Orbits

I was in Philadelphia recently and saw a couple of remarkable things. A philosophical juxtaposition between them occurred to me.

The first was an exhibit at the Franklin Institute, a science museum, on Galileo. It was a traveling exhibit that included artifacts from museums in Italy, artifacts contemporary with Galileo. These included books about mathematics and astronomy, paintings, and scientific instruments. The instruments were made in a time when practical items were made to be beautiful as well as functional, so there was a lot of engraving and gilding to be seen. The premiere artifact, however, was Galileo’s telescope.  It is one of two attributed to him, a copper tube about four feet long, covered in paper and capped on either end with painstakingly hand ground lenses. It is with this instrument that he observed the heavens and exploded the earth-centered theory of the universe.

Before Galileo the dominant theory of the heavens places the earth at the center, motionless, with the sun, planets, and the fixed, crystalline sphere of stars rotating around it. It was called the Ptolemaic system, after the astronomer Ptolemy. There was a problem with this system in its primitive state, however, aside from being patently wrong. It didn’t explain what people observed. Because of the different orbital diameters and speeds of the various planets around the sun, other planets appeared to stop in their tracks, go backwards for a time, then reverse again and go forward. This is known as retrograde motion. Ptolemy worked up a complex system of cycles and epicycles to account for this, and managed to cob together a theory that described the actual motions. Imagine walking in a large circle (the cycle) while whirling a ball on a string (the planet) in a small circle (the epicycle) over your head.

Galileo supported the Copernican, or heliocentric (sun-centered) system. When I write that Galileo exploded the earth-centered system, I mean that there was a loud noise and a stink. We have all read in school about how the church came down on him and forced his public recantation. His crime was one of heresy, contradicting church dogma of an immobile earth. It was a symbolic heresy as well. The power structures of the time were all central and hierarchical, with one man at the pivot. All people orbited the central figure, whether pope or monarch, and theology justified this unequal relationship.

This brings me to the second extraordinary thing I saw in Philadelphia. I visited the old section of the city and toured Congress Hall, where our legislators met from 1790 to 1800. On March 4, 1797, it hosted an epochal event – the inauguration of John Adams, the second president of the United States. It was an unprecedented transfer of power. Prior to that date, all major transfers of political power had involved blood. This blood was either literal, in cases of military force and assassination, or figurative, in the case of inheritance.

The inauguration was, as with Galileo, the explosion of a theory. In this case it was a literal expression of Galileo’s figurative heresy. Political power no longer revolved around one man, fixed at the center of lesser beings. The government of a country had become relativistic rather than absolute. However imperfect the new political structure, it didn’t need a complex and arbitrary theory to justify it.

One thing that concerns me about the evolution of our country is the continued focus on that man at the center. I have noticed a tendency in all political institutions to mimic the family. With small groups, committees and the like, I often notice someone trying to make the group into a version of his or her particular dysfunctional family. In the case of our nation, I notice people looking for a father figure, focusing on an individual personality rather than the relationship between the office and the people. People wish that we could get someone out of office or someone else in. That is Ptolemaic thinking. We should be thinking about the process by which an office holder such as the president gets into the position and our relationship with the office once he (so far) gets there. It is that process and relationship that determines the personality and capability of the person in office. The peaceful transfer of power between Washington and Adams was not dependent upon the personality of either man, but the political structure that surrounded them.

Political structure is less interesting to most people than personality and personal narrative, but it is infinitely more important. We have been granted a respite from the worst excesses of the Bush era with the inauguration of Barack Obama, but the president is still beholden to the financial powers that bankrolled his campaign and the campaigns of members of Congress. His presence in office is partially due to the structure of election laws across the country, which favor the partisan over the independent, the established over the new, and those with wealthy friends over those with many friends. We need to be Galilean in our thinking, and focus our efforts on those structures.

Hemp – a good idea, but not a great one

I just read yet another article about how industrial hemp could be a replacement for crude oil.  If you read non-mainstream media enough you will run into such articles. The author touted hemp’s benefits as a replacement fiber for wood pulp, cotton, and petrochemical fibers. Fine. Our ancestors wrote on hemp paper and wore hemp clothes as they raised hemp sails with hemp ropes. The U.S. government promoted the domestic growth of hemp for rope fiber during WWII, when we lost our source of so-called Manila hemp in the Phillipines.

Then I read this paragraph:

"If all the diesel engines today were converted to use hemp biodiesel, you could wipe out world hunger while providing a natural balance to global warming" says Paul Stanford of the Hemp and Cannabis Foundation, which has worked to end marijuana prohibition and restore industrial hemp.”

This kind of hyperbole drives me nuts. Here’s the blanket statement from the Minor Heretic on biofuels. If it involves…

• Growing something
• Converting that something to a fuel
• Pouring that fuel into a fleet of 230 million vehicles
• Each vehicle weighs over a ton and carries an average of 1.2 passengers at highway speeds for an average of 13,000 miles a year

…then it is not going to work. There is just not enough land, water, or nutrients to do the job. That’s not hyperbole; it is an acknowledgment of the limitations of natural systems.

Let’s just do the math on biodiesel from hemp seed. I am going to wave my magic wand and turn all 230 million registered vehicles in the U.S. into 40 mpg diesels, all converted to run on straight vegetable oil. That is a big wave of the wand, but I don’t want anyone claiming that I didn’t give hemp oil biodiesel every chance. I am also going to assume, as was suggested by one comment on the article, that the best variety of hemp will produce 8,000 pounds of seed an acre, a stunning 13 times the productivity of standard industrial hemp. According to that miracle-hemp comment this would translate into 300 gallons of hemp oil per acre.

At an average of about 13,000 miles per year, our fleet racks up 2,990,000,000,000 miles annually. That’s almost 3 trillion. At 40 mpg, that would require 74,750,000,000 gallons of hemp oil. At 300 gallons an acre, that would require 249, 166,666 acres of arable land. Call it an even 250 million acres.

There are 400 million acres of land under cultivation in the U.S. right now. Even under this bizarrely optimistic, “magic” scenario we would have to transfer over half of that to hemp fuel production. Either that, or we would have to find 250 million new acres of arable land when we are already growing crops on heavily irrigated semi-desert. Also consider that this is unrelenting cultivation, without fallowing or rotation, year after year. When one does the basic math, the ridiculous nature of biofuel-as-panacea claims becomes obvious.

By all means, let’s legalize and promote industrial hemp. It could be a much more benign fiber crop than cotton. (I like the feel of the cloth. It has great “hand”, as the tailors say.) It could even displace some petrochemical use. Give it a few years and the “petro” in petrochemicals could be launching past $140 a barrel, so I’d welcome a few alternatives.

Let us not, however, jolly ourselves into thinking we can continue driving behemoths as usual, except with bio-whatever in the tanks. I myself drive a vehicle that is converted to run on both petro-diesel and used vegetable oil. Nevertheless, I don’t con myself into thinking that it is a solution for the mass of Americans. I don’t even see it as a long-term niche solution.

The answer that will be forced upon us by the hard dictates of geology and physics is a life of limited mobility. What long distance mobility we will have will be slower, more expensive, and much less convenient than what we have today. We’ll do a lot of walking, bicycling, and just plain staying home. We need to stop fantasizing about some green magic bullet and start the long and difficult transition to life without the private automobile.

Outcomes

If you are at all interested in the health care debate, read the New Yorker article by Atul Gawande on health care costs. He examines McAllen, Texas, a community that has Medicare costs per person that average $15,000. This is twice the national average and three times some of the lowest cost areas. His core finding is that these costs don’t relate to the relative health of the community or quality of care, or even bad administration, fraud, or waste. It is all about how doctors are reimbursed and the culture of medical practice in that area.

In our system doctors generally are reimbursed by procedure. Do an MRI and the cash register rings. Blood test, ka-ching. Colonoscopy, ka-ching. Sit down with a patient for extra time and discuss their medical history in depth, no ka-ching. Get advice from a colleague without referring the patient for a procedure, no ka-ching.

Gawande found that the hospitals with the lowest cost per patient were ones that set up cooperative structures for the payment of their doctors, encouraging communication and mutual assistance and discouraging excessive procedures. Patient health outcomes were just as good or better than high spending institutions.

Well, here’s a thought: reimburse doctors according to patient outcomes. That’s what we actually want, right? Not a number of tests, but an actual improvement in the functionality of our bodies.

Modern medicine is a numbers game, after all. When we enter the medical system we get interviewed, tested, and our condition quantified. Depending on the affliction, medical personnel might establish dissolved oxygen in our blood, range of motion in a limb, our heart rate response to exercise, or the concentration of any number of chemicals in any number of tissues. This is then compared to what is considered normal for someone of the patient’s age, gender, and general condition. There are also more subjective tests of comfort and range of abilities.

When reimbursing a doctor we should consider the condition of the patient at intake and compare that to the condition of the patient over a time period relevant to the common recovery period for the particular injury or disease. Add a difficulty factor, as in Olympic diving. During a transitional period we should slowly reduce reimbursements for procedures and increase an outcome bonus. We should distribute that bonus among a group of doctors that work with the same hospital or in a limited geographic area. That would encourage doctors to collaborate and also to police their underperforming colleagues.

The exact formula for this kind of reimbursement is beyond the scope of this essay and, frankly, beyond the knowledge base of your Minor Heretic. But doesn’t it make sense to reward our health providers for making us healthy, rather than making us endure yet another procedure?

The Economics of Quality

I just read in a news report that if our economy keeps going the way it is now, the U.S. will post a 5.7% drop in GDP by the end of the year. This is, of course, considered dire. In contrast, the GDP of China is on course to grow by 6% this year, down from their usual 8-10%, but still firmly positive. The lucky bastards. Or are they?

GDP, or Gross Domestic Product, is the grand sum of all the goods and services bought and sold in the U.S. in a year. The measurement was formulated during the great depression of the 1930’s as a rough indicator of how well the economy was recovering.

It is not an original thought to point out that GDP is a speedometer, not a compass. When someone has a fender bender in a parking lot, that increases GDP, as do tornadoes, cancer, and a host of other undesirable events that cost people money. It doesn’t indicate anything about income distribution or the ability of ordinary people to pay their bills. Various other indicators of the well being of society have been proposed, but the mainstream media, politicians, and the general public remain fixated on GDP, often referred to simply as “the economy.” The economy speeds up and we cheer. It slows down, and everyone is worried.

It is also not an original act to point out that we live in a limited environment, with diminishing amounts of fossil fuels, minerals, forests, arable land, and fresh water. One would think that more people would make the connection that an eternally growing economy is a planetary impossibility. One would be wrong.

I’d like to point out a different direction for our economy, what might be called the Quality Economy. It involves focusing on the quality of production rather than mere quantity.

Our present system is focused on quantity. Great quantities of raw materials are shipped across oceans to Asia where they are transformed into mountains of mostly cheap, disposable goods. It is profitable for manufacturers to maximize the flow of goods. This is achieved through favorable trade laws and currency exchange rates, sweat labor, and planned obsolescence. But what does this really get us?

Some seriously underpaid, unskilled schmuck in Shanghai spends seven 12-hour days a week pulling injection molded plastic chairs out of a machine, while slowly dying of chemical poisoning, malnutrition, and overwork. The chairs get shipped in bunker-fueled cargo vessels to the U.S., where they end up getting stacked in a Wal-Mart by some other underpaid, unskilled schmuck. A third underpaid, unskilled schmuck whose father used to build furniture buys these ugly, flimsy chairs. They break within a year and he has to go buy more. Shanghai Plastic Chair Co. makes money, Shipping Inc. makes money, and Wal-Mart makes money, but everybody else loses.

Consider instead an economy where a skilled worker in Shanghai makes wooden chairs for people in Shanghai and a skilled worker in, let’s say, Des Moines Iowa, makes wooden chairs for people in Des Moines. Both workers can get paid a living wage for what they do. Being skilled, they have more unique economic value and therefore more economic power and control over their work environments. They will probably feel better about what they do. They will be able to afford the products of other local manufacturers. The chairs will last longer, reducing resource flow from the environment and pollutant flow to the environment. Shanghai Plastic Chair Co., Shipping Inc. and Wal-Mart lose out, but my heart does not bleed for them.

The end result is that GDP could stagnate while the lives of people here and abroad could improve. Granted, the chair example is simplistic, but the overall strategy is to go in the opposite direction of the standard economic wisdom. The trend in industry for the past two centuries has been to reduce the number and skill level of workers. The more recent trend has been to send manufacturing jobs to countries with the lowest wages, least worker rights, and lowest environmental standards. This has maximized the flow rates of materials and capital at great expense to humanity.

One objection to this concept is that it will lower productivity. We worship productivity, but what does it really mean? It is dollars of output divided by hours worked. Note that the variable we are supposed to increase is “dollars,” without any indication of the quality of what was done or its value to society. Today, greater productivity means that you work harder so that a shareholder somewhere else can make more money. Increases in productivity haven’t been matched by increased wages for workers in the U.S. for the past 30 years.

Another objection is that most people can’t afford quality. I would counter that none of us can afford quantity. In a recent essay I discussed how globalization and outsourcing is sinking this country in debt. Our vast consumption of cheap sweatshop goods is unsustainable in terms of economics, the diminishing supply of resources, and the environment. A generation or two ago, American factory workers manufactured goods that were sold to other American factory workers. We could do that again.

And don’t tell me, a la Thomas Friedman, that the world is “flat,” in terms of global trade. Last time I checked we were a sovereign nation, capable of deciding what can and cannot pass over our borders, and under what conditions. We don’t have to be part of NAFTA or GATT. The world can be as flat or as bumpy as we want it to be. It will take some significant political change to get Congress out of the pockets of Wal-Mart and Shipping Inc., but that has to be done anyway.

I’ll leave you with a photo of something I made a while back.

Your Minor Heretic started out as a blacksmith. I apprenticed to a master smith right out of high school, working for room and board. He taught me how to take fifty cents worth of steel and a few hours and make what he called “house jewelry.” The item above is a Suffolk style door latch, hammered out of a few inches of half-inch square stock. It isn’t the best thing I’ve ever done, but you could put that on a door and it would be there for your great grandchildren. It isn’t a massive amount of material, but it contains a great deal of labor and skill. It epitomizes what we need to do with our economy – apply a great deal of knowledge, skill, and labor to limited resources to produce things of lasting quality.

Judge Sotomayor, meet Dick Deadeye

(With apologies to legal scholars for my simplifications and thanks to my father for a tutorial on appellate procedure)

I have been following the news of the nomination and confirmation process of Judge Sonia Sotomayor. The howling from the right wing politicos and punditry brings to mind a character from Gilbert and Sullivan’s musical H.M.S. Pinafore, namely Dick Deadeye. Here’s the explanatory passage from the libretto:

BOATSWAIN. Well, Dick, we wouldn't go for to hurt any fellow-creature's feelings, but you can't expect a chap with such a name as Dick Deadeye to be a popular character — now can you?
DICK DEADEYE No.
BOAT. It's asking too much, ain't it?
DICK. It is. From such a face and form as mine the noblest sentiments sound like the black utterances of a depraved imagination. It is human nature — I am resigned.

The running gag is that Deadeye utters commonplace statements that reflect reality, whereupon the rest of the cast recoils from him in horror. My comparison is no comment on Judge Sotomayor’s actual face and form; her appointment by President Obama and her political position somewhere to the left of Newt Gingrich serve as her appearance to the conservatives. For some right wing-nuts her gender and ethnicity are strikes against her. She could express a fondness for the American flag and they would find an excuse to stick in their knives.

One of their key attack points was a conveniently edited tape of her saying that the courts are where policy is made. She was joking, of course, and the full tape (See below) exonerates her from the charge of advocating legislation from the bench. Nevertheless, she spoke a kind of truth, a truth that legal professionals would recognize.

The courts of appeal are the arbiters of the meaning of laws. Some laws are definitive, like speed limits, but others are complicated or vague enough to require interpretation. One of the basic tasks of an appellate court is to determine whether the law applied in a lower court case was actually appropriate to the evidence presented. The judges in these courts, as Sotomayor stated in her now-famous quote, have to think about the general application of the law as well as the case at hand. The higher courts also accept or reject laws based on constitutional precedent. An appeals court or Supreme Court judge cannot escape this interpretive duty. Some like to claim that they are originalists, sticking to the intent of the framers of the constitution. Aside from the historical mind reading problem, our forefathers used words such as “unreasonable,” “excessive,” and “cruel.” Somebody has to decide what those words mean today, and that alters the effect of a law in practice.

The right wing will continue to heap abuse upon Sotomayor for saying and doing what other judges have said and done. Her opponents don’t seem to have comprehended the near-instantaneous fact checking available online, along with the ability of her supporters to post full length quotations and video clips, both of her and of conservative judges caught in the act of saying the same sorts of things. Barring a black swan event, her nomination will go through, after some obligatory heel-digging by the Republicans. I predict that her credibility will increase as her opponents continue to make themselves look foolish.

DICK DEADEYE. Ah, it's a queer world!
RALPH RACKSTRAW. Dick Deadeye, I have no desire to press hardly on you, but such a revolutionary sentiment is enough to make an honest sailor shudder.