify from cotton into silicon.

The Endless Frontier Act is a bipartisan bill intended to counter China’s semiconductor dominance. But, again, it falls victim to this outdated notion that America can return to our Fordist days. I know I’m over simplifying, but it takes a special combination of hubris and ignorance to believe you can replace 30 years of global supply networks, throughput, and intellectual property with a ‘Made in America’ stamp. Federal funding is needed to remedy our supply chain woes, but chest pounding nationalistic protectionism won’t get us there.

The most reasoned testimony in Cantwell’s hearing came from James A. Lewis. He’s a Senior Vice President and Director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He said, “Two things broke that global supply chain. The first is the rise of a predatory China that will use any means to displace competitors in its quest for global primacy. The second is the COVID-19 pandemic, which produced an understandable desire in many nations to reduce their dependence on foreign suppliers and instead rely on national capabilities.”

He talked about how America got spooked when we realized how much we relied on China for necessary medical supplies. It prompted many in the U.S. to “want to move some critical production back onto their territories.” He’s right.

Atlanta home builder PulteGroup got fed up with delays and is building an automated assembly plant in South Carolina. Majestic Steel USA is opening new facilities across the country to avoid impediments in the supply chain. Climate calamities are also forcing companies to rethink supply chains. Paint powerhouse Sherman-Williams got fed up with Hurricane delays at southern ports. They bought a company with sites in Oregon and South Carolina to handle the load.

But as Lewis point out, in many ways this is just copying China and may be short sighted. Even the knee jerk reaction from Schumer and the Endless Frontier Act. He said, “This supply chain nationalism is reinforced by growing and powerful competition for technological leadership and by events like the semiconductor shortage.”

He continues, “Twentieth century American innovation was national, but today’s innovation base is international, with strong research and commercial links between the United States, Europe, and Asia.” And he rightfully concludes, “A country that cuts itself off from this international innovation system will fall behind.”

China has assumed America, and Europe, have been in decline since the end of the Cold War in 1989. They recognized the strategy of the U.S. and our allies was to seek regions to either invade, persuade, or buy. And then, theoretically, establish a Western style democracy to further build out a global supply chain, buy labor, and manufacture and sell goods and services.

So they invested heavily in industry within China and then expanded globally investing in 70 countries worldwide in infrastructure. Their One Belt One Road initiative has been building mines, dams, ports, railroads, airports, solar installations and more around the world to control the extraction and flow of resources and capital.

It’s like a parasitic super-structure on top of the West’s established global supply chain. It grows their dominance by feeding off of Western consumerism and neoliberal economic policies; all the while continuing to spoon Chinese made goods to the perpetually hungry mouths of American consumers.

John A. Lewis concluded his remarks with a stern directive:

“The U.S. must respond to China’s hostility, but we can no longer rely on market forces alone to advance the national interest. Defensive actions alone will not suffice. These themes all point to the need for a renewed industrial strategy, but it cannot simply duplicate previous policies because we are now in a world where the private sector leads. This means the task [for America] is to find where government intervention can best support a multinational commercial innovation base.”

A renewed industrial strategy is needed, indeed. But, so is a new economic creed that doesn’t breed greed.

Hello Interactors,

I was reminded that three years ago this week I was on a trip visiting remote Microsoft development centers overseas. Those trips afforded me the luxury of observing and understanding diverse geographies, societies, and economies. But it also drove home both the pleasure and pain imposing political and economic structures can bring.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

FLY OVER AND DIVE IN

It was the model concentration camp. Shaped in an equilateral triangle made of 10 foot high stone walls painted white, it featured machine guns mounted high at the corners; fixed on the lowly prisoners. The sidewalk leading to the entry is pleasant and tree-lined; an attractive and seemingly innocent approach to a place that is anything but. It stirs a morbid twist of emotions. The perversity is punctuated by the words forged in iron bars on the entry gate: Arbeit Macht Frei – work makes you free.

To get to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp you disembark the train in a small nearby village and walk one mile to the entrance. The same path the prisoners would have taken. You pass by houses where whole families would come out to hurl rocks and spit on fellow humans; some were Jews, some homosexual, others with a mere limp, and occasionally even a relative.

That place reminded me of how easily a government can invent a structure motivated by domination and impose it on a region and it’s citizens. It demonstrates how a small group of people can create the necessary conditions for the production of labor, death, and destitution through extreme exploitation; a top-down political and economic structure masterfully and morbidly executed by masterminds who firmly believed there actions were for the good of humankind.

These camps bring us closer to the worst human suffering imaginable. But they also draw attention the to seemingly innocent complicit behavior lurking in the shadows. Hitler had regional aspirations for the structures he imposed that elicited reactions on a global scale. His actions also influenced individual behavior and shaped the culture of citizens and cities at a local level.

This site is short train ride north of Berlin. I was in town on business, so two of my colleagues and I decided to visit before flying home. My job took me around the globe visiting remote Microsoft development centers. In a single trip, I once flew from Seattle to Ireland, on to Israel, then China, and back home to Seattle.

From Haifa to Hyderabad or Bangalore to Berlin, I’ve observed structural societal patterns from high in the sky that are shaped by a global economy, and I’ve also experienced emergent forms of adapted human and cultural behavior on the ground. A single short trip around the world can bring into focus how environments have been shaped by people over millennia – both natural and manufactured – and how in turn those environments have shaped the people.

Glancing out the window as I descended into these major cities I could spot the warm autumnal colored patchwork blocks of agricultural land stretching into the distance. They gave way to increasingly dense dendritic spars of cold concrete roads slicing through clusters of steel buildings dotted with piercing lights as ant-like traffic pulsed its way though the tangled bustle.

I imagine these monstrous metropolis’s rising out of ancient embryonic farming, fishing, or mining settlements reminiscent of the neighboring landscape; a form of economic development termed, environmental determinism. Indeed that is true for many cities and towns, big and small, around the world, but in the last two hundred years a new ‘ism’ has been determining the development environment more than natural resources – capitalism. It’s led to uneven and inequitable development and settlement.

For example, while Indonesia’s 17,000 islands is home to some of the world’s richest resources, their per capita income is under $4,000 per year. Meanwhile, the tiny island city-state of Singapore, a place with few natural resources at all, has a per capita income of over $100,000 per year.

Many are quick to assume Singapore advanced it’s economy because it modeled itself after the West. Some regions did do this voluntarily, but it was also a common justification in the 1950s and 1960s for Western powers to swoop in to ‘improve’ so-called “Third World” countries. Powerful rich Western nations would introduce, often forcefully, Western democracy and then hand over economic development of resources and industry to private firms.

Indonesia was one such experiment. It’s now not only one of the poorest countries in Southeast Asia and Oceana, but their dense forests continue to be converted to agricultural fields by outside firms making it the sixth largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world. And just last year, their government passed deregulation laws that provide incentives for the coal industry to build dozens of power plants. Imposing Western style capitalism is destroying both their environment and their livelihood.

Global institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization all pull from this play book. They seek poor and underdeveloped regions of the world and seduce, or coerce, them into believing that the way to the promise land is through both Western style democracy and industrial production. They then encourage mass consumption. The Global Plastics Action Partnership writes,

“Seventy percent of [Indonesia’s] plastic waste, an estimated 4.8 million tons per year, is considered mismanaged in ways such as being openly burned, irresponsibly dumped, or left to leak into oceans and waterways…the flow of plastic waste into Indonesia's oceans is projected to increase by 30% to around 800,000 tonnes by 2025.”

AN ADDICT GETS THEIR FIX

Economic systems, in a very basic form, are ways of creating value and distributing it. The simplest economy could mean just putting food on the table. Some are more feudal-looking where value is created for a landlord. Others are communal economies where value is created among the group and then shared between members.

Capitalism, the dominant system in the world today, creates value through waged labor and the private ownership of assets, like accumulated wealth and property. All it takes is a small group of people, capitalists, to own the assets needed to produce the value. They buy labor from people in exchange for the production of that value. Both the labor and the outputted value are bought and sold through a market system.

With wealth accumulation as a primary motivator, capitalist economic systems are engineered to grow profits. If growth lags, profits decline and competitors swoop in to recruit labor and buy cheapened assets. Capitalists are therefore incented to continually seek new means of gaining profit.

Profit comes from the value created by labor beyond which they are paid. For example, if I pay an employee $10 an hour, and it takes them an hour to produce value, if I sell that value on the market for $10 I am breaking even; no profit. If I sell the value for $15, I make a $5 profit.

But if the market demands the value to be sold at $10 (for example a competitor is selling the same value at $10) then a capitalist is incented to find a labor pool willing to create value for $5 an hour or less.

If $5 an hour is not enough of a wage for a worker to buy clothes, food, put a roof over their head, or raise a family – and is not empowered to demand a higher wage – capitalists seek labor pools in regions where they can. And raising a family is also important to a capitalist because the kids are potential future labor.

This idea of extracting more value out of labor than what a capitalist is willing to pay is called exploitation. Because capitalists own the assets or the means necessary to create the value – be it land, machines, material, facilities, software, or intellectual property – they hold power. Capitalists are motivated to accumulate wealth because wealth offers the ability to own assets and property. And with ownership, comes the power to exploit labor.

Social classes sort along these divisions in capitalist societies. Capitalists own the assets that create value and they buy labor from the working class. This simplistic description may conjure up images of slaves or migrant workers hunched over in fields with their shoulders being pulled by the weight of their yield as the sun presses down on their backs, or child labor in the dangerous steel factories of the industrial age, or overworked Asian women tediously assembling mobile devices in China.

But corporations seek to exploit white collar workers too. There’s a reason I was flying to remote parts of the world for Microsoft. There are software developers in the world willing to do the same work as American engineers for less pay. China and India were the first, but as labor prices climb in those regions software companies quickly go on the hunt for the next set of skilled labor to exploit, like Africa.

Geographer David Harvey termed this hunt for lands of cheaper labor a spatial fix. The concept was first related to a problem of overproduction of goods. Imagine a small town where the workers are producing more goods than they can buy. The surplus of goods begin to pile up creating a problem of overaccumulation. Capitalists then seek to expand to another territory to sell and produce value while fixing the problem of slowed growth, hence the term spatial fix.

This reveals the paradox of Capitalism. As soon as a region is established to produce value from labor, it starts a clock of degradation. Take Detroit, for example. As soon as Henry Ford started buying local labor to produce value for consumers using property and assets he owned, the countdown clock to the region’s demise began.

Evidence of spatial fixes that then decline exist wherever colonialism is found: Manufacturing clusters of the Northeast United States, the rust belt in the Midwest, textiles in North Carolina, metal working factories of Connecticut, mining towns in the West, agricultural clusters across the country. Japan has theirs, so does Germany. And now, the most grand example of wealth accumulation in history – China.

China’s Pearl River Delta (PRD) was rural just 40 years ago, much like the Detroit area would have been when Henry Ford showed up. But,

“The PRD now hosts nine major mainland cities in addition to the special administrative zones of Hong Kong and Macau. Two of those cities – Guangzhou and Shenzhen – are both home to over 10 million people. With more than 66 million residents in 2017 in total, the PRD has been designated by the World Bank as the world’s largest megacity, rivalling France and the United Kingdom in population terms. Its gross domestic product (GDP) of over $1.2 trillion puts it on a par with Russia, Australia, or Spain, and exceeds that of Indonesia, which has four times the population. In terms of trade levels, the region is only exceeded by the United States and Germany. The region attracts one‐fifth of China’s inward foreign direct investment (totaling over $1 trillion since 1980), and accounts for over 10 per cent of its GDP and 25 per cent of its exports. All this in a region that accounts for less than 1 per cent of China’s land area and 5 per cent of its population.”

ABSOLVE, RESOLVE, AND EVOLVE

But a spatial fix is mounting in the PRD too. Fewer Chinese are migrating to the area and the cost of labor is rising, so firms are starting to relocate elsewhere in China and Southeast Asia. Thus begins the decline of the PRD.

Companies also seek other ways to grow profits, such as technology innovations. Japan’s foray into robotic assembly lines in the 1970s and 1980s is the perfect example. Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are constantly finding ways to improve efficiencies in server farms around the globe through innovations in software and hardware – and cheap labor.

But these efficiencies can result in a surplus of labor. And if people are out of work or their wages are held too low, the demand for products starts to decrease. As container ships continue to backup at ports around the world, you can imagine how over-accumulation can become a crisis for capitalism. Or recall during the early outbreak of Covid when dairy farmers had to poor milk down the drain and livestock famers were forced to slaughter hundreds of animals when demand for those products plummeted.

There’s a tendency for economists, capitalists, and spin doctors to portray a spatial fix as a good thing. It’s growth, after all, and remember from last week’s post – up means good. But you can see the tension and instability capitalism can introduce. Pay workers too much and you lose profit. Work them too hard and they’ll quit. Pay them too little and they can’t afford housing, goods, and services – or property. Companies then produce more than they can sell, machines and workers go idle and there goes hope of further growth.

Capitalism is inherently volatile and prone to instability and rife with tension and contraction. Labor wars, unemployment see-saws, too much inventory or too little, prices are increased or slashed. I live in a city with more wealth than some nations, while more homeless tents pop up everyday.

We’re led to believe these crisis of instability are temporary. Everyday we’re fed statistics on GDP, earnings reports, employment rates, and an alphabet soup of climbing or falling stock symbols. We’re told that disruptions to any of these are the result of outside forces: viruses, weather, logistics, war, social unrest, power outages, or that servers have been hacked. Something else must be wrong, because we’ve been led to believe the economic system we have is for the good of humankind. Capitalism has been good for some humans, and it isn’t always kind. It’s time to adjust and evolve.  

The families now living in those homes in Germany outside of Sachsenhausen did not hurl rocks at us. They adapted to new cultural norms, moved on, or died out after liberation. The camp itself morphed into a prison for Nazi war crime criminals, and then it became a museum. The town went from the destination of Hitler’s elite visiting the model camp, to a town for tourists seeking understanding and solemn, sobering solace.

As fascism and Nazi power came to this village, before Sachsenhausen was built, self-interested elites collaborated and colluded in the process. They rounded up their political enemies and intellectuals challenging the movement and forced them into labor. Their properties and assets were possessed by the government or colluding private entities. It was for the good of humankind, they argued.

This is what Western governments and capitalists do when they find a new region to exploit. They seek self-interested parties with which to collaborate and collude. Those who resist are jailed, silenced, displaced, or killed. The devalued property and assets are then bought in an act of accumulation through dispossession and the locals sell them their labor for whatever price they demand. And it’s done for the good of humankind, they argue. Work will make your free.

But like concentration camps, long after the choreographed chaotic and volatile exploitation, disruption, death, and destruction of people and land, cities and regions heal. They transform and evolve through new and novel interactions between people and place. Their history, no matter how awful it may be, becomes a catalyst for a new trajectory; what evolutionary economists call path dependence.

Soaring over cities and diving into their current and past histories reveals capitalism’s influence on the shape and form of their urban tissue at different scales. Flying into Beijing you see high-rises towering next to rice fields. On the ground, one minute you’re walking in Ancient China, and the next you’re transported to the future. You see the powerless and penniless on one corner and powerful and prestigious on the other.

Up against the fence surrounding the Microsoft building in Hyderabad – that looks like it belongs in Redmond – you see cardboard homes and mud and garbage running through their belongings.

Jerusalem is split down the middle with one side lush and green with new, stylish Western style architecture and the other in near ruin with crumbling, dilapidated homes.

I saw evidence of effects of dominant and imposing structural governmental and capitalistic priorities playing out at a global scale down to the local level. But, in the ashes of the dying and the unwanted I also witnessed the genesis of societal transformation through the interactions of people and place.

The unbridled structures of global capitalism may have dominated, exploited, and devastated vulnerable people and places for the last 200 to 500 years, but I sense a need for a fix – a liberation from this well-meaning but dangerous and destructive economic tyrant.

Hello Interactors,

As the rain returns to the northwest it’s time to summon even more motivation to get outside for exercise. I established a bit of a fitness pattern this summer and I’m motivated to keep it up. But the rain isn’t the only thing holding me back, so is my body and my mind.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

THE DEVIL MADE ME DO IT

As part of my Monday fitness routine, I begrudgingly slog jog up a steep hill in my Market neighborhood, zig-zag my way through gravel alleys, down calm side streets, and through occasional narrow easements that snake between homes guarded by fences and barking dogs. Some called this route the ‘Market wiggle’.

It drops me onto an arterial road that skirts along a wooded wetlands. I suffer as I shuffle on a rolling narrow strip of painted bike lane for about a half a mile where I’m presented with a decision. Do I keep running up a gradual hill to achieve more distance or do I face the challenge of ascending a wall of over 100 steps that climb up a steep grade to my destination. It’s a short cut, but also a glute burn.

My destination is an outdoor gym plopped on a patch of asphalt nestled in the corner of an expansive park made of grassy ball fields and scattered pines. I have my routine: a series of upper body exercises on machines that leverage my body weight. I do pull-ups (kind of), seated bench press, and sit-ups. I usually have the place to myself. Though I was once surprised by an eager and excitable white toy poodle. As I was doing sit-ups he ran up behind me and licked the salty sweat off my face.

Upper body fitness has never been my favorite. It’s a necessary evil that seems to be getting harder all the time. But I have my repetition goals and I’m determined to improve. Pullups are the hardest. After a summer of just holding my chin above the bar, I’m finally getting to a point where I can actually pull myself up. (kind of)

My forearms don’t much like supporting my weight. I finish my routine and head back home. Just across from the park is a the middle school track. It’s a cinder track; a relic in the rainy northwest where most tracks have turned artificial. On the weekends I do a timed mile. I can’t help but be disappointed in my time and progress. I just can’t run as fast as I used to.

I also beat myself up over my lack of progress. I should be getting faster by now. I should be able to do more pullups. A battle in my brain ensues.

DEVIL: If you lose weight, maybe you can run faster and do more pullups.

ANGEL: Yeah, but you’re not really overweight – in fact, you’re maintaining a healthy weight because you’re running.

DEVIL: Unless, of course, the extra weight is coming from the added muscle mass from all those stair climbs, and upper body work.

ANGEL: But you can’t stop doing upper body work. You know you’ve been losing muscle mass since the day you turned 30.

DEVIL: C’mon, dudes older than you can run faster than this. You can’t run faster until you start running faster. And you just have to keep doing more pullups if you want to do more pullups!”

Then an independent interloping inquisitor interrupts; “Why are you trying to run faster? Why is the number of pullups important? What is your goal? Is it to increase the number of pullups and decrease your running speed, or is it to maintain your health?”

It’s hard to rally behind asymptotic performance plateaus. Just ask any aging professional athlete. And it’s depressing to consider that as long as that plateau may be, its end is punctuated by a certain mortal decline. I am fully aware of my body’s limitations in this race with mortality, but my mind is trained to expect, and even crave harder, better, faster, stronger.

WHAT GOES UP, MUST COME DOWN

We are all trained by a culture infused with metaphors that lead to a desire to increase growth and optimize time. In 1980, two cognitive linguists, scientists, and philosophers, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson wrote a seminal book called Metaphors We Live By. They give examples of how orientation concepts and words like up and down shape how we think and act.

You can see evidence of it in the words I’ve already written. I was beating myself up and feeling down because the number of pullups wasn’t going up. I get depressed when my running times fall off. My athletic abilities are declining as I near the height of my physical abilities. Have I reached a peak? I am now longer in top shape. As my age slowly climbs up, my abilities will be sinking fast. What if I come down with an illness? My health will decline. And one day, I will drop dead.

They suggest other metaphorical orientation concepts by category:

HAPPY IS UP AND SAD IS DOWN.I’m feeling up. I fell into a depression.

FORESEEABLE FUTURE EVENTS ARE UP (and AHEAD)What’s up on the agenda? I’m afraid of what’s ahead of us.

HIGH STATUS IS UP, LOW STATUS IS DOWNShe’ll rise to the top. He’s at the bottom of the hierarchy.

MORE IS UP, LESS IS DOWNThe GDP rose. My income fell.

GOOD IS UP, BAD IS DOWNThings are looking up. Things are at an all time low.

RATIONAL IS UP, EMOTIONAL IS DOWNHe couldn’t rise above his emotions. The discussion fell to the emotional level, but I raised it back up to the rational plane.

Another metaphor their book highlights also runs deep in our culture:

TIME IS MONEYYou’re wasting my time.I don’t have the time to give you.I’ve invested a lot of time in her.You’re running out of time.Is it worth your while?He’s living on borrowed time.You need to budget your time.Thank you for your time.

The Bible is as riddled with these metaphors as Christianity is with our culture. The great sociologist and political economist, Max Weber, claims Protestantism is at the root of capitalism in his book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,

"In these cases the choice of occupation and future career has undoubtedly been determined by the distinct mental characteristics which have been instilled into them and indeed by the influence on them of the religious atmosphere of their locality and home background."

Here are some quotes from the bible that urge followers to work their butts off, or else.

Through laziness, the rafters sag; because of idle hands, the house leaks.The diligent hand will rule, but laziness will lead to forced labor.Fools fold their idle hands, leading them to ruin.

Here’s one from the King’s bible that lends insight into perhaps why the American workforce is overworked, has too few days off, and is led to shame should they loose their job.

How long will you lie there, O sluggard? When will you arise from your sleep? A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come upon you like a robber, and want like an armed man. Proverbs 6:6

It may come as a surprise, but not every culture lives by these metaphors. The culture I was raised in certainly did. It’s also one that views the more innocuous concept of future as ahead, but another culture may view it as behind — or up, down, through, under, or over for that matter. Perhaps some cultures have no orientation metaphors at all, or use them differently than, say, the Bible does.

When these two researchers came together to write their book, they “discovered that [these] certain assumptions of contemporary philosophy and linguistics have been taken for granted…since the Greeks.”

Substantiating the role cultural metaphors play in shaping thought and action “meant rejecting the possibility of any objective or absolute truth.” Those absolutisms, including those found in the Bible, are assumed in so much of Western tradition and contemporary belief systems.

The alternative, as outlined in their book, is to suggest the human lived experience plays a more central role than some religious, mythical, or universally constant human objective truth.

Our current economic system relies heavily on a belief in rational choice theory. This idea, in keeping with the Western tradition Lakoff and Johnson sought to debunk, says that humans – also known among neoliberal economists as homo economicus – routinely conduct perfectly objective and absolute rational cost-benefit analysis before deciding how to spend money or accumulate wealth.

If what Lakoff and Johnson suggest is true, and I’m inclined to believe it is, there is no such thing as objective or absolute truth in decision making. Our decisions are guided by our culturally engrained metaphors. The so-called invisible hand that neoliberal economists turn to as a self-interested magical motivational source of individual wealth and prosperity is actually the invisible mind; a mind influenced by embedded conceptual metaphors that guide our emotions which in turn trigger our thoughts and actions.

IN EXCESS WILL END SUCCESS

Social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, once said (and I’m paraphrasing) that if you want to find evidence of irrational behavior in self-reported rational people, study their entrenched dogmatic positions – it’s there you’ll find their irrational behavior. In our currently divided society, you don’t need to look far to see evidence of the myth of perfectly rational behavior in human decision making.

“Every society clings to a myth by which it lives. Ours is the myth of economic growth.” Those are the words of British ecological economist, Tim Jackson. To illustrate the myth, he offers that “People are persuaded to spend money we don't have, on things we don't need, to create impressions that won't last, on people we don't care about.”

Aristotle observed as much in the 4th century and wrote about it in a set of eight books on the philosophy of human affairs called, Politics. He wrote,

“For, as their enjoyment is in excess, they seek an art which produces the excess of enjoyment; and, if they are not able to supply their pleasures by the art of getting wealth, they try other causes, using in turn every faculty in a manner contrary to nature…some men turn every quality or art into a means of getting wealth; this they conceive to be the end, and to the promotion of the end they think all things must contribute.”

There are ongoing debates about what Aristotle would think of today’s economy. Both capitalists and communists draw on Aristotle as the genesis of their philosophies. But suffice it to say, Aristotle was not a fan of individual wealth accumulation. Any accumulation should be shared back to the society in support of a healthy community.

Some scholars believe Aristotle would say “the lending out of money to acquire more money is merely the most unnatural and corrupting way to employ money.” As corrupt, they claim, as using human sexuality to sell sex.

They believe Aristotle would not have made it a “question of the market value of your gold.” But instead, “what kind of man your gold makes of you.”

It also seems Aristotle would not have been very impressed with the damage we inflicted on the earth in our pursuit of wealth accumulation. He was aware of the negative aspects of “unintended consequences” due to human activity, but he also found them to be “generally bad and disappointing.” That, for sure, is a departure from our current neoliberal stance.

It was Adam Smith, the father of the capitalist economic system that dominates the world today, who said,

“[People are] led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of [their] intention.”

By this logic, the plastics industry is led by an invisible hand to promote an end (for example, a path toward more plastic in the ocean than fish), which was no part of their intention. The oil industry is led by an invisible hand to promote an end (for example, climate collapse), but is not part of their intention. Even though they’ve known this for over 30 years.

The aerosol industry was led by an invisible hand to promote an end, a hole in the ozone, which was not part of their intention; but the world rallied to curb its use. The tobacco industry was led by an invisible hand to promote an end, addiction to a cancer causing drug, which was not part of their intention; but the U.S cracked down on them anyway.

British economist, John Maynard Keynes – an advocate of the free market, but also of instituting limits, put it best by issuing this sober warning,

“Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all.”

LEAKS AND PEAKS; GO WITH THE FLOW

Influential American economist Milton Friedman started to distance himself, and U.S. economic philosophy, from Keynesian ideas in the 70s. The country was in a recession and personal wealth accumulation had stagnated.

This American ideal of wealth accumulation began in American economics in the late 1940s after two world wars and a depression. Personal and national wealth accumulation was as much a need as it was a desire. It only follows that the model of economics we have with us today puts personal and corporate wealth accumulation at the center, above all else. (note the orientation metaphors I inadvertently used: follows, center, above all else!)

This economic model was drawn in a diagram by economist and Nobel prize winner, Paul Samuelson, for the canonical economic text book, Economics, in 1948. It has sold over four million copies and is still used by many schools today.

That book became standard issue for Econ 101 in universities across the country that were flooded with men returning from WWII. It’s a simple diagram that shows Circular Flows of money being exchanged between households and businesses.

Households flow labor into businesses which in turn crank out goods and services. Businesses flow wages to households that flow that money back to businesses through consumer spending on their goods and services.

There are also leakages in this central flow from households; savings leak into banks, taxes to the government, and imports to trade. These leaks are converted into value and flowed back to the business side as injections into the economy; investments flow from banks, spending from government, and exports from trade.

As economist Kate Raworth points out, missing from the diagram is the earth and the resources necessary to sustain this economic flow. But many advocates of this model believe resources are endless.

In the 1980’s University of Maryland business professor and neoliberal, Julian Simon, believed that

“Discoveries, like resources, may well be infinite: the more we discover, the more we are able to discover.”

He imagined competitive market prices would keep resources from being over exploited and novel inventions would efficiently reuse and recycle any wasted matter and energy. That doesn’t appear to be working.

Instead improvements in technology have accelerated the rate of extraction resulting in environmental degradation and collapse. Take the fishing industry. With improved sensing technologies, they’re able to fish small and sparsely populated schools of fish. It can lead to collapse and extinction.

What’s more, these small populations are vulnerable to effects of climate change which challenges both their survival and ability to repopulate. And sure enough, if they do recover, the fishing industry pounces and the cycle of over exploitation begins again.

Systems thinker, environmentalist and Dartmouth professor, Donella Meadows, states:

“Nonrenewable resources are stock-limited. The entire stock is available at once, and can be extracted at any rate. But since the stock is not renewed, the faster the extraction rate, the shorter the lifetime of the resource.” 

In contrast,

“Renewable resources are flow-limited. They can support extraction or harvest indefinitely, but only at a finite flow rate equal to their regeneration rate. If they are extracted faster than they regenerate, they may eventually be driven below a critical threshold and become, for all practical purposes, nonrenewable.”

Indigenous cultures have known this for millennia. That’s why they leave harvestable crops behind. If they didn’t, they know there would not be any seeds for next season.

We have been led to believe, and our current economic systems substantiates, nonrenewable resources are limitless. We’re taught that even though our self-interest in accumulating wealth may come with unintended consequences, those negative effects are a matter of “value judgement.”

For example, valuing profit over the health of the planet and it’s occupants is a matter of judgement. It’s a line of thinking that values capitalism and corporate and individual wealth accumulation over all else – even the prospect of the collapse of entire species; including humans. Will capitalism seek to out live human existence? You be the judge.

We’re reminded every day that economic indicators can only go up because our culture evolved to associate up with good. If an economy can only be deemed good by a limitless line that goes up for eternity but relies on limited resources that require periods of flattening of that curve to be renewed, we need to extend the metaphor for good to include flat and even declining.  

Up is good. Growth is good. And we don’t have time to waste. But even though the Bible tells us otherwise, we might want to sit down and take a breather sometimes and call it good.  

My aging body reminds me, there are limits to up. I struggle with accepting this fact. Most do. It also shows there are exceptions to metaphors. Just because our age goes up, that doesn’t necessarily mean it feels good.

My body is a renewable resource but with a limited and declining life span. It can’t support the extraction of resources indefinitely, but it can maintain a finite flow of energy equal to my body’s, albeit declining, regeneration rate.

But if I push too hard and exploit my resources; and equate increased pullup reps or faster running speed with good, I’ll drive my resources below a critical threshold and they’ll become nonrenewable.

So now when I’m feeling up for a run. I don’t let myself get too depressed when my energy starts to fall. Instead of digging deep in a yearning for peak performance, I change my goal and shift my metaphor. I push that irrational ‘growth at all cost’ dogma to the side, bring the joy of a flat and slightly declining curve to the foreground, and feel my energy levels and my spirit rise.

You see, I have a rational mind after all. Aristotle believed our ability to reason with our feelings is what makes us human. It’s what sets us apart from other animals. I have a rational choice to make when presented with a curve that flattens out or declines. I can succumb to the cultural belief and emotion that a line that curves flat or trends down is always bad, or I can shift my thinking that it is sometimes good and even necessary for survival.

If I can do this with my fitness routine amidst a mid-life crisis, surely we can for an imbalanced economic regime amidst a climate crisis.

Hello Interactors,

My wife and I took our daughter on a trip down Interstate 5 earlier this week so she could tour the University of Oregon. It’s a beautiful lush campus in a funky college town that is speckled with fancy new structures financed largely by Nike founder and alum, Phil Knight. Upon the completion of the new track stadium last year, his total contributions to the school is nearing one billion dollars. Where did it all come from?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

TIGER TRACK TREADS

He dominated his races. He’d jump far in the lead at the sound of the gun challenging his competitors to keep up as his fans chanted “GO PRE, GO PRE, GO PRE”. They’d often be wearing the pervasive shirts that said the same. At the end of one race he grabbed a shirt from sarcastic fan and stretched over his sweaty chest for his victory lap; it read, “STOP PRE!”

Running for the University of Oregon between 1970-1973, Steve Prefontaine never lost a collegiate race in the 3 mile, 5,000 meter, 6 mile, or 10,000 meter events. But internationally he wasn’t so fortunate. He came in a disappointing fourth at the 1972 Munich Olympics in the 5K. Afterwards he said,

“I felt exhausted. They didn't allow me to run the race the way I had planned to, I was chasing them all the way."

He lost three times in his senior year in the one mile event. This same year he challenged the Amateur Athletics Union (AAU) that ruled athletes representing the United States at the Olympics must not receive payment or be endorsed. Prefontaine, a charismatic athlete on and off the track, grew huge crowds wherever he ran. He knew companies would benefit from his abilities, so why shouldn’t he? He also knew he was receiving free shoes and clothes from another Eugene legend – Nike.

By the mid-70s Nike was a decade old and was just getting rolling. Prefontaine’s coach, Bill Bowerman, was the co-founder and a legend in his own right. Preferring to be called teacher instead of coach, Bowerman taught 33 Olympians, 38 conference champions, and 64 all-Americans in his 24 years as head coach. He retired at the end of Prefontaine’s senior year. One of his runners was Nike founder, Phil Knight.

Knight was a middle distance runner at the university until graduating in 1959. While he ran a respectable personal best of 4 minutes 13 seconds, he was not the best runner on the team. Which made him a good candidate for testing the shoes his coach was experimenting with.

Bowerman was obsessed with athletic performance and was frustrated by the poor quality of American running shoes. So, he made his own and asked his athletes to be subjects in his experimental pursuit of the perfect shoe. Sometimes they’d make their feet run faster and sometimes they’d make them bleed. Bowerman didn’t want to risk injuring his top runners, so Knight was often a subject.

The shoe fetish must have rubbed off on the young Phil Knight. After graduating from the University of Oregon he went on to get his MBA at Stanford. There he learned how Japanese companies were overtaking the camera market from Europeans and wrote a paper about how they were about to do the same for the shoe market.

After earning his MBA in 1962, he worked as an accountant while tinkering on the weekend with the idea of being a shoe distributor. He hopped on a plane to Japan to visit shoemaker, Onitsuka after seeing their Tiger brand at the Olympics. He presented his Stanford paper and they were impressed. They wanted to break into the U.S. market and saw this as their chance. When asked what the name of his company was, Knight invented the name on the spot recalling the ribbons he had won competing as a kid – Blue Ribbon Sports.

In 1964 the first shoes arrived and Knight sent a couple of pairs to his shoe sorcerer and former coach, Bill Bowerman. The two shook on a deal to become business partners; Phil would run the business and Bill would design a shoe with just the right stiffness. By 1970 Knight was selling Tiger shoes across the country. As the Japanese Tiger shoe started to dominate the U.S. market, Knight cut ties with Onitsuka, renamed his company Nike, asked a Portland State University graphic designer to design the now ubiquitous ‘swoosh’, and grabbed Bowerman’s first attempt at a Nike shoe, the Nike Cortez.

The shoe was released at the height of the 1972 Olympics after the world witnessed the USA Track and Field team wearing the shoe. Knight and Bowerman made $800,000 selling the Cortez, a 100% increase over selling the Onitsuka Tiger. In 1980, the year they went public, Nike already had 50% of the U.S. market. Today the company is valued at $32 billion and is the largest supplier of athletic equipment in the world.

PHIL AND BILL SPLIT THE BILL

Phil Knight and Bowerman’s success are now enshrined in what I claim is the most beautifully designed sports facility in the country – Hayward Field in Eugene, Oregon. Eugene is known as Track Town USA because of the success of Bowerman, Prefontaine, and the string of track and cross country athletes the University of Oregon has cranked out over the years. It all happened on Hayward field. A $270 million renovation opened last year and Phil Knight led the funding.

We were just there last weekend on a campus visit with our daughter. You don’t have to look far to see the financial impact Phil Knight has had on that campus. Outside of the oval track crowned jewel he contributed $27 million for a major library renovation that now bears his name, $25 million for new law school building that also endows 27 chairs and professorships, numerous upgrades to the football stadium, $500 million pledged for the Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact, and another $41.7 million for a student-athlete tutoring center. And don’t forget the basketball arena named after his son who died unexpectedly in a scuba accident, the Matthew Knight Arena.

That initial collaboration between Knight and Bowerman led to one of the most successful companies in the world. What they did together is a perfect example of two of the most critical ingredients to a dynamic economy: innovation and entrepreneurship.

Innovation is invention with impact. Bowerman personifies the image of the mad scientist tinkering in the garage in pursuit of the perfect solution. He spent so many hours breathing the toxic fumes emanating from his exploratory rubber compounds that he eventually succumbed to nerve damage. The man who wrote a best selling book on jogging in the 1970s became unable to follow his own advise due to the loss of control in his limbs. He sacrificed the speed of his own feet for the swiftness of others.

Phil Knight was born a competitor and entrepreneur. As a teen his dad refused to hire him at the newspaper he ran. He wanted Phil to struggle to find his own job. So he did. He took a job at his dad’s competing newspaper running seven miles each way to get to work. In graduate school he had a sixth sense that the Japanese approach to product development was worth emulating.

He was also savvy enough to make sure his partnership with Bowerman gave him a 51% stake in the business and Bowerman 49%. He knew he could use that leverage to make sure it was a business they were running and not laboratory for running shoes.

ECONOMOUS ANONYMOUS

The role of place should not be overlooked in their collaboration. Economic geographers point to the trust and norms that develop between individuals through close collaboration among local social networks. Personal relationships don’t adhere to a higher order economic structure, they emerge from an accumulation of shared knowledge and passion that increases the potential for innovation.

The idea stems from the great economist Karl Polanyi. In his landmark 1944 book, The Great Transformation, Polanyi gives this concept a name: embeddedness. Stanford economic sociologist, Mark Granovetter, reaffirmed the idea in his oft referenced 1973 paper, “The Strength of Weak Ties.”

Phil and Bill were also participating in an act of creative destruction. This term comes from one of the most influential economists of the 20th century, Austrian turned American, Joseph Shumpeter. Shumpeter pointed out that for an invention to become an innovation, it has to have impact through capital investment and also lead to the rise of new businesses. Blue Ribbon Sports started in Bowerman’s garage with a rubber sole made from his wife’s waffle iron and a $500 loan from Knight’s dad. But as Nike they outsource manufacturing to factories around the world, thus avoiding having to spend capital dollars owning a single building or piece of equipment.

Had these two been tinkering in Eugene two or three decades earlier, it’s likely Eugene would have become the Detroit of athletic equipment and apparel. Known in economic circles as Fordism, Henry Ford perfected the practice of building mass produced products systematically using locally sourced labor, usually men, who could theoretically earn enough to afford the products they were assembling. This wasn’t always the case. Women, especially women of color, were often forced to take side jobs to make ends meet.

But Nike was emerging in the Post-Fordist era of the 1960s and Phil Knight had already clued into the manufacturing advantages Japan had pioneered after WWII. In post-war Japan, the government played a critical role in shaping their industries. They controlled imports and exports, but also “national systems of innovation” by creating “formal and informal institutions” to facilitate the “coordination and promotion of technology transfer.”(Economic Geography), A national form of embeddedness.  

But as Japanese companies were growing, they were also getting pressure to maximize profits. A popular way to do this is to pay workers less. So during the sluggish stagflation of the 1970s, Japan introduced ‘non-regular employment’; or more generally, the temporary worker. Which, by in large, were, and still are, adult women.

These workers are not only paid less, they “have much less job security than regular employees,” have “no considerable protection from dismissal”, their “average job tenure is significantly lower than for regular employees”, and they “have limited access to on-the-job or formal training and weak career prospects.”

Karl Marx once noted in the 1800s that capitalism always seeks to eliminate the worker. Nike achieved this by sourcing near slave labor in poor countries so far away from the customer that the worker appears to have been eliminated. They let some poor nameless and faceless woman in a foreign land risk nerve damage making their shoes, so they, or their fellow community members, wouldn’t have to.

Much has been written about the overseas Nike sweatshops since they were exposed in the 1990s. The CBS program “48 Hours” did a piece titled, “Just Do It – Or Else”, where they showed workers in Viet Nam getting swatted over the head by their supervisors for making errors in the stitching of a Nike garment.

Or how about the 1997 New York Times article where they revealed Vietnamese workers were exposed to the odorless carcinogenic chemical toluene at 177 times the legal limit. And who can forget the Life Magazine photo of the 12 year old Pakistani boy stitching the laces into a Nike soccer ball? Just Do It.

FACE THE FACELESS, EMPOWER THE POWERLESS, HEED THE GREED

Seeking cheap labor in regions far away from the eyes of consumers not only hid these exploits from Nike customers, but it absolved Phil Knight of responsibility. By outsourcing capitalism to a faraway land, Nike abstracts it way and disassociates from it. Clemson University political and moral philosopher, Todd May, puts it like this,

“It is of the character of transnational capitalism that the source of economic oppression is often thousands of miles away, separated from those it exploits by many levels of bureaucracy, language, and national borders.”

In 2001 a Nike representative reacted this way to accusations of reported worker abuse, “It’s not within our scope to investigate. We’re about sports, not manufacturing 101.”

Nike has tried to curb these abuses. In 2005, they were the first apparel manufacturer to disclose the names and locations of its nearly 500 plants. They’ve created watchdog groups in many of these locations to monitor progress, but many contractors and subcontractors pack up and move to a different location away from the surveillance.

One effective way to draw attention to these exploits is to empower employees to pool their knowledge, organize, and act; a united worker’s rebellious version of embeddedness.

Companies like Nike can fold up shop at the spur of the moment and find a new supplier. They don’t own the equipment, nor do they have any obligation to the plight of the workers or effects on the local communities. Workers are cluing into this reality and instead put pressure on local, regional, and national governments to do the protesting of exploitive capitalism on their behalf.

Here’s how Thai activist and labor organizer Junya Lek Yimprasert describes it,

“We found out that the factory and the equipment already belonged to the bank. If the workers were to demand a share of the proceeds of the sale, they would get zero, so they decided to change the strategy. First they would hold the employer responsible; second the government; and finally the brands they had produced for.”

It seems to be working. In Sri Lanka, one union organizer observed,

“Auditors from Nike visited the factory and finally the company recognised our union. It had an impact on all [of the] free trade zones. The Board of Investment governing the zones amended its guidelines to allow for unions and make employers recognise them.”

Back in the 70s when Prefontaine was squabbling with the AAU, he was demanding athletes be recognized and compensated for their labor. And just a couple weeks ago, Phil Knight helped organize a company called Division Street, Inc., that will help Oregon student athletes monetize their own name, image, and brand.

I can’t help but be impressed with the new buildings and support Phil Knight is lavishing on his alma mater. Especially, the Hayward Field renovation. But I also feel discomfort knowing it all came at the expense of near slave labor at the hands of nameless and voiceless humans, mostly women, tucked away in a sweatshop.

And I’ve grown weary of public universities, and city governments, begging billionaires to throw us some spare change in hopes of making our communities as rich as they are. Celebrating philanthropy, the contributions of great men, and even star athletes only accentuates the socioeconomic malaise that divides us and unsettles us.

I have an idea. What if instead of lavishing the Oregon campus with another chunk of change or fancy building, Phil Knight took a stand. What would happen if, in an homage to Steve Prefontaine’s “STOP PRE” self-effacing sardonic strut, Phil grabbed a shirt from a Nike fan, pulled it over his suit as the crowd chanted “NI-KEE, NI-KEE, NI-KEE”, and he ran a victory lap around Hayward Field in a bright green Nike shirt with neon yellow lettering that read: “STOP GREED!”

Hello Interactors,

I was stuck needing a car this week to meet a friend for coffee, but didn’t have access to one. So, I grabbed a bus and was there nearly as fast as a car would have taken me. That isn’t always the case, of course. The incident brought back some challenging memories of a time when I was suddenly carless in a region known for cars — Southern California.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

PACIFIC COAST MY WAY

I couldn’t have been in a better mood. It was my 22nd birthday, the sun was shining, and I had just passed a spectacular view. Fields of strawberries stretching out to the Pacific Ocean. And just beyond was an orange and pink gradient sky as the sun dipped behind the dark silhouetted Channel Islands.

I was heading to L.A. from Santa Barbara where I was going to school. I was driving my silver 1983 Dodge Colt with an all maroon interior and vinyl seats. I had splurged on a sheepskin driver’s seat cover to keep my bum and back cool in the relentless southern California sun. My cousin had planned a birthday dinner at her home in Los Angeles, complete with a chocolate cake. I was trying to make good time.

As I climbed out of the flat agricultural valley on Highway 101, up the pass through the Santa Monica Mountains, and into the San Fernando Valley, I heard a loud clunk come from my engine. With my foot all the way to the floor, the car slowed to about 45 miles an hour. It didn’t sound right either. I pulled over and popped the hood, but didn’t know what to look for.

I got back in the car and inched my way to the nearest exit with my hazards flashing, pulled into a gas station, chatted with a mechanic and called my cousin to inform her and her husband to go ahead and celebrate without me. My engine had blown one of it’s four cylinders and I was going to be awhile. I puttered my way 50 miles west on side roads from the valley to the coast. Happy birthday to me.

I ended up selling my car to a scrap yard.

It was a life lesson that was just getting started. Stranded in L.A. without a car, all I could think of was that song, Nobody Walks in L.A., by the 80s band, Missing Persons.

“Walkin’ in L.A. Only a nobody walks in L.A.”

It was still in rotation on L.A.’s famed radio station, KROQ, at the time. But, without a car radio I was stuck humming it to myself as I walked in L.A – a nobody.

American roads are designed to make you feel like a nobody unless you’re in a car. It’s baked into the laws and rights of our roadways. Transportation engineer manuals guide street design to marginalize pedestrians. It’s no accident that nobody walks in L.A., it’s by design. They’re made to humiliate you and scare you into buying a car. Only then will you be somebody.

My first choice to get down to L.A. from Santa Barbara was the train. It took me from a beachside station in Santa Barbara to a gorgeous central station downtown L.A. where my girlfriend would pick me up. It was mostly commuters or vacationers so I felt like I was somebody. But it rarely got up to 50 miles per hour and would stop every 10 or 15 minutes to let another train pass or pick up more passengers. It was the slowest option. Luckily the coastal scenery made it tolerable.

Then I discovered I could take the airport shuttle from Santa Barbara to LAX and she could pick me up there. That was more expensive, but it was fast and went along the scenic Pacific Coast Highway. And it was also filled mostly with business travelers so I felt like I was somebody.

The worst option was the Greyhound bus. The L.A. station was in a rough neighborhood and was filled with some aggressive panhandlers and dealers. My girlfriend was always scared to drive away from that place alone. The ride itself to Santa Barbara was comfortable enough, but was often late at night. I was usually the only White person. There were a lot of Hispanic folks headed to stops near where the strawberry fields were.

One time the driver, also Hispanic, pulled off the freeway, turned onto a gravel road and stopped in what looked like the middle of a strawberry field. It was dark and desolate. He opened the door and on hopped a friend or family member he clearly knew. He got back on the freeway and we were off. At first I was annoyed, but then I realized the driver made that person feel like he was somebody. It made me feel that way too. But I felt like a different somebody than when I was with mostly White affluent business travelers on their way home from LAX. Was I valuing airline travelers more than bus travelers?

Living without a car in a car-centric world shifts your perspective. You encounter life differently and are exposed to more personal interactions. They need not be direct interactions; sometimes just watching a blind person navigate a public space or seeing someone suffering with a mental condition is enough to contemplate your particular plight.

Relying on public transportation hurls you into humanity whether you like it or not. You’re forced to reckon with the reality that you are sharing space and time with people different from you; but it also makes you one of them. A fellow human. Somebody.

But it can be uncomfortable grappling with this truth, so many people seek an escape from reality. And for most Americans, that means buying a car. As Gary Numan says in another new wave hit from the 80s,

Here in my car

I feel safest of all

I can lock all my doors

It's the only way to live

In cars

THE NOTORIOUS GDP

There is one form of public transportation that people seem to tolerate above all others – the airplane. Airports are a lot like train and bus stations, except they’re occupied by people who can afford to be there. And while the airline industry is highly subsidized – making it more affordable to those with modest incomes – the price of an airline ticket is out of reach for most of the world’s population.

Still, large airports provide private lounges for those seeking an escape from even the modestly privileged. I’ve been in these lounges and they can be very nice. Especially on an overseas trip. But as nice as they are, I’m always reminded there are some, now more than ever, who deem even those exclusive sanctuaries to be below them. Even sharing a ride with other first class passengers is a step too deep into humanity. So they buy their own jets. Maybe it’s time for Gary Numan to update his lyrics.

Here in my Lear

I feel safest of all

I can lock all my doors

It's the only way to fly

In Lear’s

All human beings occupy the same physical space on an earth that rotates at the same rate for all of us. We are all granted at birth access to the same space and time. A true natural born right. But societies and governments place different values on space and time. Including monetary value. Property value is more commonly understood; especially in the United States where owning property is much like owning a car – you’re not really somebody until you own one.

You’re also not really somebody until you have a job. At least in the eyes of most economists. And not just any job. A legitimate job. Sorry stay-at-home parents, most of whom have been and are women, your work is not valued. Economies originated as gendered concepts and still are. As a student, I was also a nobody. At least in terms of contributing to the economy.

If a monetary value can’t be placed on an activity, it’s not counted. The activity has to include money being exchanged through a price fixed market economy of some kind. Some company has to be siphoning money from the activity to be valued and calculated. Otherwise, it’s considered not worth counting.

Those activities include transportation. Each time you take a trip on a plane, bus, shuttle, or car your time is being valued by the government. Walking and biking to your legitimate job has zero value because no money has been exchanged in the activity. It turns out walkers are not only a nobody socially, but economically too. Walking and biking is considered an uncomfortable burden to economists.

The most common way to measure the economy is through a country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Countries calculate GDP in different ways, but the most straightforward and common method is actually rather simple. Which also makes it dubious given how complex human behavior is to understand let alone measure.

The equation takes all the recorded money spent on goods and services within a given region. This money may have been privately spent on individual consumption, like a cup of coffee or a bus ticket. Let’s call that C – for Consumer spending.

The money could have been spent on an investment, like property or stock in a company. Let’s call that I – for Investment.

Don’t forget the government spends money on our behalf as well. They spend money on roads, hospitals, libraries, schools, military, police and other services. Let’s call that G – for Government spending.

There’s also money flowing in and out of the country from abroad through exported and imported goods. That’s an easy one to calculate too. They take the value of exports; let’s call that X – for eXports and subtract the value of imports; we’ll call that M – for iMports.

Now we can do simple arithmetic to assess the value of a country’s economy.

Gross Domestic Product = Consumption Spending + Investment Spending + Government Spending + (Exports minus Imports). More tersely,

GDP = C + I + G + (X – M).

In other words GDP is a measure of a place full of people generating wealth through a series of complex monetary interactions.

As you might imagine, it’s more complicated than that in reality. Consumer spending we understand. Investment too, if you’re fortunate enough to have such means. But even that starts to get murky. Exports and imports are complicated, and so is government spending. It’s also inequitable. Since we’re talking transportation, let’s focus on transportation spending.

In order to balance inequities in government spending, the U.S. government relies on the same thing I did when weighing my different transportation options – cost-benefit analysis. I was constantly doing cost-benefit analysis in my head after my car croaked.

I would think to myself, “What does it cost to take the airport shuttle? What is the benefit to doing so? If it costs twice as much as the bus, will it get me there in half the time? It will be more comfortable, but what’s the price of comfort? What’s the price of convenience? Do I have enough money to even be doing this analysis?” It’s exhausting. Relying on public transportation in a country built for cars tests both your sanity and your vanity, but also your patience.

SWEAT AND THE JET SET

The biggest benefit of transportation is the amount of time saved getting from point A to point B. Time is what is most valued. But when the government values that time, they don’t assign equal values to different modes of transportation. The faster the mode of travel, the more valued it is. When the government conducts cost-benefit analysis, they value transport by air at $63 per hour while transport on the surface is valued at $25 per hour using median salaries as their basis.

Government economists call this: efficient. Zachary Liscow, an Associate Professor of Law at Yale Law School, explains it like this:

“Rich persons can earn more in that hour saved. But since the time of the rich is valued at such a higher rate, this policy pushes funding toward the rich instead of the poor, making it harder for low-income people to access jobs.”

The more money you have, the more choices you have to travel from point A to point B faster. This is a big motivator for the ultra-rich to buy their own airplanes. Take it from the guy who started the Microsoft research group at Microsoft in 1991, Nathan Myhrvold. He penned an article in a 1998 Vanity Fair article that stepped through his rationale for his first private jet purchase. It was written anonymously, but he’s since admitted he wrote it.

He says,

“I was, in effect, hostage to the air-travel system for the equivalent of three months a year. You’d have to be a career criminal to earn that much jail time—and the food would be better. If I had my own jet, I’d get that time back. I’d come and go without schedules or the fear of missing a flight. My time in the air would be spent in an office with wings, where I could work or relax. I would finally have 12 months to live the life that, in effect, I had been cramming into 9 months of non–airline time. This perspective made it hard not to like a jet.”

Owning your own jet is insanely expensive. But it would be even more expensive if the fuel wasn’t subsidized through the government. Myhrvold puts this reality into stark perspective:

“A jet can easily consume 3,000 pounds of fuel an hour, the equivalent of a 12-ounce can of Diet Coke every second. Fortunately, in bulk, jet fuel—essentially the same stuff as kerosene or diesel fuel—is actually cheaper than Diet Coke. All told, direct flying cost is about $2,500 ($4,000 in 2021 dollars) per hour.”

Private planes emit 10 times more carbon than conventional airlines. Four hours equals the average amount your or I emit in an entire year. One in ten flights departing France are private jets. While conventional airline flights were down 60% in 2020, due to Covid, the number of private flights by private jet increased.

A form of travel economists would call the most efficient also happens to be one of the worst things you could do to the environment. And it all gets measured and reported as positive contributions to the economy and the GDP.

I can’t deny flying in a private jet would be nice. Especially if they didn’t pollute. I think most everyone would agree. But owning a car is pretty nice too. And for most of the world’s population, owning a bike would be a luxury.

But I do think a more equitable distribution of government spending on transportation would benefit more people – especially those disadvantaged. That’s more true today than ever before given the sorry state of our bus and rail systems across the country. And despite the spending airports do get, many are also in a sorry state.

Measurements like GDP and economic political mechanisms like cost-benefit analysis have become a means to an end. Every administration since Nixon has used cost-benefit analysis to either increase or decrease regulation. Cost-benefit analysis started as a tool to benefit industry, then became a device for environmental regulation, and has since become an array of political levers either party uses to advance legislation or block it.

These engines of political and economic power have been used to measure and manipulate the wealth accumulation of a select and privileged few. But as this machine is climbing the hill of prosperity, a loud bang of inequity is reverberating from under the hood. The Biden administration has pulled over, popped the hood, and is examining what’s inside; often not knowing what to look for. Meanwhile, we keep climbing the hill, albeit cautiously. If we can’t find a way to make the engine of economic mechanisms and measures result in a more equitable distribution of wealth, it just might be time to scrap it.