(Re) Launching my blog
Welcome! For several months, I blogged at my site, globalmakeover.com, but I stopped for a time while my family moved from suburban New Jersey (after a long residence in NYC) to beautiful downtown Evanston, Illinois. Drawn to the alleged wonders of blogger.com, I am now ready to try my hand again...
...but enough about me. I hope that I bring a different perspective on many of the matters of the world, as I briefly summarize at the top of this blog. At this point in time, I'm very annoyed that the solutions to our long-term problems are not anywhere near the scale of the problems they are meant to solve. On top of this mismatch problem, let's call it, there are varying levels of awareness that a particular problem even exists. For instance, global warming has gotten pretty good publicity, but the solutions to this huge problem are almost universally way to timid. Peak oil, on the other hand, has not even broken through to mainstream consciousness (this is the idea that we are on the verge of starting to run out of oil). Many of the proposed solutions to peak oil, meanwhile, involve accepting the idea that billions of people will starve to death without oil being used for agriculture -- which is quite possible, but I believe there are solutions to this problem. The problems of mass extinction and ecosystem destruction are barely recognized, even though they are currently wreaking more havoc than global warming.
But perhaps the least recognized problem that I wish to address with this blog is the problem of the decline of manufacturing in the United States, which has been going on since the end of World War II. The idea of the "post-industrial" society, the dominance of the service sector, the alleged unattractiveness of jobs in manufacturing, plus more recently the ability of multinational corporations to export jobs and factories, particularly to China, because of the cheap oil they can feed into their huge cargo ships, have all contributed to, in my eyes, an unbelievable lack of interest in a vital subject. My mentor, Seymour Melman, who passed away in 2004, spent much of his life, from the perch of a professorship of industrial engineering at Columbia University, trying to warn the public that manufacturing was declining, and therefore endangering the U.S. economy. I had the good fortune to become his good friend, and partly through his influence I wrote a dissertation in political science proposing a theory of the rise and decline of Great Powers. The nub of the argument was that Great Powers rise and decline according to their competence, not just in manufacturing, but more particularly in the machinery used, mostly in factories, to produce manufactured goods.
So what does all of this have to do with a "Global Makeover", as the blog title suggests? We need to transform and convert our civilization, globally, from a fossil-fuel based economy to one based on renewables such as solar, wind, and geothermal (and not biofuels). The fossil fuels will eventually run out, and they are destroying the biosphere as well. Our agricultural systems are also destroying the ecosystems (and particularly the soils) that they depend on. A world without forests or life in the ocean will most likely be a dead world, including for us humans. But in order to turn this all around, we will have to manufacture new energy, transportation, agricultural, and even manufacturing systems. And in a bit of good self-reinforcing positive feedback, by building these new systems, we can revive U.S. manufacturing, and develop the rest of the world -- in a sustainable manner, in other words, not in the way China is doing it, by blindly following the tragic path of suburban civilization. How China went from "The little red book" of Mao tse-tung to "Leave it to Beaver" of American prime time TV is the subject of another long post. But in order to weather the perfect storm that is brewing, we need to both construct new infrastructure systems and build world-class manufacturing systems.
What hopefully will make this blog into a useful alternative will be the assumption that any programs will have to be led by governments, not markets, and we will have to face up to the fact that such programs will only be possible if powerful people and organizations transfer wealth and power to a global makeover, in other words, that people that have huge amounts of power will have less. For instance: In order to pursue the program suggested at the top of the blog, we would need, say, one trillion dollars a year. We could probably quite easily get that kind of money if we cut the military budget down to $100 billion from its current $500 billion plus, and reset tax rates on the rich to before Reagan, much less before George W. Bush, and if corporations paid as much of the tax burden now as they did before Reagan. Of course, trying to redirect wealth from the military, wealthiest of the wealthy, and major multinational corporations would probably be even harder than putting solar panels on every building and constructing an Interstate Railway system. But, it's a hard job and somebody's got to do it, so here we are.
I heartily invite users to comment by registering (so as to avoid spam), because, just to make things even more challenging, a global makeover will require a world-wide political movement that can win millions of friends and influence most governments. Not that this little blog will do that, but at least we can throw around some ideas and discuss them. Even with some humor, it is hoped.
...but enough about me. I hope that I bring a different perspective on many of the matters of the world, as I briefly summarize at the top of this blog. At this point in time, I'm very annoyed that the solutions to our long-term problems are not anywhere near the scale of the problems they are meant to solve. On top of this mismatch problem, let's call it, there are varying levels of awareness that a particular problem even exists. For instance, global warming has gotten pretty good publicity, but the solutions to this huge problem are almost universally way to timid. Peak oil, on the other hand, has not even broken through to mainstream consciousness (this is the idea that we are on the verge of starting to run out of oil). Many of the proposed solutions to peak oil, meanwhile, involve accepting the idea that billions of people will starve to death without oil being used for agriculture -- which is quite possible, but I believe there are solutions to this problem. The problems of mass extinction and ecosystem destruction are barely recognized, even though they are currently wreaking more havoc than global warming.
But perhaps the least recognized problem that I wish to address with this blog is the problem of the decline of manufacturing in the United States, which has been going on since the end of World War II. The idea of the "post-industrial" society, the dominance of the service sector, the alleged unattractiveness of jobs in manufacturing, plus more recently the ability of multinational corporations to export jobs and factories, particularly to China, because of the cheap oil they can feed into their huge cargo ships, have all contributed to, in my eyes, an unbelievable lack of interest in a vital subject. My mentor, Seymour Melman, who passed away in 2004, spent much of his life, from the perch of a professorship of industrial engineering at Columbia University, trying to warn the public that manufacturing was declining, and therefore endangering the U.S. economy. I had the good fortune to become his good friend, and partly through his influence I wrote a dissertation in political science proposing a theory of the rise and decline of Great Powers. The nub of the argument was that Great Powers rise and decline according to their competence, not just in manufacturing, but more particularly in the machinery used, mostly in factories, to produce manufactured goods.
So what does all of this have to do with a "Global Makeover", as the blog title suggests? We need to transform and convert our civilization, globally, from a fossil-fuel based economy to one based on renewables such as solar, wind, and geothermal (and not biofuels). The fossil fuels will eventually run out, and they are destroying the biosphere as well. Our agricultural systems are also destroying the ecosystems (and particularly the soils) that they depend on. A world without forests or life in the ocean will most likely be a dead world, including for us humans. But in order to turn this all around, we will have to manufacture new energy, transportation, agricultural, and even manufacturing systems. And in a bit of good self-reinforcing positive feedback, by building these new systems, we can revive U.S. manufacturing, and develop the rest of the world -- in a sustainable manner, in other words, not in the way China is doing it, by blindly following the tragic path of suburban civilization. How China went from "The little red book" of Mao tse-tung to "Leave it to Beaver" of American prime time TV is the subject of another long post. But in order to weather the perfect storm that is brewing, we need to both construct new infrastructure systems and build world-class manufacturing systems.
What hopefully will make this blog into a useful alternative will be the assumption that any programs will have to be led by governments, not markets, and we will have to face up to the fact that such programs will only be possible if powerful people and organizations transfer wealth and power to a global makeover, in other words, that people that have huge amounts of power will have less. For instance: In order to pursue the program suggested at the top of the blog, we would need, say, one trillion dollars a year. We could probably quite easily get that kind of money if we cut the military budget down to $100 billion from its current $500 billion plus, and reset tax rates on the rich to before Reagan, much less before George W. Bush, and if corporations paid as much of the tax burden now as they did before Reagan. Of course, trying to redirect wealth from the military, wealthiest of the wealthy, and major multinational corporations would probably be even harder than putting solar panels on every building and constructing an Interstate Railway system. But, it's a hard job and somebody's got to do it, so here we are.
I heartily invite users to comment by registering (so as to avoid spam), because, just to make things even more challenging, a global makeover will require a world-wide political movement that can win millions of friends and influence most governments. Not that this little blog will do that, but at least we can throw around some ideas and discuss them. Even with some humor, it is hoped.
posted by Josh Rynn at 7:25 PM
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