7 years ago
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Saturday, February 7, 2009
about the financial crisis
Shmitta and the Stock Market
It may seem either a bit belated or very premature to be writing about shmitta six and a half years before the next Sabbatical year. Not at all. "The Shmitta year aways seems to take us by surprise", as Rabbi Yoel Bin Nun humorously but perceptively said at the start of the last one. We need to start thinking and planning now if the Shmitta of 2014-15 is to be a time of ecological, economic and spiritual renewal for the Jewish people, rather than an unseemly political squabble. Tu Bishvat, which marks the new year for trees, seems like the ideal time to plant the seeds of this discussion.
Hazon has set up a website as a focus of public discussion for the next shmitta. www.shmitaproject.org. Prompted by the stockmarket crash, imminent global recession, as well as having to prepare a couple of talks about shmitta for a speaking tour in California, here are some thoughts that hopefully take that discussion a little further.
The causes of the economic crash are at the same time incredibly complicated and extremely simple. The simple version is that the US mortgage and housing market broke free of some fundamental principles about how you buy houses. Once upon a time, to purchase a house, you had to work hard, save a big chunk of money, and maybe supplement your savings with a mortgage that you arranged with a banker who knew you personally, and with whom you took responsibility for the repayment of your loan.
No longer. Over the last ten years, banks have advanced 100% mortgages to people they never met, with little regard to their ability to repay. The mortgage assets were then parceled up and sold to other banks and investment houses increasingly removed from the original house buyers. All this was done out of a perfect faith in the endless upward trend of the housing markets. When house prices ceased to defy gravity, thousands of home owners defaulted on mortgage payments, mortgage-based assets became almost worthless, and large, distinguished banks who held a lot of those assets collapsed, nearly bringing down the world financial system with them.
It's an old story. Charles Mackay wrote a classic history of financial crises called “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,” first published in London in 1841. “Men," he wrote, "go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
Financial bubbles, like the one in the housing market happen when people's hopes, expectations and delusions about the value of their assets lose all contact with underlying economic reality. The more sophisticated our economic system, the more we can engineer assets can have less and less to do with real things, making speculative bubbles more and more extreme Markets periodically and harshly correct these mass fits of wishful thinking, at the cost of great economic suffering. Often those who suffer most have done least to cause the problem.
Some of the less well known teachings of Shmitta are exactly about managing and moderating this tendency for economic activity to cut its roots in the earth from which it grows. Once every seven years we are meant to return to an intimate connection with the source of all wealth. A few examples:
1. You can't trade on food grown in the Shmitta year. You can eat it, give it away or leave it for the poor, but you may not turn it into a commodity. (Rambam Laws of Shmitta, 6:1) This is based on a derasha of Vayikra 25:6: "it shall be a Sabbatical year to eat." "To eat and not a trade on it." (Talmud, Sukkah 40a). In the Shmitta year food is not an object for financial speculation or persoanl enrichment. It returns to being a gift of God and of the earth.
2. Food from the Shmitta year should be treated as food - Not as compress for a wound or as air freshener, or biofuels, or anything else that food products can be turned into. This is based on the same verse from Vayikra 25: 6 "to eat." Once in seven years we get back to an awareness of food as food, not as a commodity or raw material for some other manufacturing process. To do this once every seven years would be a powerful corrective to the processes of industrial agriculture, which stock our supermarkets with products so removed from natural produce that our great-grandparents would have trouble recognizing them as food at all.
3. In the Shmitta year we return to a relationship with food that is seasonal. If you gather and store fruit from the shmitta year in your house, once that fruit has disappeared from the fields and trees, you can no longer eat what is stored in your house out of season. (Laws of Shmitta, 7:1) The Shmitta year returns us to the agricultural rhythms of nature. Whatever human ingenuity can accomplish by way of distancing us from these rhythms (whether laying up dates in your barn or flying in asparagus from Chile), in the Shmitta we re-embed itself in those natural cycles.
4. In the Shmitta we return to a relationship with food that is local. The seasonal requirement that we just saw is based on regional divisions of the Land of Israel. If the pomegranate season is over in your area, then you can't eat them, even if they are still growing somewhere else in the country. (Laws of Shmitta, 7:9)
And so on. These laws are all about bringing us back to an immediate relationship with the food we eat, as food and connected to a particular time and place. Food is the most basic economic index. The Shmitta is about ceasing to distort, quantify or objectify our connection to the source of sustenance. How do we use this value of returning to an immediate connection with economic fundamentals as a corrective to boom-bust economics? Can we translate these teachings into a post-industrial context in which fewer than 2% of us work on that land? Let the discussion continue! We have five and a half years to get it right for the shmitta year. And our world needs a way to actualize these values far sooner.
Happy Tu Bishvat,
Rabbi Yedidya (Julian) SinclairHazon Rabbinical Scholar
It may seem either a bit belated or very premature to be writing about shmitta six and a half years before the next Sabbatical year. Not at all. "The Shmitta year aways seems to take us by surprise", as Rabbi Yoel Bin Nun humorously but perceptively said at the start of the last one. We need to start thinking and planning now if the Shmitta of 2014-15 is to be a time of ecological, economic and spiritual renewal for the Jewish people, rather than an unseemly political squabble. Tu Bishvat, which marks the new year for trees, seems like the ideal time to plant the seeds of this discussion.
Hazon has set up a website as a focus of public discussion for the next shmitta. www.shmitaproject.org. Prompted by the stockmarket crash, imminent global recession, as well as having to prepare a couple of talks about shmitta for a speaking tour in California, here are some thoughts that hopefully take that discussion a little further.
The causes of the economic crash are at the same time incredibly complicated and extremely simple. The simple version is that the US mortgage and housing market broke free of some fundamental principles about how you buy houses. Once upon a time, to purchase a house, you had to work hard, save a big chunk of money, and maybe supplement your savings with a mortgage that you arranged with a banker who knew you personally, and with whom you took responsibility for the repayment of your loan.
No longer. Over the last ten years, banks have advanced 100% mortgages to people they never met, with little regard to their ability to repay. The mortgage assets were then parceled up and sold to other banks and investment houses increasingly removed from the original house buyers. All this was done out of a perfect faith in the endless upward trend of the housing markets. When house prices ceased to defy gravity, thousands of home owners defaulted on mortgage payments, mortgage-based assets became almost worthless, and large, distinguished banks who held a lot of those assets collapsed, nearly bringing down the world financial system with them.
It's an old story. Charles Mackay wrote a classic history of financial crises called “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,” first published in London in 1841. “Men," he wrote, "go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
Financial bubbles, like the one in the housing market happen when people's hopes, expectations and delusions about the value of their assets lose all contact with underlying economic reality. The more sophisticated our economic system, the more we can engineer assets can have less and less to do with real things, making speculative bubbles more and more extreme Markets periodically and harshly correct these mass fits of wishful thinking, at the cost of great economic suffering. Often those who suffer most have done least to cause the problem.
Some of the less well known teachings of Shmitta are exactly about managing and moderating this tendency for economic activity to cut its roots in the earth from which it grows. Once every seven years we are meant to return to an intimate connection with the source of all wealth. A few examples:
1. You can't trade on food grown in the Shmitta year. You can eat it, give it away or leave it for the poor, but you may not turn it into a commodity. (Rambam Laws of Shmitta, 6:1) This is based on a derasha of Vayikra 25:6: "it shall be a Sabbatical year to eat." "To eat and not a trade on it." (Talmud, Sukkah 40a). In the Shmitta year food is not an object for financial speculation or persoanl enrichment. It returns to being a gift of God and of the earth.
2. Food from the Shmitta year should be treated as food - Not as compress for a wound or as air freshener, or biofuels, or anything else that food products can be turned into. This is based on the same verse from Vayikra 25: 6 "to eat." Once in seven years we get back to an awareness of food as food, not as a commodity or raw material for some other manufacturing process. To do this once every seven years would be a powerful corrective to the processes of industrial agriculture, which stock our supermarkets with products so removed from natural produce that our great-grandparents would have trouble recognizing them as food at all.
3. In the Shmitta year we return to a relationship with food that is seasonal. If you gather and store fruit from the shmitta year in your house, once that fruit has disappeared from the fields and trees, you can no longer eat what is stored in your house out of season. (Laws of Shmitta, 7:1) The Shmitta year returns us to the agricultural rhythms of nature. Whatever human ingenuity can accomplish by way of distancing us from these rhythms (whether laying up dates in your barn or flying in asparagus from Chile), in the Shmitta we re-embed itself in those natural cycles.
4. In the Shmitta we return to a relationship with food that is local. The seasonal requirement that we just saw is based on regional divisions of the Land of Israel. If the pomegranate season is over in your area, then you can't eat them, even if they are still growing somewhere else in the country. (Laws of Shmitta, 7:9)
And so on. These laws are all about bringing us back to an immediate relationship with the food we eat, as food and connected to a particular time and place. Food is the most basic economic index. The Shmitta is about ceasing to distort, quantify or objectify our connection to the source of sustenance. How do we use this value of returning to an immediate connection with economic fundamentals as a corrective to boom-bust economics? Can we translate these teachings into a post-industrial context in which fewer than 2% of us work on that land? Let the discussion continue! We have five and a half years to get it right for the shmitta year. And our world needs a way to actualize these values far sooner.
Happy Tu Bishvat,
Rabbi Yedidya (Julian) SinclairHazon Rabbinical Scholar
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Let's not make the perfect the enemy of the essential
Obama Quote.
I interviewed for a job today. I really want it. It's 2 month Project Management.
I interviewed for a job today. I really want it. It's 2 month Project Management.
Monday, February 2, 2009
Tastes Like Wood
Cutie was eating ice cream. Paulo was drinking scotch. Cutie smelled the scotch and put it to her lips. She said it tastes like wood.
The snow is melting. I must remember to post Cutie skiing on our mountain.
The snow is melting. I must remember to post Cutie skiing on our mountain.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Cutie, King, and the New President
I'm documenting Cutie's experience with the change, the dream and hope we all feel.Last week they acted out Rosa Park's bus experience at her Hebrew school. Cutie was Rosa and was told she had to move to the back of the bus. A Policeman came and she immediately started to cry. She took it very seriously. In the car ride home she told me about Martin Luther King who had a dream that it doesn't matter what color people's eyes are it just matters if they are nice.
Yesterday we were watching Martin Luther's "I had a dream" speech on TV interspersed with Obama's speech. She dropped her Barbies and came to watch TV with us. She was entranced. She wanted to know why there was no color during the speech. I did a poor job explaining how pictures get on the TV. She then compared "The Wizard of Oz" with no color in the beginning and then when they landing in Oz there was lots of color. She's 4.
As long as we believe there is a wizard who can make things better we will be fine. Or perhaps we should go back the gold standard. (Book, The Wizard of Oz is really about the economy changes that where happening at that). Commodities, yellow brick road, brains, heart, courage, the fed behind the curtain...)
Yesterday we were watching Martin Luther's "I had a dream" speech on TV interspersed with Obama's speech. She dropped her Barbies and came to watch TV with us. She was entranced. She wanted to know why there was no color during the speech. I did a poor job explaining how pictures get on the TV. She then compared "The Wizard of Oz" with no color in the beginning and then when they landing in Oz there was lots of color. She's 4.
As long as we believe there is a wizard who can make things better we will be fine. Or perhaps we should go back the gold standard. (Book, The Wizard of Oz is really about the economy changes that where happening at that). Commodities, yellow brick road, brains, heart, courage, the fed behind the curtain...)
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Obama and me
To a number of social analysts, historians, bloggers and ordinary Americans, Jan. 20 will symbolize the passing of an entire generation: the baby boomer years.
Generational change. A passing of the torch. The terms have been thrown around with frequency as the moment nears for Obama to take the oath of office. And yet the reference is not to Obama's relatively young age — at 47, he's only tied for fifth place on the youngest presidents list with Grover Cleveland.
Rather, it's a sense that a cultural era is ending, one dominated by the boomers, many of whom came of age in the '60s and experienced the bitter divisions caused by the Vietnam War and the protests against it, the civil rights struggle, social change, sexual freedoms, and more.
Those experiences, the theory goes, led boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, to become deeply motivated by ideology and mired in decades-old conflicts. And Obama? He's an example of a new pragmatism: idealistic but realistic, post-partisan, unthreatened by dissent, eager and able to come up with new ways to solve problems.
"Obama is one of those people who was raised post-Vietnam and really came of age in the '80s," says Steven Cohen, professor of public administration at Columbia University. "It's a huge generational change, and a new kind of politics. He's trying to be a problem-solver by not getting wrapped up in the right-left ideology underlying them."
Obama, it must be said, is technically a boomer; he was born in 1961. But he long has sought to draw a generational contrast between himself and the politicians who came before him.
"I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the baby boom generation — a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago — played out on the national stage," he wrote of the 2000 and 2004 elections in his book, "The Audacity of Hope."
It's been a while since historians spoke of generational change in Washington. Fully 16 years have passed since Bill Clinton, the first boomer president, took office. Before that, presidents from John F. Kennedy to George H.W. Bush — seven straight — were part of the World War II generation, or what Tom Brokaw has termed the "Greatest Generation."
If Obama isn't a boomer in spirit, then what is he? Not exactly a member of Generation X, though obviously that generation and the next, Generation Y (also known as Millenials) embraced him fully and fueled his historic rise to the presidency.
"Gen Xers are known to be more cynical, less optimistic," says social commentator Jonathan Pontell. "Xers don't write books with the word 'hope' in the title."
Some call late boomers like Obama Cuspers — as in, the cusp of a new generation. One book has called it the 13th generation, as in the 13th generation since colonial times. And Pontell, also a political consultant in Los Angeles, has gained some fame coining a new category: Generation Jones, as in the slang word 'jonesing,' or craving, and as in a generation that's lost in the shuffle.
Jonesers are idealistic, Pontell says, but not ideological like boomers. "Boomers were flower children out changing the world. We Jonesers were wide-eyed, not tie-dyed."
And Obama, he says, is "a walking, living prime example of Generation Jones. He's a classic practical idealist. It's not the naive idealism of the '60s."
Wide-eyed or tie-dyed, Obama will be sworn in by an early "Joneser" himself — Chief Justice John Roberts, who turns 54 at the end of January. And while the average age of the new Congress is 58.2 — an early boomer group — the new president is bringing some "Jonesers" with him.
Obama's chosen treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, is 47. His pick for education secretary, Arne Duncan, is 44, as is Susan Rice, his U.N. ambassador. (His apparent pick for surgeon general, 39-year-old neurosurgeon and TV correspondent Sanjay Gupta, is a true Gen Xer.)
Of course, Obama's also bringing in veteran Clintonites — most notably Hillary Rodham Clinton, 61, his former campaign rival, as secretary of state. And his vice president, Joe Biden, 66, and defense secretary, Bush holdover Robert Gates, 65, are pre-boomers. But those are the kind of choices — inclusive of other perspectives, embracing rivals — that lead many to call Obama the first post-boomer president.
"It may be technically correct to call him a boomer," says Douglas Warshaw, a New York media executive who, at age 49, is part of whatever cohort Obama is in. "And it's in the Zeitgeist to call him a Gen Xer. But I think he's more like a generational bridge." He adds that Obama got where he was by "brilliantly leveraging the communication behaviors of post-Boomers," with a campaign waged across the Web, on cell phones and on social networking sites.
One analyst of popular culture believes Obama definitely symbolizes a new generation — just not one connected to the year he was born.
"I think it's hilarious that everyone wants to categorize people by their birth year, especially now, a time when our parents are on Facebook," says Montana Miller of Bowling Green State University. Obama, she says, represents a generational shift in ways less tangible than age.
"You can see it from his approach to knowledge. Never before have we had a president who's troubled about giving up his Blackberry," Miller says. (Indeed, Obama is still in a struggle over whether he can keep the device.) "He's constantly exposed to multiple perspectives, to what people out there feel and think."
Obama's biracial heritage also plays into the generational shift, Miller says. "It's so emblematic of how the world is changing," she says. "So many people are now some sort of complicated ethnic mix. Today's youth are completely comfortable with that."
Will Obama speak of generational change when he stands on the podium to issue his inaugural address? Given some of his rhetoric on the campaign trail, it's reasonable to think he will — just as, some six months before he was born, JFK pronounced on Inauguration Day that "the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace."
Interestingly, Kennedy is often claimed by boomers to be one of their own, even though he was nothing of the kind; born in 1917, he'd be 91 now. In the same way, many Gen Xers and even Gen Yers like to claim Obama, too.
"As humans we all want to be part of something bigger than ourselves, part of a page in a history book," Pontell says. And at least for now, he adds, "Obama's a rock star, and people are dying to call him one of their own."
Generational change. A passing of the torch. The terms have been thrown around with frequency as the moment nears for Obama to take the oath of office. And yet the reference is not to Obama's relatively young age — at 47, he's only tied for fifth place on the youngest presidents list with Grover Cleveland.
Rather, it's a sense that a cultural era is ending, one dominated by the boomers, many of whom came of age in the '60s and experienced the bitter divisions caused by the Vietnam War and the protests against it, the civil rights struggle, social change, sexual freedoms, and more.
Those experiences, the theory goes, led boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, to become deeply motivated by ideology and mired in decades-old conflicts. And Obama? He's an example of a new pragmatism: idealistic but realistic, post-partisan, unthreatened by dissent, eager and able to come up with new ways to solve problems.
"Obama is one of those people who was raised post-Vietnam and really came of age in the '80s," says Steven Cohen, professor of public administration at Columbia University. "It's a huge generational change, and a new kind of politics. He's trying to be a problem-solver by not getting wrapped up in the right-left ideology underlying them."
Obama, it must be said, is technically a boomer; he was born in 1961. But he long has sought to draw a generational contrast between himself and the politicians who came before him.
"I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the baby boom generation — a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago — played out on the national stage," he wrote of the 2000 and 2004 elections in his book, "The Audacity of Hope."
It's been a while since historians spoke of generational change in Washington. Fully 16 years have passed since Bill Clinton, the first boomer president, took office. Before that, presidents from John F. Kennedy to George H.W. Bush — seven straight — were part of the World War II generation, or what Tom Brokaw has termed the "Greatest Generation."
If Obama isn't a boomer in spirit, then what is he? Not exactly a member of Generation X, though obviously that generation and the next, Generation Y (also known as Millenials) embraced him fully and fueled his historic rise to the presidency.
"Gen Xers are known to be more cynical, less optimistic," says social commentator Jonathan Pontell. "Xers don't write books with the word 'hope' in the title."
Some call late boomers like Obama Cuspers — as in, the cusp of a new generation. One book has called it the 13th generation, as in the 13th generation since colonial times. And Pontell, also a political consultant in Los Angeles, has gained some fame coining a new category: Generation Jones, as in the slang word 'jonesing,' or craving, and as in a generation that's lost in the shuffle.
Jonesers are idealistic, Pontell says, but not ideological like boomers. "Boomers were flower children out changing the world. We Jonesers were wide-eyed, not tie-dyed."
And Obama, he says, is "a walking, living prime example of Generation Jones. He's a classic practical idealist. It's not the naive idealism of the '60s."
Wide-eyed or tie-dyed, Obama will be sworn in by an early "Joneser" himself — Chief Justice John Roberts, who turns 54 at the end of January. And while the average age of the new Congress is 58.2 — an early boomer group — the new president is bringing some "Jonesers" with him.
Obama's chosen treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, is 47. His pick for education secretary, Arne Duncan, is 44, as is Susan Rice, his U.N. ambassador. (His apparent pick for surgeon general, 39-year-old neurosurgeon and TV correspondent Sanjay Gupta, is a true Gen Xer.)
Of course, Obama's also bringing in veteran Clintonites — most notably Hillary Rodham Clinton, 61, his former campaign rival, as secretary of state. And his vice president, Joe Biden, 66, and defense secretary, Bush holdover Robert Gates, 65, are pre-boomers. But those are the kind of choices — inclusive of other perspectives, embracing rivals — that lead many to call Obama the first post-boomer president.
"It may be technically correct to call him a boomer," says Douglas Warshaw, a New York media executive who, at age 49, is part of whatever cohort Obama is in. "And it's in the Zeitgeist to call him a Gen Xer. But I think he's more like a generational bridge." He adds that Obama got where he was by "brilliantly leveraging the communication behaviors of post-Boomers," with a campaign waged across the Web, on cell phones and on social networking sites.
One analyst of popular culture believes Obama definitely symbolizes a new generation — just not one connected to the year he was born.
"I think it's hilarious that everyone wants to categorize people by their birth year, especially now, a time when our parents are on Facebook," says Montana Miller of Bowling Green State University. Obama, she says, represents a generational shift in ways less tangible than age.
"You can see it from his approach to knowledge. Never before have we had a president who's troubled about giving up his Blackberry," Miller says. (Indeed, Obama is still in a struggle over whether he can keep the device.) "He's constantly exposed to multiple perspectives, to what people out there feel and think."
Obama's biracial heritage also plays into the generational shift, Miller says. "It's so emblematic of how the world is changing," she says. "So many people are now some sort of complicated ethnic mix. Today's youth are completely comfortable with that."
Will Obama speak of generational change when he stands on the podium to issue his inaugural address? Given some of his rhetoric on the campaign trail, it's reasonable to think he will — just as, some six months before he was born, JFK pronounced on Inauguration Day that "the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace."
Interestingly, Kennedy is often claimed by boomers to be one of their own, even though he was nothing of the kind; born in 1917, he'd be 91 now. In the same way, many Gen Xers and even Gen Yers like to claim Obama, too.
"As humans we all want to be part of something bigger than ourselves, part of a page in a history book," Pontell says. And at least for now, he adds, "Obama's a rock star, and people are dying to call him one of their own."
Sunday, January 4, 2009
Cutie Skiing
Facebook and freecycle have taken up my internet time and I haven't been here for a while. Cutie and Paulo went skiing in Vermont last week. I had a nice vacation at home painting and repainting our bedroom.
We also got a 10 gallon fish tank, filter, light and heater on freecycle. We just spent $75 buying the other stuff. We have to start with goldfish to build up the bacteria. We like Fred's Pet Place Spring Valley, NY. They were very helpful.
We also got a 10 gallon fish tank, filter, light and heater on freecycle. We just spent $75 buying the other stuff. We have to start with goldfish to build up the bacteria. We like Fred's Pet Place Spring Valley, NY. They were very helpful.
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