Happiness and Socialism

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According to a new report released by the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development, a Paris-based group of 30 countries with democratic governments that provides economic and social statistics and data, happiness levels are highest in northern European countries…

Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands rated at the top of the list, ranking first, second and third, respectively. Outside Europe, New Zealand and Canada landed at Nos. 8 and 6, respectively. The United States did not crack the top 10. Switzerland placed seventh and Belgium placed tenth.

Lauren Sherman, Yahoo Travel

This is one of those pieces that I almost didn’t read because I thought I already knew the answer. I read it anyway and in fact I did already know the answer. This is one of those perennial stories that seems to pop up every year. It turns out that sharply reducing poverty and unemployment and providing good public health care and long vacations makes people happy. Who knew?

Actually, it just reminds me once again of that endless right-wing complaint about “socialism.” This is a kind of code that market ideologues use. In essence, the idea is that the government can never match the efficiency of the “free market.” It also has a little taste of fear mongering tossed into the mix, sometimes explicitly and sometimes only implied.

So “socialism” doesn’t really signify some sort of reasonable desire to restrain the power of government. In fact, the just the opposite. They complain about socialism exactly because only the state has the power to institutionalize the restraints that keep the “bloody hands” of capitalism in check. Apparently, even happiness is not a persuasive outcome for these folks.

Posted in: Online Places, Writing

What Ignorance Looks Like, Part I: Pretty Prejudice

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Ignorance and bigotry are all mixed up with our usually unspoken ideas about class, and race, and gender. In the United States, when we think about ignorance and bigotry we all too often unfairly call up the image of a poor white Southern man. We are like a general who can’t win any battles because he’s still trying to fight the last war.

That’s why this Ms. California video is so compelling; this is the new, modern face of prejudice: feminine and pretty, self-effacing and even apologetic. Bigotry, at least the public sort, is no longer aggressive, masculine and arrogant. (No doubt the old bigotry survives in all sorts of other, less public places.) Ignorance, now, is “just an opinion,” ‘the way my family was raised.”

Yet it’s still bigotry and it’s still hateful and violent. As a friend of mine always says, why do they care? What is it about a certain Christian ideology that makes a simple fact of life– homosexuality– into moral depravity? I don’t think there’s a good answer in the end. Why did these same families find so-called mixed marriages so repulsive three generations ago?

Posted in: Online Places, Writing

Ours and Mine

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I use roads that I don’t own. I have immediate access to 99% of the roads and highways of the world (with a few exceptions) because they are a public commons. We are all granted this street access via our payment of local taxes. For almost any purpose I can think of, the roads of the world serve me as if I owned them. Even better than if I owned them since I am not in charge of maintaining them. The bulk of public infrastructure offers the same “better than owning” benefits.

The web is also a social common good. The web is not the same as public roads, which are “owned” by the public, but in terms of public access and use, the web is a type of community good. The good of the web serves me as if I owned it. I can summon it in full, anytime, with the snap of a finger. Libraries share some of these qualities. The content of the books are not public domain, but their displays (the books) grant public access to their knowledge and information, which is in some ways better than owning them.

Kevin Kelly, The Technium, Better than Owning

I continue to be fascinated by the ways in which the economic impasse is eating away at older property forms and creating the possibility for new forms. The textbook industry is a good example. Suddenly, materially privileged professors and administrators are ‘discovering’ that textbooks are expensive.

“We can fix it,” they say, as if they were not, in part, responsible for this inaccessibility. Still, whatever the origins, online textbooks are going to kill off the textbook industry– of course, something equally awful might arise in its place. In any case, this might be one of those silver linings in the dark recession clouds.

These musings and potentials are complicated and unpredictable. The CD may disappear but the LP seems to be back, complete with free digital download of the music so you can play it on your MP3 player as well as your turntable. Some of the musing, however, doesn’t make much sense.

I like the way Kevin Kelly mulls over the things he, personally, does not own but uses daily. These are our collective wealth: the highways, much of the internet, and so on. He’s less persuasive when he linke these forms of ownership and rent-to-own schemes or leasing. These are mostly confidence games.

The root problem, I think, lies in the lack of a critical economics in popular culture. Economics as commonly discussed, is business economics, that is, discussions of how to make capitalism work better. You have to venture fairly far out to the periphery to find anti-capitalist economics.

Posted in: Autobiographical, Economics, Online Places, War

Wishful Thinking

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The Millennium Villages project offers a bold, innovative model for helping rural African communities lift themselves out of extreme poverty. The Millennium Villages are proving that by fighting poverty at the village level through community-led development, rural Africa can achieve the Millennium Development Goals—global targets for reducing extreme poverty and hunger by half and improving education, health, gender equality and environmental sustainability—by 2015, and escape the extreme poverty that traps hundreds of millions of people throughout the continent.

With the help of new advances in science and technology, project personnel work with villages to create and facilitate sustainable, community-led action plans that are tailored to the villages’ specific needs and designed to achieve the the Millennium Development Goals.

About the Villages

Positive thinking can be a bad thing if it blinds you to criticism and ongoing problems. Pessimism, though, can be just as bad if it prevents you from seeing potential and the possibility of change. So when someone, person or organization, makes large claims it’s important to try to find some balance between skepticism and wishful thinking.

That’s why it can be so difficult to think though the idea that poverty could be eliminated in the same way that certain diseases have been eliminated over the last century. A century ago, of course, we did not know enough about the origins of diseases to really understand how we might prevent them. And, of course, we have only eliminated a few.

In fact, the very techniques we developed to fight diseases caused their own problems; bacterial resistance to antibiotics, for example. And new diseases have arisen, such as the AIDS pandemic, that may not be resolved, much less controlled, for decades or more. So when we say we can eliminate poverty we have to be cautious about what we mean.

Still, projects like the Millennium Villages illustrate that there is a lot of common sense yet to be applied to the problem of eliminating hunger and poverty. We save an enormous amount of energy– in every sense– if we buy food aide regionally rather than shipping it from the United States. African farmers are willing and able to grow their own crops.

Similarly, it makes sense to apply some sort of systemic thinking to poverty. That means considerations of sustainability and scale, as well as a focus on agriculture, education, health, and infrastructure. This is not your father’s Care Package, dropped by parachute when famine strikes. I think there is every reason to be hopeful about this new model.

Posted in: Autobiographical, Economics, Language, Online Places, War, Writing