Does more = better?

Living here at the Oakland Catholic Worker has made me think long and hard about issues our mainstream media treats with soundbites: undocumented immigrants. Many immigrants leave their families behind and risk an extremely dangerous journey to make it into the U.S. When they get here, life isn't exactly great. They don't have medical insurance, they don't have their families, they don't speak the language, they can't receive a steady paycheck because they aren't here legally, and so they take daily, unreliable, and low-paying general labor jobs. Not an ideal life, to say the least.

Our once weekly grocery distribution to mostly immigrant families

Then why do they do it?

This is what I asked my friend. He travelled all the way from El Salvador, using the trains in Mexico (watch the documentary Which Way Home, done by a Fulbright scholar with her grant money), crossing the desert in Texas, and finally making it to California. He talks to his daughter almost daily, even though the phone card costs him some of his earnings. I asked him this question: "With all your friends and family in El Salvador, is it really better here in the US?" What he said was that yes, life in El Salvador with his family is better, in his heart and his mind, but, economically, it is better for him to be here.

At the Golden Gate Bridge

The bottom line for him is that being here, he can earn enough money to send back to his family, so that his daughter can go to university. She is at UCA, Universidad Centroamericana, in San Salvador. The buses in El Salvador are dangerous, as the whole country is ridden with gang violence, fueled by the U.S. demand for drugs. So, he sends enough money for tuition, food, and a semi-private car to take his daughter to school every day. For him, More = Better, more money that is.

Today in the news I saw debates from both sides on President Obama's new Warren Buffet tax. Many people said the worst thing we can do for economic growth is tax the people that create jobs and investments. Others said that we need to create more revenue so that crucial programs like education, roads and highways, Medicare and Medicaid, etc. can continue serving the population, and that if we invest in programs like these, this will lead to future economic growth. Both sides obviously have valid points, as you can find any number of intelligent economists who agree with either side. There are good arguments that both courses of action may lead to increased economic growth, an increase in our economy's capacity to produce goods and services, an increase in GDP per capita.

But, do we really need economic growth? Are we even talking about the right goal?

I just finished reading Bill McKibben's book "Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future," recommended by my economics major friend Ali. In this book, McKibben makes the argument that more does not equal better, that economic growth is no longer the correct goal. For a long time, More did equal Better, for everyone. Today More still equals Better for many people in the world. But for Americans?

When you have nothing, no food, no farm, no work, no family, no community, then More = Better, and economic growth should be the goal. As you start to accumulate food, clothes, computers, jobs, money, friends and family, More = Better, at least for a while. But, doesn't there reach a point where more clothes, more food, more computers, more money, more friends even... doesn't there reach a point where adding more of those things doesn't actually make it Better? Instead, it may even make it worse. For my friend from El Salvador, More = Better. But for me, I'm not so sure.

For instance, growing more chiles = better for a while, but at a certain point the salsa is just too damn hot!

"In general, researchers report that money consistently buys happiness right up to about $10,000 per capita income, and that after that point the correlation disappears" (McKibben 41). McKibben cites, among other research, Diener and Seligman, "Beyond Money," figure 2, p. 5.

This is pretty remarkable. It suggests that once you make $10,000 per year, adding more money is not going to make you happier. Even if you don't believe the statistics, you must concede that intuitively, there must exist a point where adding more stuff, adding more money, is not going to help you all that much. Whether you think that point is $10,000 or $100,000, everyone can agree in principle, if not in principal (hehe). Once we've got our basic needs met, money doesn't add anything to happiness.

What if all this debate going on about how to best increase economic growth, was totally missing the point? Why is economic growth the goal? Why not develop a better index for measuring our "success" as a country. Why not a "happiness index" or a "quality of life" index? This would surely include how much wealth we have, but it would also have to include our happiness, our parks, our libraries, our feeling of opportunity and freedom, our participation in our local economies and communities, how many times we visit our cousins and grandparents, how much free time we have, etc. (Americans work way more than Europeans, and guess what, Europeans are happier!)

For example, my finding that one of the watermelon seeds actually sprouted inside the watermelon! This was not included in GDP! Therefore, my increased happiness will not be measured by economic growth! Clearly something must be done, otherwise watermelon seeds sprouting inside watermelons will not be accounted for!

What if this pursuit of economic growth is actually the wrong pursuit to undertake?

Also, what if our country's pursuit of economic growth happened to hurt other countries? What if our pursuit of economic growth had hurt El Salvador in the past, and hence caused the circumstances that lead to my friend having to leave his home? (Anyone who has spent even 15 minutes researching El Salvador's history would concede this point) I think we should put aside the pursuit of economic growth and start talking about other measurements of our success. There has got to be a better, more inclusive way to judge progress than "amount of stuff produced" divided by population. I mean, that just sounds silly, doesn't it?

For an excerpt from the book, click this:
http://www.billmckibben.com/deep-economy-excerpt.html

Hooray for the likeliness of unlikely events!

Coincidences? Fate? Final Destination 5?
Are Nick Wren and I somehow cosmically connected?

Recently, Zena and Tim left the house to go back to Santa Clara for their last year of college. As a celebration, we all decided to go to a movie that Nelson really wanted to see: Final Destination 5. This movie's premise is that a group of people escape death, and death tracks them down, one by one, to fulfill their Final Destination 5!

Tim, me, Rosita, Zena, and Maribel (Nelson on the lens)

As the characters are brutally, grotesquely, and comically massacred in increasingly improbable ways, the characters and the detective in the movie say to themselves again and again: "There is just no way this could happen, it would be too much of a coincidence."

Nick Wren and I had never talked to each other before these past months. He and I independently decided to live at this house starting in August. However, improbably, we are both from Milwaukee, went to the same high school a year apart, Nick played soccer with my best friend Bryan, I played Sheepshead with one of Nick's best friends Mike, I got a ride to St. Louis this summer with Nick's girlfriend Beth's brother, Nick and I both are learning guitar, and we both seem to be 5's on the enneagram.

Although it is entertaining to think about connections like this, it really shouldn't surprise us if we take a look at the numbers. John Allen Paulos summarizes this idea in his book "Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences":

The paradoxical conclusion is that it would be very unlikely for unlikely events not to occur. If you don't specify a predicted event precisely, there are an indeterminate number of ways for an event of that general kind to take place (Paulos 28).

So, before meeting Nick, if I specified some connection in advance, like "What is the probability that Nick's grandma sang in choir with my grandma?", then the likelihood of this specific connection coming true upon meeting and asking Nick, is very low. However, the likelihood of any connection between us is actually very high.

As a classic example, take the probability that two people share a birthday. How many people must be gathered in a room to ensure this is true? Answer: 367 people need to be in the room. (there are usually 365 days in a year, plus February 29th, plus 1 to make sure two people share)

Now, how many people must be in a room to ensure that 50% of the time, at least two people share a birthday?

Only 23.

(The calculation is 1 - {365! / [(365-23)!*365^23]} which equals about 1/2. For a full explanation see Paulos' book on page 27, trust me it's easier than it appears)

Half the time that 23 people are in a room together, at least two of them will share a birthday. This shows that the likelihood of a broad range or category of individually unlikely events, is actually quite high. Plus, sharing a birthday is pretty specific compared to "connections" between me and Nick. A "connection" could be practically anything!

As Paulos points out:

A tendency to drastically underestimate the frequency of coincidences is a prime characteristic of innumerates, who generally accord great significance to correspondences of all sorts while attributing too little significance to quite conclusive but less flashy statistical evidence. If they anticipate someone else's thought, or have a dream that seems to come true, or read that, say, President Kennedy's secretary was named Lincoln while President Lincoln's secretary was named Kennedy, this is considered proof of some wondrous but mysterious harmony that somehow holds in their personal universe.

But seriously, it is pretty crazy that Nick and I happened to both come here from Milwaukee. I say: Hooray for the likeliness of unlikely events!

Bikes, Plumbing, and Compost, oh my!

I have been blessed with plenty of opportunities to work with my hands lately. There are so many opportunities for me to do satisfying things, where the end result is something you can see, touch, and use. I hope my life is always full of tangible, touchable, dirty work, not just paper, and definitely not cubicles, offices, and electronic correspondence (although I like computers too, just not all the time!)

Morgan and Laura run a community bike shop on Saturdays out of our basement in the back of the Catholic Worker house. Nick and I talked to them, and we can each build our own bicycle, as long as we put in some work in return! (only work and time exchange accepted, money's no good there!) So, they left us with 4 bicycles, and said "Take 'em apart!"

So, that's what I did two days ago. Here are the frames and wheels...

...and here are all the salvaged parts. (some parts like de-railers, brakes, etc. were small and needed to stay together, so naturally I put them in some plastic, food service gloves we had)

Then my new friend Terry, a retired carpenter who worked for 45 years, and ardent supporter of unions (he almost always sports various red, International Workers of the World t-shirts and baseball caps), and I, replaced a leaky sink trap in one of the downstairs bathrooms.

Terry left to go to a wobblies (IWW) meeting in Berkeley, but he left me some tools, so that I could patch together this new compost bin! I still need to line the inside with some cardboard, and then choose its new home somewhere in our garden. The bin is more or less for neatness (and keeping the compost from drying out from the wind), so you can make them out of anything really! I chose to use some old pallets we had lying around.

It was a great day of work.

Life is a Miracle

Over these last few weeks I had been reading and reading about nutrition and science and certain phytonutrients in certain fruits and vegetables, and what happens when you cook them versus eat them raw, and what is lycopene, and what is the value of vitamin C supplements… and eventually I got tired.

I realized the more I read and the more I placed hope in this science of nutrition to tell me everything, the more hollow I felt.

What was the goal? Why was I so concerned about learning so much? …to know everything? …to never die? …so that my loved ones will never get cancer? I don’t know. But all this science somehow made life, and food, feel hollow. Where was the mystery? Where was the joy in eating, and living?

Mysteriously, I decided to pick out a book called “Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition”, by Wendell Berry. Here it is in my “dresser”:

This book touched on a variety of subjects that were perfect for me, including philosophy of science and art, and also economics, technology, agriculture, and our ecosystems. It helped me realize that the hollowness I was feeling was probably a result of the attitude, the language, and the unspoken assumptions behind the books I was reading and, as a result, the thoughts I was thinking in my head.

The material on nutrition I was reading was surely humble in its acknowledgment of the vast ignorance of modern science in the area of nutrition and health. However, there were still assumptions, language, and a view of the world that is communicated through such literature. There is the assumption that, with further research, we (science) will eventually understand everything. It is only a matter of future research until we know it all, until we know exactly what it is about spinach that makes us healthy and vigorous. There is also the assumption that the entire world, humans included, is one big machine. It operates according to the laws of physics (which we humans will eventually figure out), and everything is mechanical and explainable in these terms, we just haven’t got there yet.

I think Wendell Berry is right that this is the dominant assumption of modern scientists. It was exactly what I thought when I finished high school, and I had gotten my good share of Discovery Channel, library DVDs, David Attenborough, Honors Physics, and a 5 on the AP Chemistry exam. Not until college, when I started learning about modern physics, about special relativity, about quantum mechanics, did I realize, “Holy cow, this world is WAY more complex than I thought!” Even my physics professors would tell me in office hours: “Don’t worry that you don’t feel like you totally understand it yet, even when you get your PhD, you still won’t fully understand it. Because as far as we can tell, our world is not intuitive to the human mind.”

            Even in math, I learned about something called Godel’s First Incompleteness Theorem. For years and years it was assumed that math was perfect, human rationality decomposed to its bare minimum. Thus, it was assumed that every mathematical statement was either true or false, and could be proven to be so. We just hadn’t found the proofs yet. But, with further research, we shall surely find those proofs. AMAZINGLY, this is wrong! Godel actually showed that for whatever mathematical system you come up with, there will always be statements that cannot be shown to be either true or false! There will always be statements that can be neither proved nor disproved! Could it be the same for science, for our understanding of the physical world? Could it be that we humans are somehow “cut off” from a true and total understanding of our world? Thus, the world would not be just a machine awaiting human scientific explanation. I think it is possible.

What is important is that this kind of worldview, this kind of attitude and thought process, treating the world as a machine, really left me feeling hollow. It is much better to view the world in a different way I think.

I read Wendell Berry and thought about these things partly on a walk down a hill. I took the bus to Berkeley for the day, but the bus driver made a wrong turn, and tried to correct it, but couldn’t, and tried again to correct it, but couldn’t, and eventually we were all up in a hill, in a bus that couldn’t turn around, a mile away from Berkeley! I walked down the hill, ate some watermelon, and saw this beautiful sight! (Notice the bridge in the background!) Now isn’t life a miracle?

For quite a while it has been possible for a free and thoughtful person to see that to treat life as mechanical or predictable or understandable is to reduce it. Now, almost suddenly, it is becoming clear that to reduce life to the scope of our understanding (whatever “model” we use) is inevitably to enslave it, make property of it, and put it up for sale.

            This is to give up on life, to carry it beyond change and redemption, and to increase the proximity of despair (Berry 7).

We know enough of our own history by now to be aware that people exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love. To defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know. The abstract, “objective,” impersonal, dispassionate language of science can, in fact, help us to know certain things, and to know some things with certainty. It can help us, for instance, to know the value of species and of species diversity. But it cannot replace, and it cannot become, the language of familiarity, reverence, and affection by which things of value ultimately are protected (Berry 41).

To say as much puts me on difficult ground, I know. To confess, these days, that you think some things are more important than machines is almost sure to bring you face to face with somebody who will accuse you of being “against technology”—against, that is, “the larger, more efficient business organization” that will emerge inevitably “to the benefit of the many.”

And so I would like to be as plain as possible. What I am against—and without a minute’s hesitation or apology—is our slovenly willingness to allow machines and the idea of the machine to prescribe the terms and conditions of the lives of creatures, which we have allowed increasingly for the last two centuries, and are still allowing, at an incalculable cost to other creatures and to ourselves. If we state the problem that way, then we can see that the way to correct our error, and so deliver ourselves from our own destructiveness, is to quit using our technological capability as the reference point and standard of our economic life. We will instead have to measure our economy by the health of the ecosystems and human communities where we do our work. (Berry 54).

Logic Octopus

My logic professor, Dr. Noel Adams, always loved to find great examples of logic in everyday life. Nick was serving lunch the other day, and I think he encountered a particularly awesome one. When he handed the man his lunch and cup of water, the man took the food, leaving the water on the tray, and said:

"You can take the water. I'm not an octopus."

Clearly, this is an awesome statement. I absolutely loved it. It is really quite complicated though, and it took me a while to really unpack the logic inside. Here's my attempt.

(Typical lunch and infamous cup of water)

In predicate and propositional logic, we could represent the situation as follows:

Let Ox stand for "x is an octopus".
Let Wx stand for "x wants water".
Let m stand for "this particular man Nick and I now know"
The symbol "--" in front of anything means "not" or "the negation of".
The symbol "-->" means "implies".

The implied logical argument of the man's statement, which we should have known:
(1) For all x, Wx --> Ox
(2) --Om
(3) Wm-->Om
(4) --Om--> --Wm
(5) --Wm

Explanation:

(1) Only octopi want water. "Only" statements are tricky, but I remembered that they can be translated into "If… then" statements. So, "Only octopi want water" translates to "For all x, if x wants water, then x is an octopus" or "For all x, Wx --> Ox".

(2) We are given the information that the man is not an octopus, i.e. "--Om"

(3) By instantiation from line (1) we can obtain: "Wm-->Om" for our particular man.

(4) Then, from line (3) and the use of the Contrapositive, we can obtain "--Om--> --Wm".

(5) Finally by using lines (2) and (4) and the Arrow Out Rule, we can obtain "-Wm".

Thus, clearly, if we had just remembered (1) our propositional logic, (2) the fact that this man was not an octopus, and (3) that only octopi want water, we would have obviously realized "--Wm", which is what we should have known all along:

He didn't want any water.

Bulldogs in Love!

Nick Wren and I are going to soon start a website called "Bulldogs in Love." Anyone can send in their pictures of their bulldogs that are potentially in love. Then, Nick and I will screen the pictures to make sure the bulldogs are indeed in love. Here is an example of an acceptable loving couple that happen to live right next door to the Oakland Catholic Worker.

I have recently been reading "Superfoods Rx" by Steven Pratt, M.D. from Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA. Some foods are better for us than others, and as research suggests, some foods are incredibly better than others. Below are some examples of fine, nutritious, whole foods that we will soon give out tomorrow at our food distribution to over 200 families!

On the right, Plums! And, on the left, Broccoli!

Apparently... "a researcher at Johns Hopkins University announced the discovery of a compound found in broccoli that not only prevented the development of tumors by 60 percent in the studied group, it also reduced the size of tumors that did develop by 75 percent." (Click on the word "Broccoli" for the link).

Above you'll find the Cantalopes! And, a beautiful mural painted on the wall downstairs. It was also my first laundry day. My clothes dried beneath our orange tree!

Away Today to San José!

Yesterday I visited Mara down in San Jose. Zena and Tim were giving Nelson a ride down there to apply for a job, so I hopped on in. Mara is living at a Catholic Worker house in San Jose, CA, and has been since June. Here is her house!

I got there in time for dinner, which was delicious salad with basil and spinach and almonds, pinto beans, and celery with peanut butter. Afterwards, we walked across the street to Mi Pueblo Foods and Mara bought me some cookie dough ice cream as a treat. Here is a picture of Mara in the kitchen at her Catholic Worker House. I didn't take this picture, but rather jacked it from Facebook. Hope you don't mind Mara!

The next morning after breakfast, I explored San Jose a little bit. The first place I went was, of course, the library, which was an 8 story tall building with tons of windows and art exhibits! It was awesome. They even gave me a library card, for free, without proof of residence!

Art exhibits... Prints For The People

The view from the 8th floor! Notice the mountains!