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Bonus Tip: Change Winamp's Color SchemeBonus Tip: Change Winamp's Color SchemeBonus Tip: Change Winamp's Color Scheme 08/02/2004 08:27 PM G4 Tech TV Aug 3 2004 0:35AM GMT This is a GrokNews Entry: (what is grok?)Bonus Tip: Change Winamp's Color SchemeGrok Headline matches for Bonus Tip: Change Winamp's Color Scheme"Change the Color of Visited Links""Change the Color of Visited Links" 05/04/2004 05:02 PM THE STOCK
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(Warning: some financial math ahead.) A Ponzi scheme, named after its early 20th century inventor Carlo Ponzi, is a form of pyramid scheme. Basically it involves selling a nearly worthless security to a small group of investors, with the promise of great returns if they promote the security to more investors, and so on, ideally, forever. Like any pyramid scheme or chain letter, of course, it eventually collapses when it runs out of suckers. The first ones in get rich, and the last ones in (much greater in number) get shafted. As we all know, the stock market is focused on the short term, and fluctuates wildly in response to a single quarter's earnings, external economic events, even rumour. If you look at it holistically and long-term, however, it has all the markings of a century-long Ponzi scheme, the most lucrative, and potentially most devastating, in history. Let's take a look at the US S&P 500 as a surrogate for the entire stock market, the entire market for equity securities of listed public corporations. The index goes back to 1917, but was revamped in the 1940s and recalibrated so that the index for the average of 1941-43 was 10. It slowly rose to 100 over the next 50 years, and then to 1000 over the next 12 years. This broad index earned, in 2003, about $55 per average share of the component securities, using GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles). So at its current level of about 1100, it has a P/E (price-to-earnings) ratio of about 20. That means investors are willing to pay $1100 now for a share that will theoretically 'pay back' $55 next year, and hopefully successively more in future years, to justify the 'present value' of $1100. To think of ir another way, it's like a bank charging you $55 this year, $65, say, next year, and so on for at least 50 years, as 'interest' on a loan of $1100. The 5% interest in the first year isn't very attractive for such a risky 'loan', but since future 'interest' will be dependent on (hopefully rising) earnings, there is the prospect of a very lucrative return eventually. So the S&P 500, like all equities, is said to 'discount expected future cash flows'. A general rule of thumb says that the P/E ratio approximates the annual expected growth in earnings, so that means the investor in the market is expecting earnings to grow by close to 20% each year, essentially forever. How is that possible? Well, it isn't. Earnings grow because (a) prices increase, (b) costs decrease, and/or (c) volume increases. In a 'free' market economy, prices are determined (theoretically, now) by competition -- new competitors will enter the market, and/or existing competitors will adjust their prices, to the point that their return on invested capital is just high enough to justify the investment risk. That level, in a low-inflation economy where the alternative 'risk-free' investment in GICs and bonds is only 2%, is roughly a modest 7%, with the extra 5% compensating the investor for the risk implicit in equities. And, in the long run, volume can't increase -- there's only so much market for anything, and once it's saturated, earnings should therefore level off at a flat rate. Let's suppose we've more or less reached that state now. Let's also set aside the fact that the $55 earned last year by the average share is likely considerably inflated -- there are undoubtedly some more undetected Enron-type exaggerations out there in some of these 500 companies, and GAAP allows capitalization of stock options and other near-fraudulent practices that significantly overstate 'true' earnings. Is the $55 a fair return on investment in these companies? To answer that question we need to calculate what the investment is. According to the S&P, this $55 represents a 17% return on investment. In other words, the net assets or 'book' value of the average share is $55/17% or about $325. We already indicated that a reasonable return, given the risk, was 7%, which on $325 would be about $22 per share. Why are stocks earnings $55 per share when in a 'free' market they should only be earning $22? To answer this we need to look at the three components that make up ROI (or more correctly, return on equity -- ROE). These three components are: Margin (profit/sales), Turnover (sales/assets), and Leverage (assets/equity). Leverage can be inflated by excessive borrowing, which companies can get away with in times of low interest, but which boomerang when interest rates spike. Leverage can also be inflated by stock buy-backs, where the company essentially uses excess cash flow to buy back its own stock and hence increase the value per share of the remaining stock -- but this is a form of cannibalization, and leads to the same imbalance between debt and equity. Neither is sustainable. Turnover can be increased by lowering inventories, factoring and off-balance-sheet financing, but ultimately tops out -- you need to have a certain amount of money tied up one way or another in assets to be able to run an effective business. So you're left with Margin, which ultimately is the only explanation for the enormous ROE of $55/share, when in a free competitive market someone should be willing to accept $22/share. The truth is that the market, and big corporations, are far from efficient. Many industries are heavily subsidized by governments to the tune of billions of dollars in kickbacks -- er, I mean, support payments -- per year. Big corporations also work as oligopolies to prevent smaller companies from entering their markets and charging more reasonable prices for their products. We, the consumers, are in fact paying $55 for goods and services that could be sold for $22 and would still provide the corporations with a very reasonable return. If and when government subsidies end, oligopolies are broken up, and the market for goods and services truly becomes free and open, the S&P 500 should then generate $22/share each year, a 7% ROE, still an attractive return in a low-inflation economy. So we have a number of factors at work, conspiring to drive up stock prices in the unsustainable illusion that double-digit growth can and will continue forever, or at least until we're dead and it isn't our problem anymore. We have big corporations earning exorbitant returns, two and one half times a reasonable level given the risk, paid for by the taxpayer and consumer (the same people who then take what's left of their meagre paychecks and invest it, with insane trust in the brokers' unsustainable recommendations, in the stock market). And we have a P/E ratio that is already assuming that these wildly inflated, taxpayer subsidized, price-gouging levels of profit will continue to rise even further, at close to 20% per year, forever. Voilà, Ponzi scheme, par excellence. Let's do the math. Take the $22 per share that big corporations should be earning per share in a properly regulated and open market. Acknowledge that the assumption that these earnings are going to grow in the future, when markets are saturated, consumers, corporations and governments are already buckling under grotesque and unprecedented debt loads and cannot afford to buy or pay more than they already are. Discount that annual stream of $22 of earnings for 50 years at a reasonable 7% discount rate. Know what you get for the fair value of the S&P 500 with these calculations? About 300. That is what, when you strip out the growth hype, the subsidies, the price-gouging, and the unsupportable P/E valuation, the S&P 500 should be trading at. Not 1100. Eventually the Ponzi scheme will collapse. There may yet be time to con yet more foolish investors into believing that it will rise from 1100 to 1500 to 2000 or 5000 or higher, and if investors can be duped into believing that's what shares are worth, that's what they'll trade at. This scheme has been running for a century, and made many people millionnaires. But eventually we, or our children or grandchildren, will realize that the S&P 500 should be at 300, and since stocks always trade at what people think they're worth, that's where the S&P 500 will end up. The millions left holding the bag will lose most of their life savings, their pensions, everything. (Oh, and if you change the assumptions about inflation and interest rates, the above valuation doesn't change. Future values and discount rates both go up proportionally, so the inflation-adjusted present value stays the same.) Even the brokers can see the writing on the wall. They will now try to convince you that by wise investing you can 'outperform the market' by buying low and selling high, even if the market is ultimately doomed to do no better than go sideways. This is another great variant on a Ponzi scheme. It's the stuff that has hooked the new breed of gambling addicts called 'day traders'. For every investor whose holdings 'outperform the market' there will be, of course, at least one loser. But the magic of Ponzi is that it's always the other guy, the next guy, the not smart enough guy, who will get burned. You'd be better to play slot machines or buy lottery tickets -- at least the potential payout isn't overstated by 250%. In addition to the perpetual-growth Ponzi scheme, and the 'outperform the market' con, brokers also make scads of money from IPOs -- initial public offerings. As James Surowiecki has elegantly pointed out, the IPO is a scam by which an aptly-named 'syndicate' of investment firms ('underwriters') buy a mass of shares from the company 'going public', at about half the price per share they know they can flog them to gullible investors, many of whom rely on these very brokers for investment advice. They then dump their shares on these investors, knowing that the price will promptly drop back close to the IPO price. The underwriting brokers get rich, and the unsuspecting customers get burned. That's the reason Surowiecki and others, most recently Lawrence Fisher in yesterday's excellent analysis over at our mother ship Salon.com, have urged Google, potentially the most lucrative IPO of all time, to screw the brokers and either sell all the shares directly to the public by auction, or, even better, not to go public at all, and save the delirious investors the grief they will suffer when they find out Google has no direct line to God, and hence isn't worth a million dollars a share. Eventually we, or our descendents, will learn (or have no choice but) to 'just say no' to dysfunctional stock markets and all the evils they breed. Until then, we'll continue to be addicted to short-term thinking, the illusion of perpetual growth, paying too much for everything we buy, subsidizing public companies with our taxpayer dollars, downsizing and outsourcing and offshoring as 'productivity enhancement', and putting up with the atrocious greed, corruption and devastation of insatiable global corporations that pull the strings of politicians like puppeteers, all in the name of 'maximizing shareholder value'. It's addictive gambling with a staggering cost, it's insane, and it's fraud. |
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 Yesterday I was checking my referrer log and came across a weblog called PTypes, which rates famous people, and bloggers, by personality type, and also draws linkages between three well-known personality typing schemas. I have commented before that the majority of bloggers seem to be INTPs or INFPs on the Myers-Briggs personality test, but the PTypes blogger list contains more 'Counselors' (INFJ) than either 'Architect' (INTP) or 'Healer' (INFP) personalities. More surprisingly, How to Save the World is identified as an 'Inspector's' (ISTJ) blog, which surprised me. I had always been a strong NT, and right on the line between E-I (to quote Neil Young, who seems to have a similar personality to mine, "I need a crowd of people, but I can't face them day-to-day"), and right on the line between J-P (I'm a compulsive list-maker, but I hate inflexibility). So I couldn't understand how the author of PTypes assessed me as ISTJ. Rather than argue, I decided to re-take the Myers-Briggs test. I Googled 'Myers-Briggs' and took the first four tests that came up, including this quite detailed one, which all produced the same answer: my personality has changed markedly since I started blogging. I've plotted the shift on the charts above. Using a small letter instead of a capital for close-to-the-border (less than 55-45%) scores, I've gone in one year from iNTj (a Thinker) to eNfP (a Change Agent), after not moving on the test for a decade. I suspect my blogging is more a reflection of changes in my 'personality' rather than a cause of them. But it's interesting -- is anyone else's personality changing, and why? Are personality changes fundamental and enduring, or situational and transient? Oh, and there is a 'disorder' associated with each of the 16 personality types when that personality becomes extreme or pathological. For INTPs it's schizoid (disengagement) behaviour, for INFPs it's histrionics, for INFJs it's avoidant, for ISTJs it's depression (maybe that's why the author of PTypes pegged me as ISTJ), for INTJs like I was last year it's schizotypal (social anxiety), and for ENFPs like I've apparently become this year it's paranoia. Not sure I buy this last stretch, since if I were borderline paranoic I would have self-censored some of my recent blog posts. |
About a year ago,
I made my first public commitment<
/a> to stop just talking about How to Save the World, and actually
do something about it. Here's
my progress report:
Not a perfect scorecard, but not too bad either. The problem is, even if everyone in North America did these things it wouldn't be enough. As the acceleration of global warming and other interminable bad news on the environment, the endless victories of corporatists over citizens and consumers, our continued theft of our children's and grandchildren's heritage, the prevalence of suicidal economic policies, the endless global thirst for blood and imperialist adventure, and last month's US elections all showed, we're losing ground fast. We need to be doing much more. So while I'm still working on completing the actions I committed to last year, reading Bill Moyers' stirring and depressing speech has convinced me to add some more radical, and controversial, actions to my 'to do' list, to publicly commit to do more. Earlier this year I set out the political and ecological philosophy behind what I called 'Plan B', a set of radical solutions to use once it becomes clear that social and political activism, networking, education, and the plodding pace of new technological innovation simply aren't going to be enough to save the world from inevitable social, political and ecological catastrophe and collapse in this century. The principles of this philosophy are:
Plan B is designed to give people no choice but to change. Let's take fossil fuels as an example. We could have started developing alternatives to fossil fuels a century ago. There was no burning platform. In the 1970s, prices spiked modestly. The reaction of the vast majority was to demand that the government increase the supply and reduce the price. Governments complied, even though that meant first getting into bed with and becoming dependent on ideological enemies, and later launching imperialist adventures to take over the major sources of supply economically and politically. As long as there was any choice, no matter how socially, politically, economically and environmentally high the cost, people would not change. As we near the end of oil, we will see a resurgence of nuclear power plants, more strip-mining and burning of coal, the destruction of arctic wilderness, the ruin of coastal waterways, massive, and bloody and incessant imperialist wars with oil-rich countries -- anything to forestall the need to change. The cost will be horrendous. That's human nature. That's nature, period. Do not change until you absolutely must. For oil, the answer is to not give people a choice. That means rationing supply, and imprisoning those that buy in the black market. That means huge oil tax increases to make it unaffordable for most people to buy oil beyond the bare minimum, tax-free ration, with the taxes used to finance fast-track research on alternative renewable energy. That means prohibiting bringing on-board new sources of supply that merely delay the inevitable crisis, prolong the bad habits of reckless consumption, and ruin the environment for the sake of a few month's supply. That means higher income taxes to pay for the development of a completely new infrastructure based on alternative energy (corporations won't pay for it). All of these options are anathema to North American governments, which understand human nature and won't dare impose these draconian solutions on people after seventy years of preaching that government and taxes are bad and the market will fix everything automatically. So we need to make sure there is no choice. Since we can't do this by changing human nature, persuading people to voluntary reduce consumption, we have three options: Precipitate a crisis by interfering with supply (socially and environmentally conscious sabotage), precipitate a crisis by interfering with price and supply (persuade OPEC to quadruple prices and curtail production), or avert the crisis by coming up with innovations that reduce demand. The third of these options is not available because those with wealth and power would have to invest massively in these innovations, innovations that would reduce demand for their products, so it would be both politically insane for them to do so, and a violation of the modern 'maximize short-term profit at all costs' corporate mantra, and hence would subject these courageous corporate idealists to legal action and dismissal from their posts. We can and should encourage OPEC to drastically cut production and to quadruple prices (that's what many OPEC members believe is a fair price for their product now, but they're unwilling to risk an invasion by the West if they raised the price). Production cuts aren't in their short-term interest either, though steep price increases are (I'm sure awareness of this is what's behind the recent crude price volatility). Why would OPEC nations sell for $40/barrel when they could sell for $160/barrel with little drop in demand? The only conceivable reason is military threats from the West. If OPEC doesn't have the courage to confront Bush & Co and charge fair market rates for their increasingly scarce products (which seems to be the case), the only solution left is sabotage of the energy and transportation systems, done in a way that doesn't cause human or environmental injury -- preventing the supply from getting to the market. We need a lot of individuals to sabotage the system at its most vulnerable (probably pipelines, dams, power transformers, tankers, refineries, drilling platforms, border crossings and major hubs in transportation routes). At the same time, we need to take the opportunity to block traffic in the despicable goods that finance the flow of oil -- arms flowing out to oil countries, and the IMF-mandated flow of other underpriced locally-needed raw materials and slave-labour-produced manufactured goods from poor countries to rich. This monkey-wrenching needs to be done in a coordinated but non-hierarchical way by a large number of caring, ingenious, enterprising, self-disciplined individuals. But before we can do it, we need to research how best to do it, what and where the vulnerabilities are, hand ow to achieve maximum disruption of supply with minimum effort and no serious injury to people or the environment. I am confident that most of this knowledge is online, and the rest can be put online by those in the know so that the rest of us can share it. The result would be a constant and debilitating disruption of supply to the point where both consumers and producers say 'uncle' and start to change their behaviour because they have no other choice. I think it can be done. It will take great courage (I expect this blog is already under government surveillance and will probably eventually be attacked or taken down). And it will take great intelligence, to avoid it backfiring on us, and to ensure that, once the media get addicted to this story, they are getting our message loud and clear: We are selectively sabotaging the most serious excesses of the modern economy to bring about conservation of resources and the environment the only way we know will work. If we're going to save the planet, we all need to consume less, and we're doing our part to make that happen. So here are my additional commitments for actions for 2005.
It is absolutely critical that these million individuals take great care to avoid causing harm or suffering, other than economic harm. Otherwise, extremists on either side of the political spectrum, and government agents, could exploit or defeat this movement. We need the media to understand that this principle is inviolate, so that they immediately rule us out as the source when an act occurs that causes harm or suffering. We are not terrorists, we are anti-terrorists. Corporatism is economic and political terrorism, and it is threatening all life on Earth. Our goal is simply to disrupt this economic and political system before it destroys our planet, so that there is no choice but to find a better way to live. |
 Seth Godin
of Fast Company and
Purple Numbers fame has a new BHAP (big hairy audacious project)
called ChangeThis.
The idea is that we need to be more open to well-articulated opposing
(or at least different) points of view on important issues. The 'This'
in ChangeThis is Your Mind,
and by changing it, you will become part of a broader, urgent change
movement. The vehicle that gets the ball rolling is something called a
Manifesto. Seth has plans for some online Manifestos penned by some
very big
names.It's a very intriguing idea, but I don't think it will work, not because of the Internet's limited reach or because of anything inherently wrong with Manifestos, but because it's out of sync with human nature. Here's why, IMHO:
(Diagram is from an earlier post on The Decision-Making Process) |
 We have many myths about nature. Most of them are about 'wildness' -- savagery, hardship, suffering. Most of our stories about nature are of the 'Man vs. Nature' variety, about 'survival in the wild', as if that were some extraordinary thing. We build these myths to keep people from running away from our well-meaning but damaged, terrible, unsustainable culture. Richard Manning in Against the Grain has just exploded another of the myths about our culture: He provides a compelling argument that the Great Wall of China, a work of staggering and gruelling human labour visible with a telescope from the moon, was not built, as we were told, to keep the Northern hunter-gatherer cultures (the 'Mongol Hordes') out, but rather to keep the stooped, slave labour in the 'new' civilization culture's peasants in. If you really believe nature is savage, turn off the hysterical nature documentaries and read Bernd Heinrich's Winter World, about how, even in Northern winters, even the tiniest 'wild' animals live joyful, carefree, comfortable lives. And then read David Abram's Spell of the Sensuous to find out how you, too, can reconnect with lovely, peaceful, easy, sustainable nature. The myths we teach our impressionable children about nature, from dragon fables to Old Yeller, are usually about nature's terror and the need to defend and return back 'home' to our 'safe' civilization. There is an astonishing amount of animal cruelty in children's stories, and it is an extremely predatory and desensitizing indoctrination technique. We reinforce these dreadful lies about nature's savagery by sending our children to under-supervised day-care operations called Summer Camps, which, despite their locations and stated objectives, are not at all about nature, but rather deplorable and usually incompetent immersion courses in social skills. At least the British are honest enough to do this without pretext of it being a 'natural' experience: Their social indoctrination is called Boarding School and occurs principally indoors. Whatever its intention, the principal effect of Summer Camp is to untether children from their parents' protection and their need for privacy, and force them to 'get along' with others, find their place in the social pecking order of their 'peers'. For the shy, the weak, the uncoordinated, the physically and emotionally scarred (and that's most children) it can be living hell. For psychopathic children and predatory adults, its lack of supervision provides the ideal environment for honing their manipulation skills on unprotected and vulnerable victims. Whatever this may be, it is certainly no way to introduce a child to nature. Even psychopathic adults use the 'natural experience' cover to prey upon weaker adults. This activity was most famously depicted in the film White Mile, where the aggressive company CEO (played by Alan Alda) bullies younger staff who want to 'get ahead' to go on a 'character-building' white-water rafting trip where they are absolutely at his mercy, and where nature is set up as the straw-man enemy. This psychological brutality is also evident in many cults which use social isolation and deprivation in a pseudo-'natural' setting to break down resistance to the cult leader's propaganda. I recently witnessed a plane-load of teenagers returning from a six-month 'working field trip' billeted in peasants' homes in Paraguay -- these kids were raw with emotion and filled with horror and loathing at the thought of returning 'home' and 'abandoning' the poor Paraguayan families who had opened their homes and hearts to them. Absolute gut-wrenching culture shock. We humans are so easy to socially recondition, so vulnerable to programming and re-programming! Our psyches are so fragile that, especially with the young, we must take great care not to tear them even by the simple act of exposing them to new ideas. This is very dangerous stuff. Damn our adaptability. Not surprising, then, that most people view nature with great fear, as something to be conquered or survived. Most of us have no alternative experience of it. And not surprising that so many of the well-intended 'communing with nature' alternative living experiments have collapsed or been hijacked by psychopaths or megalomaniacs. If we were to start with young people, how could we expose them 'naturally' to nature: Teaching them gently the Spell of the Sensuous without so unhinging their psyches that they would be incapable of returning to civilized life and working within it, and without exploiting their ideological vulnerability? (I know, I'm a hopeless liberal -- I refuse to use propaganda to advance the cause). Because if we don't show them nature, what possible hope is there for our world when we can only romanticize (or demonize), idealize, try to imagine a natural way to live and love and be? We learn (especially as children) what we're shown, not what we're told. There are almost no remaining models of natural life to show them, to correct the entrenched, neolithic misperception of nature as something brutal, savage, dangerous, frightening, threatening, hard, and apart. As James Taylor puts it in his song Gaia, we are taught, and left with no alternative but to:
Turn away from your animal kind,
Try to leave your body just to live in your mind, Leave cold cruel Mother Earth behind -- GAIA, As if you were your own creation, As if you were the chosen nation, And the world around you just a rude and dangerous invasion. I was at a conference a week ago with some of the most creative and intelligent people on the face of the Earth, but when I talked to them of the importance of wilderness, these mostly urban geniuses had no idea what I was getting at -- they could not imagine what I meant. I think we need to abandon the route of in-class nature documentaries and the one-day (or six-month) field trips (and 'summer camps'), and instead invent and design something completely new: Model Intentional Communities that will give children and adults the opportunity to rediscover nature, and our true nature, first hand. Just as we save endangered species and try to build their populations back up in 'natural' settings, we should try to recreate, and show, alternative human cultures, so that people brought up in our monolithic and troubled culture can be exposed to people living in balance with wilderness. Not in order to learn how to 'survive' it, but to learn how to be part of and at peace with it. Glenn Parton talks about this in his essay Humans -In-The-Wilderness. I advocate the development of a
human lifestyle in which people live in small villages sparsely
scattered through a wilderness environment. Although this framework or
groundplan is borrowed from aboriginal peoples, it is far more
flexible
than has been thought. We can devolve or scale-down modern
civilization
to closely fit ancient land use patterns without returning to the
Stone
Age.
So we're not talking about a back-to-the-land commune that refuses to use technology and shuns the 'civilized' world, but rather a series of communities of, say, 100-150 people each, plus perhaps another 20 guests at any one time who would stay no longer than a month, and bring in new ideas and take away their learning of another way to live. These model communities would meld the best of do-more-with-less innovation and technology (the Internet, solar energy, hydroponics etc.) with the best of natural community (zero growth, 100% sustainability, everything recycled, no pollution, no hierarchy, LETS money, no private property or separate 'family' dwellings etc.) These communities would 'use' only a tiny proportion of 'their' land for human purposes, leaving the rest as wilderness for other creatures, for learning and exploration and discovery and reflection and connection but not exploitation. Their population density would vary depending on the carrying capacity of the area, but on average would probably not exceed one person per four acres (a globally sustainable level). Everyone would live as part of a self-sufficient, self-managed and self-selected community, and everyone would also live on the doorstep of wilderness. The people would work only as hard as they needed to, to be comfortable -- perhaps an hour per day each (as primitive man did according to revisionist history, and certainly enough in a modern egalitarian society with the benefits of today's technology). The rest of the day could be spent in leisure, in learning, in discovery, in making love (possibly, as Glenn suggests, with more than one partner, at the collective discretion of each community), in art, in writing or other expression -- whatever each individual wanted to do. Members would be free to travel, and through the Internet and communications media and visitors there would be lots of interaction with other Model Intentional Communities and with the 'outside world', but if they stayed away too long they would be asked to give up their membership in the community. What would be needed to make this work would be someone to donate the land, without recourse or obligation, and some self-selection mechanism for determining who the members of the communities would be. Building on a small standard set of inviolable principles to ensure egalitarianism, no-growth, and wilderness protection, each community could develop its own rules and code of conduct (or operate without rules, if it so chose). It would probably take some time, and learning from failure, before these model communities would stabilize and be ready to accept visitors -- their only obligation to the civilized world. Now imagine a young person exposed to such a community for a month in adolescence or high school. She would probably find it fun (certainly more than classwork, anyway), charming, stimulating, but not appealing enough to want to stay. But when she graduated and realized the devil's bargain of civilization -- the trade-off of ecocide and wage slavery and emotional suffocation in return for 'financial security', she might well decide then to join an existing Model Intentional Community, or start her own, spreading out and refusing to buy the crappy consumer products and over-priced postage stamp building lots that drive the current economy. In short, she, and many or most or all of her similarly-exposed classmates, might walk away -- millions each year, until diverse Model Intentional Communities flourish across the globe, and the old economy, with no 'consumers' left to sustain it, crumbles away, and with it the old politics and the old social rules and the old hierarchies and the old education systems, and a new culture that values wilderness and well-being rises in its place. That's my dream. It cannot work, of course, in a world of six billion people, let alone the 12-14 billion we are likely to see by the end of the century. But if we show people another model now, a better way to live, maybe it's not impossible to believe that people will willingly, eagerly reduce their family sizes to no more than one child per female adult, so that, within a couple of centuries, our population is down below one billion and we can all live this way. We could therefore do what early 'civilizing' cultures like the Anasazi and Incans perhaps did, when, after experimenting with urban civilized culture, they suddenly and inexplicably walked away from their cities and returned to a non-hierarchical and natural life. What a valuable education that could turn out to be. |
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