Voting for Obama

This year, for the first time, I will vote to re-elect an incumbent president.  Rebecca Solnit explains why.

We are facing a radical right that has abandoned all interest in truth and fact.

Arctic Sea Ice Minimum

The preliminary minimum for 2012 is 3.41 million square kilometers.  This is 49 percent below the minimum extent average from 1979 to 2000.  It is also 18 percent below the previous record in 2007.

Update (January 25, 2015):  Watch the arctic ice cap melt away.

One Year

Today was the anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement.  Rebecca Solnit reflects on what it means.

Update (September 16, 2013):  Further reflections from Solnit at the second anniversary.  It's not about instant results, but rather the seeds that get planted.

Sea Ice Extent May Be Uncertain

Even with a record low this year, it's possible there's even less ice than the satellites show.

Lost Decade

The State of Working America 12th Edition presents the conclusion that the American "middle class has suffered a lost decade and faces the threat of another."

Compared to several other rich countries, the US has greater inequality and less mobility.

The Gini coefficient for the US has grown 32 percent since it's lowest value in 1968.

10 Ways to Rebuild the Middle Class seeks to reverse these trends.  There's a big need for well paying jobs with decent benefits.

No Magic

Too Much Magic is James Howard Kunstler's follow up to his 2005 book The Long Emergency. His answer to the sentiment that technology will save us from a myriad of ecological and economic problems is that we need to focus on intelligent responses rather than on solutions. Daily life will be changing in ways we don't prefer, and yet we are going to have to make "other arrangements" (as Kunstler likes to say).

He's been writing about these issues at least since the early 90s with The Geography of Nowhere.  There Kunstler wrote about car centered lives and the disaster of suburban sprawl.  At the time I didn't pay much attention to his comments about declining oil reserves or that burning fossil fuels was causing a global warming effect.  It was already clear that "the joyride is over" and "[w]hat remains is the question of how we can make the transition to a saner way of living."

It was a little over seven years ago that the concept of "peak oil" grabbed my attention.  I spent a couple of nearly sleepless nights reading through The Long Emergency.  It also redirected some of my attention to climate change.  I read a lot that summer in preparation for a public lecture in November.  It was one of those times when a huge dose of reality meant you can't ever see the world in the same way again.

For some time, I kept up with Kunstler's blog.  I could agree with everything he wrote while still wishing he was wrong.  Or more selfishly, hoping that he was wrong for a few more years.

Update (October 3):  Robert Jensen discusses Kunstler's book.

Reading Group

Our group will discuss two books.  Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One by Thomas Sowell and The Price of Inequality by Joseph Stiglitz.

I concede a bias toward Stiglitz from the beginning and nothing I read changed that.  Sowell's book was easy to read and had me ticked off several times.  Stiglitz spends a lot of time telling you what he's told you and what he's going to tell you, but I found his argument thoughtful and information dense.  It's one of the most informative books I've read.

The books aren't really addressing the same topic.  Sowell covers a broader range of topics as demonstrations of  economic thinking--getting past "stage one" to see the long term consequences which are often unintended.  And I get it; it's a rather basic point to make.  In a functioning government, you want that kind of debate with one side or the other asking, "did you think about such and such?"  Our ideological opponents force us to think things through and ideally that produces better results.

What I found infuriating is that Sowell really has axes to grind.  Simple minded liberals can't get past stage one with their do-gooder intentions.  It takes deep thinking conservatives to foresee the true outcomes.  And so he cherry picks his evidence with few academic references.  Over and over I end up wondering, what is he not telling me?

Rather quickly into my reading of both books, I came to the conclusion that I couldn't care less about unintended consequences--mistakes get made, but in principle they can be corrected.  The real problem seems to be the deliberately intended consequences of policy.

Stiglitz addresses more recent events which have highlighted as well as worsened the problem of inequality in the United States.  Economics and politics are bound together and policies have been in place to deliberately enhance wealth at the top over the past 30 years.  Greater wealth translates into greater political power to the detriment of most of society.  Stiglitz goes into enormous detail on the various impacts of inequality with an abundance of evidence.

And solutions are sketched out, albeit solutions that will never see the light of day in our modern dysfunctional Congress.  Stiglitz paints a stark contrast between where we are headed and where we could be.  He acknowledges the Arab Spring last year and the Occupy Movement that followed in the US last fall. The future of that movement isn't clear and Stiglitz discusses how much effort goes into getting the 99% to believe that their interests are the same as those of the 1%.  Ultimately he seems to appeal to the 1% to do the right thing--in de Tocqueville's words, "self-interest properly understood".  Stiglitz concludes with the notion that it's not too late, but hope is flickering.

I'm not without my quibbles:  Stiglitz is a capitalist.  His focus is on restoring growth rather than on redistribution (he does refer to sustainable growth).  But there are serious questions about how much (if any) growth is possible in the coming years.

But finally, it pleases me to think that a couple conservative friends got the chance to read Stiglitz. I'm curious to find out just how persuasive he is.

Another Record for Arctic Sea Ice

Sea ice volume has also reached a record low.

Update (February 15, 2013):  Satellite observations are confirming a University of Washington model that shows summer sea ice volume has declined by one-third in the past ten years and by four-fifths since 1980.

Update (May 2, 2013):  An animation showing the decline in sea ice volume.  And a White House meeting about the rapid changes in the arctic.