The Serpent's Wisdom

I saw An Inconvenient Truth this weekend. It was well-done and fairly informative, although i'm convinced that it is also a campaign film for Al Gore. An Inconvenient Al (thanks to _raven_ for the link) matches a lot of my reactions to the movie.

There's a scene where he shows the auto emissions standards of several countries, demonstrating how much lower they are in the US than anywhere else, even China. In fact, US-made cars cannot be exported to China because they don't meet the emissions standards there. Gore suggests this is one reason why US auto manufacturers are having trouble: instead of striving to compete against carmakers who are following international emissions standards, they are keeping them low here in the US.

Gore uses this observation to argue against the conservative position that lowering CO₂ emissions will be damaging to our economy. It bears adding that any entrepreneur with enough vision could turn emissions reduction into good business.

So why isn't that happening? I gained a lot of insight into human nature in that moment.

Under capitalism, as i learned about it in college, companies change their strategies to stay competitive, or they die. But this is assuming that losses will make a company actually shut down. If one mom-and-pop store can't compete against another mom-and-pop store down the street, the closing of one such store does not impact the economy or the nation. (Well, it does, but few of us will notice.) The prospect of an airline or auto manufacturer going out of business is a different story; the state and federal governments will come up with all sorts of programs and deals to prevent an economic bomb like this from dropping.

Add to this that consumers really do not have the ability to impact the decisions a very large company makes via "voting with their shoes." This would work, again, if the business in question is a neighborhood mom-and-pop. Boycotts are ineffective; General Electric doesn't care if a small percentage of people stop buying their light bulbs.

The net result is that very large companies do not have to operate by the rules of capitalist competition and operate instead by the rules of privilege and entitlement. If a company gets large enough, its shareholders and directors will claim the ability to essentially operate in open defiance of reality, and no one can stop them. This, at its heart, is what characterizes imperialism (and usually causes empires to be short-lived).

I am a socialist, but i recognize that the problem would not be solved by nationalizing corporations. The fundamental problem remains the same: institutions that grow beyond a certain size operate under a completely different set of rules.

The great problem of the 21st Century is gearing up to be: how do we design institutions that are responsive to the actual needs of real people?

Last week this story appeared regarding the sound quality of the Stradivarius violins possibly being related to a "mini ice-age" which occured from the 15th to 19th centuries.

Today I read this story about experts saying there is no doubt that global warming is occuring and that it is caused by human activity.

According to some estimates, we are overdue for an ice age. In fact, this is the subject of a movie to be released soon, "The Day After Tomorrow."

What if global warming is in fact what prevented an ice age from occuring on schedule? The "mini ice-age" ended as the industrial era was just starting.