Month: February 2011

A new imperial cycle

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For some reason, a passage that turns out to be from a Washington Post story from last July passed under my eyeballs. It was in reference to China seemingly having incorporated the entire South China Sea in its “core interests.” China’s “core interests” also include Taiwan and Tibet.[1]

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  1. [1]John Pomfret, “U.S. takes a tougher tone with China,” Washington Post, July 30, 2010. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/29/AR2010072906416.html http://www.parts-unknown.org/drupal6/?q=node/4359↩

Changing blogs *again*

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Originally published at The Benfell Blog. You can comment here or there.

For some reason, this site is just way too slow getting off the home page. I don’t know why; my server doesn’t seem overloaded when it’s doing this.

But it’s reasonable to argue that Drupal is overkill for what I’m doing here anyway. So as I write this, I’m migrating to a WordPress blog at a simpler address. If you go there now, you’ll see some really old entries because I’m still importing them from my really old blog, which I’m thinking I probably won’t update from here on out—so you’ll need to come to DisUnitedStates.org.

It’s too bad. I’m quite fond of the theme I came up with for the Drupal site, even if it does have some bugs on administration pages that I was never able to iron out.

Admiral Janeway’s new U3

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Originally published at The Benfell Blog. You can comment here or there.

This is a very different version of this chart than you may have seen before. It is based on different underlying data.

When I went to do my usual thing with the unemployment data this morning, I found that the data file the Bureau of Labor Statistics has made available in the past was no longer there. Instead, casting around, I found monthly data going back to 1948 in multiple forms.1

So things are going to be different—and I think better—from here on out. But it remains important to be intelligent with this data, so here’s what I’ve done.

  • I am not using seasonally adjusted data. When landlords start “seasonally adjusting” their rents, when bankers start “seasonally adjusting” their mortgates, when people start “seasonally adjusting” their needs for food, and when bill collectors start “seasonally adjusting” their bills, I will consider accepting “seasonal adjustments” as legitimate. Until then, people who need work still need work, and “seasonal adjustments” belong on the bookshelf along side Alice in Wonderland. This is one factor making this chart considerably messier than in the past.

  • I am using monthly data that the BLS has made more easily available. In combination with the lack of seasonal adjustment and with the compression of time since 1948 across the chart, this makes rates appears as more of a band than a line. I have a sneaking hunch this is closer to the truth.

  • My calculation methods remain the same, but because I’m using non-seasonally adjusted data, my calculation of the BLS U3 comes to 9.79 percent rather than the more widely reported 9.0 percent.2

  • As before, I assume that given a reasonable opportunity, the highest labor force participation rate to date is a more honest reflection of the proportion of the population that is available to work. In order to preserve precision (the BLS rounds the number off at three significant digits), I recalculate this from the supplied population and labor force sizes. I use this number in calculating Admiral Janeway’s U3 (named for my cat, who is in turn facetiously named for the Star Trek character) and in the unemployment rate that counts people who “want a job now” but whom the BLS excludes from the labor force. When conditions improve for the middle and working classes such that they no longer have as great a need to work, this assumption will deserve reconsideration. But as of now, we’re still headed in the opposite direction.3

  • Also as before, these statistics do not consider people who are working fewer hours than they need or would prefer. Classically this means part-time workers who want or need full-time work. Nor does it consider people who are working at jobs below their skill levels because they have not found work for which their qualifications are appropriate. Notably, Gallup currently shows an underemployment rate of 19.2 percent (and an unemployment rate of 9.9 percent).4

  • I also found a statistic the BLS has apparently been collecting since 1994 of people it excludes from the labor force but who “want a job now.” I add it to the number of people the BLS counts as unemployed (and in the labor force) and divide it by the labor force size I calculate as described above. The relationship between this measure and others is best illustrated in a version of the above chart that covers the period since 1994:

  • Finally, I do not know what adjustments the BLS may have made to its supposedly “unadjusted” data. But not all adjustments are seasonal adjustments and given the dichotomy with “seasonally adjusted” data, it is unclear to me which side these other adjustments fall—I distrust them all. And when economists try to claim that they’ve been through this, that economists have reached a consensus on these adjustments,5 it is important to remember that economics is not only the “dismal science” but is also in a contest with political science for recognition as the most ideological “science.”

With all this, Admiral Janeway’s U3, at 15.34 percent, indicates by far the worst unemployment picture since 1948. The previous peak was in January 2010, at 15.16 percent.

I am disappointed by the “want a job now” statistic (which counts people who want a job but whom BLS excludes from the labor force), which I add to the number of people the BLS counts as unemployed. Until November 2003, it was consistently higher than Admiral Janeway’s U3. Since then, the record is more mixed. It still does occasionally exceed Admiral Janeway’s U3, most recently in July 2009. But even it shows a high proportion, 13.28 percent, of people who want work. But it was higher in January (13.80 percent) and February (13.68 percent) 2010.

As for the BLS U3, it is worth considering that its labor force participation rate is sinking towards levels last seen in early 1984. At 63.90 percent, it falls between the levels of April (63.73 percent) and May (64.30 percent) 1984. The trough in 1984 was in January at 63.25 percent; 1983 saw levels that were worse. A low labor force participation rate is a major factor holding down the headline U3.

Cast-off people

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Society has an odd way of dealing with human beings it is casting off. It pretends to help them, but in fact sabotages them.

I remember back when I was living the experience of poverty that would resonate so strongly later after I returned to school and started turning over scholarly rocks on social and economic injustice. A relatively mild but particularly visible example was on those occasions when I was relying on public transportation and a group of so-called “developmentally disabled” people got on the bus. I could spot them a mile away, not simply because of their mannerisms, and not simply because they always traveled in groups, but because their thrift store clothing and lousy haircuts betrayed bureaucratic decision making that prefers cost-cutting to human dignity.

We aren’t supposed to judge people by their appearance, but in fact, the way they appear—which probably no one would choose for oneself—reinforces a sense that these people are “others,” to be isolated even amongst the other passengers on a bus by their oddity and homeliness.

Similarly, very few well-off people work graveyard shift jobs. Typically, people who work the night shift are in low-level jobs, such as in janitorial or security guard work. These are the people who most need reliable bus service, but are forced to purchase old, unreliable cars and try to keep them operational to get to work because bus service drops off dramatically after around 8 or 9 pm.

And there’s certainly an unreality to the social “safety net” in the United States, that effectively reduces the indigent to begging or to crime. And if they sleep in their vehicles, they are prone to be rudely awakened at 3 am by police who, to be brutally frank about it, see homeless people as easy targets.

I’m reminded of all this, this week, by my experiences on Golden Gate Transit. I usually catch the bus in Novato, at Redwood and Olive, to go to school in San Francisco. I go down three times a week, at different times because I have classes at different times on different days of the week. I drive to this location rather than catching the bus in Sonoma County, closer to where I live, because there are more buses running to Marin County—even north Marin—than to Sonoma County. I burn more gas but I’m a lot less likely to be left stranded.

On Monday, after class, I caught a complicated series of connections to try to get back to Sebastopol to check my mail before the mailbox place closed because a textbook still hadn’t arrived. I’ve been wondering a lot about the relationship between the published schedule and when the buses actually run—it seems to be loose, at best, making a complicated set of connections such as this rather risky. It actually worked; I caught BART at Civic Center and rode it to the Embarcadero Station and fast-walked to Fremont and Mission for Golden Gate Transit route 54, which arrived within a very few minutes of the time I got there. I then got off to transfer at the Alameda del Prado bus pad. I noticed the 54 had gotten me there seven minutes early. I also noticed that the 71 I was to transfer to (which took me back to Redwood and Olive) was ten minutes late. But I made it to the mailbox place in time to find the textbook still hadn’t arrived.

On Tuesday, I arrived ten minutes early for the route number 70 bus. And I waited. And waited. And waited. Finally, when the bus was five minutes late, I decided I couldn’t take the chance of waiting any longer. I got back in my truck and headed south.

The 70 is one of several lines that runs mostly along Highway 101, and I was driving down 101 when I saw a bus ahead. As it took the Ignacio exit, I could barely make out that it was the 70, the bus I should have caught at Redwood and Olive. It had either gone by the stop ridiculously early or not at all. Since the main Novato stop is at Redwood and Grant and the northern end of the route is on San Marin, the northernmost Novato exit, it probably just completely blew off that final leg of the trip to turn around and head back south.

So I drove to San Rafael, somewhat miraculously found a parking space in the downtown Park and Ride lot, and walked a couple blocks to the San Rafael Transit Center. I was in plenty of time to catch the 70 there. And while I was waiting, there were two boisterous drunks who were being loud and obnoxious.

The bus eventually arrived and one of the drunks put his bicycle on the rack on the front of the bus and boarded after me. The driver forcefully warned him to keep his voice down and his language clean. I settled down with some reading I had to do.

After a few minutes, I noticed we hadn’t left the Transit Center. And in fact, the driver was missing. The 70 usually doesn’t wait at the Transit Center; it just makes the stop and continues south. But in this case, we must have been there fifteen minutes before the driver returned.

It was not a banner day for Golden Gate Transit. As we traversed San Francisco, the driver had to maneuver around a route 101 bus that I assume had broken down on Van Ness. About that time, the drunk got into some kind of altercation with another passenger; he claimed to have been threatened. The driver was, of course, not amused and reprimanded the both of them.

There were further disturbances as each of them got off the bus, thankfully at different stops, as each of them had to tell his side of the story to the driver (whom I doubt cared).

And in the end, I got to class five minutes late.

On Wednesday, I caught the route number 101 south. This bus runs a similar route to the 80, but omits a number of stops in Marin County. Even so, for some reason, they always change drivers on this route at the San Rafael Transit Center. The process of changing drivers eliminates the time savings from having skipped all those other stops. And it isn’t a big deal if the relief driver is there waiting like (s)he is supposed to be.

But he wasn’t. I could see the driver who had gotten us this far on his cell phone telling someone that the relief driver had missed the shuttle that I guess Golden Gate Transit provides for its drivers. After a considerable delay, the shuttle returned and a driver got off of it. But the driver who is supposed to be being relieved had to bellow at him across the Transit Center because he was walking in completely the wrong direction as if he was expecting to drive a different route. Eventually he came over and they had a conference for what seemed like five minutes.

Eventually he got on the bus and started driving it south. His driving was okay, but I noticed he was blinking as if he was having a hard time seeing. Considering that he was the one about to drive me into San Francisco, certainly no less a challenging driving environment in a bus, this was far from reassuring.

These are all minor incidents. But even in daylight, they do not form a picture of a reliable bus service, something that low-level workers, for whom tardiness can be a job-ending event, can rely upon. Even for a Ph.D. student like myself, walking into class late draws an undesirable form of attention.

All this experience reinforces a picture, or more correctly, a series of photographs I once took for a geography class. The assignment was to use a photograph to show how humans use geography and as the teacher was discussing the assignment an idea popped into my head. I was stretching the assignment a bit—the teacher remarked that I had completed the assignment the hard way, but pulled it off—but I actually started at 6th and Bryant Streets in San Francisco, by the Hall of (so-called) Justice, and drove northbound, snapping pictures with my PDA out my driver side window. This route included what I think are the two most impoverished blocks in San Francisco, between Howard and Market, proceeded across Market Street onto Taylor Street, by a now-closed “adult” bookstore and through the Tenderloin, and up to the top of Nob Hill. Nob Hill, of course, is a very rich area, and I used these photographs to illustrate how the rich literally look down upon the poor (criminalized at the beginning of the series at the Hall of Justice).

Along the way, one of the pictures I took was of an obviously disabled couple making their way down the sidewalk in the most impoverished neighborhood in San Francisco, a neighborhood that strongly resembles a “skid row” archetype. It is emphatically not what most people would characterize as a “safe” neighborhood. I perceived this couple, with their obviously broken bodies, as having been chewed up and spit out by capitalism (though I didn’t interview them and don’t actually know their stories) and left to fend for themselves in a situation where they were very vulnerable.

And when I see drug addicts, I see people who may well have become addicts in an attempt to anesthetize themselves against the brutality of our society. That includes those drunks at the San Rafael Transit Center on Tuesday.

Probably a great many of these people have stories that simply don’t fit the dominant narrative of a society that claims to provide equal opportunity for everyone to get ahead if they work hard. And so they are cast aside, with only token efforts at assistance—such as unreliable bus systems.

But as cast-offs in an undesirable setting which many people will not choose to approach, they also serve as exemplars,[1] warning the rest of us to toe the line, to work hard, to keep to “the straight and narrow,” to not make waves.[2]

  1. [1]Herbert J. Gans, "The Uses of Underservingness," in Great Divides: Readings in Social Inequality in the United States, 3rd. ed., ed. Thomas M. Shapiro (Boston: McGraw Hill, 2005), 85-94.↩
  2. [2]Sonja K. Foss, Karen A. Foss, and Robert Trapp, Contemporary Perspectives on Rhetoric, 3rd ed. (Long Grove, IL: Waveland, 2002).↩

Water

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Alice Outwater apparently and I would very much like to see a world in which beavers dammed streams across North America, old-growth forests reclaimed vast tracts across the continent, rivers and streams were restored to their natural meanderings, prairie dogs helped to maintain natural grasslands that bison would graze upon, mussels and alligators were plentiful, and humans did not dump so many pollutants into the air and the water.[1] But complexity theory informs us that the whole of a system does not equal the sum of its parts; that there are unexpected losses and unexpected gains from that sum, which we call emergent properties; and that when positive (destabilizing) feedback occurs, we should look for the possible establishment of new systems with new equilibriums sustained by negative (stabilizing) feedback.[2] Outwater’s approach subtracts the factors listed and adds modern fertilizer and pesticide-intensive agriculture, domesticated livestock, cities, industry, water treatment, and sewage treatment. As such her solution appears to be a restoration of a natural solution that predates modern transportation, infrastructure, and not only a population that is much larger than the indigenous pre-contact population (whose size can only be guessed at) but an increasingly urban and suburban population who often professes admiration for wilderness but is aghast when mountain lions and coyotes forage in their communities or when wolves are thought to kill sheep. I can only wish that Outwater was correct; surely even the malarial swamps of Iowa and Illinois were less hazardous than are Chicago politics today.

Outwater begins to grasp the cultural difficulties as she documents how the fur trade decimated the beaver population, how North American Indians were readily enticed into participation in this trade in exchange for European technology, and how the European American civilization viewed “[w]ilderness . . . as mysterious and frightening,”[3] indeed as Timothy Beal might suggest, as a monstrous “other” to be suppressed through technology.[4] But Outwater also inadequately expresses the assumptions of the European American civilization which imposed itself upon North America and which appeared to view its resources as infinite and as existing for human exploitation, assumptions which would surely need to change if there is to be any hope of a restoration of a verdant paradise in which all living things, not just humans and domesticated animals, can have access to the clean water we all depend upon. Further, in her advocacy of buffalo meat over beef, she neglects that a world population rapidly approaching 7 billion[5] and facing climate change needs to consume less meat rather than different meat.[6]

So even as Outwater has meticulously described a number of ways in which European settlement has altered the ecological system as it relates to water, she has not described a system humans can realistically aspire to that is healthy for humans and other living things. Her picture is partial in that while she describes the myriad impacts when a culture that radically privileges—even worships—technology[7] displaces an indigenous one, she barely examines the cultural values that have proven so detrimental to our world.

As I read Outwater’s work, I found myself wanting an exploration of the hierarchical notion of “natural” and “moral” order that places humans over nature, and how that fits in with other aspects of hierarchy;[8] and attention to how an economic system that privileges competition over cooperation might manifest in a race to destroy the environment. And finally, if disease is indeed such a major factor in decimating indigenous populations and reducing their will to resist modern encroachments as Outwater (and others) suggest, what can it be that the bacteria Fritjof Capra credits for having repeatedly adapted to metabolize toxins, for playing crucial roles in natural systems at all levels, and for providing negative (stabilizing) feedback for earth’s ecosystem are up to?[9]

  1. [1]Alice Outwater, Water: A Natural History (New York: Basic, 1996).↩
  2. [2] Fritjof Capra, Web of Life (New York: Anchor, 1996); Joanna Macy, Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory: The Dharma of Natural Systems (Delhi, India: Sri Satguru, 1991); and Edgar Morin, On Complexity (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton, 2008).↩
  3. [3]Outwater, p. 36.↩
  4. [4] Timothy K. Beal, Religion and Its Monsters (New York: Routledge, 2002).↩
  5. [5] Population Reference Bureau. http://prb.org/↩
  6. [6]Cornell University, “Diet With A Little Meat Uses Less Land Than Many Vegetarian Diets,” ScienceDaily, October 10 2007. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071008130203.htm; University of Chicago. “Study: Vegan Diets Healthier For Planet, People Than Meat Diets,” ScienceDaily, April 14, 2006. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/04/060414012755.htm↩
  7. [7] Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Vintage, 1964); Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Vintage, 1992).↩
  8. [8]George Lakoff, Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2002).↩
  9. [9]Capra, Web of Life.↩