How do you keep customers coming back? Keep them constantly dissatisfied.

That is the topic of this article in Orion Magazine.  The author is Jeffrey Kaplan.  Here’s are a few excerpts from this well written article.   [Note:  you might be blocked from going straight into the article.  If so, go to the Orion link and then search for the article]. Kaplan can really analyze and some of his passages are gems:

[In 1929,] despite the apparent tidal wave of new consumer goods and what appeared to be a healthy appetite for their consumption among the well-to-do, industrialists were worried. They feared that the frugal habits maintained by most American families would be difficult to break. Perhaps even more threatening was the fact that the industrial capacity for turning out goods seemed to be increasing at a pace greater than people’s sense that they needed them.

It was this latter concern that led Charles Kettering, director of General Motors Research, to write a 1929 magazine article called “Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied.” He wasn’t suggesting that manufacturers produce shoddy products. Along with many of his corporate cohorts, he was defining a strategic shift for American industry—from fulfilling basic human needs to creating new ones.

By the late 1920s, America’s business and political elite had found a way to defuse the dual threat of stagnating economic growth and a radicalized working class in what one industrial consultant called “the gospel of consumption”—the notion that people could be convinced that however much they have, it isn’t enough. President Herbert Hoover’s 1929 Committee on Recent Economic Changes observed in glowing terms the results: “By advertising and other promotional devices . . . a measurable pull on production has been created which releases capital otherwise tied up.” They celebrated the conceptual breakthrough: “Economically we have a boundless field before us; that there are new wants which will make way endlessly for newer wants, as fast as they are satisfied.”

What is the damage done by chasing mere wants with our dollars?

by 2000 the average married couple with children was working almost five hundred hours a year more than in 1979. And according to reports by the Federal Reserve Bank in 2004 and 2005, over 40 percent of American families spend more than they earn. The average household carries $18,654 in debt, not including home-mortgage debt, and the ratio of household debt to income is at record levels, having roughly doubled over the last two decades. We are quite literally working ourselves into a frenzy just so we can consume all that our machines can produce.

What is Orion Magazine?

“It is Orion’s fundamental conviction that humans are morally responsible for the world in which we live, and that the individual comes to sense this responsibility as he or she develops a personal bond with nature.”

On the topic of advertising and over-consumption, see also, the posts listed in “Wanna go to church? Tired of shopping? Go to “The Church of Stop Shopping.””

I was in a bad mood after I wrote a post summarizing a recent Harpers Magazine article demonstrating that the United States government is working hard to keep its citizens from knowing whether numerous commonly used chemicals are dangerous.

After all, our government is supposed to be there to protect us yet it appears that our government is, instead, kissing up to the chemical manufacturers, allowing them to dump highly questionable substances into the products American consumers purchase and use.

And now, I’m in a worse mood. I just finished reading an extraordinary article called “You Are What You Drink Out Of,” by Nadia Pflaum. This article appeared in a local alternative St. Louis newspaper called the Riverfront Times. Pflaum’s story is available online, and thank goodness, because this is extraordinary piece of writing and it serves as an illustration of just how corrupt the system has become. I’ll give just the basic outline here. You’ll want to go read the entire article, however, if you want to be prepared to pull out Exhibit A the next time you get into an argument with one of the many remaining Bush-loving purported free-marketers.

The story centers around Frederick vom Saal, a biology professor at the University of Missouri. He is one of the leading experts on bisphenol A, a chemical that is ubiquitous in the United States-more than six billion pounds are produced every year. The trouble is that bisphenol A contains a substance that acts as a synthetic hormone that has been suspected of being dangerous for human beings. Vom Saal’s research found that the synthetic estrogen that leeches out of bisphenol A can pass it right into human cells at doses 25,000 times lower than any toxicologist ever before studied, and it wreaks havoc with developing reproductive organs.”

Vom Saal and his colleague, Susan Nagel (a professor of obstetrics, gynecology and women’s health), found that bisphenol A is so potent that exposing a developing fetus to it could permanently alter crucial phases of development. Their experiments showed that tiny doses of bisphenol A could trigger breast cancer. Their experiments also showed that tiny doses enlarged the prostates of laboratory mice.

The problem is that humans are exposed to bisphenol A everyday. We are exposed to it in the form of food packaging, almost every water bottle, eyeglass lenses and the linings of aluminum food cans. Bisphenol A is a synthetic material that is commonly used to make plastic.

But this is where the story only begins to get interesting. Vom Saal and Nagel published their findings regarding the dangers of bisphenol A and they were about to publish a second article (announcing that exposure to bisphenol A lowered sperm counts in mice) when they received a visit from a scientist from Dow Chemical who offered to pay the University a huge amount of money to conduct a new bisphenol A “study” at the University. Here’s the kicker: the Dow Chemical scientist (who told the university scientists that he represented the Chemical Manufacturers Association) asked “Can we arrive at a mutually beneficial outcome where you withhold publishing this paper until authorized to do so by the Chemical Manufacturers Association?”

University scientists knew that they were being offered a bribe. (more…)

What are we to make of this latest flap over a teen icon revealing herself as a potentially sexual being?

I was only dimly aware of Hannah Montana till the Vanity Fair scandal (if scandal is the word). Now it seems I can’t get away from her, which is, of course, the goal of marketing—to make something inescapable for the general public. There are elements of the incident that require less froth and more examination. The accusations of “whose idea was it in the first place and how was Mylie Cyrus manipulated?” are loud and in many ways naive.

First off, Hannah Montana is a Disney product. I don’t think we’re yet quite comfortable with the idea of a person—even a fictional one—being a “product” like a box of soap or a car, but this is indeed what the character is. Designed, engineered, and road tested, Hannah Montana is a money-making machine for Disney and the various participants in the show and franchise.

Pause for a moment and consider: Disney.

It is difficult to imagine a marketing machine that is better at what it does. Which means the chances of something being done with one of its properties that it (a) doesn’t know about and (b) doesn’t approve are next to zero. Especially when you add to that:

Vanity Fair.

Big magazine, famous magazine, a magazine people in show business lust to get into. In the vernacular, Lot A Bank there.

So we’re talking about two major corporate entities, huge public presence, who are involved—without a doubt contractually—in a presentation of a property. Again, the oddness of talking about a person as property is unsettling, but this is a show business idiom quite common. Agencies discuss “properties” all the time and they’re talking about musicians, actors, artists.

Throw into the mix Annie Liebowitz, who is arguably iconic herself. From the early days at Rolling Stone up through the present, Annie is a public figure. Meaning that, especially “in the business”, everyone knows what she does. She would also have been involved in the arrangements between Disney and Vanity Fair.

So far so good. Everyone knew what was going on.

Now, the photoshoot was crowded. Lots of people there. Including Mylie Cyrus’s parents. Not sure who mom is, but dad—Billie Ray—is an entertainment industry insider. He’s been around a long time. He has survived quite well. He knows the ropes. He is not a “stage dad” in the sense of not knowing what’s going on.

I’ve laid this out at some length to show how utterly unlikely it is that the photographs of 15-year-old Mylie in a pose more appropriate to a 20-something were an accident. That no one knew what was happening. It’s not like this was done in a basement studio, digitally, and the shots immediately posted to the web. Disney would have had to clear the shots. I cannot imagine it wasn’t in the contract that someone at Disney would get to look at them and say, one way or the other, whether they could be published. Of the two, Disney is by far the bigger gorilla—Vanity Fair was not likely to hold them over a barrel.

So what then is the Big Deal? And, if this is so inappropriate, why was it allowed?

Control over a teen-age superstar is doable. Look at Leann Rimes. Her burgeoning sexuality, while certain present and eminently marketable, was not “unleashed” till she was over 18. Her parents kept a handle on it. We can doubtless find other examples. Reese Witherspoon. Jody Foster. Helen Hunt. Even earlier, Annette Funicello.

(Though Annette is a curiosity—she never really stopped being a Mousketeer. Her emergent sexuality—blatant and impossible to get around—somehow failed to take her into “adult” consideration. Management may have been too tight and she remained—popularly—the girl on the beach who never went past the first kiss. This happens—actresses who have the audacity to “grow up” and find themselves trapped in an adolescent image. Sally Fields is a case in point. She went from Gidget to The Flying Nun, completely bypassing a mature sexual phase, and nearly remained stuck with it. She made a minor film—I forget the title—in which she appeared nude. In an interview, she admitted that the decision to do so was calculated to shatter the Gidget/Flying Nun image so she could then be taken seriously as an adult actress. The tactic might be questionable to some, but the result was a critically-successful career.)

Managing the property is the whole game here. And Hollywood (and Nashville, etc) have a problem with starlets like Mylie. Once they establish them as an icon for preteens to teens—what is called “tweens”—what do you do when they grow up and start acting like women?

Age here isn’t the issue. Let’s face it, sexuality strikes in the teen years, some sooner than others, and the limelight of a successful career seems somehow to advance the timetable. We are all-too-familiar with the meltdowns in instances where the transition is, well, bungled—Lindsey Lohan and Britney Speers are the poster girls of crash and burn. (more…)

I have been anticipating the FCC switch from analog to digital for several years. The original plan was to have the final demise of NTSC (”analog”) broadcast in 2006. Now, it will really happen. The change that they averted when they went to color is finally here. Everyone needs a new TV.

Unless you have cable or satellite. Then you can wait until your old box dies. But I use rabbit ears in my multipath hell of a location in the city. On good days, I can get 7 channels of regular interest, plus 4 explicitly Christian channels (24, 26, 49, 51. The 700 Club shares 11). Sometimes I cannot get ABC-30 or CW-11 clear enough to record or avoid watering eyes. Other times Fox-2 and My-46 are too bad to watch, too. So I really only have 3 reliable channels in analog.

Enter digital clarity. Yesterday I got my gummint subsidized converter box and hooked it up. Now I get perfectly clear (in numerical order) Fox-2.1, CBS-4.1, NBC-5.1, local weather 5.2, and PBS 9.1-9.4. That’s it.

(more…)

Check out this billboard. Apparently, there is a “Bike Show” at the “Family Arena” in St. Charles, Missouri (St. Louis area). If you attend the Bike Show, you can “Register to Win a Free Breast Augmentation.”

I’d avoid buying only your raffle ticket in the name of the family, however, because if it is the winning ticket, the family members will have to fight over who gets the free breast augmentation.

I’m wondering what they’ll offer next at the Family Arena. Perhaps the next raffle will be for one of those alleged penis enlargements that show up so often in spam.

[For St. Louis areas residents who are interested in admiring this billboard in person, it is located in the City of St. Louis, on South Kingshighway a few blocks north of Chouteau].

Marc Gunther created his blog to probe Corporate America for signs of social responsibility.   Hence, the name of his blog: “Marc Gunther - Corporate America: Making the World a Better Place . . . or Not.”

My sister-in-law (an architect who specializes in green issues) referred me to his site.   Marc’s posts are thoughtful and he has some impressive contacts with high-placed corporate types, giving him lots of good insight into the conscience (or not) of some huge and powerful organizations.

I especially enjoyed his post on the struggles of some well-to-do folks who are tired of even more well-to-do folks building houses bigger than theirs (the site of this squabble is the Hamptons).   This post is titled “Green Monsters.” The reference is to the so-called “green” luxury homes in the Seattle area (4,500 square feet) that were recently burned to the ground by eco-terrorists.  Though Gunther is sympathetic with the message of the eco-terrorists, he rejects their method. 

I do mean to suggest that those of us who are privileged ought to think and talk more about how much consumption is enough. Personally, I wish someone would find a way to raise questions about the morality of monster homes without burning them down. It’s probably too much to expect of the mainstream environmental groups that rely on donations from people living in big homes. Just look at who sits on the board of Environmental Defense or NRDC. Religious leaders could play a role, but they, too, depend on gifts from the well-to-do. Any thoughts?

Gunther is highly sensitive to the American consumption epidemic.  Although he is delighted to see some promising moves being made by some corporations, he is distressed that it is unsustainable business-as-usual for too many consumers.  The evidence?

I’d bet you didn’t spend any time at the malls or watching TV this past holiday season. Or realize that, for all the talk about climate change, roughly half the vehicles purchased in 2007 were SUVs and light trucks. Or see that despite the so-called credit crunch, millions of Americans continue to spend more money than they can afford to buy things they probably don’t need. Consider, for example, this shocking Los Angeles Times story about auto financing that, says, among other things that Americans are “slipping into a perpetual cycle of automobile debt,” that 45% of car loans are written for longer than six years, that the average loan is more than $30,000 (!)

The solutions need to happen at the grass roots level, but those solutions need to be inspired by those who are in positions to make a difference.   Will any of that happen?  It’s not going to be easy, because consumers appear oblivious and the big donors to prominent environmental groups “drive SUVs and own vacation homes.” 

I’ve added Marc Gunther to my favorites.   His driving interest in sustainable living, his unrelenting social conscience, his ability to write clearly, and his ability to serve as liaison to big corporations all put him in a unique position to communicate his worthy observations to us.

This is a no-brainer, or so I thought.  Before asking my extended family this question at a family gathering this weekend, I assumed that everyone would agree to my hypothetical proposal.  As distasteful as it might seem at first, I assumed that everyone in the room would (if given the opportunity) agree that they would eat nothing but dog food for one year in return for $1 million.

I write this post having tasted dog food on two occasions in past years.  On those two occasions, I’d chomped on a nugget of dry dog food, the kind that comes in a 40 pound bag.  I thought it tasted like cardboard, but it was not disgusting.  On the other hand, it was not food I would be inclined to eat again unless given an incentive.  Note: I have smelled canned dog food before, and I would not be inclined to eat that stuff.  The canned dog food I smelled had a strong disgusting odor to it.  It looked and smelled like it was no longer safe to eat.

So there I stood with various members of my family in my mother’s kitchen when I raised the question: who would be willing to eat nothing but dog food for the next year in return for $1 million?  To my surprise, the rejections and objections started pouring in, even though I went first and even though I proudly stated that my answer was absolutely “yes.”

Two of my sisters and my mother each rejected the idea out of hand. I listened to their excuses and I thought that I addressed all their objections, but they continued to reject the hypothetical offer.  One sister was concerned that if she went to all that work eating dog food for one year, they wouldn’t actually pay her the $1 million.  Therefore I changed the hypothetical so that it included an escrow account held by a person or institution she trusted.  Still, she refused to buy into the program.

Another concern (raised by a brother-in-law) was that even if dog food might provide most of the nutrition needed by a human being, it might not provide all of the vitamins and nutrients needed by humans.  Therefore, it might be dangerous over the course of the year.  Fair enough.  In response, I agreed that anyone engaging in this endeavor could take any vitamins or supplements that one might need (but that dog food might not provide).  That same brother in law then indicated that he might be willing to join the program, but only for $2 million.

I urged everyone to be honest.  We were talking about $1 million.  This is enough money to allow people to retire. I reminded everyone that they could buy their dog food at any supermarket or any pet store.  Their dog food could include any commercially available product labeled “dog food,” and this could include any type of dog food, dry or canned food, entrées or dog treats (I was hoping that the phrase “dog treats” would get everyone more excited about signing up for this hypothetical deal, but it didn’t).

I wasn’t suggesting that they would have to eat their dog food on the floor or that they would have to eat it out of a doggie dish.  They would merely have to agree to eat dog food, in any position.  They could light candles before dinner if that ambiance made the difference.  The main rule is that all of the food that they ate would have to be actual dog food.  The only fluid that they would be able to drink would be water, since that’s the only liquid that most people give to their dogs. (more…)

Today is Easter. Colorful eggs (pagan tradition), bunnies and chicks (pagan symbols), and consuming dangerous levels of foamy sweetener in scary yellow bites (Peeps™). Let’s not forget the “meaning behind it”: The anniversary of yet another demi-god risen from the dead. I enjoy this take on that subject.

Anyway, why not use this day to remember others of the many born-to-a-virgin half-breed godlings whose power was recognized at adolescence, who grew to great renown at maturity, who were persecuted, exiled, and/or executed by the powers that be, and died and came back to life, somehow earning eternal reward for themselves and others. Like Hercules, Osiris, Mithra, Adonis/Bacchus, Krishna, Dionysus…

I enjoy chatting with Martian anthropologists.  They visit Earth without preconceptions and they ask obvious questions. 

Recently, I encountered a Martian anthropologist who was struggling to understand what Easter was all about.    I tried to explain it in simple terms.  I first tried to tell the Martian Anthropologist (I think it was a “she,” so I’ll use the feminine pronoun) about Good Friday. I told her that a magic fellow named Jesus dies every year on Good Friday and the Christians get all glum, even though He doesn’t really die every year, and we’re not entirely sure that there was a Jesus or that he was truly magic.

I paused, then explained further.  I told her that Catholics are my favorite kind of Christians because I was raised Catholic and because they strive so hard to not eat meat on Good Friday.  She asked why they didn’t eat meat and I said I didn’t know, especially since they eat fish and fish seems to be meat.  At church, it gets even stranger, I explained.  Catholics eat bread that they claim was ”transubstantiated” into the actual body of Jesus (even though it still looks and tastes like bread.  The ironic twist is that this bread is supposedly meat and the Catholics eat it on Good Friday, even though they promise not to eat meat on Good Friday. 

Then, every year on Easter Sunday Jesus is said to rise from the dead and save us, even though we weren’t the one’s who pissed off God by trying to eat fruit from the tree that would help us understand things better.   I needed to clarify.  Actually, Jesus only saves some people.  Any people who doubt that Jesus was God are forced to go to hell, a place where they are cursed with eternal suffering rather than being allowed to die.   I told her that I’m one of those people because I don’t understand why God had to allow his son to be killed in order to save us, even though we didn’t commit “original sin.”  What’s hard for Martian anthropologists to grasp is that good-hearted people who doubt that Jesus was God also go to hell, despite being good-hearted, which is the core teaching of Jesus.

The Martian Anthropologist, hearing of this powerful and sometimes sadistic God, told me that she didn’t want to have anything to do with churches.  Getting to close to anything religious just sounded much too dangerous to her.   I told her that religion was important to humans because it scares them too, and keeps them from hurting each other except when they start wars where they argue about things like whether the mother of Jesus ever had sex.   She told me that human societies were “interesting.”   Then she asked why humans don’t simply try harder to be nice to one another rather than believe in life after death, and other forms of magic.  I told her that I didn’t know. 

Then she asked me to tell her about eggs and marshmallow chickens.  I immediately recognized that she wanted to know what Americans really believed rather than what they said they believed.  Therefore, off we went to Walgreen’s to fully understand the florescent American holiday of Easter.

She asked what Jesus had to do with Easter baskets and whether God the Father was named “Disney.”   I told her that I just didn’t know either of these things.  She asked whether there were bunnies at the manger or at the crucifixion.  I didn’t know.   Does the Bible talk about coloring eggs 2,000?  I didn’t know.

(more…)

Wouldn’t it be horrible if our American suburbs starting turning into slums?

It’s already happening, according to this article from The Atlantic:  “The Next Slum?”

For 60 years, Americans have pushed steadily into the suburbs, transforming the landscape and (until recently) leaving cities behind. But today the pendulum is swinging back toward urban living, and there are many reasons to believe this swing will continue. As it does, many low-density suburbs and McMansion subdivisions, including some that are lovely and affluent today, may become what inner cities became in the 1960s and ’70s—slums characterized by poverty, crime, and decay . . .

The experience of cities during the 1950s through the ’80s suggests that the fate of many single-family homes on the metropolitan fringes will be resale, at rock-bottom prices, to lower-income families—and in all likelihood, eventual conversion to apartments.

This future is not likely to wear well on suburban housing. Many of the inner-city neighborhoods that began their decline in the 1960s consisted of sturdily built, turn-of-the-century row houses, tough enough to withstand being broken up into apartments, and requiring relatively little upkeep. By comparison, modern suburban houses, even high-end McMansions, are cheaply built. Hollow doors and wallboard are less durable than solid-oak doors and lath-and-plaster walls. The plywood floors that lurk under wood veneers or carpeting tend to break up and warp as the glue that holds the wood together dries out; asphalt-shingle roofs typically need replacing after 10 years. Many recently built houses take what structural integrity they have from drywall—their thin wooden frames are too flimsy to hold the houses up.

This article documents that many of yesterday’s suburban Pleasantvilles that are already tipping into decay.  The elephant in the room is the inexorable increase in energy prices.  Cheap oil created the suburbs.  Expensive energy will destroy their affordability.  

Why am I convinced that the rise in energy prices is inexorable?  Because even though we are starting to have a national dialogue that “something” needs to be done about energy supplies, very few Americans are taking this crisis seriously.  We continue carving out new suburbs, encouraged by pipe dreams about corn being solution to the energy problem.  Yet we are doing almost nothing to develop sustainable ways to replacing the 5,000 gallons of oil Americans use each second.   We are in deep denial while conservation is still ridiculed by many Americans (e.g., those who vote with SUV’s and new suburban and exurban houses).

The coming years are not going to be kind to many of those Americans who bought into unsustainable versions of the American Dream.

In an earlier post, I argued that people need to better appreciate that dollars are fungible (see here  and here).  Why is it important to understand that dollars are fungible?  A case in point is the new American enthusiasm for turning food into fuel. Consider this report from Fortune Magazine:

The growing myth that corn is a cure-all for our energy woes is leading us toward a potentially dangerous global fight for food. While crop-based ethanol -the latest craze in alternative energy - promises a guilt-free way to keep our gas tanks full, the reality is that overuse of our agricultural resources could have consequences even more drastic than, say, being deprived of our SUVs. It could leave much of the world hungry.

We are facing an epic competition between the 800 million motorists who want to protect their mobility and the two billion poorest people in the world who simply want to survive. In effect, supermarkets and service stations are now competing for the same resources.
 
This year cars, not people, will claim most of the increase in world grain consumption. The problem is simple: It takes a whole lot of agricultural produce to create a modest amount of automotive fuel.

The grain required to fill a 25-gallon SUV gas tank with ethanol, for instance, could feed one person for a year.

And consider this additional bad news from Earth Policy Institute: 

We are witnessing the beginning of one of the great tragedies of history. The United States, in a misguided effort to reduce its oil insecurity by converting grain into fuel for cars, is generating global food insecurity on a scale never seen before.

The world is facing the most severe food price inflation in history as grain and soybean prices climb to all-time highs. Wheat trading on the Chicago Board of Trade on December 17th breached the $10 per bushel level for the first time ever. In mid-January, corn was trading over $5 per bushel, close to its historic high. And on January 11th, soybeans traded at $13.42 per bushel, the highest price ever recorded. All these prices are double those of a year or two ago.

As a result, prices of food products made directly from these commodities such as bread, pasta, and tortillas, and those made indirectly, such as pork, poultry, beef, milk, and eggs, are everywhere on the rise. In Mexico, corn meal prices are up 60 percent. In Pakistan, flour prices have doubled. China is facing rampant food price inflation, some of the worst in decades.

Here’s are a few rhetorical questions to consider:  Can Americans justify filling up any more of those big SUV fuel tanks now that there is solid evidence that doing so will cause families on the other side of the world to suffer and die?  Can we justify cranking up the heat in the winter to stay toasty warm?  Should we merrily take long trips without considering the effects of burning this extra fuel on food prices (and thus food availability) to those people who are living on the margin?  Can we justify building more houses in the exburbs? 

We are now witnessing a collision between A) our desire to have fun and feel prestige through the discretionary buring of fuel, versus B) our ability to honestly look in the mirror to see ourselves as kind, decent and caring people.

“The free market–the invisible hand–will take care of everything.”

I’ve addressed this topic of the free market as alleged panacea several times before.  I’ve referred to this blind faith in the market as unsubstantiated.  I’ve mockingly referred to the common belief in the wisdom of the invisible hand as a belief in the Fouth Person in the Holy Quartet.  Why mock?  Because stark shortages of critically important natural resources loom in every direction.   And yet we’re in denial. You deny the denial?  Then how is it that we tolerate, this year, big U.S. metropolitan areas like Raleigh-Durham and Atlanta had only a few weeks left of their municipal water supplies?  We tolerate that we are drawing down unreplenishable water sources throughout the desert southwest.  Intelligent civilizations don’t deny such dangers.  They consciously deal with their problems.

I’ve just read a well-phrased description of why the modern version of the free market can’t save us from our problems regarding impending shortages of essential natural resources.  The following quote is from a new book available free on-line from Population Connection: PLAN B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, by environmental analyist, Lester R. Brown (2008).

Now with the economy as large as it is, the indirect costs of burning coal—the costs of air pollution, acid rain, devastated ecosystems, and climate change—can exceed the direct costs, those of mining the coal and transporting it to the power plant. As a result of neglecting to account for these indirect costs, the market is undervaluing many goods and services, creating economic distortions.

As economic decision-makers—whether consumers, corporate planners, government policymakers, or investment bankers—we all depend on the market for information to guide us. In order for markets to work and economic actors to make sound decisions, the markets must give us good information, including the full cost of the products we buy. But the market is giving us bad information, and as a result we are making bad decisions—so bad that they are threatening civilization.

The market is in many ways an incredible institution. It allocates resources with an efficiency that no central planning body can match and it easily balances supply and demand. The market has some fundamental weaknesses, however. It does not incorporate into prices the indirect costs of producing goods. It does not value nature’s services properly. And it does not respect the sustainable yield thresholds of natural systems. It also favors the near term over the long term, showing little concern for future generations.

Dick Cavett once said: “It’s a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn’t want to hear.”  Plan B 3.0 is the kind of information that those rare people ambivalently clamor to hear.    It’s clearly written and well documented.  There’s nothing shrill in Lester Brown’s book; just the facts—lots of facts that paint a dire picture.  Over and over, humans are overexploiting precious resources, and the situation is getting dangerous in many ways.  What’s at stake?  You name it.  Oil, food, water, forests, health, fisheries.   On the topic of fisheries, did you know that there are essentially no cod to be caught in the North Atlantic Ocean any more?   Gee, how did that happen?  Why didn’t the “free market” protect the North Atlantic Ocean?

Brown argues that we need to dramatically change the way we live and consume.   He argues that the “free market” is not a cure, unless we first make the true costs of over-exploitation visible and force purchasers to pay the full price.   We need to “Get the market to tell the ecological truth.” For example, the true cost of a gallon of gas is not $3/gallon, but more like $12/gallon. (more…)

Those guys who send out spam by the bucket-load are really busy these days.    In the past month alone they have tried to sneak more than 9,000 of their fake comments onto this site.  These “comments” are attached to links to various sites selling drugs, loans, pornography and you name it.  The spammers hope that those who run legitimate blogs will not notice that these comments are not sincere.   If they can succeed in getting even a few websites to approve their comments, the appearance of their links will enhance their own site’s credibility on search engines like Google.   Hence, a vigorous and healthy spam industry.

Thank goodness I don’t have to deal with the great majority of these fake comments.  We use sophisticated software to keep out most of this spam.   A few hundred per week slip through, however. 

I thought it might be fun to share, without the attached links, the types of comments you have been missing:

Good comment. It brought light to an old idea I had.

I can not agree with you in 100% regarding some thoughts, but you got good point of view

This article sounds well, but how everything is related together

amazing stuff

Man i love reading your blog, interesting posts !

Thanks for what you said. It seems I have thought the wrong way… until now. Hope this helps also.

Try the Strait Back Golf Shirt, It’s made to help with posture on & off the course. Good luck

Ångström also postulated that an incandescent gas emits luminous rays of the same refrangibility as those which it can absorb.

Since then, most research has focused on absorbing external crash energy with crushable panels and reducing the motion of human bodies

This article sounds well, but how everything is related together?

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Great work. I am going to pass this along.

Man i just love your blog, keep the cool posts comin.

I love being a recruiter as a way to make a living. It is a fantastic mix of detective work, rapport building, conflict resolution, understanding and differentiation. In our new information age I can do it from anywhere, and that is just cool as it can be. My career fits me well, and I find it immensely rewarding when things go well, and probably learn even more when they do not.

I left my company and went out on my own because I felt like like my life was terribly out of balance. Yes part of it was the oppressive and abusive atmosphere coupled with the rampant disrespect, but all of that negativity really just made me more aware that I was following a path that wasn’t consistent with how I wanted to live. I found myself dreaming of a life where where kindness, compassion, and mutual respect formed the ground rules and, ultimately, where I could feel like I “made a difference” to the world as a whole. That life looked so far away from what I was living that it seemed like a fairy tale. When I stopped and looked at the distance between the life I was living and the life I wanted, I got scared. I also got busy figuring out a way to escape. It is not that I am against working smart and making money. I had that discussion with myself years and years ago, and I decided then that I can do more for the world with some cash than without it. But the truth was I was exhausted mentally, physically and emotionally from an environment that had become combative and very dark. I wasn’t doing anything for myself, not to mention anyone else.

When I left this past October I wasn’t at all prepared for the fireworks, especially because I had tried to do everything in the most positive manner I could imagine. I didn’t realize escaping would be so painful and difficult and infuriating, and I was shattered in a lot of ways. I felt like I had stepped off a cliff and couldn’t catch my breath. I realized I had walked away from a lucrative position with no money coming in and a whole lot going out. I was depressed and beat up before, but now I was was terrified. (more…)

I subscribe to Funny Times, a monthly humor publication filled with cartoons and humorous essays.  I consider it great bang for the buck, at a cost of about two dollars per issue.

In the March 2008 edition of Funny Times, Phil Proctor compiled some stunning statistics in his column (he calls his column “Planet Proctor”).  The context of his recent column is that the mother of two of his friends was born 99 years ago.  What was the U.S. like when she was born?  Here’s a sampling:

The average life expectancy in the US was 47 years.  Only 14% of the homes in the US had a bathtub.  Only 8% had a telephone.  A three-minute call from Denver to New York City cost $11.  There were only 8,000 cars in the US and only 144 miles of paved roads. . . . . Alabama, Mississippi, Iowa and Tennessee were each more heavily populated in California. . .  the population of Las Vegas, Nevada was 30 . . . More than 95% of all births in the US took place at home.  90% of all US physicians had no college education. . . Most women only washed their hair once a month and used borax or egg yolks for shampoo.  Crossword puzzles, canned beer and iced tea hadn’t been invented. . .  the American flag had 45 stars. . . . There was no Mother’s Day or Father’s Day. . . There were only about 230 reported murders in the entire US. . . Marijuana, heroin and morphine were all available over the counter at corner drugstores.

It’s difficult to overcome the prejudice that having more choices is always better.   In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz made a convincing case that too much choice can overload and paralyze us.   I couldn’t help but think of the paradox of choice while grocery shopping yesterday.  

One of the major chains of grocery stores in the midwest is Schnucks (that’s right, 7 consonants and only one vowel).   Schnucks has done business in St. Louis since well before I was born.  I’m assuming that Schnucks is a typical grocery store and, therefore, that it stocks as many as 30,000 different products in each of its stores–a formidable number.

As I shopped yesterday, I took a few photos to illustrate the point made by Barry Schwartz.   Here, for instance, is the mustard aisle, offering you about 30 kinds of mustard:

And that’s just the beginning.  Here’s the pickle department.  I will occasionally eat a pickle, but if you told me that I could never again have a pickle, it wouldn’t upset me in the least.  Many people value pickles more highly than I do, apparently.  Here they are, dozens of types of pickles, ready for you to choose.

I was on a roll (and I was having some fun), so I moved over to the pasta aisle:

There were a lot more types of pasta than one could fit in a single photo.  

Was there any major product, I wondered, where you could simply choose between two or three types?  The answer is “no” regarding most of the things most of us purchase most of the time.  There were hundreds of types of liquor, tea, cheese, snacks, cookies, cake mixes, cereals and pizzas, all of this choice making it so incredibly difficult to whisk in and out of the store.   You can imagine a comment echoing across America every day:  “No, not that type!  I wanted you to buy the mini, mint flavored, instant, Brazilian, fiber-enhanced, artificially sweetened low-fat version with individual servings!”

Ready for another photo?  How many types of peanut butter can there possibly be?  After all, it’s only smashed up peanuts with a bit of sweetener, right?

Actually, there are many types of smashed up peanuts with a bit of sweetener (some types coming with no sweetener).  

I decided to end my little tour at the non-dairy creamer section, assuming that there would be only few types of this product (I’m not a coffeee or tea drinker, and I’ve never actually paid attention).

There they were.  Enough brands to start a fight in any well-behaved household in the country. 

I can’t find the statistics to support me at the moment, but it seems to me that grocery stores doing business when I was young (in the 1960’s) probably carried only 20% as many products as modern grocers.  It’s also funny to consider what “works” for modern buying clubs.  Costco seems to do very well with only a couple types of each food product.   If you want pretzels, you pick either this one or that one.   If you want a jar of Vitamin D tablets, here’s your only choice (unlike the mega vitamin selection you’ll find in a Walgreen’s–if you really want to have your head spun around by choices of vitamins or supplements, shop on the Internet.  For instance, the Vitamin Shoppe brags that it carries 20,000 distinct products. 

Choosing a tombstone can also be exhausting, according to Rock of Ages.  You’ve simply got to pick the right one, or else the dead person might get hurt feelings: 

Selecting the granite for a memorial can be confusing-much like selecting a fine gemstone. If you’ve ever purchased a diamond, you know that even stones that appear similar can vary greatly in quality and value. It takes special tools and expertise to tell a perfect stone from an imperfect one-whether diamond or granite.

And what about choosing a pet dog?  For our family, it was relatively easy.  We went to the local Humane Society and took home one of the bouncy mutts (I admit that we focused on type of dogs known to be friendlier with children).   If you want to do it right, though, you might want to spend a few hours looking over all of this material at Wonder Puppy.  Before having a wine and cheese party, you simply must spend a few days learning to become a competent beginner wine-buyer here. 

It just doesn’t stop, here in the U.S.    Good enough is simply not good enough.  It’s often said that we are so choosy because we need to make the “right” choice, but that rationale doesn’t convince me.   I think that there we are often shopping for sex, whether we realize it or not.  The cure for this madness?  I don’t know that there is one, though the “Church of Stop Shopping” is trying to lend a hand to neurotic shoppers everywhere.

If choice makes us neuotic (Schwartz has convinced me that it has), we are “lucky” that we don’t have excess choices in all aspects of life.  For instance, we are in the process of wiping out many types of fish, by some estimates, 90% of the large predatory fish of the oceans, such as swordfish, marklin and the biggest types of tuna.   Soon, we’ll be surprised that there is any fish at all in the restaurant.  We’ll happily take whatever they have.

And our voting neuroses will be kept to a minimum this election (as almost every election), because we only have two choices for president (at least for those of us who vote for someone who might actually serve as President).    

This article, by Ann J. Simonton of Common Dreams recommends that we slow down in order to better appreciate, absorb and enjoy all aspects of life.

It isn’t just fast food that reminds us fast is not always better. The frantic pace of everyday life seems to impede our ability to make changes that are increasingly necessary for a sustainable future. Many have begun to realize that a primary step toward positive social change is to slow down. Cutting edge groups like Canada’s Adbusters have been promoting Slow Week to encourage SLOW as means to enjoy and prioritize all aspects of life.

She recommends that part of slowing down should include having slower sex:

The media landscape is clearly bloated with highly processed sex. High in fat content, in terms of the lies it tells. High in calories, in terms of the burden it places on the possibility of real intimacy. It does not celebrate the beauty of imperfection, the vulnerability of tenderness and shared experience. It hasn’t time for, or interest in empathic communication about respective desires and boundaries. At best it sets people up for misunderstanding and disappointment-at worst for rape and abuse.

Slow sex is not a condemnatory movement, but a movement toward informed pleasure. It isn’t about forcing change but about providing a fair and reasoned platform to address difficult questions about how the culture promotes sexual intimacy, with the caveat to do no harm.

The Telegraph is reporting on a new book that argues that teenaged girls are being corrupted by distorted images of what it means to be a woman. 

In a society that celebrates people such as Paris Hilton, girls are being brainwashed into believing that promiscuity is synonymous with success, says Carol Platt Liebau.
 
In Prude: How The Sex-Obsessed Culture Damages Girls, Liebau claims there is “scant recognition or respect” for a woman’s achievement that is not associated with sex appeal.

Liebau says the sexy images of performers such as Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera catapulted them to fame.

She claims that teenage girls are growing up in a culture in which being called “a slut” is preferable to being labelled “a prude”.

“The overwhelming lessons teenagers are now learning from the world around them is that being sexy is the ultimate accolade, trumping intelligence, character and all other accomplishments at every stage of a woman’s life,” says the author, managing editor of Harvard Law Review.

These sorts of accusations have been made before.  For instance, see here.

A few months ago the English alternative rock band Radiohead released their long awaited album “In Rainbows” as a free download, leaving it up to the fans to decide what they would pay, if anything at all.

As someone who has had the difficult and expensive experience of distributing physical copies of my documentaries on DVD I can tell you that it was with great anticipation that I viewed this experiment. I was surprised and a little disappointed to find that only 40% of those downloading actually paid for it.

I recall as a young man buying vinyl records for about $5 a piece and watching as the price slowly went up and up, hitting about $12 before giving way to CDs which eventually topped out at around $16 to $18 a pop. These days, with iTunes selling individual songs for $.99 and most albums for about $9.99, I feel like I am getting a bargain. Of course, I still have the expense of having to burn my own CDs to play them in my car, not being hip enough to own an MP3 player.

Still, I find myself wondering what I would pay for some of my favorite music if given the opportunity to decide on my own. The temptation to take it for free would be strong but I am smart enough to know that if enough people do that the ability to place our own value on music would disappear, as it has done with Radiohead. The band has since retracted its “free or whatever” offer, prompting some to accuse the band of chickening out as they saw potential revenue slip through their fingers.

In the band’s defense, Radiohead’s leader Thom Yorke contends that it was always an experiment, not a business model for themselves or anyone else, and that it had run its course. (As of December 31st “In Rainbows” has become available on iTunes and the CD can be purchased through the usual outlets.)

However, a nagging question still remains. Now that music is being freed from the cost of being physically reproduced on disk, how much should we pay for it?

What is music worth to you?

Jared Diamond is a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, as well as the author of  “Guns, Germs and Steel” and “Collapse.”  In an op-ed piece in the January 2, 2008 NYT, he reports that American rates of resource consumption are horribly out of wack with the rates of other inhabitants of the world and that Americans are due for a substantial adjustment:

The average rates at which people consume resources like oil and metals, and produce wastes like plastics and greenhouse gases, are about 32 times higher in North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia than they are in the developing world. That factor of 32 has big consequences . . .

Yet we often promise developing countries that if they will only adopt good policies — for example, institute honest government and a free-market economy — they, too, will be able to enjoy a first-world lifestyle. This promise is impossible, a cruel hoax: we are having difficulty supporting a first-world lifestyle even now for only one billion people . . .

[W]hether we get there willingly or not, we shall soon have lower consumption rates, because our present rates are unsustainable.Real sacrifice wouldn’t be required, however, because living standards are not tightly coupled to consumption rates. Much American consumption is wasteful and contributes little or nothing to quality of life.

Bill Moyers recently interviewed Benjamin Barber, a renowned political theorist and a distinguished senior fellow at Demos — a public policy think tank here in New York City. Barber’s most recent book is Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole (2007). What’s the focus of this book?

[T]he global economy produces too many goods we don’t need, too few of those we do need, and, to keep the racket going, targets children as consumers in a market where shopping is a twenty-four hour business. Capitalism, he says, “seems quite literally to be consuming itself, leaving democracy in peril and the fate of citizens uncertain.”

Barber argues that we now have “push capitalism”:

They’ve got to sell all this stuff, and they have to figure out how to get us to want it. So they take adults and they infantilize them. They dumb them down. They get us to want things. And then they start targeting children. Because it’s not enough just to sell to the adults.

One prominent example is bottled water, which is often actually bottled tap water. Was there ever really a demand for expensive bottled tap water?  Yet so many of us demand it and claim to need it. Barber argues that American adults are, indeed, infantilized.

What I mean is that grownups, part of being grown up is getting a hold of yourself and saying, “I don’t need this. I’ve got to be a gatekeeper for my kid. I want to live in a pluralistic world where, yes, I shop, but I also pray and play and do art and make love and make artwork and do lots of different things. And shopping’s one part of that.” As an adult, we know that. But if you live in a capitalist– society that needs to sell us all the time, they’ve got to turn that prudent, thoughtful adult back into a child who says, “Gimme, gimme, gimme. I want, I want, I want.” Just like the kid in the candy store. And is grasping and reaching.

Barber argues that push capitalism is threatening democracy.  It seduces us into thinking that being a consumer is being a citizen.

That a citizen is nothing more than a consumer. That voting means spending your dollars spreading around your private prejudices, your private preferences. Not reaching public judgments. Not finding common ground. Not making decisions about the social consequences of private judgments, but just making the private judgments. And letting it fall where it will.

How do we combat this threat of the hyper-consumption of un-needed goods and services that is driving us deeply into debt?  Barber makes three suggestions.

First of all we, as consumers, have to be tougher. We are the gatekeepers for our kids and our families. We have to be tougher. I mean, I ask anyone out there who needs to go out at 2:00 AM to go shopping? For God sakes, wait ’til Monday afternoon.

Second thing is capitalism has to begin to earn the profits to which it has a right, when it takes real risks. Inventing something that is needed. Folks working in alternative energy, some of them are going to make real money.

Barber’s third approach is a slap at those who disparage government and naively tell us that we should look to the “free market” to solve our problems.

We’ve got to retrieve our citizenship. We can’t buy the line that government is our enemy and the market is our friend. We used to say government can do everything, the market can do nothing. That was a mistake. But now we seem to say the market can do everything and government can do any– nothing. [But] Government is us. Government is our institutions. Government is how we make social and public choices working together. We’ve got to retrieve our citizenship.

I was tempted to share some advertisements I recently spied for luxury items to be purchased in the name of Jesus’ birthday, but such ads are ubiquitous. Pointing them out would be unneeded fuel on a small fire.

Instead, I’ll share a post I wrote two years ago about the Grinch.

I find it ironic that the Grinch’s moment of allegedly great heroism occurs when he actually embarks on an act of much greater evil than his Christmas Eve burglarly. That the Grinch pulls off his finale to the applause of a huge annual audience demonstrates that our acquisitive instincts have fully commandeered our conscious cognitive abilities.

The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood is demanding that McDonald’s immediately stop advertising on children’s report cards. 

Last week, students in Seminole County, Florida received their report cards in envelopes adorned with Ronald McDonald promising a free Happy Meal to students with good grades, behavior, or attendance.

“This promotion takes in-school marketing to a new low,” said Susan Linn, director of CCFC and a psychologist at Judge Baker Children’s Center.  “It bypasses parents and targets children directly with the message that doing well in school should be rewarded by a Happy Meal.”

The advertisement appears on report cards envelopes for students in kindergarten through fifth grade.  The envelopes are used to transport report cards to and from home throughout the school year. 

Campaign For A Commercial-Free Childhood is a

national coalition of health care professionals, educators, advocacy groups and concerned parents who counter the harmful effects of marketing to children through action, advocacy, education, research, and collaboration. We support the rights of children to grow up – and the rights of parents to raise them – without being undermined by rampant commercialism.

 My daughter has a doll called Kaya.  I really don’t mind this doll at all, although many dolls aggravate me.  Most dolls are unabashedly materialist.  Kaya genuinely seemed to be an earnest survivor–a native American just trying to get by.  American Girl did a great job with Kaya. She is hardworking (according to the books that describe her tales) as well as gorgeous.  My oldest daughter (aged 9) admires Kaya for the right reasons.  Meet Kaya.

Well . . . my daughter and I traveled to Chicago to have a special father-daughter vacation.  My daughter asked to visit the Chicago American Girl Store.  I quickly agreed.  It was her vacation too, and I like to believe that I am an armchair anthropologist.  Therefore, I’m always at work. 

If you have trouble finding the store in Chicago, ask anyone walking down the Magnificent Mile and they’ll tell you.  The American Girl store is a major Chicago institution.

I just assumed that I knew what kind of merchandise was in the