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Yearly Archives: 2010

National Wellbeing

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Can government improve our happiness?  Can it at least measure how happy the people of a nation are and work toward improving it?  The idea is being implemented, but not as some strange leftist diversion.  The Prime Minister of the UK, David Cameron, has been interested in the idea since he first ran for the leadership of the Tory (Conservative) Party in 2005 and has elaborated on it several times.  Now that he is the leader of Britain he has charged the Office of National Statistics to formulate the questions necessary to judge just how happy the British people are.

The “Wellbeing Project” is expected to report by 2012.  The debate on the project’s importance has, naturally, already started.

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Winter Tea

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This time of year, there’s nothing I enjoy more than a cup of tea. When the sky turns grey and the moisture falls heavy in clouds of snow I come in from walking my dog with a thin icicle dripping from my nose.  In a moment apart the steam from my mug then warms my nose and soon enough my gut. I am warm and  refreshed.

It is the break that makes it special. The water has to be heated and the tea steeped for 5 minutes, and then it is time to relax. I have to make time for tea, I have to stop being in motion for a short while to enjoy it.

In this moment the revelation comes as the steam rises in thin curls that disappear into nowhere. Evaporation like this is what makes life on earth possible, although in nature it is driven by the warmth of the sun. But in my small mug I can imagine the mysterious forces that bring water away from the sea.

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Re-Invent the Wheel

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Any day that starts with a nearly mandatory trip to the Apple store is not a good day. That’s my gripe for the morning as I find I have to buy another battery charger to replace the one that oh-so-easily snapped off. It’s not really a big deal except that this plug slips out so easily it probably has a lot to do with why Apple batteries don’t last very long. And here I have to buy another badly designed little thing.

“It’s Apple,” you might say, “They do stuff like that.” Well, it’s not just Apple – it’s nearly everything that wants to the latest kewl thing. The level of complexity in our world means that a lot of bits and pieces need to be put together to make things work, but they aren’t always using the best things around them. The wheel is constantly being re-invented. That’s a shame.

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Stated Risk

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What will it take to get the economy moving again?  Two years after everything simply stopped long enough to watch Lehman fall momentum is still against us.  When credit markets stop they are very hard to start back up again for a large number of reasons – the most important is the one at the heart of any free market, risk.

Interest rates near zero and a Federal Reserve pumping all the cash they can into the economy may seem enticing, but when banks can’t get any kind of interest on the loans they write they become very nervous about the risk inherent in any loan.  Is it really worth loaning out billions of dollars if you’re not sure you’ll be paid back?  So the usual mechanism to crank up the speed of the economy, cheap money, simply doesn’t work.

Perhaps there is a role for government – specifically state government.

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Making Stuff

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If’ you pay any attention to the things you are buying this holiday season, you’ve probably noticed that very little of it is made in the USofA.  That’s been true for an extremely long time – for many of us, our entire lives.  We simply don’t make much stuff in this country anymore.

We don’t have to speculate as to what that means over the long term because we have been living the long term.  We have run a net deficit against the rest of the world almost continuously for 30 years. Some have speculated that this is a good thing, as the rest of the world can make products cheaper than we can – why not run through their resources rather than our own?  The Depression that we are in, this Managed Depression, explains just how wrong that is.

But if you want some data to show the problem there is plenty.

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