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Witness the Freest Economy: the Internet

2009-10-21T18:57:00.000-07:00

by Dan O'Connor
(http://mises.org/story/3766)

[An MP3 audio file of this article, read by Floy Lilley, is available for download.]

"How selfish so ever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it."
– Adam Smith

One of the few places in the world not yet plagued by government intervention is the internet. Although some governments in certain parts of the world have infiltrated the activities of the internet to varying degrees, it remains the closest thing to a purely free economy that we can identify in the modern world.

On the internet, the beautiful aspects of human nature manifest themselves, and we see individuals and companies maximizing their talents and resources for reasons of profit, pleasure, altruism, and mere progress in itself. Given that the government neither inhibits the activities of the internet nor props up or favors any particular actors or individuals, perhaps we are witnessing the closest thing to a free market that man has ever witnessed.

Although many consider the America of the 19th century to be the closest thing to a purely free market, in fact, congressmen constantly acted in favor of certain individuals, leading in some cases to monopolistic advantages. Ironically, at the end of the century the government intervened in an attempt to break up monopolies.

So here we are in a worldwide web that connects people from all parts of the world, allowing them to exchange whatever they want with one another. It is the essence of a free market: voluntary exchange. There is no use of force or coercion on the internet. No higher authority effectively controls or dictates the way that we spend our time online or the activities that we partake in. Although some legal obstacles inhibit people from accessing certain sites and materials, given the lack of regulation or enforcement by a higher authority, users are easily able to circumvent these restrictions and achieve the things that they want.

As it evolves, we begin to witness the endless potential that exists within the internet and the unquantifiable benefits it provides to society. Although the internet currently represents freedom from both a civil and a social perspective, I shall examine it from an economic perspective.

Arguably, the human race has seen more progress and innovation through the use of the internet in the past 20 years than through the use of any innovation known in the history of mankind. As we reflect back over the last 20 years, we see thousands of amazing success stories. We see entrepreneurs from all different economic backgrounds and classes making full use of their skills, ideas, and passions. We read about success stories such as Facebook and Google, where very young people have been able to generate massive wealth while providing a cheap, convenient, and valuable new tool for everyone across the globe to enjoy. This is the beauty of a system free from government intervention.

In fact, it's such a free market that government doesn't even effectively enforce intellectual property and copyright protection. And what is the result? We see entrepreneurs from other countries imitating successful online programs with very little detriment to the originators. In fact, Chinese entrepreneurs have created very similar programs to both Google and Facebook. As a result, all of these companies have been able to generate profits while their users still enjoy the programs at no cost.

"Very young people have been able to generate massive wealth while providing a cheap, convenient, and valuable new tool for everyone across the globe to enjoy."

In turn, their Chinese competitors bring increased competition to both Google and Facebook, creating incentives for them to improve their own products and continue to innovate. This example closely resembles capitalist Americans emulating European technology in the 19th century or Japanese entrepreneurs emulating Western technology during the process of their development.

Do patent protection laws truly promote greater and faster innovation? Some companies and individuals are able to avert these government-imposed rigidities online. And the success of this less-inhibited marketplace demonstrates the lack of need for patent protection laws.

If patent-protection laws, taxes, and legal-tender laws were completely eliminated from the internet, we would then see a purely free market. Although this is not foreseeable given the world's current political system, we can still continue to enjoy the advantages of this relatively unfettered aspect of modern society.

Technological advancements benefit society for many obvious reasons. In an unfettered marketplace, innovation reduces costs for businesses and hence prices for consumers. For example, in the past, some families spent several hundred dollars every few years just to update their encyclopedia set, even though all of the content in these encyclopedias was publicly accessible; the encyclopedia companies merely compiled the information into a more concise format.

Although these companies provided a very valuable product to society, there is now a decreased need for physical encyclopedias due to the increase of information available on the internet. Let us hope the Obama administration does not attempt to "bailout" Britannica anytime soon.

We begin to see so many things being offered on the internet not only for very cheap prices, but for free. Information that used to cost individuals and companies exorbitant fees can now be found on the internet freely, thus allowing individuals and companies to spend that money elsewhere, improving their own operations.

Before the internet took off in the 1990s, businesses across the United States spent billions of dollars every year on information. Nowadays, companies save millions of dollars per year on research, data, and inventory, which can now be spent on other areas of the business, such as rewarding employees with higher bonuses or purchasing new facilities and advanced equipment. The economy as a whole is operating more efficiently, as overall costs and expenditures have gone down.

"Let us hope the Obama administration does not attempt to "bailout" Britannica anytime soon."

Often the most neglected benefit of technology for society is decreased prices. During and after the time of the Industrial Revolution in the United States, we witnessed a myriad of price reductions across most industries. As prices dropped and the cost of living decreased, individuals and entrepreneurs were encouraged to identify other niches throughout the market and introduce new technologies.

Unfortunately, much of modern society has a hard time grasping the benefit of price decreases, while central banks throughout the world continue to print money, which leads to price increases.

In modern times, we can purchase almost any sort of product via the internet and can access almost any information that we desire. When we consider the vast number of people and companies throughout society that earn profits by merely providing information, we can only imagine the enormous costs that can be saved as a result of more accessible and cheaper (often free) information now available to all of society online. What is even more encouraging is that we see the providers of this information doing so for reasons other than profit — a reflection of man's pursuit of passion and his innate sense of compassion.

Unfortunately, as has always been the case, the internet and its infinite value to society is threatened by a ubiquitous force: government. As we've seen throughout history, when companies become threatened by competitors, they do whatever is possible to prevent or squash competition — often through the use of government force.

In the 1930s, unions used various means for lobbying in DC in an attempt to introduce a minimum wage law, which ultimately passed. Smaller companies who could not afford to pay these increased wages were soon forced out of business.

Sure enough, various actors in DC are now lobbying to regulate the internet. In April 2009, AP began to publicize a widespread attack on Google — arguably the most successful company and widely enjoyed technology of the past 10 years. As more and more information-providing companies see their revenues dwindle as a result of better and more convenient information being provided by competitors on the internet, we can be certain that a greater number of companies will congregate in DC to propose greater regulation.

$15 $14

Let us hope our government is stern enough to defend the Constitution as it was written with the intent of dealing with this type of dilemma. The first amendment, freedom of the press, was most strongly emphasized by Thomas Jefferson. He stated, "Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe."

The internet is a model of the free market. It represents all of the aspects of capitalism that we cannot witness in our current offline world due to the high level of government intervention that pervades our society. Online, we see widespread competition, low barriers to entry, voluntary exchange, rapid technological advancements, decreased prices, and a flowering of creativity.
Dan O'Connor has lived in Asia since early 2004. Send him mail. See Dan O'Connor's article archives.

Friday Flashback: Kate Bush & David Gilmour - "Running Up That Hill"

2009-10-15T22:24:00.000-07:00

Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife

2009-10-15T22:19:00.000-07:00

Listen to Podcast

From the depths of history, to the classroom, to the stage, how do we understand the enduring influence of the story of Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl? Francine Prose, adoring fan and author of Reading Like a Writer will join us to discuss the book, the life, and the afterlife.

Guest
Francine Prose, author of Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife

Natural Food Fight: Whole Foods and Health Care

2009-10-15T21:35:00.000-07:00

Friday Flashback: Danzig - "Mother"

2009-10-09T18:52:00.001-07:00

Bastiat and the Law - Sheldon Richman

2009-10-09T18:49:00.000-07:00

School Sucks Podcasts: Episode 1 - Introduction to School Sucks Podcast

2009-10-09T18:40:00.000-07:00

(http://schoolsucks.podomatic.com/)
Listen to Podcast
Listen to Entire Series
Critical Thinking Question:
How many things that are good for you, that you will benefit from, need to be imposed on you...with force?

Introduction:
Explanation of title, "School Sucks" and subtitle "The END of Public Education"

Who I am, what I'm doing and why.
This is not a show about public school reform, because that would suck nearly as much as school.

Topic:
The problem with the "business?" of public education. And it's a big one. (An evaluation of the logic and ethics of the American public education system)

Bumper music: "Troublemaker" by Weezer
http://www.youtube.com/user/weezer

Look Closer:
"The Non-Aggression Axiom of Libertarianism"
by Walter Block
http://www.lewrockwell.com/block/block26.html

"The Argument From Morality (Or, how we will win…)"
by Stefan Molyneux
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/molyneux7.html

"For A New Liberty" (Chapter 7: Education)
by Murray Rothbard
http://mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp#p119

The Protestant 'Work-Shy' Ethic?

2009-10-09T18:33:00.000-07:00

(http://bhascience.blogspot.com/2009/10/protestant-work-shy-ethic.html)
At the start of the 20th Century, the sociologist Max Weber came up with a famous theory to explain why Northern Europe and North America were so prosperous: the Protestant Work Ethic.

Basically, the idea was that a unique feature of Protestant Christianity is its emphasis on work as a duty to God. While other religions asked people to do things that were laborious and time consuming, only Protestantism (so the theory went) channelled that religious duty into productive work.

It's important to take some time out here to understand what's meant by 'work ethic'. It certainly isn't simply productivity. The richest, most productive countries actually have the lowest work ethic.

And a lack of 'work ethic' doesn't mean you're lazy or driven only by financial reward. In fact, educated people have a lower 'work ethic' than uneducated people. Clearly educated people aren't lazy - they work hard to get their qualifications and don't get paid to do it.

So 'work ethic' is actually about working for no clear purpose - it's work for work's sake.

Well, in the 100 years since there's been a lot of debate and no clear conclusion about whether Weber was right. But, in theory, it seems plausible. According to economists, people only do work if they are going to get some kind of reward. If you can convince them them that their reward will be 'magical' (some kind of spiritual reward in this life or the next) then you won't have to pay them as much.

In modern economic terms, a Protestant would gain extra 'utility' from doing work, and so they would have additional motivation to work harder.

But even if the idea did hold in the past, does it still work in the modern world? And if it does, how does it work in practice? A new paper by Hans Geser has taken a look.

He scrutinized data from the Christians in the World Values Survey and found that, as far as work ethic goes, Protestantism probably isn't very much different from Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity.

But he did find some interesting relationships with religion in general. Basically, people with stronger religious faith have a stronger work ethic. But other factors of religion - whether people took Church teaching seriously, whether they went to Church, or whether they prayed - seemed to have little or no effect.

There was a surprise, however. Belief in an afterlife actually had a negative effect on work ethic.

The effect of religion was small. Overall, only around 5% of the variation between people in work ethic is explained by religion. But Geser's analysis suggests that it's not due to religious teachings. And the promise of a reward in heaven actually has a negative effect.

Which suggests that the reason religious people have a higher work ethic is that they expect to get a reward for it in this life, rather than the next.

One last thing. The effect of religion, which is small even in poor countries, disappears in rich countries. That's not because the effects at an individual level get less. What happens is that the 'national average' intensity of religious faith has a cultural effect - increasing the work ethic of believers and non-believers.

As countries get richer, their culture shifts from a religious to a secular one. And with that, the idea of working for the sake of work becomes marginalised. In rich countries, people work because they see a reason to do the work.
_______________________________________________________________________________________

Hans Geser (2009). Work Values and Christian Religiosity: An Ambiguous Multidimensional Relationship Journal of Religion and Society, 11 (24)

Small Town, Big Government

2009-10-09T18:25:00.000-07:00

by Bob Gough
(http://biggovernment.com/2009/10/02/small-town-big-government/)
[ED: Big Government isn't just in Washington, DC. In this story, local Republicans and Democrats tag-team to put out of business a local charity providing safe rides home from local bars. Often, the fight against Big Government begins at home. This installment comes from the editor of the great local news site, Quincy News.Org]

Jonathon Schonekase can’t seem to escape his past.

He changed his name hoping people would forget about his setting fire to an abandoned school when he was a juvenile. He then went to prison as an adult, where he lost his eye in a fight.

Jonathon said the loss of a friend in a drunk driving accident gave him the idea to start a service where, maybe, he could give people an option to avoid drinking and driving.

Jonathon started “Courtesy Rides” on New Year’s 2008. He posted his number in bars, people called him and he picked them up. Didn’t cost them a thing. If they wanted to leave a tip, so be it.

Now more than a year and a half after starting the service, the town where he started it has decided Jonathon needs to be regulated.

The City Council of Quincy, Illinois (pop. 40,000 and change) passed an ordinance by an 8-5 vote to tweak the taxicab ordinance in the city code to classify his volunteer service as a “for hire” business if he accepts donations.

Jonathon became a victim of his own success. He did stray from the original mission of picking up people from bars when he gave rides to other places, including the Quincy Airport and when he added more vehicles and volunteer drivers. This drew the attention of the local cab company and shuttle services.

All of the charity he provided is now government regulated.

The simple answer should be for Jonathon to apply to become a taxi. But the city taxi licensing process has a “good citizen” provision and his conviction probably stands in the way.

But the irony is Quincy’s Mayor, John Spring, has talked publicly about the perils of drinking and driving. During his latest mayoral campaign, he even offered to pick up some young adults from the bars if they needed him.

This group of young professionals, YP Quincy, made the lack of local late night cab service in Quincy a cause celeb for a moment. This group, which has been lauded by local bureaucrats and the mainstream media for its formation, was absent during the “Courtesy Rides” debate, which lasted for about a month.

But a man who was making a difference, a man who was keeping hundreds of drunks out from behind the wheel each weekend, was told red tape was more important than saving lives.

A newly-elected alderman, Republican Dan Brink, was decided to take up this issue and ask the city’s legal and police department to consider amending the city’s code. Brink, who previously worked as a probation officer, was uncomfortable with Jonathon’s past, although he said the main reason he was doing this was to determine if he was a business.

Jonathon started “Courtesy Rides” because the cab company wouldn’t run pick up anyone after 1 a.m., which is when the taverns close, and people who went to the late night clubs were certainly out of luck as they are open for another two hours on weekends.

City Attorney Tony Cameron said when “Courtesy Rides” was one man and one car, it was his opinion in February it wasn’t a ‘for hire’ business. But Cameron also said that with more advertising and adding a van and a bus, “Courtesy Rides” comes “perilously close to a smell test as for hire.”

Quincy Police Chief Rob Copley also said the addition of more vehicles and making shuttle runs besides those late-hour bar calls changed things.

“I don’t think we’d be standing here if (Schoenakase’s) mission hadn’t changed,” Copley said.

But his ingenuity, his providing a service to those in need, was met with resistance. A Democratic alderman, Steve Duesterhaus, said “Courtesy Rides” needed to be regulated for “public safety” reasons with the licensing of his vehicles and background checks for volunteer drivers. The irony is, the regulation of this enterprise causes an even greater harm.

Did the city ask the lone cab company or the other shuttle services which it licenses to step up? Were they told to stay open to handle the weekend rush of people leaving the bars and instead of fumbling for their keys they fumble for their cell phones and call someone for a ride? No. Not a word.

The Quincy Police Department even conducted stings against “Courtesy Rides” to make sure he was indeed a voluntary service. QPD didn’t find any time where Jonathon or one of his volunteers asked for payment.

The need to regulate outweighing the city’s public safety. Bureaucracy in action.

Now some local conspiracy theorists will say that is because the city likes the revenues it gets from DUI’s. Copley takes great offense to this theory. He says he doesn’t want “drunks” on the streets.

Another disturbing result of this action is that the law now casts a wide net over other enterprises, including some courier services. What is disturbing is city officials say they will not go after them. They will only go after the “renegade cab companies”. Spot zoning for law enforcement.

Jonathon and his young attorney, Ryan Schnack, plowed into the bureaucracy head-on. The new ordinance proposed by the city’s attorney, Andrew Staff, took an overbroad stance on the legal term “consideration”. They claim that Jonathon’s service will now fall under their definition of “for hire” and thusly after the vote be enforceable to fines of an ordinance violation or attempt to prove his “good character” and become a taxi service and regulated under the City and State’s Taxi statutes.

On September 21^st, during the ordinance’s second reading, the agenda heated up to force the vote on Jonathon’s fate. During this debate, the City hung its hat on the newly defined and refined city ordinance and ignored impassioned pleas to allow Jonathon to continue to operate.

One woman, Amy Zornes, lost her teenage daughter in a double-fatal alcohol-related crash just outside Quincy in April. She spoke from the heart about how she wished her daughter had called Jonathon.

“Nobody wants to be in my position,” Zornes said. “But kids won’t call their parents because they don’t want to get in trouble. They can call Jonathon.”

When Zornes finished her impassioned plea before the City Council, complete with blown up pictures of her daughter’s crash scene, she was publicly brushed off by the mayor.

“You really didn’t address the ordinance change,” was all Mayor Spring said.

The lead of the local Mothers Against Drunk Drivers chapter then said she wished every town had a “Courtesy Rides”. She wasn’t treated quite as rudely. Maybe because she was in a wheelchair.

The young attorney was asked by the City Council to provide documentation of conversations he had with various state agencies who Schnack claimed had told him they didn’t see a problem with “Courtesy Rides”. But the state agencies wouldn’t provide Schnack with any documentation, probably because no bureaucrat in Springfield wanted to stick their neck out for this.

Schnack asked Staff, the city’s attorney, to join in on a conference call with one of the state agencies to discuss the matter and Staff told Schnack he “didn’t have time to mess with” the matter.

Jonathon also didn’t provide documentation of proper insurance to the City Council. He said he went through GEICO and didn’t have a local agent who could appear with him at the Council meeting. I guess the gecko or the cavemen wouldn’t do.

So Quincy, Illinois has an ordinance changed that could put more drunk drivers on the street and expands the tentacles of government. This ordinance is now so broad that a person who takes money for carpooling kids to school on a regular basis could be breaking the law.

One of Quincy’s quirky qualities is that “Main Street” is spelled “Maine Street” as several streets in the center of town bear the names of states. Quincy’s city hall is located on Maine Street and while the street name is unique, what is happening in its city hall is all too common.

A man finds a niche. He provides a service. He is succeeding. He has come a long way from prison and his past.

Or so he thought.

The big government crowd will tell you this is a case where regulation is needed. But this is a classic example of government overreach. It’s the nanny state in full effect.

If a Quincyan doesn’t think Jonathon is safe, if they don’t like his record or his ride, they don’t have to call him.

But now it doesn’t look like they’ll have that option. Let’s hope they have someone else’s number handy.

The mayor’s office is 217-228-4545. After all, he offered.

The Conscience of a Capitalist

2009-10-09T18:15:00.000-07:00

By STEPHEN MOORE
(http://online.wsj.com/articl/SB10001424052748704471504574447114058870676.html)

The Whole Foods founder talks about his Journal health-care op-ed that spawned a boycott, how he deals with unions, and why he thinks CEOs are overpaid.

I honestly don't know why the article became such a lightning rod," says John Mackey, CEO and founder of Whole Foods Market Inc., as he tries to explain the firestorm caused by his August op-ed on these pages opposing government-run health care. "I think a lot of people who got angry haven't read what I actually wrote. There was a lot of emotional reaction—fear and anger. I just wanted to get people to think about whether there was a better way to reform the system."
Mr. Mackey has flown into Washington, D.C., for a board meeting of the Global Animal Partnership, a group that advocates for the humane treatment of animals. There was no private jet: He arrived on Southwest Airlines from Austin, Texas, and he bought the "Wanna Getaway" bottom basement fare. "I barely got the last aisle seat," he says. While in town he stays in the bedroom of his regional president, who lives in Maryland.
For the 12th straight year, Mr. Mackey's company has been praised as one of the "100 Best Companies to Work For" by Fortune Magazine. Whole Foods sells healthy food, practices "socially responsible trade," and prides itself on promoting foods that are grown to support "biodiversity and healthy soils." Mr. Mackey donates 5% of company profits to charity and has been one of America's loudest critics of runaway compensation on Wall Street. And he pays himself $1 a year. He would seem to be a model corporate citizen.

Yet his now famous op-ed incited a boycott of Whole Foods by some of his left-wing customers. His piece advised that "the last thing our country needs is a massive new health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits and move us closer to a complete government takeover of our health-care system." Free-market groups retaliated with a "buy-cott," encouraging people to purchase more groceries at Whole Foods.

Why did he write the piece in the first place?

"President Obama called for constructive suggestions for health-care reform," he explains. "I took him at his word." Mr. Mackey continues: "It just seems to me there are some fundamental reforms that we've adopted at Whole Foods that would make health care much more affordable for the uninsured."

What Mr. Mackey is proposing is more or less what he has already implemented at his company—a plan that would allow more health savings accounts (HSAs), more low-premium, high-deductible plans, more incentives for wellness, and medical malpractice reform. None of these initiatives are in any of the Democratic bills winding their way through Congress. In fact, the Democrats want to kill HSAs and high-deductible plans and mandate coverage options that would inflate health insurance costs.

The Whole Foods health-care story has been largely ignored by proponents of a government-run system. But it could be a template for those in Washington who want to drive down costs and insure the uninsured.

Mr. Mackey says that combining "our high deductible plan (patients pay for the first $2,500 of medical expenses) with personal wellness accounts or health savings accounts works extremely well for us." He estimates the plan's premiums plus other costs at $2,100 per employee, and about $7,000 for a family. This is about half what other companies typically pay. "And," he is quick to add, "we do cover pre-existing conditions after one year of service."

Whole Foods also puts several hundred dollars into a health savings account for each worker.This money can be used to cover routine medical expenses, like drug purchases or antismoking programs. If that money is not used in a year, the workers can save the money to pay for expenses in later years.

This type of plan does not excite proponents of a single-payer system, who think that individuals can't make wise health-care choices, and that this type of system is "antiwellness" because it discourages spending on preventive care.

Mr. Mackey scoffs at that idea: "The assumption behind that is that people don't care about their own health, and that somebody else has to—a nanny or somebody—has to take care of me because people are too stupid to make these decisions themselves. That's not been our experience. We find our team members [employees], not surprisingly, seem to care a whole lot about their health."

Not surprisingly, Mr. Mackey is a fanatic about healthy eating. "A healthy diet is a solution to many of our health-care problems. It's the most important solution. How much sugar do you think Americans consume?" he asks. I shrug and he rattles off the statistics: "Every man, woman and child consumes, on average, 43 teaspoons of sugar a day. In 13 days that adds up to a five-pound bag of sugar."

"We can spend all the money we want on bypass surgeries, chemotherapy and diabetes, but . . . two-thirds [of Americans] are overweight, one-third are obese." He's on a roll: "And it's not that they have to shop at a Whole Foods Market. But people need to eat whole food plant foods, primarily . . . whole grains, fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds. That diet supports our lives. We ought to live to be 90 or 100 without getting any diseases."

Healthy eating, curbing the obesity epidemic—it's hard to find much of anything Mr. Mackey says that's controversial. But the health-care reform lobby continues to attack Whole Foods as if he were an apostate.

In response to the hullabaloo, Mr. Mackey has been understandably defensive. In early September, he wrote about the op-ed on his blog: "I gave my personal opinions. Whole Foods has no official position on the issue." So I ask him, does he regret writing the article? "I regret the controversy that it caused for Whole Foods, but I don't regret writing it, because I think what I said is true and it needed to be said. I wasn't seeing anyone else saying it."

Then he adds, half-jokingly: "I've written one op-ed piece in 31 years. It might be 31 more before I write another one."

I ask if he thinks the attacks were instigated by unions. While many other grocery chains are unionized, Whole Foods is not. "Well, the unions have had an adversarial relationship with us," he replies. "I don't think all the protests are strictly union-based, but I do think the unions have contributed to that. I think they've piled on and in some cases are orchestrating some of it." He says he can't divulge private information about whether the boycott hurt sales, but the stock hasn't taken any hit.

"I sometimes think that unions don't understand that we live in a free society and people have the right to not select union representation if they don't want it. I oftentimes hear things like 'Whole Foods is preventing people from unionizing,' which is a lie. That's illegal. We can't prevent anyone from unionizing," Mr. Mackey says.

So why aren't they choosing it? "Because it's not in their best interest," he insists. "We have better benefits and higher pay" than Whole Foods' unionized competitors. "We wish the unions would respect people's right to not have a union." Do they keep agitating? "Yeah, they do."

John Mackey is unlike any other Fortune 500 CEO I have met. He's got ruffled, curly hair, is thin and amazingly fit. He recently completed a three-week hike on the Appalachian Trail. He dresses casually, and his demeanor is almost always laid back. But his close friends say, don't let that fool you. Mr. Mackey is fiercely competitive and hates to lose—two traits that help a lot in business.

His odyssey from a long-haired counterculture anticapitalist in the early 1970s to running a company that now has $8 billion in sales and 280 stores—is a remarkable tale in itself. He attended the University of Texas where he studied philosophy and religion. "I never got my college degree," he admits proudly.

He started Whole Foods in 1978 with one store in Austin with $45,000 of seed capital raised from families and friends. "We lost half of it in the first year and then made $5,000 the next year." He wanted to double down and asked the board to put up more money to expand and build bigger stores. "And of course they thought I was nuts. 'You lost half of our money in the first year.'"

The fledgling CEO convinced them that "if we don't grow, we probably won't survive." The first major super store in 1980 was a success "almost by 3 o'clock on the day it opened." It's been an upward trajectory of profits and sales ever since.

"Before I started my business, my political philosophy was that business is evil and government is good. I think I just breathed it in with the culture. Businesses, they're selfish because they're trying to make money."

At age 25, John Mackey was mugged by reality. "Once you start meeting a payroll you have a little different attitude about those things." This insight explains why he thinks it's a shame that so few elected officials have ever run a business. "Most are lawyers," he says, which is why Washington treats companies like cash dispensers.

Mr. Mackey's latest crusade involves traveling to college campuses across the country, trying to persuade young people that business, profits and capitalism aren't forces of evil. He calls his concept "conscious capitalism."

What is that? "It means that business has the potential to have a deeper purpose. I mean, Whole Foods has a deeper purpose," he says, now sounding very much like a philosopher. "Most of the companies I most admire in the world I think have a deeper purpose." He continues, "I've met a lot of successful entrepreneurs. They all started their businesses not to maximize shareholder value or money but because they were pursuing a dream."

Mr. Mackey tells me he is trying to save capitalism: "I think that business has a noble purpose. It's not that there's anything wrong with making money. It's one of the important things that business contributes to society. But it's not the sole reason that businesses exist."

What does he mean by a "noble purpose"? "It means that just like every other profession, business serves society. They produce goods and services that make people's lives better. Doctors heal the sick. Teachers educate people. Architects design buildings. Lawyers promote justice. Whole Foods puts food on people's tables and we improve people's health."

Then he adds: "And we provide jobs. And we provide capital through profits that spur improvements in the world. And we're good citizens in our communities, and we take our citizenship very seriously at Whole Foods."

I ask Mr. Mackey why he doesn't collect a paycheck. "I'm an owner. I have the exact same motivation any shareholder would have in the Whole Foods Market because I'm not drawing a salary from the company. How much money does anybody need?" More to the point, he says, "If the business prospers, I prosper. If the business struggles, I struggle. It's good for morale." He hastens to add that "I'm not saying anybody else should do what I do."

Well, that's not exactly true. Mr. Mackey has been vocal in his opposition to recent CEO salaries. "I do think that it's the responsibility of the leadership of an organization to constrain itself for the good of the organization. If you look at the history of business in America, CEOs used to have much more constraint in compensation and it's gone up tremendously in the last 30 years."

He bemoans the trend that once a Fortune 500 CEO made about 25 times the average worker pay, and now that's climbed to 300 times average employee pay. He says this violates the principle of "internal equity—what your leadership is getting paid relative to everyone else in the organization."

But there's one other institution John Mackey thinks needs a makeover—and that's government. He describes what the Federal Reserve has done with massive money creation as "debauchery of the currency." He thinks the bailouts were a travesty.

"I don't think anybody's too big to fail," he says. "If a business fails, what happens is, there are still assets, and those assets get reorganized. Either new management comes in or it's sold off to another business or it's bid on and the good assets are retained and the bad assets are eliminated. I believe in the dynamic creativity of capitalism, and it's self-correcting, if you just allow it to self-correct."

That's something Washington won't let happen these days, which helps explain why Mr. Mackey felt compelled to write that the Whole Foods health-insurance program is smarter and cheaper than the latest government proposals. As he races out the door to catch a flight to spread the gospel of conscious capitalism elsewhere, I only hope he gets an aisle seat. He deserves it.

The Freedomain Radio Interview: Lloyd deMause

2009-10-06T11:19:00.000-07:00

Alfred Hitchcock cameos

2009-10-01T16:59:00.000-07:00

Friday Flashback: Joy Division - "She's Lost Control"

2009-10-01T16:54:00.001-07:00

Frozen Shoulder Federalism

2009-10-01T16:19:00.001-07:00

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Is the United States breaking up? Dan reads a Pat Buchanan commentary that poses that question, so Dan talks about it. Also: Dan extols the virtues of citizen journalism in the wake of the "Acorn" expose.

Every Argument Against Anarchism Has Been Debunked

2009-10-01T16:07:00.000-07:00

A Day in the Life of John Q. Public

2009-10-01T15:59:00.000-07:00

By George Donnelly
(http://www.fr33agents.com/711/a-day-in-the-life-of-john-q-public/)

John gets up at 6 AM and fills his coffee pot with water to prepare his morning coffee. The water is clean and pure because he bought a reverse osmosis filtration system to clean out the lead, iron, sediment, viagra and prozac that comes in from the local government water monopoly.

His Daily Medication

With his first swallow of coffee, he takes his daily medication. He’d like to get the surgery instead, because the pills are slowly damaging his liver and kidneys. But due to government interference in the health care market – causing prices to rise – and the banking cartel’s government-chartered central bank’s debasing of the currency – causing the value of his salary to decline – he can’t afford it.

He smuggles his medication in from Mexico once a month because the government won’t allow it to be sold inside the US. It competes with the product of a large pharmaceutical company who has hired a lot of lobbyists to protect their US market share.

Government-Prohibited Products

John takes responsibility for his own health by preparing oatmeal for breakfast. He uses unpasteurized milk from the dairy down the street, avoiding the allergies and increased risk of heart disease associated with government-mandated pasteurized milk. He sprinkles some organic hemp seed on his oatmeal, a complete protein a friend snuck into the country from Canada because the government bans its cultivation here.

In the morning shower, John reaches for his favorite shampoo. It leaves his hair soft and shiny using only natural ingredients. He uses a special formula invented by a chemist friend and sold out of her garage and at flea markets – until government agents shut her down for operating a laboratory without a license and selling an unapproved healthcare product. John got the last bottle and is milking it.

Dirty Air, Thanks to the Government

John dresses, walks outside and takes a deep breath. The air he breathes is noticeably contaminated because the government subsidizes big buses that belch out dangerous chemicals all day long all over the city. Zero-emission cars aren’t available on the market because the car makers and the oil companies are in bed with the government. They don’t want change.

He walks to the commuter rail station to ride a government-owned train to work. It used to belong to a private company but the government anti-trust laws caused the railway company to fail. He wishes he could drive to work but with the gasoline tax and the overcrowded government roads, he can’t afford it. He carries an illegal firearm on the train due to a recent mugging and is afraid someone will find out about it.

Sentenced to Wage Slavery … by the Government

John begins his workday. He has a boring job with average pay, medical benefits, retirement, paid holidays and vacation because that’s what the government mandates. He’d rather get it all in cash so he can choose his own health care and retirement plans. He’d like to start a business at home from his baking hobby but the government mandates he rent a separate space and purchase industrial baking appliances in order to get started. He might be able to do that – and quit his wage slave job in the city – if the government didn’t take 40 per cent of his income right off the top.

If John is hurt on the job or becomes unemployed, he’ll get a workers’ compensation or unemployment check because he joined a local mutual aid society and voluntarily pays dues into it every week. But it’s the last one in his state and its future is uncertain because the government started competing services and can legally force people to pay for them. His mutual aid society pays better and costs less but most people can’t afford to pay for the same thing twice.

Escaping to Gold

It’s lunchtime so John heads to the coin shop to buy some gold. John knows that due to the constant expansion of the money supply by the banking cartel’s government-chartered central bank, the value of John’s dollars falls almost every day. Now that the FDIC is insolvent, he worries that economic collapse is around the corner and knows gold has always been a good store of value.

John paid too much for his house because he bought at the peak of the government-created bubble. Thanks to Fannie, Freddie, the FHA, the Fed and others in government, his house may soon be worth less than his mortgage. He had to take out government loans for college due to government higher education subsidies, which incentivize schools to charge more, because they’ll get more from the government if they do.

Government Putting His Dad out of Business

John is home from work. He plans to visit his father this evening at his home in the country. His was the third generation to live on the property. But the EPA and OSHA are trying to shut down the family scrap yard business, claiming it violates hundreds of federal regulations. The local township raised taxes on the property recently and is trying to re-zone it to render the family business illegal.

He is happy to see his father, who would like to retire, but can’t. Due to self-employment taxes, his dad paid twice into Social Security but can only get the same meager check as anyone else. With the rising costs of health care – due to government subsidies and regulatory interference – he’s afraid his first medical emergency will wipe out his hard-earned savings.

“The Free Market is a Failure”

John gets back in his car for the ride home, and turns on a radio talk show. The radio host tells him that we need more government “solutions” to our problems, that government bureaucrats know what is best for him and the free market is a failure.

He doesn’t mention that the beloved government bureaucrats and politicians have undermined every protection and benefit John enjoys throughout his day and are destroying the best things in his life.

Government Bailouts: Picking Winners

2009-10-01T15:45:00.001-07:00

On Palestinian Civil Disobedience

2009-10-01T15:32:00.000-07:00

A simple google search with the words Palestinian and violence yields over 8.5 million pages, while a search with the words Palestinian and civil disobedience generates only 80,000 pages.

by Neve Gordon
(http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/09/28-1)

Sometime in 1846, Henry David Thoreau spent a night in jail because he refused to pay his taxes. This was his way of opposing the Mexican-American War as well as the institution of slavery. A few years later he published the essay Civil Disobedience, which has since been read by millions of people, including many Israelis and Palestinians.

Kobi Snitz read the book. He is an Israeli anarchist who is currently serving a 20 day sentence for refusing to pay a 2,000 shekel fine.

Thirty-eight year-old Snitz was arrested with other activists in the small Palestinian village of Kharbatha back in 2004 while trying to prevent the demolition of the home of a prominent member of the local popular committee. The demolition, so it seems, was carried out both to intimidate and punish the local leader who had, just a couple of weeks earlier, began organizing weekly demonstrations against the annexation wall. Both the demonstrations and the attempt to stop the demolition were acts of civil disobedience.

In a letter sent to friends the night before his incarceration, Snitz writes that "I and the others who were arrested with me are guilty of nothing except not doing more to oppose the state's truly criminal policies." Snitz also explains that paying the fine is an acknowledgment of guilt which he finds demeaning. Finally, he concludes his epistle by insisting that his punishment is trivial when compared to the punishment meted out to Palestinian teenagers who have resisted the occupation. These thirteen, fourteen, fifteen and sixteen year olds, he claims, are often detained for 20 days before the legal process even begins.

Snitz is not exaggerating.

In a recent report, the Palestinian human rights organizations Stop the Wall and Addameer document the forms of repression Israel has deployed against villages that have resisted the annexation of their land. The two rights groups show that once a village decides to struggle against the annexation barrier the entire community is punished. In addition to home demolitions, curfews and other forms of movement restriction, the Israeli military forces consistently uses violence against the protestors-and most often targets the youth-- beating, tear-gassing as well as deploying both lethal and "non-lethal" ammunition against them.

Since 2004, nineteen people, about half of them children, have been killed in protests against the barrier. The rights groups found that in four small Palestinian villages -- Bil'in, Ni'lin, Ma'sara and Jayyous -- 1,566 Palestinians have been injured in demonstrations against the wall. In five villages alone, 176 Palestinians have been arrested for protesting against the annexation, with children and youth specifically targeted during these arrest campaigns. The actual numbers of those who were injured and arrested are no doubt greater considering that these are just the incidents that took place in a few villages.

Each number has a name and a story. Consider, for example, the arrest of sixteen year-old Mohammed Amar Hussan Nofal who was detained along with about 65 other people from his village Jayyous on February 18, 2009. According to his testimony, he was initially interrogated for two and a half hours in the village school.

"They asked me why I participated in the demonstrations, but I tried to deny [that I had]. Then they asked me why I threw a Molotov cocktail [at] them. I said I never had, which was true. My parents were there and witnessed [what happened]. They can confirm I never [threw a Molotov cocktail]. I later confessed to [having been at] demonstrations, but not [to having] thrown a Molotov cocktail."

After being beaten for refusing to hold up a paper with numbers and Hebrew words on it in order to be photographed, Nofal was sent to Kedumim and was interrogated for several more hours. During this interrogation Captain Faisal (a pseudonym of a secret service officer) tried to recruit the teenager to become a collaborator.

"The Captain threatened that he would arrest my parents and my whole family if I did not collaborate. I said they could arrest [my family] any time, [but] it would be worse to become a spy. He then said they would confiscate my family's permits so they could not pick olives."

Nofal's only crime was protesting against the expropriation of his ancestral lands. He spent three months in prison, during which time the Civil Administration decided to punish his family as well and refused to renew their permits to work in Israel.

When compared to Nofal and thousands of other Palestinians, Kobi Snitz is indeed paying a small price. But his act is symbolically important, not only due to his solidarity with his Palestinian partners, but also because he, like thousands of Palestinians, has decided to follow the lead of Henry David Thoreau and to commit acts of civil disobedience in order to resist Israel's immoral policies and the subjugation of a whole people.

The problem is that the world knows very little about these acts. A simple google search with the words Palestinian and violence yields over 8.5 million pages, while a search with the words Palestinian and civil disobedience generates only 80,000 pages - this despite the fact that for several years now Palestinians have been carrying out daily acts of civil disobedience against the Israeli occupation.

Thoreau, I believe, would have been proud of Nofal, Snitz and their fellow activists. It is crucial that the media and international community recognize their heroism as well.

Neve Gordon teaches politics at Ben-Gurion University. Read about his new book, Israel's Occupation (due out this fall from the University of California Press), and more at israelsoccupation.info.

Friday Flashback: Roy Orbison - "In Dreams"

2009-09-24T22:20:00.000-07:00

Death Panels and the Fear of Dying

2009-09-24T22:16:00.000-07:00

(http://www.wpr.org/hereonearth/archive_090914k.cfm)

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When Georgia Weithe's father was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 1997, she approached his impending death with absolute terror. To her great surprise, the experience deepened her life in ways she could not have anticipated, and she came to the conclusion that death is a teacher and a friend. Georgia is the author of Shining Moments: Finding Hope in Facing Death.

How Government Solved the Health Care Crisis

2009-09-24T22:13:00.000-07:00

Production and the Firm

2009-09-24T22:11:00.000-07:00

A Four-Step Health-Care Solution

2009-09-24T22:09:00.000-07:00

by Hans-Hermann Hoppe
It's true that the U.S. health care system is a mess, but this demonstrates not market but government failure. To cure the problem requires not different or more government regulations and bureaucracies, as self-serving politicians want us to believe, but the elimination of all existing government controls.
It's time to get serious about health care reform. Tax credits, vouchers, and privatization will go a long way toward decentralizing the system and removmg unnecessary burdens from business. But four additional steps must also be taken:
1. Eliminate all licensing requirements for medical schools, hospitals, pharmacies, and medical doctors and other health care personnel. Their supply would almost instantly increase, prices would fall, and a greater variety of health care services would appear on the market.
Competing voluntary accreditation agencies would take the place of compulsory government licensing--if health care providers believe that such accreditation would enhance their own reputation, and that their consumers care about reputation, and are willing to pay for it.
Because consumers would no longer be duped into believing that there is such a thing as a "national standard" of health care, they will increase their search costs and make more discriminating health care choices.
2. Eliminate all government restrictions on the production and sale of pharmaceutical products and medical devices. This means no more Food and Drug Administration, which presently hinders innovation and increases costs.
Costs and prices would fall, and a wider variety of better products would reach the market sooner. The market would force consumers to act in accordance with their own--rather than the government's--risk assessment. And competing drug and device manufacturers and sellers, to safeguard against product liability suits as much as to attract customers, would provide increasingly better product descriptions and guarantees.
3. Deregulate the health insurance industry. Private enterprise can offer insurance against events over whose outcome the insured possesses no control. One cannot insure oneself against suicide or bankruptcy, for example, because it is in one's own hands to bring these events about.
Because a person's health, or lack of it, lies increasingly within his own control, many, if not most health risks, are actually uninsurable. "Insurance" against risks whose likelihood an individual can systematically influence falls within that person's own responsibility.
All insurance, moreover, involves the pooling of individual risks. It implies that insurers pay more to some and less to others. But no one knows in advance, and with certainty, who the "winners" and "losers" will be. "Winners" and "losers" are distributed randomly, and the resulting income redistribution is unsystematic. If "winners" or "losers" could be systematically predicted, "losers" would not want to pool their risk with "winners," but with other "losers," because this would lower their insurance costs. I would not want to pool my personal accident risks with those of professional football players, for instance, but exclusively with those of people in circumstances similar to my own, at lower costs.
Because of legal restrictions on the health insurers' right of refusal--to exclude any individual risk as uninsurable--the present health-insurance system is only partly concerned with insurance. The industry cannot discriminate freely among different groups' risks.
As a result, health insurers cover a multitude of uninnsurable risks, alongside, and pooled with, genuine insurance risks. They do not discriminate among various groups of people which pose significantly different insurance risks. The industry thus runs a system of income redistribution--benefiting irresponsible actors and high-risk groups at the expense of responsible individuals and low risk groups. Accordingly the industry's prices are high and ballooning.
To deregulate the industry means to restore it to unrestricted freedom of contract: to allow a health insurer to offer any contract whatsoever, to include or exclude any risk, and to discriminate among any groups of individuals. Uninsurable risks would lose coverage, the variety of insurance policies for the remaining coverage would increase, and price differentials would reflect genuine insurance risks. On average, prices would drastically fall. And the reform would restore individual responsibility in health care.
4. Eliminate all subsidies to the sick or unhealthy. Subsidies create more of whatever is being subsidized. Subsidies for the ill and diseased breed illness and disease, and promote carelessness, indigence, and dependency. If we eliminate them, we would strengthen the will to live healthy lives and to work for a living. In the first instance, that means abolishing Medicare and Medicaid.
Only these four steps, although drastic, will restore a fully free market in medical provision. Until they are adopted, the industry will have serious problems, and so will we, its consumers.

Poetry Instead

2009-09-24T22:04:00.001-07:00

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Patricia Smith is the four-time champion of the National Poetry Slam. Jay Parini discusses the power of poetry and how it especially empowers young people in troubled times. Gioia Timpanelli uses her poetic sensibility to write prose novels and talks about the two kinds of writing. Les Murray is considered by many literary critics to be the greatest living poet in English today.

Patricia Smith is an African American who is the four-time champion of the National Poetry Slam. Her book ""Blood Dazzler"" was nominated for the 2008 National Book Award. She talks about her work with Steve Paulson and performs several poems.

Jay Parini teaches poetry at Middlebury College, and is the author of ""Why Poetry Matters."" He talks with Jim Fleming about Jim Fleming about the power of poetry and how it especially empowers young people in troubled times.

Gioia Timpanelli uses her poetic sensibility to write prose novels. She talks with Anne Strainchamps about the two kinds of writing, and her story ""What Makes a Child Lucky."" And we hear selections from the story.

Australian Les Murray is considered by many literary critics to be the greatest living poet in English today. He rarely gives interviews, but spoke with Steve Paulson and read several of his poems. His latest book of poetry is called ""The Bi-Plane Houses.

The Holy Grail of the Unconscious

2009-09-24T21:54:00.000-07:00

By SARA CORBETT

(http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/magazine/20jung-t.html?pagewanted=all)

This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzerland. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say “Liber Novus,” which is Latin for “New Book.” Its pages are made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with paintings of otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods and devils. If you didn’t know the book’s vintage, you might confuse it for a lost medieval tome.

And yet between the book’s heavy covers, a very modern story unfolds. It goes as follows: Man skids into midlife and loses his soul. Man goes looking for soul. After a lot of instructive hardship and adventure — taking place entirely in his head — he finds it again.
Some people feel that nobody should read the book, and some feel that everybody should read it. The truth is, nobody really knows. Most of what has been said about the book — what it is, what it means — is the product of guesswork, because from the time it was begun in 1914 in a smallish town in Switzerland, it seems that only about two dozen people have managed to read or even have much of a look at it.
Of those who did see it, at least one person, an educated Englishwoman who was allowed to read some of the book in the 1920s, thought it held infinite wisdom — “There are people in my country who would read it from cover to cover without stopping to breathe scarcely,” she wrote — while another, a well-known literary type who glimpsed it shortly after, deemed it both fascinating and worrisome, concluding that it was the work of a psychotic.
So for the better part of the past century, despite the fact that it is thought to be the pivotal work of one of the era’s great thinkers, the book has existed mostly just as a rumor, cosseted behind the skeins of its own legend — revered and puzzled over only from a great distance.
Which is why one rainy November night in 2007, I boarded a flight in Boston and rode the clouds until I woke up in Zurich, pulling up to the airport gate at about the same hour that the main branch of the Union Bank of Switzerland, located on the city’s swanky Bahnhofstrasse, across from Tommy Hilfiger and close to Cartier, was opening its doors for the day. A change was under way: the book, which had spent the past 23 years locked inside a safe deposit box in one of the bank’s underground vaults, was just then being wrapped in black cloth and loaded into a discreet-looking padded suitcase on wheels. It was then rolled past the guards, out into the sunlight and clear, cold air, where it was loaded into a waiting car and whisked away.
THIS COULD SOUND, I realize, like the start of a spy novel or a Hollywood bank caper, but it is rather a story about genius and madness, as well as possession and obsession, with one object — this old, unusual book — skating among those things. Also, there are a lot of Jungians involved, a species of thinkers who subscribe to the theories of Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and author of the big red leather book. And Jungians, almost by definition, tend to get enthused anytime something previously hidden reveals itself, when whatever’s been underground finally makes it to the surface.
Carl Jung founded the field of analytical psychology and, along with Sigmund Freud, was responsible for popularizing the idea that a person’s interior life merited not just attention but dedicated exploration — a notion that has since propelled tens of millions of people into psychotherapy. Freud, who started as Jung’s mentor and later became his rival, generally viewed the unconscious mind as a warehouse for repressed desires, which could then be codified and pathologized and treated. Jung, over time, came to see the psyche as an inherently more spiritual and fluid place, an ocean that could be fished for enlightenment and healing.
Whether or not he would have wanted it this way, Jung — who regarded himself as a scientist — is today remembered more as a countercultural icon, a proponent of spirituality outside religion and the ultimate champion of dreamers and seekers everywhere, which has earned him both posthumous respect and posthumous ridicule. Jung’s ideas laid the foundation for the widely used Myers-Briggs personality test and influenced the creation of Alcoholics Anonymous. His central tenets — the existence of a collective unconscious and the power of archetypes — have seeped into the larger domain of New Age thinking while remaining more at the fringes of mainstream psychology.
A big man with wire-rimmed glasses, a booming laugh and a penchant for the experimental, Jung was interested in the psychological aspects of séances, of astrology, of witchcraft. He could be jocular and also impatient. He was a dynamic speaker, an empathic listener. He had a famously magnetic appeal with women. Working at Zurich’s Burghölzli psychiatric hospital, Jung listened intently to the ravings of schizophrenics, believing they held clues to both personal and universal truths. At home, in his spare time, he pored over Dante, Goethe, Swedenborg and Nietzsche. He began to study mythology and world cultures, applying what he learned to the live feed from the unconscious — claiming that dreams offered a rich and symbolic narrative coming from the depths of the psyche. Somewhere along the way, he started to view the human soul — not just the mind and the body — as requiring specific care and development, an idea that pushed him into a province long occupied by poets and priests but not so much by medical doctors and empirical scientists.
Jung soon found himself in opposition not just to Freud but also to most of his field, the psychiatrists who constituted the dominant culture at the time, speaking the clinical language of symptom and diagnosis behind the deadbolts of asylum wards. Separation was not easy. As his convictions began to crystallize, Jung, who was at that point an outwardly successful and ambitious man with a young family, a thriving private practice and a big, elegant house on the shores of Lake Zurich, felt his own psyche starting to teeter and slide, until finally he was dumped into what would become a life-altering crisis.
What happened next to Carl Jung has become, among Jungians and other scholars, the topic of enduring legend and controversy. It has been characterized variously as a creative illness, a descent into the underworld, a bout with insanity, a narcissistic self-deification, a transcendence, a midlife breakdown and an inner disturbance mirroring the upheaval of World War I. Whatever the case, in 1913, Jung, who was then 38, got lost in the soup of his own psyche. He was haunted by troubling visions and heard inner voices. Grappling with the horror of some of what he saw, he worried in moments that he was, in his own words, “menaced by a psychosis” or “doing a schizophrenia.”
He later would compare this period of his life — this “confrontation with the unconscious,” as he called it — to a mescaline experiment. He described his visions as coming in an “incessant stream.” He likened them to rocks falling on his head, to thunderstorms, to molten lava. “I often had to cling to the table,” he recalled, “so as not to fall apart.”
Had he been a psychiatric patient, Jung might well have been told he had a nervous disorder and encouraged to ignore the circus going on in his head. But as a psychiatrist, and one with a decidedly maverick streak, he tried instead to tear down the wall between his rational self and his psyche. For about six years, Jung worked to prevent his conscious mind from blocking out what his unconscious mind wanted to show him. Between appointments with patients, after dinner with his wife and children, whenever there was a spare hour or two, Jung sat in a book-lined office on the second floor of his home and actually induced hallucinations — what he called “active imaginations.” “In order to grasp the fantasies which were stirring in me ‘underground,’ ” Jung wrote later in his book “Memories, Dreams, Reflections,” “I knew that I had to let myself plummet down into them.” He found himself in a liminal place, as full of creative abundance as it was of potential ruin, believing it to be the same borderlands traveled by both lunatics and great artists.
Jung recorded it all. First taking notes in a series of small, black journals, he then expounded upon and analyzed his fantasies, writing in a regal, prophetic tone in the big red-leather book. The book detailed an unabashedly psychedelic voyage through his own mind, a vaguely Homeric progression of encounters with strange people taking place in a curious, shifting dreamscape. Writing in German, he filled 205 oversize pages with elaborate calligraphy and with richly hued, staggeringly detailed paintings.
What he wrote did not belong to his previous canon of dispassionate, academic essays on psychiatry. Nor was it a straightforward diary. It did not mention his wife, or his children, or his colleagues, nor for that matter did it use any psychiatric language at all. Instead, the book was a kind of phantasmagoric morality play, driven by Jung’s own wish not just to chart a course out of the mangrove swamp of his inner world but also to take some of its riches with him. It was this last part — the idea that a person might move beneficially between the poles of the rational and irrational, the light and the dark, the conscious and the unconscious — that provided the germ for his later work and for what analytical psychology would become.
The book tells the story of Jung trying to face down his own demons as they emerged from the shadows. The results are humiliating, sometimes unsavory. In it, Jung travels the land of the dead, falls in love with a woman he later realizes is his sister, gets squeezed by a giant serpent and, in one terrifying moment, eats the liver of a little child. (“I swallow with desperate efforts — it is impossible — once again and once again — I almost faint — it is done.”) At one point, even the devil criticizes Jung as hateful.
He worked on his red book — and he called it just that, the Red Book — on and off for about 16 years, long after his personal crisis had passed, but he never managed to finish it. He actively fretted over it, wondering whether to have it published and face ridicule from his scientifically oriented peers or to put it in a drawer and forget it. Regarding the significance of what the book contained, however, Jung was unequivocal. “All my works, all my creative activity,” he would recall later, “has come from those initial fantasies and dreams.”
Jung evidently kept the Red Book locked in a cupboard in his house in the Zurich suburb of Küsnacht. When he died in 1961, he left no specific instructions about what to do with it. His son, Franz, an architect and the third of Jung’s five children, took over running the house and chose to leave the book, with its strange musings and elaborate paintings, where it was. Later, in 1984, the family transferred it to the bank, where since then it has fulminated as both an asset and a liability.
Anytime someone did ask to see the Red Book, family members said, without hesitation and sometimes without decorum, no. The book was private, they asserted, an intensely personal work. In 1989, an American analyst named Stephen Martin, who was then the editor of a Jungian journal and now directs a Jungian nonprofit foundation, visited Jung’s son (his other four children were daughters) and inquired about the Red Book. The question was met with a vehemence that surprised him. “Franz Jung, an otherwise genial and gracious man, reacted sharply, nearly with anger,” Martin later wrote in his foundation’s newsletter, saying “in no uncertain terms” that Martin could not “see the Red Book, nor could he ever imagine that it would be published.”
And yet, Carl Jung’s secret Red Book — scanned, translated and footnoted — will be in stores early next month, published by W. W. Norton and billed as the “most influential unpublished work in the history of psychology.” Surely it is a victory for someone, but it is too early yet to say for whom.
STEPHEN MARTIN IS a compact, bearded man of 57. He has a buoyant, irreverent wit and what feels like a fully intact sense of wonder. If you happen to have a conversation with him anytime before, say, 10 a.m., he will ask his first question — “How did you sleep?” — and likely follow it with a second one — “Did you dream?” Because for Martin, as it is for all Jungian analysts, dreaming offers a barometric reading of the psyche. At his house in a leafy suburb of Philadelphia, Martin keeps five thick books filled with notations on and interpretations of all the dreams he had while studying to be an analyst 30 years ago in Zurich, under the tutelage of a Swiss analyst then in her 70s named Liliane Frey-Rohn. These days, Martin stores his dreams on his computer, but his dream life is — as he says everybody’s dream life should be — as involving as ever.
Even as some of his peers in the Jungian world are cautious about regarding Carl Jung as a sage — a history of anti-Semitic remarks and his sometimes patriarchal views of women have caused some to distance themselves — Martin is unapologetically reverential. He keeps Jung’s 20 volumes of collected works on a shelf at home. He rereads “Memories, Dreams, Reflections” at least twice a year. Many years ago, when one of his daughters interviewed him as part of a school project and asked what his religion was, Martin, a nonobservant Jew, answered, “Oh, honey, I’m a Jungian.”
The first time I met him, at the train station in Ardmore, Pa., Martin shook my hand and thoughtfully took my suitcase. “Come,” he said. “I’ll take you to see the holy hankie.” We then walked several blocks to the office where Martin sees clients. The room was cozy and cavelike, with a thick rug and walls painted a deep, handsome shade of blue. There was a Mission-style sofa and two upholstered chairs and an espresso machine in one corner.
Several mounted vintage posters of Zurich hung on the walls, along with framed photographs of Carl Jung, looking wise and white-haired, and Liliane Frey-Rohn, a round-faced woman smiling maternally from behind a pair of severe glasses.
Martin tenderly lifted several first-edition books by Jung from a shelf, opening them so I could see how they had been inscribed to Frey-Rohn, who later bequeathed them to Martin. Finally, we found ourselves standing in front of a square frame hung on the room’s far wall, another gift from his former analyst and the centerpiece of Martin’s Jung arcana. Inside the frame was a delicate linen square, its crispness worn away by age — a folded handkerchief with the letters “CGJ” embroidered neatly in one corner in gray. Martin pointed. “There you have it,” he said with exaggerated pomp, “the holy hankie, the sacred nasal shroud of C. G. Jung.”
In addition to practicing as an analyst, Martin is the director of the Philemon Foundation, which focuses on preparing the unpublished works of Carl Jung for publication, with the Red Book as its central project. He has spent the last several years aggressively, sometimes evangelistically, raising money in the Jungian community to support his foundation. The foundation, in turn, helped pay for the translating of the book and the addition of a scholarly apparatus — a lengthy introduction and vast network of footnotes — written by a London-based historian named Sonu Shamdasani, who serves as the foundation’s general editor and who spent about three years persuading the family to endorse the publication of the book and to allow him access to it.
Given the Philemon Foundation’s aim to excavate and make public C. G. Jung’s old papers — lectures he delivered at Zurich’s Psychological Club or unpublished letters, for example — both Martin and Shamdasani, who started the foundation in 2003, have worked to develop a relationship with the Jung family, the owners and notoriously protective gatekeepers of Jung’s works. Martin echoed what nearly everybody I met subsequently would tell me about working with Jung’s descendants. “It’s sometimes delicate,” he said, adding by way of explanation, “They are very Swiss.”
What he likely meant by this was that the members of the Jung family who work most actively on maintaining Jung’s estate tend to do things carefully and with an emphasis on privacy and decorum and are on occasion taken aback by the relatively brazen and totally informal way that American Jungians — who it is safe to say are the most ardent of all Jungians — inject themselves into the family’s business. There are Americans knocking unannounced on the door of the family home in Küsnacht; Americans scaling the fence at Bollingen, the stone tower Jung built as a summer residence farther south on the shore of Lake Zurich. Americans pepper Ulrich Hoerni, one of Jung’s grandsons who manages Jung’s editorial and archival matters through a family foundation, almost weekly with requests for various permissions. The relationship between the Jungs and the people who are inspired by Jung is, almost by necessity, a complex symbiosis. The Red Book — which on one hand described Jung’s self-analysis and became the genesis for the Jungian method and on the other was just strange enough to possibly embarrass the family — held a certain electrical charge. Martin recognized the descendants’ quandary. “They own it, but they haven’t lived it,” he said, describing Jung’s legacy. “It’s very consternating for them because we all feel like we own it.” Even the old psychiatrist himself seemed to recognize the tension. “Thank God I am Jung,” he is rumored once to have said, “and not a Jungian.”
“This guy, he was a bodhisattva,” Martin said to me that day. “This is the greatest psychic explorer of the 20th century, and this book tells the story of his inner life.” He added, “It gives me goose bumps just thinking about it.” He had at that point yet to lay eyes on the book, but for him that made it all the more tantalizing. His hope was that the Red Book would “reinvigorate” Jungian psychology, or at the very least bring himself personally closer to Jung. “Will I understand it?” he said. “Probably not. Will it disappoint? Probably. Will it inspire? How could it not?” He paused a moment, seeming to think it through. “I want to be transformed by it,” he said finally. “That’s all there is.”
IN ORDER TO UNDERSTAND and decode the Red Book — a process he says required more than five years of concentrated work — Sonu Shamdasani took long, rambling walks on London’s Hampstead Heath. He would translate the book in the morning, then walk miles in the park in the afternoon, his mind trying to follow the rabbit’s path Jung had forged through his own mind.
Shamdasani is 46. He has thick black hair, a punctilious eye for detail and an understated, even somnolent, way of speaking. He is friendly but not particularly given to small talk. If Stephen Martin is — in Jungian terms — a “feeling type,” then Shamdasani, who teaches at the University College London’s Wellcome Trust Center for the History of Medicine and keeps a book by the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus by his sofa for light reading, is a “thinking type.” He has studied Jungian psychology for more than 15 years and is particularly drawn to the breadth of Jung’s psychology and his knowledge of Eastern thought, as well as the historical richness of his era, a period when visionary writing was more common, when science and art were more entwined and when Europe was slipping into the psychic upheaval of war. He tends to be suspicious of interpretive thinking that’s not anchored by hard fact — and has, in fact, made a habit of attacking anybody he deems guilty of sloppy scholarship — and also maintains a generally unsentimental attitude toward Jung. Both of these qualities make him, at times, awkward company among both Jungians and Jungs.
The relationship between historians and the families of history’s luminaries is, almost by nature, one of mutual disenchantment. One side works to extract; the other to protect. One pushes; one pulls. Stephen Joyce, James Joyce’s literary executor and last living heir, has compared scholars and biographers to “rats and lice.” Vladimir Nabokov’s son Dmitri recently told an interviewer that he considered destroying his father’s last known novel in order to rescue it from the “monstrous nincompoops” who had already picked over his father’s life and works. T. S. Eliot’s widow, Valerie Fletcher, has actively kept his papers out of the hands of biographers, and Anna Freud was, during her lifetime, notoriously selective about who was allowed to read and quote from her father’s archives.
Even against this backdrop, the Jungs, led by Ulrich Hoerni, the chief literary administrator, have distinguished themselves with their custodial vigor. Over the years, they have tried to interfere with the publication of books perceived to be negative or inaccurate (including one by the award-winning biographer Deirdre Bair), engaged in legal standoffs with Jungians and other academics over rights to Jung’s work and maintained a state of high agitation concerning the way C. G. Jung is portrayed. Shamdasani was initially cautious with Jung’s heirs. “They had a retinue of people coming to them and asking to see the crown jewels,” he told me in London this summer. “And the standard reply was, ‘Get lost.’ ”
Shamdasani first approached the family with a proposal to edit and eventually publish the Red Book in 1997, which turned out to be an opportune moment. Franz Jung, a vehement opponent of exposing Jung’s private side, had recently died, and the family was reeling from the publication of two controversial and widely discussed books by an American psychologist named Richard Noll, who proposed that Jung was a philandering, self-appointed prophet of a sun-worshiping Aryan cult and that several of his central ideas were either plagiarized or based upon falsified research.
While the attacks by Noll might have normally propelled the family to more vociferously guard the Red Book, Shamdasani showed up with the right bargaining chips — two partial typed draft manuscripts (without illustrations) of the Red Book he had dug up elsewhere. One was sitting on a bookshelf in a house in southern Switzerland, at the home of the elderly daughter of a woman who once worked as a transcriptionist and translator for Jung. The second he found at Yale University’s Beinecke Library, in an uncataloged box of papers belonging to a well-known German publisher. The fact that there were partial copies of the Red Book signified two things — one, that Jung had distributed it to at least a few friends, presumably soliciting feedback for publication; and two, that the book, so long considered private and inaccessible, was in fact findable. The specter of Richard Noll and anybody else who, they feared, might want to taint Jung by quoting selectively from the book loomed large. With or without the family’s blessing, the Red Book — or at least parts of it — would likely become public at some point soon, “probably,” Shamdasani wrote ominously in a report to the family, “in sensationalistic form.”
For about two years, Shamdasani flew back and forth to Zurich, making his case to Jung’s heirs. He had lunches and coffees and delivered a lecture. Finally, after what were by all accounts tense deliberations inside the family, Shamdasani was given a small salary and a color copy of the original book and was granted permission to proceed in preparing it for publication, though he was bound by a strict confidentiality agreement. When money ran short in 2003, the Philemon Foundation was created to finance Shamdasani’s research.
Having lived more or less alone with the book for almost a decade, Shamdasani — who is a lover of fine wine and the intricacies of jazz — these days has the slightly stunned aspect of someone who has only very recently found his way out of an enormous maze. When I visited him this summer in the book-stuffed duplex overlooking the heath, he was just adding his 1,051st footnote to the Red Book.
The footnotes map both Shamdasani’s journey and Jung’s. They include references to Faust, Keats, Ovid, the Norse gods Odin and Thor, the Egyptian deities Isis and Osiris, the Greek goddess Hecate, ancient Gnostic texts, Greek Hyperboreans, King Herod, the Old Testament, the New Testament, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, astrology, the artist Giacometti and the alchemical formulation of gold. And that’s just naming a few. The central premise of the book, Shamdasani told me, was that Jung had become disillusioned with scientific rationalism — what he called “the spirit of the times” — and over the course of many quixotic encounters with his own soul and with other inner figures, he comes to know and appreciate “the spirit of the depths,” a field that makes room for magic, coincidence and the mythological metaphors delivered by dreams.
“It is the nuclear reactor for all his works,” Shamdasani said, noting that Jung’s more well-known concepts — including his belief that humanity shares a pool of ancient wisdom that he called the collective unconscious and the thought that personalities have both male and female components (animus and anima) — have their roots in the Red Book. Creating the book also led Jung to reformulate how he worked with clients, as evidenced by an entry Shamdasani found in a self-published book written by a former client, in which she recalls Jung’s advice for processing what went on in the deeper and sometimes frightening parts of her mind.
“I should advise you to put it all down as beautifully as you can — in some beautifully bound book,” Jung instructed. “It will seem as if you were making the visions banal — but then you need to do that — then you are freed from the power of them. . . . Then when these things are in some precious book you can go to the book & turn over the pages & for you it will be your church — your cathedral — the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them — then you will lose your soul — for in that book is your soul.”
ZURICH IS, IF NOTHING ELSE, one of Europe’s more purposeful cities. Its church bells clang precisely; its trains glide in and out on a flawless schedule. There are crowded fondue restaurants and chocolatiers and rosy-cheeked natives breezily pedaling their bicycles over the stone bridges that span the Limmat River. In summer, white-sailed yachts puff around Lake Zurich; in winter, the Alps glitter on the horizon. And during the lunch hour year-round, squads of young bankers stride the Bahnhofstrasse in their power suits and high-end watches, appearing eternally mindful of the fact that beneath everyone’s feet lie labyrinthine vaults stuffed with a dazzling and disproportionate amount of the world’s wealth.
But there, too, ventilating the city’s material splendor with their devotion to dreams, are the Jungians. Some 100 Jungian analysts practice in and around Zurich, examining their clients’ dreams in sessions held in small offices tucked inside buildings around the city. Another few hundred analysts in training can be found studying at one of the two Jungian institutes in the area. More than once, I have been told that, in addition to being a fantastic tourist destination and a good place to hide money, Zurich is an excellent city for dreaming.
Jungians are accustomed to being in the minority pretty much everywhere they go, but here, inside a city of 370,000, they have found a certain quiet purchase. Zurich, for Jungians, is spiritually loaded. It’s a kind of Jerusalem, the place where C. G. Jung began his career, held seminars, cultivated an inner circle of disciples, developed his theories of the psyche and eventually grew old. Many of the people who enroll in the institutes are Swiss, American, British or German, but some are from places like Japan and South Africa and Brazil. Though there are other Jungian institutes in other cities around the world offering diploma programs, learning the techniques of dream analysis in Zurich is a little bit like learning to hit a baseball in Yankee Stadium. For a believer, the place alone conveys a talismanic grace.
Just as I had, Stephen Martin flew to Zurich the week the Red Book was taken from its bank-vault home and moved to a small photo studio near the opera house to be scanned, page by page, for publication. (A separate English translation along with Shamdasani’s introduction and footnotes will be included at the back of the book.) Martin already made a habit of visiting Zurich a few times a year for “bratwurst and renewal” and to attend to Philemon Foundation business. My first morning there, we walked around the older parts of Zurich, before going to see the book. Zurich made Martin nostalgic. It was here that he met his wife, Charlotte, and here that he developed the almost equally important relationship with his analyst, Frey-Rohn, carrying himself and his dreams to her office two or three times weekly for several years.
Undergoing analysis is a central, learn-by-doing part of Jungian training, which usually takes about five years and also involves taking courses in folklore, mythology, comparative religion and psychopathology, among others. It is, Martin says, very much a “mentor-based discipline.” He is fond of pointing out his own conferred pedigree, because Frey-Rohn was herself analyzed by C. G. Jung. Most analysts seem to know their bloodlines. That morning, Martin and I were passing a cafe when he spotted another American analyst, someone he knew in school and who has since settled in Switzerland. “Oh, there’s Bob,” Martin said merrily, making his way toward the man. “Bob trained with Liliane,” he explained to me, “and that makes us kind of like brothers.”
Jungian analysis revolves largely around writing down your dreams (or drawing them) and bringing them to the analyst — someone who is patently good with both symbols and people — to be scoured for personal and archetypal meaning. Borrowing from Jung’s own experiences, analysts often encourage clients to experiment on their own with active imagination, to summon a waking dreamscape and to interact with whatever, or whoever, surfaces there. Analysis is considered to be a form of psychotherapy, and many analysts are in fact trained also as psychotherapists, but in its purist form, a Jungian analyst eschews clinical talk of diagnoses and recovery in favor of broader (and some might say fuzzier) goals of self-discovery and wholeness — a maturation process Jung himself referred to as “individuation.” Perhaps as a result, Jungian analysis has a distinct appeal to people in midlife. “The purpose of analysis is not treatment,” Martin explained to me. “That’s the purpose of psychotherapy. The purpose of analysis,” he added, a touch grandly, “is to give life back to someone who’s lost it.”
Later that day, we went to the photo studio where the work on the book was already under way. The room was a charmless space with concrete floors and black walls. Its hushed atmosphere and glaring lights added a slightly surgical aspect. There was the editor from Norton in a tweedy sport coat. There was an art director hired by Norton and two technicians from a company called DigitalFusion, who had flown to Zurich from Southern California with what looked to be a half-ton of computer and camera equipment.
Shamdasani arrived ahead of us. And so did Ulrich Hoerni, who, along with his cousin Peter Jung, had become a cautious supporter of Shamdasani, working to build consensus inside the family to allow the book out into the world. Hoerni was the one to fetch the book from the bank and was now standing by, his brow furrowed, appearing somewhat tortured. To talk to Jung’s heirs is to understand that nearly four decades after his death, they continue to reel inside the psychic tornado Jung created during his lifetime, caught between the opposing forces of his admirers and critics and between their own filial loyalties and history’s pressing tendency to judge and rejudge its own playmakers. Hoerni would later tell me that Shamdasani’s discovery of the stray copies of the Red Book surprised him, that even today he’s not entirely clear about whether Carl Jung ever intended for the Red Book to be published. “He left it an open question,” he said. “One might think he would have taken some of his children aside and said, ‘This is what it is and what I want done with it,’ but he didn’t.” It was a burden Hoerni seemed to wear heavily. He had shown up at the photo studio not just with the Red Book in its special padded suitcase but also with a bedroll and a toothbrush, since after the day’s work was wrapped, he would be spending the night curled up near the book — “a necessary insurance measure,” he would explain.
And finally, there sunbathing under the lights, sat Carl Jung’s Red Book, splayed open to Page 37. One side of the open page showed an intricate mosaic painting of a giant holding an ax, surrounded by winged serpents and crocodiles. The other side was filled with a cramped German calligraphy that seemed at once controlled and also, just given the number of words on the page, created the impression of something written feverishly, cathartically. Above the book a 10,200-pixel scanner suspended on a dolly clicked and whirred, capturing the book one-tenth of a millimeter at a time and uploading the images into a computer.
The Red Book had an undeniable beauty. Its colors seemed almost to pulse, its writing almost to crawl. Shamdasani’s relief was palpable, as was Hoerni’s anxiety. Everyone in the room seemed frozen in a kind of awe, especially Stephen Martin, who stood about eight feet away from the book but then finally, after a few minutes, began to inch closer to it. When the art director called for a break, Martin leaned in, tilting his head to read some of the German on the page. Whether he understood it or not, he didn’t say. He only looked up and smiled.
ONE AFTERNOON I took a break from the scanning and visited Andreas Jung, who lives with his wife, Vreni, in C. G. Jung’s old house at 228 Seestrasse in the town of Küsnacht. The house — a 5,000-square-foot, 1908 baroque-style home, designed by the psychiatrist and financed largely with his wife, Emma’s, inheritance — sits on an expanse between the road and the lake. Two rows of trimmed, towering topiary trees create a narrow passage to the entrance. The house faces the white-capped lake, a set of manicured gardens and, in one corner, an anomalous, unruly patch of bamboo.
Andreas is a tall man with a quiet demeanor and a gentlemanly way of dressing. At 64, he resembles a thinner, milder version of his famous grandfather, whom he refers to as “C. G.” Among Jung’s five children (all but one are dead) and 19 grandchildren (all but five are still living), he is one of the youngest and also known as the most accommodating to curious outsiders. It is an uneasy kind of celebrity. He and Vreni make tea and politely serve cookies and dispense little anecdotes about Jung to those courteous enough to make an advance appointment. “People want to talk to me and sometimes even touch me,” Andreas told me, seeming both amused and a little sheepish. “But it is not at all because of me, of course. It is because of my grandfather.” He mentioned that the gardeners who trim the trees are often perplexed when they encounter strangers — usually foreigners — snapping pictures of the house. “In Switzerland, C. G. Jung is not thought to be so important,” he said. “They don’t see the point of it.”
Jung, who was born in the mountain village of Kesswil, was a lifelong outsider in Zurich, even as in his adult years he seeded the city with his followers and became — along with Paul Klee and Karl Barth — one of the best-known Swissmen of his era. Perhaps his marginalization stemmed in part from the offbeat nature of his ideas. (He was mocked, for example, for publishing a book in the late 1950s that examined the psychological phenomenon of flying saucers.) Maybe it was his well-documented abrasiveness toward people he found uninteresting. Or maybe it was connected to the fact that he broke with the established ranks of his profession. (During the troubled period when he began writing the Red Book, Jung resigned from his position at Burghölzli, never to return.) Most likely, too, it had something to do with the unconventional, unhidden, 40-something-year affair he conducted with a shy but intellectually forbidding woman named Toni Wolff, one of Jung’s former analysands who went on to become an analyst as well as Jung’s close professional collaborator and a frequent, if not fully welcome, fixture at the Jung family dinner table.
“The life of C. G. Jung was not easy,” Andreas said. “For the family, it was not easy at all.” As a young man, Andreas had sometimes gone and found his grandfather’s Red Book in the cupboard and paged through it, just for fun. Knowing its author personally, he said, “It was not strange to me at all.”
For the family, C. G. Jung became more of a puzzle after his death, having left behind a large amount of unpublished work and an audience eager to get its hands on it. “There were big fights,” Andreas told me when I visited him again this summer. Andreas, who was 19 when his grandfather died, recalled family debates over whether or not to allow some of Jung’s private letters to be published. When the extended family gathered for the annual Christmas party in Küsnacht, Jung’s children would disappear into a room and have heated discussions about what to do with what he had left behind while his grandchildren played in another room. “My cousins and brothers and I, we thought they were silly to argue over these things,” Andreas said, with a light laugh. “But later when our parents died, we found ourselves having those same arguments.”
Even Jung’s great-grandchildren felt his presence. “He was omnipresent,” Daniel Baumann, whose grandmother was Jung’s daughter Gret, would tell me when I met him later. He described his own childhood with a mix of bitterness and sympathy directed at the older generations. “It was, ‘Jung said this,’ and ‘Jung did that,’ and ‘Jung thought that.’ When you did something, he was always present somehow. He just continued to live on. He was with us. He is still with us,” Baumann said. Baumann is an architect and also the president of the board of the C. G. Jung Institute in Küsnacht. He deals with Jungians all the time, and for them, he said, it was the same. Jung was both there and not there. “It’s sort of like a hologram,” he said. “Everyone projects something in the space, and Jung begins to be a real person again.”
ONE NIGHT DURING the week of the scanning in Zurich, I had a big dream. A big dream, the Jungians tell me, is a departure from all your regular dreams, which in my case meant this dream was not about falling off a cliff or missing an exam. This dream was about an elephant — a dead elephant with its head cut off. The head was on a grill at a suburban-style barbecue, and I was holding the spatula. Everybody milled around with cocktails; the head sizzled over the flames. I was angry at my daughter’s kindergarten teacher because she was supposed to be grilling the elephant head at the barbecue, but she hadn’t bothered to show up. And so the job fell to me. Then I woke up.
At the hotel breakfast buffet, I bumped into Stephen Martin and a Californian analyst named Nancy Furlotti, who is the vice president on the board of the Philemon Foundation and was at that moment having tea and muesli.
“How are you?” Martin said.
“Did you dream?” Furlotti asked
“What do elephants mean to you?” Martin asked after I relayed my dream.
“I like elephants,” I said. “I admire elephants.”
“There’s Ganesha,” Furlotti said, more to Martin than to me. “Ganesha is an Indian god of wisdom.”
“Elephants are maternal,” Martin offered, “very caring.”
They spent a few minutes puzzling over the archetypal role of the kindergarten teacher. “How do you feel about her?” “Would you say she is more like a mother figure or more like a witch?”
Giving a dream to a Jungian analyst is a little bit like feeding a complex quadratic equation to someone who really enjoys math. It takes time. The process itself is to be savored. The solution is not always immediately evident. In the following months, I told my dream to several more analysts, and each one circled around similar symbolic concepts about femininity and wisdom. One day I was in the office of Murray Stein, an American analyst who lives in Switzerland and serves as the president of the International School of Analytical Psychology, talking about the Red Book. Stein was telling me about how some Jungian analysts he knew were worried about the publication — worried specifically that it was a private document and would be apprehended as the work of a crazy person, which then reminded me of my crazy dream. I related it to him, saying that the very thought of eating an elephant’s head struck me as grotesque and embarrassing and possibly a sign there was something deeply wrong with my psyche. Stein assured me that eating is a symbol for integration. “Don’t worry,” he said soothingly. “It’s horrifying on a naturalistic level, but symbolically it is good.”
It turned out that nearly everybody around the Red Book was dreaming that week. Nancy Furlotti dreamed that we were all sitting at a table drinking amber liquid from glass globes and talking about death. (Was the scanning of the book a death? Wasn’t death followed by rebirth?) Sonu Shamdasani dreamed that he came upon Hoerni sleeping in the garden of a museum. Stephen Martin was sure that he had felt some invisible hand patting him on the back while he slept. And Hugh Milstein, one of the digital techs scanning the book, passed a tormented night watching a ghostly, white-faced child flash on a computer screen. (Furlotti and Martin debated: could that be Mercurius? The god of travelers at a crossroads?)
Early one morning we were standing around the photo studio discussing our various dreams when Ulrich Hoerni trudged through the door, having deputized his nephew Felix to spend the previous night next to the Red Book. Felix had done his job; the Red Book lay sleeping with its cover closed on the table. But Hoerni, appearing weary, seemed to be taking an extra hard look at the book. The Jungians greeted him. “How are you? Did you dream last night?”
“Yes,” Hoerni said quietly, not moving his gaze from the table. “I dreamed the book was on fire.”
ABOUT HALFWAY THROUGH the Red Book — after he has traversed a desert, scrambled up mountains, carried God on his back, committed murder, visited hell; and after he has had long and inconclusive talks with his guru, Philemon, a man with bullhorns and a long beard who flaps around on kingfisher wings — Jung is feeling understandably tired and insane. This is when his soul, a female figure who surfaces periodically throughout the book, shows up again. She tells him not to fear madness but to accept it, even to tap into it as a source of creativity. “If you want to find paths, you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up such a great part of your nature.”
The Red Book is not an easy journey — it wasn’t for Jung, it wasn’t for his family, nor for Shamdasani, and neither will it be for readers. The book is bombastic, baroque and like so much else about Carl Jung, a willful oddity, synched with an antediluvian and mystical reality. The text is dense, often poetic, always strange. The art is arresting and also strange. Even today, its publication feels risky, like an exposure. But then again, it is possible Jung intended it as such. In 1959, after having left the book more or less untouched for 30 or so years, he penned a brief epilogue, acknowledging the central dilemma in considering the book’s fate. “To the superficial observer,” he wrote, “it will appear like madness.” Yet the very fact he wrote an epilogue seems to indicate that he trusted his words would someday find the right audience.
Shamdasani figures that the Red Book’s contents will ignite both Jung’s fans and his critics. Already there are Jungians planning conferences and lectures devoted to the Red Book, something that Shamdasani finds amusing. Recalling that it took him years to feel as if he understood anything about the book, he’s curious to know what people will be saying about it just months after it is published. As far as he is concerned, once the book sees daylight, it will become a major and unignorable piece of Jung’s history, the gateway into Carl Jung’s most inner of inner experiences. “Once it’s published, there will be a ‘before’ and ‘after’ in Jungian scholarship,” he told me, adding, “it will wipe out all the biographies, just for starters.” What about the rest of us, the people who aren’t Jungians, I wondered. Was there something in the Red Book for us? “Absolutely, there is a human story here,” Shamdasani said. “The basic message he’s sending is ‘Value your inner life.’ ”
After it was scanned, the book went back to its bank-vault home, but it will move again — this time to New York, accompanied by a number of Jung’s descendents. For the next few months it will be on display at the Rubin Museum of Art. Ulrich Hoerni told me this summer that he assumed the book would generate “criticism and gossip,” but by bringing it out they were potentially rescuing future generations of Jungs from some of the struggles of the past. If another generation inherited the Red Book, he said, “the question would again have to be asked, ‘What do we do with it?’ ”
Stephen Martin too will be on hand for the book’s arrival in New York. He is already sensing that it will shed positive light on Jung — this thanks to a dream he had recently about an “inexpressively sublime” dawn breaking over the Swiss Alps — even as others are not so certain.
In the Red Book, after Jung’s soul urges him to embrace the madness, Jung is still doubtful. Then suddenly, as happens in dreams, his soul turns into “a fat, little professor,” who expresses a kind of paternal concern for Jung.
Jung says: “I too believe that I’ve completely lost myself. Am I really crazy? It’s all terribly confusing.”
The professor responds: “Have patience, everything will work out. Anyway, sleep well.”
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to the Union Bank of Switzerland as the United Bank of Switzerland.

Labor Day and the low-wage future

2009-09-07T10:22:00.000-07:00

Friday Flashback: Marvin Gaye - "I Want You"

2009-09-03T23:56:00.000-07:00

Innovation – Regulatory Road Kill?

2009-09-03T23:49:00.000-07:00

(http://hallingblog.com/2009/05/26/innovation-regulatory-road-kill/)
The 90’s brought us companies such as Amazon.com, eBay, Netscape, Broadcom, and AOL to name a few. We discovered web browsers, PDAs, universal email, voice over IP, DSL, broadband cable, cable telephony, Wi-Fi, and TiVo among others. The 80’s brought us companies such as Dell, Compaq, Cisco, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Adobe Systems, and Genentech. We discovered personal computers, cellular telephones, spreadsheets, and genetic engineering. This decade we have Crocs and the iPod. Where has American innovation gone?

John Kao, an expert on innovation from Harvard, claims the U.S. is experiencing a brain drain as foreign scientists and engineers return to their native countries for better opportunities. Even more alarmingly, other countries are luring away U.S. born scientists and engineers. Much of our venture capital industry is investing their resources outside the U.S. Those venture capital funds not invested overseas are often part of the walking dead, no longer actively investing.

Why should we worry whether the U.S. is no longer the innovation leader of the World? Without innovation our standard of living is stagnant or declining. So why have we stopped innovating? Let’s look for the changes since 2000, that would effect the ability of a Qualcomm, CISCO, eBay or Amazon.com to fulfill its potential today. There are three such major changes since 2000. Sarbanes Oxley makes it much more difficult to go public today. Changes to patent law make it more difficult to secure intellectual property and easier to steal innovations. Finally, changes to stock option accounting rules make it difficult lure talent to start-up companies.

When Sarbanes Oxley was passed the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) estimated the cost of compliance would be $91,000.00 per year for each public company. The most recent estimates for the cost of compliance are between $4.0 million and $5.0 million per year for publicly traded companies. The United States has over 18,000 public companies, which means the U.S. spends around $80 Billion a year to comply with Sarbanes Oxley.

Sarbanes Oxley was passed in 2002 in reaction to the corporate and accounting scandals including those affecting Enron, Tyco International, Adelphia, and WorldCom. The legislation set new or enhanced standards for all U.S. public company boards, management, and public accounting firms. The act contains 11 titles, or sections, ranging from additional corporate board responsibilities to criminal penalties, and requires the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to implement rulings on requirements to comply with the new law.

Is the cost of this law worth its incredible price? Has Sarbanes Oxley achieved its goal of protecting investors from fraud? Sarbanes Oxley has cost the U.S. economy at least $400 billion since it passage. The stock market has been flat or declining since its passage. As a result, it is hard to argue that this legislation increased shareholder value. The banking scandals 2008 & 2009 and the Bernie Madoff fiasco make it impossible to suggest that Sarbanes Oxley has protected investors from fraud.

Sources report that 100 to 200 publicly owned companies per year, including big names such as Dunkin’ Donuts and Neiman Marcus, have chosen to buy out their stockholders and revert to private ownership. Many U.S. private firms are putting off initial public offerings, and more foreign companies are choosing to list on the Tokyo, London or other foreign exchanges rather than on the U.S. stock exchanges.

In addition, to these problems, Sarbanes Oxley has essentially killed off the public market as an exit strategy for technology start-up companies, thereby reducing investment in innovative start-up companies. In the second quarter of 2008, there were no public offerings of Silicon Valley venture capital-backed companies, a phenomenon not seen since 1978. At $4-5 million per year for a company to go public and comply with Sarbanes Oxley, it must have earnings of about $100 million and sales of around $1 billion. Given these astronomical hurdles to an IPO (Initial Public Offer), it is not surprising that start-up companies no longer consider an IPO a realistic exit strategy. Repealing Sarbanes Oxley is essential unless we want to see Silicon Valley’s status as a hotbed of innovation erode and see the future invented outside of the United States.

Changes to the patent laws in the last decade favor technology appropriators over technology creators. The Supreme Court’s eBay ruling denied inventors’ ability to enforce their basic right to exclude others from using their invention. The Supreme Court’s KSR decision changed the standard for what is patentable from an objective standard to a subjective standard. Finally, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) independently changed the internal standard for what inventions receive patents. This change has resulted in the allowance rate falling from around 70% in 2000 down to 45% in 2008. Harmonization of our patent laws with the rest of the world has broken the social contract between inventors and society.

The Intellectual Property and Communication Omnibus Reform Act of 1999 requires publication of US patent applications 18 months from the filing date. This Act is part of an effort to harmonize U.S. patent laws with the rest of the world. Patents are commonly considered a deal between the inventor and society. The inventor receives a limited term right to exclude others from using their invention and the quid pro quo is that the inventor discloses how to practice their invention. The publication rule is a clear violation of this social contract between the inventor and society. Under the publication rule, society gets the advantage of the disclosure of the invention even if the inventor never receives any property rights in his invention. Before the publication rule, if an inventor felt that the scope of the claims to his invention were too narrow or not allowable, he could withdraw his application and keep his invention a trade secret. Narrow claims are easy for a competitor to design around providing little protection in exchange for the disclosure of the invention. In other words if the inventor did not like the deal he was offered from the Patent Office he could reject it and keep his invention a secret. Even for inventions that can be reverse engineered once the invention is marketed, this is a better deal than the publication rule. Under the publication rule, it is easy for competitors to find the inventor’s idea on the World Wide Web and copy the invention. Without publication, a competitor has to spend the time and money to reverse engineer an invention.

In 2006 the US Supreme Court decided eBay Inc v. MercExchange, L.L.C., 547 U.S. 388 (2006) holding that a permanent injunction should not automatically issue as part of a judgment of infringement. A patent is a legal right to exclude, 35 USC 154, others from making, using, selling (offering for sale), or importing the invention. It is a little known fact that a patent does not give the holder the right to use, make, sell (offer for sale) or import the invention. The Supreme Court’s eBay decision denies a patent holder’s right to exclude others and substitutes monetary damages even if the patent holder prefers to enforce their right to exclude.

In KSR International v. Teleflex, 550 U.S. 398 (2007) the Supreme Court made it easier to find a patent invalid, and harder to obtain a patent by changing the standard for obviousness. In order to obtain a patent, the invention has to useful, novel, and non-obvious. This case overturned 20 years of jurisprudence associated with an objective test of obviousness. The Supreme Court substituted a flexible subject test for obviousness. This more flexible approach increases the uncertainty that an inventor will receive a patent and increases the risk that their patent is found invalid if they have to enforce their patent against an infringer. It also increased the costs associated with obtaining a patent and in enforcing a patent.

Not to be outdone, the Patent and Trademark Office launched their own assault on inventors. The allowance rate for patents has dropped from around 70% in 2000 down to 45% in 2008. The allowance rate had hovered around 62%-72% for several decades and then started a precipitous drop around 2003.

These changes to our patent systems have been nothing less than a full-out assault on the rights of innovators.

In 2005 FASB required companies to start expensing stock options. Start-up companies used stock options as a major tool in luring human talent from secure positions. Requiring the expensing of stock options places an enormous burden on start-ups. This burden has resulted in start-ups foregoing their use. There is no economic justification for expensing stock options, since changing the number of shares for a company does not change its income statement. However, the burden of this regulation has taken this important financial tool away from start-up companies and hurt innovation in the U.S.

U.S. innovation is stagnant because of the regulatory burden we have placed on high technology start-up companies. Both the empirical evidence and the logical case for Sarbanes Oxley, changes in the patent laws and the required expensing of stock options fail. Repealing these regulatory burdens on innovators will jump-start the U.S. economy.

Friday Flashback: The Temptations - "Ain't Too Proud To Beg"

2009-08-28T06:05:00.000-07:00

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE (Must Listen)

2009-08-25T01:08:00.001-07:00

(http://www.wpr.org/book/090823a.cfm)
Listen To Podcast
David Foster Wallace may have understood the modern American better than any writer of our time. His suicide in September of 2008 stunned his friends and fans. Wallace was a master at capturing the way we think, feel and live, and his books and essays conveyed an intimacy that made a lot of people feel like Wallace was a friend they'd never met. In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge we celebrate the life and work of the late David Foster Wallace.

SEGMENT 1:

Salon book critic Laura Miller explains why David Foster Wallace was the most important writer of his generation. Wallace became a literary rock star in his thirties for the novel "Infinite Jest." Time Magazine later included it on its list of "All Time 100 Greatest Novels." When Wallace committed suicide in September 2008 his fans grieved, wrote tributes, and began to speculate about rumors of an unfinished novel. Journalist DT Max tells Steve Paulson about the novel's discovery, Wallace's creative struggles with "The Pale King," and the novel's subject - boredom. Also, an interview with David Foster Wallace with Steve Paulson from 2004, just after the publication of his short story collection "Oblivion."

SEGMENT 2:

Time magazine's book critic Lev Grossman remembers David Foster Wallace, and we present another interview with Wallace in 1996, right after "Infinite Jest" was published. Rolling Stone contributing editor David Lipsky spent a week with Wallace after "Infinite Jest" came out, and was later assigned to cover the writer's life and death. He tells Jim Fleming that Wallace's emotional struggles began again after graduate school. Michael Pietsch was Wallace's editor at Little, Brown starting in the 90s and is currently at work editing the unfinished novel "The Pale King." Pietsch has given us exclusive rights to a passage from the novel, which is read by Chicago actress Carrie Coon.

SEGMENT 3:

One of David Foster Wallace's most popular essays is "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," which ran originally in Harper's Magazine. In 1997 he read a bit of the article for us, and talked with Steve Paulson about it. Wallace's Sister Amy Wallace-Havens describes her brother as immensely bright, funny and courageous. She tells Anne Strainchamps about growing up with him, and about life without him. Also we have an excerpt from the commencement speech David Foster Wallace gave at Kenyon College in 2005. It was eventually published under the title "This is Water," but it has never before been broadcast.

CD copies are available at 1-800-747-7444. Ask for program number 09-05-24-A.

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Books & CDs:

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (Little Brown)

David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (Back Bay Books)

David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster: and Other Essays (Back Bay Books)

Audio Extras:

Three TTBOOK Interviews with David Foster Wallace:
Infinite Jest interview from TTBOOK Program "Unwholesome Entertainment" 1996
“Another Supposedly Fun Thing…” Essays from TTBOOK Program "Pursuit of Pleasure" 1997
The unedited interview from the Oblivion Stories 2004.
Amy Wallace Havens unedited interview 2009
Kenyon College audio clip
Boswell ‘09 on “This is Water”

Websites:

Pomona College Tribute to DFW
http://www.pomona.edu/adwr/president/dfw2.shtml
McSweeney's tribute to DFW
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/dfw/memories.html

Music:
-Everywhere You Turn/ The Bad Plus/ "These are the Vistas"/ Sony

-Comfortably Numb/ The Bad Plus/ "For All I Care"/ Head's Up

-Reciting the Airships/ Eluvium/ "Copia"/ Temporary Resistance

-The Pacifist/ DJ Vadim/" USSR"/ Ninja Tune

-Souvenirs; Danced All Night; The Pall Bearers/ "Circus Songs"/ The Tiger Lilies/ Misery Guts Music

-Five String Serenade/ Mazzy Star/ So Tonight That I Might See/ Capitol Records

-Edge of the World/ Josh Ritter/ "The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter"/ Sony BMG

- The Long Road/Eddie Vedder/ Sony Entertainment

-Dirty Blonde/ The Bad Plus/ "Give"/ Sony Music

THE HORROR, THE HORROR

2009-08-25T01:08:00.000-07:00

(http://www.wpr.org/book/080928b.cfm)
Listen To Podcast
You're driving along a dark road when you're distracted by what appears to be a flight of arrows. You crash into a ravine and suffer horrible burns over most of your body. In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, we'll talk to Andrew Davidson abouthis debut novel "The Gargoyle," It's been described as an "Inferno" for our time. Also, the delightfully disturbing tales of Kelly Link.

SEGMENT 1:

A clip from a commercial for "Dawn of the Dead" sets us up for an examination of the horror genre. Andrew Davidson is the author of "The Gargoyle." It's his debut novel and has been described as "an Inferno for our time." Davidson reads from the book and talks about it with Steve Paulson.

SEGMENT 2:

Richard Hand is the author of "Terror on the Air!: Horror Radio in America, 1931 - 1952." Hand describes several of the programs that made that period the Golden Age of radio and we hear excerpts from classics like "Lights Out." Also, Glenn Kay is the author of "Zombie Movies: The Ultimate Guide." Kay talks with Jim Fleming about his book and some of the over 300 zombie films he reviews and rates. And we hear clips, of course.

SEGMENT 3:

Kelly Link has published her third collection of short fiction. It's called "Pretty Monsters" and is aimed at Young Adult readers. Link talks with Anne Strainchamps about the challenges of writing for teenagers, and reads excerpts from a few of her stories.

CD copies are available at 1-800-747-7444. Ask for program number 08-09-28-B.

................................................................

Books & CDs:

Andrew Davidson, The Gargoyle (Doubleday)

Richard Hand, Terror on the Air!: Horror Radio in America, 1931 - 1952 (McFarland)

Glenn Kay, Zombie Movies: The Ultimate Guide (Chicago Review Press/An A Cappella Book)

Kelly Link, Pretty Monsters: Stories (Viking)

Websites:

-- Andrew Davidson/"The Gargoyle"
http://doubleday.com/thegargoyle/

-- Richard J. Hand/"Terror on the Air!: Horror Radio in America, 1931-1952"
http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/book-2.php?id=978-0-7864-2367-5
http://people.glam.ac.uk/view/384/

-- Glenn Kay/"Zombie Movies: The Ultimate Guide"
http://www.chicagoreviewpress.com/catalog/showBook.cfm?ISBN=1556527705

-- Kelly Link
http://www.kellylink.net/

Clips:
-- "Dawn of the Dead" radio commercial
from the DVD, "Dawn of the Dead (Ultimate Edition)" (Anchor Bay Entertainment)
http://tinyurl.com/4mw4qh

-- "Horror Radio" clips from Richard Hand Mix:

-- "The Author and the Thing" episode of "Lights Out"

-- ""Poltergeist" episode of "Lights Out"

-- "Chicken Heart" episode of "Lights Out"
http://www.archive.org/details/LightsOutCollection-OTRKIBM

-- "Death for Sale" episode of "Inner Sanctum Mysteries"
http://www.archive.org/details/InnerSanctumMysteriesOTRKIBM

-- Clips used in Glenn Kay/Zombie Movies Mix:

-- "Night of the Living Dead" clips
from "Elvira's Horror Classics" DVD (Time Life Video)

-- "Dawn of the Dead" clips
from the DVD, "Dawn of the Dead (Ultimate Edition)" (Anchor Bay Entertainment)
http://tinyurl.com/4mw4qh

Music:
-- "Mulholland Drive"/Angelo Badalamenti
Performed by Angelo Badalamenti with the City of Prague Philharmonic
from the CD, "David Lynch's Mulholland Drive Original Soundtrack" ((Milan)
http://www.milanrecords.com/index.php

-- ""Rita Walks/Sunset Boulevard/Aunt Ruth"/Angelo Badalamenti
Performed by Angelo Badalamenti with the City of Prague Philharmonic
from the CD, "David Lynch's Mulholland Drive Original Soundtrack" ((Milan)
http://www.milanrecords.com/index.php

-- "Time Bomb"/Los Straitjackets
from the CD, "Supersonic Guitars in 3-D" (Yep Roc)
http://www.straitjackets.com/ http://www.yeproc.com/artist_info.php?artistId=44

-- "Mulholland Drive/Love Theme"/Angelo Badalamenti
Performed by Angelo Badalamenti with the City of Prague Philharmonic
from the CD, "David Lynch's Mulholland Drive Original Soundtrack" ((Milan)
http://www.milanrecords.com/index.php

India renews its tryst with destiny

2009-08-25T00:57:00.000-07:00

Imagining India by Nandan Nilekani

Reviewed by Dinesh Sharma
(http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KH22Df02.html)

Nandan Nilekani represents an Indian entrepreneurial class that is spearheading a quiet revolution. He claims the forces of information technology, economic liberalization and globalization have created a resurgence in India that resembles the heady days of the founding of the nation.

In the words of his friend and confidant, Thomas L Friedman, who has written the foreword to the book, India's economic rise could potentially level the playing field for more than one billion people. Weaned off of a half-century of dependency on quasi-socialist ideologies, India's forays into the information technology sector have demonstrated its readiness to take on the challenges of the free-market economy and become the largest and the fastest growing democracy on the planet.

Nilekani's rediscovery of India through entrepreneurship tells the story of an ancient civilization entering the information age - an antique land with one of the world's fastest growing cell phone penetration rates. India today stands at a crossroads, facing a major demographic transition and bustling with the spirit of technological innovation. It can either embrace this, take the arduous path less traveled and reshape the country for the 21st century, or due to a lack of political resolve forego an economic tidal wave that could improve the living standards for its hungry masses.

As a co-founder of Infosys, Nilekani stumbled upon the idea of a technology start-up in the early 1980s. He describes himself as "an accidental entrepreneur" trying to renew India's outlook.

"[A]s an IT company, Infosys always faced challenges different from the rest of the Indian industry. Shortages in infrastructure did not affect us, as our markets were international, and all we needed to do business was a wire and some computers. We experienced little of the labor problems and strikes that plagued India's traditional industries" (p 3).

Nilekani concludes that India's recent victories in economic reforms have been gained "despite the state", an idea encapsulated in the underlying theme of the book: "India's weaknesses are all within, in the ongoing struggle to define the direction of our future ideas and policies for the future" (p 5). Like a piece of software code or an Indian classical raga (melody), this theme plays throughout the book in different variations, tempos and pitch.

This is a book driven by ideas, both large and small. In part one, the book examines ideas that have arrived and where attitudes in the Indian population have changed. For example, the English language was once seen as a vestige of the Raj but with the onset of outsourcing, it has become the language of choice and a ticket to globalization. Not long ago, India's large population was seen as a burden but now it forms the human capital reserves needed to meet the challenges of affordable labor. Prior to liberalization, global brands were driven out of India; yet, today no one raises an eyebrow when another KFC or McDonalds opens in a local town or city.

The second part of the book examines new ideas that have not yet been fully adopted. For example, the idea of universal literacy. Similarly, the idea that the "real India" is to be found in its villages has been central to the romantic notion of India, but lately this has given way to the need to build modern cities.

The third part of the book examines controversial ideas the role of government in private education, the reform of labor laws and the building of integrated financial markets. In the concluding section of the book, Nilekani challenges readers to create innovative Indian solutions to uniquely Indian problems, rather than simply importing ideas from other countries. India's economy, population and energy challenges demand Indian solutions not necessarily pre-configured in Western ideas about development.

For a man of technology, inclined to measure progress in nanoseconds, Nilekani has a long view of Indian history: "The problem was that the curve of India's history and its ideas had been an extremely discontinuous one - a foreign occupation had long divorced the region from its pre-British ideas and economic and social structures ... What we saw in its place instead was strange grafting of the Indian identity with an entirely new culture. The British brought with them the English language and Western education, and with such education came the ideas of modern nationalism, self-determination and democracy. However, these ideas only reached a small elite - the British consensus was that, on the whole, Indians were best left alone" (p 10).

Nilekani states that fissures created by the British have endured; India has remained divided between the elite civil service class and the mass of humanity which is predominantly feudal and rural. The chasm between the old India, "the village India", and elite India, "the babu-sahib [term for British colonials] culture", saddled the post-independence India through the stagnant years of growth, leading up to the economic liberalization of the 1990s.

India was unified in the two decades after independence due to the national goodwill created by the transformational leaders like Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. There were also brief moments of unity during the 1962 war with China and wars with Pakistan in 1947-1948, 1965 and 1971. Otherwise, India has been divided along traditional lines of rural-urban region, religion, caste, social class and gender hierarchy. Economic liberalization was the singular event that marked the beginning of the great Indian middle class, which approximates the population of the United States.

Partly due to his global vision, Nilekani breaks through with clear insights. He recognizes that India at the time of its independence and shortly thereafter was a unified nation under the shadow of its founding fathers. This was a short-lived moment, however, and India has not been unified ever since; post-independence India has been splintering from within and without. Former prime minister Indira Gandhi tried to create a national identity driven by genealogy, personality, and an iron-fisted rule. But after her demise this led to the rise of the nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, a fragmentation of multiple communal parties and the weakening of the traditional center.

Today, Nilekani regretfully admits, "Our politics are broadly organized along the lines of caste, religion, region and class. These form the basis of our loyalties and, often, of our development policies." He adds that hope is not lost, however, as "our divisions were overcome once, in the heady days after independence, and this may happen again" (p 15) as demonstrated by the consensus formed in the recent elections in favor of the Congress Party.

Nilekani is boldly envisioning a second Indian renaissance. Is he an overly optimistic dreamer, buoyed by success and confidence in the private sector, wishing that all of India will soon possess laptops, flat-screen monitors and manicured lawns like the Infosys campus? Or, is he a cautious realist who knows that structural changes will require a paradigmatic shift in the social and moral order, which may have been jump-started by the growth in the information technology sector but still has a long way to go?

Nilekani represents a combination of both of these attitudes; parts of the book are inspirational, yet other parts are weighed down by serious policy analysis. As someone who has examined India from the perspective of social and marketing sciences, I found Nilekani's vision a much-needed antidote to outdated social and cultural theories as well as to the recent hype and hopes about India. This book will certainly go a long way towards correcting the romantic view of India as the land of snake charmers and levitating yogis.

The top-heavy policy analysis lays out a systematic argument for why India is poised to make a significant contribution to the world economy and how the next century might be the Asian century.

"India has gained dramatically from similar, massive changes in our attitudes towards our population, entrepreneurs, the English language, globalization and democracy. It has made India a country that right now has a unique cadence, where all our major strengths have come together and matured at the same time" (p 32).

Nilekani discusses how India was once considered the basket-case of the world, an overpopulated and unsustainable country of a billion hungry stomachs, but is no longer seen in these Malthusian terms. In light of the information technology boom, India is the preferred destination due to its untapped pool of talent and affordable labor.

Comparing different government policies, India and China stand at the opposite ends of the demographic and political continuum; India's destiny is tied with democracy and the demographic boom, while China's growth is the byproduct of autocracy and the one-child policy.

Nilekani of course believes that history favors the Indian model of development to reap what he calls "the demographic dividend", while China may have already peaked in terms of population growth as the typical family structure now consists of four grandparents, two parents and only one child. This has led to irreversible levels of fertility and a shortage of labor supply. Thus, India appears green and young demographically, while China is already graying, not unlike the baby boomer generation in the developed economies.

Nilekani suggests that India in fact has "a camel" in its demographic graph, consisting of a double hump or a bimodal distribution, representing a different population rate for its advanced southern region versus the backward northern states. While the southern hump has already peaked and led to irreversible birth rates in states like Tamil Nadu and Kerala, the northern hump, consisting of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, will peak sometime near 2020.

According to many demographic models, the majority of India's population will remain younger till 2050 in comparison to the rest of the developing and the developed world. Thus, the benefits of democracy coupled with the demographics of a younger population support the Indian model of development over the long haul. The challenge is that the Indian government and the populace at large must have its own house in order to fully take advantage of these demographic trends.

Having been colonized by the East India Company, Indians have always had an uneasy alliance with the profit motive and the world of private enterprise; even ancient Hindu scriptures warn against the profit motive as maya or illusory. Thus, the founding fathers when confronted with the challenges of governing an independent India opted to not give much weight or responsibility to the private sector. This led India down a socialist path in its development of industry, with the government the majority stake owner. While this fostered strong local businesses, India remained parochial, closed-off and uncompetitive vis-a-vis the rest of the world.

As the path of last resort, when India faced bankruptcy and was forced to adopt economic liberalization in the early 1990s, Nilekani along with nine other entrepreneurs received a call from Montek Singh and the current Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to attend a meeting of American and Indian business leaders for a conference with the president of the United States. The agenda of course was how to jump start the Indian economy. This in essence began India's American revival with technological innovation, which in the two decades since has doubled if not tripled its growth rate.

There are other fascinating connections between America, the first democracy, and India, the largest democracy in the world. When George Washington's armies finally trounced Charles Cornwallis in Yorktown in 1781, Cornwallis was sent packing to Bengal as the governor general of India who first pushed the English language on the subcontinent. Anyone who has driven along the East Coast on highway US-1, can easily trace the names of towns back to the old world and then connect the dots to Calcutta or West Bengal across the Indian Ocean. Even today the English language remains the common thread across time and space; it is the lingua franca of commerce and trade, except now it is transmitted through high-speed fiber optic lines.

India's feelings over the English language have blown hot and cold over the centuries; however, post-liberalization Indian companies have won software contracts on the back of English becoming the principal language of commerce, and this has indelibly shaped the Indian mind. Nilekani provides a fascinating exposition of how the rise, the fall and the eventual rise of English as the language of IT and Business Process Outsourcing services has put India at a distinct advantage in the global economy.

Because language is the often the medium of cultural exchange, India's reaction to the English language has reflected in its attitudes towards the West. Like any human relationship, this has included a range of emotional and intellectual postures ranging from outright resistance to unspoken admiration and everything in between. Resistance and admiration of the West has ebbed and flowed depending on the mood and tenor of the country. However, what seems to have swept in after the liberal reforms of the 1990s is a reversal of a staunchly inward-looking stance.

As Indian businesses have succeeded in the global marketplace, the internal fissures that held India back have resurfaced, shedding new light on the real stumbling blocks towards progress. Nilekani observes, "But even as the world is acknowledging India's new promise, the opportunity of the global economy has highlighted our internal differences - between the educated and the illiterate, the public and private sectors, between the well and poorly governed, and between those who have access and those who do not. In this sense, even as we Indians define ourselves in the context of our home and the world, we face incredible contradictions" (p 139).

India's founding fathers, while they chose a quasi-socialist economic policy, put their faith squarely in the democratic ideals of a civil society, free press and human rights. The Indian populace could not have known it at the time, but this was an immeasurable gift. The million little mutinies that have come and gone could not consume the nation state because the democratic ideals among Indians had become resilient and strong. Except for a few glitches, for example, during the emergency in 1970s, Indians have stayed on the path of democratic rule, even though it has neither come easily nor naturally.

Today as India faces a multiparty system, democratic governance has led to greater regional voices participating in the electoral process; thus, an institutional framework that was once considered "essentially foreign" has now simply become essential to the Indian experiment (p 163), again as demonstrated by the outcome of the recent elections which has voted in the architects of the economic reforms.

"The ideas that the country has become more optimistic over the last sixty years - demographics, entrepreneurship, the English language, the role of IT, globalization and democracy - have been the foundation for an expanding economy. They have also led to a kind of catharsis - it now finally looks like India has escaped from its sense of persecution and the limitations of its history" (p 271). Yet, for all its strengths and optimism India's quantum leap forward has potential pitfalls that cannot simply be shrugged off. India suffers from significant challenges in terms of building its human capital, literacy, educational system, urban infrastructure and an integrated market to name just a few of the urgently needed social projects.

The challenge that India faces now is how to sustain the economic reforms and to continue on its growth trajectory. This is where the narrative becomes fuzzy and the path appears less certain: "In this we confront the paradox of a nation that is blessed with the most talented and diverse entrepreneurs but which still does not trust the market to deliver on broad-based development. We are struggling with constrictive labor laws even as the economy is rapidly creating more jobs and markets worldwide are eager to recruit India's young people.

We are battling growing shortages in higher education as we face a crunch in skilled workers. And our battles for better ideas here require us to vanquish a monster with many heads - of old ideology, deep-rooted caste groups and the many temptations of short-term populism" (p 273). Here, Nilekani finds parallels with Latin America, particularly, with the recent Brazilian experience, where a socialist government has also adopted liberal economic policies.

Yet, his well structured arguments are at their best when he compares India's past with its present. "At the time of independence, India's leaders were clearly ahead of the people. The creation of new, secular democracy with universal suffrage, anchored by the Indian constitution, was a leap of faith the government took with an uncompromising yet trusting country. Sixty years on, however, it seems the roles have reversed" (p 297). Now, the Indian people have taken the lead on reforming the country, while the leaders are lagging behind.

Nilekani claims that India is in the midst of a bottom-up economic revolution against the backdrop of globalization. Freed from the socialist government controls, Indian people have been motivated by creativity and entrepreneurship. While India has proven its metal in the service economy, it has yet to gain the same success in the traditional manufacturing sector. Top-down planning was not able to achieve what the people have been able to unleash in the last two decades as the Indian growth story is beginning to cut across the traditional sectors and industries. Clamorous debates in the media reflect the engaging mood of the country. Rural populations and everyday folks from small towns are coming forward and taking big risks in the private sector.

The growth of the Indian middle class, concentrated in the cities, is supporting all of these trends. "We are closest today than we have ever been to a truly effective "deliberative democracy" where individuals and groups across the country are chipping away at the once absolute power of the state" (p 456). Political leadership has been put on notice with a high anti-incumbency rate.

Entrenched skepticism against economic reforms will be overcome with real results; as the economic reforms spread to wider segments of the Indian population and improve people's lives, the changes will gain a solid footing. If the returns of globalization do not reach the masses the reforms might be stalled or even worse fail miserably. As in business, implementation is the key to success.

As the recent elections made clear, political leadership may have to be steered to follow the will of the people to ensure future growth; and because the demographic window of opportunity is limited, Indian people must keep moving ahead and must not linger. According to Nilekani, the growth model has to be owned, underwritten and managed by the private sector and cannot be left simply in the hands of government officials.

The entrepreneurial as well as the philanthropic class must contribute the ideas and the capital to push the reforms forward; the reawakened India cannot afford to pass up its renewed tryst with destiny.
Imagining India: The Idea of a Renewed Nation by Nandan Nilekani. Penguin Press HC, (March 19, 2009). ISBN-10: 1594202044. Price US$29.95, 528 pages.

Dinesh Sharma is a marketing science consultant with a doctorate in psychology from Harvard. He is the author/editor of the following books: Human Technogenesis: Cultural Pathways through the Information Age (2004); Childhood, Family and Sociocultural Change in India (2003); Socioemotional Development Across Cultures (1998).

The Competition Cure

2009-08-25T00:50:00.000-07:00

A better idea to make health insurance affordable everywhere.
(http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203550604574360923109310680.html)
"Competition" has become a watchword of Team Obama's push for its health-care bill. Specifically, the Administration has defended its public insurance option as a necessary competitive goad to the private health insurance industry.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius routinely calls for more choice and competition in health care. In his weekly address this past weekend, President Obama raised the issue directly: "The source of a lot of these fears about government-run health care is confusion over what's called the public option. This is one idea among many to provide more competition and choice, especially in the many places around the country where just one insurer thoroughly dominates the marketplace." We take it this refers to a state in which one insurer holds most of the business.

It is no secret that this page is all for competition in the marketplace. If indeed that's the goal, allow us to suggest a path to it that will be a lot easier than erecting the impossible dream of a public option: Let insurance companies sell health-care policies across state lines.

This excellent idea has been before Congress since at least 2005, when Rep. John Shadegg of Arizona proposed it. It came up again recently in an exchange between Chris Wallace of Fox News Sunday and John Rother, executive vice president of AARP.

Mr. Wallace: "If you really want competition why not remove the restriction which now says that if I live in Washington, D.C. I've got to buy a D.C. health plan, and instead create a national market for health insurance, so that if there's a cheaper plan in Pennsylvania, I could buy in Pennsylvania?"

Mr. Rother: "There are states and localities where health care is much less expensive than others, and if we allow people to buy all their insurance from those places, it will raise the rates there. And it's called risk selection. It's a real problem, given the fact that health care costs can vary substantially from one place to another. So I think while the idea sounds appealing, the consequence would be it would make health care more expensive for those people who live in those low-cost areas."

How did Mr. Rother arrive at this conclusion?

His claim assumes that what makes insurance expensive in places like New Jersey—where the annual cost of an individual plan for a 25-year-old male in 2006 was $5,880—is merely the higher cost of medical services in the Garden State. He sounds an alarm in the rest of the country by suggesting that an individual living in, say, Kentucky—where an annual plan for a 25-year-old male cost less than $1,000 in 2006—would be asked to subsidize plan members living in high-priced states.

That's not how interstate insurance would work. Devon Herrick, a senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis who has written extensively on this subject, notes that insurance companies operating nationally would compete nationally. The reason a Kentucky plan written for an individual from New Jersey would save the New Jerseyan money is that New Jersey is highly regulated, with costly mandated benefits and guaranteed access to insurance.

Affordability would improve if consumers could escape states where each policy is loaded with mandates. "If consumers do not want expensive 'Cadillac' health plans that pay for acupuncture, fertility treatments or hairpieces, they could buy from insurers in a state that does not mandate such benefits," Mr. Herrick has written.

A 2008 publication "Consumer Response to a National Marketplace in Individual Insurance," (Parente et al., University of Minnesota) estimated that if individuals in New Jersey could buy health insurance in a national market, 49% more New Jerseyans in the individual and small-group market would have coverage. Competition among states would produce a more rational regulatory environment in all states.

This doesn't mean sick people who have kept up their coverage but are more difficult to insure would be left out. Congressman Shadegg advocates government funding for high-risk pools, noting that their numbers are tiny. The big benefit would come from a market supply of affordable insurance.

Mr. Rother also said "risk selection" is a problem. But the coverage mandates cause that. As more healthy people opt out of health insurance because it is too expensive relative to what they consume, the pool transforms into a group of older, sicker people. Prices go higher still and more healthy people flee. High-mandate states are in what experts call an "adverse selection death spiral."

Interstate competition made the U.S. one of the world's most efficient, consumer driven markets. But health insurance is a glaring exception. When the competition caucus in Team Obama has to look for Plan B, this is it.

Being Honest About Abe

2009-08-22T05:57:00.000-07:00

Friday Flashback: Main Ingredient - "Everybody Plays the Fool"

2009-08-20T22:17:00.000-07:00

A Green Thumb on an Invisible Hand: Can Markets Improve the Environment?

2009-08-18T22:02:00.000-07:00

Many think of the market as a mighty, erratic beast capable of transporting continents upon its back when domesticated by the adroit hands of statesmen but if left untamed would raze the defenseless into microscopic particles. This conception of networks of voluntary exchange is a dire mistake on a host of issues none more considerable than the environment. Too much trust is yielded to regulation and oversight while industries holding much ecological promise such as Solid Waste Disposal, Agribusiness and Nuclear Power fall victim to misinformed zealots who end up undermining their cause.

The last place one expects to discover eco-centered innovation are smelly eyesores yet within the past thirty years dumps have handily outpaced expectations. Because these rolling hills of refuse are such easy targets a piece of legislation entitled the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) was passed by Congress in 1976 regulating waste materials. Later tighter restrictions on landfills were added through Subtitle D in 1991. After the passage of Subtitle D a measurable decline in Solid Waste Management facilities lead to more privatization and larger sites. By conventional wisdom this paradigm shift should have resulted in catastrophe. What actually occurred was remarkable.

Despite a steady flow of solid waste, landfill capacity actually increased with time. Between 1986-1991 13 states reported their dumps contained under 5 years of capacity. Presently, no states report landfills below 5 years of capacity, and the numbers for national facilities are even more heartening. These sites retained 11 years of capacity in the late-'80s, jumped to 14 years through the mid-'90s and currently maintain around 16 years of capacity. (source) Considering the rate of waste in the U.S. remains relatively constant per capita but swells in relation to population, these statistics become quite astounding. Even though more garbage enter landfills the lifespan of these sites increases. Incineration, improved recycling rates and inter-state capacity sharing assist in controlling landfill volume nationwide. (source)

Even the deleterious consequences of dumps have either been tapered or commuted. The strategic placement of landfills away from densely populated residential areas and waterways largely mitigates ground water contamination. Porous, subterranean fabrics called geotextiles filter hazardous pollutants inhibiting dangerous leakage. Methane gas emissions from decomposing trash can now be harnessed as an energy source. Carpet manufacturer, Interface Inc., decreased natural gas consumption by 20% since implementing this new technique in 2003. (source) Breakthroughs keep refining these technologies year after year ensuring improved safety and performance.

Further up the chain of production Agribusiness continually boasts more efficient ways of cultivating crops with clever weather-resistant features. How any conscious, purportedly compassionate person could daunt this agricultural explosion falls beyond censure. The genetic strides engineered by private companies allow third world farmers greater growing flexibility and output, and the simple fact is because of these graciously unnatural modifications more food is generated globally with less land than ever before. Taking the numbers for the U.S. alone, corn harvests have increased by an additional 36%, soybeans by 12% and cotton by 31% thanks to biotechnology. (source) Farmers now use wireless equipment to measure how much water and fertilizer crops require to reduce waste and lower costs. Researchers augmented the plants themselves so they recover more quickly during droughts and floods -- an answered prayer to poor, Asiatic nations; require less tilling decreasing the overall amount of erosion and runoff; rely on 70% less water with equal or greater yields and repel pests diminishing the application of pesticides. Genetically modified seeds currently inaccessible to farmers are projected to be brought to market as soon as 2012.

Strictly "organic" farmers experience none of these benefits and leave behind a larger environmental footprint than Agribusiness. Because local farms deliver to a legion of individual retailers without a primary distribution center or encourage customers to pick-up their goods directly more fossil fuel gets dumped into the atmosphere while Agribusiness ships in bulk to fewer locations and imports their product from all over the world from regions specifically chosen to maximize efficiency for any given commodity. (source) The result is cheaper prices, better quality and less greenhouse gasses.

As demonized as Agribusiness and genetically modified foods, or "Frankenfoods," are at present no other industry proves to be a scarier boogieman for nebbish environmentalists than Nuclear Power. Three Mile Island and Chernobyl cast long shadows over the legacy of this safe, clean wonder-fuel. To set the record straight, no one died at Three Mile Island and, although tragic, the 56 dead at Chernobyl is dwarfed by the countless dead due to ash coughed up by coal factories annually not to mention the human cost of resource wars launched in the name of oil. When the death tolls are placed side by side the hysteria orbiting Nuclear Power seems rather nitwitted.

Economically, Nuclear Power Plants make sense. They receive fewer subsidies than coal, oil, solar or wind power even though coal and oil are far bigger polluters, and by the most recent estimates solar and wind power at their peak could only satisfy 20% of demand while Nuclear Power could assure 90% of all energy needs. Nuclear power also outperforms the status quo. For instance, a single enriched uranium pellet equals "17,000 cubic feet of natural gas, 1,780 pounds of coal [and] 149 gallons of oil." (source) Despite a deficit in funding, Nuclear Plants cover the total cost of externalities and the decommissioning of outdated facilities. (source) No other clean power source produces more for less.

But can it be labeled clean or safe? When measuring the output of hazardous material nuclear power barely charts next to coal. The American coal industry unleashes more physical waste every few hours than Nuclear Power's entire history. This distressing quantity factors into the question of radioactivity. Not many people realize coal ash is radioactive although Uranium has greater intensity the disparity in the waste ratio between coal and nuclear power crowns coal ash the more worrisome environmental threat. Because of the diminutive amount of waste Nuclear Plants leave behind it can be altered into a watertight material, locked into steel-reinforced containers and buried well away from any underground water sources. (source)

As for the matter of safety, Chernobyl-style facilities have long since been decomissioned. In newer models, ceramic pellets encase pieces of uranium stored inside zirconium alloy tubes forming rods confined behind 30-centimeter thick walls which in turn are housed within a 1-meter thick barrier. During the burning process safety features slow efficiency if the water becomes too warm and several models of power plants depend upon physical forces such as gravity to halt the process altogether instead of mechanized components, and system redundancies double check the internal operations. (source) To further illustrate the safety of Nuclear Power Plants, during the Cold War neither the United States nor the Soviet Union aimed warheads at these complexes because the damage would have been negligible at best.

The collapse of Soviet Russia left an ecological moonscape as public proprietorship typically disintegrates into ruin. By contrast, thousands of largely private, collaborative hands shed elbow grease to manufacture sustainable technology inconceivable to any dark breed of central planner. The alacrity, plasticity and innovatory brawn behind markets can be overwhelming but this stupefying creature functions best when left unyoked.

Profit: Not Just a Motive

2009-08-18T17:41:00.000-07:00

By Steven Horwitz
(http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/profit-not-just-a-motive/)
One of the more common complaints of critics of the market is that “the profit motive” works at cross-purposes with people and firms doing “the right thing.” For example, Michael Moore’s film Sicko was motivated by his desire to take the profit motive out of health care because, in his view, the ways people seek profits do not lead them to provide the level and kind of care he thinks patients should have.

Leaving aside for a moment whether the health-care industry is really dominated by the profit motive (given that almost half of U.S. health-care expenditures are paid for by the federal government, it is not clear which motives dominate) and whether Moore knows better than millions of individuals what their health-care needs are, the claim that a “motive” is a root cause of social pathologies is worthy of some critical reflection. The critics seem to suggest that if people and firms were motivated by something besides profit, they would be better able to provide the things that patients really need.

The overarching problem with blaming a “motive” is that it ignores the distinction between intentions and results. That is, it ignores the possibility of unintended consequences, both beneficial and harmful. Since Adam Smith, economists have understood that the self-interest of producers (of which the profit motive is just one example) can lead to social benefits. As Smith famously put it, it is not the “benevolence” of the baker, butcher, and brewer that leads them to provide us with our dinner but their “self-love.” Smith’s insight, which was a core idea of the broader Scottish Enlightenment of which he was a part, puts the focus on the consequences of human action, not their motivation.

What we care about is whether the goods get delivered, not the motives of those who provide them. Smith led economists to think about why it is that, or under what circumstances, self-interest leads to beneficial unintended consequences. It is perhaps human nature to assume that intentions equal results, or that self-interest means an absence of social benefit, as was often the case in the small, simple societies in which humanity evolved. However, in the more complex, anonymous world of what Hayek called “the Great Society,” the simple equation of intentions and results does not hold.

As Smith recognized, what determines whether the profit motive leads to good results are the institutions through which human action is mediated. Institutions, laws, and policies affect which activities are profitable and which are not. A good economic system is one in which those institutions, laws, and policies are such that the self-interested behavior of producers leads to socially beneficial outcomes. In mixed economies like that of the United States, the institutional framework often rewards profit-seeking behavior that does not produce social benefit or, conversely, prevents profit-seeking behavior that could produce such benefits. For example, if agricultural policy pays farmers not to grow, then the profit motive will lead to lower food supplies. If environmental policy confiscates land with endangered species on it, owners of such land who are driven by the profit motive will “shoot, shovel, and shut up” (that is, kill off and bury any endangered species they find on their land).

The same issues can be raised in the health-care industry. Before blaming the profit motive for the problems in the industry, critics might want to look at the ways in which existing government programs like Medicare and Medicaid, the interpretation of tort laws, and regulations such as those that limit who can practice what sorts of medicine might lead firms and professionals to engage in behavior that is profitable but unbeneficial to consumers. Labeling the profit motive as the source of the problem enables the critics to ignore the really difficult questions about how institutions, policies, and laws affect the profit-seeking incentives of producers and how that profit-seeking behavior translates into outcomes. Placing the blame on the profit motive without qualification simply overlooks the Smithian question of whether better institutions would enable the profit motive to generate better results and whether current policies or regulations are the source of the problem because they guide the profit motive in ways that produce the very problems the critics identify.

For example, high medical costs may well be a result of profit-seeking providers’ recognizing that government programs are notoriously bad at pricing services accurately and keeping good track of their expenditures. Ignoring the way institutions might affect what is profitable is often due to a more general blind spot about the possibility of self-interested behavior generating unintended beneficial consequences. Before we attempt to banish the profit motive, shouldn’t we see whether we can make it work better?

Placing blame for social problems on the profit motive is also easy if critics offer no alternative. What should be the basis for determining how resources are allocated if not in terms of profit-seeking behavior under the right set of institutions? How should people be motivated if not by profit? Often this question is just ignored, as critics are merely interested in casting blame. When it is not ignored, the answers can vary, but they mostly invoke a significant role for government. The interesting aspect of such answers is that critics do not suggest that we somehow convince producers to act on the basis of something other than profit, but that instead we replace them with presumably other-motivated bureaucrats or have those bureaucrats severely limit the choices open to producers. The implicit assumption, of course, is that the government personnel will not be motivated by profits or self-interest in the same way as the private-sector producers are.

How realistic this assumption is remains highly questionable. Why should we assume that government officials are any less self-interested than private individuals, especially when the door between the two sectors is constantly revolving? And if government officials do act in their self-interest and are motivated by the political analogs of profits (for example, votes, power, budgets), will they produce results that are any better than the private sector’s? If blaming the profit motive entails giving government a bigger role in solving problems, what assurance can critics of the profit motive provide that political officials will be any less self-interested and that their self-interest will produce any better results?

One will look in vain in Sicko, for example, for any analysis of the failures of state-sponsored health care in Cuba, Canada, Great Britain, or anywhere else. To blame the profit motive without asking whether an alternative will better solve the problems supposedly caused by the profit motive is to bias the case against the private sector.

How Will They Know?

Even this argument, however, does not go far enough. We are still, after all, focused on intentions and motivation. What critics of the profit motive almost never ask is how, in the absence of prices, profits, and other market institutions, producers will be able to know what to produce and how to produce it. The profit motive is a crucial part of a broader system that enables producers and consumers to share knowledge in ways that other systems do not.

Suppose for a moment that we try to take the profit motive out of health care by going to a system in which government pays for and/or directly provides the services. Suppose further that we could, somehow, ensure that the political officials would not be self-interested. For many critics of the profit motive, the problem is solved because public-spirited politicians and bureaucrats have replaced profit-seeking firms.

Well, not so fast. By what method exactly will the officials know how to allocate resources? By what method will they know how much of what kind of health care people want? And more important, by what method will they know how to produce that health care without wasting resources? It’s one thing to say that every adult should, for example, have a checkup every year, but should it be provided by an MD, an LPN, or an RN? What kind of equipment should be used? How thorough should it be? And most crucially, how will political decision-makers know if they’ve answered these questions correctly?

In markets with good institutions, profit-seeking producers can get answers to these questions by observing prices and their own profits and losses in order to determine which uses of resources are more or less valuable to consumers. Rather than having one solution imposed on all producers, based on the best guesses of political officials, an industry populated by profit seekers can try out alternative solutions and learn which ones work most effectively. Competition for profit is a process of learning and discovery. For all the profit-critics’ concern—especially but not only in health care—that allocating resources by profits leads to waste, few if any understand how profits and prices signal the efficiency (or lack thereof) of resource use and allow producers to learn from those signals. The most profound waste of resources in the U.S. health-care industry stems from the incentives and market distortions created by government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid.

Thus the real problem with focusing on the profit motive is that it assumes that the primary role of profits is to motivate (or in contemporary language “incentivize”) producers. If one takes that view, it might seem relatively easy to find other ways to motivate them or to design a new system where production is taken over by the state. However, if the more important role of profits is to communicate knowledge about the efficiency of resource use and enable producers to learn what they are doing well or poorly, the argument becomes much more complicated. Now the critics must explain what in the absence of profits will tell producers what they should and should not do. Eliminating profit-seeking from an industry doesn’t just require that a new incentive be found but that a new way of learning be developed as well. Profit is not just a motive; it is also integral to the irreplaceable social learning process of the market. Critics may consider eliminating the profit motive the equivalent of giving the Tin Man from Oz a heart; in fact it’s much more like Oedipus’ gouging out his own eyes.

What Makes “Psycho Killers” Tick?

2009-08-18T00:49:00.000-07:00

Is it just me or...

2009-08-17T11:27:00.000-07:00

...is the size, ornateness and majesty of any given architecture proportional to the sheer brutality of the institution it represents?

Friday Flashback: Dr. Octagon - "Blue Flowers"

2009-08-13T22:19:00.000-07:00

The Terror of Nuclear Power

2009-08-13T17:00:00.000-07:00

Artwork: Nathan Bebb
(http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4092)
Listen To Podcast
Let's have a seat at Homer Simpson's control panel, chow down on some donuts, and nap away into oblivion while blinking lights and buzzers warn of impending doom and that glowing green bar of uranium that fell into our trousers. Today we're going to examine the popular notions about nuclear power. Specifically, if xenophobia had not killed nuclear power in the United States in the late 1970's, there's a good chance that we'd have all been driving electric cars for the past 20 years; and uncounted billions of tons of carbon dioxide would never been sucked out of the ground, burned in power plants, and exhausted into our atmosphere.

So let's state the obvious. The immediate reaction to that statement is "OK, that may be true, but look at all the new problems we'd have created with Chernobyl-type disasters and lethal nuclear waste." Fair enough, and important questions, to be sure. Let's start with a quick primer on the various types of nuclear reactors.

So-called Generation I reactors were the early prototypes developed by many nations, and actually placed into production in a few cases. Generation I reactors were characterized by fundamentally unsafe designs, and kludged layers of afterthought safety systems. When most nuclear nations began deploying commercial reactors, they were usually of Generation II design. Generation II reactors were significantly improved, but these changes were primarily evolutionary. Most of the commercial plants in operation in the United States are Generation II designs. A little over ten years ago, Generation III designs began appearing in some of the world's most advanced nuclear nations. Generation III reactors incorporate not only evolutionary improvements, but also revolutionary changes such as fuel cycles that result in much less nuclear waste; reduced capacity for the creation of weapons-grade plutonium; and passive safety designs wherein the reaction cannot be sustained in the event of a problem and the system effectively shuts itself down, by virtue of its basic design. The newest plants being designed for commercial use are called Generation III+, which incorporate all the newest knowledge from operating Generation III designs. If a new reactor was approved and built in the United States today, it would be a Generation III+ design. Even if every plant employee keeled over with a heart attack, neither a Chernobyl nor a Three Mile Island type accident would be possible; the systems are fundamentally redesigned so that the reaction cannot be sustained if things go outside the parameters.

The Idaho National Laboratory is the United States' primary advanced reactor research facility, and they've outlined six new reactor types to be developed for Generation IV. The designs take everything to a new level: Lower cost, safer designs, near-total elimination of nuclear waste, and reduced risk of nuclear weapons proliferation. There are also Generation V reactors in the ether, but these are primarily the domain of late-night rumination sessions at the lab, fueled by tequila and pot.

Then there's fusion power, which is everyone's ultimate goal. Fusion reactors have the profound advantages of using simple tritium or deuterium for fuel, producing no significant waste, and absolute safety since if anything goes even slightly off-kilter, the plasma disappears and you have no reaction. It's the ultimate in cheap, clean, safe, renewable energy, despite gross misunderstandings of the technology expressed by Greenpeace and other factions. The first operational tokamak fusion reactor for research is being built by the international ITER consortium in France and is expected to come online in 2016.

So you can probably guess that Three Mile Island was probably not the newest and safest design, and you'd be right. It was a Generation II design. It was the first and only significant nuclear accident in American history. A broken valve caused coolant to leak into a containment facility designed for that purpose, raising the temperature of the core and causing a partial meltdown. Despite significant confusion on the part of the operators (this being their first experience with an accident), and a somewhat lengthy chain of errors and misunderstandings, everything eventually worked out just as it should. There were no deaths or injuries, and despite 25,000 people living within five miles of the plant, nobody was exposed to any radiation worse than a single chest x-ray. All the studies predict zero cases of future cancer, despite ongoing lawsuits that the courts continue to find to be without merit. With proper perspective, Three Mile Island can (and should) be characterized as a shining example of how well the safety systems work, even in the face of human error and old-fashioned reactor design.

But that's not the way it was perceived. By an unfortunate coincidence, Jane Fonda's movie The China Syndrome about a nuclear accident came out only twelve days before Three Mile Island. The Cold War with Brezhnev was in full force and the words "nuclear accident" were simply too much for a scientifically uninformed public. Three Mile Island became the first nail in the coffin of American nuclear power.

Seven years later in 1986, things got much worse. Chernobyl was suffering from inadequate funding. Much basic maintenance had never been performed. It had only a skeleton crew, nearly all of whom were untrained workers from the local coal mine. The only manager with nuclear plant experience had been a worker installing small reactors on board Soviet submarines. Some genius decided to run a risky test of a type that no experienced nuclear engineer would ever gamble on. The test was to shut down the water pumps, which must run constantly in that type of reactor; and then find out whether the turbines, spinning on their momentum alone, had enough energy to restart and run the pumps during the forty-second delay before the backup diesel generators would kick in. The test was so risky that one faction within the plant deliberately disconnected some backup systems, trying to make the test too dangerous to attempt. The test was run anyway. It didn't work, the pumps couldn't keep up, the graphite core caught fire, the coal miners couldn't find any shovels so they didn't know what to do, and the reactor exploded. If you think I'm exaggerating this, there are extensive resources both online and in print, if you really want the hairy truth. In this short space I'm probably not even giving you ten percent of what a travesty this was — I'm tempted to call it a joke but it's so not funny. For example, they scheduled this right in the middle of a shift change, and the new workers coming in didn't even know what was going on.

Two people died that day, and some 30 to 60 people were dead within three months. Predictions of eventual cancer deaths caused by the radiation run from 1,000 to 4,000. And, of course, the damage to the local environment is extensive and difficult to estimate. The terror of a radiation cloud blowing across Europe was the second nail in the coffin of American nuclear power.

Not only was Chernobyl a monumental failure of the human element, the plant was a Generation I design, specifically an RBMK reactor, which is generally regarded as the least safe reactor type ever built. One design flaw is that the core used combustible graphite, and this distinction is the main reason that Chernobyl-type disasters are not possible in most reactors around the world. Only a very few Generation I designs are still in use, all in the former Soviet Union, and all have been retrofitted with improvements intended to prevent this type of accident. Other nations have long been lobbying for the closure of these reactors, and rightfully so.

How do the dangers of nuclear energy compare to the dangers of fossil fuel energy? A report in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that some 50,000-100,000 Americans die each year from lung cancer caused by particulate air pollution, the biggest cause of which is coal-burning power plants in the midwest and east. Even taking the maximum predicted death toll from Chernobyl, we would need a Chernobyl-sized accident every three weeks to make nuclear power as deadly as coal and oil already is. Shall I repeat that? If the world was filled with Generation I reactors run by feuding coal miners, we would need a worst-case scenario every three weeks just to match the US death toll we've imposed upon ourselves by clinging to our current fossil fuel system. Next time you see a hippie cheering the defeat of nuclear power in the US, realize that a healthy environment and saving lives are clearly not their priorities.

Well, maybe to them it's more about the future of the planet than about saving lives today. Maybe they just don't want to see high-level nuclear waste created that's going to poison the planet for tens of thousands of years. I can see that. But here's the problem with that logic: The plants we're designing now produce less waste than ever. Some on the drawing board produce none at all. We've already created most of the waste that we ever will. It already exists. It's out there. Lobbying against future cleaner plants won't make the existing waste go away. It's out there now in temporary facilities in neighborhoods all across the country, way more vulnerable than it would be in proper permanent storage in Yucca Mountain.

Opponents say that Yucca Mountain is geologically unstable or otherwise too hazardous, so the waste might leak out. Well, trust me: The location of the Yucca Mountain site was one of the most lengthy and expensive decisions the government ever made. What do you think they were doing with all that time and money, picking their noses? Well, it was a government program, so a large part of the time and budget probably was spent on nose mining. Nevertheless, this was one of the most scrutinized decisions ever made. Environmentally speaking it's as good a site as we could hope for. If you're concerned about it, go to a neutral and reliable source and research it personally. From every scrap of reason I can muster, environmentalists should be Yucca Mountain's #1 fans. I can't imagine why they prefer to leave the waste out where it is now, unless they are driven more by ideology than by science. Who would have thought that?

There is a safe and clean solution to our energy crisis, gasoline prices, and global warming. It's the latest generation nuclear reactor.

You should follow me on twitter here.

5 Easy Ways to Save Money in a Recession

2009-08-13T16:58:00.001-07:00

A Fate Worse Than Religion

2009-08-13T15:46:00.000-07:00

Since the beginning of the year I've started using Facebook and through that social networking site and the magical powers swirling through the tubes of the internet I've been able to reconnect with quite a few people. Truth be told, I'm a pretty nosy guy. If you have me over for dinner I will rifle through your medicine cabinet and blog about its contents without remorse. So, upon my new discovery I am flooded with an irresistible impulse to look through all their pictures and read their profile top to bottom. What I found used to send me face-palming every time. Without fail these middle to late twenty-somethings always fill in their religion as either: Christian, Christ-lover, Child of the Son, Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran or, my personal favorite, Jesus Freak.

I'm always amazed at how deeply the disease of religion stays embedded in a person even as they age. It seemed to me that I brushed organized religion away as easily as dandruff but the escape velocity of superstition appears to be stronger for some and weaker for others.

As I kept reading and thinking the real disturbing personal category isn't religion -- it's politics. More often than not my former classmates and colleagues self-apply titles like "Conservative" or even "Maverick" (I shit you not) with the occasional "Liberal" or "Progressive" label rounding out the bunch. This, my friends, is so much scarier than you realize.

Think of all the different concepts you consider as "evil" floating through this world. It could be Corporate Greed, Unions, Religious Faith, Class Conflicts, Illegal Immigration, Gender Inequality, Racism, Tony Danza, etc... The state is like that only on steroids. In fact, the state can take that evil and amplify it beyond any natural level. For example, the corporation. These greedy motherfuckers want to turn a profit out of everything. They'd sell tickets to a puppy-stomping parade if they knew people would queue up, yet, in a free market they're unable to because of social sanctions, voluntary customer support, reputation and so on. If they aren't born with a high amount of altruism in their blood they at least need to fake it in order to be invited to the dance to begin with. Throw all that out the goddamn window when governments get involved. Politicians will just extract property from citizens and subsidize private enterprise willy-nilly. So much for the organic checks and balances that arise from free exchange.

The same can be said of religion. I'm sure you've heard about some tiff in the Middle East recently caused by Muslims. I'm not one to say there aren't demented little fuckers who want to annihilate everyone who won't praise their own fevered delusions, but let's have some perspective. American foreign policy made that wack-job fringe look a whole lot more attractive through years of painting the walls of their Mosques with the intestines of their children (See: Eisenhower Doctrine). Doesn't foster a lot of inter-cultural good will, does it? And why do you think Jesus-Camp Christians started getting political, because they're bored? Hell no! Governments give out goodies, it's as plain as that. It's hard to believe that people still take men like Christopher Hitchens seriously. A man who harangues against the soft target of religion until he pops but then enthusiastically signs the roster of supporters for the War on Terrorism which has killed a million Iraqis, displaced millions more, ethnically cleansed parts of the country and caused four million to become food insecure. --the fuck is wrong with this asshole?

At least with religion, if I can say anything nice about it at all, is that it provides communitarian support. A warm environment, somebody to take care of you when you're sick, a social safety net and a place where everybody knows your name. Let's see a government compete with that with its bloated, lumbering welfare system.

My point is Westernized Christians probably won't go out and kill over their religion except if they join the armed forces, and in today's world other extreme religious viewpoints would only be able to build up a fighting force based on their own moxy. Without the aggression of the state evil loses its backbone.

Free Market Science vs. The Free Rider Problem

2009-08-13T15:26:00.000-07:00

by Ryan Faulk
(http://fringeelements.ning.com/profiles/blogs/free-market-science-vs-the)

The free rider problem as it pertains to scientific research is as follows:

Company A spends $100K on developing a product, but company B can spend $10K and copy it, having the exact same product. Thus research and development is punished on a free market. That's the theory.

Edwin Mansfield, the late economist at the University of Pennsylvania came to the conclusion that in OECD countries, across all industry it costs $65 dollars to copy $100 worth of research. Or 65%. But that's just direct cost.

In order for a company to copy research, a great example is the drug industry, they have to have smart people. If I gave you a viagra pill, would you be able to reverse engineer that? No, a company needs to have smart people who can do that, with the equipment, on hand if they want to copy. So there are sunk costs involved if a company wants to copy research. This isn't just copying your neighbor's scantron answers.

Also it takes time to reverse engineer a product, and in that window the company that made the original product enjoys a monopoly. The more complex the innovation, the more difficult it tends to be to reverse engineer, and the longer that company enjoys a monopoly.

Given the advantage of the temporary monopoly of the originator plus the sunk costs needed for copiers to be able to copy, copying research and doing original research tend to come out as equally profitable strategies. Private firms in OECD spent about 3% of the budget on research.

That said, all firms engaged in research both copy and do original research themselves. Because in order to copy, you must have smart people doing original research in that field, you've got to have guys in the know, and when one company makes a breakthrough, everyone else rushes to copy.

The reason copying a product and originating a product tend to be equally profitable is basic economics. Products are only released by firms if it's revolutionary enough to earn a profit that makes up for the cost of development. And in order to make a profit, it must be difficult enough to provide a period of monopoly for those costs to be recuperated.

Products which are only slightly revolutionary aren't as expensive to develop as products which are extremely revolutionary, but also tend to be easier to reverse engineer, resulting in a shorter monopoly period. If you're interested in more detail, I would recommend Terence Kealey's book.

When the state funds scientific research, there is crowding out. For every $1 spent on research, $1.25 less is spent on research in private firms according to Kealey. I have an idea why this might be: government jobs are more secure and have shorter hours than private jobs, and so a government job of $100K a year is worth more than a free-market job of $100K a year. Or more discretely, a government job of $100K a year is worth about as much as a private job of $125K a year. That's just my guess as to why government funding crowds out private funding at more than a 1 to 1 ratio.

Also, government funding often goes to military research, which can lead to innovations there's no denying that, but it is not connected to what individuals choose to buy with their own money but what the military wants. And what the military wants isn't always tied to what's the best for waging war - for example the air force continues to fund the research of piloted aircraft because that provides jobs for pilots, whereas UAVs are clearly the wave of the future. The limiting factor of the F-22 wasn't the airframe, it was how many g's the pilot could take.

Francis Bacon, a torturer and an embezzler, in 1605 put forward the idea that science is a public good based on pure research. That yes it is applied science that leads to immediate discoveries, but that applied science can only come from a pure research background, which the short-sighted marketplace will not provide to appropriate degrees, and thus the state must fund pure research.

Now as it turns out, the best way for a firm to come up with some profitable breakthrough is to engage in pure research, because science is unpredictable and that which deals with the most fundamental and open-ended concepts - pure research, tends to result in the most novelty and thus breakthroughs.

And even companies whose sole goal is to merely keep up with the bigger companies and sell knock-offs of popular drugs have to employ scientists, and those scientists have to stay in the loop doing pure research. And so everyone is engaging in pure research constantly.

Francis Bacon's idea of state-funded science was implemented in France but not in Britain. Britain didn't implement any state science program until World War 1, and the United States didn't do very much at all until 1940.

Now one can always come up with many anecdotes about government funding of things causing that thing to come about, a great example that statist hack Noam Chomsky likes to bring up is the internet. As though connecting computers over long distances was something only state research could come up with. Sure, private research invents the airplane, automobile, about half of the computer, but connecting those computers together is a job for the state.

And on the airplane, at the time of the wright brothers, the Smithsonian was attempting to fly a heavier-than air craft as well. They were beat to it by the wright brothers.

Now just imagine if the Smithsonian had won, we wouldn't hear the end of it. "Oh, without the munificent foresight of state research planners, how would we have ever achieved heavier than air flight!" And the statists would make up arguments about the free market being unwilling to take such abstract risks or not being able to crash expensive airplanes repeatedly, and may even point and laugh at the wright brothers and say "look, there's your free market, two wacko brothers. Look at this clown show. What a failure! Maybe this crapshoot worked in 1000 AD, but look at how complex this things are now. Sure the free market worked then, but so did hunting with spears with spears. We're evolved, it's civilization. Enjoy your airplane, courtesy of the US government. Free market fundamentalist, you got pwned."

Anecdote. The state is not necessary to fund research and development, and from every angle of analysis, the state appears to pervert and distort the structure of production, in this case the production of scientific research.

How Interest Works

2009-08-13T15:21:00.000-07:00

Even something as maligned as interest is an important part of a Free Market that, when not abused, can help you in the long run.

If Mexicans and Americans Could Cross the Border Freely

2009-08-13T15:14:00.001-07:00

A meticulous and practical decimation of all the reasons typically given for why immigration should stay illegal. The authors then supply their own radical solution -- a completely open southern border. Agree? Disagree? Read more: http://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_14_01_6_delacroix.pdf

Neighbours hire their own police force

2009-08-11T20:59:00.000-07:00

(http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1204819/Neighbours-hire-police-force-3-week.html)
There is always a price to pay for rising crime rates and an over-stretched police force.
But rarely is it so clear what that cost is. Residents of an affluent suburb in Southampton have decided to pay £3.15 a week to fund a private security force to patrol the streets.
Hundreds of residents who have 'lost faith in the police force' have clubbed together to hire the private team of uniformed officers to protect them from crime in the area.

At your service: Atraks owner Dave MacLean (right) with colleague Marvin Olszewski, as they patrol the streets of Southampton. They were hired privately by residents in fear of crime
Security firm Atraks says its team will use the powers of citizen arrest as they patrol the leafy streets of Upper Shirley to 'prevent serious crime' and 'neutralise' threats.

Eight uniformed officers equipped with handcuffs and stab vests will even escort homeowners to and from the bank or on shopping trips to ensure they are not mugged.

So far 337 people have signed up in the neighbourhood while a further 1,700 have said they will join once they see the service in action.

The Atraks service - which is being tried out for free - costs £3.15 a week or residents can make an annual, one-off payment of £163.80.

Atraks needs 500 people to sign up to the scheme within a three-square-mile area for it to go ahead full time.

It is claimed all residents within this area would benefit from the scheme - not just those who had contributed to the cost.

Upper Shirley is one of the most affluent parts of Southampton but is close to a number of run-down areas.

On the beat: MacLean with fellow officer Keith Harding. Critics say the private security force scheme simply fuels fear of crime

One resident, Paul Graham, said he has agreed to pay for the scheme because he thinks the Atraks officers will prevent crime, rather than just respond to it.

The 28-year-old van driver said: 'It's not a lot of money to pay for having peace of mind. If someone is patrolling the streets at night then it's definitely going to stop some crime from taking place.

'We do see the police now and again around here but they are always busy with other things and don't have time to drive down every street.

'They will come if you call them but I think the Atraks scheme will be much more preventative.'

Another resident, an elderly woman who wished to remain anonymous, said: 'It is ludicrous that we pay our taxes and then have to pay again for a decent level of protection but I don't see any other option.'

Despite the widespread support, the scheme has come under fire from critics who say it will exaggerate the fear of violence.

But Dave MacLean, who launched Atraks two years ago, said he was acting after canvassing the opinions of local residents.

The 26-year-old former dog handler said: 'Most said they were fed up with the level of protection offered by the police and had lost faith. The police should be here to protect us and a company like ours shouldn't really be needed.'

Atraks officers will not have any powers other than those afforded to all citizens.

But Mr MacLean said his team of eight officers will talk to residents and be a visible presence on the streets to deter criminals.

They will also patrol outside schools, provide escorts to shops and banks, respond to alarms and help disperse street gangs. The service will involve dedicated patrols of officers trained in 'handcuffing, crime scene preservation, statement taking and firefighting'.

But local Labour MP Alan Whitehead criticised the scheme, saying it was 'based on exaggerating both a fear of crime and their own legal and practical powers in responding to concerns'.

He added: 'I remain of the view that a paid vigilante service is not the best way to ensure that our communities are kept safe.'

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1204819/Neighbours-hire-police-force-3-week.html#ixzz0NwhCqyMm

Argentina: Surviving without money

2009-08-09T13:28:00.000-07:00

How the poor of Argentina are trading goods and services in a global exchange network.

Taken from the OU course 'International development: challenges for a world in transition' (U213)

http://www3.open.ac.uk/study/undergra...

http://www.open.ac.uk/use

Eraserhead (1977)

2009-08-08T02:58:00.000-07:00

To The Best Of Our Knowledge: Post-Modernism

2009-08-08T02:38:00.000-07:00

(http://www.pri.org/arts-entertainment/post-postmodernism.html)
Listen To Podcast
Salman Rushdie's multi-layered novel, three types of postmodernism identified, and Stuff White People Like.

Award-winning author Salman Rushdie talks to Steve Paulson about his new novel, "The Enchantress of Florence," which features stories within stories within still other stories, along the lines of Scheherzade's stories of "One Thousand and One Nights." Rushdie also reads a few excerpts from the novel.

University of Tennessee Associate Professor Amy Elias identifies the three types of postmodernism for Jim Fleming. Elias is the author of "Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction."

Christian Lander talks to Anne Strainchamps about his popular website, "Stuff White People Like," and the companion book, "Stuff White People Like: The Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions."

Singer/songwriter Robert Ellis Orrall talks to "To the Best of Our Knowledge" producer Doug Gordon about his fictional indie rock band, Monkey Bowl. We also hear excerpts from several songs off Monkey Bowl's new album, "Ultimate," including "Al Gore (The Musical)."

Christian Lander returns briefly to confirm with Anne Strainchamps that public radio is another thing that white people like.
"To the Best of Our Knowledge" is an audio magazine of ideas - two hours of smart, entertaining radio for people with curious minds. More "To the Best of Our Knowledge"

The Market Doesn’t Ration Health Care

2009-08-08T02:34:00.000-07:00

By Sheldon Richman
(http://fee.org/articles/tgif/markets-ration-health-care/)

Healthcare reformers say they have two objectives: to enable the uninsured and under-insured to consume more medical services than they consume now, and to keep the prices of those services from rising, as they have been, faster than the prices of other goods and services. Unfortunately, Economics 101 tells us that to accomplish those two things directly — increased consumption by one group and lower prices — the government would have to take a third step: rationing. The reformers are disingenuous about this last step, and for good reason. People don’t like rationing, especially of medical care.

But some defenders of government control acknowledge that rationing is the logical consequence of their ambition. They parry objections by saying in effect: “So we’ll have to ration. Big deal. We already have rationing — by the market.”

For example, Uwe Reinhardt, an economics professor and advocate of government-controlled medicine, writes, “In short, free markets are not an alternative to rationing. They are just one particular form of rationing. Ever since the Fall from Grace, human beings have had to ration everything not available in unlimited quantities, and market forces do most of the rationing.”

Sadly, interventionist economists are not the only economists who talk this way. Most free-market economists would agree that where there is scarcity there must be rationing and that the most efficient way to ration is by price, that is, through the market.

This is factually wrong and strategically ill-advised. As we’ll see, markets do not ration. Thus the healthcare debate is not about which method of rationing — State or market — is superior.

Let me be clear about what I am not denying. I am not denying that economic goods are by definition scarce and that at any given time we must settle for less of them than we want. I am also not denying that the marketplace is relevant in determining who gets how much of those scarce goods.

I am denying that this is appropriately called “rationing.”

Markets Don’t Do Anything

To see that the market does not ration one need only see that “the market” doesn’t do anything. To talk as if it does things is to reify the market — worse, it is to anthropomorphize the market, ascribing to it attributes — purposes, plans, and actions — that only human beings possess. We may also see this as another instance of literalizing a metaphor, which, as Thomas Szasz has so often warned, is fraught with peril.

I’m not saying that economists don’t realize this diction is a metaphor. Of course they do, and there’s no harm in using this shorthand among those who understand it as such. The problem, as I see it, is that the general public doesn’t fully grasp the metaphorical nature of these statements. For the sake of public understanding, free-market advocates should not welcome a debate in which they begin by saying, “Our method of rationing is better than your method of rationing.”

Better to respond to the interventionists this way: The market does not ration or allocate. The market does not do anything. It has no purposes or objectives. It is simply a legal framework in which people do things with their justly acquired property and their time in order to pursue their own purposes.

This is squarely in the Austrian conception of the market as set out by Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek. The market order “has no specific purposes but will enhance for all the prospects of achieving their respective purposes,” Hayek wrote in volume two of Law Legislation, and Liberty.

The market was never set up by people to achieve a purpose. It is not a device or an invention aimed at satisfying an intention. “Market mechanism” is a metaphor. The market — as a set of continuing relations among people — emerged, unplanned and unintended, from exchanges, initially barter, in which the parties intended only to improve their respective situations. Lecturing at FEE this week, Israel Kirzner recalled that one of the first things Mises said to him as a graduate student was, “The market is a process,” by which he meant “a series of activities.” This is similar to what the French liberal economist Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836) wrote in A Treatise on Political Economy, “Society is purely and solely a continual series of exchanges.”

Mises, Hayek, and Tracy help us to sort out the rationing question. I submit it makes no sense to say that an undesigned series of exchanges rations goods. If we were to observe a free market (wouldn’t that be nice?), what would we see? Rationing? Allocation? Of course not. We would see people exchanging things — factors of production, services, and consumer goods — for money. Where would they have gotten those things? From previous exchanges or original appropriation from nature.

When a person buys five apples in a grocery store rather than ten because he wishes to use the rest of his money for other purposes, it seems entirely wrong to say the market (or even the grocer) has rationed the apples. The customer makes his choice on the basis of his preferences and the money available (which is the result of previous transactions).

It is true that as a result of market exchanges, goods and resources change hands and (except for land) locations. But in no sense is this rationing or allocation. The resulting arrangement of resources is simply a product of many transactions. Of course, people’s choices of what and what not to buy and sell at which prices create an arrangement of goods and resources that tends to be intelligible in terms of consumers’ subjective priorities. But that does not warrant calling the process rationing or allocation.

Those words — especially ration, which shares its root with rational – suggest conscious decision-making — as part of a plan — by an agent. In a free market there is no consciousness overseeing this “distribution” — another inappropriate word when it comes to describing the market process.

I am not saying anything that a good economist or thoughtful person doesn’t know. I am merely pointing out that we can be more effective in the healthcare debate if we are more precise in our language. We do not face a choice between methods of rationing medical services. We face a choice between rationing according to a bureaucratic plan and being freed to engage in mutually beneficial exchanges.

Sheldon Richman is the editor of The Freeman and "In brief." He is a contributor to The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.

Freedom Roundtable - 2009 Liberty Forum

2009-08-08T02:31:00.000-07:00

No more Mr. Nice Guy

2009-08-08T02:23:00.000-07:00

(http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/feature/2009/08/07/nice_guys/)

There is something BLATANTLY wrong with me that NO goddam person will tell me what it is. Every person just wants to be fucking nice and say nice things to me. Flattery. Oh yeah, I am sure you can get a date anytime. You look good, etc. Pussies.

That line from the diary of Pennsylvania gym shooter George Sodini, written before he killed three women and himself, almost makes me feel bad for him. Almost. Because in among all the misogynistic and racist ranting that makes up the bulk of the diary, he actually showed a flash of insight: There was something blatantly wrong with him, and people who told him how nice and attractive he was probably were blowing sunshine up his ass. No one told him the truth, especially not the women he was attracted to. Among miscellaneous notes tacked on at the end of the diary, he wrote: "Told by at least 100 girls/women over the years I was a 'nice guy.' Not kidding."
Sodini knew that was B.S. And yet, in an effort to learn how to appeal more to women, he took dating classes with R. Don Steele, where he was taught that being too "nice" was his whole problem. Tony Ortega, writing in the Village Voice today, transcribes a video of a Steele seminar Sodini attended, in which the author of "How to Date Young Women: For Men Over 35" says, "I would say that's the problem with most of the guys in the room. That you're too nice. Women don't like that. They don't respect it. It's about as arousing as a booger." To underscore the point, he writes on a whiteboard, "Nice Guy Must Die."
Plenty of people in the feminist blogosphere have attempted to clarify the distinction between guys who are actually nice -- whom many women, as it happens, really do dig -- and "Nice Guys," who, as Amanda Marcotte puts it, "are angry at women, at least the ones they will admit are women because they are the only ones they find sexually attractive, who refrain from giving out sex despite the fact that said Nice Guys® feel they've put in the requisite work of putting forth kind behavior, whether phony or at least somewhat sincere." But to disciples of the R. Don Steeles of the world, it never gets through. What gets through is: Women tell me I'm nice when they reject me, and my laydee-getting guru tells me women don't like nice guys, and I have a kneejerk dislike of the guys I see dating women I'm attracted to, ergo, all women hate nice guys and love jerks.
We don't have to wonder why professional Pickup Artists keep banging the "women don't like nice guys" drum: It makes them a hell of a lot of money, by reaffirming what their customers already, self-servingly, believe. So maybe a better question is: Why are so many women reinforcing the idea that insecure, manipulative jerks who feel entitled to 20-year-old booty if they put on a clean shirt and refrain from saying "whore" out loud are nice guys? How is it that so many guys like Sodini -- the kind who routinely refer to women as "hoes" (sic) and "bitches," and act disgusted by the thought of women having sex with any other men -- have heard, "You're really nice, but..." again and again in the course of being rejected?
In a post about how women's socialization leads to the very behavior we're blamed for if we have the poor judgment to let ourselves be raped, blogger Harriet Jacobs offers one answer. She says women are taught, among other things, that "it is not okay to set solid and distinct boundaries and reinforce them immediately and dramatically when crossed ('mean bitch')... it is not okay to make personal decisions that the adults or other peers in your life do not agree with, and it is not okay to refuse to explain those decisions to others ('stuck-up bitch')... it is not okay to completely and utterly shut down somebody who obviously likes you ('mean dyke/frigid bitch)."
Telling a guy the real reasons you're not interested -- you don't find him attractive, he's way too old for you, you get a distinctly creepy vibe off him, whatever -- or offering no explanation at all, because you just met this guy and owe him nothing, would be "rude." And thanks to the conditioning Harriet describes, exhibiting the slightest hint of "rudeness" to any stranger who approaches you with sex on his mind makes you feel not like a normal human being with healthy boundaries, but a mean, frigid, stuck-up bitch. Worse yet, sometimes, the same man who called you beautiful and offered to buy you a drink ten seconds ago will turn aggressive when you say you're not interested; he'll tell you flat out you're a bitch, or a whore, or less printable things. He'll reject your rejection by getting in your face and losing his temper. So really, it's a lot safer and simpler to say, "Look, you're a nice guy, but no thanks/I have a boyfriend/I can't." Most guys will walk away calmly after that -- and hey, it's none of your concern what they go home and write in their diaries.
I don't mean to suggest that that should be women's concern, or that we should stop using excuses that extract us from unpleasant and potentially dangerous situations as efficiently as possible. I just think it's worth taking a look at how a sexist culture gets women coming and going here. Because we're taught to be polite, submissive, and generous even when men are making us uncomfortable, we automatically reach for the "nice guy, but..." out. Then the guys convince themselves that "nice" is a dirty word, and charlatans like Steele profit from telling men who hate, fear and objectify women, who feel entitled to women's bodies and enraged when they're denied access, that they just need to stop being so gosh darned nice to women. And then one of them snaps and starts killing women he describes as not even looking human to him, and we're all like, "Huh, didn't see that coming. "
I'm sure this will have no more effect on "Nice Guys" than it has when umpteen other women have said it, but once more for the record: Guys, you are not being rejected because you are too nice. Niceness is a positive characteristic. I doubt any straight woman -- even the kind with a stated preference for "bad boys" -- has ever said to herself, "Hmm, I'd be really into this guy if he weren't so compassionate, thoughtful, and respectful. If he'd just dick me around and insult me a little more, I'd want to rip his clothes off." If you get rejected by every woman you approach, the problem could be a million different things, but I guarantee it's not that you're just too kind for your own good. We tell you you're "nice" because we don't want to be rude, we don't want to risk your aggression, and most of all, we want you to leave us alone.
George Sodini knew he wasn't really a nice guy. He knew there was something "blatantly wrong" with him. He wished someone would tell him what it was. But who's going to say, "You seem to have a really deep hatred of women, and some serious rage issues, and a ludicrously overblown sense of entitlement, and I'm guessing you'd need about a hundred years of therapy before you'll be ready for a healthy relationship"? Certainly not any woman he approached at a bar, who only wanted him to go away as quickly as possible and without incident. Nor friends who, by all accounts, kept pulling away until he had none anymore. Probably not his family, whom he professed to despise. So that left R. Don Steele, whose best advice was, "Nice Guy Must Die."
Well, this one did, along with three innocent women. As long as Pickup Artists keep conning insecure men into believing that hatred of women is the hallmark of a real man, and women still have reason to feel it's too risky "to completely and utterly shut down" men who make them uncomfortable, I guess all we can do is hope there aren't too many more "Nice Guys" out there with guns.

― Kate Harding

Friday Flashback: The Who - "The Kids are Alright"

2009-08-07T17:53:00.000-07:00

White House ‘Cyber Czar’ Resigns; Let’s Not Replace Her

2009-08-04T12:48:00.000-07:00

By Michael Tanj
(http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/08/white-house-cyber-czar-resigns-good-riddance/)
The White House’s acting “cyber czar” just resigned, with no permanent replacement in sight. Which is just fine. We can make more progress on the network security front without such a “czar.”

For starters, we’ve had reasonable facsimiles of cyber czars before — to little effect. The studies have been done, the list of tasks complete, yet we continue to fail year after year.

Second, the cyber czar, like most actual royalty in the world these days, is destined to be more figurehead than Sun King. He (or she) would have no power of service providers or industries that are both the underpinnings of cyber space and the victims of online assaults. Despite grandiose claims to the contrary, the government has very little direct impact on how safe national resources are online.

Finally, even if the czar did have a lot more pull with industry than he actually would; how does she put that juice to good use? Given that the czar and the individual with the power to make things happen in cyber space are not the same person: she doesn’t.

A “czar” position is the exact opposite of what we need to successfully defeat cyber space adversaries. The botnet that denies service to your governmental web sites might have been assembled by a Brazilian, who borrowed code from an Israeli, who launders his money through a Russian. None of them have met in person, and next month they may all switch roles - and throw in some Americans and Chinese to boot - for a totally different attack. A cyber czar is fighting a network with an org chart.

Forget trying to shoe-horn technology stars into government cyber security jobs (a worthy if doomed-from-the-start experiment) or creating more useless bureaucracy with another czar. We need a facilitator - someone with a lot of betweenness and closeness, to use some social networking terms - to make sure that the right people are talking, sharing, and collaborating as they best see fit. Collaboration is key to improving security and collaboration comes from trust, not edicts from the Kremlin. We’re not going to abandon our bureaucracies, so let’s move forward using that age-old mechanism for getting things done in bureaucracies: IKAGWKAG (”I know a guy who knows a guy”). The guy who knows the most guys is the guy you want in this job. Find him, and then sit back and watch what happens when you stop fighting real problems with a Visio diagram.

[Photo: Whitehouse.gov]

Practical Ways to Defend your Freedom of Speech

2009-08-03T17:17:00.000-07:00

by Brad Taylor
(http://www.fr33agents.com/474/practical-ways-to-defend-your-freedom-of-speech/)
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has released a White Paper [pdf here] suggesting ways for activists to use technology to protect free speech against censorship and retaliation from authoritarian regimes. The paper points out that the internet and other communication technologies have radically increased the scope for the dissemination of ideas, but has also given governments new means of discovering and punishing dissent. Some of the advice may be a little extreme for western countries at present, but it always pays to think ahead. It offers six practical ideas to protect your own freedom of speech, and four ways you can help others:

Ways to help yourself:

Understand Risk Assessment: Identify the risks you face, how serious they are, are prioritize your responses.
Beware of Malware: “If a government is able to install malware on the computer you are using, then it doesn’t matter what other steps you take: your files and communications will be subject to surveillance.”
Choose the Least-Risky Communications Channels: Talking in person or over encrypted internet connections is good; talking over the phone or sending SMS, not so much.
Use Encryption to Prevent Surveillance and Censorship of your Web Usage: Tor!
Be Careful of What and Where You Publish: Don’t use your own name [Damn it!], use secure connections, and avoid hosting companies with a commercial presence in your country (since they’re more likely to give you up to the Feds).
Use a Tor Bridge: Make it harder for authorities to know you’re using Tor, and keep the encryption alive even if shut off access to the public Tor network.

Ways to help others:

Run a Tor Relay: Donate bandwidth to relay encrypted traffic between Tor nodes.
Run a Tor Bridge: Like a relay, only secret.
Run a Tor Exit Node: Connect the Tor network with the rest of the internet.
Run a Proxy for Friends: Help out friends in places where censorship and surveillance are bigger problems.

There is much more information at the Surveillance Self-Defense Project. There’s not much you can do to change government policy, but there are many ways to render the edicts of the state ineffective.

THE CASE AGAINST COLLEGE ENTITLEMENTS

2009-08-03T17:07:00.000-07:00

(http://www.reason.tv/video/show/the-case-against-college)
President Barack Obama has declared that his administration aims to make college affordable to everyone by greatly expanding government aid to middle class families. The Washington Post says that Obama's higher education proposals, which include creating a brand new Pell Grant entitlement, "could transform the financial aid landscape for millions of students while expanding federal authority to a degree that even Democrats concede is controversial."
But what if President Obama has it backwards? What if America is sending too many people to college?
A recent study found that "Nationally, four-year colleges graduated an average of just 53% of entering students within six years." If 40 percent of students who enter college drop out before graduation and over 50 percent of students take six years to graduate, perhaps Obama is focusing on the wrong issue.
Reason.tv's Michael C. Moynihan sat down with Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and the American Enterprise Institute's Charles Murray, author of the recent book Real Education, to analyze how Obama's higher-education plans will impact the economic and cultural future of the United States.
Scroll down for embed code, an audio podcast, and iPod and HD versions.
For a YouTube version of this video, go here.
"The Case Against College Entitlements" was produced by Michael C. Moynihan and Meredith Bragg. Approximately 5 minutes long.

As Nasty As They Wanna Be

2009-08-02T13:12:00.000-07:00

How the Friars Club roasts expanded the First Amendment
Greg Beato
(http://www.reason.com/news/show/135072.html)
On Sunday night, eight of the most medium-sized names in showbiz convened in Studio City, California to roast Joan Rivers and her anatomically approximate face sculpture. When the event airs on Comedy Central on August 9th, and the insults commence, you may forget there was a time in American history when it was not considered appropriate to crack jokes about a 76-year-old grandmother's toxic vagina. Lucky for us, that time is long gone, and for this, we owe a debt of gratitude to Milton Berle, Henny Youngman, and all the other mid-century yuk-meisters who practiced the art of speaking the unspeakable at Friars Club roasts years before Lenny Bruce got busted for subjecting audiences to obscene grammar lessons or George Carlin compiled his list of seven words you can never say on television.
Roasts are the Rodney Dangerfields of free expression: They don't get any respect. When we credit the iconoclasts who believed that the freedom of speech granted by the First Amendment should be as expansive as Sasha Grey's fun tunnel, we turn first to literary sorts, like H.L. Mencken, Henry Miller, and Larry Flynt, and second to more cerebral funnymen like Bruce and Carlin. In part, this is because the Friars Club roasts, along with similar events held at The Masquers Club and other locales, were private affairs, with no women or waiters allowed. But we also snub roasts, one suspects, because they had no greater goal than coaxing horse laughs from filthy-minded drunks. Which of course is why we should value them all the more: How free is free speech when the only way you can unleash masturbation gags upon the public is to write a masterpiece on the order of Ulysses?
The Friars Club was established in 1904 and began holding rowdy testimonial dinners for prestigious pinatas shortly thereafter: "Veteran Theatrical Manager Butt of Jokes at Dinner," reported one newspaper article from 1910. But as Friars Club historian Barry Dougherty recounts in the book A Hundred Years, A Million Laughs, it wasn't until the 1950s, when Milton Berle started choreographing these bashes, that they turned "vicious beyond belief" and started using language that could make a statue of Freud blush.
"The biggest shock of my life was to hear Jack Benny, who was on the microphone, telling a story about George Jessel, and he used very, very salty language... " Ed McMahon told Dougherty. "It just blew me away." Larry King, reminiscing in David Weddle's Amongst the Mansions of Eden, was similarly traumatized. "Seeing someone say ‘fuck' is nothing now, but when I was thirty years old and went to my first Friars roast in New York and I heard Maurice Chevalier say, ‘Fuck,' I thought I'd die."
Apparently, the transgressive, take-no-prisoners approach that characterized the Friars Club roasts back then was enough to send these nascent cathode conformists scurrying toward the mainstream. But others were no doubt more inspired. The Friars Club roasts may not have been open to everyone, but they were formal performances before sizable crowds—and if you could tell dirty jokes with such gleefully offensive candor in that almost-public setting, with none of self-censorship that public discourse required, well, what was the next obvious step? While Berle and his Friars Club brethren are generally regarded as Borscht Belt joke-mongers whose mercenary approach to comedy would soon be superseded by revolutionary upstarts like Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce, they were actually engaged in a little radical action of their own.
"Erotic humor is far & away the most popular of all types, and an extremely large percentage of the jokes authentically in oral circulation, in this and apparently in all centuries and cultures, is concerned with the humor—often unwilling, unpleasant, and even purposely macabre—of the sexual impulse," wrote folklorist G. Legman in his encyclopedic analysis of smutty humor, Rationale of the Dirty Joke. Finally, thanks to the Friars Club roasts, America's comics were acknowledging humanity's intrinsic comic baseness rather than ignoring it. Finally, they were using their comic skills to push against the bounds of propriety, instead of merely tickling the public with childish euphemisms and coy innuendo. Cursing with abandon, reveling in their unconstrained crudity, erstwhile Catskills tumlers elevated themselves, at least temporarily, from jokers to truth-tellers by way of the completely liberated dick joke and their willingness to turn a roastee's pretenses and peccadilloes into comic fodder, no matter how squirm-inducing the process.
In the 1970s, the public got its first prolonged exposure to Friars-style mayhem via Dean Martin's celebrity roasts. Airing on NBC, these specials may have resurrected the euphemisms and innuendos the Friars had abandoned decades earlier, but they were also besotted with the casual, self-conscious irreverence that pop culture would eventually adopt as its lingua franca. Compared to, say, Saturday Night Live, Martin and those who populated his dais were incredibly visionary. While the Not Ready For Primetime Players stuck with characters, narrative, and all the traditional tools of live theater, the roasters sailed by on a wave of lightly rehearsed, heavily liquored up verite. Never had so many mediocre one-liners prompted so much feigned laughter, and yet in those instances where the show's sloppy spontaneity trumped its black-tie professionalism, Martin and his aging, nicotine-stained pals emerged as the slapdash forefathers of gonzo porn, Jackass, and YouTube.
By the early 1990s, public expression was both freer than it had ever been and also highly proscribed. In 1992, the world's biggest star, Madonna, sold 1.5 million copies of Sex, a glossy slab of coffee-table eye candy that offered a softcore take on hardcore porn. A hip-hop album that didn't warrant a Tipper sticker was artistically suspect. But bragging about the size of your slide rule to a co-worker could result in a sexual harassment lawsuit, and hundreds of U.S. colleges and universities were micro-managing student discourse via speech codes that banned everything from "insulting sounds" to "faxes sexual in nature."
In 1993, Ted Danson donned blackface, said the word "nigger" more than a dozen times, and ate a watermelon at a Friars Club roast for Whoopi Goldberg, his girlfriend at the time. Talk show personality Montel Williams stormed out of the event, and for weeks afterward, the news media reported on the fallout as Goldberg tried to explain the caustic traditions of the club's roasts and why she wasn't offended by Danson's performance. (According to Jet magazine, Goldberg also wrote much of Danson's material for the event, and set him up with the make-up artist who painted his face.)
The Friars issued a public apology, but the descriptions from Goldberg and others about the club's everything-is-fair-game atmosphere apparently piqued people's interest. Over the next few years, subsequent Friars Club roasts got more coverage in newspapers than they had in years, and in 1998, Comedy Central partnered with the organization to produce a televised roast of Drew Carey. "Ladies and gentlemen, Drew Carey is to comedy what Mariah Carey is to comedy...[He] looks like Buddy Holly and Barney Rubble had a baby and then peed on it," first roaster Jeffrey Ross exclaimed, setting the tone not only for the rest of the show, and all the televised roasts that have followed in its wake over the last decade, but also for cyberspace at large.
Emphatically blunt, hyperbolically caustic, eager to slaughter sacred cows, or really, any animate creatures that wander into their cross-hairs—is there any better way to describe the voice that speaks from the Web's message-boards and online comments sections than the voice of a comic in full-blown roast mode? At exactly the same time millions of people were venturing online and experimenting with how best to express themselves in this medium, Jeffrey Ross, Greg Giraldo, Lisa Lampanelli, and all the other heirs of the mid-century Friars were offering up a template to emulate on Comedy Central's roasts: Be ruthless, be shocking, and don't shy away from speaking the unspeakable.
Naturally, lots of dreary material results from this approach, especially as anonymous verbal snipers try to one-up each other. But while the Web's endemic snarkiness—and the outright contempt that is regularly expressed toward gays, minorities, Christians, atheists, Republicans, liberals, conservatives, Muslims, and journalists on countless online comments sections and messageboards—can be tiresome, it's also the Web's rude, unfettered, no-holds-barred mentality that makes it the most vital medium we've ever known, and the one that offers the most accurate and expansive portrait of humanity to date. As a bonus, it features an extensive collection of dick jokes.
Contributing Editor Greg Beato is a writer living in San Francisco.

Dale McGowan - Raising Freethinkers

2009-08-02T02:07:00.000-07:00

(http://www.pointofinquiry.org/dale_mcgowan_raising_freethinkers/)

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Dale McGowan has edited and co-authored Parenting Beyond Belief and Raising Freethinkers, the first comprehensive resources for nonreligious parents. He writes the secular parenting blog The Meming of Life, teaches nonreligious parenting seminars across the United States, and serves as executive director of Foundation Beyond Belief, a 501(c)(3) humanist charitable and educational foundation based in Atlanta. In September 2008 he was named Harvard Humanist of the Year by the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard University.
In this interview with D.J. Grothe, Dale McGowan talks about raising freethinking children who are steeped in the values of science and humanism. He confronts some of reasons why some nonreligious parents may continue to raise their children in a religion, including moral education, identity and community. He describes trends within the scientific rationalist and humanist movements to provide secular community, which he argues are being driven by freethinking families. He talks about ways that church is increasingly becoming replaced by secular communities, and how churches are increasingly becoming more like secular community centers, as opposed to houses of worship. He argues that raising freethinkers is the opposite of indoctrinating children in atheism, secular humanism or skepticism, emphasizing that "freethinking" is an approach to knowledge as opposed to a worldview. He also argues that parenting should not be focused on the value of inquiry and scientific skepticism, but on wonder, mystery and awe. He talks about the dangers of inculcating elitism among freethinking children. He explains why teaching about religion to freethinking children is important. He addresses ways of confronting death and the meaning of life with freethinking children, including how highly unlikely it is that any of us even exist. He talks about alternatives to lying to children about heaven, including facts from physics about the atoms in our bodies having existed since the beginning of the universe, and how such scientific truths may take on mystical pantheistic meanings. He talks about new social science research on happiness, and how it relates to and informs secular parenting. And he cautions that applying the best social science to parenting shouldn't mean that we make our children our next science project.
Also in this episode, Michael Blanford, founder of the Skeptical Society of St. Louis and coordinator for the Life Science Lab for the St. Louis Science Center, shares an audio essay about the awe of science for children and why freethinkers should be more emotionally engaged when celebrating evolution as the story of life.

Primo Levi's Universe

2009-08-02T02:02:00.000-07:00

(http://www.wpr.org/hereonearth/archive_090730k.cfm)

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Italian humanist Primo Levi is best known as a memoirist of Auschwitz, but he was also a scientist, fiction writer, and poet: in short, a Renaissance man. Primo Levi's Universe by Sam Magavern, published to coincide with Levi's 90th anniversary on July 31st, gives us a chance to find out what made this great humanist tick.

Guest
Sam Magavern, author of Primo Levi's Universe: A Writer's Journey
Related Links
Sam Magavern
Primo Levi's Universe: A Writer's Journey
Our previous show about Levi: Christmas in Auschwitz

Friday Flashback: Cat Stevens - "Moonshadow"

2009-07-31T11:18:00.001-07:00

The Conspiracy Skeptic: HIV Denial

2009-07-30T09:26:00.000-07:00

(http://www.yrad.com/cs/)
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Abbie Smith is a grad student at the University of Oklahoma studying HIV. She has a popular blog called ERV (ie endogenous retro virus). Smith takes on creationists, the Disco'tute's head honchos, the top HIV deniers, all the while trying to find a way to keep HIV from killing babies. All that from a person who doesn't own more than 3 small kitchen appliances. Naturally, she stops in to chat with the Conspiracy Skeptic about HIV denial.

Abbie and PZ Myers
Abbie should not be confused with Abbie Hoffman.
Abbie's old blog
Japanese scientist who thinks you can change the structure of water if you say nurturing things to it
Oh Lenny
Abbie will give you a cool blog for free, earning under 20K a year. Lenny will sell you $188 tuning forks or a $1300 water filter
Abbie takes on Behe
Abbie debates Lenny
Lenny accuses Duesberg of all kinds of nasty stuff
Lenny's entirely bizarre indictment of Duesberg
Abbie vs Dembski I
Abbie vs Dembski II
Abbie vs Dembski III
Abbie vs Dembski IV
Abbie vs Dembski V
Abbie vs Dembski VI
One of those crazy HIV photos that aren't supposed to exist
More HIV images that supposedly don't exist

Iran, China and the New Silk Road

2009-07-30T09:18:00.000-07:00

By Pepe Escobar

Part 1: Iran and Russia, scorpions in a bottle

HONG KONG - Does it make sense to talk about a Beijing-Tehran axis? Apparently no, when one learns that Iran's application to become a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) was flatly denied at the 2008 summit in Tajikistan.

Apparently yes, when one sees how the military dictatorship of the mullahtariat in Tehran and the collective leadership in Beijing have dealt with their recent turmoil - the "green revolution" in Tehran and the Uighur riots in Urumqi - reawakening in the West the ghostly mythology of "Asian despotism".

The Iran-China relationship is like a game of Chinese boxes. Amid the turbulence, glorious or terrifying, of their equally millenarian histories, when one sees an Islamic Republic that now reveals itself as a militarized theocracy and a Popular Republic that is in fact a capitalist oligarchy, things are not what they seem to be.

No matter what recently happened in Iran, consolidating the power the Khamenei-Ahmadinejad-IRGC axis, the relationship will continue to develop within the framework of a clash between US hyperpower - declining as it may be - and the aspiring Chinese big power, allied with the re-emergent Russian big power.

On the road
Iran and China are all about the New Silk Road - or routes - in Eurasia. Both are among the most venerable and ancient of (on the road) partners. The first encounter between the Parthian empire and the Han dynasty was in 140 BC, when Zhang Qian was sent to Bactria (in today's Afghanistan) to strike deals with nomad populations. This eventually led to Chinese expansion in Central Asia and interchange with India.

Trading exploded via the fabled Silk Road - silk, porcelain, horses, amber, ivory, incense. As a serial traveler across the Silk Road over the years, I ended up learning on the spot how the Persians controlled the Silk Road by mastering the art of making oases, thus becoming in the process the middlemen between China, India and the West.

Parallel to the land route there was also a naval route - from the Persian Gulf to Canton (today's Guangzhou). And there was of course a religious route - with Persians translating Buddhist texts and with Persian villages in the desert serving as springboards to Chinese pilgrims visiting India. Zoroastrianism - the official religion of the Sassanid empire - was imported to China by Persians at the end of the 6th century, and Manichaeism during the 7th. Diplomacy followed: the son of the last Sassanid emperor - fleeing the Arabs in 670 AD - found refuge in the Tang court. During the Mongol period, Islam spread into China.

Iran has never been colonized. But it was a privileged theater of the original Great Game between the British Empire and Russia in the 19th century and then during the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union in the 20th. The Islamic Revolution may at first imply Khomeini's official policy of "neither East nor West". In fact, Iran dreams of bridging both.

That brings us to Iran's key, inescapable geopolitical role at the epicenter of Eurasia. The New Silk Road translates into an energy corridor - the Asian Energy Security Grid - in which the Caspian Sea is an essential node, linked to the Persian Gulf, from where oil is to be transported to Asia. And as far as gas is concerned, the name of the game is Pipelineistan - as in the recently agreed Iran-Pakistan (IP) pipeline and the interconnection between Iran and Turkmenistan, whose end result is a direct link between Iran and China.

Then there's the hyper-ambitious, so-called "North-South corridor" - a projected road and rail link between Europe and India, through Russia, Central Asia, Iran and the Persian Gulf. And the ultimate New Silk Road dream - an actual land route between China and the Persian Gulf via Central Asia (Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan).

The width of the circle
As the bastion of Shi'ite faith, encircled by Sunnis, Iran under what is now a de facto theocratic dictatorship still desperately needs to break out from its isolation. Talk about a turbulent environment: Iraq still under US occupation to the west, the ultra-unstable Caucasus in the northwest, fragile Central Asian "stans" in the northeast, basket cases Afghanistan and Pakistan to the east, not to mention the nuclear neighborhood -Israel, Russia, China, Pakistan and India.

Technological advancement for Iran means fully mastering a civilian nuclear program - which contains the added benefit of turning it into a sanctuary via the possibility of building a nuclear device. Officially, Tehran has declared ad infinitum it has no intention of possessing an "un-Islamic" bomb. Beijing understands Tehran's delicate position and supports its right to the peaceful use of nuclear energy. Beijing would have loved to see Tehran adopt the plan proposed by Russia, the US, Western Europe and, of course, China. Carefully evaluating its vital energy and national security interests, the last thing Beijing wants is for Washington to clench its fist again.

What happened to the George W Bush-declared, post-9/11 "global war on terror" (GWOT), now remixed by Obama as "overseas contingency operations" (OCO)? GWOT's key, shadowy aim was for Washington to firmly plant the flag in Central Asia. For those sorry neo-cons, China was the ultimate geopolitical enemy, so nothing was more enticing than to try to sway a batch of Asian countries against China. Easier dreamed of than done.

China's counter-power was to turn the whole game around in Central Asia, with Iran as its key peon. Beijing was quick to grasp that Iran is a matter of national security, in terms of assuring its vast energy needs.

Of course China also needs Russia - for energy and technology. This is arguably more of an alliance of circumstance - for all the ambitious targets embodied by the SCO - than a long-term strategic partnership. Russia, invoking a series of geopolitical reasons, considers its relationship with Iran as exclusive. China says slow down, we're also in the picture. And as Iran remains under pressure at different levels from both the US and Russia, what better "savior" than China?

Enter Pipelineistan. At first sight, Iranian energy and Chinese technology is a match made in heaven. But it's more complicated than that.

Still the victim of US sanctions, Iran has turned to China to modernize itself. Once again, the Bush/Dick Cheney years and the invasion of Iraq sent an unmistakable message to the collective leadership in Beijing. A push to control Iraq oil plus troops in Afghanistan, a stone's throw from the Caspian, added to the Pentagon's self-defined "arc of instability" from the Middle East to Central Asia - this was more than enough to imprint the message: the less dependent China is on US-subjugated Arab Middle East energy, the better.

The Arab Middle East used to account for 50% of China's oil imports. Soon China became the second-largest oil importer from Iran, after Japan. And since fateful 2003, China also has mastered the full cycle of prospection/exploitation/refining - thus Chinese companies are investing heavily in Iran's oil sector, whose refining capacity, for instance, is risible. Without urgent investment, some projections point to Iran possibly cutting off oil exports by 2020. Iran also needs everything else China can provide in areas like transportation systems, telecom, electricity and naval construction.

Iran needs China to develop its gas production in the gigantic north Pars and south Pars fields - which it shares with Qatar - in the Persian Gulf. So no wonder a "stable" Iran had to become a matter of Chinese national security.

Multipolar we go
So why the stalemate at the SCO? As China is always meticulously seeking to improve its global credibility, it had to be considering the pros and cons of admitting Iran, for which the SCO and its slogan of mutual cooperation for the stability of Central Asia, as well as economic and security benefits, are priceless. The SCO fights against Islamic terrorism and "separatism" in general - but now has also developed as an economic body, with a development fund and a multilateral economic council. The whole idea of it is to curb American influence in Central Asia.

Iran has been an observer since 2005. Next year may be crucial. The race is on to beat the clock, before a desperate Israeli strike, and have Iran accepted by the SCO while negotiating some sort of stability pact with the Barack Obama administration. For all this to happen relatively smoothly, Iran needs China - that is, to sell as much oil and gas as China needs below market prices, while accepting Chinese - and Russian - investment in the exploration and production of Caspian oil.

All this while Iran also courts India. Both Iran and India are focused on Central Asia. In Afghanistan, India is financing the construction of a US$250 million road between Zaranj, at the Iranian border, and Delaram - which is in the Afghan ring road linking Kabul, Kandahar, Herat and Mazar-i-Sharif. New Delhi sees in Iran a very important market. India is actively involved in the construction of a deep water port in Chabahar - that would be a twin for the Gwadar port built in southern Balochistan by China, and would be very helpful to landlocked Afghanistan (freeing it from Pakistani interference).

Iran also needs its doors to the north - the Caucasus and Turkey - to channel its energy production towards Europe. It's an uphill struggle. Iran has to fight fierce regional competition in the Caucasus; the US-Turkey alliance framed by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization; the perpetual US-Russian Cold War in the region; and last but not least Russia's own energy policy, which simply does not contemplate sharing the European energy market with Iran.

But energy agreements with Turkey are now part of the picture - after the moderate Islamists of the AKP took power in Ankara in 2002. Now it's not that far-fetched to imagine the possibility of Iran in the near future supplying much-needed gas for the ultra-expensive, US-supported Turkey-to-Austria Nabucco pipeline.

But the fact remains that for both Tehran and Beijing, the American thrust in the "arc of instability" from the Middle East to Central Asia is anathema. They're both anti-US hegemony and US unilateralism, Bush/Cheney style. As emerging powers, they're both pro multipolar. And as they're not Western-style liberal democracies, the empathy is even stronger. Few failed to notice the stark similarities in the degree of repression of the "green revolution" in Tehran and the Uighurs in Xinjiang. For China, a strategic alliance with Iran is above all about Pipelineistan, the Asian Energy Security Grid and the New Silk Road. For China, a peaceful solution to the Iranian nuclear dossier is imperative. This would lead to Iran being fully opened to (eager) European investment. Washington may be reluctant to admit it, but in the New Great Game in Eurasia, the Tehran-Beijing axis spells out the future: multipolarity.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives

2009-07-30T09:16:00.000-07:00

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (Little Brown)
David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (Back Bay Books)
David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster: and Other Essays (Back Bay Books)

Andrew Davidson, The Gargoyle (Doubleday)
Richard Hand, Terror on the Air!: Horror Radio in America, 1931 - 1952 (McFarland)
Glenn Kay, Zombie Movies: The Ultimate Guide (Chicago Review Press/An A Cappella Book)
Kelly Link, Pretty Monsters: Stories (Viking)