Thomas Piketty: Capital in the 21st century

by Madeleine Kando

Piketty has caused an international panic. The camps are predictable: he has been criticized vehemently by the Right, including the London Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal, and he is being defended by progressives, for example by Paul Krugman. Clearly, Piketty is a threat to the plutocracy. But as you will see, I agree with Krugman that Piketty is fundamentally correct.

Thomas Piketty is the author of the voluminous 'Capital in the 21st Century', a book on economics and the growing inequality between the rich and the poor. This unassuming professor, who looks more like a schoolboy than a formidable economist, has taken the world by storm. His book contains an incredible collection of historical data that shows that the extreme concentration of wealth that was so typical of the 19th century, the Belle Epoque (1871-1914) is coming back in full force to haunt us in the 21st century. Read more...

Beyond Einstein: Could Scotty Beam you up Instantaneously?

by Tom Kando

I am a hack when it comes to physical science. Nevertheless, I have long been fascinated by astronomy and quantum mechanics. I remember being mesmerized by popularizations of science such as Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, as were “billions and billions” (joke) of other people.

I’ll also confess that I still watch reruns of the first generation Star Trek (Does that make me a Trekkie?).

For example, on August 25, 2009, I published a post on this blog titled  What does "E=mc square" mean? And  on October 21, 2009, I wrote  Will We ever Travel to the Stars?

In that article, I pointed out that even if we were to double the speed of our currently most advanced spacecrafts to, say, 100,000 miles per hour, it would take an astronaut 29,000 years to reach the nearest star (Alpha Centauri), which is 25 trillion miles away. This is as much time as has lapsed since Cro-Magnon man. I concluded that, while we may not be completely earth-bound, we are certainly the prisoners of the solar system - FOREVER.
Read more...

Is Scarcity a Fallacy? Part Two

By Tom and Madeleine Kando

In our previous post, we introduced the environmental debate raging between what Matt Ridley calls the Ecologists and the Economists in his April 25 Wall Street Journal article 'The Scarcity Fallacy'. We wrote that this is the familiar debate between what is better called environmental Optimists and Pessimists, or Malthusians and Anti-Malthusian, or Environmentalists and Anti-environmentalists. We presented the “optimistic” position, listing and discussing nine of their arguments.

Today, we present the alternative position - that of the (neo-)Malthusians, or the ”pessimists.” This is basically the environmental position, and it is also our own position, by and large. The best-known modern-day neo-Malthusian is Stanford’s Paul Ehrlich. Here are some of the major arguments:

We concluded the first half of this article by pointing out the difficulty of predicting the future by studying the past. However, the pessimists remind us that probabilistically the past is the best predictor of the future. Someone who has often been a klutz is more likely to be a klutz again than someone who has not been one. And there are things that are 99.9999% sure to happen. For example, it IS a certainty that we will run out of fossil fuels. Read more...

Is Scarcity a Fallacy? Part One

By Tom and Madeleine Kando

On April 25, Matt Ridley wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal titled "The Scarcity Fallacy." 
Ridley once again revives the debate which has been raging between (neo-) Malthusians and ant-Malthusians at least since the 1960s.

Ridley’s article is very good, yet it cries for critical analysis: He calls the two camps  the Ecologists and the Economists.

Ridley uses to term “Ecologist” as a synonym for  “environmentalist,” i.o.w. anyone who is worried about continued population growth, energy use, and the resultant harm to the planetary environment. He employs the label “Economists” in  reference to those who do NOT share that worry, and who  feel that our technological ingenuity will help us avert ecological  catastrophe.
These labels are somewhat misleading, because economists are by no means all anti- environmentalists. Only two economic schools  see continued  growth and  technology as the solutions to poverty and to other problems: Free-Market Capitalism, and Marxism. But many other economists disagree. Better dichotomies would be Optimists vs. Pessimists, or  Malthusians vs. Anti-Malthusians, or Environmentalists vs. Anti-environmentalists.
Read more...

A Thank You Note

by Madeleine Kando

A bird, lying on his back, is showing his soft, white underbelly. His heart is heaving. He is dying. He is dying in my backyard. Maybe he flew against our large bay windows; maybe the giant red tailed hawk tried to catch him but missed and injured him. He is lying with his little feet stuck in the air. His breathing is slowing down; soon he will stop and lay still forever.

I am overwhelmed with the intensity of life and death that is playing out every second in this little corner of New England. The three emaciated deer licking my bird feeder, barely able to stand, barely having survived the harsh winter, their ribs showing under their dull colored hide. The hawk has caught a squirrel, but he has dropped it and the squealing tells me that he is hurt.

He will crawl into a hollow tree trunk, lick his wounds and survive, or die a painful death. His little body will add to the fertility of the soil in which my seedlings will be born. Tiny specks of green amongst the dead leaves and twigs left behind by the retreating winter. It is such hard work to die. It is even harder work to be born.
Read more...

Is Ambivalence Good or Bad? I am not sure...

by Madeleine Kando

"I love my man, I'm a liar if I say I don't.

But I'll quit my man, I'm a liar if I say I won't."

Billie Holiday, 'My Man,' Billie's Blues (1936) 

The official definition of ambivalence is ‘having conflicting feelings toward something or someone.’ It means "sitting on the fence", not knowing which side to choose. It usually has a negative connotation but in my opinion, ambivalence has gotten a bad rap over the course of human history. It has become the whipping boy in the arsenal of our emotions. I am not sure why, because ambivalence has a lot going for it. In a fair fight, it would win over certainty any time. After all, it has to fight on two fronts in an argument. Like an immigrant worker, it toils away; doing the dirty work that certainty feels too superior to take on.

Here comes certainty strolling down the street, briefcase in hand, stuffed with opinions whose ink is barely dry, immune to all the ugly stares from opposing views, so full of itself, so overconfident. That’s what I hate about it, it’s just too damn sure of itself.
Read more...

Time Famine: The Lethal Combination of High Tech and Bureaucracy

by Tom Kando

I have been retired for a few years, but I find myself hurrying more and having less time to do all the things I want to do. Maybe it’s my age. I am slowing down. I can obviously no longer work as hard as I used to. But judging from what I hear from others, even from some relatively young people, there is more to it than that:

It seems to me that life is getting increasingly time-consuming, not less so. Technology schmecknology! Many years ago I published a pretty successful book called Leisure and Popular Culture in Transition.  Like many other utopian fools tainted by the sixties’ Counterculture, I predicted that technology would soon enable humankind to enter the Age of Aquarius. The workweek would decline to 20 hours. Machines would do the work. People would devote themselves to poetry and philosophy. The Maslowian hierarchy of needs would be fulfilled.
Read more...

Five Ways We Can Reform Young Offenders

by Daphne Holmes

While instances of crimes committed by young (under 21) offenders seem to be in slight decline, the violent nature of those crimes is on the rise, and the age of the offenders seems to be getting lower, according to a report by the Australian Jesuit Social Services, titled Thinking Outside: Alternatives to remand for children. The response on the part of most countries’ governments and school districts has increasingly been to handle these young offenders’ crimes by means of the criminal justice system. While such a response is indeed understandable, it has not to date proven particularly effective, so we must look beyond the immediate knee-jerk reaction to youth crime if we hope to see the trend reversed.

Who are the young offenders?
In the above mentioned report, it is noted that a significant majority of youths who are processed by the criminal justice system "have been victims of abuse, trauma, and neglect, with high rates of drug and alcohol abuse, child protection involvement and school exclusion. Mental health issues and intellectual disability are also prominent.” It is also noted that minority children constitute a much higher percentage of offenders than their ratio within the overall population. While the report was based in and focused upon the situation in Australia, it documents a trend that is consistent with findings in other countries, as well. Read more...

God Created the Earth, but the Dutch Created Holland

by Madeleine Kando

Once more, I am visiting beautiful Holland, where my mother still lives and where I grew up. She is settled in the northern tip of this small country, her flat abutting a pristine stretch of green fields dotted with sheep, cows and horses. It is spring time and the high-pitched bleating of newly born lambs calling for their mother, fills the air. Giant white swans slowly navigate the small 'ditches', like miniature barges with elegant wings. I cannot resist driving on these tiny polder roads, barely able to keep my wheels from veering into the trenches that separate the fields.

It is miraculously beautiful. The landscape has not changed since the Dutch masters of the Golden Age immortalized it in their famous paintings. A sliver of a horizon dotted with church steeples and poplars, domed with an immense sky. The light from the intricate web of waterways, lakes, rivers and the surrounding sea is reflected back on a hazy countryside, as if it were bathed in milk. Read more...

Flying Fantasies

by Madeleine Kando

Flying is like signing away your rights as a human being. Not only is your life put on hold, but you never know which side of providence your fate will fall.

On my most recent flight to Holland, I thought lady luck had smiled on me and my fellow passengers, but after we were all seated in the full, upright and locked position, our carry-ons stowed away, we were told that there was a slight problem with one of the landing lights, which would only take 20 minutes to fix. I could see lady luck start packing her bags and by the time we were told that unfortunately they needed to wait for a replacement part to be flown in, which would take at least 3 hours, she had stepped out of the plane altogether.

We were 'deplaned' and asked to wait at the gate, where we were offered complimentary refreshments, a euphemism for the familiar constipation causing mini pretzels and soft drinks. What would that incoming plane do without the part we would be stealing from it, I wondered? Probably wait for another plane to come in, have those passengers wait 3 hours, and so on, ad infinitum. Read more...