10,000 Hours to Greatness

What was your adolescent dream ambition?  Rock star, football player, violinist, chess master, actress, master chef, writer, film director, video game programmer, reporter, politician?   I wanted to be another Robert A. Heinlein on most days.  On other days, I pictured myself competing with Bob Dylan or Neil Young, but during those rare moments when I thought I was being down-to-Earth, I figured I’d become an astronomer.  I became a computer programmer, and not even a very exciting kind of programmer, like those guys who program artificial vision or Mars rovers, but a name and address kind of database guy.  Probably all of us, in our teenage fantasies, expected to do a whole lot more with our lives than we actual did.  So why didn’t we become rock stars?

Malcolm Gladwell explains why in his new book, The Outliers: The Story of Success.   To learn about one of the factors of success, read a significant extract in The Guardian.  Gladwell makes the case that successful people, the kind that become rock stars or computer programming billionaires, succeeded because they all have devoted at least 10,000 hours of practice to their craft.  That figure has been reported for years, but Gladwell explores the idea further and wider.  Want to be the next Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen or the Beatles, then practice a lot, a whole lot, for about 10,000 hours and you’ll be ready for Carnegie Hall.

I must be a genius at television watching because I’ve probably logged more than 25,000 hours watching TV.  Ditto at listening to music and reading novels, but those passive activities really don’t count.  And I know I’ve put in 10,000 hours at work programming computers, but I’m no Bill Joy.  I’m nowhere near as good a programmer as my friend Mike.  Mike has spent thousands of hours studying programming after work.  I seldom do that.  My guess, the 10,000 hours Gladwell is talking about, are those hours where you’re pushing your brain to learn something new, where you’re constantly trying to get something right, where you stay on the cutting edge of discovery.

Another factor I wonder about is age.  Many of the examples Gladwell covers deal with people putting their 10,000 hours in before they were 20.  That’s practicing 2.7 hours a day from the time you’re 10 till 20.  What kind of kid has that discipline?  Bobby Fischer, Bill Gates, John, Paul, George and Ringo.

To test this concept, we should start teaching about the rewards of 10,000 hour of practice to every kid that begins kindergarten and remind them every day until they finish high school.  What if we all gave copies of The Outliers to every tiny tot expressing a desire to be famous, could we create a super ambitious next generation?

Would every seven year-old that was actually able to grind out his 10,000 hours of practice become a major success?  If I could time travel back to my younger self and convince him to pick something and stick with it, would I have been able to become a rock star or science fiction writer?  We like to think winners are big successes because of lucky genes, or the lucky bastards were at the right place at the right time.  Malcolm Gladwell suggests it isn’t always so.

The answer I am seeking is whether or not I can use this knowledge now, at age 57.  I’ve tried to play the guitar more than once in my life, but I doubt I’ve put 20 hours of solid effort into the endeavor.  If someone had shown me this article before I bought my first guitar at a pawn shop when I was a teenager I might have saved myself $25.  Then again, maybe I would have bought the guitar with more realistic expectations.  But do the math.  Let’s say I was disciplined enough to practice 1 hour a day.  That’s 365 hours in one year.  Ten years of study will log me 3,650 hours of practice time.  That’s almost three decades to mastery.  Gee, I could become a studio musician by the time I’m 97.  I could speed up the process by practicing 2.7 hours a day and be looking for music work by the time I’m 67.

Are old dogs too old to become virtuosos.  Gladwell said that music students who only gotten in 4,000 hours of practice were destined to teach.  That makes me ask:  How many hours until I’d be a competent hobbyist?  Let’s say I wanted to take up the guitar again.  How many hours would it take to learn 10 of my favorite songs, and be able to perform them for my friends so they could 1) recognize the tunes, 2) endure listening to all ten songs, 3) be willing to testify that I could play the guitar without smirking, and 4) be able to play those songs in time with other musicians?  I’m not talking about being great, but being able to play like people used to do back in 19th century, when friends would play for fun because back then, if you wanted to hear music you had to make it yourself.

I can think of several hobbies I would like to be moderately accomplished at.  I’ve recently taken up digital photography.  I’m better than most snapshot shooters, but light years away from the good amateurs that I see presenting their work in online galleries or selling photos at arts and craft fairs.

I’d also like to be a better web graphic artist and master Photoshop.  At work I develop web pages, but mostly for data entry and reports.  I’d like to have the skills to create better looking web sites.  This desire overlaps somewhat with the digital photography because people wanted more photos on the web pages I maintain.

Would 1,000 hours of applied practice make me a skilled amateur?  There’s a chance I’ve already put in 100 hours at digital photography, and I can already feel a great deal of improvement.  Would 1 hour a day of dedicate study and practice get me a quantum leap ahead by next holiday season?  I think it would, despite the fact that I’m 57.  I went and shot some friends yesterday for about 2 hours.  Before I left I studied my camera’s manual and picked out a handful of new techniques to try.  Knowing about those tricks didn’t magically make me shoot better pictures, but I was seeing different looking photos than what I’ve been shooting before.

Taking MFA writing courses helped me improve my fiction writing.  Where I failed was the daily practice.  If only I had developed the discipline to practice one hour a day since Clarion West Writer’s Workshop in 2002, I would have logged 2,200 hours of practice.  I think I have put in 600 hours on blogging since last year, and I see improvements there.  To be honest, I would be much better if I consciously studied creative non-fiction techniques and applied them in a systematic disciplined way.  I should dissect great essays for practice.  To work, I think practice means pushing the envelope.

January 1 is still over a month away, but an interesting New Year’s resolution experiment for 2009 would be to apply the techniques I’m learning from Gladwell’s book to see how far I can take this old dog brain of mine.  If I really wanted to scientific, I should pick the guitar, something I’ve got about zero skill with and see how far I can get in one year.  Does the 10,000 rule apply to everything?  Or does it only apply to a person’s natural inclinations to pursue certain skills?  If we all put an hour a day into juggling, would we all reach the same skill level after a 1,000 hours of practice?

The only song I can remember the words to is “Happy Birthday,” and I still stumble on that third line.  I’ve listened to “Like A Rolling Stone” at least a 1,000 times, but I can’t recite the lyrics, nor could I hum the tune.  A friend once taught me the chords to that song, and I got so I could play them through consistently, but few people could ever guess what I was playing.  Logic tells me since I’m rounding the bend towards the home stretch to the social security years, I shouldn’t waste any of my practice hours chasing skills that have little chance of paying off.  Would any number of hours of practice help a tune-deaf person lacking any sense of rhythm learn to play music?

The only endeavor I’ve stuck to in recent years has been this blog, and piddling around with my three other web sites, The Classics of Science Fiction,  Lady Dorothy Mills and Classic Booklists, which are all extremely homely when it comes to web design.  Let’s see what 400-600 hours of disciplined practice would do for these existing efforts.

To be honest, I’d still like to be great at something, but I think I’m too old for that.  How many late bloomers make a success at 57?  Sounds silly, doesn’t it?  But is age really the factor?  If success is dedicated focus and discipline, could it be those traits always show up by the adolescent years not because those are they best years to learn, but because if you’re going be focused and disciplined person those traits would have shown up by then?

I was never great at anything because I never wanted to pick one thing and stick to it, pursuing that one skill like an idiot savant.  What would be fascinating to know if I could somehow discipline my brain to focus on one pursuit and ignore all other interests, would mastering that skill be any different at 7 or 57?  If I was 27 or 37 or even 47, I think I’d try hard to find out.

JWH 11/29/8

Defining Science Fiction

This is my 185th post for my WordPress blog and my 51st that will be filed in the science fiction category. I started out as a late middle-aged guy wanting to reinvent himself by pursuing a new hobby and ended up doing way too much naval gazing. I need to break out of that loop, wrap up what I’ve learned, and move forward. Because I have spent so much time on the subject of science fiction, I’ve decided the way to find closure is by being my own Freud and define the term “science fiction.”

Hundreds of people have tried to define the phrase science fiction. It’s as slippery a definition to pin down as pornography. Among the billions of people that ride planet Earth through space, there are probably several million that would describe themselves as science fiction fans. That implies that science fiction is an art form, like there are fans of jazz or impressionistic art. But if you were given two jazz songs to listen to, one by Benny Goodman, and one by Miles Davis, could you define jazz? To say that Galaxy Quest and Red Mars are both science fiction is true, but one is a parody of science fiction and the other is hard-core science fiction. It’s like looking at all the breeds of dogs and then coming up with a definition that describes them all but doesn’t include cats and other animals.

After pursuing hundreds of hours of meditation on the subject, I want to define science fiction as a belief system rather than an art form, and when we label something science fiction we’re doing the same thing as when people call something Christian music or a religious novel. Religion is an approach to defining reality. Science fiction is an approach to defining reality. So too are philosophy, science and journalism.

If you watch the Christmas classics The Bishop’s Wife, It’s A Wonderful Life or A Christmas Carol, you are seeing a religious definition of reality put into fictional form. Viewers are asked to believe that angels exist as part of our reality, and that the spirit of Christmas is as fundamental as gravity.

For the viewers who choose to watch Star Wars or Star Trek movies instead, they see a much different reality defined. Both belief systems suggest aspects of our reality that science has never seen. And even though the word science is part of the phrase science fiction, and the implication is science fiction uses science as part of its belief system, science fiction is no more scientific than creationism or intelligent design philosophy.

Personally I have always wanted “real science” fiction to exist, and some writers try, but such works are rare and they are not the works that people point to when they use the phrase science fiction. It is possible to sidestep the philosophical issues and just lump religious fiction, science fiction and call it all fantasy fiction. I love movies about angels, but I don’t believe they exist. I also love movies about faster-than-light travel, time travel, and magic like in Harry Potter stories, but none of those things exist in reality either.

It’s easy to use the fantasy-for-fun escape clause, except that too many of our homo sapiens billions do believe in those fantasy concepts. That’s why I define science fiction as a belief system like religion.

What we need to define now is fiction. Is fiction no more than shared fantasies that have been made into an art form? Films and television shows have become the most popular art form of all time, with some stories embraced by millions of fans. Fiction becomes an escape from reality, and the different forms of fiction appeal to variations in belief systems. We admire what we believe, or want to believe.

I chose not to believe in a religious system when I was a child probably because I had already been imprinted with science fictional beliefs before religion had a chance to imprint on me. By age four or five, Topper, Invaders from Mars, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Superman, Target Earth and a host of other science fictional and fantastic stories got to me before Bible stories could. Instead of believing in God, gods, angels, devils, and miracles, I took up beliefs in space ships, aliens, robots, time travel, invisibility, telepathy, and what not. Is it any wonder that the fundamentalist religions of the world want to protect their children from popular culture?

If I wanted to, I could write a book about how science fiction affected people in the same way a social scientist could write a book about how religion affected people. If I had the time, that might be a fun project. Part of the fun would be to show how various science fictional ideas were introduce into the culture through the evolution of science fiction. The roots of Star Wars could be taken back to E. E. “Doc” Smith and Edmund Hamilton. Tracking the seeds planted by John W. Campbell Jr. or Robert A. Heinlein would take years.

The difference between the belief systems religion and science fiction is we can track down who introduced a belief concept into reality with science fiction, but we have no idea who invented the concept of angels or gods, but rest assured, humans in the distant past thought them all up.

I now feel like I know where I got my science fictional beliefs and how. What do I do now? If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. I’ve gotten to this realization many times before in my life. It’s like a heroin addict finally seeing that injected bliss is false bliss – it doesn’t mean he’ll stop shooting up. Religious teachers often use the metaphor of sleep to describe the condition that exists before enlightenment. There is both religious Buddhism and atheistic Buddhism, and the same must be true for science fiction.

As long as readers can stay awake and remember the concept of “real science” fiction, ordinary science fiction falls into the black hole called opium for the masses. My constant struggle to define science fiction is merely my struggle to stay awake and fight my addiction to science fictional beliefs. The only way to save fiction from escapism is to define true art as that which exposes belief systems.

The trouble is most citizens of our reality prefer escapism to reality. Harry Potter books will always be more popular than the stories of James Joyce or Edith Wharton. This makes the role of the book critic to define a novel as being realistic or escapist, and if the work is fantasy, rate the quality of the opium. Harry Potter books would be primo smoke. A book like The Life of Pi by Yann Martel is a fictionalized version of this essay. It uses fantasy to trick the reader into seeing reality, and then admits that most readers will want to go back to sleep.

I know I will go back to sleep now, and return to my science fiction beliefs to while away the hours while I wait for death. I should reject all fantasy fiction, but I know the power of my addiction, and if I reread this essay from time to time, I’ll even remind myself of where it comes from, and wake myself up for a moment or two. I know I will spend the afternoon watching WALL-E with my wife and friends, and this evening watch the twelfth and final episode of True Blood with another friend. Tomorrow night I’ll watch The Big Bang Theory and Heroes. If I could understand why I prefer entertaining fiction to seeking a deeper understanding of reality I would really find enlightenment.

JWH 11/23/8

The Children of Science Fiction

I am a child of science fiction and the 1960s.  On rare occasions while growing up I’d run into others of my kind, but it didn’t happen often.  It’s not like today where most kids love science fiction, even the popular pretty girls.  I was a member of many pop culture groups, including the first generation raised on the boob tube that became the hordes that worshipped long hair, rock music and the counter culture.  It seems a few us also read Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke.

As I type this Jefferson Airplane’s “The Ballad of You and  Me and Pooneil” is blasting through the speakers.  The long version.  If I had a Venn diagram that collected people born from 1950-1955 and grew up interested in science fiction, astronomy and San Francisco acid rock music of the 1960s, how many of those people would have overlapping interest in all three subjects?  How many people out there grew up influence by L. Frank Baum, Robert A. Heinlein, Mark Twain and Jack Kerouac?

I know who my blood relatives are, but now I’m wondering, who are my literary relatives?  With the advent of the Internet I’m running across my kind more and more.  This first started happening back in the 1980s with online bulletin board systems.  Just recently I stumbled on a couple of online watering holes, where my SF siblings hang out talking about the classic books of science fiction.  These are two Yahoogroup discussion lists:

There are about two hundred science fiction fans signed up between the two groups, with each group reading a classic SF title a month and discussing it, and a subset of those participating are a number of fans my age that started reading SF the same time I did in the early 1960s.  We all discuss those old SF books with various levels of passion for the genre, but it seems like science fiction did a number on us that made us different from the normal kids growing up around us, giving us our own unique subculture.

I feel the kids who grew up with Star Wars are much different from my generation that grew up with Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke.  Sure we might have evolved some when we started reading Delany, Zelazny and Dick, and the New Wave writers, but we’re strangely tied to that generation of Ace Doubles and Ballantine Books and finding our reading thrills on twirling wired racks.   And I wonder if the kids who grow up now with the many forms of science fiction today have any sense of kinship at all.  I know about First Fandom, and later generations of SF fans from the 1940s and 1950s that preceded my generation, because dozens of them became the science fiction writers my generation loved.

From my science fiction cousins, born 1950-1955, many also went on to write science fiction too, like Catherine Asaro, Kage Baker, Iain M. Banks, Steven Barnes, Greg Bear, David Brin, Pat Cadigan, Orson Scott Card, Brenda Clough, Julie Czerneda, Karen Joy Fowler, Lisa Goldstein, Kathleen Ann Goonan, K. W. Jeter, Gwyneth Jones, James Patrick Kelly, John Kessel, Michael P. Kube-McDowell, Geoffrey Landis, Paul J. McAuley, Pat Murphy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Richard Paul Russo, Mary Doria Russell, Geoff Ryman, Lewis Shiner, John Shirley, Melinda Snodgrass, Bruce Sterling, S. M. Stirling, Michael Swanwick, Lawrence Watt-Evans, Walter Jon Williams, Robert Charles Wilson, Timothy Zahn, and many others.

Will their fans be as faithful as my generation for going back now after forty and fifty years and rereading their favorite adolescent books?  The 1960s was one strange trip.  The times, with rock and roll, Vietnam, the counter culture, civil rights, psychedelic drugs, and all the other pop cultures of the 1960s, seared deeply into our brains.  Distinctive smells trigger memories, and science fiction is like newly mown spring onions, dredging up long forgotten past experiences – but artificial ones, one of adventures on far off worlds, induced by a self mesmerizing technique of staring at black marks on cheap paperback pulp pages.  I can’t play an oldie rock song without an old science fiction story haunting me.  I can’t read an old science fiction story without 60s rock music coming out of that old memory radio.
No matter how hard I try, I can’t exorcise science fiction from my soul, and I have tried.  Fifty of my nearly two hundred blog posts have been about science fiction.  Science fiction is a toy I’ve never outgrew.  No matter how much I try to convince myself into believing that science fiction is merely entertaining stories I can’t deprogram myself.  I once wrote, “The Religion that Failed to Achieve Orbit” to be funny, but it’s not.  I rejected religion as a tyke, but caught the science fiction bug instead.  No matter how much my Zen master beats me with his bamboo cane, I still see the Maya of science fiction.

Is it just me?  Or are there other aging science fiction junkies out there still looking for sense-of-wonder fixes?  When I turned fifty and decided to go to the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop, I intended to write Science Fiction 2.0 stories.  I wanted to purify my mind of all the old science fiction tropes and invent new ones for the twenty-first century.  Heinlein, for all of his success never achieved escape velocity.  The science fiction I grew up with was merely wish-fulfilling fantasies about escaping this problem filled world and running off to enchanting new worlds.

Rereading the classics of science fiction is like retracing the original trail looking for new clues.  Joining these Yahoogroups have introduced me to other people doing the same thing.  Is it merely nostalgia?  Is circling back just a common trait of getting older?  Are my efforts just a silly desire to recapture my youth?  Is it just a search for lost meaning, or a narcissistic impulse to find importance in my life?  Or could it simply be that I want to be a amateur scholar of genre history?

I don’t know if this is true or not, but somehow I feel my generation was more influenced by growing up with science fiction than earlier or later generations of science fiction fans.  For most readers of science fiction, the genre is just a category of entertainment.  For people growing up with the 1960s, the baby boomers, who felt the whole world was watching, science fiction added an extra dimension of drama about the future.  We listened to our rock and roll brothers and sisters sing about the revolution, and thought, “sure thing man!”  But we believed the revolution was going to lead mankind into outer space, not some groovy hippie commune.

Now that I’m getting old, and reconnecting with other science fiction fans who are rereading those old classic SF novels from our youth, I think we’re reevaluating the meaning of science fiction.  Were we just kids reading repackaged pulp fiction because it was exciting, or was it visionary and educational?

I’m currently listening to METAtropolis, a shared world-building theme anthology edited by John Scalzi and published by Audible.com.  The five writers, all newer science fiction writers born 1962-1979, write about cities of the near future with the same kind of 1960s revolutionary excitement.  They grew up with science fiction and the Internet, another social revolutionary vector, and they see exciting possibilities.  Does that help us?

Unfortunately, the world of science fiction philosophers is tiny, and not as influential as the more famous digital-world philosophers.  There is overlap, but I have to wonder if the unfolding of the future has already outpaced the writers of the future.  How will John Brunner’s epic experimental Sci-Fi masterpiece, Stand on Zanzibar from 1968 and set in 2010, match up with the real 2010 when it arrives, or even the science fiction writers of 2008 trying to predict the near future?

Using hindsight, and rereading old science fiction, how many of those childhood reads really prepared me for the present?  I recently discovered this quote while rereading The Space Merchants by C. M. Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl:

The Conservationists were fair game, those wild-eyed zealots who pretended modern civilization was in some way “plundering” our planet.  Preposterous stuff.  Science is always a step ahead of the failure of natural resources.  After all, when real meat got scarce, we had soyaburgers ready.  When oil ran low, technology developed the pedicab.

That’s a pretty fascinating quote written originally in 1952.  Especially when you realize that this is satire and the conservationists are right even back then.  Science fiction is just amateur philosophers thinking about the future.  Sometimes, it’s just an action story.  Sometimes, it’s a “what if this goes on…” story.  Science fiction writers and readers think about all the possibilities.  Now the children of science fiction are growing up in the real future.  Have their literary parents, the science fiction books they were raised on, prepared them properly?

I’m always surprised to find seeds like the quote above when rereading old science fiction.  It makes me wonder if reading science fiction helped program my personality.  I’ve been concerned with over population, the limits of growth, pollution, global terrorism, economic collapse, and more, all my life.  A certain percentage of the population take global warming very seriously.  Another percentage don’t.  Is it because they weren’t prepared by reading lots of science fiction scenarios?

I fondly remember hundreds of wonderful science fiction novels, but when I reread them, many aren’t so wonderful today.  Foundation by Isaac Asimov has some cool ideas, but the storytelling in that fix-up novel is clunky.  City by Clifford Simak is another fix-up novel that still provoked a sense of wonder in me, but failed to work with some of my friends.  Strangely, I discover that I admire Philip K. Dick’s old work because he wrote about quirky realistic people who were motivated by their own self interests that often superseded the direction of the plot.

Too often old science fiction novels contained characters that are just mouthpieces for the author to rattle off his pet ideas.  That makes for bad storytelling, but is maybe a clue about my personality and why I’m haunted by science fiction.  Science fiction wanted to explain reality.  It lacked the discipline of science.  It was much further out than religion, which was always quite far out, but science fiction sold itself as being scientific, which has never been true.  The 1960s was a kooky time, with UFO freaks, drug trippers,  Edgar Cayce disciplines, ESP dreamers, so is it not all that strange that a bunch of kids wanted to follow Danny Dunn and Tom Swift Jr. into outer space.

Of course, you know what that means?  I reread science fiction in my fifties because I’m wanting to return to the dreams I had in my teens.  2008 is the far future from my kid self of 1968.  It’s just not the future I expected or wanted.  Is being nostalgic merely wanting to start over again, and maybe this time get it right?

I finish this as Jefferson Airplane starts singing, “Have You Seen the Saucers.”  I kid you not.

JWH 11/19/8

Is The Internet Bad For The Economy?

Since the earliest days of Amazon.com I have been buying shelf loads of books from this innovate Internet business every year.  Then I stopped going to record shops and bought my CDs from them too.  Later on I bought running shoes, electronic gadgets, printer ink, and anything else that was convenient.  I buy a lot more books because of Amazon.com’s heavily discounted prices, no state sales tax and free shipping on orders over $25.  Now that the economy has taken a fall, I’ve got to wonder if my buying habits helped in knocking it out?

None of my favorite bookstores have gone under, but they’re struggling.  All my old record stores are dead.  So is the place where I bought my running shoes.  And all the small computer shops I used to visit have disappeared.  My state is hurting from low revenue, mostly gotten from sales tax rather than an income tax.

I buy a lot of audio books.  Audio books used to be $25-150 on cassettes and CDs, but I get them for $9.54 each at Audible.com as a digital download.  I never would have bought many titles if I had to pay the old prices, but if retailers now sold them for $15-25 a book, and Audible.com didn’t exist, I would buy 3-4 titles a month.

I used to buy 2-4 CDs a week.  Now I buy none because I pay $120 a year for unlimited listening on Rhapsody.com.  I used to buy a lot of software, but most of the programs I use today are free.  My wife and I used to collect DVDs, but now we have Netflix.  We used to pay for photo prints to give to people, but now we email copies.

I’ve got to ask:  Is the Internet hurting our capitalistic system?  I love the Internet.  I would never want to give it up.  But survival in this world depends on economic activity.  And comfort and security depends on everyone having a job and the economy doing well.  A 2% rise in unemployment, which we’ve recently experienced, has brought fear and misery.  What will 10% do to our sense of well being?  Do you remember the early 1980s?  People are talking about this financial crisis being the worse since the Great Depression.  1932 had a peak of 25% unemployed.  I have no way of imagining that level of bad times, and I don’t think anyone under 95 can really remember what it was like either.  We really don’t want to go there, and need to consider doing almost anything not to.

We all need to be conscious of our economic impact.  Spending frugally, staying out of debt, making careful purchasing decisions, and all those lessons financial advisors taught us might not be the right thing to do right now.  Would spending a few dollars more for each book and paying the sales tax be a better choice for my local economy than ordering from Amazon?

This afternoon my wife and I wanted to watch a movie together, but there was nothing on at the theater we wanted to see.  So we thought we’d go by Target and buy Kung Fu Panda.  It was $19.99 plus almost $2 in tax.  I could get it from Amazon for $15.99, a savings of almost $6.  But we decided to wait a couple of days for when it comes in via Netflix.  The rental cost would be less than the tax, thus saving over $20.

We didn’t buy Kung Fu Panda.  We just didn’t feel like spending $22 for something so trivial in these economic times.  If Kung Fu Panda would have been on sale for $12.99 we would have come home with a new DVD.  I wanted to help the economy, and considered a 4 DVD set of Dexter Season One for $17.99 plus tax or a 6 DVD set of Northern Exposure Season 6 for $14.99, both of which seemed like excellent buys, but I’ve been spoiled by Netflix.  Why buy something to own when I only expect to watch those shows one time?

See, the Internet has turned me into a bad consumer.  It’s saved me a lot of money, plus it’s more efficient because I don’t have to maintain a physical copy of something that would clutter up my house.  But I’ve deprived a local business of income, took jobs away from the local economy, and reduced the tax revenue of Tennessee.  My gain is a loss for my community.

Either we have to design an economic system with the efficiency of the Internet in mind, or we need to go back to our old ways.  I’m reminded of an old science fiction story.  I can’t remember the title, but it was about a future where the poor had to consume on schedule, while the rich were free to consume as needed.  An example, the poor had to change their shirts several times a day to keep production up in shirt factories. 

Do we really want an economy where people need to buy DVDs rather than rent so more people will have jobs?  Or buy a new gas-guzzling SUV every three years.  I’m sure you get my drift.

Well, the answer might be yes.  If we want to keep the old economy going.  And we might until they invent a new economy.  This is all very hard.  What if you could buy a car that would last 300,000 miles, and used little or no gas, being mainly powered by solar panels on your garage’s roof.  What does that do to GM or Exxon?  If environmental technology, ET, becomes just as efficient as information technology, IT, what does that do to the economy?

What if I took the money I saved by using the Internet and spent it on renovating my house with local labor, buying from local suppliers, but with the goal of making my home more energy efficient?  Will that help the new economy, or just delay the death of the old economy?  I already bought a new SEER 16 HVAC that’s saving me hundreds of dollars a month on energy.  That’s $9300 that went into the local economy, but now my monthly nut to the utility company is smaller.  I could start spending money on insulation, better windows, better appliances, and all of that will add to the economy.

Eventually, I’ll have a very energy efficient house, and I’ll start putting much less into the economic system.  It’s like switching from buying DVDs to renting them.  At some point being efficient leads to less economic activity.

Yes, I think the Internet is bad for my old local economy, and bad for our old national economy.  What’s needed is a new economy.  It’s called a steady-state economy, one that’s not based on growth.  Is the financial crisis that has come down on us going to be the metamorphosis that we must endure before becoming butterflies in a new economic world?  Will Barack Obama return to old tricks to solve our new problems?  Or can he be Copernicus seeing the Ptolemaic economic solar system with new vision?

We can always go back to a wood-chopping, horse and buggy world.  We could turn off the Internet.  This financial crisis may force many to give up cell phones, Internet and cable TV.  Without the Internet, most people will have little need of a personal computer.  Going backwards is possible and may happen.  We may have to prop up the old economy, but is that what we want?

It’s very important that we all pay attention.  In the next few years, a lot of decisions are going to be made.  Where are you going to throw your support?  Every dollar spent is a vote.

JWH – 11/15/8

We Need A Number

Go do a Google search on this phrase – “Target Atmospheric CO2” – and include the quotation marks, and you will find 2,400 links.  The links point to essays discussing a scientific paper by James Hansen and other scientists called “Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?”  The gist of the story:  The likely safe high range for CO2 in the atmosphere is 350ppm, and we’re beyond that at 385ppm.  Hansen is the NASA scientist that first alerted Congress to the global warming problem back in 1988.  Randomly read some of those essays reacting to the paper and you’ll save me the time paraphrasing it.  The paper itself is perfectly readable, if you’re patient, but it’s bumpy with scientific speak, so it might be easier to read the commentaries.

Many of the writers act like 350 is the magic number we need, and in some ways that’s true.  It gives humanity a very specific goal.  It tells everyone that if we want weather like the nice weather we grew up with, then everybody needs to go on a carbon diet and get the atmospheric CO2 below 350 again.  However, that does not convey the sacrifice needed to achieve the goal.

I think we need another number.  Scientists need to decide what is the fair share target number we all need to stay under personally to get the job done.  Recycling paper and buying compact florescent lights are not going to do the trick.  I think until we have a personal number to target, along with proper labeling on everything we buy, people won’t understand how much CO2 they need to cut out of their lives.

How much sacrifice do we need to make?  If the nations of the world had a crash program to switch to 100% solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear and other sources of clean energy, would that solve the problem?  Would that be one way to solve the problem without asking individuals to think about the details?  Or should governments just kill off some of the most polluting industries?  Do we need to give up the beef industry?  Or the paper industry?  Or the airline industry?  Or all of them plus more?  Or would it be better to ask the citizens themselves to take on their own share of global warming responsibility and let them make their own decisions on how to clean up their share of personal waste?

If we had a number to measure our personal use against, we could all decide the sacrifices we’d like to make.  Some people might be willing to dry their clothes on the line outside for a year to budget flying to New York City for a vacation.  Other people might buy high tech cars that put little CO2 in the atmosphere so they can enjoy living in a larger house.  Others might choose to walk to work so eating steaks wouldn’t break their personal greenhouse gas consumption budget.

Many people have suggested having a carbon tax to help fund a Manhattan style project to convert to clean energy power plants.  This would discourage waste and finance change.  Having a tax would be one way to quantify for the public their duty to humanity.  It could also simplify the decisions people make.  If gasoline with a carbon tax was $12 a gallon, then you’d think long and hard about wasting it.  If the price of electricity from coal went to 4x with a carbon tax, it would give utility companies income to build new plants and customers incentives to make their houses energy efficient.

This would be the easy route.  What if in the next ten years we screwed around and didn’t do anything and it became frighteningly obvious we need to do something drastic?   Would we make bigger sacrifices then?  What if we had to outlaw the gasoline powered car?  Or outlaw airplanes?  Or ration electricity?

There are thousands and thousands of things we can do now by freely making the choices ourselves before the governments of the world have to get heavy.  If we knew what our carbon allotment was, it would be easier to make those choices.

Take for instance paper.  I have no idea how much paper contributes to the problem of global warming, but I have seen one number that says that junk mail adds 114 billion pounds of CO2 annually.  My reaction is to give up paper completely.  I’m phasing out my magazine and newspaper subscriptions, I’m doing my best to never print computer documents, I’m working to reduce junk mail, and I’m finding ways to shop for products with less packaging.

If everyone thought this way, paper magazines would disappear from society and everyone would read electronic periodicals.  Is this good or bad?  That’s a lot of jobs lost.  Potentially, it could mean a lot of businesses would go under.  I’d hate to see that, but on the other hand, paper really isn’t needed in our computer networked society.  My local newspaper just started offering a weekly electronic edition that looks just like the print edition, but costs less than the Sunday only paper subscription.  I’m moving to a paperless lifestyle, but even though it’s logical to me, is it what everyone else should be doing too?

I draw the line at magazines and newspapers, but feel that books are worth their environmental costs because we preserve them and consider newspapers and mags disposable.  What if that’s wrong.  What if there’s a way to have environmental safe magazines?  Unless scientists tell us the values associated with all our consumption we won’t know how to make enlightened decisions.  If a National Geographic subscription form came with a number – 24 – for 24 pounds of CO2 added to the atmosphere per 1 year subscription then that would be a big step in understanding the problem.

However, unless I know my allotment number, say 1,000 pounds per year, I wouldn’t be able to practically use the 24 figure I got from National Geographic.  So Mr. Hansen, it you and your science buddies would be so kind, give us another number.  350 is cool for the world to know, but we all need another number, a number that would tell us how to live by so all 7 billion people riding on spaceship Earth pulls that 385ppm figure down to 350ppm.  That number is the maximum amount in pounds of greenhouse gases we can each safely add to the atmosphere in a year.

President Elect Obama, you could help with this too.  Instead of offering another general economic incentive package, offer us tax breaks on buying specific clean energy products and services.  That would be another way to quantify a solution.  Tax what’s bad for the environment, and subsidized what’s good.  Get the U.S. to do more than it’s fair share to get the world below that 350ppm number.  We owe the rest of the world.

JWH 11-9-8