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.