Category: General Thoughts

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The new dynamics of global energy and climate: A conversation with Exelon CEO Chris Crane

America was plunged into an energy crisis soon after I graduated from HS, so besides drinking way too much beer as a freshman at University of Wisconsin Stevens Point, I was occupied with forestry and energy. I try to go to energy related programs at Brookings, AEI or Wilson and so I went today to “The new dynamics of global energy and climate: A conversation with Exelon CEO Chris Crane.” Exelon is the largest electric parent company in the United States by revenue, the largest regulated utility in the United States with approximately 10 million customers, and the largest operator of nuclear power plants in the United States.

Mr. Crane talked about his firm’s vision which includes providing reliable power and cutting carbon emissions. He said that you can believe in climate change or not, but that firms like his have to adapt to it because it is happening. To stave off the worst of climate change the USA will need to drop carbon emissions by 80% by 2050. This is a tall order. The electrical sector is off to a good start. We are down 25% based on 1990 figures, but it may get harder to do. This was done largely by substituting natural gas for much dirtier coal. Nobody really anticipated the big supply of cleaner and cheaper natural gas. We cannot count on that sort of good luck again.

Renewables like solar & wind are coming along very well, but they do not supply the base loads.
There are times when the wind doesn’t blow, and the sun doesn’t show. Base loads for the time being can be supplied only by fossil fuels, hydro or nuclear. Exelon is the largest operator of nuclear power plants. The nuclear power plants are losing money. They cannot compete with cheap natural gas, but they have a big advantage in that they do not emit CO2. If these plants went off line, CO2 emissions would necessarily rise. This is what happened in Germany. In their rush to be green, they shut down nukes and dirty coal plants took up the base-load task. There is currently a social benefit to keeping the nukes in business.

As a result, German CO2 emissions actually went up not in spite of but BECAUSE of their green movement.

Carbon taxes – the good, the bad & the unlikely
Exelon supports carbon taxes, specifically the Baker-Shultz plan (I have written about this on other occasions). Crane thinks that only market driven plans have a real chance for success. We should look to outcomes, rather than back any particular technology and let various techniques compete. We do not know which will be best, or maybe what combination will be most effective.

Challenges include developing better electrical storage and connecting pipelines and power lines. New England is at risk, for example, because activists have opposed and effectively shut down construction of electric transmission lines that could bring Canadian hydro-power and gas pipeline expansion to bring abundant American natural gas to the region. Ironically, Exelon power plants in New England that use natural gas need to import LNG, and these imports come from Russia.

Hydrogen economy  – perpetually five years in the future

The talk ended on a hopeful note. Crane talked about the hydrogen economy. This is not a new idea, but its accomplishment seems always to be five years away. Hydrogen is a perfect fuel. It burns cleanly, with the only emission being water vapor. The problem is that hydrogen really is not a fuel source, but more a storage medium. Hydrogen exists nowhere in nature in a pure form. It must be made. The most ecological method would be to divide it from oxygen in water. H2O is made of hydrogen and oxygen and it the most common thing on the earth’s surface. But separating the H from the O takes lots of energy. A process might be to use solar to make hydrogen when the sun is shining and then to use this hydrogen in fuel cells to make energy when it is dark.

My first picture is from Brookings. The program was from 2-3:30. This makes a difference to me. I ride my bike down, but I prefer to take the Metro back, since it is uphill and I am tired. I can take the Metro before 3 or after 7, so I had to hang around until 7. Fortunately, there are nice places to hang. The next picture and the video show the Botanical Garden, a great place to hang around. Notice the longleaf and lobolly pines. After that are some elm trees near the old USIA and last shows the kiosk at McDonald’s. You order electronically and then they bring your order.

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Value of Hypocrisy

I am a hypocrite and I proudly so. Hypocrisy is a prerequisite for civilization and the basis of courtesy. Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice plays to virtue, since hypocrisy implies acceptance of the value you pretend to have.
 
Diplomacy, Politics & Courtesy are Hypocrisy Codified
All good diplomats, all good statesmen & most good people are hypocrites. They must work productively with people whose values they do not share, often with people they personally dislike. Would it be nobler to be sincere and express their “true” feelings, presuming they have thought through what the true feeling even are?  It sure would not get more done.

The right question is to ask what people CAN do, not what they can’t. Effective people look for common goals among opponents and common aspirations even among enemies. You need not agree on everything to work together on something.

Look for Agreement
In my diplomatic career, I have usually followed the maxim that – “You make friends shoulder to shoulder not face to face,” i.e. working together on common aspirations is better than talking about your problems. I do not want to disparage dialogue, but you should be looking for shared aspiration, not just airing grievances. Just talking about differences as often leads to finding more differences rather than resolving those you have already. “What can we do together?” is better than “Why don’t you like me?”

When I meet someone, I look for common aspirations – looking for the doors or windows – the ways in – not the stone walls that keep us out. This just makes sense. I do not know why you would do anything else. Yet, I find more-and-more people rejecting this. I hear people saying that they cannot talk to “those people” because “they” are unreasonable. Yeah. They say this w/o seeing the irony.

I joke that when I was serving in Iraq (2007-8) I ate lunch with guys who would have – maybe tried to kill me only weeks before. I do not think it was always just a joke. I have found common aspirations with communists, religious radicals, former (maybe current) criminals and lots of people who just hated people like me or what I represented. It was rarely pleasant at first and often never got better, but sometimes we found something we both wanted and could set aside our dislike to get it.

Feeling Righteous or Being Right
It is satisfying to be self-righteous, to assume that you or your group has a monopoly on “the good.” We all want to think we are fighting the good fight. After the fight, however, how many times have you regretted the need for the violence (real or intellectual).  Surveying the carnage and destruction after the battle of Waterloo, his great victory that he had anticipated for a decade, the Duke of Wellington reportedly said, “The only thing worse than a battle lost is a battle won.”

If we can (and should) look for common ground with foreign enemies, we certainly cannot deny this to our fellow American opponents.

It is NOT a betrayal of principles to work with opponents and find common purpose with enemies. In fact, it is affirming a greater principle of inclusiveness. It is how civilization works. Let’s maybe be less indulgently sincere. Hypocrites often get more done and almost always are more pleasant to be around.

And if you look for it, you may sincerely find good in those you think hate you and maybe you can hate the a little less and maybe learn not to hate at all.
 

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Milwaukee Sewage Plant

You didn’t need a weather vane or even to hold your finger to the wind to know which way the wind was blowing when we lived near Lake Michigan in Milwaukee. An east wind blowing in from the Lake brought relief from the heat of summer, but the price was the smell. We lived less than a mile from Lake Michigan and from the Milwaukee sewage treatment plant. It is better now than it was when I was a kid, but I still thought it might be interesting to see the place we had so often smelled by never saw close up. So with my sister, Christine Matel Milewski, and cousins Mary Karshna Robertson and Dick Karshna, we went to look at the plant.

When it was built in 1926, the sewage treatment plant was one of the best in the world. It still is. Some of the original tanks and facilities are still working.

A big challenge for the sewage plant is that Milwaukee originally had a combined sewer system. That means that rain water that runs into storm sewers mixes with sanitary sewer that run from toilets and drains. In 1926 this made sense. The cleaner storm water periodically flushed out the system. The cost was that when storms were severe, there was too much to process. One inch of rain over the area covered by the sewer system. drops 7.1 billion gallons into the system. The excess went out into Lake Michigan, partially treated.
Milwaukee addressed this problem in 1994 by building tunnels deep under the city. During big storms, the water is shunted into the tunnels and processed when there is capacity. Partially treated water is sometimes still discharged. The woman at the sewage plant said that it had been almost two years since this last happened. Ironically, I just saw on the news that the sewers had backed up today. We had a couple inches of rain in a short time, following a lot of rain yesterday.

I was also interested in biosolids. We have used them on the tree farms, but they are hard to get. Milwaukee makes fertilizer out Milwaukee’s crap. Milorgranite is very well processed so that it can be used even on food crops.

The sewage process also produces methane, which is used to run the plant.
When the water is discharged into Lake Michigan, it is 98% clean. Not sure what that means exactly, but it is clean enough. The area around the discharge is full of sea birds because it is attractive to fish. What the fish like it the highly aerated water.
The pictures show the process. Sewage is first filtered by screens. Lots of stuff finds its way into the sewers, things like shopping carts, mobile phones and even bowling balls. These are taken to landfills. Next they filer our coarse materials like sand and grit. It then goes into settling tanks, where settling materials are removed at the bottom, while grease and soaps are skimmed off the top as they float on top of the water.

After that, the water goes into digester, where microorganism literally eat the sewage. These are also aerators. Lots of air is pumped in to give the microorganisms a little help. The microorganisms live for only 7-10 days. They spend their short lives eating & reproducing. They settle to the bottom when they die, where they are processed into Milorgranite. The progeny are recycled into the next batch. Milwaukee put in the first microorganisms in 1926 and the community has been in business ever since. The microorganisms are hard working employees. After the microorganisms are done, the water is chlorinated to kill any pathogens that somehow made it through. Then the chlorine is neutralized and the water discharged into Lake Michigan.

First picture is the skimmer, followed by the digester. Picture #3 show some of that rain that overwhelmed the system. Next is Lake Michigan south of the plant. You see a group of geese going one way and a group of boats towed in the other way. Last is a Lake Michigan vista looking north.

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Old World Wisconsin

Wisconsin was demographically more like Mitteleuropa than middle America in the late 19th Century.  The majority of the population was immigrants or their children.  The biggest ethnic group was German, but there were lots of Norwegian, Swedes, Poles, Fins and various others.

At first, they looked for their fellows from their own countries, but very soon they were merging into the culture that became Wisconsin’s.

America was MORE a nation of immigrants back in the late 19th Century than it is today, and they were MORE diverse.  It is fashionable today to talk about diversity only in terms of skin tone, but it is more a matter of culture and habits.  A Polish peasant coming from rural Galicia was more different culturally from an America-born neighbor that a typical immigrant from Nigeria or China is from his American-born neighbor today.  Consider that the Polish peasant may never have heard a word of English before embarking for America.  He would not have read American novels, heard American music and he could not have seen American movies or listened to American radio.  You can find nobody like that today unless you go into the forests in places like the Amazon or New Guinea, even there maybe not.

We look back on the successful integration of immigrants back then and think its was easy.  It took about three generations, which is not that different from now looking at how fast immigrant language become only second languages and then largely disappear.

Our mental model of assimilation is also wrong.  America did not assimilate the immigrants of the late 19th Century.  We integrated them and their cultures into the American whole.  I often choose the Germans as example, since they are Americas biggest ethnic group, at the time of Old World Wisconsin, they made up at least 25% of the American population and a majority of the people in Wisconsin.  People of those days thought they would never fit in completely.    I bet people reading this are surprised how much of America is German.  Why?  Because they fit in so well that we don’t think about it anymore.  Americans think that they are just being American when they have a beer and a hot dog, when they send their kids to kindergarten, eat an apple pie or hamburger.  And these things ARE American, since they are modified from the original.

The value of diversity is that we can appropriate and adapt the more useful or attractive parts of the cultures we meet, while sharing ours with them.   Appropriate AND adapt.  We do NOT want to keep the cultures pure or separated and we should never encourage people to keep the old ways.  If you want to see and appreciate the old ways, you can go to places like Old World Wisconsin.  In Old World Wisconsin, you can see the roots of lots of our habits and behaviors.  We are today more aware of the flowers and the fruits.
The first two pictures show livestock. They have heirloom breeds, like those immigrant would have owned. Next is the Polish house, followed by a Norwegian house. These are actual structures moved to Old World Wisconsin from other parts of the state.  Last is a schoolhouse. Immigrants thought education was the way to the future and they were right, so they build schools like that. They taught only in English, often using the famous  McGuffey Readers to teach reading and wider America culture.

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Building a More Dynamic and Competitive Economy

Just concluded an interesting program at Brookings, see linked.
Steve Case, founder of AOL, talked about bringing businesses away from the coasts and into the heartland. He has a embarked on a project to help this. The idea is that there is a lot of talent outside the places where all the money drops. I earlier watched a series of his talks re on The Great Courses Series “The Third Wave”
(https://www.thegreatcourses.com/…/the-third-wave-the-future…)
I recommend it.

Most interesting was the last panel that featured our former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe. He is a very dynamic guy. I have always enjoyed encounters with him. (He was a good friend to forestry in the Commonwealth. His first lady even set a small prescribed fire and encouraged longleaf restoration). If I sum up his method for encouraging businesses to come and grow in Virginia, it would be energetic engagement. He and the other panelists advised against big money incentives. They are usually not worth it. This is hard to do, especially for the more out-of-the-way places.

He said that Virginia is lucky in that we do not need to incentivize too much, since the business climate is very good. A potential problem is labor. We are at near full employment and firms might not come because they cannot find the right labor. We should make long-term investments in education rather than short term wins by giving out incentives.

Link to the program

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Getting the forestry message out

Persuasion

I am writing a presentation that I will deliver at one of the breakout sessions at the Tree Farm National Leadership Conference, in Albuquerque, New Mexico – January 31-February 2. The topic is “Using more wood for the love of forests: getting the message out.”  This is background for the “getting the message out” part. I am overdoing it a bit.
Don’t worry; this is not the text for the talk.

For anybody who plans to attend the session, don’t worry. I am NOT planning to deliver this in the talk and I will talk more about forestry. All this exercise is to build the background for a couple of slides and all this will be reduced to a few sentences. BUT … I will be ready for any questions and I wanted to put this up as reference so anybody interested in more background can read it.

My method for talk preparation is odd. I write all this kind of stuff and read a lot. Then on the day before or even the day of the event I write what I am going to say – long hand – in my pocket notebook. That makes it flow, since I leave out details. I often change the talk even as I am giving it, depending on audience reaction. This was a problem for me in State Department, since my text “as prepared” was often significantly different than my talk as delivered.

My PowerPoint Presentation The slides are included below. They will change before the presentation. It is heavy with pictures, since I don’t think PowerPoint should be text heavy. But that might make it download slower.

John-Matel-_Virginia_Tree_Farm_Foundation_presentatio_Jan-7Download

Everything is always becoming something else
We always have always and always will live in a dynamic environment. Our efforts to understand and act within it change it, so that we never really face the same challenges twice. There is no finish line; there is no stable end goal. Success means sustainable change.

Portfolio or Toolbox Strategy (for an uncertain world)
No technique or media tool will work in all situations. That is why we need to deploy the whole panoply of tools and techniques and know which combinations are best. This is more art than science.  The key is flexibility. Don’t get too enamored with any one thing or develop strategies around one platform. We don’t want a Twitter strategy. We want a strategy that may use Twitter as one of many tools. Carpenters don’t have “hammer strategies.”  They have building strategies that may involve hammers as one of the many tools in the box.

The human equation: bridging the last three feet
When I worked in public diplomacy, our patron saint was Edward R. Murrow, the famous journalist & the greatest director of the United States Information Agency. He observed that our communication technologies could span the globe, but the real persuasion took place in the last three feet – human contact. He lived in the days before Internet. IMO, internet can (although less easily than people think) create or at least sustain the kinds of engaged relationships Murrow was talking about, but we still must build those relationships. There is a cognitive limit to human engagement. We can only keep in real contact with a couple hundred people, although new technologies may expand that number, it does not reach into the millions or even the tens of thousands. That is why we must set priorities. We just cannot love everyone equally and any strategy designed to reach everybody will satisfy nobody.

There is no garden w/o a gardener  
We cannot outsource or compartmentalize our brains or our engagement. The person the communicating must be involved in decisions involving it. There just is no way around this. If we don’t get involved, we cannot make good decisions. Too often, we just try to hire consultants.  Many consultants are good and are worth the money we pay them, but others are like the guy who borrows your watch and then charges to tell we what time it is. If we outsource our decisions, we essentially outsource our intelligence. Then THEY know what we need to know. It is a lot like hiring a guy to look after your spouse. Even if it seems to make her happier, maybe you are not doing playing your part.

BTW – be very wary of pseudo-experts who claim to “speak for” large groups of people or have some kind of inside knowledge that cannot be replicated or properly explained.  If they cannot explain it to we even in broad strokes, they probably don’t understand it themselves and often they are just hucksters protecting their phony baloney jobs.  We have too many such people hanging around us not to trip over them occasionally.

Leverage existing systems and products
Speaking of gardens, we can have a great garden w/o the walls. There are existing communities where we can participate and after we have participated maybe invite others into our own system to participate with us.  Remember that there are always more smart people outside our group – any group – than within it.

I make an effort to write comments on articles about forestry or fire. I am not usually very original or profound. I can usually use the same things over and over. It may seem banal to me, but for most of the readers it is the first time they saw it.

Give up some control
This goes with the above about using and sharing platforms. If you want to influence others, you have to be prepared to be influenced by them. My way or the highway works only in rare instances and if you demand what you think is perfection; you may soon find that you have that perfection all to yourself, since everybody else has wandered away from you.

Be platform flexible
Again speaking of platform sharing, your message is important, not the medium it is delivered on. You have to be flexible enough to choose the appropriate delivery mechanisms and not fall in love with any one of them. They pass quickly. Just ask Jeeves.

Try lots of things and know that most of what you try will fail, usually publicly, sometimes spectacularly
Revel in it. Embrace it. It is impossible to predict outcomes in the new media. Even if you had perfect knowledge of the current situation, it will change in unexpected and unknowable ways. The best strategy is a statistical one of spreading your bets and then responding to changes as they happen, rather than try to set out with certainty in advance. Those who try nothing, get nothing and it is small consolation that they are never wrong.
So, let me sum up before I move on. Technologies are new; human relations are old. Our “new” methods return to an earlier age when communication was engaged, individualized, personal, two-way and interactive. And the lessons of anthropology (people) trump technology (machines.)

How can we make this work?
Forget about mass marketing & advertising analogies. We are not selling something as simple as a can of soda (soda-pop, pop or Coke depending on your part of the country) and we do not have the resources to engage mass markets.

What I am talking about a mass networking proposition, where we build key relationships with opinion leaders and use leverage to allow/encourage others to reach out, who in turn reach out … We cannot reach THE common man (because he doesn’t exist) and we should be careful not to mistake A common man for THE common man.

There are thousands of books and experts who will point to the example of the obscure person who did something great. They are right; but it is easy to pick Bill Gates out of the crowd AFTER he has been wildly successful.  Then it is easy to explain why he succeeded. Of course, millions of others did similar things and did not become the richest man in the world.

They call this survivor bias. In many ways it is like a lottery. We can be sure that SOMEBODY will win the lottery, but we cannot tell who before the drawing. So, we have to play the odds and we cannot treat everybody who buys a lottery ticket like a potential millionaire.

Humans are social creatures who make decisions in contexts of their culture & relationships
We make a big mistake if we treat people as members of undifferentiated masses. Human societies are lumpy. There are relationships that matter more and some that matter less. And they are in a constant state of flux. People make most of their important decisions in social contexts & in consultation with people they trust. Later they might go to some media sources for confirmation or details. Probably the biggest decision we have ever made was buying a home. Did we just read some literature and make an offer? Or did we ask around and talk to people we trusted? How about our cars?  We like to explain our behavior rationally, but looking relationally will provide more reliable assessments.

Information is almost free, and a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention
We now must find or create social context for our message to get attention.  I always laugh (at least to myself) when I hear someone say that “we got the message out” or “We reached a million people”. I am going to start calling this the barking dog strategy, because like the dogs, we just shout “I’m here; I’m here; I’m here. It doesn’t matter what we say; it is what they hear that counts.  If our message does not say the right things, if it doesn’t fit into their cultural and socials contexts and if it is not delivered in an appropriate way, it doesn’t get through.

“Men do not think that they know a thing until they have grasped the ‘why’ of it.” – Aristotle 
Understand – Everything has rules and patterns
I mentioned Aristotle. Let’s go a bit farther east and think of Lao Tzu. He talked about the need to understand the “Tao”, the patterns and logic in all things. Understanding these things could make the most difficult tasks fluid and easy. There are usually easier and harder ways to do things. Sometimes we CREATE more resistance and make less progress by pushing too hard. We should try to understand before we try to persuade. If people have been doing things for a long time, there is a reason. Figure out what that is and persuasion becomes much easier. And always look for the links and relationships. People may not be aware of what drives their own behavior, but it is often linked to social acceptance, and a person’s outlook often changes more based on the perceived future than on the present reality. Aspirations often motivate more than current reality. Find common aspirations.
Let me digress with a fish story from my time in Iraq.  During the late unpleasantness, Coalition forces had to ban fishing on the Euphrates River to prevent insurgents from using the water as a highway. But fishermen didn’t return after the ban was lifted, even though the fish were plentiful and bigger given the no-fishing respite. We thought of helping them buy new boats, nets, sonar etc. But the reason that they weren’t fishing was much simpler – no ice. The ice factory had shut down and in this hot climate if we cannot put the fish on ice, we cannot move them very far or sell them. We helped the ice house back into operation and the fishing started again.

ENGAGE – influencing our community but also being part of it and willing to be influenced 
This story shows the importance of engagement. We also have to get out – physically – and meet people where they are.

Inform & Interpret – turn information into useful knowledge
Engaging is fun and essential, but if we are not doing what we set out to do if we don’t inform and persuade. Since information is almost free, what do I mean by inform? This means turning raw information into useful knowledge and narratives. Even simple facts must be put into contexts. What if we didn’t have any dresser drawers or hangers in our closet? What if we didn’t have any bookshelves or cabinets and all we stuff was just lying on the floor. It would be hard to find things and many things would not be useful.
Turning information into knowledge is like putting things in some order. This usually means framing and narratives.  People understand stories and until they have a story that makes sense, information just sits there, useless as the shirt we cannot find under the pile of dirty clothes. Analytical history, BTW, as opposed to antiquarianism or chronicles is depends almost entirely on framing. The historian must choose what to put in and what to leave out and that makes the story.

So, if we are talking about actual persuasion, it probably won’t help just to make information available. Providing information was a key to success in the past because accurate information was in very short supply. Today what matters is how that information is put together – the contexts, relationships and the narratives.

As persuaders we need to acknowledge what we know, what salesmen and marketers have long understood and what theories of behavioral economics are now explaining. We are not in the information business. Information and facts are part of our raw material, but our business involves persuasion that is less like a library and more like a negotiation paradigm and rational decision making is not enough to achieve success.

I mentioned framing, but I should say a little more. The frame is how we characterize information or events.  If we want to be pejorative, we can sometimes call it spin, but there is no way we can understand complex reality w/o some kind of frame. Most of our frames are unconscious, but that doesn’t mean they are not powerful or pervasive. Think of the ubiquitous sports frame. Describing something like American football, (i.e. centrally planned, stop and start with specialized plays and players) versus football other places (i.e. fluid, fast breaking with the players less specialized) makes a big difference to how it will be perceived. Or think of how we try to frame our presidents. We want our candidate to be in the frame with Lincoln and Washington, Warren G. Harding and Rutherford B Hayes, not so much.

Build a community & be part of a community
Figure out what we can contribute and do it. Remember people make decisions in the contexts of their relationships. Also make sure that we get something back.

The basis of almost all human relationships is reciprocity. All human societies believe in reciprocity. It has survival value. We want to be able to give to our fellow human and expect that he will do the same when we are in need. When that breaks down, so does civil society. It is probably a good idea to be SEEN to get something in return anyway, since if we don’t others will impute an ulterior motive anyway.

I know that this sounds crassly materialistic, but the reciprocity need not be material. We might help a person in the “pay it forward” mode, assuming that when he gets the opportunity he will help somebody else. The reciprocity might just be gratitude. But when a recipient is left w/o some way to reciprocate, a good person feels disrespected. At first, they are happy to get something for nothings, but they soon learn to despise their benefactor. And maybe they should, since his “generosity” is taking their human dignity.
A simple rule in persuasion is that it is often better to receive than to give. Let the other parties feel that they have discharged their social obligations, maybe even that THEY are the generous ones. We notice that the most popular individuals are rarely those who need or want nothing from others, even if they are very generous. And one of the most valuable gifts we can receive is advice and knowledge. Let others share their culture and experience.

Just a few more short points …

Inclusive & Exclusive 
Communities are inclusive for members and exclusive for others. We attract nobody if we appeal to everybody. We must earn membership in any community worth joining.

Personal – or at least personalized
Editors and marketers have tried for years to homogenize for the mass market. That’s how we got soft white Wonder bread and Budweiser beer. Niche markets – and social media is a series of niche markets – require personality.

Reiterate
Success is continuous learning – an iterative  process- not a plan – and a never-ending journey. As I wrote up top, we never get to the end. We must learn from our failures and our successes and move on. The best we can do is make our own ending worth of the start.

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Summers Vindicated (Again)

Background  

How much do innate differences account for differing outcomes? This is an uncomfortable question and even asking it is dangerous. Larry Summers lost his job at Harvard in part for stating a truth about how the distributions of men and women differ, with the male distribution having a much higher dispersal, i.e. the average is very similar but there are more men at the extreme genius level and more men among the abject failures.

Science has been unable to determine how much of this comes from biology and how much is from cultural reasons. What is not in dispute is that men and women – in the aggregate – make different choices that result in different outcomes. We stipulate that we should counter all forms of overt discrimination. We are talking about what would remain even if we were 100% successful, the differences based on innate characteristics or choices. If we could identify the sources of this, what should we do?

John Rawls, on whose theories are an important underpinning for current progressive ideas on justice, talked about the vail of ignorance. If you did not know what position you would have in society, what sort of society would you choose?

Let’s adapt Rawls’ formulation a little. If you knew nothing about what your position in society would be, would you choose to be male of female in America? Consider the following – the distribution of men and women is different. A male will have a better chance of being among the top individuals in professions, business and science. Good. But there are not many people who reach these heights. The top 1% is … 1%. A male also has a greater chance of being homeless, landing in jail, being a victim of violent crime, dying in an on the job incident and dying in general. Men don’t live as long. Recent research indicates that although females earn less on average than males, women control more than half of all the personal wealth in the U.S. Some of this is likely related to the living longer factor.

Anyway, if you were a non-designated individual in some ethereal plane, and given the choice of gender – with absolutely no other information about whether you would be born rich or poor, privileged or persecuted, lucky or cursed – which would you choose?

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You didn’t build that – the logic of vines

“You didn’t build that” is a accusation sometimes made against the successful and it is correct as far as it goes, which is not too far. But I was thinking about successful strategies in general when I was attacking vines in my woods.

If you count up all the hours I spend working in my woods, probably the most total hours are spent fighting vines. After the first thinning, I will be able to use other means, but now it is up to me. It is fairly labor intensive and I never will win. I don’t mind doing it because it is decent exercise and I get to be in the woods by myself with the quiet to think. And I was thinking about vines.

Vines are semi-parasitic and opportunistic. They tend to show up most where there has been a disruption. They do not bother to build an infrastructure like a tree does. They just climb up and/or lay on top. At best they are mostly harmless, but usually they cause some trouble for the tree, especially if the proliferate.

I can just find and cut the source of the vine and just let them die back and fall off, but I often pull them down. It is the exercise part. Some people in the gym pull on ropes. This is like that. It is interesting to see how far a vine goes. Some of the grape vines can lay across a half dozen trees. When you pull, lots of dead branches and needles fall. It is fun to watch. None are so heavy as to hurt if they hit me. One reason I am fighting the vines now is that they form fire ladders. The vines catch dead wood and needles, forming near perfect kindling to take a fire on the ground into the crowns. This condition also precludes the use of fire as a management tool until after the first thinning or I knock down most of the vines.
Being a vine is not a bad strategy. You can get as high as the trees w/o putting down much of an investment.

There are vine-like strategies in our economy as well as our ecology. Food trucks jump to mind. They don’t spend money on chairs, garbage removal, dining rooms etc. Like the vine, they can impose those costs on others.

New network organizations often follow a vine strategy. Think of Uber or AirBnB. Like vines, they just crawl up existing structures, taking no responsibility to build much of anything beyond the connection. The connection is indeed value added, presuming somebody else builds the frame.

This will be a big challenge to our economy. It is already. It impacts the income differential. It used to be that to build a business you needed to build something physical and hire people. Today a few people can run a massive operation with almost no investment in plant, equipment or people. They are like vines.

Vines are a part of nature and a useful one, as long as there are not too many. When we see whole forests covered in invasive vines, such as Chinese wisteria or kudzu, we know things have gotten out of hand. It is dangerous if we get a kudzu economy.

My photo is from yesterday. I try to walk a more or less straight line into the woods, cutting and pulling down vines as I go. You can see some of the pulled down vines in the picture. I am trying to do a grid pattern and I use market paint to keep track. I am actually making decent progress through persistence if not speed. Not all trees get attacked by vines, but when you find one, you usually find lots and different species. They seem to grow up in places where hardwoods have come in among the pine. Most of the vines do best when they can climb lower branches. The pines provide fewer opportunities at this stage. But I do not think that the hardwoods are causing the problem, at least not entirely. The hardwoods likely have colonized the parts of the woods less dominated by the pines, there is a little more sun and more disturbance, so what brings the hardwoods also brings the vines. It is correlation not causation.

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Longleaf art

Artist webpage
William Bartram
Artist Phillip Juras delivered the lunchtime talk, explaining how an artist can portray reality in a way photos cannot. Well, not reality in the sense of exact reproduction but in the perceptions of the changing nature. He gave an example of fire in the woods. A photo of a fire often shows a strange kind of leaping flame. When we watch it in real life, we see the continuity. An artist can capture what we see in our mind’s eye.

An artist can also paint things that were, might have been or might be. Juras studies photos and journals to get an idea of what the landscapes may have looked like. He relied, for example, on the journals of naturalist William Bartram, who traveled through the southern colonies from 1773-7. (Other stuff was going on around that time, but I guess it didn’t much affect him.) The landscapes he described are generally unavailable today, but an artist can recreate the feeling, or at least an approximation.

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Old World Wisconsin

Old World Wisconsin is an open air museum that shows daily life in Wisconsin immigrant communities in the 19th Century. The buildings were moved from various parts of Wisconsin and reassembled on site. There are reenactments who explain how things were done on the farm or in the forge.

Life was often very hard. Even the well-off had very little space. They worked hard all day and everybody was what we would call “food insecure” almost all the time. But they built America with all that hard work and sacrifice and hard as life was in America, it was better than what they left.

We often think of immigrants as urban. We can picture the neighborhoods of Italians, Irish or Chinese. In the 19th Century, however, most Americans lived on the land and most immigrants went directly to farms. Nature provided the discipline and the assimilation. They brought with them skills that improved life and productivity and despite their apparent isolation became integral parts of the American system. Americans were a practical people. They asked if the newcomers could do something useful. They new people usually could.

Wisconsin was really a land of immigrants in the 19th Century. The majority of the population was German at some points. (Wisconsin is the only state to have had a majority of one foreign nationality.) Other prominent nationalities included Norwegians, Swedes, Finns & Poles. They are represented at Old World Wisconsin.

Consider “assimilation”. To most people that means that the newcomers become like the host nationality. This happens, but it is not a one-way operation. The immigrants from the Old World created a new world Wisconsin, with its own particular culture.

Germans, for example, brought with them their belief in education and rule of law. Crime rates dropped and education improved when Germans moved in. They brought kindergarten (as the name implies) and the American university system was to a large extent build on German models, especially the land-grant universities. Of course, beer, brats and pretzels are among their prominent contributions.

My first picture is one of the German farms. Next is the Norwegian cabin outside and inn. They raised three kids in that little space, three kids and one pig each year, notice the pen. They spent a lot of time outside. Picture #4 is a Polish cottage. It is not build in a Polish stye. It is made of short logs put in sideways and cemented together. It used a lot of wood but was easy to construct. Last picture shows one of the fields. They have animals. You really could not have a living museum w/o farm animals.

They have craftsmen and farm animals at Old World Wisconsin. The blacksmith explained how they made tools and horseshoes. They kept the shop a little dark so that they could see the color of the hot metal to assess the temperature. He uses coking coal, which is hotter and makes less smoke. It does not conduct heat and you can touch the coal next to the fire w/o burning yourself.

The guy in the German section explained how they built houses. They did not use nails for the main construction. Instead they made pegs (as you can see in the photo) and fit the parts together. They started the construction in the woods, picking out the right trees. Home Depot had not yet opened.