HodgBlog

I spend a lot of time thinking about what I’m doing vs. what I could be doing, and what’s important in life — finding meaning in life, rather than looking for The Meaning of Life. Several books have helped draw my thoughts together, including Melissa Everett’s Making a Living While Making a Difference, which I read more than 10 years ago, and two I read more recently: the Dalai Lama’s Ethics for a New Millennium, and Viktor E. Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Here are some thoughts:

• Central ideas from the Dalai Lama’s book: (a) the fundamental desire of everyone is to avoid suffering and to be happy, and (b) the way to achieve true happiness and fulfillment for yourself is to help others avoid suffering and be happy.
• Central ideas from Viktor Frankl’s book: we can only be happy and satisfied in life (and mentally healthy) if we have a sense of meaning in our lives: a reason to live, a goal, a “why”. This sense of meaning can be found from three sources: action/work (doing something significant), love (caring for someone), and dignity (showing courage and hope in the face of unavoidable suffering).
• Central idea from Melissa Everett’s book: You’ll be happier with your work if it aligns with your values, which means that you need to first understand what your values are, and then think about how you can find work that fits them.
• My list of activities to concentrate on, to bring meaning, happiness, and fulfillment to my life:
  • Spending time with family and friends, and supporting them through difficult times
  • Expanding my knowledge, perspectives, and connections (reading, traveling, study, being outdoors)
  • Helping others improve their lives (volunteering, teaching)
  • Intellectual challenges (writing software, puzzles, games)
  • Creativity (crochet, sewing, cooking, making music, writing)
  • Health (eating well, exercise)

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I recently read an interesting book by James Tooley called The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey Into How the World’s Poorest People Are Educating Themselves, published by the Cato Institute.

This book describes how the governments of many countries in the developing world are failing to educate their children, because their government-run schools are basically worthless. The author described seeing many schools where only a small fraction of the teachers even arrived at the school on any given day, and an even smaller fraction were engaged in meaningful teaching activities (he also did careful studies that documented these problems, as well as poor educational outcomes); this system was made possible by wide-spread government corruption. Perhaps it is no surprise that everyone involved is apparently aware of the issues at the government schools, from the children and their parents, to government officials at all levels, to the international aid agencies and foreign governments that continue to give money for education to the government agencies that are running the schools. So of course, middle- and upper-class families living there send their children to for-profit private schools.

But the real surprise in this book was that Tooley found that many extremely poor people in these countries were also sending their children to for-profit private schools — low-cost schools run by entrepreneurs of similar backgrounds to the poor families, living in the same neighborhoods (rural areas or urban slums). And although these poor private schools tended to have dismal facilities by our standards (poor lighting, poor sanitation, etc.), this was more than balanced by much greater level of accountability than the government-run schools, as parents would immediately withdraw their children (and their tuition money) from poorly-performing schools. Tooley also documented, through careful study, that these low-cost private schools (so low in cost as to be affordable by workers at the very bottom of the social scale) had much better educational outcomes than the nearby government-run schools.

After reading this book, I was left wondering (as Tooley certainly intended) why international aid organizations and US and other governments would continue to pour money into corrupt and ineffective government-run educational programs in these countries. Tooley suggested instead that we direct our aid money in two directions that seemed worthwhile to me. First, he suggested setting up scholarship funds for poor children’s tuition in the low-cost private schools. The cost of such tuition per student is very low, in US dollars or European currencies, and the return in educational provision is high. Tooley has apparently already been involved in setting up one organization that provides such scholarships. Second, the major barrier for educational entrepreneurs in setting up or improving their schools is the lack of financing — banks will not or cannot lend to them, in spite of their financial soundness. So, the idea would be to set up micro-credit institutions dedicated to funding such educational ventures. I haven’t been able to find any projects of this nature that are in progress, but definitely the ideas of micro-credit are well developed in general, and maybe someone will start one up soon. We’ll have to wait and see.

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I recently read The Green Collar Economy, by Van Jones (with a forward by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.). I think President Obama must have read it too, since the ideas he’s been talking about lately for fixing the economy are basically the same as what Jones sets out in his book. This is a good thing, in my opinion. Here are the main points from this book:

• The US is spending about $1,000,000,000,000 (1 trillion dollars by the US definition of “trillion”, or 1 billion by the British definition of “billion” — 1 million million either way) per year to subsidize the coal and oil industries. The book doesn’t give any documentation on how it got this number, but if it’s true, I can only ask: Why?
• Given that burning oil, natural gas, and coal contributes to global warming and other pollution problems, that the supplies of these resources is finite, and that dependence on foreign oil is a major security issue, we need to move towards not burning these fuels at all.
• We can replace the energy coming from coal and oil with geothermal, wind, and solar energy (see my previous post on energy for more on that idea), in conjunction with a move towards better efficiency and sustainable food production.
• The following public policy shifts are needed, in order to make this happen:
  • Stop subsidizing oil and coal
  • Introduce a “cap and trade” system that will cap carbon emissions in the US at current levels, decreasing the cap every year on a pre-determined schedule (so that industry can plan ahead), and set up a system for companies to trade their carbon cap credits.
  • Streamline electricity transmission rules, so that any electricity producer is guaranteed access to the local grid everywhere, while owners of transmission lines and local grids are compensated for their use (similar to the access to local telephone lines from the Telecommunications Act of 1996).
  • Modernize the electric grid, adding high-voltage long-distance trunk DC transmission lines, better control software, and battery storage facilities, so that solar and wind-generated electricity can be effectively generated when and where the sun and wind hit, and used when and where it is most needed. The estimated cost of this modernization is about the same as the 1-year oil and coal subsidy mentioned above, and as with the telecommunications modernization that led to our current Internet backbones, if access is guaranteed, private investment may pay for a significant portion of this cost.
  • Subsidize efficiency and sustainability, ranging from home and building lighting/heating/insulation improvements to mass transit to organic food production.
• Jones and Kennedy believe this will not only improve the environment, but also significantly improve the economy. They cite examples of Sweden and Iceland, which have both significantly reduced their use of oil and coal, and whose economies are booming as a result. Jones also points out that many of the “green collar” jobs generated by these programs would pay a decent wage, be attainable by people with a high-school education (with a little training), and be impossible to outsource (things like installing solar panels and weatherizing buildings have to be done here in the US).
• Jones also advocates for an approach that is based on principles of equal protection and equal opportunity: making sure that this environmental movement includes, protects, and creates jobs in lower-income areas as well as among the more affluent.

President Obama apparently wants something very much like this plan to be put into effect, and the economic stimulus plan being signed today contains at least some of these ideas. I’ll be interested to see what comes next.

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I have been thinking a lot lately about economic growth. It seems like the news media, and practically everyone else, assumes that if the economy is growing, it’s a good thing, and if it isn’t, something terrible is occurring. This assumption has been bothering me for a while, and I recently read a book that put my vague uneasiness into words: Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future by Bill McKibben. In this book, McKibben makes the following points:

• 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.

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I recently read a book called The Middle of Everywhere, by Mary Pipher. In it, Ms. Pipher shares stories of refugees who were settled in Lincoln, Nebraska over the past 10-20 years.

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.

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