Why have Americans stopped driving?

It's not really a complaint, mind you; if people want to get off the road, it's okay with me. It does raise two questions, however: (1) What the hell's going on?; and (2) Why is it that the lamestream media never so much as mention the phenomenon?

First, the facts. The chart at right was crunched together by Mike Shedlock at his "Mish" econoblog, and graphically describes gasoline usage over three-month periods (Nov-Dec-Jan) over a historical period, which provides some useful context. The same data have been discussed at length by Charles Hugh Smith at his "Of Two Minds" blog. Both arrive at essentially the same conclusion: American gasoline use has fallen off a table in recent months.

If you had no idea this was going on, you shouldn't blame yourself. As HUGE a data point as this represents, it does not fit well into the current, election-year-driven happy talk about the economy, nor does it comport with the massively-falsified labor statistics promulgated each month by the Illusionist-in-Chief herself, Hilda Solis of the Department of Labor. Propaganda sites such as the New York Times do not want to touch this, because it raises disturbing questions such as, how are Americans actually getting to all these new jobs the economy is creating? So if American gasoline usage has fallen over 40% in a very brief period, well, it must have something to do with the (very mild) weather that has plagued the United States of late.

The chart demonstrates that Americans are currently purchasing about 33 million gallons of gasoline per day (the chart, to smooth the data, provides a moving average for three-month totals of daily usage; thus, 110 million divided by 3). At the height of the housing bubble, daily gasoline usage was closer to 56 million gallons per day; thus, current usage is about 58% of the zenith of happy motoring, or at about the same level as ten years ago. This is yet another symbol of our Back to the Future Reality: most economic data points, such as the total number of jobs in the economy, or the inflation-adjusted level of average income, or the inflation-adjusted value of the major American stock markets, all seem to confirm the same picture. Absolutely nothing has happened in the last decade other than a growth in population and a continuing decline in our standard of living.

Why are Americans keeping their 254 million cars and trucks parked? One surmise, I suppose, is that Americans might simply be living in them but lack the bucks to actually operate them. It is not, by the way, a matter of fuel efficiency. Hybrid technology and a move toward more fuel -efficient cars account for about 6% of the decline over the last 10 years. So the data really do point toward a dramatic diminution in actual gasoline used.

The good news is that America probably has brought itself into compliance with the Kyoto Protocols on global warming, bringing to mind the old tri-partite saying about greatness, updated here for environmentalism: Some societies are born environmentalist, some achieve environmentalism, and some have environmentalism thrust upon them. The United States would appear to belong in this third category.

Realistically speaking, the sharp drop in usage must reflect an abandonment of a great deal of discretionary driving. The price of gasoline (and note its extreme inflexibility - where's the old "law of supply and demand?") creeps into the unconscious mind of a cash-strapped society and people just quit driving. I think about the cost of driving now in ways I did not before. Take, for example, a staple experience of my distant youth, the round-trip drive to L.A. One would drive to L.A. instead of flying because it was seen as a practically "free" way to travel. Now those 900 miles, calculated at 30 miles per gallon and $4.00 for each gallon (out here on the Best Coast), set you back 120 big ones. Or, simply a drive into San Francisco for the day. Our local governmental districts do not want to share in the general economic downtrend, and since they hold monopoly power over all the "infrastructure," they have jacked bridge tolls and municipal parking to the moon and beyond. It costs six bucks to cross the Golden Gate Bridge (discussions are underway to raise it to probably ten bucks) and it's difficult to find a downtown parking garage where you can leave your car for two or three hours for less than ten dollars more. So a simple drive to SF (about 1.3 gallons of gas for me) costs in the neighborhood of twenty to thirty bucks, if I use a car (the costs of buses and ferries, of course, are better than that, but those fares have also been ratcheted up in recent years - another example of a "non-shared" sacrifice enjoyed only by the civilian populace). And all of that is before the cost of whatever I had in mind as an activity in San Francisco. If I'm going out to dinner, obviously I'm over the hundred dollar mark at this point.

The bottom line is that it costs a lot to move around. If one is among the 47 million or so Americans on food stamps, or among the millions and millions of long-term unemployed, blowing a couple of hundred bucks on a long drive, or simply on a jaunt into the Big City for the day, can become an unaffordable luxury. I think this is what is really going on. An expense you can do without, you do without.

I also think this is part of a more general phenomenon in this country, the development of a kind of Human Dark Matter, an unseen cohort of people who have fallen off the grid and into an Underworld where they are not countable, where their economic activity cannot be measured because it doesn't show up in government numbers, or tax revenue figures, or in the official labor statistics. What you might call, increasingly, Real America. I'm working on a post called "Five Fractals In Search of A Macro-Iteration," a delightfully unpretentious title, don't you think? And the gasoline usage figures are part of that picture.

Updated: The graph, with its two-sided scale, is not altogether clear, so here are similar data in haec verba from the Of Two Minds blog:

"Deliveries steadily rose to a peak of 67.1 MGD [million gallons/day] in July 1998, declined marginally in the 2001-2 recession and then surged to 66.8 MGD in August 2003. If we just look at one month--say November--then we see that deliveries remained in a remarkably consistent channel from 1994 to 2008, between 54 MGD and 63 MGD, with the higher numbers occuring in the "peak bubble years" of 1998 and 2003.

"In 2010, gasoline deliveries declined to the low 40s--literally falling off the charts. In November 1983, deliveries were 51.1 MGD; in November 2010, they were 42.8 MGD, and in November 2011 they were 30.9 MGD."

Louis C.K. & the Pointlessness of Civilization

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=hzbV4YzH0R0

Tip o' the Hat to Guy McPherson and his Nature Bats Last blog for posting the hysterically funny Louis C.K. rant on civilization linked above. My daughter acquainted me with Louis and his "sitcom" series, which is a sort of postmodern update on existential themes featured in Seinfeld, in the sense that both series concern Absurdity, the alienation of modern life and the elaboration of the pointless dramas we create in order to distract ourselves from the fact of our mortality (and all such modern cinematic themes, in America at least, originate with the great Woody Allen).

Louis is discussing, from another angle, the concept of the "organic society" mentioned here a few posts back; civilization is built on specialization and the creation of a societal machine comprised of interrelated parts (called "jobs," including call centers which focus on making sure you're deriving maximum enjoyment from your World At War video game, as Louis suggests) which provides a "living" for modern human beings. We forget, almost always, that this way of approaching human life is not an inevitable choice (there is nothing in human evolution which compels the organization of human life along these lines), but is simply the outcome of cognitive decisions, enforced now by modern industrial culture. In many ways, as Henry David Thoreau pointed out, and as Louis C.K. in a very funny way describes, this specialization leads to a preposterously constricted, dull and unsatisfying life for the vast majority of its human participants. And it has led, among its other drawbacks, to environmental disaster and the prospect of near-term extinction through either global warming or nuclear holocaust.

I think I can answer the question Louis poses concerning the very real hostility of Evangelical Christianity to environmentalism in general and to climate change arguments in particular. In the superstitious world of Apocalyptic religion, extinction events are the exclusive province of the supreme beings. No matter how large a trash pile we create on what the Christians call "God's Creation," it's okay because this life doesn't really count anyway. Thus, it is presumptuous and probably sacrilegious to contemplate puny Man's ability to bring about his own extinction; the Christians are wrong, of course, because species become extinct all the time (the average life being about 200,000 years, accelerating now because of the cesspool humans have made of the world), and homo sapiens will prove no different. Our assumption is that the "lesser mammals" lack a sufficiently complex central nervous system for misuse in the creation of religious mythologies; that would appear to be the only distinction.

I think Louis presents a genuine insight into the nature of human cities. They are themselves concentrated areas of pollution and litter, and it is counterproductive to insist on their "cleanliness" since this simply potentiates the externalization of their trash into the broader civilization. We are talking only of a certain fussy "aesthetics," and yet, as Louis points out (very subtly), cities are already very alien, inhuman places, with their smoothed (paved) surfaces and rectilinear construction of tall buildings and streets laid out on a grid. These features are what give cities such a nightmarish, alienating feeling, an "inhuman" feeling, captured best, perhaps, by the German Expressionist painters and the American artists they influenced, such as Edward Hopper (I'm thinking particularly of "Night Hawks" .)

One takes one's Sunday morning sermons where one finds them, I suppose, and a Big Up to Reverend Louis.

Saturday Morning Essay: Michael Hastings & "The Operators"

Brought to you by Peet's Coffee, as always.

I'm finishing up a very good read, The Operators, by Michael Hastings, the Rolling Stone writer who achieved quite a media buzz a couple of years ago when his disclosures of "off the cuff" remarks by General Stanley McChrystal, who was then the commanding officer in Afghanistan, caused the sacking of McChrystal by an embarrassed White House. Hastings is a good, lively writer in the Hunter S. Thompson/Matt Taiibi mode, and had the courage to exercise the license he was apparently given by McChrystal's entourage to write his story any way he saw fit. The way he saw fit was simply to reproduce the scenes in Afghanistan, Paris, Berlin and elsewhere in which McChrystal and his "Team America," a rowdy, hard-drinking, profane staff of somewhat iconoclastic career Army guys spoke at length about what they thought about Obama, Hamid Karzai (the President of Afghanistan, elected under very dubious conditions), Gen. James Jones, the National Security head (called a "clown" by Team America), the various ambassadors and envoys to Afghanistan, such as Holbrooke and Eikenberry, and the counterproductive nature of the war in general. Indeed, some commentators thought this was the real reason McChrystal had to go, his "counterinsurgency math," by which he calculated that every innocent civilian killed in Afghanistan produced ten more insurgents against America and Karzai. Obviously, President Obama can't have that kind of logical deduction, coming from his own theater commander, on the cover of the Rolling Stone.

Hastings probably seemed like a tame mascot and Boswell to McChrystal's Dr. Johnson, but in fact Hastings has a keen mind and deep powers of observation and analysis, which proved McChrystal's undoing. McChrystal himself is an interesting subject, a liberal Democrat by inclination who is nevertheless a supremely ambitious careerist; it's just that his career is in the Special Ops section of the Army, and counterinsurgency in particular. Tall, gaunt, ascetic when he's in the combat theater, and a two-fisted drinker when he hits the bars in France and Berlin, McChrystal is a hard guy to pin down. He inspired intense loyalty among his Team America entourage, was considered enlightened and innovative in his approach to Afghanistan, yet he was involved in both the Pat Tillman and Abu Ghraib scandals

One scene stuck with me. In Berlin in 2009, McChrystal gave a lecture on Afghanistan to a group of German media figures. In the account given by Hastings, the lecture was a tour de force, an historical exposition of Afghanistan's thirty years of constant war, and in a country where about two-thirds of the population is younger than 25 (life expectancy in Afghanistan is 44), this fact alone means that the vast majority of Afghans have never experienced peace during their lifetimes. McChrystal described the tribalism, the drug trade, the corruption in the central government, the nature of the insurgency, the Taliban, everything. At the end of the lecture, one German reporter asked McChrystal a question that stunned Hastings; the reporter pointed out that McChrystal had mentioned Al-Qaeda only once.

This is a question, as Hastings notes, that an American reporter would never ask, nor probably even think to ask. Yet this is the putative reason we invaded in 2001, over ten years ago. What is somewhat reassuring to one's sanity (and to the reliability of one's own perceptions) is that Hastings, who had the privilege of an insider's perspective on the top command in Afghanistan (and was allowed to write about it), winds up asking the same common sense questions that occur to everyday Americans. Such as: why do terrorists, Al-Qaeda or otherwise, actually need a "safe haven" from which to plan attacks on America? Especially when one considers, as confirmed by the Report of the 9-11 Commission (which, I repeat, apparently no one has read, in or out of government), that the 9-11 plot was actually put together in Hamburg, Germany, Cairo, South Florida and Phoenix? Why is Afghanistan, the sixth poorest country in the world with a population of 30 million, with no real military capability and no nuclear weapons, actually any sort of threat to the United States?

The answers to these questions are obvious, and Hastings provides a valuable public service in lifting the veil on all the nonsensical propaganda which Obama and others use to justify this "necessary war." It isn't necessary at all, it's counter-productive, and it is carried on for two principal reasons:

1. As a money-making venture for the military-industrial complex, and for all the lobbyists the MIC supports (who in turn support their employees in the Congress and White House).

2. As a theater of operations where Army commanders can advance their career ambitions by participating in an actual war, sort of. It's a war in the sense that lots of people, Americans and especially Afghans, die violent deaths.

One could add that Afghanistan is also a political meme. By being for this war (again, sort of), President Obama can be Presidential and tough on terror. The war has no connection to American security, in reality, or even to the "war on terror" (whatever that is), as even Team America would probably concede; indeed, the book cites official studies by the Rand Corporation (best read with one's Dr. Strangelove voice) and by the CIA which demonstrate convincingly that combating terrorism with the ordinary criminal justice system is more effective than launching wars against countries that supposedly "harbor" terrorists. But the meta-reality of Media Discourse, a stupid and dumb beast, in which the Afghanistan war has a totemic or emblematic essence connected to America's righteous revenge for the outrage of 9-11, is the one that is debated on the campaign trail and among the regular toadies of the press (excluding guys like Hastings and Taiibi).

Why did we invade Afghanistan? That's a question that first occurred to me in the fall of 2001. Now Hastings has written a book which sheds a lot of light on that question. The impulse to invade (as an act of misplaced or impotent revenge) is probably distinct from the institutional reasons that have kept the war going for a period nearly three times as long as America's involvement in World War II (3 years, 8 months, versus 10 years, 3 months), but it still adds up to complete nonsense. I suspect that the answer, at bottom, is that we fight many wars because we have a huge military establishment that wants something to do and wants to justify its existence and all the careers attendant to it. You can't give those answers as the official rationale, so we torture logic to create propaganda that sustains these misbegotten adventures.

My Favorite Economic Factoid

I apologize in advance for bringing this topic up so often, but I just really can't get enough of it. I think it's because it absolutely encapsulates and epitomizes the fundamentally fake nature of the modern American economy.

To wit: the Federal Reserve has just reported that it has remitted $76 billion to the Treasury Department of the Fed's earnings on its $2.9 trillion portfolio of Treasuries, mortgage-backed securities, and other trash. Relative to this number, the Fed maintains a very low overhead (on the order of 1/2 billion), so the Fed's gross earnings essentially equal its net. The Fed is a lean, mean, phony-money-generating machine.

I think what I love more than anything is the learned discourse about this topic among all the major economic thinkers: Ben Bernanke, Paul Krugman, Brad DeLong, Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, Brian Sack of the New York Federal Reserve, as they ponder this awesome contribution to American solvency. They honestly take all this shit seriously, the "money" the Fed is paying into the Treasury, the money the Fed uses to "purchase" Treasuries on the "open market" from the In Crowd Primary Dealers, the "Quantitative Easing" programs that enabled the Fed to take all that dodgy mortgage paper off the hands of its troublesome children in the banking community in the first place. They consult graphs and charts, talk about the "expectations for inflation," note with satisfaction that the U.S. Treasury market remains saturated with offers for the Treasury's promises to pay money in the future on the paper it sells today, and at such a low cost! The Treasury barely pays anything for the privilege of accepting over a trillion dollars a year in new issuance.

Of course, the Federal Reserve is itself the largest holder in the world of Treasury bonds, which it purchased on the open market, as noted above. The Primary Dealers participated in auctions, bought Treasury bonds, then held most of this paper for a few weeks before flipping it to the Fed. The Fed thus avoided violating the rule which prohibits the Fed from simply buying the bonds directly from the Treasury at the original auction. You see, if the Fed did that, it would be directly "monetizing the debt," and the Fed would never do that. Instead, the Fed waits until someone else, a big bank or broker-dealer, first purchases the Treasury bonds; then the Fed conjures money out of thin air with a few keystrokes on its computer, takes possession of the bonds, and credits the reserve account of the Primary Dealer with a few billion, on which the PD earns a quarter of a percent in interest.

The Fed isn't really operating a Quantitative Easing ruse right now; it's running "Operation Twist," whereby as bonds in its portfolio mature, they are exchanged for bonds with longer duration. Thus, 2-year bonds become 5-year bonds, 5-year bonds become 10-year bonds, and so forth. Bernanke wants to lock in the super-low rates on which the Treasury is "obligated" to the Fed for as long as possible, because the Fed's big stash of Treasuries achieves a dampening effect on bond rates in general.

It's quite a high-wire act, the business of running a phony economy. Bernanke knows that he is engaged in a titration problem, analogous to the swimming pool metaphor I used a few posts back. I mean after all, if the Fed can really support the Treasury not only by purchasing bonds with conjured money, but can push the issue by then reporting "earnings" on these bonds and remitting them back to the Treasury to the tune of $76 billion per annum, then why not a reductio ad absurdum whereby the Fed simply buys all of the Treasury's issuance? And why not eliminate all taxation and support the Federal government entirely with Treasury issuance, all of which is purchased by the Fed with conjured money? But no need to stop there. Why not simply put the entire Gross Domestic Product on the government's payroll, all $15 trillion of it, and finance it all with keystrokes from the Fed's corner office computer?

Well, of course now I'm simply being ridiculous. However, in my ironic defense I would say this: if the logic of a proposition can be extended to encompass the absurd conclusion of the reduction in question, then the logic of the actual reality is also absurd. It is only a question of degree. Bernanke has gotten away with it so far because he tries to keep it down to a roar. He asks himself, when considering yet more "quantitative easing:" will this be the pillar, when I yank it out, that finally brings the entire temple down on my head?

I note with grim amusement that Russia, China, Iran and other countries are now actively seeking ways to work around the dollar-dominated system for settling oil deals and other commodity purchases. It's not hard to see why this would happen. Russia is selling real stuff, oil and natural gas, in exchange for paper originating on the computer in Bernanke's corner office. When China and Russia reinvest the dollars they receive from commodities, they must "repatriate" this money in America in exchange for Treasury promises that pay virtually nothing, with a negative return, in fact, when inflation is factored in. And the paper they buy is with actual money earned from selling real stuff, whereas Bernanke can buy his Treasury paper, with precisely the same value and return, simply by tapping in numbers.

Thus, at some point the foreign buyers will be gone. They won't need dollars anymore because they will find another way to settle their accounts. Not this year perhaps, not next, but soon, and for the rest of America's life. The American government will continue to run its massive deficits, of course, and with our savings rate effectively locked in at zero, it will be up to the Primary Dealers to buy it all, every piece of dubious paper emitted by the Treasury. To attract the foreign buyers, the recipients of all that money we use to buy all the stuff we used to make, or can't produce ourselves (such as most of the oil we use), we would have to pay them a real rate of return. But as the national debt hits $20 trillion and beyond, a rise in interest rates will be disastrous, and it's doubtful that the world's remaining producers of essential commodities (oil, most specifically) are going to be interested in American funny money anyway.

It is all very much like the myth of Narcissus. American leaders feel trapped by the expectations of the electorate; despite all evidence to the contrary, no one who values his favored position in American politics can afford to admit the awful truth, that this whole system is phony, made up out of thin air, fumes if you will, and we are running on those fumes and nothing more. We are transfixed by our own image, by our beauty and self-regard, and we cannot tear ourselves away from the reflecting pool. And one day we will take a header.

Through A Glass Darkly: The Republican Debate

I think Diane Sawyer is cute, always have thought so, and to think she's got the neurons to hang in there with an intellectual/creative guy like Mike Nichols. She's even cuter than George Stepho-etc. thinks he is, and that's very cute indeed. Looking at Diane was the only mitigating factor in the hour of life otherwise wasted watching the Republican "debate" last night. Sometimes, when I have subjected myself to a heinous experience like watching Republicans compete for Luddite of the Year Award, I get an inkling about Barack Obama's actual strategy, and it starts to look pretty clever. If you don't vote for him, then this is what you're looking at.

There are five pasty-white boring guys left now on the Republican side: Huntsman, Paul, Romney, Santorum, Gingrich, Perry. I guess that's six; somehow it doesn't matter. Ron Paul, increasingly, seems like a set of attitudes, borrowed from sources as diverse as Ayn Rand and Noam Chomsky, about how the world ought to work. He thought the Supreme Court decision of Griswold v. Connecticut, which was a 9th Amendment case about privacy rights, and specifically the constitutional right of a couple to use contraception in defiance of Connecticut's "blue law" to the contrary, was a Fourth Amendment search-and-seizure case. Then building on his error, Ron restated that that's one of the reasons he's against the Patriot Act. Here's the alarming part: Rick Santorum, who won some sort of distinction as the stupidest man in Congress when he represented Pennsylvania as a Senator, analyzed the case correctly. Of course, Rick Santorum believes that the states ought to be free to ban contraception if they feel like it, because the "right to privacy" is not in the Constitution.

Mitt Romney, sitting on his razor-thin lead and enjoying no real base of support in the modern Republican Party (a contradiction in terms, I realize), declined to answer the question directly from Cutesie George: does Mitt support the right of states to ban contraception? Well, gee, Mitt said. No state wants to ban contraception, so why talk about it?

That's how weird the Republicans have become. Their leading candidate cannot answer definitively that contraception is a good idea and ought to be available to people. What on Earth is the objection to contraception? Are the Republicans at the point where they think that the biological destiny of each and every ovum to become a (full-grown Christian) human must not be interrupted on pain of a murder charge? Does even God think that every spermatozoa has a soul?

Okay, to be fair, what these antiquarians are squirming to avoid is the recognition of any right to privacy under the 9th Amendment in the first place, because that's the foundation for Roe v. Wade, and that's the real quarry they're gunning for. They all want (Huntsman may be the exception) the unfettered right to a first-trimester abortion overturned, and they know they're only about one vote on the Supreme Court away from the prize. If Huntsman can figure out a way to relate the abortion issue to his years as an Ambassador to China, we'll get a clearer picture of his position.

Romney's the kind of Republican mannequin who would have been a shoo-in for the party's nomination even four years ago, but the ideological miasma of present-day Republicanism is getting in his way. He doesn't actually have any opinions or principles. You can tell he doesn't care if gays get married, if women get abortions, if people copulate with aardvarks on the street. They're all stupid issues, the government should let people do what they want sexually and socially, and he knows it (although now I think we need an Aardvark Rescue movement). He just wants the fricking nomination. He's a Republican like his father before him, and apparently you have to make a lot of dumb statements now with feigned passion in order to get this band of lunatics to let you sail under their banner. Thus, he's unable to attract more than 25% of their support, which must represent the magnitude of the vestigial sanity in the Republican Party.

Rick Perry continues to impress me as perhaps the dumbest person ever to vie for national public office. I don't know why he keeps showing up. It's over, Rick. Mitt Romney misses him most of all, because when Rick was considered tenable, it kept the attention away from the truly awful Rick Santorum and the quirky insurgence of Ron Paul. If Mitt could have maneuvered the race into a final match-up with Rick Perry, so that just the two of them would have been debating, the idiocy of Rick Perry would have become so patent and painfully obvious that Mitt would have won by acclamation. As it is he has to stagger through these debates with the idiosyncratic Ron Paul and the sanctimonious Rick Santorum offering stark contrasts to the empty-suit nothingness that is Romney's position on everything.

The debates do accomplish some things. In the first place, I'm beginning to see that Ron Paul is essentially a Human Bullet Point Announcer. His ideas are civil libertarian, highly idealistic (unrealistically so, in some cases), jarringly impractical (Medicare, access to health care in general), regressive (private ownership rights as superior to civil rights for minorities), and enlightened (the closing down of the American empire and its ruinous cost). The man behind all these ideas seems a little sketchy when you watch him in action, and as I've said, I don't know how he would function as an actual chief executive. The world could very well end on his watch.

I think Obama, of course, will just keep doing what he's doing, tuning in occasionally to watch, and relish, the Republican Circular Firing Squad as it moves from state to state, like the freak circus it is.

Saturday Morning Essay

Brought to You By Peet's Coffee.

As I've said before, if Barack Obama is reelected, then Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis should win the Most Valuable Player award going away. The official unemployment rate, U-3, keeps dropping, now down to 8.5%, despite two facts that would appear to make such a development mathematically impossible. (1) The actual number of jobs in America has not increased, holding steady at around 140 million. (2) The working age population continues to increase, month by month, year by year, and is now about 250 million. Using our fifth grade math, we can simplify terms and create the fraction 14/25. To convert this to a percentage, we divide the numerator by the denominator, and we get about 56%. 56% of the working age population in the United States, other than those in prison, the military or mental hospitals, have jobs.

I would guess that a very large percentage of those with these jobs hate their work and wish they didn't have to work. Such thoughts usually bring me around to thinking about Emile Durkheim, the famous social theorist who gave us the term "organic solidarity" to describe the economies of advanced industrial nations. Durkheim was referring to specialization, that rat-race arrangement that Henry David Thoreau, writing around the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, tried to warn us against. Society in modern countries has become a kind of "organism," a complicated, interrelated contraption in which we perform specialized functions to satisfy our various "needs," such as the need to undergo a weekly spiritual lobotomy while watching "American Idol" or "Dancing With The Stars."

Nevertheless, despite this proliferation of "needs," the actual requirements remain those of the evolved homo sapiens, as described in Walden: maintaining one's vital heat. With modern technology, this is not really that hard to do. For example, I wear clothes, as all non-nudists do. I buy mostly discount clothing at Costco, stuff arrayed on the big tables. Khaki pants, jeans, polo shirts. It's all cheap and it gets the job done. You don't have to spend more than 12 bucks for a pair of pants made in India or Vietnam. I have shirts in my closet that I've had for 20 years. They're in good shape, too; I'm easy on stuff. America makes about 7% of its own clothing these days, down about 80% over the last 40 years. At the next layer of heat maintenance, I have a house. It's about 50 years old, in decent shape, and it retains heat, not as well as it should (it's an American house), but it's warmer in here than outside. I heat it with a furnace fueled with natural gas. America produces a lot of its own natural gas. The electricity for the lights and the various gadgets in the house is furnished by PG&E, and this utility (very hip and committed to the battle against climate change) produces power through natural gas, hydroelectric dams and nuclear power, for the most part. I use compact flourescents for the lighting.

I eat fairly low on the food chain, and much of the food, including the beef, is produced locally. We have a big "local food" movement in my county, and it works fine.

So that's it. All of my needs are met. I can stay alive with what I've just listed above. When you think about it, America needs far, far fewer than 140 million people with jobs to get the things done I've just listed. Farming, for example, has mostly become agri-business and is not labor intensive except for certain crops at harvest, and probably more Mexicans and Guatemalans do that work in America than Americans. As noted, we don't make our own clothing anymore; 12 year old girls in Asian countries handle that for us. The energy industries hire a lot of people, but increasingly that work is mechanized as well. Auto manufacturing and sales in the USA are on a steady decline; the 250 million cars and trucks we already have are increasingly being kept for longer periods of time as the economy stagnates. You can fix your beater instead of replacing it every three years just for show, and avoid investing a ton of dough in an immediately depreciating hunk of metal, leather and rubber.

We need trades people, of course, plumbers and carpenters. We need doctors (far fewer than we have and better allocated to useful specialties), accountants and lawyers, although we could probably get by better with about 1/4th the number of attorneys we have. We need teachers to train people in the skills they will need to participate in the "organic" society, an admittedly kind of circular logic.

I really wonder what the "core" number of workers that we need to make society function actually is. It's pretty easy to list completely superfluous professions and occupations: nail salon workers; cosmetic plastic surgery people; tanning salon owners; party planners; wedding planners; florists; financial planners; workers in luxury car factories; personal trainers; 90% of the movie stars and movie makers; radio "personalities;" 90% of the politicians; professional athletes; NASCAR drivers; runway models; anyone named Kardashian; tabloid publishers, editors and writers; 85% of the real estate brokers; the lower half of the island of Manhattan; 80% of federal employees, most of them duplicating work that could be done at the local level; 80% of those in the military, many of whom simply serve because the "organic society" doesn't produce any real jobs; everyone in the fast food industry; all workers in the defense industry other than those making nuclear bombs and the means to deliver them, just to show the world we should be left alone (the only meaningful "national defense"); hundreds of other occupations and preoccupations. My guess is that the common estimate that 20% of the people do 80% of everything necessary is not far wrong, so that 80% of everything could be accomplished by about 28 million people (20% of 140 million, the work force) strategically and intelligently placed in American society, and the remaining 20% is probably, after all, not necessary. So 222 million working age Americans are just kind of futzing around pretending to do something necessary that we don't actually need.

I'm serious, actually, and you probably sense I'm not far wrong. Most jobs in Durkheim's world are completely unnecessary, and many of them (when you consider the extreme degradation of the environment, to the point of human nonviability) are positively harmful and dangerous (consider this list from Desdemona Despair, a depresso-blog about ecological catastrophe: www.desdemonadespair.net/2011/12/50-doomiest-stories-of-2011.html). We're living on the edge because of our calamitous overuse of the Earth.

I think this is why we became a "consumer society." There's really not enough to do of an essential nature, so we just make shit up to do and call it "necessary." Thus, when the total jobs number stays stuck for years and years on end, we try to figure out what's "wrong" with the economy. What's wrong with the economy is that it doesn't make any sense to begin with. What we're trying to do, again, is to create the excess wealth within the economy that will allow millions and millions of people to pursue the superfluous and unnecessary occupations they used to have, and we're having a very hard time doing it. For about 30 to 40 years, we did so by leveraging the existing capital stock of the country (debt and mortgaging against bubble prices) to disguise the fact that the economy had run past its actual usefulness.

Thus, if humanity survives (a very iffy proposition), we will do so either along the lines of the Buckminster Fuller fantasy, where the vast majority of people do not work and are maintained in their vital heat by technology and a small cadre of workers, or we will revert to Thoreauvian, generalist competence, abandoning Durkheim's World. Either way, the times they are a-changin'.