is what i do

Breaking news: “The Giant Pool of Money” has just won a Peabody Award! Congratulations to Adam, to Alex, to Ira and the team at This American Life, and to the people at NPR who tried something new and helped foal a winner!

First, the DuPont/Columbia Award; then, the George Polk Award; now, the Peabody. In broadcast journalism, those are the three biggies, and the Peabody is arguably the biggest of them all. Joan and I are bursting with joy for you, Alex and Adam. We knew that show was good work, spectacularly good work, when we first heard it, and it’s good to see that judgment confirmed. Keep it up.

Brewster Kahle, over at the Open Content Alliance, has an interesting post about the cost of digitizing books. His overall take: it’s very cheap, especially relative to the cost of maintaining brick & mortar libraries. And, I might add, incredibly worthwhile, especially when you factor in the negligible additional cost of reproducing a digitized book. As a way of preserving our cultural heritage in the face of certain change, and possibly pernicious attack, it’s money that we absolutely need to spend.

The next step is to figure out how to get those digitized books into the hands of readers, with some responsible way of preserving some reasonable level of copyright protection for authors (needless to say, perhaps, that I consider our current copyright laws unreasonable). Kindle doesn’t do it; Apple’s probably upcoming netbook/tablet/ginormous ipod touch might, but only for a few. Perhaps the OLPC consortium might look into repurposing their technology as eBook technology; that might help more people, and respond to greater need, and spread information more widely and democratically and at lower cost, than the rather silly and instantly outmoded device that they came up with (and that I first saw in Brewster’s offices; thanks, Brewster & Becky).

I never thought I’d write a post praising moderate Islam. I’ve pretty much concluded that the phrase is an oxymoron, like “tolerant fundamentalist”. But this video is almost enough to convince me otherwise:

For one thing, it’s a lovely song, with lyrics that seem, from the subtitles, to be graceful and true. Its message is universal; although the images are of Islamic terrorists, and its clearly aimed at an Islamic audience and clearly intended to move that audience to reject terror, it is a song that any of us can sing with feeling and with broader intent. I call myself an atheist; you repeat the term, and there is venom in your tone. Yeh hum naheen. You look at an old white man; you see an Imperialist American, and you scowl and spit. Yeh hum naheen. I look at a cluster of Hasids in Williamsburg; I think of their wives, bewigged and burdened with babies, and I see deluded oppressors. Yeh hum naheen. This is not us; I am not that: not that one you reduce me to, not that one you label me, not one at all, but many, and you as well. Yeh hum naheen.

I can see this song joining others I have sung in my life whose lyrics were not in my tongue, but whose meaning added richness to my life: Die Gedanken est frei, Kumbaya, Guantanamera, Viva la Quince Brigada, Hey, Zhankoye. I will listen again. And again. I hope to hear it sung by many who are not Muslims.

I am still suspicious of and disgusted by Islam as it is revealed in the Koran, just as I am suspicious of and disgusted by Judaism as it’s revealed in the Torah, and by Christianity as it’s revealed in the Gospels, in Revelations, and in the epistles of Paul. Those books are full of bile and vengeful rage; the God Who terrified their authors is a paranoid solipsistic SOB, powerless, irrelevant, and almost certainly illusory. Those who believe that God to be real and who try to live their lives according to His will are to be pitied.

But this is a great song, and it carries a message we would all do well to hear and to integrate into our view of things and our habits of mind. There’s a website and a foundation. There is a petition against terrorism, which millions of Pakistanis have signed - more Pakistanis have signed the petition than voted in the last Pakistani election. That is hopeful.

Incompletely developed thoughts, loosely connected:

• It’s not spending. It’s buying. The government is not spending our money when it builds roads and subsidizes the employment of teachers and health care workers; it’s buying us better roads, better schools, better hospitals.
• Economics is not an empirical science. It’s reasoned guessing. That’s why there’s no Standard Theory in economics, like there is in Biology and Physics.
• What’s happened in the past 30 years is new, radically new. The development of information technology, and the use of that technology to control machines, requires that we think differently about cost, price, and profit: no theories developed before about 1975 can deal with the dramatic drop in manufacturing and service delivery costs that have happened since then.
• Steady or gently rising prices, plus plummeting costs, have created enormous profits, inflating investor wealth and expectations way beyond what was reasonable before 1975.
• The general idea that we have been pretty much immune to inflation in recent times is an illusion. Falling costs (which involve stagnant or falling wages and fewer jobs) have very much the same effect as classical inflation.
• By the same token, deflation, when the disparity between price and cost has gotten so out of line, is not the horrendous event that classical economic theory imagines the word to describe.
• When costs drop, innovative effort requires less capital investment; the big losers in a deflationary economy are the capitalists. Fuck ‘em.
• The cost to government of stimulating innovation and increased production of commodities (including commodity services like education and health care) is not great in an economy in which costs are dropping dramatically and steadily. Government is in a better position to measure its return on stimulus investment in terms appropriate to the well-being of the society and is not (or should not be) concerned, as a private investor must be, about maximizing the monetary return on its investment.
• There are a lot of people used to working who have lost their jobs. Deflation doesn’t help them much; if there’s no money coming in, it doesn’t really matter much how low prices fall. Those people need jobs, which intelligent government stimulus will generate, and, until those jobs materialize, they need help getting by.
• I don’t need direct help, at least right now. I don’t need tax cuts or checks in the mail; deflation will take care of me in that regard. I want the government to buy me stuff that it’s unrealistic to expect private capitalism to buy me, and to create jobs in the process, so that civic order and individual pride and responsibility can be maintained.

How much sense is there in all this?

“My life is never dictated by superstitions. My faith is first and foremost. If you believe that God’s in control, there is no reason to believe in superstitions.”

Ishmael muses:

Another occasion for attachment. Alex and Adam won a Silver Baton at the DuPont-Columbia Journalism Awards Thursday evening. It’s a big deal, and they were in exceptional company. The award was for the prescient radio show they produced last May, “The Giant Pool of Money“, which did so much to de-mystify what was then being called “the sub-prime mortgage crisis” and has since morphed into the worst global economic catastrophe since the Great Depression. Adam and Alex were on the story early; they got it right, and they made it clear. The show has been downloaded more than half a million times and has generated more comment than any other show ever produced by This American Life. It led to the Planet Money project (podcast, blog, and regular radio segments produced for NPR and/or This American Life), and several other collaborations between Alex and Adam, each of which has received favorable reviews. Alex says this is a great time to be an economics journalist; we’re sure it’s going to get more and more interesting, and we hope the news that Alex and Adam will be covering gets better and better as Obama and his team take control. Alex, Adam, wonderful work! We are proud of you.

(Thanks to Adam’s dad for the photo.)

Ace was a handsome rabbit. He was large, as rabbits go, with erect ears and a lovely tri-tone coat: dark brown, lighter brown, and tan. Alex found him in the street outside his apartment, in Wicker Park, in Chicago, in the summer or fall of 2000. After trying in vain to find his owner, Alex kept him. Ace had free run of Alex’s apartment; he used his litter box faithfully, mostly, and once the electric and telephone cords were safely taped to the walls so that Ace couldn’t chew through them, he was not much trouble. When Alex moved to New York just after Thanksgiving in 2002, we kept Ace until Alex found a larger place. So we kept Ace, as we’ve kept so much - people, pets, opinions, stuff, the house we’ve lived in for the past 35 years - that we accepted without really thinking much, or took on just for a while, and then became attached to.

Ace was an unlikely object of attachment. Aside from his handsomeness, he had nothing much to commend him as a pet; not much in the way of curiosity, or friendliness, or personality. Rabbits are prey animals; as Alex observed, they behave as if anything that moves intends to eat them. Their bodies bend in just one plane, to move very fast in a straight line, and they are not at all sinuous, like a cat. Ace was cute, after his fashion; he lost his fearfulness enough to come to us when we came into his room, sit up on his haunches, and beg for a favorite treat: a styrofoam-like corn log. He’d take it gently in his teeth, drop to all fours, and promptly lose complete interest in us.

Still, we were attached to Ace, at least enough to get choked up and shed some tears when we had him euthanized this morning. Over just a couple of days, he stopped using his litter box, became drastically constipated, stopped eating and urinating, and lost control of one hind leg and one front leg. But his ears were erect to the end, and, as he sat trembling in the banana box in which we carried him to the vet, he appeared to relax as Joan scratched his forehead - the only physical attention he ever seemed to respond to. The vet assured us that the euthanasia was carried out painlessly, and asked us if we wanted Ace cremated and his ashes saved in a ceramic urn. We said, “No, we’ll just take the body home”, which seemed to surprise the vet, and which saved us $230. We received the carcass in a cardboard box, neatly taped up, and just a few hours ago, I gave Ace a proper burial in the dumpster behind the Brew House. I would be happy with a similar disposal of my carcass, but, alas, that won’t be an option for those left to handle the matter.

Ace’s passing has left me pondering. I’m leading a study group in the teachings of the Buddha, and one issue that’s caused a lot of discussion is the matter of karma and rebirth. If the Buddha was speaking literally and with true knowledge, as I think is likely, then Ace’s birth as a rabbit is likely the result of unwholesome karma by some divine or human being back in time - perhaps a person whose bullying behavior as a schoolboy resulted in rebirth as a fearful timid being in the animal realm. But as rabbit lives go, Ace’s was a fortunate one. He was never caged, never tormented, kept warm in the winter and moved to an air-conditioned room through the hot days of summer. And he lived a long life. He was probably nine years old when he died, and the vet told us that most domestic rabbits don’t live much past five or six. He was lively and, as far as we could tell, happy until just a few days ago. So there must have been some mitigating karma in the chain.

And the question then becomes, how does a fortunately born rabbit act with wholesome intention, so that, next time around, he might achieve an even more fortunate birth - move one or two steps up in the chain of beings? Was Ace, perhaps, less destructive than his animal instincts would lead him to be; did he intentionally not destroy the more valuable books on the lowest shelves of his room, or did he make a special effort to keep his stool in the litter box? Did the very slight affection he seemed to display for us demonstrate something like generosity and respect for beings closer to enlightenment than he was? I hope so; if there is some karmic principle that determines the luck of the draw, I hope that Ace has achieved a yet more fortunate birth, one that brings him closer to release from the dukkha that characterizes all samsaric existence.

There are all sorts of other thoughts that Ace’s death has set shimmering in my mind. One concerns that lingering attachment. It was clear, from the vet’s response to us, that we were demonstrating considerably more equanimity in the face of Ace’s imminent demise than most of the people she dealt with. She might even have found us a bit callous. But we shed tears. It’s clear that I am far from ready to abandon completely and without reserve my clinging to the things in this world in which I have found pleasure.

I had another thought, entirely political and non-buddhistic. In assenting to Ace’s euthanasia, I am convinced that we acted rightly and in the old rabbit’s best interests. Both law and the opinion of the multitude support us in that (although I am sure that there are those who would dissent). Now, why is it proper to help an animal, a pet, to evade the worst pangs of the dying process, but it is not proper to so so for a human being? Why may we not help a loved one to an easeful death, even with their conscious assent, even in response to their heartfelt pleading? Why are we are forced by law to prolong a painful and terminal process beyond all natural limits? Why must we maintain the pain of those who are dying and of those who love them? Why can’t we imagine a way to allow responsible euthanasia for those who have requested it, either in conscious pain or with foresight in advance of their inevitable decline?

Those are important questions, more important and more momentous than the question of why those who inherit my carcass can’t deposit it in the nearest dumpster or leave it in the woods for scavengers to transmute to fertilizing shit.

Now, returning one last time to those tears. Is it, in fact, Ace that I remain attached to, or did his passing stimulate tears in response to a much deeper and more karmically disastrous attachment? Let me close by quoting Gerard Manley Hopkin’s magical poem:

Source: John Wellington Ennis: Ken Blackwell for RNC Chair

John Ennis knows Ken Blackwell; he’s made a feature-length documentary of our former Secretary of State’s devious (and successful) schemes to deliver Ohio to Dubya in 2004.

J. Kenneth Blackwell, the former Secretary of State of Ohio whose administration of the 2004 election made Katherine Harris look like Mary Tyler Moore, is aggressively pushing to become the next chair of the Republican National Committee when its 168 members convene in 2009 to figure out how to pull their party out of the deep, dank hole they have dug themselves into. And I for one support his selection wholeheartedly.

Ennis’s article details the many ways in which Ken exemplifies those qualities that sunk the GOP in November. He wishes Blackwell success in his drive to skipper that derelict vessel, and he concludes, “I think that most readers of Huffington Post will join me in supporting Ken Blackwell to lead the Republican Party to a dismal future. Indeed, his penchant for election fraud may be their only chance left.”

In a brilliant article in Vanity Fair, Nobel Prize Winning Economist Joseph E. Stiglitz gives us a remarkably clear and clear-headed review of the multiple bad decisions that have led us to our present mess, starting with Reagan’s decision to fire Paul Volcker from his position as Chairman of the Fed and replace him with the radically anti-regulation Ayn Rand worshipper Alan Greenspan.

Stiglitz lists five key mistakes, decisions that were made in the administrations of Reagan, Clinton and Dubya. Mistakes cascade - each bad decision makes it more difficult to undo the negative results of the last bad decision. So, Greenspan was the first mistake; Stiglitz points out that Greenspan presided over not one but two bubbles: the high-tech bubble of 2000-2001 and the subsequent housing bubble.

He [Greenspan] had many of the tools he needed to cope with the situation. To deal with the high-tech bubble, he could have increased margin requirements (the amount of cash people need to put down to buy stock). To deflate the housing bubble, he could have curbed predatory lending to low-income households and prohibited other insidious practices (the no-documentation—or “liar”—loans, the interest-only loans, and so on). This would have gone a long way toward protecting us. If he didn’t have the tools, he could have gone to Congress and asked for them.

Of course, the current problems with our financial system are not solely the result of bad lending. The banks have made mega-bets with one another through complicated instruments such as derivatives, credit-default swaps, and so forth. With these, one party pays another if certain events happen—for instance, if Bear Stearns goes bankrupt, or if the dollar soars. These instruments were originally created to help manage risk—but they can also be used to gamble. Thus, if you felt confident that the dollar was going to fall, you could make a big bet accordingly, and if the dollar indeed fell, your profits would soar. The problem is that, with this complicated intertwining of bets of great magnitude, no one could be sure of the financial position of anyone else—or even of one’s own position. Not surprisingly, the credit markets froze.

Greenspan ran the Fed through the course of the next three mistakes that Stiglitz identifies: the tearing down of the walls that separated commercial banks from investment banks and the consequent pressure on the commercial banks to take on riskier investments; the Bush Administration’s many actions that, in Stiglitz’s words, seemed to be based on the belief “that tax cuts, especially for upper-income Americans and corporations, were a cure-all for any economic disease—the modern-day equivalent of leeches”; and the breakdown, throughout the first decade of this century, of ratings agencies as adequate arbiters of the financial soundness of the companies they rated (and from whose ranks they came).

The final mistake was the bailout of the banks:

The original proposal by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, a three-page document that would have provided $700 billion for the secretary to spend at his sole discretion, without oversight or judicial review, was an act of extraordinary arrogance. He sold the program as necessary to restore confidence. But it didn’t address the underlying reasons for the loss of confidence. The banks had made too many bad loans. There were big holes in their balance sheets. No one knew what was truth and what was fiction. The bailout package was like a massive transfusion to a patient suffering from internal bleeding—and nothing was being done about the source of the problem

The conclusion Stiglitz comes to is radical and, to my mind, right on:

The truth is most of the individual mistakes boil down to just one: a belief that markets are self-adjusting and that the role of government should be minimal. Looking back at that belief during hearings this fall on Capitol Hill, Alan Greenspan said out loud, “I have found a flaw.” Congressman Henry Waxman pushed him, responding, “In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right; it was not working.” “Absolutely, precisely,” Greenspan said. The embrace by America—and much of the rest of the world—of this flawed economic philosophy made it inevitable that we would eventually arrive at the place we are today.

The article is not all that long, and Stiglitz’s majestic command of the facts and their implications make his story most convincing. Let’s hope that the Democratic majority has the good sense and that President-Elect Obama has the leadership skills to restore a role for government in the creation and maintenance of an economic system that will be equitable, transparent, and productive of widely shared prosperity and well-being.