Letters to the Editor

• Payoff? Oh, yes

  [Read the article: The payoff from being environmentally correct]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  But who needs it be true? As an aspirational goal, it's good enough.

  I'm surprised to see this kind of conclusion in "How the World Works!"

  The ideas of "breeding competition," "innovation," "good for corporations," and "good for the economy in general" are all orthogonal at best, and on most days represent some profound contradictions — whether or not environmentalism is the context.

  Any discussion of whether a given policy is "good for the economy" has to first start off with agreed-upon answers to the following questions:

  —When we say "economy" do we mean businesses or people? Under most circumstances we can't say "both" — people want to be paid high wages and spend them on a wide variety of innovative, high quality goods at low prices, while businesses want to pay the minimum possible wage to produce goods of the lowest possible quality for the highest possible price in a tightly controlled (and hence targetable) market in which a limited selection is available.

  —When we say "businesses" which businesses do we mean? Uncompetitive big businesses whose profits are dependent on stable behavior of a captive market, and whose primary leverage is economy of scale? Or small businesses who compete for a share of a contested market, and whose primary leverage is innovation?

  The bottom line is that people are the driving force in a consumer capitalist economy. So for most definitions of "good for the economy," we're talking about constrained markets — regulated and competitive (and regulated to ensure competition, which could not come back into fashion too soon).

  It so happens that if you have an educated workforce, constraints also lead to innovation — that's the path to success in small business. And innovation implies, yes, the growth of high-end, design-economy labor, which pays better and is more rewarding — if you have access to enough educated labor.

  In the 1990s, due to a combination of environmental and pro-competition regulations under the Clinton Administration, there was an enormous boom in the environmental engineering field. (Full disclosure: yours truly made good money at the time providing IT to the industry.) Engineering firms couldn't grow fast enough to keep up with demand. Labs couldn't keep up with the demand from the engineering firms. Chemists, geologists, and computer people weren't graduating fast enough to keep up with the demand from labs.

  Did existing businesses have to shell out more to this new industry? Yes. Did they pass the costs along to consumers? You bet. Did consumers mind? No, not as a group, because overall they were getting paid more, too — in part because of the growth of high-tech jobs in the environmental sector. Where inequalities exist in a system like that they have to do with lack of access to the resources, primarily knowledge, that give people the ability to float with the rising tide.

  Coupled with the concurrent push to close a number of military bases as part of the "peace dividend" (does anyone remember that anymore?) and the legal finding that the military was indeed subject to EPA regulation, there even came to be a kind of "military-environmental complex," as branches of the armed services all realized that even if they couldn't command the same operational budgets for all those bases, they would need sustained funding, over the course of decades, to comply with the EPA cleanup requirements. Once the number-crunchers did the math on this, the services became born-again environmentalists.

  So... bad for the economy? Only if you mean bad for the poor bastards who've been raking it for so long without ever needing to adapt, or invest in sustaining an educated labor force. In other words, no, not in any meaningful sense.

  Yeah, it's more than just aspirational. It's an economic paradigm that we as a people can choose to embrace or reject. We've done both at this point, for fairly extended periods at a time, and it ought to be clear which choice works out better.

  Permalink Friday, January 18, 2008 05:16 PM

• Pin-up girl

  [Read the article: Unclear if latest YouTube craze has deep sociological meaning]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  There is sociological meaning, but it's not very deep — people are into pictures of cute girls who look good in front of cameras. She could have been a magazine fashion model, a pinup girl, a silent movie star, a surreptitiously shared daguerreotype — pick an era, any era.

  If there's anything worth noting here, it's that (so far as we know) this young woman wasn't "created" by the fashion industry, didn't have to sleep with anyone to get exposure, or suffer through any of the traditional forms of exploitation on her way to star-for-a-week status. She's realized the promise of the digital age by creating herself.

  But that's not really a new concept, nor is this woman a particularly good example. (The phenomenon of the weeping Brittany boy, for example, is much more interesting in that regard.)

  Honestly, this seemed more like a one-line "Look at what's hot today" Video Dog post, not the basis for substantive inquiry into technology and society.

  Permalink Saturday, January 19, 2008 07:38 PM