When Will We Ever Learn

I remember the first time I walked into a public library with my Dad. I had gone before, but it was always just a fast affair. It was summer of 1976, and Dad wanted to walk around, so I did the same. Being thirteen at the time, I no longer needed to visit the children's section. For the first time, I was looking at adult books.

The sheer number of books at the Regency Branch was astonishing to my young mind. But there weren't just books. There was music, records, plenty of them. There were also newspapers and magazines from all over the country, and I flipped through the "New York Times" for the first time. Sandalwood Junior and Senior High had them as well, but I never paid attention; here, they leaped out at me.

The sheer bulk of information available at my fingertips left a lasting impression on me. For me, libraries are every bit as important as any other civic institution, and perhaps on par with churches in relevance. Keep in mind that this was still the mid 1970's, and most mass consumed communication at the time consisted of radio, television and the various publications. Keeping current usually meant that you were maybe a day behind, though with television big events could, and did, preempt anything showing at the time.

Still, the amount of disinformation that I encountered (and frequently believed as well) was amazing. By the time I graduated, I was learning how to discern the chaff from the wheat, and still struggle to move beyond innuendo and rumor. For me, that library, as well as the one I worked in at school, were brains to borrow. It was all free.

Around the time I entered college, the first computer networks were being traced between many of the local colleges. The potential power, the promise, they held amazed me. I knew that the day was coming when those same college networks would connect everyone. It had been speculated for years that this was coming. By 1995, thanks to companies like AOL and early social sites like The Well, millions of homes were connected. Today, it is rare to encounter a household without the Internet.

When you think about it, this is sort of like a digital library of Alexandria... with scandal sheets, bulletin boards and diaries for the reading. While not perfect, there is plenty of verifiable information on the Internet, real honest information. It is not perfect, but it is current. News is almost instantaneous. So is innuendo and rumor.

Somehow expecting that at an age when news and information could be had in mere seconds that people could verify information for themselves, to discern the chaff from the wheat, was simplistic and naive.

While the facts may be the facts, belief systems are harder to overcome. If something looks too far fetched but fits into our belief system, it is easier to not look for those facts than to overturn those beliefs. For us, our perceptions are more important, too valuable.

I'd be a liar if I said I wasn't a victim of my blind faith at times.

The inability to acknowledge facts when they come up against our beliefs is not just a human weakness. It is a fatal flaw, something those who wish to control us seek to control at any given chance. In this day of oligarchs and plutocrats it is easy to be manipulated. Even well meaning, though sometimes occasionally misguided, friends and family fall into these traps and rifts can form. The powerful are not so misguided, and their pockets deep, their will strong.

But not invincible.

For their control depends upon an uniformed public, one which won't verify facts. They may seek to control that flow of information, and in many cases have succeeded in turning the tables. Facts, though, are immutable, and sooner or later resurface.

It is up to us, therefore, to try to stay ahead of the hucksters. They have plenty of flash, plenty of noise. We must look beyond all of that. We must learn.

We Get What We Pay For, And Someone Else Pays

A few months back I was researching my Schwinn Spitfire. This is a classic, from the days before they were known as "beach cruisers" or even "cruisers"; they were simply single speed, coaster brake equipped bikes. In the case of the Spitfire, and its near stablemate the Tempest, they were dubbed "industrial bikes". Industrial indeed, for at 22kg, they are extremely solid.

My Spitfire was made in April 1978. At the time, it sold for $139, not a cheap single speed but fairly typical for the period. When I found the bike, as a pile of rusty parts in early summer of 2008, it was basically worthless. But, adjusting for inflation, it would have sold for over $450 new.

That seems pretty steep, but in fact many well made bikes pretty much cost the same. A comparable Huffy model from the same period was correspondingly less, of course, but would still be over $300 today.

These were mass produced bicycles. Huffys were common to most department stores, while Schwinns by that time were relegated to shops. The lesser bikes, your AMFs and Murrays, plus a few off brands such as Setico (common to the local chain, Pic-n-Save) could frequently be found for much less, usually the $50 to $75 range. You don't see too many of them around, and for good reason; they were poorly made, usually from plants in Taiwan.

Those plants in Taiwan would eventually improve, and much of their production would be taken up by manufacturers in the People's Republic. A few years ago, Huffy and Schwinn were acquired by a large conglomerate, and the production moved to those same manufacturers.

Which is why you can still find new Schwinn and Huffy cruisers for less than a couple hundred dollars. Suffice to say, they are a far cry from their ancestors.

But they are inexpensive and every new school year or Christmas they leave the racks in droves and find their way onto American streets. And, due in no small part to their cheap construction, frequently find their way to dumpsters within a couple of years, when they are sometimes replaced by bikes of similar quality.

Logically, simply spending a good amount of money on a good quality bike is the right thing to do. The larger retailers know this, but seldom stock them. Their business is in turnaround; bikes break and are replaced. For the most part it is a good economic model for retailers, but a poor one for the consumer.

But that's not what this is all about.

The drive to keep consumer prices down has had several negative effects on our economy for the past three decades. The first is the mass migration of manufacturing to areas where the costs can be kept down. While this has sometimes resulted in good products, the vast majority of these products have been of lower quality, cheaply made and soon landfill fodder.

The second is an artificial devaluation of consumer goods in some areas, and a resultant flattening of wages. Because the costs of a vast number of consumer products is so low, the drive by the worker to demand even modest increases in wages decreases. Forget the fact that some things have kept pace with inflation or have even surpassed it; we can still fill our lives with cheap consumer goods, so we feel as if we are living a good life. That feeling is what the producers and marketers of these goods are banking on, so to speak. As long as those cheaply made trinkets that clutter our lives can be supplied, we should be expected to feel good.

The trade-off, though, has been a reduction in real manufacturing jobs, stagnant wages and a lifestyle that is artificially buoyant. A good many real productive jobs have been replaced by service jobs, which lack the same security.

We didn't mind, of course, as long as we could have that lifestyle. People here may have lost jobs, and people abroad may be forced into factories with abominable working conditions and horrific wages. As long as we could have our big televisions or even cheap bicycles.

Yet we have embraced this lifestyle, even as we have been racing towards along with an economic model that was unsustainable. What I fear is that we have yet to hit rock bottom, and it may be all of us who have yet to feel that impact.