The Awkward Pose

The pivotal scene in last season’s Nora Theater Company production of The Women Who Mapped the Stars takes place around a dinner table in the year 1900. Or maybe it’s 1910. Or perhaps 1923.

Whatever.

Four nineteenth century women scientists from Harvard’s Observatory (Williamina Fleming, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, Annie Jump Cannon, and Antonia Maury, though few called them ‘scientist’ in those days) are celebrating the New Year, the new century, and imagining new possibilities for women. Cecilia Payne, a British woman who studied at Cambridge (though could not earn a degree), who’s crossed the Atlantic to pursue a PhD. at Harvard, crashes her mentor’s party. It’s a wonderful scene, layered in scientific irony. Bending time confounds the Victorians who, though deep thinkers, know nothing of Einstein. Yet collecting generations of female scientists in a singular place across time confirms a central fact of Cecilia’s reality: relativity.

Satisfying as that scene is, the purest nugget of wisdom in The Women Who Mapped The Stars occurs later. Cecilia is frustrated by observations and calculations that consistently indicate stars are composed primarily of hydrogen; when everyone ‘knows’ they are primarily metals. She craves to see something fresh, new, to be the first, the ‘discoverer.’ Annie Jump Cannon appears at her side and offers a completely opposite perspective; how every time she looks at the night sky, she feels a connection, a unity, with every other creature enjoying that very same view.

Although Cecilia is most definitely female, her 1920’s garb and short bob, render her masculine beside her nineteenth century forebears. Similarly, her desire to stand out, rather than fit in, conforms to our traditional notions of male versus female behavior.

The charm and depth of The Woman Who Mapped the Stars is how it confounds our ideas of women, of science, of progress without hitting us over the head with it (except maybe in the too long finale). The play’s message—a feminist call to enable curiosity and creativity wherever it’s found—lingers well beyond the play’s end.

I don’t what the future holds for this intriguing piece of theater. Although it was developed at MIT and Harvard and caters to Cambridge’s uber rationality, it warrants a wide audience. If you get a chance to see it, grab the opportunity. Like relativity, what The Women Who Mapped the Stars reveals applies to all of us, everywhere.

This is the sixth in the series, A Soft Landing, which explores how we might achieve a more just, equitable society without violent revolution.

Taxes are a most effective form of behavior modification. Every kind of tax, no matter how seemingly universal, affects our actions. When we tax a product, a service, a piece of land, we shrink its net value by jacking up its opportunity costs, thus driving people to either pay more, find alternatives, or do without.

A simple example. For five bucks and change in tolls, I can drive from Cambridge to Albany in three hours on the Mass Pike. Or, I can drive Route 2 for free. Route 2 is more scenic, but the journey takes over four hours. Which route I follow depends on how much time I have. If my time is worth more than five dollars an hour, I take the Pike, correct? Actually, it’s not so simple. A deeper level analysis changes the calculation. If the weather is bad, the Mass Pike is safer. In addition, Route 2 requires more gas and vehicle wear, so that route actually costs more than the Pike, despite the toll. However, like most humans, I am more sensitive to direct pay costs (a toll) than deferred costs (maintenance), so I don’t properly factor the real cost of my trip. As this simple tax example grows complex, we see that although taxes modify our behavior, the causation is neither linear nor direct.

A more extreme example. The State of Colorado extracts a 39% cumulative tax on recreational marijuana. That’s a lot. If I live in Colorado, I have three options: buy pot legally and pay the tax, purchase it illegally, or forgo getting high. For many, the third choice is not an option, and so Colorado collects an impressive amount of tax on marijuana because the other alternative, the black market, comes with significant downsides.

Similarly, tax credits and deductions modify behavior by reducing opportunity costs, thereby increasing economic activity accordingly. When Massachusetts offered credits for installing residential solar panels, we became a national leader in residential solar, despite our cold and grey weather. When the credits expired, the solar market shrank, as reduced utility bills alone were insufficient incentive for many people to convert.

How government distributes tax revenue also affects behavior. The Mass Pike is essentially a do-loop. Tolls are used to maintain the Pike, which keeps it the premier highway in our state, thus promoting more use. Colorado’s marijuana taxes are more complicated. Some revenue is recycled into drug rehab and prevention programs, but more goes to education, building schools and affordable housing. People who do not participate in the legal marijuana market benefit from its proceeds, which contributes to Coloradan’s overwhelming support of legalized marijuana.

There are so many ways we get taxed, but most of us confront three forms on a regular basis: property tax, sales tax, and income tax. All three are general levies assessed across a broad population, and though there is some inherent behavior modification (tobacco is taxed at a higher rate than milk), we are wary of using taxes to guide behavior. Witness the uproar against New York Mayor Bloomberg’s proposed soda tax.

This fear is wrongheaded. First, because our existing tax structure already encourages specific behaviors. It promotes consuming over saving, driving cars over public transit, purchasing a house over renting. Only when we acknowledge how deeply taxes influence behavior, can we restructure them to promote the kind of long-term objectives that are so difficult for us short-term humans to apply (why we bristle at tolls yet dismiss costs like maintenance and deprecation). We need to move beyond taxing income, property, or goods. We need to tax impact; to use taxes to encourage our better natures.

In America, the so-called land of opportunity, every person ought to be able to do whatever he wants and buy whatever she can afford, so long as it does not impinge directly on others. We cannot abide ‘Thou shalt not…’ However, the more expansive, intrusive, and unsustainable thing a person wants to do or own, the higher he or she should be taxed for the privilege.

A 5,000 square foot house on five acres should be taxed at a much higher rate than a 2,000 square foot house on a two-acre lot, which should be taxed at a higher rate than a 1400 square foot townhouse on a transit line. There might even be certain forms of housing (maybe less than 1200 square foot, net-zero, in urban areas) that are not taxed at all. A second house ought to be taxed at a higher rate than a primary residence. The tax rate on a foreign-owned condo that sells for $4000 per square foot (all too common in New York, and San Francisco; coming soon to Boston) should be taxed higher still.

We can reframe property taxes to reflect the true impact of development. Similar shifts can also occur for sales taxes, maybe even income tax.

Is this a practical idea? Not yet. A country that can’t grapple with carbon cap and trade (a straightforward impact tax) is far from being able to assess people’s private consumption in a balanced manner. It will be fractious, it will be complicated, but if we decide that we want our taxes to do more than fund our government, they can also reflect our values, promote long-term interests, and extend our habitation on this planet.

On the day after Thanksgiving, a non-shopper like me has time on his hands. I stumbled upon a satisfying Big Box alternative: the F.A.T. Chain Reaction (F.A.T. = Friday After Thanksgiving).

For 21 years, the MIT Museum has sponsored a team-build chain reaction event, though I’d never heard of it until last week, when an invite to volunteer showed up in my inbox. As always, when I say ‘yes’ to something, I get more out of it than I anticipate. In this case, donating a wintry afternoon rewarded me with an inspiring snapshot of humanity.

Here’s how F.A.T. Chain Reaction works. Teams of people—some families, some clubs, some ad hoc geeks—sign up to design and build a segment of a chain reaction. Each team gets one folding tabletop, upon which to construct something that will move a force (a tug of string) from one end of their table to the other end, and impart an equal force onto a string connected to the next table. The force can be transmitted by string: but also ping-pong ball, metal washer, marble, domino, magnetic motor, whatever.

On Friday morning, teams gather and assemble their gizmos on tables lined up in MIT’s field house. The public begins to arrive at one o’clock. They check out the entries while Arthur Ganson, a kinetic sculptor, interviews each team and projects their creations on large screens. The crowd grows. By 3:30 p.m. over 1500 people cram the bleachers and spill out onto the floor. Mr. Ganson makes everyone feel welcome. “These constructions illustrate principles of physics. Sometimes, they may need an extra push, or an external hand. These other forces of spirit are welcome.” A poetic way of saying, don’t sweat a glitch.

The countdown. The initial pull. The chain reaction begins. Two nimble guys with microphones trace the cacophony each contraption makes; two cameramen project the progress of the force on monumental screens. The crowd gasps at each dramatic explosion. We can’t help but pick favorites when three plush animals mounted on photovoltaics teeter along parallel labyrinths, jockeying for the lead until one finally reaches the far end of the table and releases its string. Further on, a ball tethered to the end of a string mounted on a pole winds into a spiral. It unwinds. We can see that the ball must knock against a wooden spoon in order to trigger a row of dominoes. The string winds back upon itself. Unwinds again. Will the ball hit the spoon? A third spin tight to the pole. We hold our breath. The third unspooling. The ball hitting the spoon seems to be the most pressing concern in the world. It just misses. The string spools onto the pole yet again. Unwinds. Voila! The ball nudges the spoon, the spoon pivots against a domino, dominoes fall until the final one triggers the string. The chain continues.

The force moves through 27 constructions, hundreds of pulleys, wheels, labyrinths, musical instruments, and cannons. For me, F.A.T. Chain Reaction is an ideal metaphor for our world: an exercise in collaboration as well as trust. Each group believes in their own concoction, and also harbors faith that their fellow engineers will transmit the force across their respective tables.

Everybody works hard; everybody revels in each other’s success. When an external hand is required, it represents a complementary force rather than a failure. The resulting chain reaction is greater than any constituent part.

Twenty-two minutes and four seconds after it starts, the chain reaction runs its course. The crowd applauds. The tinkerers pack up. Other volunteers and I dismantle their tables. There are no trophies, no losers; just bright-eyed kids dissembling their contraptions, already conceiving ideas for how they will make them better—next year.

This is the fifth in the series, A Soft Landing, which explores how we might achieve a more just, equitable society without violent revolution.

A new Constitution, discussed in the last three essays of ‘A Soft Landing,’ is insufficient alone to ensure a peaceful transition to a more equitable society. We will need tidal change in our economic, social, political, and educational perspectives as well. Perhaps the most challenging shift will be dialing back our fixation on economic growth to embrace economic balance. The American mantra of ‘economic growth’ is universal. It transcends ideology, party, race, and class. It even transcends our boundaries: the entire world aspires to accelerated consumption. We proclaim that economic growth is essential to our wellbeing. On the contrary, it hastens our doom.

For the first ten thousand years or so of human existence, as we evolved from hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists, economic activity was minimal; our needs were basic and we provided them for ourselves. Great civilizations rose and fell based on their military/security apparatus more than their facility in production or trade. The vast majority of people built their own houses, wove their own clothes, and grew their own food.

Then, a few hundred years ago, capitalism sparked. Sturdier ships, steam engines, emerging cities, division of labor, financial markets, fossil fuels, mass production, military industrial complex, hyper-specialization, increased affluence. Each economic advance created new problems: pubic health crises, mass immigration, income inequality. Yet, for most of us, life improved. Sustained economic growth led to longer, healthier lives.

But that trajectory is stalling. Escalating consumption, far beyond adequate food, shelter, and security, delivers diminishing satisfaction. So much stuff enables autonomy, and weakens our human connections. The collateral damage of our excess—accelerating climate change and environmental degradation—creates new health hazards and ecological imbalance that undermine the very foundation of human existence.

Economic activity is fueled by the incentives we supply, and those incentives yield specific consequences. When cheap land and gasoline promote building 3,000 square foot houses on two-acre lots, the consequences are strained water supplies, sprawl development, and increased carbon emissions. If our incentives promote 1400 square foot net-zero townhouses on public transit lines, the global consequences are more benign.

In order to evolve from a society premised on economic growth to one centered on economic balance, we must shift incentives to better achieve sustainable consequences. This will entail revising our social safety net, our tax strategies, and our regulatory structure (to be addressed in later posts). But there’s one fundamental shift in economic thought that underlies all other changes. We need to start assessing real cost to the natural resources we use.

All economic activity includes three principle attributes: raw materials, human manipulation, and capital. When we build a car, we determine the cost of the steel, glass, and vinyl based on the cost of extraction; design, fabrication and assembly are manipulation costs, and capital keeps everything greased. What we don’t do, at present, is ascribe a value to the actual materials themselves. As a result, we underestimate the consequences of everything we take from the earth. Ore, sand, and oil are plentiful, but they are not infinite. When we remove them, we tinker with the natural order. We create repercussions among fellow creatures and in our environment that are woefully underacccounted in our current economy. Acknowledging and ascribing value to every component of our planet, in place, will help offset the pollution, erosion, and destruction we create when we extract materials. It will incentivize us to be more prudent in how we use them.

How we will do this will be difficult, and imperfect. But as a basic first step toward a world in economic balance, we need to start.