How to Save the World

In my family, both of my parents are dying and my grandchildren are about to inherit the earth. Dad spent many years on an assembly line making cars. I worked at refineries making gasoline. He enjoyed traveling and drove to California 23 times, just for starters. I live in a very small rural town and don’t think twice about driving 60 miles round trip just for a special supper out. Have we made it more unlikely that our children’s children will have a world worth inheriting?

Thinking about the many issues of ecology and economics makes my head want to explode. Nevertheless, somehow, it still seems important enough to try to wrap my mind around it. If not for me, than for the ones I love. It turns out that smart people of good will are actually starting to get a handle on all of this. Some scientists are focusing on barely-imaginable details. Other researchers are backing off far enough to get an overall picture of the entire forest of environmental and social issues.

Surely, it is obvious that our finite world cannot sustain infinite growth. We must discover, meet and deal with limits to growth. Yet, we continue to expect that every nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) must always continue to grow to provide improving standards of living for a growing percent of our populations. Something has to give.

Jobs-Part 1: Automation

Whatever happened to all the elevator operators, telephone switchboard operators, cabbage pickers and tollbooth collectors? These and many thousands of other jobs have been eliminated by automation technology. On the bright side, we can now directly dial almost any phone in the world and not have to worry about watching our seconds on long distance calls. But, these are jobs, for you and your neighbors, that will never come back.

Our losing so many jobs to machines is not the end of the world or the end of work, but it is traumatic. The changing nature of work (and availability of jobs) will create some economic challenges. You see senior citizens sacking groceries when they would rather be holding their grandbabies or nursing their bunions. You see college graduates assembling grease-burgers (hold the ketchup) when they would rather be building their families and paying off their student loans.

We’ve gone through this before. Whatever happened to tanners, weavers, cobblers, and blacksmiths? Those were the days of craftsmen, apprentices, and hand-carved ornamentation on furniture. You could tell who had made a piece by the personal touches in its design. You took care of what you owned because you knew that years of experience, hours of labor and, sometimes, sweat and blood went into its production.

Debunking Trickle-down Economics

In 1896, William Jennings Bryan declared that, “There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. 

The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it.” Later, Lyndon B. Johnson added, in his brutally blunt style: "Republicans [...] simply don't know how to manage the economy. They're so busy operating the trickle-down theory, giving the richest corporations the biggest break that the whole thing goes to hell in a hand basket."

This economic idea of “trickle-down” dates back to the earlier horse-and-sparrow aphorism: “If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.” In our time, it was formally called “supply side economics.” Ross Perot called it “political voodoo.” Whatever you call it, it has been a dominant political policy priority in many governments and corporations for a long time. But, a metaphor producing an easily-visualized image does not make it an apt model of reality.

In Praise of the Public Sector

In Praise of the Public Sector

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I'm in a particularly grumpy mood this morning as I think about the almost-completed water tower maintenance in our small town and the inconvenience that came with it. Today's newspaper had several critical letters to the editor.

I have a more-appreciative attitude. We should be grateful for the wisdom and courage of our Mayor and City Council to undertake a very necessary project that they knew up-front would bring out a lot of complaining. The fact of the matter is that the temporary inconveniences were an entirely unavoidable part of the job. It’s where we needed to go and what we needed to do. We ought to be thanking our public servants instead of giving them grief.

Sometimes we forget that government, the widely-despised “public sector,” is really us – you and me and those of our neighbors who, for some deficit of sanity, feel compelled to render an extra measure of service to their communities. And the thanks they get? A general unwillingness to grant them the resources and cooperation they need to fully achieve the many responsibilities we demand of them.

Book: The Role of Productivity in Community Success: The Jesuit-Guarani Cultural Confluence

The Role of Productivity in Community Success: The Jesuit-Guarani Cultural Confluence

This historical essay, drawn from the deepest jungles of Uruguay in South America, examines the creation of a flourishing culture and economy that lasted for almost two centuries. It explores the guided development of a virtuous web of social and economic controls that mixed the philosophy of Catholic Jesuit missionaries with the traditions of the native Guaraní peoples.

An unprecedented experiment in progressive community-building may have once created that rarest of cultural treasures – a functional and stable utopia... ended only by outside pressures of conquest and exploitation.

This is a living parable for our changing world, now suffering from seemingly-intractable political, cultural and economic turmoil… and struggling to be born into a tenuous future on uncertain threads of hope and despair. Rapid introduction of technology, educational systems, health care systems and social order have succeeded before – balancing competition and consumption in a new kind of community – and might be made to work again as we seek to create our own "new economy."

In this startling synthesis, Mr. Satterlee brings together and introduces: 
  • historical records, 
  • the social theories of the Catholic Church, 
  • the management theories of Peter Drucker, 
  • the psycho-social theories of Don Beck’s Spiral Dynamics Integral, and
  • the economics ideas of William Lewis and the McKinsey Global Institute on “the power of productivity.”

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Essay: The importance of explaining the economic benefits of “fairness to wage earners”

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The importance of explaining the economic benefits of “fairness to wage earners”

From the book: Chum for Thought: Throwing Ideas into Dangerous Waters by David Satterlee

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Read or download this essay as a PDF file at: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4eNv8KtePyKUWtKUUtOdjFGcTg/edit?usp=sharing

#employment #MinimumWage

Chum For Thought:
Throwing Ideas into Dangerous Waters

Have you noticed that President Obama doesn’t get enough recognition for all the changes that he has made to support America’s recovery? The connections seem so obvious that they shouldn’t need a team of advertising consultants or a horde of supporters shouting from their housetops.

Well, perhaps the dots need to be more-explicitly connected. Perhaps we do need to wrap our minds around the fact that the working and middle classes matter, and that fairness to wage-earners has both social and economic benefits for our country.

 

Essay: The politics of despair and optimism

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The politics of despair and optimism

From the book: Chum for Thought: Throwing Ideas into Dangerous Waters by David Satterlee

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Read or download this essay as a PDF file at: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4eNv8KtePyKajVCSVpSLU1JY1U/edit?usp=sharing

Chum For Thought:
Throwing Ideas into Dangerous Waters

The politics of despair and optimism

Last week, I wrote contrasting the patriotism of fear and fighting with the patriotism of compassion and community. This leads us back to a reconsideration of the politics of despair vs. the politics of optimism. When living in troubled and difficult times, it is not wrong to acknowledge the true state of affairs – all the better to deal with it. But, there are unproductive and productive responses to hardship.

First a little whiplash: The railroads of England used to be a marvel. They tied the country together, ran to well-chosen destinations, and ran on time. You could depend on buying your ticket, catching your train, and getting where you were going. 

Goods, services, and citizens flowed easily. Then, in a time of temporary decline, the managers decided to maximize short-term profits. They invoked austerity measures. For a number of years, they repeated a cycle of discontinuing the least-profitable routes. They were somehow surprised when,

Essay: Democrats in 2012—The need to get real

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Democrats in 2012—The need to get real

From the book: Chum for Thought: Throwing Ideas into Dangerous Waters by David Satterlee

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Read or download this essay as a PDF file at: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4eNv8KtePyKTGFUdXdkLTVfWkE/edit?usp=sharing

#Elections #Liberals #Politics #DCCC 

Chum For Thought:
Throwing Ideas into Dangerous Waters

Democrats in 2012—The need to get real

Some Democrats are hesitating to rally behind our president. I don’t get it. Put all the rest of the clutter and noise aside and here is what you have left: President Obama is leading in the best direction. Mitt Romney has promised to take our country in the other direction. Progressive change may be slower than expected, but our President has persistently moved us forward. Republicans have gone to radical extremes to obstruct his efforts, willingly damaging our nation in the process. Their disdain of the public good is unconscionable.

Some Democrats caught Barack Obama’s vision for the future and assumed that their party would immediately run screaming, with hair on fire, as fast as it could to the left. But, that is no way to govern the whole country. That is no way to consider the diverse interests of America’s many citizens, including our many deeply-conservative neighbors.

Some Democrats, failing to send liberal representatives to congress in 2010, also failed to understand that, particularly in this economic and political climate, Moses himself could not have led such a rebellious people out of the wilderness overnight. The good news is that