Economic is Everything

I wish that I had studied economics.

For the past year or two I have been thinking that economics is the root cause of all decisions. Not economics in the normal sense of transactions involving money, but rather economics as always trying to obtain increase. Now this increase could be in prestige, influence, knowledge, faith, or anything which an individual values.

The theory is that for every type of situation (with kids, with spouse, family, work, school, church, bar, whatever) a person has a hierarchy of values; for example when I am at school my values, are getting information, socializing, grades, and networking in that order. However, when at home my values shift to making wife happy, making kids happy, sleeping in that order.

I think that whenever a decision needs to be made there is a mental process of comparing the foreseeable results of a decision in the view of how you will gain with respect to the values of the situation. So at home I am faced with a decision of helping a child play a game or helping my wife cook dinner, this one is easy because I can help the child increasing the child's happiness which in turn increases my wife's happiness and I acted in accordance with my top two values generating good feeling for me. When I am at work however, and a child needs help I ignore it, or spend little time or effort on the problem because my values are different and a child's happiness is much farther down on the list than production. 

The interesting part of this theory comes when two different value sets that are in opposition come into contact. The hypothetical would be in a business setting where the top value is acquisition of wealth and an opportunity comes along to greatly increase wealth but is illegal. This then effects not only the work value system but also potentially social values (increased prestige if it works, or shunning if it fails), religious/moral values (right versus wrong) and possibly others. Before a decision can be made a person must determine which values have the highest priority and which value set will generate the greatest return on the decision made.

I thought that with this system a researcher could figure out the values of individuals in a way that you could begin to determine how a person will act in any given situation. The problem is that the whole premise rests on circular logic;

A person acts in a certain way because of the value set in play during certain situations.

How do you know what they value?

Because of how they acted. 

Why did the person act that way? 

Because of their values......

but it is still fun to think about.

Us vs. Them

Here is another question that I have been wondering about for a year or two; how do groups form and maintain a common identity, or distinguish between "us" and "them".

I read a book for school dealing with the termination phase of U.S. Indian relations. In the book the govt. wanted to terminate the special status of American Indians by paying off outstanding debts. The legislative leader was a senator from Utah, and he wanted to show how well the system worked on the Utah Indians. The Ute reservation in Utah had three different Ute tribes, two from Colorado, and one from Utah. As the Utes saw the writing on the wall they made a strategic move in deciding who was "us". They decided that anyone of the tribe with 50% Ute blood or less would be considered them, or other. This decision affected the Utah Utes the most as they had interbred more than the other Ute tribes. When the termination order came around the Ute leadership struck a deal that only those "other" Utes would be terminated and the rest would maintain their Indian status.

To me this seems like a logical and deliberate step in the definition of "us" for economic and political reasons, and I'm OK with that. I wonder if there is ever a time when those are not the reasons why we define groups the way we do.

During the Cold War the us/them mentality was a common propagandistic tool, just as it was in WWII, WWI, and anytime a group of people feel the need to be mobilized against another.

I think that part of this might come out of the western religious traditions which are all dualistic in nature, and this spills over into all other thought processes.

Maybe that is false, because even in non-dualistic traditions the us/them issue arises. I have also heard that when ever there are more than three or four people in close proximity an us/them situation will develop. I listened to a thing on the bio-dome experiment and although all the people in there were scientists and friends groups formed that were antagonist towards each other. 

This is not to say that the groups aren't fluid, change in who is in or out can happen quite rapidly and also depends on the circumstances. If you look at the typical family model there are levels of us/them: 

1. my wife and children 
   
2. my parents and siblings 
   
3. parents and siblings in-law 
   
4. grandparent, aunts, uncles and cousins
   
5. grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins in-law
   

Really I think that it all has to do with economics, not just economics of money, but economics writ large, of trading or working in someway for something be it money, status, information, but that is another post.

Is reality consensus driven

Over the past couple of years my Grandfather has gone crazy. At least that is what I say when the subject comes up, but there is much more to it than that.

The real issue is that my Grandfather now perceives certain aspects of his current situation in a different light then the majority of people around him.

Now there are many things that people perceive differently every day, from words spoken, to the precise hue of a color. So what is the "problem" with my grandfather?

As I see it the problem is that his view is just different enough to cause problems with the rest of society, and has far ranging effects on those around him.

The idea of perception influencing reality has been around for a long time and has its own brach of philosophy called metaphysics which studies the nature of reality.

Doctors know about the phenomena and refer to it as the placebo effect.

This difference in perception is also one of the ways you can tell that a person is very well encultureated, because they can not perceive the world in anyway other then how they have been taught.

That being said, it seems that reality is really consensus driven; as long as the majority of people perceive things in mostly similar ways then there is no problem. However, when the is a perception that falls outside of the culturally appropriate boundaries the person is called crazy and in our society often institutionalized. 

This may seems as unfair, because who is to say that one perception is more valid than another? But if there was no unifying thread the only reality I can see would be chaos, but that is just my own perception.

Help Please

At school we have been working on a fabulous project. There is a daycare called Neighborhood House in Salt Lake that provides daycare for children and disabled adults for low income families. A number of years ago they acquired an acre and a half of land in-between their exisiting property and the Jordan River. It has been vacant, growing very good thistles for years, but it is now time for a change.

Our graduate workshop was asked to develop some plans to use this land. We were asked to try and make a spot for the community to enjoy while making the space work with Neighborhood House's existing program.

We talked with the staff, the kids, the adult clients, potential funders, and people from the community to figure out what should be on the site. In the end each student (all five of us) came up with our own design based on the input from our earlier meetings.

All of our designs are on this blog http://neighborhoodhousegardenproject.blogspot.com.

We need some help in figuring out the cost for some of our design elements, as well as general thoughts on the designs.

If you have a moment please look at the site and give us some feedback.

Thanks

I've been thinking about energy recently. The new administration has expressed a  desire to push forward with alternative energy and I think that it is a fabulous idea.

I have been wondering if certain areas could make alternative energy the basis of their economy, exporting it out to surrounding regions.

The area that I think about the most in this regard is Nevada (and parts of Wyoming). It seems to me that it would be the perfect place for large solar arrays, or wind farms. The place is desolate, with small farming towns, that really makes one wonder about the sanity of people who try and farm crops in the desert, or high plains. However the farming of energy, especially renewable energy would be ideal for boosting the local, and regional economy and providing for more secure and stable national energy environment.

The only problem I can see with this plan is transmission. I don't know the best way to get the energy from the middle of nowhere to the more energy consumptive cities.

My other energy thought comes from a show I saw on a German policy, where the legislature provided people with twice the amount of money for putting into the energy grid than it cost to withdraw from the grid. Basically there was no way that you could not make money if you installed a windmill or solar panels. The images shown were of thousands of houses with solar panels on them, solar panels on the side of the major roads, and out in the range land with cattle and sheep grazing beneath them.

I though this was a great idea. The government provided the proper incentive for people to make an initial, completely safe investment. Then when the bills term expires the country is blanketed with a renewable energy source and is less dependent on the more volatile international energy market. All that and it's good for the environment.

Apocalypse 2012

So I watched part of a show the other night about various prophecies that foretold the end of the world. Among the things discussed were the oracle at Delphi, the prophecies of Nostradamus, the I Ching, and the Mayan calendar.  Most of the show was dumb, (by which I mean overly speculative and reading way to much into the texts) but there was an interesting point that was brought up. We credit the ancient people with setting the ground work for modern civilization, but deny any place in our own cosmology for their belief in non-scientific ways of knowing. Having a background in anthropology, archaeology, and history it still suprises me how often we assume that our knowledge is greater than those people who came before us. I read an article in the NY times a year ago about how a pattern on a mosque used mathematics so advanced that our scholars only figured it out a few years ago.

The people in the past were not any less smart then we are now, but working with different information and with a different lens for sifting through the information that they had.

This ties into a problem I have with a lot of adults, and treating kids like they are stupid. I remember offering up ideas as a child and getting derided solely on the basis of my youth. No I am not saying that my ideas were great, or even right, but if they weren't right it was most likely because I lacked sufficient information to come to a "correct" conclusion. Now that I am an adult I get all sorts of people to listen to me, but my thought process hasn't changed much if at all from when I was younger.

I guess that the point of this is that maybe the ancients (or kids) have a lot more to offer then we really give them credit for. Being adults we are indoctrinated by culture and educational disciplines to see things in a certain way and ignore other potentially valid information. Maybe if we take a step away from what is "appropriate" we will better understand our world.

Climate Change pt 3 - Suburbs

The aspect of this climate change lecture I attended that I really questioned was that creating more dense urban environments would lower vehicle miles traveled and thereby CO2 emissions and that this would be good for slowing/stopping climate change.

But if more people move into the cities and create denser environments won't we be puching out the people who are already there. There is data to suggest that the new move into the cities is concentrated in the middle and upper class, which would mean the displacement of the lower classes that currently reside in cities. These poor people will be pushed out into the suburbs where housing prices are cheaper. From there they will have to drive into the cities for work, most likely with older cars that are not as fuel efficient. Since there are a lot more poor people than rich people and they will all be driving now the whole climate change benefit will be negated.

Although climate change will not be affected by this development some other things will. Emergency services, and various social welfare opereations currently opperate mostly in cities where their clientele are, mostly concentrated and with access to public transportation. What will happen when the people who need these services are more spread out and there isn't good public transit?
What will happen to the bedroom communities which have little to no industry when the majority of the population needs more service, but can pay the taxes?
Will the McMansions be converted into apartments like the old Victorian and Edwardian mansions in most downtown areas; and will zoning allow for such a thing?

This change in spatial distribution of economic class will have a lot of long range effects and I worry that no one is really thinking about it.

Climate Change pt2 People

So, now that we have gone over the fact that the threat to plants and animals doesn't bother me we will move on to some people issues.

With the types of problems that should be happening with climate change a lot of people are going to die or be injured. I think that there is a fair amount of this that is needless. Most of the needless deaths will be those people who for reasons that I don't understand refuse to move out of harms way.

We have seen people in the news who won't move out of the way, and I don't just mean those who move away for good, because there is no place that is safe from every natural disaster (well, I heard of a study conducted once to find the safest place to live in the states when thinking about natural disasters and it was rural Vermont or New Hampshire.) The west coast has earthquakes, the west has drought and wildfires, the central states have drought then flooding then more drought, then there are the hurricanes, tornados, ice storms, and avalanches, for other areas. The point is that there are few if any places to truly get away for a long time, but there are things to do to mitigate risk. Like evacuating when asked (though not necessarily to where the government wants you to.) Having a plan to get out of the way when something is going to happen, or after it happens should save lots of lives.

Another thing to mitigate the destruction of natural disaster is to practice better stewardship of the land we are on. Development on islands that used to take the brunt of storms weakens entire area, so does the draining of swamps, or not allowing rivers to change course occasionally. Nature itself often creates systems to allow for a quick return to homeostasis, and if we work with those systems instead of creating our own we would be in much better shape.

But the big problem is those people who haven't the resources to plan, or remove themselves from disaster. I think of Bangladesh, one of the poorest nations in the world, where people die by the thousands every year in floods. With global climate change and rising sea levels that country will be loosing more land, leading to increased crowding, poorly made environments and compounding deaths due to natural disasters. 

In our own country there are more resources for providing for the poor, or enfeebled, opportunities available to get them out of harms way.

In the lecture I talked about in the preceding post one long term strategy was to create denser urban environments so that all people would contribute less to climate change, and so that goods and services would be more easily distributed after disasters.

My question was that wouldn't denser environments pose potentially greater threats to human health and well being, and also contribute to climate change?

When people are crowded together disease spreads more rapidly leading to greater illness and death. There is also the urban heat island effect where dense areas become a few degrees hotter then the surrounding area leading to severely localized micro-climates which have more intense weather, and weather related disaster. Also with heat islands the infirm die at greater rates (remember continental europe a few years ago?), as well as children.

I say this not because I do or do not think that dense urban environments are better than sprawl, I am just saying that there are so many ramifications to any major shift in how people interact with the environment that plans and policy need to be well thought out and strategies should try to address the problems foreseen by the solution to the current problems. And part of that is identifying the actual motivations we have for solving a problem. 

It makes me think of a new despair.com tag "Government: If you think the problems we create are bad, just wait until you see our solutions."

Climate Change pt1 flora and fauna

I went to a lecture yesterday about urban sprawl and climate change. The essence of the presentation was that by listening to current trends and creating more compact urban spaces we can reduce the number of vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and that this would in turn lower CO2 and help stabilize the climate.

I had two questions during the presentation (this post deals with the first one) 1- by creating more dense environments wont we be creating other climate change due to the urban heat island effect; and 2- there was a statement that market forces are clambering for more dense places, but if this is unevenly distributed demographically then wont all of the potential gains be for nought?

My thoughts on question 1 really have to do with what is the fear motivating action to limit climate change. As I understand it with a global rise in mean temperature major weather events (like strong hurricanes, flooding, drought and wildfires) will become more common, extinctions will occur at a fast pace, area of the world will be rendered uninhabitable and there will be a lot of habitat change for plants and animals.

A lot of the issues don't seem like that big of a deal to me, mostly the changes in habitat, and diversity. Change is a part of what happens constantly on this planet, and extinction is a fairly common thing to have happen. I have heard arguments that this is different because it is happening at such a fast pace that there is no time for adaptation to happen. That argument, I think, is based in old, linear evolutionary thinking whereas now a model of punctuated equilibrium seems better, where lots of mutation and evolution occurs rapidly followed by a period of more stable linear evolution. So even if there is a mass die off, the availability of resources will allow the survivors to flourish and diversify to the new environment.

A lot of the issue seems to be that we don't want things to change. It is like a community rants and raves about a new development in their area, not necessarily for any reason other than nothing like that has been there before. Change is inevitable.

Of course the other reason may be guilt that thing are dying and it is all our fault, but thankfully I don't seem to suffer from that particular malady.

Wal-Mart the Savior of Suburbia

In my classes and in a few newspaper articles recently I have heard about how the spatial orientation of America is changing.  Since WWII the american dream has been the white picket fenced lot in the suburbs, with a car or two. Almost all of the people who could leave the cities did, leaving minorities and the poor trapped in a cycle of ever decreasing property values and opportunities for employment. 

In the past few years, however, the stereotypical American dream has changed. More and more affluent white people are leaving the suburbs to move back into the cities. According to some demographers the suburbs will soon become what the inner cities where in the late 70s and 80s.

The recent increase in transportation costs, if they continue, will exacerbate this trend. More and more people are looking for more dense, diverse, and walkable areas in which to live. This takes more money away from the suburban municipalities which means higher taxes to maintain the same levels of service. Also, as more poorer people move into the suburbs the need for municipal services will increase which means even higher taxes.

My hero in the battle to save the suburbs is Wal-Mart, so maybe its an anti-hero. If Wal-Mart got into real estate I think that it could anchor a lot of people in the suburbs. Wal-Mart, as with most big box stores, exisits in the suburbs because that is where they could get a whole lot of land for fairly cheep. All around Wal-Marts other shops spring up creating a semi-diverse shopping area. If Wal-Mart created some apartments or condos on top of their existing buildings, or converted the old buildings they have abandoned then there would be an almost automatic mixed use walkable area for people to live. Almost every time a mixed use development has been built the demand has been so great that the developers have made plenty of money on the investment, so the risk is small on Wal-Marts end. Other benefits for Wal-Mart would be a captive marketing audience, and the possibility of giving residents special deals in the store. If, like the majority of Wal-Marts goods, the housing was mostly low income then it could also provide housing for Wal-Mart employees.

I think that the people who could benefit most from this idea would be senior citizens. Wal-Mart already has a pharmacy, and I think I heard somewhere that there was a trial going on with having M.D.s in there as well. Seniors could then maintain their independence which is going to be a big issue with all of the boomers that will be retiring soon. 

So to recap Wal-Mart mixed use developments would:

-provide jobs, and housing for lower income people who are already moving in greater numbers to the suburbs,

-provide an expanding economic base for suburban cities that will be entering into decline,

-provide an easily accessible area for senior citizens to maintain an independent lifestyle,

-save the suburban form from dying under the weight of its own sprawl,

-allow Wal-Mart to increase penetration by offering to consolidate and increase its low income housing areas so that the cities may maintain their fiction that they are still rural (which is code for white).

ITunesU

This place is the best playground in the whole world. ITunesU has free download audio and video recordings of college courses from universities all over the states, and now from the UK and Australia. This palace of information is great because while going to school there are many courses, or subjects that sounded interesting but I couldn't take for various reasons. Now I can listen to lectures when I want to, not having to worry about any homework or papers and just enjoy the insights of learning a bit about a new subject.
So far I have downloaded courses on Hannibal, introductory physics (Physics for Future Presidents, is great), microeconomics, Heidegger, epidemiology, and individual lectures about marketing, biotechnology, current affairs, and speeches by the Dali Lama, Steve jobs, and Margaret Mead.
I believe that the broader the knowledge base a person has the better decisions that person will make in their specialization. If possible I would specialize in being a generalist. In fact I have thought that a really great jobs would be to just read and study lots of different things for half the day and spend the other half of the day helping specialists form odd connections that never would have been thought of be people in that specialization.
So thank you apple for a wonderful free opportunity to ingest more information than I ever could before.

Science as Religion

I was listening to the radio the other day and heard a story about an atheistic camp for kids. The rationale was that all other sorts of religions have camps where kids can be indoctrinated so why not the atheists and agnostics.

The thing that I find interesting about atheism (at least as it pertains to a rejection of religion and a whole hearted embrace of science) is that science,  like all other theoretical orientations relies on a few fundamental principles that must be true in order for the system to work. In science some of those beliefs are that the world, universe and its properties are knowable, that people are smart enough to figure them out, and that the same principles or forces that work today have always worked in the past. Without these pillars science falls apart, therefore absolute faith in the truth of these principles is required. That is the first way that science is like religion; the next way is more fun.

My second way that science is like religion is that science has taken up a lot of the same space that the Catholic church held in medieval Europe. Both claim to have the keys of knowledge that they alone possess and therefore are the arbiters of Truth. Both have a hierarchy that is fairly closed to the majority of the people (Popes and cardinals then, PhDs now) and along with that exclusive hierarchy is a secret language held only by the elite (Latin and discipline specific jargon). I had a friend once tell me that all of the useful information and processes in school were taught to masters students and the only thing you were taught as a PhD candidate was how to use the jargon effectivly.

There are more parallels to be drawn, but these are the two that I like to bring up the most.