Problems with US exceptionalism

From a retired Army colonel and now professor at Boston Univ.

http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201008121000

After WWII, the US was the only industrial power that wasn't decimated by the conflict, so it made sense for us to exert global leadership in rebuilding the world (in our image) and establishing the UN to enforce justice and resolve conflicts peacefully. But maybe that privileged victor status went to our heads, and 60 years later we and some allies now act in defiance of the UN, and routinely engage in wars of choice, not "just wars" of last resort. Although we are a big, omnipresent target, the 50 states of America have not really been threatened militarily since Pearl Harbor, apart from four suicide airliners. Why do we still feel the duty/destiny/entitlement to "make the world a better place" through projection of military and economic might, especially when most of our efforts have caused more harm than good for the majority of those affected? Hindsight is 20/20, but some signs at the time indicated that unchecked communist domination and their nuclear destruction of Western society was not really likely. Yet we designed and executed an aggressive Cold War foreign policy assuming that all the world's reds were unified and committed to our demise. It wasn't just about peace-loving Americans reluctantly forced to contain dangerous commies, it was about us actively defeating our rivals to achieve global superiority ourselves. But of course we couldn't go overboard, or the Soviets would launch their nukes, so we conducted limited or proxy wars. Then came the Vietnam wake-up call, but unfortunately America's post-Vietnam leaders were the very people who didn't suffer from the war, didn't understand the war, and instead re-wrote its narrative in order to continue a flawed US interventionist strategy endorsed by the military-industrial complex. So that led us to the Iranian Revolution, Israel-Palestine impasse, Latin American civil wars, Afghanistan (2X), and Iraq (3X). We weren't 100% to blame for those situations, but we didn't really play a helpful role either.

What is worrisome is that "constant war" now seems to be the price we pay for trying to free the world. If it's not the Soviets, it's the Latin drug cartels, the Eastern European gangsters, African warlords, the few remaining commies, or "Islamo-fascists." We are rehashing the exact same insincere rhetoric, and forcing our "professional volunteer military" to work overtime (to the point of exhaustion and suicide for some) because we can't allow a bunch of turban-heads to undermine our global standing. We have more soldiers and bases overseas than protecting our shores. But our Middle East failures have demonstrated that even we cannot always bend others to our will, we don't have all the solutions worked out, and the world is really complex and maybe impervious to sudden external improvement, even with our huge resources. And we've paid an even bigger price, since beyond our military casualties and expenditures, we've made the price of crude quadruple, poisoned international diplomacy for years, and our massive debt has compromised progress on most other national priorities. Those factors have only served to strengthen our rivals too. Plus our military actions have created new enemies and dispersed formerly more concentrated, conspicuous threats. The Times Square and underpants bombers probably would be living normal, lawful lives now if we made different war decisions.

I know that we can't just bury our heads in the sand and ignore global problems/injustices, but there are less expensive and destructive ways to approach them. If we really want to make the world a better place, half of war is rooted in poverty, economic injustice, and lack of law/education. We can easily invest in development projects that alleviate those global problems and reduce the likelihood of conflict, which will also create economic opportunities for Americans and score us diplomatic/humanitarian points. And for the hardcore violent people out there who are bent on hurting us and others out of twisted hateful ideology, surveillance, defensive measures, and surgical anti-terror missions may be more effective than occupying entire nations. Cheap, easy cyber-monitoring of communications and money wires have prevented more terrorism than our entire war in Iraq, and no one had to die. Lastly, if we improve our own ethics and conduct, and eliminate some of our offensive, unjust practices, that will go far to advance our supposed goals of global peace and freedom.

Bottom line, we have to learn to let go. Humanity and the world have gotten on just fine without America for 99.99999% of history. There's no natural law dictating that humans must shape the world in our image, that a benevolent superpower must maintain order in the world, and that the power must be us. We are barely in control of our own checkbooks; how can we expect to control the world and its 6B diverse inhabitants? US exceptionalism is a hard ideology to wean off; we all were indoctrinated in grade school and every election cycle. We feel noble and proud to be the vanguards of global freedom, white knights standing up for everything that's good. While others cower and capitulate, we confront the dark forces of the world. Mass media really exploits this, and I'll admit that I wanted to join the military as a kid, and more recently was a little moved by Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech at the time. We beat King George, the Apaches, the slave masters, the fascists, and the Soviets. We made the world safe for democracy and capitalism, and we can do anything we set our minds to. Yes we have done some good along the way, but did we have the right to drastically alter the lives of so many, and was it worth the steep price some had to pay for our ambitions?

Even our educated, perceptive, 21st Century President Obama is not immune. In his famous, jubilant election victory speech in Chicago, he asked Americans to help him "put our hands on the arc of history, and bend it once more towards the hopes of a better day." What hubris, even if we really have all the best intentions. It is true that the US has the power to write, or end, history any time we want. But will it be for the good of the few people in power, or the greater good? Sometimes the best thing we can do is nothing, and our world will never be free of evil and violence. That doesn't mean we shouldn't stop trying to be good global citizens, and we do have the serious responsibility to use our vast power and wealth for good. So let's think very hard about the ways to do that properly and successfully, instead of rushing to assert ourselves in every single conflict that threatens our prestige, and masking it with some noble crusade rhetoric.

Feedback to NPR's story on parenting temperamental teens

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129150658

To Morning Edition,

As I contemplate starting my own family soon, I was fairly disgusted with this story on parenting strategies for dealing with temperamental teens. While I think your guest, Dr. Kastner, had good general advice for conflict mitigation among familial ADULTS, I don't think kids deserve to be reasoned with that way. Kids are already too spoiled and coddled today, even versus Gen X's youth. Parenting is not about bargaining and compromising to make everyone happy; parents are the authority because they provide food, education, shelter, and many luxuries that you and I didn't have as children. The least modern kids can do to show their respect and appreciation is to behave properly and not talk back. They are not the bosses of the household. I understand the desire to cultivate self-esteem, and plenty of strict, angry parents unfortunately turn abusive, but would parents rather have their kid grow up to feel good about him or herself, but become an egotistical, undisciplined jerk in the process? America already has too many of those.

That hypothetical academic exercise of the teen writing a statement reflecting on the consequences of vandalizing a neighbor's house is ridiculous. Pediatrics and behavioral science can help us understand the tumultuous process of growing up, but can't be simply used to condone and explain away bad behavior. Kids are not wild animals. Even in the heat of the moment and under peer pressure, a 13-year-old should still be able to practice good decision making and do the right thing. If not, then the parents and society have truly failed. If kids really were that out of control, they shouldn't be allowed to go out unsupervised and put themselves and others in danger. If I was caught spraying shaving cream on a neighbor's home, my fairly liberal immigrant parents would paddle the lesson into me, prohibit me from hanging out with those "bad influence friends," and I would never do it again. In fact, the shame of bringing that trouble on my family would be motivation enough. I wouldn't have needed to reflect and share about it like a support group.

We may owe Toyota an apology

http://www.insideline.com/toyota/driver-error-is-culprit-in-most-toyota-crashes-says-nhtsa.html

It's easy to bag on a strong foreign company dominating a very American industry (especially for politicians during a recession), but it looks like the real culprits for the acceleration safety problems were dumb-ass American drivers. Initial findings from the NHTSA investigation of 58 sudden-acceleration-associated Toyota crashes across the country showed ZERO evidence of electronics causing acceleration from vehicle data logs. In fact, in over 30 cases the vehicle log shows that the driver did not apply the brake, so in all likelihood their acceleration was due to a panic slam on the wrong pedal. With apparently no definitive evidence, Toyota was accused of sudden acceleration from electronics, floor mats, and sticky pedals. The company initially denied the claims, then acknowledged some design flaws, and issued big recalls to rectify the 3 risks. But in the government analysis, zero of the 58 crash cases were due to sticky pedals or electronics, and only one was due to the floor mat. Out of the millions of Toyotas being happily driven each day in the US and worldwide, there were only a small number of crashes, and funny how the acceleration accusations were only in our country, huh? NASA is currently helping to see if electromagnetic interference could have still caused electronic acceleration. Of course lawyers for greedy and blame-shifting plaintiffs suing Toyota are challenging these findings, but 58 is a pretty big sample size to me. What I'm ashamed of is how quickly the media took up the accusations as Biblical truth, and how I and most of the public believed them without proof.

What the JetBlue employee meltdown says about the US workplace and society

http://news.yahoo.com/s/theweek/20100811/cm_theweek/205934_1
http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201008110900

By now you've probably heard the buzz surrounding Steven Slater, the
veteran JetBlue flight attendant who was harassed by a passenger on a
flight and decided to say "F this job!" and illegally exited the plane
down an emergency chute, with beers in hand. Maybe he was living out
all our closet fantasies (and paid the price by going to jail, but
he'll get the book deal and TV circuit). I'm sure he would have
preferred to do his job (of 28 years) happily with others treating him
respectfully. Though what does that say about the state of the US
workplace and society if Slater is now celebrated as a folk hero for
breaking the law, possibly putting people in danger, and acting
against everything in his professional training? That customer must
have been an astronomical bitch because JetBlue FAs are some of the
best in the industry, and probably have very thick skins after years
of abuse and training. But honestly, I'm sure we all have a list of
people we'd like to curse out on the PA system, and many
jobs/customers that we'd like to stick it to.

I'll try to refrain from a cliched anti-society diatribe, but humor me
with this set-up. I know we tend to remember the "good ol' days" with
rose-colored lenses, but we probably weren't always this stressed out,
this nasty to each other, and work wasn't this horrible, was it? Some
things have changed since the last generation was young. We usually
don't have pensions anymore (and don't stay with 1-2 firms our whole
career), nor just one car/TV per household. Standard of living and
life expectancy have risen, but so have costs, while real wages
haven't kept up (unless you're a CEO, and in that case your wages have
ballooned). For many of us, the finer things in life are still
unaffordable without taking on dangerous debt, but we still try: total
US consumer debt is now in the trillions, our pre-recession savings
rate was negative, and savings is currently still worse than postwar
America. We have also segregated ourselves into many racially and
economically homogeneous suburban enclaves, and may not need to have
"real interactions" with strangers for days at a time (automate
everything, drive-thru everything, hurry up and be on your way).
Culturally, it's also strange now that it's accepted and almost
desirable to act like a spoiled good-for-nothing like Paris Hilton, a
cocksure idiot like Sarah Palin, or a pathologically ambitious a-hole
like The Donald. What happened to doing right by people and making an
honest buck? Sorry, I'm 30 and I sound 70.

When IBM envisioned the first computers, the designers hoped that they
would help humans by saving us time on repetitive, grunt work
calculations. But since the PC revolution, computers and mobile
electronics have only served to take time from us. Yes computers allow
us to be more productive, but now employers demand more of us (and
practically expect some workers to be on-call 24-7, plus some tech or
work-addicts even do it to themselves, checking their BlackBerries at
completely inappropriate times). An average, not even an excellent,
worker is now doing the jobs of 2-3 workers from 1960, and many
traditional US industries have vanished or relocated overseas. Gadgets
and the internet have allowed us to share ideas and access resources
like never before (for better or worse: tolerance of diversity has
increased, but so have all sorts of cyber-crimes), but also bleed us
of our precious free time (and money) with semi-pointless,
quasi-social distractions like Facebook. Families spend less time
together (maybe a good thing depending on the family), and even less
quality time. We may spend more time exhausted in front of a screen
than raising our kids.

Competition for quality education, jobs, government services, and
other basic living essentials has risen drastically. Workers are
spending more time in commute, more time in travel-heavy jobs, and
more time at work in general vs. the 1960s. The rich-poor gap has
increased, and more Americans are employed by corporations than ever
before. Executives and managers are under more pressure from
shareholders and others to cut costs, innovate, and find new ways to
boost productivity/efficiency, even at the cost of worker morale and
the law. Forget the work-life balance; for many people work is life,
which makes the personal pain of an unsatisfying job or losing a job
even harder to handle. The recession has only exacerbated these
tensions and problems.

All this creates an environment for people to treat each other badly,
and we have many pressures and incentives to do so. Our egos fall
victim to our competitive free-market culture, and we may equate
differences in wealth/achievement with differences in personal worth.
"I'm a big-shot doctor, so I can talk down to you, lowly flight
attendant! I paid my ticket and I can do whatever I want!" Worries and
threats are everywhere. Bad news on the 24-7 channels, bills coming
due, and everyone seems to try to take advantage of us, make us part
with our hard-earned money, or otherwise short-change us somehow.
Politicians are always in scandals, there is less public trust, and
therefore less trust and courtesy for each other. When anxiety is
high, we are not ourselves, or is that our true nature? We have less
time and more stress, so we're living on the edge with a shorter fuse,
and minor annoyances or injustices could cause us to blow up. And as
the many life annoyances wear us down each day, we have less patience
and energy to handle the big problems and confrontations with poise.
And it doesn't seem that this trend is going to reverse any time soon.
But no one wants to acknowledge the insanity of our predicament for
fear of appearing weak and unable to cope.

Maybe an airplane is a microcosm of our social condition. A bunch of
impatient, tense strangers, who would rather be somewhere else doing
something else, packed in an uncomfortable, artificial enclosure with
bad air. There are turbulence, crying kids, and terrorist threats, and
of course weather and technical delays. The only things keeping us all
from descending into chaos are watered-down cocktails, an LCD screen
in front of us, and Sully Sullenberger.

"Why parents hate parenting"

An interesting discussion and lengthy article about why many American couples may not want kids, or aren't happy because of them:

http://nymag.com/news/features/67024/
http://www.kqed.org/epArchive/R201007301000

As a rule, most studies show that mothers are less happy than fathers, that single parents are less happy still, that babies and toddlers are the hardest, and that each successive child produces diminishing returns. ...Robin Simon, a sociologist at Wake Forest University, says parents are more depressed than nonparents no matter what their circumstances—whether they’re single or married, whether they have one child or four.

...all parents spend more time today with their children than they did in 1975, including mothers, in spite of the great rush of women into the American workforce. Today’s married mothers also have less leisure time (5.4 fewer hours per week); 71 percent say they crave more time for themselves (as do 57 percent of married fathers). Yet 85 percent of all parents still—still!—think they don’t spend enough time with their children.

...Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize–winning behavioral economist, who surveyed 909 working Texas women and found that child care ranked sixteenth in pleasurability out of nineteen activities. (Among the endeavors they preferred: preparing food, watching TV, exercising, talking on the phone, napping, shopping, housework.) This result also shows up regularly in relationship research, with children invariably reducing marital satisfaction.

Well that's a bit of a loaded question, since what kind of masochist enjoys child care? They enjoy playing with their kids, showing off their kids, and watching them do cute things, succeed, and grow up. But who would like the maintenance? You may love driving your sports car, but that doesn't mean you like getting dirty to change the brake pads. But personally, I will always prefer napping to anything involving a kid. Also, I'm sure many single or child-less people also wish they had more personal time (I surely do).

LOL:

It was big news last year when the Journal of Happiness Studies published a Scottish paper declaring the opposite was true. “Contrary to much of the literature,” said the introduction, “our results are consistent with an effect of children on life satisfaction that is positive, large and increasing in the number of children.” Alas, the euphoria was short-lived. A few months later, the poor author discovered a coding error in his data, and the publication ran an erratum. “After correcting the problem,”it read,“the main results of the paper no longer hold. The effect of children on the life satisfaction of married individuals is small, often negative, and never statistically significant.”

Any why is this happening?

Before urbanization, children were viewed as economic assets to their parents. If you had a farm, they toiled alongside you to maintain its upkeep; if you had a family business, the kids helped mind the store. But all of this dramatically changed with the moral and technological revolutions of modernity. As we gained in prosperity, childhood came increasingly to be viewed as a protected, privileged time, and once college degrees became essential to getting ahead, children became not only a great expense but subjects to be sculpted, stimulated, instructed, groomed. (Princeton sociologist Viviana Zelizer describes this transformation of a child’s value: “Economically worthless but emotionally priceless.”) [me: raising a kid in the US from age 0 to 18 now costs $250,000 on average] Kids, in short, went from being our staffs to being our bosses. [me: this of course affects parental discipline]

This is especially true in middle- and upper-income families, which are far more apt than their working-class counterparts to see their children as projects to be perfected. (Children of women with bachelor degrees spend almost five hours on “organized activities” per week, as opposed to children of high-school dropouts, who spend two.) Annette Lareau, the sociologist who coined the term “concerted cultivation” to describe the aggressive nurturing of economically advantaged children, puts it this way: “Middle-class parents spend much more time talking to children ...and treating each child’s thought as a special contribution. And this is very tiring work.” Yet it’s work few parents feel that they can in good conscience neglect, says Lareau, “lest they put their children at risk by not giving them every advantage.” [me: isn't that a sad reflection of our competitive, me-first, never-enough society?]

Even more surprisingly, they found that parents’ dissatisfaction only grew the more money they had, even though they had the purchasing power to buy more child care. “And my hypothesis about why this is, in both cases, is the same,” says Twenge. “They become parents later in life. There’s a loss of freedom, a loss of autonomy. It’s totally different from going from your parents’ house to immediately having a baby. Now you know what you’re giving up.” (Or, as a fellow psychologist told Gilbert when he finally got around to having a child: “They’re a huge source of joy, but they turn every other source of joy to shit.”) [me: if only it wasn't so true]
It wouldn’t be a particularly bold inference to say that the longer we put off having kids, the greater our expectations. When people wait to have children, they’re also bringing different sensibilities to the enterprise. They’ve spent their adult lives as professionals, believing there’s a right way and a wrong way of doing things; now they’re applying the same logic to the family-expansion business, and they’re surrounded by a marketplace that only affirms and reinforces this idea. “And what’s confusing about that,” says Alex Barzvi, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at NYU medical school, “is that there are a lot of things that parents can do to nurture social and cognitive development. There are right and wrong ways to discipline a child. But you can’t fall into the trap of comparing yourself to others and constantly concluding you’re doing the wrong thing.” 

The only peer-reviewed study that uncontroversially concluded that kids improve parents' happiness was conducted in - you guessed it - Northern Europe.

The researcher, Hans-Peter Kohler, a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, says he originally studied this question because he was intrigued by the declining fertility rates in Europe. One of the things he noticed is that countries with stronger welfare systems produce more children—and happier parents.

Of course, this should not be a surprise. If you are no longer fretting about spending too little time with your children after they’re born (because you have a year of paid maternity leave), if you’re no longer anxious about finding affordable child care once you go back to work (because the state subsidizes it), if you’re no longer wondering how to pay for your children’s education and health care (because they’re free)—well, it stands to reason that your own mental health would improve. When Kahneman and his colleagues did another version of his survey of working women, this time comparing those in Columbus, Ohio, to those in Rennes, France, the French sample enjoyed child care a good deal more than its American counterpart. “We’ve put all this energy into being perfect parents,” says Judith Warner, author of Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, “instead of political change that would make family life better.”

I'm not so sure about the strong welfare-more children link, because some data suggest the reverse. Birth rates are still quite low in strong social welfare states like Japan and Germany, but also low in poor welfare nations like Russia and Bulgaria. Sometimes people in rich nations decline to have kids not for the stress reasons, but because they're interested in other stuff, especially in their "prime years". They go to graduate school, have busy jobs, travel, buy things, volunteer, and maintain hobbies/friendships/online life. And before they know it, they're 40 and can't conceive even if they wanted to (except for Palin). When teens basically "need" smartphones and laptops to manage their relatively simple lives, us adults have even more chores/distractions, so there's no void/need to fill with a baby. So I suppose the self-centered Western lifestyle can motivate some couples to have kids and others to not. Third World families are bigger partially due to lack of education and access to family planning tools. But they also willingly birth a lot of kids as insurance against infant mortality, but also as a labor source and for material support in old age. A strong pension system precludes the need for many kids to support you.

But it's very true that strong social support makes parenting so much easier, as a previous email described (http://worldaffairs-manwnoname.blogspot.com/2010/01/american-work-family-conflict.html). When European parents don't have to fret about affordable childcare, accessible medical care, maternity leave, and even getting enough time off for a summer vacation, family life is better. Much has been said about the anachronistic US summer vacation for school kids. This was originally meant to free up kids to help their farming and ranching parents with the busy summer season. But of course less than 10% of Yanks currently live on farms, so there is no reason for our summer break to be the longest in the G20, apart from giving underpaid and overstressed public school teachers a break so they don't blow their brains out (but we just end up transferring the stress to parents and day care). So our kids learn less, and are a bigger time burden on their parents, who also work longer hours, spend more time in commute, and have less vacation days than others in the G20. Recipe for problems.

What about a couple's romantic life? You guessed it.

This is another brutal reality about children: They expose the gulf between our fantasies about family and its spikier realities. They also mean parting with an old way of life, one with more freewheeling rhythms and richer opportunities for romance... Healthy relationships definitely make people happier. But children adversely affect relationships. ...Psychologists Lauren Papp and E. Mark Cummings asked 100 long-married couples to spend two weeks meticulously documenting their disagreements. Nearly 40 percent of them were about their kids. “And that 40 percent is merely the number that was explicitly about kids, I’m guessing, right?” This is a former patient of Nachamie’s, an entrepreneur and father of two. “How many other arguments were those couples having because everyone was on a short fuse, or tired, or stressed out?” This man is very frank about the strain his children put on his marriage, especially his firstborn. “I already felt neglected,” he says. “In my mind, anyway. And once we had the kid, it became so pronounced; it went from zero to negative 50. And I was like, I can deal with zero. But not negative 50.”
... The amount of time married parents spend alone together each week: Nine hours today versus twelve in 1975. Bradbury, who was involved in the UCLA study of those 32 families, says the husbands and wives spent less than 10 percent of their home time alone together. “And do you think they were saying, ‘Gee honey, you look lovely. I just wanted to pick up on that fascinating conversation we were having earlier about the Obama administration’? ” he asks. “Nope. They were exhausted and staring at the television.”

A possible silver lining and what it all means for your decision for children:

We know that having kids increases stress/fatigue and reduces happiness/freedom. On the other hand, the married women were less depressed after they’d had kids than their childless peers. And perhaps this is because the study sought to understand not just the moment-to-moment moods of its participants, but more existential matters, like how connected they felt, and how motivated, and how much despair they were in. ...Parents, who live in a clamorous, perpetual-forward-motion machine almost all of the time, seemed to have different answers than their childless cohorts. ...Technically, if parenting makes you unhappy, you should feel better if you’re spared the task of doing it. But if happiness is measured by our own sense of agency and meaning, then noncustodial parents lose. They’re robbed of something that gives purpose and reward.
“When you pause to think what children mean to you, of course they make you feel good,” [Gilbert] says. “The problem is, 95 percent of the time, you’re not thinking about what they mean to you. You’re thinking that you have to take them to piano lessons. So you have to think about which kind of happiness you’ll be consuming most often. Do you want to maximize the one you experience almost all the time”—moment-to-moment happiness—“or the one you experience rarely?”
“I think this boils down to a philosophical question, rather than a psychological one,” says [Cornell psychologist] Gilovich. “Should you value moment-to-moment happiness more than retrospective evaluations of your life?” He says he has no answer for this, but the example he offers suggests a bias. He recalls watching TV with his children at three in the morning when they were sick. “I wouldn’t have said it was too fun at the time,” he says. “But now I look back on it and say, ‘Ah, remember the time we used to wake up and watch cartoons?’ ” The very things that in the moment dampen our moods can later be sources of intense gratification, nostalgia, delight. 

Dan Ariely, who wrote those behavioral economics books on irrationality, studied how people tend to value the exact same item more if they possess it than if they don't and others do. Part of that is egotism, and no one wants to regret what we've already committed to as a good idea at the time. We're so glad that we didn't buy that blue house that turned out to have termites, but we love our beige house even though it has wiring problems. No one wants to admit that having their kid was a mistake, especially to his/her face. But humans err. Maybe having kids was a mistake for many couples out there (post-children divorce rates may suggest that, even though the couples may cite other excuses for their split). But they're trying to make the best of it and derive as much purpose as they can (forget pleasure). They may know deep down it was a mistake, and maybe wish for another crack at life, but in the meantime they want to make something good out of their "mistake", so the sacrifice was not in vain. Like how some families of soldiers needlessly killed in wars of choice still force themselves to believe that their child died a hero to "protect freedom".

No one is saying that people should only engage in activities that are guaranteed to produce 100% satisfaction and zero regret. That's impossible, and makes life boring frankly. But at least for kids, we have to be realistic. For many middle-class Americans, having a kid means decades of stress, fatigue, zero to uninspiring sex, unhappiness, and maybe divorce/poverty. But is that "sacrifice" worth it to gain the special pride, "joy", and nostalgia at the beginning and in the end - if you survive it - that child-less people can never know? For some people, it's a resounding "yes". For others, they have kids without contemplating it, or have kids unplanned. Though to be fair, it's not like we get to have a preview of what our future parental life will be when we're deciding. At best, we can just examine the case studies of our friends and relatives, and see if that type of life would be appealing.

But we also need to temper expectations. We can get some of the benefits of parenthood for a smaller blood sacrifice. So what if we don't dote on our kid 24-7, and he/she doesn't go to Space Camp and Harvard? Even if everyone on our block is doing it, and looks down on us as "bad parents", who cares? The kid probably won't become homeless or Charlie Manson if you skip ballet lessons. As long as there's love, morals, and common sense, no one else needs to "approve" of your parenting methods and limitations. And there's no need to kill yourselves trying to give your kid stuff that he/she may not even need or want. You have a life to live too, and a worn-out parent may be worse for kids than a "less committed" one. Forget about the Joneses, do less, buy less, don't take the promotion if you can't handle the extra workload, and maybe you'll have time to actually enjoy family life. Quality, not quantity. On the other hand, people with kids should realize that they can't perfectly maintain the single or couple life anymore. There's another term in the equation, and each spouse will get less attention now. Yes couples can and should spend time and money on themselves, but obviously if the choice is piano recital or poker game, you have to do the grown-up thing. And loving spouses can't be so demanding and expect their partners to keep off the love handles and do all the little romantic things they did during dating, while also performing well on the job and as a parent. It doesn't mean he loves you less, but now the relationship is different. We give up some stuff to get other stuff. Flexible, realistic, and understanding spouses and parents have a better chance in the minefield of child rearing. Those who "want it all" and won't take no for an answer are setting themselves up for a life of misery and disappointment, which will reflect on their kids as well.

The Chevy Volt: GM's "electric lemon"

"In truth, the first-generation Volt was as good as written off inside G.M., which decided to cut its 2011 production volume to a mere 10,000 units rather than the initial plan for 60,000."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/opinion/30neidermeyer.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=G.M.%27s%20electric%20lemon&st=cse

A dismal assessment of the car that is going to "save GM". The author brought up a good point about the Volt's ridiculous cost vs. all the huge government subsidies GM got to develop it. So probably the real cost of a Volt is $24K higher to the consumer/taxpayer (10,000 initial orders for vehicles vs. a 2009 $240M DOE grant to help fund the project, and that doesn't even include the billions of bailout funds given to GM). Plus GM decided to sell the Volt at cost, rather than take a loss as Toyota initially did with the Prius (even a whopping 40% loss in 1997), but are now reaping the rewards, recent safety concerns aside. They wanted to give consumers access and build up a loyal following for its 21st Century flagship vehicle (3rd most popular Toyota model in the US, and most popular in Japan), which GM won't be able to do for its "flagship". Another confounding factor is the government's involvement, since Uncle Sam and the UAW are majority owners of GM. Obama's task force has already concluded that the Volt won't be profitable, but maybe decided to not cut the price in order to make the company look financially healthier in preparation for its upcoming stock offering. Regardless, the first generation Volt is not the answer for America's green transportation needs, or Detroit's Renaissance. And since innovation comes so slowly for Big US Auto (if at all), even a good future Volt will have probably missed the boat vs. better EVs from foreign companies that hit the market faster.

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The author makes some good points, but he's also a well-known hater of domestic manufactures (sometimes deservedly, sometimes not). Whether the Volt was worth the government investment in the first place is a good question, but now that the investment is made, criticizing the pricing is a little ridiculous. There have been reports that dealers have been offered $10,000-$20,000 over list from eager buyers, suggesting that it's possible that GM has set the price too *low*. Toyota set the price low for the first generation of Prius because they weren't even sure that there was a market for green cars to begin with. Now that it's been well-established that having the latest, greatest green car gives you the largest car-peen in the neighborhood, there isn't as much need for that. What Chevrolet will need to do to make the Volt and follow-ons successful is not fiddling with the launch model price, but fundamentally making a car that doesn't suck. It's a tall order for GM, for sure, but I really don't think the car will be made or broken based on the pricing of the first 10,000 guinea-pig launch units.

And while the first iteration of the Volt has clearly been overhyped (it won't be the game-changer for GM that it's been touted, nor will likely the second generation be), the technology of the Volt will have to be the game changer if we ever hope to get off of our dependence on oil. For better or worse, electronic cars will probably always be a niche market until somebody deals with the fear auto owners (legitimately or not) have that they will be stranded if the battery ever runs down in the middle of nowhere. The fact that the Volt deals with this fear means it is the first serious attempt at making a true mass-market electronic car, with all the energy and climate impacts that entails. If the Volt fails, I really hope the technological effort expended on it survives on in future models, both at GM and elsewhere.

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The Volt was absolute not worth the government investment, especially
when you consider all the other assistance GM has received from
Washington over the years. If Tesla or Toyota got the same support, we
would have gotten much more bang for the buck. Criticizing the price
is not ridiculous. It is one of the most important factors that car
buyers consider (#3 according to Consumer Reports). Just because rich
morons are willing to overpay for Volts in order to be the first on
the block to have one (same thing happened with Tickle-Me Elmos and
Wiis) doesn't mean that car is a bargain or even fairly priced. After
all, many Americans terribly overpaid for real estate during the
housing bubble.

http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/cars/new-cars/news/2010/01/2010-car-brand-perceptions-survey/most-important-factors/brand-perceptions-most-important-factors.htm?EXTKEY=AYAHFP01

Toyota took a loss on the 2nd generation Prius as well, and the
current cost of a new Prius is about the same as a gen. 1 Prius with
inflation adjusted. So they have really gone out of their way to make
the vehicle accessible and generously priced for people. Plus the
Prius is a quality vehicle, and most owners love them. When do you
think the first Volt mass recall will take place? What's the
over-under for May 2011? What tech gains have we enjoyed from the Volt
anyway? Briggs and Stratton have been making portable gas-electric
generators for decades. GM is still waiting on the DOE to invent a
better battery so they can lower the price and increase range for
drivers. And the whole EV market is still struggling with
infrastructure. Plugging in a fast-charging EV to your home may blow
out your local transformer. You will need to call your power company
for a retrofit. There aren't enough public charging stations. Yes
government hasn't been serious about making EVs possible, partly due
to resistance from Detroit, Big Oil, and affiliated
industries/politicians. But there are better solutions out there to
the EV range concern than the Volt's, such as Better Place, already in
a contract with Nissan-Renault in Israel:

http://www.betterplace.com/

Most urban drivers commute less than 40 miles one way, and plenty of
combustion vehicle drivers forget and run out of gas too. People think
SUVs are "safer", but they pollute 40% more (which leads to
respiratory problems) and they have a higher rollover risk. A lot of
the public's fears are unfounded or ignorant, but unfortunately EV
makers still must persuade them if they want their businesses to
succeed.

Bad war news all around

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100727/ap_on_bi_ge/ml_iraq

So the IRS is up our asses for every last dollar, and persecutes poor people for taking liberties with the earned income tax credit (http://www.allbusiness.com/government/government-bodies-offices-government/10246878-1.html). But I guess the Pentagon has fallen victim to the moral hazard of managing other people's money that they're not accountable for. Jeez, just hire some temps from Accenture or something. They can call in high-tech drone air strikes from 15,000 miles away, but can't use TurboTax? For such a regimented, hierarchical organization as our military, how can there be no oversight and leadership on something so major as Iraq reconstruction funds? I guess that's another example why soldiers shouldn't moonlight as "nation builders". We all have our roles, talents, and limitations.

Also, what do you guys think about the Afghanistan war Wikileaks? Good or bad for the NATO effort and our democracy? Definitely bad for US-Pakistan relations, which may not necessarily be a bad thing. Wikileaks founder Assange predicted that one day his org would have "blood on its hands" (but feels that it's worth it to expose government-military crimes and deception), and Washington is threatening that it may happen now, maybe to discourage future leakers and control the damage. Civilians and the media don't need to know about sensitive real-time operational info (like how stupid Geraldo and Faux News exposed US troop positions and were then expelled from Iraq by the Pentagon: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/01/international/worldspecial/01MEDI.html), but if the war is so justly and properly executed, why the need to hide it from us? They wouldn't even let us film returning caskets until recently. We all know that mistakes abound in wars and even allies quarrel, so why do they feel the need to project the illusion of perfection and harmony to us? They must really think we're that stupid. I understand the desire to maintain soldier morale and public war support, but getting caught in an embarrassing scandal is bad for morale too.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100727/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/us_afghanistan_wikileaks

---------

All information from the wikileaks was redacted to protect sources and the data released was at least 7 months old so there was no risk of releasing sensitive information.

---------

Yeah I think that is an unlikely risk as well (considering all the other ways you can be burnt in the intel game, even by your own leaders - Valerie Plame for example), but the gov't is desperate to discredit the act. Assange was smart to "re-leak" the info through the NYT, Guardian, and Der Spiegel because those org's would diligently check the content and only publish what passed their legal dept's. It's ironic because Assange has previously lambasted the mainstream media, since they often also have access to Wikileaks' secret content, sources, and more, but are too "cowardly" to bring it into the light.

Problems with performance evaluations

"Keep in mind, of course, that improvement is each individual's own responsibility. You can only make yourself better." - Prof. Sam Culbert

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122426318874844933.html

This editorial was written by a UCLA Anderson business professor, and maybe you've already dealt with these issues. In my research field and company department, performance reviews aren't really a big deal because managers don't really take management seriously, promotions are so infrequent, and pay is more determined by experience rather than performance. So that is partially why I should probably change careers. What are your experiences? If some of you manage people, how do you feel about evaluating your team at same time as being evaluated by your superior? What's your take on the merits and BS of the exercise?

I guess my take on his comments is that the process is inefficient because each party is concerned with self-interest over honesty, and the process becomes more about asserting authority and dictating conditions, conforming to over-general company standards rather than attributes that make one successful in one's specific role, and ass-covering rather than truly improving performance for the company's benefit. Plus, I'm sure 90% of workers can provide anecdotes how their companies do not reward or estimate performance fairly. Also, perf. evals. can deteriorate into an eval. of the employee's ability to get along with his/her manager (which is part of being a good worker but not the whole story), not actual job performance. This erodes the critical manager-subordinate trust relationship and diminishes productivity in the long run.

The subordinate is trying to excuse away, pay lip-service to, or hide any failings, in order to get more pay and title. We all want to survive and promote ourselves. But this may give the manager the wrong impression of that person, and set him/her on a career path that he/she may not be happy with or ready to handle (I can attest to this, as some of my deception to make myself look better during a recent perf. eval. backfired, and led me to get new job duties that I absolutely loathe). Or if the manager and subordinate disagree on the subordinate's performance, that can also be a recipe for trouble (manager: he must think I'm stupid to disagree with all these points I worked hard to make), and another ding on their performance ("not accepting criticism", "defensive/combative", etc.). I know life isn't fair, but it's tough for a manager to rate you with incomplete information, and it's tough to endure a one-way barrage of criticism without looking like an excuse man to explain your faults. What if you struggled on a project while going through a divorce or family illness that you may not feel comfortable to share with your manager? And even if you do share, the manager may write the info off as save-assing, or put a black mark on your file ("'personal problems").

Maybe your company employs "360 feedback" where other coworkers rate you and factor into your overall eval. Well each of those people may have their own agendas, biases, and subjective impressions of your abilities from brief encounters, so how is that helping the manager? If the employee is permitted to choose reviewers, that also paints a skewed picture of performance. Plus the manager is probably not obligated to take their comments into official consideration, so if your boss doesn't like you but your 360 reviewers gave you high marks, your boss may ignore or overrule them. If the subordinate is brutally honest and self-critical, then the manager has no choice but to give a harsher evaluation, so the employee gets punished for being truthful when peers weren't, and will therefore enjoy less career development and maybe even risk job security. There's no incentive to improve in areas that the boss isn't already aware of, because that would be admitting faults.

The manager is basically just a messenger relaying news of performance incentive compensation that was predetermined by his/her superiors. And he/she may be put in an awkward position to justify a crappy raise to a highly valued worker, due to corporate forces outside of both of them. So from the subordinate's view, this either erodes morale in the company, or faith in the manager, and definitely undermines the legitimacy of the perf. eval. Plus I don't think there's much in it for the manager. He/she is not really punished for having sub-par workers who fail to improve, nor rewarded for turning around a struggling worker. The manager has the incentive to demonstrate to superiors that his/her group is kicking butt and problem-free, so it may be more convenient to jettison a problem worker than actually manage him/her into improvement, if possible.

Since the manager-subordinate relationship is so critical for the subordinate's career growth, the subordinate is almost forced to be dishonest in order to stay in the manager's good graces. And if the manager is not doing a good job (which in turn makes it look like his/her subordinates are failing too, and managers can easily pass the buck), the subordinate has no real channel of criticism recompense. Sure, your next-level boss may ask you to evaluate your boss at times, but that is a booby trap. If you deliver honest critiques (especially in writing), your manager may end up finding out, and it's not hard for him/her to guess who said it. And then it just becomes a game of he-said-she-said, with upper management more likely to side with your boss over you, since they have more invested in your boss, you are easier to replace, and what does this kid know about management anyway? So again, you are almost forced to lie and say everything is hunky-dory (I have had this experience). Maybe workers would even want to lie, because nothing good can come from your boss being under the gun, except if he/she gets fired or quits, which can be a long waiting game and no guarantee that the replacement will be better. A boss under fire is even more pressured to be a dick and work his/her people to death to look like things are turning around. On the other hand, if your boss' star is on the rise, you may get lucky and hitch a ride. So again, it's a totally disingenuous process. Maybe this is all obvious and just a feature of working. I'm sure many good managers hate the status quo but feel stuck with it, since they too could be punished for "insubordination", and any complaints could be viewed as a challenge to the higher-ups that developed/endorsed the system.

Many management scientists are working on this problem, and how to squeeze the most performance/motivation out of workers while making them happier. I like the writer's solution of a forward-thinking performance preview, instead of a review that feels more like getting sent to the principal's office. Maybe we all have to be more like contract workers to get a fairer shake. Working with your boss, if you reasonably accomplish A, B, and C, and improve D and E, then you are entitled to X perks at the end of the year. No more, "I really tried to fight for you, but the company is tightening its belt." Everything is in the open, and the manager-subordinate team now have their stakes aligned. And maybe subordinates should be entitled to see the performance previews of their managers too, in order to see where they stand and hold the manager accountable from below. If 360 feedback is used, the reviewers should be chosen randomly and must get reviewed by that person in turn. Of course the labor market would work much more efficiently if more information was transparent, like salaries, but it's not going to happen. Though if somehow parts of perf. evals. could be accessible company-wide, workers could also see how they stack up vs. peers and how their goals and performance affect larger organizations. When the manager-subordinate relationship is too closed off and in the dark, it makes it easier for the manager to abuse his/her position. And with more info in the open, the manager is better protected against accusations of unfairness or mismanagement, so everyone wins, except for dictator micromanagers.

The article synopsis:

• The Promise: Performance reviews are supposed to provide an objective evaluation that helps determine pay and lets employees know where they can do better.
• The Problems: That's not most people's experience with performance reviews. Inevitably reviews are political and subjective, and create schisms in boss-employee relationships. The link between pay and performance is tenuous at best. And the notion of objectivity is absurd; people who switch jobs often get much different evaluations from their new bosses.
• The Solution: Performance previews instead of reviews. In contrast to one-side-accountable reviews, performance previews are reciprocally accountable discussions about how boss and employee are going to work together even more effectively than they did in the past. Previews weld fates together. The boss's skin is now in the game.

Americans fleeing to Canada due to global warming, and other environmental issues

"Rather than spending money only on cutting greenhouse-gas emissions, [scientist James Lovelock] believes that [Canada's] government would be wise to develop plans to house and deal with the millions of American wetbacks who will soon wash up on our shores. 'This is going to become a very habitable part of the globe and people are going to want to come here in vast numbers.'"

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/apocalypse-now/article1172056/
http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange2/current/lectures/human_pop/human_pop.html

The global recession has kind of put environmental policy and climate change on the back burner, but ideas of environmental apocalypse are getting more prevalent, especially with reminders such as the BP spill. We are familiar with the various disaster scenarios caused by the Earth's average temp going up a degree or two, due to more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Apparently our neighbors to the north are preparing for milder weather in the future, and for the influx of desperate people from the south similar to the Dust Bowl migration (another man-made eco-disaster). We may or may not believe that human activities are contributing to global warming, but no one can deny that more humans on the planet, consuming more and more resources and polluting more and more ecosystems, is also a major environmental concern. But how do we ethically and fairly manage the human population, as part of an overall sustainability strategy? Governments can't even agree on how to bail out Greece, so I'm not sure how we can tackle larger problems with uglier choices.

I'm sure you economists are familiar with the Malthusian model of population growth. Biological proliferation is exponential, yet Malthus thought that the growth in our sustenance capacity was linear, so at some point we would outgrow our resources supply, suffer a population crash, and then hover around a new equilibrium, as other species do. Some 1960s era scientists like Paul Ehrlich also thought that our species (numbering just 3B at the time of his writings) would overshoot the planet's ability to sustain us, and face a population and environmental calamity by 1979 or so. But those bright people were wrong, because they failed to predict the influences of technology and economics to enhance our survival (in the short term at least). 

Technology and innovation have allowed humans to continually raise our global carrying capacity, and create stout defenses against most other predatory animals and nature's fury. From the Stone Age until the Industrial Revolution, the global population was fairly steady around 100-300M, but then really took off since the Spanish Flu. Medical advances and sanitary practices have severely mitigated or even abolished some diseases. Genetically-modified (GM) agriculture and food science have improved crop yields many times over, and permitted foods to last longer. Water purification and management have made that resource safer and more accessible. And global economics in the Information Age have allowed buyer, laborer, and seller to connect on an unprecedented scale, boosting productivity and wealth in almost every nation. But some of this has come at a cost. Huge tracts of nature were destroyed to clear land for farms and ranches, and industrial pollution/urban sprawl have wiped out other areas. High-density animal husbandry has increased the risk of animal-human disease transmission, as we have seen with avian flu. GM strains have overtaken local species and disrupted environmental equilibrium. Over-used anti-microbials have weakened human immune systems and unleashed drug-resistant strains. Mass marketing has convinced consumers that they need to buy all sorts of single-use, non-biodegradable junk to be happy. So ironically, the very ingenious innovations that allowed humans to dominate the globe and vastly increase our numbers may be the causes of major population loss and species decline in the future. And of course humans were only able to increase our carrying capacity by endangering or exterminating other species and ecosystems in the process.

All the technologies that I mentioned were not necessarily developed out of human need or altruism, but instead out of a desire for profit. This is a cynical simplification, but even if individual inventors were benevolent, then needed to partner with a profit-seeking company or self-serving government to mass produce and market their creations. Economics doesn’t necessarily obey natural laws. Free-marketeers probably believe that wealth and humankind can increase indefinitely. But wealth is a human construct, and the resources that wealth is built on do have finite limits. Even “virtual capital” like Facebook still requires silicon chips and hydrocarbon-fueled electricity to exist. People are debating whether we have reached "peak oil" or not, but what about peak grain, water, etc.? They will come to be at some point, despite mighty efforts to postpone them. Conservation of mass. Nature strives to achieve equilibrium, but businesses exist to maximize profit and countries exist to take care of their own, even if it means breaking the law and putting people and the environment in danger. Companies influence our governments and employ many of our citizens, so when push comes to shove, we may find ourselves siding with them instead of the planet and the poor. Therefore, the only way I see our species being able to sustainably continue its growth is to cease all R&D and economic activity not related to food/water production and environmental protection/restoration, in order to reduce waste and focus on planetary survival. But this would require a global dictatorship in order to abolish profiteering and distribute resources on a need basis. Unfortunately such command economies like North Korea have had a horrible track record though.

Maybe population shocks and environmental collapses won’t be as drastic as Easter Island, because the planet changes slowly, and humans can be very adaptable when we put our minds to it. But if population losses do occur, they won’t be felt evenly. Rich nations can close their borders and distribute drugs during pandemics, or so we hope. Rich nations can afford to overpay for food, water, and energy during shortages, or use their armed forces to commandeer access. Rich nations are mostly geographically situated to avoid the harshest effects of global warming, and have the resources to migrate to greener pastures if needed. Rich nations, despite being much less populated, are bigger culprits of resource waste and pollution, yet sadly it will be the already suffering poor that suffer more. I don't buy the racist argument (at least to me) that poorer nations are killing the planet because of their birth rates. You've seen those satellite images of the world at night - the lights, which correlate with emissions/consumption, aren't on in the Third World. Their life expectancies and standard of living are much lower, so ten rural Rwandans aren't killing the planet as fast as one suburban American. Yes more poor pre-industrial people can be a problem, but more so for other humans than the planet, since Earth doesn't really care about a little more subsistence farming and human defecation going on. "Semi-poor" people in Brazil, Nigeria, and China are more of a concern, because for the first time in their history they can afford the heavy machinery to clear-cut forests and strip mine in order to make a living, which endangers other species and habitats, causing all sorts of unforeseen havoc on the natural balance. And of course rich nations enable this by selling them the equipment, providing a market for their unsustainably-harvested resources, and investing in and managing their operations to make money. We can't really blame the poor, because when you have nothing else, people become capital. A village with 100 kids has a better survival outlook than one with 50. I'm sure many people in the G20 would want to have more kids, but just can't afford them. So our economics have evolved from a facilitator of fertility to a limiter.

Some might argue that the rich will come to the poor’s defense. Have we so far? Rich nations stay rich partly by keeping the poor down. The top killers in the world are respiratory diseases, tuberculosis, and malaria – all cheaply preventable/treatable and affecting younger, productive people in the Third World. Yet the rich spend so much more money on cancer and cardiovascular treatments, because that is what we die from when we’re old. Tony Blair helped set up a fund so that rich nations would contribute a measly 1% GDP to virtually eliminate poverty (the merits of his plan are another discussion), but so far most of the G20 are behind on their pledged donations, and the global recession has put the project further on hold. And speaking of that, we have enough environmental crises to worry about, but now rich nations are creating their own socioeconomic calamities that also hurt people in the Third World by cutting off credit and increasing protectionism.

It will get really interesting when rich nations (and their symbiotic growth nations like China and Brazil) end up fighting each other over resources and environmental issues, and sadly we may witness it in our lifetimes, or it's already ongoing in the shadows.  


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Thanks for your comments. Yes surely if I had to rank expenditures for wars, Western illnesses, and Third World illnesses, I would put war at the lowest priority - especially our current conflicts. I understand why our government would prefer to research expensive cures for Western diseases over more cheaply treatable Third World killers, I am just questioning the morality and even efficiency of that. Chloroquinine, malaria nets, antibiotics, and HIV/TB drugs are sure thing solutions for millions of patients. Companies and the NIH spend billions of dollars on diabetes, cancer, cholesterol, and neurological research that gets next to nowhere. Even some current "breakthrough" cancer treatments on the market have a median extension of life of about 5 months, at a cost of $20k/month to Medicare or one's HMO/PPO. I can see why we would want to fund such efforts, but in my view it's not a great use of precious resources.

Sure, debt/GDP is a way to measure a nation's financial health, but when I mean rich nations, I think GDP is a decent metric. How productive is that country and how much do the people and government spend? Obviously Sierra Leone and Nigeria are rich in some resources but poor by many other measures. America may be rich in wealth/consumption but poor in less quantifiable measures of life quality.

Conflict is not 100% guaranteed, but it's like 99% guaranteed, if you consider human nature and history. Surely there is a chance that we will reform and improve our behavior before it's too late, but it's a small chance. When the pressure is on, people's true colors show and nations will stop at nothing to protect what they think is rightfully theirs. Brazil is not Switzerland. In fact their rich-poor wealth gap is the biggest in the world, even more than Mexico and the US. Brazil may be externally at peace (though its military imports are the highest in South America, but per capita/per $GDP they're much lower), but internally there is major racism between the fairer skinned minority who own everything and run the country, and the indigenous/black masses. Many native Amazon tribes have been victims of injustice and are not represented by their national government. The poor in the favellas are victims of drugs violence and social neglect. But yes, Pakistan and India have avoided nuclear war, though various skirmishes over the years have claimed dozens of lives, and maybe the attack in Mumbai and violence in Afghanistan can also be partially attributed to their conflict.

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/mil_con_arm_imp-military-conventional-arms-imports

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GDP might not be the best measure for the next century; after all, something like software isn't included in the standard GDP measure and I image other "knowledge economy" outputs (e.g. intellectual property) is also not included in the measure.  Just as developing nations have been able to deploy infrastructure in one-tenth the time spent in the industrialized world (e.g. nothing to 3G telecommunications in 10 years v/s 100 years of the Bell evolution) it could be the case that by focusing on GDP as a measure of wealth we make ourselves more susceptible to the "blind spot" you mentioned with respect to American life quality and even to the actual difference between "rich" and "poor".

Also, I guess we have to agree to disagree about the potential for conflict; I can understand your point (i.e. a simple regression on the data shows a trend) but I also think relying on history alone can be a... well... regressive way of thinking.  After all, our country did get sick of "return of the neo-cons" after a few years, yeah?

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I agree about the limitations of GDP. But for now it's a quick and dirty measure that almost tells you enough of what you want to know. But there is a move to add more "knowledge capital" to the GDP in a few years. I think they'll try to take into account worker training/development, and more R&D type value. But I think it's hard to quantify quality of life. The UN/WHO measures I think include GDP, life expectancy, and subjective surveys, but I'm not sure how you add more to that.

But I don't think it's fair to compare US telecom's history to the rapid rise in some poorer nations. Yes some industry inertia and political red tape has retarded our efforts to modernize (and we've now fallen behind several nations), but without the groundwork done in the US, Europe, and East Asia, poor countries wouldn't have the know-how to get their networks up so quickly. Plus it's foreign companies who are consulting and investing in the poor nations' networks, otherwise they wouldn't be able to get off the ground.

I think wars and politics may be cyclical like economics. As you said, after a near decade of neo-con extremes, we moved back towards the center-left, even though many of Obama's policies are similar to Bush's. But after all, we're a center-right nation I guess. But humanity has never really had to struggle through a global environmental crisis before (climate change and energy/water security), on top of the usual political, social, religious, and economic crises. Now with globalized everything, a problem in one area may have butterfly effects far beyond. Basically, powerful nations have always had more than they knew what to do with, and life essentials were more affordable. Now $70/barrel oil is a reality, and it may get worse. Now decade-long droughts are not only possible but likely. Now even traditionally "rich" countries are going into record debts and unable to fund social programs, create enough jobs, and even birth/educate enough young people. This may exacerbate conflicts and tensions among nations and peoples.

You could be living in "Gasland"

http://www.gaslandthemovie.com/
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127593937
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2010/06/21/127988546/gasland-hbo-gas-drilling-film-exposes-drinking-water-worries

HBO is airing a documentary series this month, and one of the films is called "Gasland" by Josh Fox, about the problems associated with domestic natural gas extraction in American communities. The filmmaker was actually approached by a gas drilling company to lease his family's land for extraction for $100,000, and he first wanted to research the pros and cons before making a decision. What he discovered was so angering and shocking that he decided to drive across America to interview people living with the consequences of gas drilling for a documentary. Of course they were unaware of the impending BP disaster when the broadcast schedule was planned, but the content is now all too familiar. This is part of the true cost of our energy consumption habits.

The natural gas industry touts its product as cheap and "green", and yes its combustion is less polluting than petroleum and coal (but only 25% so). Plus it can be used in a variety of applications (from large scale electricity generation to vehicle fuel), extraction infrastructure is fairly compact, and we even have plenty of domestic reserves, so it sounds like a great energy source. But like ethanol, natural gas is dirtier than most of us know, and the companies tasked with its extraction have committed a litany of environmental and ethical violations. This controversy is not well publicized maybe because US natural gas reserves mostly exist in poorer, rural counties in the northeast, mountain states, and the southern Midwest. Much of the land is federally-owned, and those who live there don't have much of a political voice. The residents are generally less-educated and lower-income, so when a Halliburton-type drilling company approaches them with a fat check to buy the rights to drill on their land, they tend to sign. Companies give all sorts of guarantees that the drilling is safe and you won't even notice, and the rural residents are from the "my word is my bond" tradition, so they trust them without reading the dozens of pages of fine print. And if pollution problems are found and admitted to, the companies often pay off the victims into silence (or underpay for the true damage they inflict) and keep drilling the next day. But some short-changed victims were so mad that they broke their non-disclosure agreements to speak on camera. Even if landowners refuse to sign with drillers, they can still get screwed. If their neighbors agree to lease, their property value may sink because now they live next to an industrial site. By that stroke, drillers and your neighbors can collectively force you off your land by making your property virtually worthless if you resist.

Just as we are tapping new oil reserves with more sophisticated (and riskier) deep-sea drilling, we can now access deeper natural gas deposits using a technique called hydraulic fracture (nicknamed with a masculine moniker, "fracking"). Basically, the gas is trapped in dense rock (shale) over a mile underground and can't be cost-effectively harvested by a conventional well, so with the advent of horizontal drilling, we can bore into the shale and then pump in a high-pressure fluid mix. The mix of water, sand, and proprietary chemicals (that companies may or may not admit are included in the pumping fluid, and are currently not legally required to disclose) fractures the shale so the gas can percolate up to the wells. Through the work of the filmmaker and environmental activists, we now know that fracking fluid contains benzenes, sulfides, and other carcinogens banned by the EPA Clean Air, Water, and Safe Drinking Water Acts. 65 identified ingredients are known to be health hazards. It used to even contain diesel fuel, but Halliburton cut a deal with the EPA in 2005 to stop using it in exchange for a waiver to substitute benzene.

If you recall, 2005 was a big year for the industry with the passing of the Energy Policy Act. After VP Cheney's formed his energy task force and held secret meetings, industry lobbyists successfully convinced politicians to open up unprecedented tracts of federal land to energy exploration, and insert loopholes to exempt the oil and gas industries from many environmental rules. As you would expect, Halliburton is one of the biggest gas drillers, and the industry fracks a staggering 35,000 wells each year in the US. So far the EPA has shown interest and expertise in investigating and regulating fracking chemicals, but agency leaders have copped out, and pronounced that "the states should decide" how to regulate gas drilling. In response to calls for greater scrutiny, the industry has said that fracking is completely safe without providing much supporting evidence. They in turn threaten back that added regulation of drilling will only serve to increase the cost of natural gas to consumers. In response to criticism that "Gasland" paints a slanted picture with anecdotes only from angry anti-gas families, the filmmaker challenged an industry rep to provide him with just one example of a happy, healthy American community living alongside fracture drilling, and so far they haven't gotten back to him yet.

Fracking may sound good; we're tapping vast gas pockets that were previously inaccessible. But the fracking fluid has to go somewhere, and drilling sites are often near aquifers that supply well water to local residents (and in many drilling areas, there aren't big reservoirs or rivers, so people rely on wells to survive and farm/ranch). Some of the waste fluid returns to the surface and is collected in huge pits. If the company is conscientious, they will pump up the liquid and dispose of it safely. But often the drillers will just allow the fluid to evaporate, seep back into the soil, or even expedite evaporation by pumping the fuel through vaporizers. This is all legal apparently. But the poisons don't just disappear. They either accumulate in the water supply or become aerosols that get inhaled by living things nearby.

Fracking breaks up underground shale to release gas, but that gas isn't 100% collected by the wells either. It also seeps into the water supply, and there have been several documented accidents of tap water catching on fire and causing well or household explosions. Many residents were forced to buy bottled water or rely on rainwater cisterns instead. Poisons also contaminate the wildlife, making it harder for local farmers and ranchers to make a living, or even live healthily. The incidence of some cancers, asthma, and neurological disorders (all well-documented side effects of exposure to various fracking fluid base chemicals) is uncommonly high in communities near drilling areas. And as one interviewee in Wyoming said, viewers may think it's crazy but people like him really love what they do - 3rd or 4th generation ranchers who carry on the tradition of Western living that we usually relegate to nostalgia. Now they can't even water their herds enough to develop them for market. So in addition to the massive environmental and health effects of gas drilling, we may be losing a unique and precious feature of American history and culture also. Yes our supercharged economy needs energy to run, and gas is a precious resource. But potable water is also very precious, and although laws and subsidies make its price artificially low, humans are also fighting wars across the globe (either with guns or lawsuits) over water access. Ideally we should protect both our energy and water resources, and it makes no sense to destroy one while pursuing the other, unless you stand to make a lot of money in the process of course. 

Even if companies went beyond the porous rules and made sure their drilling waste didn't endanger local life (if that is even possible with fracking), how green and minimally-invasive is natural gas exploration anyway? Reserves are often in remote areas, so there has to be hundreds of diesel truckloads of equipment transported hundreds of miles to set up a well, and in many cases miles of new road to the site have to be paved beforehand. It's like clear-cutting in the Amazon, and may leave the land like a moonscape afterward. Fracking consumes 400-600 tanker truck loads worth of water, and only a fourth of that volume can be recovered and cleansed (if the company chooses to). If each well consumes 1-7M gallons of water per frack (and wells are sometimes fracked over 10 times), the industry creates trillions of gallons of contaminated water per year (the industry term for the waste is "produced water"). The drilling and refining processes also need to be powered by diesel generators, which collectively spew out tons of emissions. Combine that with gas leaks and chemical evaporation, and the air in microclimates near heavy drilling zones (even densely populated areas like Ft. Worth, which has 15,000 wells in its vicinity) is more unsafe than LA smog.

Most states are in very bad financial shape now, and thanks to the GOP blocking of the jobs bill, will get even less federal assistance in 2010. As consequence, they have had to trim down their environmental and regulatory workforce, and may be more open to allow gas drilling to reap royalties, taxes, and create jobs. As long as they don't live in drilling areas, what do those state legislators care? A major drilling expansion is planned in the Marcellus shale in upstate New York and Pennsylvania. But projected well sites are located in the upper Delaware River Basin and NYC watershed that collectively supply the drinking water to NYC, Philadelphia, and over 15M residents in between. NYC council members are trying to stop the expansion, and so far no wells have broken ground yet.

Undermining Obama's leadership

"Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), who was an oil and gas engineer before he started his career in politics, says President Obama is politicizing the BP escrow fund after having little to do with it being set up.

[T]he real story here is that BP had already made the decision to set aside $20 billion to compensate those harmed by this tragic disaster several days prior to the President’s speech. The true outrage is that this was never the President’s idea at all, and he should be ashamed for pretending it was for political purposes.

On Thursday, Rep. Anh "Joseph" Cao told me that he pressed BP on the fund idea a month ago, inspired by the example of Exxon after its 1989 spill off the coast of Alaska. And on Friday I talked with Ray McKinney, another engineer, who is running for Congress in Georgia against Rep. John Barrow (D-Ga.). McKinney stressed that there was no serious disagreement about the escrow issue, and said Democrats were concocting a political debate when all that mattered was making BP pay and investigating the disaster.

"I think what the government has done has been totally mis-focused," said McKinney. "What I hear when I turn on my radio, is a stupid statement some congressman made, and that's what everyone focuses on. There's a lot of finger pointing and a lot of blame, but everyone agrees we've got to finish the relief well and get to the bottom of why this disaster happened."

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/right-now/2010/06/do_republicans_deserve_credit.html

Basically, BP had already decided on the escrow fund (an action most prudent corporations would do), and Obama and BP announced it at the White House, both for their own PR purposes.

In the end, politics as usual but hardly a "Chicago-style shakedown".

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Thx, A. Gosh, so first they're mad about the "shakedown", and now they're mad that Obama was passing the account off as his idea? In this case, I don't think the public will say, "Shame on you, Obama!" for the escrow account, even if he is trying to take more credit for the idea than deserved. I don't think many Americans outside of the oil industry or irrationally anti-Obama circles will sympathize with BP on this one. As you said, the consensus is that BP + affiliates are 100% at fault and should pay for the damages 100%. So what's the difference, $20B now or later? Sure there may be some hokey claims filed here and there (as was the case after 9/11, and many of them were paid with little investigation!), but in general I think Americans want to see John Q. Fisherman or B&B owner given a lifeline so they don't plunge into financial ruin, for the short-term at least.

I think Obama entered the White House wanting to really be taken seriously as a legit statesman and C-in-C. So he and his people did all they could to distance themselves from the Obamania idol worship. "It's not about me, it's about we, and what we need to get done for America." But now, after all the ridiculous attacks and hits to his approval rating, I think he has to confront the issue and make it about him sometimes, because it is. I know he's not a complainer, cynic, or excuse-man, but he's got to fire back at these GOP idiots who are really only interested in his downfall, no matter the cost to the nation they profess to love. He's a polite guy and a consensus builder, but by now he should see that all but a handful of GOP lawmakers want to seriously work with him.

I wish he would say, "Some Republicans are fighting me every step of the way, uselessly criticizing every minute detail of my presidency instead of working hard for big picture solutions. Some people don't want change that may compromise their fortunate position in society, so they prefer to side with big banks and polluters like BP, instead of supporting me to rein in Wall Street excesses and compensate the victims of the spill. They fabricate controversies out of false claims or completely uncontroversial issues that have major public approval. They just want to confuse you about me, so my party and I lose big in elections. I'm not a miracle worker and I make mistakes, but I am not what they say I am. America, I want you to know that I took the hardest job in the world at one of the hardest times in our history because I know this great nation's potential, and we're not there, partly because of greed, egos, and corruption in politics. 'Yes we can' only works when we work together. I hope you will recognize that some of your elected leaders don't want that. They want to see me (and us) fail so badly, that they will sacrifice all our futures for their petty 'thwart and blame Obama' game. We don't have a moment to waste, and we've squandered too many opportunities. Terrorism, health care, climate change, energy, and financial reform aren't going away, even if I'm not in office. Much of the GOP have zero helpful ideas for these global problems and sometimes even deny their existence. So instead of falling for distractions like my citizenship status, please help me put pressure on the negative influences in Washington to either get them to finally do the people's work, or send them home in disgrace like they deserve."

It is about Obama, and I can't help but conclude that the utter disrespect for his office must be partially due to race. He's not a self-made joke like Nixon or Clinton. He hasn't done anything terrible yet, and is mostly "no drama Obama". Can you imagine our generals showing such public insubordination to even a buffoon like Bush? The military loved Bush, even though he was responsible for 5,000 of their brothers and sisters dead and many more wounded, with little improvement to our national security. I'm actually surprised that McChrystal got fired, because it makes the Obama admin. look a little thin skinned, but I'd rather have an overly sensitive civilian leadership than a military that answers to no one like Pakistan.

Gen. McChrystal running his mouth

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100622/ap_on_en_ot/us_mcchrystal_enemies
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/119236

Like the unprecedented shame of the current French World Cup soccer squad, I guess this is what happens when you let your ego convince you that you are bigger than the mission and the country. For a military commander, I understand that playing diplomat at black-tie events and sucking up to politicians (because they control your resources) can be annoying and not really in your job description. But disrespecting civilian leaders and foreign partners won't help your cause, and will probably undermine public support and military morale. Modern generals have to be worldly gentlemen and not tabacky-spitting, ass-kicking macho men. Well I suppose they have to be both at times, but I'd rather trust a commander who speaks sparingly and uses his brain (rather than the other head), than a prima donna crooning for the cameras. Unfortunately, the US military seems to have produced too many of the latter over our history (Patton, MacArthur, LeMay, Schwartzkopf), and too few of the humbler Bradley/Eisenhower types. Because when your ego and ambition are out of control, what's to stop you from putting your soldiers or innocent civilians in danger for your own career gains and power trips? It's really sad that we need to keep reminding our "civil servants" to put the country first.

If he had any honor, McChrystal should step down. Not just for these comments, but also for lack of progress in Afghanistan, and I don't think things will radically improve by next summer (winter makes large coordinated military operations nearly impossible over there, so they have 4 fewer months to work with). Remember the first surge operation in Marja that was touted as a great success? Now that some US forces have moved on to prepare for the Kandahar offensive, Marja has slipped back to partial Taliban control (and insurgents may have shot down a NATO chopper yesterday). We can't be everywhere at once, and the Afghan troops aren't up to task and probably never will be - at least enough to secure their nation to a level of our liking. Heck even the more advanced, institutional, and better funded Pakistani military can't control its Taliban.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/09/AR2010060906214.html

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"You're leading by example. That's what we do. Particularly when it's really, really hard, and it hurts inside" - Gen. McChrystal

To be fair to the general, McChrystal's big shot friends and foes involved in the Afghan war may also be egomaniacs and opportunists with their own agendas, so it's not like he's a tyrant and everyone else are victimized lambs. The degenerate, dysfunctional soap opera that was Hitler's inner circle and Nazi High Command during WWII seems to be the rule, not the exception, for wartime leadership bodies (look at Bush's war room with Cheney, Wolfowitz, Condi, Rummy, and Powell being like the only sane one). Some are jealous and resentful of McChrystal's rapid rise to fame (deserved or not), and that may be biasing their views. And I think we'd all agree that it is the biggest pain in the ass possible to wage war under the framework of a vague NATO coalition with a million different opinions, complaints, and special interests to please. NATO doesn't have great nation-building expertise, and Afghanistan is 100X more challenging than the Balkans. But hey, no one invited NATO to come.

If McChrystal's data and experience lead him to believe that Obama et al. are truly wrong on various war issues, he has the right to feel that way and express himself consistent with his military duties and obligations. But so far, McChrystal has "won" the debate and gotten almost all he asked for, so why would he need to bitch to the media? Though he got what he needed by playing dirty - initially Obama/Biden were hesitant to escalate the war, so McChrystal and the Pentagon sensed that and "leaked" a memo to the press, basically warning of doomsday unless he gets 40,000 more boots, which more or less forced Obama's hand for fear of looking weak on defense. After that, McChrystal doesn't have the right to get mad at his former commander, Ambassador Eikenberry, for doing the same and questioning the war strategy in a leaked cable. Well, it's now on McChrystal to prove he's right, but I wonder how many more people will die before he feels vindicated or just gives up. Maybe McChrystal is singing like a canary now as insurance in case his counterinsurgency-development strategy fails, so then he can say that others were fighting him all the way, preventing him from getting the job done. Maybe he'd be right, but maybe this move will make defeat more likely. Or maybe this hoopla is way overblown. I'm sure the Taliban doesn't care and doesn't read Rolling Stone. I wonder how our troops will react. They will probably side with their commander, but his example can't be good for military focus and professionalism. 

The RS article said that McChrystal was the son of a general, which probably helped him overcome his 298/855 ranking at West Point, despite being very sharp physically and mentally. He was top of his class in one area: over 100 hours of demerits for poor behavior. During the 2003 Iraq invasion, he was a Pentagon spokesman, not a field commander. Later his office was responsible for the lie/error claiming that Pat Tillman was killed by enemy fire, not by friendlies, and there were reports of detainee abuse at Camp Nama in Iraq in 2006, which was under his command. Yet strangely, it was like his poop didn't stink, and Washington and the media gave him a pass during his confirmation hearings for the top Afghan job. Maybe they were so desperate to have a white knight rescue us from the quagmire. But what probably helped his rise was his time leading JSOC in Iraq (basically black ops), and his people were responsible for killing the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, al-Zarqawi. He is known for modernizing Ranger training and using cyber-geeks to help hunt terrorists. But currently as head of ISAF, the troops resent McChrystal's strategies and new restrictions on using deadly force. It's a tough balancing act - using enough violence to scare and beat the Taliban, but restraining yourself so as to not incur more civilian casualties and the political blowback, which unfortunately puts NATO troops in more harm. It's a delicate approach that may not be viable in practice, and the soldiers seem frustrated and confused about it.