Honey they shrunk the dollar!

I can't bear to listen to the sound of our whining, hypocritical Congress. This week the Senate Judiciary Committee held "hearings" to investigate high oil prices (what do oil prices have to do with judicial issues?). The quotes from certain Senators posing as "concerned protectors of hard-working Americans" make me gag. Diane Feinstein, all innocence and outrage, accused oil company executives of "having no ethical compass about the price of gasoline.” Feinstein and her Congressional cohorts are the ones without compasses. They know the real reasons for high oil prices. And so do we:

1. Growth in world-wide demand for oil.
   
2. Stupid, stupid, stupid (did I mention stupid?) US energy policies, which have done nothing but encourage consumption.
3. Tightening oil supplies (there are fewer and smaller new oil fields coming online, and older fields in places like the North Sea and Mexico are running dry).
4. The weak dollar (if the dollar was as strong today as it was in 2001 the price of a gallon of gas today would be about $2.70)
   

I hesitate to give the impression that I think that high gas and oil prices are a problem, because I don't. Given Congress's lack of spine and Bush's belief that a legitimate energy policy consists of drilling in Alaska and begging the Saudis to pump more oil, we need high prices to force us to cut our consumption of petroleum. But one thing that we ignore when we complain that those OPEC meanies and oil company bullies are kicking sand in our faces, is how much of a role the diminished dollar has played in making oil prices appear higher.

Since 2001 the price that Europeans and Asians pay for oil has doubled, while for Americans the price has quadrupled. Similarly, since 2001 the price of gasoline in Europe has increased about 40%, while the price of gas here in the US has grown 110%. The reason for the difference has little to do with market dynamics, it's because the dollar has shrunk in value compared to other currencies. It's not just oil, the same thing is happening with other commodities, like gold (see chart below). In 2001 the Euro and the dollar were equal in value, whereas today the dollar will only buy you .6 Euros. If the dollar had remained as strong as the Euro, today we Americans would be paying $70-$80 for a barrel of oil, and (as mentioned above) about $2.70 for a gallon of gas.

The dollar's value is akin to our credit rating, and as far as the rest of the world is concerned, our credit's in the toilet. Since 2001 (remind me, who moved into the White House in 2001?) the dollar has lost half its buying power in world markets. This is because of the huge budget deficits we’ve run up to pay for Bush’s tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's also a result of our ballooning trade imbalance which comes from importing far more than we export, and borrowing money to pay for all those overseas goodies (we are China’s biggest debtor). And the dollar has shriveled significantly from our mortgage and banking crisis, and the fact that the housing portion of the US economy has lost 25% of its value in the past two years.

Price of gallon of gasoline in Euros or Dollars	2001	2008	Change
Belgium	€ 3.75	€ 5.43	+45%
France	€ 3.75	€ 5.20	+39%
Germany	€ 3.77	€ 5.30	+41%
Italy	€ 3.72	€ 5.36	+44%
Netherlands	€ 4.17	€ 5.95	+43%
UK	€ 3.04	€ 4.33	+42%
US	$1.87	$3.94	+111%
Relative value of the Euro and Dollar	2001	2008	Change
Price of gold in Euros	€ 275.00	€ 550.00	+100%
Price of gold in dollars	$275.00	$900.00	+227%
Value of the Dollar in Euros	€ 1.05	€ 0.65	-38%
Price of bbl oil in dollars	$30.00	$130.00	+334%
Price of bbl oil in Euros	€ 30.00	€ 65.00	+115%

Congress wants us to believe that high gas prices are somebody else's fault, and so they hold hearings to pin the blame on greedy corporate execs and callous OPEC sheiks. They're hoping that we won't notice that because of our shriveling dollar, gas prices have risen twice as fast here as in Europe or Japan. So far we seem to be buying the ruse. The average citizen, and even the typical reporter, gives little thought to what it means to be living in a world economy. We assume that the dollar is rock-steady, and oil price increases will disappear in a flurry of committee hearings. Instead of applauding Congress for playing the blame game, we should be holding them (and the Bush Administration) accountable for their head-in-the-sand economic policies that have cut the purchasing power of the dollar in half, and for wishy-washy energy policies which have done nothing to cut US consumption of oil.

Blogger's choice awards

(A bit of a detour this week - into media favorites)

I like GoodReads, the web site that helps you (their blurb):

• see what your friends are reading.
• keep track of what you've read and what you'd like to read.
• get great book recommendations from people you know.

When Colleen (or maybe it was Marin) first sent the GoodReads link to me, I went crazy, entering in all of the books I've read over the past gazillion years. But once I had finished compiling my reading history, my contributions to GoodReads dwindled to a book every month or two. The problem is, GoodReads is only about books and books make up a small part of the media I (please give me another word, "consume" seems so banal - absorb? digest? ah well...) consume nowadays.

What I'd love to find is a GoodReads for all the other media - podcasts and movies, and radio shows and websites and magazines and (yes, even the boob tube) TV shows. So I thought I'd make a stab at it here. What follows (which I admit is an amateurish beginning without the database and Friends e-connections and fancy-shmancy user interface) is a list of a few of my favorite things. (Sing along..."Podcasts on roses and bright shiny movies, warm woolen web sites and books that are groovy, brown paper magazines wrapped up in string..." etc etc)

Some of my favorite podcasts:

• I love "Fresh Air", and I also hate it, depending on the day. When Terry Gross focuses her interviewing acumen on a topic of interest to me - politics, religion, science or economics - her show is terrific. She has a talent for crafting questions that draw people out, and that ask them things that I would ask if I were a clever interviewer. Her interviews with controversial characters like Tim Lahaye or Bill O'Reilly provide revealing insights into the way these folks think and act. On the other hand, when she plays the NPR version of Barbara Waters, dabbling in pop music or TV shows (topics in which I have zero interest), I feel that she's wasting her talent on trivial trash. Why is "Fresh Air" under the podcasts, you may ask? First off, I am seldom near a radio when it broadcasts, and secondly, in iTunes I can delete the crappy shows where Terry enthuses breathlessly about "Desperate Housewives" or "The Wire".
  

• The Cato Institute's podcasts are much more than just libertarian propaganda. Cato provides a forum for politicians, historians and economists of all stripes to present their views. They usually invite two or more renowned guests to present differing views of an issue. Listening to Cato podcasts gives me the feeling of being a fly on the wall of the halls of power.
  

• "On The Media" is a straight-forward and intelligent look at how the news is reported (not to mention that Brooke Gladstone, who I met when NHPR brought her to Concord, NH, is my secret crush). You might think that a weekly show that's all about making media would be insipid and navel-gazing, but I often learn more about the news from OTM than I do from the news.
  

In the interests of brevity, here's a quick list of some of my other favorites:

• Movies - "Brazil" (every minute is brilliant), "The Great Match" (I never thought I'd use the word "cinematography" when explaining why I loved a movie - Thanks, Murray!) and "A Clockwork Orange" (many of Kubrick's films, like "2001: A Space Odyssey", show their age, but this one is just as powerful as it was 25 years ago).
  

• Books (or rather authors) - John LeCarre (I wish the Cold War hadn't ended), William Gibson (sci-fi that's more than cowboys in space), John MacPhee, E. B. White and John Steinbeck
  

• Web sites - NYTIMES.COM (check out the Freakonomics and Dick Cavett blogs), forecast.weather.gov (mmmm, weather porn about northeasters "bombing out in the Gulf of Maine!"), thesaurus.com (when you need another word for "consume" and you need it now!)
  

• TV shows - "The Daily Show" (John Stewart doth protest too much when he says "we do humor, not news"), "The Colbert Report" (although Stephen can be too much to take, sometimes), Red Sox games, "Mystery" on PBS (Helen Mirren is my other secret crush, but why is so much of the rest of PBS programming nothing more than "self-help for yuppies"? Will someone please put Suze Orman out of my misery?)

• Radio Shows - "Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me" (but only when Paula Poundstone is on), "Morning Edition" (although I have to warn you that NPR will never keep you up to date on Amy Winehouse), "Lucky Dog Radio" (on iTunes Radio)
  

• Magazines - "Harpers" (if only Lewis Lapham didn't have to use the word "mammon" in every issue), "The Atlantic" (long articles that are actually worth the time it takes to read them), "Paste" (just for the CDs and DVDs)
  

Okay, your turn. What are some of your favorites, and why?

Pander bear

I got an email from Lisa yesterday, nudging me because I hadn't posted on Saturday morning (my usual schedule). It's true, I was a laggard, but I was working. Really.

This was the week of the gas pump pander, with Hillary Clinton staging her ridiculous idea of a gas-tax holiday from the back of a pickup at a North Carolina truck stop. Hillary's playing the slimiest of political ploys, and it appears to be working. She's proposing to suspend the paltry 18 cent a gallon federal gas tax from May Day to Labor Day, to "ease our pain at the pump". She wants us to believe she's doing us a favor, but she's really just helping us fall further and further behind the rest of the developed world. She's betting on Americans being myopic, and it appears from her recent gains in the polls in North Carolina and Indiana that she's making the right bet.

We Americans have gotten ourselves horribly addicted to gasoline, and the last thing we need is a politician to enable us. Over the past 25 years European and the Asian governments have deliberately raised oil & gas taxes about 20 times the measly 18 cents we pay, exacting this price to become nearly three times as energy efficient as we are. We did nothing but guzzle. Our faith-based energy policy rested on the belief that the world oil supply would grow forever. America played the grasshopper to Europe's ant. Three of the four best-selling vehicles in the United States last year were the Ford F-150, the Chevy Silverado and the Dodge Ram - all pickup trucks which get 15-17 MPG. Europe's economy is humming today, as is their currency. When Bush took office in 2001, the dollar was worth 1.15 Euros. Since then the dollar has steadily shriveled, it's now worth 0.65 Euros. What we have to show for 25 years of "head in the sand" energy policies are decrepit mass transit systems, suburban garages full of SUVs and pickup trucks, and trade deficits ballooning because of oil imports. Whose fault is this?

What Americans should be doing is accepting responsibility for our profligate ways, but we'd much rather look for scape goats. The oil companies are easy targets, after all they're making tanker loads of money from the worldwide demand for oil. Hillary's plan combines the suspension of the federal gas tax with a windfall profits tax on those big oil company meanies who forced us to buy all those SUVs and build all those suburbs (Exxon and Shell are probably behind the explosive economic growth in China, too). She knows her tax proposal is a gimmick that's unlikely to ever pass Congress, but what the hey, demagoguery sells. She accuses anyone who disagrees with her gas tax holiday plan of being on the side of the oil companies. Such b*llshit. She's the one proposing to pass our tax dollars over to the oil companies, using us as the middle men. Because the biggest benefactor of her gas tax holiday will be the oil companies.

If we're worried about the oil companies taking too much of our money, what do you think we should do - try to tax their profits or buy less gas? I did a quick calculation this week. A Ford Explorer (one of the most popular SUVs of the past 10 years) gets about 17 MPG, and has a 22.5 gallon gas tank. My 2002 Honda Civic gets 39 MPG and has an 11 gallon gas tank. It takes me $35 today to fill up my tank. It takes the Explorer driver about $80 to fill up her tank. We can both go about 400 miles on that tank of gas. Which one of us is inflating oil company profits?

This spring we're seeing headlines that show that high gas prices are starting to have a beneficial effect. Americans are buying smaller cars and driving less. As Americans buy less gas, oil companies take less of our money. If we cut our driving and gas consumption enough, gas prices might actually drop, but no matter, the important thing is that we'll cut our consumption of and expenditures for gasoline. On the other hand, if Hillary's tax holiday was to pass, this good behavior likely goes on holiday as well. The short-term, symbolic drop in gas prices would motivate Americans to hold off trading in the guzzler for a sipper, at least until the fall. Many of us would change our minds and decide to drive the family to Disneyland after all. Gas consumption would go up! Oil companies would smile, broadly. Even if they had dropped prices at the pump the full 18 cents when the tax was suspended (doubtful) they'd start to raise them again as demand soared over the summer. The oil companies (and their profit margins) will just LOVE Hillary's gas tax holiday. And where will we find ourselves (and gas prices) come Labor Day, when the gas tax will be reimposed? How happy will we be at that point?

The primary reasons that oil companies are making big profits in the US is because we've done nothing to cut our demand, and demand from the rest of the world is growing rapidly. America consumes half of all the world's gasoline supply. We're 1/20th of the world's population and we use 1/2 its gas! What did we think was going to happen, when the rest of the world started to catch up? Worldwide demand for automobiles and gasoline is growing exponentially as newly minted middle class consumers in China and India adopt a western lifestyle. Do any of us honestly believe that this is the oil companies' fault? We all know that we need to become more efficient, and conserve more. The thing is, we didn't mean we wanted to do it right now. Maybe next year, or next decade. We'll change our ways sometime in the not-too-distant future, as soon as we've paid off the Chevy Tahoe and taken that Las Vegas vacation. Hillary's doing us no favors, but you can't really blame her, she's just giving us what we want.

Barrelin' down the Boulevard...

I can't wait for the next time that I fill up my gas tank. Sean (my son) has motivated me to do some hypermiling, and I am eager to see the results. It all started when he sent me an email after my post about cars and my complaint that Honda seemed to be regressing in their fuel efficiency designs. Sean came to Honda's defense, "I was just scanning through your blog...You need to consider that an '08 Fit has all kinds of extra safety features like air bags, ABS brakes, power steering etc. that add weight to the vehicle. It probably also has A/C, power windows and locks, and more than an AM radio with two speakers. It might even have a digital clock which is well known to be an energy hog. Anyway, today's lower fuel economy ratings are not as bad as they seem. If Honda was to build the '85 Civic today it would get a horrible safety rating and no one would buy it. As it is, they make cars that are much safer and more comfortable without sacrificing much fuel economy."

Good points, all (nice to see Sean putting that engineering education to good use). I would still trade the power windows and the digital clock (why does that use so much energy?) for a Fit that got 10 more MPG, but I admit I'm not your typical car buyer. Sean went on to tell me about hypermiling, which is a combination of car modifications and driving techniques which enable one to get much better gas mileage than the certified MPG posted on the sticker. I visited a couple of hypermiling web sites, which are run by gas-sipping fanatics, to learn how I can "hypermile". They make some fairly ridiculous suggestions, such as to follow 1-2 car lengths behind a tractor-trailer, to benefit from the draft effect. Picturing this reminded me of that old joke, "Why do bulldogs have flat noses?" for which the answer is "From chasing parked cars.". I think I'd like a lot more than 1-2 car lengths between me and a speeding 18 wheeler. There are also suggestions to park in the highest spot in the parking lot, so as to be able to get off to a rolling start (which led me to imagine parking lots designed by M.C. Escher, which always lead down hill no matter where you park), and a suggestion to jettison all unnecessary weight (alas, no more driving around with a bull moose strapped to the hood), as more poundage means less mpg.

I took three tips to heart, and have implemented them this week. These are:
* coasting whenever possible,
* avoiding jack-rabbit starts & stops, and
* inflating tires well above the standard 32 PSI.

Coasting (taking my car out of gear and taking my foot off the gas) is a piece of cake for me, since I drive over Temple Mountain twice a day. The mountain provides me with two lengthy down-hill slopes to support my free-wheeling. If I ignore the speed limit I can coast a good 6-7 miles (fully one-third of my trip) on the way to work and 3-4 miles on the return home (because the east side of Temple is a bit less steeply inclined). The speed limit is a problem. If I hit the brakes to keep my speed close to the posted 50 MPH on the steeper stretches, then I lose too much momentum to make it over the one or two little rises that break the otherwise continuous 7 mile downhill run from Temple to Wilton. I'm thinking of suggesting that speed limit laws be modified for hypermilers, as it seems to me that conserving kinetic energy is more valuable than safety.

I'm having a harder time with not being a jack-rabbit. I can still hear my mother repeating (endlessly, it seemed, when I was young) "patience is a virtue". She did her best in a futile attempt to help me become more zen-like. I remain decidedly un-zen, especially when in my car. I view driving as a competitive event, the goal of which is to get somewhere faster than the other people with whom I am forced to share the road. I "game" stop-lights when there are two lanes, trying to guess which lane will move more quickly when the light turns green (a general rule of thumb is to pick the shorter line, unless there is a big truck in it). I hate passing someone slow and then ending up in the wrong lane and watching them pass me again. It's like I've gone backwards. In any case, I'm working on driving like the Dalai Lama (does he drive, or teleport?). It is not easy.

Lastly, I've inflated my tires, up to 40 PSI (the owner's manual suggests 30-32 PSI, for a soft, comfortable ride). From what I read on the hypermiling sites 40 PSI is a good place to start. The hypermiling web sites caution readers that higher tire pressures may result in a stiffer ride, but I didn't notice any difference. I am going to check the tire manufacturer's recommendations and maybe go up to 45 PSI, or even higher.

So here I am, impatient (I hear you, mom) to go to the gas station and fill 'er up. My tank holds a little more than 11 gallons, and I was getting 38-40 MPG before I tried a little hypermiling. The hypermiler web sites talk of gains of 10% to 50% (the higher numbers come from those tail-gating drivers with the flat noses). Right now the tank is about half -full (not half-empty) and I've gone 280 miles. I may not be able to wait until it's empty. Come to think of it, driving with a half-full gas tank all the time, because of its lower weight, might be another technique to achieve higher MPG. Or I could buy bigger tires for the rear wheels, so that I'd be going downhill all the time:) What other things should I try?

Bitter Suite

There's been a lot of attention paid recently to the mood of blue collar Americans (aka Reagan Democrats) in places like Ohio and Pennsylvania. The presidential candidates are full of praise for the noble American worker, promising them that they'll stem the "theft of American jobs by those damn furriners". The political conversation about global trade and jobs tends to go no deeper than "NAFTA sucks!" and "China cheats!". Hillary tries to win the "bitter" blue collar demographic by saying "NAFTA and the way it's been implemented has hurt a lot of American workers...". Hillary forgets to mention that NAFTA was authored by hubby Bill during the years she was working at his side, getting all that White House experience. Obama counters "...that he has always opposed NAFTA, and that the trade deal should be amended and renegotiated.", again conveniently forgetting that he used to support NAFTA. Both Obama and Clinton, speaking at the Pennsylvania Forum on Manufacturing, maintained that "...the policies President George W. Bush has supported have outsourced thousands of jobs all over the world but mainly to China, ultimately affecting the U.S. manufacturing industry." Whether they supported free trade in the past, both Obama and Clinton now agree that it was NAFTA and China who laid off all those American factory workers. In 2008 xenophobia is an easier sell than free trade.

The problem is, all this focus on NAFTA and China as the primary causes of lost American jobs is a load of baloney. No one can dispute that there are a lot of middle-aged Americans who've lost high paying manufacturing jobs over the past 20 years. They had found those jobs in the plants that bloomed in the United States after World War II. In the 1960s Americans only had to graduate high school and show up at the local factory to land a plant floor job with great pay and benefits. But those jobs did not last forever. Over the past couple of decades the news has been full of stories about US layoffs and plant closings on the one hand, and NAFTA trade agreements and the boom of manufacturing in China on the other. It's only natural to assume that a "giant sucking job vacuum" was siphoning jobs from Detroit and Gary directly into Tijuana and Shanghai. The problem is, that's not what happened. Americans didn't lose those jobs to Mexico or China. They lost them to productivity.

When we talk about the decline of manufacturing in the US we equate the loss of manufacturing jobs with a decline in manufacturing output. But manufacturing in the United States is not declining. US manufacturing output, as a % of GDP, is as high as it's ever been in the past 50 years. Unfortunately for Obama's "bitter" workers, while US Manufacturing output has remained strong, productivity growth has eliminated many of their jobs. Productivity in manufacturing has grown 2.8% per year since the 1960s, meaning that manufacturers only need 1 worker in 2008 to do the work that 4 did in 1968. In some industries, like automobile manufacturing, productivity gains have been even higher.

A walk through downtown Detroit provides ample evidence of closed plants and lost jobs. But Detroit autoworkers didn't lose nearly as many jobs to Mexico as they lost to the much more efficient plants run by Toyota and Honda (and even Saturn) in places like Tennessee and Kentucky. The loss of jobs in Detroit had little to do with globalization, they were lost because of the intransigence of autoworker unions, coupled with management incompetence at GM, Ford and Chrysler. Americans are still building cars. There are more automobiles being produced now in the United States than during the 1960s heydays of the big 3 automakers, but they're not being produced in old-line, union manufacturing cities like Detroit and Gary, Indiana. And they're being produced by far fewer workers.

The same is true of steel. In 1964 the US produced 126 million tons of steel while employing 515,000 steel workers. In 2001 the US produced 100 million tons of steel while employing 161,000 steel workers. Total US steel consumption fell about 20% during that time period, due to a shift to lighter-weight materials in cars and other products (weight costs money & energy, and steel is heavy). Note that while steel production and consumption dropped about 20%, steel worker employment dropped 68%. In 2001 the US steel industry produced 100 million tons of steel with 1/3 the number of workers that were needed to produce 100 million tons in 1964.

Displaced factory workers should be blaming computers, and robots, not China and Mexico. The digital revolution has created amazing efficiencies on the shop floor, in the warehouse, and in the supply chain. We love efficiency, it's a beautiful idea, but the reality of efficiency is that it saves labor, which means it eliminates jobs. That's what efficiency is all about. Not only are job losses in the US not China's fault, but in fact American workers and Chinese workers are in the same boat. Between 1995 and today China has lost about 15,000,ooo manufacturing jobs, even as their manufacturing output has soared. Automation, productivity and efficency are equally harsh mistresses for workers on either side of the Pacific.

Hillary's and Obama's xenophobic NAFTA and China bashing will do nothing to restore those lost manufacturing jobs. American workers don't need protectionism, they need new opportunities. We'd be a lot better off if politicians focused on balancing budgets, expanding education and increasing economic development, instead of making defensive promises to suspend NAFTA and put tariffs on Chinese toothpaste.

Iterating literacy...

The practice of reading words on paper appears to be dying. Reading's impending death has been covered (ironically) by all the newspapers. If you run a google search on "death of reading" you'll find hundreds of articles covering reading's demise, in papers ranging from the Washington Post to the Washington Times (I can assure you, that's quite a wide spectrum). You'd have to be a total non-reader to have missed all of the stories about the NEA (the National Endowment for the Arts, not the National Education Association) studies "Reading at Risk" and "To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence" which chronicle our growing "ignorance". These studies focus on non-readers, in particular on teenagers, citing alarming statistics on all the reading they're not doing and the societal dissolution their illiteracy will bring.

The Washington Times editorial page strikes a typically grim and shrill tone "Here are some of the troubling highlights...from 1982 to 2002, the percentage of 18- to 24-year-olds who read literature dropped from 60 percent to 43 percent. Fifty-two percent of the same age demographic said they read a book voluntarily in 2002, which is down from 59 percent a decade earlier...Our increasing failure to read constitutes a kind of creeping national illiteracy which should concern everyone, not simply librarians and booksellers. Literacy is an integral aspect of civil society. Substance, culture and literature should not be the ironic casualties of the Information Age." I love those value-laden words - "substance" and "culture". Of course we accept that the Washington Times editorial board is the arbiter of substance and culture (this is the newspaper published by Sun Myung Moon, the wacko Unification Church leader who maintains that he's the new Messiah).

This is one of the rare issues on which the Washington Times and the Washington Post agree. Here's this from the Washington Post "More than half the adults in this country won't pick up a novel this year, according to the NEA. Not one. And the rate of decline has almost tripled in the past decade...". Reading's mourners share a tone of gloom and doom, and warn us against creeping ignorance. The future they depict is one of drooling idiots pounding their keyboards and wiggling their joysticks, barely able to feed themselves. We must make children read (they seldom mention adults, they know how much luck they'd have trying to make adults read)! Good luck, I say.

I'm not feeling the gloom. I have to wonder. Which way are we facing when we wail and gnash our teeth about the decline of printed word literacy, forward or backward? Is it okay that reading is fading in importance, or is it a sign of the coming apocalypse?

On the apocalypse team are academics like Maryanne Wolf of Tufts University, along with all the newspapers and the NEA. Wolf's been making the rounds of high-brow talk shows, expertly reinforcing our fear of reading's demise whilst flogging her book "Proust and the Squid" - a not-so-aptly named treatise on how reading shapes our brain. Wolf argues that reading is an acquired skill that forces us to think deeply and synthesize information. She further argues that if reading fades in our culture, we will lose that ability to think deeply and digest (not just consume) information. She fears that reading will not survive the onslaught of "digitization", and that its potential loss is serious and saddening.

For every printed word literacy pessimist like Maryanne Wolf, there's an optimistic digital literacy champion like Henry Jenkins , the professor of New Media Literacy at MIT. Jenkins and a number of other researchers think we educators should redefine literacy to represent the way that people, especially teenagers, are engaging in the digital world. According to Henry, educators like Maryanne Wolf are building a "Maginot Line" in a hopeless attempt to defend reading and children against the encroaching digital world. He argues that we need to "...identify skills, knowledge, and competencies young people need to become meaningful participants in the 21st century culture around them – skills central to citizenship, community life, and cultural expression...in this new landscape of video games, cell phones, podcasting, blogging, instant messaging and other kinds of media-intensive experiences, children are participants – not spectators, not consumers in the traditional sense of the term. These new media forms and the cultures that emerge around them offer young people new opportunities for emotional growth and intellectual development but also require new kinds of ethical responsibilities. The goal of media literacy education in the 21st century should be to prepare kids to live within a more participatory media culture..."

So, which is it - doom or boom? I love to read. I read two newspapers a day (I think I'm one of the Boston Globe's last 4 readers). I also generally have a book or two going (I'm halfway through "The Looming Tower" and "Spook Country" at the moment, in case you're wondering). But I understand that just because the Washington Times editorial board and the NEA think we're going to hell in an iPod basket, there's no way we can force teens or adults read more ("No dessert until you eat your Proustian spinach!"). I don't think that we're reading less because we have suddenly become dumber, or shallower. I think it's that there are much more engaging media available to us. The printed word has always been a narrow form of communication, engaging only one of our senses (and that one only indirectly), while forcing us to adapt to the form, not vice-versa. Even Maryanne Wolf admits that our brains are not well-suited for reading. She explains that our brains go through a process of rewiring to match the medium of printed texts, and a significant percentage of us, known as dyslexics, never fully adapt. Maybe reading is fading because it is poorly suited to our abilities, and the new digital media are more powerful alternatives. It may be that bemoaning our fading printed word proficiency in 2010 is akin to anguishing over the weakening wrists of teamsters who no longer needed to wield buggy whips to drive cars in 1910.

The new media are not only more engaging, they are much, MUCH more democratic. For most of the past 500+ years the printing press was the only mass media game in town. The media were controlled by those who owned the means of production, first in the form of books and newspapers, and then more recently, television and radio. If you wanted to publish something, or broadcast something, you had to own the printing press or the TV station (ham radio operators being the exception). Then suddenly, over the past 15-20 years, an economic & technological revolution has taken place in media. The internet gives each of us the ability to broadcast our creations to the entire wired world! And not just an email, or a blog post, we can post movies, slide shows, music, etc. Video cameras can be had for a few hundred dollars today, instead of tens of thousands. To edit a video 15 years ago required an investment of $150,000, now anyone who owns a Mac or an XP computer can do it for free. Every teenager can (and does) build their own web site. Podcasts are as easy to make as a newsletter (perhaps easier). Of course the Washington Post and the Washington Times should feel wretched about our declining interest in printed texts, because they have lost their monopoly.

I understand that this revolution has trade-offs. I love that I can post 2000 word opinions on my blog every week, and no longer risk the indignity of having my 150 word letters rejected by the Boston Globe (what do they know?). But I also recognize that I can't afford to have a news bureau in Islamabad or Indonesia. Nor can I be assured of the quality of everything that is posted to Youtube, or MySpace. One of the biggest challenges in the explosion of digital media is keeping up with it all, and finding the nuggets hidden in all the dross. I sincerely hope that someone like Goodreads will come up with a Goodfeeds, where we can all let each other know about the latest podcasts, vodcasts, web sites, etc that we've found (what are your favorites?).

So what do you think? Will the next generation be a bunch of simpletons with tiny brains and over-sized thumbs? Will we soon lose the pleasure of spending a rainy afternoon in a bookstore cafe, sipping a mocha choca latte yaya and thumbing through the latest William Gibson? When they go online, "is our children learning?" (you gotta love it when the Washington Times complains about declining literacy while endorsing George Dumberer Bush for President). Should public schools use whips and chairs to make kids read? What should literacy look like 10 years from now?

Bring it on!

I was ready to move on from (pass?) the topic of cars, but the New York Times website has a story this morning on new models of small cars that are selling well in Europe and Asia, but which we'll never see here in the United States. Arrggghhh! These cars are incredibly fuel efficient, and so freakin' cute! Check them out here.

I was thinking of writing a blog spot or two on George Bush's legacy (negligance-y?). He's in the Balkans (again), making speeches about bringing Ukraine into NATO (I thought the whole point of NATO was to keep countries like the Ukraine out of NATO), and pissing off Angela Merkel and Putin. He keeps returning to Eastern Europe (looking for that watch he lost, perhaps), apparently because it's one of the few places where he is popular. Bush may be polling in the single digits in Boston, but he's boffo in Bulgaria. Given how well he's handled things here and around the world - Katrina, Wall Street, the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, health care, crumbling infrastructure, the economy, China, Social Security, etc. - it's good to have him offstage, where he can do the least damage (we need a Hippocratic Oath for presidents like Dubyah - "First, do no harm").

Or we could talk about the economy, and Wall Street. How do you feel about Bear Stearns, did you send their deposed CEO, James Cayne, a sympathy card?. Will we need to build an Ark to survive the rising tide of mortgage defaults, and should we worry that so many people took out loans that they had no chance of ever paying back? As we head into a recession should we be cheered by the job opportunities for Repo men? Does it matter that, for the first time in my lifetime, the Canadian dollar is now worth a dollar? How about that deficit? Are the Gen-Xers ready to step up (no more slacking) and pay my generation's bills? Or should we declare bankruptcy and hope that China will write off all our debts?

I'm also tempted to talk about education, given that it's what I do. The dollar and our educational proficiency seem to be tracking each other, is that a good thing? Is it a problem that the US is so far behind Finland (they're number yksi!) and 30 other countries in math, science and literacy tests? Are standardized tests accurate predictors of our future societal and economic health? Is education all about the contest, and the prize (what is the prize)?

Or, we could go back to discussing religion. By which I mean the Red Sox (the one true faith). Baseball season has begun, no more of that knuckle-dragger sports-page-filling football folderol. Is Manny the Mozart of hitting (if you've watched Manny in the dugout, and you've seen Amadeus, you'll understand that the comparison is not meant as praise)? Can the Yankees' creaky, ancient pitching staff hold up for a season? Is there anything more satisfying than a night of baseball in which the Red Sox win, and the Yankees lose?

And there's technology. Wonderful, incomprehensible, banal technology. Is the iTouch a boon to mankind, or just another ADHD-inducing distraction? Speaking of religion, which is it - Mac or Wintel? Is Steve Jobs a visionary, or just amazingly arrogant? Do you youtube? Is the democratization of media the best or the worst trend to come down the pike? Should we celebrate the fact that today anyone can create a film of their cat flushing the toilet and share it with the world, or should we fall to our knees and pray that Rod Serling will come back from the dead?

What do you think about these things? What shall we talk about next?