Thursday, April 10, 2008
Unintended Consequences
It seems you can’t mess with any part of the world with out messing with the whole thing. We have apparently decided that we need to be less dependent on oil in fueling our economy. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that out, so far so good. Pursuant to this brain storm we’ve fallen face first into the production of ethanol from corn. Why turning fuel for your body (which is fairly fuel efficient) into fuel for your SUV (which isn’t) escapes me, but that’s another blog.
Here is where an impressive streak of unintended consequences begins. Using corn to produce ethanol drives up the price of corn. Farmers in the grain belt stop growing soy beans and plant corn instead, to take advantage of the high price. This drives up the price of soy beans. Dog food makers (who use a lot of corn in their product (don’t tell fido) can’t afford the pricey little kernels and so they substitute sweet potatoes. Society of St. Andrew (who normally distributes millions of pounds of cull sweet potatoes to the poor each year is left holding the proverbial (empty) bag. There, I’ve whined and I feel better. But wait! There’s more!
Remember the soy beans? They’re still expensive. So, cattle farmers in the Amazon basin plant soy beans in what used to be pasture land for their cattle. Meanwhile they still need pasture for the cattle business so (you guessed it) they speed up the cutting of the Amazon rain forest to provide more pasture. I understand from the nice people at Time magazine that they cut down an area the size of Rhode Island just last year!
Now the rain forest absorbs a lot more carbon dioxide (green house gas) that does pasture so global warming gets progressively worse, because of ethanol! Who knew? Is there a solution to all this? Beats me. But it might be a good idea (given the girth of the average American) to invest in a bicycle and use it when ever possible. Just a thought.
Thursday, April 03, 2008
Recession! You think?
Alright, let’s everybody panic. The feared recession seems to be upon us. What to do, what to do?
Pardon me if I don’t jump right on that panic stricken band wagon. In almost all ways that really matter to people (the quality of life we lead, day to day) we’ve been in a recession since the middle seventies. Therein hangs the tale.
How can it be that there’s been a recession in our quality of life for the last thirty years and we never read about it? Well, because we don’t pay attention to anything but our Gross Domestic Product in measuring our economic well being. And GDP is a lousy measure of our actual well being. GDP measures only goods and services that are traded for money. GDP excludes everything else. So if you have an oil spill, for instance, GDP goes up when you pay someone to clean it up. No one in his right mind thinks the oil spill contributes to our well being. In the same way everyone knows that to stay home and raise our young children is very important. Yet, when we do that, because we’re not paid to do that, GDP doesn’t record our increased well being. When we go to work and pay for day care, then GDP goes up!
The point of this tirade is simply that we will have better quality of life when we begin to pay attention to those things that make for a better quality of life, and not before. As long as GDP is our God, then we’ll get more of what that God offers. Quality of life is not necessarily one of that Gods’ blessings.
