No, this post is about the costs to our healthcare that arise from our social isolationism. Okay, so the title is a bit misleading, it says individualism, but I tend to not see a dramatic difference. Individualism encourages us to look to no one but ourselves for our necessities, which when taken to its logical endpoint, means we become more isolated. Semantics aside, my argument is pretty simple: our isolationism is costing us in our healthcare spending – and big time.

One thing that we don’t really hear about in healthcare debates, particularly when comparing the United States to other countries is that virtually all of the other countries with universal healthcare also have much tighter social webs, community life, and place less emphasis on individualism. I don’t think there is a direct 1:1 correlation between community attachment and healthcare spending, only that there is an indirect link that probably hasn’t been studied very much. A few areas strike me here as very likely areas where this matters a lot:

1) the elderly. Older people are notoriously lonely, especially in the US. In my relatively limited travel, I’ve noticed that older people rarely live alone in other places, they usually live in multi-generational households. They watch their grandkids (or great grandkids) and their children take care of them. The psychological toll of that constant loneliness really gets to people and lonely people are more likely to be depressed, get sick, and generally be less happy. I imagine that older people like to see their doctors more because they have someone to talk to. Hell a lot of older people I know base a good chunk of their social lives around discussing their health conditions and ailments. Who better than a doctor . . . which leads me to . . .

2) Hypochondriacs. People who think they are always sick. Have a sore thoat? Maybe it’s tonsilitis. Oh God! a bump on your neck? must be a tumor…or so WebMD suggests. More information isn’t good if the person receiving the information doesn’t know how to interpret it properly, but that’s an aside. Without people, family, close friends, co-workers to give us that reality check and tell us it’s ok, every sneeze sends us to the doctor and every chest pain demands an MRI. Which of course leads to . . .

3) Pill Popping. Suburban housewives are huge drug users. They just pop prozac and antidepressants. They put their kids on ritalin because they’re hyper (really? a hyper kid needs medication? Really? God what would have happened to me if ritalin were widely prescribed when I was 5). We turn ourselves into blank zombies. We’re not any happier because of all of the pills. We don’t feel any better. If anything our isolation and self-medication make us feel worse, hate our lives, and become depressed. Which leads me to . . .

4) Psychiatric Care. Now I’ve never been to a psychiatrist, a psychologist, or a therapist of any kind. Some who know me well enough might suggest it could help. Maybe, maybe not. I have, however, known many people with severe problems who were and are on multiple meds and seeing multiple therapists. Some people genuinely need this. For a lot of people, however, I get the feeling that having a loving family around and good, supportive friends would be as good or better. Even people with serious issues could probably benefit from a tight social network. I’m not spouting here, because I’ve seen the difference in people (primarily with depression) who deal dramatically better with their issues when they’re around family and friends than when they feel alone.

And of course all this stems from the belief that *I* (not me specifically, but the Ego “I”) am a special and unique snowflake and my life is worth an infinite amount of money (well as long as I’m not picking up the tab) and of course so are my loved ones’. Now when it comes to *your* life  and you will cost a million dollars for the possibility of living another two months, to hell with you. Ah the Ego bias.

This isn’t nuts, it’s probably a series “well duh” things. I know. But no one’s talking about it.

Point being that we can do a lot to “fix” health care by expanding coverage, cutting costs and all that jazz, but we may still face higher costs than we have to because of our culture of isolation and individualism. I’m not suggesting we all hug and sing kumbaya. I’m not suggesting we have group hugs (although I do enjoy hugs). Point simply being that we’re treating conditions more than we need to or that probably shouldn’t exist as a result of our culture. I don’t know how to “fix” it. I don’t know that it can be “fixed.” Just an observation.

Power = Access + Process

Recently Sen. Specter, a moderate, endangered Republican, stated he will not vote for cloture to bring the card check vote to the floor.  Now a compromise proposal is being floated, but both main interest groups are opposing it.  All along both groups have vowed that no compromise would be acceptable.  I suspect that position will hold, at least through 2009.  But the reason isn’t Arlen Specter.

In the media we may hear lots of stories about why the bill is held back.   The story may center on specific moderate Senators, or we may hear a narrative about how the EFCA is too bloody of a battle to fight now when we are facing economic disaster, or that the Dems are waiting for Frankin, or that unions need to wait for the economy to recover to weaken the business’s gloom and doom predictions.  But what’s really going on?  It all comes down to money.  This is the kind of fight that employs a great many lobbyists, many of whom have less and less other paying work due to clients cutting their lobbying budget or being unable to pay their bills.  Too many people on both sides are getting paid for anyone to want to draw thier guns.  Why fight the war when after it’s waged the retainer checks will stop coming in?  And until the vote takes place, both unions and business groups will stay especially interested in fundraisers for moderate, endangered members like Specter.

Bear with me people…I’m an engineer, not an artist.

2) Obama wont rush dont ask dont tell.  This will be pushed back out of the beginning of the agenda.  While Obama might be catching some hell from the gay community about dont ask dont tell, he’s way to smart to let this derail his first 100 days the way it derailed Clintons.  Too much political capital.

3) Stimulus will pass with broad bipartisan support, and many republicans will later regret their vote as they run low on popular ways to distinguish their record from Dems.

4) A few months stories will break about the ultimate policy pragmatist Rahm sparring with Congressional leaders about what to push when, he’ll be pushing to keep things centrist and post-partisan a while longer.

5) Michelle Obama will dazzle us all with her poise and grace.  By the end of 2009, she will have a higher approval rating than even the Barackstar.

6) Neither Cuomo nor Kennedy will be the next Senator from NY.

7) Dow will be above 10,000 by July, but will dip below 7,900 again before April.

8) Jaybandit and I are having a weight loss contest, I will win.

So the government is about to spend a gajillion dollars and the transition team is probably thinking up how to target the investments to get the most bang for the buck. Many have suggested using a chunk of it to help states or to fund proposed and planned infrastructure projects. Funding infrastructure projects has the benefit of putting large numbers of people directly to work in construction. Indirectly it will stimulate demand and create jobs in other sectors that supply materials as well as in service sectors as people spend the money they’re earning with their nifty construction jobs. 

 The biggest cause for concern in investing in existing planned projects is that we might be entrenching a problematic status quo or invest in scattered projects without an overarching vision that sets the tone for the future development of our country. If the portion of the package that is going towards infrastructure simply goes into repairing aging roads, maintaing bridges, and the odd new road project, it will do something to stimulate the economy, but it won’t change our trajectory. What we really need to do is rethink our infrastructure and use this money to launch our country into the next upswing. Eventually the economy will stop hemmoraging jobs and money and we’ll be out of the beta phase. The question is whether our recovery will be slow and our plateau lower or quicker and our eventual plateau higher. Essentially we have to ensure that this stimulus makes the country more competitive far into the future. If our investment stops at repair (we need the repair TOO) and small projects, we are just fixing our infrastructure so that we can compete in the 1970s, not the 2010s.

We need to invest with vision. A patchwork of uncoordinated projects won’t get us far, it’s got to be big, bold, and innovative. We need to invest in upgrading our roads, rail, universities, power grid, medical practices, and communications networks. A coordinated effort to upgrade our infrastructure would do all of these things in such a way that they work together seamlessly. We’re about to give America a $1 trillion makeover. Will the end result be Angelina Jolie or Michael Jackson?

Anyone who has driven in any of the more high traffic corridors of a major metro area can attest to the sorry state our roads are in. Traffic is backed up for miles at rush hour, potholes are common, and repairs are haphazard, unsightly, and always seem to be done at the worst times of the day. While we need to repair and improve our roads, we should also be careful that we do not increase access points too much otherwise the problems of today will be back within a decade as urban areas sprawl out to infinity with cheap houses made out of popsicle sticks and cardboard, “starter homes,” popping up in the exurban fringe. Roads are nifty and all, but they are part of our problem because part of why we are losing our competitive edge is that we can’t keep up with our infrastructure needs. It’s a hell of a lot harder to maintain hundreds of thousands of miles of road that is heavily trafficked than to maintain fewer roads with lighter traffic and mass transit systems. At a certain point the number of people using a transportation grid point is too low to pay for or justify creation and maintenance, but we seem to do it anyway, depriving more heavily trafficked areas of maintenance funds. New road projects should include innovative ideas like New York’s failed congestion pricing scheme that would have charged people to enter Manhattan below 60-somethingth street and put a portion of that money into mass transit projects. Other ideas floating around are converting HOV or Carpool lanes into sliding-scale toll roads where users would pay increased fees for using the lane at peak hours than off-peak hours with each additional X cars increasing the price of use.

Related to highways and roads is our use of cars. Yeah I know, open highways, house in the burbs, white picket fence, 2.3 kids, dog named spot. American dream. That particular American dream might just hold us back in the future. It made sense in the 50s, it seems to make sense in the 00s. As the price of fuel increases and as governments the world round consider attaching a cost to carbon emissions, the use of internal combustion engines will become increasingly expensive. Oh sure we’ll have new technology  that uses less carbon, is cheaper, etc, but I’m still waiting for California’s hydrogen highway to not look like a huge publicity stunt. As the economy recovers, basic materials will go right back to their pre-bust highs much faster than most would like and things like copper for wiring, rubber for tires and insulation, steel for construction, concrete, hell any raw material will go through the roof. The longer the distance between people, the more we’ll have to spend per capita for these things that undergird our infrastructure, and the more it will cost to maintain them. We don’t need to kill cars, just make it such that they are not a necessity in American life.

A logical offshoot of a decreased dependence on cars would be an increased reliance on rail. This runs the gamut from freight rail, to commuter rail, to subways. A really bold plan would fund projects like California’s bullet train from LA to San Francisco or a national bullet system linking major metropolitan areas that could compete with airlines as fuel becomes more expensive. On the freight rail front, we could really use more freight track because demand has outstripped supply for a number of years and the overload contributes to accidents and massive delays. On the commuter rail and subway/lightrail front, the government could fund proposed projects in a number of major metropolitan areas and, if combined with some form of congestion pricing or flexible tolls, could create infrastructure that is more self-sustaining costwise.

Our education system generally is in need of some serious improvements, but even more immediate is the need to change how we conceptualized higher education. People should not be graduating college with more debt than they can reasonably expect to earn in their first year of employment. A possible way to help on this front is to increase federal aid to students and/or create scholarships with strings attached for students who want to pursue a career that might not be as remunerative (or perhaps just gentler loan terms). Also, we should look seriously about how much we need the higher education we have today. I’m not saying all post high school education should go, just that credentialism has gotten a bit ridiculous. Jobs that often require a B.A. really require nothing more than six months of office training in many instances or perhaps a year or two of copy editing and computer skills training, but the low bar to get a decent job just keeps going up as the number of people with B.A.s goes up and the salaries aren’t keeping pace with the debt load kids are graduating with today. B.A.s are great if you’re going into academia or graduate-level work, sciences, etc. But do you really need a B.A. to write? To do any number of boring office jobs that currently require a B.A.? To be an accountant? Hell in Puerto Rio you may need a college degree to be a tour guide earning just above minimum wage. Really? I’m all for a liberal arts education, but when you’re 18 and trying to find a decent job, I’m not sure that spending 4 years racking up debt to get a degree in film is really a step in the right direction.

Next on the agenda is our aging and inefficient power grid. I’m not talking solely about our old power lines and transistors that are blowing out with fun blackouts in the Northeast, but our entire energy infrastructure. Investment in more localized power sources from smartgrid technology which allows small producers (i.e. rooftop solar panels or turbines) to feed power back into the grid would be a good start. Investment in renewable energy sources would also be a boon. Like it or not, most of the world will eventually move towards some form of carbon pricing and it’s better to be prepared while we’re busy tossing around all this money than be caught later.

Our communication network is lacking to say the least. Our broadband access is around #14 and anyone who has ever tried using their cell phone outside of a city, or sometimes even within a city (my mom’s in LA comes to mind) can attest to dropped calls and shoddy service. This is especially true while travelling. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had dropped calls while driving or riding the train. Both of these problems are indirectly related to our low-density settlement patterns because it’s harder to serve sparsely populated areas with just about anything than higher-density areas. That’s not really the point though. The point is that even in modestly dense suburbs there are service issues, gaps, and no service areas.

Whether you agree with the huge stimulus package or not, it’s coming. I’m just here to offer some ideas on how to make sure it gets spent in a way that benefits us for decades rather than short-term.

It’s been a particularly busy year, with big stories emerging in politics, the economy, and international affairs. I originally was just going to do a Top 10 People of the Year list, but there got to be so many people that I decided to split it up into the two lists you see below. Some of these are predictable, some not so much. Discuss.

Top 10 American Newsmakers of the Year

1. BARACK OBAMA, President-Elect of the United States of America

Duh. His campaign will be a model for future political operations for years to come, his victory was an historic landmark, and he is probably the most influential President-Elect in modern history. Enough said.

2. BEN BERNANKE, Chairman of the Federal Reserve; and HENRY PAULSON, Secretary of the Treasury

The biggest story this year outside the election has, of course, been the steadily declining economy. The framers of that story at its most critical moments were Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson. While their navigation through the crisis has been less than sterling, they have been the ones holding the reins on this side of the Atlantic (but see Gordon Brown, below).

3. DAVID PETRAEUS, Commander of US Central Command

The story to come out of this year’s improvements in Iraq should not merely be the increase in troop levels. Rather, it should be COIN – the military’s shorthand term for counterinsurgency. The centerpiece of counterinsurgency is to peel off persuadable elements of the insurgency, teaming with them to fight the more hard-core elements. No man was more responsible for implementing this strategy in Iraq than General Petraeus – and no man outside of the Pentagon is in a better position to carry the lessons learned over to Afghanistan.

4. SUSAN RICE, UN Ambassador-designate and former Obama foreign policy adviser; and BRENT SCOWCROFT, former National Security Adviser

Rice and Scowcroft are far from ideological twins: the first is a liberal internationalist strongly committed to strengthening international institutions and promoting human rights; the second is a hardheaded Republican realist. But they share an antipathy toward the neoconservatives who gained control of George W. Bush’s foreign policy, and they represent Barack Obama’s dueling foreign policy sympathies: Rice is reportedly Obama’s most trusted foreign policy adviser, while the only Republicans whom Obama has given a voice in his administration are those with close ties to Scowcroft.

5. HILLARY CLINTON, Secretary of State-designate and former Democratic presidential candidate

Hillary Clinton’s story is an epically sad one. There is little doubt she is a talented and qualified figure, but she was forced to compete against a political phenomenon running a brutally efficient campaign, all while she was surrounded by incompetents and buffoons (including her husband). Even worse, the degree to which she broke barriers has been hampered by a viciously unfair media machine capable of seeing her only as monster or machine – anything but a history-making woman.

6. GAY AMERICANS

The results of Prop 8 make it hard to remember that 2008 was actually a pretty good year for the LGBT community: two state supreme courts recognized a right to same-sex marriage; restrictions on HIV-positive immigrants were lifted; and majorities were strengthened in support of ENDA and overturning Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. Oh, and we came the closest we’ve ever come to a successful vote on marriage equality. But the real story is the aftermath of the Prop 8 vote: the gay community has been nationally mobilized and is now in a better position to effect change than it ever has been.

7. STEVE JOBS, Chairman and CEO of Apple, Inc.; and ERIC SCHMIDT, Chairman and CEO of Google, Inc.

The iPhone, the G1, Google Chrome, the new Macbooks. Apple and Google remain the frontrunners in technological innovation.

8. DAVID AXELROD & DAVID PLOUFFE, former senior Obama campaign operatives

The men behind the political arm of the Obama campaign shouldn’t be overrated. The key to their success was not their innovative use of the Internet, their fundraising prowess, or their impressive branding. It was their candidate. But those other things will become the hallmark of future political campaigns, and that’s no small feat.

9. SARAH PALIN, Governor of Alaska and former Republican Vice Presidential candidate

That Sarah Palin is probably the most popular Republican in the country says all that needs to be said about the current state of the Republican Party.

10. RACHEL MADDOW, host of MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show

This was the year America learned that progressives can succeed on television, with Rachel Maddow taking the crown as Queen of Cable News. But she’s not significant just because she’s liberal. She’s also got a damn good show that is smart, substantive, and entertaining. At a time when cable news is almost universally noise, from Hannity to O’Reilly to Olbermann, Maddow demonstrates that you don’t have to shout to have an entertaining news show.

Honorable Mentions: Nancy Pelosi; Tina Fey; Ron Paul; Michelle, Malia and Sasha Obama; Nate Silver

Top 10 Global Newsmakers of the Year

1. GORDON BROWN, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

In any other year, the Prime Minister of the UK would not top this list. But when the financial crisis hit, it was Gordon Brown’s plan to inject capital into the struggling financial institutions that the rest of the world ended up copying. Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke’s original plan to buy up bad assets was abandoned in the wake of Brown’s actions, leaving Paul Krugman to ask: “Has Gordon Brown saved the world financial system?”

2. ASIF ALI ZARDARI, President of Pakistan

His state is on the verge of collapse and has found itself at the center of more than one international crisis. Barack Obama argued military strikes against the state might be appropriate in certain circumstances; al-Qaeda operatives are occupying its northwest territory; and the terrorist attacks in India have heightened the already high tensions between the two states. Whether Zardari is able to hold his country together is the most important international relations question of the coming years.

3. HU JINTAO, President of China

The Beijing Olympics, China’s massive stimulus plan, and the weight of America’s national debt have caused American awareness of China’s influence to grow. And the line is being drawn between those who view China’s emergence as an opportunity and those who view it as a source of inevitable conflict.

4. NOURI AL-MALIKI, Prime Minister of Iraq

One of the most fascinating stories of the year was the unfolding of negotiations over the Status of Forces Agreement between the U.S. and Iraq. Nouri al-Maliki played a strong hand surprisingly well, and the result was a SOFA that largely resolved the debate over American forces in Iraq without the incoming President ever having to make a decision.

5. THE SOMALI PIRATES

Every part of the Somali pirate story is representative of a new international system. A big part of Somalia’s brokenness is due to the United States’ support of Ethiopia’s invasion – a lesson in the limits of American power. The result is a failed state in which pirates are able to amass arms and roam the high seas – a lesson in the increasing influence of non-state actors. And the emerging solution is an international coalition organized through the UN to better patrol the region by air, land and sea – a lesson in the need for multilateralism.

6. ALI KHAMENEI, Supreme Leader of Iran; and MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD, President of Iran

Iran’s influence has ebbed over the course of the year, as its economy has crumbled and as Barack Obama’s election has already begun to undermine its international standing. That decrease in influence should probably be seen as encouraging, but it could also end up making the situation all the more volatile if Iran begins to feel backed into a corner – and if Israel begins to perceive a greater threat.

7. LUIS MORENO-OCAMPO, prosecutor of the International Criminal Court

It’s been a busy year for the ICC, throwing its weight around in Sudan, Uganda, and the former Yugoslavia. As the ICC becomes more active, its record will either strengthen or undermine the case for using international institutions to address the world’s problems. So far, it’s looking pretty good.

8. ROBERT MUGABE, President of Zimbabwe

Dictatorships are generally bad. They’re especially bad when the dictator implements a lot of really bad policy that cripples the economy. And they’re even worse when there’s a glimmer of hope that the dictator is losing power in a slowly democratizing country, only to have the dictator hold onto power through violent repression of the opposition.

9. VLADIMIR PUTIN, Prime Minister of Russia

Russia isn’t as important as many think, but its very lack of importance is making it a thorn in the world’s side. All things considered, Putin’s attempts to assert himself on the world stage should be among the easier crises the United States faces internationally – but only if we don’t adopt a provocative, conflict-oriented approach to things.

10. REVOLUTIONARY ARMED FORCES OF COLOMBIA – PEOPLE’S ARMY (FARC)

The tensions in South America don’t generally hold the same kind of threat-of-global-chaos that exists in the Middle East or South Asia. But this year FARC’s hostage-taking shenanigans heightened tensions among Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador, making clear that this is another hotspot the world needs to keep its eye on.

Honorable Mentions: Omar al-Bashir, Mikheil Saakashvili, the Guantanamo prisoners, Stephen Harper, Joseph Kony

Everything your suburban parents told you about the future was wrong.

Hate to break it to you, but you’re not going to have a better, easier life than your folks did because you went to college.  As a matter of fact, if you’ve got a bunch of student loans, you’re going to spend the next ten or fifteen years significantly worse off than they did.  The suburbs, the McMansions, the long commute–all of those are as dead as flappers and bathtub gin, wiped out in the orgy of corporate and government immorality and excess that was the ‘oughts.

Along with the lowered expectations, you’re going to have to deal with a constantly uncertain future which includes the loss of direct political impowerment–the latter due to the fact that you’re going to be spending so much time simply surviving that you won’t have time to change the world.  The speed of the internet will give you more than the disenfranchised Okies had, but not much.  Revolutionary change is the purview of the children of the upper-middle class and your parents just lost half the value of their houses and retirement accounts.

Baby-boomers don’t remember hard times, but we remember long hours at the feet of our parents and grandparents–they were still alive, so that proved that they could survive much harder times than you are going to face.  (There was no bank safety net in 1929–rather than losing “pretend values” in inflated houses and bloated 401ks, they put their paychecks in and watched the teller windows close for four or more years.)

For what it’s worth–and I don’t expect everyone to listen, any more than they did in March of 2007 when I first warned about the onrushing depression, here are some items culled from their advice and adapted for the realities of the 21st Century.

Plan on living on half your pre-crash salary.

Or, in the case of soon-to-be college graduates, your projected salary.  Odds are that you and/or your significant other will be out of work quite often as the economy re-adjusts and that the jobs that you’ll end up taking will pay quite a bit less than you planned.

How long will this be true?  It depends on which theory of economics applies.  The new President has a plan of action similar to the one that Roosevelt pursued during the 1930s.  Murray Rothbard claims that Roosevelt’s programs extended that Depression by six additional years.  Conventional historians counter that the Roosevelt plan reduced suffering and shortened the trough.  Others claim that nothing happened either way and that the reason that the Great Depression ended was the increase in innovative investment due to the US’s entry into the Second World War.

In short, no one knows, except that it’s not going to end anytime in the near future.  Vox Day, who has been spot on economically over the last decade, thinks that before it ends we’ll be seeing 17% unemployment in the United States.  This would not surprise me in the slightest and in order to keep eating and end up on the other side in a position allowing prosperity, every step from now on will have to be carefully considered.  It is entirely possible for a person to have a high-paying job one week and be out on the street the next.

Here’s some advice for getting yourself ready for harder times:

Sell as much of your extraneous crap as possible and pay off any loans you may currently have.

If Prescott’s right and we’re about to hit inflationary times, your interest rates, which are tied to the prime in many cases, will skyrocket and all you’ll be able to afford is close-to-minimum payments.  Remember, all you have to do is be late on one payment on some credit cards for them to jump ten or fifteen percent in rate–if you’re missing payments, you sure as hell can’t afford that to happen.

If I’m right and we’re going to have deflation, you want to hold on to as much cash as possible, since companies, desperate to keep any profit going at all, will be dropping the price on everything. This means that the dollars under your mattress will buy you $1.10 worth of stuff in a few months–it’s similar to what we’ve seen in electronics, but applied to the economy in general.  Those of us on fixed government pension incomes or with jobs that we hold on to will be sitting pretty in a deflationary situation.

So, debt is bad and cash on hand is good–besides, you didn’t really need that Boxster or the wall-length TV, did you?  Remember, the government made it much harder to declare bankruptcy than it used to be, so that option is less inviting than it was twenty years ago.

Rent, don’t buy.

As the number of unsold “investment houses” increases, owners, desperate to get anything out of them, will be dropping rents to what people can afford.  This is already starting to happen with business property in the downtown areas of large cities.  I expect this trend to continue and expand.  How low property values go will depend on inflationary/deflationary scenarios and how high unemployment goes.  Since that’s uncertain, you’ll lose every cent you put into a house that’s foreclosed and often that will be considerably more than you’d have had to pay for rent.

Team up to pool resources.

You don’t have to be married to use the kind of “efficiencies of scale” possessed by polygamous families.  It is cheaper to live as a couple than it is alone and costs per person can be reduced by up to 75% per person by living as a group of five rather than as a couple.  In addition, large family or peer groups increase the liklihood of one of the members having employment income as times get harder.  The number of practical skills in the experiential pool are likely to be much higher in a large group than in a couple.  During the 1930s, all this went without saying, since the nuclear family didn’t exist until after World War 2.  Large extended groups, related or not, will mark a return to the natural state of human living.

Despite low costs and the lure of bargains, do not invest in stocks.

From a strictly historical standpoint, the slowest recovery in a suddently-altered economy are stocks.  If you look at the Great Depression, the values of the major index did not reach 1929 levels (adjusted for inflation) until 1954.  You do not want to wait that long.  Those who had liquidity during the GD bought tangible items being auctioned off to pay back taxes–some of them are still in the family three generations later.  While it is not necessarily true that the same conditions apply during this time period, I believe that the kind of government interference in the marketplace that’s coming up will impede, rather than encourage, stocks’ return to pre-crash rates.

Keep enough money on hand to relocate.

Recovery, like the rest of the future is not going to be evenly distributed.  In the past, those who were willing to go where the jobs were had an advantage.  While this will be lessened by 21st Century communications, skills in tangible industries cannot be transmitted over the airwaves.  Get some “get out of the country” money together and don’t touch it, no matter what.

Whatever you do, keep your internet access and phone service.

The greatest advantage we have over the folks in 1929 is the speed and volume of our communications technology.  Even though it seems to be a luxury, the ‘Net will be invaluable to set yourself up for the next section of advice….

Diversify Your Skill Set

“Anything for a Buck America”–You’re Punk’d

A large number of seemingly-indestructable American institutions are going to become a thing of the past in the next ten years.  People who are currently involved with the Big Three Automakers, unions like the UAW and Machinists’ Union, print newspapers and magazines, non-bank financial institutions, and large law and lobbying firms will find themselves in the same position as the makers of buggy whips after the introduction of the automobile.  The economic and moral paradigms that allowed these institutions to prosper will have changed permanently by the time the dust settles.

The false economic paradigms involved the belief that the rate of innovation allowed the perpetuation of inherent inefficiencies in concept.  In other words, business was so good that CEOs could have salaries 300 times that of a line worker, the union workers could work thirty years and retire with full salaries, and newspapers could charge for advertising even though no one was reading them anymore.

The false moral paradigms involved the belief that if an end was good enough, any means was allowable.  Over time, in a post-religious society, this evolved into one where the improvement of one’s own position was a desirable end that would allow illicit means if no one was watching or if the means were clever enough.  This has culminated financially in pyramid schemes like Madoff’s and politically in the kind of corruption Blo-jo has demonstrated in Illinois and that permeates even the new administration, with its ties to Tony R and the Clinton Foundation’s foreign “donations.”  When financial times get hard, the moralities taught by the major religions become more attractive across society.  This will institute a backlash that will ripple through the halls of both Wall Street and K Street.  While I don’t expect that investment, lobbying, and law firms will be outlawed, per se, I expect that they will be regulated to such a great extent that they’ll have to lay off half of their junior partners just to pay their own legal fees to satisfy the Federal regulators.

What should I do with my new degree in Finance?

Damn, sorry to hear about that, dude.  Tough break.

Best thing to do would be to start working on some salable skills that could aid in keeping you alive.  Right now, an internship in organic chicken farming is a lot better deal than one at Citibank.  The arts and entertainment are often good ways to bring in nightly money.  Bars and dance clubs have good evenings as people try to forget their troubles, you might consider calling your classmates and getting a garage band going if you have any talent.  (Billy Joe–you may get your chance to be a poet and street musician, after all.)

Odds are, you’ll be out of work enough that both gardening and craft skills will help to save enough money to keep a roof over your head.  There are hundreds of sites on the Internet that teach you how to sew your own clothes, raise your own zuccini, cook your own meatless dishes and fix your own electronic devices.  Any of the above can also be used as barter to get you stuff you cannot make yourself–a move towards a more cashless economy.

“Ha!  My degree is in Electrical Engineering–I’ve got a job for sure!”

Well, ‘fraid not.  You see, the second thing that happens after a company lays off the 20% of dead weight in their low-level work force is that they start cutting R&D.  If you look at the late 1970s, the American carmakers had so little research going on that they nearly lost the auto market permanently to the innovative Japanese.  The word in corporate America is “last hired, first laid-off” so you either won’t get a job, or you’ll have it until the next ledge on the way down to the bottom is reached and you’ll get axed, then.

There is a bright spot for you, though.  With the lack of competition from the major corporations, garage tech has a higher liklihood of coming up with something that someone will want to purchase in the periods when there’s a bit of money floating around.  Apple and Microsoft both came out of the late-70s recession and I doubt very much that they could have done so if IBM and Texas Instruments had had their engineering staffs fully operational.  I know that this sounds like the equivalent of saying “get your classmates and start a band” but the paradigm has worked in the past and now, with the speed of communications, you don’t even have to be in the same town to work together.

“How about the intangible professions, I hear education and health care are increasing the number of jobs?”

They are, for now.  The problem with education, though, is that jobs there are dependent on a reasonably affulent tax base, which has just gone with the wind.  There’s a feedback delay of about two years, I figure, between the loss of business and personal revenue and its reflection in the education industry.  No big loss, I figure, modern educational institutions are useless at best and a menace to society at worst.  The University of Illinois will be laying educators off by 2010, I figure.

Health care is a more chaotic case–after all, when you have a heart attack, you don’t look at investment opportunities.  There will always be some jobs in health care, but the insurance companies that are currently financing the expansion of hospitals and clinics have been hit as hard by the financial downturn as the rest of the economy–one of the big three, as a matter of fact, is close to bankruptcy.  If the government gets involved, there will be extensive regulation of one kind or another that will freeze innovation and limit the number of jobs available in the industry.  In addition, a government-run health industry will make it dependent on collected revenue.  If there is a universal health plan promulgated by the Obama administration, I figure the industry lay-offs will start about 2011.

Plan for the Other Side of the Depression

Sooner or later, the depression is going to be over and the world will go back to a semblance of normalcy.  That world won’t look very much like ours, however.  The suburbs will be ghost towns, workers will get paid more in cash and less in benefits, and health care will either be self-paid (in the more libertarian future) or totally governmental (in the police-state future).

Business will be cut-down, streamlined, and transparent to a degree that no one can imagine right now.  I expect that the day-to-day dealings of all industries to be examinable by the government and the citizenry–sort of a “freedom of information act” for commerce.  Families are going to be larger (and not necessarily all hetero or monogamous).  They’re also going to be church-going–I expect that this long financial downturn will finally put the kibosh on the “brights” movement and most of the secular humanists.

So, you want to be rich in twenty years?  Figure out new industries that depend on lightning-fast reactions to the needs of large extended families and that operates in a totally moral manner.  That ought to do fine.

It is time to face facts. In spite of the largest turn-out by liberals, the largest turn-out by young people, and the largest turn-out by gays in the history of the state of California, this measure was still passed. What does this mean?

In my opinion, it means that the cause is lost. The California and Arizona defeats for state-sponsored gay marriage combined with the married-only adoption measure in Arkansas point out that no matter how much supporters want such, the majority of people in the US, even including some of the non-racist, liberal elite that elected the first black President, just aren’t comfortable with the state sponsoring marriage between men or between women. In other words, folks, if it didn’t happen this year, it’s not going to–it’s a high-water mark for the issue like 1979 was for the ERA.

It has been my opinion for decades that giving the government control over who gets married has been a disaster. Whether it be the miscegenation laws of the 1950s, the back-and-forth, now you’re married, now you’re not of California and Massachusetts, or the persecution of polygamists by the state of Texas, the government has proven that it cannot be trusted with the inalienable right of individuals to form unions as they please.

Why would anyone want the government’s nose in their business, anyway–advocates of opening the definition of marriage certainly want the government out of their bedrooms, don’t they? As always, it falls into the fallacy of money being more efffectively distributed by the government than by individual action. Those who advocate gay marriage want the so-called benefits offered to heterosexual married couples, even though many of those benefits have been offered in an attempt to control their behavior and move them toward the actions the government sees as desirable.

Urbanagora has a great crop of thinkers–folks in the economic, futurist, political, and activist realms. I’ve got a challenge for all of you to work on with me…..

Since we cannot gain what we want from the government, nor, (seeing that young people with a given opinion keep that opinion throughout their lives) can we expect to do so in the next twenty-five years, let us design a way of making the benefits for couples and multiples better than those offered by the government for heterosexual couples. We can discuss economic strategies, contracts, ways to put pressure on employers, union-like actions. I’m open to any idea that does not start out…”we get this measure passed by Congress” or “if the courts rule such-and-such.” Government has failed–it’s up to each of us to take up the slack.