Poverty Is Not So Bad

OK, OK, I admit it. I wrote that title just so I could hear the howls of protest.

But the truth is that it’s pretty hard to define “poverty”. It means different things in different places and at different times. In the 1930s you were not poor if you weren’t vaccinated for polio because it didn’t exist, but you are now. And you may not agree with what I think are the truly unacceptable elements of poverty.

Income is an important determinant, but a more important one is the conditions that bring the common benefits of the period to all. For example, failing to protect all children with the vaccines available today is not only poverty, but is a type of apartheid. To me a certain minimal level of income is more like a sine qua non. If you don’t have that level of income, you are prevented from a decent life, but better income doesn’t necessarily mean you have one.

Poverty means different things
in different places and times.
Being above the poverty line
doesn’t necessarily mean you aren’t poor.

Many of those limiting conditions are cultural. What difference does income make if you are in danger of being shot walking out your front door on the way to work? What difference does your parents’ income make if you go to a school where the most significant student activity is avoiding learning anything of importance, and taking homework home could earn you an ambush?

Education. Learning. Knowledge. Know-how. These are the things that mark a person who not only is not poor, but is rich in the ways that money does not touch. It is not how one earns a living that is the most important factor. It is how good a citizen you are, how responsible you are to your family. Poor people are perfectly capable of pondering their political-economic situation and discussing it with logic and intelligence.

While an expensive education no doubt gives one a broader perspective and more background information, there are plenty of supposedly college educated people whose discussion of culture or politics may be shallow compared to a person with less formal education, but who wants to know what’s really going on. Someone who thinks and reads for herself, in other words.

While there are plenty of adults in the world who have little or no formal education, because it simply wasn’t available to them, the real poverty-stricken are those who had a free education until adulthood, but actively avoided benefiting from it. There are cultures in the US that actively suppress anything that might tell others that you actually know something important.

The real poverty-stricken had a free education,
but avoided benefiting from it.

One of them is in the red-dirt South. Young men, rarely women, ride around in pickup trucks, which seems to be their main goal in life. There are guns in the rack, and empty beer cans in the truck bed. Now and then they shoot at road signs, which are peppered with bullet holes all over the deep south. They may run moonshine, or drugs. If you should ask an important question of such types, you are likely to get a blank stare, because they are not even aware of the problems that affect them every day of their lives, let alone that they are the problem.

Urban African-Americans and Latinos face a different challenge that too often results in the same sort of utterly misplaced priorities. Criminal gangs (and all gangs are criminal) can make life dangerous for any urban kid. It’s very difficult for parents to remove their child from danger if they are threatened by gangsters, or of being hit by a stray bullet, because that requires more money than just being above the poverty line.

But the more serious outcome arrives with a kid who succumbs and joins the gang. He (almost always a he) learns to carry a weapon. He will be responsible for committing crime for the sake of the gang. He may be required to murder a member of another gang. He is likely to die in his mid-twenties. But, worst of all, his mind, his entire life, is wasted on the inconsequential, and he becomes emotionally and intellectually stricken with deep poverty he can never completely defeat even if he does survive.

The common thing linking these groups of mostly young men, besides guns, is their mental self-mutilation. They have purposely made themselves stupid, and doomed to a life without useful skills. They could all get a job pushing a broom, maybe, but many won’t have the self-discipline to keep it, let alone take it upon themselves to improve their intellectual life.

These groups of mostly young men
have mental self-mutilation in common.

Without doubt, the one thing that separates the educated from the dysfunctional impoverished is reading. It is tragic to find a high school kid who has never read a book, who in fact reads virtually nothing, and doesn’t even learn anything of importance from TV. Who considers reading a waste of his important time. In fact, he cannot read, in spite of years of opportunity.

To me, this is shocking and tragic, because this kid’s attitude will probably last forever, and he has purposely become an ignoramus whose life will be dragged down by other things than his native intelligence, things outside his control.

I know of travelers who have visited and become friends with people in deepest poverty in various parts of the world. They report that the very poor people they came to know led a rich life nonetheless. They had family, they had love, they had music, they had humor, they had culture and spirituality, and because of these their lives were rich, even in the absence of many of the blessings that only money can buy.

This is why I say it is not entirely the level of income that makes a person rich or poor. It is these other things that make life worth living, and they can be absent even with adequate income.

The Big Banks Cannot Be Controlled

Gar Alperovitz (What Then Must We Do?, recommended reading) recalls that a lot of distinguished economists and politicians realized long ago that nothing can be done to make the big banks into a reasonably democratic enterprise. They cannot be regulated. They employ armies of million-dollar-a-year lawyers for the expressed purpose of avoiding regulation. If they are broken apart they will simply continue doing what they always do, which is to buy smaller banks until they are too big again.

All that might be OK, if it weren’t for a few factors. Namely, the big bankers all to easily become corrupt and reckless, and endanger the entire national economy, even the world economy, as they did in 2008. They have little interest in the people from whom their billions come. As the losses to the American citizen crossed the $16-trillion mark and millions of lives were ruined, bankers announced the end of the recession and once again began rewarding themselves with annual bonuses hundreds of times larger than the median family income. And they continued buying smaller banks, even during the worst of the crisis, so that many of them are larger now than they were in 2007. Is it any wonder that a whole lot of Americans think defenestration (preferably from the 20th floor) would be suitable treatment for most bankers, as an article in the Atlantic suggested.

Conservative economists long ago understood
the impossibility of controlling banks.

The conservative economists of the Chicago School of Economics long ago understood the impossibility of controlling banks better than did liberals. For example, as Alperovitz notes, Nobel laureate George Stigler demonstrated how regulation became specifically designed for the benefit of the regulated industries.

Alas, what can be done?

One obvious part of the solution is to formally recognize that the conservatives were right, and crucial industries, particularly banking, that cannot be regulated should simply be nationalized. This does not mean that all banks should be run by the government. What it should mean is that government would control government business, such as the issuing of debt—the “printing of money”—which we presently rely on private banks to handle, for a big fee, of course. The big banks that do government business should be run by the government, and not farmed out to very-rich bankers whose primary interest is their own wealth.

Virtually every member of Congress
is beholden to big money powers.

Secondly, a new law separating the functions of banking from investment must be re-established, similar to the Glass-Steagall Act that was destroyed in a fit of freemarketism that proved disastrous for all but billionaire bankers.

This is a tall order for one obvious reason: the big banks quite literally own Congress. Virtually every member of Congress, is beholden to big money powers who not only bankroll their increasingly expensive re-election campaigns, but essentially dictate what they will do while in office. Thinking for themselves or actually representing the interests of their constituents becomes increasingly rare behavior among politicians.

So, is it impossible to nationalize the big banks? Not at all. We just did it. The problem is that we gave them back when we should have kept them. Or at least certain ones. The next time we face an economic crisis—all but guaranteed within the next decade—we should be ready to seize the banking that should be the responsibility of the government and not let go.

Banks that do government business
should be run by the government.

Gar Alperovitz tells us about something else about banking. Significant public and cooperative banking has been going on for a very long time, and such establishments are not readily subject to being consumed by larger banks. Some 7,200 credit unions manage more than a trillion dollars of assets, and perform all of the common services that banks do. (This is why you should move your money to one if you haven’t already.) There are also other non-commercial banking entities, including 140 federal banks and quasi-banks that provide loans and loan guarantees for a wide range of activities. The unique state bank of North Dakota saved the state from the worst of the Wall Street depravity, and now a majority of other states are looking into establishing a state bank.

Wall Street, which considers itself the epitome of free enterprise, nearly caused the collapse of the entire world economy in 2008. But as soon as disaster struck, they called on us, you and me, to rescue them from their headlong reckless irresponsibility. Bastions of democracy while the benefits fill their pockets; sudden socialists when their mendacity catches up to them.

We should seize the banking functions that government should control, and turn the rest loose to sink or swim. It may take us a long time to understand this truth that conservative economists realized long ago.

Bangladesh Is Our Personal Responsibility

Everyone knows about the recent tragedies in the sweat shops of Bangladesh, the collapse of an eight-story building with the loss of 1,127 lives, but also the factory fires that killed hundreds, and the others that keep happening. Those who have given it any thought at all realize that the inexpensive clothes we wear are purchased with the very lives of people forced by circumstance to labor under inhumane and dangerous conditions for very little pay. But that stops very few of us from buying that inexpensive clothing.

If you don’t believe that our clothes are inexpensive, take a look at old houses. The original closets often consist of one shallow space four feet wide, which was sufficient to hang one’s entire wardrobe back when. Remodeling often involves converting a small bedroom into one or two walk-in closets many times the size of the original closet space.

Our inexpensive clothing is bought
with the blood of the world’s poorest
and most exploited.

American retailers are busy trying to find ways to assure that disasters similar to the recent collapse won’t happen in the future. But they are talking only about Bangladesh garment workers, and many other industries in many other countries are no different. It’s a solution that is doomed to failure.

First, we can’t simply have our inspectors check out a factory every six months. They may well find that all is in order. Fire extinguishers, emergency exits, no dangerous materials, no risky machines, and so on. In Bangladesh, it was the local engineer-inspector, as well as the workers themselves, who warned management that the building had slipped into a dangerous condition and should be shuttered—which they ignored.

We cannot be assured that our cheap clothing doesn’t have blood on it if we look only at Bangladesh. Third world nations tend to have few laws and regulations protecting workers, let alone effectively enforced construction codes. If they did, our clothing wouldn’t come so cheap. In fact, right now buyers are busy looking at other countries with cheap prices, so that we can continue to buy underpriced things. “Friendly to business”, they call it, but what that really means is friendly to exploiters.

Far too many factory owners
are ruthless, driven by greed,
and have little interest in safety.

Far too many factory owners are ruthless in keeping production at maximum and safety at minimum. They pay as little as they can get away with, practice wage theft, and abuse workers in many other ways, even in the US. In China, conditions were so bad at FoxConn that dozens of workers jumped out of high windows rather than continuing to live in such misery. Thousands of workers everywhere have been injured by long exposure to unsafe chemicals used in manufacturing. But we still buy their blood-soaked goods. We don’t know how to avoid it, or we can’t resist the low price.

It becomes apparent that the world needs a global agreement to provide fair and safe working conditions for those who make things for others, regardless of what that does to prices at Walmart and Target.

Oh, oh, now we’re in big trouble, because to radical conservatives in the US any suggestion that a global problem requires a global solution means the fabled Secret Black Helicopters of the Secret New World Order will descend, the Secret African Armies will enslave us, the Secret United Nations plan to take away all our guns will be activated, and so on, yada-yada. Rand Paul, supposedly a serious presidential candidate in 2016, accused President Obama of working with “anti-American globalists” to “plot against our Constitution”. I doubt he means multinational corporations, which would at least be real entities. He’s really saying we need more guns. Reality means nothing to such people.

Either we control greed
or we accept that our purchases
are bought with the blood and suffering
of the world’s poor.

Therein lies the real problem. Either we devise ways to overcome the nitwittery of the far right and control the greed of manufacturers everywhere, or we simply accept the fact that our purchases are bought with the blood and suffering of the world’s poorest. In the long term, this means we must have fair treatment for all working people. That won’t mean everyone earns an American income. It means everyone would work under satisfactory conditions, including safety, humane treatment, reasonable hours, and fair pay. Things would cost more, but there wouldn’t be so much blood on them. The trouble is that the capitalist system is inherently tilted toward the opposite, a world of gross inequality, with the benefits and money going to the capitalists, and the rest working for low pay in dangerous conditions under the heel of the greedy.

Everyday Socialism, Or How We Actually Pay for Things

Conservatives decry “socialism” with quivering jowls and red face. And it’s all hot air. They would be the first to complain if the everyday socialism they rely on were suddenly removed and they had to pay for their public benefits themselves.

When Obama won a second term there was a great hue and cry about seceding because he would surely lead us directly into socialism—which somehow hasn’t happened since conservatives first made the claim in 1857. When secession was hot I suggested those interested should indeed secede, but they would then be required to pay the actual cost for the American public services they use, that they currently enjoy for free, such as highways, the electric grid, airports, communications, and so on. But then, secession was as much hot air as the bloviating about “socialism”.

Conservative hot air about “socialism”
distracts us from the demise of democracy
and the rise of inequality.

As a democratic nation that has greatly benefited from social programs from the first, we can only wonder what the hell conservatives are so exercised about. But I’m being disingenuous. It’s basically a distraction to make us think that our public programs are the same as the spectacularly unsuccessful state socialism that does not reward individual initiative. This distracts us from the gradual compromise of the democratic principles on which our country was founded, and the erosion of the fortunes of everyone but the rich.

Conservatives also want us to believe that government programs are inherently inefficient, that virtually everything would be better managed by private enterprise. Balderdash. Take Gar Alperovitz’ example (from What Then Must We Do?, recommended reading) of publicly owned utilities. There are over 2,000 of them, and they provide dependable electric power to a quarter of the nation at significantly lower cost than private utilities. This is because private utilities are compelled to pay profit to stockholders, and they pay their executives twenty-five times as much as the perfectly competent managers of publicly owned utilities. Moreover, when privately owned utilities are threatened with conversion to public, they reliably respond with a campaign of carefully timed blatant lies that claim electric rates will skyrocket and we will march directly into socialism. Of course they would say that. Going public would end the ongoing party they enjoy at the public’s expense.

Private utility executives are
overpaid by twenty-five times.

Everyday socialism in the US includes a growing number of cities that are earning revenue by utilizing the land they own. Among the first to be established was Boston’s Faneuil Market, next to historic Faneuil Hall. It returns a portion of the profit of its businesses to the city instead of property tax. This brings in 40% more than property tax might. Other cities lease out land near transportation hubs. A number have fully or partially owned hotels, convention centers, hospitals, and other businesses, which earn a beneficial percentage of profit for the local government. A rising number of communities are developing methane recovery facilities at landfill sites, and other green ventures.

Various state retirement systems have shown themselves to be well managed, contradicting conservative claims, even showing increased value during economic crisis. Nineteen states provide assistance to worker-owned companies, and a number of others provide assistance for training, technical assistance, and other programs. Twenty-three states directly invest public funds in startup companies. In the great conservative bastion of Texas, the 150-year-old Texas Permanent School Fund owns half the public land and associated mineral rights. Profit from this socialist enterprise distributes about two billion dollars to Texas schools every year.

Everyday socialism is all around us,
common and efficient.

Alperovitz makes these points to show us that conservatives’ much heralded loathing of “socialism” is belied by the everyday socialism found all around us, even in firmly conservative locations. Later I’ll mention some other little-known economic developments.

A footnote:

Remember E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful? Here is a new article from the Schumacher Center, an interesting summary of what’s going on with the Mondragon organization. Mondragon is now about 60 years old. It was started by a village priest in Spain’s Basque region, where he envisioned that a worker-owned company would give 20% of their profits to help the local community and to establish new businesses. The concept was outrageously successful, even during times of economic crisis. Mondragon now has over 100 cooperatives employing over 100,000 persons and grossing some €6-billion ($7.8-billion) a year.

When unemployment in Spain hit 27%,
unemployment at Mondragon was still zero.

Enterprises include a bank, Caja Laboral, which is doing very well. But when Spain joined the Euro zone the bank was forced by regulators to diversifying into “safe” Wall Street banks. This wise advice cost Mondragon $40M when those safe banks folded due to their reckless gambling. It’s also worth noting that while there is 27% general unemployment and 57% youth unemployment in Spain right now (with the conservative government claiming that recovery is just around the corner), Mondragon has zero unemployment, because the co-ops do not fire employees to maintain profit, and because they shift workers between co-ops as needed. Mondragon has a number of other forward-looking enterprises that benefit not only their workers and their families, but their communities, the Basque territory, and the whole country.

The Test of Social Utility

Here is my criterion to determine whether a job or occupation deserves to exist: does it contribute something of value of the community, to the society or the nation. I call it the test of social utility. Surely, lots of others must have had the same idea, but I haven’t seen them so far.

It seems to me that any work that contributes toward the maintenance or betterment of society as a whole is work that is worthy, whether humble or exalted, and should be supported with helpful laws and a positive public attitude. Conversely, any work that has a negative effect on society fails the test, and should be illegal and shunned by all people.

Does it contribute something of value.

Consider common criminal activities, such as car theft, drug dealing, burglary, and so on. These make negative contributions to society, removing value from the common good, and are rightfully unlawful, because they fail the test of social utility and harm their victims, who are ultimately the rest of us. But other jobs that fail the test are not so obvious.

Certain people have said that nearly half of the population are worthless moochers, who are too lazy to contribute anything toward social wellbeing. They (we) prefer to live forever on welfare, and never work a day in our life. How true is that?

Not at all, it turns out. Not that there aren’t lazy people; there are plenty in Congress. Figures that are bandied about by conservative pundits purport that welfare comes to some $168 per day, nearly 50-grand a year. This nonsense, a figure dreamed up by conservative think tanks counts disaster relief and similar non-welfare moneys as welfare payments. By the time it was filtered through Republican congressional staff and put out for inflation by gasbag pundits, those who are in dire trouble are found to be actually rolling in dough, to their great surprise.

It’s very easy to demonstrate social utility.

What’s more, there are many who claim that generation after generation of families live totally on welfare. They seem to have forgotten that there is a general lifetime limit of five years for welfare receipt.

But that’s a distraction. The fact is, the desire to work and earn a living is strong and all but universal, notwithstanding the lethargic in Congress and elsewhere. And those being publicly supported are mostly the aged, the ill, the injured, the disabled, students, or children. The remainder are between jobs or are so badly underpaid they cannot escape poverty.

A number of occupations clearly fail
the test of social utility.

Unfortunately, there are a number of other occupations that clearly fail the test of social utility. Here’s some of them: hedge fund financing, derivatives banking, computerized trading. (For a glimpse of what one-half second of computerized trading in one stock looks like, click here. Millions of such trades occur every second.) There are other unworthy jobs, but these three seem to me to be occupations that cannot demonstrate that they perform a socially useful service in spite of the mega-riches they provide for their purveyors. They do not improve business or commerce. The money they earn does not benefit the public; nobody other than themselves and their investors benefits. They function for the sole purpose of making themselves and their clients rich, and the richest of them, hedge fund manager David Tepper, did so to the tune of $2,200,000,000 last year. That comes to $2,203 per second, and without doubt is one of a number of factors that have boosted our inequality to a level seen last in Tsarist Russia.

Hedge fund financers, derivatives bankers,
computerized trading bankers, and certain others
cannot demonstrate that they perform
a socially useful service.

The thing is, it’s super-simple to show that your work benefits society. Anyone who cleans things, sells things, moves things, tests things, and so on, is obviously contributing to the betterment of society, no matter how humble the work. Bankers make things possible. Auto mechanics keep us rolling. Business folk keep our cities humming. Safety experts keep us from running into each other.

But there are far too many at the upper edge of income whose work provides no genuine benefit to society as a whole. Instead, they benefit only themselves, with enormous sums of money, money that nobody can possibly claim they actually earn. The occupations that fail the test of social utility appear to fall into two categories: crime and money manipulation.

Figuring Out “Next”

It’s becoming apparent to more and more people that both of the primary economic systems in the world today have fatal flaws that punish the innocent and fail to provide for the common good. But if you don’t like either corporate democracy or state socialism, what do you want?

Allow me to introduce Gar Alperovitz, of the University of Maryland, whose most recent book What Then Must We Do? gives us the broadest look at the situation that I have found so far. I’ll try to capsulize some of what he says across several posts in coming weeks.

The big problem is that the very system itself is at fault.

I have a stack of books on the topic of what to do next. In every case, the author has a suggestion. In each case, the suggestion centers around a single idea. Alperovitz does not presume there is a single solution. In fact, he does not presume to know what must be done. What he does is to summarize the situation, including many facts and figures not commonly known, and a number of changes that have been made already, also not widely known. What he suggests is that we start applying ourselves to the problem, while at the same time finding short-term solutions to the problems that plague us at present.

The big problem is that the very system itself is at fault. The corporate economy concentrates ever more money in ever fewer hands, and the lot of everyone else erodes, little by little. This is inevitable, part of the DNA of the system. You’ve all seen the charts. If not, look at this one and you will have no doubt. In fact, you should look at it anyway, even if you’ve seen it before.

We cannot adjust and jigger the current system to make it right. The problems are deeper than that. Of course we must do everything we can to improve our situation while the new system defines itself. In time, if we are lucky, we will devise an entirely new economic system that does a much better job of providing for all people, not just the rich. But it’s not a given, and there is no timetable.

The problems are too deep to
jigger and adjust the current system.

What is it that the economy should give to every person, even the poorest? No one would say we’ll all be rich. That’s a bit like saying everyone will be above average. But the poorest should benefit from the important advances of the time, and must not lack for anything essential for modern life. So, for example, we have vaccines for many diseases that were once killers. They must be readily available to all, and good medical care must be available equally to all. Estimates are that 120 Americans die every day because they cannot get treatment. No one should die for lack of medical care. Medical care needn’t be luxurious to be satisfactory; it just needs to be. At present it exists only for those who can pay. But plasma TV, cars, electronic gadgets, and other toys are not part of the mix.

I have championed worker-owned companies in this blog, but there are many other democratic arrangements Alperovitz tells us about that I will mention in coming posts. To begin with, 40% of all Americans are members of some form of cooperative, including electrical, insurance, retail, health care, credit unions, land trusts, and many more. Credit unions are the largest, with about $1T in assets. If you want to get your money out of the clutches of out-of-control bankers, a credit union is a good place to start.

The free-marketers are blowing hot air
about the role of government.

The free-marketers are blowing hot air about the role of government. Their faith says that less government is always better. But of course they all accept and use the many things that only government can provide, such things as highways and communications.

They also neglect to mention the huge role that extortion plays in their operations. It’s now routine for corporations to demand special treatment in return for locating in a specific city or state. Tax breaks. Free land. They call that being “good for business”. One cannot logically claim to be a free-marketer while at the same time demanding special privileges. And they do demand special privileges, so it’s quite clear they are blowing hot air when the go on about the so-called free market.

This routine favoritism costs us up to $200,000 per job produced. It costs us in government revenue loss; it does not benefit the tax account. Moreover, it’s an addiction that doesn’t end, leading to further demands that, if not extorted, can end with absconding to someplace still more compliant. Not unlike the global market situation. This has a disastrous effect on the local economy, because all sorts of support businesses and the local government come to depend on the larger corporation, and are then abandoned. To my way of thinking, the billionaire owners of sports teams are the worst, because they demand that a new multi-million dollar stadium be built at our expense, but for the exclusive use of their team and no one else. Do they then favor the fans with reasonable ticket prices? Not on your life. It has nothing to do with the sport.

Next: The everyday socialism we already benefit from, and some better ways of paying for things.

OK, Then, A Flat Tax on Wealth

Nobody’s talking about a flat tax much these days. I think it should be brought back into the discussion.

The reason it’s not on the table at the moment is that such a tax would fall disproportionately on the poor, just as sales tax does, and Congress is loathe to risk rioting in the streets if it were imposed. That may be wise, but they have no such compunctions about actually hurting the poor over the past four decades. However, I think we could make one minor adjustment that would solve the whole problem: tax wealth rather than income.

One minor adjustment would solve the whole problem:
tax wealth rather than income.

Here are a few numbers. The total wealth of individuals in the US is about $120-trillion. Present total federal tax revenue is about $3-trillion. Tax on wealth, therefore would be 2.5%.

Unlike a flat 10% income tax, which would come to $2,000 for an income of $20,000, a poor family has almost no actual wealth to tax. A used car, a TV, appliances, furniture. So their wealth tax would be close to zero.

The mega-rich would no doubt be especially unhappy
that their taxes would no longer be half of
what their employees pay.

But your one-billionaire, he would have to cough up $25,000,000 every year. Your one-millionaire: $25,000. Now that’s more reasonable.

Those in the ultra-high brackets would no doubt make major complaints. They would be especially unhappy that their taxes would no longer be half of what their employees pay. This wouldn’t surprise me, because they complain about paying any taxes at all—they being the “job creators”, after all, and they expect the rest of us to worship them for their selfless service. Never mind that they haven’t done much in the way of job creating for years, not to mention that their service is hardly what one could call selfless.

This is all more than a little tongue-in-cheek.

This is all more than a little tongue-in-cheek, because Congress, being the fully-owned property of the corporations and the mega-rich, could not conceive of changing the tax code in any way that required the rich to pay more and failed to penalize the poor for being the lazy moochers all Republicans know they are.

And it’s not what I think would solve so many of the fiscal problems of the country anyway.

The single most beneficial change
would be to implement Living Wage laws.

The single change that would be the most beneficial would be to implement Living Wage laws, in which the lowest full-time incomes would be possible to live on, albeit simply, something we don’t even come close to now. Minimum wage is Poverty Wage. In fact, the restaurant minimum of $2.13 per hour hasn’t changed in 22 years, and you can’t live on it even with generous tip income. Living Wage would by itself simply evaporate the bulk of poverty in the country, leaving only those truly unable to earn their living. Inequality would be greatly eased, which by itself has numerous positive side effects. And federal tax revenue would be increased at the same time welfare needs would fall.

Not a bad deal for something so simple.

Futurecast

It’s my turn with the crystal ball this week, so I thought a little light prognostication about coming developments in moving people around would be in order. This is about getting around in cars and things, but in the long run we must find ways to get around less, which means completely reorganizing our world, which we’re not doing. (See Casey Mulligan in the NYT.) Meantime…

Sorry, no flying cars, but I do think transportation in general is due for some serious modernization. All this stuff is pretty much available now, but we are slow to change, and stubborn. We like tradition. Tourists love San Francisco’s old cable cars and antique streetcar collection. There was a huge uproar when Buenos Aires decided to get rid of their old wooden streetcars recently.

Sorry, no flying cars.

Consider the “trolley”. We call them “light rail” these days, but they are anything but light. There is no reason that most of the parts of a modern subway or street car could not be made from lighter and stronger materials. The stuff of tennis rackets and airplanes. Developers are working on that. Putting every single part on a diet will save big bucks. When these cars are lighter overall, it will not be necessary to have massive undercarriage and wheels. When cars are light, the business part of the wheel could be made of some miracle nylon-like material, which could be easily replaced. We’ll all appreciate the quiet. We’re already used to automatic announcements and information about the next arrival, but there are still lots of electronic and communications improvements ahead.

Modern light rail should be made
from far lighter and stronger materials.

Several subway deaths have been in the news lately. Subway cars should have devices that detect an obstruction on the tracks and trigger an automatic stop. Suicide by subway is not uncommon either. Most of these could be thwarted in the case of high speed trains by barriers at the station, which are already common in Beijing and a number of other cities, others by auto-stop devices.

Busses too can be further modernized, along the same lines. I like the development you see all over the Americas these days, of dedicated bus paths in the middle of a wide boulevard, with an elevated passenger platform in the middle serving busses in both directions. Passengers have already paid, so busses have but to open their doors and they walk in. Huge numbers of people are moved quickly, with little waiting. But here is something more modern sounding we will see pretty soon: autonomous vehicles. (Yes, I know, jobs, but it’s inevitable.)

In a few years: autonomous taxis,
busses, shuttles, and streetcars.

In many cities and smaller towns it is relatively easy to have main transportation lines that carry large numbers of people, which will need human operators for some time. It’s harder to bring public transit to less populated neighborhoods. But suppose you could summon a small vehicle with your smartphone, designating where and when you want to be picked up and where you want to go. A small, driverless car arrives at the assigned time, you enter and confirm your reservation using your phone, and it takes you to a major transportation line a few blocks away, or directly to your destination. Payment is made for the whole trip, and is handled electronically, much like the electronic cards common everywhere.

Cars are not likely to vanish any time soon, but they could and should have markedly new abilities. All of these have been in the works for some time now, and await only for the world to catch up.

The steering wheel and brake pedal are
anachronisms we tolerate for nostalgia’s sake.

Driverless cars are already in development. The three things that make them increasingly practical are GPS, sensing devices on the car, and various types of sensors imbedded in roadways. Google has been working on this for some time, as have virtually all car makers. Remember that big car in the TV ad that parked itself between stacks of wine glasses? Cool. But it had to be positioned exactly right to do it. There’s no reason all cars cannot do the job with much less fuss and more accuracy. Carbon dioxide is the main contributor to global warming. How about a device that is part of a car’s cooling system that takes air in and removes carbon dioxide. Easy enough to do with particulate emissions, but can it be done with carbon dioxide?

Personal driving is overdue for some changes too. The steering wheel and pedals are anachronisms we tolerate mostly for nostalgia’s sake. There is no reason that driver controls cannot immediately be replaced by a joystick device, making the driver’s seat more commodious and comfortable. Oh, and mirrors should go away in favor of cameras that project a wide-angle image at the top of the windshield. Some cabs in NYC already have these.

Your driverless car will go where you tell it,
drop you off, and go park itself
at an electronically reserved spot.
Later it will come get you.

Likewise, even such futuristic things as summoning your car to pick you up after you finish your shopping, or even to tell your car to go find a parking place, are within reach. We can already find where parking places are. It’s only an additional step to putting “dibs” on one and sending your car off to park there.

No practical flying cars, I’m afraid, but I have a suggestion for a small plane for short flights, taking off and landing on designated strips not much larger than a driveway. It is very light, with broad wings, and can be airborne in a very short distance at low speed. It would move passengers between runways less than 100 miles apart. There is no pilot, of course. It would be great for people who live some distance from a big airport. [Later: check this out.]

Trucks aren’t going away either. One improvement might be computerized rear end steering. When the rear wheels can be steered, a long vehicle can turn into a much more narrow street. Like the fire department’s long hook-n-ladder, only no one has to sit back there to do it.

Let’s not forget bicycles, which are becoming increasingly important and popular, not long after the swarms of them in China vanished in favor of millions of polluting cars. But safety and comfort can and should be improved in dozens of ways, primary among them mandatory lights and helmets. How about sensors that warn of impending danger, or even of a car in a blind spot? Some such devices could be in the helmet, and sound a warning or even project an image on a “windshield”. How about built-in theft-proofing devices which lock both wheels and anchor the frame to a bike rack.

(If you want to ride without a helmet, I suggest twenty-to-forty million in mandatory insurance coverage. That way the rest of us won’t have to pay for the continual care you will require for the rest of your life after a bad brain injury.)

CVT would revolutionize bicycling.

Continuously variable transmission would revolutionize biking. CVTs are part of the Prius and several other cars. There are no discrete gears. Rather, the transmission smoothly adjusts to the pressure needed to move the car forward. On bikes, the rider would always pedal with the same pedal pressure, and of course that pressure would be adjustable to the rider’s preference. Going up hills is slower, because more total energy is required, but pedal pressure remains the same. When starting from a stop, the bike goes slowly at first, with constant pedal pressure, but soon the wheels are turning at normal speed.

For several decades into the computer age I expected that things would come to a sort of stasis, that development would settle into something that would last for a while. What has happened instead is that new developments have actually accelerated, and are still accelerating, and not just in computers. We have no idea what the future will bring. All we know is that it will be astonishing.

Build a House in Haiti

The French ruined the newly free nation of Haiti after 1803 by suing for the value of their slave plantations lost to the revolution. The unenlightened Haitians, being ex-slaves and mostly uneducated, agreed, rather than suing France for a couple centuries of unpaid labor as they should have, and it took nearly a century and a half to clear the debt.

But the Americans were worse, beginning with President Thomas Jefferson. He, being a slave owner, was worried that the slave rebellion in Haiti might inspire an American slave rebellion. To discourage that, he meddled with the Haitian economy to ensure their failure and poverty. We followed over the next two centuries with various invasions and occupations, support of dictators and bad leaders, suppression and kidnapping of good leaders, trade embargoes and dirty dealings, and the usual demand that Haiti deal with us as a free market against our heavy government subsidies. Is it any wonder Haiti is such a mess?

Then the earthquake struck, and everything fell down, killing lots of government officials, at least 220,000 others, and leaving thousands of orphans.

The French, then the US, have ruined Haiti
ever since their independence in 1803.
Then the earthquake struck.

In the three years and several months since, the monumental work of saving Haiti has been going on, but only about half of the help promised by the US and others after the quake actually arrived, leaving hundreds of thousands of Haitians trapped in blue-tarp refugee camps, with no employment and precarious health conditions. Recent reports have been discouraging. As usual, once the disaster was no longer news, people forgot about it. The promised aid either didn’t arrive or was misspent, leaving 400,000 still homeless three years later. But there are also bright points.

A number of excellent NGOs were there long before the quake, but found their mission transformed by the huge long-term commitment required post-quake. Among those was Habitat for Humanity, which worldwide provides a new or rebuilt home every 5-1/2 minutes. Habitat’s usual worldwide plan is to require able bodied people who need a house to invest a significant amount of sweat equity, meaning that they work long and hard for it, and are acutely aware of the value of the home they are moving into. But all that was changed by the quake and the sheer volume of need. The immediate need was for shelter, any shelter, and Habitat and others contributed many thousands of kits to build blue-tarp temporary shelters.

Next came the impossible task of building more stable homes for the hundreds of thousands in the camps. Over 4,000 upgradable shelters have been built by Habitat, a tiny part of the need. These have a permanent cement foundation, wooden frame, tin roof, and plywood walls (shown below with a proud new owner). These homes can be expanded and made permanent with cement block walls as economic conditions improve. So far, over 300 “core” homes have also been built. These are stronger and more permanent from the first, and are also expandable.

But, despite the desolate conditions, what Haitians need and want most is gainful employment, not homes. Unemployment is about 60%, and with permanent work they could buy or build their own homes. For many NGOs, their work is basically nullified if they fail to provide permanent opportunities for their clients. This is true everywhere in the world.

The best NGOs have caught on to this. In Haiti, Habitat trained 6,600 people in construction, construction business practices, financial literacy, and health and hygiene. More than 2,100 have found outside jobs through Habitat. Paul Farmer’s Partners in Health has provided work to Haitians for a large percentage of their operations in Haiti, everything from doctors to rural workers who regularly check on patients in far away homes.

The need is enormous. In spite of our debt to Haiti for having ruined so much for so long, our government is not helping much. Every dollar you and I send is enormously helpful.

The “Natural” Level of Crime

It’s my unscientific belief that most people are basically good and trustworthy. It also seems unarguable that there is a small percentage of people that are basically not good. But the question that has bugged me for a long time is how many people are like that when the world is at its best. What is the natural percentage of those who are naturally bad, and how would you find out?

There are all kinds of problems in any such investigation. For one, it seems natural that virtually nobody can afford to be totally virtuous if he is starving (not to mention that it’s virtually impossible to be totally virtuous anyway). But one assumes that such a person would return to the virtuous path in better times.

Most people are basically good.
How many are basically bad?

A digression. I was once told of a guy who traveled a lot and seemed to get mugged wherever he went. He was accosted in a southern Asian city by a very skinny man wielding a butter knife and demanding money. Our guy could count every one of this man’s ribs, and was immediately sympathetic to this robber with a butter knife. So he whipped out his wallet and presented all his money to the man, who refused it. Some argument ensued, after which the man reluctantly accepted half the money, and, we assume, was at least able to keep his family alive a few more weeks.

Obviously, this was an honorable man who became a robber only under the duress of extreme poverty and starvation. But there seem to be plenty of others who choose to be a bad guy for no particular reason. Why? Why are there people who believe that their real fault was that they got caught, not that they have done something that is universally condemned?

Why are there people who believe
that their real fault was that they got caught.

There also seem to be a few people who suffer from abnormal brain development or from a mental illness that prevents them from feeling empathy. They do atrociously cruel things to others simply because they are incapable of empathy. That’s not unlike children who pull the legs or wings off of insects, when you think about it.

Consider the worst of the worst, the violent career criminal, the serial murderer. Those who have studied these monsters say that every such person without exception suffered a truly horrible childhood. They were treated cruelly beyond belief by the parents who were supposed to nurture them. Usually their parents were criminals and addicts, and they abused their children in many ways, including regular beatings and constantly belittling them as worthless to the extreme. Yet even such extreme abuse does not lead inexorably to a life of violent crime.

Violent career criminals without exception
suffered a truly horrible childhood.

If even one person steps up to make such a kid understand that he has value, his life can be saved, and there will be no future victims. The big if is that this must happen before it’s too late. There seems to be a threshold moment, after which such a person is lost. The cusp probably occurs in middle or late adolescence. If a young person is helped before that point, he can be saved. There are many teachers and others who have assumed this role, and the world is a far better place for it.

If a child grows up with abuse, and without guidance, the likelihood is high that he will be exactly the kind of parent his parents were, carrying the abuse to the next generation, and the one after that. The good news is that both he and the next generation can be saved by wise teachers, counselors, religious leaders, and other relatives who teach a young person about ideals, if only by example.

The good news is that both the mistreated teen
and the next generation can be saved.

We should also remember that environmental lead is such a powerful poison for babies and toddlers that environmental exposure to it can cripple their brain development at a crucial stage, which often shows up as bad behavior and criminal activity two decades later. This is our failure, not the child’s.

Another complication in my study is that there is no clear-cut correlation between crime and the level of poverty or inequality. For instance, shootings in the US peaked in the 1970s, and have fallen steadily since, while inequality has grown steadily worse. At the same time, the number of guns has increased, yet the number of families owning guns has decreased sharply.

In fact, as Steven Pinker shows us in his book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, the actual level of violence has been steadily falling for centuries. The violence in daily news reporting hides this trend from us, because it is violence that gets reported, not normal life. The sea change we haven’t noticed is our attitude toward others. There are still far too many people whose idea of fun is to hurt someone, or some animal, but it used to be that most people accepted such cruelties as normal. The numbers of people and countries who specifically reject violence and cruelty rises slowly but steadily.

The actual level of violence
has been steadily falling for centuries.

Unfortunately, the necessary task that will never end is to civilize each and every young person in each and every generation directly. To give each one of them moral guidance, and show them how to behave. Boys in particular need to be taught, because they become men in body long before their brains are fully equipped to make sound moral and ethical judgments for themselves. They are capable of violence because they have a man’s strength, but without a man’s judgment. They must be taught to use their strength wisely. The papers are full of reports of young men who have already made bad choices that will stunt their futures, or maybe even trap them into a life of crime. It all points up the importance of direct, personal training for young people, males especially.

So my question—What is the “natural” level of crime?—appears to be unanswerable. What we can say is that, since the long-term trend is down, the “natural” level is lower than it is now. What we can say is that every young person needs guidance to understand right and wrong, and respect for others. That’s encouraging, but it reminds us that we can never, ever, be complacent.