Coffee Addiction

(Warning: This post links to a site that is unduly laden with advertising, but perhaps still worthwhile.)

Boise is described as a coffee-crazed town;
too bad my only visit there predates my own obsession!

Without cable (or broadcast) television, I miss a lot of programs. Honestly, I do not miss most of what I miss. Fortunately, people who know that I am blissfully isolated in this way look out for me, especially whenever they encounter a program related to coffee. For this I am grateful, most recently to my mother, who alerted me to the NBC (or CNBC -- I don't know the difference) program Coffee Addiction. Apparently it is some sort of occasional series, and as I prepare for my next coffee adventure in a few hours, I do not have time to run down all of its threads.

The show includes several interviews with leaders of major companies and several interesting slideshows, such as one highlighting some cities with great coffee scenes (west of the Mississippi, that is). Overall, the series seems to touch on many of the coffee topics I have been writing and speaking about for a few years ... even including coffee's sexy side. More important than the cafes or even the health issues, it is encouraging, to see a major media outlet grappling with the sustainability and ethics of coffee production and trade.

I am also encourage that my colleagues at Vanderbilt's Institute for Coffee Studies were consulted, and a link is provided on the program's main site, along with the corporate links and a plethora of ads. Many segments of the program are available on Zomobo.

Back to Nicaragua

Coffee handling at
SolCafe,
photo from 2006

In 2006, I was the official faculty leader of a study tour for the first time, though I had helped to lead similar ventures in the past. That first trip was a "shake-down cruise" in many respects, as nobody was really doing tourism in the coffee-growing areas of Nicaragua yet. The only tour operators we could find in 2006 and again in 2007 were Managua-based companies with no experience in -- or respect for -- rural communities. We learned quite a lot, and after a 2008 hiatus we found that an excellent, Matagalpa-based operator was now available. Additionally, we found excellent reasons to take the tour to some other areas of the country, notably to courrent social-development projects in León and both current and historic projects in and around El Cuá.

Prior to the first trip, I planned to go only once, and then try the same topic in a different country. But I fell in love with Nicaragua -- as did many students -- and as I write this, we are nearing departure for the sixth Geography of Coffee study tour, happily working with Matagalpa Tours for the fourth year in a row. To the extent we have internet access (and this increases each year), I will be posting a few observations from the field on this blog. For now, the 2012 study tour web page includes our basic itinerary and some additional background.

Best of all, my fellow blogger and favorite librarian -- who accompanied me on the first trip -- now gets to enjoy a journey that promises to be even more pleasant and rewarding.

Café Slavia: Redoubt of Ideas

Credit: Martin Sutovec, via Don in Massachusetts

Ronald Reagan is credited with bringing down the totalitarian regimes of the Eastern Bloc, when in fact it was a writer. Not by himself, of course, but the playwright and scholar Vaclav Havel did more to instigate change with his typewriter and ideas than President Reagan with his bombs and secret wars.

I was reminded of that era of transition from nuclear standoff to popular uprising by On Point Radio's wonderful remembrance of Havel just after his death this week. From one of the participants in that discussion, I learned of the pivotal role of a particular Prague coffee shop in the advancement of Havel's cause. Kavárna Slavia is often cited as the most important of several of his haunts as he was writing and meeting and fomenting change in Czechoslovakia. The web site of Café Slavia (as it is also known) suggests a place much larger than a typical cafe, with an extensive menu and elegant decor that suggest "restaurant" more than "coffee shop." Visitors now flock to Café Slavia, both for its food (though some find it wanting) and for its connection to an important history.

The geography of coffee shops often puts them at the center of the local cultural geography because of their role in fostering conversations of substance. It is for this reason that wise politicians go to coffee shops to listen, opportunist politicians go to be listened to, and politicians who fear ideas seek to shut them down.

Ayn Rand and the neo-Dickensians

In his AlterNet article "How Ayn Rand Seduced Generations of Young Men and Helped Make the U.S. Into a Selfish, Greedy Nation," clinical pyschologist  Bruce Levine writes:

The good news is that I’ve seen ex-Rand fans grasp the damage that Rand’s philosophy has done to their lives and to then exorcize it from their psyche. Can the United States as a nation do the same thing?

Rand was a writer and philosopher of an earlier generation who continues to damage the society in which she thrived. She elevated selfishness to a virtue, and helped make the United States a less caring nation in which poverty and inequality persist to degrees far greater than would be suggested by this country's wealth, Christian heritage, and rhetorical commitment to the value of children. (Even the conservative London Economist writes that the United States is "in a class of its own as the only rich country where women get no paid maternity leave at all.")

Levine describes in some detail the workings and influence of Rand's inner circle, improbably named "The Collective," which either included or influenced many important neocon figures, from Alan Greenspan and Ronald Reagan to Ron Paul and his rather demented son Rand.

The title and opening paragraphs of the article suggest that the influence of Rand came to define an entire generation. Though I do not think he makes the case for a reach that is quite so broad, Levine is right to take Rand's influence seriously. Because some of Rand's staunchest disciples do now have considerable power, his analysis of her most problematic ideas is quite useful to those concerned with today's politics.

Two passages illustrate some of the more pernicious contradictions of Rand and her followers. First, the champion of rugged individualism has helped to put economic liberty above political liberty, and has put individuals in the thrall of corporations. As Levine explains:

While Rand often disparaged Soviet totalitarian collectivism, she had little to say about corporate totalitarian collectivism, as she conveniently neglected the reality that giant U.S. corporations, like the Soviet Union, do not exactly celebrate individualism, freedom, or courage.

Second, Rand has been embraced by many who consider themselves Christian. Not only does this require believing in a Jesus very different from the Nazarene who delivered the Sermon on the Mount, but it also requires ignoring huge swaths of Rand's writing. Again, Levine explains:

In recent years, we have entered a phase where it is apparently okay for major political figures to publicly embrace Rand despite her contempt for Christianity. In contrast, during Ayn Rand’s life, her philosophy that celebrated self-interest was a private pleasure for the 1 percent but she was a public embarrassment for them. They used her books to congratulate themselves on the morality of their selfishness, but they publicly steered clear of Rand because of her views on religion and God. Rand, for example, had stated on national television, “I am against God. I don’t approve of religion. It is a sign of a psychological weakness. I regard it as an evil.”

To be pro-Rand and pro-Jesus requires a politics in which reason and evidence are diminished and even reviled. Unfortunately, even a cursory examination of talk radio and political debates suggests that is very much the world in which our politics now occurs.

For more about Rand, see my Reason Shrugged and Libertarians in Space posts, in which I describe her thinking on public-sector workers and the delusions of independence among fringe libertarians.

Morning Routine

Boston Globe reporter Lisa Zwirn finds plenty of anecdotal evidence that even in a slow economy, many people continue to splurge on coffee purchased outside the home. She finds that people are remarkably consistent in their habits of location, brew, and flavor, though some customers do have favorite "treat" coffees that they order only occasionally. 

The consumption patterns described in the article run the gamut in terms of timing, location, and quality, and provide some interesting insights into the factors that shape the geography of coffee shops.

Best Case Against Green Energy

Source: Wind Powering America

Every oil field on the planet runs a course from discovery through increasing production to peak production to declining production and eventually to exhaustion. The last drop is never really extracted from the ground; fields can be reopened if the prices rise or technology improves. Nonetheless, just as most of the world's individual oil fields have passed their peak, so also has the planet as a whole. Peak production of the other fossil fuels may not have been reached on a global level yet, but coal and natural gas will inevitably decline, albeit much later than oil has done.

I was reminded of this as I read an article against green energy in an April 2011 issue of Forbes magazine. In The Green Energy Economy Reconsidered, Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren do the great service of describing five important drawbacks to sustainable energy alternatives, with a particular focus on wind and solar power. I call their article a service because it is important to understand the limitations of these sources, if for no other reason than to understand why they have not yet been adopted much more widely.

The authors describe fundamentally geographic reasons that essentially free energy has not been widely adopted in the United States or elsewhere. Low spatial density and spatial mismatches between supply and demand are two of the major obstacles. For Taylor and Van Doren, these are among a handful of reasons to reject government efforts to promote green energy. The article implies at least a faint recognition of the peak-oil problem, but dismisses it as not particularly relevant to questions of electricity production, in which more-abundant coal is dominant. As free-market proponents, they argue that the burdens of green energy are so great that they do not justify market-distorting subsidies.

I would like to suggest the opposite. The limitations of green energy explain why the market has not yet allowed for their widespread adoption, but these limitations do not explain why that initial market response (or non-response) should be accepted. This may be the strongest possible case against green energy, but it falls short in several key respects. First, fossil fuels appear more cost-effective than they actually are, because important externalities -- including but not limited to pollution costs -- are ignored. Second, free markets in petroleum and the other fossil fuels would lead inevitably to the near-exhaustion of each resource described above, but this need not be taken as the only possible future.

Given the extremely high costs of climate change, our current goal should be to leave as much oil, coal, and natural gas in the ground on a permanent basis as possible. Subsidizing green energy in the short term -- though admittedly not easy -- can bring about some of the needed reductions; doing nothing will, of course, achieve nothing.

A Bet Worth $4.81

I'll bet $4.81 that Mitt Romney wishes he had not suggested a bet to rival Rick Perry in a recent debate. As reported by Glen Johnson, when trying to make a point about his record on health care, he suggested a bet of a particular size -- small enough to be taken seriously, but big enough (for Rick Perry and most of the rest of us, anyway) not to be entered into lightly.

On one hand, Rick Perry should have taken the bet, as Romney was putting bravado ahead of evidence in defending one of his many reversals on health care. On the other, he was correct to demur at the amount, especially since this revealed him to be a bit closer to the average audience member than is his challenger.

Just George H.W. Bush revealed his status in the stratosphere of privilege through his fascination with grocery scanners -- he had never heard of them before a grocery-store tour during his campaign -- Romney has revealed his distance from the average American by suggesting this wager.

Based on the latest figures I could see for median net worth, his $10,000 bet would be equivalent to a $4.81 bet by a person of median net worth. (The mean net worth is much higher, since the numerical space below $102,200 is much narrower than the space above it.) As my favorite librarian has often observed, "The problem with rich people is that they don't understand that poor people don't have money." Next to Mitt Romney, almost all of us fall into that "poor people" category.

And by the way, I lied in the first line of this post. Like Rick Perry, I don't bet. And like Perry, I know that most of the evangelical right doesn't bet, either.

Hull High: Another Case for Regionalization

Taking Attendance is an excellent report by journalist Johanna Seltz in today's Boston Globe, in which she describes the problems associated with dwindling enrollment at in the town of Hull, particularly in its high school. Anticipating one of my first questions, she is careful to document this as a demographic trend, rather than a shift toward private schools. She then documents some of the reasons for the trend, including changes in available housing. The article also hints at a bit of a positive-feedback, or spiraling affect, as the problems of shrinking schools are to some degree self-feeding: fewer families lead to fewer families.

Shrinking enrollments reduce variable costs and crowding, allowing for a more tranquil and perhaps more productive learning environment. But the fixed costs of maintaining a building are spread over fewer students, the ability to offer specialized courses is reduced, with the definition of "specialized" eventually extending to basics, such as shop and foreign language. In Massachusetts, high fixed costs at the district level are an additional burden, and Seltz reports on the efforts of Hull Superintendent Kathleen Tyrell to address this through regionalization.

As I have written in some of my earlier posts on this topic, only in Massachusetts (and perhaps New Jersey), would the combination of two tiny towns be considered a regional consolidation. Even this, as Tyrell has found, is difficult, especially for a district that is isolated on a long peninsula, limiting its potential partnerships. Even more limiting than the physical situation of Hull, however, is the ideological commitment to "local control" in school districts. It is sadly ironic that school committees and the citizenry at large is not willing to set aside ego in order to cooperate in genuine regional districts at the county level.

The state provides some incentives to regionalize, but it aims too low. Massachusetts has a few hundred school districts, where states of similar size might have a few dozen. Nobody actually agrees on exactly how many -- one has as few as 2 children. (That is not a typo.) Combining Hull with another small town would be an improvement in the short-run, but county-wide districts would be a more reasonable long-term goal.

As illustrated in Hull, the cost of maintaining 351 fiefdoms is simply too high. A regional district could allow for some real creativity, too, perhaps to include magnet schools or shared resources for 50/50 online courses in some subjects.

I understand why Gov. Patrick and Lt. Gov. Murray have been slow to act on the recommendations on this issue from the 2009 Citizens Task Force Report (the relevant section of which I authored). Inertia is difficult to overcome both at the local level and within the state bureaucracies employed to oversee them. But it is long past time for the state to offer stronger incentives to encourage districts that combine the back-office functions not of two or three towns, but of ten or twenty.

As the Globe report suggests, regionalization would not solve all of the problems associated with Hull's slipping demographics. But it would certainly help!

Ho Chi Movement

Place and movement are among the five principle themes in the study of geography. Both are captured beautifully in a 2m20s video clip comprising 10,000 stop-motion photographs of public areas in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon). It comports very well with what my friend Vernon Domingo has told me about his experience in the city earlier this year.

Ho Chi Minh's Wild Traffic

by Sommer Mathis

Political Fetishes

In today's political discourse the difference between actual conservatives and the radical right is that the latter has turned two conservative ideas into radical fetishes.

A generation ago, Grover Norquist pressured conservative politicians to pledge never to raise taxes. His intention was not simply to balance budgets, but to combine balanced budgets with lower taxes in order to shrink government. His objective, he said, was to weaken and shrink government until it could be drowned, metaphorically, in a bathtub. Even before that, readers of Ayn Rand's fantasies became convinced that the private sector is always more efficient than the public sector, and that it is impossible for the latter to ever be productive.

The results have these obsessive thoughts have been profound for the quality of life in America, particularly with respect to education and health care. An additional result is aesthetic, as public spaces are increasingly privatized and turned over to marketers to make up for gaps in public funding, brilliantly illustrated by Morgan Spurlock below. 

Sound fiscal  policy and a vibrant private sector can provide sure footing for a democracy, but today's bipedal fetishists view the body politic only from the ankles down.

Lagniappe

During the California wildfires of 2016, Brad Craig exemplified the hypocrisy of "fair-weather libertarianism." He was wearing this anti-tax, anti-government t-shirt as he smiled and thanked the tax-supported government workers who saved his home.

Brad Craig, False Patriot