The typoon Morakot has just posed massive damage on Taiwan.
Here's some pictures breaking my heart:
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/08/typhoon_morakot.html
I felt sorry and sad when I saw these pictures.
Only were we involved in the impaired area,
we could imagine how cruel the natural will be.
何謂女姓主義？ What is Feminism?
女性主義者的革命尚未發生，可是我們的世界需要這種大思考改革。 不人道的父權制度被全世界拒絕是時間早晚的問題。所謂的女性主義者應該叫做人道主義。父權制度上所指的「人」其實是男人，女人不包括在內。因此，父權制度所謂的「人道主義」不包括對待女性。 所以女性主義只能叫做女性主義，不能叫做人道主義。
大體上說，在父權制度上，女人被對待的方式相當於動物被對待的方式。換句話說，控制女人的觀點是從控制動物的觀點而來的。在歷史上，當男生控制起動物的生殖來，動物就成了他們的資產。在我們的文化上，到現在孩子還算是一種資產，這樣一來男生為了維持他們的資產，所以控制起女人的生育。因此，男性必須把女性與孩子們當成資產一樣，他們不可讓女人與孩子們成為有自由意志的「人」。
我們換一個方面來說，很多人說女性主義者的工作是讓男女平等。事實上並非如此。女性主義者不但不是要把機會平均分給男性與女性，這麼大規模的工作反而不是女性主義者的範圍。
女性主義者只是要所有人接受與承認「女人就是人」這個簡單的概念。所謂的人就是有自由意志、有完整身份、有真實存在的情況，而在自己的命運舞台上當演員。所謂的「女性主義者」就是「承認女人就是人」的主義。
This essay is one of my first ever composed in Chinese. (Yay to rockin’ that two-month intensive Chinese course this summer!) Here’s a sentence by sentence translation:
The feminist revolution has not yet happened, but the world badly needs a radical change in thinking. It’s really only a matter of time before the world rejects the inhumane system of patriarchy.
What’s called ‘feminism’ should actually be called ‘humanism’. In our patriarchal culture, what is called ‘human’ actually means ‘man’. Women aren’t really included in this term. So when we in this patriarchy talk about ‘humanism’ it doesn’t really include women. And so feminism can only be called ‘feminism’ and not ‘humanism’.
In general, under the patriarchy, women are considered to be in the same category as animals. It’s like this: the idea of controlling women comes from the original concept of controlling animals. When men first began controlling animals’ reproduction, animals became property. In our culture, even now children are still considered to be a kind of propery, and so in this way, men control women’s reproduction in order to protect their property. In doing so men turn women and children into a form of property, preventing them having the social status of free willed volitional humans.
Let’s look at this in a different way. A lot of people say that the aim of feminism is equality between men and women. Actually this is not the case. The work of feminism is not to give women and men equal opportunities, such a large scale work is outside feminism’s scope. Feminism just wants people to accept and simply recognize that women are human beings: human beings possessing free will and intelligent volition, who have complete identities, who live their own realities, and who are actors on the stage of their own destiny.
When we say ‘feminism’, what we mean is ‘recognizing that women are human beings.’
大體上說，在父權制度上，女人被對待的方式相當於動物被對待的方式。換句話說，控制女人的觀點是從控制動物的觀點而來的。在歷史上，當男生控制起動物的生殖來，動物就成了他們的資產。在我們的文化上，到現在孩子還算是一種資產，這樣一來男生為了維持他們的資產，所以控制起女人的生育。因此，男性必須把女性與孩子們當成資產一樣，他們不可讓女人與孩子們成為有自由意志的「人」。
我們換一個方面來說，很多人說女性主義者的工作是讓男女平等。事實上並非如此。女性主義者不但不是要把機會平均分給男性與女性，這麼大規模的工作反而不是女性主義者的範圍。
女性主義者只是要所有人接受與承認「女人就是人」這個簡單的概念。所謂的人就是有自由意志、有完整身份、有真實存在的情況，而在自己的命運舞台上當演員。所謂的「女性主義者」就是「承認女人就是人」的主義。
This essay is one of my first ever composed in Chinese. (Yay to rockin’ that two-month intensive Chinese course this summer!) Here’s a sentence by sentence translation:
The feminist revolution has not yet happened, but the world badly needs a radical change in thinking. It’s really only a matter of time before the world rejects the inhumane system of patriarchy.
What’s called ‘feminism’ should actually be called ‘humanism’. In our patriarchal culture, what is called ‘human’ actually means ‘man’. Women aren’t really included in this term. So when we in this patriarchy talk about ‘humanism’ it doesn’t really include women. And so feminism can only be called ‘feminism’ and not ‘humanism’.
In general, under the patriarchy, women are considered to be in the same category as animals. It’s like this: the idea of controlling women comes from the original concept of controlling animals. When men first began controlling animals’ reproduction, animals became property. In our culture, even now children are still considered to be a kind of propery, and so in this way, men control women’s reproduction in order to protect their property. In doing so men turn women and children into a form of property, preventing them having the social status of free willed volitional humans.
Let’s look at this in a different way. A lot of people say that the aim of feminism is equality between men and women. Actually this is not the case. The work of feminism is not to give women and men equal opportunities, such a large scale work is outside feminism’s scope. Feminism just wants people to accept and simply recognize that women are human beings: human beings possessing free will and intelligent volition, who have complete identities, who live their own realities, and who are actors on the stage of their own destiny.
When we say ‘feminism’, what we mean is ‘recognizing that women are human beings.’
8/2 article: The Bechdel Test
Hello! Our next meeting is at Catmints Cafe, on Sunday August 2, 3:00pm
Address: Catmints Cafe Roosevelt Road, Sec. 2, Lane 101, No. 9 (02)8369-1271 MRT Kuting Station, exit 3..?
Article: See below the jump. For more information on these themes, you can follow the links.
From comments thread on IBTP: All Old Moves Suck
no fun June 29, 2009 at 10:57 pm:
You know what I hate about movies? The fact that a friend gave me this challenge almost a decade ago, and I don’t think I’ve seen a single movie since then that fit the bill.
Name a movie where the protagonist is an adult woman, and she ends up :
1. Alive and healthy
2. Happy
3. Not in love
Dauphine June 29, 2009 at 11:15 pm:
What’s even more amazing (in a “what the fuck?” way) is how few movies pass the Bechdel Test:
1. There must be more than one female character
2. They must talk to each other
3. They must talk about something other than a man.
Address: Catmints Cafe Roosevelt Road, Sec. 2, Lane 101, No. 9 (02)8369-1271 MRT Kuting Station, exit 3..?
Article: See below the jump. For more information on these themes, you can follow the links.
From comments thread on IBTP: All Old Moves Suck
no fun June 29, 2009 at 10:57 pm:
You know what I hate about movies? The fact that a friend gave me this challenge almost a decade ago, and I don’t think I’ve seen a single movie since then that fit the bill.
Name a movie where the protagonist is an adult woman, and she ends up :
1. Alive and healthy
2. Happy
3. Not in love
Dauphine June 29, 2009 at 11:15 pm:
What’s even more amazing (in a “what the fuck?” way) is how few movies pass the Bechdel Test:
1. There must be more than one female character
2. They must talk to each other
3. They must talk about something other than a man.
July 5 Article: Facing the truth
Here is the information of our rethinking ourselves meeting in July:
1. Date and time: July 5 (Sun), 3:00 pm
2. Place: Goethe Gourmet Gasthaus/ 哥德德式創意美食/羅斯福路三段283巷11號 Tel:02 2362 0060
3. Name of the article: Facing the truth
4. Article: http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displayStory.cfm?story_id=11959198
1. Date and time: July 5 (Sun), 3:00 pm
2. Place: Goethe Gourmet Gasthaus/ 哥德德式創意美食/羅斯福路三段283巷11號 Tel:02 2362 0060
3. Name of the article: Facing the truth
4. Article: http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displayStory.cfm?story_id=11959198
Oh HELL no!!
Don't you find it very disturbing that Mainland China's "Public Peace" police will be allowed to patrol in Taiwan and arrest whomever they like? Why is Taiwan compromising its sovereignity? And why did only one news channel report about this?
More information in English:
Taipei Times Editorial
Earlier Taipei Times Article
The View from Taiwan
F.Varga
And for a side note:
Why Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) is really cool.
A similar story in English here.
From the Taipei Times editorial on May 12:
The problem, however, is that the level of trust necessary for this measure to be undertaken is lacking and crime-fighting in the Taiwan Strait does not threaten security to the extent that it would make this move imperative — not to mention the odious symbolism of the presence of Chinese police on Taiwanese soil.
Another factor that, in other scenarios, makes officer exchanges possible is mutual recognition of sovereignty among all participants and the limits on extraterritoriality that this implies.
When it comes to China, however, the fact that it does not recognize Taiwan as a sovereign state and claims it as its own poses additional problems. Among these are the specters of the application of Chinese law on Taiwanese territory and the reinterpretation of Taiwanese laws that could stretch the definition of crime to include “splittism” and speech on topics that are illegal in China.
Article For 6/14-- When a 'Chosen' Tibetan Lama Says No Thanks
Article will be discussed on Sunday June 14, at 3pm, at Goethe Cafe. Willy is the moderator.
Goethe Cafe
Address: Roosevelt Road, Sec 3, Lane 283, No. 11
Tel: 02 2362 0060
Subway exit: Taipower Building Station exit 2
Article
When a 'Chosen' Tibetan Lama Says No Thanks
By David Van Biema
"For the last time, I'm not your messiah," groans the title character in the 1979 comedy The Life of Brian. (They crucify him, anyway.) There's an echo of Brian's panicked renunciation in a shakeup currently underway in Tibetan Buddhism — in this case, nobody's laughing, although the ending will, no doubt, be happier.
Late last month, two Spanish media outlets confirmed that 24-year-old Tenzin Osel Rinpoche, one of the most renowned Buddhist "golden children" — toddlers determined through dreams, oracular riddles and their own "memories" to be tulkus, or reincarnations of high Tibetan Buddhist lamas — has abandoned his foretold identity. Instead of a Lama, he wants to be a filmmaker, and has reverted to his original Spanish name, Osel Hita Torres. (See pictures of the Dalai Lama at home)
The abdication of the anointed tulku is a significant embarrassment to the group he was supposed to head, the powerhouse Foundation for the Preservation of the Monastic Tradition (FPMT), the foremost Tibetan teaching organization in the West. It also challenges Westerners who have adopted Buddhism to find more sophisticated ways of understanding its magical side.
In 1989, with the approval of his Spanish convert parents, four-year-old Hita was tapped by FPMT monks as the reincarnation of the group's co-founder Thubten Yeshe. Their methods will be familiar to anyone who has seen Bernardo Bertolucci's Little Buddha or the current documentary Unmistaken Child: The monks reportedly heeded some dreams; the Dalai Lama consulted an oracle; and the capper was that young Hita "recalled" the color of the dead lama's car.
Last month, however, the magazine Babylon confirmed that the shaggy-haired Hita had long-ago dropped out of his Tibetan University, and that he no longer even considers himself a Buddhist. He was quoted more pointedly in the newspaper El Mundo as saying, "I was taken away from my family and put in a medieval situation in which I suffered a lot. It was like living a lie."
Britain's Guardian then added the delicious factoid that at one point the only people Hita saw were Buddhist monks and Richard Gere. Last Monday, a statement attributed to Hita appeared on the FPMT website calling the press reports "sensationalized," and insisting "there is no separation between myself and FPMT." Still, his confirmation of his career change in the same posting in fact suggests a major rift.
Josh Baran, a New York Buddhist who has facilitated the Western trips of several high lamas, suggests that Hita's defection shouldn't cause adherents to lower their prayer flags. The West, he says, "has a romantic ideal that these lamas have some kind of super-vision and can look at a child and say, he's the one." While signs and portents may play a role in monastic successions, he explains, so do more worldly considerations. Tulkus often inherit considerable wealth and influence, and powerful monks will jockey to place their own candidates. The political needs of their lineage also figure. And sometimes the consensus-based system doesn't yield a clear winner: Tibetan history crackles with bloody battles between rival claimants or their camps.
None of this is unfamiliar to Western religious traditions. Roman Catholic Popes are supposedly chosen by the divine intervention of the Holy Spirit upon a conclave of cardinals — yet many have proven less than holy, and wars have been fought over successions. A bit like Catholics through the ages, says Baran, Tibetan Buddhists "assess a tulku's wisdom not by his title, but by his piety and learning." The monks try to pick the bright and promising children, he says; but Tibetans also assume the weeding-out function of the extensive tulku education: "no matter who they pick, the best and the brightest will surface in the course of the process."
By that logic, Hita simply weeded himself out. Robert Thurman, a Buddhist scholar, former monk and friend of the Dalai Lama, recounts that when told years ago that Hita was to receive a traditional Buddhist education in India he expressed concern. Thurman's argument: "If he wanted Tibetan traditional [education] he could have reincarnated in a Tibetan family in exile." The result of the misplacement, he says, is that Hita "has broken away in a full-blown identity crisis." Thurman thinks that after some time in our "busy postmodern world," Hita may see the value of the Tibetan tradition, "which he will then be able to approach or not, of his own free choice." And, he adds, "More power to him!"
Goethe Cafe
Address: Roosevelt Road, Sec 3, Lane 283, No. 11
Tel: 02 2362 0060
Subway exit: Taipower Building Station exit 2
Article
When a 'Chosen' Tibetan Lama Says No Thanks
By David Van Biema
"For the last time, I'm not your messiah," groans the title character in the 1979 comedy The Life of Brian. (They crucify him, anyway.) There's an echo of Brian's panicked renunciation in a shakeup currently underway in Tibetan Buddhism — in this case, nobody's laughing, although the ending will, no doubt, be happier.
Late last month, two Spanish media outlets confirmed that 24-year-old Tenzin Osel Rinpoche, one of the most renowned Buddhist "golden children" — toddlers determined through dreams, oracular riddles and their own "memories" to be tulkus, or reincarnations of high Tibetan Buddhist lamas — has abandoned his foretold identity. Instead of a Lama, he wants to be a filmmaker, and has reverted to his original Spanish name, Osel Hita Torres. (See pictures of the Dalai Lama at home)
The abdication of the anointed tulku is a significant embarrassment to the group he was supposed to head, the powerhouse Foundation for the Preservation of the Monastic Tradition (FPMT), the foremost Tibetan teaching organization in the West. It also challenges Westerners who have adopted Buddhism to find more sophisticated ways of understanding its magical side.
In 1989, with the approval of his Spanish convert parents, four-year-old Hita was tapped by FPMT monks as the reincarnation of the group's co-founder Thubten Yeshe. Their methods will be familiar to anyone who has seen Bernardo Bertolucci's Little Buddha or the current documentary Unmistaken Child: The monks reportedly heeded some dreams; the Dalai Lama consulted an oracle; and the capper was that young Hita "recalled" the color of the dead lama's car.
Last month, however, the magazine Babylon confirmed that the shaggy-haired Hita had long-ago dropped out of his Tibetan University, and that he no longer even considers himself a Buddhist. He was quoted more pointedly in the newspaper El Mundo as saying, "I was taken away from my family and put in a medieval situation in which I suffered a lot. It was like living a lie."
Britain's Guardian then added the delicious factoid that at one point the only people Hita saw were Buddhist monks and Richard Gere. Last Monday, a statement attributed to Hita appeared on the FPMT website calling the press reports "sensationalized," and insisting "there is no separation between myself and FPMT." Still, his confirmation of his career change in the same posting in fact suggests a major rift.
Josh Baran, a New York Buddhist who has facilitated the Western trips of several high lamas, suggests that Hita's defection shouldn't cause adherents to lower their prayer flags. The West, he says, "has a romantic ideal that these lamas have some kind of super-vision and can look at a child and say, he's the one." While signs and portents may play a role in monastic successions, he explains, so do more worldly considerations. Tulkus often inherit considerable wealth and influence, and powerful monks will jockey to place their own candidates. The political needs of their lineage also figure. And sometimes the consensus-based system doesn't yield a clear winner: Tibetan history crackles with bloody battles between rival claimants or their camps.
None of this is unfamiliar to Western religious traditions. Roman Catholic Popes are supposedly chosen by the divine intervention of the Holy Spirit upon a conclave of cardinals — yet many have proven less than holy, and wars have been fought over successions. A bit like Catholics through the ages, says Baran, Tibetan Buddhists "assess a tulku's wisdom not by his title, but by his piety and learning." The monks try to pick the bright and promising children, he says; but Tibetans also assume the weeding-out function of the extensive tulku education: "no matter who they pick, the best and the brightest will surface in the course of the process."
By that logic, Hita simply weeded himself out. Robert Thurman, a Buddhist scholar, former monk and friend of the Dalai Lama, recounts that when told years ago that Hita was to receive a traditional Buddhist education in India he expressed concern. Thurman's argument: "If he wanted Tibetan traditional [education] he could have reincarnated in a Tibetan family in exile." The result of the misplacement, he says, is that Hita "has broken away in a full-blown identity crisis." Thurman thinks that after some time in our "busy postmodern world," Hita may see the value of the Tibetan tradition, "which he will then be able to approach or not, of his own free choice." And, he adds, "More power to him!"
Article For 5/23 -- The Price Is Not Right
The W-a club will be held on Saturday May 23, at 7 pm, at Imbiss. Fanny is the moderator.
Imbiss
Address: Xinhai Road, Sec 1, Alley 34, No. 3
Tel: 02-2362 0611
Article:
The Price Is Not Right, by Thomas Friedman, NY Time, March 31, 2009
(The article connects environment issues to financial crisis issues.)
Think About It:
In addition to toxic assets in banks and those pollutants damaging our environments, what else in our life or societies are mispriced? What can we do to make these be correctly priced?
You May Be Interested In:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/opinion/12friedman.html
(A story shows how the Costa Rica has strike a balance between economy growth and environment preservation.)
More About Sup-prime Crisis And Those Banks:
http://www.ft.com/indepth/subprime
Article
I don’t expect much from the G-20 meeting this week, but if I had my wish, the leaders of the world’s 20 top economies would commit themselves to a new standard of accounting — call it “Market to Mother Nature” accounting. Why? Because it’s now obvious that the reason we’re experiencing a simultaneous meltdown in the financial system and the climate system is because we have been mispricing risk in both arenas — producing a huge excess of both toxic assets and toxic air that now threatens the stability of the whole planet.
Just as A.I.G. sold insurance derivatives at prices that did not reflect the real costs and the real risks of massive defaults (for which we the taxpayers ended up paying the difference), oil companies, coal companies and electric utilities today are selling energy products at prices that do not reflect the real costs to the environment and real risks of disruptive climate change (so future taxpayers will end up paying the difference).
Whenever products are mispriced and do not reflect the real costs and risks associated with their usage, people go to excess. And that is exactly what happened in the financial marketplace and in the energy/environmental marketplace during the credit bubble.
Our biggest financial-services companies, some of which came to be seen as too big to fail, engaged in complex financial trading schemes that did not adequately price in the costs and risks of a market reversal. A.I.G., for instance, was selling insurance for all kinds of financial instruments and did not have anywhere near adequate reserves to cover claims if things went badly wrong, as they did. And our biggest energy companies, utilities and auto companies became dependent on cheap hydrocarbons that spin off climate-changing greenhouse gases, and we clearly have not forced them, through a carbon tax, to price in the true risks and costs to society from these climate-changing fuels.
“When the balance sheet of a company does not capture the true costs and risks of its business activities,” and when that company is too big to fail, “you end up with them privatizing their gains and socializing their losses,” Nandan Nilekani, the co-chairman of the Indian technology company Infosys, remarked to me. That is, everyone gets to rack up their private profits today and pay them out in current bonuses and dividends. But any catastrophic losses — if the company is too big to fail — “get socialized and paid off by taxpayers.”
This is why we need new banking regulation that reins in the leverage and speculative trading that big banks and insurance companies can undertake so they never again become simultaneously too reckless to regulate but too big fail and taxpayers are forced to pay off the toxic assets they accumulate. And this is also why we need a tax on carbon — so we and our power utilities don’t become permanently addicted to cheap coal that makes for lower electricity prices today but spits out toxic greenhouse gases that have to be paid for by future generations tomorrow.
That’s what “Market to Mother Nature” accounting is all about. It begins with the premise that the distinction between the G-20 and the Copenhagen climate change negotiations is totally artificial. They are just flip sides of the same global problem — how we as a world keep raising standards of living for more and more people in ways that will not, as a byproduct, have both the Market and Mother Nature producing huge amounts of toxic assets.
The old system, which has reached its financial and environmental limits, worked like this: We built more and more stores in America to sell more and more stuff, which was made in more and more Chinese factories powered by more and more coal that earned more and more dollars to buy more and more U.S. T-bills that got recycled back to America in the form of cheap credit to build more and more stores and more and more houses that gave rise to more and more Chinese factories.
This system was a powerful engine of wealth creation and lifted millions out of poverty, but it relied upon the risks to the Market and to Mother Nature being underpriced and to profits being privatized in good times and losses socialized in bad times. This capitalist engine doesn’t need to be discarded; it needs some fixes. For starters, we need to get back to basics — accountable lending, prudent saving, reasonable leverage and, most important, more engineering of goods than just financial products.
Some of our biggest financial firms got away from their original purpose — to fund innovation and to finance the process of “creative destruction,” whereby new technologies that improve people’s lives replace old ones, said the Columbia University economist Jagdish Bhagwati, in an interview in The American Interest. Instead, he added, too many banks got involved in exotic and incomprehensible financial innovations — to simply make money out of money — which ended up as “destructive creation.”
“Destructive creation” has wounded both the Market and Mother Nature. Smart regulation and carbon taxation can heal both.
Imbiss
Address: Xinhai Road, Sec 1, Alley 34, No. 3
Tel: 02-2362 0611
Article:
The Price Is Not Right, by Thomas Friedman, NY Time, March 31, 2009
(The article connects environment issues to financial crisis issues.)
Think About It:
In addition to toxic assets in banks and those pollutants damaging our environments, what else in our life or societies are mispriced? What can we do to make these be correctly priced?
You May Be Interested In:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/opinion/12friedman.html
(A story shows how the Costa Rica has strike a balance between economy growth and environment preservation.)
More About Sup-prime Crisis And Those Banks:
http://www.ft.com/indepth/subprime
Article
I don’t expect much from the G-20 meeting this week, but if I had my wish, the leaders of the world’s 20 top economies would commit themselves to a new standard of accounting — call it “Market to Mother Nature” accounting. Why? Because it’s now obvious that the reason we’re experiencing a simultaneous meltdown in the financial system and the climate system is because we have been mispricing risk in both arenas — producing a huge excess of both toxic assets and toxic air that now threatens the stability of the whole planet.
Just as A.I.G. sold insurance derivatives at prices that did not reflect the real costs and the real risks of massive defaults (for which we the taxpayers ended up paying the difference), oil companies, coal companies and electric utilities today are selling energy products at prices that do not reflect the real costs to the environment and real risks of disruptive climate change (so future taxpayers will end up paying the difference).
Whenever products are mispriced and do not reflect the real costs and risks associated with their usage, people go to excess. And that is exactly what happened in the financial marketplace and in the energy/environmental marketplace during the credit bubble.
Our biggest financial-services companies, some of which came to be seen as too big to fail, engaged in complex financial trading schemes that did not adequately price in the costs and risks of a market reversal. A.I.G., for instance, was selling insurance for all kinds of financial instruments and did not have anywhere near adequate reserves to cover claims if things went badly wrong, as they did. And our biggest energy companies, utilities and auto companies became dependent on cheap hydrocarbons that spin off climate-changing greenhouse gases, and we clearly have not forced them, through a carbon tax, to price in the true risks and costs to society from these climate-changing fuels.
“When the balance sheet of a company does not capture the true costs and risks of its business activities,” and when that company is too big to fail, “you end up with them privatizing their gains and socializing their losses,” Nandan Nilekani, the co-chairman of the Indian technology company Infosys, remarked to me. That is, everyone gets to rack up their private profits today and pay them out in current bonuses and dividends. But any catastrophic losses — if the company is too big to fail — “get socialized and paid off by taxpayers.”
This is why we need new banking regulation that reins in the leverage and speculative trading that big banks and insurance companies can undertake so they never again become simultaneously too reckless to regulate but too big fail and taxpayers are forced to pay off the toxic assets they accumulate. And this is also why we need a tax on carbon — so we and our power utilities don’t become permanently addicted to cheap coal that makes for lower electricity prices today but spits out toxic greenhouse gases that have to be paid for by future generations tomorrow.
That’s what “Market to Mother Nature” accounting is all about. It begins with the premise that the distinction between the G-20 and the Copenhagen climate change negotiations is totally artificial. They are just flip sides of the same global problem — how we as a world keep raising standards of living for more and more people in ways that will not, as a byproduct, have both the Market and Mother Nature producing huge amounts of toxic assets.
The old system, which has reached its financial and environmental limits, worked like this: We built more and more stores in America to sell more and more stuff, which was made in more and more Chinese factories powered by more and more coal that earned more and more dollars to buy more and more U.S. T-bills that got recycled back to America in the form of cheap credit to build more and more stores and more and more houses that gave rise to more and more Chinese factories.
This system was a powerful engine of wealth creation and lifted millions out of poverty, but it relied upon the risks to the Market and to Mother Nature being underpriced and to profits being privatized in good times and losses socialized in bad times. This capitalist engine doesn’t need to be discarded; it needs some fixes. For starters, we need to get back to basics — accountable lending, prudent saving, reasonable leverage and, most important, more engineering of goods than just financial products.
Some of our biggest financial firms got away from their original purpose — to fund innovation and to finance the process of “creative destruction,” whereby new technologies that improve people’s lives replace old ones, said the Columbia University economist Jagdish Bhagwati, in an interview in The American Interest. Instead, he added, too many banks got involved in exotic and incomprehensible financial innovations — to simply make money out of money — which ended up as “destructive creation.”
“Destructive creation” has wounded both the Market and Mother Nature. Smart regulation and carbon taxation can heal both.
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