Monthly Archives: June 2013

Personal Experience

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Personal experience is defined as the events, successes, failures, sensory input, and thought that create our value systems – the personal experiences throughout our entire life that guide our judgment, our understanding of good and bad, our perception of reality, and our personal opinions.

In the post “The Evolution of Faith,” a metaphor describes how personal experience is very real but also very limited. We ask a fish: What is water? The fish will know water as a collective experience of its lifetime. However, the fish will not know about water in its entirety. The fish will not know the chemistry, the physics, the behavior of water as ice, or the cyclical atmospheric role of water through evaporation, rain, humidity, and the creation of climate – not even the source of the very water that sustains the fish.

This limitation may be satisfactory if a human were a fish. In many ways, a human is much more sophisticated than a fish, particularly as a thinking creature who knows it is always important to understand the greater view of reality beyond personal experience. If a human does not continuously learn about and examine reality, the human mind unnoticeably slows down, shrinks and becomes brittle.

The mariner attended a social gathering with some of his closest friends. All were bright, successful individuals; all were middle class; men and women were present; all were very caring in nature and open to radical thought. As the conversation progressed through the evening, the mariner became aware of how influential personal experience can be. There were several opinions where a simple experience prevented a logical examination of reality, where personal experience disrupted the judgment of broader issues.

Often, the middle class is described as the worrying class: They are in the middle between the wealthy, who do not experience the squeeze of financial insecurity, and the poor, who do not experience the challenge to have a successful future. The wealthy seemingly are interested only in becoming wealthier without regard for the wellbeing of the middle class; the poor are interested only in survival without regard for the morality of the middle class. Therefore, judgmental behavior abounds in the middle class – sustained by worrisome personal experience.

There are many classic middle class prejudices toward the poor: abuse of food stamps, welfare cheaters, lack of a job. The list is much longer. Two aspects of these prejudices occur to the mariner: First, personal experience cannot be the measure of another person’s personal experience – the “walk a mile in my shoes” argument. Second, allowing personal experience to be the primary thought process does not achieve anything – the issue is always broader and more complex than personal experience can explain. If not, behold, the human has become a fish!

It is harder to be judgmental about the wealthy. First, everyone would prefer to be wealthy so the middle class accepts behavior of the wealthy more easily. Second, individuals of wealth can afford to buy their way out of immorality. Is this why the wealthy never go to jail? Is it acceptable to steal billions of dollars from the economy while receiving infusions of capital from the government to cover losses? Is it within the morality of the middle class to destroy the lives of millions of people in order to gain even more wealth? Is it within the morality of the middle class to toss out a government program that is a lifeline for millions in poverty because personal experience noticed a difference in moral behavior?

Readers may ponder these questions. However, ponder them with more than a fish brain.

 

Ancient Mariner

 

Winners and Losers

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Winners and Losers

This post is about the shift in an economic paradigm. An example is the emergence of the computer. The computer age has been around in a meaningful way since the 1950’s. The new technology-based workforce added millions of new jobs to the economy – jobs for engineers, programmers, software developers, data base designers – and those that were in the first wave of lost jobs were armies of bookkeepers, administrative assistants and typists. When a new economic model bursts on the scene, there is a great wave of new opportunity, large cash flow and an upward change in lifestyle – except for the losers.

On a recent cable news program, a career communications entrepreneur responded to the question about new technologies displacing workers by saying that the new technologies will add 2.6 million new jobs to the workforce, blithely avoiding the point of the question. He failed to mention that a significant portion of the workforce loses their jobs in a major change of the economic paradigm and will not have a place in the new economy.

Several years ago on Bill Moyers’ PBS interview program, three noted economists, liberal and conservative, supply side and demand side, all agreed that on average, fifteen percent of the workforce will not have jobs in a new economy. The attitude of the economists was heartless. Jobs disappear, they agreed, it is part of the process. Empathy for jobless families was absent; that is just how it is.

We first learn about this winner and loser phenomenon in Economics 101. The typical example is the disappearance of jobs related to a horse transportation economy when automobiles displaced the horses: no need for all those buggy whip workers. No need for so many carriage makers, farriers, and harness makers.

At a presentation for incoming freshmen at the University of Iowa, the speaker was an economics professor. He said that economics is really a continuous series of decisions to balance supply and demand. The example he gave for balancing supply and demand was the availability of organ donors versus the greater number of those who need organs. “Who gets the organ and who doesn’t?” he asked. The principles of economics seek the best model for the economy. In this case, it is a set of policies used by medical professionals to make the decision. In other words, there always will be winners; there always will be losers.

Listening to news broadcasts and interviews of experts, we already are evolving into a new economy. First, there is the globalization of the marketplace; second, Internet technology will change what the word “work” means.

There will be fewer winners than losers. The economics professor provided a realistic metaphor using donor organ supply and demand.

Someone once said that democracy elects the safest candidate rather than the appropriate candidate. Given the silliness of our Federal, State and Local governments, the electorate definitely is safe from unexpected change. The private sector has many inadequacies but it is always for change. That is where the big money is.

The United States is similar to the sailor that has one foot on shore and one foot on the drifting boat: calamity is bound to happen. There are so many loopholes and welfare for the rich and so much incompetence dealing with discretionary programs that the Federal government has fallen into a useless pit lined with greed and ignorance. The open question is how to apply economic fairness as change occurs ever more rapidly. But that’s another posting.

Troubled Earth

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All of us are familiar with news about global warming, more energy in the atmosphere that increases severe weather, and rising oceans. There are side effects that are escalating: disappearance of polar bears, pandas, gibbons, and hundreds more species associated with the human misuse of the planet. There is the issue of overpopulation, food distribution, interference by nationalism that stops solutions, abuse by entrepreneurs and corporations that lead to oil spills, ground pollution, air pollution, acid rain and on and on.

What all these troubled issues have in common is that they are manmade and man can repair them. While this is a tall order for humans, at least a solution is identifiable – if never accomplished.

Other troubles for the planet (from the human perspective) are not manmade and humans have no control over these planetary processes. Planet earth is in the midst of a polar shift of the magnetic field – the North Pole will become the South Pole and vice versa. Already a magnetic compass is of little use in most of the southern Atlantic Ocean. More important to humans is that while this polar shift occurs, the magnetic field protecting the Earth from dangerous solar wind will be weak and virtually disappear for a length of time. The effect is increased occurrences of cancer, unknown damage to plant and animal evolution, disruption of satellite communication, etc.

Another planetary issue is the wobble effect in the Earth’s declination. Very much like the toy gyroscope wobble, the Earth reaches a point of imbalance that causes a very noticeable adjustment in declination. The Earth’s “wobble” is increasing. The effect of the chaotic moment will bring on our next ice age. Some scientific predictions suggest this will happen in this century, though data is incomplete.

The major currents of the Earth’s oceans are slowing. For example, the Gulf Stream is pushing less and less warmth to the North Atlantic. This will cause very large changes in long term weather patterns along the eastern half of North America – it will be colder and Arctic fronts may visit Georgia; The British Isles may well have an eco shift toward weather more familiar in the Nordic nations.

(There was a link here but I removed it because many articles were not scientific in nature)

There are many more planetary activities beyond human control; one well known one is the impact of a meteor. Most relate in one way or another to the issues mentioned in this post.Lastly, more an entertaining factoid than a troublesome event, is the fact that the Moon is drifting away from the Earth at the same rate as one’s fingernails grow – about two and a half inches per year.

Ancient Mariner