What is the significance of this?

http://www.mint.com/blog/trends/who-is-paying-taxes/

If a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory.  If a revolution destroys a government, but the systemic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves.... There's so much talk about the system.  And so little understanding.

           --Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Thinking in Systems is the primer that the subtitle promises.  This book should be required reading for both libertarians and liberals.  Both are guilty of not incorporating limits to growth in their respective philosophies.

From Understanding Knowledge as a Commons:

We hope the readers of this book take away a strong sense that there are indeed analytical commonalities underlying many problems of deep concern today.  How do we build effective forms of collective action and self-organizing, self-governing initiatives? [p.21]

A brief and easy to understand explanation of why the term "banksters" is warranted:

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2009/12/former-barclays-chief-points-out-bonuses-were-paid-fruadulently.html

"...the typical American lifestyle teems with risk factors for mental illness"

http://www.livescience.com/health/090729-what-makes-us-crazy.html

Last Section in a Chapter labeled Moral Hazards:

ADVICE TO THE CLASS OF 2009

So far, not a single major university has asked us to make the commencement address.  Nor a minor college.  Not even a school of cosmetology or taxidermy.  But as we write from London, protected by a broad ocean and a narrow reading of the First Amendment, we will give advice no one asked for.

"Plastics," was the advice given to college graduates in Mike Nichols' 1967 film The Graduate.  But that was when there was still hope for the United States' manufacturing sector.  Even then, it was too late.  The percentage of GDP from the manufacturing sector fell for the next four decades, from more than 20 percent in the last [I assume this should be late] 1960s to barely 12 percent in 2008.  Better advice would have been "derivatives."  They stank just as bad, but they were much more profitable.  Although only 8 percent of GDP, finance accounted for 40 percent of corporate profits in 2007.  And derivatives grew from nothing to a face value of 16 time the GDP of the entire planet.

But your elders are always giving you bum advice.

"You cannot decline the burdens of empire and still expect to share its honors," said Pericles to the class of 430 B.C.  He lived during a time not unlike your parents' era in the United States -- when Athens was on top of the world.  But vanity got the better of him.  He launched an attack on Sparta that backfired badly.  He soon died of plague and Athens was not only ruined, but enslaved.  Athens' "golden age' turned to lead.  Young Athenians should have shrugged off the burden rather than accept it.  You should do the same.

When you were born 20-some years ago, the nation's total debt per person was less than $90,000 -- adjusted to 2009 dollars, of course.  Although that was a lot of money, it was nothing compared to what was coming.  Now it's $186,717 per person -- more than twice as much, in real terms.  Fortunately, private debt is not inheritable.  But it comes to you as a lien against property.  Instead of paying off their mortgages and leaving you a house, free and clear, the baby boomer generation spent the "equity" in their houses even faster than they got it.  House prices rose.  But mortgage debt rose faster.  Although your grandparents owned 80 percent of their houses, by 2007, the typical homeowner only really owned four rooms of an eight-room house.  And then, when house prices fell, so did his remaining equity...to the point where one out of six homeowners is now underwater.  You could still eventually inherit a house, but you may have to scrape the barnacles off the front porch.

But that's not even the half of it.  Although your parents had control of the U.S. government, they allowed themselves a little larceny.  Add the unfunded retirement and health care benefits they voted for themselves to the official national debt, and together they are scheduled to cost your generation four times the total annual output of the United States.  This is over and above the private debt they accumulated.

Some of this debt can be carried.  Some will have to be paid down.  But as it stands, as much as $77 trillion [with a "t"] of post-2009 earnings must be stolen from the future in order to pay for the liquor your parents drank...the bombs they dropped on god-forsaken foreigners...and the interest on their debts.  So, forget about saving for a European vacation or a house of your own.  Even if every penny of your savings -- and every other American's savings -- are put to the task you will still be paying for your parents' expenses all your life.

But wait, there's more!  The burden is getting heavier.  Federal budget projections show an additional $7 trillion in deficits over the next 10 years.  Described as the cost of fighting recession, the present generation buries its own mistakes under cash that the next generation hasn't even earned yet.  Today's bankers, businessmen, and speculators are being bankrolled by you -- tomorrow's bankers, businessmen, and speculators.  Today's homeowners get a helping hand...from whom?  Tomorrow's homeowners -- you.  Today's employees get a boost, too.  Same story.  Where do you think the money came from to pay Wall Street bonuses?  How do you think GM stays in business...and Fannie Mae...and AIG...Who pays those salaries?  Who pays to keep troops all over the world and keep old people supplied with new drugs?  Who pays for hundreds of billions' worth of "shovel-ready" boondoggles?  You will.  At least, that's the plan.

The luck [or bumbling idiocy] of one generation is the curse of the next.  Like Pericles, your parents inherited a dollar; they leave you a peso.  They took over the strongest, richest, most competitive nation in the world.  And like Pericles they minded everyone's business but their own.  Now, not only does the United States owe money all over town, its government puts out trillions more in IOUs every year -- each with your name on it.  You're not even out in the real world yet, and you're getting the bill for 50 cents of every dollar the feds spend -- almost none of it earmarked for you.  But that is the thing about the real world your teachers probably forgot to tell you about.  It is more unreal and fantastical than anything you studied.

Here's what's real: You've been dealt a bad hand.  From the bottom of the deck...your parents have slipped you some nasty cards.  Our advice?  Fold 'em.  Get up from the table before they clean you out.

Some additional excerpts from Financial Reckoning Day Fallout that I felt warranted inclusion [see yesterday's post]:  

From Page 151:

A learned and thoughtful man may speak before a crowd and get no positive reaction whatsoever.  A real demagogue, on the other hand, will distill his thoughts into a few simpleminded expressions [Lou Dobbs?] and soon have enough admirers to run for public office.  Readers who have wondered why it is that politicians all seem to be such simpletons now have their answer: It is a requirement for the job.  For, en masse, mankind can neither understand complex or ambiguous thoughts nor remember them.

Quoting Gustave Le Bon (The Crowd) on page 164:

Notwithstanding all its progress, philosophy has been unable as yet [The Crowd was first published in 1895] to offer the masses any ideal that can charm them; but as they must have their illusions at all cost, they turn instinctively, as the insect seeks the light, to the rhetoricians who accord them what they want.  Not truth, but error has always been the chief factor in the evolution of nations, and the reason why socialism is so powerful today [1895] is that is constitutes the last illusion that is still vital.  In spite of all scientific demonstrations it continues on the increase.  Its principal strength lies in the fact that it is championed by minds sufficiently ignorant of things as they are in reality to venture boldly to promise mankind happiness.  The social illusion reigns today upon all the heaped up ruins of the past, and to it belongs the future.  The masses have never thirsted after the truth.  They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them.  Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.

According To Wikipedia, Hitler and Mussolini were big fans of The Crowd and Mussolini reportedly kept it by his bedside.  Today, our "leaders" simply use polls to guide their actions.  The result is the same.

From Page 166:

Essential to any society is what Le Bon calls a "General Belief" -- a very large myth -- that holds it together.  Marxist Leninism -- or at least lip service to it -- held the Soviet Union together for seven decades, for example.  Even in the 1960's, when people began to realize that the creed was a loser, they stuck with it for another three decades for they had nothing to put in its place.

As always, I'm trying to develop the case that we need to integrate the best of our existing institutions into a new institution that provides more security, freedom, opportunity, and sanity.  A few select excerpts from books I've read or previewed in the last few days that may cause you to question our current system:

City of the End of Things

From the Introduction:

In his first Whidden Lecture of 1967, Northrop Frye echoes a line and title from Lampman (1861-99), one of the most evocative poets writing in English in the last part of the nineteenth century.  The 1892 poem seems to represent a hellish or apocalyptic dream that begins in the Tartarus of classical mythology.  Frye names his first lecture after the poem in a book about Canada's first century....The title of this volume, which comes from Lampman via Frye, suggests the precariousness of modernity in its cities in and against nature....The years in and about 1967 have a good deal to say about what went before and came after.

From Page 119:

Technology cannot of itself bring about an increase in human freedom, for technological developments threaten the structure of society, and society develops a proportionate number of restrictions to contain them.  The automobile increases the speed and freedom of individual movement, and thereby brings a proportionate increase in police authority, with its complications of laws and penalties.  In proportion as the production of retail goods becomes more efficient, the quality of craftsmanship and design decreases...

One of the misconceptions of our time is that we have a great deal of freedom.

Rules, Games, and Common-Pool Resources

From Page 323:

...individuals may be more capable of changing their situations and of adopting workable heuristics (norms) than is typically presumed....The capability of humans to agree upon rules that structure their own games has not been taken sufficiently into account in traditional analysis.  We hope this book will help change that in the future.

In an empirical setting where individuals have at least some autonomy to decide on their own rules, we can also develop useful predictions.  If the interests of the individuals involved are relatively symmetric, face-to-face communication is possible, and the situation is relatively simple, we expect individuals to select rules that are

1. already known to them, either by experience or by reputation;
2. easy to learn, follow, and monitor;
3. likely to reduce the complexity of the situation; and
4. perceived as likely to improve joint outcomes.

From Page 329:

Those who have developed forms of mutual trust and social capital can utilize these assets to craft institutions that avert the CPR [common-pool resources] dilemma and arrive at reasonable outcomes.

I must admit that I quickly lose interest in books that are written for an academic audience.  The specialization that abounds these days -- higher education is built around specialization -- is mind-numbing.  It seems as if a lot of fiddling is going on as resources are squandered.

The Third Jesus

From Page 40:

...any attempt to impose an ideal society upon the framework of lower consciousness is bound to fail.

In my opinion, Chopra does not do enough to emphasize Supreme Identity -- as contrasted with Supreme Being.  I suppose that he is attempting to reach the Christian that is starting to think that there may be more to spirituality than doctrine and dogma...

Financial Reckoning Day Fallout

From Page 91:

Remember, the present economic system is not capitalism...it's a kind of Marxism for rich people...in which the elite make the profits while the losses are redistributed, shared throughout the entire population like Mao jackets and influenza.  The genius of the present system is that it dupes the masses into thinking they are capitalists, making it possible for the speculators and hustlers to offload their risks onto them.

If in doubt; double down: http://www.juneauempire.com/stories/111909/sta_524671946.shtml

If you are in a retirement plan and are concerned about whether there will be any funds in your account in the future, contact me.

...We can see the world from outer space, and appreciate that we are all confined to one small planet, dependent on its resources for our survival.  We can measure our population numbers and calculate that we now number over 6.5 billion individuals and that this number is increasing every minute.  In a single generation, we have watched the volume of water, a vital resource, in many wells, boreholes, reservoirs, and rivers decrease dramatically; some of the largest rivers in the world now no longer flow to the sea.  We can measure the acreage of forests that are destroyed daily, and we know that forest cover is disappearing at an unprecedented rate.  We can see that we are irreversibly changing our planet and destroying the very systems that support us.  And we can predict the course of these adverse trends and understand the urgency of taking actions to secure our future.  Because of our increased numbers and wasteful utilization of resources, our activities are threatening the survival of our species and that of many others as never before.

Because we are intelligent, we know these things, and because we are intelligent, we have the ability to do something about it. We are unique in that we can plan for the future.  We can educate our children, and they their children, to appreciate the urgency and necessity of taking serious action to stop the destruction of our planet.  Through education and population control, these trends can be reversed.  Inevitably, many millions of years from now, the Sun will become too hot for any life to survive on Earth, but for now we certainly have the ability to extend our brief tenure on this planet from one of the shortest to one of the longest.

This book puts humanity into perspective in time, in space, and as just one of millions of species that have inhabited Earth over the last 3.5 billion years.  It has taken 6 to 7 million years for Homo sapiens to evolve from a common ancestor of modern apes to ourselves, and we have existed as a species for just 200,000 years.  The success of a species can be measured from several different angles.  In terms of population numbers, we are undoubtedly successful, and increasingly so.  In the last fifty years, our population numbers have increased exponentially from 2.5 billion to 6.5 billion.  In terms of technological development, no other species has ever reached out level.  We can probe outer space, penetrate the depths of the oceans, and accomplish undreamt of calculations through increasingly sophisticated computers.  But in terms of longevity of our species, only time will tell.  We are newcomers to this planet.  From an evolutionary perspective, 200,000 years is just a blip, which raises the key question: Is our unique combination of adaptations, and most particularly our enlarged brain, a successful adaptive strategy in terms of the long-term survival of our species?  Or will Homo sapiens, the only surviving species of a diverse evolutionary past, be a short-lived phenomenon that appeared and disappeared in a few hundred thousand years, inhabiting the planet for less time than the majority of our ancestors portrayed in this book?

On a related tangent, I just came across this:

Education is not a preparation for life. Education is life itself. (John Dewey)

at one of Guy McPherson's web pages.  A recent McPherson post can be found here.  I found his description of the heartland to be acerbically refreshing. 

In the early 90's I became concerned with the sprawling development that was occurring in Boise, Idaho.  I formed a non-profit group that attempted to educate the public on alternatives to sprawl -- namely New Urbanism aka Traditional Neighborhood Development.  I continued to be an advocate for New Urbanism through 1998 and used my position as an institutional real estate investment manager to promote the same.  However, I came to realize that the issue of sustainability involved much more than shifting from suburbia to urbia.  Exposure to books like Limits to Growth and follow-up books caused me to realize that substantial changes had to be made in order to pull out of Overshoot.  Indeed, we have to come up with a system that cuts our energy and resource use by as much as 90%.

It soon became clear that we had to have a massive shift upward in personal development in order to correct our course.  The best guide to understanding personal development that I found was Spiral Dynamics.  Over time I came to realize that it is essential to drop the ego and understand non-duality -- a position that is consistent with science.   While saints and sages associated with all of the major religions throughout the last 2500 years have recognized that this is the way to enlightenment, it has not been introduced in a comprehensive way to a majority of the population.

I also came to realize that our education systems encourage us to be specialists who consequently do not understand the entire system.  This has caused us to be complacent about our predicament.  My conclusion with respect to religion and education is that we have to begin to educate young people as early as the age of eight in how to think rationally and how to think in terms of systems.

Lastly, I have come to the conclusion that credit is the source of most of our problems.  It has literally encouraged us to borrow against the future.  While groups like the Peterson Institute have done a good job of attempting to educate the public with respect to the federal deficit, they have not put forth a comprehensive vision of how we need to transition to a credit-free society.

Whether the label was club, university, or bank, the general theme of the blog has been that we have to learn and live in a completely different way from that which got us to this point.  The theme has also been that the for-profit/non-profit system that currently dominates all that we do is not working.

And now to the concept of MindfulWorldBank.org.  Essentially, we need to expand capitalism to everyone -- not just the top 5% or so.  MindfulWorldBank would own high-quality assets and depositors would own the bank.  Rather than paying a landlord, residents would deposit funds in an account at MindfulWorldBank; thereby building equity rather than throwing money away.  Administration would be handled by volunteers, rather than by executives/bureaucrats.  Eventually, the entire MWB infrastructure would look something similar to a health spa with paths rather than streets.  Cars might still be in our future but would not dominate the landscape and our lives as they do today.  Rather than sit behind desks and in front of computers, we could all be gardeners, gourmet chefs, bicycle mechanics, yoga instructors, or be occupied by some other meaningful work.

It should be noted that this concept is related to the work of recent Nobel recipients Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson.  It addresses the commons in a comprehensive way as well as providing a new organizational structure that is designed to bring out the best in all those who live, work, and invest in the system.  While it is exciting to see their work recognized, it would be more exciting to see it put into practice.

A new organization such as this can be developed from the ground up or with assistance of a wealthy patron.  Please help market the concept.  Questions are encouraged.