Worry Wart

An Extended Complaint About Kitchen Aide’s Customer Service

Lean thinking was the business rage of the late eighties. Ideas in lean thinking include reducing redundancy, reducing inventory, and reducing the amount of capital one uses to achieve an end. There is much good to be found in lean thinking; but as is true of every good idea it is essential to bring the idea into practice, to use it to inform decisions, but to stay clear of letting it control your business or your life. Lean thinking is one business tool. No matter what its proponents claim it is not the whole of a business.

Let us construct a hypothetical example of a customer service center for a kitchen counter-top appliance manufacturer. Assume it stocks and ships several hundred SKUs. All of them are replacement parts for things like mixers, blenders, toasters, and so on.

Now, let us assume that the management of this enterprise has the lean thinking religion. That is, they organize all of their business approaches around the lean thinking idea, assuming that what else there is to running the business well will take care of itself. Perhaps they lose sight of the idea that the business purpose of the enterprise is to keep parts flowing to customers. Instead, they see only the operational mandate to minimize costs by keeping a razor-thin inventory. Or rather, to arrange a flow of goods from suppliers to customers in a way that reduces the inventory at the service center to zero.

In fact, the optimal solution in terms of minimizing cost of managing the center is to arrange it so that an order for a part and the part itself arrive at the center on the same day. This would allow one to keep zero inventory. And it would provide prompt service for each customer. It’s the best of all possible worlds.

If the scale of the business is large and the number of SKUs is small, it is likely that the average amount of volume for each SKU is relatively large compared to the random noise in order volume. And one can schedule regular deliveries for most SKU’s - maybe weekly or even daily. If one has been in the business for decades, one can develop high-quality time-series forcasting models for parts orders. One can actually hope to approach the ideal situation in which a part and order arrive on the same day.

If the parts are not of some highly time-sensitive nature, then two or three week delivery times may be assumed to be acceptable. In this case, all one needs to do is to arrange weekly or biweekly deliveries of virtually every SKU that might ship. Inventory then becomes nothing but evidence that one has overestimated the order volume of an SKU. A well-managed SKU, then, is never in stock.

In this model, the optimal solution from a cost standpoint is not to carry stock but to carry a standing backorder quantity on all parts. The game is no longer to minimize inventory, but to manage the backorder list in a way that loses the fewest customers. If one gets incredibly good at the game, one needs not stock any parts. And the customer remains oblivious to the fact.

The model above has a glossy kind of appeal that would give lean-thinking fundies wet dreams. And if all one can see in a business is the goal of minimizing costs, there is no other possible model. But is minimizing cost the only game? A business with no costs is no business at all. A business with no customers has the lowest operational costs of all.

Cost minimization is unconditionally good to the extent that it improves efficiency - delivering the same net results with fewer resources. But cost minimization is unconditionally bad when it kills your business. All the stuff that actually matters lies somewhere in between.

You have to actually connect the operational details with the business goals. One of those goals has to be delivering stuff to the customer. Lean strategies that fail to deliver have ceased cutting fat and started amputating limbs. This is where the model begins to fail.

The model above starts with a hidden assumption. It assumes that parts are ordered one at a time. It is not an unreasonable assumption if one is shipping blender parts to housewives. It might work most of the time in this or some other contexts. If one has business practices that always treat the order of any part in a manner that is consistent with this assumption, one has a viable operation. But what happens if someone orders more than one SKU?

I ran into a very interesting example of this in a recent exchange with Kitchen Aide’s customer service department. Last November my wife placed an order for some parts with them, several different SKUs. In April, when they had still not shipped, she cancelled the order. In May I tried again. I started online filling out a customer request. Nearly two weeks later, after getting no response, I called the company. The first call was shuffled through the auto-answering maze. I waited five minutes. Then there were some rings at the other end. Then dial tone.

On the second or third try, after ten or twenty minutes of waiting I got a real person. Long queues is a sign of lean thinking. It screams “The customer’s waiting time costs us nothing.” Not true, but that’s another argument.

I placed an order for the parts. I was told that everything was in stock except for one part, and it was due the next day. Roughly three weeks passed and I did not receive the order. So I called customer service and spoke to Janet.

This time I was told that “all the parts were on backorder.”

“How could this happen?” I asked. “All the parts, save one, were in stock when I placed the order. And that part was due the next day.”

“The order is configured to ship when all the parts are available,” answered Janet. “Some are coming in this week and some are coming in next week.” In other words, parts that should have been shipped to me were shipped to other customers because of the way my order was configured.

I suddenly understood the game. And I explained it to Janet in a forceful and unpleasant way. “While my order waits for food processor blades, all the blender jars are shipped to other customers until there are none left. When the food processor blades arrive, the blender jars are out of stock. But while we wait for jars, the blades go out of stock again. And we are back to where we started. This process repeats itself forever. Or until one cancels the order.”

Janet assured me that what I was explaining was impossible. And that the parts would be in stock maybe this week. Or maybe by the end of this month. Really, I had no cause for concern.

But I have had graduate courses in statistics and in inventory control. I have a good imagination. I have also worked in industry and I have lived among fundamentalists of all sorts: I know how insane things can get. I understand something about what might have happened and why. I was capable of setting up a model of their operation in my own mind and proving to my own satisfaction that unless the system were fooled into treating my order that had four separate SKUs as four separate orders, I would absolutely never receive any part of my order. I was upset that the whole of the customer service organization was completely oblivious to this glaring problem and that it meant that people with smaller orders who ordered after I did always got their stuff first.

The special quality of the idealized operation we described above is that it assures that most parts are on backorder most of the time. It is not an accident. It is not even viewed as an undesireable side effect of minimizing inventory. It is the operational goal of the inventory management system. Now, if regular deliveries always brought in more parts of every SKU than there were backorder quantities, one could still recover.

But if one were designing the system to be brutally efficient on a day-to-day operating sense, then one would take deliveries five days a week. And it would almost always be the case that some SKUs would arrive only on certain days of the week.

On a given week blender jars would arrive on Monday. And they would all ship out Monday. Food processor blades would arrive Tuesday. And they would all ship out Tuesday. And so on. Such an arrangement would distribute labor over the week and achieve certain returns of scale in the process of moving parts from incoming queue into outgoing queue.

So, if a person placed an order that included a blender jar and a food processor blade; and if that person specified not to ship until all the parts were in stock, it was a mathematical certainty that they would never receive their order because it could never ship. The parts would never be in the warehouse at the same time. It was not an accident of the design, it was a goal of the design.

It is at this point that an enlightened business manager might begin to understand how lean-thinking fundamentalism is strangling his business. The lean-thinking model eliminates all sales to customers who order more than one part at a time. It assures that their broken appliances remain broken forever. It drives them to buy from competitors with inferior products who have business processes that allow them to actually ship product against complicated orders.

Now, I am absolutely certain that if some person from Kitchen Aide were to read this essay they would categorically deny every part of it. That’s fine; but as I write this I am still waiting for those parts my wife ordered in November. I am still waiting for those same parts I ordered in mid-May. The explanation may be subtly different; but the results are the same.

In the mean time we bought an Oster blender that turns ice cubes into snowdrifts in a way that my Kitchen-Aide blender never could approach. But it makes such a godawful racket that I fear it will cause hearing loss. And while it boasts “all metal drive” it also has a base that has the look and feel of really cheap plastic. I look at it, and I feel sad because all I can see is the day i throw it out, another tangible symbol of the gap between the hopes we have for products and what they deliver.

We live in a marvelous age where all sorts of stuff is incredibly cheap. We have learned to manufacture efficiently. We have learned to distribute efficiently. But there are still gaping holes in our ability to manage effectively. I just want a blender that can be made to work, even after parts break; and one that does not make me deaf. I’m sure that there exists a solution to this problem; but the first two tries were failures.

When you have to throw away the first two instances of any good before settling on one that works, you begin to wonder whether the current world is not built upon false economies. You begin to wonder whether lean thinking has not just cut the fat but also amputated important organs; the principle organ of thought, for instance.

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Hillary Clinton came within a handful of votes of being the first woman to clinch the Presidential nomination from a major political party in the US. That’s an accomplishment all of us can be proud of. It changed the assumptions of electoral politics and creates many reasons to hope for a bette future. Hillary stands to be the proudest for she put the most at risk. It was her talents more than those of any other single person that led to her success.

Clinton’s monumental achievement came with great investment by people who identified with her ideals and with investment by people who paved the way for her. It would be a grave mistake to imagine that Hillary’s success depended exclusively or even primarily on women; for that would severely underestimate the breadth of support she had. She had support from every identifiable group.

If one is looking at Clinton’s success in terms of gender, one would trace the line of history backwards. In recent history there are womens’ organizations such as NOW that contributed much in terms of effort and in terms of helping us see society in a way profoundly different from how it was seen just fifty years ago. But the arc of change goes back much farther.

In the early twentieth century one finds women campaigning successfully for voting rights. Thier sucdess brought women into the political arena in an explicit way, a way that was unprecedented in agricultural and post-agricultural societies.

Before that one can find the successful reigns of Victoria and Elizabeth as examples of female leaders who proved both more durable, more serious, and more wise than almost all their male predecessors in the same role. During Elizabeth’s reign Shakespeare wrote, the British started permanent settlements in the new world, and the Spanish Armada was defeated. By the time of her successor, England was a very different place. A century ealier it had been a forgettable minor appendage to Europe. A century later it had become one of Europe’s most powerful and influencial nations.

In a similar way, England was transformed under Victoria into the world’s most successful and sprawling empire. In light of recent American history, what is remarkable about this feat was the fact that one could send British aristocrats into foreign lands such as India for decades at a time and they would persistently and energetically pursue primarily the interests of the crown, subjugating and suppressing the impulse to take unfair advantage of the situation. And when corruption occurred, it was generally dealt with in effective ways. The durability and scale of the arrangement is sufficient testimony to the greatness of the enterprise. Victoria’s dogged sense of decency and restraint was crucial to the success of the enterprise. It is almost impossible to imagine England managing the task under a male monarch.

The extraordinary level of common sense we find in the writings of women authors of the early ninteenth century, most notably Jane Austin, does much to aid the cause. Austin digs deep beneath the facades of wealth and privilege to get to the essential qualities of humanity - the qualities that create durable society.

This whirlwind tour we use to suggest that in Anglophone history women have proven themselves repeatedly in the political sphere. There is little question that the world is better off when intelligent, well-educated, and serious women play central roles in culture and politics. There ought to be more of them.

Our purpose here, however, is not to talk about identity politics, but to show how feminism and the values that women preferentially hold are essential in a well-functioning political arena. And to suggest that women and men alike might be better served by focussing less on identity politics than on ideas of justice and fairness.

In some hypothetical ideal world gender would be irrelevant. Leaders would make good choices. And most reasonable people would agree with those policy choices seeing them as effective and just. A good leader would be a leader who could identify the most effective and just policy positions and who could best persuade others to follow, to adopt those policy choices.

When we say effective we are thinking in a sort of utilitarian way, the most good for the most people. Or, when it comes to the obligation of governments to minimize certain kinds of dysfunction and dissatisfaction, the least amount of ill of any given sort for the most people. When we say just, we mean that policies are completely blind to all the sorts of factors that divide people: race, gender, ethnicity, class, wealth, build, amount of hair, and so on. Or, if they are not blind, they compensate to some degree, for societal factors and practices that might be judged unjust. And they do so in a way that knits society together more closely.

Many things stand in the way of such an ideal world. One is that people generally choose to associate with people who are - in some way or another - like themselves. It’s why men associate with men. And women associate with women. It’s why people with common ethnic backgrounds tend to associate with other people with similar ethnic backgrounds. It’s why people tend to hire people who remind them of themselves. It’s also why people tend to vote for people who remind them of themselves. It’s a natural tendency. But it can produce unfortunate outcomes. Because men tend to care most about power, they seek it most vigorously and are over-represented in all the seats of power. Powerful men, then, tend to promote other men for reasons we just explained.

Feminists complain about a persistent, insular, and dysfunctional patriarchy. It plagues politics and corporate governments causing the same kind of pain and difficulty in good reasoning that a perpetual migrain headache might cause.

It’s an accurate observation in many cases. The problem with men arises from the fact that in agricultural and post agricutural societies the culture is almost completely derived from principles of individual property ownership. And property ownership is one of the primary distinguishing characteristics of mating priviledges for males.

In this context it is nearly always (assumed to be) in the male’s best (evolutionary) interest to magnify the power difference between himself and the next male lower on the economic scale. Thus, males tend to build highly vertical heirarchical societies with great inequality. And they tend to be cruel to those of lower status. It’s a tendency that is deeply embeddeed in the psyche; it is one that we inherit from other primates such as the ancestors common to us and baboons. It is one we share with most social mammals including most pack and herd animals.

The grave problem with this culture is that it tends to produce a small number of very rich people and a large number of very poor ones. This leads to social unrest and ferment. And this, in turn, leads to violence. That this is almost entirely absent from North America’s history is an artifact of the huge bounty of natural resources its European settlers have enjoyed by virtue of settling a huge almost empty continent. But when that bounty becomes sufficiently depleted, the process will be observed here, too.

Societies have responded to pressures of shortages in two ways. One is primarily suppressive. Armed forces put down the revolt and suppress violence. Experience in Latin America over the last century might teach us that so long as there is profound inequality and widespread social discontent, there cannot be peace in a society.

By contrast, some societies have worked over the millennia to inculcate a strong sense of interconnectedness and interdependence - one that drives a kind of personal industry. It’s not hard to see this in certain northern European and Oriental societies. One of the side-effects of this culture is that there is more of a sense of shared purpose and shared destiny. The differences between the upper and underclasses are smaller. There is a stronger sense of group identity.

So what does all this have to do with feminism? If one views feminism through a Marxist lens, seeing it as a kind of class struggle in which men are cast as the boursoisie and women as the proletariat, then what we have talked about has nothing to do with feminism. But recall that Marxism calls for the total destruction of the bourgoisie and the elimination of capital. Metaphorically speaking it’s a kind of “kill the patient” practice of medicine. Most males would like to believe that most females might actually be just a little happier with some kind of male presence. If this were so, a different model would be called for. What kind of society are we aiming for? And what kinds of cultural practices will serve that end? These become the central questions.

These questions lead us to explore a little more carefully the complementary roles that men and women play in society. We have already pointed out that the role men play is primarily competitive. By contrast, we might see that historically the role that women have played has tended to be more cooperative. That this tendency exists is a fact of nature. How we channel it is a matter of culture.

The ideas of fairness and justice, of cooperation and interdependence, of an interconnected and roughly equal society are ideas that tend to be more closely linked with the female psyche. It would be wrong to assert that they are exclusively female impulses or ideas. But it would be just as wrong to assert that they are so prominent or find expression so persistently in the male population as they are and do in the female population. On average, women tend to view the world a little less competitively and a little more cooperatively than do men.

It’s a pattern with deep biological roots. The differences can be seen in many mammalian species. It is quite common for sibling females to care for each others’ young. It is a practice observed in primates, in bats, and in felines. We observe here the evolutionary foundation for the general tendency of women to be just a bit more sensitive to the needs of others, to be just a little more cooperative, to be just a little more fair, to identify just a little more with the needs of the downtrodden is a tendency that leads us to reasonably expect women, on average, to be better at creating and executing policies and practices that are fair, inclusive, broadly based, just.

Arguably, it is precisely this impulse that enables humans to form societies. And it is our sense of empathy that makes possible the deep level of cooperation that holds society together.

Society needs to balance competetive and cooperative forces. Competetive forces, properly managed, tend to disribute power. They tend to spur economic and personal development. They tend to drive change. They tend to move people and institutions toward excellence. They even drive societies to exercise cooperation on ever larger scales.

But if they are not managed scrupulously they have a tendency to concentrate power. When combined with a sort of laziness and a sense of entitlement, competition creates social classes and class barriers. And this leads to societal inequities. Cooperative forces can interfere with the negative effects of competitive forces. The happiest and most durable societies strike a careful balance between these two impulses and practices.

When one sees a homeless person freezing on the sidewalk it is a sense of fairness that prompts one to get city council to designate some warm building for the purpose of housing such people on cold nights. And to use tax dollars to heat the building. At one level, to take up the cause of the less fortunate is a simple act of human kindness.

At another level it is an act of enlightened self interest. The economic and societal forces that caused this person to rot in the street no doubt are at work elsewhere. If the collection of such people becomes too large and if their plight becomes too hopeless, discontent and dispair will create violence. At first it will be private and incidental. But eventually it will become public and general, if the underlying causes are not addressed.

It is a sketchy argument, but we have established at least some reason to believe that ideas about fairness, justice, and cooperation strenghthen society and make it a happier and more productive place. Some of the cooperative ideas we talk about are ones that have seen little expression in the political arena in over three decades. They are ideas we need to relearn in context of contemporary political and economic realities.

Feminism’s great success is that it has allowed women to adopt the methods used by men to get and hold on to power. It has made women economically and poltitically powerful as they have never been since the dawn of the agricultural age. This is a great and laudable achievment. It rightly ought to be celebrated. And its gains ought not be easily or frivolously given up. Hillary Clinton’s candidacy is proof of how far modern feminism has brought our society. It gives us cause for celebration.

But the gains have come at a cost. And everyone has paid. In some sense the cost has been paid most by the ones who have gained most from the change. Women who have gained economic power have too frequently had to trade away important relationships. Or they have had to adopt corrosive methods. Or they have had to live dual lives as homemakers and as professionals. The whole experience leaves many feeling empty, drained, exhausted, incomplete.

Men have been slow to make the paths easier for the women they care about. As John Fowles put it “the great failure of feminism has been its failure to free men” from their assumed gender roles. That is not a criticism that any feminist who finds some sense of dissatisfaction with the status quo ought to dismiss lightly. Or any man who loves a woman with any modicum of independent spirit. Yet it is a criticism rarely taken up. Feminists, even when they see all the problems being caused by men seem to imagine that all the solutions lie in women becoming more like men rather than the opposite being true.

The consequence of this has been that many women who gain economic power lose things that women hold more dear; a rich relationship with a spouse, a stable home environment, a secure space in which to raise children. It is an unreasonable cost. In many cases an unbearable cost. And it is little wonder that many women have rejected the whole game. They are not necessarily stupid or lazy or slavish or backwards.

It might mean, instead, that they cling to a set of values that embrace things that many people find more meaningful than power and wealth. They forgo some measure of these things for a kind of personal satisfaction that comes from close relationships. The feminist ideal, if it is concerned with a broad well-being of women must honor this choice and work for societal institutions and structures that ensure those who make such choices do not get left behind economically or politically. Doing this well will encourage men to adapt better to a world of more equally shared experience.

The more hidden consequence of this game is that the most powerful and influencial women, as they moved onto what once was seen as men’s turf, needed to adopt mens’ competitive methods to be successful. They needed to frame their actions in the same dog-eat-dog terms. To a profound and sometimes disturbing extent they had to become men not just in the best senses, but also in the worst of them. The side effect of this practice has been that influencial women have actually been much less effective than their predecessors in promoting ideas of fairness and cooperation in the political marketplace.

The cost has been borne by the poorest 99% of Americans. Unemployment, ineffective systems of health care, crumbling infrastructure, failures in education, ossification of the social class structure, environmental degredation, erosion of the middle class, these are but few of the devastating effects of this shift in focus away from cooperative ideas of fairness and justice that corresponded temporally with the coming of age of the modern womens’ movement.

Even the current banking crisis can be framed in relationship to this idea. If one views banking as being primarily a service for creating and preserving capital on the broadest scale, then the stodgy regulated bank of pre-deregulation days (i.e. pre-1996) could be seen as a powerful social institution in service of a primarily cooperative ideal. It would never create a great deal of financial wealth for the bank itself; but its social purpose was to enable others to build and accumulate wealth. And this it did well, efficiently, dependably. It’s a very conservative point of view. And it is one that puts cooperative and broad societal needs ahead of the needs of shareholders in banks.

As we have already suggested, this is but one of dozens huge policy areas in which America’s most powerful and influencial women, by moving onto the same turf as America’s most powerful men failed to check a potentially harmful policy change.

All of these changes were part of the Reagan Revolution. It is, of course, completely inaccurate and unfair to lay the blame for all of the failures of the Reagan Revolution at the feet of feminists. In fact, women have become an ever increasing portion of the political resistance to that revolution. The Reagan Revolution was simply a kind of reaction to several decades of moderate liberalism. Americans had forgotten the costs of unchecked greed and institutional corruption in government. And the false promises of the that revolution had a kind of seasonal appeal to a vocal, if slight majority. But the return to sanity in public policy will be achieved most expeditiously if women can succeed in changing the cultural values.

If we are to achieve the noblest of ends to which the feminist cause aspires, namely, to elevate the dignity and fulfilment of all people to the highest level possible, it will become important to refocus on the ideas of shared causes, common good, fairness, and justice. And women, as always, are in the best position to start that societal change by demaning fair treatment of each other from their children. ( We say women neither because it is necessarily or uniformly women who wil do this - some men are in a better position - but because we have identified the ennobling cooperative ideas with women. If the message is to stick it needs to come from men just as clearly and broadly as it comes from women.)

Even as the Bush administration proves beyond a doubt the blatant bankrupcy of the pure laissez faire approach to economic development; even as it proves the corrupting power of concentrated media in service of big government and of an avaricious military industrial complex; even as it is locked into a tailspin of lawlessneess and degeneracy; even as it attempts to commit America ot an endless and counteproductive war; even as it proves the wanton destructiveness of its policies on all fronts - political, social, and economic, the traditional approach of feminism fails to attack the doctrine common to all of these failures.

It’s a doctrine eschews all cooperative principles that spring from empathetic impulses and embraces instead world bounded entirely by force and coercion. If feminism is to serve best whom women love most, it must learn to reach us where our noblest impulses originate. It must learn to cultivate and nurture these impulses; to educate them in ethics and civic-mindendnesss. And it must school us again in the study of the arts, for a society that cannot sing or write or paint or dance is a society impoverished beyond imagination. The only mode of expression left is violence.

It must learn to train men and women alike to be able to think in corporate, cooperative terms. It must teach men and women alike to take ethics seriously and to judge all transactions with a view to fairness. It must help us realize the power of associative joy.

The only hope for America as a democratic society, the only hope for the West as a bastion of freedom, the only hope for the ideals of equality and personal dignity enduring as principles of government is for the empathetic ideas, the cooperative ideas, the inclusive ideas that draw us together with the noblest of intentions to displace the meaner spirited ones of the Reagan Revolution - the ones realized in the housing bust, the perpetual war in the mideast, the lawlessness of the executive, the endless trampling of Constitutional rights.

These are the ideals that women preferentially bring to the political arena. Not all women do so. Nor are the ideals absent from men. But women as a group tend to be just a little bit better here than men are as a group. If we focus like a laser on building up the importance of cooperative ideas, of creating members of society who understand not just how to gain advantages but also how to preserve the benefits of a deep and broad societal interconnectedness, we can rebuild a society in which the satisfactions for which feminism rightly aims are expressed more naturally and broadly within society.

If we promote values that women preferentially possess, we shall arrive at a political point where women naturally hold a large portion of the most important positions in government and commerce. Neither men nor women will think twice about gender or race; but only in terms of the right mix of personal characteristics and competencies for these positions. The ultimate goal of identity politics will be satisfied; and the solution will be one that is neither forced or unnatural. The solution will be robust, sustainable, pleasing. It will produce a world that we all can find more satisfying. It will make Hillary Clinton’s success both more durable and more ennobling.

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The Secret Plan* to Portray Obama as a Pederast

I was sweeping the floors down at the neocon headquarters the other day when I overheard a few prominent neocons discuss a few dirty tricks that would make Nixon’s “dirty tricks” crew green with envy.

K: What do you think, is “Obama the Marxist” idea getting traction?
F: People are idiots. We tell them a hundred times that Obama is a Marxist and he will be a Marxist.
K: So where are we in that process?
G: Not far along. We need to swing about fifteen percent of the electorate and any movement so far is much less than the margin of error.
K: There’s lots of time before the election. Think we can reach the middle on this one?
G: We can certainly energize the base. We can swing a few of the aging “better dead than red” “yellow dog Democrats” in the South. We can give a lot of traditional Republicans second thoughts about abandoning their beloved GOP. They might go into the booth intending to vote for Obama but emerge having voted for McCain.
K: Whether they realize it or not. (All Laugh.)
G: We expect to count the vote this time around, too.
K: Okay, so the Marxist thing doesn’t completely solve the problem, it just stops the bleeding. What else do we have?
F: There is race. As I said before “I say Obama is a racist. And unless he can prove otherwise, he is one.”
K: Sound’s like children’s game of cooties.
F: That’s politics today, isn’t it, Bill?
K: But of course, you are right, Bill.
G: “I know it’s true, like all fundies:
God wrote it clearly on my undies.”
F: Don’t knock divine revelation; it takes whole peoples where reason dare not go.
K: Race is tricky ground, because if one appeals to race explicitly, the process backfires. But there are dozens of indirect approaches. The swiftboating approach is a good one. Produce fake associates who portray him as racist. Guilt by association is good, too. Portraying his preacher as anti-American was a great start.
F: Why not provoke a few of the more volatile black leaders. High visibility guys like Sharpton or Jackson tend to grate on the independent voter. There are even non-racist Democrats who find the demagoguery of these guys to be strongly distasteful. If guys like this could be broadcast saying outragiously racist things in a speech supporting Obama, we could turn half the white voters in America away from Obama.
G: It’s a thought. Obama would be in the difficult position of having to choose between distancing himself from men who are closest to his core supporters and allowing guilt by association to poison his candidacy. In one case he alienates his base. In the other case he is painted as a racist.
K: We have some good speechwriters who work for Democrats. Let’s see what we can do. If we can get the right connections, we’ll set up a media event.
F: What about the Islamist tag? I mean, he has an Islamic name.
G: Hussein, mother of all bad guys in the Mideast. And Osama, father of all bad guys in the Mideast. Son of a divorced white woman and a black foreigner. How does such an evil person even get to be a candidate? (Chuckles)
K: Pillory Hillary. Rush did most of the groundwork. But you wrote the book on it, Jonah.
G: It was a close call.
K: The Islamist tag seems to work pretty well with the poor white trash. It might make a difference in the heart of the Appalachians. But the real question is whether the independent voter can be persuaded that Barak Hussein Obama is actually an islamofascist. If he chooses Hillary, it will be easier. Even if he himself is not one, he associates with them. End of story.
G: But if he doesn’t choose Hillary?
K: It’s not clear to me that there is a lot to gain from this fight other than to energize the base.
G: But the Sharpton thing can be exploited here. Sharpton is viewed widely as also being antisemitic. So if one could provoke Sharpton to really alienate every Jewish person in America, one might swing a big chunk of the liberal Jewish vote.
K: We’ll work that into the racism project. It will be a good two-fer, racism and anti-semitism. What else?
G: That he is a crook, and a pederast.
K: Crook? What does that get you?
G: I see your point. Nobody gives a shit that Dubya broke the law. Over and over. Law means nothing. But sex: everyone understands sex.
F: You think you can get that to stick?
K: The idea is to sow seeds of doubt, then nail the issue at the last minute. On the issue of Marxism, we just keep repeating the same old stuff. We have dozens of footsoldiers; guys at think tanks, guys who mysteriously resigned from Congress, and so on. On the more scary issues we use more subtle tactics. Like starting the rumor that the guy denies being a pederast.
F: Ha, Ha, why would anyone deny being a pederast if they weren’t one? There simply would be no question.
G: But that’s just the start, right? The rumors of denials will just set up the mental frame for the big putsch.
K: We have radio talk-show hosts and guests who are perfect for the job. They will float the rumors for weeks; and the rumors will be persistently lambasted in the “liberal media.” This will keep the idea in circulation. Meanwhile, find someone who has a bone to pick with Obama personally, someone who has a twelve year old son. Pay them a few hundred thousand to claim that Obama solicited sexual favors from their son. Hold the press conference on Halloween to announce the charges. By the time the law-suits are settled and people understand what really happened, McCain will be out of office.
G: It’s a slam-dunk. I have to give you and your father credit, Bill. Over the last fifty years you have reduced public discourse to pure pablum and reduced the reasoning powers of the public to the sub-moronic level; their capacity for critical thinking is inferior to that of the nematode. Fifty years ago the kind of approach you advocate would have been unthinkable. Today it’s actually the most effective approach.
K: You give me too much credit, Johah. The American impulse to be motivated in political choices by material gains rather than by moral reasoning, and to be people of action rather than people of thought has always made them perfect candidates for this kind of treatment. It’s just an accident of history that we’re the first people in a long time to really capitalize on the gap. So long as Americans choose warriors and giants of commerce as heroes rather than philosophers, true moral leaders, and insightful men of science, our jobs will be easy.
G: I’ll tell you, this is the team to be on. There’s some serious thinking and long term planning going on. Thinking up dirty tricks is diabolically fun. It pays very well. And we never lose.
K: We never lose.

*The conversation is purely fictional. Any resemblance it might bear to persons, institutions, events, conversations orl dirty tricks - real, planned, or imagned by others - is purely coincidental.

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I was in the middle of my first order of salsa from Amazon.com when I got the message “Http/1/1 Service Unavailable.” That was at roughly 11:45. As I write this at 3:14, the service is still down. By some measure, Amazon.com is the world’s largest retailer. Not in sales volume, but in terms of reach. No retailer offers more SKUs. Now, the fact that Amazon.com is down for three hours is not the end of the world. In fact, I may be the only person to notice it. If anyone else did, they would probably do what I am doing, feel a little put out and try again later. But what the service outage does suggest is that the internet, for all it does achieve, is built on technologies not immune to Murphy’s law. This particular failure is not a failure of the internet, but it is a failure of one of the world’s most prominent internet-only businesses.

It reminded me that big things fail. It reminded me of a perpetual worry I entertain, which is that we are not smart enough to manage the technological society we have created. It is not an opinion I have always had; but it is one that has gradually crept up on me. More and more, it seems to me, the world is becoming cheaper, more tawdry, and more prone to great breakdowns.

Before Chernobyl I had the sense that society in all its technological compexity might be sustainable. Sure, almost every important facet of production and distribution - if it was to be understood with any depth - required graduate study in some specialized field. But the educational system was pretty good at promoting competent people, and the number of highly skilled positions need not necessarily extend beyond the pool of qualified people.

Chernobyl marked the start of a change in my attitude that was reinforced by a move from Texas to New Jersey. When I considered the great accident at Chernobyl I understood that anyone who took an undergraduate heat transfer course and who knew what film boiling was would be smart enough to avoid the act that caused Chernobyl to blow up. In the US that would translate to tens of thousands of engineering students per year. When I studied heat transfer as a graduate student, I learned that most of the analytical solutions to difficult heat transfer problems were done by Russian workers. So to the extent that the development of analytical techniques to solve problems develops more robust understanding of the problems, the Russians were arguably in a better technical position. They arguably had a more qualified pool of people to choose from. And Chernobyl was one of Russia’s most expensive pieces of technological equipment. So they would put good people there. So how would one explain the accident? The accident was not caused so much by lack of personal talent as it was caused by lack of institutional wisdom.

One might argue that the meltdown at Chernobyl was caused by two big factors. One was that the Russians were not as obsessed with safety as are people in the West. Solzhenitzyn noted this obsession and thought it made westerners do silly things. We will, one day, argue that the West’s obsession with controlling everything to the point of denying death has hidden costs and that those costs we may one day not be able to afford. The argument is especially useful in considering health care costs. But this tendency to believe that everyone can cheat death does have its payoffs; one is that all nuclear reactors in the West have robust containment buildings that assume the kind of scenario that occurred at Chernobyl.

Another factor might be hubris. It may be something about the way people self-select for occupations. In the West, the engineer tends to be a cautious type of person. In the Soviet Union, technical people were better rewarded and tended to reach star status more regularly. So, perhaps, technical fields attracted a different kind of person. And the institutional pressures were more focussed on producing high-visibility success than they were on avoiding costly failures.

In any case, Chernobyl demonstrated Murphy’s Law, “If anything can go wrong it will.” And ever since that time I have had the creepy feeling that we are not smart enough to manage the technical world we have created. By smart enough I may not necessarily mean as individuals, I mean as a society. Individually, the Russian engineers were smarter than American ones. But somehow the incentives got rigged in a way that made smart people do stupid things. As Deming, the creator of modern day quality control put it “A broken system will defeat a really intelligent person every time.”

The examples of failures are many. And as a technical person, I find some of them astonishing.

At one point in time our household had DSL service through one of the free-world’s largest telecom companies. Each evening at roughly 6:00 the service would simply crash. You could not ping the name server. Multiple visits by tech support people took place. Everyone denied that what was happening could happen. Then they would see it happen. There were phone calls to vice presidents and high-powered tech support people. After some period of time it became clear that the problem had to do with the details of the way the database of IP adresses was updated at the company. Perhaps a hundred man-hours were expended in trying to resolve the problem. In the end everyone gave up. We switched to cable-modem service. It works despite the fact that even though contractors are paid to bury the wires twelve inches in the ground they can frequently be observed lying just beneath the mulch in the garden beds.

And then there is electrical service. Consider that moment a few years ago when the entire northeast went without power for a few days because of a computer switching glitch in a station outside Cleveland, OH. I was spared that outage; but for the previous six summers a bad transformer in my neighborhood took down power service during the dog days of summer for four to eight hours at a time. I would tell my wife “this never happened when I lived in Zambia. If I am going to live in a third world country, I want the cost of living to be lower than it is in New Jersey.”

What quality was it that made electrical service in a third-world nation more reliable than it is in New Jersey? Part of the answer might be that it actually wasn’t; my experiences in the two places may not be representative. But part of the answer is due to a shift in attitude. In the middle of the twentieth century the public assumption about utilities was that they be completely, 100% reliable. It was an attitude that the west projected even into third world nations. Reliable service was just part of doing business in the regulated utility era. Unreliable systems made rate increases impossible; and at the same time, guaranteed rates meant that some amount of redundancy could be built into the system. It certainly did increase the cost of generating and distributing electricity; but it did prove highly reliable.

In the post-Reagan era, by contrast, the reliability issue is not seen as a fixed constraint but as a simple business issue. If a utility outage causes a billion dollars in damages and takes the lives of two hundred people, but the companies involved can escape responsibility for the losses, then there is simply no financial reason to invest in upgrades to power distribution systems that improve or maintain any given level of reliability. Things break down at whatever frequency maximizes profit. Take the argument very far, and before long electrical service becomes something with rolling outages built into the design. One just starts hoping that one will have power for the few hours of the day one needs it most. But the issue of economics ensures that the power will always fail just after noon on all of the hottest days of summer and not be restored until midnight. It produces a nightmarish kind of existence; but it’s the kind that perfectly unconstrained free markets would deliver when they are free of any kind of responsibility to deliver service in a reliable way.

Fortunately, electrical power companies assume liability for some kinds of losses due to power outages; but not all kinds. When I worked in the solar power industry in Michigan, the process equipment that we used would go out of kilter if power went down for even half a second. It took several hours to set up again. We would lose half a day of production, minimum, with each outage. And every thunderstorm in summer had its associated outage. But the power company flatly denied that a power outage existed if the power was out for less than some period of time - ten minutes or an hour.

How many other things break down? Almost everything. I was in a hospital emergency room for a few hours not long ago. At the first station there were six beds and one head nurse. And in the ninety minutes between arriving and being transferred to another station when this one closed, the nurse got three material facts wrong relating to patients in her care. That’s a rate of about one fact in thirty minutes. Or about 4000 mistakes per working year. In this case it turns out that one mistake she corrected. Another mistake was corrected for her at the insistence of a patient. A third mistake had no bearing on the case at hand. But it is just a matter of time before this nurse makes a mistake that costs a life.

Most people in the medical field, fortunately, are somewhat less prone to mistakes; yet collectively, people make mistakes all the time in the medical profession. Medical mistakes are the single leading cause of death. If misdiagnosis is included as a kind of medical mistake, then medical mistakes are responsible for at least three deaths in eight in the US. It’s not because everyone is incompetent as the nurse in question. It is because the systems are not designed with the question of outcomes in mind. Dead patients still pay their medical bills.

With Amazon.com, the whole of the business depends on a reliable internet presence; so one can be assured that the company will do what it can to prevent the kinds of problems that cause the site to go down for three hours at a time. But incentives in other areas of activity are not so clear. The goal of good government policy is to rig the incentives so that businesses actually act in the best interests of their customers; for profit does not always motivate this kind of behavior. It certainly does not in health care. It does not necessarily do so in the case of utilities. It frequently does not in the case of monopolies and businesses with little competition. And as one learns in the second week of introductory microeconomics, in the case of oil and food, profit is maximized when there is not enough to go around. Sometimes things get broken by accident. Sometimes they are broken purposefully for business reasons.

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When is farming about connecting with nature; and when is farming about overcoming nature? It’s a question Don takes up in the case for and against industrial agriculture. Specialization and returns to scale make farming economically efficient; but they tend to take the joy out of the task of farming. Is there a kind of “middle ground” in which economic efficiency and the satisfactions of a connection to nature can happily coexist? Don’s commenters suggest there might be.

The power of Don’s piece is that he has hit upon a metaphor of the modern era. The question he asks is one that has been central to western culture since the Renaissance. We develop the question here, in a slightly different way.

In engineering, efficiency is defined clearly against some ideal. For instance, in thermodynamics first law effficiency describes the ratio between the energy released as heat and work extracted from that heat source. In the comments that accompany Don’s essay, there appear a number of ideas about efficiency. Each idea is important; and it is useful to understand how rational choice causes one to substitute one sort of efficiency for another.

1) efficiency of labor - how much food can be produced with an hour of labor. This is an essential idea. If a people is to produce arts and sciences, it only does so on a world-class way when a large portion of the adult workers are engaged in tasks not related to farming and raising children. Civilizations since the Sumerian have flourished in the brief intervals where new agricultural techniques or new lands have produced food in bountiful amounts and reduced labor to a minimum.

2) efficiency of land - how much food can be produced on an acre of land. In densely populated areas this becomes the limiting factor to sustaining a population. North America’s great blessing is that we have a few more decades, perhaps a century, before this issue is so constraining as it is now in China, Haiti, Bangladesh, or Rwanda. Recall that many historians believe that the Renaissance really got in full swing in Europe after the Black Death had wiped out a third of the population. Having lots of fertile land per capita has been the constant factor in the rise of the west for most of the last three millennia.

3) efficiency of energy - how much food can be produced with a given amount of exogenous energy input. Michael Pollan estimates that fully 15% of the food energy calories that Americans consume can be traced directly to ammonia used to fertilize the soil in which corn grows; and this ammonia is derived from natural gas. We are eating petroleum. This fact explains, too, why ethanol from corn is not such a great idea as a primary energy source.

In a purely economical sense, we would strive to create farms that have high efficiencies in all three areas. Artificially cheap oil has pushed us to substitute energy for labor. Similarly, artificially cheap land has driven us to substitute land for labor. We have enjoyed a huge number of material and cultural benefits from this: only two percent of Americans work the soil for profit. The rest of us enjoy other pursuits. But we have also created industrialized agriculture which has its own set of problems.

One problem is the lack of sustainability. When the oil and gas run out, the system crashes. Or when monoculture creates a primary food source that can be wiped out by a single organism - as potatoes in pre-famine Ireland or maize in current US agriculture, the system crashes. There is, therefore, a great need to move toward cultivation techniques that are much more sustainable.

A large enough collection of incremental improvements will position us well to make the leap when the energy crunch materializes. Some will increase the number of choices of seedstock and the number of kinds of primary foods. Some will allow us to run farm equipment and food distribution machinery on vegetable oils. Diesel engines were originally designed to run on vegetable oils, so this is not a great technological leap. But wind, nuclear, and solar energy will all play essential roles as well.

On the farm, soil fertility will be sustained less by addition of chemicals derived from natural gas and more from biogenic processes. We will learn to cultivate plants and use farm animals in ways that naturally keep soil fertile. We will learn to cultivate flora and fauna that keep nature balanced. We will cultivate beneficial insects such as honeybees, parasitic wasps, lady bugs, and beneficial nematodes. We will use the balancing techniques built into the natural world to bring balance to agriculture.

This brings us to the striking idea in Don’s piece. He establishes farming as something more than a simple economic activity. He establishes it as a means of connecting with nature. I have filled a suburban lot with roses, shrubs and flowering plants and I enjoy hearing birds sing in the morning, so I understand the satisfaction that comes from this connection. It seems to me that this is a factor missing from modern life, industrial farm not excepted.

But instead of interacting with nature, we do what is expected of us in a society that exists purely as an economic machine. Don, having once failed at creating a fully sustainable farm in which land is tilled using mules, moves on to other agricultural activities. At one point he contemplates working on a chicken farm. One of his tasks on the chicken farm would be to cull the flock. It involves moving through the chicken super-dome whacking underdeveloped chickens with a PCV pipe, collecting the carcasses, and recycling them.

Even while we may understand that this culling plays a vital role in keeping chickens big enough to provide us with large Sunday meals, the genius of his piece is that Don succeeds in making the act of popping underdeveloped chickens on the head with PVC pipe the metaphor of the current era. He gets us to understand that when we are no longer affected by this image, we cease to be fully functional as empathetic human beings. And society - no matter how economically successful - ceases to create meaningful relationships. We have been dehumanized.

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Faulty Reasoning in Gardening and Banking

“I seem to fail with most of my dahlias.” I complained to a gardening friend.
“Not me,” replied Jason smugly.
“You probably read the instructions before planting them.”
“Yup.”
“You probably follow the instructions, too”
“Yup.”
“You can probably tell me to the last ounce how much horse manure to put on each different dahlia.”
“Yup.”
“Suppose I am planting border dahlias and I live in a place with rich, moist soil, how much horse manure do I use?”
“None.”
“Poor soil?”
“None.”
“Okay, so when do I use horse manure to fertilize dahlias?”
“I would say about a year before you plant them.”

I was asking the wrong question. Horse manure and dahlias have little to do with each other. I was in the wrong universe of discourse. And no matter how long I pondered the problem or how deeply I considered it, I was just wasting time. As I reflect on the conversation, I realize I was reasoning like this

1) Plants grow better with horse manure
2) Dahlias are plants
3) Therefore, dahlias grow better with horse manure.

So where did I go wrong? Certainly Dahlias are plants, so the problem must lie in the first proposition. What is actually true is that some plants grow better with horse manure. Some actually don’t. Stingy plants don’t - the kind that thrive on the punishing open plains and high desert. And a lot of young plants are burned by the excess nitrogen in horse manure.

There was something about this logic that reminded me of a completely different discussion. It was a discussion in which someone was arguing something like this

1) The Federal Reserve manages money supply.
2) The current banking crisis is due to burgeoning money supply.
3) Therefore the Federal Reserve is to blame for the current banking crisis.

Each premise is true; but, it seems to me that the conclusion is false. There is no question in my own mind that the second premise is correct. The problem may or may not be the fact of of glut of credit - it might be more related to the means employed to create that great tidal wave of easy money - but it is integrally linked to it. If the second premise is true we must look for the problem in the first.

Back in the days when banks could only lend money on the basis of deposits and when all credit was extended by chartered banks with very strict reserve requirements, essentially all money originated with banks, and shortfalls were borrowed from the Federal Reserve. At that time in history, the Federal Reserve played a powerful role in regulating money supply. And premise 1) was essentially true.

But when banking deregulation occurred, other sorts of institutions were empowered to lend money. And the requirements that restricted the transactions were materially relaxed. Companies like Bear Stearns that used mortgaged backed securities as collateral to lend more money were, in effect, printing money. And the amount they lent had no connection whatsoever with the Federal Reserve or with the interest rates charged by the Fed. Or, more correctly the connection it had was obscure, contorted, indirect, difficult to understand. And the result was that even if the Fed had increased interest rates, it is not clear that the move would have stemmed the flow of new money. One might argue that it would have simply driven more people to borrow from the institutions that were, in effect printing money rather than from banks. And that might have caused things to become unstable sooner.

It’s not clear that very many people understand intuitively how the deregulated system differed from the regulated system. But it clearly caused a burgeoning of one kind of money supply. And that drove up securities on Wall Street during the dotcom bubble. Then it drove up real estate. And now it drives up the price of oil, other commodities, and agricultural products. And all the while the supply of the kind of money that the Fed manages grew in a healthy relationship with the part of the economy it represented.

So it’s not that the Fed did the wrong thing. It’s that the instruments that caused the problem have nothing to do with the Federal Reserve system. Rather, they have to do with the investment world. Banking deregulation caused the problem. Any solution that does not strip financial institutions of the of the power to, in effect, print money, will assure that the same problem recurs, perhaps via some mechanism that appears at first to be different. The players will be different, the instruments will be different, but many of the effects will be the same.

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Global warming, free trade, biofuels, water resource management, energy availability, and over-population. What do these factors have in common? They all affect the cost of grain around the world. Grain has been going up in price, more than doubling in price in one year.

The cause is a kind of perfect storm; a combination of many factors hitting the market at once. Unusually warm temperatures have caused significant drops in grain production in northern China, perhaps in other regions. Free trade has driven local farmers out of the market in many poor nations. It has also made two of the world’s most populous nations richer; and as a result the peoples of those nations wish to eat better. This generally involves eating foods that take more resources to produce. Biofuels efforts have drawn a huge amount of grain off the global market. Water resources - aquifers such as the Ogallala in the plains states - are being depleted. And oil prices are escalating. This raises the cost of mechanized production and it raises the cost of fertilizer made from petroleum ( i.e. most of the nitrogenous fertilizer used in agriculture. )

The Grain Shortage

The problem is so severe, so widespread that WaPo has run a whole series of articles on the issue.

The food price shock now roiling world markets is destabilizing governments, igniting street riots and threatening to send a new wave of hunger rippling through the world’s poorest nations. It is outpacing even the Soviet grain emergency of 1972-75, when world food prices rose 78 percent. By comparison, from the beginning of 2005 to early 2008, prices leapt 80 percent, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization. Much of the increase is being absorbed by middle men — distributors, processors, even governments — but consumers worldwide are still feeling the pinch.

The Economist dedicated a large portion of a recent issue to the crisis. Food crises are an almost perpetual souce of news. At any given point in time one can find a few parts of the world where food is scarce. The reasons usually have something to do with bad weather, war, or bad government policy. They almost always have something to do with poverty and overpopulation as well.

But this time it is different. It is a fundamental problem of there not being enough grain. We need to take it seriously. Changing distribution patterns will not solve the problem. In a kind of strict sense the free-marketeer is right. The free market left to its own devices will solve the problem. And if we simply do not care how many billions of people starve to death, and how much strife, death, and destruction this causes, then we may grant them this point. If, however, we care just a little, then we need to think about what can be done to alleviate the immediate problem and what can be done to move toward a durable solution.

To most Americans this is pretty much an abstraction because the cost of grain is such a small portion of our annual income that what grain costs, per se, doesn’t seem to have much impact on our standard of living. But the same is not true in almost any non-European nation.

Late last year, just as corn prices began to escalate there were protests in Mexico. The price of tortillas, a staple food in Mexico City had recently doubled. Since the tortilla is the cheapest source of calories in the Mexican diet, such a change hit hard. The government intervened to help stabilize prices, but many reasonable people worried that the action would, in fact, precipitate a more severe shortage.

Since then, much has happened. In Haiti, recently, the government collapsed under political pressure for its bad handling of food and agricultural policy. That hunger should hit Haiti early when food prices would rise is never a surprise because the nation is so densely populated that it perpetually lives at the very edge of disaster. (Jared Diamond in Collapse) But this fact does not make the human misery of starvation any less real.

The problems have hit many large nations. India and Egypt have banned the exportation of rice. South Korea, China, and Japan are bidding up food prices at an unprecedented pace. Violence has hit many nations (WaPo)

At least 14 countries have been racked by food-related violence. In Malaysia, Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi is struggling for political survival after a March rebuke from voters furious over food prices. In Bangladesh, more than 20,000 factory workers protesting food prices rampaged through the streets two weeks ago, injuring at least 50 people.

and

The food price shock now roiling world markets is destabilizing governments, igniting street riots and threatening to send a new wave of hunger rippling through the world’s poorest nations. It is outpacing even the Soviet grain emergency of 1972-75, when world food prices rose 78 percent. By comparison, from the beginning of 2005 to early 2008, prices leapt 80 percent, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization. Much of the increase is being absorbed by middle men — distributors, processors, even governments — but consumers worldwide are still feeling the pinch.

This food crisis has a number of related causess. What is special about this crisis is that

• it is global.
• it is not a problem reasonably related to distribution.
• its causes are not special but general. Not temporary but enduring.
• the forces that caused the shortage are all going to get more severe, in the absence of serious intervention.

Global Warming
Global warming is arguably the smallest component of this particular instance of global food shortage. There have been some large areas in northern China where unseasonably warm weather has led to crop failures, but it would be hard to argue that a pattern of unusual climatological conditions caused crop failures on a kind of global scale. That said, gobal warming is likely to play an increasing role in agricultural problems. In a number of highly populated nations such as Vietnam, a very large portion of the arable land is within a foot or two of sea level. And if sea level rises by a foot in the next century - as it is likely to do - these fertile areas will be inundated. Huge swathes of fertile land that exist where major rivers such as the Mekong in Vietnam, the Mississippi in the USA, and the Yellow River in China will be inundated and rendered useless for the crops now grown there. Global warming did not cause this famine; but it might play a very big role in the future.

Biofuels
Recent changes in energy legislation have led to a significant amount of corn being used to create ethanol. Separate analyses by Patzek and Pimental suggest that it actually takes more petroleum to create a gallon equivalent of ethanol ( in terms of energy ) than is available in that ethanol. Other workers have suggested that there might be a slight gain; but whereas a viable primary source of energy at some point in the future mightl have a gain of ten to one or three to one, there is virtually no hope that ethanol from corn, under any scenario will reach two to one. Something like half is used up just separating the water from the ethanol. Something like a third is used up as nitrogenous fertilizer for to grow the corn. And we can quibble about the remaining sixth. But by any measure, it’s a bad idea to view ethanol production from corn as a primary source of fuel. It is not.

Dispite this argument, the US government has granted huge subsidies to businesses who would ferment corn starch and distill the resulting fluid into ethanol. According to the GAO more than a fifth of corn production is now used to make ethanol. It’s a number that has been growing sharply over the last three to five years. And it almost certainly accounts for a large part of the price increases in corn that have rocked the world economy.

Peak Oil
There is hardly a major developed field on record today that is not well past peak production. Russia was thought to be awash in oil just a few years ago but there seems to be evidence that production there is falling. It is off sharply in the North Sea. And the productive Caribbean wells of Pemex are down in production. Wells in the continental US peaked in the early seventies. And there is some question about whether the Saudi fields have as much oil as claimed; their claimed reserves fail to be reduced by the production of oil.

New fields are being found and developed, but it has been some time since the discovery of new oil reserves matched the rate at which oil is depleted from existing ones. This is not a sustainable game. And we are on the downward sloping edge of the curve. Presidents at oil majors have argued “it’s not that there isn’t enough oil; it’ s that there isn’t enough oil where we can safely develop fields.” So there is a question whether this would change if the geopolitics of central Asia and Africa were materially different. But it is more of an academic question than it is a practical one. Oil that one cannot extract doesn’t count; not until you can extract it.

This peak in production comes at a precise moment in history when the level of wealth in China and India is beginning to allow a significant portion of people to buy cars. So a dwindling supply occurs precisely when there is burgeoning demand.

Because the chief variable costs associated with growing grain are energy costs, most especially the cost off nitrogenous fertilizer, and because nitrogenous fertilizer is derived from natural gas, the price of oil and gas will play a powerful role in the price of grain by strongly affecting the price of production. Furthermore, if one can cheaply convert food to motor fuel, then there is an implicit tension between eating and operating mechanical equipment - driving, flying, mowing the lawn. The lower limit on the price of grain is determined by its value as a fuel.

A shortage of oil drives up the cost of oil and gas alike. It therefore drives up the production cost of grain, the tranportation cost of grain, and the value of grain as a biofuel. In the absence of biofuel conversion, rising oil prices simply drive up the cost of grain production. But with efficient biofuel conversion, the price of oil also sets a lower limit on the value of grain as a feedstock for ethanol.

With subsidized and inefficient biofuel conversion, the picture is even bleaker. You burn more oil in making ethanol than you gain in energy from the ethanol. The process means that you simultaneously have less energy and less food. They are both more expensive. You spend more money for food and fuel.

If one were a cynic and if one believed that the Bush or Cheney family or any of their political backers had any interests in oil or oil service companies and that these interests were driven up in value by a the spiralling price of oil, then one might imagine that the reason the US is rushing headlong into the grain-to-ethanol business is to create a shortage of oil and to drive up prices.

(It seems bizarre to me to argue this because had I not run the I’d be an avid supporter of biofuels. I’d like to believe that biofuels might one day be a significant sustainable source of energy. And I know that you have to start with a solution that is less than optimal. So I would normally expect myself to be supporting ethanol production from biomass. But the current policy situation is difficult to explain in any rational manner, )

Water Shortages
A material amount of the world’s grain is grown with some irrigation. And a significant portion of that depends on water in non-renewable aquifers or in aquifers that are being drawn down much faster than they are being replenished. Today, while there is water we are suffering from grain shortages. In a matter of a few short years or decades, major aquifers in the US, India, and China will be empty. And the amount of grain we now produce will no longer be possible. The amount of energy and expense required to move water from where it exists to where it is needed will be overwhelming. This bodes ill for future grain supplies. If we have hopes of doing this, we need some really cheap and ever-enduring source of energy. But we don’t

A recent article in The Futurist suggested that only 15 percent of the grain grown in the US depends on irrigation water from the rapidly depleting Ogallala aquifer. But it suggests that India and China may be in a less favorable position.

It sounds quite rosy for the US. The US will have a excess capacity in food production so long as it has an ample and secure energy supply. Efficient manufacturing nations such as China will need to import a large amount of food from the US. And they will be able to trade many goods for food. It sounds pretty promising, but a lot depends on whether the US can maintain its manufacturing base, support its currency, create a reliable and sustainable primary energy supply. If so, then the amount of grain the US would likely send abroad would likely not cause hunger pangs stateside. But if China succeeds in cornering the world’s supply of raw materials and if most manufacturing is done in the Orient, then the US will risk becoming a kind of peaon state.

Whatever happens at a national level, at an international level, the poor will be starving. That’s happening today. But if one cut world grain production by fifteen percent and if eating habits of the more economically successful nations did not materially change, it would mean many tens of millions might not be able to afford to eat. It will no longer be a question of distribution. it will be a question of production. There will be no easy solutions.

Free Trade
Free trade, in the long term, is supposed to guarantee that no economic good ever experiences shortages; the theory is that the price will go up, more will be produced, and viola, we’re back where we started. Except it doesn’t work for goods that actually have a finite supply; fertile land, fresh water, oil, stuff like that. Therefore it does not work for grain whose production capacity is limited by the availability of each of these limited resources.

The Economist recently ran a series of articles on the global food shortage. The editors of that newspaper pretended that nothing but market forces are required to stay a food shortage; but it is hard to buy that idea. It assumes that the reason there have been few food shortages in Western Europe and the US over the last several centuries is because of the marketplace alone. But it is not. It is because an efficient marketplaced operated in a space in which there was ample capacity to produce food. At some point in time it is almost inevitable that global population will be limited by food production. And at that point in history, a fair portion of the human population will have less to eat than they need. It will not be a question of more efficient markets. The physical stuff required to produce grain - fertile land, fresh water, energy and fertilizer will not be in sufficient supply to grow the amount of grain necessary to feed the whole human population.

How long it will be before we get to that point is a matter of some question. It may be a decade. It may be five decades. If there is another great, massive revolution in crop genetics it might be eight decades. If humans learn, in the intervening time period to farm the oceans it might be twenty decades. But already humans consume something like twenty percent of the energy that plants turn into sugar. And a good portion of that energy is required to mainain soil fertility. So we might just be able to double the amount of food we produce on land - assuming we can find the water and energy sources to do so.

For some short period of time the high price of grain will have a beneficial effect on small farmers who are land owners in nations like Mexico. Two years ago they were not able to produce corn at a cost competitive with the corn imported from the US. So they quit. Today that is not the case. So they can grow corn again and make a living at it. This will increase corn production a bit in the short term. Similarly, there was an interesting piece in the Economist that suggested that a recent government initiative of subsidizing fertilizer and seed corn succeeded more by accident than by virtue of being good policy. But measured in terms of whether it produced a lot of corn, it was a raving success. If Africa were to be stabilized, its food production capabilities would, no doubt, add some to the equation for a while. So long as high fertility rates persist, it will always be less than two generations of developmental stasis, or less, from catastrophic starvation.

So the free market will adjust to high grain prices by committing more land to grain production. And more labor. Economic theory says that this land will be poorer than the land now in production. It might, therefore, become exhausted earlier. In any case, once this minor adjustment is made, there is not much wiggle room. There is talk of bringing more acreage in the US under cultivation.

It may not be a bad idea. But it is true that committing land to corn production takes a toll on soil fertility. One may trade short term gains for longer term losses. To understand the issue, one would need to have a robust model of soil fertility, one that specified how much energy is required to sustain the soil flora that sustain economically important plants.

The Malthusian Crunch
Most of the food shortages since the start of the twentieth century have had distribution as a fundamental component. Current (then) agricutural practices were sufficient to produce enough food for everyone in the world. The problem was to transport the food to where it was needed. And to pay for that transportation. Under such conditions it is easy to argue that food supply is simply a matter of supply and demand. If the price of food went high enough in places where it was in short supply, the free market system would move food to that location. Problem solved.

Except, not really. Because in most places where the supply of food was short, there also existed little or no manufacturing. So the people who were starving had little to trade for food. In the case where there actually is an ample supply of a good, the free market sometimes fails to deliver that good where it is needed. That is an interesting problem. It suggests that the free market is good at allocating resources in a particular way, but sometimes the consequences of that are not desirable by certain important measures. Still, problem is fundamentally different from the problem we face right now.

The current problem is not fundamentally about distribution it is fundamentally about production. The problem we face now is that food is scarce on a global scale.

Westerners have been able to dodge the Malthusian crunch for five centuries thanks to the rapidly expanding western frontier. It was not until the late ninteenth century that the Dakotas were settled by Europeans. And it was well into the twentieth century that distribution became completely effective in drawing its bounties to urban markets effectively.
Mechanization, chemical fertilization, and irrigation all increased the productivity of these vast but otherwise marginal agricultural areas. irrigation and chemical fertilization expanded their productivite capacity in mid-century; and genetic manipulation did so later on. But the frontiers physical and intellectual that have brought us to this point in history have been pushed about as far as they can go.

If one looks at the fundamental biochemistry governing the way plants turn sunlight into sugars, one discovers that humans exploit a rather large portion of the available energy already. If I remember correctly, E. O. Wilson (in Consilience) estimates it at about twenty percent. This means that tinkering with genetics can only bring marginal improvements. To get the kind of bounteous excess that we enjoyed in the mid twentieth century, scientists would have to re-invent photosynthesis to be two or three or ten times as efficient without sacrificing anything else. Or we would have to learn how to cultivate crops in the parts of the ocean now barren of life. Marginal changes will mean that most of humanity is reduced to living on the margins - as has been the case for most of human history.

This food crunch rightly ought to warn us that it is not axiomatic that free markets alone have been responsible for the excesses in food production in the western world. It is at least in part due to a really big accident of history. This experience can warn us that all limited resources run out. And that rising prices do not always succeed in producing enough of the item in question.

Actions
So what should we do?

• Encourage wind and solar energy production in a durable, systemmatic way.
• Price water, oil, and coal at a level that more nearly reflects the value it creates for society, one that more nearly reflects its replacement price. Use the excess to encourage conservation and sustainables.
• Set up and fund free fertility control services around the world.
• If the political viability of such services is threatened by controversial issues, do what can be done first.
• Encourage every nation to create, fund, and sustain organizations that guarantee the welfare of its aged. There is almost a perfect corellation between this and low fertility rates.
• Create incentives to build desalinization plants for coastal California cities, Arizona cities, and Texas cities.
• Create business incentives and supports for businesses that turn America’s bountiful foodstuffs into high value-added food items.
• Provide minor incentives and/or supports to trading companies that trade high value added food and food derivatives overseas.
• Streamline the nuclear plant design and permitting process, creating a small family of related pre-approved designs as France has done.
• Build nuclear plants. The oil in Iraq has cost America between half a trillion and two trillion dollars. For that price we could have built enough nuclear power generation plants to generate the power extracted from oil we still do not have. And they would continue generating power long after the oil is used up.
• Reprocess the fuel
• Use waste heat from nuclear plants to distill ethanol from cellulosic biomass.
• Use cellulosic materials to make ethanol, do not use foodstocks
• Study soil fertility and understand how much food energy must be pumped back into the soil to sustain fertility. My guess is that it’s much more than we have assumed.
• Fund studies that demonstrate ways of nitrogenating soil effectively without the use of fertilizer derived from fuel
• Develop crops efficient at producing oils; vegetable oils need little refinement; and if waste heat from nuclar power is not to be used in alcohol distillation, this fact reduces the energy input of the fuel. It therefore substantially increases the gain by a huge margin. ( We note that if soybeans could be made efficient at producing both oil and soil nitrogen, they might be a very valuable crop… )
• Fund fusion research and development seriously.
• Fix healthcare so that it works better and uses less money. The current system is killing the US economy.
• Teach civics. People who are can think critically about the ethics of greed are less likely to be caught by its traps and to starve in them

If we do all of these things promptly, and if we do all of these things well, then there is some hope that we might stay ahead of the Malthusian limit for a few decades.

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In the day it was written the King James Bible stood as a symbol of the Reformation, a realization of Renaissance and Enlightenment principles. Today it stands as a symbol of the past, a day where witches were burned at the stake and religious practice was prescribe by the state. Are we turning today in that direction? It’s a much bigger question than we have time to answer; but we hope that this little piece succeeds in framing the question.

What is Medieval?
Renaissance artists gave the middle ages a bad reputation. Mostly, the middle ages deserved it. It was a superstiious age. An age governed by a greedy and corrupt church and peopled by men who were almost all illiterate and provincial. The medieval ideas of self-sufficiency, superstition, continuity, cyclicality, religious bias, and stasis that governed medieval thought were overthrown by the opening up of the New World and the establishment of reliable trading routes to the far east. The enlightenment was a response to new possibilities, new frontiers, new ideas, new ways of doing things.

Since the end of the Apollo program, however, the world in general and Americans in particular have been turning inward and looking backward. The impulses that ruled medieval life are gaining momentum. Not all of these are necessarily bad. Self-sufficiency is a useful goal for any society when it comes to issues of food and energy, for example. When these are in ample supply, most other things might possibly follow. When not, the others don’t matter very much. But most of the medieval principles run in opposition to a happy, prosperous, egalitarian existence rich in art and culture.

The great objections to the medieval lie in its mental attitudes. Medieval thought is bound by superstition. It denies or ignores science. It preys on ignorance. It closes peoples’ minds. It exploits and magnifies minor power differences creating a highly stratified society. It magnifies and exploits cultural differences, creating Balkanized areas. All of these things combine to make it hostile to arts and sciences.

The same hostility is one that blossomed during the Reagan revolution in America. That same revolution brought an appeal to “deregulation” and “free trade” that is in opposition to medieval principles. But it created a “trickle down economics” and a class divide of hyper-rich set in opposition to lower classes. And it began reserving for that class special priviledges that would allow it to propagate its power advantages over the middle and lower classes. If this class divide proves durable it will be the start of a kind of feudal power system that resembles those that preceded the French revolution. And this divide will pose more difficulties to the lives of Americans than the modest gains of free trade ever could. The Reagan revolution promises to return Americans to a life of servitude of the sort their acestors left Europe to escape.

Changes in culture such as the enlightenment, the French revolution, and the rise of democracy do not happen all at once. They happen by accretion. More than four hundred years elapsed between Marco Polo’s trip to China and the writings of enlightenment authors such as Rousseau, Montesquiieu, Voltaire, Hume, and Jefferson. Similarly the retrograde motion from a happy, liberal democracy to a world of feudal lords and serfs cannot happen in a generation. One would expect that the trend would take some time to develop.

Looking back we will see the elimination of the study of civics from the high school cirriculum to be one such event. We will see Reaganomics and the culture of greed to be another. We might compare the thinking of Rawls and Nozyck and decide that at the point in time when society chose the assertion of rights in the first person over an attempt to deal with property in a way that recognized a kind of joint stake humans share by virtue of being social creatures, we turned our backs on liberal ideas and doomed democracy to failure. Judge Stevens suggested we were doing just this in his dissent in the landmark decision of Nordlinger v. Hahn. And Kevin Phillips comes at the worry from another angle in American Dynasty.

It’s hard to know where this arc of descent will take u;s but when we get there we might look back and see many markers of the descent. One is a kind of nostalgia for the past, an impulse to connect with it in a way that turns its back on things easily judged to be better. One example is an impulse all humans have to be attracted to things they held most dearly in their youth. It’s a natural impulse. It’s one that accounts for such things as the durability of pair-bonding and the fact that music we listened to in our youth casts a spell on us from which we cannot easily escape. No matter what I might think of these songs today, “Colour My World” and “Stairway to Heaven” will always have an effect on me.

But sometimes our yearning for the past seems to be unrelated to actual experience. We imagine simpler times to be stripped of the stresses of modern times. But they were not. The stresses were simply different. Today they are more abstract; then they were more related to the physical environment, perhaps. It may be that we are better equipped to deal with the stresses of simpler times than the ones of today. And if that is true, then we have arguably created a way of living that is out of balance with our nature. But it’s not clear that medieval times offered the kinds of primitive satisfactions that our romantic imaginations attach to them. Social structures were rigid and material shortages prevailed. In a sense, it was the worst of all possible conditions.

Attention, Shoppers
It seems odd at first, but this argument was provoked by reflection on the following, a passage quoted from the writer’s almanac and sent to me by a friend:

It was on this day in 1611 that the first edition of the King James Bible was published in England. 

It was a chaotic time in England, and King James I thought that a new translation of the Bible might help hold the country together. There had been several English translations of the Bible already, and each English version of the Bible had different proponents. King James wanted a Bible that would become the definitive version, a Bible that all English people could read together.

King James appointed a committee of 54 linguists for the project. For the first few years, the scholars worked privately on the translation, and starting in 1607, the collaborative work was assembled. It went to press in 1610, and the first finished King James Bibles appeared in 1611.   

Many of the turns of phrase in the King James Bible came from previous translations, but it was the King James Version that set them all in stone. Several of its phrases have become enduring English expressions, such as “the land of the living,” “sour grapes,” “like a lamb to slaughter,” “the salt of the earth,” “the apple of his eye,” “to give up the ghost, and “the valley of the shadow of death.”   

And I wondered out loud what the current fascination with the KJV comes from:

I am really intrigued by the recent fascination with the story of the KJV. This is the second blip I’ve seen about it recently. One was in a major news publication. I have never seen one before, in all my life. I wonder where the interest comes from?

The KJV is a kind of iconic expression of the durability of the Reformation. There had been for centuries before an effort to commit the scriptures to the vulgate. The people who were behind this were essentially the same ones who backed Protestantism, if I am not mistaken. James, as a Catholic king ruling a land that not long before had been overrun by Cromwell and his Protestant roundheads, probably viewed the project in part as an investment in the continuity of his neck.

The KJV is quite an achievement, though. It is sometimes brilliant in the turn of phrase, but it is rarely too difficult to understand. College sophomores today may have some difficulty following substantial bits of Shakespeare read aloud; but they will rarely have so much difficulty following the KJV.

The KJV is dated, however. A significant portion of the words it uses simply have different meanings today. In contemporary usage “suffer,” \, almost never takes the sense of “allow” or “permit” as in “suffer the children.” And “day” which was then used to denote any period of time, short or long, twenty four hours or twenty four million years, today generally refers to just twenty four hours. My guess is that one could identify a thousand words, perhaps ten times that many whose usage is so materially different today that reading the KJV would give the wrong impression of the author’s original sense. (or of the sense in conveyed in the documents used by the KJV translators )

Whatever one might choose to believe about religion, one must view the KJV is a cultural icon. It was a material expression of the notion of empowering the common man, an idea that seems deeply ingrained in Germanic culture. One might even argue that it did more to standardize English usage than any single document in history. It was one book that could be found in almost any household that had readers. And it was one document from which all the faithful read for almost four centuries. It’s hard to find a document in the English language with broader and longer exposure.

The Magical Mystery Tour
Again, why should we suddenly care about the KJV translation? Since WWII there have been two or three new renderings of biblical writings into modern English. Some worked very hard to preserve the sense but sacrificed beauty; others worked very hard to preserve the artistic and mystical qualities of the writings while yielding a bit of ground on the sense. By comparison to any of these, however, the KJV fails quite compellingly to deliver sense and clarity without the reader doing more work than most readers of the KJV typically do. So why this interest in the KJV? It cannot have to do with the question of how to understand scripture better.

My own guess is that one of the attractions of religion is its mystical attraction. And part of that mystical attraction lies in the very difficulty one encounters in decoding “sacred” messages. It is a vestigal impulse borne of the infantile need to make the leap into a lingual world. We are drawn to the puzzles that occupied our minds before we mastered language. A Bible that has its own “language” that is different from our own yet somehow comprehensible satisfies this need better than a Bible that is clear and plain. A bible with a hard to decipher message moves us into a time when “the world lay at our feet.” We could get what we wanted, if only we knew how to ask for it. Or so we thought. Religious practice sometimes restores us to this happy state.

What we see happening is a re-engagement with the mystical. Since humans get much satisfaction from mystical entanglements, this, by itself, is not a big problem. Humans rightly ought to engage with the mystical in order to live meaningful lives. Science cannot provide this.

But reengagement with the mystical sometimes means denying science, and if this behavior is taken as part of a pattern of denying all other enlightenment principles, one might begin to wonder how close we may be coming to a new age of stasis and the kinds of inward-looking impulses that accompany it. Power concentrates in high places. In high places, science, for its failure to enthrall, has been overthrown. There too, ethical reasoning for its inabiltiy to deliver excess profit has been overthrown. All that is left is power and mystical impulses.

We await the rack. Or worse.

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