Month: February 2009

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Now is the Winter of Our Discontent

I suppose the economy will continue to decline for some time, with or w/o the stimulus package.   But I prefer to look to the things that are looking up.  

Below are the new homes near my house.  Now sold out.

While we were at Sears yesterday to get a new dishwasher, making our small contribution to the recovery, we noticed the help wanted signs.  There was also a help wanted sign at Safeway.   Construction around Washington has slowed but not stopped.    The new complex near my house, the one that had sold no lots last summer, is now sold out and the houses are almost done.   I don’t like the houses, but the evidently are what some people want, people with the means to buy new houses.

Recessions aren’t all bad.   I read in the papers that people are saving more money, putting off purchases and being more careful about what they buy.   

Same place in July 2008 (six months ago)

This is the paradox of thrift.  Saving is a virtue, but if enough people save enough money during hard times, not enough money flows through the economy.

Below is condo construction near my house.

Still,  until recently we worried that people were not saving enough, that houses were getting too expensive and that people were becoming to extravagant in their purchases.   It is not what you make but what you keep.   Real disposable income rose every month of the last quarter and the savings rate spiked up too.   Read about it at this link.

I don’t want to minimize the problem.   I know people are suffering and I stipulate that I have a steady job so maybe I don’t feel the downturn as much as some others.  But I have lost money in the markets and my house is worth significantly less.  I would also point out that even with the recent jump in unemployment; almost 93% of Americans still have jobs too.  So my experience is not that special.  I think we are getting a little too worked up.  FDR famously said that we have nothing to fear but fear itself.  Maybe we should recall his wise words, uttered in a much more difficult time.  I think some of this passion we hear on the news is hyperbole.    As Ben Franklin said, “passion governs and she never governs wisely.”

I have been reading a lot about the Great Depression and I got a second-hand feeling for those hard times from my parents.  During those years, unemployment reached almost 25% and that number understates the problem in comparison to today, since there were many more farmers back then as a % of the population and many of them suffered hard times or even lost their farms but were not immediately counted as unemployed.    Beyond that, back in the 1930s many more families had only one wage earner.     

Below – we still have vultures.

So let’s lay this out by the worst rates per decade.   According to Bureau of Labor Statistics, unemployment rate in 1933 = 24.9%;  unemployment rate in 1949 = 7.9;  unemployment in 1958 = 7.5; unemployment in 1961 = 7.1%;  unemployment rate in 1975 = 9.0; unemployment rate in 1982 = 10.9%; unemployment in 1992 = 7.8%; unemployment in 2009 is 7.6%.   You might also take a look at the better times – 1948 3.4%; 1953 = 2.5%; 1969 =3.4%; 1970 3.9%; 1989 = 5.0%; 1999 = 4.2%;  and not long ago in 2006 = 4.4%.  (I graduated HS in 1973.  From 1973-1997, the unemployment rate never dropped below 5% and in many years it was above today’s level of 7.6%, BTW.) 

We have hard times periodically and we recover.   During the hard times, we think good times will never return; during good times we think we have reached a new age when hard times will come again no more.  We are always wrong.  Things decline after they reach a peak and the come up after they hit a bottom.  That is the way is was, is and always will be.  It is a simple tautology.

Now is the winter of our discontent about to turn to glorious summer?

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Internet Steals Memory

People in pre-literate societies had phenomenal memories.  Great epics like the Iliad & the Odyssey started off as oral stories.   While details were dropped or enhanced over time, storytellers could repeat from memory tales that cover hundreds of pages of modern print.  

Literacy is a foundation of civilization.  One of the reasons is that it enhances and replaces physical human memory.    It allows for accurate communication over distance and time and prevents the loss of knowledge and collective experience.  It also means that individuals no longer need to remember details when they can consult an easily available written source.  They no longer need to learn them at all when they can easily consult the collective memory. The analogy of memory to muscle is imperfect, but Hippocrates’ old dictum still applies, “That which is used develops; that which is not used wastes away.”   Everything else being equal, a man with a notebook and pencil is still better off than the man who has to rely only on his great memory, but we pay an atrophy price for leaning on the memory crutch.   

Computers and the Internet turbo-charge access to the collective memory. Much of the accumulated knowledge of humanity is available in seconds at the cost of a few key strokes.   That is why I love the Internet.   (I feel a tinge of regret that my treasured for reference sources have become mostly dusty decorations, and  I still appreciate the cultural and tactile pleasure of actually a book, but I fear that the last “people of the book” generation has already been born.)  Internet magnifies my memory, but it also changes it. 

My memory used to be better and I don’t chalk up the entire decline to the effects of age. Internet & computers are partly responsible.  That which is not used wastes away and if you know you don’t have to use it, you often don’t.  I don’t have to exercise memory as I used to because I know l I really need to remember only parts.  If I can remember part of a name and part of a story, that is good enough.  Internet will do the rest.   A good example is the quotation from Hippocrates above. I remembered that the quote existed. I thought it was from Hippocrates. Google found it.  

My memory used to be imperfect but it was organized mostly in complete stories associated with names, places and often dates in ways that made sense.  My computer assisted memory is unorganized and random.   I rely on external organization power of software to put what I know in order. Search engines assemble it for me, and I have mixed feelings about that. Computer power enhances but devalues intellectual muscle in the same way power equipment enhances but devalues physical muscle. It is an equalizer.  

Being a strong man used to be a determining advantage working on a farm or building a house.   I can still remember a time when truck drivers had powerful forearms from wrestling the wheels of the big rigs or when you knew that a man was a farmer by shaking hands with him.  Today just about anybody can aspire to these jobs. Lack of physical strength is no longer a barrier.   

Will the same thing happen with intelligence?  It is happening already. I am a beneficiary. I could handle the higher level math required for my MBA only because calculators and computers largely eliminated the need for actual calculation. My statistics professor was sad that all her years of training doing regression equations by hand had been made redundant by cheap calculators that could be wielded by anybody with a couple minutes instruction.

All things considered, the price is worth paying. You are reading something right now that could not exist ten years ago, and not only because of the obvious internet as a medium. I write something for my blog almost every day. Many of the entries are recounting of my experiences, but some are mini-essays.  I can write, edit and post an entry in less than an hour.  This is only possible because of technology.   My digital camera provides the illustrations.  Everything I do would have taken me a lot more time and probably required added help. Microsoft Word replaces someone who would read and correct my grammar and spelling.   The digital camera replaces the photo developer. Easy upload takes the place of printers.  The Internet delivers it and provides takes the place of researchers who would have to dig through card catalogues and dusty stacks to give me what Google does in seconds.  Ain’t technology wonderful?

Most things are better remembered than they were lived.  My memory probably was never as good as I remember it being anyway.

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Water, Water

I used to love the days in late winter when the warming sun would melt the ice and snow in the alley behind our house and send little rivers of water down the hill.  My friends and I would make ice dams.  They didn’t last long, but it was fun.  When I got a little older, I would go down to Lake Michigan.  My favorite places were the little beaches in Grant and Warnimont Parks.  I like the Lake in all its moods and majesty, but I was always attracted to the little rivulets the poured down the hills.   I can still sit for hours by a stream just watching and listening to the water flow.  

Below is Genito Creek, which runs through our land in Brunswick County.  Notice the river birch and the natural levies.  The river water naturally deposits soil along the river edge. Heavy rain will take it over the banks to flood the forests and the levies trap it on the inside making temporary ponds. This enriches soils, replenishes ground water and provides habitat for wildlife, especially amphibians.   Flooding is good.  It is only a problem when we develop and build on places best left to the natural riparian environment.  Flooding is predictable.  If you need expensive flood insurance, you probably should not have built your house where you did.

We camp near flowing streams and build our cities next to rivers.  Where we don’t have these things near enough, we construct fountains in urban squares.  Even people who don’t like to swim like to sit near a pool.  Love of flowing water is something primeval and instinctive in humans. 

Peter Glieck of the Pacific Institute gave me some interesting insights.   Here is the link to his talk at the Wilson Center.  He focused on the ecological disaster unfolding in China.  I will let you read about that at the link if you want.  It is scary.  They have destroyed 80% of their wetland in N. China, sucked dry many streams and rivers and exhausted or polluted most of the easy accessible groundwater.   But I want to concentrate on some of the general ideas.

We can never run out of water, but we can run out of water that you can afford to get or water we can get w/o destroying local ecosystems.  Dr. Glieck explained it that water uniquely exhibits characteristics of both a non-renewable stock resource and a renewable flow resource.   It is renewable, but can be used up locally. 

Regions can and do exhaust or destroy their accessible water supply and some stocks are essentially non-renewable.  We call them “fossil water.”  Examples include the Ogallala aquifer under the American Great Plains.  Water is not a global resource. It is too difficult and expensive to move worldwide in large enough quantities.  You can move bottles of drinking water over the oceans, but you cannot base your general water needs on sources that are too far away.   (BTW – tap water in most of the U.S. is excellent, often better than what you get in bottles.)  In fact, the story exhausted water often goes with the fall of civilizations.

Water and energy are connected.  Energy production uses and often pollutes water.  It takes water to grow biofuels, but that is only the tip of the iceberg.  Moving water consumes a great deal of energy.   The single biggest consumption of energy in California comes from pumping water from Northern to Southern parts of the state.   Water is reused an infinite number of times.  Cleaning it and pumping it around is what takes the resources. 

Below shallow temporary ponds are created at new construction sites to catch the runnoff and protect surface waters from silting.  If left alone, this would become a vernal pond and provide a home to amphibians, as well as all sorts of bugs – good and not.

Rain Gardens

There are lots of rain gardens popping up around Washington.  I found some up near the Capitol and there is a whole complex of them at the EPA.   I didn’t take a picture since there was little to see in the winter.    But I did read all about it on the placards nearby.   Please follow this link to the information about them.

Below is a vernal pond on our CP land.  You can see why people might call them unattractive.  It greens up by April and this part is mostly dry by August.

Below is what the same place looks like in October. You can hear the water, but cannot see it unless you push through the plants.

A rain garden is sort of a fancy name for a vernal pond, which is itself a fancy name for a temporary pond, a fancy name for a big mud puddle.  You have to change some names.  Swamps become wetlands; jungles become rainforests.  The old names have developed negative connotations that stand in the way of understanding.  Vernal ponds are really important but under appreciated.  They used to be common, mostly because of neglect.  Water just pooled up and nobody did anything about it.  They form with the spring rains and/or melt water and disappear with the heat and dryness of summer and/or when growing vegetation sucks up the surface water.  But as our landscaping “improved,” people filled in or drained many of the ponds.  Who cares?  We should.

Below is one of our streams.  It flows and floods depending on recent weather conditions.  It always flows across the surface where I took the picture, but it goes underground and reemerges at other points.

Vernal ponds are important to water quality.  They allow water to soak into the ground and they slow the flow to allow nutrients and silt to settle out.   As importantly, vernal ponds provide places for amphibians to breed.    Key characteristics of vernal ponds are their impermanence and stagnancy, precisely the things that make them unpopular with grounds maintenance crews and home owners.   If the pond is permanent enough to support fish, they tend to eat the amphibian eggs and if the water flows it washes them down. 

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Learning From the Management Gurus

If I could read only one magazine a week, it would be “The Economist” because it has such a variety of topics written in a style I enjoy. I have subscribed to the Economist since I was in graduate school and it has contributed as much to my education as my grad school experience.  Actually, all education, formal and otherwise, builds what went before.   I was reminded of that today with this Economist article on Fredrick Taylor. 

I met Taylor (figuratively) in grad-school when I studied operations research.   He is the father of “scientific management” and while I think the strict application of his theory is probably a bad thing (Lenin was a Taylor fan), he did start the systematic study of management processes that has done a lot to create the modern prosperity we now enjoy.   Peter Drucker wrote that Taylor was, “the first man in history who did not take work for granted, but looked at it and studied it. His approach to work is still the basic foundation”.    That was worth something.  

I don’t like the practical and complete application of the theories.   Even if you don’t know Taylor, you know his work.  He is the time management guy, the one who set loose all those guys with clipboards and stopwatches to measure workers.   “In our scheme, we do not ask the initiative of our men. We do not want any initiative. All we want of them is to obey the orders we give them, do what we say, and do it quick.”  That assumes you don’t want innovation or initiative. This was the frightening world of “Modern Times” or “Metropolis” and in the early 20th Century the trends didn’t look good.  Fortunately trends never continue and we got back to a more human and humane system, at least in theory.  Humans don’t work like machines and everybody is better off if everybody is thinking.

That’s Taylor on the left. I will let those who care enough read re the other stars of management.  Here are the links:
Max Weber, Richard Rumelt, Warren Buffett,  Richard Pascale, Alfred Sloan, Peter Senge, Laurence Peter, Henry Mintzberg, Peter Drucker, Geert Hofstede, Abraham Maslow, Douglas McGregor, Gary Hamel, Michael Porter,  Dale Carnegie, Igor Ansoff, Warren Bennis, Frank and Lillin GilbrethC.K. Prahalad.

Of course every real-world leader needs to develop methods that fit with his own strengths, circumstances and proclivities. The management theorists can inform choices, but they cannot make them for you (anyway many of the gurus are sometimes a bit like Harold Hill in the “Music Man.”) I learned a lot from reading the theories and then trying them out in practice.  I read most of Peter Drucker’s books and I had several of Tom Peters’ books.  In Search of Excellence” had a lot of influence on me because I read that when I was in grad-school and it was one of my first books of that kind.  I must have spent thousands of dollars on leadership/management books. BTW – I also consider the reading of biographies as a type of leadership training.   You learn from the experience of others.

I found Maslow’s hierarchy of needs a very useful construct when I was in Iraq.  As Maslow points out, you can’t accomplish much until you meet basic safety and security needs.   All the other things were just not possible out of that sequence.  That insight alone was probably studying him.    I am not saying that we should apply these ideas w/o modification, but they are very useful.   Most of the Marine officers I talked with in Iraq were familiar with Maslow and they got it right too. “The Economist” reminded me of something I had forgotten.   I read Henry Mintzberg in grad-school, but not since.  But I had internalized something he wrote, and paraphrased it for many years, probably because it fit in well with my personal preferences.   Mintzberg was very different from Taylor’s machine like idea of focusing on task.  The good managers he studied jumped from topic to topic.   According to Mintzberg, good managers thrive “on interruptions and more often than not disposes of items in ten minutes or less. Though he may have 50 projects going, all are delegated.” In a study of British managers at the time, he found that they worked without interruption for more than half an hour only “about once every two days”. He also found that senior managers spent more than three-quarters of their time in oral communication. He concluded, “the job of managing is fundamentally one of processing information, notably by talking and especially by listening.” To be a good manager you have to be a good listener.”

Management is not the same as other sorts of work.  That is why when the guy who seems to be the most serious worker in the place is put in charge, things often go wrong and why self-described hard workers often think their boss isn’t doing anything.    Making connections and understanding the whole becomes more and more important as you get farther along and the value of actual “work” declines.  It becomes more important to know what to do and work through others.

The management gurus tend to put leadership and managment in the same boat.  There are differences.  I think it is easier to study and define management.  In Taylor’s world, leadership is only management and even that is essentially surrendered to the system.  In a really well designed scientific management system managers are more like administrators.  Leadership is needed to set new courses and create change.  If you are not going anywhere, you don’t need leadership to get you there.

It is almost impossible to describe precisely what a good leader does that makes him/her a good leader, or when you describe it, it sounds trivial.  He just knows what to do.  Things just work better and more smoothly when some people are around.  And of course there are some leaders who are just creators of useless effort.  Life doesn’t have to be that hard. Maybe the management gurus can put it in better words than I can.

The lesson I took was that leaders working ostensibly hard behind their desks are not really working very effectively and if things are going wrong, it is more likely BECAUSE of rather than in spite of their best efforts.  Working hard on the wrong thing is worse than doing nothing at all.  Leadership above all means making the right choices.   Besides, as RR said, it is true that hard work never killed anybody, but I figure why take the chance?   Maybe they should waste a little time walking around and talking to the people doing the work, and read “The Economist” every Saturday.         

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Do Words Count More Than Deeds?

Ford Edsel and New Coke are spectacular examples of how even the most sophisticated marketing and biggest bucks cannot sell a product people don’t want.  But we are talking about tangible products in these cases.   Each time you tasted New Coke, you were given another chance to test for yourself.   Everybody who saw or drove an Edsel could make his/her own judgment.   Imagine if you had ONLY the advertisements about these products and/or you had to depend on what others said about them.  Go one further. Imagine that much of what you had almost no opportunity to make independent verifications and that almost everybody involved in explaining to you had a vested interest in misleading you, or at least spinning the facts.  Now you are in the world of public affairs.

Abraham Lincoln famously said that “You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”  This sentence is designed with the encouraging part as the punch line, but it not really very encouraging.    Phase it just a little differently.  Some of the people are always fooled.  Some of the people are sometimes not fooled, but all of the people are fooled some of the time.  Mr. Lincoln wisely didn’t speculate about how many people would sometimes not be fooled or the amount of influence they might exert on the benighted majority.

We can recognize mass deception epidemics in retrospect.  We know how they turned out so we can see the errors. But what do we learn?  By the time the facts are known, we have moved on to other things and with the wisdom of hindsight people convince themselves that they were not really fooled at all.  As someone who loves ancient history, I can think of widely believed hoaxes that persisted for thousands of years.  But let’s limit ourselves to recent ones that we can all recall w/o too much effort from our own lifetimes.  We had the missile gap, the population bomb, global cooling, nuclear winter, imminent collapse of the global financial system (about once every ten years), WMD, diet coke, breast implants, power lines etc causing cancer, and the biggest of all – communism.   This last one was interesting to me professionally, since my dislike for communism was the big reason I joined the then USIA.  Until 1989 most experts predicted the continued health and expansion of communism.   In fact, I was in Vienna on the very day the Berlin Wall came down listening to experts tell me that the East German government was fundamentally sound and enjoyed the grudging support of its people.  It was naive, they said, to expect any real change.  By 1995, you almost couldn’t find an expert who didn’t claim to have known that the communism was about to collapse. 

Self-deception is the most effective kind.

Communism didn’t work, plain and simple, and it was horribly oppressive to boot, but for a bankrupt ideology, communism enjoyed a remarkably popular life. At least fifty million people died as a result of communism, making it the biggest killer in history.  You can understand how people living under those ghastly systems attenuated their criticism, hoping to avoid joining those millions already moldering mass graves, but communism was also widely accepted among intelligencia in the free nations, where people with the freedom to speak and inquire should have known better.   Even today pictures of Che Guevara adorn dorm rooms and t-shirts on college campuses.  And they are not usually adjacent to picture of Charles Manson or similarly murderous cult leaders.

You can fool some of the people all of the time and sometimes for many years. We Americans are a pragmatic people and we have grown up in a country with long traditions of democracy, free flow of information, free media, free markets, free inquiry and a lot of choices in general.  We have trouble understanding how uncommon our happy situation is, both historically and geographically. This gives us an exaggerated confidence that the truth will come out and that it will be accepted by most reasonable people.   But remember in closed countries they sold products a lot worse than Edsels or New Coke and people were content to get them.  They still do.

As pragmatic people, we also believe that what we do makes a difference and we take responsibility for our actions.  We appropriately hold ourselves to higher standards.   But that should not prevent us from making objective comparisons and should not lead to assumptions of moral equivalency with nasty enemies … or worse. We suffer from the effects analogous to excellent students from very stringent grading system competing with mediocre or poor students from a lax one for admission to an engineering program.  If administrators consider a B in highly competitive course in advanced calculus less than an A in the everybody-passes basic arithmetic curriculum, you better drive carefully over the bridges designed by their graduates. 

Or if you permit, let me provide another analogy.   The couch potato can easily criticize the players in the Super Bowl, but we all know he could not have leap high enough to catch that pass in the end zone nor kept both his feet in bounds when he came down. Deeds count more than words only when people have the independent ability to judge, effects are reasonably close to actions in time and space and when feedback is available and reliable.   Otherwise they are like the tree that falls in the wood with nobody around to hear it.    

So, what do we do?  I certainly don’t advocate lowering our high standards or hiding our mistakes, but we should raise our expectations of others & don’t overlook their shortcomings either.  After the President’s SOTU speech, some leaders in countries where democracy is viewed with limited enthusiasm said that they would wait to judge his deeds.  Judge his deeds – great!  That goes both ways.   Let’s see how the couch potatoes do on game day or the wizards of basic arithmetic perform on the practical exam.  AND we always ask the “compared to what?” question.  You don’t win respect by lying down in the face of criticism and the truth will come out only if it has some sturdy and persistent advocates.   

And as Lincoln understood, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, some of the people will be fooled all of the time.

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Walking to Wilson

Below is the Monument to the Second Army Division. It stands near the White House. It was originally set up in memory of WWI dead, but later added battles from WWII and Korea. I walked past this many times, but this is the first time I stopped to look closely.

I started at my normal office and then took the shuttle to HST and transferred to go to NFATC, where I talked to the group going to Iraq.   I wonder how much my advice is worth.  Things change so quickly in Iraq and our footprint is so different now.   But I told them what I knew.    I caught the shuttle back to HST in time just to miss the shuttle to SA44.   Just as well.  I wanted to go to the Wilson Center to see a speaker on worldwide water resources, so I walked over to the Ronald Reagan Building, where Wilson Center is located.  It seems to me that water resources and environment will be big issues in the next few years.   One of the things I like most about Washington is that there are so many opportunities to learn new things.  I will write some notes about what I learned when I get a little more information and context.

Below is an exhibit re Woodrow Wilson at the Wilson Center.  Wilson was our only president with a PhD.  He valued study and the development of ideas.  The Wilson Center for scholars is his living legacy.  Scholars there share their ideas with each other and the public (like me).  They also publish “The Wilson Quarterly”.

The Wilson Center is almost midway between State and SA 44, so after the lecture I walked back to my office.  It was cold and I had to stay late to finish the day’s work, but I liked the lecture, the walk gave me time to think and I got some pictures.  

Above is the inside atrium of the Ronald Reagan Building.  Below workmen are putting up a profile of President Reagan. 

Below is a statue of Simon Bolivar near the Mall and near the OAS.  

Below is Nathan Hale.  He scouted British positions for General Washington and was executed by the British after they captured him.  They didn’t have the ACLU in those days.  His last words were “I regret that I have but one life to give for my country.” 

Below is salt on the street.  It seem like when it snows in Washington, it rains salt.  You can see how much this salt was not needed.  They are too quick with the salt around here and the effort is not a virtue. All that salt eventually finds its way into the Potomac and then pollutes the Chesapeake Bay.  The lecture I listened to on water made me notice this. The costs of doing these things is high, but environmental costs are hard to quantify, while people sliding on the streets are easy to see.  Too bad.  Many people claim to be concerned about the environment, but then they complain or sue when they are inconvenienced or slip on the pavement.   The Chesapeake is worth a few bent fenders, maybe even some broken bones or at least the risk of these mishaps.

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Mean Streets Softening

Below are apartments in Washington SW. They are an early example of slum clearance, rebuilding and low income housing. According to the sign nearby, they were built during the 1930s. I like the neighborhood; it is a great location with lots of nice trees and open space. They are now being converted to condos, probably expensive ones. So there will be these expensive places – newly affluent former low income housing, amidst the current low income housing.

Everything gets its cable television marathon sooner or later.   AMC recently featured a “Death Wish” marathon with a couple “Dirty Harry” movies thrown in.  These movies were wildly popular.  They made Charles Bronson famous and inspired spin offs.  The movies really were not very good and the premises were ridiculous (like most action movies).  They were popular because they caught a cultural wave and connected with ordinary people’s fears and anger.  They were made at a time when societal norms were breaking down and crime was spiking up.   It seemed like the cops could do nothing and that the crooks could get away with anything.  If the cops did manage to make an arrest, weak minded judges would let them out, citing the need to go after the “root causes” of crime.

Below is vandalism.  Somebody put a lot of effort into pulling these benches apart.  As I wrote in the earlier caption, this is a nice neighborhood, but some of the neighbors are not well behaved.

Crime rates started to come down around 1990.  Nobody can really explain it and there are certainly multiple causes, but an important factor was the prominence of the broken window theory.  If you look at the pictures above, you can see how a few acts of disorder can make a whole area feel unsafe.  

You can read the link if you want details.   Generally, the idea is that disorder causes crime.  If you want to cut big crime, you go after the little disorders.    The most important root cause of crime is crime itself and the disorder it engenders.    People who live disorderly lives usually end up poor and sometimes criminal but it is very hard to live an orderly life when you are surrounded by disorder and indifference.

Below is the progress of the construction.  I have taken pictures of this before at earlier stages.  I think it will be done by summer.

Attitude plays a big role in almost any human endeavor.   I think that sometimes we lose the conviction that we have a right to impose order and when that happens disorder ensues.    Being judgmental is unfashionable, but the ability to make reasonable distinctions is the mark of intelligence.   The broken windows theory wasn’t a panacea, but it provided a base on which we could again make reasonable judgments.    We could say with renewed conviction that some of the petty crime and antisocial behaviors were not okay.    The subsequent success of welfare reform, which works from some of the same assumptions, helped win the intellectual battle.   We still have some rear guard “root causes first” folks, although decision makers tend to listen to them indulgently and even talk their talk,  they usually reject their practical advice.   Our streets are safer and more pleasant and that is worth a lot.

Below – you can see the neighborhood has some attractions and good location.  This is Delaware AV SW looking northeast. The new cars indicate the coming prosperity.  The progress is regrettable in some ways.  The poor people who live in the public housing enjoy the good location.  They will be displaced by the improvements as their neighborhood moves farther upscale and high rent than they can afford.

I don’t think we will ever get back to the low crime rates of the 1950s.  Populations were not as mobile back then and it was easier to isolate, localize and control crime. * But there has been a lot of progress since the 1970s.   I walk all around Washington in places that I would have feared to tread twenty years ago.   The neighborhoods in the pictures is a good example.  Even nice neighborhoods like Capitol Hill just up from here used to be dangerous after sundown.   Today you can even go up to U Street at night.  It is lively and a little sleazy, but certainly not the fearful war zone I remember inadvertently wandering into twenty years ago.  Back in 1985 when I first visited Baltimore they warned you not to stray too far from the well protected tourist zones near the harbor and monuments.    Today I don’t worry too much about Mariza living there.

Below is a street scene in Baltimore near where Mariza lives.  The houses are nicer on the outside than inside for now.  Old buildings are hard to fix.  It is easy to put new brick on the facade, but the plumbing and wiring are nightmares. This picture is from November 2009. 

BTW – Profound changes often stem from prosaic causes. Crime rates spiked in the 1960s for lots of reasons.  We can blame all sorts of social breakdowns but cars and air conditioning also played  roles. Most crime is committed by young males.  If they don’t have cars, they are not very mobile.   If they rip off the local grocery store, everybody knows who they are.   The car not only makes getaways easier, it also allows them to go far enough from home where nobody knows them.   Air conditioning is a more subtle cause.   W/o air conditioning, people sit on their front porches or stoops on warm summer evenings.  Neighbors get to know each other and everybody is keeping an eye on the street.  Air conditioning isolates people within their homes with the windows closed, leaving the streets to strangers.  These things are the realities of our society today and those are two of the reasons why I don’t think crime rates will ever drop to their 1950s levels.   Of course, maybe modern surveillance technology will jump into the breach, but that is kind of scary.   

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Energy, Water & Food/Government, Science & Markets

The U.S. has become the world’s biggest producer of wind energy and will probably be the biggest producer of solar energy by the end of the year, according to Scientific American.    We have lots of land for windmills in America and lots of sunny places for solar, but what we also have in abundance is imagination and innovation.    We are constantly being told that we are falling behind in this or that.   Just a couple years ago, I read that we would be left behind in the renewable energy business.  I know that we can parse the news in many ways, but being first in solar and wind energy means something no matter how you look at it and it doesn’t look like being left behind.

And remember that this happened before we made all those green investments the government promised to make. 

Energy, water and food. Providing ourselves with these prosaic necessities is the challenge of the next decade. This is a worldwide challenge, so let’s look to good practices worldwide. Brazil has been working on alcohol fuel for four decades. Arid Australia is a leader in allocating scarce water resources. Although not currently the world leader, it might be India that soon leads the world in biotechnology.

Brazil provides an excellent example of the interaction of market forces, political will and good luck. Brazil’s military dictators stared the program back in 1975. There is some doubt whether a non-authoritarian government could have taken the initial steps to make it happen. Even with subsidies, favorable laws and official sponsorship, Brazil’s ethanol program languished and almost died in the very low oil price environment in the 1990s. The history of Brazilian ethanol once again confirms the necessity of a higher price of oil to encourage alternatives. When prices rose, the ethanol program once again made economic senses.

The lesson: Government intervention may be necessary to jump start alternative energy programs. A big change in infrastructure is something individual firms cannot handle alone.   However, it is clear that the government can propose and encourage, but the market ultimately decides. Luck played a big role in Brazil. If the price spikes had come just a few years later, the Brazil energy program may well have been left for dead and very difficult to revive.

Fuel is important, but water is even more crucial to survival.  Ironically, energy solutions such as Brazil’s use of sugar cane to make fuel will worsen water shortages. Unlike fuel, however, we do not produce water; we do not use it up. It is the ultimate renewing resource. What matters is quality and location. This renewing aspect has fooled us into thinking water is (or should be) free.  Most water is not really allocated at all. In non-arid areas, we just assume there is enough water and even in arid ones, we generally give precedence to whoever is nearer or who got there first.  This guarentees that water is wasted. We have to stop treating water like a free good and begin to distribute it according to market principles.

This will seem unjust.   A couple years ago, I watched the Milagro Beanfield War, directed by Robert Redford.  It concerns some poor farmer who steals water bought by a rich developer.  It is natural to sympathize with the little guy, but if more people practiced his primitive methods it would drive everyone into poverty. He just wants to grow some beans – in the middle of the desert.  He doesn’t know and the plot doesn’t openly reveal it, but he just wants to waste water, increase the salinity of his soil and ultimately make it useless.  Only the free market (including rule of law, reasonable regulation & market mechanisms) will allow diverse decision making can achieve a fair result.  You can still cheer for Joe Mondragon, but recognize that he is part of the problem.

The lesson: We have to look at the bigger picture and think of water as a regional, maybe even a world resource. If done properly, it can be done justly and gradually with most people given choices that improve their lives.  If we pretend we can go on the old fashioned Milagro Beanfield way, everybody suffers and some people die, but somebody gets the satisfaction of “sticking it to the man.”

In the end we might have some great options from the science of biotechnology or nanotechnology.  Biotechnology can produce plants that require less water, fertilizer and energy to produce greater outputs.  But the connection is even more direct. Biotechnology is already contributing to the production of biofuels and may soon make the production of ethanol from cellulous faster and easier. Cellulous alcohol is the holy grail of liquid fuels. That would mean we could make fuel out waste products such as wood chips or stalks, or from easily grown and ecologically benign crops such as switchgrass.  Nanotechnology may produce much better ways to capture, store and transmit energy.

Lesson: Paradigms change and we can make them change. If we think only about how things are today, we can never solve our problems. In fact, it is likely that today’s problems CANNOT be solved with today’s methods.  We cannot solve problems with the same techniques that got us into them.  Innovative solutions require a leap of faith, but it is a leap of faith in human intelligence and our ability to learn & adapt.

We are standing at a crossroads where our provision of energy, water and food are radically changed. These three factors will be more completely integrated than ever before. All change is difficult, but if done right this one will make all (or at least most) of us much better off and make our lifestyles more sustainable.

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Give a Man a Hammer

The world is too complex to be understood directly, so we use simplified mental models to make sense of things.   All of us have habitual models – metaphors – that we fit w/o much thought to the events in our world.    The model/metaphor we use determines what we do.    But none of our models is reality.  They fit more or less well, and to the extent the model is a bad fit, we make bad decisions that follow with perfect logic from our assumptions.

Give a man a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail.   The model makes a difference.  The most explicit models we employ are often related to sports.  Think about how different the results can be.    A football model will entail planning by a leader and execution by different people, each with specific specializations (quarterback, linebacker etc) on the field in separate steps with pauses between moves.  Basketball, with its continuous fluid and reactive action, produces a very different model evoke very understanding of the problem.    I often wonder how many of our international misunderstandings result from our football metaphor versus their football/soccer way of simplifying reality.

Explicit models are treacherous enough, but it is the IMPLICIT models – the ones we use w/o thinking – put the biggest hurt on us.  Framing the model is the most important part of decision making, but it is often completely overlooked.    Decision makers often assume models out of habit or inertia and then cannot understand why their perfectly logical choices that flow from their premises do not produce the expected results.     Reality is too complex and confusing.  You have to have a model to simplify it, but make it a good one.

My preferred model is ecological, specifically forestry, and I have worked to refine my understanding of this model and its application.   No model is perfect, but this one is robust because it accounts for interaction of complex factors, properly accounts for the effects of time, anticipates changes in conditions and anticipates random shocks.  The most important insight in this model is that the actions you take will change the expected outcomes and they will never produce proportional results.    Little inputs can create very large results, very large inputs may produce almost nothing and change come in spurts and lumps.   This doesn’t make intuitive sense because we tend to think in terms or physical models where inputs relate directly to outputs.   If I pour eight ounces of water into a cup, I expect to find eight ounces.   In a biological model, eight ounces may result in a gallon of result or nothing at all; or it might produce no visible result for a long time and then make a big jump.  

You also learn that some things take time to work and extra resources cannot rush the process and that there are some things you just cannot have, not matter how much you want them or how good it would be to get them.

Many people think that if we just all agree, we can have all we want.   When it doesn’t work out, they assume there must be some villains standing in the way.  But in the real world, there are many things we cannot have right away – we have to wait – lots of things we cannot have simultaneously and some things we cannot have at an acceptable cost and things we cannot have at all no matter what cost we are willing to pay.   And this happens naturally.  Villains are optional.    And often you don’t get what you think you want, but what you get is better.  Sustained interaction with the natural world teaches these lessons.   That is why forestry is a good model.  But it takes time to learn. 

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Building the Future

Below is the art in front of the Building Museum.

The world is better now than it was a century ago, but we have lost that sense of muscular optimism.  Pity.  You could read it in their literature and you could see it in their architecture.  I was reminded of that today when I went up to the National Building Museum.  It was dedicated by President Grover Cleveland and it has all that substantial grandeur common to buildings of that period.

Vast and imposing indoor space is the hallmark of American public buildings from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  They are cathedrals of the Republic.

I went to see the exhibit on green cities.  It was not that good for me, although I can see its general value.   The whole museum is set up more as a place to bring school kids to learn about these things.  I like the concept, though.  It is possible to design buildings and whole cities in ways that make them both more pleasant and more environmentally sustainable.   We are often confronted by the false choice of either destroying our world or living a Visigoth level of technology and consumption.  The correct answer is neither.  We can do better.

Implicit in the dilemma is the false premise that people and nature don’t mix and that the best we can do is mitigate or repair the damage we inevitably cause.  In fact, humans are an integral part of nature.  Some of our activities do indeed damage nature: others improve it.  The key goal is to make our existence sustainable for a long, as nothing lasts forever, and the premise of man v nature is not helpful.    

In the great scheme of nature, animal and plant life sets the stage for its own local destruction.  Pine trees grow so thick that they shade out their own offspring.  Grazing animals have to keep moving as they destroy the grass they need to eat.  Elephants rampage through the forests they depend on for food. Despite all the Rousseau “noble savage” fantasies, pre-industrial humans were/are that way too, i.e. very destructive.  Their populations were sustainable only because their numbers were small enough to minimize the damage.  This is the way it works in the animal world; this is how it worked with human populations.  People moved away when things got bad or they died off.  It was a Malthusian spiral never ending – that is the real circle of life – until our technology and knowledge broke us out of it. Of course, this created a different set of problems.

Below is the frieze on the National Buidling Museum.  The building was finished in 1887.  It used inexpensive materials, such as brick instead of cut stone.

We humans, alone among the animals so far, have the capacity to see the larger effects of our activities.  The game is not over. We may yet suffer the population crash that afflicts animal species when they overrun their habitat’s carrying capacity; but not today or tomorrow.   I still have that old fashioned optimism and I have seen the new fangled techniques of environmental restoration or renewal.  Things will be tough, but we will get better.

BTW – we look back on the past with some nostalgia because we know how the story came out.  It is harder to see forward than look back. We should recall past hard times.   The panic (as they called recessions in those days) of 1907 was horrible. Some people actually didn’t get enough to eat; obesity was not a problem of poverty a century ago.  The stock market lost more than 50% of its value.   In the absence of a central bank (the Federal Reserve was not established until 1913) JP Morgan stepped in to rescue the economy with a private sector bailout.  We recovered.  This panic was during the time of Theodore Roosevelt.  Most of us just remember his muscular optimism and know absolutely nothing about the panic of 1907.   That sense of historical amnesia is why our expectations are so high and why we always think we live in the worst of times.

Morgan later went in front of a congressional committee.  This is part of the exchange.

Untermyer: Is not commercial credit based primarily upon money or property?
Morgan: No, sir. The first thing is character.
Untermyer: Before money or property?
Morgan: Before money or anything else. Money cannot buy it … a man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the bonds in Christendom.There is a good biography re Morgan by Ron Chenow.  I recommend it.   I also read his biographies of Alexander Hamilton and John D. Rockefeller (Titan).  They are all good books.