On the Economy: Shrinking Pains

Natural systems do not grow forever. Populations either reach a certain point and then stabilize as they rub up against competitors and resource limits, or they drop off a cliff as they exhaust their resources. The real core of the economic crisis we are facing now is that the economy is an artificial system that has been built on a foundation of unlimited growth. At every stage it is simply assumed that growth is the ultimate goal. 

Sales had better be up, consumption had better be up, resource extraction and manufacturing and profits had better be up! 
 
Even as we're hoping our economy will generate more wealth and jobs, we're hoping for stabilization in world population figures. And there's actually good news here: we're seeing a slowdown in population growth. We may have passed the seven-billion-people mark, bet getting to eight will take longer than it took to get from six to seven. 

But consider: if the population doesn't grow faster this year than last year, how can we have sales that grow faster this year than last year? What happens when we reach the point where everyone simply has enough stuff, and stops buying more? And given that our currency actually represents debt (not gold, not grain, not any naturally occurring commodity), how can it continue to grow if people tire of borrowing to purchase things they do not need.

It becomes harder to make money. The incentive for crooks within the financial system to steal and cheat becomes irresistible, and soon the whole system itself is a farce. (See the Lehman Brothers collapse, the “too big to fail” bailouts, etc.)

So how can we build a financial system without a foundation of constant growth? 

Our current situation is unprecedented. The world population has never faced a slowdown in growth, never mind a decline. (The Black Plague may have decimated Europe, but it put just a tiny dent in the world population.) This turnaround is something to celebrate. It's a success of the world's increasing prosperity and education. Given that no population can grow at an accelerating pace forever (just ask any petri dish full of bacteria) we should thank our lucky stars that this is happening. 

But can we build an economic system that rewards stability instead of growth? Is it a matter of regulating the money supply? Could we turn back from debt based currency to a gold or silver standard? Or do we need to reconsider what incentives people respond to? Rather than measuring success as taking more profits than your neighbor, can we build a culture that fosters stable communities, humane working environments, and supportive relationships?

That's hippy-dippy, pie in the sky utopia talk, for sure. But the alternative sounds dreadful. If we can't adapt our economy to a population that isn't growing at a constantly accelerating pace, then both the economy and the population are bound to collapse with a viciousness that is as brutal as it is inevitable.

I don't hear anyone else asking these questions. The silence horrifies. 

Instead, I hear Bill Clinton talking about ways to restart growth. I see companies scrambling to drive down costs to save their profits in the face of declining sales, producing cheap products that suck in working environments that are inhumane. I sit in meetings where everyone breathes a sigh of relief if our percentages are just a little higher than last year's, and we say, "well, at least we haven't started to slow down yet," in the knowledge that the minute we do, we're dead. I hear European politicians saying things like, "Only growth can lift us out of the Eurozone crisis," but they never say where the growth is going to come from, who is going to buy their exports, or what fuel will power their factories to run faster than they're running now. And then I see reports of entire cities in China, skyscrapes and condominiums and shopping malls, vast and shining and new, without a single person who can afford to live in them. The government is building for the sake of their growth reports, while their citizens live in shacks, five families to one bathroom, not a one of them able to afford the empty prosperity looming above them. 

The wealth is there. The buildings are there. Why not just let the people...move in? 

An economic crisis seems like the most artificial folly on the face of the planet. Markets crash; the sun still rises, the tides flow in and out, birds still sing, all oblivious to the fact that debt figures hit some number and stocks are in the tank. An ounce of gold doesn't know it's worth ten times as much because people are desperate. 

This is a collapse of fiction. But it's been such a rewarding fiction, for so long, that we'll struggle to maintain it for as long as we can. We'll give absolutely everything we can to believe our lives can keep going on like this forever. We'll give everything we can, until we have nothing left.

Room for Second Life in a Busy Life?

It seems that the more technology I accumulate around myself, the less meaningful work I get done. I used to be able to write a story every week on my typewriter. Now, I’m lucky if I get past checking my email accounts, blog feeds, and facebook statuses.

Then, for some reason, as if I weren’t distracted enough already, I got the grand idea of checking out Second Life. Now, that has sucked up pretty much any free time remaining to me.

Oh, but it is fun! And it’s satisfying, this feeling of being thoroughly engaged, always something to check up on, always someplace to go -- without leaving your chair. And at the end of the day, I have no piles of paper bearing down on me, as I did in the old typewriter days. Am I worse off for not having told a story in the old, traditional medium? Would anyone have read it?

In Second Life, I can listen to a concert performed by folks playing together from  three different continents. I can chat with Australians and Englishmen and South Americans all at the same time. I can be told off by an irate Detroiter in one window while psychoanalyzing a graphic designer with low self esteem in another. I make friends with people from around the globe, and suddenly I’m concerned about what time zones people live in. What time is it in Poland? In Peru? There are friends there I want to talk to, when will they all be on? 

Second Life is rather like World of Warcraft, only instead of all the dull leveling up and treasure hoarding, there’s conversation, art, and music. Not all of the highest caliber, of course, but that’s true of everything. As Ted Sturgeon said, “97% of Science Fiction is crap. But then, 97% of everything is crap.”

My Puritan Guilt has me thinking this new time-sink is a terrible development. If I go after the Nanowrimo trophy this year, I’ll have to set Second Life aside for November.

Ah, but I am still holding down a full-time job, finding time to visit the folks on occasion, scratching the dogs on the head several times a day. And I’ve even gotten outside to replace that broken window-pane and re-putty one and a half whole window sashes. (Only 20 and a half more to go!) I’m going to play the moderation card on this one, just as with booze and tobacco, and say it’s all right.

Will we continue reading stories in the century to come? Storytelling survived radio and television, although it was certainly changed. But now that the words-on-paper format seems stuck in precipitous decline, just what forms will our fictions take in the future? And will we miss the old ones? Can culture survive a population that is aware only of distractions and diversions, and never focused on real content? How can we remain aware of current events when there’s a party going on every minute?

If Romans had computers, would the end of their world have looked a little like this?

The Growing Length of Novels

Is it just me, or do books seem to be getting inordinately long, these days?

Time was, people would joke about the fantasy-novel doorstoppers that Robert Jordan and the like put out, as if the girth of their text was somehow indicative of a stretched-out, poorer quality story. When the Wheel of Time series grew to eight, then nine, then ten volumes, it turned into a kind of self-parody, mocking itself just by sitting there on the shelves. (It’s still not complete, although Jordan has passed on.)

George R.R. Martin has been producing similarly sized volumes, and who knows how big Game of Thrones is going to turn out to be before the final tome takes its march across the bestseller lists. The difference is, these books are actually pretty good, and they’re making their way into the mainstream with a little help from HBO. Then there’s Patrick Rothfuss, whose Name of the Wind was perhaps the most beautifully written book I’ve read in the last decade, and who followed it up with Wise Men’s Fear, promising more of the same exquisite storytelling spread across 1,200 pages. I haven’t cracked that one yet, because I needed a break from fantasy.

Instead, I turned to my other great reading pleasure, Science Fiction, and turned to Neal Stephenson’s latest, Reamde, which title references to a computer virus within the book whose name ironically refers to the brief “readme.txt” files which have accompanied software installations since the dawn of DOS. Now, Stephenson has always written big bricks of books – for a more extreme example check out his System of the World saga – and to make his own process even more masochistic he does his first drafts in fountain pen. But I’m losing interest in Reamde about halfway through, and I’m stuck wondering if, having invested so many hours into the first half, it’s more of a waste of time to abandon the story and forget about it, or whether the greater waste would be forcing myself through to the end of a book that I have lost pleasure in reading. (This is an especially Puritanical dilemma and I wonder if anyone besides a New Englander could truly understand it.)

Then I heard that one of my favorite “literary” writers is coming out with a new novel: Haruki Murakami. His early books were spare little gems, perplexing and fascinating, inviting repeated readings and careful reflection. But it turns out his new book, 1Q84, is going to clock in at – you guessed it – over 1,000 pages. I’m not sure I can wrap my head around that much Murakami, and I’m not sure that I want to.

It’s as if someone told me they were going to bring me a fine, single-malt whiskey, and then they delivered a keg of the stuff, and then told me that, to really appreciate it, I’d have to drink the whole thing. Whiskey just isn’t supposed to come in kegs. Some things are meant to be sipped and savored, and when you see that much Murakami in one barrel, well, it makes you wonder just what you’re getting.

David Foster Wallace came out with Infinite Jest in the mid 90s, and at the time that was an anomaly in the literary world: 1,300 pages including 300 pages of rather self-indulgent footnotes. Passages of Infinite Jest were lovely, though, and heartbreaking, and brilliant. I’m wondering if my experience with Murakami will be the same as the experience I had with Wallace. I enjoyed it for about 400 tightly packed pages (including time for those footnotes) before realizing I’d been reading the same book for an entire season without getting halfway through, and so I put it down and never came back.  Still, I kept a lot of those characters and situations present in my head in a way that just hasn’t happened with many books, since. Hal, the tennis academy, the AA meetings, the league of wheelchair assassins, the VHS tape that kills you if you watch it…they’ve all stayed safely tucked away in my noggin for the past 15 years, and I didn’t even finish the damn book.

Maybe I can sip my way through half a keg of Murakami and that will be enough.

So what’s behind this trend towards freakishly long books? Did the publication of Infinite Jest win support for a format that had previously been mocked as appropriate only for low-rent fantasy literature? If so, then why the sudden increase in book-girth now, fifteen years later? Have paper and printing costs been dropping? Hardly, paper and ink is more expensive now that it has been in quite some time, and books have to be deeply discounted to become affordable.

Are editors just getting lazy? Or are authors becoming divas, unwilling to compromise and have their words cut? It does seem that, as a writer finds a measure of success, their books grow and grow as editors and publishers seem afraid to ruffle the feathers of their proven cash cows. Which is too bad, because a lot of these books would be better if they were shorter. And these editors should realize that cows don’t have feathers.

There do seem to be several factors that may contribute to this publishing trend:

• e-books have no printing costs, and as more and more of a book’s sales go digital, buyers may actually feel they are getting more of a bargain when they download a bigger file. So I wonder, do the increased sales of a digital book offset the increased paper and ink costs of printing a huge doorstopper volume?
• The bargain effect probably applies to physical books too. This is the age of Wal-Mart and the wholesale club. When it comes time to buying a book people really want to stock up. The difference between a 300 page paperback and a 700 page paperback is usually just a dollar or two, so it feels like you’re getting ripped off when you buy the smaller one.
• People have become accustomed to long serial formats, and this taste has grown beyond fantasy trilogies and those mystery series themed with numbers and letters and gotten right down into the fabric of the single book. Those Game of Thrones books are like trilogies within trilogies.
• The rest of our culture is increasingly short and fragmented. We want to set aside our Youtube clips and our Twitter feeds and have something familiar to pick up and read, night after night. People who still read might not be looking to books for an escape into something different, but rather for the comfortable feeling of returning to the familiar.
• Computers make it easier to write at length. Authors can ramble on at a PC with words per minute unseen in the days of flowing ink and mechanical type-bars. Computers make it easier to edit, too, but they seem to have the opposite effect. Writers will let it all pour out, confident they can go back and cut and re-arrange. I suspect that, when words seemed more indelible, that more thought was taken in putting them down in the first place.

Stephen King blames the decline of the short story on people’s laziness. Once you’ve invested the mental energy it takes to enter the world of a story, it just seems like an awful lot of work to start from scratch, again, 30 pages later. And while I rather agree with him, that’s not why I’ve never been a fan of the short story. I just find that, after I’ve read a book of short stories, I can only remember a couple of them, and my memory of those is usually gone within a week.

Novels really have time to work their way into your mind and stay with you, to remind you of things you’ve long forgotten, and to even change you if you need changing. They have always seemed, to me, to be the form of art most effective at repaying the investment of my attention.

But 1,000 freakin’ pages? You’ve got to be kidding me. I just don’t have that kind of time to invest.

Canine Capacity

For those of you wondering how many dogs you can comfortably fit on a 34’ trawler, it turns out the answer is…at least four.

There’s a mother, father, and daughter in that picture, by the way. Plus what you might refer to as a “fuzzy uncle.”

I leave it to the reader to work out which is which.

Back on the Water Again

…if only briefly. (Hopefully more to come in future years.)

Stepdad traded in his sailboat for a smaller trawler, much more to his liking. And I have to say this thing does invite some serious lounging around.

And look at all the room for a typewriter table out here on the back porch.

Now I have another excuse for not finishing my novel. I need the proper boat to type it up on!

Seriously, though, the potential for serious, distraction free writing out here is fantastic. What better excuse to steer clear of the distractions of the computer than spotty harbor Wi-Fi and the need to run your generator in order to keep your batteries topped off. The more I think about it, the more I realize there can’t be a writing tool better adapted to ship-life than the manual typewriter.

So long as you keep it well-oiled. The salt can’t be good for it.

Meanwhile, the boat comes with a built-in escape from the terrible winter weather. Why use that expensive tank of fuel to heat your home when you can use it to move your home?

Anyone want to trade a trawler for a drafty old half-cape?

Ultimate Writing Software

We can all agree, I’m sure, that the best distraction-free writing hardware out there is a manual typewriter. However…

After long, careful, and somewhat regretful consideration, I’ve determined that the best word processing software I’ve used over the past decade and a half is Microsoft Word 97.

Marvel as it launches, entire, within microseconds of that second click. Struggle to spot the tiny 50 MB memory footprint. Relax as you discover that it handles novel-length documents without a hiccup. Thrill as you discover the organizational potential of its online layout view. Wonder at what, exactly, software developers have been doing for the past decade and a half to improve on a package that did everything you needed, without complaint.

Granted, it’s proprietary. It’s not open-source. It won’t open the documents your friends and co-workers might email you, since they’ve most likely moved on to pointlessly newer iterations of the office suite. Oh well. Just ask them to dig into their “save as” menu for something more compatible.

Alas! When I think back on the writing tools I’ve tried over the years, only to settle back to this one. But OpenOffice takes a full 20 seconds to launch, consumes eleven times the RAM, requires the Java Runtime Environment, and from what I can tell doesn’t offer me a single additional feature I have any use for. Then there’s AbiWord, the lightweight open-source alternative, but with every machine I’ve ever run that on, the text has flickered as I type. Not only is this distracting, it leaves me with the impression that my words are the merest whispers on a screen, ready to be swept away by the slightest electrical whim. (This is true, of course. But there’s no call for rubbing it in.) Evernote does a nice job of organizing my thoughts, but it invites a bit too much obsessive shuffling around—and there goes my focus. Besides, who really wants to have their every thought and self-indulgent drivel synchronized across internet servers, anyway? That’s what blogging is for!

It was on a lark that I popped this old Office 97 disk in when I found it during a deep tidying-up. I thought, “Gosh, this ran just fine on the computer I was using 14 years ago, and I wrote two novels with it. I wonder how well it would work on a Pentium-4 with a dedicated graphics card and dual monitors?” (Yes, I think I’ve officially “maxxed out” the old PC which I bought from the gentleman who recycles pieces he picks up at the dump.) And it turns out that Word 97 launches faster on this computer than Windows 7 Notepad.

It’s funny how hardware and software have been advancing in lockstep, with applications growing bigger and more bloated just as processors grow more powerful and memory more accommodating. Why does it feel as if it takes just as long to get something done on a computer today as it did 15 years ago? This is patently absurd. But the business plan of selling cheap hardware loaded with the latest bloat-ware—thereby making your new computer feel just a little out of date as soon as you’ve turned it on—has been doing a decent job of driving Moore’s Law into the 21st century.

The best operating environment for me these days seems to be a moderately up-to-date PC (four to eight years old) running software from the generation before. Excel 97 launches faster than the Windows Calculator, and has become my go-to tool for summing columns of numbers or performing basic arithmetic. Photoshop 5.5 (from another late 90s install disk) is more than capable of formatting images for blogging and has the capability of handling more professional photo-editing than I’m qualified to perform, and it, too, runs nimbly on a modern, high-definition monitor.

Notable exception: Windows Live Writer, which provides the simplest interface for blogging on any platform. Even Apple doesn’t have anything to compete with it, for love or money. Which is surprising. People have been blogging for over a decade now and only Microsoft has come up with a simple way for them to edit posts locally and then post them to any service. Who would have thought?

Labor Day Chores and Pleasures

The guys from N-Star were working on the street that leads down one side of our property last week, running new line to folks who had been out of power since the storm. There were up in bucket trucks, trimming trees and taking down half-broken limbs.  I felt kind of bad we never even noticed our neighbors had been without power for an entire week.  (We only lost our power  for two hours, not even long enough for me to run down the laptop battery playing FreeCell.  We had the oil lamps and board games and manual typewriters lined up, and everything, but the lights were back on before it even got dark.)

Anyway, a couple of the linemen walked around to our place. I thought they were going to tell us they were disconnecting power for a while so they could work, but actually they just wanted to chat about how old our house was and how old the trees were that they were trimming up. Answer to both: 300 years, more or less. Also, did we suggest they have lunch at the restaurant down the street. Yes. Awfully nice guys. (Or maybe they were just relieved to be talking to someone who hadn’t been without power for a week.)

They told us they’d be leaving all that wood piled up on the edge of our property outside the fence, so we go around and pick it up if we wanted any firewood.

So today I ran the extra-long extension cord over the fence to fire up the electric chainsaw again. The summer-campfire woodpile is all topped off now, probably enough to keep us going for the next three seasons. (The chainsaw needs a little bit of sharpening after all this heavy use, though. Time to ask the step-father for a refresher course in filing it. I know he showed me years ago, when I was much less interested in such things.)

Later we rode our bikes along the canal and to our usual beach, hoping for an end-of-season swim. But the Labrador Current must have been at it again, piping that ice-cold water back down from Greenland, such that standing in the surf for more than 30 seconds makes your ankles ache. Gussie dove all the way in, which surprised me, but she was out again within the minute.

It was a fine afternoon anyway, with a nap on the sand and some people watching. Plus, dogs are allowed on the beach again, post-season, which makes it a more humane place and encourages conversation. Then a stop on the way back at the hot-dog vendor with the thatched umbrella, two for me and one for the wife, and a stop again at the little ice-cream stand that opened up this year, quite conveniently along our bicycling circuit.

Rode home under thickening clouds to spend a couple hours smoking a pipe and reading out on the patio, watching the chickens and listening to the traffic out front crawling its way home from the three-day weekend.

Ha! We were already home!


Not a bad Labor Day, not at all.