Does increasing taxes on the wealthy hurt the economy and lead to higher unemployment?

For years Republican politicians have claimed that increasing tax rates on the wealthiest, who are the "job creators," will hurt the economy and lead to higher unemployment rates. I decided to test these claims by collecting evidence.

The claim that higher taxes on the wealthy hurts the economy was recently tested by Thomas L. Hungerford in a 2012 publication of the U.S. Congressional Research Service ("Taxes and the Economy: An Economic Analysis of the Top Tax Rates Since 1945" CRS Report for Congress no. 7-5700 / R42729, http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/r42729_0917.pdf). Here is what he found: "There is not conclusive evidence, however, to substantiate a clear relationship between the 65-year steady reduction in the top tax rates and economic growth. Analysis of such data suggests the reduction in the top tax rates have had little association with saving, investment, or productivity growth. However, the top tax rate reductions appear to be associated with the increasing concentration of income at the top of the income distribution. The share of income accruing to the top 0.1% of U.S. families increased from 4.2% in 1945 to 12.3% by 2007 before falling to 9.2% due to the 2007-2009 recession. The evidence does not suggest necessarily a relationship between tax policy with regard to the top tax rates and the size of the economic pie, but there may be a relationship to how the economic pie is sliced." In other words, the only definite outcome of decreasing taxes on the wealthy is to increase economic inequality, which has been shown to cause a host of societal problems.

The figure below from the 2012 CRS report shows that there is no correlation between the top marginal tax rate and economic growth as measured by real per capita GDP growth rate:

In a New York Times article published September 15, 2012, David Leonhardt (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/opinion/sunday/do-tax-cuts-lead-to-economic-growth.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0) asked "Do Tax Cuts Lead to Economic Growth?" and answered "no," presenting this chart to support his conclusion:

The chart clearly shows that the Bush tax cuts did not prevent the country from plunging into a deep recession. In fact there are many investments made by the federal government that are more effective than tax cuts at spurring economic growth, including funding of basic research, which leads to the development of new technologies for the market. For example, most of the technologies embedded in Apple's popular IPhone originated in federally-funded research (see http://thebreakthrough.org/archive/american_innovation), as did the Google Search Engine, which was an outgrowth of a National Science Foundation grant to Stanford University. We conclude that there is no evidence that increasing taxes on the wealthy hurts the economy.

Now let's address the second, related question: does raising the highest marginal tax rate lead to higher rates of unemployment? To answer this question I made a plot with highest marginal tax rate on the x-axis (independent variable, data from http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/Content/PDF/toprate_historical.pdf ) and average annual unemployment rate on the y-axis (dependent variable, data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, http://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet).

The chart shows that increasing income taxes on the wealthy does not increase unemployment; if anything, the unemployment rate goes down when tax rates on the wealthiest increase.

Many people don't realize that tax rates on the wealthiest declined dramatically between 1945 and 1990, and declined further beginning in 1995 to the lowest levels on record in 2005 (see figure below).

Yet recessions have repeatedly come and gone, as reflected in this chart from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics showing unemployment rates since 1948:

(from http://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet). The unemployment chart looks nothing like the previous chart of the highest marginal tax rate, indicating there is no correlation between the two.

So why do Republican politicians keep claiming that lowering taxes on the wealthy will create jobs and grow the economy? I don't have data to objectively answer that question. I can only speculate that their motivation is political rather than economic: they receive large campaign contributions from wealthy donors who, in return, expect enactment of favorable tax policies.

Economic growth can be too fast, leading to attacks against children in China

Change as rapid as China is experiencing is destabilizing. Imagine you are Chinese peasant whose lifestyle does not change while everything changes around you. Your friends who became wealthy will no longer be friends with you; the girl you hoped to marry now spurns you because her family is now wealthy. The landmarks you grew up with have been torn down and replaced with modern buildings. You feel alienated and disempowered. What do you do? Perhaps these changes can explain the strange rash of copycat crimes in China that started in March 2010, when a man stabbed eight children to death while they waited for a bus outside their elementary school in the southeastern city of Nanping. At his trial the man said he was angry because he was jilted by a woman and treated badly by her wealthy family. On April 28 he was put to death, and on the same day the second attack occurred: a man in the southern city of Leizhou wounded 15 students and a teacher in a knife attack. The third attack occurred the next day in the eastern city of Taixing when a man slashed 28 children, two teachers and a security guard with an 8 inch knife. The following day a fourth attack occurred in Beijing, where a farmer attacked kindergarten students with a hammer, then burned himself to death.

According to experts, "outbursts against the defenseless are frequently due to social pressures... and growing feelings of social injustice in the fast-changing country. An avowedly egalitarian society only a generation ago, China's headlong rush to prosperity has sharpened differences between haves and have-nots (Bodeen, AP, 4/29/2010)". Change can be too fast for systems and people to adapt; even seemingly positive change like rapid economic growth is unsustainable because it is destabilizing and causes social upheaval.

The Failure of the U.S. Government to Address Sustainability

The U.S. Government will fail to adequately address sustainability issues, and American citizens will have to abandon the top-down approach and rely on a bottom-up approach to solving these problems that affect our national security. I say this because Congress and the public have become so polarized along ideological lines that compromise and political progress have become impossible. As a result, moderate members of Congress are choosing to leave rather than run for reelection. On February 16, 2010 when moderate Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) announced that he would not seek reelection after two terms, he stated that "there is too much narrow ideology and not enough practical problem-solving" on Capitol Hill (Kellman and Jackson, AP, 2/17/2010). Nowhere was this more apparent than when the Senate in January rejected a bipartisan deficit commission that could have forced Congress to make painful budget decisions. Members of Congress are unable to agree to reduce capital outflows, but they refuse to increase capital inflows by raising taxes because that is politically unpopular. Most telling was the fact that some Republicans who originally supported the commission changed their votes after President Obama endorsed it. Clearly these members of Congress were acting in the interests of their political party rather than of the country they serve.

By rejecting the establishment of a commission that could have taken the heat for such unpopular decisions, Congress essentially sealed the economic fate of the federal government. This plot shows the federal deficit over time. The total area under the annual deficit bars is a measure of the total deficit, i.e., the economic overshoot = outflows - inflows, which is also shown by the cumulative deficit line that is now approaching $6 trillion. The federal budget is seriously out of balance, but even worse, in most cases these deficits were planned. Unbalanced proposed budgets are passed every year now.

In this plot I've shaded Republican administration years red and Democratic administration years blue. Notice that until Barack Obama took office in 2009 the red area was much greater than the blue area, meaning that until 2009 Republican administrations contributed more to the deficit than Democratic administrations. Of all of the Presidents since 1970 only Bill Clinton managed to balance the budget, ringing up surpluses in his last three years of office. In contrast, President George W. Bush changed the budget surplus of his first year in office, which was budgeted by Clinton, and turned it into record deficits within two years.

As a result of the economic recession in President Obama's first year in office in 2009 the annual federal budget deficit rose to the highest level ever. It remains to be seen if the benefits of the money spent on the economic stimulus package to stave off the recession outweigh the harms resulting from the increase of the deficit, but if the trend continues, the federal government will soon be unable to meet its financial obligations, and this will likely result in an economic collapse. Most economists predict that interest payments on the budget deficit will consume 80% of all federal revenues by 2020 (Tom Raum, AP, 2/15/2010).

And it will only get worse. In January the U.S. Supreme Court, dominated by political ideologues, voted to eliminate any limits to political contributions by corporations or lobbies. Most American citizens believe that members of Congress are already in the pockets of corporations. Now these corporations will have unlimited influence. The fate of bills will be decided by who has the deepest pockets. And when it comes to the three ABCs of unsustainability, who do you think will win when Congress tries to regulate Automobile, Beef, and Coal producers? Will members of the Senate ever vote to limit CO2 emissions when wealthy oil companies are paying them not to?  Congress is losing its integrity and its independence. Soon it will lose its economic power and therefore its influence. We can't rely on Congress to fix our problems.

Our Relationship with Nature

*Please note: I haven’t been posting recently because there have been so few comments that I was not convinced anyone was reading my entries. If you read this entry, please post a comment (click the “Comment” link at the end). You don’t even have to write anything; I just want to use the number of comments to estimate how many people are reading. If no one is reading these, then I’m not going to bother posting any more. Thanks, John

Till now man has been up against Nature; from now on he will be up against his own nature.  ~Dennis Gabor, Inventing the Future, 1964

There is a basic antagonism between the philosophy of the industrial age and the philosophy of the conservationist. – Aldo Leopold

Environmental problems develop when there is an unhealthy relationship between humans and the environment. The ways people approach, treat, and think of nature depend on their self-image. According to Wilson [1] there are two competing types of human self-image, exemptionalist and naturalist. Exemptionalists believe that humans exist apart from environment and hold dominion over it. In western civilization, most believe that God made the environment for our benefit, and that we have the freedom to use it as we see fit. Using technology, we can improve our current environment or adapt to any new environments. In contrast, naturalists believe that humans have perfectly adapted to our environment through millions of years of evolution, but that we are now rapidly destroying that environment. However, we can only be happy when we live in our original, natural environment because it is prescribed in our genes. The basic principle of organic evolution called habitat selection states that species prefer and gravitate to the environment in which their genes were assembled. Thus, we are completely dependent on our environment, including other species.

Wilson supports the Naturalist view. He states that the failures of the Biosphere 2 project (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioSphere_2) show that we and our environment are fragile and that our current technology cannot be used to create artificial sustainable environments. Exemptionalists claim that new technologies (power of the human mind) and free-market economies will provide adequate resources for the growing population; however, Wilson points out that there are limits to the amounts of water, arable land, oil, and food (including seafood), that can support us, and all of this is complicated by global warming. Exemptionalists are taking a gamble when they advise pressing forward with current policies and assume that technology will provide solutions to these growing problems before they become disasters. Ecologists like Wilson don’t like these gambles because they know that if we lose, we lose everything.

Wilson [1] believes that economists, who generally take the exemptionalist point of view, promote policies that are inconsistent with sustainability. Their economic models ignore human behavior, and they ignore the environment. A big problem is that they assume that there are adequate resources for all countries to have the same standard of living as the U.S.. However, the U.S. can only maintain its standard of living by using the resources of other countries (“economic miracles are not endogenous”), which we will demonstrate in detail later. Finally, economists do not use full-cost accounting, i.e., they don’t include the loss of natural resources. In this book I advocate a naturalist approach to solving environmental problems and achieving future sustainability.

The different approaches to nature are illustrated in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy. Elves lived symbiotically with nature and are presented as pure and good, while the ugly and evil orcs used resources like trees in a non-renewable way and transformed their environment into a wasteland. Clearly, to Tolkien it was evil to destroy the beauty of nature. In the Lord of the Rings some humans sided with elves and some with orcs, just as today humanity is divided between naturalist and exemptionalist camps (I’m not trying to say that exemptionalists are as ugly as orcs).

I am a naturalist rather than an exemptionalist, so I believe it is most effective to work with rather than against nature. You must always keep in mind that Nature is a powerful force; it is constantly at work, and while your short bursts of work may be more intense, and the use of energy from oil can magnify your efforts, eventually Nature will win because it has limitless time. How did streams cut through mountains to create water gaps? How did ancient mountains almost completely erode away? In ”The World Without Us”, Alan Weisman [2] describes what would happen to our structures (cities, buildings) if humans disappeared. It wouldn’t take long for nature to completely erase the evidence of our existence.

1. Wilson, E.O., Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. 1998, New York, NY: Vintage Books. ISBN 367 0-679-45077-7.

2. Weisman, A., The World Without Us. 2007, New York, NY: Picador. ISBN 416 978-0-312-42790-0.

Industrial Agriculture

The American farm is not what it once was. Agriculture is now a commercial operation, not a family operation. On the modern industrial farm, monocultures (a single crop, usually corn) have replaced polycultures, and farm animals are often nowhere to be found. In the past, we took animal waste and used it to fertilize the crops that fed the animals; this comprised an efficient closed loop system. Now we house animals in feedlots, where the waste is no longer a resource but a pollutant, and at the farm we have to use fossil-fuel fertilizer in place of manure.

Unfortunately industrial agriculture is now firmly entrenched in the U.S.. Pollan [1] gives an excellent introduction to the problems of industrial agriculture, which is entirely reliant on fossil fuels, less healthy for us and the environment, consumes more resources, and is therefore less sustainable than old-style agriculture. As noted before, it now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce one calorie of food, whereas in the 1940's it only took 0.4 calories to produce on calories of food energy. Pollan [1] points out that unless we make the food system more dependent on renewable solar energy than non-renewable fossil fuel energy, it will be difficult or impossible to make progress in the U.S. on health care, energy independence, or climate change.

The use of monocultures and loss of agricultural biodiversity in industrial agriculture is particularly troubling. For example, long ago there were many varieties of bananas grown in the tropics. But consumer preference soon led to the predominance of a single cultivar (bananas are grown by propagation because they are seedless) named Gros Michel. That cultivar was wiped out in the 1950’s by Panama disease (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bananas) and was replaced by the Cavendish, which is very popular because it is grown year-round and has long shelf-life. However, because of the way it is grown, it lacks genetic diversity, which makes it vulnerable to disease, and it therefore could be wiped out like its predecessor Gros Michel. Growers are concerned that the Cavendish could be wiped out in a pandemic, perhaps caused by the black sigatoka fungus, within the next twenty years, and there are no similar plants to replace it. This would be a huge loss because the banana is the most popular fruit and the fourth most important food crop worldwide ("A future with no bananas?". New Scientist. 2006-05-13. http://www.newscientist.com/channel/earth/dn9152-a-future-with-no-bananas.html). Thus, high biodiversity gives us food security.

Like our monoculture lawns, monoculture crops are unnatural and therefore require lots of energy to maintain. Modern grain crops are annuals rather than perennials, and modern varieties did not develop over millions of years in perfect tune with the local climate. Rather, they were developed quickly through breeding and genetic engineering to grow fast, not to be hardy. They are not as well adapted to the local environment as the weeds, which is why the weeds take over if we don't fight on behalf of the crop. The less hardy and well-adapted a crop is, the more energy that is required to make it grow. To reduce the amount of oil-derived energy used to produce crops you must work with rather than against nature. Use perennials as crops rather than annuals. Choose natural varieties that are well-adapted to the local environment (known as heirlooms), even if they have lower yields. The resulting increase in genetic diversity will increase our food security. And decreasing our reliance on oil in agricultural production now will better prepare farmers and our society for the post-oil world. We will discuss these solutions in more detail later in the section on Organic Agriculture, but where you can have the most influence on changing the food production system is in the choices you make as a consumer.

Consumers drive the food production system. Americans want cheap food, and they tend to prefer sweet and highly processed foods. Also, they don’t want to know how their food was produced, and they don’t want to have to cook; it’s too much effort. So why do we often feel fat and stupid? Our ancestors used to spend much of their day growing, preparing, and cooking food. Today food is an afterthought. Most parents don’t ask the question “what will we have for dinner tonight” until they get home from work. They don’t have the time or energy to pick fresh vegetables and prepare a balanced meal. For breakfast, our grandparents took the time to make eggs, bacon and toast every morning; our parents replaced that with the convenience of cereal and milk. Now we don’t even leave enough time to eat a bowl of cereal, often rushing out the door with an instant breakfast or a protein bar.

To me the protein bar symbolizes everything that’s wrong with American food culture. Families used to sit together at the table, talk, and enjoy their food. Now we don’t have time for that, so we choose to rush off to the car with a bar that looks like a turd and tastes like cardboard. Protein bars are highly processed, so we don’t recognize the taste of any of the ingredients. And no wonder! If you read the list of ingredients, you will find that it is extraordinarily long, and that you don’t recognize the names of most of the ingredients. Most of them are synthetic chemicals. If you gave your grandparents a protein bar they would probably frown, take one bite and spit it out. They would not consider a protein bar to be food because it contains no recognizable ingredients, and therefore has no recognizable taste. And when you told them how much it cost per ounce, they would laugh at you. The more processing it takes to make a food, the more expensive it becomes per ounce, and the more profit the food manufacturer makes. So of course, food companies try hardest to sell their most highly processed foods by heavily advertising them. So why do people buy them? For the convenience (I think protein bars would survive a nuclear war), and because we think they are good for us. However, in my experience the people who rely on highly processed foods such as protein bars are less healthy than people who eat “real” food. Protein bars are just another type of fast food, and we all know that fast food is unhealthy. The trend towards increasing proportions of fast food and processed foods in our diets has led to an epidemic of obesity and type II diabetes in the U.S..

One of the most damning indictments of industrial agriculture is that it is unethical. People sometimes joke about where the meat in their hot dog came from, usually agreeing “you don’t want to know”. We sometimes hear from animal rights groups about atrocities committed in slaughterhouses, but those groups have lost credibility in the eyes of much of the public, and the average person can’t just walk into a slaughterhouse to verify the claims. It’s amazing to me that animal feedlots have not been subjected to greater public scrutiny. Part of the problem may be that the American public still has a soft spot in their hearts for farmers, and they don’t want to hassle them, but again it is not family farmers but large corporations that run CAFOs. Why do the media and the public handle them with kid gloves? I’ve read about reporters being turned away at the doors of CAFOs (e.g., [2]), but that never stopped investigative journalists in the past. As a result, I don’t know as much about CAFOs, slaughterhouses, and food processing as I should (I almost wrote “As I would like”, but I’m not sure I would like to know, which may explain the public being satisfied to be left in the dark). But I have read about what happens to egg-laying chickens [2], and it so upset me that ever since I read about it I have paid 4x as much for cage-free eggs.

In conclusion, the food production system in the U.S. is seriously flawed because it harms human health, it degrades the environment, and it is unethical. It is broken because the federal government’s subsidy system rewards the overproduction of corn. These subsidies make processed foods made from corn inexpensive, leading to the expansion of fast food companies such as McDonald’s. In fact, McDonald’s is probably the primary beneficiary of farm subsidies. The goal of our food production system is to maximize productivity, so we subsidize Happy Meals but not healthy meals. In 1973 we decided as a country to produce as many calories per acre as possible, and that is when America started getting fat. We now live in the "age of plenty", eating more calories than in 1970 but spending only half as much of our salaries on food (currently on average we use 16-17% of our salaries to buy food compared to about 30% in 1970). On the plus side, industrial agriculture requires fewer people to produce food, freeing people to do other things, and very few people in the U.S. are starving. But is industrial agriculture good for us? And is it good for the environment? I think the answer to both questions is no.

Pollan [1] lists some simple principles for improving agriculture in the U.S.. Improved Food Policies should: 1) strive to produce a healthful diet for all people; increase the quality and diversity of calories rather than the quantity. 2) aim to improve the resilience, safety, and security of our food supply. 3) reconceive agriculture as part of the solution to environmental problems like climate change. He notes that "while there are alternatives to oil, there are no alternatives to food". To make food production more sustainable he recommends that we resolarize farms, reregionalize the food system, and rebuild America's food culture. He ends by listing "21st century's most urgent errands: to move into the post-oil era, to improve the health of the American people, and to mitigate climate change." As noted by Brown [3], “"The wildcard in the food prospect is climate change. Crop ecologists estimate that for each 1-degree-Celsius rise in temperature above the norm during the growing season, we can expect a 10-percent decline in grain yields."

What changes can we make in agriculture to make sure that it can feed the 10 billion people predicted to be on the planet in 2010? Is it even possible to adequately feed that many people? It depends on what they eat [4]. If everyone on earth becomes a vegetarian, then it may be possible.

Until the Green Revolution the limiting factors on agricultural yield were nutrient availability and soil moisture. Using energy from oil, farmers erased these constraints by applying oil-derived fertilizers and pumping water for irrigation. An eleven-fold increase in fertilizer use combined with a three-fold increase in irrigated area and the adoption of high-yielding hybrids of corn, wheat, and rice led to a tripling of world grain harvest [3] (Fig. World Grain Production and Consumption). However, in many areas this high-intensity agriculture is unsustainable because it relies on the non-renewable resources oil and deep groundwater. Like oil, on a human timescale deep groundwater is a single-use resource: once we use it, it's gone. And oil and water shortages are appearing nearly simultaneously, giving farmers a double-whammy. This may cause grain production to actually decrease in the near future. Since demand continues to increase due to the annual addition of roughly 70 million people per year and the expanding use of grains as biofuels, the outlook is for increasing grain prices and increasing numbers of hungry poor people. In addition to grain shortages, we must also worry about the decline in the world fish harvest due to the recent collapse of some marine fisheries. The per capita wild fish harvest is now lower per capita than at any time since the early 1960’s (Fig. World Wild Fish Harvest Per Person). Catastrophists point to these trends and claim we are facing a global food crisis, but their predictions in the past have frequently proved inaccurate. For example, catastrophist Brown made the following food supply predictions that are obviously inaccurate: "Farmers...can no longer keep up with rising demand; thus the outlook is for chronic scarcities and rising prices" (Brown 1974); "Global food insecurity is increasing...the slim excess of growth in food production over population is narrowing" (Brown 1981). However, we have to admit that the current trends are troubling, and that we have to come up with new solutions to prevent a global food crisis and sustainably produce an adequate food supply for 10 billion people.

Perhaps the biggest problem in affluent countries like the U.S. is that we now take food for granted. As observed by Smil [4]: “When judged by the allocation of labor force, ours are predominantly service economies. They depend, however, no less than millennia ago, on adequate food production. I find it astonishing that this truism is so widely, and so easily, discounted. Saving, as so many economists do, that agriculture does not matter as much as it used to because it now accounts for just a few percentage points of the GDP betrays a touchingly naive trust in arbitrary accounting procedures and the most profound ignorance of the real world. Our postmodern’ civilization would do quite well without Microsoft and Oracle, without ATMs and the WWW—but it would disintegrate in a matter of years without synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, and it would collapse in a matter of months without thriving bacteria. Our first duty is to take care of these true essentials.”

How can we expand agricultural yield in a sustainable way? One approach is to breed crop varieties that we can grow in arid and cold regions that are currently not farmable. Another is to multicrop, i.e., to grow two or three crops each year rather than harvesting one and then leaving the land bare and unproductive for the rest of the year. China has used some of these methods to greatly increase their food production. Some catastrophists like Brown predicted widespread starvation in China in the 1980's-1990's (see [4]), but China is now a grain exporter.

To avoid future global starvation we need to stabilize world population, change our buying and eating habits (pay the true cost of food by being willing to pay extra for organic foods), move down the food chain by becoming vegetarian (eat foods from lower trophic levels in the food chain), stop growing crops for fuel, develop less energy-intensive forms of agriculture such as no-till farming, and use water in a sustainable way (no deep groundwater mining) by raising water productivity [3]. These topics will be explored in later chapters.

1. Pollan, M., The Food Issue: Farmer in Chief, in New York Times. 2008: New York, NY

2. Pollan, M., The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. 2007.

3. Brown, L., Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization. 2008, New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.

4. Smil, V., Feeding the World: A Challenge for the Twenty-first century. 2000, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Change the Way You Live: Sustainable Living

"The diligent farmer plants trees, of which he himself will never see the fruit." — Cicero

You go into a community and they will vote 80 percent to 20 percent in favor of a tougher Clean Air Act, but if you ask them to devote 20 minutes a year to having their car emissions inspected, they will vote 80 to 20 against it.  We are a long way in this country from taking individual responsibility for the environmental problem.  -William D. Ruckelshaus, former EPA administrator, New York Times, 30 November 1988

The activist is not the man who says the river is dirty.  The activist is the man who cleans up the river.  -Ross Perot

Materialism is widespread in our culture. It is perhaps the most important social force in our society. It drives our economy, fuels our desires, and preoccupies our minds. Americans are addicted to shopping and self-indulgence. We continue to spend even when we don’t have any money, which is part of the reason why our country is now in the throes of an economic crisis (another reason is that we are bumping up against the physical limits to growth where our demand (ecological footprint) exceeds the supply (biocapacity)). That we continue to purchase products that we don’t need and can’t afford, when we buy them when we know we shouldn’t, when the anxiety caused by accumulating financial debt does not prevent us from purchasing more, then we have an addiction, a disease of the mind. The symptoms are an uncontrolled compulsion to shop and purchase items and the habit of “going shopping” whenever we have free time even when we don’t need anything. There is also a buildup of tolerance to the pleasure of shopping but decreasing satisfaction with continuing purchases, so we must buy more to get the same “high”, a sure sign of addiction. The following sections contain prescriptions to the disease of consumerism. Many of these prescriptions are common sense, and they don’t require the knowledge of a scientist to explain or elaborate. However, I am reminded of the numerous books and magazines sold daily that tell the reader how to lose weight. The answer is obvious (stop eating!), but sometimes we need encouragement. Also, I would argue that here we are dealing with a much larger problem than obesity, and unlike obesity there is more than one way to reduce the problem.

How Should I Start Living Sustainably?

We have to shift our emphasis from economic efficiency and materialism towards a sustainable quality of life and to healing of our society, of our people and our ecological systems.  -Janet Holmes à Court

Reduce Your Consumption

We’ve reviewed a lot of evidence that consumption has the biggest impact on the environment. I hope it has convinced you to change your lifestyle. But how? What changes will have the greatest effect? To reduce consumption requires changing the way you think and how you spend your time, which is not easy. So be patient, and take small steps. Don’t get frustrated. It will probably take a few years of effort before you become satisfied. Start small, or start with the “low-hanging fruit”, the easy changes that have a big impact.

First, you must divorce yourself from materialism. Look around your home. How much do you own? How much of it do you really need? When looking at past and potential purchases, ask yourself if you would be less happy if you didn’t own it. If you are still tempted to make an unwise purchase, remind yourself that it is unsustainable, and picture what it will look like in a landfill a few years in the future. Remind yourself that the peace of mind you gain from keeping that money in the bank, or avoiding another credit card purchase you can’t afford, is worth more than the item. Pat yourself on the back for not letting advertisers manipulate your behavior. If you stop and think this way before making any purchase, you will avoid the trap of impulse buying that comes naturally in a materialistic world.

When trying to reduce consumption, one of the easiest guidelines to remember is to avoid disposable products. I’ve followed this guideline for most of my life, because it always seemed so obvious to me: products are designed to be disposable so that we will spend much more money continuously replacing them. Disposable products may seem more convenient, but often they are marginally so, and using them generates huge amounts of waste. Water bottles have become a symbol of our wasteful society, and rightly so. It’s so easy to avoid using disposable water bottles: buy a BPA-free water bottle, carry it with you wherever you go, refill it for free, and wash it every day. You can save yourself lots of money by doing this.

It’s useful to keep in mind that corporations always try to sell as much product as possible. They do this by convincing you through advertising that you need something that you don’t really need. There are endless examples of ways that advertisers try to get consumers to consume more, e.g., Taco Bell serves a "4th meal", and movie theaters have increased the size of their drinks to the point that they no longer fit in the drinkholders, both obvious examples of why America has an obesity epidemic – we are victims of advertising. Some advertisers suggest that you can’t be happy without their product; for example, Best Buys motto is: "You. Happy."

Another way that corporations get you to buy more is through the use of planned and perceived obsolescence. Everyone born before the 1970’s has the perception that the quality of products has declined, and that products are now designed to be disposable. I remember that my grandfather spent a lot of his time fixing things, and as a result, he seldom had to purchase replacements. In fact, I still have some of my grandfather’s tools, which are now between 50 and 100 years old. How many of today’s products last that long? Few do because most products now are designed with planned obsolescence in mind. Again, the goal of the manufacturer is to get you to buy as much of their product as possible, so they design the product to fail after a planned amount of time, usually just after the warranty lapses. In fact, most consumers now accept that they will have to buy a replacement shortly after the warranty expires, but it wasn’t like that in the past. My parents and grandparents each owned only one vacuum in their lifetimes, but today people frequently replace their vacuums after only one or two years of service. The vacuums are made so cheaply that they are not even worth repairing. Do you remember TV and appliance repair shops? You almost never see them now, because it usually is more expensive to repair a product than to replace it. Now the old product goes into the landfill as waste, and we waste more time shopping for and more money purchasing replacements.

Corporations and advertisers also rely on perceived obsolescence when they try to convince you to replace a product that still works perfectly well. By emphasizing a fancy feature in each new version of a product, usually a feature that you are unlikely to use and definitely don’t need, they convince you to buy replacements on a regular basis. This strategy has always worked well for car sales, but it works even better for new electronic devices that perform better tricks every year. I know people who buy annual upgrades of products such as the IPod nano or the IPhone because Apple is so remarkably good at marketing. I personally am a technophile, so I enjoy playing with gadgets and figuring out how to use all of their features (I even read the manuals!), but I still use less than half of the features bundled in most of my electronic gadgets. Yes, I am tempted to buy the newest versions of these products, but I know I don’t need them. From my experience, the constant upgrading is time-consuming and expensive, and I have more enjoyable and less expensive things to do. To convince myself not to buy them, I find the best strategy is to remind myself how much time it will take to figure out how to use them and to configure them properly. I now strive to simplify my life and eliminate clutter, a topic to which we will return.

Sometimes it’s not easy identifying the cheaply made junk. A good source of information on product reliability is the magazine Consumer Reports. Over time, you will learn which brands and countries sell junk, and which make reliable products. My grandfather used to say decades ago that anything marked “made in China” was junk, and that may be even truer today (and we now know that they frequently make their products using materials that are bad for our health).

Besides avoiding purchases of disposable products and junk that is designed to break, and repairing rather than replacing, you should try to purchase products that are made from renewable resources and that are made locally (to reduce carbon emissions from transportation and to help your local economy). Always keep in mind that your goal is to reduce your footprint. Does your footprint look like that of an elephant, or of a mouse? Stop living so large!

Case study: DuPont Plant, New Johnsonville, TN

For a number of years I took students in my graduate course Aqueous Geochemistry to tour the DuPont Plant in New Johnsonville, TN, about two hours west of Nashville. The plant manufactures Titanium Dioxide TiO₂ by mining the mineral ilmenite FeTiO₃ and reacting it Hydrochloric acid HCl as follows: FeTiO₃ + 2HCl = FeCl₂ (aq) + TiO₂ + H₂O. The Titanium dioxide is a pigment that gives Kilz paint, Oreos, and many types of toothpaste their brilliant white color. There are two problems with this process. One is that the product solution is still very acidic. The other problem is that ilmenite contains many toxic heavy metals that are soluble in the acidic solution. In the 1960’s when people didn’t know better, DuPont was allowed to dispose of hundreds of thousands of gallons of this toxic acid solution directly into the Tennessee River, which of course killed all fish and bottom feeders downstream. Later they switched to the more environmentally friendly but more expensive process of deep-well injection. They drilled wells between 1000-2000 feet deep and then pumped the acidic waste into a confined, deep limestone layer. The thinking was that the limestone (which contains calcite CaCO₃ and dolomite CaMg(CO₃)₂) would neutralize the acid: CaCO₃ + 2H⁺ = Ca²⁺ + H₂O + CO₂. The confining (impermeable) layer above would keep the waste isolated from shallow aquifers that supplied drinking water. Once again, there were two problems with this plan, which my class would remind the DuPont engineers of every year, and every year they would claim ignorance. First, the acidic solution dissolves the limestone, which results in the formation of large caves deep underground. Eventually the weight of the overlying rock layers causes them to collapse, breaking into pieces, falling, and filling the caves. This shatters the confining layer and makes it permeable, so that the wastes can rise up into the aquifers. The other problem is that, as shown in the reaction, limestone dissolution produces CO₂ gas, and the pressure of that gas can build until it shatters the overlying rock and escapes. Either way, it seemed likely that the confining layer would eventually be compromised. So, to their credit, DuPont came up with a new solution that was even more environmentally friendly but (they claimed) even more expensive. Since around the year 2000 DuPont has been reacting the ilmenite with sodium carbonate, and according to the DuPont engineers the only by-product is harmless FeCO₃ (the mineral siderite), which is used to make bricks for construction. However, recently it was learned that this process produces dioxin as a by-product. Pure Dioxin is the strongest poison known to man (it is the neurotoxin in Agent Orange), and the New Johnsonville Plant is the fourth-largest producer of dioxin in the U.S..

This case study illustrates many different points. First, it is difficult to anticipate all of the potential outcomes of a complex industrial process. That is why ecologists advocate the precautionary principle. Second, industrial chemistry sorely needs to be “greened”. Green chemistry is a field just now coming into its own, and it has the potential to reduce greatly the environmental impact of the chemical industry. Third, despite repeated attempts at trying to “green” the chemical process, the production of Titanium Dioxide still causes serious environmental problems. DuPont is being sued by numerous plaintiffs who live near or work at their Titanium Dioxide plant in DeLisle, Mississippi, who claim that dioxin has seriously damaged their health or caused the death of loved ones (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7693391300780002092). At New Johnsonville, TN, many citizens are afraid to talk about the health risks posed by the DuPont plant because they work for the plant, their livelihood depends on its success, and they fear retaliation (http://www.dupontsafetyrevealed.org/newjohnsonville.htm). This raises many questions: Should we allow chemical companies to manufacture goods like Titanium Dioxide that are nonessential (it is simply used for aesthetic reasons) but that cause great harm to human health and the environment? Or should we close the plants, even if it meant that thousands of people would lose their jobs? The plants in New Johnsonville DeLisle are by far the largest local employers, so closing them would be an economic disaster for those communities. In fact, years ago when DuPont reapplied to the State of Tennessee for a permit for deep well injection, a representative of the Tennessee Environmental Council asked me if I would testify against the application. I refused, saying that deep well injection seemed to be the best of the alternatives known at the time, and that I couldn’t bear the thought of helping to put all of those people in New Johnsonville out of work. Yes, I am pro-environment, so I believe we should always be looking for ways to protect the environment, but the overall benefits of change have to outweigh the overall negatives, and in this case, the economic vitality of New Johnsonville seemed to me to outweigh the potential risks of deep-well injection.