I recorded a demo EP. 5 songs, full-band arrangements, all originals. Themes include climate change, the financial crisis, disillusionment with the Obama administration, the dystopian future, and turning 30. There is even a music video. Check it out on my music website: http://www.stolaroff.com

I started working on this project maybe a year and a half ago. It turns out, recording an album on your own is a lot of work. Why do many of us take on challenging creative projects with dubious rewards? It’s something I continue asking myself, and I think I’ve explored it far enough to know that the answer is not, simply, “for fun”.

The beauty of capitalism, argues Adam Smith and my textbook, is that resources are magically guided by the invisible hand of the market to their most efficient uses. No central planning body is needed, as it is in communism, to decide how much of each product should be produced and who should receive it.

On the micro-scale, this is true in many ways. The individual decisions of millions of businesses, communicating through prices, add up to a system that satisfies most people’s wants with a dizzying array of constantly-improving products. We don’t need a giant bureaucracy to set the price of raisin bagels or determine how many electric lawnmowers should be built.

However, what I’m now discovering is that there is no “invisible hand” analogy on the macro-scale. The “natural” macroeconomic outcome of an entirely free market is abhorrent. Devastating cycles of boom, bubble, and recession; ever-more concentrated wealth; terrible working conditions for the poor; and, perhaps, resource depletion and collapse. It’s entirely up to the government (and, in some cases, labor unions), to guide the market with fiscal policy (government spending), monetary policy (mainly the interest rate), and human rights protections, and to clean up after the market with social welfare programs.

The hands are quite visible. So how much do you trust your government? They’ve been doing a bang-up job lately. Poor monetary policy (years of super-low interest rates, among other problems), contributed greatly to the housing bubble and our current Great Recession.

I just think it’s important to remember when certain pundits and Wall Street executives plead for small government and financial deregulation, that there is no reason to believe that would help in macroeconomic terms.

On the micro-level — when you are talking about things like price tariffs, subsidies, restrictions on trade, product standards — there is a justification, at least in theory, to call for “smaller government” or deregulation. Because here the market allocates resources more efficiently than the government would (again, at least in theory). But we already know what happens to the macroeconomy, left to its own devices, and that is everyone but the fabulously rich and very lucky gets smacked around by the invisible hand.

Waterboarding is torture. It’s a well known and accepted fact by everyone except a small number of extremists like Dick Cheney, and unfortunately, editors of major newspapers like the Washington Post. The torture memos recently released by the Justice Department describe waterboarding, among other forms of torture. However, as one example in a pattern of underplaying torture committed by the U.S. Government, today in a news article the Washington Post referred to the techniques described in those memos as “harsh tactics that critics liken to torture”. This is akin to describing carbon dioxide as “an industrial byproduct that critics liken to pollution” or referring to current economic conditions as “a slowing of the market that critics liken to a recession”.

Of course you can find many people, even people in prominent or powerful positions, who believe carbon dioxide is not a pollutant (e.g. Senator James Inhofe), or who don’t characterize current economic conditions as a recession. But that does not justify presenting a widely-held and generally-accepted fact as a fringe belief. Waterboarding is widely and generally accepted to be torture, not “likened” to torture and not only by “critics”, just as carbon dioxide is not merely “likened” to pollution and not only by “critics”.

I wrote a letter to the editor of the Post about this; I’ll let you know what happens.

I went to a panel discussion last night on “Merging Climate and Transportation Policy”. There were panelists from roughly the political left, right, and center, but all were thoughtful, had many good points, and agreed that the current system for spending federal transportation dollars is terrible. A lot of discussion about transportation and climate change tends to focus on technological fixes, like electric cars or biofuels, but this one focused on reducing driving — essentially changing behavior. The center and left panelists seemed to be boxing at the shadow-accusation that any such attempt is “social engineering”, largely by arguing that putting the right price on driving (i.e., making it significantly more expensive) isn’t about changing behavior, it’s about letting people make the right choices.

Well, prices changes behavior. That’s the point. There is some psychological value to giving people options, even ones they can’t afford, as opposed to mandating something (“You can only drive on odd-numbered days”), but it’s still about changing behavior. We know that raising the price of driving causes people to do it less (cf. recent increases in gas prices and subsequent fall off in car travel), but it’s not a terribly strong effect. If we want big reductions, like cutting miles driven in half, it’s hard to imagine that just pricing people out of their cars ($15 gas?) will be acceptable. I’m convinced the much more powerful (and palatable) tools will be land-use planning, making urban cores more attractive places to live (e.g. by improving urban schools), and cultural shifts toward valuing neighborhoods and urban features.

One of the interesting questions that came up was, “will policies to reduce miles driven also suppress economic growth?” This is something the right and center panelists were very concerned about. And actually, it’s hard to see how a pricing-based policy wouldn’t. There could be some rebound effects, like a more vibrant commercial economy if congestion-pricing makes the city more pleasant to shop and do business in. Or perhaps everyone would save fuel on balance because congestion-pricing eliminates gridlock. However, the main effect of charging more for driving is that people have less money to spend on other things. But let’s think about the other types of policies — the ones that get people replacing cars with transit and living closer to things. Offhand, I would say the economy becomes more service-oriented. People go out to eat more, spend more on cultural attractions, meet each other in bars and so on — the classic urban lifestyle model. They have smaller houses which they spend less to fill with things and, or course, less on cars. Bad for the economy? It’s not obvious, but I’d guess it’s better for communities to have more-local economies in the long run. Another direction it might go is that car travel gets expensive/unpleasant but the alternatives aren’t great either, so people just stay home. Probably yes, this would slow economic growth. Although that shouldn’t be the question. Are people less happy? Spending more time with the family and less time commuting to far-flung jobs is not bad. Staying home to watch tv and get isolated and depressed, on the other hand, probably is bad. So there is a right way and a wrong way to reduce driving. I expect that the strategies based on building vibrant communities support both economic growth and movement to a service-based economy that is better for the environment and connects people with each other.

I generally feel that people are not worked up enough about corporate invasions of privacy. So it’s good to see an article like this in the Times talking about these issues. People think I’m a little crazy when I tell them I trade supermarket club cards with other people to confuse the consumer profiling system. Maybe that’s because, according to the sidebar, 64% of people don’t realize supermarkets can sell their customers’ purchase information to other companies.

The author makes an interesting framing of personal privacy as an implicit contract. It’s not illegal for someone to follow you around from store to store and record your purchases, but we would consider it an invasion of privacy. We implicitly regard such information as belonging to you. The information has value to every company that can sell you more things if they know your purchasing habits, but this information has (largely) not been monetized. Apparently, the main way that buyout artists made money on hostile takeovers in the ’80’s was by breaking implicit contracts, like the implicit contract to pay senior workers more.

From my own experience from my father’s work in wholesaling, this seems to be a major way that large companies push out small businesses. Some of it is due to higher efficiency from economies of scale, but a lot of the lower prices come from breaking implicit contracts. A small sales business relies on personal relationships. “Good service” is based largely on the understanding that if something goes wrong, it will be fixed at no charge. The small businessman builds loyalty with the customers, often investing a lot up front in samples, demos, and time. The implicit contract is that the customer will stay on board for a while if she finds value in the product. A big company, on the other hand, can offer lower prices, but demos and personal time are short. Likewise, service is more an “our way or the highway” approach. Big companies can freeload on the value that smaller companies invested to get a new product adopted by coming in afterward, perhaps with a cheaper knockoff, and undercutting. At the same time, they keep costs low by redefining the implicit rules of good service and doing less for the customer.

If a small company who you’ve been doing business with for years says, “okay, I’m going to renege on all our agreements, but my prices will drop a little next year”, you’d probably be mad and find another supplier. But a new entrant has an easier time changing the rules, like the way the buyout artists could hire new managers who hadn’t made any promises about future salary. Similarly, online entrepreneurs have this incredible opportunity to break implicit contracts because the social rules of the Internet are still fuzzy. Corporate behavior is checked to some extent by consumer opinion, and behavior that really breaks the social code is sometimes met with a profit-shrinking backlash. But when the social code is fuzzy, this mechanism is less of a protection. Facebook bungled its attempt to spy on users’ purchases by going too far too fast. But I suspect if they made a more staged, strategic invasion of privacy, they would have gotten away with it. How did Google get away with reading private email? If a corporation started scanning our paper mail for keywords and tacking ad fliers on the envelopes, people would not stand for it. But now no one seems to mind the Google approach.

The capitalist compulsion is to monetize everything that can be legally (or sometimes illegally) monetized. It looks to me like the social lawlessness of the Internet and ill-formed social views about digital information are openings allowing personal identities to be rapidly monetized. Perhaps a partial solution is for online communities to coalesce around certain principles and defend them, as seemed to work in the Facebook case. If a major online community really drafted the “Internet Rules of Privacy” and got some prominent other communities to sign on, perhaps pledging to boycott companies that don’t follow the rules, that might really change the game.

As much as I’d like to see a landmark piece of legislation that defines ownership of personal information and restricts the collection of personal data, I wonder if the bottom-up approach, a sort of citizen-union, could work faster in the case of the Internet.

The kind of thing I like to see: a happy Post-Gazette article on the success of urbanism in a city neighborhood. It profiles the work of Artists and Cities, Inc., a two-woman development firm that has created three multi-unit buildings in Lawrenceville “where artists can afford to live and/or work.” As a super-bonus, their newest building is a LEED-certified green building (I love the intersection of urbanism and green design).

When I was looking to buy a house two years ago, my real estate agent described Lawrenceville as an “up-and-coming neighborhood”. Foundations and neighborhood organizations have worked very hard to seed a revival by supporting an artistic community there and it has worked pretty well.
It also looks like the neighborhood is moving to the gentrification stage. The first two of Artists and Cities’ buildings filled mostly with artist, but the latest, still under construction, is filling with “mostly young professionals, and a few empty-nesters.” It sounds like a blow for folks in the arts community who might see their rents go up, but the “Cheap Slum -> Bohemification -> Gentrification” seems like the best model of urban redevelopment we have so far.

Now when the rate of renovation and construction in the cities outpaces that of the suburbs, we’ll really have something to get excited about.

A paper recently published in Earth Interactions looks at the climate impacts of various North American diets, and in particular the greenhouse gas (GHG) impacts of meat consumption. I saw a poster for this research at AGU in the fall and was somewhat surprised by the findings. After much data-gathering and plenty of assumtions, the authors make the case that the difference in GHG emissions between the average American diet and a vegetarian diet is large — on the order of the difference in emissions between driving an SUV and a sedan.

More generally, animal-product consumption at typical American rates results in GHG emissions of 1-3 tons-CO2-equivalent per year per person. This is in the same range as driving larger vehicles (the consumer activity most commonly associated with climate impact), e.g. 3.6 tons/year difference between a hybrid and an SUV, 1 ton/year between a Camry and a Prius.

So if the whole country went vegan, how much GHG emissions would we avoid? About 6%, it seems. A huge quantity, to be sure, but clearly not the sole solution to climate change. But the point is taken that, on the scale of typical choices that consumers have personal control over, diet is right up there with vehicle choice and home energy efficiency as one of the most important.

Some other interesting tidbits fall out of the analysis. For instance, if one is going to eat a quantity of animal protein, the best type from a climate perspective is poultry. Slightly better than dairy and eggs, and significantly better than fish. Red meat is unsurprisingly worst — by a factor of 2.5 or so (see Figure 3). Still, the usual ethical hierarchy of meat consumption is upset. The emissions for fish are especially surprising since there are none associated with its production. Apparently the high emissions are due to the increasingly large distances that fish are transported.

In any case, I’m sure most of us were generally aware that meat consumption has environmental impacts. We’ve heard figures about how many pounds of grain, how many gallons of water, how many acres of land, are required to produce a pound of beef. Many have made the argument for vegetarianism in terms of resource conservation and availability of food for a growing population. But this is the first analysis I have seen specifically on climate impacts, and it challenges a few of my long-held notions about diet ethics.

As I have written earlier, Vaclav Smil’s book, “Feeding the World” had convinced me that the energy-optimal diet contains some meat, since not all livestock are competing with humans for primary energy. Seafood is the best example of this: there is more food available to a world that eats seafood than one that doesn’t. Hence, perhaps, the prevalence of pesco-vegetarianism. Again from an energy-efficiency perspective, consumption of dairy and eggs makes sense as a source of high-quality protein. But from a climate-impact perspective, things are more complicated. There is a strong case for veganism, if anything, and generally, less meat of any kind is better. And of course, red meat is still the worst.

Smil discussed some evidence that consumption of a small amount of animal protein has had significant health benefits historically (he suggests an optimum of eating meat twice a week or so). The authors of the climate and energy paper devote a section to surveying the health risks of high-protein diets, and assert that vegetarian diets are at least as safe as typical mixed diets. They do not contradict, necessarily, that moderate consumption of animal protein has benefits. Overall, however, I’m less sure of the best diet for good health and a clean conscience since reading this article.

It could reflect only my previous ignorance, but I feel like Feminism and women’s issues have been getting a lot of play lately. We had Mareen Dowd’s urban-white-successful-girls’ lament¹ about how hard it is to find a husband. Then there was Linda Hirshman’s article in the American Prospect describing the “Opt-Out Revolution” (educated women dropping out of careers to be stay-at-home moms) and decrying the brand of feminism that says this is okay if it’s their choice (“choice feminism”). It was an excellent article, if extreme in it’s view that educated women ought always to put careers first, and try to marry dumber, younger, less successful men to make sure they continue to be the bread-winner.

The death of Betty Friedan stirred up the feminist discussion once again and propted Salon editor-in-chief Joan Walsh to enter the fray with “Feminism After Friedan“, which criticizes Hirshman’s absolutism and tries to find some balance in the debate over whether educated stay-at-home moms can be consistent with feminism.

Meanwhile, there was the Samual Elito confirmation. And, spouting bullshit about the “war on boys”, some conservatives are advocating affirmative action for boys entering college (the poor blokes aren’t the majority anymore), and aparently some colleges are already subtly practicing it. What’s more, they tell us all this education is only going get women a harder time finding husbands and raising families, and thus being happy.

There’s significant evidence that men don’t like women who are smarter. They don’t like women who are more successful. They don’t even like women who are funnier.² What an astoundingly insecure lot we are. Yet somehow, marriage makes people happy (though kids, apparently, do not).

There’s a thorny conceptual challenge at the heart of this mess, which, like many feminists and humanists, I’m still struggling with to develop an opinion. It is fair for women, even successful and educated ones, to want a family and the fulfillment it offers. Unlike Linda Hirshman, I don’t think the workplace is necessarily a greater place for human expression than the home. Betty Friedan asserted that housework could not require enough thought or energy to challenge women. She seemed to think of life as essentially progressive, and that moving forward, leaving one’s mark on the world, is the full expressions of one’s humanity. Work is implicitly a progressive activity in her view, whereas home life is about living vicariously through the progression of your family. But there are a lot of jobs that are no less inane than tending house. And a lot of people feel raising and providing opportunities for their children is the ultimate progressive act.

On the other hand, if more women choose to accept traditional roles, fewer women are able to choose at all. There is still clearly a battle raging for gender equality, less so in the workplace and more so in the home, if one agrees with Walsh. Women seem to be in the position now of having career responsibilities and family responsibilities (or at least of desiring both), creating a tension that doesn’t exist for men, who have not been expected to shoulder much of the family burden. Conservatives advocate a “separate but equal” approach to gender roles. They say “family is what you really want; give back the career.” And those who “opt out” appear to agree. But this approach leads in a dangerous direction. We’ve seen how well separate remains equal before.

I expect there is some new organization of society which will eventually solve this problem — when there is a critical mass of stay-at-home dads, or when technology and labor reorganization (e.g. day care) have so reduced the burden of homemaking that neither parent is expected to stay home. And I would love to see what gender differences look like in absense of social conditioning (how much does biology really matter?). But I tend to believe Hirshman’s claim that feminism is stalled. How do we move toward this new paradigm? And how can women balance their lives in the mean time?

I hope for comments.

1. “What’s a Modern Girl to Do? New York Times. October 30, 2005. [Lexis-Nexis]
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2. Strike previous three statements and replace with statistically precise and rhetorically clumsy analogues. [↩]