Mitt the Spider

 

Watching Landings

 

You’re at the local airport. You watch landings, because pilots always do. Today, because there is a lot of traffic and you're not pressed for time, you watch for awhile. Twenty, maybe thirty landings go by. What do you see? Fifty percent (this is a flight school strip) touch down halfway down the runway. One or two touch down in the last 1000 feet.

What do you take away from the experience?

Gossip, certainly – if you're standing there with fellow pilots. Comfort, possibly – if you feel you can do better than most of what you're watching. Or perhaps chagrin, if the reverse is true and a recent example of your own work sticks in your craw.

But there is a more important take-away: forming an opinion or evaluation by discerning and comparing.That is the dictionary definition of judgment. And the aviation version of judgment is more practical: if I find myself in this situation, can we do it?

The we in the last paragraph refers to you and your airplane. You learn skills and you memorize your airplane's limitations. You are a team.

The situation is whatever pickle you're going to get into on your next flight. Can I land on a 2000-foot runway?

You look up the Landing Distance Required in your Flight Manual or Pilot Operating Manual. For my N-Model Bonanza I find 1600-2000 feet (no wind, 75°F. or less, 2000 feet pressure altitude or less). So we can do it, right?

Not so fast. The runway at my local airport is just under 4000 feet long. I consistently turn off on the center taxiway, but not without some braking. I have a bit too much speed over the fence and I float too long. So I'm not quite ready for that 2000-foot strip. My airplane is, but I am not.

Here is another clue. My POM also lists Landing Distance Required for a Short Field Landing. Same configuration, but the over-the-fence speed is 5 knots less. Instead of 1600-2000 feet, the required distance is 1200-1400 feet. Add five knots and add five hundred feet! Nope: my energy management – hey, my hands and feet, if you get right down to it – are not good enough yet.

Why not, you may ask? After all, I have been a pilot for 45 years. Well, two things: first, I'm 68 years old; and second, after I retired from airline flying I didn't touch a yoke for six and a half years. So I had to write exams and do a lot of re-learning. Now I'm learning the hands and feet again.

In short, for the moment my airplane is better than I am.

Hours, Experience, and Judgment

How do we discern and compare on the road to developing pilot judgment? First, look at the one or two Bottom Guns who touched down in the last 1000 feet. “Good enough,” they say. I guess so, if their airplane can stop in that distance. Then the fifty percent who touched halfway down. “Plenty of runway left. No sweat.” These guys are like me. Their airplanes are better than they are. It's just a matter of how much better.

What's missing? A path to learning judgment.

Experience is measured in hours. Judgment, theoretically, comes from experience. But it is not automatic. Hours of flight or even hours of practice take you nowhere unless they are accompanied by some discernment and comparison. Neither the Bottom Guns nor the halfway-down-the-runway pilots are safe trying to land on a 2000-foot runway. But do they know that?
Spiders are kind to their own. Well, story except for the kinky Black Widow, who eats her husband after sex.

Spiders are very good at controlling the populations of lesser insects – gnats, for example.

Above all, spiders dine in style. Pheasant under glass has nothing on them. Have you noticed? A fine, strapping exoskeleton gets stuck in a beautiful, geometric web whose strands are stronger than steel. There is no rush, no baring of teeth or ripping of flesh. No blood on the floor.

The spider, epicure and medical professional, injects a magic potion under the shiny shell. The guts and muscle of the beautiful captive are reduced, sautéed and flambéed. Only then does the spider dine – elegantly and unhurriedly.

After the meal the prize remains. The beautiful prey is still there, intact and whole, framed in the skyscraper web. Its value seems undiminished.

But it will move no more, except when the wind pulls at the strands binding it. The soul is long gone.

So too does private equity provide for its own.

What’s in it for Me?

I admire Maureen Dowd and enjoy her columns, but she is off track on this one (Playing Now: Hail to the Chiefs – New York Times, Sunday, September 9, 2012).

She does, however, speak for us.

We live in a market-driven society that has come to expect service. I'm paying. You deliver. We have become puffed up with the importance of our money.

But education doesn't work that way. Good health care doesn't work that way. And – this was the President's point – democratic government doesn't work that way.

Just before the line Ms. Dowd satirizes – the election four years ago wasn't about me. It was about you – the President had the courage and the leadership to remind Americans that “We, the people, recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights.” He goes as far as to say that “freedom without a commitment to others . . . . is unworthy of our founding ideals.”

President Obama is right. We won't get out of the mess we're in unless each of us can turn to a fellow citizen who has done good work and say, “Welcome home. You did that. You did that.”

We can't demand good work. We can't demand good teaching, good health care, or good government. No matter how much money we have, we can't put the “good” in any of these. Paying is not enough, and the Market is not a leader.

So perhaps Ms. Dowd has done all of us a service by putting a voice to our selfishness. The voice rings hollow in a society largely emptied of respect for good work and of motivations other than money. But perhaps Ms. Dowd was satirizing us and not the President?

How To Live: What Humanity Has Learned So Far

Be grateful. Do good work. Keep the faith. This is how to live, according to two millennia of world culture.

Different cultures put it differently. Within a cultural tradition, the religion might put it differently from the philosophy or from the literature. And of course there are many religions, philosophies, and works of literature, each with its own voice.

But that is not what we are concerned with. Here we want to speak of what they all say, even if they do so in different words.

Be Grateful

This is the starting point. Without gratitude it is difficult, if not impossible, to move ahead into a productive life, into happiness, into peace. All religions address this point. The clearest exposition is the awakening of the Buddha. Sitting under the Bodhi tree, he saw that the self is the source of all unease.

Self-awareness is a great gift, but it is a double-edged sword. One can easily become drunk on self-awareness and slide further into addiction to its many temptations. Self-pity. Depression. Unhappiness.

Other religions are not so direct in their path to peace. Most approach from the other end, from faith. Believe in a god or gods, they say. Then by surrendering you will have expanded your awareness beyond your self. Believe and your problems will be solved.

This approach, it seems to me, is less attractive for two reasons. First, we are endowed with intellect and curiosity, and to be well we must use our gifts. To be told to suspend them, right off the bat, goes counter to our valid instincts. Second, there is a temptation to laziness in any belief. By accepting Jesus, for example, we can be saved. Or perhaps by saying we have accepted Jesus we can be saved, from one moment to the next. Have we really stepped outside ourselves, or is it a delusion? Are we instead inside ourselves, thinking of ourselves as good persons? And maybe of others as not quite as good persons?

I am not saying it is impossible to get to gratitude through faith. Or through good work, for that matter. It is just harder. And there are more pitfalls along the way.

Think of a cow, lying in a field of clover, chewing her cud. Is she content? Probably the question is meaningless. She is one of many cows eating clover and ruminating. She is surrounded by green and birdsong, by life, by creation. She knows she is not the center of the universe, or rather, she would never be tempted to think such a thing. She is already saved.

We humans can always be tempted. The doctrine of original sin is a way of pointing this out. The Christian cycle of acceptance and absolution, the ritual of the mass, is a path to awareness beyond the self. But it is not the only path. True, pain is part of life, and through the pain of transgression we can walk into gratitude. But it can be simpler. We can hear a thrush sing its greeting to the dawn and be made whole, which is to say to be made part of a whole, our awareness extending beyond our selves. Gratitude. For nature. For creation. For not being alone. For not being the center of the universe.

Do Good Work

I said earlier that we are endowed with intellect and curiosity. From birth, we have many other gifts as well, although just as each of us has different DNA, so each of us differs in our particular combination of gifts. Good work is putting these gifts to work for the benefit of mankind.

Of course we need money. Or maybe some land on which to grow food. Our first goal, after all, is survival. Once again, here is a valid instinct to be heeded. But the goal is not land. The goal is not money. The goal is survival for the purpose of doing our good work. Work which is unique to each one of us. So yes – as individuals we are important. But not because we are better than others. We are important because humanity and all creation will be better off if we manage to realize our gifts and give them back. We will be better off if we don't die with those gifts still clutched to our bosom.

Keep the Faith

This is another way of saying, be hopeful.

Be in the moment. This is important. When we are doing our best work we are in the moment, fully engaged, like the cow chewing her cud. But we are humans, endowed with intellect and curiosity. So we remember the past and think of the future. So yes – be in the moment when you can, as much as you can. But don't be dismayed if your thoughts turn to the past or the future. Our ability to do so is one of our gifts. But like many of our human gifts, it comes with temptations. To regret the past. To worry about the future. Some regret and worry is fine, of course. Regret and worry have their purpose. But don't get stuck there. The past must be accepted if we are to move on. And the future must hold promise. We have to believe in a future, whether it is in this life or beyond. We have to be hopeful.

I will finish with a personal parsing of the Lord's Prayer:

Our father who art in heaven. I am not alone. There are others. There is all creation.

Hallowed be they name. This creation is beautiful, and beauty will feed me.

Thy kingdom come. Let there be a future which is better than today.

Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Let me understand the limits of my gift of free will. Let me not suppose that I have dominion over others, or even complete dominion over my own life.

Give us this day our daily bread. May I have what I need to survive, so I have a chance to realize my gifts.

And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. May what I have done wrong not stop me, not prevent me from going on. And I know it is a bargain: I must forgive others as well as myself.

Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. I know that each one of my many gifts comes with temptations. I know that by struggling against those temptations I increase my chances of survival to do what I must do. Once again, this is a bargain.

For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory. When I succeed and do my good work, let me understand that it is not for me. It is for all of humanity and even all of creation. It is not to put me above my fellow creatures. It is not to wield power for power's sake. If I am given power let me be a leader, not a bully. And if I am successful let me be grateful, not puffed up.

For ever and ever. May this continue beyond and outside of me for a century of centuries. For as long as my intellect can comprehend.

Amen.

The Education Myth

What do we mean by Education?

 

Educate: from the Latin educere, to lead out. Teach: this is from deik, a much older word. The Proto-Indo-European from which it springs is thought to be more than 5500 years old.

Today, as our education system suffers, there is much talk of educating and teaching but few speak  of indoctrinating. It just doesn't sound right. We want to do something high-minded for our kids, not beat them with rulers. But wait. Indoctrinate: from Middle French and Latin, to give instruction in the fundamentals or rudiments. This is the same root (the Latin doceo, docere: to teach) as doctrine: something that is held or put forth as true; and doctor: teacher. But there is another meaning to indoctrinate and that is why it didn't sound quite right: to imbue with an idea or opinion. That is the indoctrinate we are leery of.

What is it that we want to do with education, anyway? If we are honest we will have to include some indoctrination, some giving of instruction in fundamentals. Remember Reading, 'Riting, and 'Rithmatic? The three 'R's? But we want more than that. We want the educated person to be able to think for herself.

Keeping the Public in Public Education

This is the title of a newly-published small book by Rick Salutin, teacher, writer, and long-time columnist for The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star (Linda Leith Publishing, 2012). He dedicates the book to his teachers – two of them in particular. He reports on his visit to Finland, which in the last decade has ranked consistently first in the world in student achievement. What he found was simple: in Finland teachers are respected and allowed to do what they do best.

I recommend this book highly to anyone seeking evidence and carefully reasoned arguments for the following conclusions:

Teaching and learning is an interaction between two human beings.

Teaching to the test is counterproductive.

Management oversight of teachers is counterproductive.

Graduate degrees in “education” are useless.

Curricula can be good, bad, or offensive.

The real goal is to think for yourself.

What Industry Wants

North American industry finds itself in a bit of a bind. Most of the jobs it needs done require a thorough grounding in Math and Science. We are not educating enough people to fill these positions. To be sure there are generations-old partnerships like that of Stanford University with Silicon Valley. But in general industry doesn't look far enough forward to help in the education of the next decade's engineers and scientists. Instead, what we see is the proliferation of “for profit” universities, which are in essence vehicles for turning student loans into capital formation tools. Never mind that the student victims wind up with a degree which is even narrower and more overpriced than one from a legacy non-profit university. Charter schools are another example where public money is used to finance a “free market” experiment.

So where do we look for guidance? The right points out that government only imposes tests and hierarchies, so the free market is the only option. The left says big money tilts the income curve and skims the graduating cream to work for hedge funds, so government is the answer. While these are arguable points, they don't help us to improve education, to get us to a place where, as in Finland, citizens respect teachers and kids learn naturally and well.

The Education Myth

The myth is simply that education is found in institutions. We have come to so thoroughly identify learning as emanating from schools and universities that we have forgotten the basics: a teacher shows something, points it out, says, look at that! Then a student sees that thing as if for the first time.

If we consider this simple but essential relationship, many useful insights follow:

The institution is the house, the teacher and student make the home.

Learning depends on mutual respect.

There are as many ways to learn as there are students.

There are as many ways to teach as there are teachers.

Forcing conformity kills the motivation to learn or to teach.

What Now?

Teachers should have a university degree. Just not in Education. If they are really teachers they will know what to do.

We should stop worrying about tests, for teachers as well as for students. Let teachers teach and let students learn. It will be obvious soon enough who is getting it right.

No one has a right to be taught. Everyone should have a chance to learn. At a policy level this seems like a contradiction, but it is not. Let teachers and student find each other and chances and opportunities can be winnowed out from rights and entitlements.

There have always been teachers who got it right. In the fifth century B.C. it was Socrates. In the last decade it has been the Finns. We have been looking in the wrong place.

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." W.B. Yeats

 

Work is Dead

Hello, Grandmas and Grandpas. Ever wonder why your kids are living at home? Or why, when they do make money, it's one-shot, scavenger deals that pick away at the edge of the economy? Our kids – gleaners, snatching the crumbs?

For an answer, take a look at the corporate executive. No, not the entrepreneur, still in charge of the company he founded twenty years ago. No, not even that new political god, the small business owner – he (or she) is so busy with cash flow that there is no time for vision. I am talking of the CEO of a publicly traded company, hired by the Board of Directors and responsible to the shareholders.

The job of this CEO is to systematically devalue work.

Why, you ask? Remember – the time horizon for a CEO is the next quarterly report, which is never more than three months away. He could spend his time dreaming a vision for the future. But – especially in these hard, competitive times – he doesn't dare. The bottom line has to look better three months hence and his only choice is to cut costs. So he merges, divests, moves work offshore, and fights unions. He cuts costs, because that seems to be the only way he can protect the shareholders.

But work, and workers, are more than just a cost to the company. They are also its most important asset. A generation ago workers were loyal, dedicating their life's work to the company that kept a roof over their heads and food on the family table. That loyalty is long gone. Today every worker is stressed as his salary and benefits suffer the Death of a Thousand Cuts. He can't quite voice it, but he knows his company thinks he is replaceable and essentially worthless.

So we have the Occupy movement and We are the 99%. We have to do something to stop this race to the bottom. But what?

We might start by asking Who are the Shareholders?

As I wrote March 18, the shareholder is most likely a hedge fund, which owns a stock, on average, for twenty-two seconds. The decision to buy and sell the stock is made by a computer algorithm.

So the Board exercises its fiduciary duty and hires a CEO, who in turn exercises his duty to the shareholder, who turns out to be no one, a chimera, a moving target.

Our work, our careers, are being devalued by an algorithm, for the profit of a very few. Sadly, no one else is in control.

Twenty-two Seconds

I remember learning about money and velocity. Apparently money doesn’t do society much good sitting in a pillow. Rather, it should be circulating – invested – enabling the endeavors of man.

For the last decade a mantra has been buzzing in the business background: we're doing it for the shareholders. The buzz, though, is coming from a few well-connected and (now) wealthy top executives, not from the bulk of individual shareholders, whose interests have been poorly represented.

In today's Sunday New York Times Jonathan Haidt has a piece titled Forget the Money, Follow the Sacredness. He writes in the context of the 2012 US presidential election, but his insight deserves wider application. He speaks of tribal and group behaviour, and observes that “the great trick that humans developed at some point in the last few hundred thousand years is the ability to circle around a tree, rock, ancestor, flag, book or god, and then treat that thing as sacred”. We have done that with The Market.

The PBS Newshour of March 15 contains not one but two segments of importance both to the financial world and to the rest of us. The first is a reaction to Greg Smith's Why I am Leaving Goldman Sachs, wherein he speaks of the firm's lack of integrity and disregard – even scorn – for its customers. The second (21:20 to 29:46 in the March 15 Newshour) is an interview with Robert Harris, whose new novel, The Fear Index, came true even as he was writing it. It seems that certain hedge funds have mopped up the scientists who were to work on the Texas Supercollider (before it was cancelled) and got them instead to develop software which scans the news (a digital feed from Bloomberg first and foremost) for anything that could spook the market. The software then makes the appropriate trades. At one such fund author Robert Harris (in real life, in real time) watched a software algorithm make 1.5 million dollars in twenty minutes.

But the most significant and disturbing moment, for me, comes at 25:22 in the March 15 Newshour. It seems that although high-frequency trading firms make up only 2% of the 20,000 trading firms operating today, they make 75% of all trades. And – and here I nearly fell off the couch – the average time a stock investment is held these days is twenty-two seconds.

Remember how money with velocity is good? By that measure we should be doing very well indeed. What happened?

We could ask ourselves Who is this shareholder to whom executives pay lip-service? And Who or what is The Market that we seem to revere and to which politicians kowtow? Is it a Wizard of Oz? Or, as Robert Harris says, is it more like a Frankenstein run amok?

We would do better worshiping a god.

Reductio ad Absurdum

Thank you economists! The power couple has spoken! (Life as taught by a Power Couple: The New York Times, Sunday, February 12, 2012)

Right there in the Business Section, the Dismal Science speaks to the great unwashed, enlightening us about the important stuff. You see, Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes had it wrong. Markets don't just control trade and commerce. They control everything!

Forget free will. Forget intelligence and reason. Forget philosophy, art and literature, morality, religion and emotion. Forget even reason, once it has inevitably taken us under the sway of the Almighty Market. For (especially if we are special) The Market will tell us how to spend our gifts for the benefit of humanity.

If, for example, an immigrant can be persuaded to rake our leaves for a modest stipend, why not hire him? If his wife will clean the house and do the laundry, better yet. It leaves us more time to do what we do best: working out how The Market actually applies to everything, even to life! L'chaim!

But what about 2 1/2 year-old Matilda?

The Market says that an unemployed twenty-something teacher can be had for $50K/year. Hire her, schedule her M-F 8AM to 7PM. The problem of Matilda's upbringing is solved. And of course, by executive decree, Matilda eats no meat or sugar and attends art classes. Like all children, she is above average.

What, though, about Mom and Dad when they are my age? For at their age I too was doing what I thought was important: putting bread on the table and keeping a roof over our heads. Now, a generation later, my perspective has shifted. Sure, the basics have to be there. The roof, the bread. The luckiest among us will also the able earn that roof and bread doing something we love. But in retrospect and approaching the end of life nothing even comes close in importance to what we do for those we love, our children first and foremost.

Does The Market know that?

First Letter to the 99%

Dear Young People,

It's winter. The heady autumn of Occupy Everywhere is now last year's news. Mitt Romney says corporations are people. Newt says government doesn't make jobs, private enterprise makes jobs. All politicians are promising jobs. None of that helps if you don't have a job.

A young man interviewed on NPR has a job. He says his company doesn't represent him politically. He says his company doesn't have the right to use the profits it makes on HIS WORK to vote against him.

Perhaps you gave gone into debt (like the country) to get an education and you still can't find a job. You are bummed, and rightly.

This is all pretty discouraging stuff. But wait. Start from another perspective.

The government doesn't need you. No corporation or small business needs you. The jobs they may or may not offer can be filled by you or by someone else, interchangeably.

But the world needs you. There is no one else in the world who has exactly what you have to give.

In my post of December 11, 2011, Advent and Jobs, I asked, “Who decides what my work will be?” If you're young and you don't yet have dependents, you have a chance to give the finger to The Market and decide for yourself.

This is not easy, and I have no illusions that it will be possible for everyone. But I write this in hope and in the belief that looking clearly at the problem is a good start. So before you take that job as a “greeter” or as an “associate”, think about the work you want to do. All work – however strange and useless it may appear to The Market, is worthy of your human dignity if it comes from the heart. So try to make time – quiet time – to listen to that voice inside – and it will come, but it is a soft voice – that will tell you about the work that you are meant to do, the work that will be your vocation. Then fight for it with all your might.

I don't know how you're going to do it. I would tell you, but I know the solution is unique to you and I am not privy to it. What I do know is you might have to ask for help. It could be as little as asking a parent, sibling, or friend with a credit card to pay $2.95 to iPage or $3.15 to FatCow every month so you can have your own website. Set it up with WordPress and you can work on it anytime you have access to a computer and WIFI. It may take a year or two to learn the ropes and find out how to attract people to your site and figure out what you are selling or giving away. At the end of the second year you owe your parent, sibling, or friend $72.

Then who knows? When Mitt or Newt or even Barack gets around to offering you a job, you might just say no.

Creeping Paradigm

Listening to NPR New Years morning I heard repeated references to health care as a product. Accordingly, the mandate has become a requirement to buy a product. Obviously a non-starter, right? No one can tell me to buy a Prius or a Big Mac.

No. I'm free to chose. There's a market out there and if there's a good product at a good price then I'll consider it. If not – well, forget it.

The logic is irrefutable.

But then, in the same NPR segment, a conundrum appeared. It seems that insurance works by calculating actuarial risk on a pool of customers – on their cars, their houses, or themselves. Risky pools mean higher prices. Fair enough. And yet, as the interviewee in the segment pointed out, in health insurance the market creates an incentive for healthy people to opt out and buy only on the way to the hospital. Does this all sound suspiciously like Credit Default Swaps?

What has happened to our reasoning?

I am beginning to suspect that we, in our free-market economy, have accepted a paradigm so completely that it is leading us astray.

Paradigm: pattern, model, example. The pattern of discriminating among ads and logos on the mall has become strong in our heads. Intoxicated by our freedom to choose, we weigh McDonald's against White Castle and perhaps wind up at In and Out Burger.

In an attempt to escape from this “logic”, let's try an old technique – the reductio ad absurdum.

If health care is a product, what about education? It is being sold that way, these days. What we know is that it is essential and expensive. We are also learning that it does not guarantee a job, and that going into debt on its behalf has become less attractive. How about child care? Working families increasingly depend on it, so it too has entered the marketplace as a product. What about marriage? Isn't it about love, procreation, and raising children and grandchildren? Well, sometimes it can be about snagging a trophy wife or a divorce-able cash-cow husband, about figuring out what is the best buy for me.

Do we approve? Of course not. Somewhere here we draw the line. But where?

Perhaps, rather than thinking about product, we should instead think about work. Instead of thinking about what we need, about what is best for me, we should instead think of what we can give, of what work we can do.

If we look at health care, we can see plenty of beautiful, real work going on. People get into that line of work because they want to help others, to care for them. The same is true in education, where devoted people spend their working lives trying to connect to another human being, one at a time, because that is the only way it works – really works. And what is the family values debate all about? Really, what we all want is a family that works, where both parents are devoted to the cause of rearing their children; where one working outside the home is sufficient to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table, and where the other can stay home doing the huge job of rearing the young.

The real bottom line is that all work that is worth anything is caring for others or making things that do. Love is not a commodity. We owe it to each other.

Advent and Jobs

This is my first novel. It takes place in a parallel universe where the country north of the Great Lakes is known as Arcadia. The main character is the airline herself. She views the other characters in the story as her people.

Outline

 

To connect the vastness of Arcadia an airline was brought forth by the government and her name was also Arcadia.

She loved her father, Arcadia's first Minister of Movement. Through her youth and young adulthood she struggled to live up to her father's vision and to his example of service to country.

After his death her ambition and her desire for independence led her to participate as an equal in the modern world of business. In this she was assisted by many fine men and women who devoted their careers to her cause.

Most of these were ordinary people doing their best work for Arcadia and loving her as they loved their families. But there were a few who made their mark. They left their imprint on Arcadia and changed her course.

One day in Arcadia's prime it came about that Miles, who had her best interests at heart but who also had a strong sense of his own destiny, singlehandedly wrote a script that played on Arcadia's stage for a decade before it devolved into a war with the Ministry of Movement. Unaffected by the war, management were taken unawares when it lead to a strike.

The strike ended the war but was instrumental in promoting two people before their time: Enrico to Captain and Boy Wonder to CEO.

Both rose to the challenges before them.

Enrico had to fight fiercely to win and hold his captaincy. Boy Wonder was tested almost immediately by a takeover bid and prevailed with Snake's help. However, Snake tempted him and Boy made a Faustian bargain with Arcadia's soul which led to merger and eventually to bankruptcy.

In the end, all were diminished. Enrico wound up on permanent sick leave. Boy Wonder traded youthful promise for a guaranteed retirement offshore. Arcadia, in her dotage, feels she is the only coherent voice in the asylum.

 

Status

 

The third draft is in edit as of October 2011. My intention is to publicize the book by flying much of Arcadia's route structure in a Beechcraft Bonanza.
Who decides what my work will be?

Unless you are one of the advantaged kids from a two-parent family with seriousness of purpose and discretionary income, ambulance the decision most likely will be up to somebody else – not you, thumb not your family, maybe not even a person. Rather, The Market will decide what work to offer you, what its value will be, and what will be the terms and conditions of employment. In other words, The Market will determine who you are.

Who decides what the goals of our civilization should be? Politics, of course. We are a democracy, are we not? We have a vote, so we collectively determine public policy. Right?

Well, almost. But we are a nation-state in a global world. And global corporations are increasingly independent of the nation-states, wielding their putative personhood to control public policy in the various nation-states where they do business. The political horizon is the next election; the business horizon is the end of this quarter. So the answer to this question as well is The Market. The Market will decide our goals.

Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes would be horrified. Their child has become a monster, their financial system has morphed from a well-oiled machine into a shell game of risk management. Surely, somewhere, there is some leadership?

Perhaps we are looking in the wrong place. Where, after all, have our achievements always begun?

 

With birth, I would say. Consider how the prophesy is phrased: For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given. We are given a gift: the most precious of gifts. The we is everyone. We are persons, citizens of the world, civilization. The gift too is everyone – the miracle of new life. And the government shall be on his shoulder. Perhaps we have been looking in the wrong place.

Certainly each child needs to be nurtured and educated and guided. Certainly she needs to find her place in our society. But her gift – her work, her goals, her contribution to our survival – must be honoured if it is to be realized. There is only one key that will unlock this gift, and it is only revealed one-on-one, one human being to another. You could call it parenting. You could call it teaching. You could call it love.