Appreciating Natural Gifts

Agriculture

Appreciating Agriculture

Food

Appreciating Food

Appreciating Energy

Appreciating Time

Government

Appreciating Government

Education

Appreciating Education

Religion

Appreciating Religion

Business

Appreciating Business

Cook, Earl Ferguson, Man, Energy, Society, Freeman.:  1976  ISBN 071670725X, Page 203

Life in a high energy society is in sharp contrast to life in a low energy society.  Family and community are subordinated to the state because most goods and services are produced outside the family and because the means of social control do not depend upon the family’s and community’s allocating status and inculcating behavior.  All goods come from production units much larger than the family and for the most part outside the community.  Services are performed by specialists, only the more common of whom will be found within the immediate community, and by consumer-operated power appliances.  The centralization of mass production and the proliferation of service centers require extensive transportation and communication networks; the speeds at which bodies and goods are moved, and words and pictures transmitted, become important indicators of the vitality of a high energy society.

Jorge, Antonia.  Competition, Cooperation, Efficiency, and Social Organization. New Jersey:  1978. ISBN 0838620264, Page 56

When we observe modern technology mixed with a “backward” human factor in an underdeveloped country, we know we must “modernize” the latter if we are to have a higher degree of economic efficiency.  Unfortunately, our present knowledge is not sufficient to determine what efficiency values may be attached either to the performance of labor under various organizational alternatives or to the managerial and organizational forms that would result from the presence of different “spirits” in the human beings involved.

Steve Weinberg, “Mr. Bottomline,” On Earth Magazine, Spring 2003  Pages 34-5

John D. Graham is a brilliant theoretician who achieved tenure at Harvard when he was thirty-two.  Now, at forty-six, he is the person journalists call the bush administration’s “regulatory czar.”  Every economically significant regulation drafted by every executive branch agency to carry out the laws of Congress—on power plants or forest conservation, on meat inspection or dioxin—must cross Graham’s desk before it goes into force.  He decides whether the protection is worth the price.  On environmental matters, his answer is often No.

Graham’s specialty is a long-established but controversial number-crunching technique called cost-benefit analysis.  Its purpose is to quantify, in dollars, every cost and every benefit of a possible course of action.  Because Graham has spent his entire professional life working to enshrine it (and its near cousin, risk analysis) at the center of public policy, his nomination process was highly contentious.  He got thirty-seven “No” votes in the Senate—second only to attorney General John Ashcroft, a better-known figure appointed to a much higher-profile office.  Among the letters sent to the Senate abut Graham was a critique signed by fifty-one academics; they charged that he had repeatedly lowballed health and environmental benefits, used “extreme and highly disputed” economic assumptions, and issued hard-and fast opinions on complex medical and scientific topics in which he had no training….

He religiously follows the advice he gave in a 1996 speech to the Heritage Foundation:  Be careful what you say.  At a panel for the foundation (a think tank that champions weakening government regulations), other speakers talked about “regulatory relief.”  Graham said, “I think our message should be that we want smarter, more efficient regulation in order to get more protection at less cost.  Therefore, the word ‘relief’ is entirely inappropriate.”

Ralph Nader, Crashing the Party.  New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002.  ISBN 0312284330

Page 32

Having lost key committee chairs and the Congress to the Republicans and Republicrats, some Washington-based environmental groups persuaded themselves that they could maneuver or outsmart polluting companies through private deals with them.  One such deal, involving the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and their West Coast representative Ralph Cavanagh, resulted in California’s electricity deregulation fiasco.  This idea was the brainstorm of John Bryson, CEO of the Southern California Edison Company and NDRC.  The latter thought that competition in generating and distributing electricity would bring more conservation, more renewable energy on-line, and cheaper prices for consumers.  Deregulation unanimously passed the California legislature in 1996 with very little public awareness or discussion.  Our attempt in 1998 to repeal parts of this bad law by a statewide referendum - Proposition 9 - failed by a wide margin due to a $45 million television campaign by the utilities.  Having given up on the prospect of regulation, California turned over regulatory power to the electric companies, their holding companies, and the large out-of-state power generators that have turned electricity into a speculative commodity.  The harshest price consequences for consumers and taxpayers have resulted, shaking the state’s economy and increasing costs to business.  Any regulatory authority to stem this crisis was given up in 1996 to corporate supremacy.

Page 210

It is difficult to recall major advances in fairness or living conditions in our country’s history that were not struggled over or wrenched from the avaricious grasp of the rulers by the ruled.  I am not speaking of charity here.  As I said repeatedly at rallies all over the country, a society that has more justice is a society that needs less charity.

That night I kept coming back to the critical medium called word of mouth which, by the way, made this major outpouring of Bostonians and college students possible.  “Replace some of the small talk with exciting political talk about the future of this country,” I urged at the rally.

Page 313

Complex, changing societies need more public or citizen time for a more just society if our private time is to be enjoyable, peaceful, safe, and productive.  Each person has a contribution to make.  It is sometimes useful to evoke a metaphor from the natural world.  The great natural asset of our country which is the Mississippi River start with a drop of water in northern Minnesota.  One drop joins with other drops to form a tiny rivulet that joins with other rivulets to form a brook, which together with other brooks makes a stream that with other streams makes a river, which together with other rivers swells the mighty Mississippi.  So, too, is the case with millions of citizens, watering the life-expanding potential of a functioning democracy open to fresh ideas and replenishing initiatives. 

Page 319

FIRST-STAGE GOALS FOR A BETTER AMERICA

1.     Enact legislation that mandates publicly financed public elections and broad reforms of the electoral process.  Strengthen citizen participation in our political economy.

2.     Enact living-wage laws, strengthen worker health and safety laws, and repeal Taft-Hartley and other obstructions to collective bargaining and worker rights.

3.     Issue environmental protection standards to systematically reduce damaging environmental toxins and to promote sustainable technologies.

4.     Provide full Medicare coverage for everyone and revamp our national programs for prevention of disease and trauma.

5.     Launch a national mission to abolish poverty, as other Western democracies have done, based on proposals made long ago by conservatives, liberals, and progressives.

6.     Design and implement a national security policy to counter violence and the silent mass violence of global diseases, environmental devastation, and extreme poverty.  Reduce waste and corporate domination of defense budgets—a wasteful defense i s a weak defense.  Wage peace and advance nonviolence by education and by foreseeing and forestalling global perils.

7.     Renegotiate NAFTA and GATT to be democratic and to be “pull-up,” not “pull-down,” trade agreements that subordinate labor, consumer, and environmental standards to trade matters.

8.     End criminal justice system discrimination, reject the failed war on drugs, and replace for-profit corporate prisons with superior public institutions.

9.     Defend and strengthen the civil justice system, apply criminal laws against corporate crime, and fully prosecute consumer fraud and abuses.  Expand consumer, worker, and children’s health, safety, and economic rights.

10.   Strengthen investor-shareholder rights, remedies, and authority over managers and officers and boards of directors so that those who own the companies also control them.  End the massive corporate welfare schemes that distort and misallocate public budgets.  Reintroduce the historic function of corporate chartering as an instrument of ensuring corporate accountability and the sovereignty of the people.

Bizimana, Nsekuye. “Development and Breakdown in Rwanda.” ­The Myth of the Modern.­  Pages 124-5

Applying the same economic criteria for judging development in Rwanda as in the West, the authorities in Kigali had reason to be pleased with the results attained up until the breakdown in 1994.  In the rural areas the quality of housing had been improved from huts to stable houses, and primary hygiene practices had been instituted.  Many industrial products (with negative effects that only became evident later) offered more comfort than the traditional way of life.  More Rwandans were being educated at home and abroad, and the number of subjects taught at the national university had increased.  In fact, Rwandans were proud in claiming that Kigali had become a little European island in Rwanda.

The fact is, however, that from the point of view of human development, a sharp deterioration in the quality of life had taken place.  The influx of every imaginable Western industrial product, from washing machines, hi-fi sets and video players to sweets and cars, led to an even greater admiration of the West.  People wanted to acquire these fine things more than ever, but only a small portion of the population could afford them.  The result of all this was the creation of an arrogant bourgeoisie, who believed in the principle that 'the more you have, the better you are.' Such powerful bourgeoisies formed a state within a state, thus controlling almost everything.  This was similar to the dictatorship-of-capital seen in the West.  The benefits of modernisation were rarely distributed equal.  Thus those areas with fine modern installations despised the areas without.  As a result, tension developed between different areas within the country.  This is known as regionalism.  In many African countries, regionalism corresponds to tribalism, because different tribes live in different regions.  Money reigns and thus people go to any measure to acquire it.  This striving after money inflicted serious damage upon our culture.  Egoism gained ground.  Nobody did anything unless he personally intended to gain from it.  Little was shared and the spirit of solidarity amongst our people collapsed.

Description of video “Ancient Futures: Learning From Ladakh” The Video Project $19.95 (800) 4-PLANET  by Liza Gross, Sierra Club magazine

What happens when modern development encroaches upon an ancient culture high in the harsh Tibetan plateau of northern India?

Not even Ladakhis—mostly Buddhists with deep spiritual ties to the earth can resist the onslaught of an increasingly global economy.  This insightful case study based on Helena Norberg-Hodge’s book of the same title (published by Sierra Club Books in 1991), examines how development with its attendant seductive images of glamour and gadgets promising life free of hardship, destroys social and ecological bonds.  Pollution, resource depletion, sprawl, breakdown of family and community, crime, growing economic disparity—all are crises in industrialized nations. 

While these problems are not the sole province of the West, Norberg-Hodge traces their appearance in Ladakh to Western national of progress.  And because modernization has taken hold so rapidly here, the roots of these modern maladies, mostly obscured in the West, are easier to trace.

“Development has systematically dismantled the local economy and self-reliance, and the first victim is the small farmer whose livelihood is completely undermined,” Norberg-Hodge tells us.  Ldakhis are buying heavily subsidized wheat trucked in from the plains of India because it’s cheaper than grain grown minutes away in local villages.  They are drifting away from a cooperative small-farm model, based on organic farming and renewable resources, toward dependence on chemical-intensive agriculture and imported goods and services.

Once protected from food shortages and rationing by these close-knit communities, villagers are now at the mercy of market forces beyond their control and of roads that are impassable two-thirds of the year. Forced into competition for scarce, meaningless work that doesn’t pay enough to meet basic needs, they’ve become alienated from their neighbors.  Broken community ties have led to escalating crime and homelessness, virtually unheard of 20 years ago.  “There has been progress,” on Ladakli says, “but people are not as happy as they once were.”

Respect for ecological limits is yielding to modern promises of uncontrolled economic growth and consumption, as this fragile high-desert ecosystem succumbs to the corollaries of modernization: garbage and human-waste-filled streets and waterways, chemical-fertilizer and pesticide-laden fields, increasing population and ethnic friction, and loss of respect for women and families.

The film does not suggest that we renounce our wicked Western ways and head for the hills, but that we reestablish our ties to the earth, recognize its natural limitations by developing renewable energy sources and recycling waste, and resist globalization by supporting local cottage industries and small farmers.  In the end, these rules to live by transcend cultural boundaries, and Norberg-Hodge eloquently shows us the way to follow them.

LYNCHED NEGRO

      by MAXWELL BODENHEIM

                   Your downcast, harlequin, defenceless face

                   Was turned to ashen flakes, and wavered up

                   In lightly shapeless impotence upon

                   The sprightly scandals of a morning wind,

                   The hands of other men fell on your breast,

                   Like scores of scorpions instinctively

                   Expelled from jungle-spots within their hearts.

                   Your blood, in fine quick problems, spattered out

                   Upon the morning air that studied them

                   And left complete, dry answers on your skin.

                   (Oh, what is life but cold arithmetic

                   Where fractions serve as subtleties and add

                   Refinement to the rise and fall of dull,

                   Blunt numbers shuffled indisputably:

                   And what is death but mathematics where

                   The numbers graduate to higher planes

                   And leave a "terrifying" interest?)

                   Yet, something beyond pain within your shriek

                   Would indicate, black man, that sky-large brains

                   Can stumble in their count and recognize

                   An eerie, unrelenting quality

                   Forever in revolt against their plans.

                   Emotion and its choking metaphors

                   Insist that two times two is never quite

                   The four that "life" methodically brands

                   On nations and the ceaseless pain of men.

                   You were accused of tendering a strong,

                   Experimental hatred to the frail,

                   Intense obstruction of a woman's flesh,

                   And endlessly you squawked your innocence.

                   But crime and justice do not live beyond

                   The point where death, with one, efficient whim,

                   Corrects the tongues of bungling, churlish men.

Claxton, Guy.  ­Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind.­  U.S.A.:  1997. ISBN 0880016221, Pages 4, 5 and 6

The individuals and societies of the West have rather lost touch with the value of contemplation.  Only active thinking is regarded as productive.  Sitting gazing absently at your office wall or out of the classroom window is not of value.   Yet many of those whom our society admires as icons of creativity and wisdom have spent much of their time doing nothing.  Einstein, it is said, would frequently be found in his office At Princeton staring into space.  The Dalai Lama spends hours each day in meditation.  Even that paragon of penetrating insight, Sherlock Holmes, is described by his creator as entering a meditative state 'with a dreaming vacant expression in his eyes'.

There are a number of reasons why slow knowing has fallen into disuse.  Partly it is due to our changing conception of, and attitude towards, time.  In pre-seventeenth-century Europe a leisurely approach to thinking was much more common, and in other cultures it still is.  A tribal meeting at a Maori marae can last for days, until everyone has had time to assimilate the issues, to have their say, and to form a consensus.  However, the idea that time is plentiful is in many parts of the world now seen as laughably old-fashioned and self-indulgent.

Swedish anthropologist Helena Norberg-Hodge has documented the way in which the introduction of Western  culture has radically altered the pace of life in the traditional society of Ladakh, for example.  Until ten years ago, a Ladakhi wedding lasting a fortnight.  But their lifestyle rapidly altered following the introduction of some simple 'labour-savings' changes:  tools, such as the Rotovator, to make ploughing quicker and easier; and some new crops  and livestock, such as dairy cows.  Compared to the traditional yak, cows yield more milk than a family needs,  creating a surplus which can be turned into cheese and sold to bring in some extra cash.  While there is no harm in  taking life a little easier, in encouraging families to accumulate a little 'wealth', unfortunately this apparently benign  aid package' also gave the Ladakhis a new view of time – as something in short supply.  Instead of the Rotovators and the cows generating more leisure, they have in fact reduced it.  People are now busier than they were:  busy  creating wealth -- and 'saving time'.  Today a Ladakhi wedding lasts less than a day, just like an English one.  Within the Western mindset, time becomes a commodity, and one inevitable consequence is the urge to 'think faster':  to solve problems and make decisions quickly.

Partly the decline of slow thinking is to do with the rise of what the American social critic Neil Postman has called 'technopoly' -- the widespread view that every ill is a problem which has a potential solution; solutions are provided  by technological advances, which are generated by clear, purposeful, disciplined thinking; and the faster problems are solved, the better.  Thus, as the Ladakhis have recently joined us in believing, time is an adversary over which technology can triumph.  For Postman, technolopoly is based on  the beliefs that the primary, if not the only goal of  human labour and thought is efficiency; that technical   calculation is in all respects superior to human judgment;   that in fact human judgment cannot be trusted, because it   is plagued by laxity, ambiguity, and unnecessary    complexity; that subjectivity is an obstacle to clear   thinking; that what cannot be measured either does not  exist or is of no value; and that the affairs of citizens are best guided and conducted by 'experts.'

In such a culture, time spent exploring the question is only justified to the extent that it clearly leads towards a solution to the problem.  To spend time dwelling on the question to see if it may lead to a deeper question seems inefficient, self-indulgent or perverse.

In contemporary 'Western' society (which now effectively covers the globe), we seem to have generated an inner, psychological culture of speed, pressure and the need for control -- mirroring the outer culture of efficiency and productivity -- in which access to the slower modes of mind has been lost.  People are in a hurry to know, to have answers, to plan and solve.  We urgently want explanations: Theories of Everything, from marital mishaps to the  origin of the universe.  We want more data, more ideas; we want them faster; and we want them, with just a little  thought, to tell us clearly what to do.

We find ourselves in a culture which has lost sight (not least in its education system) of some fundamental distinctions, like those between being wise, being clever, having your 'wits' about you, and being merely well informed.  We have been inadvertently trapped in a single mode of mind that is characterised by information-gathering, intellect and impatience, one that requires you to be explicit, articulate, purposeful and to show your reasoning.   We are thus committed (and restricted) to those ways of knowing that can function in such a high-speed  mental climate:  predominantly those that use language (or other symbol systems) as a medium and deliberation as a method.   As a culture we are, in consequence, very good at solving analytic and technological problems.  The  trouble is that we tend, increasingly, to treat all human predicaments as if they were of this type, including those for which such mental tools are inappropriate.  We meet with cleverness, focus and deliberation those challenges that can only properly be handled with patience, intuition and relaxation.

To tap into the leisurely ways of knowing, one must dare to wait.  Knowing emerges from, and is a response to, not-knowing.  Learning -- the process of coming to know -- emerges from uncertainty.  Ambivalently, learning seeks to reduce uncertainty, by transmuting the strange into the familiar, but it also needs to tolerate uncertainty, as the seedbed in which ideas germinate and responses form.  If either one of these two aspects of learning predominates, then the balance of the mind is disturbed.  If the passive acceptance of not-knowing overwhelms the active search  for meaning and control, then one may fall into fatalism and dependency.  While if the need for certainty becomes intemperate, undermining the ability to tolerate confusion, then one may develop a vulnerability to demagoguery  and dogma, liable to cling to options and beliefs that may not fit the bill, but which do assuage the anxiety.

Town asked to improve energy efficiency  By DANIEL BARLOW Brattleboro Reformer Thursday, March 11, 2004

BRATTLEBORO—Paul Cameron sees the $10,000 in funding he is asking for as more than just his group’s budget for the coming year—it’s an investment in the future of the community. Cameron, the head of the nonprofit group Brattleboro Climate Protection, is asking the Brattleboro Town Meeting Representatives on March 20 for the funding so that his group can continue working on a plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in town.

“I look at it as a moderate investment in Brattleboro’s future,” said Cameron on Wednesday. “The result will be lower taxes, cleaner air and an improved quality of life.”

Part of an international movement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve energy efficiency, the local group is part of the Cities for Climate Protection campaign, an effort that has taken root in 550 local

governments, including 150 in the United States. Other nearby towns that have similar groups include Burlington, Keene, N.H., and Amherst, Mass. The Brattleboro group was formed in June 2002 and has an office in the planning office at the municipal center. It has worked with town and school officials on a plan to reduce emissions in town-owned buildings and Brattleboro’s elementary schools by 20 percent over the next six years.

The group is also seeking to reduce emissions throughout town by 10 percent by 2010 and plans to launch a campaign later this year to sign up local businesses. Companies such as Fibermark and Putney Paper Co.  have expressed interest, said Cameron.

Under the current plan, reducing the town’s emissions and increasing buildings’ energy efficiency would mean no initial financial contribution, explained Cameron; instead the cost of the energy audit and retrofitting would be taken from the savings made by the alterations. The town currently spends more than $700,000 annually on energy and the town’s elementary schools spend approximately $135,000. It is estimated that around $84,000 will be saved each year if the town buildings and elementary schools reduce energy consumption by 10 percent, Cameron said. “That will save the taxpayers money,” said Cameron. “That is funds that can be used for other town services.”

Among the accomplishments in 2002 was the conversion of some of the Windham Solid Waste District’s vehicles to biodiesel, the introduction of a biodiesel pump at the Fleming Oil Co. station in West Chesterfield, N.H., and hosting an energy-effecient workshop attended by representatives from approximately 40 Brattleboro businesses.

In Burlington, a group similar to Brattleboro Climate Protection has been active since 1996, and city and state buildings in the area have signed up for the 10 percent challenge, said Debra Sachs, the director of that group. In the past few years, hundreds of households in Burlington have signed up for the challenge and recently 200 employees at IBM signed up and vowed to look at transportation alternatives to and from work to reduce vehicle emissions.

“It’s amazing how it has really taken on a life of its own,” said Sachs.“We have a very transparent and transferable program that others can take and make their own.” Brattleboro Climate Protection has typically been funded through a combination of grants, private donations and town funds. In 2003 the town gave the group $8,500 and donations and grants gave the effort another boost of $12,000.

Selectboard member and supporter of the climate group Pat DeAngelo said the effort is a “win-win” for the town’s finances and the town’s environment. “Let’s say the audit comes back and says it will cost $30,000 to implement the recommendations,” she said. “Well, that seems like a lot of money, but not once you factor in what the town will be saving each year by implementing it.”

“Plus we are cleaning up our air and improving the health of everyone in town,” she added.

Looking to the future, Cameron said his group plans to have local businesses sign up to the 10 percent challenge via a Web site to track their emission reduction efforts. There are also plans to establish an award program for the companies that improve their efficiency.

The group will also continue to push biodiesel as a healthy alternative, coordinate more workshops and look for other opportunities to use wood-chip heating systems. If the $10,000 allocation is not approved at town meeting, the impact on the group’s efforts is not clear, said Cameron. The group’s efforts would likely look much different, he explained, if the funding support from the town did not get approved.

“It’s going to save money for the town,” he said. “There are real gains here.”

PRICELESS: On Knowing the Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing, by Frank Ackerman and Lisa Heinzerling,  The New Press, 270 pp., $25.95  reviewed by Osha Gray Davidson in OnEarth from the Natural Resources Defense Council, Spring 2004

A doctor, an architect, and an economist were sitting in a bar arguing over who had the most important profession. "Clearly, it's surgery," claimed the doctor. "After all, God created Eve by removing one of Adam's ribs."  The architect disagreed, saying that her job was by far the most important. "Way before Adam and Eve, God built the heavens and the earth out of chaos," she insisted.

The economist leaned back in his chair, smiled, and said quietly, "And who do you think created the chaos?"  The joke, of course, is that economists claim to bring order to a chaotic world. But the humor seems more apt than amusing these days, with the Bush administration shredding decades of environmental laws, often justifying its actions with an economic strategy -- cost-benefit analysis -- that seems perfectly reasonable but is in truth fundamentally flawed.

When the Bush administration announced in 2001 that it was appointing economist John Graham to head the little-known Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the White House bureaucracy that reviews regulations proposed by the various government agencies, it claimed that Graham would bring order to the way the federal government regulates everything from the amount of mercury a coal-burning power plant can release, to how many trees we should log from our national forests. But instead of order, Graham's obsession with cost-benefit analysis has brought more chaos -- and controversy.

Among the bizarre concepts Graham has championed is the notion that older people are worth less than the young. According to this logic, if Regulation A would save the lives of 50 3-year-olds each year, at a fixed cost, that might be worth doing. But Regulation B, which would save the lives of 50 elderly citizens each year at the same cost, would get scratched. That's because by already having lived many years, the elderly have, in effect, used up much of their value to society.

Graham's championing of this "life expectancy" approach (or "senior death discount," as critics call it) so outraged advocates for the elderly that last May, then-administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency Christie Whitman was forced to assure the public that the agency wasn't basing any of its decisions on Graham's calculation that the lives of people past 70 are worth precisely 37.8 percent less than the lives of everyone else.

That's not to say that there's anything wrong with the underlying principle of cost-benefit. We all use it to make decisions every day. Let's say you want to buy a mountain bike, for example. You find a mid-priced one that you like, with good rear shocks. The salesperson, however, steers you toward a "state-of-the-art" model, with rear and front shocks, a superlight frame, and hydraulic disc brakes. Just one problem: It costs three times as much as the bike you selected. So you think about your dwindling bank balance and that looming mortgage payment. You consider that you're likely to use the bike only a couple of weekends a month. It'd be great to have the primo model, but, all things considered, you decide it makes more sense to go with the less expensive bike.

What you just did in your head was a quick cost-benefit analysis. It's clearly reasonable and helpful when used properly, but problems arise and multiply when policy makers use it as their primary tool to evaluate proposed environmental and health policies, such as whether to put a limit on the pollutants that cause global warming. As Frank Ackerman and Lisa Heinzerling make clear in their important new book, Priceless, when cost-benefit analysis is misused, as it is in the Bush White House, it becomes, literally, a formula for disaster.

"[This economic] theory gives us opaque and technical reasons to do the obviously wrong thing," they conclude. "Cost-benefit analysis promotes a deregulatory agenda under the cover of scientific objectivity."

There are a number of reasons why this is so, and Ackerman (an economist at Tufts University) and Heinzerling (a law professor at Georgetown) do an excellent job of explaining the many deficiencies of cost-benefit, and they do it in clear, jargon-free prose -- no small feat when writing about economics.

They point out that costs of regulations are easy to quantify, while benefits are not. It's one thing to put a price tag on the cost of new "scrubbers" to remove pollutants from smokestacks. But to do a cost-benefit analysis, you have to compare that cost to its purported benefit, and how do you decide how much clean air is worth? Scientists may be able to estimate how many lives will be saved by such a regulation, but economists then have to convert those lives into dollars -- a slippery business. And that's not all they have to do, because air pollution doesn't just kill people outright, it is also responsible for a variety of chronic ailments such as bronchitis and asthma. How will those be "monetized" (the economic term for fixing a dollar value to intangibles -- a necessary bit of jargon in this debate)? And what about something even more abstract, such as the psychological benefit to parents who live downwind from less-polluting smokestacks and who know that their children are not at increased risk for developing respiratory illnesses? What dollar figure do you put on that? In practice, what happens most often, as the authors point out, is that if economists can't monetize it, they ignore it. And many of the benefits of environmental regulations, from the sense of tranquility fostered by an open landscape to the biodiversity of a forest left unlogged, resist monetization. When forced into a narrow economic framework, Ackerman and Heinzerling argue, the benefits of environmental regulations will nearly always be understated.

While costs are easy to translate into dollars, they are also easy to inflate. Consider the case of vinyl chloride, a chemical used in a variety of manufacturing processes and a known carcinogen. In 1974, the government proposed lowering the maximum daily amount that workers could be exposed to vinyl chloride from 200 parts per million (ppm) to one ppm. Industry executives howled that the new regulation would bankrupt them. Compliance, they maintained, could cost upward of $90 billion. The government adopted the rule anyway. A few years later, a study found that compliance had actually cost $278 million. Why? Because when forced to lower worker exposure, business did what it does best: It innovated, designing new technologies to lower costs.

Decades later, regulation-phobic industries are still spending a lot of money trying to hamper the government's ability to effectively regulate them. Before going to work for the White House, John Graham founded and directed the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, its funding provided by large corporations, many of which have demonstrated a staunch antiregulatory agenda: General Motors, Union Carbide, Exxon, to name a few. It's hardly surprising, then, that a 1995 study coauthored by Graham purports to show how regulations -- when not subject to the scientific rigors of cost-benefit analysis -- can end up being wildly expensive and of meager benefit. Ackerman and Heinzerling take the study apart and instead demonstrate how Graham manipulated data to achieve the results he wanted. Judging by the regulations Graham cites, it's hard to imagine how the country remains solvent.

Take one measure limiting the emissions of chloroform at paper mills. Graham's study showed that, for every year of human life saved, the regulation would cost industry a whopping $99 billion. What he fails to make clear is that the measure was never put into law. No government agency even advocated that it be put into law. Graham's analysis, and more significantly how it has been portrayed by antiregulatory conservatives, muddles the distinction among actual regulations, measures that were considered and rejected (precisely because they weren't cost-effective), and others -- like the $99 billion example above -- that were never seriously considered at all.

On the surface, Graham's list suggests that government regulations are an undue burden on industries. But Ackerman and Heinzerling reveal that of the 10 most expensive regulations listed by Graham, nine were never enacted into law. This academic sleight of hand is troubling coming from a prestigious institution such as Harvard. But when such misrepresentations are the work of an individual who becomes a powerful government official -- one whose decisions affect the fate of Americans' health and the environment for generations to come -- it's downright scary.

The most essential feature of cost-benefit analysis, at least when it's used to decide among public health and safety regulations, is also its most troublesome, and that is the belief that economists can accurately calculate the value of a human life. Proponents like John Graham defend this notion with near religious zeal, but are economists really able to produce such a number? Well, in 2002 the Bush administration said that for the purpose of cost-benefit studies, it would value each human life at $3.7 million. Yet, just two years earlier, the Clinton administration determined that a human life is worth $6.1 million -- a figure that's 65 percent higher. There are scores of economists out there, each pushing his own "life valuation" equation. Some say a human life is worth only $100,000; others say it's worth $12 million. The enormous range shows the absurdity of the exercise itself. But it's especially ironic that the conservative, "pro-life" Bush administration would choose a formula that dramatically devalues human life -- at least when it comes to regulating the polluting industries that have contributed large amounts to the president's campaign coffer.

The holy grail of cost-benefit analysis -- the true monetary value of a human life -- won't be found in even the most complicated equations, assert Ackerman and Heinzerling. Human life, they write, is literally priceless, as are many of the other things economists like Graham rack their brains to put a price tag on. What formula will tell us how much the remaining 90 wild California condors are worth? How much would you take for the Grand Canyon?

Environmentalists who play the dollar game may win those battles where the monetary benefits of what is being saved are easy to calculate, but they will eventually lose the war. By trying to determine the value of nature (in 1997, one group of eco-minded economists and scientists put a price tag of $33 trillion on the entire biosphere), they concede the premise of cost-benefit analysis: that everything has a price, and what doesn't have a price has no value. Ackerman and Heinzerling argue persuasively that values -- the nonmonetary kind -- are really what should be at the heart of crafting policies to protect our health, safety, and the environment. Ardent cost-benefit advocates such as Graham believe that they can reduce the complicated mechanics of democratic decision making to mathematical formulas. But, as the authors write, when it comes to these vital issues "there is no formula... For good decisions, public debate and participation are essential." The authors' alternative to the cost-benefit binge of the current administration is that we stop believing that there is a perfectly objective, scientific method out there that will essentially make our regulatory decisions for us, and instead embrace spirited public debate. Not a bad idea for a democracy.

In their final chapter they offer some basic principles to guide the discussion -- "an attitude rather than an algorithm." If the authors are less successful in articulating these principles than they are in debunking cost-benefit, that's understandable and perhaps inevitable. After all, it is easier to pick apart algorithms than it is to delineate an attitude. The principles they offer are admirable (who could argue with the proposition that policies should "promote fairness"?), but they're a bit fuzzy, and we've heard them all before. That doesn't mean they're wrong -- just that they don't add anything particularly new to the debate.

But this one small fault shouldn't detract from Ackerman and Heinzerling's very real achievement: Priceless exposes a little-known but significant and fatal flaw at the heart of the Bush administration's antiregulatory crusade.

Efficiency cannot be placed above equity, THE TIMES OF INDIA,    FRIDAY, APRIL 02, 2004  COUNTERVIEW                                         

The case against reservations in the private sector does not stand up to scrutiny as it is based on a priori notions decontextualised from social reality. One such unquestioned virtue is 'efficiency', or the pursuit of profit through optimal utilisation of resources, both material and human.

Human resources are considered to be most efficient when, in the employer's perception, they possess the qualifications to perform the specific tasks assigned to them. It is, however, far from realistic to assume that the 'best' persons are employed, since all forms of recruitment, public or private, suffer from arbitrariness and subjectivity.

'Merit' and 'efficiency' are given the go-by even in the private sector, more so in large organisations where self-serving bureaucracies pursuing goals other than profit maximisation run the show. Economists such as Joseph Schumpeter, William Baumol and J K Galbraith have pointed to the role of the faceless technocracy in these organisations. Therefore, efficiency would not be compromised if reservations were introduced to address social concerns.

A moot point is whether efficiency should be pursued at the expense of equity in a poor, labour-abundant country such as ours. Efficiency is a concept that derives from labour-scarce economies which need to focus on improving the productivity of each individual. In India , pure efficiency would leave out of the economy and market a sea of individuals, thereby not only creating social schisms but also reducing the size of the market. The deepening of the market as opposed to its widening may not yield quite the same results for the entrepreneurial class, because satiated people consume less.

Therefore, a broader market comprising diverse cultures will recompense what is arguably lost by way of merit or efficiency. Corporates in the US pursue affirmative action more out of enlightened self-interest than altruism. Finally, private capital cannot be isolated from the public, just as the private sphere of the individual cannot be delinked from her social existence. The pursuit of a reservations-free domain seems just as illusory as that of a free market.

Myers, David G., Ph.D.  “Does Economic Growth Improve Human Morale?”  Newsletter from the ­Center for a New American Dream­  1997 Page 3

As a young man fresh out of college, I served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in rural Nepal.  My one-room house had no electricity, no heat, no indoor toilet, no running water.  The local diet offered little variety and virtually no meat...  Yet, although my living conditions in Nepal were a bit startling at first, the most salient feature of my experience was how quickly they came to seem normal.  Within a matter of weeks, I lost all sense of impoverishment.  Indeed, my monthly stipend was more than most others had in my village, and with it I experienced a feeling of prosperity that I have recaptured only in recent years.  [Citing  Robert H Frank:  “The Empty Wealth of Nations,” Unpublished manuscript, Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University, 1996.]

Blumm, Michael. “The fallacies of free market environmentalism.” Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, Spring92, Vol. 15, Issue 2, p371, 19p

The liberty of those who emit air pollutants, discharge water contaminants, or dispose of hazardous waste materials may well be increased. But those exposed to environmental degradation lose liberty. And the numbers of liberty-losers typically outnumber considerably the liberty-gainers. Whether aggregate liberty is gained from market transactions is difficult to ascertain, but it is clear that some of the liberty-losers pay enormous health costs….

Unfortunately, it is a fantastic myth. Markets persistently fail to produce the ecological and health information necessary to allocate efficiently environmental resources. By focusing exclusively on “willingness to pay,” markets assume the wisdom of current preferences and the fairness of existing wealth distribution. They also carve out a significant role for the judiciary, the least representative branch of government, to allocate environmental resources. For these reasons, markets cannot supplant government intervention to correct environmental market failure.

Goldsmith, Edward, et al.  ­The Future of Progress.­  1995.

Page 11

The economic paradigm

According to modern economics, a continuous increase in economic output is necessary, both to increase prosperity and to solve environmental and social problems.  This belief, in fact, underlies the policies of every government, regardless of their position on the political spectrum.  A narrowly defined criterion of economic efficiency is used to plan and administer economies, and factors that can be reduced to monetary value are given primary importance.  Production choices are dictated by those who wield power in the money economy.

Page 12

The economic growth imperative compels businesses to constantly grow, to find new markets, resources, and areas of life to colonise.  Products are made to wear out sooner than necessary.  Marketing professionals use whatever means are available, including the creation of new 'needs', to stimulate consumer spending.

Page 94

Development has brought not only tourism, but also Western and Indian films and, more recently, television.  Together they provide overwhelming images of luxury and power.  There are countless tools and magical gadgets.  And there are machines -- machines to take pictures, machines to tell the time, machines to make fire, to travel from one place to another, to talk with someone far away.  Machines can do everything for you; it's no wonder the tourists look so clean and have such soft, white hands. 

Media images focus on the rich, the beautiful, and the brave, whose lives are endless action and glamour.  For young Ladakhis, the picture is irresistible.  It is an overwhelmingly exciting version of an urban 'American Dream', with an emphasis on speed, youthfulness, super-cleanliness, beauty, fashion and competitiveness.  Progress" is also stress:  humans dominate nature, while technological change is embraced at all costs.

In contrast to these utopian images from another culture, village life seems primitive, silly and inefficient.  The one-dimensional view of modern life becomes a slap in the face.  Young Ladakhis -- who are asked by their parents to choose a way of life that involves working in the fields and getting their hands dirty for very little or no money -- feel ashamed of their own culture.  Traditional Ladakh seems absurd compared with the world of the tourists and film heroes.

This same pattern is being repeated in rural areas all over the South, where millions of young people believe modern Western culture to be far superior to their own.  This is not surprising:  looking as they do from the outside, all they can see is the material side of the modern world – the side in which Western culture excels.  They cannot so readily see the social or psychological dimensions – the stress, the loneliness, the fear of growing old.  Nor can they see environmental decay, inflation, or unemployment.   On the other hand, they know their own culture inside out, including all its limitations and imperfections.

Harrington Emerson, The Twelve Principles Of Efficiency The Engineering Magazine Co., New York, 1919, Page 376

Woman brings a baby into the world, but men organize a million grown babies into an army; a woman feeds her infant from her own breast, but men organize a commissariat department that encircles the world; woman teaches each separate human being to rise from all fours and walk like a man, but a von Moltke speaks the word and a million men tramp in time and measure; woman chews hides and greases them and smokes them into the softest leather, out of which she cuts and sews moccasins, but men take the hides of five continents and cut them into a million pairs of shoes a week; woman spins her single thread and weaves it into cloth men run their thousand spindles and weave their miles of fabrics; woman makes tepees, but men build hundred-story-high skyscrapers, housing 20,000 people; woman croons her lullaby to her restless baby, but men organize grand opera, develop the phonograph; woman whispers to her lover at the tryst, but men by speech to multitudes secure presidential  nominations and pile up for the presidency a million votes more than the triumphantly elected Cleveland; men connect their offices with all the other business offices in the country and shout their affairs across the continent, or send their danger calls two-thousand miles through the air.

Sarewitz, Daniel R.  Frontiers of Illusion.  1996.  ISBN 1566394155, Page 124

The raison d’etre of both the basic research system and capitalism is the pursuit of growth of knowledge and insight in the one case, and of productivity and wealth in the other.  And the key to growth in each case is the self-interested motivations of the individual—of individual scientists pursuing their curiosity and individual consumers maximizing their utility.  The cumulative effect of all this selfish action is progress for all.  But the analogy goes deeper, in that the rhetoric of both basic research and the free market is rooted in an efficiency ethic that gives primacy to magnitude of growth while viewing direction of growth as intrinsically unpredictable and thus outside the domain of government control.  From this perspective it is the job of the government to encourage growth of the knowledge base and of the economy but not to try to influence the character of this growth in any way. 

George Washington, First State of the Union Address, January 8, 1790 in New York City

I shall derive great satisfaction from a cooperation with you... in the pleasing—though arduous task --...  of ensuring to our fellow citizens the blessings they have a right to expect.. from a free, efficient, and equal Government.

Mission Statement of the Million Man March --www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/dec95albert.htm

"We, the Black men and women, the organizations and persons participating in this historic Million Man March…concerned about increasing racism and the continuing commitment to white supremacy in this country; deteriorating social conditions, degradation of the environment and the impact of these on our community, the larger society, and the world…"

"We begin our challenge to corporations by rejecting the widespread notion … that corporations have no social responsibility except to maximize profit within the rules of an open and competitive market… The weight of corporations in modern life is overwhelming and their commitment to maximizing profit and technological efficiency can and often does lead to tremendous social costs such as deteriorating and dangerous working conditions, massive layoffs, harmful products projected as beneficial, environmental degradation, deindustrialization, corporate relocation, and disinvestment in social structures and development

Zeldin, Theodore,  Philosophical Anthropology: An Intimate History of Humanity, New York:  1994, ISBN 006017160X, Page 469

In ancient times, justice was blind, unable to recognize the humanity that is in everybody.  In modern times it has been one-eyed, narrowly focused on the principle of impersonality, imposing the same rules on everybody so as to avoid nepotism and favouritism, but unable to notice what people feel when they are treated impersonally and coldly, however justly or efficiently.  The impersonal monetary compensations of the welfare state have not been able to heal the wounds of unfairness, because nothing can compensate adequately for a wasted life, least of all when even in the USA, which has studied efficiency to its limits, it takes seven tax dollars to get one additional dollar of income into the hands of a poor person.  Only with both eyes open is it possible to see that humans have always needed not just food and shelter, health and education, but also work that is not soul-destroying and relationships that do more than keep loneliness out, humans need to be recognized as persons.

Bruce Springsteen, CBS News, Interview on 60 Minutes, New York:  1996 Page 11 of the transcript

Mr. Springsteen:  In my opinion, it was the failed policies; you know, that the efficiency of the economy is not the most paramount thing.  A country’s judged not by just its accomplishments, but by its compassion, the health and welfare of its citizens, you know.  That’s the—that’s the core of its spirit.

Sclove, Richard, Democracy And Technology, New York:  1995.  ISBN 089862861X, Page 48

What of the concern that strong democracy could be grossly inefficient—wasteful of time and hazardous to prosperity? As with competing forms of social organization, there are such risks.  But this concern may also involve misconstruing the meaning of efficiency and the nature of strong democracy.

An action is efficient if it accomplishes its end without the unnecessary expenditure of scarce resources.  However, in a strong democracy social ends are not simply given.  They must be formulated via a strong democratic process.   Thus, rather than conceivably impairing economic efficiency, democracy is a precondition for legitimately specifying the ends with respect to which efficiency is defined.

Mark Twain, from Internet site Quoteland.com

"We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world; and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve men every day who don't know anything and can't read."

Gouyette, Claudine; Pestieau, Pierre “Efficiency of the Welfare State.” Kyklos, 1999, Vol. 52 Issue 4, p537, 17p, 5 charts, 3 graphs

To better grasp our approach, consider two countries that are identical in all respects but for the way their welfare state operates. In the first country social spending is allocated towards the truly poor households, or towards those facing unexpected income losses; transfer programs as well as the production of social services are run efficiently in terms of costs and resource utilization. In the second country, the picture is totally different: the Matthew effect prevails; administrative costs are rather high and productive efficiency in social services is low. It is pretty clear that in aggregate terms, efficiency is greater in the first country than in the second one and our aggregate measure would reflect this difference (obviously, the assumption that these two countries are identical in all other respects is crucial)….

The welfare state consists of two types of programs: transfer programs such as welfare, social security, unemployment insurance, and production of services by hospitals, day care and schools. The issue of efficiency in transfer programs can be considered in two ways: whether transfers are made to the right people and whether the financial intermediation is cost efficient. Efficiency in the provision of services is expressed in terms of resource utilization: can we produce the same quantity and quality of services with less resources, or conversely, can we produce more and better services with the same amount of resources?

We have seen that there exist clear inefficiencies in distributing services. Because of administrative complexity or fear of stigmatization, the most needy can fall outside the protection of the welfare state. Regarding the administrative cost of social insurance, particularly health and retirement insurance, a single public provider tends to be cheaper than a multiplicity of private firms. Finally, in the production of services, there are clear efficiency slacks, but they are not so dependent on ownership, public or private. What matters is competition and autonomy.

The conclusion to draw from this survey is clear. First, one needs to fight the Matthew effect, and if this is not possible, make transfers transparent and universalistic. Second, one needs to keep administrative costs at their current level, while at the same time maintain the quality of services provided. Third, one needs to introduce competition and autonomy in the management of social services. With an energetic efficiency-enhancing approach, the welfare state can recoup its credibility and recover desperately needed resources.

( The concept of ‘Matthew effect’ is used by sociologists in different areas (see, e.g., Deleeck et al. 1983). It is called after the ‘Parable of Talents’ as told in the Gospel according to Matthew: ‘For into every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath’, Matthew 25-29.)

Fermi, Rachel, Picturing The Bomb, New York, 1995:  ISBN 0810937352, Page 1

Because they understood the energetics of nuclear fission—the enormous output of energy for such a small input of material—the physicists also understood almost immediately that this unexpected discovery would have major political consequences.  One atomic bomb, probably not much bigger than an ordinary aerial bomb, certainly no bigger than a truck, could destroy a city.

Arthur M. Okun, Equality and Equity: The Big Tradeoff, Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1975, Pages 6 and 10

Features of Rights

An obvious feature of rights—in sharp contrast with economic assets—is that they are acquired and exercised without any monetary charge.  Because citizens do not normally have to pay a price for using their rights, they lack the usual incentive to economize on exercising them....

Second, because rights are universally distributed, they do not invoke the economist’s principle of comparative advantage that tells people to specialize in the things they do particularly well.  Everybody can get into the act, including some who are not talented actors....

A third characteristic of rights is that they are not distributed as incentives, or as rewards or penalties.  Unlike the dollar prizes of the marketplace or the non-pecuniary honors and awards elsewhere, extra rights and duties are not used to channel behavior into socially constructive pursuits....

A century ago, that advocate of thoroughgoing laissez-faire, Herbert Spencer, opposed a host of universally distributed public services, resting his criticisms on several grounds, including disincentive effects....

Fourth, the distribution of rights stresses equality even at the expense of equity and freedom.  When people differ in capabilities, interests and preferences, identical treatment is not equitable treatment, at least by some standards.

That most important principle—that rights cannot be bought or sold—is the final characteristic on my list.  The owner may not trade a right away to another individual either for extra helpings of other rights or for money or goods....

The Reasons for Rights

Why then does society establish these inefficient rights?  The justifications for rights take three routes—libertarian, pluralistic, and humanistic.

Liberty

To the advocate of laissez-faire, many rights protect the individual against he encroachment of the state, and thus convey benefits that far outweigh any cost of economic inefficiency....

The traditional rationale for public interference with market exchange and for the public provision of services rests on so-called “externalities,” which involve the interests of third parties.  Environmental regulations are necessary because the pollution of the air and the water by one individual harms innocent bystanders.

Pluralism

Rights can then be viewed as a protection against the market domination that would arise if everything could be bought on sold for money.  Everyone but an economist knows without asking why money shouldn’t buy some things....  Society refuses to turn itself into a giant vending machine that delivers anything and everything for the proper number of coins.

Humanism

These rights that are obtained without a quid pro quo recognize the worth of every citizen in the society.  They go along with membership in the club.  They then become the hallmarks of affiliation, a part of human dignity, and take on added significance for that reason.  Because they are entitlements and not handouts, people can accept them freely without feeling like freeloaders.

Norgard, Jorgen S.  Declining Efficiency in the Economy.  Denmark:  1996.  ISSN 13964038, Page 281

The only way economic growth can continue in a society where people’s economic wants are already rather satisfied is to provide satisfaction in a more inefficient way.  One way is to convince people to prefer be