Do bigger houses make for a healthier economy?

So here’s a little insight that one can only get from living in Europe after having lived in the US/Canada, which is this:  In the US/Canada, you have much more house per family; I’ve seen the statistics; it’s roughly double the square footage on average in the US.

This has a number of hidden effects that I don’t think that many economists plug into their primary equations.  In Holland, the houses are really small indeed, almost everyone lives without appreciable yards.  We stayed in the townhouse of this wealthy yuppie couple with a baby, and they had literally no garage, and one single storage closet.  The dude’s only tool area was one single toolbox stored in the cupboard where the brooms and cleaning stuff were stuffed.

So the point is that this dude cannot de facto be in the market for lots of dudely stuff, such as wheelbarrows, lumber, metal poles, chainsaws, giant tool benches, riding mowers, and a whole host of other things which for decades every middle-class American male took for granted as being part of his lifestyle.  Just think of all the things which the average American consumer buys  to fill up their garage space, their toolsheds, etc.  All of these things there is a huge market for in the U.S., and this in turn stimulates the economy.

In Europe, they literally do not  have space for more than a few smallish carpets, a few lamps, one or two framed pictures,  etc., and so there is little market for this, meaning that buying things, even for an uppery middle-class couple, is a relatively rare event.  Because normal household goods are de facto luxury items,  every single household thing is ridiculously expensive.  This is why anywhere outside of Ikea,

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The basic human motivators. Competition, dominance, and sex in an ideal society.

So it’s an ongoing project here at the Platonist, to come up with the ground rules for what would ideally become a book, setting out a Grand Unified Theory (if we may), of how to create an ideal economy, politics, and society.  This is essentially an update of Plato’s Republic, moving beyond earlier utopian or dystopian literature and taking into account what we’ve learned in the last few decades, since advances in the social sciences have been tremendous, and very inspiring if you know where to look.  This is especially true  in our advances in the theory of egalitarianism, and the discursive elements of this, since Foucault.  And of course our ‘system’ has to move beyond being a system, since one thing we’ve learned is that imposing systems doesn’t at all work.  What we would suggest in this rewriting of the Republic, would be a series of concrete policies that would be designed to maximize happiness, through existing democratic and legal institutions, and maximize opportunity, for those who would want it, without imposing anything on anyone (since this would never be better than our current system–freedom is key).  In essence, we’d be continuing the current and ongoing explorations in the social sciences, whose goal, we would argue, is to find ways to help us to live better.  To explain what has worked, and why, and what hasn’t, and why, with the aim of furnishing us with wisdom to make the right choices, ones that are of course naturally obvious.  For example, it’s quite obvious now that democracy works better than any true monarchy or one-man rule, for a whole host of reasons.  This was not so obvious 300 years ago.  This is the sort of thing, only using newer discoveries, that we are aiming to highlight here.  Economics, in particular, is a rich field for this, since  the marxist-capitalist conflict of the 20th century arguably blinded most economic thinkers by turning them into partisans, instead of scientists.  Economics has been dominated too much by polemics, and not enough with the business of maximizing happiness and opportunity.  It is still in the hands of the anti-marxist, pro plutocratic elite, and we need to reclaim economics from them –  - real economics, scientific university economics.  The book ‘prosperity without growth’ is part of this new trend.  It is happening.

At any rate, one of the fundamental stumbling blocks to any would-be set of principles for improving the way things work (since surely there are quite a few problems we have yet to address as well as we could if only we worked it through) is the fact that we’re still pretty much hardwired for hierarchy as I have said in another post – i.e., we still carry strong tendencies to act according to pack and troop principles, which got us through our millions of years living as beasts.  These instincts aren’t however often so great for creating an egalitarian, maximum-opportunity society.  Psychologists and anthropologists have now identified a lot of these, but let’s spell them out here, so that we can get them out in the open, and grapple with them as we discuss and shape our economic and political wish list.

1)  The desire to be cool.  This used to be called ‘honor.’   It’s probably our first instinct, once we move beyond toddlerhood, and stays with us until senility.  You want to have the people immediately around you like you, and act positively towards you.  This is because in primate troop society, this meant you were  ’alpha.’  Everyone fawns over you, does stuff for you, laughs at your jokes.  This translates into personal power.  The Fonz snaps his fingers, and people do stuff for him.  (Jeff Winger in “Community” being an updated version of the same).

2)  The desire to be sexy.  

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The Owl vs. the Dove: Why do our bosses make us get up so early? Why does our economic system discriminate against those who function better later in the day?

Research is now finally beginning to confirm what some of us have known since teenagerhood:  some people have an innate proclivity to go to bed late and get up late, while others are programmed to go to bed early and get up early.  One can see the evolutionary advantages to a given tribe if you have people of both types on hand:  this way, you always have someone on watch.  They say that the ‘owls’ (those who incline to stay up late and get up late) are programmed for their afternoon ‘nap’ about 2pm, while the doves are programmed to have theirs about 12:30 or 1 on average.

Speaking as a certifiable owl, one of the most horrible things about almost every job is that it forces you to get up far too early.   It has gotten a bit easier for me as I have gotten older and have required less sleep:  as a late teen (when most people require their peak amounts of sleep at up to 9 or even 10 hours) it was absolutely brutal to get up for high school, which the administrators had perversely set up so that it began earliest, while elementary school began latest.   Thus high school started at 7:20, meaning we all got up at 5am!!!, while elementary school didn’t start until 9.  I have also seen studies saying that they should reverse this order:  elementary kids tend to get up early (which I also did:  I was up at 5 and 6 when I was 6-10 years old), while high school kids really want, naturally, to stay up late and get up late (this whether you are a dove or owl – you still have tendencies to do more sleeping in and staying up at that point).

Even though I need a bit less sleep now (8 hours to be fully functional, rather than 9 as a teen), the hours that almost every job forces you to get up at are entirely inhumane.  It should definitely go into the global declaration of human rights that people have a right to enough sleep, and therefore the right not to get up at 4:30 if they want to.  These days, however, it seems that insanely early waking hours are almost entirely unavoidable.

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Why all this talk of population decline as ‘demographic disaster?’ A review of Tim Jackson’s “Prosperity without Growth.”

So I was bumming around the LSE bookstore a few weeks back, and found Tim Jackson’s “Propserity without Growth:  Economics for a Finite Planet”  sitting front and centre as a “staff pick featured read.”

And I thought, thank gravy that someone in the establishment is actually beginning to talk about the relationship between population and economics in a way counter to the prevailing wisdom.  As Tim succinctly explains in the first chapter of his book, the current economic model is fundamentally grounded upon one basic mantra, which is that population growth is essential to economic growth.   Economists assume that as population grows, the economy will grow slightly faster, increasing per capita wealth, and thereby making everyone richer.  As Tim points out, however, we’re rapidly coming up against the limits that our planet’s quite finite resources can possibly tolerate, in terms of food growable, food fishable, biological sustainability, waste disposal, not to mention the still not at all solveable fuel shortage problem, and the global warming problem that the oil industry has so successfully spread misinformation about.  I’ve already talked about this stuff in my post “what is the ideal population of the earth.”

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The meaning of life in the long term–’luminous beings are we’? (The platonist on metaphysics.)

So I guess it was J. M. Keynes who said “In the long term, we’ll all dead.”  Fair enough.  But what about our society, our species, and our planet (or even–despite Keynes– us, once we figure out how to stop ageing)?  I’ve already written a post about what our goals should be as a species, over, say the next few hundred years.  But what if we move beyond this timeframe?  I find it’s always good to give you some perspective.  And it helps us to answer, in a more serious fashion, that high-school and comic-strip metaphysics question, ‘what is the meaning of life?’  One can actually be more precise than one might think, nowadays.

When I was a kid, I was a big astronomy buff.  I memorized most of the constellations and their brightest stars; I remember standing out on frigid, crystal-clear winter evenings and checking out Aldabaran in Taurus, the Pleides, Betelgeuse the red giant  in Orion, and Rigel, the ginormous blue star at the other end of Orion.   I subscribed to Astronomy magazine, saved my allowance and bought an 8″-wide  mini ‘light bucket’ dobsonian telescope, which was very economically priced by the way, and when it arrived, it turned out that it was made of a big tube of cardboard, painted red.  That was a bit of a disappointment, but the thing was still so big, that it was magical.  On summer evenings, my best friend and I, and maybe a parent or two, would sit on our back porch in the dark; we had an unobstructed south view, and we were on a bit of a hill, so we could clearly see Scorpio crawling along the southern horizon; the sinisterly red Antares is truly wicked in the context of the scorpion, and is perhaps my favourite star.  Although Vega in Lyra is also a favourite.  With my telescope, I remember checking out the globular cluster near Antares; my favourite was M13 in Hercules.  They still looked incredibly faint and patchy through the lens, and my parents would never have chipped in to buy a camera and tracking apparatus to take photos, but it was magical nonetheless.  At first I wanted to be an astronomer, until I realized that they have to be total math whizzes, and basically just spend their entire time looking at and analyzing data streams.  It seemed unbelievably sterile and tedious to me as a late teen, and so I went for the arts and language instead.  And the really interesting stuff, theoretical physics and cosmology require a math ability that I might have had, but I jumped off the math train in middle school, and once you’re off for a year or two, you can never catch back up.  At any rate, it’s been a bit too long since I’ve really enjoyed the stars on a summer’s evening.  Many years of living in urban apartments have driven a wedge between me and the sky, even though now we finally have the possibility of enjoying it again from our back porch. 

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The Matrix effect; or how humanity is being turned into a hive of cell-people. (And how video games are making us complacent in the change).

In the Matrix, we get glimpses of people who have been turned into fuel sources for an ambiguous controlling elite (of robots); this is just one example of a ‘cell-people’ theme that runs through a lot of Sci-Fi.  Another obvious example is the Borg, where individuals have become entirely subsumed into the ‘collective’ and basically serve as worker drones for a hive mind.  There are other variations where people are simply raised for food.  The main recurring elements in this genre are that people have almost no space in which to move or exercise independent action (because they docilely inhabit tiny cells), and are essentially kept alive for the purposes of others.

The reason why this type of story has resonance, is because it calls to mind some salient truths about the present, and also provides a warning about various metaphorical futures for humanity.  In this post I would like to point out that the world is actually heading in this direction, in a much more real sense than is usually perceived.

There has always been slavery;

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What is the ideal environment for raising children?

There are  quite a few ways in which one could define the term  ”Environment,” but right now I’d like to talk a bit about kids’ physical surroundings.  Clearly, you need a nurturing household, and a happy, stable family life, with loving parents and access to enriching activities and a good education in order to have an optimized upbringing.  But what role does physical environment play in producing an ideal childhood, and thus, hopefully, an ideal adult?

First, I will come down hard on the side of nature.  I believe that raising a child in an urban setting is tantamount to raising a chicken in a factory.  Urban parents have to work extra hard to give their children anything like an enriching environment, and unless they are rich and have regular access to horse stables or a vacation home in the suburbs, or else outdoor enthusiasts who bring the kids to natural parks every weekend, the main result is that urban kids grow up with the stultifying sense that there are always four walls present.  Always.  Every direction that an urban kid turns, she or he sees brick walls, cement walls, highway overpasses, and other built environments.  In a city, one is very seldom more than 100 feet from a wall, in fact.  Walls, walls, walls.  Not good symbolically, and not good psychically.

You see, we have been evolving for millions of years, our own species for a hundred or two hundred thousand years, outside.  Nary a wall in sight.  And for the past several thousand years, our ancestors have spent most of their time farming (a few of them hunting), which means most of their time has been spent outside, in wide open natural surroundings.  Due to this extremely long genetic history, we as individuals come pre-programmed to like certain things:

-Green valleys.  Why?  When primitive humans came into a green valley, this told them that there was plenty of water, game, fruit, nuts, berries, and the other things which sustain life.   Coming into a brown, sterile landscape always spelled wariness, and brought with it the very real danger of starvation.  Urban environments are like desert wastes (which people only appreciate now because they know they will not run out of water, food, etc), and trigger an innate uneasiness, linked to this very strong instinct.

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Why do American workers criticize French workers so much?

So I came across an article on the fact that the French are all up in arms and striking and protesting because Sarkozy is proposing that they raise the retirement from 60 to 62.  Most people in the civilized world are, I believe, are amazed that the French had it so “easy,” that they could retire so relatively early.  And so few people are terribly sympathetic with the French workers, in an era of tightening state budgets, and increasing ranks of old people whose pensions must be paid.  Who cares if it is raised to 62?   For one thing:  it represents a precedent.  If it is raised to 62 now, there is no guarantee that it won’t be 64 in 2 years, and 66 2 years later.  This is a genuine cause for some alarm.

But the real issue, it seems to me, is why, when I look at the comments thread, I see so many half-literate people writing in things like “stop complaining and get back to work frogs I am lucky if i get to retire at 70″ and the like.

So there are two possible reasons for this.  Either a) the French are supidly bankrupting their state, so that “everything is going to seed and ruin,” or else b) the Americans are so brainwashed by their own corporate media, that they become like the slaves of old, who snitch on their fellows who are planning to escape, because they so identify with the master, and are so jealous because they themselves have not the courage or wherewithal to plan an escape, that they lash out at at their fellow slaves.

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Just in case you were getting complacent about global warming…

Yeah, so now the coral reefs in indonesia are totally biting it due to the record heat waves and record water temperatures… but don’t worry, it has nothing to do to with global warming….

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100818/ap_on_sc/as_indonesia_dying_coral

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Twentieth-Century Art. (Draft Post)

So, class, today I’d like to discuss why it is that twentieth-century art has been so important (considering that most people consider art to be worthless and at best frivolous), at the same time that it sucks.  So let’s start with a simple and obvious proposition:  twentieth-century art sucks.  Then, we can go into why it has nonetheless been hugely important, and we can end with some observations on the positive impacts that it has had, basically despite itself.

Before we can discuss why this art sucks, we should discuss the ideas and the technological underpinnings which have by and large shaped the direction of twentieth-century art.

First, some definitions.  What do we mean by twentieth-century art?  Well, we are speaking in the broadest meaningful terms.  In general, we can talk of this art as the sum of the cultural movement which has come under the rubric ‘modernism’ and which started about the time of the first world war.   Under this heading we can put classical music, painting, sculpture, architecture, and literature, including whatever sub genres you like.  All of these fields have been influenced in broadly the same way, and followed broadly similar trajectories, since the dawn of European culture in the middle ages, and they have continued to do so up to the present day.

Thus, we come to the ideas that have shaped this art.  First is obviously the western cultural tradition, which has been evolving since the middle ages, and has taken the form of a dialogue between plato and aristotle:  between the idealism of plato and the scientific desire to continually improve one’s knowledge represented best by artistotle.  Since the renaissance, at least, European artists have seen themselves as being part of a continually evolving, and usually improving, tradition, where artists of the present are in dialogue not only with their peers, but with their forebears.  Up until about 1900, artists in this tradition believed for the most part that by improving their art, they were striving and perhaps reaching ever closer towards the platonic ideals of truth, beauty, and beauty.  They also, many of them, at least paid lip service to the notion that these platonic ideals were also the ideals that formed the best parts of the christian tradition:  in other words, when Bach wrote  “ad maiorem gloriam dei” at the top of his compositions (“to the greater glory of God”), everyone shared his sense that he was making things beautiful because one of God’s commandments to huanity was that they should continually try and achieve the perfection which He embodied (viz, truth, beauty, the good, justice, etc.). 

After about 1910, however, everything changed in the art world:  in general, it became fashionable, due to the influence of Marxism, to see “traditional” art (i.e., all art before 1910) as “bourgeois,” and thus as part of the culture of “oppression,” which had previously dominated all societies.  And this makes sense on many levels:  because the cathedrals and churches which were the centres of so much western art were so obviously just monuments to the oppression of clerical elites, and arguably of theocratic voodoo pushers who wished merely to keep the masses dumb by feeding them opiates, it was not too difficult for an increasingly sophisticated intellectual elite to grasp the notion that all previous art had been the product of oppression.  Even neoclassical art was the product of “bourgeos” rulers who wished to awe the people into thinking that they were the “most reasonable” and obviously had a monopoly on beauty, harmony, and truth.   So, sure, this was one reason to suspect previous art.

Another reason was the recent “death of god” proclaimed by Nietzsche, which was shored up by the findings of Darwin, Freud, and Marx in their respective fields (which together covered most of human knowledge).  If God had always been the underpinner of the platonic ideals of truth, justice, and beauty, but he was now dead, then were these ideals of truth beauty and the good just farcical lies?  If god was just a big lie perpetrated on the people by ruling elites, then were not the very ideals of truth, justice, and beauty just sublimations of the same thing?  One had to throw out all the old notions of beauty if one wanted to create a “new art,” which alone would be “free” and alone would be “liberating” to “the people.”

So 20th century art was born in a notion that it would:

a) expose the lies of the bourgeoisie (i.e., show that they had been for centuries creating a property system, a capitalist system, which mimicked feudalism, insofar as it exalted a rich few who exploited the masses for their labour and stole their birthright from them). 

b) find new modes of expression which were based on a truer and freer truth than ever before.

c) in doing so, it would create a “new beauty” of its own which was not defined by theocrats, or some long-dead culture’s notion of what God is, but rather a beauty of proletarian solidarity.

Note that, after the 1980s, these ideas are seeming pretty stale, these notions of the proletariat, etc.  This is because economists have realized, even left wing ones, that Marxism doesn’t really work that way, and so the underpinnings of a proletarian beauty have been proven to be wrong.  Not to mention, we’ve all now had ample experience of where a quest for “other forms of beauty” gets us:  both communist regimes,. and twentieth century artists have now spent decades proving to us that their quest was sorely misguided.  The rusty i-beam sculptures which ruin many public parks across the world are eloquent testimony to that, as are the architectural skylines of almost any city built between 1930 and 1990 (when things started to pick up, a little). 

Note, too, that pretty soon after the initial rebellion against beauty, most artists kind of forgot the original purpose of these movements, but instead just followed what they learned at art school, which was that what their art teachers did was the fashion. 

Now, we can talk about the technological underpinnings of twentieth-century art.  

1)  Painting vs. Photography.  One of the key components of 20th century art which few people remember to discuss is that changes in a few basic technologies drastically and permanently changed the nature of art, the relationship between people and artistic media.  By about 1900, photography had become so common and convenient that it began to supplant painting.  Remember that prior to this, for thousands of years, the only way to record, or remember a person or place was to paint it.  Thus, prior to about 1900, painting was a necessary art form, which filled a basic functions that could not otherwise be fulfilled.  Nowadays, it’s an extravagant luxury.  After 1900, however, painters began to develope some pretty radical reactions to th efact of photography chasing them off the field of usefulness altogether:  the surrealists attempted to take painting into a place that photography couldn’t easily go.  Again, it’s arguable if this was very useful, since for at least 60 years now painting has had next to no cultural signficiance.   

2) Music in the age of the phonograph.  Argument:  classical composers, live performance, and the orchestra form, became mere luxuries, instead of being necessary to the production of music.  A few stars could now monopolize the market.

3) Poetry in the age of the phonograph.   Argument:  poetry was killed by recorded music. 

4) Drama in the age of television.

5)  Literature in the age of television and movies.   

So, we’ll have to leave it here for now.  This is a draft post, but the issue is a complex one, so it may take a while to finish.  In the meantime, if you are inspired to do so, please comment! 

-trivium.

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