The other day, I went to the store to buy some hundred watt light-bulbs. Guess what? I found I had a choice of either 90 watt standard soft-whites, or reduced “natural” illumination 100 watt bulbs. I’d been hearing about the future phase-out of incandescent light bulbs, but this isn’t “future.” It’s now, and there’s clearly a great push to replace the once-standard 100 watt bulb with compact fluorescents or, apparently, with lower wattage bulbs.

It doesn’t stop there, either. I have track lights in my kitchen. We installed the track lighting some ten years ago to replace the fluorescent lights that always seemed dim, and never directed enough light to specific areas. The track lights solved the problems. Except now… I can’t find the 75 watt halogen bulbs the track lighting was designed for. All I can find are 70 watt bulbs that seem to produce less light than 60 watt bulbs, and the kitchen is getting noticeably dimmer as the 75 watt halogen bulbs expire. Some people may find cooking and eating in dimness romantic, but we’d prefer that it be a choice and not a requirement.

Then, too, we have ceiling lights in several hallways and rooms, and the fixtures were designed to provide adequate light based on incandescent bulb sizes, and they don’t take compact fluorescents. Oh… and by the way, the “natural light” incandescents burn out in a couple of days in ceiling fixtures.

I’m presuming that all of these dimming down light bulb initiatives are in the service of energy efficiency and designed to “replace” the inefficiency of the incandescent light bulb. I don’t have a problem with replacing less efficient lights with more energy-efficient and environmentally friendly lights, but I have a huge problem with a forced reduction in light levels. Frankly, even with glasses that correct my once-perfect vision back to theoretically perfect vision, I have trouble reading fine print in dim light. So do millions of other Americans, most of us past 50.

I have a lower level office [i.e., walkout basement] which has overhead fluorescents. With them alone, the office light level is that of a medieval monastery in midwinter. So I have a desk lamp that has a three way bulb, and it does make everything light enough in the work area — but it’s getting harder and harder to find the three-ways with the 250 watt bulbs.

Now… I suppose I could install more lighting with lower wattage compact fluorescents and modified incandescent bulbs… and the way things are going I may have to… but why should I have to? If compact fluorescents are so good, and so efficient, why can’t someone manufacture one that delivers the lumen levels I need? So far as I can see, all these initiatives and changes are merely semi-mandatory light-reduction measures, not a replacement of current light levels attained with inefficient technology with the same lighting levels obtained more efficiently.

Or am I missing something? Is this another part of the sinister plot to do away with reading? Is it a way to make seniors stumble and fall and increase their mortality to reduce Medicare outlays? Or is it another form of age-discrimination against those of us who don’t operate by the light of blackberries or palm pilots or the like? Perhaps it’s a way to keep light from shining into the way government operates? Or is it a hidden subsidy to the lighting manufacturers as we all have to buy new and redesigned lighting in order to be able to see in our own homes?

Whatever it is… it’s not efficiency.

Just last week, one reader made the observation that, in the case of “instant communications,” people were the ones who decided the use of tools in the fashion I decried, and that it wasn’t the question of the tools, but that the problem lay with people, “as usual.” I have to say that, while I’ve always been a supporter of “not blaming the tools,” something about this view bothered me, and I think the issue boils down to a question.

Are there “tools” or institutions that influence people toward “bad” or “uncivil” or “unethical” or even “unproductive” behavior, by their superficial attractiveness or other attributes?

Moreover, do we tend to minimize the negative impacts of these tools because their other attributes overshadow in our minds –or emotions — their true costs to both individuals and society?

I’d certainly submit that this may well be the case with modern communications technology. Psychologists have already determined that computer/games/cellphone type equipment is highly addictive to certain personalities, and, as I noted earlier, instant communications seem to foster a rather wide range of behaviors that are either impolite, unethical, counter-productive, or just plain illegal. Obviously, the technology, as that reader noted, is not at fault, but, nonetheless, with the wide-spread use of that technology, we’re seeing problems we didn’t see before, or at least not on the wide-scale scope and severity as at present.

Another tool that has engendered incivility and an extremely high number of fatalities is the automobile. Because of its convenience, its utility, and its versatility, we don’t want to do without them, and certainly there’s nothing inherently “evil” about cars, except perhaps in the eyes of greenhouse extremists. Yet… what is there about a car that provokes human behavior that ranges from merely stupid to downright lethal? Vehicle deaths in the United States are something like three times homicides, and for the last 60 years have totaled two and half times the wartime combat deaths of U.S. service members. What persuades theoretically rational adults to drive a car when they’re so intoxicated or high that they can barely walk, or to cruise the highways at speeds more suited to the Indianapolis 500? Why do normally sane individuals become maniacs when cut off by another vehicle in rush-hour or other traffic? Why, when studies show that cellphone use, and especially texting, while driving impairs drivers more than drinking, do so many people persist in combining these lethal behaviors? Certainly, the car didn’t beg them to do it.

Firearms are another case in point. Like it or not, they’re implicated in nearly 30,000 deaths a year, roughly 47% being suicides and 48% being homicides. While guns don’t pull their own triggers, a prevalence of firearms does result in higher death rates. This may be simply because they’re more effective than other weapons, but that effectiveness combines with human nature to result in a rather high body count… particularly in the U.S.

Another area is electronic music. While seldom fatal, the ability of amplified music to penetrate thick walls and sealed vehicles is resulting in increasing hearing losses among listeners, usually younger people. And, of course, hearing losses must be compensated for by higher volume levels… causing greater hearing loss… and none of them ever seem to consider turning down the volume.

Likewise, the institution of ubiquitous fast food and other forms of “instant nourishment” has resulted in an epidemic of obesity in the United States. Again… the food didn’t drag people into McDonald’s or whatever instant cuisine establishment might be an individual’s choice, but the prevalence of such establishments clearly biases people toward eating habits that mitigate against good health.

So… while such tools and institutions do not in themselves require unfortunate results, does their presence and ease of utilization result in an influence that is biased toward less than optimal human behavior? If so, can and should we ignore that influence by arguing that such less than optimal human behaviors are solely personal decisions?

No… it’s not the tools, not exactly, but… I have to wonder whether the tools are somehow stronger than some people’s common sense and willpower…or whether an awful lot of people are “intelligence impaired.”

The other day, my wife had a local singing engagement for a community event, one of those things she and other members of the university community do gratis. Before she started teaching for the day, she checked her email and saw nothing urgent. Because she teaches straight through for eight hours on Tuesdays, as she does on most days, she did not have a chance to check her email again until after five o’clock. At that point, she discovered that the community event organizer had now asked her to sing an additional song — one not even mentioned previously — that was printed in the program… and she was singing that evening. Fortunately, my wife knew the song, but she never had a chance even to rehearse the song with her accompanist. Needless to say, she wasn’t pleased about the situation, because it’s hard to perform as well as one can without some advance preparation, and refusing to sing doesn’t set well with the audience or the local organizers. She said nothing, sang well, and everyone seemed pleased… but it still bothered her… and me.

The day before, she had a senior student email her a request for a faculty recommendation for a graduate school application — less than a day before the application and recommendation deadline. Routinely, incoming freshmen think nothing of putting off doing assignments until hours, if not minutes, before they are due — and many keep doing this for weeks and months. While this has historically always been an academic problem for some students, it’s now endemic with the vast, vast majority of incoming college students. Some never learn, and usually flunk out, despite test scores and grades that indicate that they have the intellectual ability to do the work. Every year, students applying for jobs or graduate schools wait longer and longer before they contact faculty, clearly never thinking that, first, the faculty member may have other commitments, even other recommendations to write, or, second, that it does take time to write a decent recommendation.

More than infrequently — and with distressingly increasing frequency over the past year — I’ve had people request information, wanting it “now,” for deadlines, etc., even when they’ve known of the need for weeks or months. I’ve checked with offspring who are in various positions in business, and they report the same phenomenon. Almost no one seems able to: (1) plan ahead and (2) realize that accurate information and/or work products can’t be reliably produced “instantly.”

Yet with “instant” communications, from email to Twitter to cellphones, more and more people are equating instant access to instant results. There seems to be a subconscious process whereby people think, “If I can get to you instantly, why can’t you get back to me instantly, and with what I want/need?” The additional problem with all the instant access is that if you don’t reply, you get more emails and messages wanting to know why you haven’t replied to the point that less and less real work tends to get done, or people have to work longer to get the same amount of work done, because they have to keep responding. Now… it’s easy for someone like me to say, “Just ignore them until you have time to get to them.” The problem is that too many of the instant communications come from superiors, and ignoring insistent superiors is a quick way to end up where you don’t have to respond because you no longer have a job. Even if you can quickly delete the non-important messages, that takes additional time. In my wife’s case, despite a spam filter, she routinely receives two hundred plus emails daily. Most are junk, but she still has to wade through them and delete them, or her system starts rejecting all email because her inbox is too full, and then she misses the important ones.

More telling is that this instant access mindset ignores the fact that most requests or orders or requirements that are conveyed can’t be addressed instantly — and especially not accurately. This pressure for providing things now is already leading to inaccuracies in everything from news reports to the information on which business and political decisions are being made. It also ends up delaying production and creating unnecessary stress from education to the work-place.

Then, to top it all off, electronic media are perfect for exhibiting passive-aggressive tendencies. When you really need information, especially from someone who doesn’t report to you, the failure to reply, even after days, or weeks, can be incredibly irritating… and non-productive.

Now… tell me again why instant communications are so wonderful.

A number of pundits have talked about the need for accountability in our society, but in practice most of this talk has led nowhere.

Despite years of rhetoric, testing, and all sorts of initiatives in education, all the way from primary schooling through universities, the actual outcomes of American education have declined. I’m not talking test scores. I’m talking about the ability of American students to read, write logical and coherent paragraphs and papers without coaching, and to be able to think and make and understand logical arguments. Initiative after initiative has demanded greater accountability on the part of teachers. I’m not against teacher accountability, but it’s only half the accountability problem in education. Like it or not, students have to be held accountable for their learning — and they’re not. Instead, teachers must spoon feed, must inspire, must somehow get the students to learn. Why doesn’t anyone want to admit that, until students are also held accountable, the “education situation” won’t ever be improved?

Our financial system offers other cases in point. Little more than a year after the melt-down of the financial system and the near-collapse of the stock market, the investment banks and hedge funds and all-too-many of the other high fliers are at it again, paying enormous bonuses to executives, generally for those who can multiply profits to an obscene degree. Simply put, there is a risk-reward trade-off. The riskier the venture, the higher the reward, but the greater the probability of failure. The problem here is that the individual trader, hedge fund manager, etc., doesn’t face personally the magnitude of the downside. I have great doubts if many of them would be quite so interested in such jobs if they — and their CEOs and superiors — had to repay the money and then spend the rest of their life either in jail or working at a minimum wage job to repay what they’d already spent because they lost billions for other people. While the corporate structure was initially designed to limit liability, so that corporate failures didn’t destroy individuals, what everyone who designed the structure failed to foresee was that the structure effectively destroys accountability, and the larger the corporation, the greater the destruction of personal accountability. When a trader can walk away with hundreds of millions, does it really matter that much if he or she will never work in the field again?

The banks have jacked up consumer credit card rates, on average, to over 20%, partly because the federal government is trying to take away some of their least ethical and most profitable “charges,” such as $35 fees for $3 dollar ATM overdrafts. A major reason for the higher interest rates is because, first, the banks never priced their ATM/credit card services at their cost level and were using fees to cover costs and profits, and, second, because far too many consumers were less than accountable for paying when they ran up huge credit card bills — prompted by media advertising that further undermined accountability by encouraging people to buy, buy, buy…

Politics offers another lesson in accountability, if from the other side. Because of the intense media scrutiny of politicians, virtually all officials elected on a federal level are indeed held accountable — but they’re held accountable for what their constituents want… not for wise decisions. That was one of the reasons why the founding fathers designed a different system with various checks and balances that we’ve destroyed in the name of greater democracy… and that has led to less real accountability.

Our electronic communications and purchasing systems further undermine accountability. A thug who mugs someone for $50 has a far greater chance of being arrested and imprisoned than does a scammer or a phisher who uses the internet to con hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars — and we’ve set up the system in such a way that it’s effectively impossible to find such con artists, let alone to hold them accountable.

Given the way in which we’ve undermined accountability, the real wonder is not that the instances I’ve mentioned have occurred, but that there haven’t been far, far more than what we’ve experienced.

Recently, there have been a number of articles about the failure of economics and its metrics in predicting and reflecting on the “health” of the United States. Much of the criticism has focused on the use of GDP [Gross Domestic Product] as a leading indicator. Unfortunately, such criticisms, while having statistical and economic validity, have the result, whether intended or not, of shifting debate from the larger problem.

The larger debate has been around for a very long time, but with the growth and power of the “market economy” and those who benefit directly, and often excessively, from it, those earlier misgivings tend to be buried in the detritus of history. There was a reason why William Jennings Bryan rallied millions behind his presidential campaign in 1896 when he campaigned against what he saw as the Republican plutocrats with his slogan that “you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold” Although technically a speech for bimetallism, the slogan reverberated though the west, the laboring class, and poor farmers. In his poem “The Gods of the Copybook Headings,” Rudyard Kipling pointed out exactly what happens when the “gods of the marketplace” become paramount. The Russian revolution, while it might have been directed by goons and disaffected intellectuals, was paid for by the blood of the poor and disadvantaged, as was the more recent Cuban revolution and the rise of Fidel Castro. The current American rage against investment bankers and the “market” also reflects a gut-level feeling on the part of most Americans that valuing everything in dollar terms is somehow wrong, even as we react to commercial after commercial that insists happiness and success come from acquiring this and that, and more in general.

Yet the reaction of the financial, economic, and political leaders has been to address the shortcomings of the “market system.” Too many of these leaders and too many of both the critics and those who feel that the “GDP Problem” is resolvable are ignoring the critical assumptions that lie behind the use of economic statistics to define, for want of a better term, “national prosperity.” The first assumption is simply that, given modern methods, anything of value is commercial and can and should be able to be valued and quantified accurately. The second is that, in economic terms, those things that cannot be valued and quantified in hard and measurable terms are of lesser or no value. Now, I’m well aware that my statement of the second assumption will scarcely go unchallenged, but in economic and public policy terms, there shouldn’t be any dispute. For example, almost no business or corporation put an economic value on their acts that degraded the environment until governments stepped in and assigned values, essentially by fiat, in the form of fines and regulations. At that point, and only at that point, did the environment become valued in economic terms. The same sort of reaction occurred with regulations on child labor and wages.

Before going on, for those who may think that I am being excessively “liberal,” I want to make several basic points. First, like it or not, every working nation or region needs to maintain over time a viable market-based economy. You cannot trade, purchase, or sell goods or services without a societal mechanism for doing so, although there are many variations on “market economies,” some better and some worse. Second, market systems work best for goods and services that can be easily quantified and valued, and the harder and more removed such quantification and valuation are from the day-to-day ebb and flow of commerce, the less accurate and the less reliable any valuation is. Third, because market systems are imperfect, large systems need various restraints or rules. Too few restrictions, and one has the worst excesses of the American robber barons or the current Russian commercial oligarchs. Too many restrictions, and one eventually has no market system at all, but a government-run and badly administered [because it cannot be administered well by anyone, given the complexity involved] command-and-control system, which usually results in a black market, if not several.

The rush to find better quantification of everything in life effectively presupposes that everything can be quantified absolutely. But can everything of value and worth really be quantified in economic terms? By adopting a market-based approach to everything in society, as we seem well on the way to doing, we seem to have forgotten, at least in terms of laws and national policy, that when we try to place a dollar [or euro or yuan or yen] value on everything, that which cannot be quantified accurately, or quantified at all, tends to be undervalued or not valued at all.

Recently, I’ve been seeing ads on television citing the fact that the United States has one hundred years worth of undeveloped natural gas — with the implication that this is some vast enormous reserve that should be immediately exploited. The question that comes to my mind is: “And then what?” What energy sources will be available to my children’s grandchildren? This ad points out, effectively by example, that there is little or no value to preserving resources for future generations. It ignores the costs to future generations of having to use more expensive fuel sources — or perhaps having none at all.

What few policy-makers seem willing to admit is that there are whole sectors of life and the world that the market system cannot value accurately, nor will ever be able to do so in cold economic terms. Some of these are: the value of an individual life; the value of the survival of the human species; the value of an integrated and functioning world eco-system; the good health of an individual; the pursuit of happiness; freedom; freedom from hunger… That list is far longer than any policy-maker wants to consider in realistic political or legal terms — and none of them can be valued accurately in economic terms.

For example, how does one value a human life? Some economists will say that we have established a de facto value for human life by the terms of either life insurance or the health and safety regulations we have put in place over the past century or so. But consider the terms of those regulations, or of life insurance. In life insurance, the death benefit is based strictly on the level of premium one is willing to pay. In government regulations, the value of a human life is determined by comparing the cost of implementing the regulation and dividing those costs by the total estimate of “lives saved” by the regulation. In addition to the very real difficulty in estimating the number of people who might have died, there is also the problem of, if you will, quality control. Are all lives the same? Are all lives of people of the same age even the same? Will a child grow up to be a drug addict who is a drain on society or a Nobel prize-winning scientist? If all lives are valued the same, then the process says that human accomplishment means nothing. If they are not, how does one determine what makes one life more valuable than another?

Geology and science suggest rather emphatically that at some time in the future, a rather large or moderate chunk of rock or other cosmic debris will slam into our lovely planet, and millions, or billions, or all of our species will die. It’s not a question of if, but only of when, or whether we do ourselves in before that occurs. We have yet to come up with the comparatively few millions of dollars necessary to scan our solar system to see everything that might be headed our way. And why is the value of species survival quantified at less than the cost of a few bridges to nowhere?

As a culture, we seem unable not only to grasp, but to act in realization of the fact that there are real values, perhaps greater values, to aspects of life that cannot be quantified than to those to which a dollar value can be firmly pinned. Yet dollar certitude remains what we as a society hold to. Is that because Madison Avenue has told us so… or because the majority of us are unable to say that some things are more important than the no-longer-so-mighty dollar?