Why Capitalism Is Stupid: A Case Study

Note that I didn’t say bad, or evil, but stupid.

Before we go any further, let me state that I have never studied economics, and I’ve only taken one intro-level philosophy class. The topics I’m bringing up here are steeped in both, and I know I’m out of my element.

Capitalism has, as a core principle, a belief that competition drives innovation and growth, which helps a society to thrive; whether its helping society to thrive is intentional or just a consequence is debatable. And in practice capitalism is just as susceptible to corruption as communism — both fail as a result of the boundless greed of the powerful. But for the moment let’s not dwell on the big picture… let’s just look at one example of how capitalism can be… well, stupid.

I live in Minneapolis, a large city of 425,000. Along with St. Paul (pop. 310,000) it is the core of a metro area of 3.6 million. Like all large cities, Minneapolis is divided into a number of distinct communities. The community I live in is called Longfellow, and combined with neighboring Nokomis, the immediate area has a population of around 65,000 people.

Unlike many other parts of the city, Longfellow-Nokomis has always resisted the heavy encroachment of large chain businesses. Of course we have a Target, a scattering of McDonald’s and Subway locations, etc. But for the most part, the businesses here are small and local.

In fact, in an area comprising about 13 square miles, home to 15% of the entire city’s population, there is only one Caribou Coffee, and until recently, zero Starbucks (not counting the one inside the Target… which is a capitalism story for another blog post). Of course we have dozens of local independent coffee houses, but only one each of the two big chains.

And they’re right across the street from each other.

How does it benefit the citizens of the community to have a Caribou and a Starbucks within sight of each other, when the vast majority of residents of the area don’t live within walking distance of either one? Who does a decision like this really serve? How does this help society to thrive?

What we’re looking at here is not a failure of capitalism in principle, but an example of how it fails in practice, as power is consolidated in the hands of a few greedy, powerful corporations.

I’m sure this is the point where a (21st century) Republican dutifully says, “But how can a corporation be greedy? Greed is a human emotion, and corporations are businesses, not people.” Oh right, corporations are only people when it comes to exercising their right to free speech. (And political money equals speech.) I’m sure few, if any, of the individuals within these corporations are ruthlessly greedy. But they don’t need to be. The system is built on a principle whose logical consequence is that increasing profits outweighs any other considerations. That could be defined as greed.

One could argue that Caribou and Starbucks have grown to that tipping point in capitalism where they are no longer focused on competition through innovation, but on stifling competition through consolidation of power. Nothing better exemplifies to me capitalism’s absurd failure than a business opening its first location in a large, heavily populated area within feet of its rival.

Sadly, I’m sure these corporations did extensive research and determined that the best location in Longfellow-Nokomis for a major chain coffee house was right at this spot, even if there was already another one right there. And I bet both will do booming business, because… honestly? Most of us just don’t question it.

Now get in the car. I want some coffee.

Reflections on a particularly rough week for race relations in America in 2016

Note: I initially posted this on Facebook. But things on Facebook have a tendency to get lost in the noise. Better to also preserve it here in the musty silence of my blog.

Seeing some pretty extreme responses on social media from some white people in the wake of the past few days’ events. If I could say anything to white people who are scared and/or angry and/or, God forbid, arming themselves for a race war, it would be this:

Social justice is not a zero sum game. You don’t have to do worse for others to do better. To quote the late, great Paul Wellstone, “We all do better when we all do better.”

You may have a vision of what “America” is, or what an “American” is, and that vision may be a particular color. But Americans who aren’t white are still Americans, just as much as you are.

Black Americans who are reacting to their friends and relatives being gunned down by police at routine — far too routine for many of them — traffic stops have a right to be scared, and angry. But Black Lives Matter is not about revenge. It’s not about starting a war. It’s about JUSTICE. About bringing more PEACE to our streets, our cities, our country. It’s about the “American” in “African American.”

At least, that’s how I see it. And living in the city, I’m probably in much closer proximity to BLM than most white Americans who are themselves scared or angry right now. So please, don’t be. Stop. Listen. Think. Feel. Understand.

Our fellow Americans who weren’t born with the inherited privileges conferred by white skin are living under the burden our ancestors placed on them — a burden that we perpetuate every day that we don’t actively acknowledge and work to counteract it. Hear their voices. Amplify them. Don’t silence them.

And when something happens like the shootings in Dallas, wait for the facts. BLM is a peaceful movement. Dallas PD has a good relationship with BLM. Officers were there to PROTECT the BLM marchers. The shooters do not represent Black Lives Matter or its goals.

I could go on, but I’ve already spoken too long. But don’t stop listening. Seek out those voices that are demanding peace and justice and hear what they are saying. And I will continue trying to do the same.

Thinking out loud on Twitter about the new Minneapolis paid sick time rules

No further commentary, but I wanted to gather up my thread of tweets on this topic from today.

First, the news behind it: Minneapolis paves way to give thousands of workers paid sick time

Here’s what I had to say, as I thought through things on Twitter. (I know I should have used Storify or embedded tweets or something but a screenshot of the whole thread was easier.)

Screen Shot 2016-05-27 at 9.42.34 AM

A few thoughts from a nerd who actually DOES care about politics

Jason Kottke linked to a post by David Roberts on Vox today:

Tech nerds are smart. But they can’t seem to get their heads around politics.

This is a great article on nerds and politics, or their lack of interest therein. It addresses a lot of the misconceptions that cloud our understanding of the political landscape in America.

But even as it tears apart the false dichotomy between the two major parties (i.e. they are not “mirror images” of each other), it falls prey to that exact line of thinking with one example it gives.

A voter with one extreme conservative opinion (round up and expel all illegal immigrants immediately) and one extreme liberal opinion (institute a 100 percent tax on wealth over a million dollars) will be marked, for the purposes of polling, as a moderate.

OK, that’s a helpful illustration. Except. There really are people on the right (*ah-hem* Donald Trump) saying we should round up and expel all “illegal immigrants” (don’t use that term) immediately. But there is no one on the left proposing anything even close to a 100% tax on wealth over a million dollars.

It’s hard, even for people trying to expose the lack of a parallel on the left to the extremism on the far-right, to avoid thinking the far-left is populated by crackpots with ludicrously draconian, totalitarian ambitions. But those people do not exist. There is no “far-left” in American politics, equivalent to the far-right.

Even Bernie Sanders, who self-identifies as a socialist — in America! gasp! get me my clutchin’ pearls! — isn’t proposing things like that. The ideas coming out of the left are reasonable and rational, benefitting the vast majority of Americans (at the expense only of those who can easily afford it) while pursuing a progressive goal of greater equality and opportunity for all. They only seem “extreme” because they are so radically different from the course we’ve been traveling on for the past 30ish years.

The real fault of logic here is in assuming that the “center” of current American political thinking is anywhere near the true center of the spectrum of possibilities.

Confession: I wrote this as soon as I hit that “100% tax” line because it aggravated me so much. The rest of the article furthers most of the ideas I’m expressing here, and is far more detailed and well-researched. It is absolutely worth reading, above my rants, but I still think it’s worth calling out this particular example.

In a future post I’ll take on the other big issue I see with nerds and politics: that nerds’ general disdain for politics leads them into a superficial alignment with libertarianism. But that very disdain is also the reason why they don’t explore deeply enough to realize how problematic libertarianism is, and how much it really doesn’t represent their values.

Discovering the Driftless

What if you lived in the middle of a geological curiosity and didn’t even know it?

Well, maybe not the middle, but just beyond the western edge? That was me, growing up in Austin, Minnesota. Austin is on the eastern edge of the prairie, flat and surrounded by corn and soybean fields. It’s a small company town, headquarters of Hormel Foods. A union town. And as a kid, the only thing I knew about the area that was noteworthy was that we invented Spam.

But I did also know that just a bit farther to the east, the terrain got… weird. Flat cornfields turned into rolling hills, and then into steep bluffs as you approached the Mississippi River. On the other side of the river, in Wisconsin, things got even weirder, with strange rock formations dotting the hilly landscape, until eventually farther to the east things flattened out again. And I knew the place was weird below the surface too, with caves and underground streams.

I often wondered what made the areas just to the east of my hometown so much different than where I lived, or anywhere else I had ever seen, for that matter. But not enough to really explore or investigate it. Even as an adult. After all, the Midwest is boring. If you want interesting landscapes, you go to Utah or Arizona or really anywhere besides what feels like the least exotic place on the planet.

Catch My Drift

Last year, while working on the Land Stewardship Project website, I encountered a term I had never heard before: “Driftless.” Specifically, the “Driftless Area,” a name applied to that “weird” part of southeastern Minnesota and southwestern Wisconsin near where I had grown up.

I wondered why it was called “Driftless.” I assumed it had to do with drifting snow. That would seem to be a logical assumption: from Austin west to the South Dakota border, snow drifting across the windswept prairie is such a problem that there are permanent gates at most entrances to I-90, so the road can be shut down easily during big winter storms. Drifting snow is not as much of a problem farther to the east, where the hilly terrain keeps it (somewhat) in check.

But I found it a bit strange that the area would be called “Driftless” for that reason. And it’s not.

Drift, in geological terms, refers to sediment and rocks left behind by retreating glaciers, which in addition to leaving behind drift, tend to flatten out and otherwise disrupt whatever landscapes had previously existed before them.

It’s no surprise to anyone who understands even the most basic principles of geology that most of the Upper Midwest was covered by glaciers in the last ice age. But, strangely, a large area was completely untouched by the glaciers, bounded roughly by the cities of Eau Claire, Wisconsin on the north; Rochester, Minnesota on the west; Madison, Wisconsin on the east; and the Quad Cities of Iowa and Illinois on the south. This is the Driftless Area, so named because it was untouched by the drift left behind as the glaciers of the most recent ice age retreated.

The Driftless Area is so different, then, primarily for two reasons: first, its landscape and features were not flattened and transformed by the glaciers themselves; and second, because the runoff from the melting glaciers further carved and shaped the already odd landscape. Where the retreating glaciers had left behind prairies dotted with lakes, the untouched Driftless Area was left with deep river gorges, sinkholes, bluffs and monadnocks. The Mississippi River runs right through the middle of the Driftless Area, and its gorge and present course were formed during the melting period.

“That Sounds Like a Desert or Something”

The biggest question I have now is not how did this place get the way it is, but why had I never heard of it before? I’m still just beginning to explore the answer to this new question, but I suspect partly it’s because the geology and geography of the area are still being studied, just beginning to be understood.

A documentary film project is underway, exploring Mysteries of the Driftless Zone. The filmmakers are exploring the area both above and below the surface, studying its strange topography, rock formations, caves and unique life forms that survived the ice age and now exist here and nowhere else.

As this clip shows, they’re also touching on the other mystery of the Driftless Area: how people who live in it (and La Crosse, Wisconsin is as “in it” as you can get) don’t even know it exists.

It’s fascinating how giving something a name can give it importance and meaning. Although I’ve always liked and been interested in this area, I find it much more compelling now that I can think of it as a distinct thing with a name. Why is that?

Geo(logical)-Politics

As another final curiosity, and harkening back to a blog post I wrote after the 2008 election — discussing the fact that the curious distribution of votes for President Obama in the Deep South in that year’s election closely followed the contours of the Atlantic coastline from the Cretaceous Period, 85 million years ago — we have this blog post by Scott Sumner.

While Mitt Romney carried most rural parts of the country except those that have a specific historical or demographic reason to favor the Democrats (African-American voters in the Deep South, non-whites in the Southwest, miners in northern Minnesota’s Iron Range), there was one fairly large, weird blob in the rural Upper Midwest, an area populated largely by white farmers, that is uniformly blue on the 2012 election map… the Driftless Area.

Sumner gives no explanation or theory for why the Driftless Area favored Obama — simply noting that it did. The county I grew up in is on the edge of that blob. It’s always gone for the Democrats as far back as I can remember, but that’s always been primarily because of the strong union presence in Austin. And I’ve always felt that farmers in Minnesota might favor the Democrats more than their counterparts in other states because of our state’s peculiar political history: we don’t have the Democratic Party. We have the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, or DFL, resulting from the 1944 merger of the Democrats with the Farmer-Labor Party, a left-wing third party that was fairly successful in the early 20th century and was a key to the enduring progressive populist bent of the state’s politics to the present day.

But that’s a bit of a tangent here… I still don’t really know or even have a theory as to why the Driftless Area — all of it, not just the part in Minnesota — went for Obama. (Especially when you consider that Romney’s running mate, Paul Ryan, is from the Driftless Area, or just east of it.) I just think it’s interesting and… weird, like the place itself.