But I should complain? My brother, who lives in southeast Idaho, reported that wind speeds reached 111 mph! That was enough to blow over a semi on I-15. Now that’s windy.

That’s because all of the candidates, save Ron Paul, champion more tax cuts. With lower tax rates, the federal government faces reduced revenues. If there are no corresponding reductions in spending, the annual deficits and the accumulated debt skyrocket.

That’s the judgment of U.S. Budget Watch, which released its analysis of the GOP candidates’ tax plans. You can view the report here (pdf). Here’s a chart from the report.

From the report’s executive summary:

Historically, debt held by the public has averaged less than 40 percent of GDP since 1970. Today’s debt is roughly 70 percent of GDP and rising fast, particularly due to the retirement of the baby boom population and rapid health care cost growth. The United States is currently at a crossroads, where fundamental but thoughtful changes can be made now, or else far more painful ones can be forced upon us down the road.

You’ll note that by 2021, Gingrich’s proposals, if enacted, would boost the nation’s debt to more than 110% of GDP. Santorum’s plan would be slightly less, at nearly 105% of GDP. Only Paul’s proposal would yield a debt-to-GDP ratio of less than 80% in the out-year.

Did you pick up on “thoughtful changes”? It has never occurred to me to associate ‘thoughtful’ with any one of the GOP candidates.

All the Republican candidates for president essentially want to make older people poorer.

Only in America.

If population continues to increase and if per-customer electricity consumption also increases, the PUD and other utilities experiencing the same trends will have to increase their power supplies, do even more conservation, or both.

As I mentioned above, the PUD has, since 2005, steadily increased its annual conservation numbers (aMW). Beginning in 2009 the PUD has broken the previous annual record every year. But, even this level of conservation has failed to arrest the rise in electricity consumption. Each of us, on average, is using more kilowatt-hours than before, and there are more of us each year.

Whatever we use today of finite resources will not be available for future generations. Also, with consumption comes waste, which must be disposed of. As we continue to pollute the air and the water and the land we create scarcities of public goods for future generations.

Yet, should we even care about the well-being of future generations? Do we have any moral obligations to make the planet habitable for our progeny?

Let’s try a thought experiment based on John Rawls’s discussion of “the original position.” Imagine that you are in a special room with nine others. Each of you ten represents the interests of a century’s worth of people. However, you don’t know which century you represent. It could be this century or it could have been five centuries ago. The point is, you don’t know. We’ll also assume for this experiment that there are no technological differences between centuries. Thus, what the tenth century could do with machines and gadgets and devices the first century could do, as well. In doing this I want to ignore the positive technological and intellectual capital that one generation bequeaths to the next, so that there is no cost-benefit analysis going on from one generation to another, as in, “I’ll put up with the stinky, rotten air because I’ve got this great Blackberry to play with.” (That’s so 20th century.)

Let’s also assume that there is a grand moderator who tasks the group with making energy resource decisions behind this “veil of ignorance.” How do you decide?

If you knew you represented the earliest of the ten centuries, you might not give a damn about what you leave behind. If you were the second century, you might experience a little less of this and a little more of that; but in total, your well-being is not all that different from the first century’s. However, by the tenth century, the accumulation of I-don’t-give-a-damn decisions leaves you with nine centuries’ worth of garbage, polluted air, global warming, food insecurity, and so on. If you could, you’d ring the necks of the other nine.

But, again, you don’t know which century you represent. If you imagine that your century is at the mid-point or closer to the last, you would very well prefer that the previous centuries had behaved themselves, and didn’t leave the planet worse off than when they found it. Indeed, because you don’t know, you’re likely to make decisions that do no harm, or as little as possible, since you could be on the receiving end of, well, a whole lot of shit. And no one likes shit.

I’ll assume that you generally appreciate the implications of this little thought experiment, and that you understand the do-no-harm principle under the “veil of ignorance.” So, what kind of energy resource decisions do you make?

We might consider those things we would not do, for fear that we could be on the receiving end. Here’s a brief list:

• mine, pulverize, then burn all the coal under the ground
• extract oil from tar sands that is later burned
• buy and drive gas guzzlers
• extract and burn all the natural gas you can find
• cut down all the trees and burn them to make room for petroleum-based agriculture
• toss all your used batteries and gadgets into the garbage
• have more than two children
• increase your consumption of electricity

These things that we’d likely not do look awfully familiar, because that’s pretty much what we do today. Suppose we avoid doing them all. Is that enough? Hardly.

You still need electricity to do just about everything, from running your alarm clock to drying your hair to warming up leftovers to powering your computers and gadgets to keeping the lights on. You may also need it to keep warm, especially if you live in a multi-family dwelling.

Can we continue to operate our devices without using up all the resources and leaving the planet in a mess? Maybe, but it will take a different mindset.

First of all, from this thought experiment we can gain a keener understanding of sustainability. We cannot exhaust finite resources as if there were no tomorrow. But are there enough renewable resources to provide our electricity needs over ten centuries and more?

On a positive note, consider that almost all of the electricity consumed by PUD customers is renewable, and most of that is hydro. Only a tiny fraction of the supply comes from fossil-fuel generation plants, and that’s only because the utility is forced at times to buy power from the market. Since that market is largely defined by the regional transmission grid, each utility served by that system can and does use power generated by coal and natural gas plants in Montana, Oregon, Idaho, and any of eleven western states, plus parts of Canada and even northern Mexico.

However, if you lived just about anywhere else in the United States, most of your electricity is generated by combusting carbons. Are there enough renewable resources to replace indigenous coal and gas?

Back to conservation, by using scarce resources more efficiently there would be more electricity to go around, perhaps even enough for future generations. But trust me, that’s going to require a quantum leap in how we live, work, build and transport things, and get from here to there.

To be sure, I really don’t know if the entire population of the planet could meet its electricity needs from only renewable resources plus conservation. If we can’t figure out a way to do so, then we may be consigning future generations to misery and privation.

I’ll offer my quick answer. I don’t think we have the collective will to change course. We’ll continue as before, with a relative few managing to escape the negative externalities imposed by prior generations. The descendants of the Rest of Us will not be so lucky.

So, it appears that conservatives may get their wish as the U.S. Supreme Court takes up the case of Abigail Fisher, who sued the University of Texas for racial discrimination. Since the court had previously allowed for the use of race in a college’s admission selections, the mere fact that the court has placed Ms. Fisher’s case on its docket can mean only one thing: the court will reverse itself. It’s highly unlikely the court would consider the matter only to affirm its previous decision, since refusing the case would have the same effect.

Texas has an unusual admission’s policy. Any high school student graduating in the top ten percent of his or her class can attend the state’s public colleges and universities. Ms. Fisher, who is white, did not. She was therefore placed in a pool in which race is a factor for admissions. But when she was passed over by the University of Texas, she sued, charging that she was denied entrance because of race.

The complexion of the current court is decidedly conservative. It will be even more so since Justice Elena Kagan has recused herself, likely because as Obama’s solicitor general she was involved in the appellate process, according to the New York Times. Moreover, the court’s frequent swing vote belongs to Justice Kennedy, who, as the Times points out, has never voted to uphold an affirmative action policy. The numbers, then, are five against race-based policies and three in favor.

The Times suggests that this case, Fisher v. University of Texas, may have limited effect, even if the court rules in her behalf, which it is expected to do. However, as we learned from the Citizens United case, this court has no compunction about expanding its reach beyond the rather narrow issue at hand. Indeed, its ruling in the latter upended a hundred years of precedent regarding congressional restrictions on campaign finance.

It was Martin Luther King’s dream that we would eventually become a society that judged people by the “content of their character” rather than on the “color of their skin.” Conservatives, including those on the Supreme Court, have turned round that message, using it to preserve preferential treatment of white citizens.

Affirmative action policies were designed to compensate for generations of racial oppression, whites over people of color. The policy makers assumed that exclusive reliance on merit (e.g., GPA, SAT scores) would effectively reduce opportunities for non-white races. Implicit in this assumption was that years of oppression had denied to people of color those conditions that nurtured or enhanced childhood learning, conditions enjoyed almost exclusively by whites.* By taking affirmative action to redress race-based inequities, policy makers and courts hoped to diversify post-academic achievement.

With the court’s expected decision on Fisher v. University of Texas, admission policies at most, if not all, levels will be devoid of racial considerations. Color will no longer matter, thus perverting Dr. King’s dream.

____________

*  It does not follow that no white children suffer from impoverished conditions that prevent above-average academic performance. Indeed, in absolute numbers, more Caucasians live in poverty than do African Americans or Latinos.

See for yourself, via Brad DeLong. DeLong writes:

At the time, back at the start of 2009, arguments that the Recovery Act would not push the unemployment rate down over the two years after its enactment took one of three lines:

1. Unemployment is really not cyclical but structural, so whatever boost to spending it might generate would show up in higher prices and wages as businesses trying to satisfy demand bid against each other for a fixed pool of non-zero-marginal-product workers.
2. Government purchases must be financed by issuing government debt, and debt issues would push up interest rates and so would discourage private investment spending.
3. Government purchases must be financed by issuing government debt, and the future taxes needed to amortize the extra debt would frighten businesses and investors, so we would see equity prices tank as this fear would discourage private investment.

None of those things happened.

So there.

Serious questions about the fairness of capitalism are being raised. These are driven by sharp increases in unemployment beyond the business cycle – one in six of American men between 25 and 54 is likely to be out of work even after the economy recovers – combined with dramatic rises in the share of income going to the top 1 percent (and even the top 0.01 percent) of the population and declining social mobility. The problem is real and profound and seems very unlikely to correct itself untended.

Focus on that last line. The problem “seems very unlikely to correct itself untended.” This suggests more of the same, rising wealth amidst a shrinking middle class marked by high unemployment—unless someone tends.

How shall we tend?

Edsall cites Jeffrey Sachs, who advocates: “a social democracy — capitalism plus a hefty dose of state support for families, education, early childhood development, higher education, and active labor market policies — can still do the job. The performance of northern Europe, around 120 million people including Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Norway, provides a good illustration of this success.”

Readers of this blog will surely recognize that theme. But, as Edsall quickly points out, the Republicans, especially this current crop of presidential hopefuls, rebuke such a perceived turn toward “socialism,” exposing their ignorance, their cynicism, or both. If they are aware of the Nordic exception, they refuse to admit its lessons for fear of denigrating the U.S.A., which at all times and under all circumstances must be forever praised as the “shining beacon on a hill.”

Is the Great Divergence a sign of market failure? Not so, according to a couple of economists cited in Edsall’s piece.

In a paper published by the Council on Foreign Relations, Spence and co-author Sandile Hlatshwayo argue that the employment problems of the United States do not result from market failure. Just the opposite: the problems arise from an exceptionally efficient global marketplace. Instead of benefiting from the market, many in the United States, particularly those holding mid-level skill jobs that can be performed at lower cost overseas, are paying the costs of efficiency — the victims, in effect, of creative destruction.

All of which begs the question: What about the Nordic experience? Why doesn’t “an exceptionally efficient global marketplace” adversely impact Finland, or Sweden, or Norway as it allegedly does here? Why is “creative destruction” operating in the U.S. and not Germany and Denmark?

Edsall concludes his article thusly:

The debate over the workings of democracy, the market, technology and globalization remains unresolved. The political system instinctively avoids this debate, despite its salience and centrality, because the political costs of engagement are likely to substantially outweigh any potential gains. At an undetermined point in the not too distant future, however, as the “gale of creative destruction” blows through the heartland, the debate will become inescapable.

For better or worse, and I think it’s the latter, our political mechanisms, however defined or originated, thwart genuine tending. Edsall suggests that there are high “political costs of engagement.” I believe he’s correct. Neither side of the debate dares to address the fundamental problems of our economy, which is clearly not working for the Rest of Us. Instead the politicians appeal narrowly to their wealthy beneficiaries as they also stoke the fires of ideological hate.

In a previous post I mentioned an op-ed that appeared in the New York Times. Eric X. Li, a self-described “venture capitalist,” offered this gloomy assessment:

History does not bode well for the American way. Indeed, faith-based ideological hubris may soon drive democracy over the cliff.

I suspect that the very wealthy shrug off such premonitions. Regardless of what happens in America they will surely benefit, because their wealth allows them to exploit opportunities on a truly global scale. They are not, strictly speaking, Americans. Nor are they democratic in any meaningful sense. Rather, they are nation-neutral, just like the international economy; and they don’t give a damn about the Rest of Us, because they don’t have to. Indeed, we are a mere nuisance, at best, invisible, at least.

What I find truly pathetic is that the Rest of Us don’t seem to give a damn either. We’re as likely to chalk up our struggles to the natural order of things or the efficient operation of markets as to believe that all of this is deliberate, the continuing result of unopposed machinations funded and orchestrated by the One-percenters.

We are therefore right to condemn Congress and its corrupt politicians.* Yet, our political system was devised to give the people voice—”we the people” established a written constitution. As it turns out we are a representative democracy. Thus, we are supposed to rely on the people we elect to carry out our preferences. Therein lies the fatal flaw.

What we would prefer gains no traction, because our voice can hardly be heard over the din of unbridled capital. The folks we send to Washington elevate remaining in place to the highest priority. While they will need our votes to stay in office, how we vote is largely determined by campaign rhetoric, bought and paid for by monied interests. To assume that none of the propaganda makes a difference is to ignore what has happened in the Republican primaries. Candidates’s fortunes have risen and fallen in the minds of the voters by one slew of attack ads or another. This expensive negative shit matters.

Insofar as our “representatives” cotton to the well-heeled with impunity, there seems little prospect of crafting an alternative economy that benefits the Rest of Us—unless we dare think outside the political box. If the status quo isn’t working, we might consider something else.

All options are on the table. The debate is “inescapable.”

____________

*  Corrupt, def.: “having or showing a willingness to act dishonestly in return for money or personal gain.”

Before the game some bozos at ESPN and elsewhere decided that it would be cute to engage in double-entendres. The turnover-prone Lin contributed to the team’s lone defeat on Friday, since he’s become the team’s starting point guard. Thus, there’s a “chink in the armor.” Get it? Today ESPN fired one culprit and suspended another.

Dave Zirin reminds us that America is still full of racists, both conspicuous and quiet.

Boeing hardly deserves praise for a pro US jobs position. If it could bust the unions, it would. The 787 was one of the most ‘distributed’ projects to ever make the roadmap, creating a logistics nightmare for its project managers. Consequently, it was late and one can only hope the Sr. Management team understands the root cause. They might do well to read up on Conway’s law.

I admit to never having heard of Conway’s law, so I did the usual thing—checked Wikipedia. Here’s the link. I’ll give my layman’s summary, which may be terribly wrong.

The type of product producible by a firm is determined by both the architecture of that firm and its intra-architectural communications.

An example of Conway’s law in action is provided by Wikipedia:

A real life example: NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter crashed because one team used United States customary units (e.g., inches, feet and pounds) while the other used metric units for a key spacecraft operation. This information was critical to the maneuvers required to place the spacecraft in the proper Mars orbit. “People sometimes make errors,” said Dr. Edward Weiler, NASA’s Associate Administrator for Space Science. “The problem here was not the error, it was the failure of NASA’s systems engineering, and the checks and balances in our processes to detect the error. That’s why we lost the spacecraft.”

I’m not sure that this example really explains my limited understanding of the “law.” My friend, who used to work at Boeing, so he knows a bit about the company from the inside, faulted management for farming out the various components of its new 787, which Obama found “cool” on his recent visit. Those of us who live in Puget Sound can attest to the many-monthed delay in getting the plane up to snuff. There was, indeed, a “logistics nightmare” for project managers attempting to coordinate globe-based manufacturing, transportation, and assembly. This “distributed” network proved to be a horribly conceived and poorly executed strategy.

This got me thinking about Apple, the world’s most valuable company. However Apple is structured and whatever its processes, it continues to put out amazing products that customers can’t wait to snap up. Why Apple and not, say, Microsoft or Samsung, or any one of dozens of other would-be competitors? Could Conway’s law help explain?

Apple is a notoriously secret company, but there have been glimpses into its operations from Walter Isaacsons’s biography of Steve Jobs and Inside Apple, by Adam Lachinsky. Both emphasize Jobs’s propensity to say no. The key to success is not only having the best available people but also identifying core competencies and focusing intently on just a few products.

There are only four major product lines at Cupertino: iPod, iPhone, iPad, and the Mac. In turn, these products use the best software, and all of the products are integrated via just two online ecosystems: iTunes Store and the App Store. We can now add a third, iCloud, which is emerging as the wireless ligament connecting everything.

Jobs told Isaacson that Sony, which had controlled most of the mobile music market with its Walkman, couldn’t produce the iPhone or even the iPod-cum-iTunes. Why not? There were too many divisions in Sony and each was jealous of and competitive with the other. By contrast, Apple was more like a series of concentric circles with Jobs at the hub. (source)

Here’s Isaacson:

Indeed, Sony provided a clear counterexample to Apple. It had a consumer electronics division that made sleek products and a music division with beloved artists (including Bob Dylan). But because each division tried to protect its own interests, the company as a whole never got its act together to produce an end-to-end service.

During Jobs’s years in the wilderness, tending to Pixar and NeXT, many outsiders urged Apple to license its operating system to hardware vendors, just as Microsoft does with Windows. For a while Apple did just that, under Gil Amelio, its then-CEO. When Jobs returned to the company he co-founded one of his first moves was to cancel the licensing deals. He also aborted the Newton, John Sculley’s favorite device, but widely lampooned in the press and in Doonesbury. Jobs realized before, then, and forever that the key to producing “insanely great products” is to carefully wed both hardware design and operating systems, and he would preside over the weddings.

Microsoft can’t do this, because the company is all about software; it has no hardware experience. Likewise Google develops the Android operating system, which it gives away to dozens of original equipment manufacturers, including Amazon, Samsung, and HTC. Each of these companies’ devices vary, often in significant ways, from screen size to the placement and use of buttons. I pity third-party developers who must figure out a way to get their applications to run satisfactorily on a myriad of different units.

There’s a link to an academic paper in the Wikipedia entry on Conway’s law. Three professors at the Harvard Business school sought to look more carefully at how products might “mirror” the organizations that produce them. They came up with this table to differentiate between organizations.

I’d say that Apple fits comfortably under “tightly-coupled.” But it could have become a different company altogether had Steve Wozniak had his way. Apple would have been “loosely-coupled,” “decentralized,” and “emergent.” It would also be a much, much poorer company and probably would not have survived the “Homebrew Computer Club” populated by geeks and nerds, Wozniak’s kind of people.

I suspect that Apple’s competitors are not so easily pigeonholed. They likely share more of the “tightly-coupled” traits, though Google and Facebook, at least in their beginnings, could be described as “loosely-coupled,” encouraging their employees to informally collaborate on “emergent” products. Lachinsky tells us that Apple, by contrast, is a very serious place; employees are expected to work long and hard once they enter the front door, and they have to pay for their own lunches.

When Isaacson asked Jobs to name his proudest achievement, Jobs didn’t mention the iPhone or the iPad. No, his proudest achievement was Apple, the company. He was so certain that this was so that he quietly established Apple University, internal to the organization.

In 2008 Jobs hired Joel Podolny, the dean of the Yale School of Management to build then superintend the “university.” Podolyny developed case studies of Apple’s product development, the great, the so-so, and the ugly. They are taught by members of Apple’s senior management. It was clearly Jobs’s intention to create a lasting legacy for people who “think different.”

When it was becoming clear that Jobs was not long for this world pundits and analysts wondered aloud if Apple would continue its success. How much of Apple was Steve Jobs himself? Or had he really succeeded in building a lasting legacy, comfortable that his successors would keep the Apple ball rolling?

While it’s still early, there appear to be no signs of the company’s abating. It’s stock price is now over $500. The new iPad 3 is expected within weeks. Apple will release a new Mac operating system every year just as it does now with iOS. This fall the company will reveal the iPhone 5. There are rumors of a new television that will function much differently than current examples, though how differently is presently the stuff of rumors.

Meanwhile, Apple’s would-be competitors, which could be the entire electronics industry, are busy copying Cupertino’s products in look and feel—Exhibit A, Samsung, the shameless target of numerous patent violations filed by Apple’s lawyers. But I doubt that they will produce devices and software and ecosystems that will threaten Apple’s juggernaut. The reason may indeed have something to do with Conway’s law.

You can’t do Apple unless you are Apple. And there’s only one Apple.

Once again, after relative fiscal calm during the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations, deficits became the norm under the administrations of Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and the first Bush—and thus coinciding with the Great Divergence. It was only under the Clinton administration that the government produced a surplus, reaching a high of $236.2 billion in Clinton’s last year. Then came G.W.

Over his two terms the core conservative principle of balanced budgets took a hike. Huge tax cuts, mostly for the wealthy, sharply reduced revenues. Meanwhile, G.W. had an bone to pick with the man who tried to kill his daddy. His wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost upwards of three trillion dollars by some estimates. Yet, there were no corresponding revenues. Spending more than you take in is the very definition of deficit. No matter—Bush was a Republican and thus deserving of praise and honor. Besides, “deficits don’t matter,” proclaimed Darth Vader.

But that’s surely not the mantra among today’s GOP. Why, if we don’t chop spending we’ll become the next Greece. We just can’t afford to put people back to work, fix roads, pay teachers, or support seniors.

So, let’s raise taxes.

Fie!—exclaim the Republicans. Are you crazy? You’ll undermine the “job creators.”

Deficits, it seems, matter only when a Democrat occupies the Oval Office.