An ad appeared in Life Magazine on Feb 2, 1962 with a picture of a large glacier. The headline underneath in bold caps read: “EACH DAY HUMBLE SUPPLIES ENOUGH ENERGY TO MELT 7 MILLION TONS OF GLACIER.” (Humble Oil later became part of Exxon/Mobil.)

I don’t think the ad men would recommend this ad for an oil company today. The Sierra Club magazine put a copy of it, without comment, inside the back cover of a recent issue.

I am going to shock some of my green readers (if there still are any) by claiming that, unlike the Sierra Club and despite the BP debacle, I think it is still a pretty good ad. Before you send me to the recycle bin, let me explain.

Oil is without question the single most useful, versatile and valuable substance in the modern world. For high-energy density it has no peers. It is also the basic raw material for a host of other high-priority products. A common view today among commoners and Presidents, Democrat and Republican alike, is that we are “addicted” to this valuable substance. I respectfully object. We get addicted to stuff that harms us, like cigarettes, alcohol, heroin. Oil is the very lifeblood of modern civilized life. When Mae West quipped “too much of a good thing is wonderful” she could have been thinking of oil. Without it we would go back to the Dark Ages, or at a minimum to the days before the Civil War in America.

The Sierra Club and all the rest of us depend on oil to power our cars, trucks, airplanes, ships, tractors, motorcycles, lawn mowers, cranes and bulldozers; to produce our food; to provide tires for our bicycles and other vehicles; to take us on nice vacations via auto, airplane, bus or train (including all the wonderful Sierra Club Outings to the High Sierras, Montana, Alaska, Peru, the Galapagos Islands, the Greek Islands, the Arctic, etc.); to ski, to play tennis, soccer, basketball and swim; to produce our medicines; to make our eyeglasses, contact lenses and hearing aids; to paint our houses and shellac our floors; to manufacture anesthetics that make our operations possible and painless; to make the refrigerant to preserve our food and provide air conditioning in our homes, schools and automobiles; to provide the ink to print our books, newspapers and magazines; to produce the plastics, motherboards and screens for our cell phones, TVs, computers and iPads; to make the strings on our guitars and the “ivories” for our pianos (we used to kill cats and elephants); to help produce many of the chemicals that make windmills, solar panels and long transmission lines possible; to supply the asphalt for our roads; and the chemical raw materials to help make just about all of our modern clothing, appliances and furniture. You name it and it probably has some oil in its manufacture.

All this considered I think it is high time to give a little credit to the folks that provide this essential substance, our oil companies. Yes, I think that BP, Exxon-Mobil, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and other companies, large and small, along with their multitude of supplier companies and millions of employees around the world, deserve our thanks rather than our obloquy. Yes, mistakes are made and tragedies result as in the current oil-platform explosion and leak. Which large industry has not made mistakes or caused tragedies?

40,000 or more people are killed in automobile accidents every year in the United States and no one condemns the workers and companies that provided the cars. Many thousands of patients die in our modern hospitals due to mistakes and negligent care? We don’t condemn all hospitals, doctors and nurses. Nor do we begrudge these doctors, nurses and hospitals their just incomes. Yet the people who provide us with the most essential substance of all are often demonized and condemned out of hand as though they were drug dealers to our “addition.” Are we also “addicted” to motorized transportation and to modern health care?

Yes, we could go back to mid-19^th century days before Rockefeller and his fellow innovators made oil such a treasured and valuable substance. There would be some advantages it is true. We wouldn’t have to worry about oil spills or global warming. We wouldn’t have to fret about whether our food supply was organic or not. We wouldn’t have to worry so much about health care, unemployment insurance or the national debt. We wouldn’t have to worry about social security funds running low since the average life span was around 40 or so years.

We would have to worry more about creatures like whales and other mammals of the sea being hunted to extinction to provide oil for our lamps and sewing machines. Also for many wild animals of the forests and plains which also might be hunted to extinction to provide needed protein for our overpopulated continent (as did happen with many of our Native-American predecessors in North America). We wouldn’t have to worry about our children getting poisoned by oil-related pollution but we would have to worry about them dying from malaria, dysentery, cholera, tuberculosis, typhoid fever and many other nasty diseases for the most part controlled in the U.S. thanks to oil-derived insecticides, pesticides and water-purification chemicals. Families would be much larger since most children would die of disease, accident or malnutrition before they reached maturity. The U.S. population then was about a tenth of what it is today. That means, of course, that without modern chemicals like oil and other fossil fuels nine out of ten of us would never have been born.

If we went back a few more centuries—before the Industrial Age began that is–we would discover that almost all of our ancestors were slaves, serfs or peasants who lived a short, nasty, brutish life, quite different from the lives of the aristocrats we are familiar with from our history books and historical novels. (The aristocrats, for the most part, also died young.)

Yes, the oil companies make large profits today. And the CEOs of these oil companies rake in millions in salary, bonuses and stock options. So do sports heroes like Bret Favre, Tiger Woods, Derek Jeter, Lance Armstrong and Lebron James. So do many Hollywood stars and directors. The CEOs of oil companies manage billion-dollar budgets, with hundreds of thousands of workers, operating in some of the most physically, socially and politically difficult and dangerous environments on the globe. The sports stars and entertainers may deserve large incomes because of the entertainment they provide. The CEOs deserve at least as generous an income for their critical contributions to the very existence of our modern world.

And finally, yes, the oil companies profits are sometimes (not always) what some call excessive. These profits also provide a substantial share of the income of most of the pension funds in the western world as well as a substantial share of the funds that research renewable energy possibilities. That’s more than I can say about the large incomes of sports stars and Hollywood celebrities.

Some of you may say, yes, you have a point, but we have to move on, to replace oil with new renewable energy and matter resources. I agree. But. This is going to be a long haul. Renewable energy resources are at present a very very long way from replacing oil and other fossil fuels. What are we going to do for the next thirty or forty years? Kill off 90% of us and then hope to replace the deficit when renewables do arrive in sufficient quantity and quality?

I’m serious. We should be accelerating as fast as humanly possible renewable research and development. And we should be encouraging as much and as fast as possible improvements in efficiency and conservation. But with all the intelligence and all the good will in the world it will not be possible to replace oil and other fossil fuels for at least three or four decades, if not much longer. That is simply the hard truth much as we might like it to not be so.

So in the meantime it would behoove us to muster just a few kind words for oil companies. If oil is an addiction it is an addiction we desperately need to survive. So far as oil goes today “too much of a good thing is wonderful.” Especially when that “too much” comes from the land and waters of the U.S. and Canada. The oil we can get here means that much less we will have to import from countries that are not very friendly to our western values.

Bill Stonebarger, Owner/President Hawkhill

P.S. For more detail on these issues see: Energy and Society, Energy on Earth, Resources, Populations and Climate Change, Capitalism and Democracy and Science and Democracy. (This is also to let you know you can buy many of our programs now on Amazon.com. Key in “Hawkhill” or “Bill Stonebarger.”)

Mae West claimed that “too much of a good thing is wonderful.” And for some good things, it is. Things like health, happiness and yes, even money. For other things though it is problematical.

Environmental progress for instance. Or racial and gender progress for another. Here I think folks on the leading edge of racial, gender and environmental issues today are often their own worst enemies in demanding “too much of a good thing.”

Martin Luther King and all the “freedom-riders” deserve enormous credit for the major advances in civil rights for all in the 1960s and 1970s. Feminist leaders of the 19^th and 20^th centuries deserve enormous credit for demanding and getting equal opportunity for women in education, in business, in sports, in politics and indeed in all areas of modern life. And certainly early environmental leaders deserve enormous credit for leading the way to clean up our soil, water and air in the 20^th century.

Today however some racial, environmental and feminist activists, as well as guilt-ridden politicians and supporters, seem to me to be often harming progress in race, gender and environmental issues. How so?

Take race and gender first. There is no question that there are gaps in achievement between definable groups in pretty much any and all fields of human endeavor. Jews are over represented in Nobel Prizes and in many other scientific, artistic and intellectual achievements. Blacks are over represented in professional sports like basketball, football, boxing and track and field. Women are over represented in literary fiction writing, health-care, teaching, social work and other helping professions.

So what?

We have made significant and steady progress in the western world by bringing a good measure of equal opportunity to all people in all of these fields. When we start demanding not only equal opportunity but equal results we are on shaky grounds. Garrison Keillor in his mythical Minnesota town of Lake Wobegon said that “all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.” If only it could be so in the real world. Here the truth is that demands for equal results often backfire, reduce opportunities for all and sometimes even harm the very people they are meant to help.

For instance. In our zeal to make amends and assure equality in the Great Society days of the 1960s we passed hundreds of civil rights, environmental, social welfare and affirmative action laws that were designed to help minorities, women, the poor, the elderly, the environment and answer any and all needs of society that it was thought were not being met by private enterprises. Government bureaucracies ballooned to administer expensive new programs in unemployment, food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid, help for the disabled, public broadcasting, Head Start, urban mass transportation, war on poverty, environmental protection, consumer protection, etc., etc. Many of these programs were championed by a Democratic President and Congress and were later expanded by Republican administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. I was a strong supporter of this Great Society. Today I realize that the results have been a mixed bag. Some of the Great Society programs have proved to have lasting benefits. Others have not. And some have been harmful.

For instance: unwed mothers got generous help in raising their children so long as they did not have a husband. Minimum wage laws sought to make sure that all workers got a living wage. An unintended result was that African-American and other minority and poorly educated and unskilled males were cut out of the mainstream economic world. It was difficult if not impossible for most of these young men to get a job at the entry level in many industries. (Illegal immigrants were often the beneficiaries. That is another story.)

One result of these well-intentioned Great Society programs was the breakdown of the African-American family (as well as many lower-income white families). As the African-American economist Thomas Sowell pointed out, “the black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life.”

Another unintended result was a huge increase in African-Americans males (as well as low-income white males) in prison. In 1950 we had a population of around 125 million people and a prison population of around 250,000. By 2000 the U.S population had doubled but the prison population has jumped 8 times to over 2 million! In 1950 65% of the U.S. prison population was white, 35% was black. By 2000 that was reversed and today 65% of prisoners are black, 35% white. Why are so many lower class males, black and white, into drugs and crime today? The most plausible answer is–we have made it nearly impossible for males with below average abilities and education to get a job and support a family. Sadly, it turns out that too much of a good thing was not so good.

Environmental advocates of the 1960s (like their civil rights cousins) can take deserved credit for their leadership in vastly improving the quality of the air, water and soil in my lifetime. As I pointed out in a previous blog, Pittsburgh in the 1940s was pretty dismal. Today Pittsburgh and just about all cities in the U.S. are much much cleaner and healthier for living creatures of all kinds, including Homo sapiens.

Today though, it seems to me that some of the environmental crusaders have gone off the deep end by promoting anti-growth policies that will end up degrading, not improving our environment. For example: demonizing energy companies, tearing down dams, restricting new developments, discouraging mining, opposing genetic engineering, trashing nuclear power, getting moratoriums on oil drilling, demanding ever more stringent regulations in order to weed out the last microgram of pollution, making corporations and profit-making  dirty words, making “green” lifestyles into a new religion and in general opposing growth. These anti-growth policies will cut back on national and international wealth all right, but they will do precious little for the world’s environment.

Wealthy countries are healthier countries, with less pollution, more freedom and far more potential to innovate. The proven way to create wealth is to rely heavily on the magic of the free-market, not on the heavy hand of the government. If you want to see what government funded “innovation” is like, go to Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, many countries in Africa or countries in Eastern Europe before the Berlin wall came down.  I have been to quite a few of these countries and the results I saw were not pretty.

The moral is that while government regulations and government welfare are sometimes necessary and desirable, as with so many things, too much of a good thing is not wonderful. To effectively solve most environmental and fairness problems you also need solid innovative work by free profit-seeking citizens and companies. You need wealth and innovation. You need win-win economics, not zero-sum stagnation. (Incidentally, the 1960s were also noted for large pro-growth tax-cuts by Kennedy and Johnson which did lead to vigorous economic growth as similar policies did in the Reagan pro-growth tax-cutting days. I leave it to readers to assess the situation today.)

Too much of a good thing is wonderful. Sometimes. But sometimes not.

Readers may disagree. Let me hear from you.

Bill Stonebarger, Owner/President Hawkhill

P.S. My usual commercial plug. Go to www.hawkhill.com for many new DVD programs that can help make your 2010/2011 school year a positive example of “too much of a good thing is wonderful.”

Fourth of July has come and gone and left me with a sad feeling. At my age I am not that fascinated by fireworks any more but I love the flag and patriotic songs more than ever. My wife and I watched the old movie about George M. Cohan on the Fourth. I had a few tears when Jimmy Cagney belted out the great Cohan songs, “You’re a Grand Old Flag” and “Over There.”

The sadness comes from realizing I seem to be in a minority today, at least among sophisticated people. In many ways the United States is a far better country today than it was when I was young. Richer, fairer, healthier, less polluted and with far more liberty, prosperity and justice for all. On the other hand it seems to me to be less patriotic, less proud of our heritage and our achievements, including the many that happened in my lifetime.

Think of it. Winning terrible wars against Nazi Germany, Fascist Japan and Totalitarian Soviet Union; bringing a long postponed new measure of freedom and dignity to African-Americans; pioneering a new world of electronics—computers, TV, cell phones, iPads, et al; shattering the “glass ceilings” for women in education, commerce, sports, arts and sciences; raising the living standards of almost all citizens to heights never before seen in human history; increasing life spans from 45 to 79 years; making our air, water and soil cleaner and healthier than ever before; and becoming without question the world leader in bringing many of these benefits to people in just about every country in this still troubled world.

And yet when her husband was nominated for President our own First Lady could only manage a weak hurrah, “for the first time in my adult life, I was proud of my country.”  Her husband too has been more prone to apologies than to pride in America’s accomplishments. (See Charles Krauthammer’s recent column in the Washington Post.)  Much worse are many professors, like the one at the University of Massachusetts, who claimed, “the American flag is a symbol of terrorism and death and fear and destruction and oppression.” Or the professor at the University of New Mexico who commented after the 9/11 attack, “anyone who can blow up the Pentagon gets my vote.” Or the famous Harvard scholar and pop-star on the college lecture circuit, Noah Chomsky, who says “if the Nuremberg trials were applied then every post-war American Presidents would have been hanged.”  In my younger days Kate Smith made her fame singing “God Bless America.” Today Reverend Wright became famous by shouting, “God damn America!”

Admittedly most of these folks are at the extreme left end of the political spectrum. But sad to say their influence is stronger than you might think even when watered down. It is especially strong in the all-important world of elite secondary and college classrooms as well as the all-important world of communication stars in New York, Washington and Los Angeles. How many of these influential folks put the flag out on this Fourth of July or sang “You’re a Grand Old Flag?”

Finally, I doubt whether many Hollywood directors would consider making a patriotic movie these days. Instead we get movies like Michael Moore’s Sicko (the star is Fidel Castro) and Capitalism: A Love Story (which of course it was anything but), or Oliver Stone’s JFK, Natural Born Killers and his new South of the Border (the star is Hugo Chavez, the villain is U.S.), or for that matter James Cameron’s popular hit Avatar (starring primitive innocence, villain once again is the American military).

These people need to learn a little history. For instance:

As I mentioned in a previous blog, one of the most significant and progressive actions of the United States in my lifetime does not get anything close to the credit it deserves–the Marshall Plan after World War 2.

In all ages before the Industrial Revolution, the Scientific Revolution and the rise of free-market economics, wealth was a zero-sum game. Wealth was land, gold and slaves, peasants or serfs. All of these things were quite limited so if one person, or one group, got a big piece of the wealth pie another person, or group, would have to be satisfied with a small piece. In order to get more wealth there was only one way – war. If you won the war, to the winner went the spoils–more land, more gold, more slaves. If you lost, tough.

Once the Industrial, Scientific and Free-Market Revolutions came on the scene about two hundred years ago, the calculus changed, but sometimes only in theory. Wealth in a scientific-industrial world was no longer based on land, gold and slaves, but on human creativity. On the ever-increasing and ever-renewable capacity of human beings to innovate, to do more with less, to use the heretofore hidden powers of nature to multiply goods and services without limit. And then to share this new wealth in free-market win-win transactions where both sides profit. When it came to wars, however, the old zero-sum ideas still held sway.

After the First World War, for instance, the winning allies France, Britain and the U.S. were still operating on the old idea that to the winners should go the spoils. Following ancient precedent they stole much of Germany’s wealth in land, resources and productive power. They demanded huge financial reparations that helped to cripple Germany for decades to come. The result was what you might have expected. A bitter and proud people fell for the first demagogue who came along, Adolph Hitler. And so we got World War Two and the Holocaust.

Pretty much the same thing happened here in America after our Civil War.  The victorious North led by Radical Republicans made the South suffer. Lincoln would have done it differently, but he was dead. The result was a hundred years of Jim Crow laws and deep poverty throughout the South.

After the Second World War for the first time in human history things changed dramatically. The democratic allies led this time by the United States had finally learned the lesson that wealth was not a limited zero-sum game. Wealth was human creativity and free trade. The best way to assure a peaceful prosperous future for all was not to punish the enemy but to help them recover. That way they could create new wealth that could then be shared with the rest of the world through free trade win-win agreements. (Significantly, one of our war-time allies, the Soviet Union, did not learn the lesson and eventually collapsed itself after punishing East European foes.)

With the Marshall Plan traditional Judeo-Christian ethics (forgive thy enemies, do good to those who hurt you) were able to join hands with free-market economics and scientific creativity to lead the way to a more promising future. Led by former General George Marshall (then the new Secretary of State under President Harry Truman) the United State spent more than a trillion dollars (in inflation-adjusted currency) to help Germany recover from the devastation caused by the war. The result is what you see today. Germany is one of the most prosperous democratic countries in the world and a powerful force for world peace and prosperity.  We see the same good news with Japan and Italy.

We are trying to do the same thing today in Iraq and in Afghanistan. Let’s hope we succeed. It wasn’t easy in the much poorer 1940s and it may be even harder today, even though we have a hundred times the resources now.

But that is the power of an idea. And no, we not only have little to apologize for in the United States, we have every reason to be proud of our spectacular successes in that now departed 20^th century. And indeed of our efforts in the first decade of the 21^st century.

Does past success mean there are no new challenges today? Of course not. But the many strong challenges today—Radical Islam, ballooning deficits, run-away government bureaucracy, soaring unemployment, soaring health care and pension costs, still too much world-wide poverty and disease, energy problems, immigration issues, broken families and even global climate change—are real, but manageable. They are manageable, that is, so long as we have learned the lesson of the Marshall Plan (and for that matter the old Judeo-Christian lesson) of loving your enemies and respecting the power of free-markets and win-win economics.

And in the meantime why not pause once in a while to sing “you’re a grand old flag, you’re a high flying flag, and forever in peace may you wave. You’re the emblem of the land I love, the home of the free and the brave.”

Bill Stonebarger, Hawkhill Owner/President

P.S. This time I do go back to my sales pitch. I really think our high schools and colleges need a batch of fresh air to provide our young people with a few facts and liberating lessons from history. We can help. See our up-to-date DVD programs: Democracy in World History, Resources, Populations and Climate Change, Democracy: The Basics, Capitalism and Democracy, Religion and Democracy, Science and Democracy, and last but not least our old but still strong classic, Spaceship Earth.

One easy way to tell a windbag from a sage is to measure the Fog Index of their writing. Take the average number of words they use per sentence. Calculate the percentage of words that are three syllables or more. Add these two figures and multiply that sum by 0.4. The resulting number is the Fog Index. This is a rough measure of how many years of schooling you would need to understand what the windbag (or the sage) is writing about.

You might be surprised that the Bible, Shakespeare, Mark Twain and other quality literary texts have very low Fog Indexes. About 6. In other words a sixth grader should be able to understand. The NY Times, Newsweek and Wall St. Journal have Indexes of about 11, high school level.

Some bureaucratic, academic and corporate prose gets up into the high 20s, or even 30s. Graduate school level and beyond. Often way beyond.

In my science classes, and later in my filmstrip, video and DVD productions I often used low fog quotes to make a point. Here are a few favorites.

“I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t believed it.” Anonymous

“Green’s Law of Debate: Anything is possible if you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a thing—a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process.” Buckminster Fuller.

“Everybody lies; but it doesn’t matter since no one listens.” Anonymous.

Cal Coolidge was famous for keeping his mouth shut. When he was introduced to a famous football star of the Chicago Bears, however, he became more loquacious. “Nice to meet you, young man. I’ve always liked animal acts.”

“A mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillion of infidels.” Walt Whitman.

“An artist is not a special kind of person. Every person is a special kind of artist” Eric Gill.

“When a man brings his wife flowers for no reason, there’s a reason.” Piers McBride.

“Oh God, if I am to have so much … let me have more.” Walt Whitman.

“The government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul.” George Bernard Shaw.

“Dare to be naïve.” Buckminster Fuller.

“Hell, if I could explain it to the average person it wouldn’t have won the Nobel Prize.” Richard Feynman after winning the Nobel Prize.

“Don’t always follow the crowd because nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.” Yogi Berra

“No matter how much evidence exists that seers do not exist, suckers will pay for the existence of seers.” J. Scott Armstrong.

“It has been for me a glorious day, like giving sight to a blind man’s eyes: he is overwhelmed with what he sees and cannot justly comprehend it.” Charles Darwin on first seeing tropical forests.

“A dog is a dog except when he is facing you. Then he is Mr. Dog.” Haitian proverb.

“Ben Wattenberg’s new book is a compelling reminder that we must learn to bear the truth about our society, no matter how pleasant it may be.” Jeanne Kirkpatrick in a review of  “The Good News Is the Bad News Is Wrong.”

“Any idiot can face a crisis. It’s the day-to-day living that can wear you out.” Anton Chekhov.

Lady Astor once said to Winston Churchill, “if you were my husband I’d give you poison.” Churchill replied, “if you were my wife, I’d take it.”

“I used to eat a lot of natural foods until I learned that most people die of natural causes.” Anonymous.

“I ran into someone I hadn’t seen for 20 years last week and he’d changed so much he didn’t even recognize me.” Piers McBride.

“We all know that no proposition is so foolish or meretricious that at least two Nobel Prize laureates cannot be found to endorse it.” Walter Gratzer.

Richard Feynman on refusing to read his own obituary before his death. “I have decided it is not a very good idea for a man to read it ahead of time. It takes the element of surprise out of it.”

“The spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not quite sure it is right.” Judge Learned Hand.

In a Sidney Harris cartoon a beautiful maiden is speaking to a hard-working scientist, who is staring at some arcane equations on his blackboard: “I’m your guardian angel and I think it’s time you knew that for the past 37 years you’ve been barking up the wrong tree.”

Bill Stonebarger, Owner/Manager Hawkhill

P.S. Relax, no sales pitch this week. Take down the 4^th of July flags but save them for Labor Day. Email me for a free copy of our Fog Index poster which gives more detailed directions for calculating the Index. billjane@hawkhill.com

Environmentalists today could take heart from both. Call in the Marines to help destroy that hole in the ocean floor that is leaking so much oil into the Gulf. (Actually some experts really are advising explosives.) The Seabees impossible dream could give heart to the folks trying to clean up the oil from beaches, wetlands and ocean.

I claimed in my blog a few weeks ago that the oil leak was not the end of the world and some readers were incensed. I stand by that statement even though the disaster doesn’t look any better today than it did a month and a half ago. As an article in the NY Times pointed out last week, however, it was not by a long shot the “worst environmental disaster” in U.S. history.

The famous Johnstown, Pennsylvania flood of 1886, for instance, killed 2,200 people and destroyed many millions (billions in today’s currency) of dollars worth of property. Like the BP spill it was caused by human negligence. An aging dam with neglected  maintenance collapsed. The “dust bowl” of the 1930s destroyed millions of acres of farm land in the Great Plains states, cost hundreds of thousands of people their homes and livelihood and sent into the atmosphere dense clouds of red dust that so darkened the air in Washington DC and New York City you could not see across their streets. That was before depositing all that good Plains soil into the Atlantic Ocean. And then there was the wholesale destruction of forests when the 19^th century lumber companies cut the top off Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Consider also the English point of view on current leak. Piers McBride, retired journalist and News reader in England wrote: “11 people killed on an oil rig leased by British Company BP resulting in four presidential visits, a $2.60 billion clean up and the establishment of a $20 billion compensation fund inside two months. 15,000+ people killed in an accident at Bhopal plant owned by American company Union Carbide resulting in no presidential visits, no clean up and $470 million compensation after 25 years.”

All of these earlier environmental disasters were caused, like the present one, by human error and often human greed as well. Some, like the denuding of the primeval forests were even done deliberately, as the present BP disaster (or for that matter the Union Carbide one) was not. None of them brought permanent long term damage that could not be repaired.

Still another example of environmental destruction is Europe during the Second World War. That war brought near total destruction to hundreds of large cities like Berlin, Nuremburg, London and Rotterdam and 20 million or so human casualties. Amazingly enough hard-working, creative people found ways to put it all back together after the war, and in a remarkably short time. I’m betting the same thing will be true of the Gulf damage. I worry, though, that long-term political and social damage may end up a worse problem.

The Gulf tragedy is giving new fuel to doomsday prophets who use it to buttress their claims still once again that (1) the world is running out of resources (especially oil); (2) the world is severely overpopulated; and (3) pollution is getting worse all the time. The more they preach these dogmas, the more popular their solutions become. That is, that we need to rein in our corporations, drastically change our life styles and become ever more “green.” If we don’t make these changes soon our very civilization will collapse in a miasma of oil sludge.

I answer, nonsense. Far too few people realize that most scientists today (not necessarily the ones that get the most publicity) say that all three of these claims are simply not true.

One of the experts we interviewed for some of our filmstrip and later our video programs was the late economist from the University of Maryland, Julian Simon. His lifetime work on Resources, Population and Pollution issues were often not well received in establishment circles in the 20th century. That is putting it mildly. A high-profile  biologist at the Smithsonian Institute, Thomas Lovejoy, bristled when I brought up his name in a question at an interview. He got red in the face and snapped back, “Criticisms from somebody like Julian Simon are utterly trivial. I mean the man does not understand biology at all. He is the guy who says you can do it with mirrors.”

On the other hand Simon had supporters at prestigious places like the independent non-partisan institute Resources for the Future. And since his death in 2001 he has gained increasing credibility.

Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish statistician, environmentalist, “man of the left” and Greenpeace supporter, had the standard liberal opinion of Simon’s work when he first heard of it in a visit to California. He had read that Simon suggested the world was better off environmentally today than ever before. He had read that Simon claimed that resources were more plentiful and were likely to become even more plentiful in coming decades. Simon also claimed that pollution was decreasing and would likely decrease still more in coming decades. And finally Simon claimed that populations were stabilizing and in many places would decline in coming decades, and in any case overpopulation was not a serious world problem.

Lomborg didn’t believe a word of it. He thought Simon must be a crank. Or crazy. Certainly not a scientist.

But Lomborg did think it would be an interesting challenge for him and his students to check up on the Simon’s arguments and the data he used to support them. His expectation was that the check-up would show clearly how misled and unscientific Julian Simon was. After months of careful study he and his students in Denmark were stunned. They found that most of the time Simon was quite accurate. His well-documented data did show pretty conclusively that the world is not running out of resources, the world is not becoming more polluted and that the world is not overpopulated.

Eventually Lomborg published his findings in a meticulously documented book THE SKEPTICAL ENVIRONMENTALIST (Cambridge University Press, 2001).

That isn’t the end of the story. Some furious environmentalists in Denmark demanded a retraction. In an effort to refute the book’s claims they brought a complaint about Lomborg to the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty (DCSD). The committee sided with the environmentalists, proclaiming in good bureaucratic prose, “objectively speaking, the publication of the work under consideration is deemed to fall within the concept of scientific dishonesty.”

However a few months later Lomborg and his book were vindicated by a higher-level Danish government commission, the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation. Among a long list of criticisms, the ministry reported that “the DCSD has not documented where Dr. Lomborg has allegedly been biased in his choice of data and in his argumentation, and … the ruling is completely void of argumentation for why the DCSD finds that the complainants are right in their criticisms of his working methods. It is not sufficient that the criticisms of a researchers’ working methods exist; the DCSD must consider the criticisms and take a position on whether or not they are justified, and why.”

As Ronald Bailey argued in Reason magazine, “only economic growth will allow, for example, the 800 million people who are still malnourished to get the food they need. But will they get it? Not if the anti-Westerners win out. As THE SKEPTICAL ENVIRONMENTALIST makes clear, those who hate modern industrialized societies—whether they are Islamic radicals or radical environmentalists, threaten the hopes of the poor and imperil the natural world as well.”

Maybe Jeanne Kirkpatrick had the last word when she reviewed a book that was also pro-Simon, The Good News is the Bad News is Wrong. “Ben Wattenberg’s new book is a compelling reminder that we must learn to bear the truth about our society, no matter how pleasant it may be.”

Bill Stonebarger, Owner/President Hawkhill

P.S. I realize that many educators, perhaps most, do not agree with some of these opinions. I am old enough now to not care whether I preach to the choir or make money by following the politically correct crowd. I really feel it is time educators and their students hear some contrarian views. You can experience some of these by exposing yourself and your students to my latest program RESOURCES, POPULATIONS AND CLIMATE CHANGE. (See above.) Go for it and remember “the impossible takes a little longer.”

When I was in high school (a long time ago) there was a popular song that summarized one my bigger worries. The song began “you’ve got to be a football hero to get along with a beautiful girl.”

Even today I remember how much I wanted to be a football hero. Or for that matter any kind of sports hero. Alas, in my large high school I was good in academics but mediocre in sports. I was just not talented enough or tough enough to make any of the varsity teams.

My two sons did better. Both were varsity basketball and soccer players and I was proud. I was also proud of quite a few of my nieces and nephews who were outstanding athletes in school and in college. One played quarterback in a California Bowl game and was voted the most valuable player.

All of this personal confession has relevance to my comments two weeks ago about the differences between liberals, progressives and conservatives. Progressives, I claimed, tended to stress equal results and liberals equal opportunities. Conservatives tend to think we should think twice before making radical changes in systems that work pretty well. I went on to point out that “in sports, minorities (especially African-Americans), have opened up achievement gaps every bit as wide in their favor as the academic ones where they lag behind. No one seems to be alarmed about this sports gap, why make so much about the academic test gap?”

The truth is that for most young people (and their parents and friends and fans) sports are, if anything, as important if not more important than academics. Still another truth is that the qualities that lead to success in sports – work ethic, perseverance, ability to work together in a common cause, courage, competitive drive, social skills, natural grace and ease – are just as important in life after school, if not more so, than success in academic subjects (especially as it is poorly measured by achievement tests).

In my humble opinion the best thing to do about any and all so-called “achievement gaps,” between any definable groups is–ignore it. Forget about it. Live with it. Make sure politically and practically that you provide opportunity for all individuals but as for results, let the chips fall where they may. So I can’t throw a football as well as Brett Favre. And I can’t hit a baseball like Willie Mays. And I can’t jump as well as Michael Jordan. And maybe I never had the toughness, perseverance and work ethic that made some of these athletes along with the lowliest second stringer on the high school football team successful in sports and in life. So what? You can probably get along with a beautiful girl anyway. I did.

In my recent News I did endorse the progressive point of view on health care. I think now that may have been premature. I do think that we are a wealthy enough society to assure everyone good health care just as we promise roads, sanitation services, police and fire services, etc. How to do that is still up for argument. An article in the NY Times last week as well as a thoughtful response from a reader leads me to rethink however my unqualified endorsement of some health care reform reforms.

Last week, for instance, the NY Times reported that the latest twist in progressive health care circles is to not just pay for prescription drugs but to pay people to take them. According to Pam Belluck, the NY Times reporter, “one-third to one-half of all patients do not take medication as prescribed, and up to one-quarter never fill prescriptions at all.”

Some doctors, pharmaceutical companies, health-care providers and social workers are trying a new experiment. Paying people to take their medicine! From $10 to $100 a day! Part of the rationale I suppose is that we want equal results as well as equal opportunity. The promoters also claim it will save money in the long run because these same people who do not presently take their medicine end up in the hospital or nursing home and since taxpayers will have to pay that bill too, better to bribe them to take their medicine now than pay more to save their lives later.

The Times reporter claims that “experts” vouch for the one-third, one-half, one-quarter statistics. I am suspicious. Who are these experts and what evidence do they have for such big numbers?

Aside from that and aside from the question of the government becoming the ultimate nanny, comes the question how far are we prepared to go to assure equal outcomes? Do we want to pay people to wear their helmets when riding motorcycles or fasten their seat belts in cars on the grounds that if they have an accident we will have to pay for their hospital and burial bills? Do we want to pay students to do their homework in high school on the grounds that we will have to support them with welfare if they don’t graduate? Do we want to pay people to recycle their newspapers and plastic cups on the grounds that if they don’t we will lose forest acreage and contribute to climate change? Do we want to pay people to buy hybrid automobiles on the grounds that doing so will help conserve oil? Do we want to pay people to exercise in gyms, swimming pools and health clubs on the grounds that it will save money in the end by preventing heart attacks later? Where do you draw the line? Or do you?

A Hawkhill News item the week before last about health care reform brought a thoughtful critique from retired psychologist Larry Larrabee who has an original take on these questions. He had long experience running a mental health clinic in Wisconsin.

“I agree [that in health care], a definite change is needed, both the basic costs are frequently ridiculous and, although accessibility (in my opinion) is not a major problem, care should be more affordable for everyone  …  I feel that until tort reform occurs in health care, we are dealing with a problem that absolutely cannot be afforded by ANY country. A recent study by a prestigious university found that among diagnostic tests ordered by cardiologists, 75% had been ordered solely to protect the doc from a malpractice suit and the doc saw absolutely no other justification for his order. The study surveyed several hundred cardiologists in the US and provided anonymity to obtain the honest reporting by the cardiologists. When the left says malpractice costs do not drive up health care cost, they are simply referring to awards, settlements and premiums. The far, far greater cost is the cost of defensive medicine done by all practitioners, including myself.

“The other part I am uncomfortable with is that the government will essentially be running the program (certainly later if not initially) much like it does Medicare. The Left cites the lower cost of the Social Security Administration managing Medicare as compared to private health insurance carriers. Again, this is a major error. That lower cost is based on the SSA cost of operation as a percentage of the entire SSA budget with many costs for Medicare generally folded into the overall budget. … when you make the adjustments, the average private administration cost is 30% less than the public administrative cost!

“The answer, to me, is to drastically correct the tort boondoggle and then to set up a system very much like the Medicare Prescription program that very clearly allows for private companies, with government supplements, competing on the Part D premiums and doing so while each company offers several alternative plans. AARP, of course, trashed the Part D program since it is quite left leaning but, in fact, Part D works very well, thank you.

“I think that if we do have a national health insurance of some kind, the premiums should be graduated based on annual income (as in gross, unadjusted, federal. income tax records of the preceding year) or establish very high deductibles, based again on income, with some relatively large deductibles (say $1000 to $2000 per year or illness for the lower income group and as much as $40,000 or $50,000 for upper income groups). High deductibles are an excellent way to reduce cost as all corporations know.”

I realize that none of these questions are easy nor are the answers obvious. Let me know what your opinion is.

Bill Stonebarger, Owner/President Hawkhill

P.S. You already know my pitch. Please look to our web site for more information and insight on science/society issues like the ones addressed in these blogs. Our big sale is over but we have dramatically reduced regular prices on all of our programs for the 2010/2011 school year.

For health care issues see: DISEASE AND HEALTH. For progressive, liberal and conservative points of view on other science/society issues see: SCIENCE AND SOCIETY: GLOBAL ISSUES OF THE 21^ST CENTURY, CAPITALISM AND DEMOCRACY, DEMOCRACY IN WORLD HISTORY and RESOURCES, POPULATIONS AND CLIMATE CHANGE.

Some readers were incensed by my comments in last week’s News about the Gulf Oil Spill.

Dennis Conroy, retired USAID executive in California, wrote: “Your Hawkhill News of June 7 was incredulous and disgusting. No mention of the eleven men who died.  No concern for the tens of thousands of fishermen, shrimpers and other watermen with no job and the loss of their way of life. And no pity for those who depend on tourism along the coast for a living. The impact on the gulf and on these people and sea life will be felt for years.”

Robert Baxter, a Canadian librarian and teacher, wrote: “So, according to you, we can forgive the disaster, as well as other similar types of environmental pollution (Alberta Tar Sands, for one) and wars over oil in the Middle East because we don’t want to live like they did in the Middle Ages. Is that supposed to be some kind of an argument, justification or comparison? … Please stop sending me these messages, and remove me from your list of contacts. Thank you. Have a nice day.”

On the other hand I did get some compliments.

Pete Cerar, real estate agent in Dayton, Ohio wrote: “Right on Bill. By stopping drilling we depend more on foreign oil which has to be shipped to us. The spills from tankers far out weigh the spills from oil rigs by about 10 times. Again, we do things for the wrong reasons.”

And Kerry Swift, university administrator in South Africa wrote: “Well spoken Sir! There is, of course, another side to this whole debacle which has been picked up by the Spectator (UK not US version). In a recent editorial they find the constant harping on BP as ‘British Petroleum’ with heavy emphasis on the ‘British’ distasteful as it is being done to deflect responsibility away from those U.S. players, like the company that built the defective platform and in a much broader sense the US consumer’s insatiable demand for oil for lifestyle wants rather than human needs. The Spectator points out that BP has been a global player for many years and its British roots are lost in the distant past. It suggests that the Federal Government should also take the rap for this disaster. It is a kind of U.S. jingoism that is making the Brits really mad and which damages the ’special relationship’. I think it is also showing up Obama in a poor light but that’s a personal view! I never really liked the Chicago activist’s mafia moving in on the White House anyway. As you say, it’s not as if BP planned this horror show!”

I replied to critics Conroy and Baxter that I have a lot of sympathy for all of the people harmed by the Oil Spill (including BP employees, shareholders and customers). Sympathy is cheap. Planning for the future is more difficult. BP promises (we’ll see if they live up to the promises) to pay for all legitimate claims from families of the men killed in the explosion, of fishermen, shrimpers, tourist losses and any other people harmed by the spill. They are also paying right now to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars for ships, equipment and workers to clean up the beaches, keep oil out of the marshes, and in general mitigate as best they can the environmental damages to the ecosystem of the Gulf and the Gulf states.

BP has the major liability for this tragedy. They are accepting the responsibility. Our federal government has responsibility too, but so far it has not distinguished itself. The governor of Louisiana, the state most affected, has begged the feds to respond more promptly to his calls for more equipment, more workers, and more help in building berms to contain the oil and keep it off the beaches and marshes. I understand that many high-tech ships from other countries that have special gear to help in oil clean-up operations are ready to help but apparently they cannot be used because of a 1920s law in the U.S. that forbids foreign ships from working in U.S. waters. This Jones Act was waived by Bush in the Katrina disaster, but presumably because of his ties to unions, Obama lets these ships remain idle. Bush was excoriated unmercifully for his supposed tardiness in responding to the Katrina hurricane damage. Obama’s response to this tragedy has, if anything, been slower and less effective.

More important than sympathy or blame or even cleaning up as best we can, is the future of oil and gas exploration in this country. That was my main point last week and I repeat it this week. My example of medieval life in the castle may have been a bit of a stretch, but I really think many people today do not understand the desperate importance of fossil fuel energy and material in our world-wide modern civilization. Not only do we depend on fossil fuels for transportation, electricity, agriculture and other energy-rich activities, they are also the base for our modern material culture from medicines to shampoo, from computers to furniture, from books to condos, iPads and baseball mitts.

Some of us older folks remember the bitter anger and the long gas lines in Jimmy Carter’s days. Those times will be a picnic compared to the future time when gas will sell for thirty dollars a gallon, our factories come to a screeching halt because they can’t get enough electricity, food quadruples in price because fertilizer becomes too expensive and unemployment hits 50% rather than 10%. Recycling, eating organic, biking to work or driving a Prius might help. But not much.

Even on a less apocalyptic note if we continue to support moratoriums on drilling in the gulf and Alaska, the immediate result will be increased imports from unfriendly nations, more support for terrorists, and risks of tanker spills worse than risks of new oil spills from drilling. The other immediate and inevitable result will be the removal of drilling rigs that presently supply a third of the crude oil produced domestically and with the removal the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs. Many of them permanently. This will be even more of a disaster for the Gulf States and a huge increase in the already bloated unemployment rolls. To compound all this damage I just heard last week that the administration falsely claimed that a scientific panel endorsed the moratorium. Falsification of a scientific report like that is inexcusable.

Just about everyone including me is in favor of developing alternative energy sources as fast as possible. But not everyone seems to realize how long it will take for any alternative to fossil fuels to make a substantial difference. As I said in my blog, the most optimistic forecasts I have seen from experts would be two or three decades. Twenty or thirty years! That’s a long time to be unemployed. What are we going to do in the meantime? All the invective and criminal prosecution in the world against BP (and other oil-companies) is not going to help. But it might make things worse.

Let me hear from you.

Bill Stonebarger, Hawkhill Owner/President

P.S. Again I urge you to consider some of our own Hawkhill programs that address different aspects of these very real national problems that in one way or another all involved the crossroads of science and society. Even if you do not want to buy the complete video or DVD programs, you might want to read the scripts (at no cost) that are also published on our web site. www.hawkhill.com.

Relevant programs to this discussion are: Energy and Society, Ecosystems, Toxic Wastes, Ecosystem Cycles, Resources Populations and Climate Change and Capitalism and Democracy.

More important, many of these pundits are using the tragedy to advance an ongoing hate-oil-companies, anti-free-market agenda that could result in environmental tragedies far worse then the Gulf oil spill. Rather than spending so much time and energy on finding someone to blame I think we should concentrate on cleaning up the mess as best we can and getting on with the job of finding new sources of energy to power our 21^st century world.

By new sources of energy I do mean solar, nuclear, fusion, hydro, geothermal, whatever. But I also mean new fossil fuel discoveries including domestic sources of oil and natural gas. And yes, all of these fossil fuel quests will no doubt mean more “drill-baby-drill.”

If you want to consider what everyday life would be like without oil and gas (and without free-market capitalism) you should read: AD 1000: Living on the Brink of Apocalypse (Harper & Row, 1988) by Richard Erdoes. In those feudal “green” pre-industrial, pre-fossil fuels and pre-capitalist days, if you were rich enough to live in a castle (99% percent of the people were not) here is what life would be like without oil and gas.

“Lords might be powerful, but they were seldom comfortable. The castle’s heart was the great dining hall, its floor covered with straw or rushes. Bones and scraps from the long trestle table were simply thrown upon the floor and eagerly snapped up by the ever-present snarling dogs, who generously supplied fleas to both high and lowborn. Whenever the rushes began to stink of rotting scraps and dog droppings and so ‘full of vermin that they seemed to move by themselves,’ they were thrown out and replaced by fresh ones, on special occasions by sweet-smelling grasses.

“The typical castle was dark and dank. Windows were mere slits covered by parchment or small slabs of horn, as glass panes had not yet come into use. Rooms were consequently very drafty, and rheumatism was the common lot of the suffering tenants. In winter, people either fried by roasting their backsides at the fire or shivered if at a distance from the chimney place. Smoke, soot, and cinders found their way into inflamed eyes. Castles were insufficiently lighted by torches or pine slivers dipped in resin. Only the richest barons and prelates could afford candles. It was no wonder poets waxed ecstatic singing of the coming spring and the fading winter.

“People relieved themselves wherever and whenever they could, and crude scatological jokes were part of the table talk. Furnishings were spare. The residents’ few possessions were kept in a chest, sometimes covered with a pillow, which also served as a seat. Tables often were just boards laid over trestles. Long benches seated the guests, and always there was a special high seat for the lord and master at the head of the table.”

Besides the discomforts, if you were really lucky (and really rich) you might live to be as old as 40. But not without suffering and recovering slowly from nasty diseases like smallpox, bubonic plague, typhoid, cholera and pneumonia that killed your brothers, sisters, children and parents many years before.

Instead of piling on we should be thanking BP, Exxon-Mobil, Shell and the other giant oil companies and their hundreds of thousands of skilled and semi-skilled workers for their difficult and almost-all-of-the-time successful work in bringing this precious fuel up from the depths of sea and land to support our civilization. And when inevitable freak accidents happen rather then threatening them with criminal prosecution we should at a minimum be sparing with criticism and condemnation. BP did not do this on purpose. They have taken responsibility and are doing their best to minimize the damage. How many can say as much?

To repeat the obvious, our civilization desperately needs oil and gas to survive and it will need more oil and gas for quite a few decades to come before new and cleaner sources of energy can be discovered, marketed and adopted by any significant portion of humankind. Banning drilling (or crippling it with still more bureaucratic regulations) in the Gulf, in Alaska or in the continental U.S. and Canada will not be helpful. All it will do is increase our dependence on oil from places like Nigeria, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. Besides exporting our cash and pollution risks to these not very friendly countries, we will be forced to depend on shipments in ever larger tankers where the risks of disastrous spills will be as great, probably greater, than the risks of drilling in deep water.

Bill Stonebarger, Owner/President Hawkhill

P.S. If you want to know more about the change from feudal zero-sum economies and societies see our program THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION, CAPITALISM AND THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.  Or the new releases RESOURCES, POPULATIONS AND CLIMATE CHANGE and ENERGY AND SOCIETY.

Timothy Ferris in a new book THE SCIENCE OF LIBERTY (HarperCollins, 2010) promotes a new way of looking at political labels. He points out that the usual left wing/right wing labels are out of date. They originated back in the French Revolution when the then liberal radicals sat on the left side of the French National Assembly and the conservative monarchists sat on the right side of the Assembly.

Instead of a straight line with left-wing liberals at one end and right-wing conservatives at the other end, Ferris suggests a triangle. At the apexes of the triangle you would have LIBERAL, PROGRESSIVE and CONSERVATIVE. Classical liberals are people (going back to John Stuart Mill, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine) who lean in the direction of freedom. Progressives (going back to Karl Marx and social-democrats) lean towards equality. And Conservatives (going back to the English philosopher Edmund Burke) lean towards tradition.

Like any and all labels, of course, this oversimplifies. Individual people (and politicians) are always some unique mixture of these three trends when it comes to individual issues.  Even though I remain suspicious of all political labeling, the Ferris triangle seems to me more sensible than the traditional left-right continuum. Let’s take a few examples.

Minimum wage. Progressives favor raising the minimum wage as high as possible in order to bring more income equality. Liberals favor no minimum wage at all, on laissez-faire free-market principles. Conservatives are reluctant to change whatever we have now.

In this case I think the liberals have the strongest argument. Progressives have good intentions but many studies have shown that the higher the minimum wage, the more unskilled young workers are squeezed out of the market and left unemployed. This especially hurts young minority males who do not get the chance to take that first step on the lower rungs of the employment ladder. Of course you could abolish the free-market altogether and go to a system like Cuba where everyone has the same salary and inequality of income does not exist. You would probably also get, as in Cuba, equal poverty.

Health care. Progressives are in favor of a national heath care program where every citizen would have equal access and equal treatment. Liberals say the government should stay out of it and let the chips fall where they may. Conservatives say our present system is adequate.

In this case I think that the progressives have the better argument. Just as good roads, clean air and water, police protection, and equal access to the courts are important government benefits for all citizens, so too I think we are a wealthy enough society that good health care should be a must for all citizens. My wife and I get our health care bills paid (mostly) by Medicare. So here I agree with the progressives. It would probably be best to have a single-payer system for everyone as we presently do with Medicare, and as most European countries do with all citizens.

Education. This is one is tricky. Progressives, with their emphasis on equality, demand that we close the achievement gaps between minority and majority populations. That we produce not only equal opportunity, but also equal results. Liberals agree that we need to provide equal opportunity but we can’t and should not guarantee equal results. Conservatives demand that we provide solid content education for all citizens, minority and majority. All three have a point.

On the whole here I find myself somewhere in the middle of liberal and conservative points of view. Like the conservatives I think we do need more attention to solid content. Like the liberals I think we need to keep advancing the equal opportunity side promised by the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Supreme Court decision in 1954.  So far as the progressive point of view goes, I applaud efforts to close the “achievement gap.” However I wish we did not put so much alarm and publicity on this particular gap. There are “gaps” in every field, in every job, in every activity.

For most people (especially teenagers and young people) sports, for instance, are far more important and far more prestigious than academic test scores. And in sports, minorities (especially African-Americans), have opened up achievement gaps every bit as wide in their favor as the academic ones where they lag behind. No one seems to be alarmed about this sports gap, why make so much about the academic test gap?

Free-markets and globalization. Here I think the conservatives and the liberals have the winning side and progressives who often oppose globalization today are simply wrong. If you define progressive as favoring equality, globalization has been a huge success. Progressives today, in other words, seem to oppose the very things that are helping to achieve their goals. A recent study found that globalization does lead to change as capitalism always has. UN statistics show enormous overall gains in countries as diverse as India, China, Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Brazil and South Africa. The World Bank reported in 2004 that economic growth in the underdeveloped world resulted in a “spectacular” decline in poverty in East and South Asia. The report showed that with the exception of sub-Saharan Africa, world poverty as a whole has declined dramatically. “Never before have so many people—or so large a proportion of the world’s population—enjoyed such large rises in their standard of living,” reported the Bank.

What about the United States? Have we suffered? Actually no, we too have gained! Spectacularly. Contrary to the critics of globalization, the Congressional Budget Office reported that average wages in the United States rose between 1991 and 2005. This was the period of greatest expansion in global trade and the period when China and Mexico were blamed for taking American jobs and income. Dividing the level of income in the U.S. into five parts, the gains between 1991 and 2005 for the wealthiest fifth were indeed large, 50%. But contrary to what many think the gains for the lowest fifth, the poorest in the U.S., were even larger. They increased by 80 percent! (The gains for the three in-between middle-class fifths increased by around 20%.) In the end globalization not only resulted in truly astonishing increases in world-wide prosperity, but it has also added around $10,000 a year to the average American household income!

War and peace. Here there are so many exceptions I don’t think labels make sense. When I visited the cemetery at Omaha Beach in France a few years ago I sobbed on my knees when I saw all of those crosses. Young men who never had a chance to live the rich full life I have had. And not a single one had a political label.

In the end as my few examples demonstrate, none of the three political categories, liberal, progressive or conservative has a monopoly on “progress” In other words, you can’t bank on solving problems by reaching into your back pocket and pulling out a prepaid credit card labeled “liberal,” “progressive,” or “conservative.” Maybe in the end we should refrain from using these labels at all.

Corrections and additions:

Dr. Doo Jung Jin at the Northwest University in Kirkland, Washington kindly sent me a couple of corrections for my recent blog on experiments in Korea. Japan controlled Korea from 1910, not from 1911. The Korea War did not start in 1947 as I mistakenly wrote, but in 1950. I should have caught that last error myself because it was indeed in 1950 that my wife and I had just graduated from Antioch College and were quite aware of that war.

Another reader, Steve Gorzula, gave me a boost by agreeing with my comments on zero-sum economics and by sending an interesting article of his own on Nepal, a country right now going through painful political turmoil. His article gives a good example of win-win economics by focusing on the potential for hydro-power in Nepal that could make a crucial difference in the Nepalese struggle to move into the modern world.

Bill Stonebarger, Hawkhill Owner/President

P.S. The 2010 sale is over now, but for the rest 2010/2011 school year we have cut all of our regular prices by 50% or more.  Look to our web site above for bargains on top-quality relevant DVDs to help make your fall beginning a rip roaring success.

It’s a bit of a stretch perhaps but the news last week that scientists had for the first time constructed a living thing from scratch (from chemicals off-the-shelf that is) got me to thinking in a different way about what I had originally planned to write about for this Hawkhill News. Here goes.

Many people today still believe that the wealth of the country, and of the world, is like a big pumpkin pie. If I get a bigger piece, you will have to be satisfied with a smaller piece. This makes for a zero-sum world. If I win, you lose. If you win, I lose. Actually for quite a few thousand years that view made sense.

Agricultural-age societies for at least ten thousand years past banked on a pie of land, gold and slaves (or serfs or peasants) for their livelihood. Since these all were severely limited the only way one group could get wealthier was to steal from another group. That usually meant war.

When the scientific and industrial revolutions began a few hundred years ago the enormous leap forward in world-wide wealth made this zero-sum economics obsolete. Now instead of war, creative invention and free trade was the best way to get wealthier. But belief in zero-sum wealth did not disappear. Unfortunately it is still alive today and distorting our world views.

Some green activists, for instance, still seem to believe in zero-sum ideas. Jeremy Rifkin, one of the green movement leaders, claims that “we are going to have to learn that the more we consume the less resources are available on the earth for other human beings and other creatures.  So if we want to steward this planet for our children’s generation we are going to have to develop a green lifestyle, a green cultural movement, we are going to have to learn to use our fair share of resources and no more, we are going to have to be good neighbors in terms of the rest of the planet.”

Which gets me back to the new invention that J. Craig Venter and his associates announced last week–life. His new bacteria were created from scratch, using only simple common chemicals as the raw materials, the “natural resources.”

What would Rifkin say about this new invention? My guess is he would object as he has to most experimental work in genetic engineering. But suppose we could, as Venter just demonstrated, design bacteria (or a new plant or animal) on the computer, using only the most common simple chemicals. This new “resource” might reproduce rapidly and be able to gobble up carbon dioxide, or oil spills, or create a new fuel for vehicles, or a new material to replace paper or copper wires or lumber, or take down malarial mosquitoes, or attack cancer cells, or repair the molecules in the brain that cause Parkinson’s Disease or Alzheimer’s. Just suppose. All of these are not only possible now, but probably inevitable.

(I can already hear some saying, but what if these new bacteria get away from us and cause havoc, even catastrophic havoc? My answer: yes, we do have to keep up our guard, but would you want to give up automobiles, computers, electricity, etc. just because sometimes they do cause serious problems?)

The main point is, if and when they come (and actually some have already come) would you call the new organisms a “natural resource?” Would you want to buy and sell these resources with our neighbors around the world or corner them for only our own use and prosperity?

The point is, like most of modern resources, like most things we call wealth today, the important thing is not the simple chemicals that come naturally out of the soil, air and water, but what human sweat and creativity has made of them. One of the most important forms of modern wealth, for instance, computers, are made of the most common of chemicals, mostly silicon, which comes from sand. Ventnor’s new bacteria too are made of the most common chemicals, water, carbon dioxide, nitrogen and a few other very common elements like nitrogen, sulfur, potassium and zinc.

To be good neighbors to the rest of the planet it seems to me that our best bet would be to share the information needed to create the new wealth, like computers, vaccines, plastics, scientific laboratories, schools, books, blogs. Then we would both benefit. It would be a classic win-win exchange.

Last week I used Korea as an example of a controlled experiment in history. This week I have another experiment in mind that shows in a major way how win-win economics trumps zero-sum thinking. It also shows that there is progress in the world even if delayed.

After the First World War ended in 1917 the allies were still thinking in zero-sum ways. After you win a war, to the winners go the spoils, right? They proceeded to impose harsh revenge on Germany. They took away big chunks of its territory, stole factories and mines, imposed heavy reparations and in general made life miserable for the defeated country. The result was what they could have predicted. Germans rebelled, reorganized and rearmed for the next war. And you got Hitler, World War Two and the Holocaust.

After the Second World War the United States and her western allies took a different tack, based on a different idea, win-win economics. Instead of punishing Germany and Japan we helped them rebuild their devastated cities and economy. This strategy resulted in quick recovery, conversion to liberal democratic ways of life and peaceful win-win competitive trade where both sides became winners.

Today Germany and Japan are among the world’s richest free-market liberal democracies. And the United States, contrary to some critics, is still number one–the world’s richest, most powerful, freest and most creative country. In other words, all sides over the past sixty years, victors and vanquished (with the notable exception of those states that are today still Communist or Radical Islamic) have been winners.

Bill Stonebarger, Hawkhill Owner/President

P.S. You still have time. The big 2010 sale will end next week on June 1. Please take the opportunity now to stock up with top-of-the-line VHS videos and DVD programs at huge discounts. 90% for the videos, 70% for the DVDs. Your students will appreciate it next fall and you won’t be sorry. I guarantee it. See our web site above for further information and to place your order.

P.P.S. For more on the connections between win-win economics and democracy see our well-reviewed program CAPITALISM AND DEMOCRACY. For more on the history of genetic engineering see STEM CELLS, GENETIC ENGINEERING, THE HUMAN GENOME PROJECT, CLONING: HOW AND WHY, and THE GENE ON DVD.