Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You

Health Care and the Architecture of Choice

This week President Obama signed into law the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and in doing so brought to fruition a process of seemingly unending, intense debate. Health care reform is, without question, an enormous and sensitive undertaking. Making it over this latest hurdle inspires reflection on the compromises that allow such a complex process to move forward. The full import of representative democracy can be disputed but the epic effect of this particular vote, a "Yes" comprised of myriad smaller decisions and deliberations, cannot. And despite the gravity of this decision these individual members of Congress necessarily use the all same tools everyone uses in making choices of all sorts. The latest science regarding the interplay of emotion and intellect in decision making does not suggest that one should be the master of the other. Rather, a more integrated approach is recommended which can improve both policy making and the choices allowed by those systems we put in place.

The authors of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, practice what they preach. In fact, Thaler and his frequent collaborator Shlomo Benartzi developed Save More Tomorrow, a popular savings program closely associated with asymmetrical paternalism. Asymmetrical paternalism is a movement informed by the newest research into how people make decisions and Nudge is dedicated to spreading these insights. Nudge asks, "How can we best use choice architecture to help people recognize healthy, beneficial choices without diminishing their freedom?" Certainly, this is a very useful consideration for policy makers to make. Documenting specific examples of the ways that intellect and emotion cooperate and clash in contributing to such phenomenon as the spot light effect and the planning fallacy, Thaler and Sunstein explore psychological territory of interest to both public policy makers and individuals rerouting their own lives.

Jonah Lehrer's How We Decide references the sorts of nudges associated with asymmetrical paternalism within the larger context of exploring the biological underpinnings of how/why we make the decisions we do. Fascinating examples documented, in a style that may remind you of Oliver Sacks, include the tale of Ann Klivestaver who lost hundreds of thousands of dollars to a gambling problem caused entirely by medication taken to combat Parkinson's and Wag Dodge's spontaneous decision to burn a patch of grass around himself, creating a buffer of burned out vegetation as a forest fire raged toward him at rate he could never out run. How We Decide documents the successes and failures of rational and intuitive decision making and proposes a powerful blend of the two in which individuals use metacognition (thinking about thinking/feeling) in acknowledging the weaknesses and strengths of both approaches.

Some of the most excruciating choices that we make happen in the market place. So how can we make ourselves better, more informed consumers using these latest revelations about how we choose? Michael Shermer's Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics provides some insight in its examination of how our natural inclinations often fail us. Shermer explores evolutionary implications in decision making on the individual scale as well as in the larger, global sense. Mind of the Market supplies many practical observations that are useful in avoiding seductive pitches on the sales floor and elsewhere in life. Thoughtful descriptions of tendencies such as availability and representative fallacies make Mind of the Market a worthwhile read in terms of creating a personal and positive choice architecture even if applying those same concepts on a macro scale is ambitious and possibly questionable.

Though the reality we experience is the result of countless choices made by and around us, ultimately we are responsible only for those decisions we personally make. It is encouraging to learn that those decisions are best made by consulting all the aspects that make us who we are (not rational thought alone) and that these resources could be aggregated by policy makers in making major decisions and, in turn, providing sensible options for all.

Season of Giving

Last week the Christian Science Monitor reported that even during our current economic crisis, folks are giving to those in need. For many of us, this is what the holiday season is all about, being generous and compassionate with our fellow human beings. And even though we may not have a lot to give, anything helps.  Plus, we never know when it might be us who needs the helping hand. One particular issue this article focused on is food insecurity here in the United States. Did you know that in 2008, 49.1 million people lived in food-insecure households, including 16.7 million children? This is according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, click here for more of the USDA's information on "Food Security in the United States". But no matter what the need, I wanted to highlight this article in the hopes of inspiring a season of giving for all of 2010. Let's start the new year off right!

For information on how to make even the smallest donation count, please take a look at Wendy Smith's Give a Little. This book is chock-full of information on a variety of charities, and the ways in which they help people throughout the world.  It also includes heart-warming stories from the people on the receiving end.  Smith makes clear that even a $10 or $20 donation can really help a person in need.  And with so many worthy causes, Give a Little is valuable for the person who knows they want to give, but doesn't know where to start.  Smith does an excellent job showing how just a few dollars can cause a ripple effect that "lifts a whole family, a town, and, astonishingly, even a nation of out poverty."

A similar philanthropic how-to is Town & Country: the Guide to Intelligent Giving by Joanna L. Krotz.  Again, this book includes personal and inspiring stories of people making a difference, and also gives advice on how best to donate money or time to make the most impact, no matter what your financial status.  There is a helpful chapter on examining the things that are important to you in order to find your cause, for "the world and its communities are overflowing with need."  Krotz also offers numerous resources at the back of her book to help you create your own "giving plan".  This book is full of facts, tips and moving accounts of people's generosity.    

Lastly, and again in the hopes of inspiring, Frans De Waal, renowned author and Professor of Psychology at Emory University has written a very interesting book that argues humans and animals are "hard-wired" to express empathy.  So often we hear of the selfish acts of our fellow human beings, just look at the actions leading up to our recent economic bust.  But in The Age of Empathy, De Wall believes there is a behavioral "glue" in primate societies that includes empathy, sympathy, a sense of fair play, and trust.  De Waal refers to this as the "fellow feeling" and goes so far as to quote Adam Smith (who some refer to as the founding father of capitalism) from his own Theory of Moral Sentiments:

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.

De Waal uses insight and humor to compare human behavior to that of our animal friends and in doing so, makes us all feel a bit more human...and hopeful.

Now go forth and make the world a better place and happy 2010!

Car Crazy

General Motor's bankruptcy filing this Monday is all over the news – one element that's been widely reported locally is the closure of 40% of the company's dealership franchises throughout the U.S., including many in Oregon. I don't know why I never stopped to think about it before, but it was news to me that car dealerships are often franchises, rather than fully independent local businesses. So of course, I turned to the library's amazing collection to see if I could learn more about the history of selling cars in the U.S., and I found a great book that got me started on a trajectory of reading about the automobile industry, the impact of cars on cities, and more. Read on if you'd like to share this journey with me!

I started with the pictorial celebration and history of the American way of selling cars in Robert Genat's The American Car Dealership. Genat starts out with a brief history of the automobile business, explaining the rise and fall of the many small car manufacturers in the early 20th century, the eventual rise of the "Big Three," and the methods all of them used to get their product from the assembly line into the hands of American drivers. He also discusses the architecture of car dealerships, promotional strategies they employed, the art of car salesmanship, the used car business, and the role of dealers' parts and service departments. There are fascinating historic photos to illustrate this narrative on every single page.

Obviously cars themselves have completely changed the American landscape. The next book I turned to was Down the Asphalt Path, Clay McShane's history of the rise of the automobile and the development of 20th century cities and suburbs. In a way, it's more a history of roads than it is a history of cars – McShane sets the stage with a history of urban travel before the arrival of streetcars, then discusses the development of large streetcar networks and their attendant streetcar suburbs, then examines various uses of urban streets in recent history. After providing all this context, he examines how the technology for building smoother roads developed, and explains how Americans began to view streets as arteries for transport rather than open public spaces for socializing and providing fresh air and light in crowded cities. Down the Asphalt Path is a serious intellectual work, but it's also an engaging story tracing the changes in American streets (which, after all, cover a pretty significant portion of the land in our cities!).

My personal experience has been that the different kinds of cars on the road is part of what makes different places special. For example, I lived on the east coast for a few years, and it really made me nostalgic for Oregon, where classic cars are fairly common – because in the east, all you see is late model stuff. Another thing we've got a lot of here on the west coast is art cars. You've probably seen one or two around town, but if you want a real eyeful, take a peek at Harrod Blank's photo book Art Cars. It's a hundred and forty pages of amazing, one-of-a-kind cars. Seriously, these cars are incredible! One is completely covered in beer cans, another in cigarette butts, another in Pez dispensers. World-famous telekinetic Uri Geller is pictured with his car, which is, you guessed it, covered in bent spoons and forks. There's no way I could describe all the fabulous cars in this book, you'll have to check it out yourself!

But perhaps you want to create your own auto-related tangent? More power to you! If you want to leaf through some beautiful pictures of classic cars, learn about how cars have influenced and shaped society, or read about the history of car design or of the the auto industry, the library can totally help you out with that too! Or, of course, you can always ask a friendly librarian to help steer you towards the car book, article, DVD, or website that's just right for you.

Will Shopping Save Us?

In times of economic trouble, there are always innumerable news stories about the rate at which we're buying stuff, surveys asking us how we feel about the strength of the market, and how that's affecting all the mysterious ways and means of The Economy. In the U.S., consumer spending is a pretty big slice of economic activity generally, so pundits argue that shopping may well be the thing that will save us. Reports last week that consumer confidence is up, and personal income and spending are steady are seen by some experts as an indication that the economy may be poised for a recovery. We're shopping and we feel good about shopping.

I find this connection between our personal spending activities and the overall health of the economy interesting, since there is so much written about how consumerism is damaging interpersonal connections and community vitality, encouraging obesity, endangering our personal privacy, and weighing us down with personal debt. Andrew Szasz takes an interesting angle on the subject of how rampant consumerism hurts us: his book Shopping Our Way to Safety examines the growing trend in "green" and "natural" products. Are they effective tools for nurturing natural ecosystems and making our homes safer? Do they shield us from having to address the real environmental problems we are facing? Szasz argues that buying greener products won't do it; to obtain true safety, we have to act together to create substantive environmental reform that addresses the root causes of environmental troubles.

Kate Bingaman-Burt is an artist whose work focuses on personal consumption. Her zine What Did You Buy Today? chronicles her own daily purchases. Each zine represents a month of buying things. For each day in the month, Bingaman-Burt has drawn a portrait of one of her purchases, and explained its purpose and how much it set her back. From headphones to groceries to craft supplies to utility bills, What Did You Buy Today? is filled with beautiful, charming drawings and descriptions that engage readers, and may even encourage some to examine their own personal consumption patterns. (Bingaman-Burt also publishes her daily consumption drawings on her blog, though I'd recommend looking at them in zine format for a truly rich and contemplative experience!)

But what if you're so poor you have very little opportunity to engage in consumerism? Stephen Pimpare's A People's History of Poverty in America looks at different aspects of our lives – sleeping, eating, working, family life, cultural engagement, political activity, and our desire for personal dignity and respect, among other things – from the point of view of people who are living with severely limited economic resources. It's an interesting set of questions to consider at a moment when our entire culture – not just big corporations and big advertisers – is entreating us to shop in order to salvage the world economy.

Hard Times

One thing the economic downturn has done is inspire people to be creative about saving money. Cooking at home, trading or bartering goods and services, and learning new practical skills are all on our minds right now. I don't want to draw too sharp of a comparison between our current predicament and the Great Depression of the 1930s, but the library has been getting some new books that give us a window into daily life during that period, and, well, I gotta share some of them with you!

If you want a feel for what life was like in some other place and time, a book of documentary photographs is a darned good place to start. Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field brings together a collection of photographs from Lange's 1939 trips to photograph regular people who were hard hit by the Depression in California, the Pacific Northwest, and North Carolina. The photographs, which are published here for the first time, include portraits, landscapes, and scenes of communities, and many are truly stunning.  Author Anne Whiston Spirn's history of Lange's work as a photographer for the Farm Security Administration is also fascinating.

The Great Depression was great in many senses – one was that it affected people all over the globe. Australians were seriously hard hit, and as unemployment rose and consumer spending dropped, many people faced eviction and homelessness. Iain MacIntyre's brief, beautifully made zine Lock out the Landlords chronicles the history of the Australian eviction resistance movement, illustrated with historic photographs and brief excerpts from contemporary newspaper reports on housing-related grassroots activism.

Back here in Oregon, Elaine Dahl Rohse's Depression-era childhood was spent on a cattle ranch near Monument, in Grant County. Her memoir Poverty Wasn't Painful recalls those years with humor and good grace about the difficulties of the era. Rohse started her writing career as a newspaper journalist, and her short, breezy chapters read like a newspaper column – interesting, opinionated, and friendly – and she discusses a wide-ranging array of topics: playing high school basketball; huckleberry picking; the daily chore of washing dishes; her mom's careful husbanding of bacon fat; and many, many more.

To Consume or Not to Consume?

We're in troubled times for consumerism. On the one hand, we have people telling us to buy less, buy green, and to recycle what we've bought once we're done with it. On the other hand, we've got people from the government, supposedly very smart people, telling us to buy more, spend rather than save, and consume to get America back on track. I'm starting to feel like the fate of the whole economy depends on which kind of laundry detergent I buy. I'd rather not have that pressure. One thing is becoming clear, though: our love for the shopping mall is growing cold. The New York Times investigates the economic fate of the Mall of America and malls in general, but also tells the stories of the shoppers and retailers in this center of the American Dream.

The story of the American mall as we know it today actually begins with an Austrian architect. Victor Gruen fled the Nazis in 1938 and quickly established himself in the United States. His original vision for the suburban mall was as a center of community, though he later joined the criticism of his own work as creating urban sprawl. Jeffrey M. Hardwick's Mall Maker : Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream outlines the motivations of the man and delves into his most famous projects' influence on American society.

For a breezy, fact-filled waltz through our love affair with all things shopping--bargain-hunting, the Home Shopping Network, and the market stalls of Ancient Greece, to name a few--join Pamela Klaffke on her Spree: A Cultural History of Shopping. This factoid-filled book provides short takes on the history of shopping. The only heavy lifting required will be your shopping bags. If the economy sours even further, this book might serve as an artifact to share how lightly we used to view consumption in the late 20th Century.

For those of you ready to make a shift to a less object-focused material lifestyle (let me know how it goes), Jane Hammerslough explores why Americans are so attached to our posessions in Dematerializing: Taming the Power of Possessions. You could find a better guide for living simply or taking steps to live more sustainably, but Hammerslough's book focuses on decoding the meanings we ascribe to objects as a culture and deciding as individuals what truly is valuable and important to us. She takes a personal approach without telling us what to do and reminds us to be thankful for what we have in the richest--still--country in the world.

Great Depression Film Festival

People are really talking about our current economic downturn. We're talking about it amongst our friends and family and coworkers, people discuss it on the bus, and it's an agenda item in meetings of community organizations and businesses alike. And it's in the news – so much so, in fact, that many news websites have special sections devoted to the economic crisis, including the Christian Science Monitor and the New York Times.  Like a lot of people, I've been drawing some parallels between what's happening now and the Great Depression my grandparents lived through 75 years ago. What was life like then, for regular average Americans? What happened when the bottom fell out of a town's main industry, when young people couldn't find any work at all, or when economic pressures caused families to disintegrate? Maybe the best place to find out is at the movies!

There are some films about the Great Depression, like Bonnie and Clyde, The Color Purple, The Grapes of Wrath, and Cradle Will Rock, which are perennially popular, and if you want to get them from the library, you'll have to wait in line. But there are others, great films that can give you a little perspective on what the great depression of the 1930s was like without having to get on a long waiting list. Here are a few that I like – all of them have loftier themes than mere economic woes, but each film has a setting that's richly evocative of the social challenges of the Great Depression: the prevalence of crime; the extreme shortage of honest, steady work; the temptations of drink and drugs; and many other details of daily life are important elements of all three stories.

The first little gem I'd like to share is the rather scandalous 1931 film Night Nurse. The film begins as Lora Hart (Barbara Stanwyck) manipulates the rules to get a position as a student in a nursing program at a local hospital. The story follows her through her training and to her first job, caring for two sick children whose mother is a drunken, partying socialite. Lora herself is no beacon of moral upstandingness, but her commitment to her profession is sincere and she finds it tested when she begins to realize that she is the only person in her employers wild, boozy household who has any genuine concern for the two children's welfare. (The library's copy of Night Nurse is part of the Forbidden Hollywood Collection, and comes packaged with several other racy early 1930s films.)

For those of you who like a film that exposes the seamy underbelly of life, without being too desperate or tragic, Paper Moon is just the ticket. Con man Moses Pray (Ryan O'Neal) has agreed to deliver recently-orphaned Addie Loggins (Tatum O'Neal) to her aunt's care, but their interest in their destination wanes after Addie becomes a partner in Moses's confidence schemes. Eventually they tangle with a bootlegger who turns out to have powerful connections, and Moses has to figure out how to run from the law without compromising Addie's safety.

But if you crave adventure, daring deeds, and excitement, I'd recommend O Brother, Where Art Thou? Three escaped convicts set out after $1.2 million dollars that one of them, Everett (George Clooney), claims to have stolen and set by before he went to prison – but they're in a hurry because the treasure will be buried under a lake that's about to be created when a new hydroelectric project is brought on line. At the same time, Everett is trying to get back to his wife and family. Along the way they record a hit country song, help rob a bank, and stumble on a meeting of the local Ku Klux Klan, and, well I can't even begin to enumerate all the trouble they get in!

The American Way of Debt

In some ways, I am an atypical American when it comes to money: I didn't have a credit card until I was 30, I started saving for retirement in my mid-twenties, and I have never taken out a consumer loan to pay for a car or appliance. In one way, I am completely typical: my balance sheet is in the red. I owe more in student loans than I have in all of my cash and retirement accounts combined. Over the last decade, the average American household debt has ballooned to over $100,000 and annual household savings has declined to under $400 in 2008. This and other scary facts are made startlingly clear in a recent New York Times series called The Debt Trap.

If there were an award-granting institution that gave an award for spot-on predictions, 2006's In Debt We Trust: America Before the Bubble Bursts would take the top prize. Filmmaker and author Danny Schechter starts the film by talking about his own debts and then trains his investigative eye on the credit card industry, the major financial institutions, and mortgage lenders. No predatory lending practice is free from his scorn. He talks to bankruptcy lawyers, think tank experts and economists to back up his claim that The United States is heading for a major financial collapse due to the over-extension of the credit and mortgage markets. A feeling of deja vu crept over me as I watched. What was true for a small number of Americans back in 2005 has become a grim reality for millions in 2009.

When I think about my grandparents, I marvel at how young they were when they started their families and built or bought houses. Very few of my friends started breeding before the age of 25 and most of the people I know don't own houses, and we're generally in our thirties. I've often wondered why. Personal choice? Not wanting to be tied down? Selfish career-obsessed behavior? Maybe not. It turns out that today's young and early-middle aged adults have less money than their counterparts of generations past. We earn less and our dollar has to stretch further. Tamara Draut is an expert on this squeeze and was interviewed for the film In Debt We Trust. Her book Strapped: Why America's 20 and 30 Somethings Can't Get Ahead details this problem and lays the blame partially on rising college tuition costs and the outsize student loans people have taken out to pay them.

One complaint about today's 20 and 30-somethings is that their expectations of what an adult, middle class lifestyle should look like are too high. People of my generation just don't know how to make the tough choices and sacrifice (though I would argue on my own behalf that not owning a car is a major sacrifice). The Economides family knows a thing or two about tough choices. Steve and Annette Economides and their seven kids, aka America's Cheapest Family, live on about $44,000 per year. The family scouts bargains wherever they go and they have tips to share on a range of topics, including budgeting, grocery shopping, planning budget vacations, and teaching kids about money. Though I'm sure they're pleased with the proceeds from this book, they would probably recommend that you check your books out from the library rather than buy them.

A recent Writers Talking event featured local blogger J.D. Roth, who's made a name for himself with the blog Get Rich Slowly, a blog about personal finance. He's got a low-key attitude and doesn't specifically endorse one system of managing your personal finances over any other. No hard and fast rules, just a general philosophy. For the full range of materials the Library has on offer, try searching the catalog for books about personal finance, budgeting, or consumer education.