What's most important?

What's the most important thing you can have?  Is it love? happiness? money?  That's the question Dennis Prager asks, and he gives an excellent answer to the question right here.

Energy controversy

Given the economic benefit of the natural gas boom - huge economic benefit - it would be nice to have a clean win for American energy consumption, to be certain that the energy boom is proceeding safely.

But the fracking procedure to develop shale natural gas has raised questions.  Will there be a health cost to pay for this new technology?  Water, chemicals, and sand are pumped into the ground and then some of it becomes waste to dispose of.

T. Boone Pickens makes his case in favor of development of our natural gas reserves in a TED talk here.  To watch people voice their worries about hydraulic fracturing ("fracking"), search on youtube.com.

Energy abundance

The phenomenal new production of natural gas in America has so many benefits:

"Because U.S. natural gas prices are now the lowest in the world, industries that once exported manufacturing facilities abroad are suddenly bringing them back home as they pursue new investments. All of this has increased economic growth, created jobs with good wages and produced revenue for governments at all levels."

Lower prices on energy (natural gas has gone down by 75%!)  are good for everyone, but I always think first of families who are struggling and both parents working full time.  Our credit union loan officer a few years ago, for example, was a mother with three young kids, working all day in that office, and pregnant.   A savings of, say, $100 a month on heating/electricity costs could put all those kids in new shoes.

Other countries, like China, have natural gas deposits that they will develop eventually, but they'll have to ramp up their technology and infrastructure to do it.

"Private ownership of mineral rights in the U.S., along with an existing network of pipelines, enables oil and gas to find their way to market. And this . . has given America its big head start."   

Technical problems are driving up the price of natural gas in India.

Energy independence - let's hope

Yes, it's possible that America may produce all its own energy by 2035 according to the International Energy Agency, as reported in the NY Times, "When America Stops Importing Energy."  We could be the world's largest oil producer by 2020, and even export it.

After 30 years of decline, oil production in North America has surged and will produce a shock in the global market.  It comes from Canadian sands and from U.S. shale.  You may know people, as we do, who have relocated to North Dakota to take part in the oil bonanza there.

Since 2008, U.S. oil production has increased by 40%, and imports have diminished considerably.  It can only be good for us when we stop sending hundreds of billions of dollars overseas.  Wealth and jobs stay here.

Oldest Vet is 107

"I'm no young man no more," he says, so he'll spend Memorial Day quietly at his home in Texas.  Richard Overton was born in 1906 and served in World War II.  

This spring he was flown to Washington D. C. by Honor Flight Network to visit the WWII memorial, and he loved it:

“I was really honored when I got there,” Overton said of his visit to the World War II Memorial. “There were so many people, it was up in the thousands. And we danced and we jumped … them people tickled me to death. It made me happy as can be.”

College too expensive?

About one third of millenials think they would have been better off working right away rather than going to college because of the debt they incurred.  Student loan debt is now bigger in the U.S. than credit card debt, with 42% calling it "overwhelming."

Maybe demand for higher education is falling, because "288 colleges have so far reported that they “have space” for incoming freshman despite the fact that the “official” deadline for most schools has passed."  This author at Forbes thinks they all are willing to be generous with grants or scholarships, so new students and their parents should definitely shop around.

Yale prof's final message

"Imagine Robert DeNiro as an eminent conservative scholar of ancient Athens."   That's how professor Dr. Donald Kagan is described.  He is retiring from Yale University and gave his farewell lecture this week.  He's not pleased with what he has seen at Yale.

"On campus," he said, "I find a kind of cultural void, an ignorance of the past, a sense of rootlessness and aimlessness." Rare are "faculty with atypical views," he charged. "Still rarer is an informed understanding of the traditions and institutions of our Western civilization and of our country and an appreciation of their special qualities and values."

He was given a standing ovation by the students and the faculty.

Global Christianity's appeal

Alister McGrath is Professor of Historical Theology at Oxford and author of Christianity's Dangerous Idea.

In McGrath's view, Pentecostalism is a "legitimate outcome" of the idea behind all of Protestant faith:  that all people have the right and responsibility to interpret scripture as faithfully as they can.   The expression of Pentecostal type faith in cultures around the world is is not dictated by any American denomination.  They have their own models of worship that work within their culture.

Some Latin American Catholic clergy adopted Marxist theories into their theology several decades ago, calling it "liberation theology."  But McGrath says, "Pentecostalism is replacing Marxism as the solace and inspiration of the urban poor."

That's because, as he puts it, "Far from being oppressive or fraudulent (as Marxism argued), belief in God has been liberating and transforming."

Those global Christians

What current world-wide movement went from zero to 500 million followers in about a hundred years?  It might be hard to think of one.  The growth is called "staggering", "incredible."  It's a kind of Christianity that didn't exist before 1900 but which finds a home in diverse denominations like Baptist or Catholic:    pentecostal/charismatic.

"The typical late twentieth-century Christian was no longer a European man but a Latin American or African woman," and there's a good chance she is pentecostal.

The Lausanne World Pulse offers these points (among others) to explain how the movement has managed to grow so fast:

• "contagious relationships" - "Studies reveal it is not the big events or the big names that are decisive in Pentecostalism’s dramatic growth; the movement grows because people whose lives are dramatically changed tell their friends and family."
• "adaptive methods" -"Almost instantly Pentecostalism became Russian in Russia, Chilean in Chile, African in Africa. Pentecostalism’s freedom in the Spirit created grassroots movements that are at home in almost any context." 

Global Christianity

In 1900, 80% of all the world's Christians lived in either North America or Europe.  One hundred years later, this is no longer the case.  Mainline denomination churches in America have been in decline for many years.  European churches carry little influence and may be nearly empty on Sunday mornings.

Today, about 60% of all Christians in the world live in Africa, Latin America, and Asia.  In Great Britain there are at least 15,000 Christian missionaries evangelizing the locals, and most of them are from Africa and Asia.

Yoido Full Gospel church in Seoul, Korea, had 6 times as many worshipers attending this week as the ten largest churches in Canada combined.

The largest Christian European church congregation is in Kiev, Russia, and its pastor is from Nigeria.

More Catholics worshiped yesterday in the Philippines than in any European country.

This is from The New Shape of World Christianity, by Dr. Mark Noll, Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, formerly of Wheaton College.

Closer to home:  when my son's (American) college roommate decided to get seminary training, he chose a seminary in Africa.

Guns up, crimes down

As the author says in his first paragraph, this does sound crackpot:  "more people are buying firearms, while firearm-related homicides and suicides are steadily diminishing," but it's data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Sales of guns to women are climbing sharply.  "The days of a woman being dependent on a man for protection are long gone", says a personal safety instructor.  Increased numbers of  men and women both are signing up for training.

This Bureau data begs the question of whether criminals are deterred by the increasing chance that their victim may be armed.  I have no interest in guns - but it's a good question.

photo: thedailybeast.com

Less people - India

(I'm trying to leave this topic but it's fascinating stuff . . )

Stanford history prof Martin Lewis last week published a piece on India's falling birth rate:  from 1960 to 2009 it fell  from about six live births per woman to just 2.5 (2.1 is replacement rate).  As India continues to modernize, there's no reason to assume their birth rate will stop falling right here.  

Ten different maps of India's states show their rates of Female Literacy, GDP per Capita (gross domestic product per person), Percentage of Urban Population, Life Expectancy at Birth, Electricity for Lighting, TV Ownership, Percent of Women Exposed to Media -- all compared side by side to India's map of Total Fertility Rate (TFR).

These map comparisons show that India's falling TFR tends to correspond with more electricity, more wealth, and more tv.  Again, as Jonathan Last concluded, falling TFR is not a result of temporary social stress, but results from more opportunity for income, more education, more modernity in almost every way.

Per last Friday's post, there are still folks who worry about population explosion.  Martin Lewis says they should change their narrative:

"old-school environmentalists typically prefer to “wrap the latest scientific research about an ecological calamity in a tragic narrative that conjures nostalgia for Nature while prophesying even worse disasters to come unless human societies repent for their sins against Nature    . .” The data presented here confirm that it is time for a new mode of environmental rhetoric."

Deep reform

Yes, it sounds like a contradiction in terms usually used to describe quite different branches of Christianity, but Evangelical Catholicism: Deep Reform in the 21st Century Church is the title of a new book by George Weigel, who is called by the National Catholic Register the "greatest observer of the global Catholic Church."

He says that "deep reform" is coming to the Catholic Church in this century based on the Gospel.  "Evangelical Catholicism . .  preaches no generic truth-about-God.  Rather, Evangelical Catholicism, born from the Old and New Testaments [the Bible], proclaims that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob . . . finally and definitively revealed himself in Jesus of Nazareth, Son of God and son of Mary . . No one comes to the Father except through friendship with Jesus Christ."

Going further, he calls for nominal Catholics who don't actually believe the Bible's claims to either convert fully or to leave the Church

He also offers comment on Europe's critical drop in birth rates:  "the demographic winter into which Europe has seemingly consigned itself in the 21st century, by its willful failure to produce future generations, can be read as the result of a malaise that hung over much of the West . ."

More . . "less people"

South Korea was not mentioned last week, but they have their declining birth rate problems too.  According to Financial Times, their average age will climb faster than any other country's.  It seems to be linked to the high cost of education and to the decline of lasting marriages, causes author Jonathan Last also cited.

Bloomberg Business Week has a slide show of countries with lowest birth rates here.

In USA Today, James Dobson says, "It comes down to this: A society with a serious decline in its birth rate will become a world without springtime or regeneration. The laughter and exuberance of the young will become a diminishing treasure. The result will be a self-absorbed culture dominated by old, tired, dying individuals."

Today's kids - and then their children -  will not pass on to their heirs the same kind of society they grew up in.

Good weekend

It's a good feeling to start the weekend after a week's work, and it's also a good feeling to start the work week again . . refreshed.  “You need to hit Monday ready to go. To do that, you need weekends that rejuvenate you, rather than exhaust or disappoint you."

In this article from Forbes, check out "14 Things Successful People Do on Weekends"

Less people, a minority opinion

Hans Rosling, Swedish statistics guy, wants to make statistics-based information available to everyone so that we are all working with correct information, true information.  See his fascinating website at "Gapminder, for a fact-based world view."

So I went there to see if he had substantially the same facts as author Jonathan Last (What to Expect When No One's Expecting).   The answer is, Yes, he does.  In his video "Religion and Babies," he agrees on the fact of declining and low birth rates all over the world excepting certain African and Middle Eastern/Asian countries (check which countries these are here) whose birth rates are still way above replacement rate (2.1 births per woman).

But there is a different conclusion.  When he announces the very low birth rate, he uses a triumphant tone and his audience smiles and applauds!  It makes me think of The Population Bomb, book of the 70's which pictured a horrific future due to overcrowding of earth.  There are still people who worry about a deadly population explosion and so they celebrate the birth dearth.

Maybe they don't know the economic struggle that the world will have to deal with as there are fewer people.  Are they fine with Russia, Japan, Germany, Singapore going so low that they may not recover?

As you hear media start to cover total fertility rate issues in the future, try to pick up which point of view they're coming from.

I can't speak for Rosling, but we know there's a divide between some who consider human beings a "plague" and those who see human beings as creative and exceptional - different in kind from the material world and not just another consuming mouth to feed.  I thank God that The Population Bomb was incorrect, and that the world is considerably better off than its author expected.

Less people means less wealth

Younger people try risky entrepreneurial innovation far more than older people do, so growth of total wealth in the society slows down as younger people make up a smaller percentage of population.  Meanwhile there will be a higher percentage of older people who will need support as they leave their wealth-creating years.

That's a net loss of overall wealth for society (the "economic pie"), leading to inevitable change in entitlement programs.  You may know that Social Security payments to current payees are supported by current workers' taxes.  In 1940 there were 150 workers for every retiree, then 16.5 workers in 1950, and by 2010 "just 2.9 workers were paying for the benefits of each retiree."

China's famous one-child policy has been successful to the point that their total fertility rate is 1.55.  Its "population will soon get very old and then begin to rapidly contract:  By 2050 the country's population will be falling by 20 million every five years; one out of every four citizens will be over the age of 65."  They've started to see labor shortage.

From What to Expect When No One's Expecting

"Less people" reversal

You'd think that paying citizens to have children would work.  But the examples of Japan and Singapore show that people usually can't be bribed into having babies.  Despite offers like huge cash payments and tax credits, the number of Singapore babies just kept plummeting downward.  Today Singapore's total fertility rate is 1.1.  There is no historical example of replacement rate coming back from a sustained loss of this kind.

Author Jonathan Last (of What to Expect When No One's Expecting) has some suggestions for the U.S.    It seems clear that many people don't want (more) children, but truly choose careers/income/lifestyle instead, delaying (at least) marriage and kids.   So he says we should make it easier for the ones who do want them with changes to the university system and highway system, more work from home, and even multi-generational homes.

One more strategy has to do with those parts of America in which the total fertility rate is still at or close to replacement level:  those parts are also the most religious.  

" . . it is important we preserve the role of religion in our public square, resisting those critics who see theocracy lurking behind every corner.  Our government should be welcoming of, not hostile to, believers - if for no other reason than they're the ones who create most of the future taxpayers."

Reversal of the global trend to very low birth rate - is it possible?  Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore said in 1983 that it was too late to turn back the clock "and have our women go back to their primary role as mothers, the creators and protectors of the next generation."

Consequences of less people

For decades in America, urban planning has meant (very roughly) organizing the building up of cities for more people.  This is not the mission in Germany.  They're working on shrinking cities.

Hoyerswerda near the Polish border has lost half its population in the last 30 years.  "The main job of Hoyerswerda's government these days is demolishing abandoned buildings," and a third of housing has already been torn down.  By 2050, it's expected that one of every three people (including little kids) in Germany will be over 65.  Picture what that will look like.

In Japan, the government has for many years been paying its citizens to have more children without successfully moving the birth rate up to replacement level (2.1 babies per woman).  Many programs, but the total fertility rate is still only 1.39 babies per woman.  Way, way below replacement.

"Because of its dismal fertility rate, Japan's population peaked in 2008; it has already shrunk by a million since then . .  At the current fertility rate, by 2100 Japan's population will be less than half what it is now."  Picture what that would look like.   Sociologist Masahiro Yamada coined a new term:  Parasaito shinguru, or "parasite single."  Harsh words for a working woman who lives with her parents and spends her entire paycheck on trendy clothes, travel, restaurants - instead of building a family.

Governments and policy makers are thinking things through, even though the consequences may not show up in your life for a while.

From What to Expect When No One's Expecting

Less people

Only 3% of the world's population lives in a country with rising population; the rest of us live in countries whose population is declining.  That 3% lives in Africa and in the Middle East, while more industrialized nations around the world are either going to lose people or are already losing them.

A birth rate of 2.1 births per woman is required to maintain a stable population.  In Germany, the total fertility rate is 1.42 births per woman.  The rest of Europe is also well below 2.1, and Japan and China are even lower.

Central and South America have seen their birth rates tumble from previously high numbers down to 2.1 - 2.8 and they're expected to descend further before very long.

Serious consequences are probably unavoidable because this is a cultural thing that exists in the minds of people, a choice.  It's not because of a temporary thing like war or disease:  it's the choice of reproducing-age adults all over the world.   

(from What To Expect When No One's Expecting)

Reviewing The Hobbit

My imagination never filled in the details of the old Dwarvish kingdom when I read  The Hobbit, and of course author Tolkien doesn't fill them in either.  So it was really fun to see the dwarves' old home on the big screen~ on the other hand, there were galloping rabbits  . .  But something had to be made up in order to extend one book to three movies.  And we know why there had to be three movies.

Naturally, the movie does not equal the book.  It never does.  Somewhere I read that the living Tolkien family was profoundly disapproving and decided to ignore the movie completely.

It should show up at the second-run theaters pretty soon, so here's a review from the late Roger Ebert's website if you like his material.

If you really love and know the book, you may enjoy this discussion on a podcast by Dr. Louis Markos and his colleagues at HBU.   Markos has also written a new book called On the Shoulders of Hobbits:  the Road to Virtue with Tolkien and Lewis.

So far, so good

But, regarding the fish and plants grown by the "accidental farmer" (yesterday's post) is there actually a market place demand to reward all this work and problem-solving?  Hebert says there is.

Case in point is local chef Lenny Russo of the Heartland Restaurant and Farm Direct Market in St. Paul.  About the fish, he says, "They're pristine, beautiful.  The quality is outstanding.  I'd have them on the menu all the time if I could."

So Hebert and his partner have a good product and market place demand for it, but they're still working on some challenges:  "We never wanted to get ahead of ourselves and grow a million fish before the whole puzzle is figured out . . that's how people go bust."

So far, so good.

Accidental farmer, he says

"I am 100% an accidental farmer . . This all started as a hobby, and I saw the opportunity and went with it."  Now Chad Hebert and Warren Burgess grow 10,000 perch:   in a warehouse near I-35W and the Crosstown.

Their warehouse appears to be full of huge dad-made bunk beds.  Fish are in the bottom, plants (lettuce, tomatoes, herbs) are on top.  Pumps run water from the fish tanks to the "top bunk where the water is sprayed continuously onto the oxygen-producing plants in their soil.  The water runs through the soil, where it is filtered by soil, roots, and the beneficial bacteria that live there.

"The water then drops in a frothy stream back into the fish tank, becoming highly oxygenated as it falls.  No wastewater is ever returned to Minneapolis sewers.  "We have water in there that's four years old," explains Hebert."

There's also ladybugs, impatiens (flower habitat of the ladybugs), and 14,000 red wiggler worms, all interacting together.  The goal is "to make a box of fish in a warehouse exactly like a self-sustaining healthy lake that produces a sustainable, incessant three-course gourmet protein- and vegetable-rich meal."

This is from "After the Oceans," by Dara Moskovitz Grumdahl, Twin Cities foodie and writer, in Mpls-St.Paul magazine.  More sustainable indoor farming tomorrow.