Old Is the New New

Ray of Hope - Cambodia by Maciej DakowiczJoe's tweeting the self-repair manifesto reminded me of a post I had been planning with a similar theme: buying things new, throwing them away when they get old, and buying more new crap is the dominant paradigm of 21st Century consumer life.  How much of this is simple conspicuous consumption, how much of this is pure rational response to price distortions and poor policy, and how much is simple human nature (Young children especially seem to hate hand-me-downs, though this could be learned behavior.) is beyond both the capabilities and scope of this magazine.  But this paradigm must shift sometime.  We cannot simply produce-use-throw-away-produce-use-throw-away forever.  Self-repair is one good place to start.  Not only can we cut down on waste, but we can learn engineering skills necessary for the ever-increasingly-technical economy of the future.

Another way to cut down on waste is by renting instead of owning things.  My friend, Tim Hyer, started the company Rentcycle, which seeks to coordinate renters and leasers of all manner of products on the Internet.  It's this kind of entrepreneurship that must dominate if we are to have both a truly global and a truly sustainable society.  

In addition to the two aforementioned solutions - self-repair and renting, I would propose a third, fundamental shift in consumer preferences: 

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Hot Luntz

Political Consultant Frank Luntz is arguably the most influential man in the world.  His distinguished career as a director of focus groups for the Republican Party, frequent commentator on Fox News, consultant for conservative political parties in Australia and the United Kingdom, and author is tempered with the unapologetic dishonesty of his mission and that of his company, the Word Doctors.  The Word Doctors's work is, as Luntz himself describes it, "testing language and finding words that will help (our) clients sell their product or turn public opinion on an issue or a candidate."  In other words, Luntz is an unabashed propagandist in the grand tradition of Big Brother and Napoleon the Pig.

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Doomsday Clock Reset at Six Minutes to Midnight

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which measures the civilization-ending potential of nuclear weapons, climate change, and potentially dangerous emerging technologies in the life sciences, issued a press release yesterday announcing that the famous Doomsday Clock would be reset from five minutes to midnight to six minutes to midnight.  From the BAS Board:

It is 6 minutes to midnight. We are poised to bend the arc of history toward a world free of nuclear weapons. For the first time since atomic bombs were dropped in 1945, leaders of nuclear weapons states are cooperating to vastly reduce their arsenals and secure all nuclear bomb-making material. And for the first time ever, industrialized and developing countries alike are pledging to limit climate-changing gas emissions that could render our planet nearly uninhabitable. These unprecedented steps are signs of a growing political will to tackle the two gravest threats to civilization--the terror of nuclear weapons and runaway climate change.

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Private vs. Privatization

The free market is understood to be the optimal delivery mechanism for most goods and services.  As competition intensifies, the weaker competitors are selected out and the stronger competitors are selected in.  The stronger competitors grow and evolve to meet the demands of a particular consumer base.  Friedrich von Hayek called this behavior of the market a "spontaneous order" and posited spontaneous order as a generalized Theory of Evolution.  Darwinian Evolution can itself be described as a special case of spontaneous order, as can language, memetics, pedestrian traffic, the popularity of music, the price mechanism, Wikipedia, and the order of the universe.  For his work on the price mechanism, Hayek won the 1974 Nobel Prize in Economics.

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Cash for Clunkers and Keynesianism

I recently read this article which appeared in the Wall Street Journal, exposing cash for clunkers as an idea that turns out, was as stupid as it sounded:

Cash for clunkers had two objectives: help the environment by increasing fuel efficiency, and boost car sales to help Detroit and the economy. It achieved neither. According to Hudson Institute economist Irwin Stelzer, at best "the reduction in gasoline consumption will cut our oil consumption by 0.2 percent per year, or less than a single day's gasoline use." Burton Abrams and George Parsons of the University of Delaware added up the total benefits from reduced gas consumption, environmental improvements and the benefit to car buyers and companies, minus the overall cost of cash for clunkers, and found a net cost of roughly $2,000 per vehicle. Rather than stimulating the economy, the program made the nation as a whole $1.4 billion poorer.

Apparently, it didn't even benefit the automakers, who have seen record sales slides for September in the wake of the program.

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