Sacred economics, and what is really worth something?

PP showed us this amazing video tonight, about what economics is about and what it should be about:

 It is very interesting and great, watch it! 

It questions our current society's focus on money, natural resources, lack of sharing and giving...  I want that Gift Economy that he is talking about.  Maybe, just like Paying it forward, we should be Giving it forward more in our lives.

The downside with corporate positive thinking...

A great piece about why realism is better than overly positive thinking:

Today's news in Sweden

Here are some recent news and reflections on current events in Sweden from my trip here:

There is a new law in Sweden that all businesses have to pay all invoices within 30 days.  No exceptions. Nice.

It has been so cold that soon the whole sea between Sweden and Finland is frozen across the narrowest part where the island Aland is, right north of Stockholm.  That doesn't happen every winter, and I love the thought that the ocean is freezing over.  Instead of boats they then use hover crafts to get out to the villages in the archipelagoes.  They use special ships to break the ice on the route between Sweden and Finland too.

The mistletoe plants, parasitic bundles of green that you can see in the tops of naked trees in the winter, are spreading rapidly in Eskilstuna.  When I grew up there were none here, and now they are abundant.  They have berries that are eaten and spread by the Bohemian waxwings.  Changing biodiversity!

Swedish food stores are strange.  They have lots of ecological and sometimes local food, but then the produce looks substandard or simply isn't there.  Regular cauliflower looks like it went through the laundry dryer.  Leeks are limp.  Potatoes, a staple in this country, are in a giant bin, and you have to pick through them to get the ones that don't have blemishes.  Lettuces are half as big as in the US.  And chicken is a lot more expensive that beef and pork, even the most regular cuts.  Chicken breasts (regular mass produced, nothing special) on sale is $5 a pound, while beef roast on sale is down to $4/lbs.  So maybe it is the red meat that is cheap...   I have to investigate this some more and will try to get some photos to illustrate this. This is very surprising to me.

There is a suggestion that Swedes would have a special meat tax since red meat is worse for the environment and the climate than chicken and vegetarian fare.  The Swedes don't like that at all.

New Jersey snow plow drivers are much better at removing snow than the Swedish ones. This really surprised me. Here they don't plow all the way to the curb.  Or on the left side of a highway, making a 4-lane highway turning into 3 lanes, 2 full ones and then two middle lanes that are only half-plowed.  Dangerous. 

The sun gets up around 8.30-9 and by 4 PM it is dark.

There is a Swedish phenomenon called 'fredagsmys'.  Fredag is Friday, and 'mys' is kind of 'hang out and have a great time, but without alcohol, in a cutesy setting'.  This started after I left Sweden, and it is just a way for the stores to sell more chips, dip, ready-made junk food, soda and candy for Friday nights.  A TV program with funny jokes, music and such on Friday evenings for family get togethers (parents, friends, little kids, etc.) helped too.  But really, it is just a giant marketing thing that has fooled most of the Swedes. Fredagsmys is now a word in the dictionary and every kid knows the word and want it.  Can't families do things together without having to have an imposed fake 'get together' time in front of the TV?  I think this is a great example of an artifical need that has been created by food and candy companies, and the Swedes just went all along....

October 24, a date as any other? (and Stamps of the Day)

There is probably some significance to each date during a year, but somehow this date is stuck in my mind.  Maybe because my oldest grandparent was born on this day in 1897 and that seemed so far, far away in time, even when I grew up many decades ago.  So, I had to look up what else had happened on this date. Very many things indeed - telegraphs, stock crashes and so on.  

Here are some things listed on Wikipedia:

1632 – Anton van Leeuwenhoek, Dutch microbiologist was born (d. 1723) (Imagine seeing cells and moving euglenas for the first time, in the water you drink... )

1861 – The First Transcontinental Telegraph line across the United States is completed, spelling the end for the 18-month-old Pony Express. (From horses to copper lines. )

1929 – "Black Thursday" stock market crash on the New York Stock Exchange. (A big stock market crash also happened on Oct 24 2008)

 1931 – The George Washington Bridge opens to public traffic. (It now costs $12 to cross it into New York City)

 1945 – Founding of the United Nations (I didn't know they had their own stamps)

(Source: links and entries from Wikipedia)

A sports quote and some ponderings

Football has the same relation to education that bullfighting has to agriculture.                                
           Robert Maynard Hutchins (President, University of Chicago)

This is of course about the crazy college sports that are going on here in the US.  Players that are like slaves, using their bodies for a few years, end up with injuries for the rest of their lives, and earn a lot for a short time, and then nothing maybe.  There are billions of dollars in college sports here in the US.  In Sweden the sports are private teams, unrelated to colleges, like other parts of Europe.  How did US sports come to be so associated with educational institutions?  There are students here in the US that pick their college based on how the football team is doing, not how good the academic programs are.  That is just crazy. 

Toothpaste for dinner shows it best in his cartoon, Sports Aren't News.  [OK readers, you may like sports, that is OK, I am not outlawing it, I just think it is ridiculous that more money and attention is spent on sports than making this a better world to live in for everybody.]

Source and copyright for image: www.toothpastefordinner.com

Book Review: and I shall have some peace there by Margaret Roach

I like biographical books describing someones sudden change in life, travel to new places, or how they deal with new environments and experiences.  There are many great books about such challenges, from very introspective, to nature writing, to childhood tragedies.

So, when I picked up this book, I thought it would be about something similar, how a person did find peace on her own little dirt road.

Margaret Roach was an editor at Martha Stewart Living for many years, and lived a fast and stressed Manhattan life.  On the weekends she drove up to a cottage she owned a few hours north of New York City, where she tended a garden on a slope near the Berkshire mountains.

In the book she describes how she quits her job, leaves the city, and moves up to the cottage (hmm, I just realize that I have no idea how big her house is or how it looks), to live there full-time.  This is when the trouble starts, both in reality for her, and with the book.  She never describes WHY she left, what it was she wanted to get away from.  It is just very vague. Same thing when she is in her cottage, WHY is she lost and feel invaluable?  Her writing is great, but the content is fragmented, and there is hint after hint, but very little data about her (except she needs to point out several times that she is very petite and only a size 2, and a vegetarian for 30 years... it gets a bit tiresome).  I wish that she had described the situations and challenges better.  After reading the book I can't even picture her garden or house, nor the landscape it is situated in. I can picture many of her snakes though...  It is just not descriptive in a sense where you can understand, it is just fragments, like specks of paint on an old T-shirt.

She leaves her job at the start of the American recession in 2008, while the health care debate is going full steam and we are about to elect a new president.  The world is full of war, environmental problems, health care issues, unemployment disasters, and stock market crashes.  But all she cares about is to move to her little cottage, tend her garden and be alone.  That is all well, but she never seems to realize that she is incredibly lucky by obviously having amassed a fortune big enough to buy such a place, not work for pay, and still be able to have health insurance, enough food, and all others of life necessities. This is not how most people's lives are, so if she want us to understand her personal challenges and life story she better have to describe them better because most people would LOVE to be in her position. But, I have a feeling she thought that writing this book would be a great way to get some more money (she says so), so the content of the book was less important than that it was a book, period.

Maybe many upper-class women at a similar age (50s) can connect with her feeling of being lost in the world, but I cannot.  Is that because my world is filled with valuable things such as education of a new generation and research that improves society, knowledge and people around me...?  I can see that if you work at Martha Stewart Living how mostly caring about wall color, having a perfect geranium, and collecting green glass could get tiresome in the end.  Tiresome and maybe with a loss of doing things that really matter in the world.  But the solution to this would not be to create a garden just for you, but to do something that matters and brings change to many, I would think.  But Margaret Roach did not. There is a lack of balance here, and the lack of balance consist throughout the whole book.

She really lives a luxurious life in that she could make this decision and spend 2 years gardening and write a book...  but she seems totally unaware of what is going on in other people's lives and the world and is 100% self-centered.  In fact, after reading the book I must say that she portrays herself as very selfish.  Many people would love to have a garden they could spend all their time in, but few can realize this dream.  Margaret does, and she opens up her garden to the public a few times a year, but the rest of the time it is mostly her and the garden and a few friends.  The worst things that seem to happen is when a gray fox family moves into the garden and starts a communal fox bathroom in a corner, which she fights day after day with coyote urine. She comes through as a spoiled Manhattan rich girl, unfortunately.  I am sure she is a nice person, but her self-centered focus gets tiresome early on in the book.

Her deep fear of snakes is a theme in the book, as is her longing for 'being someone'.  So, there are snakes, and I am afraid of them too, and eventually she deals with them and manages her fear.  But everything is so personal, in the sense that you get the feeling she thinks the frogs are there for her, and her only.

People love her book, and her blog (which is equally self-promoting and selfish, I think), but I got rather annoyed.  If you want to make the world a better place, then go out and do something about it.  Make small changes in your local community if you like, you don't have to join the Peace Corps.  It is a great way to feel important and valuable, if you become valuable to others and creative positive change. (All Margaret seems to have done is to flip burgers on the grill once in a while at a local community picnic.)  But hunkering down behind a garden gate that you rarely open more than once a week and become an hermit living on past earned money, it is luxury and not a challenge.  Well, maybe a mental challenge, of course, depending on how your mind works.  I don't like to critize people that write biographies and stories like this, but I have to say that this book rubbed me so much the wrong way.

Summary: Rich girl moves to country where she writes and gardens, full of self-pity, selfishness, fear of snakes, and in the end realizes she is somebody. Grade: C (but the writing is good).
(Note: I am sure Margaret Roach is a nice person, and this review is only based on the book. But if you write books like this you set yourself up to get criticized, especially if you turn out to be as navel-gazing as portrayed in this book.)

More on the future, or the lack of it...

In today's New York Times, opinionator Thomas L. Friedman is writing about the unrest in the world, from burning London, arabic uprisings, Tea Party craziness, to unhappy people.  What is going on here, really? He writes:

"There are multiple and different reasons for these explosions, but to the extent they might have a common denominator I think it can be found in one of the slogans of Israel’s middle-class uprising: “We are fighting for an accessible future.” Across the world, a lot of middle- and lower-middle-class people now feel that the “future” is out of their grasp, and they are letting their leaders know it." 

Read it all here, it is very interesting and I think he hits on several important points on what is going on and why we are all so frustrated, especially the younger generations.

A happy, fulfilled and easy future is maybe out of our grasp. At least it is easy to feel trapped, helpless, and frustrated over all the things that seems to get worse and worse when you look forward in time. And more and more people feel like this.  Here in America, for the first time ever, the children born today are predicted to live shorter lives than their parents (mostly due to diabetes and similar epidemic diseases), but most on people's minds are not health, but jobs, homes, food, and simply "how to get a good life".  Young people can't afford homes.  There aren't enough jobs.  Who cares about how much taxes you have to pay when you can't even get a job?  (The tea party seem to have forgotten about that angle of things.).

And when the future seems uncertain, with climate change, stock markets roller coasting, and untrustworthy politicians, those on top that have more hang on to it more, and those that have less feel desperate and loose more.  What do you think, readers of the blog?

 

And here above is something else to ponder... (text borrowed from the internet)

Is art is about empty space?

rather empty bulletin board for the sculpture department - depressing I think, originally uploaded by Vilseskogen.

Depressingly few job openings, exhibitions and other opportunities posted on the board at the Sculpture department at MECA (Maine College of Art). Too bad. Or maybe the bulletin board master is on vacation?

Some amazing and cool Scandinavian style fabric designs can be found at this UK website, Fabric Rehab.  I love this owl print, and it reminds me of late 1960s early 1970s things I saw when I grew up (or maybe it was early 1960s and they were still in style in my part of Sweden?).

How about this dandelion fabric? OK the color is a bit mustardy, but otherwise?


Kristen Kimball, of The Dirty Life fame and hard work, has written an essay on the Oprah website - worth reading.  There is also a great interview with her here, which I don't think I have linked to before from this blog.  More about living off the land locally, on this blog.

And while you are reading all these great things, often building on shared resources and shared commitments and responsibilities, here is one woman who's research is famous for studying this, everyday life around the world and how we share things ethically and honestly: Elinor Ostrom. She got the Nobel prize in Economics for her research, which is pretty remarkable, when you realize that:

"Ostrom’s key idea is that neither the state nor the market is the best manager of our collective resources—it’s us, we the people. The commons concept is catching on in a big way as we look at how to lighten our impact on the earth, live within the means of our natural resources, and navigate the ownership issues of a new digital era."

Read more here, and there is an interview with Elinor here.  I met her last year through work, and the best quote from her that day was: "Shame can be a most useful feeling."  She was talking about shaming people into doing the right thing, like when they had mock trials along the Rhen River accusing big companies of destroying the water of the river with pollution.  It led to the clean-up of the river, quite voluntarily, by several companies who wanted to be known as the ones that do the right thing, not the wrong thing.  The same process can be used when a village manages a common forest, grazing land, etc., but it only works if you have democratic processes in place and if all people care about the outcome.  Her research is most fascinating, and have implications for how we don't manage common resources today like the air, oceans, water quality and quantity, and carbon dioxide pollution.

Book review: The dirty life by Kristin Kimball

Another name for this memoir, The Dirty Life by Kristen Kimball, could have been The inconvenient life or The unexpected happiness in a ditch or under a cow belly.  Kristin Kimball is a New York City journalist when she shows up at an organic farm in Pennsylvania to interview the youngish farmer, Mark.  He was too busy running the farm so he put her to work, weeding, to begin with. During the second day she finally managed to get some answers to her questions, and by then she also had her old interest in farming come alive again (she was always interested in food).  

This book describes the development of her passion for farming, and first her relationship and then marriage with Mark, who is a somewhat crazy hippie-like man.  She is brutally honest, funny, and writes eloquently about everything from her mom's appalled face when Mark shows up with a newly slaughtered turkey in a plastic bag (with the neck hanging out) at their first Thanksgiving, to the feeling of warm, good soil that is just waiting for the spade and shovels and plows.

They move away from New York, trying to find some land to farm organically and 'completely', in the sense that they want to be a self-sustained farm that produces everything a family might need year round: grain, sugar (maple syrup and honey), vegetables, milk (and cheese and yogurt), pork, chicken and eggs, beef, sheep for lamb, and so on. That is a lot complex than to farm just one thing (milk cows or corn for example), but also much more rewarding.

They find some land they are allowed to lease in upper New York State and start Essex Farm.  Mark is a true back-to-old-times person, hating any kind of plastic and waste of resources.  They decide to try to do as little as possible with tractors and instead they buy two draft horses, which will help them to plow and weed and transport manure and maple syrup buckets around, you name it. There is a great interview with Kimball here.

The first year they work all the time, live on nearly nothing except on what they can grow and are worried because they are not sure that the neighbors are willing to become members and get everything they need from the farm instead of from the regular grocery store.  But, if you build it they will come. The neighbors, many of them retired farmers from farms that now are abandoned, help them out with sage advice, ancient rusty but important draft horse equipment from old barns, and a hand here and there when needed.  And they start to sign up as members to get part of what is produced at the farm.

Today, 7 years later, the farm has over 100 members and is thriving.  Kristin Kimball wrote her book on early mornings between 4 and 7 in the fire station, before her daughter woke up and the work at the farm started.  I really loved this book, and read it faster than most because it captures you.  Not only is the story both compelling (and sometimes disgusting) and interesting, Kimball's way with words is beautiful, often poetic.  But mixed with a great sense of humor - she never takes herself too seriously, but she also can be very serious at times.

I am not ready to become a farmer with draft horses after this book, but I sure would love to have a farm like this close-by to get great, real, local, handmade food from.  I am so glad Kimball wrote this book because I hope it will inspire both young people to become farmers and conscious eaters and 'cookers', as well as all of us to think about what it is that we really need in our lives.  Flat screen TVs and the latest world news don't seem that important after you have read this book.  A bunch of hay and a sunset and a well-cooked meal is more real.  So, read it.  It is one of the top ten books I have read in 5 years, and I mean it.  So, grade A+, 5, or *****.

[Disclosure: I did not get paid to say anything of this. :)  Better put this in here so I am not like those corrupt and greedy economy professors in the movie Inside Job, which I recommend the whole world to see, but more on that later.]

Some excerpts:

"A farm is a manipulative creature.  There is no such thing as finished. Work comes in a stream and has no end. There are only the things that must be done now and things that can be done later. The threat the farm has got on you, the one that keeps you running from can until can't, is this: do it now, or some living thing will wilt or suffer or die.  It's blackmail, really."

About preparing bull testicles for dinner after a slaughter:

"I peeled off a layer of membrane only to find another layer. Maybe a testicle is like an onion, I thought, and if I keep peeling I will end up with nothing.  So I left some of the white and squiggly purple stuff on until I got to slicing them into rounds and discovered that the true interior of a testicle is light brown in color, with a fine granular texture - more prairie uni than prairie oyster, if you ask me.  I tossed the slices in seasoned flour and pan-fried them in butter, and served them for breakfast along with scrambled eggs and toast.  The taste was interesting, not too far from a very fresh sea scallop, which the slices resembled in shape and size."

"My existence, from daybreak to dark, became focused on the assassination of weeds. Before that first year, I'd filed "agriculture," in the card catalog of my head, in the same general place as "nature." As in many things, I was so wrong. Farming, I discovered, is a great and ongoing war."

"It was September, deep harvest season, days of pulling carrots, pulling beets, stacking hundred-pound bags int he root cellars.  Mark scythed the rows of black beans and kidney beans, dry and hard in their brittle pods, and I forked them, stems and all, onto the wagon, which the horses drew slowly down the row."

"The food at harvest season is so right the less is done to it, the better.  Sunday dinners were exercises in simplicity. Green salad, practically naked. Steamed green beans with butter. Beets roasted in a hot oven, sliced and tossed with a whisper of oil, a suggestion of vinegar, a bit of dill on top."

A no win-no win situation

Who profits from war?  Well, not us, but others do.  Then and now. Sickening.

NYC National Debt Clock runs out of digits

(the photo is from April. Photo: Jesper Rautell Balle)

Sad, bad news. I didn't know that quadrillion existed. I hope we never get there.

NEW YORK (AP) — In a sign of the times, the National Debt Clock in New York City has run out of digits to record the growing figure. As a short-term fix, the digital dollar sign on the billboard-style clock near Times Square has been switched to a figure — the "1" in $10 trillion. It's marking the federal government's current debt at about $10.2 trillion.

The Durst Organization says it plans to update the sign next year by adding two digits. That will make it capable of tracking debt up to a quadrillion dollars.

The late Manhattan real estate developer Seymour Durst put the sign up in 1989 to call attention to what was then a $2.7 trillion debt.

What will come after Americanism?

There is a really interesting opinion article in the latest issue of Newsweek by Fareed Zakaria titled "The Post-American World". I haven't read all of it yet, but I wanted to share some with you. It is about the changing world and how USA are no longer the superpower it used to be. He addresses the increased importance not only of China's economy but many other developing countries, the increased peacefulness of the world (even if we don't feel it), the anxiety of Americans, and how islamic militants are becoming less popular in muslim societies. USA is no longer the center of the universe, and I think this is a good thing. This connectivity among people and cultures that we can see developing creates instant and unexpected connections across borders and minds, and I think Obama's success is also part of this. The new web-based world works different than the old media and economies, and it will take time in some countries to adapt to it. Old stiff, self-important politicians from years past will especially be left behind (bye, Hillary Clinton). Here are some excerpts, and you can read the rest by following the link above.

"We are living through the third great power shift in modern history. The first was the rise of the Western world, around the 15th century. It produced the world as we know it now—science and technology, commerce and capitalism, the industrial and agricultural revolutions. It also led to the prolonged political dominance of the nations of the Western world. The second shift, which took place in the closing years of the 19th century, was the rise of the United States. Once it industrialized, it soon became the most powerful nation in the world, stronger than any likely combination of other nations. For the last 20 years, America's superpower status in every realm has been largely unchallenged—something that's never happened before in history, at least since the Roman Empire dominated the known world 2,000 years ago. During this Pax Americana, the global economy has accelerated dramatically. And that expansion is the driver behind the third great power shift of the modern age—the rise of the rest.

At the military and political level, we still live in a unipolar world. But along every other dimension—industrial, financial, social, cultural—the distribution of power is shifting, moving away from American dominance. In terms of war and peace, economics and business, ideas and art, this will produce a landscape that is quite different from the one we have lived in until now—one defined and directed from many places and by many peoples."

"Why do we think we live in scary times? Part of the problem is that as violence has been ebbing, information has been exploding. The last 20 years have produced an information revolution that brings us news and, most crucially, images from around the world all the time. The immediacy of the images and the intensity of the 24-hour news cycle combine to produce constant hype. Every weather disturbance is the "storm of the decade." Every bomb that explodes is BREAKING NEWS."

Insightful!

The American Dream?

There is a great opinion article by Thomas Friedman in New York Times today. A sample:

"A few weeks ago, my wife and I flew from New York’s Kennedy Airport to Singapore. In J.F.K.’s waiting lounge we could barely find a place to sit. Eighteen hours later, we landed at Singapore’s ultramodern airport, with free Internet portals and children’s play zones throughout. We felt, as we have before, like we had just flown from the Flintstones to the Jetsons. If all Americans could compare Berlin’s luxurious central train station today with the grimy, decrepit Penn Station in New York City, they would swear we were the ones who lost World War II."

Read more here. (you might have to sign up for free, let me know if you can't get access)