World Governance

One World Government - it's now the likely future, according to economists.

Prophets of doom and their signs of the end! 

World governance today has taken an interesting turn.  It is a bit of a surprise for those who expected governments to grow closer together and merge into the prophesied one-world government, perhaps in collaboration with the UN.  That or some similar path has been described by doom-cryers over the years.

What few expected was the subordination of governments by big business.  Regulatory changes purchased by corporate influence in recent decades have spawned multi-national corporations and banks that are bigger and politically more powerful than countries.

Businesses we remember from years ago have been purchased whole or in part by other businesses.  Brand names we thought were competitors all belong to a single parent corporation.  Banks we thought were staid and reasonably sized are now financially larger than countries and more powerful as well.  Given standing by the Supreme Court, corporations exercise more power and leverage in Washington than any other influence group.  Similarly around the world, corporations have greater influence than governments on foreign trade policies.  The extraordinarily influential oil industry comes to mind for its part in regional conflicts in Africa and the Middle East.  The war in Iraq is acknowledged to have fought for Big Oil.  This century's trade agreements serve big business almost exclusively.  Of the world's 100 largest economies, 63 are countries, and 37 are corporations.

Network Diagram of Linear Granger-causality relationships that are statistically significant at the 5% level

among the monthly returns of the 25 largest (in terms of average AUM) banks, broker/dealers, insurers, and

hedge funds over January 1994 to December 1996. The type of institution causing the relationship is

indicated by color: green for broker/dealers, red for hedge funds, black for insurers, and blue for banks.

Granger-causality relationships are estimated including autoregressive terms and filtering out 

heteroskedasticity with a GARCH(1,1) model.

Corporate goals are profit and winning.  The corporate ethic is exclusively bottom-line.  The only ethical constraints on their activities are in regulations imposed by governments, all progressively weaker over recent decades.

The financial and insurance industries are even more interconnected than the manufacturing sectors.  The degree of overlapping investment and interdependence has increased explosively.

As regulatory constraints were removed, banking morphed and merged into investment groups, hedge funds, and currency exchanges.  Risks increased exponentially, and unethical practices emerged faster than governments and oversight agencies could contain them.  They gave us the Great Recession which cost trillions from the pockets of the people.  The finance industry professionals came out rather well with mega-bonuses in the same year that investors and the economy experienced giga- and tera-losses.  We haven't recovered yet, nor will most of the citizenry except for the wealthiest 10%.

Foolish parents allow their children to play on the cliff tops. The results are predictable and in this case, probably irreversible. The question for us is perhaps how we might make our way forward individually and as a nation as the changes become more intrusive.

The banking industry has been transformed in recent years, not only with the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in

1999, but also through financial innovations like securitization that have blurred the distinction between loans, bank

deposits, securities, and trading strategies.  The types of business relationships between these sectors have also changed,

with banks and insurers providing credit to hedge funds and also competing against them through their own

proprietary trading desks, and hedge funds using insurers to provide principal protection for their funds
while simultaneously competing with them by offering capital-market-intermediated insurance such as

catastrophe-linked bonds.

Prophets have spoken about events at the end of the age.  We're curious what they might have been shown that provoked the descriptions they've left for us.  What did they really see?  As the years pass, it perhaps becomes a bit clearer.  What's the good response on our part?

Ref: Econometric Measures of Connectedness and Systemic Risk in the Finance and Insurance Sectors
Ref: An Incredible Look At The Exploding Levels Of Financial Industry Interconnectedness

Creating Wealth and Poverty

Today, about half the world lives on less than $5/day per person. Improvements in recent decades have benefited the wealthy with comparatively little progress for lower income groups.

"... this process of poverty creation - the forceful extraction of commonly managed assets to serve financial elites - is exactly what recent social movements have called attention to. Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, the African uprisings, even the anti-austerity stance of new political parties in Spain and Greece, all have one thing in common: the recognition that the only way for a tiny group of people to become obscenely rich is for huge masses of others to be kept chronically poor.

This cold logic of poverty creation tells us what needs to be done. Before obsessing about amounts of foreign aid, or pretending it can solve deep systemic problems, we need to all focus on changing the rules of economic systems to make them more inclusive, more participatory, more focused on creating well-being than simply extracting more aggregate wealth, and more accountable to those billions who are not being served by the current rules. This is how mass poverty truly can be brought to an end."  ~Jason Hickel, Joe Brewer, and Martin Kirk

Here in the developed world, we fuss over the availability of the bath soap we prefer or the car we really want or the house that measures up to the stature of the person we aspire to become.  The world's typical household, however, struggles to feed and educate their children, to fight off disease, to simply survive.  

It doesn't have to be like this, does it.  There are many things we as individuals can do.

Church isn't for me ...

Really?  Church services and such are great, but is it for me?  Just lots of pew sitting?

All these apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers ... are for equipping us for our work serving others.  (That's what it says in the book.)  And if I'm not equipped yet, just how long is it supposed to take anyway ...

As my wife points out, the purpose of church and teaching are perhaps mostly for the younger folks, to help them get their lives on track and their work begun.  She says us older folks don't go to church to 'get' but to 'give'.  

It raises a question about growing up.  Do we understand that while development and learning are continuous, those are not the purpose; they're the means. Surprisingly enough, the best of life seems to show up when we're involved with some good work.

Tremendous challenge and change filled our early years as is typical, and contrary to our expectation, it continues.  There's plenty of real stuff to do along the way.  That's where the fun really starts.  I.e., joy, love, grace, strength, plus the adventure, etc.



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What is church anyway?

The Goal in 96 seconds!

How hard can it be?

Thinking outside the box.  What box?

If your ask your daughter, she might point out how we consume at a rate we can't support.  Or how we've reduced ocean fish populations to a point that they'll take a century to recover (by best estimates), but only if we quit over-fishing.  She'll see our generation as responsible.

Your granddaughter might point out that those animals she so admires are endangered along with their habitats.  That's troublesome, and it's a battle between conservationists and monied interests.  She'll see our generation as responsible.

Then there's your dad.  He might point out that he'd paid the price to defend your freedom, your chance to change the world for the better.  He will see our generation as the one where economic inequality began to infect the entire world financial system.

And grandpa; he survived the market collapse and the Great Depression.  He'll point out that the lessons learned there were all discarded by our generation.  Our extraordinarily interconnected business world now overshadows governments and national policy.

At the bottom of the world economy, folks who live a basic existence are hard pressed.  In Africa, friends struggle to get by with a few goats and perhaps a breeding pair of camels in Djibouti, a family garden and a sailing dugout for fishing on the Gulf of Guinea, a small maize crop in Kenya.

There is a silver lining, perhaps.  Our poorest friends have a chance of surviving.  If the global economy follows the predictions, when the collapse comes, maybe it's the rich people (the developed world) who will starve first.  You have to wonder.

Those are challenges we face; ours to change or to leave for others.
Are any important issues being reasonably addressed by today's candidates for office?
How hard can it be?

There is no box.
Business isn't as usual.  It's evolving as rapidly as technology.
Finance isn't as usual.  It's reshaping the marketplace.
Parenting isn't as usual.  There are new issues.
Relationships -- okay, relationships are still the centerpiece of life, but ...
Family isn't as usual.  Culture seems to be eroding some of the important parts.
Right and wrong haven't changed, but many folks seem to think otherwise.
That's the world our children have to deal with, and we need to equip them for it.

José Rizal; in whose image?

Some folks find themselves in less than perfect circumstances, and they rise up to be perhaps larger than life.  Such was José Rizal who struggled with political and religious oppression under colonial rule.  He was a world changer.

In response to a narrow, lifeless religious rule, "No, let us not make God in our image, poor inhabitants that we are of a distant planet lost in infinite space.  However brilliant and sublime our intelligence may be, it is scarcely more than a small spark which shines and in an instant is extinguished, and it alone can give us no idea of that blaze, that conflagration, that ocean of light.  I believe in revelation, but in that living revelation which surrounds us on every side, in that voice, mighty, eternal, unceasing, incorruptible, clear, distinct, universal as is the being from whom it proceeds, in that revelation which speaks to us and penetrates us from the moment we are born until we die.  What books can better reveal to us the goodness of God, His love, His providence, His eternity, His glory, His wisdom?  ‘The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork."  --  José Rizal, more than a century ago.  

José Rizal was a doctor, a prolific writer, and a key voice in the emergence of the Philippines as a nation.  Rizal challenged political norms and aggressively advocated freedom of speech and assembly for the Filipino people.  For his writings, he was prosecuted by the Spanish colonial authorities, both governmental and church, as an inciter of rebellion.  He was executed, and the Philippine Revolution exploded immediately after his death.  

His books, poems and plays are seen as powerfully influential both at home and abroad, inspiring change for freedom and liberty, for education and opportunity, a grand vision indeed.  His first book Noli Me Tángere was initially banned by colonial authorities, but copies were smuggled into the Philippines.  A poem he wrote shortly before his death was later recited by Indonesian soldiers before going into battle for their own independence. 

Monuments in his honor stand in more than a dozen cities around the world including Manila, San Diego, Chicago, Madrid, Lima, and Hong Kong.  Nearly every town and city in the Philippines has a street named after Rizal.  He was thirty-seven.

Curious what triggered Rizal?  He read Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Against the odds

One against many is not uncommon, nor are the results predictable.

"Are you in over your head, son?" The judge smiled as the young lawyer answered, "Absolutely." ~The Rainmaker -- Danny Glover, Matt Damon, 1997

One against many is not uncommon, nor are the results predictable.

'Pick your battles', we're told.  Does that mean pick the ones where the odds are in our favor?  Or perhaps it means we should choose the important ones; the ones where the issue is life-significant.

Should we battle over which tv show to watch?  Or perhaps it would be more appropriate to invest our personal efforts in serving well, ethically well, good-conscience well for the sake of others.

It's sometimes difficult to see clearly what has perhaps been obscured by time and competing concerns.  Sometimes, important issues finally emerge, and you see that you can do something.

So you decide.  You're going at risk, but this is important enough to justify action.  You've picked your battle.  Now, how do you go forward?

Ideally, you'll graciously unveil the problem (and a reasonable solution), and others will immediately agree and change.  More likely, you may stand alone against the inertia of things as they are; most folks dislike change and the associated effort.

It was like that with slavery.  Pro-slavery advocates claimed that enslaved Africans were lesser human beings who benefited from their bondage.  In England, William Wilberforce and others campaigned for years against the slave trade.  They won in 1833.  In America, the abolitionist John Brown led a violent insurrection in 1859 that got him tried for treason and hung.  He's credited with triggering the Civil War.  Brown's actions prior to the Civil War as an abolitionist, and the tactics he chose, still make him a controversial figure today. He is sometimes memorialized as a heroic martyr and a visionary and sometimes vilified as a madman and a terrorist. Historians are divided on whether it is accurate to refer to Brown as "America's first domestic terrorist".

Today, economic inequality is a worldwide epidemic brought to us by the business world.  The by-products -- social and racial discrimination, constrained opportunity, and class oppression, all are increasing rapidly in both developed and developing countries.  Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, and protests in Ferguson all point to the same inequity.  While some recognize that all are created equal, not all are treated equally.  

So, is the issue of equality big enough, life-significant enough to warrant our involvement?  Or to at least have a clear opinion?

You might also appreciate:  The GAP or Poverty is a Weapon of Mass Destruction

Fighting Persistent Discrimination

In the beginning, conquerors just killed or drove out the inhabitants of the land.  They justified their behavior, saying the natives were lesser creatures, sub-human, and owed no particular consideration.  Humanity has improved somewhat.

Social change through the centuries ...

slaughter

 slavery and indenture

  segregation and violent separation

   social and class isolation, discrimination, regulatory exclusion
     economic inequality and immobility

One common element remains unchanged through it all; the belief that 'they' are less worthy, somehow.  Such thinking persists across the centuries and continues today to produce new problems for 'them'.  The 'upper' person looks at the 'lower' and says things like, "they don't deserve," or, "not my problem."   The trigger might be race or ethnicity, economic status, or even manner of dress.  

Such thinking gives us 'shopping while black' and QOL policing practices, racial profiling and violent response problems, all of which are deeply troubling.  It goes on to provoke crime and gang cultures, rebellions against inequality and today's thinly veiled oppression. 

There's much more underlying criminal activity, of course, but the science is established.  Inequality and discrimination provoke protest, resistance, and violence.  Such was the root of the French revolution and dozens more in the 18th century.  It was the root of the women's rights movement,  the civil rights movements, and modern feminism.  There's more happening even now.  

So, either ...
 there are some who are 'above' others by virtue of race or culture or status ...
  those 'above' deserve greater freedom, power, wealth, opportunity ...
   their children deserve better food and care, better education and jobs and pay ...
Or ...
 all are indeed created equal ...
  all are equally deserving of respect, of opportunity, of a place ...

We can't have it both ways.  Either we will serve ourselves at the expense of others, or we will accept and make a place for others and treat them like we treat ourselves.


Economic inequality (the GAP) is today's most visible expression of that which plagues humankind.  It too can be conquered.

The GAP.   It's only one piece of the puzzle, but it needs to be acknowledged, understood, and addressed.

Monday, January 18, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 2016

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has spent a career thinking about how to address income inequality. One major reason: Dr. Martin Luther King.   Stiglitz says King saw the struggle for social justice as a battle not just against racial segregation and discrimination, but also as one for greater economic equality and justice for all Americans. 

In a recent book, Stiglitz examines the causes and consequences of an unequal society and offers solutions for what we can do about it. For this Martin Luther King Day, a conversation with Joseph Stiglitz on “The Great Divide” in America.  ~ on NPR Today

Ethanol

... and food for the table

In 2015, the U.S. used about 5 billion bushels of corn to produce over 13 billion gallons of ethanol fuel. 

The grain required to fill a 25-gallon gas tank with ethanol just once can feed one person for a year, so the amount of corn used to make that 13 billion gallons of ethanol will not feed the almost 500 million people that it might have served. That is more than the population of North America.

Seventy percent of all corn imports worldwide come from the U.S.

Food price spikes affect the poor immediately.  In the run up to 2007, the global price of corn doubled as a result of an explosion in ethanol production in the U.S. coupled with the Great Recession.  In eastern Africa alone, 400,000 died as a result according to the World Health Organization.  

Competition in the marketplace is troublesome, sometimes.  Because corn is the most common animal feed and has many other uses in the food industry, the price of milk, cheese, eggs, meat, corn-based sweeteners and cereals increased as well.  World grain reserves dwindled to less than two months, the lowest level in over 30 years.

Globalization is more complicated than we expected; it's not going to be easy to avoid doing harm.

Persecution is ancient history (NC-17)

... and persecution continues today.  It spreads broadly, and note the persecution of Christians and Shiites by ISIS.  Adults and children have been abducted, raped, beheaded, crucified, and worse because they didn't profess the right religion.  

The Obama administration has formally recognized the genocide.  

(CNN)  Secretary of State John Kerry said on April 15th that the United States has determined ISIS' action against the Yazidis and other minority groups in Iraq and Syria constitutes genocide.  "My purpose here today is to assert in my judgment, (ISIS) is responsible for genocide against groups in areas under its control including Yazidis, Christians and Shiite Muslims," he said, during a news conference at the State Department.

Kerry said that in 2014, ISIS trapped Yazidis, killed them, enslaved thousands of Yazidi women and girls, "selling them at auction, raping them at will and destroying the communities in which they had lived for countless generations," executed Christians "solely for their faith" and also "forced Christian women and girls into slavery."

'Hundreds' of Yazidi women killing themselves in ISIS captivity

ISIS 'forced pregnant Yazidi women to have abortions'

Persecution in practice is an extraordinary wickedness that permeates today's world.  It must not be confused with simple crime or conflict. It is inhumanly perverse and requires an appropriate response.  

A woman's beauty

There is a singular feature that men notice in a woman.

Although the curves get a lot of attention in the media and perhaps in juvenile conversation as well, there's more. There are eyes and ankles, and everything in between, all part of the picture and scoring on the scale of visual beauty.  Surprisingly, a man won't fall in love if that is all there is, even if she's a 10.

But he might fall in love if he sees that one feature that every man admires, ... and that's backbone.

She may or may not be a classic or modern beauty, a runway beauty, or a high school 'most beautiful', but if there's depth to her character, if there's courage of conviction, if there's substance to her as a person, he's impressed.  And maybe even stunned.  So much time and effort is spent on appearance and perhaps not so much on who they are, what they value, what they're willing to tackle in order to live up to their principles.

One of the more stunning young ladies I know has that quality.  She's pretty, wonderfully engaging and open, smart; okay, she's really attractive, but I don't think she knows or cares much.  What you notice when you talk with her is that she's a person of substance.  She's fought her way through school and college and graduate school, and she's on her way to Africa with the Peace Corps for two years.  She's scared, but she's going.  She wants to do something that makes a difference.  She's smart enough and has the credentials for big business and commensurate salary, but she wants substance and meaning in her life,  She's off on her adventure today.  I'm so impressed and almost jealous.  Only almost, because the next two years aren't going to be easy.    She's off to see the real world, knowing that everything she holds dear will be challenged, and she will be radically changed by her experience.

I'd tell my daughter's story which is similar, but I'm understandably prejudiced.  She was a talented ballerina, a comfortable scholar all the way through graduate school, and gorgeous, of course.  She also picked a path for her life where she could attend to things that mattered.  I remember her telling me, "I'm going to pour out my life on something, it might as well be something that makes a difference."

Crossing paths with such a person is refreshingly uplifting, encouraging in so many ways,

Women of substance, the ones who are genuinely admired, the ones who are truly beautiful people, they probably won't show up in Hollywood or on reality shows.  They live in a real world that is far above and beyond such things.  Of course.





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Memory Banda’s life took a divergent path from her sister’s. When her sister reached puberty, she was sent to a traditional “initiation camp” that teaches girls “how to sexually please a man.” She got pregnant there - at age 11.  Banda, however, refused to go. Instead, she organized others and asked her community's leader to issue a bylaw that no girl should be forced to marry before turning 18. She pushed on to the national level … with incredible results.

Reinforce for strength

This is the fun part of being a genuine person.  We build our own identity and character over a lifetime.


Self-construction starts with ideas and concepts we get during our formative years, usually from parents and others.  Those are templates and perhaps a foundation upon which we will build.

Every element of personality,

identity, and character must

be built up and prepared

for the battle to come,

or it will fail at the

critical moment

of specific

need.

Morals, ethics, theology, philosophy, and worldview before age twelve or so are usually simple and comfortable.  If left unrefined, they'll settle in as part of who we are but in a perhaps insubstantial way.

That can be a problem when real life intrudes.  If we don't have the depth and strength we need, we can do harm to ourselves and others when the day comes.

Deal with it!  One way is a deliberate disassembly, validation, and reassembly of each aspect of our identity and character, of every value we hold.  Opportunities for such honesty aren't offered by quiet times and pointless days, however.

Honesty hears a differing opinion without anger, a contradictory analysis without judgement, an alternative solution without criticism, and in so doing you have opportunity to know what you believe and why.  Often, we'll learn more from folks who don't think like we do, those who see things differently.

(If you can't have a comfortable discussion as an outsider, you don't know why you endorse the values you hold.  An angry response in such a conversation comes from insecurity and fear, does it not?)

Reinforce for strength.  Study to know and live the truth, and in so doing, you'll find you need not be ashamed, rightly handling truth as it is offered.

Minimum wage - for what?

The minimum wage is the introductory point for teens and the unskilled to get some exposure in the workplace.  That's its purpose.  True?

No. The enactment of a minimum wage was intended to preclude the abuse of workers by employers, to ensure an adequate wage was paid for a minimum living standard.

The Fair Labor Standards Act, when first passed into law, applied to industries whose combined employment represented about one-fifth of the labor force.  In those industries, it banned oppressive child labor and set the minimum hourly wage at 25 cents, and the maximum workweek at 44 hours.

The law was extended over time to deal more effectively with the tendency of employers to misuse and underpay employees.  It was intended to provide a living wage precisely because employers tended to overuse employees and throw them away.  Such is still the tendency in many business venues.

Those who suggest that minimum wage need not keep pace with inflation are endorsing, perhaps unknowingly, the practices of employee abuse and enforced poverty.  There are many economic factors at play, and perhaps several concerns about the impact of fair wages, but that's the issue.  Fair wages, fair schedule policies, fair consideration of employees in the business plan.

Retail and fast-food are among the industry offenders.   Most of them artificially limit employee hours to avoid the costs associated with full time. This is not an unintentional practice, but a careful plan for distribution of hours to minimize cost to the corporation at the expense of the employees. Two half-time workers cost less than one full time worker.  That's not actually true due to reduced productivity, loyalty, and high turnover, but some industries like Walmart and Burger King use the method aggressively.

“If you raise the minimum wage, the inevitable effect will be, number one, young people will lose their jobs or not be able to get their first jobs,” says Ted Cruz, 2013.  That's one opinion; is he right?  Keeping wages low; is that the solution we need for the sake of the teens?  

Minimum-wage workers today are older than they used to be.
Their average age is 35, and 88 percent are at least 20 years old.  Jun 9, 2014 
There are between 3 and 6 million folks in the category. 

What solutions are available?  Is it time to reconstruct the fair labor standards act?

When We Don't Understand ...

Understanding Must Change!  The alternative is deliberate ignorance.


Slavery was normal and accepted until Wilberforce and others said it wasn't.  They said it was wicked and unchristian and inhuman, and they described it as it was, actually.  They described individuals affected by it, how it tortured and degraded and robbed them of life and family and liberty.

John Brown recounts how as a young fellow, he had visited a family who had a negro slave boy about his own age.  Brown remembers being treated wonderfully while the slave boy was poorly clothed and fed and, while Brown looked on, was beaten with a shovel.  Brown commanded the raid at Harpers Ferry which led to secession and the Civil War.

It took more than a century for the common understanding of slavery to be reshaped.  More than a century to deal with basic human equality.  Today, everybody knows, it was just wrong.  Now, there's no way to talk about slavery that makes it good or just or moral.

So, what are today's issues?  What are those parts of culture that are normal and accepted, but which similarly need to be reshaped in our understanding?

Your first reaction upon seeing this - this is wrong! Of course. This isn't what we saw in school.
Countries are their correct size in relation to each other in this south-up view,
an example of a cylindrical equal-area projection.

... how about the real world?

The world we've been shown never existed.  It's a distorted map that was created when Europe was the center of the world.  In use since 1600, it exaggerates the relative size of northern countries by 2x-3x.  Bizarrely inaccurate, yet it's used in most of the world's academic curricula today.   Does size matter?  Would it be helpful to our worldview if we knew how the countries of the world are actually arranged?  (watch the short video here before moving on)

And yes, Brazil is about the size of the U.S., and four times the size of Greenland.

The impact of such misrepresentation:
The world's view of the developing world is 'below' and 'lesser', in part from our concept of relative size and position.  The common map is known to have been produced as an expression of cultural superiority, racism, and positional relevance.  Most westerners refer to Africa as a country.  It's not.

... then perhaps, class distinctions?

Prejudice and discrimination have historically been imposed along racial and ethnic lines, but even more so based on wealth.  We have created a class and economic inequality in every instance.  The upper class has access to wealth and privilege to which lower classes do not.
We've labored in the west to provide equal opportunity, and in many ways we've done well.  Social mobility has changed over the decades in America for minorities and others.  For a while (part of the 20th century), we saw the working and middle classes doing well along with the rich.  For the last five decades, however, the GAP between working folks and the wealthy has widened, and the GAP is accelerating.  It's now visible in every developed nation.  Social mobility, the opportunity to rise out of poverty, has declined through that period for a number of reasons.

Updated 10/2018

Economic inequality - it plagues every nation, and in the developing world it is exploding in an exaggerated form.  Its root is ancient, and it is propagated today to a great degree by the international marketplace.  What was once trade for mutual benefit has become wealth extraction at the expense of others, a predatory form of capitalism.

How if affects people - in a developing country, I sat with the men of a large, extended family.  All had been educated in local schools and had done well enough.  All were bright, energetic fellows.  Conversation continually returned to 'a little business', things they might attempt that would generate income.  They raised crops in gardens, they bought in the country and sold in the city market, they tried roadside kiosk sales, they attempted to restore a junked taxi and put it into service.  The country has no emerging industry, no jobs market, no particular growth that offers a chance for the great majority.  Kids who stay in school at great expense and effort by the family find little opportunity for employment afterwards.  The country is corrupted, of course, by the international marketplace.  Natural resources are profitably exported, but the profit goes to just a few, mostly outside the country.  This is typical.  Wealth flows from bottom to top.  Developing countries pay more in interest to the developed world than they receive in assistance projects.  Sixty dollars monthly is a typical employment income.

In the developed world, the GAP is that uncrossable expanse between those who are working hard to get by and those who accumulate wealth just by having wealth.  In the U.S., income for the top 1% exceeds the total for the bottom 40%, and it's not from labor and productivity, it's from the effort of others.  Every day, income; extraordinary wealth is extracted from the economy at the expense of those at the bottom.

Social and economic mobility happens for some, but it's largely a myth for most.  Forty-seven million Americans live in poverty; their children and grandchildren are likely to do the same.  It's not something they chose; it's done to them.  It's a less obvious but equally virulent form of indentured servitude, of slavery.  As William Garrison would have said, there is no neutral position.

We've attacked discrimination based on race, on culture, on gender with some success.  The root of it all continues unchanged, based solely on position, wealth, and influence, the acquisition of more at the expense of others.  Is there anything wrong with that?  Or is there some appropriate equality for all mankind, some measure of grace and worth that makes a place for each one?  Can we contribute to it?  Is there any good news on the subject?

Macroeconomics is not a simple science.  There are no single-point solutions to such broad spectrum flaws of function.  As with the issue of slavery, however, the GAP exposes a national flaw, a vulnerability which, unless addressed and resolved, will continue to fracture the national identity and preclude success of the national purpose.

Welcome to the American life, the vision, and the task.

It's hard to say.

It's difficult to express some things in words.

We have important things to share with our children and friends, but doing it in words gets mixed results.   The problem is the 'words'.  They aren't good enough.

The years since the Enlightenment have given us both more and less understanding of reality.

From the Enlightenment era, we have philosophy, the study of the general and fundamental nature of reality, existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language.  It's that last one that has caused the most trouble.  Language, and the words we commonly use to discuss and describe life and the things we face from day to day....

That which we would like to communicate is almost always larger than the available words will convey.  Imagine, for example, standing at the altar on your wedding day as the music begins and the people stand and turn toward the entrance.  Moving gracefully into view, your veiled princess approaches on her father's arm, and as everything else fades from your awareness, your eyes meet and you feel it to the core of your soul; your entire world is consumed in a firestorm to be replaced by the most improbably magnificent view of the days to come ....  See what I mean?  You could talk for the rest of your life and never really convey what you experienced in that surreal instant.  If you've experienced it yourself, you've perhaps got a clue.  If not, your imagination may or may not get you even close.

It provokes the question, are words ever enough?  And, do words impose artificial limits on reality?  Converting reality to words is a philosophical imperative today, but is that a realistic expectation or just arrogance.  Can today's human mind truly grasp and convey everything and anything?

“Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean.  Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.” 
― Theodore Dreiser

“The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.” 
― Italo Calvino

“For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.” 
― Aldous Huxley

Describing adequately in words what you can do

in a day could take a lifetime or more.  Something

worth remembering when you try lecturing your kids.

"Jesus did many other things as well.  If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written."
― John, the Apostle  

Thus we come to the crux of the matter.  Do we understand what is offered to us in words?  Do we see the reality it's attempting to describe?  How much more is there beyond the scope of the words?  

Now we see a bit of the dilemma faced by physics and metaphysics; only one of the two finds words to be sufficient.  Similarly struggling through the centuries, science and religion (things you can explain vs. those you perhaps cannot).  

The Enlightenment may have let us down somewhat.  We thought we were moving toward a concrete reality where we would have scientific descriptions for everything ... and controls for everything.  Disappointed?  Because there is so much more than we'll ever find described in words?  

Perhaps for now, we see as though looking through a murky glass, darkly; ... which is to say that 95% of everything, everywhere in the universe, is still unknown, undetectable, and 'dark'.  And that's the science of it as of 2016; almost all of everything is unseen and undescribed.  There's more beyond all of that as well.


“It is not that the meaning cannot be explained. But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words.”   ― Haruki Murakami

... and, “If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.”   ― Edward Hopper


You might enjoy Liberal Arts, too.
Happy New Year.  :)