One Chicagoan’s desperate attempt to schedule a package drop-off.

David Brooks writes about the current generation of so-called social entrepreneurs–a group of educated, worldly young people who find clever ways to advance social justice. Inherent in their save-the-world optimism is a deeply cynical view of government and formal systems. The latter cynicism, Brooks contends, blinds them to the only known path to societal betterment: order.

“Most poverty and suffering — whether in a country, a family or a person — flows from disorganization. A stable social order is an artificial accomplishment, the result of an accumulation of habits, hectoring, moral stricture and physical coercion. Once order is dissolved, it takes hard measures to restore it.”

Instead of starting micro-businesses that make water purifiers and micro-loans, Brooks wishes the social entrepreneurs would turn their skills and passion on corrupt courts and defunct government. He wants us to emulate the noir hero–a person who upholds virtue even as he doubts it.

He’s right that politics and institutions cannot be ignored when tackling social problems. The best, cheapest water purifier in the world will not make its way past a dysfunctional government. In many developing countries, corrupt governments parody effective institutions by offering all of the bureaucracy (elaborate regulations and legal procedures) and none of the stability (civil and property rights).  In Nepal, applications to see the Annapurna region of the country require numerous forms of identification, signatures, and, of course, fees. Title to land, meanwhile, can be revoked without recourse at any time by an insurgent party. A weak criminal justice system fails Nepali children who are sold in violation of the law. Any step toward justice must begin with a reliable government, not one with better forms.

I work in legal system reform–a job without end or clear successes. I see that systems matter, but trying to change them is maddening. I recently heard an Illinois state senator describe an agonizing process of persuading government entities to publish for researchers public information. Though the information was public, the entities controlling the data gained some power from gatekeeping it. The Senator’s proposal to just put the info on the Web, plainly sensible as it was, would take away this power. After months of polite but inert discussions, the state finally legislated . . . a committee to study the question of publishing the data.

The noir hero fought a known foe–a corrupt prosecutor, say. He didn’t set out to save the entire planet–and without delay. If he had, he might want to evade the system, too, instead of losing precious time to fighting it.

My latest book review is up at our new site, Ringside Reviews.

A blurb:

Jobs is no elitist–he’s “middle class from California.” But he nurtured each product even as he orphaned loved ones. He hoped each product would transcend the shit in the world. Like great music wipes a mood clean. Like admiration. Like forgiveness.

University of Chicago, 10:35 am

This “People Are Awesome” video has been making the rounds again as end-of-year lists compile. It’s got me thinking a lot about what it means to be truly excellent at something–in particular, something athletic.

Athletes approach the sport in a fundamentally different way than amateurs. It isn’t just how much they practice. It’s how they think about the sport. For the greatest athletes, sport becomes a mantra, a way of looking at things, an essential part of life. They see the arc of a baseball in a stream of water, the adjustment from a 9 iron to a wedge in weight of the breeze. In other words, excellence in sport can be transcendent.

There is something truly awesome about that.

My latest post is up at the Huffington Post.

A clip:

While marijuana use is evenly split across races, enforcement is heavily skewed along racial lines in Illinois, according to the state-sponsored Illinois Disproportionate Justice Impact Study.  AnotherChicago Reader article affirmed those findings in Chicago:

The ratio of black to white arrests for marijuana possession in Chicago is 15 to 1, according to a Readeranalysis of police and court data. And by the time the cases make their way through the court system, the gap widens even further: the ratio among those who plead or are found guilty is 40 to 1.

These arrests and guilty pleas devastate defendants’ future job prospects and arguably increase the likelihood that they will engage in criminal activities to support themselves.

Advocates of the marijuana ordinance recognize this disparity and urge policies guided by evidence rather than discretion. They also argue that marijuana users are not a major threat to our communities and decriminalization does not encourage use. In short, marijuana possession does not warrant our current costly enforcement strategies and severe penalties.

My latest Huffington Post article, written on behalf of Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice. An excerpt:

The challenge for the Cook County criminal justice system is similar to that of the Oakland A’s. A cash-strapped organization must identify incremental changes that will produce effective and cost-effective outcomes. In other words, we’ve got to find the “fat catchers” of criminal justice policy. The Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice is currently drafting a report with a host of recommendations aimed at reducing incarceration, recidivism, and costs. It is informed by a number of sources–interviews with staff throughout the criminal justice system, programs in other municipalities, and evidence-based criminal justice research.

The Dish points to a study showing that opposite-handed eating reduces mindless consumption. No doubt, it also wards off Alzheimer’s. But why does switching hands make you eat less?

Rick observed that eating with chopsticks has the same effect. The idea, it seems, is to constrain your eating tools (hands) so that they work at a pace that matches (rather than exceeds) your metabolism. This is why grazing at a party never results in over-fullness: you’re too busy chatting (and digesting) to over-eat.

Other suggestions for bridling consumption . . . wear mittens?

Occupy Wall Street’s struggle to define itself has been a greater subject for discussion than the protest itself. Pop historian William Hogeland‘s has provided a concise reading list for revolutionaries, but he has also provided much more. He’s given them a name: The Whiskey Rebellion.

Hogeland explains:

“Like it or not, though, it is Occupy Wall Street that has the most in common, ideologically, not with those Boston merchants and their supporters but with the less well-known, less comfortably acknowledged people who, throughout the founding period, cogently proposed and vigorously agitated for an entirely different approach to finance and monetary policy than that carried forward by the famous founders. Amid horrible depressions and foreclosure crises, from the 1750′s through the 1790′s, ordinary people closed debt courts, rescued debt prisoners, waylaid process servers, boycotted foreclosure actions, etc. (More on that here and here.) They were legally barred from voting and holding office, since they didn’t have enough property, so they used their power of intimidation to pressure their legislatures for debt relief and popular monetary policies.”

I’ve watched this movement with wide, earnest eyes. Having been raised a community banker and formally educated in philosophy, law, and now public policy, I’m fascinated by a real-time political movement rooted in these issues. Especially one lead by my generation. While Hogeland illustrates one parallel to the current atmosphere, history offers no shortage of others.

I’m currently listening to Sylvia Nasar’s enlightening new book, Grand Pursuit, and my jaw drops with déjà vu about every twenty minutes. Grand Pursuit tells the history of political economy–the application of economic theory to achieve social good–through the lens of great practitioners and their surrounding social movements. It is a compendium of the West’s numerous economic booms and busts over the past two hundred years. It is also a mirror for the last two decades.

The book is full of striking parallels, but here is one excellent quote. Britain experienced a depression in 1866-67 that eventually lead to the Panic of 1873 and  what is now called “The Long Depression.” This prolonged economic contraction followed a period of explosive growth during which saw a tripling of Britain’s GDP. The 1866-67 depression affected all classes, but it disillusioned one in particular: the youth.

“The resurgence of hunger, homelessness and disease in the midst of great wealth radicalized the generation that grew up during the boom and had taken affluence and progress for granted. Playwrights wrote dramas with proletarian heroes, poets published works of social criticism, professors and ministers used their pulpits to denounce British Society.”

Sound familiar? It is a powerful thing to promise a generation unending growth, success, and returns on their education only to tell them those promises, like the prosperity of their childhood, were inflated.

My generation may not agree upon the specific reforms needed, but we are united by that most powerful sentiment: disillusionment. I will be watching closely as Occupy Wall Street (and Occupy Chicago, where I live) takes shape. My guess is that “Whiskey Rebellion” will take hold with the movement and the media, and give the group a focal point.

It looks like Rick Perry’s even got the New York Times and the US Attorney’s Office confused about the definition of a ponzi scheme.

Perry first equated the nation’s pension plan with Bernie Madoff’s investment strategy in his 2010 book, Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington. Ever since journalists and bloggers dug up the controversial remark, he’s decided to turn it into a kind of mantra.

This has gone over fairly well with the public: Perry leads Romney 31% to 24% according to the latest USA Today/Gallup poll. It helps that “Ponzi Scheme” has the dual benefit of association with financial super-villain Bernie Madoff and a vague understanding as an unsupportable swindle.

Perry neglects to mention that the ponzi victim is himself a kind of schemer. He is so intoxicated by the idea of easily-won large sums of money (money that must come from somewhere) that he fails to realize he’s the mark.

But Americans aren’t victims and nor are they schemers in the Social Security system. They pay into Social Security at the front end of their lives with the understanding they will not enjoy the benefits for a very long time, and perhaps not at all. Ponzi schemes are about defrauding your neighbors; social security is about collaborating with them.

The US Justice Department and Full Tilt Poker have given us another example of what a ponzi scheme is not.

On Tuesday, federal prosecutors filed a civil complaint against Full Tilt Poker, alleging in part:

“Full Tilt Poker . . . defrauded players by misrepresenting that their funds on deposit in online gambling accounts were safe, secure, and available for withdrawal at any time. In reality, Full Tilt Poker did not maintain funds sufficient to repay all players, and in addition, the company used player funds to pay board members and other owners more than $440 million since April 2007.”

The Full Tilt Poker scam is missing the element that makes a scheme essentially “ponzi”: that the victim receives unusually high earnings. The gamblers were not duped into putting their funds into a Full Tilt account with the promise of extraordinary returns. Unlike, say, S.E.C. general counsel David M. Becker and family, who earned $1.5 million off of an original $500,000 managed by Madoff before his colossal fraud collapsed.

This is not to say that Social Security is like Full Tilt Poker, of course. Online gamblers believed their funds were being held in trust for their later benefit. Americans’ funds actually are.

Perry’s not only failed to grasp the technical differences between a ponzi scheme and social security. He’s failed to grasp the human difference.

My very first review over at www.filmhookreviews.com was of Steve James and Alex Kotlowitz’s new documentary, The Interrupters, about mediators of gang violence in Chicago. I went to an early showing at the Gene Siskel Film Center. Afterwards, James, one of the Interrupters, and another Ceasefire employee gave a Q&A. It was really something.

Check it out.

My latest Book Punch is up at Micah Ling’s excellent site that reviews books in 200 words:

http://bookpunchreviews.wordpress.com/2011/08/19/dog-sense-by-john-bradshaw/

Also, check out the sister sites, Beat Jab and Film Hook.

The NY Times reported on the recent comeback of grizzly bears in the continental US. I encountered the much-maligned mama grizzly with two cubs while backpacking in the Absorakas Range of the Wyoming Rockies. To my intense relief, the bear retreated, leading her cubs up a mountain at an unfathomable pace. But not before standing on her hind legs, just a few hundred feet away, scrutinizing the human threat before her.

Grizzly bears are one of the only protected species that also attacks humans. And as the population expands, the threat of attacks–while still infinitesimally small–grows. If we plan to accommodate biodiversity, we must learn to live with these bears.

We can start by not habituating them to human food and garbage. An appetite for human food has become a death sentence for the grizzly’s smaller and much more populous cousin, the black bear. Repeat offenders must be tracked and euthanized.

And how is it we know that bears, and not, say, raccoons, are rifling through our garbage? Corn.

The bear’s hair also speaks volumes. With a snip, a biologist can examine isotopes — atoms of a chemical element — in a hair to learn what a bear has been eating. When a bear killed a camper last year near Yellowstone National Park, biologists wondered if the bear had been habituated to human garbage. Since most human food has corn syrup in it, biologists tested the hair for an isotope associated with corn. It did not have that isotope, meaning the bear had not foraged in trash cans.

So corn has now become a proxy for human food. What does that say about our own expansion on the continent?

My review of Tina Fey’s Bossypants (audiobook) is up over at bookpunchreviews.com. Thanks, Micah!

Last week, Jonathan Franzen wrote a commencement speech-cum-op-ed about the meaning of love, and its impostor “like.” The piece finishes as an exceptional tribute to the complexities of love, and, to some extent, activism. But I want to focus on this first, perhaps shallower, part of the essay: our love of stuff.

Here’s a pearl of a passage, giving examples of how stuff undermines real love, by equating the temporary elation of buying a thing with the emotional fulfillment of being loved:

Its first line of defense is to commodify its enemy. You can all supply your own favorite, most nauseating examples of the commodification of love. Mine include the wedding industry, TV ads that feature cute young children or the giving of automobiles as Christmas presents, and the particularly grotesque equation of diamond jewelry with everlasting devotion. The message, in each case, is that if you love somebody you should buy stuff.

At a certain point in my adult life, I could no longer watch tv commercials without ruining the experience for anyone in the room. I groan, pretend to retch, or just yell at the tv. “That stuff will not make you happy! You are being duped into working long hours to pay too much for stuff that someone else worked longer hours to make!”

Of course, I foster commercialism with the best of ‘em. Like many Americans, my spouse and I own a car, a television, two computers, three digital cameras, two functioning iPhones, an iPod, a Kindle, and a graveyard of broken or obsolete gadgets. I also own hundreds of books–on shelves and in boxes–for the primary purpose of being comforted by them. The very essence of avarice.

We may be hardwired to bond with and lust for stuff. The book Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things couches an unexpected suggestion in its shocking case studies about pathological people: to hoard is to be human. The drive to acquire runs deep: “In some early civilizations,” Stuff explains, “possessions were seen as part of an individual’s ‘life spirit’ or self. Anthropologists have explained this as the basic psychological process for ownership.”

The fashion industry has known this for decades. But increasingly tech companies like Apple, which marries identity with its sleek objects, exploit this natural tendency. Hoarders merely identify with their possessions more than most. According to Stuff, hoarders experience significant levels of distress at having to part with seemingly worthless items. But even more intriguing, many of the books’ subjects actually apologize to their stuff–including garbage and rotting foods–before being compelled to toss it.

Franzen disposed of his old Blackberry without sentiment. But perhaps he just hasn’t gotten serious with his stuff.  Hoarders have added another familiar dimension to their relationship with objects: obligation, devotion, dedication. They don’t just love stuff; stuff is their beloved.

In a new book called The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World, Australian environmentalist Paul Gilding predicts that humans will–nay, must–break the addictive cycle of stuff. As Thomas Friedman describes it this week in a New York Times column:

We’re currently caught in two loops: One is that more population growth and more global warming together are pushing up food prices; rising food prices cause political instability in the Middle East, which leads to higher oil prices, which leads to higher food prices, which leads to more instability. At the same time, improved productivity means fewer people are needed in every factory to produce more stuff. So if we want to have more jobs, we need more factories. More factories making more stuff make more global warming, and that is where the two loops meet.

In order to break out of this loop, according to Gilding, we will have to shift to a world where people work less, consume less, and generally lust less over stuff. Where do we sign up?

But the psychological roots of consumerism run deep and counter to logic. We know a diamond won’t buy everlasting romantic harmony. We know the planet cannot birth an endless supply of iPods for our pleasure. And still, because having, keeping, and loving stuff is as natural as eating and breathing, we shop. Breaking the cycle will happen by necessity, but not choice.

I’m now contributing to the University of Chicago’s public policy site, Chicago Policy Review. Today my first post went up, and you can find it here. Below is an excerpt.

It’s nearly impossible to imagine an innocent person confessing to homicide. Especially in a state that institutes the death penalty. Why on earth would a person—a wholly innocent person—not just hold his ground and refuse to confess?

That failure of imagination turns into outright skepticism when a false confessor insists upon his innocence at trial. The line of reasoning varies but the conclusions are the same. A variation on the argument above goes, “Since no innocent person would risk his life by confessing falsely, then he must be guilty. If not of this crime, then another.” Alternatively, “Well, if he did lie to interrogators, then he’s an admitted liar, so why should I believe his latest story?”

The underlying premise is one of a prosecutor’s greatest assets: innocent people don’t confess falsely. Juries are so deeply persuaded by confessions that, in some instances, they convict in the face of DNA evidence that excludes the suspect. The powerful and irreversible nature of the false confessions is the single best reason for interrogation reform and elimination of the death penalty.

Donald Trump’s retreat from a presidential campaign coincided with the deadline NBC gave him for committing to a new season of the Celebrity Apprentice. Celebrity Apprentice is one NBC’s highest rated shows, meaning that they most likely agonized over Trump’s potential presidential run. A run would mean Trump couldn’t do the show, and NBC would have to scramble to replace him, or the show altogether.

As if it wasn’t already obvious, it’s now perfectly clear that Trump leveraged the threat of a presidential campaign to his exclusive benefit. Trump undoubtedly held his faux campaign over NBC execs’ heads throughout negotiations for the next season. He took those negotiations up to the “courthouse steps,” as it were, reportedly discussing his run with NBC on an “hourly” basis leading up to his decision.

It’s shameful to commercialize a presidential campaign this way, but Trump has company. Mike Huckabee, too, unveiled his decision not to run on his highly publicized Fox news show. If he had any respect for the office, he would have announced his decision promptly, rather than scheduling it for prime time television at the behest of his sponsors (and his own wallet).

The only difference between Huckabee and Trump is that Huckabee once seriously considered being president, while Trump simply saw the business opportunity in bluffing.

Candidates with media network ties may use those networks however they wish in contemplation of a presidential run. But it’s still disgraceful to see them cash in on the potent combination of national politics and prime-time television.

Here’s my latest bookpunch review, guest written for Micah Ling’s site, which reviews books in 200 words.

http://bookpunchreviews.wordpress.com/2011/04/29/tinkers-by-paul-harding-reviewed-by-katy-welter/