mandarine

When I was a kid, my brother, after perusing too many history books, used to speculate about which period and place he would have preferred to live in if he had had a choice. Depending on his mood, he would choose the Roman empire, New Zealand before the arrival of European settlers, Victorian England, etc. Sometimes, he would inquire what my choice would be. My answer was always ‘here and now’. Maybe I lack imagination. Or somehow I felt that life had never been so fine, at least around here. Food, health, democracy, justice, knowledge, comfort, leisure: it was impossible to find a time in history when even the most powerful emperor could have had such an easy life as that we were having.

Now that I am gradually changing my lifestyle and my project of life, I sometimes play the same sort of game and wonder if such a change could have been easier before, for instance in the late sixties. And the answer is no.

It has never been so easy to change one’s life, because the surrounding mentalities have probably never been so open. Nobody is going to come and lynch me because I dress differently, or because I worship another God, or because I am eating less meat, or because I ride a bicycle, or because I have unclassifiable economic activities, or because I take a nap on weekdays. I cannot imagine how a black, lesbian, hippie, unemployed, communist single mother could have managed back in the seventies. I am almost sure she could come to my village now, and at least half the people would stand up for her if she came into trouble with the closeder-minded minority. This trend is the delayed effect of the big mentality change of the sixties and seventies - human rights, civil rights, women rights, sexual freedom, freedom of speech - now getting new momentum from environmental concerns.

However, there is a strong opposing trend: the buildup of conservative ideas, probably associated to a wealthy and aging dominant culture. People who see terrorism as a greater threat than global warming; people who believe one molested old lady or one abused child is a motive for putting surveillance cameras everywhere and everybody’s life into electronic databanks, while cutting on education spending because we need to reduce taxes; people who say we have to work more and earn less because this is globalization, idiot.

So my take is that now is the best of times to choose to do something different, to choose an uncommon lifestyle, or even to go against mainstream cultural habits (before it’s too late). Maybe not for artists or intellectuals - the golden age of total freedom was probably twenty years ago for them. But for ordinary people, now is probably the right time.

In fact, even if we feel there are still too many shackles in our lives, I guess the word ‘freedom’ in the declaration of human rights and our (French) constitution has probably never been so meaningful than here and now. I can travel, I can work or not work, I can live with whomever I want, I can say whatever I think and read whatever I like, I can vote or even run for President, I can get a divorce, I can make friends with whomever I choose, I can go out after hours, etc. So many things I can do that were impossible a hundred years or even fifty years ago.

Conversely, there are few things I have to do. In fact, contrary to what some people will say, today’s western lifestyle is not only negotiable, but mostly optional: I do not have to watch TV; I do not have to buy stuff in a supermarket; I do not have to own a car; I do not have to have a full-time job; I do not have to have a large house with central air, three bedrooms, a living-room, a kitchen, a bathroom and a garage; I do not need a lawn or a swimming pool; I do not even have to have a phone or a computer or the internet.

Once I decide I can let go of some of these (maybe I’ll keep my internet connection, though…), then comes a breath of fresh freedom that makes everything possible.

Introduction

Intellectual property rights in general and patents in particular are monopoly rights under a disguise. For the sake of encouraging innovation and the communication of ideas, society grants exclusive exploitation rights to the company or individual holding the patent, therefore making patents a very effective way for big business to circumvent anti-monopoly legislation.

The justification for inventing the concept of patents in the first place was this one: we wanted to support innovation, so we wanted to reward inventors, and for this we accepted a temporary monopoly in return for sharing the idea (when a patent is filed, the idea is published) and for giving it away (after a 20-year period, the idea goes into the public domain). Obviously, this scheme is more beneficial for society than an absence of protection, which would result in either discouraging inventors, or at least in making inventors keep most inventions secret. When the inventor dies, the idea is lost.

Essentially, it is the general public, or more specifically the customer, who pays for the idea: because of the exclusive exploitation rights granted to the holder of the patent, the product is sold with a higher commercial margin. The good side for the customer is that he/she only has to pay for successful ideas. The ideas which do not make it into a successful product will not generate revenue for the inventors: it is as if these unsuccessful ideas had been ‘given away’ with simply a 20-year delay.

Monopoly is not the only solution

But granting monopoly rights over an idea is not the only way we could encourage ideas. There are at least two other ways.

The first alternative is public research. We do not call them inventors, but I am certain that publicly-funded research scientists are contributing far more efficiently to the world of ideas and innovation than corporations. As soon as they are published, new scientific discoveries enrich the public domain, and they often lead to successful commercial applications from companies who file patents based on industrial applications of free, public-domain ideas.

The second alternative is preemption: society (represented by a government, a patent office, an association, etc.) could buy an idea upfront when the applicant files for a patent. The deal could be the following: how much do you want society to give you (the inventor) in exchange for giving the idea away? This is exactly what big corporations do when they buy patents from private inventors or small businesses. The main difference is that society, now holder of the patent, would choose to give away the idea. The net result is that the inventor has received the same reward, but the general public gets the benefit of the idea for a fraction of the price.

Free ideas have more value than commercial ones

You could argue that 20 years is not long when we consider really really good ideas like the wheel, the bicycle or semiconductors. So why I am so keen on seeing innovation make its way into the public domain as fast as possible?

The first reason is that there is a very stiff threshold effect between something free and something we have to pay for. If I tell you I have an idea which might make your day or even make you rich, but that you have to pay me 10$ first, you would certainly decline the offer. And even if I told you the idea first, and then told you you had to pay 10$ to use it, you would probably decide to try to find another way of doing the same thing rather than pay me the 10$, even though the extra effort you put into it would probably greatly exceed the 10$ mark. Maybe if I had asked you only 1$ or 1c, you would not have been so strong-headed. But if I had given the idea for free, then I am quite sure you would have taken it at once. Or even better: you would have improved on it and probably shared your new idea for free.

This leads to the second reason why I think ideas should all be free: many ideas are just marginally good ideas until they meet a host of other ideas and they can make a fantastic whole. To make a good bicycle, you need the wheel, you need cable spokes, tires, sprockets, ball bearings, a fork with trail, a diamond frame, hollow tubes, welding, light alloys, pedals, cranks, gears, a drive-chain, a derailleur. Each of these is a patentable idea in itself. Imagine you wanted to invent the bicycle and had to pay for all of these but did not know whether you’d sell three or ten, or maybe a hundred bicycles (how could you predict it was going to be the single greatest revolution in human transportation after the wheel?), you would have been stuck.

Ideas have to circulate, they have to meet, exchange, improve each other, talk together, fight. The more barriers between them, the harder it is for them to grow into really great improvements.

Legal costs of enforcing a stupid system

Now imagine I had told you a really good idea for making butter, and then asked 10$ in case you wanted to use the process. You could very well say no thanks and use the idea nonetheless, as no-one would know how you make your butter. Once disclosed, ideas can never be taken back. Therefore it takes a lot of effort to consider ideas like solid objects that can be traded, sold, and taken back.

It is a bit like giving you a chair for free, allowing you to take it home, but asking you 10$ for each time you actually sat on it. I would have to plant cameras in your home (or a pressure detector in the chair) to know whether you were using the chair or not. But that would be a violation of privacy, so I would need to go to the courts and get a legal action started if I wanted to go that way.

Ideas are not solid objects that we can apply the standard commercial business model to. Just like digital music, when one wants to go against the laws of physics (I cannot prevent you from copying a file when I want you to be able to download it for listening, and I cannot physically take back an idea I have disclosed), one has to spend considerable effort on legal aspects. And each time, there is no benefit for society, only lawyers get richer.

A few examples of the costs related to forcing ideas into an inadequate model:

• because patents are a property right, the text must be absolutely unambiguous and must follow a very strict pattern, by law. When I could simply publish my idea in a few lines so that my colleagues and competitors worldwide would understand what it is, I have to spend ten times the effort and force the idea into a very awkward mold of matryoshka-doll-like claims, with very awkward language so I leave as few cracks as possible for the competition to break it or find a workaround.
• because patents are a monopoly right, they are a key element in failing to find commercial agreements. The question of what party will become proprietor of whatever innovations result from a given joint project is so important that we are seeing more and more projects delayed or even dropped because both parties could not find an agreement over the corresponding contract clauses. Instead of encouraging innovation, patent laws are in fact holding collaboration back. When you know how much collaboration can boost innovation, you understand that intellectual property becomes clearly counter-productive in those cases.
• because ideas should never be disclosed outside of the patenting process (otherwise the patent is not valid) and because the patenting process is so long (up to several years), we are stuck in the development of a great new idea: we need external funding to proceed, but we can hardly communicate what it is we want funding for. And even if we can communicate, we are asking funding while telling at the same time that we will have exclusivity. I do not know many customers who would love such a bargain.
• legal battles over a patent result in so much legal costs that any commercial profits from the exploitation of the patent would be nulled. Big corporations know it. This is why they favor quantity over quality: nobody will dare to question the validity of 1000 patents. Between them, big corporations merely count patents and mutual patent violations, and they generally do not go to full-fledged legal action. But against smaller businesses, they do not hesitate to unleash the steam-roller.

Costs of monopoly

As mentioned above, legal costs are so high that nobody really dares to question patents. Therefore, big corporations with a lot of cash, a large patent portfolio, and an intimidating team of IPR lawyers can essentially claim monopoly over almost anything and kill off weaker competitors by simply raising the fist of their intellectual property rights.

As they get more powerful and richer, they start intense lobbying in favour of extending intellectual property rights:

• in scope (patenting living things, patenting exotic medicinal plants that aboriginal healers have always used but never published about, patenting genome,…)
• in time (there is intense lobbying from big pharmaceutical firms to extend patent monopoly from twenty years to fifty or seventy years, with the justification of long time-to-market for new molecules)

As they can keep their monopoly only by renewing their patent portfolio, they start a runaway race for innovation. Innovation for the sake of monopoly, not for the sake of any true advantage to the general public. And to make sure the general public runs along, they start spending the monopoly money on advertising. By endlessly fueling our frustration and making stuff with the new patented gizmo appear so much more desirable than the stuff we just bought, advertising contributes to the general dissatisfaction while it feeds landfills. Therefore, not only do we have to pay more for some innovation because it is patented, but as it is an innovation we do not really need, we pay even more for the advertising which frustrates us into buying it; and a little extra for resource depletion and pollution.

Just give

We should just give our ideas away. After all, an idea is the least costly and the most valuable gift.

I will write soon why I even think there is a business model for open-source industrial innovation just like there is one for open-source software. Stay tuned.

Summary

People need three things: land to grow food, energy to make stuff, and information to interact. In the old model, it was easier to pack people together so they could make stuff and interact more efficiently, and move food and energy around. But now that the information and energy can be everywhere, we had better live where food grows. [more]

Preamble

French singer Renaud wrote a song in the 1980s entitled Miss Maggie, in which he signifies his utter disgust at men’s violence, stupidity and vanity by praising women’s lack thereof, “except perhaps Mrs Thatcher”. The words have Renaud’s trade-mark slang vulgarity and poetic touch, and the song was acknowledged by many as a great feminist manifesto, while it also aroused somewhat of a diplomatic row by taking cheap shots at UK’s then female yet stiff neoliberal PM.

(listen to the song)

[…]
It was not from a woman’s brain
That arose the nuclear bomb;
And no woman’s hand has been stained
By a drop of Amerind’s blood.
Palestinians and Armenians
Witness from the depths of their graves
That “genocide” is masculine
As are “SS-man”, “bull-fighter”…
Because in this whorish mankind
The murderers are all brothers.
There’s no sister to rival them
Except, perhaps, Mrs Thatcher.

Woman, I love you above all
For your weakness and for your eyes
Whereas the man’s strength only rests
Within his tail and his gunfire.
When doomsday’s come, eventually
You’ll find Hell crowded with he-fools
Playing “who has the longest pee,”
Playing with footballs and war tools.
But I would like a dog to be
And to keep on earth for ever;
And by way of streetlamp, daily
I would choose Mrs Thatcher.

translation by Christian Souchon

I used to love the song, and I still do, but now only for the words, not the manifesto: I believe that fueling the feminist cause with underlining alleged essential qualities women have over men can in fact dangerously backfire. Here is why.

Dead End Feminism

Famous French philosopher and feminist Elisabeth Badinter wrote a short book in 2003, entitled ‘Fausse Route’ (’Dead-End Feminism’) explaining that feminism was heading into the wrong direction, especially the radical ‘neofeminist’ views of Andrea Dworkin or Catharine MacKinnon in the US. To make it short, she deplored the fact that feminists there and the mainstream media (and law decisions) were beginning to go too far in presenting all women as essentially good, caring, peaceful, innocent, therefore victims, while men were systematically pictured as evil, careless, violent, guilty, therefore torturers. Because it can be easily amplified by the media, and because there are still unfortunately too many examples to ‘prove’ it right, this simplistic notion that genders are irreconcilable and that women must always be protected from men is rapidly spreading in the US, then to Europe and even France.

And yet, original feminism (at least in France) was not about differences, it was about equality. Elisabeth Badinter knows it well, as she’s been a pionneer for the feminist cause, along with Simone de Beauvoir or Françoise Giroud. But it seems that the message was lost along the way. The simplified “woman good / man bad” motto is gaining ground, and turning the once fundamental philosophical debate over equality into a sour farce of counting points through court rulings and inane laws.

Admittedly, the dualism emanating from the arguments of some [female] supporters of equal access to political careers never assumed the provocative shape of separatism. But through repeated statements that women are less warlike, less vain, more concrete, more concerned than others, more dedicated to the fight in favor of life and liberties, they are depicting a caricature-like negative image of men.

Translation by yours truly

She is particularly critical of how this simplified feminist battle has pervaded the university campuses in the US, where all the shades of human and boy-girl social interactions between near-adults are gradually replaced by black-or-white interpretations of sexual intentions, and where the only means of prevention against abuse is emotional or even physical segregation. Instead of letting girls and boys untangle the emotional, social and sexual mess of late teenagehood; instead of teaching girls to fend for themselves and confirm first-hand the effectiveness of a righteous slap in the face, the new paradigm is surely steering the feminist movement away from any chances of future equality.

Equality means equality

By underlining the differences between women and men and by making them look as if they were intrinsic; by pretending that women are natural angels and that the women who do infanticide, murder, theft, procuring, or bad-ass politics are all either forced or corrupted into it by males; by dismissing most cases of male victims of female abuse as weakly and pathetic while never urging women to just hit back, this simplistic feminism is barring the way towards equality, while opening wide the gates for complementarism or differentialism. All the minor forms that the same sort of feminism can take, be it through Emily’s post or endorsed by men like in Renaud’s song, encourage this complementaristic view.

And I believe gender complementarity is patriarchy under a disguise, as it contains two major pitfalls:

1. If there are fundamental, essential, intrinsic differences between men and women, they must be a consequence of sexual differences. The essential sexual difference is that women can give birth. Therefore, the normal destiny of a woman is to be a mother and thus take care of the kids, the nest, etc…
2. Once you begin to admit that men and women have essential differences, why would you want equality? And even if there were natural differences, is it not mankind’s fate to rise from its natural state?

In my opinion, the immediate and practical implications of sexual differentialism are even more dangerous. By making biological differences the distinctive characteristic of women, they justify in advance the specialization of genders we have tried to fight against for more than thirty years. Under the pretense of opposing ‘horrible neutrality’ and ‘abominable lack of differentiation’, they are giving back undue strength to old stereotypes, masculine and feminine alike.

Therefore, I strongly resent all manner of speech going along the lines of “equality in complementarity”. It sounds too close to “the world needs floor cleaners as much as it needs rocket scientists”. This is why you will see me jump at your throat if you go that way, even when you are as dear a friend as Emily is.

You see, I have stakes in this too. While all along feminists have been fighting so that women could be equal to men, I have been thinking that I would love a world in which men could be equal to women. I’d love a world where it would be socially acceptable to be a stay-at-home father, while the wife runs a computer repair business; I’d love a world where a man could say (without you smiling): I’ve never touched a screwdriver - I leave it all to Tessa, she’s so clever with DIY stuff ; I am more into crochet and knitting - I love it with my herbal tea while watching major league baseball on TV with my buddies.

The feminine and the masculine

I am not much into Yin and Yang stuff, but I am convinced there is a feminine and a masculine side to everyone. The words feminine and masculine are misleading, as they make it sound as if femininity was intrinsically attached to women, and masculinity to men. I do not think so. I believe the level of femininity and masculinity in men and women is 90% cultural (you do not have to agree there, but bear with me for the sake of the argument). Just like a small imbalance in a chemical mix can gradually segregate two compounds, likewise it does not take a lot of initial difference in testosterone levels to kick-start the cultural chain-reaction and lead to the appearance of biological determinism through millennial delusion.

I strongly believe that the world would be a better place with more femininity in it; it does not mean that women should take over. It only means that femininity should take over, and men have (almost) as much of it in them as women do. Hardcore neofeminism just does not leave them a chance to find it out.

Epilogue

Now, it does not need a lot of straightening up to make Renaud’s song and Emily’s post acceptable. Just change ‘woman’ with ‘femininity’ - and forget you ever believed feminity was womankind’s own, and you get very convincing literature. I am not too much of an extremist after all.

Cross-posted at What We Said

Along the same lines

Men are, women are
The gender meme
Statistical gender equality

When you google 'Airbus Boeing Peak Oil', the top result is this article that I wrote in the summer of 2006. Being a Cassandra proved right gives one all sorts of uneasy feelings, but I will carry on in that direction and offer a revised version of my prophecy, adorned with new details.

In a nutshell: people are talking a lot about the difficulties for airlines with $150-a-barrel oil. But we also have to understand that it is going to be much worse for aircraft manufacturers. They probably know it; but they cannot believe what they know, and they cannot say it either. This is not just another crisis for air transportation and aerospace construction: this is the last crisis until the end of the fossil fuel era.

Hard times for airlines

First an important premise: there are no serious alternatives to jet fuel for airliners. And even if there were, they could never be cheap in a world of expensive energy. The problem is not that oil is scarce: the production has never been this high — that's why we call it Peak Oil. The problem is that energy supply is not meeting global demand: until demand abates, any type of energy will end up costing the same, be it classical kerosene, gas-to-liquid synthetic jet fuel, or biodiesel. Regardless of the environmental footprint. Just know that if it was technologically feasible, filling an A380 tank with biofuel would use up 150 hectares of yearly yield,considering an optimistic figure of 2000 litres per hectare for Jatropha biodiesel. You'd need 150×2x365×150 = 16 million hectares — the arable land in France — to power the currently ordered A380 fleet.

Meanwhile the fuel efficiency improvements do not come anywhere close to compensating the price surge. Boeing claim that their new 787 will burn 20% less fuel than current jets of the same category (namely the 767 or A330). 20% is how much oil prices rose between the beginning of April and mid-May 2008: 30 years of technological improvement in aircraft and engine design will offset six weeks of price increase, and no technological Deus ex Machina will change that deal.

The obvious consequence is that cheap flights are gone for good. We are currently witnessing a fast concentration of the market, because the fierce competition prevents airlines from transferring the whole fuel bill to their passengers. As the weaker players exit the arena, ticket prices will rise until the few remaining airlines can break even financially. We will see a trend of de-democratization of air travel, and people will gradually change their travel habits, starting with the poorer and newer travelers.

There is a second key element that will drive air traffic down: as planemakers' market forecasts point out, air traffic growth is consistently correlated to world GDP growth. No need to be a psychic to imagine that GDP growth will seriously suffer from expensive energy. When people's purchasing power shrinks because of the energy bill, they will think twice before flying. Note that a major economic downturn could very well stop the rise in oil prices or even reduce them for a while. But it will not help air traffic - unemployed people do not fly all that much.

Meanwhile, environmental awareness is growing worldwide: the global warming theme is increasingly popular with the sort of middle class travelers who used to fill economy seats for exotic vacations. There will be less scuba-diving in the Maldives; less horseback-trekking in Mongolia; less leopard-spotting in Tanzania. Flying is losing political correctness points by the day. This is even beginning to reach the corporate world, although sometimes only for mere greenwashing concerns: more firms are asking their employees to fly less, to favor teleconferencing or to merge meetings. Business travel, the spine of airline profitability, is probably weaker than most hope.

I also see a final, more tricky contributor to airline misfortunes: many airlines have based their financial model upon the resell value of their aircraft. Planes are a huge investment, with a long lifetime — a bit like homes. Maybe you see what I am hinting at. Just as the housing crisis brought many people to bankruptcy, many airlines will lose their financial footing when the industry's obvious overcapacity and gloomy outlook pulls the market value of second-hand aircraft down. All this will contribute to reduce air traffic over the next decades, to the levels of the 1990s, then the 1980s, then the 1970s …

Harder still for aircraft manufacturers

The average natural decay of a fleet because of ageing is around 6% a year. When yearly traffic is constant from one year to the next, 6 planes for every 100 go into retirement, and are replaced by newer planes. This means that if airlines cut the world's capacity by a mere 6% each year, old retiring planes will not need to be replaced, and no new aircraft will be sold at all. A 6% capacity reduction is equivalent to just changing the Tuesday flight of the daily San Francisco to Tokyo service from a 747-400 to a 777-300ER. A reduction the economic press or the general public would hardly notice can make Airbus and Boeing assembly lines grind to a halt. US carriers will reduce capacity by 10% to 15% this third quarter of 2008 alone.

All told, the industry will cut capacity by 9% in 2008, according to James Higgins, analyst for Soleil-Solebury Research. (quote from CNNmoney.com)

In short: airlines make money in proportion to air traffic; aircraft manufacturers make money in proportion to air traffic growth. In a world with negative air traffic growth, the former float, the latter drown. Therefore, although we will probably not see the end of air traffic any time soon, this extremely nasty leverage effect will make aircraft manufacturers suffer considerably.

One might argue that in a world of expensive oil, airlines should scrap all old, gas-guzzling planes and buy new, soberer ones instead. That would be easy if they were making a lot of profit or could promise a bright future. But when the industry is consistently in the red zone, and getting redder, bankers do not follow. Few airlines have sufficient cash to sign billion-dollar contracts without external investment. Therefore airlines will be like people in poor countries: they will be running old vehicles which use up tons of gas because they cannot afford the newer models which make twice the miles per gallon.

Admittedly, a handful of airlines will be in a position to buy the new planes. When all the world's money ends up in oil exporters' hands, they have to buy things from us to avoid drowning under the heap of green bills. Aircraft are a great choice, as they are both hard-currency-intensive and fossil-fuel intensive, which oil producers have a lot of, as per design. Consequently, aircraft sales may in fact undergo an increase because of high oil prices. This I call the "Aboulafia effect". I conjecture that such an increase is inherently short-lived. Middle-East carriers will probably become prominent players, and gradually snatch the bulk of the market from the traditional airlines. But air traffic will shrink nonetheless, and all they will need to do is buy back the recent planes from their victims, scrap the old ones, and make the most of a declining market — something they are becoming good at.

As if matters could be any worse, there will finally be a mean backlash effect: thanks to cheap liquidity seeking asylum, the years 2003-2007 were absolutely euphoric in terms of aircraft orders. Manufacturers had to invest massively in infrastructures and people in order to ramp up production and honor those orders. But these planes will not materialize into deliveries before a couple of years. There is plenty of time for many airlines to go bankrupt or otherwise hit financial turbulence. This will mean massive delivery deferrals, then cancellations, so that assembly lines cannot even hold onto their current backlog. Who knows, we may witness the very curious artefact of a negative net yearly order-book. In the real world, that's called jumping off a cliff with a lot of momentum.

The combined value of the orders for Airbus and Boeing planes exceeds $500 billion at list prices, so large-scale cancellations and deferrals could easily amount to tens of billions of dollars and affect suppliers of engines and other parts in addition to the jet makers. (from the Wall Street Journal)

What next?

When that happens, it will be catastrophic for all the people, organisations, or communities, which now contribute to the aircraft manufacturing adventure. This could send Seattle or Toulouse the way British textile, or French foundries went not so long ago. And do not get influenced by prejudice. Aerospace does not have an intrinsically higher value than those industries we have come to regard as lowly. Today's ghost slums were full of very busy and extremely proud people at the peak of their flourishing trade.

I do not know what the smartest move for aircraft manufacturers is, and I am glad I am not in Tom Enders' or Scott Carson's shoes. Publicly acknowledging that the air travel industry is on the brink of inevitable decline would discourage investors and hasten the fall. And yet, the earlier they can start downshifting, the smoother the forced landing. They should be cancelling the B787 (a little too late for that one) or A350 developments, and simply offer to fit new generation engines on good old 767s and A330s. That would already be at least half the fuel economy, for a much smaller cost, while not forcing new capacity on the market place. Or silently work on a totally new kind of bird, absolutely optimized for fuel efficiency, even if it changes the rules of the game: a Mach 0.62, 20,000ft, turboprop, middle-range, high-capacity, DC-4-comfort machine that would be the soberest flying camel to get people where trains can't go for the next half century.

Or maybe steer away from this dwindling trade altogether and find a new frontier. How about giant wind turbines? If those do not sell, nothing will anyway, so that may be worth a try.

Notes

Many thanks to Richard Heinberg and Julian Darley of the Post Carbon Institute for accepting publication at Global Public Media.

Requests for reproduction or translation should be sent to the Post Carbon Institute.

Economist and Nobel Prize recipient Joseph Stiglitz recently published a book entitled The Three Trillion Dollar War. He claims that the global cost of the war (not just counting troops wartime bonuses or weapons, but a host of indirect costs) is above three trillion dollars for the US and the same for the rest of the world.

There are roughly 30 million people living in Iraq.

Instead of using the money to destroy a country and make cripples, terrorists, or fundamentalists, maybe it would have been smarter (and just as machiavellian) to share the six trillion dollars among Iraqis and give a million to each family, in exchange of all the oil, a democratic tame government, and exclusive commercial rights for US firms, so that the money finds its way back to where it came from.

Nobody wants to blow themselves up when they get to choose between being a martyr and a millionaire.

Barter vs. gift

We often think that when currency did not exist, most societies relied on barter for economic exchange. This is the main argument in favor of the use of money, which essentially allows to delay both halves of barter by materializing debt. In a barter economy, you can only trade what you have, whereas with currency, you can trade what you will (probably) have later.

When the seller (or the lender) realizes later that you cannot in fact honor the debt, then you get a financial crisis, in which everybody starts to question the value of everybody else’s debt (i.e. money loses its value), therefore nobody wants to sell or lend (i.e. accept someone’s debt as payment), therefore many people stop working (nothing to sell), therefore economy grinds to a halt.

But this is not true. Barter may have been the rule for merchant trade (i.e. rare and foreign stuff like beads, salt, silk, spice, etc.), but for daily economic exchange, barter was the exception and gift was the rule.

Somehow, we have been brainwashed into believing that any exchange should be reciprocal. But we must not look very far to find perfect examples of a gift behaviour which is as old as life itself: one expects no quid pro quo when one raises a child or takes care of a family. Obviously we do not ask a newborn baby to give something or do something special in return for nursing or shelter. We do not ask a newborn baby to sign a debt certificate. It is true that some parents have great expectations (you’ll be a famous lawyer, my son), but most parents only want the best for their kids, regardless of what the kids will do to them in the future.

Savings and credit

Savings (and then credit) is what you have when you have worked more than what it takes to fulfill your short-term needs (or wants). You can either stash this surplus as hard goods, like a squirrel hides nuts, but most people hoard it as money (or investment). Money (or invested capital) is someone else’s debt. When an insane economy forces goods onto impoverished people in exchange for debt, and then realises that the debt cannot be honored, then people’s savings are hit. Your surplus has melted just like hazelnuts can rot. It seems fair enough, but the crisis goes far beyond simply telling the rich that their surplus has vanished (bummer). And the poor are also hit, first when they get squeezed (e.g. evicted) so that creditors can get crumbs back, then when the economy slows down and they lose their jobs.

What if I had just given my surplus away?

Now imagine we have our brains intact and can live in an economy when we never expect anything in return. If I have surplus, I will give it away, for whatever I feel deserves it best. I will probably think twice before giving my surplus to the rich and old, and instead, it will feel natural to give it to the young (and generally poor), especially if someone had done the same for me when I was young and poor myself.

I do not expect anything in return, I do not think of the surplus as mine and to be returned one day; therefore, there cannot be a financial crisis. But society does get the full benefit of this ‘investment’ in any case, and I will get my interest directly through social recognition (there were rich people before money existed), and obviously indirectly via the healthy society I contributed to.

Note that the people who get gifts from me, even repeatedly, should not consider that they owe me anything nor feel uncomfortable in any way as a consequence of my largesse. In today’s world, only children can do that well.

If you think hard enough, there is no more nor less ‘justice’ in this system than the current one. But it is more robust, and certainly more humane. Probably, a gift economy does not work when you do not know the people. Instead of seeing it as an obstacle against my utopia, I see it as a good reason to get to know my neighbours and make tons of friends on the web. Who knows, maybe I will have to give something to you one day.

Epilogue

We have a saying in France, which goes like this: “Les bons comptes font les bons amis”, which means “Good accounts make good friends”. My personal belief is that “Les bons comptes font les bons comptables, c’est tout”: “Good accounts make good accountants, period”.

An announcement

#2 will celebrate its zeroeth birthday sometime around end October.

This is an opportunity to recycle an old post that probably not everybody has read. If you have, you are welcome to read it again.

Introduction

A couple of years ago, I heard a heated argument between my brother-in-law and his cousin. The young mother of three had hinted something about my in-law still being single at age 35+ and having no active plans to found a ‘real family’. The accused righteously retorted that the cultural model of the normal family with kids is slowly drowning our planet in overpopulation, and that his choice was the reasonable one. He was this close to saying something like ‘as far as sustainable development is concerned, having kids amounts to owning a SUV’.

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Warning: I could not resist a little doom and gloom.

When we are burning fossil fuels, we only see the environmental impact. There is supposed to be a Kyoto quota, and when we consume more, we feel some sort of hypothetical environmental guilt regarding global warming. The concept of future generations is very abstract, and very uncertain, and it does not make for easy arbitrations in everyday’s life.

Digression on market, non-renewables and future generations

As a side-note, just note that market price is fixed just with today’s supply-demand balance. Future generations cannot stake claims on today’s market, while today’s sales will deprive them of their share. Imagine a group of ten friends camping together in the wilderness, with so much tea for breakfast. Four early-risers sit down for breakfast at sunrise, and drink as much tea as they wish. Four others wake up later, find that there is only tea left for three. Two of them agree to drink just half a mug each in exchange of cookies from the other two. The two late-risers get nothing. Had we placed all ten together with the global tea and cookie problem, the share would have been quite different.

For non-renewables, day-to-day supply-demand market rules are a total nonsense.

An unfair negotiation

But let’s not consider future generations. Let’s just focus on today’s market. What does the price of fuel reflect? It reflects the market and the law of supply and demand of today. The more people want fuel now, the higher the price will get.

I want fuel. Fuel price rises. I can afford it. I pay my fuel. Why should I feel guilty of burning it? Because a sky-high price is just a way of saying that somebody else forsook their expected share of today’s fuel supply. It would be OK if it were my retired neighbor in the same affluent neighborhood who said: “OK, you need to drive to work, I will stay at home instead of going fishing, so you can have my share of today’s gas”. But it is not like this. The negotiation power on a market is money, not importance. Therefore, the final share will not reflect an arbitration in terms of what’s more important to humans considered equals (e.g. trading comfort uses for vital ones), and the rich will always get more of the share, however futile their intentions.

Economic theory says that the rich will pay more, therefore get poorer, while the poor save money by not buying the stuff, therefore things even-out in the end. This is only true if the rich do not get richer with what they get to do with the stuff. And if the poor do not starve before that. Because in the meantime, rising gas prices are also pushing food prices upwards.

In a world of scarce resources in which the power scales are already all the way to our side, something has to break somewhere if we want more for us. Whenever I drive my car for a week-end excursion, whenever I turn heating on, whenever I eat a juicy steak, I can only do this because someone else forsook their share of today’s driving to work, their share of today’s stove, their share of today’s food.

My macabre illustration

Imagine yourself and a small child fighting over a blanket while camping out in a blizzard. The colder it gets, the harder you have to pull to keep warm and cosy. You have more strength, therefore you get more of the blanket, although you do not need it as much as the kid does. At some point, the child is too weak and lets go of the blanket altogether. This is called price elasticity in an unfair market.

The factory has admittedly greatly increased the creature comfort of mankind. Innumerable articles now in general use were luxuries enjoyed only by the gentry and quite above the aspirations of common folk before the factory system was established. The factory has enabled the masses to live under conditions, and to consume “goods, wares and utensils,” which otherwise they could not have afforded. Rich and poor both have been enabled to purchase more goods and more kinds of goods and to consume and destroy them more freely than was previously possible.

It is, of course, difficult to determine how much of the credit for all this is really due to the factory itself and how much to the fact that scientists and inventors directed their efforts to the development of factory machinery and factory methods to the neglect of improvements in domestic production. We have always to bear in mind that the well-being we credit to the factory is based upon comparison between the low prices and high consumption made possible by the factory after it has had the advantage of all the inventions and the increases in scientific knowledge of the past century and a half, and the high prices and low consumption which prevailed under a relatively primitive system of individual production.

in This Ugly Civilization, Ralph Borsodi, 1930

And he’s been proven right in at least one respect: personal computers completely wiped out mainframe computing. I am ready to wager that there are tons of other examples where we believe a centralized model is more efficient when in fact it is not.