Going to Eugene this Summer?

Consider trying the Amtrak Cascades, a nice way to go.  

With a nice 30% fare discount running until Sep. 12

Take Amtrak Cascades to Eugene: Leave your car and save big! (PDF attached) 06/04/2014

June 4, 2014

For more information: Shelley M. Snow, ODOT Public Affairs, (503) 986-3438, mobile/text: (503) 881-5362

SALEM - The Oregon Department of Transportation is partnering with Amtrak Cascades and Lane Transit District for the ninth annual "Dump the Pump" campaign, encouraging commuters and other travelers to take an alternative to a personal car on an upcoming journey or two...or ten!

During June, if your destination, via Amtrak Cascades or POINT (Amtrak Thruway) bus, is Eugene*, then you get a free day pass for Lane Transit District (LTD). LTD provides connections in Eugene, Springfield and throughout Lane County – even up to the McKenzie River area. It just goes to show: sometimes you can get around without a car!

National "Dump the Pump Day," Thursday, June 19, is aimed at raising awareness of the financial and environmental benefits of choosing a commute option other than driving alone (use an alternate mode of transportation, and you don't have to go to the gas pump!). In addition to saving on LTD bus fares, travelers on Amtrak Cascades in the Willamette Valley may take advantage of a 30% discount running now until Sept. 12. (You must use this link to access the discount.)

"We're hoping people who haven't taken our passenger trains lately, or ever, will venture out," said Hal Gard, ODOT Rail & Public Transit Division Administrator. "We have the two new trainsets now, so we're encouraging everyone to consider the train/bus option. Give it a try – you might find you really like it."

Get the details (PDF attached) on the free day pass from LTD, and prepare to dump the pump!

##ODOT##

*Take the train or bus from Portland, Oregon City, Woodburn, Salem or Albany. For 30% off details, visit http://www.amtrak.com/save-30-percent-between-portland-and-eugene-on-amtrak-cascades. 

 

Second of Two Great Events (starting) at Straub, Sunday June 15

Subject: Two Events at Straub Environmental Center this coming weekend!
Reply-To: FSELC Upcoming Events <fselc@fselc.org>

Spring Nature Hike
Sunday, June 15th
Kingston Prairie
Meet at Straub Environmental Center to carpool
8am - 11:30am

This 52-acre Nature Conservancy Preserve southeast of Stayton is the best example of native prairie remaining in the Central Willamette Valley. Both wet and dry habitats harbor native grasses and a host of wildflowers. The hike is free and open to the public.

To register and get carpooling instructions, call John Savage at 503-399-8615 after 7p.m.

First of Two Great Events at Straub Environmental Center

Subject: Two Events at Straub Environmental Center this coming weekend!
Reply-To: FSELC Upcoming Events <fselc@fselc.org>

Citizen Science Class
Saturday, June 14th
Straub Environmental Center
12noon - 4pm
$5/person

Citizen Science is the collection and analysis of data relating to the natural world by members of the general public, typically as part of a collaborative project with professional scientists.
 
Join other community members in an opportunity to be involved in collecting authentic and meaningful data to support the preservation of species and ecosystems with our first ever Citizen Science Class at Straub Enviornmental Center!

In partnership with the City of Salem and School District employees, participants will:

• Participate in two local data collection projects – Urban Tree Inventory and Neighborhood Inventory
• Investigate a wide variety of regional and national data collection opportunities online
• Select a project to participate in
• Share the experience of data collection at an August meeting

 
Please RSVP at nichole@fselc.org or via phone at (503) 391-4145

Awesome resource for every thinker: Quandl - Find, Use and Share Numerical Data

http://www.quandl.com/about/data

THIS is what the Interwebs are for. Like a giant planet-sized reference library that you can wander through to your heart's content.

Genius.

Just because the 3rd Bridge will never happen . . .

. . . Is no reason to be sanguine about the huge wasted effort Salem is funding.  

The excellent summary explanation of Peak Oil (where oil supply, the lifeblood of industrial societies, stays flat or grows very little, despite massive increases in spending to maintain that supply) illustrates how little time we have to boost our resiliency and prepare for the unavoidable, the era when private motoring returns to being a pleasure reserves for the wealthy, the way flying is today.

Salem has sprawled in a particularly destructive way, setting itself up for real trouble, because we've acted as if the bills for that sprawl will never come due. But reality is not to be denied, and the critical reality of today is that the era of abundant wealth being pulled straight out of the ground with little or no effort is over, so we are soon to experience the wealth contraction ratchet, where all our squirming will only cause the ratchet to contract faster. 

The worst thing we can do is squander precious capital on autosprawl amenities like the Bridgasaurus Boondogglus. Spending money to try to maintain the good old days of sprawl development is like tying a cinderblock to each leg before trying to run a marathon -- not only stupid in itself, but counterproductive to the conditions we will soon be facing.

Peak Oil Revisited…
http://read.feedly.com/html?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.resilience.org%2Fstories%2F2014-06-06%2Fpeak-oil-revisited&theme=white&size=medium

In a lecture to the Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy in February of 2014 Steven Kopits, who is the Managing Director of the consultancy, Douglas Westwood explains how conventional "legacy" oil production peaked in 2005 and has not increased since. All the increase in oil production since that date has been from unconventional sources like the Alberta Tar sands, from shale oil or natural gas liquids that are a by-product of shale gas production. This is despite a massive increase in investment by the oil industry that has not yielded any increase in 'conventional oil' production but has merely served to slow what would otherwise have been a faster decline.

More specifically the total spend on upstream oil and gas exploration and production from 2005 to 2013 was $4 trillion. Of that $3.5 trillion was spent on the 'legacy' oil and gas system. This is a sum of money equal to the GDP of Germany. Despite all that investment in conventional oil production it fell by 1 million barrels a day. By way of comparison investment of $1.5 trillion between 1998 and 2005 yielded an increase in oil production of 8.6 million barrels a day.

Further to this, unfortunately for the oil industry, it has not been possible for oil prices to rise high enough to cover the increasing capital expenditure and operating costs. This is because high oil prices lead to recessionary conditions and slow or no growth in the economy. Because prices are not rising fast enough, and costs are increasing, the costs of the independent oil majors are rising at 2 to 3% a year more than their revenues. Overall profitability is falling and some oil majors have had to borrow and sell assets to pay dividends. The next stage in this crisis has then been that investment projects are being cancelled – which suggests that oil production will soon begin to fall more rapidly.

The situation can be understood by reference to the nursery story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Goldilocks tries three kinds of porridge – some that is too hot, some that is too cold and some where the temperature is somewhere in the middle and therefore just right. The working assumption of mainstream economists is that there is an oil price that is not too high to undermine economic growth but also not too low so that the oil companies could not cover their extraction costs – a price that is just right. The problem is that the Goldilocks situation no longer describes what is happening – another story provides a better metaphor – that story is 'Catch 22'. According to Kopits the vast majority of the publically quoted oil majors require oil prices of over $100 a barrel to achieve positive cash flow and nearly a half need more than $120 a barrel. But it is these oil prices that drags down the economies of the OECD economies.

For several years however there have been some countries that have been able to afford the higher prices. The countries that have coped with the high energy prices best are the so called "emerging non OECD countries" and above all China. China has been bidding away an increasing part of the oil production and continuing to grow while higher energy prices have led to stagnation in the OECD economies. (Kopits, 2014)

Now lets put that in a bigger context. In a presentation to the All party Parliamentary Group on Peak Oil and Gas Charles Hall showed a number of diagrams on slides to express the consequences of depletion and rising energy costs of energy. I have taken just two of these diagrams here – comparing 1970 with what might be the case in 2030. (Hall C. , 2012) What they show is how the economy produces different sorts of stuff – some of the production is consumer goods – either staples (essentials) or discretionary (luxury) goods. The rest of production is devoted to goods that are used in production – investment goods in the form of machinery, equipment, buildings, roads, infrastracture and their maintenance. Some of these investment goods must take the form of energy acquisition equipment. As a society runs up against energy depletion and other problems more and more production must go into energy acquisition, infrastructure and maintenance – less and less is available for consumption, and particularly for discretionary consumption.

Click on images to enlarge

Whether the economy would evolve in this way can be questioned. As we seen the increasing needs of the oil and gas sector implies a transfer of resources from elsewhere through rising prices but the rest of the economy cannot actually pay this without crashing. That is what the above diagrams show – a transfer of resources from discretionary consumption to investment in energy infrastructure. But such a transfer would be crushing for the other sectors and their decline will likely drag down the whole economy.

Over the last few years central banks have had a policy of quantitative easing to try to keep interest rates low – the economy cannot pay high energy prices AND high interest rates so, in effect, the policy has been to try to bring down interest rates as low as possible to counter the stagnation. However, this has not really created production growth – it has instead created a succession of asset price bubbles. The underlying trend continues to be one of stagnation, decline and crisis. The severity of the recessions may be variable in different countries because competitive strength in this model goes to those countries where energy is used most efficiently and which can afford to pay somewhat higher prices for energy. Such countries are likely to do better but will not escape the general decline if they stay wedded to the conventional growth model. Whatever the variability this is still a dead end model and at some point people will see that entirely different ways of thinking about economy and ecology are needed – unless they get drawn into conflicts and wars over energy by psychopathic policy idiots. There is no way out of the Catch 22 within the growth economy model. That's why de-growth is needed.

References

Hall, C. (2012, March 30th). "Peak Oil, declining EROI and the new economic realities" The All party Parliamentary Group on Peak Oil and Gas:http://www.slideshare.net/APPGOPO/energy-return-on-energy-investment/ (Slides 94 and 98)

it's the cars

Yes, the insane American diet of processed industrial phood is a huge problem. 

But it's not the only one.

We have systematically won the war against our health and the health of our children (and the future of our species) by placing the infernal combustion engine on a carriage at the center of all domestic policy, successfully eliminating from our lives nearly all exertion.

In Salem, we have turned a city that should be a bicycling and pedestrian paradise into a lethal, obesity ridden, economically devastated tract pockmarked with ugly strips of autosprawl and vast acreages and vast portions of our public budgets devoted to nothing but care, feeding, and storage of cars, thus ensuring that each household must equip itself with its own private auto transport fleet at great expense, helping perpetuate both the poverty and the ill effects on health.

A city that requires people to have a car just to take part in the normal activities of life is a city that levies a huge unrecognized tax on its residents, a crushing burden that is part of a vicious cycle, where even those who most need transit oppose it because, with a crippled system like ours, the cost of transit is on top of the cost of the private transit fleet, instead of as an efficient, lower cost replacement.

The auto era is ending, however. The only question is how much sprawl we're going to shackle ourselves to first, how much development that will crater in value when most of the cars get parked or sold for scrap.

----
Being Happy With Sugar

High-fructose corn syrup can't be a particular driver of the obesity epidemic in the U.S., Brouns says, "because obesity has grown just as quickly in countries that barely use HFCS. It is a misconception." For one example, Coca-Cola in Mexico famously contains sucrose in place of high-fructose corn syrup. "Natural" sodas at places like Whole Foods advertise that they, too, have sucrose or fruit-juice concentrate instead of HFCS. But Mexico has recently been jockeying with the United States for claim to the most obese country in the world.

Salem airport's strategy: you pay for their private plaything

http://www.statesmanjournal.com/story/news/2014/06/03/earth-strategy-airport-land-leases/9942993/

But if the airport is going to continue to be "an economic engine," as Wales calls it, airport maintenance problems will have to be addressed. And paying for repairs and upgrades is expensive.

"Like most general aviation airports, money is tight," Wales said

Day-to-day operations of the airport are paid for with revenues generated at the airport, such as land leases and fuel fees. Dollars from the Federal Aviation Administration pay for the majority of big, capital projects. The city, however, still must come up with a 10 percent local match through grants or savings.

The city that has one half-starved library and one nearly gutted one less than a mile away, and that has no transit service at all on weekends and limited service weekdays -- that same city pours millions into subsidizing the airport for the 1% to enjoy, but not pay for.

In other words, this property doesn't generate tax revenue at all, it consumes it, both local and federal -- all so the 1% can enjoy the amenities, including the millions squandered on baggage handling facilities after there was no baggage to handle.

Some "economic engine."  

Time to put out a request for bids--get the airport off welfare, put it to work: sell the operation to a private investor, let them operate it, setting the rates, and paying taxes.  The businesses out there can form a company to be the buyer and can make all the improvements they want.

Great free resource -- weekly e-letter

Great resource for Salem, a much more income diverse place than people seem to realize.

 

 

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	May 26, 2014
THIS WEEK
Thomas Piketty hasn't just produced a book. He has produced a phenomenon — and we're devoting this week's entire Too Much to his new Capital in the Twenty-First Century. How could we not? A few short months ago, after all, who would have ever imagined that a tome about inequality would be topping the bestseller lists? Or that an obscure French economist who cheerfully contemplates "confiscatory" taxes on the rich would have an audience with America's highest tax official? We did our first Too Much piece on Capital in the Twenty-First Century a month before the book's official U.S. publication. Since then, a host of commentators have chimed in, some with insight, others with nonsense. We survey below this chattering class chatter. We also offer our own take on Capital in the Twenty-First Century as well as a reader's guide that can help you dig as deep into the Piketty perspective as you have the curiosity — and the time — to go. So welcome to Thomas Piketty's world. May our own come to share his vision.	About Too Much, a project of the Institute for Policy Studies Program on Inequality and the Common Good Subscribe to Too Much Inequality.Org Join us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter
GREED AT A GLANCE
You don't have to turn too many Capital in the Twenty-First Century pages to come across a fascinating instance of greed and grasping, past or present. The past in these pages stretches back to the let-them-eat-cake days before the French Revolution. Years after that Revolution in 1825, author Thomas Piketty relates, officials in Paris incurred a huge public debt to finance what became known as the "émigrés billion," the fortune in francs paid to aristocrats who had fled revolutionary France "to compensate them for the rather limited redistribution of land that took place in their absence." The French government continued borrowing to enrich the rich throughout the rest of the nineteenth century. By the twentieth century, interest on that debt amounted to over 2 percent of national income, more than France was spending on education . . . Capital in the Twenty-First Century also goes exploring the wealth scene in the nineteenth-century United States. Men, women, and children held in slavery, Piketty details, made up 40 percent of the population of America's South in 1860, and the wealth these slaves represented — for slave owners — roughly equaled the entire total value of U.S. farmland. In fact, Piketty adds, the value of Southern capital by 1860 amounted to nearly as much as the then "total value of capital in Britain and France." In the South, observes Piketty, "we find a world where inequalities of ownership took the most extreme and violent form possible, since one half of the population owned the other half." We can choose to track the concentration of our modern world's wealth, points out Capital in the Twenty-First Century, by counting the billionaires among us. We had five billionaires per 100 million adults in 1987, 30 in 2013. But a more helpful yardstick, Thomas Piketty suggests, might be the wealth owned by a fixed percentage of the world's population, "say the richest twenty-millionth of the adult population of the planet," about 150 of 3 billion adults in the late 1980s and 225 of 4.5 billion today. These uber rich averaged $1.5 billion each in 1987 — and nearly $15 billion in 2013. After inflation, these deep pockets have upped their net worth annually by an average 6.4 percent over the last three decades.	Quotable "If you'd like to live in Downton Abbey, the good news is that our economy has entered a second Gilded Age of opulence and elegance. The bad news is that you'll likely end up among the vast majority stuck sweating in the kitchen." Bernard Condon, Josh Boak, and Christopher Rugaber, A French Economist's Grim View of the Wealth Gap, AP "The oligarchs of tomorrow are likely to have names like Walton, Zuckerberg, Soros, Adelson, Trump, and Koch, even if they never work a day in their lives." Chuck Collins, Derailing the Dynasty Train, OtherWords
PETULANT PLUTOCRAT OF THE WEEK
Thomas Piketty's warnings against letting our world sink under the domination of inherited wealth seem to have hit too close to home for Pierre "Pete" du Pont IV. The 79-year-old former governor of Delaware hails from one of America's oldest wealth dynasties, and the hubbub around Capital in the Twenty-First Century has him seriously out of joint. We have too many "smart and talented people," du Pont railed last month, who "spend their time and energy fulminating about things that don't really matter" — like the wealth of the wealthy. Added the former GOP Presidential candidate and leading light of a family worth over $15 billion: "America is a great nation. We should not be surprised or troubled that some of its citizens are wealthy."	Like Too Much? Email this issue to a friend
IMAGES OF INEQUALITY
All the numbers in Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century boil down in the end to a century-long "U." The top 1 and top 10 percent shares of income and wealth waxed high at the beginning of the twentieth century, dropped substantially in the middle, and have come roaring back up over recent decades. Piketty recently traced this distributional "U" at a presentation in London.	Web Gem Paris School of Economics/ The academic home base of Thomas Piketty has thoughtfully devoted a sizable amount of its online real estate to everything Capital in the Twenty-First Century-related. You can find here all the book's figures and tables — and spreadsheets with all Piketty's basic stats.
PROGRESS AND PROMISE
A Global Wealth Tax? Let's Show Some Love The top complaint against Capital in the Twenty-First Century? Author Piketty, critics charge, offers up only a single solution — and an impractical one at that. Piketty's "policy proposal — a global tax on wealth — has no chance of happening," the New Republic opines in a typical comment. "Why describe such a serious problem and then offer such an un-serious solution?" Another analyst deadpans that Piketty's global wealth tax belongs on a "fantasy shelf." But all this dissing of a global tax on wealth does Piketty's thought a distinct disservice — on two counts. The first: Capital in the Twenty-First Century does not advance just one solution. Piketty places his annual global wealth tax in the context of what he sees as a broader rejuvenation of progressive taxation. He urges much higher top marginal rates on income — up to 80 percent on income in the top brackets, about double the current U.S. top rate — and a stronger estate tax to prevent the passing on of immense private fortunes from one generation to another. Capital in the Twenty-First Century also recognizes the equalizing impact of what Piketty calls the "social state," the public policies and institutions "put in place to regulate the relationship between capital and labor." The second reason the dissing of Piketty on the wealth tax rates as piling on: Every major brake on wealth's concentration, down though the years, has come across initially as wildly impractical. In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Piketty acknowledges the utopian feel of his global wealth tax proposal, but then goes on to lay out a step-by-step process for moving a global wealth tax forward in a politically practical fashion. The global wealth tax Piketty proposes would yearly subject net worth over 1 million euros, about $1.37 million, to a set of escalating tax rates that would range from 1 percent on wealth between 1 and 5 million euros to as much as 10 percent on fortunes of "several hundred million or several billion euros." The "global" aspect of the tax, Piketty argues, could grow over time from national and regional arrangements. "International coordination to restrict capital movement is already happening in certain places," This Week analyst Ryan Cooper noted earlier this month. "A similar effort to tax wealth wouldn't be all that different."	Quotable "In the United States, Piketty shows, the incomes of the top 1 percent have grown so high — chiefly due to the linkage of top executive pay to share value, a form of capital — that they soon will create the greatest level of income inequality in the recorded history of any nation." Harold Meyerson, How capitalism enriches the few rather than the many, Washington Post "There are two ways to change a society: from the bottom and from the top. Occupy Wall Street tried it the first way and paved the road with populism. Thomas Piketty is going for the second way. He has roiled the pundit classes." Heidi Moore, Thomas Piketty is a rock-star economist, Guardian "Understanding how the elite become what they are, and how their wealth perpetuates itself, is now a hot topic of scientific inquiry." Mike Konczal, Studying the Rich: Thomas Piketty and his Critics, Boston Review "Piketty has brought to the fore the empirical fact that income inequality calcifies into wealth inequality." Heather Boushey, I Like Jane Austen's Novels, Huffington Post
inequality by the numbers
	Stat of the Week Our planet held about 7 billion people in 2012, notes Capital in the Twenty-First Century, and generated enough economic output to provide a $1,035 monthly income for every person on Earth, had the income from that output been divided equally.
IN FOCUS
All Hail Piketty, But Props for Pickett, Too A bold new egalitarian take on our modern economy from France joins a powerful rendering of inequality's toll — on our daily lives — from the UK. Blend the two into our politics and watch plutocracy start shaking. What makes the new book from French economist Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, so important? A number of commentators have recoiled from that question. They've chosen instead to grumble about the enormous hype around the book — and pound out pieces that trumpet out some variant of "Piketty has got it wrong." These pieces do have their place. Indeed, author Piketty opens and ends his epic tale of wealth's ebb and flow stressing the limits of what he has to say. His sources, he notes, "remain imperfect and incomplete." His conclusions — "by nature tenuous" — "deserve to be questioned and debated." But make no mistake. This book has fundamentally changed our global discourse over inequality. We have been contemplating for years now how deeply unequal we've become. Capital in the Twenty-First Century has shifted our gaze to the future, to how terrifyingly unequal we may soon be.   We have "no natural, spontaneous process," as Piketty notes, that can "prevent destabilizing, inegalitarian forces from prevailing permanently." Yet nothing in our political and economic life, he also reminds us, comes to us "foreordained." We can shape our future. We just have to start soon, or else resign ourselves to the restoration of "patrimonial capitalism," an economic order where inherited wealth dominates, distorts, and destroys any hopes for real democracy — or even basic decency. Capital in the Twenty-First Century actually represents Thomas Piketty's second major contribution to our global inequality discourse.   About a dozen years ago, Piketty and fellow French economist Emmanuel Saez, now at the University of California at Berkeley, began revolutionizing how we track — and think about — income distribution. Up until then, researchers had largely depended on government household surveys for most all of our income stats. These surveys generated an abundance of useful data about the low- and middle-income households that make up the vast bulk of our developed world's populations, but collected next to zilch of statistical value from society's highest-income households. The result: We ended up with analyses of income distribution that typically clumped households into broad "quintiles" or "deciles." Studies based on these stats seldom did more than compare the incomes of the bottom fifth or tenth of a nation's households with the middle and top fifths and tenths. Piketty, Saez, and their colleagues upset this applecart. They dove into tax return data and assembled, first for France and then for the United States and other nations, detailed data series that traced the evolution of incomes at — and even within — the top 1 percent of households. In 2011, the Occupy movement would shove this top 1 percent data onto our political center stage, and pols and pundits would soon be acknowledging the vast gap between the top 1 percent and everyone else. Piketty's pioneering research helped ease all this new awareness out of the public policy shadows. With his blockbuster new book, Piketty is taking us another giant step forward. Capital in the Twenty-First Century places contemporary income concentration in over two centuries worth of historical context, primarily zeroing in on France, Britain, and the United States since the late 18th century. Intense levels of income and wealth concentration, Piketty's broad sweep reveals quite strikingly, have defined our industrial world for generations. The only exception: the decades of the mid twentieth century, a relatively brief interlude when the richest 1 percent's share of society's income and wealth dropped substantially in both Europe and the United States. During these mid-century years, the return on capital — the dividends, rents, interest, and capital gains people of means rake in off the assets they own — did not follow basic historical norms. Economies in the mid twentieth century grew more quickly than the wealth of the rich. Societies became more equal. What explains this equalizing? The twentieth century's incredibly disruptive world wars, Piketty argues, opened a unique window for egalitarian shifts in tax and other public policies.  But the mid-twentieth century, Piketty argues, represents a special case, and he spends a major portion of his Capital in the Twenty-First Century endeavoring to show why. His central theme: The rate of return from capital will generally tend to outpace economic growth, a relationship Piketty reduces to the formula r > g. In plainer terms: "Wealth accumulated in the past grows more rapidly than output and wages." Inevitably, writes Piketty, the entrepreneur "tends to become a rentier, more and more dominant over those who own nothing but their labor." Eventually, "the past devours the future." Serious reviewers have differed over how convincing a case Piketty makes for his "r > g" formula. Much more convincing: Piketty's demolition job on mainstream economics and the political fairy-tales our top politicians tell about our economic system, most notably the notion that the free market, left to its own devices, will distribute "the fruits of economic progress among all people." Piketty, adds economist Paul Krugman, crumbles "that most cherished of conservative myths, the insistence that we're living in a meritocracy in which great wealth is earned and deserved." The historic data Piketty so impressively marshals, the anecdotal evidence he brings to bear from the historical record and even from literature, all make clear that capitalism has a powerful tilt toward the top, an underlying tendency to rather ferociously concentrate income and wealth. And where will this concentration, if we let it continue, lead us? Increasingly inherited wealth, Piketty writes, will confront us with an extreme concentration of capital "potentially incompatible with the meritocratic values and principles of social justice fundamental to modern democratic societies." But we face other threats as well from extreme inequality, threats that sour our daily lives on any number of fronts, from the trust we have in each other to our physical and mental health. Capital in the Twenty-First Century doesn't go into these threats.  Another landmark book on inequality does. That book — The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better — appeared five years ago, first in the UK and then around the world. Spirit Level editions have appeared since then in two dozen nations and sold, in English alone, well over 150,000 copies, a monster total, at least before Capital in the Twenty-First Century, for a serious book in the social sciences. Like Thomas Piketty, Spirit Level co-authors Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have marshaled vast arrays of data. These two epidemiologists — scientists who study the health of populations — have identified nearly every social problem where reliable statistics let us compare how well or poorly the major nations of the developed world are delivering a decent quality of life. In which developed nations, Wilkinson and Pickett ask, do people live the longest? What nations show the highest levels of obesity? Where do people born at the bottom have the best shot at climbing up? Which nations send the most people to prison? Have the most teenage moms? Tally the most homicides? People in some developed nations, the Spirit Level documents, can be anywhere from three to ten times more likely than people in other developed nations to be obese or get murdered, to mistrust others or have a pregnant teen daughter, to become a drug addict or escape from poverty. And the nations that do the best, on yardstick after yardstick, all turn out to share one basic trait. They all share their wealth. "If you want to know why one country does better or worse than another," as Wilkinson and Pickett note, "the first thing to look at is the extent of inequality." The United States, the developed world's most unequal major nation, ranks at or near the bottom on every quality-of-life indicator that Wilkinson and Pickett examine. Portugal and the UK, nations with levels of inequality that rival the United States, rank near that same bottom. People in more equal societies simply live longer, healthier, and happier lives than people in more unequal societies. And not just poor people in these societies, Wilkinson and Pickett emphasize, but all people. All people, in other words, have a personal vested interest in preventing the frightfully unequal future Thomas Piketty has put before us. Successfully sharing this understanding, widely and broadly in the political arena, may be our best hope at forging a twenty-first century where that future never takes place.	New Wisdom on Wealth A selection that highlights some of the more telling reflections on Capital in the Twenty-First Century From Academe Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, A Tocqueville for Today, American Prospect, March 10, 2014. Two political scientists note that Piketty has little to say about "the kind of political movement necessary for a fairer future." Emily Eakin, Capital Man, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 17, 2014. The best positioning of Piketty and his thinking's evolution. Robert Solow, Thomas Piketty Is Right, New Republic, April 22, 2014. Exploring the "rich-get-richer dynamic." From the Business Press Gillian Tett, Lessons from a rock-star economist, Financial Times, April 25, 2014. Musings on why Piketty's Capital has received such a bountifully positive reception. From Beyond the Beltway Jay Bookman, On Piketty, capitalism, and increasing inequality, Atlanta Journal Constitution, April 28, 2014. The Jefferson connection. From the Left Doug Henwood, The Top of the World, BookForum, March 25, 2014. Piketty helps us see how wealth concentrates in capitalist economies. Mark Weisbrot, Piketty in Washington, Common Dreams, April 16, 2014. Following Piketty — and the debate that surrounds him — around for a day. Robert Kuttner, What Piketty Leaves Out, American Prospect, April 30, 2014. If we want less inequality, we need to understand the institutions and politics that once undergirded our equality. Thomas Frank, Capital destroys right-wing lies, but there's one solution it forgets, Salon, May 11, 2014. Piketty's blind spot? He has virtually nothing to say about labor unions. David Harvey, Taking on 'Capital' without Marx, In These Times, May 20, 2014. An analysis from one of the world's top Marxist thinkers. James Galbraith, Kapital for the Twenty-First Century? Dissent, Spring 2014. An unsparing critique. From the Right Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, The Conservative Case For Thomas Piketty, Forbes, April 24, 2014. Bring on a capital tax. Joshua Hendrickson, Unequal to the Task, National Review, May 5, 2014. This University of Mississippi economist acknowledges "the sheer volume" of the data Piketty has compiled as a "significant contribution." William Watson, What Thomas Piketty gets right, Financial Post, May 16, 2014. A conservative claims Piketty as a fellow crank. Mervyn King, The Tenuous Case Against Capitalism, Business Day, May 18, 2014. A central banker says we should worry that greater income inequality might be transmitted to succeeding generations From Analysts of the Right Kathleen Geier, What Piketty's Conservative Critics Get Wrong, Baffler, April 28, 2014. A sweeping rundown. Jared Bernstein, Piketty's Arguments Still Hold Up, After Taxes, New York Times, May 9, 2014. A look at the conservatives attack on Piketty's statistics. From Abroad David Priestland,  Are we at a Piketty tipping point for the left? Guardian, May 7, 2014. We're not living in 1945 anymore. Saliem Fakir, The Relevance of Thomas Piketty for South Africa, All Africa, May 14, 2014. Piketty is bringing our focus back to how super wealthy elites earn their money and what they do with it. From the Light Side Robert Shrimsley, The nine stages of the Piketty bubble, Financial Times, April 30, 2014.
NEW AND notable
Thomas Piketty's Capital: A Reader's Guide Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014. The thought of tackling a 685-page book a little intimidating for you? Cheer up. Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century actually only runs 577 pages in text. You can skip the footnotes. You can, truth be told, skip the whole book and still dip your toe deep into the Piketty waters. The online world is bustling with resources that can help you get a really solid sense of what Capital in the Twenty-First Century has to offer. And all these online resources also make for a great orientations should you choose to actually read the entire book. So where do you start? Some thoughts. Read an online primer. Matthew Yglesias at Vox has put together one of the best. His Short Guide to Capital in the Twenty-First Century revolves around 14 questions that range from the most elemental ("What is capital?") to the interestingly edgy ("Does this have anything to do with Karl Marx's Das Kapital?"). Steve Pressman at the Boston-based Dollars & Sense has taken a different approach. This progressive economist has been blogging about Piketty's Capital as he makes his way through the book — and the excitement around it. You can start with his intro or skip right into his reading travelogue. Watch a quick video. BBC Newsnight has prepared this sprightly three-minute introduction to Piketty's most basic points. You'll enjoy it, whether or not you ever intend to open the book. Piketty's publisher, the Harvard University Press, offers a more traditional, but equally brief, "talking head" video prologue. Watch Piketty discuss his thesis. In New York last month, Piketty talked about his book on a City University of New York panel that included three of inequality's most honored critics within the economics profession. The video runs over an hour and a half. Don't freak. If you have a free evening, watching this won't waste it. Looking for a bit more manageable time-frame? This Chris Hayes MSNBC one-on-one discussion with Piketty runs only a half-hour. Read interviews with Piketty. PBS economics correspondent Paul Salmon conducted a particularly lucid interview with Piketty earlier this month, and this New York Times write-up of a chat with him offers the most personal background on the French economist. A useful interview with the British journal Juncture has Piketty grappling directly with many of the points his progressive critics raise. For more on the Piketty basics, try this Real News Network dialogue. We've also seen some riveting interviews about Piketty, most notably this Bill Moyers discussion. Check out the reviews. The Century Foundation is hosting one list of major Capital in the Twenty-First Century reflections. Try reading as many as you can before you tackle the book. They won't spoil the ending.	Enjoy Too Much? Email this issue to a friend who might like Too Much, too   How did the grand fortunes of the early 20th century shrink down to democratic size by the middle? Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century doesn't go into the details. Too Much editor Sam Pizzigati's new book does. Learn more about it.
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Too Much, an online weekly publication of the Institute for Policy Studies | 1112 16th Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20036 | (202) 234-9382 | Editor: Sam Pizzigati. | E-mail: editor@toomuchonline.org |	Subscribe to Too Much Forward to a Friend