WHAT DO WE NEED?

I hear a lot of talk about jobs. Everyone says the country needs more jobs. Yet I know many, many people with jobs who are not very happy. I suppose they are happier than if they could not pay their bills, but perhaps the problem is that they have too many bills to pay. I don’t know.

It just seems to me that historically jobs have not been society’s problem. Everyone had more than enough work to do taking care of their own work. Don’t misunderstand. I know that for much of history things were very hard for the common man. But usually poverty stemmed NOT from not having enough work to do. Historically poverty has usually stemmed from the fact that individual toil benefitted others than oneself: often royalty or government, but occasionally thieves and armies.

Today we need jobs because men have been removed from their work. Laying concrete all day pays a wage, but it is not very personally satisfying. Waiting on customers all day is less strenuous, but nearly drives people crazy. There seems to be more to life than a job and salary. Or at least many people think so.

There has also been a tremendous interest develop in entrepreneurship. I wonder why that is. It looks to me like owning one’s own business is a lot more risk and hard work than a job. Yet many want to own what they do. They even seem to work harder at their own enterprise than they do their jobs.

There is a common psychological list of people’s needs. It varies from time to time and from psychologist to psychologist. But generally it looks something like air, water, food, shelter (including clothes and housing), and energy for warmth and cooking. I find it interesting that psychologists never list work as essential to man’s well being. Yet humans are seldom idle. They may socialize and spend time in various forms of meditation. But they often spend their time beautifying, improving, and building. Art, music, poetry, tools, and better equipment seems to have occupied much of mankind’s time.

Maybe people need fewer bills and more demands. Maybe people would rather work for their own risks and rewards. Maybe people don’t need jobs, but businesses. Maybe we don’t need to create jobs, but farms and small factories. Maybe people need to work. Maybe people need to work for themselves as much as they need to work. Maybe it isn’t jobs we need at all.

WHICH IS MORE IMPORTANT, CITIES OR LAND?

(Oh, this is the same post as it was last week. But no one seemed to care much about the flooding of Louisiana. I wondered if they would be more interested in the concept of whether cities or food are more important? Or maybe they think that cities are more important than land. Do people think the world advances because of brilliant individuals, or by the caring labor of thousands, if not millions, of minds? Are any of these things related?)

They made the decision today to release water upstream from New Orleans. I understand the thinking behind that difficult decision. They had to weigh the needs of a few thousand people against the needs of many thousands more. I don’t know what is right.

But I do know the decision is very much a modern decision, and may prove short-sighted. They have basically decided that a city is more important than a farm. When inflation increases the price of food and there is no food to buy, the decision may look less compassionate.

One of the reasons this decision was made is that in the past sixty years we have moved people off the land in massive droves, and into the cities. So now very few people live on the land and many live in the city. Compassion would lead one to spare the city. But the people were moved off the land, supposedly in the name of efficiency. Large corporate farms being considered more efficient than the family farm.

But it is a false efficiency. No one ever has time to do sloppy work, and the modern corporate farm is sloppy farming. Eventually the exhausted soils, the erosion, the mono-cropping, the failure of pollinators, the energy expenses of plowing and shipping will overwhelm the system and it will collapse. When bad work is done the future will pay the price, and it will be very expensive in suffering.

As I look at cities with high buildings, slums, industrial blight, sameness and masses of people, I sense the loneliness and the lack of dignity. Each individual vies to be considered an individual, to be noticed. We glorify the individual in the celebrity culture. If one fails at gaining individual attention they fade into the anonymity of the city and abandons personal responsibility.

The real genius in the world is not individual genius. It is in the minds and hands of 10,000 individuals going about their business sharing ideas, helping one another and collectively finding what works in society. The genius of human culture is long, deep and slow. Sloppy work looks efficient. The city is always in a hurry.

MAKING, DISTRIBUTING, CONSUMING

Most economists talk about production and consumption. In between the two, the produce must be delivered to the consumer, and that portion of the economy has exploded in the last fifty years. This has been driven by two changes in the economic world.

First, industrialization increased efficiency of production. But this required centralized production into specific local areas, often far from the consumer. Whether this consists of an expensive factory, or huge corporate farm, production became more and more centralized.

But produce must be delivered to the consumer. So following industrialization the means of delivery and distribution needed to be expanded. This began with railroads and expanded to automobiles and airplanes. Overnight shipping companies and delivery services expanded. But all of this required cheap fuel so that the cost of delivery was reasonable enough to keep the price down.

So the cost of delivery is due to the cost of fuel. The question is, if the cost of delivery (fuel) goes up; will the cost of goods become too expensive for the centralized manufacturing model to work? And if the centralized manufacturing model fails, what will take its place?

It seems to me that there are only really two solutions. Either the cost of fuel must decline, or manufacturing needs to be decentralized so goods are closer to the consumer. Either of these solutions can be fostered by technological changes, but the technology developed will look very different.

A great deal of energy is being spent on the fuel question. Oil has driven the cheap distribution paradigm, and so much attention is paid to finding oil, obtaining oil, extending oil and replacing oil. However, the amount of oil available is finite, even though we don’t agree on how much is there. We will eventually run out of it. Biofuels, in the quantity needed to run the present system, is thermodynamically impossible. Efficient use of present fuels may be increased, but that also has a probably finite set point. The development of hydrogen as a fuel would seem to be a valuable development, but is some time away, if possible at all.

The other solution is to decentralize production. Some would say that this can’t be done. But it has been done before. In fact, throughout of most of human history, production and consumption have been local. Using modern technology which has reduced the amount of labor necessary to run factories and automated much production, could a post-industrial system develop in which factories were small and decentralized, manufacturing close to the consumer to minimize shipping.

Perhaps where there used to be family farms, there could instead be family factories. These could produce goods for, at most, regional consumption. The attention of most technology researchers is directed at continuing the present system and working on extending cheap fuels. Should someone be looking at miniaturizing manufacturing and minimizing distribution costs? If you know of people who are doing this let me know.

HUMAN NATURE

Humans are all confused about human nature. On the one hand we understand that in some ways we are like animals and have similar needs for food, shelter, and reproduction. But then we want to claim that we are not like animals because we are “civilized”. But the concept of being civilized means that we aren’t like animals at all and therefore have very different needs and expectations.

This leads us to do all sorts of crazy things and adopt some very conflicting attitudes. For example, as civilized animals we need food to survive, but routinely do things that endanger our food supply in the name of ease, efficiency, or profit. We grow more food than we need to make money which cannot be eaten. We create shelters, not just for our lives, but for our separate work, play, recreation and storage of things. Animals would mostly be appalled. And then we have turned reproduction into entertainment, and made it a matter of civilized correctness that everyone must get to participate regardless of fitness or wasted effort between identical genders. And lastly, as civilized animals we think that we should live infinitely, even in a finite world, and that people should not necessarily be held accountable for their actions. The animal world is singularly unforgiving.

Human success as an animal relies, not on strength, speed, tooth or claw. Instead it lies in intelligence, family groups and culture. Yet we are busy destroying the family group and our brains in our excesses.

You may wonder what this has to do with making America productive. But before anyone can produce anything, they have to decide what it is they should produce. And their concepts of why they are alive, what is their purpose in being alive and what they hope to accomplish will dictate to a great extent what they choose to produce. If we do not think clearly about the issue of human nature, we will not think clearly about what we produce.

The point is many people do not think clearly about who they are or why they exist. When that happens they may willingly embark on production activities that make no sense or that may actually hurt them in the process. Are you an animal? Or are you something different, something special, whether we call that civilized or divine (“a little lower than the angels”)? That will make huge difference about what you choose to produce.

MAKING DO

Is the human race is running out of water? Is the human race making too much carbon dioxide? Is the human race running out of energy? Is the human race is running out of air?

Nonsense! There is the same amount of water that there has always been. It may well be in different places. It may contain new materials that didn’t use to be there. But we haven’t “run out” of any water. Similarly, we don’t have too much carbon dioxide. The amount of carbon in the world hasn’t increased. It has obviously changed forms and moved from place to place, but the amount is the same.

Yes, it matters how we use language. For example, running out of water is a condition that sounds like it requires using less water. In fact, what it requires is to find new ways of cleaning up what we have, recycling, and distributing it more evenly. We may not be able to take cheap water out of ground water anymore, but the same amount is somewhere. It will just take some effort to get it.

Why are the only suggestions about greenhouse gasses about limiting their production? Carbon dioxide is naturally produced and has always been. What normally happens is that the carbon dioxide is recycled into living plants. So why doesn’t anyone suggest promoting plant production instead? Kind of makes me wonder.

We are not out of energy. We are running out of cheap stored energy known as petroleum. But the amount of energy available is more or less stable and comes from the sun. That doesn’t even mean that solar energy is the only energy available. Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the Universe and when it burns it forms water vapor. Hmmm. Aren’t we running out of water?

Will life be more complicated in the future? Yea, probably. And maybe more expensive. But should we make more laws, or make better questions. Should we make more regulations or more solutions? I know what I’m going to make!

A POST-INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

With the advent of the industrial revolution a pattern of production was established that was successful under the circumstances of that time. I wonder if it is still valid.

For the last 100 or so years we have extracted raw products, shipped them long distances to a centralized place where the raw product was formed into a manufactured product. Then the manufactured goods were reshipped back out to many different destinations for sale. The shipping of raw products in bulk was efficient enough to make the advantages of centralized manufacturing profitable.

Reshipping was less efficient because of the many destinations involved, and because there was additional weight for packaging, record keeping for multiple items, and sales expenses. But while energy was cheap the system worked.

But what happens when shipping is no longer inexpensive? Shipping raw product to central locations, only to be manufactured, repackaged and reshipped may not be the most cost efficient way to do business because of the transportation costs.

Is there another way? What if manufacturing were decentralized and greater care was taken in shipping the raw product? What if careful efficient routes were developed for raw products that would drop off product as it was transported for regional distribution? This would reduce the amount of product in volume and weight as deliveries were made, and thereby reduce the expense of shipping raw product overall.

Then, what if, instead of having huge central-manufacturing plants, numerous mini-plants were built across the country in various regions. Then only the finished product needed in the region would need to be manufactured, and shipping finished product could be restricted to local regions. This would greatly reduce shipping costs for finished products.

While this may seem to have little to do with bees and agriculture, I think it does. You see, that is the model of our capitalistic country for the first hundred and fifty years of its existence. Small farms created the products that served a region. The raw products were sent too many small manufacturing enterprises that served a region, sometimes single families. Shipping of product on all ends of production, manufacturing, and consumption was kept to a minimum. That worked because transportation costs were expensive and inefficient. Without petroleum power, electricity, refrigeration and highways, shipping was just inefficient.

I believe that the industrial revolution was possible because of inexpensive energy. In the future, perhaps near future, the price of transportation is going to increase substantially due to increases in the cost of energy. Petroleum may yet last for many years. Sources such as coal, natural gas, wind power, hydroelectric power, solar and others will certainly be developed. However, the tremendous capital expenses required for these sources of energy is going to make the cost of transpiration continue to increase.

If the industrial paradigm is based upon inexpensive transportation, and if transportation continues to increase in cost, then the only alternative would seem to be a new industrial revolution structured in a far more decentralized manner. Perhaps the family farm will become economically feasible again, along with family manufacturing plants scattered across the nation. The computer is a general purpose machine, so perhaps it could lead us to regional general purpose manufacturing facilities.

WHAT SHOULD WE MAKE?

Let’s begin with vandalism. If one person, or a group, wrecks a private home it is a crime. However, if one person, or a group, destroys a community it is often called progress. There is much oil shale in my part of the world. Many people think we can make it into oil and thereby save our way of life. Of course, the industry needed to make it into oil would destroy the present way of life for all who live here. But I suppose it will happen eventually, just as it has in West Virginia, Kentucky, and other places, because there is so much money to be made.

If I build a home with a wife and children, and put us up in a little house with a garden out back, it is not considered a very big accomplishment by the world. Everyone does that. But if I build a large plant that employees many people to extract oil from shale, and which destroys the way of life that the family enjoyed, it is considered a great accomplishment indeed.

It’s always interesting to me that so often people who want to change things, are seldom the people affected by the changes. The men who own the oil shale plant won’t live there. The politician who passes laws governing land seldom lives on the land that he passes the laws about.

It was decided years ago that the efficient way to get things done was to make the same thing, in the same way, at the same time, in the same place. It was called the industrial revolution. It has a made a lot of money. But making money isn’t making something. It is making an idea. We don’t have words to differentiate between making objects that exist in the real world, and making mental or abstract things.

Making war is not making at all. Making laws are not things but ideas. Making love at least has the potential to make life. Making music is a physical sound wave. Making noise is more about making, than making trouble.

What about making people? It’s a long process that requires more than making the body. It requires making a brain, a mind, a spirit, a person. So look how we do it. Every must learn the same things (standards), in the same way (school), at the same time (math at 10:00 AM), and in the same place. We even have to learn the things we learn within the same time frame. It is not the same thing to learn chemistry as it is to learn chemistry in sixteen weeks. But that is what the government routinely requires. It’s the industrial way.

Okay. So what should we make? What do you think you should make?