It has been suggested that to make our way of life more sustainable, we ought to shop locally (see my previous blog entry for discussion). But yesterday I read an article in Science news, based on a study published in Environmental Science and Technology, that I thought made an interesting point: the type of food we eat has a much greater environmental impact than how far it has traveled to reach us, at least in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. The study authors looked carefully at all parts of the process by which we obtain food, and found that the bulk of the greenhouse gases (83%) came from food production, with only 7% from farm-to-store transportation. Therefore, switching to buying only locally-produced food doesn’t really address the bulk of the problem. Instead, we need to think about the production phase: we can get about the same reduction in greenhouse gases by replacing red meat and dairy products with chicken, fish, eggs, grains, or vegetables just one day per week, as we can by buying all of our food locally. This has other benefits as well, in terms of the food crisis: a lot of the grain we grow is fed to animals to produce a much smaller amount of meat and dairy products, so shifting to eating the grains directly can also help alleviate the food crisis. Maybe we’ll all need to become vegetarians soon?

• When you measure the economy, only things that cost money count. So, for instance, increases in things like hospital stays, divorces, and burning coal in out-dated power plants count towards economic growth, whereas things like volunteer work, walking rather than driving, and spending time reading a library book with your child don’t.
• Economic growth in recent decades has not actually increased most Americans’ real earnings or standard of living.
• We are already facing food and energy crises, which will get worse if we keep “growing” the way we have been, and we can’t afford the global warming that would result. (See my previous articles on The Energy Future and Biofuels for more information.)
• Economic growth that raises individuals’ income up to the point where their basic needs are reliably met (roughly $10,000 per person per year) certainly makes them happier, but after most people have reached that point, economic growth does not increase people’s happiness.

So the problem is clear: economic growth is not improving the world or our happiness, and it isn’t sustainable. Unfortunately, the solutions are not easy. Here are McKibben’s key ideas:

• In the area of measuring the economy: When we measure the the value of economic activities, put a value on the natural resources they use up, as well as the pollution they produce, and count that against their economic benefit. Also, rather than only measuring things that cost money, attach an economic value to happiness and to beneficial activities like teaching, volunteer work, and child raising.
• In the area of sustainability: Work on making our economy more localized instead of more globalized, letting each local community come together to figure out how to make itself better. McKibben is convinced that if we all try to make more of our economic activities local, we will both solve our larger economic problems and make ourselves happier, as we get more of a sense of being involved in a community. His ideas include using building materials that come from nearby; eating food that is grown on nearby, small organic farms; adding small wind turbines and solar panels to our cities; and building sidewalks, bike lanes, and bus rapid transit. It’s hard to argue that any of those would be a bad idea.

Many of the stories Ms. Pipher shared in her book were somewhat familiar to me — I’ve traveled a lot, I make an effort to follow the international news, and here in Seattle I have a lot of contact with immigrants in my volunteer work (teaching English as a Second Language and Spanish-English interpreting). Certainly, all immigrants have some things in common: they have to adjust to a new culture, in many cases a new language, and often a completely different job from what they did before. But this book focuses on refugees, who have additional difficulties, such as mental health issues arising from their history of being subject to war, political persecution, death threats, and the like in their home countries. So, as I read the stories in this book, at times I thought that the refugees it describes had little in common with the immigrants I normally come in contact with. But really, the differences are not as large as I thought at first. Even immigrants who lack official refugee status (it’s pretty hard to get) may have been persecuted at home for their beliefs, gender, or membership in an ethnic group, or may be trying to leave a country at war. Some of the women and children who come here are escaping domestic violence. And even the average undocumented Mexican immigrant worker has probably come here to work because he didn’t have any chance of making a living wage at home. All of these types of immigrants have a lot in common with refugees, in that they came here because they felt they really had no choice.

So, I really think this book is relevant and important for everyone living in a more privileged country to read. It is also well-written, and even though many of the stories might make us uncomfortable, we still need to know about them.

• The schedule for the day: a bus trip to Olympia, a rally, some time to visit legislators, and a bus trip back.
• The legislative agenda for the trip: improve programs that help immigrants become citizens, housing assistance, English as a Second Language classes with child care and transportation included, and better programs for immigrant children in the public schools.
• The parts of this legislative agenda that I feel strongest about are the educational components. For instance, in my volunteer work (teaching English to adults, interpreting between Spanish-speaking immigrants and social service agencies, and helping out with various school and after-school programs for children), I have met many adults who have difficulties attending ESL classes, due to scheduling, transportation, and child care issues. Yet learning the language is a key determinant of well-being among adult immigrants, so I feel it is important to improve access to ESL classes for immigrants. The issue of education for their children is also crucial, and our schools are generally failing to educate children who arrive as English-language learners — the schools do not currently have the resources to overcome the barriers that these children face (lack of grade-level educational background prior to arrival, reading/speaking English at far below grade level, difficulties for teachers in communicating with parents, and less parental academic support because the parents also may lack English skills and/or educational background).
• At the rally, there were many inspirational words, mostly about how much immigrants matter to our state. One speaker, an immigrant from Korea who is now a state representative in the legislature, addressed the crowd and said, “Some day, maybe one of your children might become the President of the United States” (this made me think of Barack Obama, who is the son of an immigrant). Another speaker used the analogy of our country being a “tapestry” of people — each person a single thread, easily broken, different colors and sizes; together a strong and beautiful fabric.
• After the rally, we were encouraged to visit our state representatives. I went to see Maralyn Chase, one of my two representatives in the state House, and had a long conversation with her about the issues. She seemed very receptive, and very interested in my experiences and observations, as well as the legislative agenda papers I gave her. I felt like that conversation made the trip worthwhile.
• Sometime during my conversation with Representative Chase, I said that I wasn’t sure how things really got done in the legislature, and she said “This is how things get done” (referring to our conversation). I realized at that moment that I was lobbying my representative: trying to convince her to support a certain legislative agenda. So I am now a lobbyist!
• When our bus returned to the Literacy Source (the agency where I have been teaching ESL), the program coordinator congratulated me on moving from just being a volunteer service provider to being an activist, which has fewer negative connotations than the word lobbyist… but I still say that I am a lobbyist.
• Although the trip was short (we left after the morning rush hour, and returned before the evening rush hour, so there wasn’t a lot of time actually spent in Olympia), I thought it was very worthwhile. I hope that most of the people who went had the opportunity to talk, one-on-one or in small groups, with their elected representatives — although the rally was good for inspiration, I don’t think it was likely to accomplish much, on its own. In my opinion, the lobbying time was the most worthwhile part of the trip.
• I heard recently on the news that our governor had signed a new bill establishing a state-wide panel to study the situation of immigrants, in regards to what services they have and what services they need. This seems like a good idea. It apparently came about through lobbying by the organizers of the trip I participated in, probably partly as a result of last year’s lobbying efforts, but it was a nice coincidence coming so soon after this year’s trip.
• Maybe next year, rather than spending all that time on the bus, and standing in the rain at a rally, we could all visit our representatives during the part of the year when the legislature is not in session. The representatives would have more time (for instance, my state senator was not available the day we were there, and the two state house members were pretty busy with meetings), and we wouldn’t have to spend time driving to Olympia, because the legislators would be at their offices in our districts (no more than a few miles from home). Though probably, without the buses and the rally, not too many of us would actually make the effort to do it (for instance, I have rarely even written or called my representatives before now)…. So, the Olympia trip was probably the right way to do this, after all.

Even before seeing the film, I knew the situation was bad for people in the U.S. with no health insurance, and felt that we needed, as a country, to do something to improve health care for the poorest people. But now I feel strongly that we need to do something about the situation for people with health insurance too. It seems to me that the general public is becoming more aware of the issue, so maybe there is hope that our government will do something about the health care situation.

However, I’m not sure it will be happening soon. Clearly, any proposal that keeps for-profit insurance companies in charge of health care decisions will not solve the problems of our current system. But if you read through the health care plans on the top Democratic and Republican Presidential candidates’ web sites, you will see that to the extent that they have plans, they all rely heavily on getting more people covered by private insurance. None of the candidates seems to realize the scope of the problem for people who do have insurance. Maybe Michael Moore needs to sit down and watch his film with each of them until they really understand the issue.

Facts and Statistics

• According to the Pew Hispanic Center, there were about 11 million illegal immigrants living in the U.S., as of March 2005, which is about 3.8% of the total U.S. population.
• Of the 11 million estimated illegal immigrants living in the U.S., again according to the Pew Hispanic Center, about 7.2 million of them are working illegally, amounting to 5% of the U.S. workforce.
• The most common industries for illegal immigrants in the U.S. are construction (1.4 million illegal workers, or 12% of the workforce) and “leisure and hospitality” (1.2 million illegal workers, or 10% of the workforce).
• The median earnings of illegal workers are around $400 per week for men, and less (I am not sure how much less) for women.

Observations

• Basic economics (and logic) tells us that people make decisions based on benefits to themselves. So, who is benefiting from illegal immigrant labor?
  • The businesses that hire illegal workers are benefiting. Clearly, if businesses could hire legal residents at the same total cost (considering salary, benefits, hours, and productivity) as illegal workers, they would hire the workers with papers, to avoid legal problems. So, the illegal workers must be working for lower wages than legal residents would, doing work that legal residents would not do, or working under conditions that legal residents would not tolerate.
  • The illegal workers are benefiting. Typical workers I have met say they came here because they had very little chance of finding work of any type in Mexico, and literally no way to live without work (i.e. not many social services, food banks, soup kitchens, etc.). Here, they can find some work, and they say that even if they are living on the streets of Seattle (many do), their life here is better than what they had available at home: at least they will not starve if they have to go a week or two without working. The people I’ve met who have families here, especially the women, are an inspiration for their dedication to improving their lives and the lives of their children.
  • There are some costs offsetting the benefits. For the illegal workers, these include the cost to get here (hiring someone to convey them across the border, risking life in desert crossings, etc.) and the risk of deportation. For businesses, they include the risk of fines and bad publicity if they are discovered hiring illegal workers. But the fact that we currently have 7 million illegal workers means that these costs must be much lower than the benefits for these two groups.
• This situation is not new. Illegal immigrants have been coming here for decades, mostly from Mexico, and there has been ample work for them for decades. The risk of being discovered and deported has seldom or never been high enough to discourage people from coming here to work; the risk of fines has seldom or never been high enough for businesses to stop using illegal immigrant labor.
• The public in the U.S. is asking for solutions to the “problem” of illegal immigration. But the politicians (funded by business interests) are not offering effective solutions on a scale that would make any difference, any more than they have for the last few decades. Here are the options that I think could actually reduce the number of illegal immigrant workers:
  • The most reliable and humane way to do so would be to improve conditions in Mexico and Central America. If all Mexicans had real options for a good life at home, they wouldn’t come so far from their families and familiar settings to work illegally here — the net benefit would no longer outweigh the cost.
  • We could also erase the advantage businesses gain by hiring illegal workers: make sure that illegal workers have the same salary, benefits, and workplace protections that legal workers do, or give them legal status.
  • The other option is to increase enforcement by a lot (deportations of workers or fines to businesses) to increase the economic costs to businesses or workers.
• The other question is whether illegal immigrant labor is a problem at all. I do not think it is a problem that the workers are working here to improve their lives. But they experience problems due to the fact that they are living and working here illegally, such as constant fear, lowered social status, and loss of employment rights. It’s not a particularly easy life, and it doesn’t seem right that people who are merely trying to improve their lives, and who are also contributing to our economy, should have to live that way.

• We need to generate more energy. The world’s population is growing, and per capita energy use is increasing as the developing world raises its average standard of living. Experts estimate we will need to approximately double the world’s energy production by 2050.
• Biofuels are really a means of transferring energy, not generating energy. Scientists who carefully calculate the energy used in planting, fertilizing, harvesting, transporting, and refining biofuels find that it takes nearly as much (or in some cases more) energy to create the biofuels as the biofuels contain. So, we can use biofuels as a means of transferring energy from one form to another, but we cannot really use them as a means of generating energy.
• We need to grow more food. As the world’s population grows, we will clearly need to produce more food in order to feed the population (unless we all convert to vegetarianism, which would allow us to eat food currently being used to feed farm animals).
• Biofuel crops are grown on agricultural land. If we want to produce biofuels, we will need to either convert food-crop land to fuel-crop land, or convert non-agricultural land to fuel-crop land.
• Biofuels use a large amount of land. For instance, if we converted an entire year’s U.S. corn production to bioethanol, we could only replace only 6% of the year’s U.S. gasoline consumption.
• 35% of the earth’s ice-free land is already used for agriculture. Converting more land to agriculture means cutting down forests. This is already happening in Brazil, which is converting Amazon rain forest to sugar cane production for bioethanol.

Given the above, I cannot see any reason to devote resources to developing biofuels. We cannot afford to use land for growing biofuel crops, and biofuels are not a significant net generator of energy anyway. How can we bring this to the attention of the public and our politicians?

One idea that comes up a lot is to raise the minimum wage, or make it apply to more segments of the local or world population. At first glance, it seems obvious that if people doing the lowest-paid jobs in our society were earning more for their work, the gap between their earnings and the cost of living would be smaller. However, when you analyze the situation more carefully, the result is less clear. For one thing, according to classical economic theory, in a perfectly competitive market economy the presence of a minimum wage leads to unemployment, which could drive more people into poverty (see this Wikipedia article for a more detailed description of why). I am not sure whether this would really happen or not — economists disagree about whether this applies to the real economy — but it is a possible problem with the idea of raising the minimum wage. Another consideration is that raising the wages of the people who earn the least would certainly have some effect on prices. I’m not sure how much we could expect prices to increase, as compared to the increased earnings of the working poor, but clearly the poorest people are the most affected by price increases, and it would certainly reduce the positive impact of their higher wages. So maybe this isn’t the best idea.

Another possible method of alleviating poverty for working people is government subsidies, which could take the form of cost of living reductions (housing subsidies, food aid, free health insurance) or increases in take-home income (through tax deductions/refunds or some type of direct grant). This method might be more effective at reducing poverty than raising the minimum wage, because it should not lead to unemployment or price increases. On the other hand, sometimes people receiving government subsidies are stigmatized, and there is also the issue that subsidies may be a disincentive for people to work. One idea that I think avoids these problems is tax reform. For instance, right now in the U.S., every working person pays 6.2% of the first $92,000 earned in any calendar year for Social Security, and 1.45% of all earnings for Medicare (the employer matches these amounts). This tax could be restructured so that, for instance, the first $30,000 earned in a year was exempt from both taxes, and there was no upper income cut-off (perhaps with an adjustment of the rates), to shift the burden of this tax to those who can better afford to pay it. Alternatively, the special Social Security and Medicare taxes could be completely eliminated, and regular income tax rates adjusted to make up the revenue, because our income tax structure already ensures that people earning the most (whether from employment or investments) pay the most (loopholes aside), and people earning very little pay nothing. The current Earned Income Tax Credit also allows working poor people to receive a tax refund, which is a small direct grant to people who are working to support families; it could be increased. How about linking it to geography, and making sure that anyone working full-time (or legitimately unable to work due to disability) is brought up to at least the minimum income needed for their family to get housing, health care, child care, and food in the area where they live? I wonder how much this would cost to put into action, as compared to the rather ineffective and inefficient collection of subsidies we have now.

A third possible method of alleviating poverty among the working poor, for the longer term, is education. Now, I am a firm believer in education, and I believe that everyone in the world should have the right to a decent education. Also, statistics consistently (and not surprisingly) show that people with more education earn more, and they quickly recoup the investment of time and money spent on education. However, although I am certain that education is beneficial to the individuals receiving the education, and I believe it is beneficial to society as a whole to have a better-education world population, I am not sure that improving education will reduce poverty among the working poor in the U.S. The reason is that I don’t see how improving education will eliminate the need for the low-wage workers that are at the base of our economy — someone will still need to pick our vegetables, work in our fast-food restaurants, and clean our offices. If they are better educated, will they really earn more for types of work that do not require any special training? Possibly if the entire population were well-educated, they would demand a premium for doing boring work, but other than that, I doubt that improving education would make a big change in the poverty rates among the people doing those jobs.

On the other hand, I think increasing the education level in the developing world could have a real impact on poverty there (and on economics-based illegal immigration world-wide). This is because a higher general level of education enables a country to participate on a more equal footing in the global economy — to move from an economy based on subsistence agriculture and exporting agricultural products and natural resources, which does not provide many well-paying jobs, to one more like an industrialized nation. Several countries I am aware of in Central and South America have successfully made this transition in the last few decades, and while there have certainly been factors other than education contributing to these transitions, clearly they would have been impossible without improvements in the general level of education in those countries. There are certainly negative consequences of such transitions (such as increased energy use, probably leading to increased environmental impact), but for me, the morality of the situation is clear. The benefits to the individuals living in the developing world, if their educational systems are reformed and their economies become more industrialized, are such that we cannot morally deny them the chance for a better life.

So by all means, let’s push for better education here and around the world, to improve everyone’s standard of living in the longer term. And in the meantime, I think it’s time for something like an expanded Earned Income Credit that would bring everyone up to a basic level of income. And I think it’s time for me to find out what the current Presidential candidates are planning on doing about poverty, as well as the energy and constitutional questions I’ve been exploring in recent articles. More on that later…