The Right Way to Flourish

Tom Friedman wrote today about the ethical void that popped out of the revelations of Bernard Madoff’s colossal Ponzi scheme.

The Madoff affair is the cherry on top of a national breakdown in financial propriety, regulations and common sense. Which is why we don’t just need a financial bailout; we need an ethical bailout. We need to re-establish the core balance between our markets, ethics and regulations. I don’t want to kill the animal spirits that necessarily drive capitalism — but I don’t want to be eaten by them either.

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Sustainability seemed to fade a bit this week, in spite of the so-called good news about the apparent drop in consumer spending. The news media and the blogs were full of contradictory pronouncements as to whether the data indicated a change of values or, more directly, emptier pocketbooks and credit lines. The off-and-on-again bailout of Detroit will take a lot of money that might better go to transforming our relationship to the automobile. It is not just jobs that we would be preserving, but an old, outmoded form of mobility. A better policy would be some sort of transition project that would both retrain the displaced workers and invest in alternative forms of transit. Once the politics of the bailout are settled, I am afraid the long-term problem that remains will become forgotten until the next crisis. . .

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As the Holidays approach, I seem to be more like the Grinch every day. I guess I am looking for trouble when I read the newspaper, surf the internet, or listen to the boob tube. What astounds me is how easy it is to find it. Trouble to me is evidence of the utter blindness and deafness of the effects of our culture on everything from the climate to the size of our waistlines. And not just our waistlines, but those of other cultures, probably still pretty skinny because they have yet to adopt our eating habits.

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In today’s New York Times, Roger Cohen has written a lament about technology and modernity, couched in a sentimental comparison between Paris and Havana. It’s a wonderful piece. Having spent several years saying the same things in my fundamentally analytic way, I marvel at the way a real writer can tell a story that jumps out of the page. . . .

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I missed a week while I was away celebrating Thanksgiving with my family. With Christmas getting nearer, the drumbeat of offers for greener gadgets has gotten louder. As I have said many times, it is almost always better to buy a greener alternative whenever you have decided to buy something. Almost always because it is still very difficult to determine what green or environmentally friendly really means. Any of these and other related labels invariably involves trade-offs between green gas emissions, toxics, recyclability and so on. But remember, the only real choice for sustainability is to leave the item on the shelf. . . .

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Happiness is a clue that someone is flourishing. It’s not everything that constitutes flourishing, but it seems to be a necessary condition. Happiness is not restricted to the economic well-being of anyone. Money, as it is said, cannot buy happiness. But it also appears that computer display screens with others’ faces and news about them do not bring it either. A study of happiness reported in today’s New York Times points to the positive effect caused by the presence of other happy people.

How happy you are may depend on how happy your friends’ friends’ friends are, even if you don’t know them at all. . . And a cheery next-door neighbor has more effect on your happiness than your spouse’s mood. . . . So says a new study that followed a large group of people for 20 years — happiness is more contagious than previously thought. . . .

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One of the keys to attaining sustainability is learning to attack problems at their roots. To continue to address only the symptoms fails to produce the desired results and often leads to serious unintended consequences. In the case of modern cultures, the result is the arrival of unsustainability. In complex systems, the unintended consequences can be very large and threatening. . . .

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Not satisfied with adding totally new gadgets to the enormous varieties of electronic things already available, companies are placing electronic versions of “old-fashioned” human powered games and tools on the already over-crowded shelves in your favorite merchant’s store. Kate Galbraith writes about Gadget Proliferation in her New York Times “Green Inc.” column.

…these [human-powered items] are far outnumbered by gadgets that have traditionally been hand-powered, but now have given in to the electronic age. These are great fun, but in terms of energy use, they are not particularly green.
I was reflecting on this last night while playing (and losing) several rounds of post-Thanksgiving electronic Boggle (sold only in Britain for about $23). . . .

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In my book, I discuss ads showing up on people’s foreheads. Advertising on televisions in schools has raised controversies for some time, but now we have even more intrusive advertising. USA Today reports that a teacher in San Diego is selling ads to be placed on student’s exam booklets to make up for cuts in his copying budget. . . .

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Thanksgiving is one of the few holidays that celebrates the family and looks inward instead of honoring a public event or individual. As is now our custom for the last few years, we traveled to DC to be with my daughter and family, and enjoyed a sumptuous holiday dinner with friends. Our two families shared the preparations as we have done for the lat few years. A high point was to her everyone’s thoughts about the occasion. One theme ran through everyone’s comments: thankfulness for being together again.

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