The stupid economy (part 3)...

AN English businessman in Canada, Ian Ward, saw his markets for British Columbian timber and salmon in the Persian Gulf suddenly dissipate with the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. And international timber prices fell. He couldn’t have foreseen or prevented it.

And it was at that point that he discovered the demand for disposable chopsticks.

Chopsticks go back 5,000 years in China. As status objects, they have been crafted from gold, precious jade, coral and ivory. Everyday utensils are usually made of plastic, resin, bamboo or poplar wood. And you can get “portable” chopsticks, even collapsible chopsticks, that fit into a specially-made case or cloth bag so you can use your own chopsticks when you are eating out. For show-offs, Luis Vuitton makes an upmarket set of rosewood chopsticks in a carry case that retails at over $400.

The shared-toothbrush reflex seems to kick in more strongly in Asia than in Europe. We seldom think about the places restaurant utensils might previously have been put. And to take our own knife, fork and spoon to a friend’s place for meal would be thought odd, even insulting. In Asia, communicability is a bigger issue… all those surgical face masks when there’s a bug in the air? They can seem odd in the West but they almost certainly prevent more contagion than our fear of used toothbrushes.

Back in the 1870s, cheap, disposable chopsticks were enterprisingly developed by a frugal Japanese artisan as a way of turning his wood scraps into a useful product. It made sensible use of wood that otherwise would be wasted, and fitted with Japanese cultural sensitivities.

The idea caught on. And not just in Japan.

Restaurant customers throughout Asia liked the idea of pristine utensils in little paper packages to accompany every meal. By the latter part of the 20th century there was a staggering demand in Asia for 80 billion pairs a year. Factories struggled to meet the demand and forests were felled. Throwaway chopsticks had become an industry calling for 16 million mature poplars a year and, by that time, with Asian economies on the rise, most of the wood was coming from China. It didn’t help that less than half of the raw timber cut was suitable for chopstick making.

Ian Ward saw all this and, looking around, realised he was surrounded by what could be the opportunity of a lifetime: the aspen forests of western North America… poplar wood!

The Rocky Mountains region is dominated by pine forest, broken by tracts of pale, straight-grained aspen. This is timber country. Forestry skills and lumber mills… with ports for shipping product across the Pacific.

In the America State of Minnesota, a slump in steel had seen unemployment soar and the Governor, Rudy Perpich, saw his hometown, Hibbing, as a great setting for a chopstick factory that Ian Ward saw employing 120 people, churning out seven million pairs of chopsticks a day and bringing in $5 million a year. It wouldn’t hurt his chances of re-election, even if there were accusations of pork-barrelling.

Several millions of government-sourced funds were soon found to help get the ball rolling and it’s said that 3,000 people — impelled by the fall of the steel-centred local economy — joined the queue for the first 30 jobs the company advertised.

There was no environmental lobby rushing to the defence of the 60 or so bird species that thrive the nutritious habitat provided by the groves of straight-grained aspen. There was no outcry on behalf of an ecosystem that sustained countless insects and more than 50 species of mammal —including bears, moose, elk, deer, rabbits, beavers, porcupines, squirrels, chipmunks and gophers — and provided forage for farms as well as for wildlife. In the grasslands, aspens are often the only natural source of shade and shelter.

Instead, local optimism ran rampant. But, after two years, the specially-built machines fell silent, stalled by a $7 million debt. The market was virtually all China’s.

What could have gone wrong? There were some start-up glitches with the machinery and other small issues that might reasonably be expected. But the killing blow was delivered by currency speculators who pushed up the relative value of the American dollar, making the chopsticks ever-so marginally dearer, and pushed shipping costs fractionally higher. And, because of the enormous volumes involved in the big chopsticks challenge, the slight difference in the cost of a single pair of chopsticks translated into a tremendous price hike for Asian importers looking to buy scores of container loads of them.

You could say that the greed and opportunism of the currency speculators saved the aspen forests. Or that their greed and opportunism killed a few hundred jobs and an entrepreneur’s dream. Either way, the currency traders were indifferent. They were pursuing blinkered self-interest in a way that’s sanctioned by our notions of economic freedom.

There’s a story you can unravel if you look at the history leading up to the recent financial crash that goes straight back to the racist basis of “subprime” mortgaging practices… time and again, opportunistic greed spills over into social destruction.

Now, to its great credit, China is discouraging the use of disposable chopsticks altogether… because of their environmental impacts. And that’s not an idea that occurred to any of the players in the story of the Minnesota chopsticks story.

Britain’s Institution of Mechanical Engineers recently published a report called Population: one planet, too many people?. It demonstrates that we already have all of the technology and know-how we need to peaceably accommodate nine billion people on the planet. We already have the technology to move to a low-carbon energy economy — what we need to address is “market failures” that stand in the way of its adoption. And, it argues, instead of razing slums and re-building, we would do far better to help the world’s massive urban slums to improve and develop organically towards healthier standards of living and economic vitality.

And a newly published report of a massive five-year modelling study undertaken jointly by France’s INRA (National Institute for Agricultural Research)and CIRAD (the Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Developpement) — both major European agricultural and development agencies — concludes that feeding the project nine billion isn’t an insurmountable objective either.

The study looked at the sustainable capacity of the world to provide everyone — everyone, the whole projected peak world population of nine billion human souls — with 3,000 calories a day, including 500 calories from animal sources.

And, it’s do-able.

The necessary steps include ways to curb world price fluctuations. The rich, they say, have to stop consuming as much as they do and reduce their wastage from the current average level of 800 calories per person per day. Even as farming methods take greater account of environmental necessities, including reduced use of fossil fuels, the production levels are achievable. The strategy would involve, rather than pest-prone large-scale monoculture, helping farmers to lift production while maintaining biodiversity.

It calls for food scientists to organise globally, as climate science has been able to do.

Together, the two pieces of very significant research point — not to any technical or scientific obstacles but to the aimless social effects of our tolerance for profit-taking by individuals in ways that harm society at large. And perhaps it slips the collective mind that legality isn’t quite the same as morality.

In a time of unlimited surpluses, that may not matter quite so much. But, though we certainly have “enough”, we don’t have those buffering surpluses any more. And the problem isn’t projected population figures — population growth is topping out, right now. Nor is the problem to do with living space, technology or limited productive capacity. It’s nothing that complicated… it’s our unconcern. But food prices are rising , critically in many poorer countries, triggering risings and riots... and a part of the pressure comes from pension plan investments in the wealthy West, and speculation in the commodity market.

As for disposable chopsticks… maybe it’s time to think twice about buying more and more short-life, over-packaged cosmetic niceties and novelty goods we don’t need, no matter how good an idea they seemed in the first place.

Eating’s more important.


Also see:

Part 1    -     Part 2    -    Economic history in a teacup

Beautiful, beautiful bicarb....

WE'VE changed the chemistry in the bathroom.

We’re now using tooth cleaner that’s a mixture of sodium chloride and sodium hydrogen carbonate… sea salt and baking soda, mostly baking soda. It has the fresh, clean tang of the ocean to it… a taste I especially enjoy.

The toothpaste thing got really complicated.

Looking at the shelves in the store, I’d start to glaze over: there’s stuff to “whiten your teeth” …as opposed to? Miracles in a tube promise variously to “strengthen your teeth”, “remove plaque”, “fight” tartar, “sweeten your breath”, “cure gingivitis”… “fight” cavities… fight cavities? Now there’s a thing.

How do you FIGHT a CAVITY: a cavity is a hole. Fight the doughnut? Maybe. But the hole? What does this toothpaste do to the hole? Does it lay siege to it somehow? What if, like the last dentist I had, it concludes: “to hell, let’s take the whole damn tooth out”… but, wait! There on the shelf lies another intriguing promise: “cavity PROTECTION”. It protects cavities? From the cavity-fighting brand?

And to board the “other bus” Colgate, for one, has even put out a bicarb and peroxide paste in a tube so it “looks like” toothpaste. They call it “Sparkling White”. Go ahead… they need your money too.

Is this all confusing, or is it just marketed by confused people? Toothpaste IS confusing. The flavours are incredible for the tongue-tying variations on the word “mint”: there’s “mint”, “regular mint”, “fresh mint”, “kiss me mint”, “ice mint”, “cool mint”, “citrus clean mint”, “intense fresh”, “peppermint”, “spearmint”… then, at the bottom of the cliff, there’s “bubble gum”, “strawberry” and “watermelon” flavoured gels for kids — and, leaving “mint” for dead, even a “Spongebob Squarepants” variety. I’ve heard of, but never experienced flavours like lavender, tea, vanilla, citrus, pine, cinnamon, fennel and peanut butter. I’ve gone through drugstore shelves across Canada and continue to wonder why there’s no “premier grand cru Bordeaux” toothpaste? If you want toothpaste to taste good, why not be a little more ambitious about it?

Then there are toothpastes for “sensitive teeth” — sensitive teeth? Teeth tear, rip and reduce flesh and plant matter to a pulp, for heaven’s sake… and they get all precious and “sensitive” about toothpaste? There is “refreshing” toothpaste… how does that work? Where do you put it?

Oh, and you can get “fluoride-free” toothpaste and “menthol-free” which seems a bit like selling “white” milk on the basis of its being “chocolate-FREE!”. Or you can get fluoride-added toothpaste — and menthol-added toothpaste.

The Canadian Dental Association “recognises” more than 40 varieties of toothpaste (including Colgate’s bicarb and peroxide in a tube).

So, what’s in toothpaste?

Well, having researched this, I can tell you that as much as 40 per cent of most toothpaste is hydrogen dioxide (water) — the stuff that gushes from your tap — and rest is mostly abrasive, insoluble grit — fine sand, essentially — that’s there to grind away the scum, but it rips away a bit of enamel with it. This surface damage is called “polishing”. Some toothpastes use glitter — white mica — for extra dazzle.

The other ingredients are cautiously added by parts per million: a soupçon of some sort of fluoride salt — to toughen the teeth — and hint of detergent to help break up the scum… a bit like the stuff they use in greater quantities on oil spills. And there are tiny pinches substances that produce some credibility-enhancing foam. The same sort of stuff goes into shampoos.

Then there’s Triclosan: an organic toxin that slaughters bacteria by taking away the enzyme they need to make fatty acids. Of course you do know that alcohol takes care of bacteria pretty effectively? And that the tiny little bacteria that teem all over your skin, in your every orifice, in your digestive tract… your microscopic, lifelong personal companions… they outnumber your body cells by a ratio of about 10:1 and are, for the most part, benign. Yet you want to provoke these little creatures by using Triclosan-laced toothpaste?

Then there are flavourings and colorants intended to present toothpaste as a tempting confectionary item. And the colours: blue, white, pink and white striped, pale green… which reminded me of “caries fighting” toothpaste and those good old days when Levers put chlorophyll in toothpaste as though my teeth might be encouraged to photosynthesise.

They used to advertise “sodium lauryl sulphate” until they found out that, though not quite a carcinogen, CH3(CH2)10CH2(OCH2CH2)nOSO3Na tends to peel the skin off some people so it probably isn’t very good for you: a bit like bleaching your hair with lye.

I’ve even seen pet toothpaste (as in toothpaste for pets) and a terrifying warning that 80% of dogs and 60% of cats have gingivitis, peridontitis or tooth decay — side-effects I guess of all those pet foods manufactured from grain by-products and abattoir waste.

And I asked myself a question: WHY do I want to buy toothpaste… for me? And why would airlines ban it from carry-on luggage? I know what they say… but what’s the REAL reason.

Besides, Ben Franklin, I believe, used honey and charcoal as toothpaste.

And my mother happily used and got the superfluous added value from baking soda that it’s hypoallergenic (my mother had no allergies).

The rest of the story? Well, baking soda — alias “bicarb”, NaHCO_3, sodium bicarbonate, etc — is a fine, crystalline powder. It doesn’t smell, it’s slightly alkaline but relatively non-toxic. It doesn’t burn or explode and only sparingly dissolves in water. It sounds safe on aircraft.

Besides, it’s already in our bodies: in our bile, it’s what stops the hydrochloric acid in our stomachs from burning holes through our bellies.

Ancient Egyptians mined it in a form called “natron” to use as a cleaning compound. And, over thousands of years, it’s proved itself in so many ways… as a water softener – great for washing machines and for washing dishes; it’ll deodorise and freshen shoes, carpets, cupboards, rubbish bins, and things like kitchen sponges and shower curtains. Even your pets. Oil and grease stains wash out better with baking soda in the wash water.

It will put out fires, help polish iron and stainless steel and clean marble or formica — it even works as a silver polish — and it leavens dough. Mix it with sugar and it will see off cockroaches and silverfish. As well as cleaning your teeth, it is a good antacid and, added to bath water, it helps to relieve sunburn and eczema. It even takes tea and coffee stains off pots, mugs and cups. It works as a facial scrub and body exfoliant
… and you can pat baking soda onto your underarms as a deodorant. Made into a paste with water it will soothe insect bites, clean ovens and floors, and stand in as a handwash or hair cleanser A cup of baking soda a week down the drain will help keep a septic tank in good working order.

As well as helping to wash cars, inside and out, it will neutralize battery acid corrosion. Just be sure to disconnect the battery terminals before your attack it with your baking soda and water. A wipe with baking soda on a dampened cloth helps repel rain from the windshield.

And, if you happen to be plucking chickens, baking soda added to the boiling water will help loosen the feathers.

Try doing that with a tube of toothpaste!

Boredom? Really?

FOREVER slow on the uptake, I've only recently fully realised why my mother gave me a copy of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene for my eighth birthday.

It was because I had learned the word “boring” at school a few months before.

When I tried it out at home, I suddenly found myself with a cup of water in one hand and an old toothbrush in the other, cleaning the bathroom from floor to ceiling, a task that engaged me from around four o’clock that afternoon until close to six. It gave me time to reflect on my mother’s tirade about boredom being the symptom of a “slovenly” mind, and, she told me: “you are not going to waste your life trying to be an imbecile,” adding, perhaps ambiguously: “Don’t miss the bits in the corners.” Boredom, to her, was a self-inflicted disengagement with life.

I used the word “boring” within her earshot only once again… a year or two later, totally unthinkingly. I hadn’t even meant it. It artlessly “slipped out” in my unguarded “how was school?” reply. Again, I was compelled to some introspection with a toothbrush in the bathroom. I never saw it again, but I’d bet that she put that toothbrush away safely somewhere in case it was ever a needed again.

By then, though, I wasn’t finding school “boring”… rather, I think I’d forgotten the real meaning of boredom. The Faerie Queene had me in thrall. It’s not a book “for kids” and my mother, herself a teacher, obviously knew that. It was written in 1596 in early English for heaven’s sake. And it is all about grown-up lust and violence and courage, cruelty, faith, truth and virtue, about deceit, deception and self sacrifice… a metaphorical working out, through poetically articulated fairy tales of chivalry, of life’s enduring moral conflicts. And the “v”s are all written as “u”s… it’s stuff beyond any eight year old’s comprehension. But it flooded my imagination for life.

I guess it began after I started throwing out words like “wondrous”, “soothly” and “betide”, and calling the sun “Phoebus” — stuff that made teachers blink. I had a small coterie of friends who’d all talk the talk and get into “knightly” rough and tumble in the playground, at the beach and wherever else we got together to play. We had words no-one else had… I looked up their meanings in the glossary at the back of Spenser’s book. We were a movement, pledged to imagined arts of chivalry. We picked playground “giusts” with boys with “lumpish heads” who failed to meet our standards by pushing around “faire”, “milde” or “innocent” girls or telling “guileful” lies. We were severe but comical pains in the butt.

But we were never bored. We were always on quests for “adventure”. We lived vividly in a transformed world at the edge of craziness. And the problem was that so much of Spenser’s allegory expresses of the sorts of “truth”, conflicts, failings and qualities we discover within ourselves

As I said, my mother was a teacher. Her classrooms generally brought together a mix of cultures: pakeha (New Zealand European), Maori, Pacific Island and sometimes English, Dutch and Asian children, new immigrants. She had syllabuses to work to, but bent rules, I know, to fire the curiosity of kids who seemed a bit left out or were falling behind. And, when I was rather older and studying psychology and anthropology at university, we’d talk about things like cultural influences and the way people think. By that time, she had moved on and was working with the ethnology department of the big regional museum.

She was a complicated, intelligent and demanding person who would incisively put her finger on things she saw obstructing human fulfillment and goodness. Boredom in her view was, I learned, not just about a “slovenly” mind. It was about an obnoxiously ill-mannered, lazy and immaturely self-focused mind. It was a cowardly refusal to explore anything beyond the boundaries of one’s own immediate preoccupations. Its cure was curiosity, and firing curiosity was, to her, the first obligation of a teacher. Curiosity is what feeds and grows the “self”… not times tables and the alphabet: curiosity makes the “self” interesting enough to live with. And the truth in The Faerie Queen is that it resonates with the inner struggles of bringing one’s “self” to maturity.

Boredom, my mother would say, is a dereliction of that struggle.

Boredom seems to be a peculiarly “modern” mood. It first appeared in literature in 1852: several times, in Charles Dickens' Bleak House.The expression “to be a bore” apparently turn up about 100 years earlier. Recent research has connected boredom with cultural variables and gender, attention spans and depression. And it’s been linked to a host of psychological physical, educational, and social problems including depression.

Boredom seems to have had a lot to do with the odd angst of Ivan Chtcheglov. The son of a taxi-driving Ukrainian revolutionary father and a French mother, he was a perfect candidate for the toothbrush. He won some notoriety when a fit of ennui drove him and a friend to try to “deconstruct” the Eiffel Tower with stolen dynamite because “its light kept them awake at night.” For five years following his failed attempt on the Paris landmark, he was confined to a mental hospital and died in 1998.

As a political theorist, activist and poet, Chtcheglov inspired several small, volatile, left-wing avant-garde groups like the Lettrist International and the Situationist International: left-wing cliques of exclusivist, squabbling and egocentric artist-intellectuals. “We are bred in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun,” Chtcheglov declared in 1953. “A mental disease has swept the planet: banalization,” he wrote with characteristic portentiousness. “Presented with the alternative of love or a garbage disposal unit, young people of all countries have chosen the garbage disposal unit.”

Then, in the late 1960s, the Situationists coined a Chtcheglovian slogan: “The society that abolishes every adventure makes its own abolition the only possible adventure.” It was an augury of punk that reappeared on a banner under which members of the “Reclaim the Streets” movement partied when they shut down London’s M41 motorway in 1996. But is was not society but their own timidity, laziness, lack of imagination and extreme presumptions of entitlement that denied these listless souls “adventure”.

The thing that shines most vividly from Chtcheglov’s intellectual legacy is its self-pitying, ineffective pointlessness. A few attempts at penetrating observation float off to die alone and incompletely understood in voids of self-absorption, all for want of a toothbrush and a cup of water.

My mother would have sorted out Martin Heidegger. He associated boredom with waiting at train stations. “So walk, you fool,” I can hear my mother sharply snap. A couple of hours in our bathroom, and he’d have prised his head from his navel and the world would never have heard his pronouncement that: "profound boredom, drifting here and there in the abysses of our existence like a muffling fog, removes all things and men and oneself along with it into a remarkable indifference. This boredom reveals being as a whole.” What a wuss. It seems to me he missed a bit in the corner too.

Baudelaire blamed society's corruption for inflicting boredom on sensitive souls. My mother would have blamed Baudelaire. Schopenhauer described boredom as a “tame longing without any particular object”, while to Dostoevsky it was “a bestial and indefinable affliction”. Erich Fromm viewed boredom — “perhaps the most important source of aggression and destructiveness today” — as a psychological response to industrial society that locks us into alienated labour. A Canadian classicist, Peter Toohey, has countered that boredom is “a timeless universal human emotion” that impels us to art and literature. “Stuff it… I think I’ll write a novel,” one can imagine Tolstoy grunting as he launched himself into page one of War And Peace. Author Elizabeth Goodstein says that, although boredom seems embedded in the human condition, it’s linked to ways of thinking about our existence and experiencing time that reflect a specifically modern “crisis of meaning”.

Boredom has certainly become the bane of modern and postmodern society. It seems to have a way of surfacing wherever societies suffered self-inflicted surfeits of wealth: it drove Roman emperors mad. But, while the likes of Caligula could express their cravings for heightened stimulation in “real life” by engaging with high-risk abandon in real violence and extreme experience, boredom merely scums our social interfaces as an appetite for simulation and depictions of fantastical activity. It sustains a stupendously lucrative market for “entertainment” and titillation.

It leads us over the rainbow to a place where consequences scarcely exist, a kind of nowhere zone that is far safer, less demanding and less disappointing than reality, but also less satisfying. Life takes on the characteristics of an air guitar: the only place we get to live out our fantasies in is our heads because the fantasies are, in real life, beyond us: untenable and inexpressible. And, shorn of consequence, they lead nowhere. But, so demanding does real life seem by comparison that the temptation is to let our imaginations shrivel like vacuum packaging around the simulations.

Entertainment is a form of transcendence, but it’s one that persistently reminds us of our own ineffectiveness. It mocks us, and what else can we do but glaze over?

On the other hand, the transcendence that comes from within, rising sharp, bright and scary out of real life, changes us, often dramatically; it brings us to life: vivid real life. And, when we are changed, our world is changed.

Real life is not in the least boring, yet the amount of time spent in front of computer and television screens is rising.

Different studies produce varied estimates but a good idea of what’s going on was given by the U.S. ratings service Nielsen in May 2008. It reported that the average American was then spending a little over four hours a day locked in communion with a television set (127 hours and 15 minutes a month) and another 26 hours, 26 minutes a month working out online: together, on average, that’s five hours of electronically delivered inputs a day: one third of a healthy waking human life, or 75 full, 24-hour days a year. A 2010 Canadian study of high school students found their average daily screen time was about seven hours: more than 100 days of the year. If work and commuting take up nine hours a day, and sleep a healthy eight, and another seven hours are spent staring at a screen… that leaves no time at all for family, for preparing and eating food, for keeping fit, for getting to know friends and neighbours, for smelling the roses… for silence and solitude, for contemplation and reflection. Something’s wrong here …entertainment has become THE thing, and the most damaging, hurtful accusation that can be hurled at a person, a place, an event or an activity is that it’s “boring”.

Young backpackers, eagerly looking forward to taking a gap year to explore “the world”, were surveyed by TNT Magazine Travel Show 2008. Asked what they rated as the most essential item to take with them, 32 per cent of these intrepid would-be adventurers (mindful of the acute danger of travel-tedium) chose their iPods. That a first aid kit might come in handy, just in case, occurred to a mere two per cent of them.

An unfortunate thing about entertainment media is the way that the experience has to keep intensifying to hold the interest of its quickly jaded heavy users. It works precisely like a drug addiction: each “fix” needs a bigger kick to keep up with the craving.

So, in just over 50 years, “horror” movies have progressed from the whimsical absurdity of a giant radioactive octopus in It Came From Beneath the Sea (1955) to the graphic sexual torture of films like Eli Roth’s Hostel (called “a sadistic freak show” by one of the film’s more charitable reviewers)… while electronic games have gone from William Higginbotham’s innocent Tennis for Two game of 1958 to Nintendo’s Mad World that lets players rip enemies’ hot, pulsating hearts from their chests, hack them apart with chainsaws and impale them on road signs… all on the “family friendly” Wii console. Entertainment is fraught in this way with the characteristics of addiction. And the boredom deepens.

Genrich Krasko, an American physicist and author of This Unbearable Boredom of Being, sees boredom as one of the most burning problems of today's America: crime, drugs, greed, ugly gender polarization, disintegration of family, decay in morals, racism, and so on, are the direct consequences of a crisis of meaning that has engulfed America.

Krasko, is a fan and follower of the late Dr Viktor Frankl: a psychiatrist, psychologist, philosopher and Holocaust survivor who, in The Unheard Cry for Meaning, wrote: “For too long we have been dreaming a dream from which we are now waking up: the dream that if we just improve the socioeconomic situation of people, everything will be okay, people will become happy. The truth is that as the struggle for survival has subsided, the question has emerged: survival for what? Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.”

And, in Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning: “Unlike an animal, man is no longer told by drives and instincts what he must do. And in contrast to man in former times, he is no longer told by traditions and values what he should do. Now, knowing neither what he must do nor what he should do, he sometimes does not even know what he basically wishes to do. Instead, he wishes to do what other people do... or he does what other people wish him to do...”

It’s time to pull out of the nosedive.