The Right Way to Flourish

This now famous line from “Network” was uttered by Howard Beale, the embittered newscaster. It also seems to have been in the background of people’s explanations for the choices made in this past election. Or perhaps, it was only a variation like, I’m as mad as hell at you, and I’m not going to take you anymore! It’s much, much easier to take out one’s frustration in these troubled times on somebody than to spend the time to locate where the “this” in Beale’s cry really lies. It’s never quite clear in the movie whether Beale’s use of “mad” refers… Read More

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My colleagues in the sustainable consumption network sent me the abstract below of a recent academic article about choice. It provides further evidence of what academic psychologist Barry Schwartz has been saying for quite some time. I’ve added a TED video of his to the end of this post. Schwartz’s argument is simple, but elegant. The idea of freedom as proportional to the number of available choices stops working when that number gets large. At some point more choice become pathologic, and the actor, rather than being able to enjoy more freedom, comes under what Schwartz calls the tyranny of… Read More

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I’m still chewing on the question asked by one of the readers of this blog. Is the emergence of flourishing, beauty, happiness… different from the emergence of observable physical phenomena like eddies or tornadoes? Thermodynamics helps explain how emergent structure appears in systems far from an equilibrium with little order present. These structures are patterns we can discern against a context of randomness, chaos, and disorder. In the late 1980s, the idea of “[self-organized criticality](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organized_criticality)” was developed and used to explain the suddenness by which these structures showed up. The term, punctuated, is often used to describe the jump from… Read More

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Sorry for the unexplained absence. I seem to have acquired a case of blogger’s block, but only a mild one. I promised to continue for a while to write about complexity and its relationships to sustainability. One of the most interesting and intriguing features of complex system is emergence. The idea is quite simple, but the process is mysterious. Emergence is the appearance of some quality that arises from the structure of a system, that is, from the relationships among all the parts. The ripples on a sand dune or the regular shape of a snow flake are one kind… Read More

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I have written much about complexity in this blog, but find it remains perplexing and arcane to many. It is perplexing to me as well, but that’s no excuse from working to understand this concept and its critical importance to our future. The most direct way to state that importance is to say we live in a complex world, but don’t have the mental and conceptual tools to deal with it. Our culture is firmly grounded in understanding the world through a mesh of fixed rules and relationships revealed by cutting up the world in separate, distinct little pieces. The… Read More

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It’s a little after 8pm and I’m already pretty sad. I guess I have taken a sea change in the Congress as a given. I might come back later and write a coda. I usually watch the ABC national news with Diane Sawyer who made a couple of comments today and yesterday I take issue with. Yesterday, she announced that ABC would be focusing on China shortly using words close to “to understand what it takes to stay ahead of them,” Today she made a gratuitous remark about watching democracy in action today. I would rather call today an example… Read More

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First green washing, now pink washing. What color of the rainbow is next? (RED)� products. Yellow ribbons? “Cause” marketing is big business says Joanna Weiss in today’s Boston Globe, writing about products draped in pink packaging to signify that the vendor/manufacturer is supporting the fight against breast cancer. Weiss quotes other cancer cure advocates who claim that the only big winners are the purveyors of pink products. The application of pink — in the name of raising money and steering women toward the radiologist’s office — does seem to get broader and cheerier each year. Now, we have NFL balls… Read More

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I have been reading a lot recently about how values affect and guide choice. My focus has been largely on choices in the consumption market place: cars, food, iPods, shoes, houses and so on. I can’t, however, stop thinking about how values are playing out in the current political campaigns. In yet another case of synchronicity, I stumbled onto a new study/analysis, Common Cause, prepared for the WWF. I mentioned it a few posts ago. In that earlier post, I noted only that reliance on rationality had led progressive causes astray. The research discussed in the WWF report makes a… Read More

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This is the headline of the lead article in this year’s Newsweek’s green issue, replete with their ranking of the “greenest” 100 corporations. It’s all pretty underwhelming copy. The #1 big idea is that of Blairo Maggi, who previously signed on to a 2006 moratorium to stop selling soybeans from clear cut rainforest lands. (He is known as the soybean tycoon in his native land, Brazil.) His pick as #1 is based on his recent decision to extend the ban to Amazonian beef. Brazil is now the world’s largest exporter of beef. Maggi, also previously Governor of the state of… Read More

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A spectre is haunting Japan – the spectre of deflation. With this ironic twist on the Communist Manifesto, we are witnessing the downside of capitalism in Japan. An article in the NYTimes by Martin Fackler chronicles the recent decline in the economic output in Japan and the hardships it is creating. Caught in a business cycle with no upside in sight, the Japanese economy has fallen behind China’s. The original Asian Tiger, even before that term was in vogue, is little more than an old alley cat. The article paints a dark, painful picture of people living in a multi-storied… Read More

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