A student, a letter and a $4 message

The following remarkable column was first published on Sunday, December 14th, 2008 in the Press Democrat. The student is my student. We’ll call him RV. [js]

By Paul Gullixson
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

We recently received this letter here at The Press Democrat:

“Dear Sir

Madam, I am writing to you because I want to turn a wrong into a right. Over the past few weeks I have been paying for one newspaper and taking two. To make things worse, I sold the extra copies to my fellow 8th graders at school. I realize that I benefited from your loss, and I am sorry.

I realize now that my actions were dishonest and unkind. Enclosed is a money order, and I hope it will sufficiently cover your loss.

Sincerely,

An 8th Grade Student.”

Enclosed was a money order for $4. There was no return address. I’ve shared this letter many times in recent days and decided that I would like to respond here.

Dear ‘Student’:

Today, I am celebrating my 10-year anniversary here at The Press Democrat. I mention that because in all those years of opening letters to the editor, I don’t recall ever coming across a note quite like yours.

I’m impressed, for reasons I hope will be evident.

First of all, anybody who can sell newspapers to eighth-graders in this day and age is OK with me. I’ve been led to believe that eighth-graders are no more interested in newspapers than they are asparagus.

My colleagues were equally impressed when I read your letter aloud at our department heads’ meeting and handed your $4 money order to our controller. (You should have seen his face. It’s not often he receives revenue from the Editorial Department.)

They had one question for you:

How are you at selling quarter-page ads? You may have a future in newspapers — as long as there are newspapers in the future.

Some say newspapers are dying. I hope not. At the least, we’re certainly experiencing some dramatic changes. Many businesses are being pushed to the brink.

But I fear there’s something else that’s dying out there, something more important than newspapers. You addressed it with your letter.

It’s called integrity.

As David Brooks, a New York Times columnist, recently wrote, “Recessions breed pessimism.” Crime goes up. So does lying and cheating.

So does forgetting to admit when we’re wrong.

You say that you know your actions were “dishonest and unkind.” If only we could hear such words from those responsible for our current financial crisis — and so many things that are happening in our world.

Adults have made a mess of things, and I’m afraid we’re going to be leaving your generation with some hefty bills. I don’t know how to begin to apologize to you for that. But bills and bailouts are not the only thing I worry that my generation is handing down.

A recent study found 64 percent of U.S. high school students say they’ve cheated on a test in the past year. Thirty percent have stolen from a store. Both of those numbers have risen steadily in recent years.

That, to me, is more discouraging than anything we’ve heard from Wall Street.

The study by the Josephson Institute in Los Angeles also found that using the Internet to plagiarize an assignment (36 percent), lying to parents about something significant (83 percent) and lying to save money (42 percent) also were up.

Michael Josephson, founder and president of the institute, put it this way: “In a society drenched with cynicism, young people can look at it and say, ‘Why shouldn’t we? Everyone does it.’ ”

Well, maybe not everyone.

Which is one reason I wanted to publish your letter today. Some here at the paper have suggested that there’s a parent, maybe even a teacher, who encouraged — ordered? — you to write this.

To that I say, what does it matter? Whether you wrote this alone or with someone lurking over your shoulder, both are evidence of someone in your life who cared enough to teach you the value of accountability and honesty.

Consider yourself fortunate. Not everyone has someone like that.

Maybe this letter was even embarrassing for you to write. If so, it’s probably equally embarrassing now to see me responding in print.

But I wanted to commend you. There’s no bravery in conformity. It takes real courage to ignore the cynicism of the world, the temptation to hide, the encouragement to avoid, and stand up and do the right thing.

Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. I’ve waxed philosophic long enough. I fear I may be getting melancholy on my anniversary. I just wanted to thank you for your message and your reminder of something worth much more than $4.

I don’t know where our country is going. But what I do know is that the things we can’t afford to leave behind are fundamentals like integrity, accountability, hope, faith.

They still matter. They always will.

Take pride in this letter. Maybe someday, you will even encourage someone to do the same — admit a mistake and seek to make amends.

If so, you’ll do more than that just turn a wrong into a right. You’ll be a leader.

And those don’t just fall out of newspaper racks, you know.

(Paul Gulllixson is editorial director for The Press Democrat. E-mail him at paul.gullixson@pressdemocrat.com)

In Defense of "Sweatshops"

In one of my economics classes the subject of sweatshops [and what to do about them was discussed]. The following is one of the better articles and analyses on the subject. A very strong case can be made that the real problem is not that sweatshops exist but rather, as Charles Wheelan suggests, that there are not enough of them. Powell’s article was was first posted June 2, 2008. [js]

by Benjamin Powell*

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"Because sweatshops are better than the available alternatives, any reforms aimed at improving the lives of workers in sweatshops must not jeopardize the jobs that they already have."

I do not want to work in a third world "sweatshop." If you are reading this on a computer, chances are you don't either. Sweatshops have deplorable working conditions and extremely low pay—compared to the alternative employment available to me and probably you. That is why we choose not to work in sweatshops. All too often the fact that we have better alternatives leads first world activists to conclude that there must be better alternatives for third world workers too.

Economists across the political spectrum have pointed out that for many sweatshop workers the alternatives are much, much worse.1 In one famous 1993 case U.S. senator Tom Harkin proposed banning imports from countries that employed children in sweatshops. In response a factory in Bangladesh laid off 50,000 children. What was their next best alternative? According to the British charity Oxfam a large number of them became prostitutes.2

The national media spotlight focused on sweatshops in 1996 after Charles Kernaghan, of the National Labor Committee, accused Kathy Lee Gifford of exploiting children in Honduran sweatshops. He flew a 15 year old worker, Wendy Diaz, to the United States to meet Kathy Lee. Kathy Lee exploded into tears and apologized on the air, promising to pay higher wages.

Should Kathy Lee have cried? Her Honduran workers earned 31 cents per hour. At 10 hours per day, which is not uncommon in a sweatshop, a worker would earn $3.10. Yet nearly a quarter of Hondurans earn less than $1 per day and nearly half earn less than $2 per day.

Wendy Diaz's message should have been, "Don't cry for me, Kathy Lee. Cry for the Hondurans not fortunate enough to work for you." Instead the U.S. media compared $3.10 per day to U.S. alternatives, not Honduran alternatives. But U.S. alternatives are irrelevant. No one is offering these workers green cards.

What are the Alternatives to Sweatshops?

Economists have often pointed to anecdotal evidence that alternatives to sweatshops are much worse. But until David Skarbek and I published a study in the 2006 Journal of Labor Research, nobody had systematically quantified the alternatives.3 We searched U.S. popular news sources for claims of sweatshop exploitation in the third world and found 43 specific accusations of exploitation in 11 countries in Latin America and Asia. We found that sweatshop workers typically earn much more than the average in these countries. Here are the facts:

We obtained apparel industry hourly wage data for 10 of the countries accused of using sweatshop labor. We compared the apparel industry wages to average living standards in the country where the factories were located. Figure 1 summarizes our findings.4

Figure 1. Apparel Industry Wages as a Percent of Average National Income

Working in the apparel industry in any one of these countries results in earning more than the average income in that country. In half of the countries it results in earning more than three times the national average.5

Next we investigated the specific sweatshop wages cited in U.S. news sources. We averaged the sweatshop wages reported in each of the 11 countries and again compared them to average living standards. Figure 2 summarizes our findings.

Figure 2. Average Protested Sweatshop Wages as a Percent of Average National Income

From "In Praise of Cheap Labor," by Paul Krugman. Slate Magazine, March 1997:

A country like Indonesia is still so poor that progress can be measured in terms of how much the average person gets to eat; since 1970, per capita intake has risen from less than 2,100 to more than 2,800 calories a day. A shocking one-third of young children are still malnourished—but in 1975, the fraction was more than half. Similar improvements can be seen throughout the Pacific Rim, and even in places like Bangladesh. These improvements have not taken place because well-meaning people in the West have done anything to help—foreign aid, never large, has lately shrunk to virtually nothing. Nor is it the result of the benign policies of national governments, which are as callous and corrupt as ever. It is the indirect and unintended result of the actions of soulless multinationals and rapacious local entrepreneurs, whose only concern was to take advantage of the profit opportunities offered by cheap labor.

Even in specific cases where a company was allegedly exploiting sweatshop labor we found the jobs were usually better than average. In 9 of the 11 countries we surveyed, the average reported sweatshop wage, based on a 70-hour work week, equaled or exceeded average incomes. In Cambodia, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Honduras, the average wage paid by a firm accused of being a sweatshop is more than double the average income in that country. The Kathy Lee Gifford factory in Honduras was not an outlier—it was the norm.

Because sweatshops are better than the available alternatives, any reforms aimed at improving the lives of workers in sweatshops must not jeopardize the jobs that they already have. To analyze a reform we must understand what determines worker compensation.

What Determines Wages and Compensation?

If a Nicaraguan sweatshop worker creates $2.50 per hour worth of revenue (net of non-labor costs) for a firm then $2.50 per hour is the absolute most a firm would be willing to pay the worker. If the firm paid him $2.51 per hour, the firm would lose one cent per hour he worked. A profit maximizing firm, therefore, would lay the worker off.

From Nicholas D. Kristof, The New York Times, 14 January 2004:

And so I think what Americans don't perhaps understand is that in a country like Cambodia, the exploitation of workers in sweatshops is a real problem, but the primary problem in places like this is not that there are too many workers being exploited in sweatshops, it's that there are not enough. And a country like Cambodia would be infinitely better off if it had more factories using the cheap labor here and giving people a lift out of the unbelievably harsh conditions in the villages and even in the urban slums.

Of course a firm would want to pay this worker less than $2.50 per hour in order to earn greater profits. Ideally the firm would like to pay the worker nothing and capture the entire $2.50 of value he creates per hour as profit. Why doesn't a firm do that? The reason is that a firm must persuade the worker to accept the job. To do that, the firm must offer him more than his next best available alternative.6

The amount a worker is paid is less than or equal to the amount he contributes to a firm's net revenue and more than or equal to the value of the worker's next best alternative. In any particular situation the actual compensation falls somewhere between those two bounds.

Wages are low in the third world because worker productivity is low (upper bound) and workers' alternatives are lousy (lower bound). To get sustained improvements in overall compensation, policies must raise worker productivity and/or increase alternatives available to workers. Policies that try to raise compensation but fail to move these two bounds risk raising compensation above a worker's upper bound resulting in his losing his job and moving to a less-desirable alternative.

What about non-monetary compensation? Sweatshops often have long hours, few bathroom breaks, and poor health and safety conditions. How are these determined?

Compensation can be paid in wages or in benefits, which may include health, safety, comfort, longer breaks, and fewer working hours. In some cases, improved health or safety can increase worker productivity and firm profits. In these cases firms will provide these benefits out of their own self interest. However, often these benefits do not directly increase profits and so the firm regards such benefits to workers as costs to itself, in which case these costs are like wages.

A profit-maximizing firm is indifferent between compensating workers with wages or compensating them with health, safety, and leisure benefits of the same value when doing so does not affect overall productivity. What the firm really cares about is the overall cost of the total compensation package.

Workers, on the other hand, do care about the mix of compensation they receive. Few of us would be willing to work for no money wage and instead take our entire pay in benefits. We want some of each. Furthermore, when our overall compensation goes up, we tend to desire more non-monetary benefits.

For most people, comfort and safety are what economists call "normal goods," that is, goods that we demand more of as our income rises. Factory workers in third world countries are no different. Unfortunately, many of them have low productivity, and so their overall compensation level is low. Therefore, they want most of their compensation in wages and little in health or safety improvements.

Evaluating Anti-Sweatshop Proposals

The anti-sweatshop movement consists of unions, student groups, politicians, celebrities, and religious groups.7 Each group has its own favored "cures" for sweatshop conditions. These groups claim that their proposals would help third world workers.

Some of these proposals would prohibit people in the United States from importing any goods made in sweatshops. What determines whether the good is made in a sweatshop is whether it is made in any way that violates labor standards. Such standards typically include minimum ages for employment, minimum wages, standards of occupational safety and health, and hours of work.8

Such standards do nothing to make workers more productive. The upper bound of their compensation is unchanged. Such mandates risk raising compensation above laborers' productivity and throwing them into worse alternatives by eliminating or reducing the U.S. demand for their products. Employers will meet health and safety mandates by either laying off workers or by improving health and safety while lowering wages against workers' wishes. In either case, the standards would make workers worse off.

The aforementioned Charles Kernaghan testified before Congress on one of these pieces of legislation, claiming:

Once passed, this legislation will reward decent U.S. companies which are striving to adhere to the law. Worker rights standards in China, Bangladesh and other countries across the world will be raised, improving conditions for tens of millions of working people. Your legislation will for the first time also create a level playing field for American workers to compete fairly in the global economy.9

From David R. Henderson, "The Case for Sweatshops." Weekly Standard, 7 February 2000:

The next time you feel guilty for buying clothes made in a third-world sweatshop, remember this: you're helping the workers who made that clothing. The people who should feel guilty are those who argue against, or use legislation to prevent us, giving a boost up the economic ladder to members of the human race unlucky enough to have been born in a poor country. Someone who intentionally gets you fired is not your friend.

Contrary to his assertion, anti-sweatshop laws would make third world workers worse off by lowering the demand for their labor. As his testimony alludes to though, such laws would make some American workers better off because they would no longer have to compete with third world labor: U.S. consumers would be, to some extent, a captive market. Although Kernaghan and some other opponents of sweatshops claim that they are attempting to help third world workers, their true motives are revealed by the language of one of these pieces of legislation: "Businesses have a right to be free from competition with companies that use sweatshop labor." A more-honest statement would be, "U.S. workers have a right not to face competition from poor third world workers and by outlawing competition from the third world we can enhance union wages at the expense of poorer people who work in sweatshops."

Kernaghan and other first world union members pretend to take up the cause of poor workers but the policies they advocate would actually make those very workers worse off. As economist David Henderson said, "[s]omeone who intentionally gets you fired is not your friend."10 Charles Kernaghan is no friend to third world workers.

Conclusion

Not only are sweatshops better than current worker alternatives, but they are also part of the process of development that ultimately raises living standards. That process took about 150 years in Britain and the United States but closer to 30 years in the Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

When companies open sweatshops they bring technology and physical capital with them. Better technology and more capital raise worker productivity. Over time this raises their wages. As more sweatshops open, more alternatives are available to workers raising the amount a firm must bid to hire them.

The good news for sweatshop workers today is that the world has better technology and more capital than ever before. Development in these countries can happen even faster than it did in the East Asian tigers. If activists in the United States do not undermine the process of development by eliminating these countries' ability to attract sweatshops, then third world countries that adopt market friendly institutions will grow rapidly and sweatshop pay and working conditions will improve even faster than they did in the United States or East Asia. Meanwhile, what the third world so badly needs is more "sweatshop jobs," not fewer.

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Footnotes

1.

Walter Williams, "Sweatshop Exploitation." January 27, 2004. Paul Krugman, "In Praise of Cheap Labor, Bad Jobs at Bad Wages are Better Than No Jobs at All." Slate, March 20, 1997.

2.

Paul Krugman, New York Times. April 22, 2001.

3.

Benjamin Powell and David Skarbek, "Sweatshop Wages and Third World Living Standards: Are the Jobs Worth the Sweat?" Journal of Labor Research. Vol. 27, No. 2. Spring 2006.

4.

All figures are reproduced from our Journal of Labor Research article. See the original article for notes on data sources and quantification methods.

5.

Data on actual hours worked were not available. Therefore, we provided earnings estimates based on various numbers of hours worked. Since one characteristic of sweatshops is long working hours, we believe the estimates based on 70 hours per week are the most accurate.

6.

I am excluding from my analysis any situation where a firm or government uses the threat of violence to coerce the worker into accepting the job. In those situations, the job is not better than the next best alternative because otherwise a firm wouldn't need to use force to get the worker to take the job.

7.

It is a classic mix of "bootleggers and Baptists." Bootleggers in the case of sweatshops are the U.S. unions who stand to gain when their lower priced substitute, 3rd world workers, is eliminated from the market. The "Baptists" are the true but misguided believers.

8.

These minimums are determined by laws and regulations of the country of origin. For a discussion of why these laws should not be followed see Benjamin Powell, "In Reply to Sweatshop Sophistries." Human Rights Quarterly. Vol. 28. No.4. Nov. 2006.

9.

Testimonies at the Senate Subcommittee on Interstate Commerce, Trade and Tourism Hearing. Statement of Charles Kernaghan. February 14, 2007.

10.

David Henderson, "The Case for Sweatshops." Weekly Standard, 7 February 2000.

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*Benjamin Powell is Assistant Professor of Economics at Suffolk University and Senior Economist with the Beacon Hill Institute. He is editor of Making Poor Nations Rich: Entrepreneurship and the Process of Development.

Copyright 2008 Liberty Fund Inc.

Three Decades of Global Sea Ice Cover

by Jack Strange

This graph shows more than twenty-nine years of daily data gathered from satellite imagery and remote sensing. It sums both north and south polar sea ice areas. No models, no scenarios, just data provided by the National Center for Environmental Prediction/NOAA. There’s the regular winter freeze and the summer melt. It looks like a heartbeat, doesn't it? But see if you can spot the catastrophic melting trend that has everyone so alarmed? Look closely. Nope… I don't see it either.

How To Cripple a Global Economy In Five Easy Steps

by Jack Strange

A quote widely attributed to the famous physicist Richard Feynman said, “No matter how complicated a subject, if you can't explain something to an average high school kid, you really don't understand it.” The recent cascade of events that has caused credit markets to freeze, the housing market to collapse, the stock markets to crash, and an instability in the global banking system have been in the making for decades and are well understood. What is less understood, even by some of the brightest economic and financial minds in the world, is what to do about it. It challenged me as a teacher of economics and mathematics to find a way to explain it to my students.

Let’s examine what happened in five plus steps that led us to the crisis we’re in today.

Step one. Historically, conventional home loans have required a reasonably significant down payment. 20%-25% was not unusual, with repayment schedules that run from 20-30 years. I remember scrimping and saving for years in order to accumulate enough cash for the down payment on my first house. In such an arrangement both the lender AND the borrower have significant equity (an ownership interest) in the property. This means that both the borrower and the lender have strong incentives to assure repayment of the loan in keeping with the terms of the agreement. That delivers stability and reduces default and foreclosure rates. Potential borrowers were evaluated by trained and experienced loan officers who frequently relied as much on intuition as on a checklist to evaluate the creditworthiness of borrowers. In other words, conforming loans protect EVERYONE when housing markets are rising as well as falling. Both the borrowers and the lenders have equity. But over the last two decades there was a change in how home loans were both offered and evaluated.

So now Congress gets into the act. There was a concerted push in the U.S. Congress to make home loans more “accessible” to a greater number of people; a populist political objective. “Everyone should own a home,” the politicians crowed, “a piece of the American Dream,” whether qualified or not. The prevailing attitude was that accessible mortgages were a positive externality and a public good. (As it turns out it’s not. It may be the world's biggest negative externality and still the government is subsidizing it.) Legislation was enacted that made it a stated regulatory objective of the two big GSE’s, the government sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to assure that as much as 40% of all the money (liquidity) that the GSE's made available to banks to lend to individual buyers went to buyers in the “affordable housing” markets. Many of these so-called sub-prime borrowers are those customers who could not possibly qualify for conventional conforming loans due to a lack of an adequate down payment, little credit experience, a history of delinquency or bankruptcy, insufficient income, or dubious legal residency. In other words, they were promoting and making risky loans to those who are far less likely to repay them.

Regardless, the banks and mortgage brokers pitched low down payment and no income/no asset (NINA) loans to less-than-qualified borrowers like there was no tomorrow. Sure, the risk of loan defaults was substantially higher with the sub-primes but so was the potential reward since the sub-primes yielded higher interest rates and profits. Institutional investors were hooked. Throughout the 90’s Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan kept the Federal Funds Rate so low that these alternative instruments looked more and more attractive. “If a few borrowers defaulted, so what? We repossess the house and it still keeps gaining in value,” they thought. Sweet!

Many of these loans would then be “repackaged” through process called securitization and re-sold as derivatives such as mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations to institutional investors who saw their value as high-return investments but who had little connection to the actual borrowers on which these securities were based or to the inherent risk that these mortgage pools carried. Derivatives are financial instruments whose values depend on the value of other underlying financial instruments. They are the house whose inherent stability depends on the quality of the foundation that it’s built upon. Now the trap was set and properly baited.

So there's the smell of money in the water and the feeding frenzy begins fueled by good old-fashioned greed. The banks and mortgage investors throw caution to the wind and try to make sure that they’re able to chomp and gobble as much green meat as they can. And why worry? The government and its GSE surrogates Fannie and Freddie were there to provide the safety cushion. Yes? Absolutely! And if not them... the American people.

Step two. What ever happened to the steely-eyed loan officer with the trusty and well-worn rubber “NO LOAN” stamp whose job it is to protect the lender’s assets by carefully screening and qualifying loan applicants? Well, he was replaced by a statistical method of screening called credit scoring. Credit scoring had already proved itself an efficient and effective method of evaluating the creditworthiness of potential borrowers of other forms of debt like unsecured credit cards. So it should have worked with mortgages too. Or at least that's what everyone thought. Credit scoring had the other “advantage” of being less likely to be biased by factors that “human intuition” relies on such as, “What kind of neighborhood is the house in? Does the applicant have a steady job? Is his income verifiable and reasonable? Does he really have prospects of paying off the loan over the next twenty years? Does he seem like a solid citizen?” But credit scoring (instead of human intuition) as a predictor of credit risk failed to include a number of relevant variables. The statistical model relied on by lenders was broken so when housing prices declined credit scoring failed. Add that to the fact that, as we saw before, mortgage loans with low down payments are inherently destabilizing. Still 52% of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s lending was to sub-prime borrowers. It was the enabler of the housing bubble… a bubble ready to pop!

OK, so where are we? Home loans are being offered to many new unqualified buyers. Risky? Sure. But as long as real estate values kept climbing you can afford to gamble. Everyone’s a winner! There’s no downside, right? Right?

Step three. With all this easy credit floating around to qualified and unqualified buyers alike it didn’t take long for the housing industry to get into the act. Houses and apartment dwellings were springing up everywhere like mushrooms after a spring rain. So much so that they got ahead of the market and that led to a classic problem of over-supply. According to some estimates, at the beginning of this year there were 18 million unoccupied housing units out of about 150 million households in the US. That leads to the free fall of prices as they seek market equilibrium. Pop! The housing bubble bursts! Add to this supply of housing the thousands upon thousands of new foreclosures coming on the market and things start to get really ugly!

Step four. You are a homeowner. Maybe you’re one of those sub-prime borrowers. You’ve got yourself a $400,000 adjustable rate mortgage (ARM) on a house with no money down. Sweet! But there's very little equity. Hey, when the mortgage broker pitched the financing package it seemed to be almost too-good-to-be-true! No money down, you didn’t need to prove your income, so you got fired twice last year but nobody checked, and the interest rate was really low so even the payments where do-able. Sure it’s an ARM but the rates don’t seem to adjust much and besides that’s two-years into the future. Go for it dude! And many did.

So here we are. The interest rates adjust. Actually, they skyrocket! You can't make the payments. You consider selling the house. But wait a minute! You discover that the house is now worth less than when you bought it. Whoa! That’s not supposed to happen. Real estate values always go up. Right? Worse still, you find out that you owe more than the house is worth. You’re upside down on your loan! So what do you do? You walk away. The bank will foreclose and take a bath. But not you. No sir. You'll only get dinged on your credit rating. A credit rating that wasn’t all that great in the first place. What about the ethics? I mean a contract is a contract. But hey, times are tough for everybody and sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.

So the bank does indeed take a bath. Not just on this house but on thousands of similar houses. Now it’s in real trouble. And not just this bank but lots of banks.

Step five. The government gets into the act again. The goal of writing loans to unqualified sub-prime borrowers as a regulatory objective in part led to the unsustainable house of cards. In other words instead of allowing market forces to be the self-organizing system that drives the mortgage market, the calculated tampering by Senator Chris Dodd (D-Chairman, Senate Banking Committee) and Rep. Barney Frank (D-Chairman, House Financial Services Committee) to achieve their political objective (the regulatory mandate) of making housing “affordable” to bad-risk buyers has in-part led to a meltdown in global financial markets. Government’s role should have been to put a check on the derivatives and a check on credit scoring. It consciously did just the opposite.

Summing up... it's a tale of reckless behavior, of violation of fiduciary trust, of cynical political gamesmanship, of unbridled greed, of economic illiteracy, of no oversight, of no consequences. Lessons learned? None.

The fix? To close with another quote from Richard Feynman… "The real question of government versus private enterprise is argued on too philosophical and abstract a basis. Theoretically, planning may be good. But nobody has ever figured out the cause of government stupidity and until they do (and find the cure) all ideal plans will fall into quicksand.

Fair share? We need to be reminded...

In this season of bloviating political bluster, of global economic meltdowns, of financial bailouts and recriminations, of income redistribution schemes, of shameless and unrestrained pork barrel spending, of cynical accusations of greed and selfishness, it is important that we remind ourselves who it is who actually pays the bills. A minority of working Americans are now subsidizing a voting majority who pay little or nothing at all... the same majority who are pandered to with handouts by the economically-illiterate Barack Obama and John McCain. This road leads to tyranny. It is tyranny when a consuming majority possessing of an insatiable appetite can vote itself largess at the expense of a productive minority. It has been said that there is nothing more fun in this world than spending other people's money. When you don't have to earn it and when you can command it by legislative fiat there are no limits to the amount of fun you can have... aside from sapping the will of the productive to succeed. As Alexander Tytler observed, this may be the ultimate fate of democracies.

It makes you different.

Ten days after being hit by a car… well, it makes you different.

I’ve been watching and enjoying professional bike racing as a spectator for years. Crashes aren’t unusual. The risk is always there. After all, you’re racing around the countryside for hundreds, if not thousands of miles. Many of those miles are on under-improved roads, in all kinds of weather on tires that don’t quite span an inch across. When nearly two-hundred riders in a peloton ride at a blistering race pace merely inches away from someone else’s wheel you expect broken collarbones, road rash, sometimes worse. Yeah, accidents happen. It's part of the game.

Commuters and recreational riders face risks too. But slips and falls are just one hazard. Now add the greater fear that comes from the few, but vocal, angry and hostile drivers who may only wish you harm even if they don’t all act on their impulses. Or from the inattentive driver who may not set out to hurt anyone but who will kill you dead just the same. Then there’s the cop who many cyclists know; the cop who sees someone on a bike as an obnoxious nuisance undeserving of the equal rights he's sworn to protect; the cop who through inexperience, laziness or intent shatters the very institutions that many of us grew up with and clinged to by trampling on notions of justice and fair play. We’ll see where this road leads.

If you’re lucky the story continues...

You can’t prevent or even plan for this sort of thing. One minute it’s a beautiful fall afternoon in the Wine Country of Northern California. Temperatures are moderate, the sky is blue and you’re out for a ride to shake off the “dust of the day.” The next minute you’re sprawled on the pavement bleeding next to a twisted bike. If you’re lucky the story continues, if you’re not... it ends there.

Last Monday afternoon I was out for a ride on my shiny new Trek Portland commuter bike. The route included a short portion of Santa Rosa’s Highway 12, a divided thoroughfare that further south is well-known to cyclists for its narrow shoulders, its higher proportion of senior-citizen drivers, and a couple of high-profile motor vehicle-on-bike collisions that ended tragically (for the cyclists). But on this stretch of roadway it was different. The sun was setting behind me, traffic was moderate and the shoulders beautifully wide. As I approached my intended left turn I glanced behind, first in my mirror and then by turning my head, to make sure that traffic would allow me to safely move from the shoulder into the marked left turn lane at an intersection controlled by a light. “Aha, a nice long gap,” I thought. So I cautiously extended my left arm to signal my intentions and trustingly changed lanes while maintaining my pedaling cadence. As I eased across the highway I breathed a sigh of relief. I made it into the relative “safety” of the left turn lane next to the planted median. “Home free,” I thought. Now my thoughts turned to meeting my fiancé at the pool where she is a competitive swimmer.

In the next instant, I got a fleeting glance of the Volvo that plowed into me from behind. No screeching tires… no evasive maneuvers… no shouts of “Look out!” ...just pow! And that’s about all I clearly remember until I found myself in an ambulance on the way to the hospital.

I was one of the very lucky ones. I’m able to write about it afterward. Many are not. What was the driver doing? Chatting on her cell phone? Checking her email? Stuffing a burrito into her mouth and dripping salsa on her blouse? Maybe she was distracted by a Chihuahua on her lap? Who knows? What drivers need to realize, take seriously and take responsibility for is that they are piloting 3000-4000 lb. steel projectiles on the same streets where defenseless cyclists ride, joggers run and children play. A moment of driver inattention is negligence that can result in serious injuries or worse. Still, they’ll be out there… babbling on their cell phones, curling their eyebrows, and stroking their lap dogs.

Ride defensively? Sometimes there’s simply nothing you can do. Your life is entirely in their hands.

SMART Train. How smart?

SMART is a proposed 70-mile passenger railroad and parallel bicycle-pedestrian path along the publicly owned Northwestern Pacific Railroad right of way through two counties. The rail line runs from Cloverdale, at the north-end of Sonoma County, to Larkspur, where the Golden Gate Ferry connects Marin County with San Francisco. Contiguous bike trails from Cloverdale to Larkspur... what's not to like? Well, I'm a taxpayer too.

The first problem that I see with the SMART train project is the in-excess-of half billion dollars that it will cost to develop. As an economics teacher I view everything from the perspective of choices and allocations. If a region (like ours) had a not-insignificant half billion dollars to spend should we ask, "Is this the best way to invest it given the many priorities we have?" In other words, we will be making a conscious decision to spend it on a train rather than health care, children, the elderly, etc.

Second, every time I see a public bus it is nearly empty with the exception of the bridge-subsidized Golden Gate buses headed to San Francisco, exactly where SMART won't go. Can you (or anyone else for that matter) honestly say that you will take the train to San Rafael, Novato or Larkspur rather than drive with enough frequency to even remotely approach SMART's ridership estimates? And when you get to San Rafael, Novato or Larkspur you do so on public transit's schedule not yours. "Darn! There goes the ferry! When's the next one?" Then, when you get to San Rafael do you wait for a bus to get you closer to your destination or do you rent a car or hire a taxi, walk maybe?

Lastly, SMART is being positioned by proponents as costing "only" a 1/4% increase in the sales tax. That works out to more than a regressive 3% increase in tax dollars paid. So if you buy $50,000 per year in taxable goods and services you will pay an incremental $125 per year for the next twenty years. Imagine getting a bill for $125 every year from SMART. Then imagine writing a check to pay the bill... and that's whether or not you ever buy a ticket.

Well, I still like the bike trails.

Tolerance

If individuals from an ethnic minority, or the homeless, or women, or the disabled, or gays, or illegal immigrants, or legal immigrants, or children, or a religious sect, or the poor were targeted for random let alone systemic harassment there would be justified outrage in the media, officialdom, and the community as a whole.

Imagine the alternative. A well-dressed executive in his BMW loudly curses random women passers-by simply for their gender. A hard-working tradesman jeers gays because of some perceived affront to his sensibilities. An over-stressed soccer mom spits on an old man in a walker because he can't get across the intersection fast enough. A civilized society would neither tolerate those behaviors nor those who do.

Yet cyclists exercising their legal and constitutional right to the highway experience these harassments with alarming regularity... and there is silence, there is apathy and worse… there is tolerance.

When Beams Collide

Buried beneath hundreds of feet of pastureland, straddling the border of France and Switzerland, lies the world’s largest and most powerful scientific instrument… a “big bang simulator.” Seventeen miles in circumference, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider uses more than 3 million amperes of current to accelerate counter-rotating beams of protons to within a small fraction of the speed of light. These protons acquire mass as they approach relativistic speeds… the faster and faster the proton packets go the more massive they become as energy is converted directly into matter.

In just a few weeks high-energy physicists operating the big machine will coax the proton beams into head-on collision. Conditions at the heart of the accelerator will be similar to the extreme temperatures and energy densities that existed a tiny fraction of a second after the the moment of creation. By studying the debris from these collisions scientists hope to gain a deeper understanding of the nature of “everything.” They may even see traces of the elusive Higgs Boson, the so-called “God Particle” thought to give matter properties of mass.

But, there is the more remote chance that a microscopic black hole may be spawned. Most scientists dismiss claims of any real danger that the Earth itself could be swallowed up and plunged into the abyss of “spaghettification,” since any microscopic black holes would likely evaporate in a billionth of a second or less. But one can never be too sure. Best advice... on the eve of beam collision day, have a margarita or two and kiss your ass goodbye. Bottoms up!

UPDATE (21 Sep 08): The day of our extinction has been postponed at least a couple of months due to an electrical failure followed by a helium leak in the collider.

Lions and tigers and bears!

“Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!” chanted Dorothy and her friends as they hustled through the dark forest on the way to the Emerald City. Cycling is like that. You follow the road… ok, so it’s not yellow and it’s not brick. Instead, there are these little white stick men, each so-correctly sporting a little helmet leading you though the “safety” of white lines painted on the asphalt. A safe lane to follow… sometimes eyed menacingly by creatures of the urban forest who will do you harm.

So who or what worries me on the road? Are they the cranky, snarling apple trees? Nope… I can jam faster than they can. Or, maybe the fez-capped flying monkeys? No way… toss ‘em a Luna Bar. I’m scared of that guy in the SUV who wants to beat the red light and crushes the accelerator.

You patiently take your lane... waiting for your light to turn green. It does. You stand on the pedals and just then a blur of metal goes flying across your path… a chick on a cell phone in a Honda. She’s oblivious to you. She sees her light go from yellow to red but that’s not for her. That’s meant for the guy behind her. She’s gonna scoot across the intersection and as long as she presses that phone to the side of her head, stiffens her neck and keeps her eyes focused straight ahead then she can’t see anybody and nobody will see her! That’s leads to road-kill. Don’t let it be yours. When your light turns green that means look left, look right, look left again… oh my!

The Naked Cyclist

With gas hovering around $4.00 at the pump coupled with a growing concern for the environment many drivers are discovering the cycling alternative to cars. Then somewhere along the way these riders discover the sweeping sense of freedom that one gets from floating on two wheels -- a sense of freedom that comes close to that of flying without ever leaving the ground. Health, fitness, smiles and memories of childhood follow.

But cycling in Sonoma County can also deliver you to a dark and scary place -- a place populated by hostility, menace and official indifference.

There are few cyclists who have not encountered the angry, frustrated motorist who believes that cycling is a politically correct movement that further restricts the motorist’s ability to travel the highways unimpeded -- highways that are really “intended” for cars not bicycles. These spandex-clad bike riders with those funny mirrors stuck in their helmets or worse yet, those cyclists who sport knickers and messenger bags and ride single-speeds, have created one just more obnoxious obstacle for the harried motorist. “Just who do they think they are? Get off the road! Someone needs to teach them a lesson!”

Road rage against cyclists can range from flipping off the offending bike rider punctuated by a choice f-bomb; to “buzzing” the cyclist – veering to within inches of the bike’s handle bars at high speed with an intention to intimidate. Taken a step further, some deliberately touch or collide with the bike rider, often with tragic consequences.

Under state and federal law bicycles are vehicles and their riders have the same constitutional right to use the highway as do cars, trucks and farm tractors. They must obey the same traffic laws that apply to all. Yet there are motorists who through either ignorance, arrogance or a perverse sense of entitlement view cyclists as a nuisance to be restricted to the bike path or sidewalk. But it is when those motorists who pilot two to three tons of steel act out their rage against a 20 lb. bicycle that their impulse becomes murderous intent.

Cyclists are harassed, threatened, cursed and spit upon with uncomfortable regularity by drivers who feel compelled to show me their contempt and disapproval of my legal right to share “their” road. Friends have had cans and bottles thrown at them while riding the scenic roads of our county. A beer bottle striking you at 50 mph squarely between the shoulder blades is a sick form justice for the perceived “offense” of encroaching “their” highway and violating “their” sense of driving etiquette. And for some, frightening or hurting a cyclist is just plain fun.

Road rage with the design of trying to instill an apprehension that physical harm is imminent is committing assault under state law even if the offender doesn’t touch you. It’s an interesting commentary that if someone were to approach a pedestrian and aggressively threaten them it’s likely that the perpetrator would be spending the night in jail. Sadly, that’s not true with cyclists. Reports of police indifference to the harassment of cyclists are not uncommon. Officers take complaints and do absolutely nothing as I can personally attest. That kind of official indifference shows tacit tolerance for road ragers and further emboldens them. These drivers disrespect the law and violate the cyclist’s rights but most important, they are a deadly menace to society.

No bike rider should ever take to the roads of Sonoma County feeling naked in the face of harassment against cyclists or against anyone else for that matter. It is our duty to speak out against road rage and against those who tolerate it. We must hold them accountable for their actions or for their indifference before another human being riding a bicycle is seriously injured or killed.