The Drama of POSSIBILITY

I am just now beginning to hear through the grapevine the college admissions results of former students. It's quite an exhilarating feeling, let me tell you, even from the sidelines a continent away.

Some months ago, Stanley Fish wrote a column about how he found himself entranced by the spectacle of the NBA Draft. Ultimately, he ascribed his fascination to the idea that "what [he was] witnessing was the repeated renewing of hope." For me, it's a compelling explanation. One cannot help but feel in awe of the promise and potential on display. The idea of an unmolded life that just sits ready for the taking is...exhilarating. Cherish it! you want to scream both for yourself and for the world.

A couple months after graduating from college, I e-mailed a professor who had been particularly influential for me. He responded by writing, "Your life sounds full of PROMISE now, keep notes on your days..." His capitalization of that word, "promise," made an impression on me, and that's why I remember the e-mail.

These ritual cycles--the birth of a newborn, the election of a new president, matriculation and graduation--all enact the drama of rebirth and POSSIBILITY. It's a beautiful thing, central in my mind to our existence as human beings, and one cannot forget it. Even during the profanity that is separate from the ritual moment.

"From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility," anyone?

To Oysters and Elk

2010, Year of the Tiger

I was getting my hair cut today by a middle-aged Chinese woman. We were chatting. She asked me my age and went on to comment that I must be a Tiger according to the Chinese zodiac calendar. She prophesied good things for me in the year ahead, which was nice to hear.

I got to thinking about the twelve-year cycle that the Chinese zodiac calendar runs through. It's comforting to think about time in cyclical rather than linear, sacred rather than profane terms. Rather than a straight-shot march through the years, a cyclical imagination of time gives me an anchored sense of continuity. 2010, Year of the Tiger. The next one after won't be until 2022. Puts things in a different light.

Themes

A couple weeks ago, the CEO of my company was recognized for her leadership as one of the top 100 women in the hedge fund industry. She wrote up a speech to accept her award and distributed the transcript internally. In her address, she identified key themes that have run consistently throughout her life and career, and she concluded by urging others to do the same. It is an exercise in introspection and self-awareness that serves to guide one through life's decisions.

I have written in this blog, on and off, for a little over a year now. Reading over old posts, I can identify a couple themes that have been most prevalent in my mind for at least the past year or so.

1) Living probabilistically. For me, thinking probabilistically is a way to deal with the limits of individual agency, a mode of thinking that encourages one to confront randomness proactively by tweaking those variable that are within one's control. The focus is not on short-term variation but rather on long-term properties.

2) Intellectual humility. Having deep conviction in my own fallibility, I try to approach problems and questions from the perspective of discussion and not debate.

3) Responsibility. About a month ago, a high school friend was in town visiting, I was hanging out with her and her friends in my apartment, and conversation grew more intense and drunken. A guy threw out a comment about being answerable only to yourself and how you should pursue whatever career it is that makes you happiest. Invariably, I get a very strong and negative reaction to such comments. I believe in relational being, and I believe in a notion of responsibility that supersedes the individual.

4) The beauty and richness to be found in stories, especially those that connect in unexpected ways.

5) The power of ecology as a metaphor. For understanding cities. For understanding policy-making. For understanding people. Currently, I obsess over the idea of triple bottom line thinking and what I am now going to call Maslow's ecology of needs.

For now, I feel pretty comfortable with these themes being drivers of my personal growth for the years to come.

Yikes. There is such a thing as too much introspection. And indeed, you, my imaginary reader, are beginning to make me blush self-consciously. Too much sincerity. Too little sarcasm.

"Relationship Science"

Yesterday, I read The New York Times Magazine's feature on marriage.

In line with the thinking of my previous post about cities, the salient question for me is, What kind of a problem is a relationship?

With language reminiscent of that used in The Corrections (Franzen), Elizabeth Weil describes her marriage variously through the lens of economics, psychoanalysis and military strategy.

Economics:

[Marriage is] an environment of scarcity, it's "a barbaric competition over whose needs get met"; it's "two people trying to make a go of it on emotional and psychological supplies that are only sufficient for one."

Psychoanalysis:

Monogamy is one of the most basic concepts of modern marriage. It is also its most confounding. In psychoanalytic thought, the template for monogamy is forged in infancy, a baby with its mother. Marriage is considered to be a mainline back to this relationship, its direct heir.

Military strategy/Politics:

...I began seeing Dan as my adversary, the person against whom I was negotiating the terms of our lives.

Perhaps we'd been striving in raising children and not in marriage because child-rearing is a dictatorship and marriage is a democracy. The children do not get to vote on the direction of the relationship, on which sleep-training or discipline philosophy they like best. But with a spouse, particularly a contemporary American spouse, equality is foundational, assumed. (emphases mine)

The problem to me seems to be that Weil approaches her marriage much as she would other facets of her life, that is, with the same industry and the same resources at her disposal. She says as much: "...I started wondering why I wasn't applying myself to the project of being a spouse. My marriage was good, utterly central to my existence, yet in no other important aspect of my life was I so laissez-faire. Like most of my peers, I applied myself to school, friendship, work, health and, ad nauseum, raising my children. But in this critical area, marriage, we had all turned away. I wanted to understand why. I wanted not to accept this."

In regarding her role in her marriage as a "project," Weil tries to dissect her marriage and analyze it as she would other problems. She tests hypothesizes. She gives herself exercises and homework assignments. She appeals to expert advice: marriage counselors, sex therapists, psychoanalysts, relationship scientists. There is even mention in the article of a "Love Lab," where one purported expert claims 94 percent accuracy in predicting whether a married couple will last longer than six years.

Absurdity in my ears. Management consultants get assigned to "projects," not life partners. Being in a relationship is fundamentally a different kind of problem than a work project, an investment decision, a weight-loss plan or an international treaty. It is an area of life in which our maximizing tendencies come up against a wall and our typical modes of thinking meet their limits. Thinking otherwise can be of real detriment.

I think Weil's efforts to grow in her marriage are admirable. But something about the way she sets out to improve her marriage strikes me as deeply wrong. Something in my gut tells me that we need to draw upon a different set of resources when thinking about matters of the heart. As a culture, we have let the language of economics and politics infiltrate our thinking about relationships. We increasingly regard love as something that can be demystified with the right application of analytical tools. Despite our best efforts, relationships resist demystification, rightfully so in my mind.

What kind of a problem is a relationship? What are the implications of how we choose to answer that question?

What kind of a problem is a city?

Cities happen to be problems in organized complexity, like the life sciences. They present “situations in which a half-dozen or even several dozen quantities are all varying simultaneously and in subtly interconnected ways.” Cities, again like the life sciences, do not exhibit one problem in organized complexity, which if understood explains all. They can be analyzed into many such problems or segments which, as in the case of the life sciences, are also related with one another. The variables are many, but they are not helter-skelter; they are “interrelated into an organic whole.”

...The tactics for understanding [the life sciences and cities] are similar in the sense that both depend on the microscopic or detailed view, so to speak, rather than on the less detailed, naked-eye view suitable for viewing problems of simplicity or the remote telescopic view suitable for viewing problems of disorganized complexity.
In the life sciences, organized complexity is handled by identifying a specific factor or quantity—say an enzyme—and then painstakingly learning its intricate relationships and interconnections with other factors or quantities. All this is observed in terms of the behavior (not mere presence) of other specific (not generalized) factors or quantities. To be sure, the techniques of two-variable and disorganized-complexity analysis are used too, but only as subsidiary tactics. (433-440)

That's Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. If we take the metaphor of a city as a living organism seriously and recognize cities as emergent phenomenon, then what is the appropriate analytical approach for cities? Although my friends tell me that Jacobs is dated in her understanding of how the life sciences are studied, I think the basic point remains: Cities are not "understandable purely by statistical analysis, predictable by the application of probability mathematics, manageable by conversion into groups of averages."

For me, this is a profound point, especially given the ubiquity of the statistical approach in social science thinking today. What is more, the framing of the problem determines the nature of the solution. Moving forward, the question is, How does one combine the sensibilities of Jacobs' street-level humanity with the empirical rigor of an econometrician?

Are You Interesting?

Ben Casnocha writes a lot about interesting-ness: what it means to be interesting, how to be interesting, how to determine quickly whether someone else is interesting. Sometimes, I like what he has to say about the topic, particularly when he says something along the lines of, "The way to be interesting is to be interested."

But for the most part, his thoughts leave me a little bit peeved. Who are all these people that Ben comes across in daily life that he deems so uninteresting? Does he meet so many inexcusably boring people that he feels compelled to write about how to be interesting so regularly?

At one point in my life--namely, during the intellectual awakening of my adolescence--I would sneak away from social gatherings to read James Joyce. His words--"Evidently she had been unfit to live, without any strength of purpose, an easy prey to habits, one of the wrecks on which civilization has been reared." (Dubliners 91)--sent fireworks off in my head as I exclaimed to myself, "How true and how sad it is that so many people muddle through life in zombie-like fashion!"

So I admit it. I've made my fair share of snap judgments about people I find uninteresting and not worth my time. But, taking a break from Joyce, I started talking to people and took a stab at understanding others. Everybody's got a story to tell, obstacles encountered and overcome, dreams foiled and realized, hearts broken and filled. Looking back, I regret every single time I have written someone off as being uninteresting.

Back to my question: Are you interesting? Yes, you are.

A Sense of Place

1) My grand-uncle was born in Dong Shih, a small farming town in the central highlands of Taiwan. He grew up speaking Hakka, the dialect of his parents, and Japanese, the language of formal schooling during Japanese occupation. My grand-uncle has lived through colonialism, World War II, forty years of martial law and an economic miracle that saw Taiwan engage the global economy at unprecedented levels. While his beginnings may have been humble and provincial, his knowledge of the world is vast and his experiences diverse. My grand-uncle forged a career as a successful businessman, but as life would have it, his wife became ill at a young age and was largely confined to the house. He refused to leave his wife's side and never once left the country even as opportunities for travel became commonplace and it became clear that my grand-aunt's health would neither worsen terribly nor substantially improve.

A couple years ago, my grand-aunt passed away. So at the age of seventy, my grand-uncle left Taiwan for the first time in his life to go to Japan. Upon his return, I was eager to hear his impressions of the wider world, what it was like for him to step off Taiwanese soil for the first time. With a proud grin, he responded to my inquiries, "Taiwan is a great place to live."

2) A couple weeks ago, I participated in a tour of the Village Bottoms district of West Oakland, which for over half a century has been the object of systematic marginalization. I moved to San Francisco about a year ago, and I must admit that I know embarrassingly little about the Bay Area and its history. Fortunately for me, the leader of the tour, Marcel Diallo, a Village Bottoms native, intimated vast and deep knowledge of the neighborhood. Every block we walked he infused with rich history. For years, he has labored to revitalize the neighborhood for which he harbors obvious love. At a venue that Marcel has toiled to designate as a cultural space, there hangs a portrait of his grandmother. On the portrait reads a quote from Marcel's grandmother: "When I sat for this portrait in 1951, West Oakland was one of the few places we as Black folks were allowed to live. Today I wouldn't leave the Bottoms if they paid me."

3) I was talking to a colleague the other day trying to figure out how she landed in San Francisco after growing up her whole life in Michigan. She told me she had been ready for something new and wanted to experience for herself all the hullaballoo about San Francisco. Three fantastic years, she tells me, she has been in San Francisco. Now she's itching to move on to something new again. "You can only do Bay to Breakers so many times. You know what I mean?"

You've Gots to be Kidding Me

There was not a single tree growing in San Francisco when the first Spanish arrived; it was too dry and wind-blown for trees to take hold. Today, Golden Gate Park looks as if Virginia had mated with Borneo, thanks to water brought nearly two hundred miles by tunnel. The same applies to Bel Air, to Pacific Palisades, to the manicured lawns of La Jolla, where the water comes from three directions and from a quarter of a continent away. (Mark Reisner, Cadillac Desert 333)

An Explosion of Good Will

From David Bornstein's How to Change the World: "In the United States and Canada, for example, almost everyone has heard about the explosion of dot-coms--a much smaller phenomenon--but millions have still not heard the big story: the worldwide explosion of dot-orgs" (6). The book begins with an account of how the number of NGOs and nonprofits has ballooned over the last couple decades. Readers, I presume, are supposed to applaud what is taken as a proxy for an explosion of good will.

My training in economics has me asking a number of questions:

1) What is driving growth in what Bornstein calls "the citizen sector?" My economic intuition tells me it is something other than good will.

2) NGOs and nonprofits form to address social goods that are neglected by both private and public sectors. Why are these social goods being neglected? Government exists for the provision of public goods, or when possible, to enforce legislation (taxes and property rights) that helps internalize externalities. What role does that leave for the citizen sector?

3) From what are resources being diverted to fund newly formed NGOs and nonprofits? Does this represent an efficient allocation of resources?

4) If there is a loss in efficiency, can we count growth in the citizen sector as a boon to society? How might we begin to answer this question?

5) How do market forces and competition operate in the citizen sector?

The book doesn't answer many or any of these questions. Nonetheless, I found it a worthwhile read for its stories of ground-level, piecemeal change throughout the world. The Ashoka Foundation sounds fascinating and definitely seems to be onto something.

No doubt there is abundant literature to answer some of the questions that I have posed. Now if only I could find some of what is out there...

Storytelling

Recently, Chris Blattman linked to this essay about how book clubs diminish the intimacy of the reading experience.

For me, the essay brought to mind my undergraduate study of postcolonial literature, which helped me appreciate the diversity of different models in reading. The author of the essay, Adam Sternbergh, no doubt relies upon a Western model that envisions an intimate, singular connection between text and reader. Implicit in the model is a highly individuated reader, a liberal self isolated from community and context. No surprise then that Sternbergh romanticizes the ideal of reading Moby Dick "while sailing the world alone."

For myself, I draw inspiration for my reading from a different model. In an essay on oral subjectivity, Cynthia Ward writes, "The value of the oral tale to the oral culture lies not entirely in the tale itself but, perhaps more significantly, in the discussion it generates after it is told." This insight accords with my experience of texts that come alive in discussion. In such cases, the give-and-take of discussion heightens the reading experience rather than cheapens it.

The Policy Imperative

A couple months back, I posted an entry criticizing the various initiatives discussed by Bill Gates in a TED Talk regarding education reform. I continue to believe that my criticisms represent valid concerns. However, when a friend of mine asked me what I would suggest in lieu of Gates' initiatives, I had nothing to offer. My friend then retorted that my criticisms were, in light of my failure to present viable alternatives, irresponsible and unproductive.

I agree with my friend and have come to appreciate more what a policy perspective entails. Policy-making is inherently a forward-looking, problem-solving enterprise. It engages with real constraints and by virtue of its future orientation contains seeds of optimism. Critical thinking and analysis are great things that one picks up from a liberal arts education. But a policy perspective demands more than critical thinking. It demands that we take the next step to ask, What now? How do we move productively forward given available resources and constraints?

I intend to better incorporate the set of questions implicit in a policy orientation into my daily thinking.

The Demise of Stacey's Bookstore

I am currently reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. I am only half way through, but the book already has me seeing cities through different eyes. The story of Stacey's Bookstore is a case in point.

---

In March of this year, Stacey's Bookstore, not long after celebrating its 85th year of existence as an independent bookstore, closed its doors for good. I used to frequent Stacey's. On the second floor, there was a large sunlit reading area where readers could read free of pressure to consume. No Starbucks or Seattle's Best attached. The reading area was often arrayed with rows of seats for the appearance of guest authors and a weekly lecture series. Employees were most often middle-aged or older, well-read individuals who were long-time San Franciscans and could speak passionately about their favorite titles or reading spots in the city. As someone who wants eventually to be a bookstore proprietor, I appreciated Stacey's as a cultural asset, a place that strove to be a community center, a cultural hub in addition to being a place to buy books.

When I first saw signs for the clearance sale that anticipated the store's closing, I felt along with other loyal patrons that something special was being lost. It was easy to understand, though. The economy was in shambles. Online retailing had long ago changed the landscape of brick-and-mortar book sales. And how was a mom-and-pop store supposed to compete with national chains such as Borders or Barnes & Noble? It was easy to cast Stacey's Bookstore as the unhappy victim of changing economic and social circumstances, and that is precisely how the story was reported.

Now, reading Jacobs' book, I am beginning to understand the demise of Stacey's Bookstore in a new light. Stacey's Bookstore, located in San Francisco's Financial District, was doomed to failure from the get-go as a result of its specific location in San Francisco's urban fabric. What now seems remarkable to me is that the bookstore lasted as long as it did. Applying the analytical framework developed by Jacobs in her book, two factors are prominent:

1) The Financial District, as one might infer from its name, is not a district that boasts great functional diversity. People work in the Financial District. One does not go to the Financial District for entertainment or commerce or for its cultural vitality, and one certainly does not live there. The result is extremely lopsided pedestrian traffic. Venture into the Financial District Monday through Friday nine to five and it feels quite lively, but it feels quite like a ghost town outside standard work hours and weekdays. Business at Stacey's was premised on weekday noontime and after-work pedestrian traffic. That leaves for a lot of dead hours in between, and it is extremely difficult to sustain a bookstore let alone a cultural hub in this context.

2) Aged buildings in the Financial District are nonexistent. As pictures show, Stacey's Bookstore resided in a building that looks and feels very new, surrounded by office buildings that also look and feel very new. The advantage of aged buildings in cities is that they usually require lower capital and maintenance costs, demanding lower rent. As a result, aged buildings are better able to support businesses with lower profit margins, ideal for small independent establishments. Without aged buildings, you get a lot of franchise stores like Quizno's, Chipotle, Subway or Staples. As Jacobs writes, "great diversity in age and types of buildings has a direct, explicit connection with diversity of population, diversity of enterprises and diversity of scenes" (212). No wonder then that the Beat writers hung out at City Lights Bookstore in North Beach.

In short, the Financial District is not really a place that is equipped to support a viable center for cultural activity. This reality is a property of the city, its layout and urban planning. The demise of Stacey's Bookstore can in large part be understood by the overwhelming dullness of San Francisco's Financial District. Its vacated space remains vacant.

Hating on Agribusiness

It's so easy to hate on agribusiness these days. Such industrial behemoths as Monsanto and Cargill, they are the bullies in our story, the Goliaths, the colonial oppressors against whom it is our moral obligation to fight the good fight. They've infiltrated Washington, D.C. with their lobbyists, co-opted the political process, insulated themselves from popular pressure in order to pursue their single-minded pursuit of profit. They pillage our planet with their environmentally destructive practices; they ignore the welfare of animals, workers and family farms; they feed the masses with diabetes-inducing Frankenfood, helping us along in our journey to exploding the national healthcare budget. Oh, they are so evil. It is so, so easy to hate on agribusiness.

Hating on agribusiness has a long history, beginning with Upton Sinclair's muckraking in The Jungle. More recently, books such as Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore's Dillema, documentary films such as Supersize Me and Food, Inc. have helped fan popular resentment of agribusiness. But as with all such linear, good versus evil stories, we should view this tale, which has so captivated popular imagination, with some amount of skepticism.

Rather than blindly throw our weight behind Alice Waters and Chez Panisse, the organic food movement or small-scale farms or the holistic, wholesome grass farming methods of individuals such as Joel Salatin, we should listen to the views of dissenters. For many environmentalists, the ruthless efficiency of agribusiness and the use of genetically engineered crops are in fact an environmental imperative. James Lovelock, in The Revenge of Gaia, writes:

As I have said before, we cannot farm more than about half the Earth's land surface without impairing Gaia's capacity to keep a comfortable planet. Sadly, at our present numbers the lower productivity of organic farms compared with intensive agriculture makes it a dubious enterprise. (121)

Lovelock goes on to argue that we need to disabuse ourselves of the notion that all "man-made chemicals" are harmful with "natural chemicals" somehow beyond reproach and always salutary. Stewart Brand, in a recent TED Talk, echoes these concerns about the too-easy categorization of agricultural methods and the land-intensity of agriculture as he comes out strongly in favor of genetically engineered crops. What to do about these concerns that detract from the linear simplicity of the story told by agribusiness-haters?

As ever, a Manichean worldview serves us poorly. There are never easy solutions and always trade-offs to be weighed and considered...

What I've Read This Year

Once you graduate from college, you no longer have a syllabus to dictate your reading material. During my first year out of college, I read books that had some way or another found their way onto my bookshelf in previous years but remained unread. The result was a fairly random selection of books with little in terms of coherence or focus.

The trouble with a random selection of books is that it becomes difficult to contextualize what you are reading. Context is precisely what a course syllabus provides, and context is what most enables you to learn and achieve a balanced perspective on a topic. In an effort to increase the efficacy of my reading, I have tried recently to choose books that at least participate in the same conversations. From the past eight months or so, this is what I have read chronologically:

The Time Paradox, Philip Zimbardo
Fooled by Randomness, Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Hot, Flat, and Crowded, Thomas Friedman
Cradle to Cradle, William McDonough and Michael Braungart
The Green Collar Economy, Van Jones
The Subprime Solution, Robert Shiller
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan
Pioneering Portfolio Management, David Swensen
The New Paradigm for Financial Markets, George Soros
Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
The Iliad, Homer
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama
Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
The Revenge of Gaia, James Lovelock
Natural Capitalism, Paul Hawken and Amory Lovins
Break Through, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger
The Mystery of Capital, Hernando de Soto
How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, David Bornstein

The dominance of nonfiction in this reading selection is interesting to me, and I suppose this reflects a change in my tastes and priorities. The fiction I've read has been pretty random, but the nonfiction can be organized according to a number of themes that I find myself caring about more and more. These themes include: 1) sustainability and today's environmental movement; 2) development economics; and 3) behavioral economics.

I want to fashion my future reading lists according to these three broad themes (with the occasional novel to satisfy my cravings for fiction). Next up, I have:

Banker to the Poor, Muhammad Yunus
The Long-Legged House, Wendell Berry
The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles
Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely

Would love to hear suggestions. Right now, I especially want to find a book that deals with the intersection of urban planning and sustainability issues.

Nuclear Energy?

In The Revenge of Gaia, James Lovelock makes what I found to be a compelling case for nuclear energy. While I don't feel well-versed enough in the nuclear debate to comment intelligently on Lovelock's specific arguments, I was struck by his analysis of current popular resistance to nuclear energy. In particular, Lovelock quotes W.J. Nuttall's Nuclear Renaissance at length:

The real opposition to nuclear power within the public grew in the 1970s and the 1980s. It may be argued that this has been a consequence of the rise of single-issue pressure groups and youth culture. That is, as the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations of the late 1960s grew out of earlier Civil Rights demonstrations, so the anti-nuclear demonstrations of the late 1970s arose directly from the Vietnam War protests, once that conflict had come to an end. This, however, is a rather Americanized perspective on what has been an erosion of enthusiasm for nuclear power. In Britain the defining socio-political events of relevance are those assoicated with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in the late 1960s and resurgently in the early 1980s. Not only was CND passionate and anti-American, but it was also fun and it was cool. This fusion of popular culture with the British anti-nuclear movement of the 1960s is vividly captured by the present writer's uncle Jeff Nuttall in his visceral autobiography Bomb Culture, in which he describes one CND Aldermaston March as a Carnival of Optimism: 'Protest was associated with festivity.' This important aspect of matters nuclear has only slightly attenuated with passing decades. Those advocating nuclear renaissance ignore such aspects of nuclear power at their peril. (quoted in The Revenge of Gaia, 94)

To this, Lovelock writes: "I agree with Nuttall, and it is easy to see why many greens are so anti-nuclear; they often are the children of a union between environmentalism and the CND...gradually as the Cold War intensified and the two superpowers tested larger and ever larger weapons, the all-pervasive fear of all things nuclear became widespread" (94).

While it is typically easy to view today's issues and groups in isolation of the socio-historical contexts from which they emerged, this analysis of anti-nuclear sentiment highlights the importance of taking a historical view and examining origins. This is the work that has been most thoughtfully done for the environmentalist movement (to my knowledge) by Van Jones in The Green Collar Economy, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger in Break Through and by Gavin Hood in X-Men Origins.

Important stuff, I say.

Break Through

Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility. An excellent read. I am tempted to say that it is for me the most intellectually influential book I have read since Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. That statement will have to withstand the test of time, but I highly recommend the book to anybody interested in liberal politics, or politics and environmentalism in general.

Explains perfectly why I have never called myself an environmentalist. More on this later...

Goals

I attended a climate policy conference some weeks ago and I was super impressed by a bunch of the speakers but one in particular. Holmes Hummel. She is young, confident, articulate, personable, a Congressional Science Fellow who teaches at Berkeley and consults on carbon-pricing policymaking. After the conference, I reported my impressions to a friend of mine and we came up with the following life goals:

1) Be articulate.
2) Be impressive.
3) Have shit together.

Ideally by age thirty.

Zeitgeist

I watched Fight Club a couple nights ago. The last time I watched the movie I must have still been a freshman in college, so it was interesting to revisit the film.

In one scene, Tyler Durden pulls Raymond K. Hessel, some poor Asian dude, out of a convenient store and puts a gun to the back of his head. Durden--upon learning through interrogation by gunpoint that Raymond had studied biology in community college in hopes of becoming a veterinarian--issues an ultimatum: either Raymond puts himself on the path towards being a veterinarian in six weeks time or he will be hunted down and killed.

A heartening lesson from Tyler Durden with typical Brad Pitt, will-to-power, Randian undertones. The film, and its message, struck a chord in 1999 and ensuing years. It tapped into a deep strain of male anxiety about the meaninglessness of everyday work, of being a cog in corporate bureaucratic machinery, of being trapped in the value system of consumer culture. Forge the life that you want to live, mold your circumstances according to your wishes, be the chief architect of your own life. The film beats this mantra into your head with very little room for subtlety.

In 2009, though, I think the film strikes a false chord. In this great recession of ours, when rugged individuals aren't feeling so rugged, when fatalism is running high, there is a lot of respect to be had for the Raymond K. Hessels of this world, people who are making an honest living and who've adjusted rather admirably to changing circumstances. Tyler Durden, on the other hand, comes off as adolescent in his narcissism, irresponsible. Mischief? Mayhem? I'll pass.

Our zeitgeist is, in my mind, aptly captured in the 2008 Academy Award winner for Best Picture, Slumdog Millionaire. D) It's written. How nice would that be?

John Rawls and Isaiah Berlin...

would approve of Barack Obama.

As I was listening to Obama's commencement speech at Notre Dame and his comments on abortion, I was momentarily brought back to my philosophizing college days. So I dug in the archives and looked up some old essays that I had read by John Rawls and Isaiah Berlin. Here are some quotes that I've culled for your (my) reading pleasure:

The concept of justice is independent from and prior to the concept of goodness in the sense that its principles limit the conceptions of the good which are permissible. A just basic structure and its background institutions establish a framework within which permissible conceptions can be advanced...Other things equal, a conception [of justice] will be more or less stable depending on how far the conditions to which it leads support comprehensive religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines which can constitute a stable overlapping consensus...It suffices to remark that in a society marked by deep divisions between opposing and incommensurable conceptions of the good, justice as fairness enables us to at least conceive how social unity can be both possible and stable. (Rawls, Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical)

Principles are not less sacred because their duration cannot be guaranteed. Indeed, the very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past. "To realize the relative validity of one's convictions," said an admirable writer of our time (Joseph Schumpeter), "and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilized man from a barbarian." To demand more than this is perhaps a deep and incurable metaphysical need; but to allow such a need to determine one's practice is a symptom of an equally deep, and more dangerous, moral and political immaturity. (Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty)

As a philosophical stance, liberalism is surely not unproblematic. However, the idea of an "overlapping consensus," the need to identify common ground in a pluralistic world and move productively forward from it, at least gives liberals in the United States a starting point when talking about "moral issues."

Dreams from My Father

I am a bit of a late-comer to the book, but I just finished it and am very glad I took the time to read it. It is very well written in my opinion, in terms of both its prose and its construction. Barack Obama writes about the various figures in his life with great empathy and does a good job preserving narrative momentum throughout.

In hero-journey fashion, the book begins with news of the loss of a father and concludes with a reconciliation of sorts. At once familiar and novel, the book achieves its resonance primarily through the strength of its archetype. And as an archetype in its broadest terms, Obama's story is truly one in which we can all inscribe our own anxieties, fears and dreams.

I run in circles that typically gush with Obama love, so I am sure that my praise will sound trite. Nonetheless, here I go. What really impresses me is Obama's strength, his willingness to probe at difficult questions that are sure not to yield easy or particularly palatable answers. In an exchange between Obama and his half-brother, Mark, who is also of mixed race, I am struck by the possibility of an alternative path, of it all being otherwise:

"Understand, I'm not ashamed of being half Kenyan. I just don't ask myself a lot of questions about what it all means. About who I really am." [Mark] shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe I should. I can acknowledge the possibility that if I looked more carefully at myself, I would..."
For the briefest moment I sensed Mark hesitate, like a rock climber losing his footing. Then, almost immediately, he regained his composure and waved for the check.
"Who knows? he said. "What's certain is that I don't need the stress. life's hard enough without all that excess baggage." (344)

What Mark regards as superfluous stress, "excess baggage," Obama considers the core of his existence. It is so easy to leave difficult questions for another day, to sweep inconvenient histories aside. Plenty of people choose to put on willful blinders and maybe it is easier that way to get by. But Obama refuses such easy answers, looks incessantly at the facts of his life that are most difficult to digest, and for this, I admire him greatly.

Dolores Labs

Last week, I spent all my time at work day-dreaming about how Dolores Labs, or something like it, will eventually eliminate the need for my job. If you have any experience working a mechanical, repetitive, mindless job, you'll forgive me for my indulgence.

The Irony is Priceless

From Maureen Dowd's Tuesday column this week:

"My adventure did feel like time travel into the past, especially when the G.P.S. began flashing near Yosemite that we were "entering an area where turn-by-turn guidance cannot be provided.""

Isn't Dowd's irony or sarcasm or whatever you want to call it absolutely blissful? She is poking fun at our dependence on technology and how unimaginable it now is to go on an adventure without the aid of technology-aided orientation. Get it?

It's subtle I know, but there it is. After I read the column, I was overcome by a rapid-fire succession of questions. To give you some background (if you haven't read the column yet), Maureen Dowd takes her readers west through San Francisco on an expedition to pan for gold, an activity that has apparently experienced something of a renaissance as our recession has deepened. Let me break that down again. Maureen Dowd, a New York Times op-ed columnist, hops on a plane from New York City to San Francisco, then goes to Yosemite with her GPS to pan for gold for a couple of hours, all so that she can reflect in 850 words on how the literal search for gold captures the state of the economy and our national psyche at the same time. Fool's gold. Otherwise known as pyrite as we are fortunate enough to learn. It's symbolic of our times.

So back to the questions that raced through my mind. How much does Maureen Dowd get paid? Did the NYTimes really fly her out to San Francisco just so that she could write this column? Did she fly first-class? Is there really a recession? Has the price of stock in The New York Times Company really fallen 90% in the last five years? Did the company lose $58 million in 2008 or is Google Finance just lying to me?

What the hell is going on here?

And, finally, how do I get her job?

Lessons from Google Reader

On March 30, 2009, The Atlantic published an article titled "The Quiet Coup," written by Simon Johnson. Almost immediately, Andrew Sullivan, a blogger at The Atlantic Online posted a reader's response on his blog. As well on the same day, Dani Rodrik, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, posted his thoughts on the article. A slew of comments and other blog posts quickly followed.

I found out about Simon Johnson's article because I subscribe to Rodrik's blog and saw a bunch of related items being shared by friends who also use Google Reader. On April 2, David Brooks published his two cents in his NYTimes column. By the time Brooks came out with his op-ed piece, I had read a half dozen opinions about "The Quiet Coup," and it was pretty tough to put a substantively different spin on what had already been written by premier economists who participate in the blogosphere.

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This one a little bit closer to home. On February 2, CleanTechnica.com published a piece about how Andres Pacheco and Alex Bell, two engineering students from Swarthmore, had built a hydrogen fuel cell-powered motorcycle for their senior project. LivingtheAmericanGreen.org followed suit with a post on February 17 and a Wired.com blog covered the engineering project once again on March 3. Yesterday, the Discovery Channel's Daily Planet put out a video clip featuring interviews with Pacheco and Bell and the motorcycle crawling along Swarthmore pathways.

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So, as I spend more and more time on Google Reader, here are a couple of things that have struck me:

1) Redundancy. As can be seen from above, there is a lot of redundancy in Internet news coverage, and it becomes especially clear when using Google Reader. A friend of mine calls this "echo."

2) The line between traditional media sources (print journalism and TV production) and the Internet blogosphere definitely blurs. Traditional media moves at geriatric speed in comparison to the hordes of freelance writers out there. Note that the Discovery Channel covered the Swarthmore engineers a good two months after CleanTechnica.com caught wind of the story. The claim is that traditional media comes out on top in terms of quality and thoughtfulness, but that notion is pretty quickly challenged when you see the likes of Dani Rodrik or Timothy Burke blogging frequently.

3) What do you do with the idea of authorship? Think of a million students crammed into a single classroom and think of the voices in that classroom. Individual voices inevitably get drowned out in a general din. Who said what first? Can you tell the difference between the original and the echo? I must say: this idea of echo makes me very gun-shy when it comes to posting.

4) My time spent on Google Reader has definitely, definitely crowded out my other reading, and I don't feel good about this shift. At Swarthmore, it's common and often fashionable to complain about the insularity of the campus and how bubble-like it is. I'm beginning to view "the bubble" and "the ivory tower" differently. To constantly be at the cusp of engagement with the world through the Internet and the blogosphere...to always be reading words that are no more than a day old...I need respite from it all. To be sure, I am a neophyte in the blogging world and I feel a bit like a newborn babe when it comes to everything that is happening right at this moment. But this sense of novelty I enjoy and want to preserve. It comes from the four years I spent hidden away between library stacks and it enables me to approach all that is now critically.

I need to crawl back in bed with The Iliad, words that have rung true for centuries. Otherwise, I fear I will be swept away in the sea of voices, lost forever.

Bay Area Culture

A couple of weekends ago, I had a college friend come visit me here in San Francisco. On one of the afternoons that he was here, we walked pretty aimlessly around the city but eventually went to hang out by City Lights Bookstore in North Beach. After perusing the eclectic titles shown in the window display, we made our way towards Vesuvio, which is famous for having been a hangout spot for a lot of the Beat writers, including Kerouac and Ginsberg. Fittingly, the alleyway that separates City Lights and Vesuvio is named Jack Kerouac Alley. Well, in Jack Kerouac Alley, there was a street performer sitting up against the wall plucking away on his guitar a Dylan song and singing plaintively. Next to him, there was a group of four to five guys and girls dancing. Bodies and limbs were being flung every which way, there was a lot of stomping and stumbling as it was obviously free-form interpretive dance. One of the dancers saw that we were admiring the whole scene and beckoned us to join. He took a couple of steps towards us, stopped a second and then said, with conspiracy in his voice, "Right here. This is the energy that created the universe." We walked into Vesuvio and nursed a couple rounds of Anchor Steam beer.

Fertile Ground

Unemployment is not a good thing. I don't think anyone will tell you otherwise. Certainly, as we hear consecutive updates about job losses and the unemployment rate creeping higher and higher, nobody is rejoicing.

Last week, though, The Economist Magazine published a special report on entrepreneurship that I found to be uplifting. With the kind of economy we have right now, a lot of people are losing their jobs through no fault of their own, and a lot of recent graduates are struggling to get their first jobs as well. Not only that, there are tons of people who find themselves underemployed, working at jobs that don't fully utilize their potential. A colleague of mine recently told me a story about a lawyer friend working shifts at a gas station. In economics-speak, we might call all this "labor displacement." It isn't that the growing hordes of the jobless are unemployable or lazy or stupid, it is just that the ground beneath the economy as we know it is shifting.

How to put a positive spin on this dismal reality? Well, with so much displaced labor, there has got to be something that is now in surplus. But what is it? For one thing, there is a lot of excess, underutilized talent floating around. And when you get a lot of free-floating, talented individuals from just about every industry, a likely byproduct is the creative recombination of skills into something novel, something innovative. All of the brainpower that has recently been laid off, after it has exhausted the thrill of severance pay and newfound freedom, well, it has to find something new to feed upon. I find this not only highly comforting but also greatly exciting. High unemployment rate = fertile ground for entrepreneurship! It's just like science! (That's why I used the "equal" sign.)

Job

I want a job with IBM, doing this. But how do I get it?

Photo Blog

I recently reconnected with an old high school friend and he showed me his photo blog. I find it very impressive, and I find the wordpress formatting to be very flattering for the photos. Now I've got to get my act together and take some pictures.

But check it out here. Maybe you'll recognize some neighborhoods.

Spring Forward, the (Tragedy) of Suburbia

In Quito, there wasn't much in the way of seasons. Total daylight varied by maybe forty-five minutes over the course of the year. There was a rainy season to be sure and a dry season as well. But four, well-defined seasons? Forget about it.

Now that I live at a higher latitude, things are a bit different. The days are lengthening noticeably. The golden sun dips into the ocean progressively later each day. Freezing cold mornings, blue skies, warm days, my goodness! it's spring! and what a feeling! What does springtime conjure up in my mind?

Lazy afternoons spent soaking up the sun on Parrish Beach... But more than that, with a Proustian bent, I remember whizzing down hills on a bike in the neighborhood park in Denver suburbs, breathing pungently fresh air mixed in with the occasional gnat, breezing by cattails that lined the creeks streaming by. I remember rollerblading, playing street hockey in the cul-de-sac only a couple blocks away from home, collapsing onto a friend's lawn in exhaustion and being overtaken by the itchiness of rolling around in grass. I remember throwing tennis balls against the stone facade of my house, diving to snag erratic rebounds so that I could play baseball like the Big Cat, Andres Galaragga.

What is it about these pleasant childhood memories spent outdoors in springtime air? They have such a suburban hue, or stench, depending on how you look at it. Subsidized by cheap energy and the interstate highway system. My nostalgia for life in Denver 'burbs, though, is not tinged with any sense of guilt. Hell, I think I'd still like some day to raise kids in the kind of safe neighborhood in which I grew up. I want it all. I want to tread lightly on the environment, I want all the material goods that come from industrial development, I want the safety and sense of space that comes from living in a suburban neighborhood...

Ahhh...springtime!

Engineering Bias: a Transaction Cost?

It's very tempting to view today's energy problem as essentially an engineering problem. A quick scan through popular media turns up all sorts of reporting about the promise of new devices that will help us reduce our energy consumption and thus both our environmental footprint and our dependence on foreign oil. On the supply side, we hear about the need to invest in solar and wind power, or just more efficient, cleaner methods of extracting energy. On the demand side, we hear about pushing for fuel efficiency in vehicles, energy efficiency in our buildings and everyday appliances. These are all good things, positive developments to get excited about. But the one thing that such "solutions" have in common is an engineering perspective, and I worry about this engineering bias.

For one thing, viewing the energy problem in this way allows the layperson to deflect personal responsibility. Climate change? Dependence on foreign oil? Air pollution? These are problems for engineers to solve, one might say. Such a deflection of personal responsibility dictates business-as-usual for all non-engineers. That kind of mentality is worrying when there are demonstrated gains to be had in human behavioral changes.

Also, single-minded focus on engineering solutions crowds out more systematic ways of thinking. Gains in energy efficiency do not have to come at the level of devices. A couple of weeks ago, I attended a lecture delivered by a PhD student from Stanford's Precourt Institute for Energy Efficiency. The student's research related to CDMs (Clean Development Mechanisms), which are institutionalized methods for industrialized nations to curb their own environmental footprint by offsetting carbon emmissions more cost-effectively in developing countries. The student observed that transportation systems are being overlooked as an offsetting mechanism and proceeded to analyze the cause of this prejudice. Turns out that the panel that is responsible for approving CDMs is staffed by engineers. It also turns out that it's much harder to quantify to the satisfaction of an engineer's standards the carbon offsets that result from developing a transportation system. (Warning: I am definitely butchering the nuances of the research and the empirical analysis of the causal relations, but this is my take on the talk.) When you take into account these things, it begins to make sense why a panel of engineers might overlook systematic improvements in favor of device-level projects. The idea behind CDMs is to provide an efficient platform for industrialized nations to reduce carbon emissions, but it appears that an engineering bias presents a significant transaction cost that hinders the program's cost-efficiency.

So what big systems-level improvements might we be overlooking right now? Well, this is a thought piece, so I am just going to throw some ideas out there. In addition to transportation systems, I think that the energy-intensity of agriculture needs to be looked at more systematically. And I think policymakers need to think more seriously about reversing urban sprawl and stepping up urban revitalization.

Two Metabolisms

A long time ago (2002), in Cradle to Cradle, William McDonough and Michael Braungart introduced the idea that we need to think about materials as belonging to two different metabolisms, namely a technical metabolism and a biological metabolism. The authors argued that waste predominantly results when the two metabolisms get mixed up and confused with each other in "monstrous hybrids."

It's an interesting idea that I believe is fundamentally right, but it seems that putting the idea into practice is (surprise!) infinitely more complicated. (An interesting article about McDonough and his complicated visionary status can be found here.)

But I'm not writing to talk about the practicality of zero-waste design, I'm writing to extend the idea of two metabolisms to energy consumption and energy efficiency. I've been casually grappling with the idea for a bit now, but I think I've come to something of a revelation with the aid of revisiting Cradle to Cradle.

Just like materials, our energy consumption can be thought of as belonging to two different metabolisms. One industrial/technical and the other ecological/biological. Energy efficiency makes sense only in the context of industrial energy, because industrial energy belongs to a metabolism whose primary input is carbon-emitting fossil fuels. With regards to the ecological metabolism, energy efficiency makes no difference whatsoever.

All the hoopla these days is about increasing the efficiency of industrial energy. I'm beginning to believe that we should really be focusing our efforts on first understanding and then manipulating the interaction between industrial metabolism and ecological metabolism. Okay, that's a bit confusing. But bear with me, this is an idea in progress.

Let's take buildings as an example. We could and indeed are beginning to focus our energies on how to make buildings more energy-efficient. Such efforts belong to the industrial camp. But if we stop thinking about buildings as devices to be engineered, if we get away from the industrial logic of energy efficiency, then we get a different picture and a whole set of different questions. How can we get buildings to partake in an ecological metabolism? How can we capitalize on natural energy flows (regardless of efficiency) to satisfy our energy demands?

In my opinion, we should be trying to maximize our dependence on ecological metabolism while minimizing our dependence on industrial metabolism. Rather than focus on the efficiency of devices, we ought to focus on how to be more a part of an ecosystem. I'm not entirely sure about this, but I think there is potential in exploring the different types of thinking that follow from the different types of metabolisms. Is it possible to reduce our dependence on industrial metabolic logic?

On Being a Cog

Some quotes that I believe deserve to be read:

"Willie, aren't you wise to the Navy yet? It's all child's play. The work has been fragmentized by a few excellent brains at the top, on the assumption that near-morons will be responsible for each fragment...Whether it's the fragment of coding, the fragment of engineering, the fragment of gunnery--you'll find them all predigested and regulated to a point where you'd have to search the insane asylums to find people who could muff the jobs. Remember that one point. It explains, and reconciles you to, all the Navy Regulations, and all the required reports, and all the emphasis on memory and obedience, and all the standardized ways of doing things. The Navy is a master plan designed by geniuses for execution by idiots. If you're not an idiot, but find yourself in the Navy, you can only operate well by pretending to be one. All the shortcuts and economies and commonsense changes that your native intelligence suggests to you are mistakes. Learn to quash them. Constantly ask yourself, 'How would I do this if I were a fool?' Throttle down your mind to a crawl. Then you'll never go wrong." (The Caine Mutiny [Wouk] 105)

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"I watch the cars go by for a while on the highway. Something lonely about them. Not lonely--worse. Nothing. Like the attendant's expression when he filled the tank. Nothing. A nothing curb, by some nothing gravel, at a nothing intersection, going nowhere.

Something about the car drivers, too. They look just like the gasoline attendant, staring straight ahead in some private trance of their own. I haven't seen that since...since Sylvia noticed it the first day. They all look like they're in a funeral procession.

Once in a while one gives a quick glance and then looks away expressionlessly, as if minding his own business, as if embarrassed that we might have noticed he was looking at us. I see it now because we've been away from it for a long time. The driving is different too. The cars seem to be moving at a steady maximum speed for in-town driving, as though they want to get somewhere, as though what's here right now is just something to get through. The drivers seem to be thinking about where they want to be rather than where they are...

Folks, I just forgot the biggest gumption trap of all. The funeral procession! The one everybody's in, this hyped-up, fuck-you, supermodern, ego style of life that thinks it owns this country. We've been out of it for so long I'd forgotten all about it." (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance [Pirsig] 333)

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"It is precisely his fantastic dreams, his most banal stupidity, that he will wish to keep hold of, with the sole purpose of confirming to himself (as if it were so very necessary) that human beings are still human beings and not piano keys, which, though played upon with their own hands by the laws of nature themselves, are in danger of being played so much that outside the calendar it will be impossible to want anything. And more than that: even if it should indeed turn out that he is a piano key, if it were even proved to him mathematically and by natural science, he would still not come to reason, but would do something contrary on purpose, solely out of ingratitude alone; essentially to have his own way. And if he finds himself without means--he will invent destruction and chaos, he will invent all kinds of suffering, and still have his own way! He will launch a curse upon the world, and since man alone is able to curse (that being his privilege, which chiefly distinguishes him from other animals), he may achieve his end by the curse alone--that is, indeed satisfy himself that he is a man and not a piano key!" (Notes from Underground [Dostoevsky] 30-31)

The Iliad, Probabilistically

I am reading The Iliad right now, and as I make my way through Homer's epic poem, I find myself referring constantly back to a point that Taleb makes in his book, Fooled by Randomness:

My very first impression upon a recent rereading of The Iliad, the first in my adulthood, is that the epic poet did not judge his heroes by the result. Heroes won and lost battles in a manner that was totally independent of their own valor; their fate depended upon totally external forces, generally the explicit agency of the scheming gods (not devoid of nepotism). Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost. Patrocles does not strike us as a hero because of his accomplishments (he was rapidly killed) but because he preferred to die than see Achilles sulking into inaction. (34)

Taleb's observation really drives home for me the appeal of probabilistic thinking. Probabilistic thinking provides a way to understand the real limitations of individual agency and gives the prominence of circumstance/ground/luck a fair reckoning. From Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, a similar idea:

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference. (60)

Probabilistic thinking once again! An elegant way to deal with uncertainty, isn't it? A clarion call to live honorably, to live with probabilistic greatness, regardless of result.

Incentives in the Classroom

In a recent TED Talk, Bill Gates talks about the importance of great teachers in shaping leaders. He discusses the incredible variability in quality between teachers and ultimately suggests that a new model needs to be adopted to encourage the professional development of teachers. With his business acumen and demonstrated success in the corporate world, he suggests tools that he is no doubt familiar with:

1) Employing better technology with the video monitoring of classrooms, both for the benefit of surveillance as well as for the benefit of distribution and study.
2) Smarter incentives for teachers.

I really don't like any of these two suggestions. Truth be told, I dislike them with some kind of intensity. The great teachers I've had in my life have always emphasized their respective decisions to become teachers as not being motivated by money. What happens in a classroom is a special thing that exists outside the logic of business operations. That for me is the big picture argument against both 1) and 2).

In theory, video monitoring promises great returns. How else could I have access to all the great lectures distributed for free on TED.com? But TED Talks are a peculiar case. They are lectures and not discussions. Invariably, they are not interactive with the audience. Great teachers respond to the different personalities of different classrooms spontaneously and organically. Great teachers engage the unique interests and backgrounds of their students. Videos do none of these things. Yes, videos can play a role in the dissemination of information, but great teachers do far more than engage in a one-way flow of information from teacher to student. A recorded lecture commodifies a lesson plan. I cannot be inspired by a commodity. In a video, I would never have experienced the palpable passion that Mr. Maggio demonstrated for literature. Any move towards the commodification of education goes against everything that I have learned both as a teacher and as a student.

As for its other purported purpose, surveillance, video monitoring seems to wage a silent war against accountability and trust. The trust and mutual respect in a successful classroom cannot be legislated from the outside. It has to be built from within the classroom, from the ground up. In my opinion, video monitoring would undermine teacher efforts on this moral dimension.

What about smarter incentives? For one thing, incentives require measurements. If teachers are incentivized by the measurable amount in which their students' scores improve on some standardized test, then teachers will begin to teach to the test. There are so many problems with this that I don't even know where to begin. So I won't.

Barry Schwarz says in his excellent talk that we have thus far responded to the financial crisis by trying to improve the regulatory environment and devise smarter incentives. Regulations and incentives are important, but they neglect, according to Barry Schwarz, practical wisdom. The exercise of practical wisdom takes place independently of regulations and incentives. In fact, Schwarz cites a psychological study that demonstrates how the presence of financial incentives can undermine basic goodwill and the exercise of moral wisdom. Interesting stuff. People should behave ethically because it is the right thing to do and not in order to receive some monetary reward.

Bill Gates' suggestions about how we can improve teacher quality are efforts to improve the efficiency of regulations and incentives. Something important is missing. I agree that great teachers should be rewarded and paid handsomely. The service done by great teachers is truly immeasurable. But treating education in a business manner undermines what education is all about.

Nicholas Negroponte, in his talk about One Laptop per Child, discusses his decision to make his organization nonprofit. He says one of the greatest advantages of being nonprofit is that you can attract the best people in the world. Why? Because the people that you attract by being nonprofit are attracted by the merits of the project at hand. Because people who are the absolute best at what they do are seldom motivated by money alone. In my mind, what goes for the nonprofit world goes for what happens in the classroom as well.

Energy Perceptions

I have joined livingtheamericangreen.org as a contributor. So, when appropriate, I will be cross-posting on both this and that blog.

There certainly is a lot of talk about being green these days. A lot of publicity on a lot of different fronts. Given the media exposure, I think it would be prudent to see how well perceptions match up with reality.

As I am sure many a commentator has noted before, there is a truly disproportionate amount of attention being paid to three letters in particular: M-P-G. A lot of people seem to regard the mpg of your vehicle as a merit badge, a barometer for just how "green" you are. The unfortunate truth is that mpg represents but a small slice of the energy pie, even when considering the transportation sector in isolation. First, we should be concerned not about miles, but about passenger miles. Five people carpooling in a gas-guzzler surely beats five people each driving their own hybrid car. Second, we need to account for the embodied energy in the production of a new vehicle. With regards to transportation, we should ultimately be thinking about how to take cars off the road, and how to get people to share cars, bike, walk or use public transportation.

The outsized attention being paid to vehicular fuel efficiency ought to give us pause. How else do the various loci of media scrutiny skew public attention on energy issues? There are a lot of commercials these days about the wondrous possibilities of a smart electric grid and smart devices (vehicles included). Is all the hoopla deserved? Does it crowd out other energy interests? By many estimates, agriculture accounts for fully one-fifth of U.S. petroleum consumption. But is one-fifth of our attention being directed towards increasing the energy efficiency of agricultural practices? I don't have any numbers to back me up on this, but I would guess not.

Media scrutiny is important because it plays a role in shaping the public conscious and directing public as well as private funds towards the development of various initiatives. It would behoove the "green movement" to think about how the allocation of media attention matches up with underlying realities.

Information Anxiety

The Internet makes available a lot of information, and its democratizing effect really is unbelievable. If you are at all curious about or hungry for what is out there, though, the sheer amount and variety of information can be overwhelming.

So this is my plug for Google Reader. It takes a modest amount of time to familiarize yourself with all of the tools, but it allows you to conveniently centralize your information consumption and to keep up with sources that you might not visit with high frequency.

The information flow is still a bit overwhelming. I currently have 256 new items. But Google Reader allows you to manage the flow with some efficiency. The function that I am most excited about is the "Share" function. Rather than have an anonymous crowd filter Internet content, you can have those people whose opinions you respect and interests you share perform a filtering function. In this way, you get to see quality articles that you would never have seen otherwise. Plus, the "Share" function doubles as an archiving tool.

Now, the thing to do is get on Google Reader and find a group of people that will actively share. As with all network ideas, the "Share" function becomes effective only after reaching some critical mass. I have not reached the critical mass yet, and that is why I am writing this entry.

Bringing my connectivity up a notch...Many thanks to one James and one Benjamin for directing me to Google Reader.

The Omnivore's Dilemma

I have nothing but praise for Michael Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma. It is informative, engaging, thoughtful and thought-provoking. I especially enjoyed the ecological perspective that Pollan employs as well as the intellectual humility with which he writes. Intellectual humility, by the way, I find myself prizing more and more highly everyday.

Ecological Perspective. We often think of literary analysis and the tools employed in such analysis as being useful for, well, literary analysis alone. But Pollan demonstrates just how far a simple literary conceit, a metaphor, can go in explaining the way behavior is organized. How a Cartesian metaphor largely explains the contemporary model of industrial agriculture. How an ecological conceit yields a totally different specimen, the Polyface Farm in Virginia that calls itself "beyond organic," or "postindustrial." The implications are dramatic for a term that I've been thinking a lot about recently, "efficiency":

Most of the efficiencies in an industrial system are achieved through simplification: doing lots of the same thing over and over...By contrast, the efficiencies of natural systems flow from complexity and interdependence--by definition, the very opposite of simplification...Polyface Farm is built on the efficiencies that come from mimicking relationships found in nature...(214-215)

I still need to do a bit more thinking about this, but I think the distinction between industrial efficiency and ecological efficiency is important and exciting. Especially with all the attention that "energy efficiency" has received recently.

Intellectual Humility. The book's NYTimes reviewer criticizes Pollan for being too nice a guy, for failing to judge when judging was clearly called for. To be sure, Pollan is neither didactic nor vituperative in his style, but I take the book's balanced argumentation as a sign of intellectual humility, something that Pollan clearly values as well:

The problem is that once science has reduced a complex phenomenon to a couple of variables, however important they may be, the natural tendency is to overlook everything else, to assume that what you can measure is all there is, or at least all that really matters. When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one's ignorance in the face of a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine. (148)

I like this a lot: "a healthy appreciation of one's ignorance in the face of a mystery..." On buying Argentina-grown asparagus from Whole Foods, Pollan writes:

The ethical implications of buying such a product are almost too numerous and knotty to sort out: There's the expense, there's the prodigious amounts of energy involved, the defiance of seasonality, and the whole question of whether the best soils in South America should be devoted to growing food for affluent and overfed North Americans. And yet you can also make a good argument that my purchase of organic asparagus from Argentina generates foreign exchange for a country desperately in need of it, and supports a level of care for that country's land--farming without pesticides or chemical fertilizer--it might not otherwise receive. Clearly my bunch of asparagus had delivered me deep into the thicket of trade-offs that a global organic marketplace entails. (175)

The material in this book could easily have lended itself to a rhetorical attack on the vices of industrial agriculture. But Pollan refuses to deliver on that account, and the final product is incredibly refreshing. Though I am none the wiser as to how one ought to disentangle the moral knot presented.

The Journey Defines the Place

Maybe it's because I was an English major in college and studying literature has deeply informed my worldview. But, for me, this world and this life that we bumble our way through is most enriched when populated with stories. I say "enriched," but maybe "enchanted" better captures what I'm going for. Because stories, as meaning-giving, hermeneutic devices, imbue our discrete experiences with what is often for me a sacred dimension. A bunch of mumbo-jumbo that is.

Here is what I mean. A couple of days ago, I drove thirty miles from my sister's house to the Snoqualmie Falls. As I am prone to do, I got lost along the way and took a detour, bringing the trip to something more like fifty miles. The detour was both worthwhile and frustrating. I got to see beautiful parts of the Pacific Northwest that I would not otherwise have gotten to see, but I was also obviously delayed from arriving at my ultimate destination, the Snoqualmie Falls. Finally, after asking for directions at a gas station, I found my way to a lookout point. I parked my car in the parking lot and walked all of ten yards to a gazebo from which I could enjoy a quite stunning view of the falls. An hour of driving, getting lost, asking for directions, and thirty short seconds of walking. And there it was, Snoqualmie Falls as though in a postcard picture.

The waterfall was impressive but very much a letdown. Gazing down from the gazebo platform, I remembered another similarly sized waterfall I went to see last year, El Paílón del Diablo in Baños, Ecuador. To get to that waterfall, I biked for an hour and then hiked twenty minutes before having the waterfall unveiled to me from behind formidable rock formations. I could hear the thunderous roar of the waterfall well before I saw it, and as I approached, anticipation built even as my body tired. Undoubtedly, the path to the waterfall had been paved in a very literal way to ease my journey, but still, I felt that my view of the waterfall had been in some way earned. Seeing El Paílón del Diablo was a qualitatively different experience than seeing the Snoqualmie Falls. Much more gratifying.

So the journey defines the place. And what else is a journey but a story? Another example. This one from Kerouac's On the Road:

The bus trip from Denver to Frisco was uneventful except that my whole soul leaped to it the nearer we got to Frisco. Cheyenne again, in the afternoon this time, and then west over the range; crossing the Divide at midnight at Creston, arriving at Salt Lake City at dawn--a city of sprinklers, the least likely place for Dean to have been born; then out to Nevada in the hot sun, Reno by nightfall, its twinkling Chinese streets; then up the Sierra Nevada, pines, stars, mountain lodges signifying Frisco romances--a little girl in the back seat, crying to her mother, "Mama when do we get home to Truckee?" And Truckee itself, homey Truckee, and then down the hill to the flats of Sacramento. I suddenly realized I was in California. Warm, palmy air--air you can kiss--and palms. Along the storied Sacramento River on a superhighway; into the hills again; up, down; and suddenly the vast expanse of a bay (it was just before dawn) with the sleepy lights of Frisco festooned across. Over the Oakland Bay Bridge I slept soundly for the first time since Denver; so that I was rudely jolted in the bus station at Market and Fourth into the memory of the fact that I was three thousand two hundred miles from my aunt's house in Paterson, New Jersey. I wandered out like a haggard ghost, and there she was, Frisco--long, bleak streets with trolley wires all shrouded in fog and whiteness. (60)

Kerouac presents San Francisco in its physical context, in its geographic setting. For Kerouac, having hitchhiked, bused and driven three thousand miles from the East Coast, San Francisco is a physical destination in a way that it isn't for me. After reading this passage, it dawned on me that I arrived in San Francisco by being dropped from the sky. My experience of the city is as a result qualitatively different from Kerouac's. Lacking a substantive journey to precede arrival, emptied of history, stripped of meaning, a city is nothing more than a bunch of concrete and glass, an abstraction of industrial development.

It is in this light that I have begun to understand technology. Technology shortchanges the journey in order to deliver the place. Snoqualmie Falls delivered to me. San Francisco delivered to me. What energy did I expend personally to arrive at these places?

I think this is why I experience aversion to things like Facebook. Facebook has the power to deprive social interaction of journey. As far as maintaining a social network goes, Facebook is infinitely more convenient than having to go through the trouble of composing a thoughtful e-mail let alone scrupulously handwriting a letter. Convenience is Facebook's utility. But at the same time, its convenience shortchanges the usual journey that is required of keeping up a healthy interaction.

The same logic can be applied to food. What knowledge do we possess of the journey that the food we consume took in order to arrive on our dinner plates? Most often, nothing. This is the magic of industrial agriculture and technology. Food delivered to us. Unfortunately, the anonymous food that we consume, and our ignorance of its journey, deprives the food of any real meaning. There is little to no enchantment involved in scarfing down a BigMac. We enjoy it only in an abstract sense.

None of this is to say that I am a Luddite. Believe me you, I enjoy my BigMac or McPollo as much as the next guy.

Thoughts inspired by The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan on which I will write more...

Online Community

I picked up a print edition of the New York Times today. It was a refreshing change from reading the Internet version. Its flimsy, cumbersome pages so tactile, so present in my hands. Needless to say, browsing a print edition is decidedly different from browsing a web page. With a hard copy, you are forced to see an article in visual context, which in turn directs your attention to articles you wouldn't otherwise notice, whereas you are only able to read a full article online in isolation of other stories. The experience is substantively different.

It got me thinking, though. Ever since graduating from college, I have spent a ton more time online than ever before. Why?

1) Community. At a small residential college like Swarthmore, you are much more a member of your immediate community. Now, deprived of that tight-knit and physically-bounded community, I use the Internet to leapfrog my more immediate physical surroundings. I don't know the names of any of my neighbors sadly enough.

2) Information consumption. In an academic setting, information tends to flow in the context of human-to-human interactions. In the classroom. In the dormitory lounge or hallway. Now, information streams to me overwhelmingly via digital signal. Online periodicals. Recorded lectures. Blogs.

3) Increasingly sedentary life. If you are working any kind of white-collar, entry-level job, then your circumstances almost certainly dictate that you spend more time sitting in one place than ever before. The Internet provides a convenient way to feign hard work.

I can't quite pinpoint what I want to say in this entry, but I think I am beginning to see the Internet and connectivity in a different way. Web 2.0?

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I spend a lot of time on NYTimes.com. I used to be a big fan of their feature that allowed you to save a page under "My Saved Pages." It was like a scrapbook of my favorite news clippings, making it super easy to pull up old articles and also to see what other people had deemed worthy of saving. Recently, the website eliminated this feature. WHY? How do other people archive or flag articles that they want to store away for some reason or another? (Seriously, I want to hear answers.)

The other feature I really like on NYTimes.com is looking at the articles under their "Most E-mailed" or "Most Discussed" tabs. These tabs help differentiate the overwhelming amount of information in a self-sorting way. Essentially, they crowd-source the arbitration of quality, which is no easy task. Not really a novel thing at all, but when I think critically about the way I surf the Internet, I think that my methods are lacking. I don't think I use the Internet to its full potential. E-mail. Online Banking. NYTimes.com. Wikipedia. Amazon. Various blogs. Pretty much, that is the extent of my Internet use.

It seems like differentiating quality through a crowd-sourcing mechanism is exactly what Digg does. Cool idea that I am currently looking into. Seriously, I need to reconsider my surfing methods and bring my connectivity to a new level. Especially considering the amount of time I spend online. Yeah, I'm ready to elevate things.

Going Kerouac on Everybody's Ass

I watched "Step Brothers" the other day. Funny movie. Made me laugh.

There is a job interview scene in the movie where Dale, the character played by John C. Reilly, explains twenty some years of unemployment by saying that he had "gone Kerouac on everybody's ass." Yeah, I thought that was pretty funny.

So, you know, I've been wrestling with the idea of responsibility recently. Especially after Obama talked about "a new era of responsibility" being required of us. Big important questions like, you know, what does responsibility even mean? Or: did Sal Paradise live responsibly?

Because, don't you see, maybe Sal was living more responsibly than any of us. Maybe he was just being responsible to the gift of life, and that's why he gripped life so hard and then ripped it again so hard.

This column about institutional thinking helps me understand what I think is an important piece of the puzzle. So often we frame questions about important decisions in terms of ourselves. This is the way we are trained to think. What am I passionate about? What will make me happiest? Thus, the archetypal journey of self-discovery makes intuitive sense to us. Kerouac occupies a prominent place in our collective conscious. We aspire to live passionately, to dig life right alongside Dean Moriarty.

I guess Kennedy's famous exhortation to "ask not" hinges upon the distinction between individual and institutional thinking. When thinking about responsibility, the important question is, What are we responsible to? Ourselves? Or to the various groups to which we belong? Nation? Family? Or here are a couple of old possibilities that might appear extremely novel: History? Our forebears? What responsibility do I have towards George Washington and his men on that bleak winter night?

Deficit Spending

In November 2008, Thomas Friedman wrote a column urging young people to save more:

I go into restaurants these days, look around at the tables often still crowded with young people, and I have this urge to go from table to table and say: "You don't know me, but I have to tell you that you shouldn't be here. You should be saving your money. You should be home eating tuna fish. This financial crisis is far from over. We are just at the end of the beginning. Please, wrap up that steak in a doggy bag and go home.

Is Thomas Friedman offering sound economic advice here? Certainly, the importance of saving seems to be the new mantra these days. Lots of emphasis on "bargain meals" and such. But, really, should everybody be saving? Should we all be hoarding money in preparation for financial endtimes?

Steven Levitt puts the question nicely in his blog entry, titled, "When it Comes to Saving, Who Would You Listen to: My Wife or Milton Friedman?" (Note that Levitt is speaking of Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, and not Thomas Friedman, economic layperson and obviously in cahoots with Levitt's wife.)

A lot of people blame today's economic crisis on excessive borrowing. Loans were too often extended to people not worthy of the credit. A fair assessment. But does this mean that borrowing is necessarily a bad thing? No.

Enter probabilistic thinking. The US government currently operates at a deficit and all signs point towards this deficit increasing dramatically during Obama's first years as president. This is not a bad thing. Economists are generally in consensus that large fiscal stimulus (read: deficit spending) is required to get the economy back on its feet. But there is an important distinction to be made when talking about the deficit, the difference between structural deficit and actual deficit. The structural deficit can be thought of as a probabilistic deficit: do spending programs exceed expected tax revenues (which can be calculated using the economy's long-run probabilistic unemployment rate). So Obama's challenge is this: to simultaneously increase current actual deficit spending while eliminating Bush-era structural deficits.

How does this all relate to the initial question about the prudence of saving? Well, the same principles that apply to government deficit spending apply to personal finance, especially for young people with long time horizons to consider. It is okay to borrow and to spend so long as you are probabilistically-structurally sound. In fact, your spending patterns need change from what they were a year ago only if there has been an underlying, probabilistic shift in your expected, life-time income stream. Consumption-smoothing, after all, is one of the primary functions of financial markets.

As for Thomas Friedman's advice? He with his words is single-handedly responsible for a statistically significant drop in consumer confidence, and we should blame him at least partially for our current woes.

Of course, probabilistic thinking sometimes or oftentimes runs counter to emotional thinking. Thus the conflict between the coldly rational Milton Friedman and the surely sentimental wife of Steven Levitt (why she must surely be sentimental I have no idea).

Maybe I am just trying to rationalize my current spending habits.