I attended a welcome session and mediation at a Buddhist center in Cambridge the other night.
There was so much not to think about.
The third in a series of posts inspired by What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets by Michael J. Sandel.
When Larry Summers was the President of Harvard, one day he opened Morning Prayer at Memorial Chapel with a few words on the theme of what “economics can contribute to thinking about moral questions.” In his talk he weighed economics’ predisposition to measure benefits assigned to individuals, and its assumption that the aggregate good is the sum of each individual’s good. He also addressed the conundrum of whether it is worthwhile to boycott goods produced in developing world sweatshops, when sweatshop work may provide the best economic opportunity for local workers. He diffused those who criticize the selfish, greedy nature of markets by saying, “We all have only so much altruism in us. Economists like me think of altruism as a valuable and rare good that needs conserving.”
Altruism is not blood. Blood flows through us but we must mete it out carefully since it can only be incrementally replenished. Altruism is in our blood. Altruism is a way of thinking about the world, and our place in it. It is an activity that nourishes us in a particular way; it satisfies and fulfills us but there is no limit to how much of it we can offer.
We are impoverished when a man of Larry Summer’s intellect and influence (Chief Economist at the World Bank (1990-1992), Secretary of the Treasury (under Bill Clinton 1999 – 2001), President of Harvard University (2001-2006), and Director of the National Economic Council (under Barack Obama 2009-2010)) has such a wrong-headed view of altruism and dismisses altruism’s possibilities. Money is important in this world, but it is not the only important thing in this world. The sooner that we put money is more reasoned perspective, the sooner we can make progress in the hard work of making this world a more just and equitable place for all.
Larry Summers
The second in a series of posts inspired by What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets by Michael J. Sandel.
Ultimately there are just two economic camps. Some believe in a finite economic pie whereby I can only capture a greater share if my neighbor’s shrinks. Others believe in an expanding pie. They understand that my neighbor and I can both have healthy slices, that our portions can each grow, and that, miraculously, our portions will grow even faster when they are interrelated.
Evidence of the finite economic pie exists in every specific economic transaction. If a job is available and my neighbor gets it, than I don’t. When Boston limits the number of taxi medallions (currently valued at $625,000 each), the high cost of entry makes taxis scarce and expensive. If charter schools siphon per student allocations from public schools, the public schools have less money. When China produces quality goods at lower cost we lose that manufacturing. The finite economic pie creates a world of winners and losers. It motivates winners to protect their advantages, hence unions, licensing, tariffs, and lobbyists; while it disenfranchises the losers from the system, hence apathy, resentment, and revolution.
However, the finite pie theory offers a restrictive view of greater economic opportunity. Our evolution from a local agrarian to regional industrialized to global information-based economy is premised on an ever-expanding economic pie. In the ideal, the expanding pie can offer a job to me and my neighbor; it can stimulate demand to accommodate more taxi drivers, it welcomes schools best suited to each student’s need, and it offsets outsourced manufacturing with higher-level economic prospects at home. An expanding pie point of view recognizes the potential for future growth, but is less tangible in the here and now.
My own career is a perfect example of how an expanding economic pie works over time. I went to graduate school in architecture. At the time all architecture schools had similar curricula and students entered the job market with basic building design skills. Early in my career I worked on schools, houses, offices, even shopping centers. Then I landed a job designing a hospital and found a keen fit between my skills and the challenges of creating healthcare facilities. Within a few years I was an expert in healthcare, at least according to our marketing materials. For years I worked in every aspect of hospital design and construction but around age 50 I started to focus only on clinical planning – working with nurses and doctors to organize the building to meet their clinical needs. In the last few years, as healthcare clients become more committed to cost containment and aligning their facilities with optimal patient care, I have become a Lean process facilitator; I write papers and speak at conferences about how to integrate Lean process improvement into the healthcare environments.
Thirty-five years after I joined my profession I do work that did not exist when I began. Healthcare has become more complex, healthcare facilities have become more specialized, and the teams that create these spaces have become both larger and more expert at the multiple factors that must be considered. The pie required to create healthcare facilities grew larger, the teams expanded to include more specialized skills, I benefited, and I like to think that my clients did as well. Today, a graduate student in architecture can choose from among many specialized programs, including healthcare design. They can enter the job market with more specific skills than I possessed at that age.
The other advantage of an expanding economic pie over a fixed one is the ability to accommodate the inevitable shifts that occur as economic needs change. When computers entered the work place reports of people being replaced by machines were exaggerated, yet it happens and will continue to happen. Thanks to EZ Pass we have fewer toll takers; thanks to ATM’s we have fewer bank tellers. In general, as each rudimentary task is automated what takes its place are a collection of higher skilled jobs, designing and maintaining these systems that require continuing education and training. Just as I needed to gain credentials to transition from draftsman to Lean facilitator, an expanding economic pie almost always requires expanded skills.
One of my biggest frustrations over the past decades has been the automobile industry’s lethargic (reactionary?) response to creating more energy efficient transportation. They have taken a ‘fixed pie’ approach to making cars more efficient, which has led to the US automakers losing ground to their overseas competitors. Part of the problem for this is that expanding pie economics requires a broad vision and coordinated action that is at odds with American business concepts. Our reliance on individual initiative and free enterprise can lose out against countries with an industrial policy geared towards an expanded economic pie.
This leads us, as in so many economic discussions, to comparing the United States and China. China’s hyper-centralized capitalism can direct their economic output and tap into the needs of an expanding pie while we remain the best place on earth for individuals to develop their own ideas and generate individual economic reward. A pie bound by a specific circumference would impoverish the earth’s hungry, growing population. A pie expanding at sonic speed would be like a super nova energized beyond control. Somewhere between them lies an economic sweet spot.
I recently read Michael J. Sandel’s What Money Can’t Buy: the Moral Limits of Markets. The book stirred up ideas that kept branching and expanding and inspired a series of blog essays.
The economic underpinnings of the United States have ceased to serve the best interest of the people. We could attribute this to nineteenth century robber barons exploiting workers, or the failure of early twentieth century progressives to alter profit driven capitalism, or the rise of the military-industrial complex, or our reluctance to grapple with the interdependencies of the global economy. But I prefer to lay the blame on James Carville. As manager of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign against George Bush, Carville coined the phrase, “The economy, stupid”. The slogan, usually paraphrased “It’s the economy, stupid”, did three things simultaneously. First, it got Clinton elected. Second, it cemented the idea that economic issues trump all others in national elections. Third, it bestowed autonomy and power to our economic system beyond the ability of any ordinary individual to influence.
Prepositions matter. ‘Our’ economy is something we own, we have a stake in it; perhaps we can affect it. ‘Their’ economy is other; it differentiates and possibly creates barriers among people or countries. ‘An’ economy is neutral, there is no value assigned to its merit. But ‘The’ economy is established, fixed, authoritative and unalterable. Nouns preceded by the preposition ‘the’ are rendered important, even majestic. We don’t pay tribute to a queen; we honor the queen. And every one of the three billion males on earth knows the difference between a man and being ‘the man’.
The human propensity to personify is universal; we are reassured by symmetry and human proportion. But when we personify abstract concepts, bestow human attributes upon them and accord them human rights, we yield some of our own. Corporations were created as individuals of business in order to pool risk and resources for a more efficient good. But when corporations received the right of free speech (thanks to the Supreme Court ruling in Citizen’s United), actual humans lost some of our own voice. Similarly, when we proclaim our web of economic activity to be ‘the economy’ it is no longer something that serves us, it is something we serve. When we elevate the economy to a position of immutable power, when we attribute it the ability to play king maker in a presidential election, when we toil under its burden, we are diminished in return.
These days we call our economy the consumer economy since consumer spending is the largest component of economic stimulus. Consumer spending is now 71% of GDP, up from 61% a generation ago. The consumer economy used to be great; it provided stuff we needed. Then marketers perfected the pathways to human desire and the economy moved from providing for our needs to satisfying our wants. By the time George Bush II recommended shopping as the appropriate patriotic response to the Iraq war, consumption had become a civic duty. Now the consumer economy is the noose around our neck. We are told over and over that the only route to prosperity is through buying more stuff.
For most of us, the only certainty in a consumer economy is the certainty of debt. Debt is not bad in itself; it an essential lubricant to a flourishing industrialized economy. Debt allows people with ideas and capability to execute their vision, ultimately to create wealth. But just as corporations have been given too large a voice in our world, debt has become a burden that we serve rather than a tool that serves us. Debt is no longer something we undertake in exchange for creating wealth over time, it is the mechanism by which we survive from month to month. Most of us are in debt, have been since we were young, and will be for the rest of our lives. Debt is the tether that binds us to the consumer economy and traps us under its power.
I propose we abolish ‘the’ economy. Since I am no revolutionary and never want to topple all the good that is the United States, I suggest we start small. First, wash away the proposition ‘the’. When economic activity aligns with our interests, it is our economy, when it diverges from our interests, it is their economy, a signal that we ought to circumvent it, and ultimately change it. When debt is going to help start a worthwhile business, buy a house or educate a child, go for it. But when a dinner out or new TV will tether us to constant payments, think twice. Don’t bow to marketing and political messages that push us to consume. Don’t revere the economy imposed by others. Figure out what constitutes your economy and cumulatively let’s make it our economy, an economy that works for everyone.
There is no place more beautiful than Cape Cod on a clear summer day, except perhaps that same crooked peninsula as day wanes and evenings jeweled light shimmers across the bay.
This weekend was my first significant cycling on Cape Cod – 115 miles out on Sunday from Cambridge to Eastham to visit my friends Mike and Jan, and then 95 miles back today. I got lost several times going, which extended my distance there, and hopped on the T from Braintree to Harvard on the way home to avoid riding at night.
Cape Cod’s beauty, like so much of New England, is rooted in the satisfying arrangement of ordinary elements – the sea against the dune, the wind animating the grass, the elegant proportion of a 6 over 6 window on a cedar clad saltbox. It is the perfect environment for cycling – a landscape well scaled for ten miles per hour. I spent most of my pedaling time on Route 6A, where the perpetual quaintness of period structures, billowing tress and vibrant day lilies is occasionally blown apart by intermittent yet expansive view across a marsh to distant dunes.
My trip was triggered by my annual visit to a Cape Cod League baseball game in Orleans, though we never got there. Dinner talk lingered and Mike offered to show me around Eastham during the hour the sun dropped into nightfall. He is a lively tour guide, versed in the history, politics, and characters of a small town set in this precarious strip between ocean and bay.
Although Eastham includes land with roads, houses, and such, it is the water that commands attention, or rather all the ways in which the water meets the land. Bay beaches have tall bluffs, salt ponds have scruffy edges, fresh ponds offer gentle sand for youngsters, marshes appear painterly and benign until you get caught by one racing out with the tide, while the ocean is an endless stretch of serenity on a quiet summer evening.
I don’t visit the Cape often, but I go there in my head when I need images of repose. This weekend I stocked up on year’s worth of serenity.
Fort Hill Eastham, MA
Nearly forty years ago, as a Bachelor of Civil Engineering seeking a 180-degree break from academia before pursuing graduate school, I applied to ACTION, the 1970’s-era aggregation of government service efforts that included the Peace Corps, VISTA, and a smattering of other programs. I received multiple prospectuses, mostly variations of building bridges in Afghanistan. I contacted my ACTION rep and apologized that I was not interested in going to another country; I wanted to serve in the United States. I didn’t tell her I was afraid to go abroad. I didn’t tell her I feared being the Ugly American, that I worried about struggling with a foreign language and had zero confidence in my ability to actually design and build a bridge. ACTION placed me in Levelland, Texas, about as psychically far from Cambridge as a person can go and still remain in the United States. I had a remarkable, transformative year. I believe I touched a few lives and I appreciated all those who touched mine. When graduate school beckoned, I was fresh for the call.
Today my daughter leaves for the Peace Corps. She suffers none of the doubt I did at her age. She has already traveled to more than twice as many countries than me, has a more nuanced view of the globe than ‘Ugly American’ can describe, is facile with languages, and when confronted with the challenge of traversing a river, no lack of confidence will keep her on the near bank. Besides, Abby has a keen sense of surpassing her parents, and the most elementary math demonstrates that Cambodia is far beyond Texas.
Abby leaving fills me with wistful pride. My gut aches hollow when I think of my little girl 8,700 miles from home, but I fill that void with the satisfaction that she is doing what she wants, and her pursuit is grounded in so much good. All parents pray that our children will avoid harm, we worry over the dangers of violence and drugs and indifference that surround us; we are consoled when they mature into active participants in the world. But when they surpass simply doing alright and engage in such a positive way, we wallow in their reflected glow. My pleasure in seeing Abby follow such a noble dream blunts how wretchedly I will miss her.
Joining the Peace Corps is a profound act of hope trumping reality. The United States has over 1.4 million military troops on active duty, many of them introducing democracy to our neighbors with flack jackets, bombs, and bayonets. A mere 8,000 Peace Corps volunteers represent our nation in 139 countries armed with nothing more than a willingness to live among others, learn their language, understand their customs, and share the seeds of our bounty with those interested in listening. It is a Ghandian approach to changing the world; one that seems unlikely to succeed. But history shows time and again that every attempt to create lasting peace through coercion fails, so what else is really left but an attempt to understand each other at the individual level.
The hope of the Peace Corps is that small interventions, face to face across a table, a classroom, or a rice paddy, can produce meaningful and lasting results. But the Peace Corps also believes in mash-ups; in throwing together people of divergent cultures, religions, and ways of thinking. The pairing may produce friction, or incremental improvement, or the cross-culture mix might just foment disruptive change.
In a world of seven billion people, gigantic corporations, environmental destruction, and social disorder that leaks across national boundaries it is easy, almost rational, for a single person to survey the situation and turn away from the chaos. The odds of making an impact are so small. But the Peace Corps, and Abby, teach us that the odds are still greater than zero.
As Abby flies west to the East, she bestows upon all of us left behind hope in a world that still offers the opportunity for one person to make a unique imprint. She brings to a Cambodian community the hope that one young woman cares enough to give them two years of her energy and talent. And she herself brims with the hope that thrives on constructive action. Although I place good odds that Abby will effect useful change in whatever she encounters in Cambodia, I am certain that whatever benefits she gives to that country will be returned to her ten-fold. In offering so much of herself, Abby is sure to receive knowledge, understanding, and compassion beyond measure; gifts that will shape her entire life.
Being late the party, what can I say about my first trip to Costco that has not already been said? The bargains are good, the quantities obscene, and the clientele value-driven. It’s only been a few years since I ventured into my first Wal-Mart, and Costco does not disappoint in taking that low price shopping experience to a higher, more frantic plane.
I was lured into wholesale paradise by the need to supply a party for 100+ people to celebrate my daughter before she heads off to the Peace Corps. She had a detailed list of how many pounds of strawberries, half gallons of salsa, towers of plastic cups, dozens of chicken wings and cartons of frozen hamburgers we would need. The experience aligned with my expectations, but greatly exceeded them. The warehouse atmosphere was charged; the palette stacks ominous, the sample ladies pushing nibbles at intersections ubiquitous. Still, Costco seemed to amplify my preconceptions rather than change them until I realized something I had not anticipated. Shopping at Costco is great exercise.
First, there is the walking. Costco has over a mile of aisles and my calves got a good stretch as we explored every one. Second are the carts; double size versions of their supermarket cousins, my shoulders pulsed like Rocky Balboa as I pushed pounds of frozen meat. Towards the end of our visit, when we left our carts in a central spot to scatter and fetch those final items we missed on our first pass, I found myself curling cartons of 24 count power bars. I got a lower back workout lifting all the items to check-out and then replacing them to our baskets on the far side of the cash. The only thing that got lighter was my wallet. We motored our goods, and our quads, to the car and chest pressed them into the trunk. When that was full, we stretched our torsos stuffing things into the back seat as well. Back home my gluts burned trudging quarts of condiments up the stairs.
Aside from the illusion that we are saving money buying more food than we possibly need to eat, Costco might just be the healthiest shopping experience in America.
My new gym?
Today I hit a milestone – 1000 Bikram yoga classes. The date corresponded with completing exactly four years of practice, an average of 250 classes per year. I wasn’t counting until one day the owner Jill told me I was on class 200; since then I have made calendar ticks to mark my progress.
I would like to say that my 1000th class was unique, but it really wasn’t; we were an easy going Sunday crowd with many familiar faces and a good balance of heat and effort. I managed what I consider a ‘complete’ class’ in that I held every posture, though I am still short of full expression in many poses. Hitting the four digit number did not miraculously stretch my body to new depths.
In a world of seven billion people, individual achievements are constantly eclipsed. At the nearby Andover studio, an elderly woman, Elaine Brody, recently completed 1000 classes in 1000 days! On her milestone day a new practitioner joined the class, to whom Ellen reportedly said, I wish I were you. I can understand what she meant; after 1000 classes the euphoria of the new is gone. I still love Bikram and acknowledge its benefits, but that feeling of walking on a cloud after class, the marionette looseness of my joints, and the incredible thrill of balancing on one perfectly still leg are now an integral part of my regular being. The exhilaration is diminished.
Fortunately, the satisfaction, health, and well-being remain.
In 1977 I spent beautiful spring afternoons in an overheated classroom with a view of a trash compactor in MIT’s nondescript Building 12 snoozing through Urban Sociology, the last of my Humanities requirements and perhaps the most boring course ever conceived. I learned only two things in that class. First, that I dislike social science, which possesses neither the elegant rigor of pure science nor humanities’ grace. Second, that ’revolution cannot occur in a country where 70% of the people are content’, as the professor quoted one fine day. Apparently, at least 70% of Americans in 1977 were satisfied with their lives and I must have been one of them. Secure that we would not plummet into revolution any time soon, I dozed through the remainder of the semester.
That comforting statistic helped me to sleep soundly for over thirty years. Then, around the time my ironic friend Larry informed me that, ‘70% of all statistics are true’, I started having doubts. I realized that progress is not always forward. After all, the world turned retrograde for hundreds of years during the Dark Ages, the Belle Époque ended with the most gruesome war to end all wars (until the next one), and Afghanistan circa 1950 was a progressive country while Afghanistan circa 2013 is a tragedy. Could it be possible that despite all of our resources, wealth, and opportunity the United States could devolve into a country ripe for revolution? Could the 1980’s mantra Greed is Good subvert into the 2020 mantra that Greed destroys US?
This morning I watched Wealth Inequality in America, a six minute video that left me reeling. Not only are less than 70% of Americans content, significantly more than 70% of Americans are loosing their race on the economic treadmill while a tiny proportion of our citizens grow wealthy beyond imagining: http://economy.money.cnn.com/2013/03/08/wealth-video/. Watching the video unspool our wealth inequality in six minutes is like watching an acorn balloon into a towering oak through time lapse photography, except that this seed could germinate revolution.
We Americans love our revolution, but the United States is not a place prone to upheaval. In the last two hundred years Mexico has had five revolutions; Haiti has had too many to count. We staged our single battle against Mother England, won, and established a stable and relatively equitable government. As revolutions go, ours was an outlier. Rebels are rarely wealthier than their oppressor, though eighteenth century Americans were better off than their English cousins. Revolutionaries are usually poor, but even more often revolution is triggered not by poverty per se, but discontent fomented by an inequitable economic pie.
Back in 1977, when 70% of Americans were content, revolution was unthinkable. But how low does that percentage have to drop before bellyaching turns into action, civil disobedience, and insurrection? I am not aware of a metric that maps the spiral towards revolution, but I discovered the Gini coefficient, a measure of income equity, which has a likely correlation. Gini coefficients range from 0.00 (perfect equity) to 1.00 (total inequity). The CIA tracks every nation’s Gini coefficient because countries with high Gini’s are more prone to civil unrest, totalitarian regimes or both. In the 2009 Gini view of the world, the map is blush in Scandinavia, where the Gini is as low as 0.25, it grows beige across Europe, Canada and India, tan across Russia, orange for the United States, Mexico, and China, where our Gini is about 0.45, red for Brazil, and Congo, maroon for Columbia, Bolivia and Haiti, and blood red for South Africa, whose Gini of 0.70 is the highest in the world.
Gini is not a measure of wealth; it is a measure of fair. And the United States has colored itself solidly among the nations of the world whose income is distributed unfairly, the countries most prone to either iron-clad rule or revolution.
I get numb by the numbers broadcast about national debt, bailouts, and the Gross National Product. But the simple calculation of dividing the $54 trillion United States GNP by the 315 million people who live here illustrates that each citizen’s proportionate share of our country’s wealth is $170,000. Few of us have that much income, but because the one percenters have so much more flowing their way, the vast majority of us have less.
The United States will not have a revolution soon; it is not among our current strategies for affecting change. But if we keep moving in the direction we are, with increasing inequality and increasing discontent, our culturally accepted methods of influencing government and economic policy will fail, and the people who experience inequality – which is virtually all of us – will turn to other means to achieve equity. I hope it does not come to that. Let’s use our democratic processes to translate the will of the people rather than the will of lobbyists or corporations, to make the United States a land of greater equality rather than a land of greater instability. We are blessed to be so rich. Let us use that blessing to become more just, compassionate, and fair.
The Gini Index for 2009
The ENR McGraw-Hill 2013 Best Global Projects Awards was well organized, like most social events orchestrated by engineers. Dinner prompt at 6:30; alphabetically ordered project descriptions at 7:30. Winning teams paraded to the platform in business suits; there was only a smattering of women. ENR snapped a formal photograph, followed by the random click of iPhones, general applause and on to the next winner. Dessert served before 8:30, everything finished by 9:00 pm.
I believe I smiled direct at the camera for the main photo but somehow I could not maintain that attention, so what appeared on Len Gengel’s iPhone was this peculiar image of me right angling into space. Back at our table, we all had a good laugh at my clueless expression, but I realized it was not something new. The photo captures the very same person gaping away from the view finder – wondering what in tarnation I am supposed to be doing – that inhabits the earliest photo of me at age 22 months. The more things change, the more the stay the same.
Paul E. Fallon, looking away at ENR McGraw-Hill Awards, 2013
Paul E. Fallon, looking away at Christmas, 1956
The Awkward Pose 