Quote on Consumerism from the founder of Early Retirement Extreme

"The problem is that most of us have become utterly dependent on this industrial-technological  system  for  all  of  our  needs  and  wants.  Shopping is as important as oxygen to us. Close down the malls for a few days and people go crazy. We no longer think of ourselves as citizens but as ”consumers”, a descriptive term that I've always found kind of derogatory. This dependence  is  so  fundamental  that  it  goes unseen, much like fish don't see the water they swim in. Consequentially, the only solution we can think of whenever we struggle with unfulfilled needs or wants is to ”earn more” and start a side-business, negotiate a raise, and gamble on some more education – it's an investment in your future (ha!). The only perceived way to a better so-called standard-of-living is to work harder and smarter and earn more. However, what this often results in is more environmental damage or at best reshufling money from suckers to scammers." - Jacob Lund Fisker

Spoiled: The Economic Downturn, Luxury as Necessity, and "Struggling" in the Modern Economy

• Sep 26, 2009

Spoiled: The Economic Downturn, Luxury as Necessity, and "Struggling" in the Modern Economy

My original comment was not meant to imply I don't believe that there are tangible effects on people (most notably unemployment, which is certainly up compared to a few years ago).
All I said was that media and politicians largely made it up.  I think it is a self-fulfilling prophesy to an extent, where in people hear constant messages that times are tight, therefore they cut back on consumption, therefore retail markets fall, therefore manufacturers cut back, and employers start laying people off.  Which fuels the beginning of the cycle even more.  This is why business analysts track "consumer confidence".  In fact, to a large extent it is what the stock market is all about.  Its less a question of how well a company is doing and more one of how popular are they.  If people think its doing well, they buy, which itself drives the stock price up.  It works both ways, so if everyone is convinced the market is doing bad, they sell so they don't lose too much by waiting, and then companies don't have the capital to invest.

-


I think it is totally unreasonable to adjust what it means to be "poor" based on those around you.
If we did that, billionaires could claim to be poor if those around them are multi billionaires.  In fact, everyone except for the single richest person in the world would be "poor".
Clearly there should be some objective standard of poverty.
I think the only reasonable one is the point at which you have a reasonable fear of not being able to provide the basic necessities for oneself and family.  Food, shelter, clean water.  If you can afford so little food that it affects your health, you can claim to be poor.

It doesn't have to be a "big" car.  If you own a car, you aren't poor.  Period.  Never mind that most people in the world couldn't even afford the up-front purchase price of a car.  Much higher than that in the long run is costs for fuel, insurance, parking and tolls, maintenance, tickets...
For hundreds of thousands of years of human existence even the wealthiest people in the world could not buy cars.
Only in the US do people honestly believe that they are a "necessity".
All over the country people claim to be struggling who are paying for cable TV.  They eat out and buy $2 cups of coffee.  They have cell phones and internet connections.  These are things most people in the world can't afford.  They are not basic necessities.

Supposedly a person in the bay area needs 3 times the federal poverty level in order to live "comfortably"
http://articles.latimes.com/2007/oct/17/business/fi-wages17
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/A-Bay-Area-couple-with-two-kids-can-t-make-it-on-2518301.php

They take it for granted that everyone needs a car.
And since when does every 6 year old need her own room?!
In the case of the 2nd article, I have no contempt for the person they profile.  She (rightly) considers herself middle class.
(Hopefully, after having been interviewed she doesn't change her own standards).
Now, going into collection, obviously a problem.  Thing is, that is another of those uniquely American things: living beyond your means.
The whole recession started because of people deliberately buying beyond their means with interest only loans.  The whole idea being, buy something you can't afford and assume that the market will go up enough to cover it.  Then, surprise!  The people who were living beyond their means defaulted on their loans.
Consider that the size of an average new home has increased 250% over the past half century.

Then banks didn't want to lend.  "Credit crunch".  Well, again - the solution to a credit crunch?  Don't live beyond your means. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/harry-moroz/forget-the-squeeze-the-mi_b_263100.html

Thing is, poor people don't get lines of credit extended to them in the first place.  Because they are poor.  The people who go to Labor Ready for temp work, the people who live here in the trailer park, they don't get loans for houses or new cars.  They don't have credit cards.  Most of them don't even have bank accounts.  They pay rent with money orders and bring paychecks to check cashing places.

This is poverty: http://www.utne.com/Politics/Squatter-Villages-Tent-Cities-Informal-Urbanism-Economic-Crisis.aspx
And it was around long before the foreclosures on sub-prime loans started piling up.

In my line of work, between my low rates, and my green focus and good reputation, I end up having a huge range in terms of the incomes of my customers (hence the sliding scale idea).
I get students and people on SSI who genuinely can't afford more than me.  I get others who live in 6 bedroom 3 story houses in the hills.  I have been nonchalantly handed $100 tips on more than one occasion.

I also work with day laborer sometimes.  These are people who will work for pretty much whatever you offer to pay them, work incredibly hard, and never complain.  I ask them about work, about home, they invariably tell me: they are getting very little work here.  Very little.  But it is still better than the situation back home.  That's why they are here.  They work for less than minimum wage since they lack language skills and legal papers.
A customer yesterday mentioned her mother used to work for Nike in Vietnam.  The company ships the product clear around the world because the people will work for a fraction of the US minimum wage.  But she said it was a very decent salary compared to other options available to the people there.

The worldwide average income for an adult is roughly $7000.
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2006/MateNagy.shtml (note, this is over a decade out of date - the inequality has grown since)
That's including the 1st world; including the US.
This is in "purchasing power parity" - accounting for not only exchange rates, but what you can actually buy with a given amount locally.
$7000. 

Over 80% of the worlds population has an annual income below that rate.
The world median income is $1700.
http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2007/10/07/average_earnings_worldwide/

So, yeah, I do think that is pretty much just the homeless who have a legitimate claim to poverty in this country.  

There are plenty claims that the economic downturn hits the poor hardest: but then, they are putting people who own $290,000 4-bedroom townhouses in the category of "working class"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/16/AR2008101603605.html

The truly poor don't have far to fall.  A recession can not possibly affect them as much as someone who has tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of annual income to potentially lose.

-

The last thing I wanted to mention is about how profit distribution ties in to unemployment.
In this country it has always been accepted as a given by almost everyone that 100% of the increase per worker in productivity due to advances in technology goes to the owners of the company, and not to the employees.
For example, say someone invents a machine that allows a worker to produce 2 times more widgets per hour.
What happens is (since the market for widgets hasn't grown, so they don't need to produce twice as many) the company lays off half it's work force, produces the same amount of widgets, sells them at the same price, and increases its profit substantially (paying half the wages, but making the exact same revenue).

There is no inherent reason that they couldn't instead reduce all of the workers hours 50%, while increasing wages 100%.  Neither the employees nor the company loses any money.  They both make exactly the same as they did before.  The only change is the workers have half the work hours, and can use the rest of that time however they choose.
In the 2nd option no unemployment is caused.

In actuality productivity per worker has increased roughly 20 fold over the past century.
Over the same time (adjusted for inflation) wages have only increased 7 fold.  The entire rest of that increase has gone to profit  - ultimately to the upper class, who own the means of production.

Profit is after business expenses and costs and taxes, after wages, even after salaries to the CEO and upper management, often in the millions (even among companies that are losing money - even ones that got federal bail out money paid million+ salaries.)
Profit is what is left over after that.  It goes to people who do literally no work for it at all.
There are industries which make as much as 20% profit margins.
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2009/performers/industries/profits/

So when companies claim they "have to" lay off workers because they are making less revenue, I say they are full of crap.  If they are making ANY profit, anything over breaking even, they have no justification for laying people off.  If they are paying upper management 6 digit incomes, there is no justification for laying off their lowest wage earners.
In many European countries (and Canada) that is actually illegal.  The government can (and will) sue a company for laying off workers unnecessarily.  In these places it is understood that the whole purpose of the economy is to serve the needs of the people, not to make people with investment capital even richer.

We could reduce unemployment to the minimum possible by having overtime kick in at, say, 35 hours a week.  Then to maintain current levels of production, companies need to hire 15% more people just to get back to the level they were at before.

There is nothing inherently good about creating wealth (or widgets for that matter) just for its own sake.
Going from multi-millionaire to billionaire will cause no overall long-term increase in happiness.

But instead of increasing the income of the destitute and struggling up to the level of secure in basic necessities, as a society we have been allowing - even encouraging - all of the increase in wealth to go to the top levels of society.  The ranks of middle class conservatives and libertarians push for this hardest of all: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090128071009AADfUVw
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2009/09/snapshots-tea-party

-

It's human nature to want more than whatever one has, and to want more than everyone around you.
And everyone wants to believe they earned what they have, no matter how strong the evidence against it, because its easier on the conscious than admitting being greedy and amoral.
Its what explains the "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" myth.
You can see it in everyone who rallies against illegal immigrants.  They will insist it has to do with following laws for the sake of laws, but suggest making all immigration legal, and you find out its really about allowing them government benefits and taking American's jobs.  The only way to justify it would be to claim that some people "earned" being born in a first world country.  (People always have the "us vs them" xenophobic mentality that makes benefiting at the expense of others ok as long as they are "others")
I think that, just like with laws to discourage violence, or the use of birth control, discouraging some of our basic instincts is better for everybody; the desire to always have more, on a planet with finite resources, is what makes people who live extravagant lives in this country think they are poor.  I think that's not ok.

The economic downturn means that people who lived excessively unsustainable lives now live moderately less unsustainable lives. It's actually not enough, but its a start.
I think that's a good thing.

Summary of not-very-thought-out rant on pending video

• Aug 13, 2008

Summary of not-very-thought-out rant on pending video

A few weeks ago the creators of faircompanies.com came to my home with cameras, and I gave a tour of my home, and spoke of some of my political and philosophical ideas while I worked.

I didn't prepare what I was going to say, and in retrospect, perhaps I should have.

After, I tried to figure what exactly my overall point has been.

Some things in personal life have been getting in the way of writing for a while, but I think I can summarize it all now.

The overall point is this:  Do the big stuff.  Having done that, don't sweat the small stuff.

Americans have grown accustomed to a excessively high level of luxury and convenience, to the point where some of what we take for granted doesn't even improve quality of life. 
And among the people who are aware of the implications of our impact, it has become all too easy to rationalize doing the exact opposite.
Today a great many people do all the little things, and this makes it easier to rationalize not doing what will make the biggest difference.

This is not to say that there isn't a level of sacrifice in the little things, or that they don't make a positive difference. 

We should continue to

turn down the heat or AC a few degrees
use cloth shopping bags
keep tires inflated and engines tuned
turn off the water while brushing teeth
shut lights when leaving a room
recycle

and all the rest

But, even if every American did all of those sort of things, our rates of consumption of both energy and material (per capita) are so far beyond that of any other society in the world.
Many Americans today point to China and their rapidly growing economy.  They are catching up, and projected to surpass us in, for example, use of coal and oil.  But they also have over 4 times as many people.  When they reach our levels, they are still using 25% of what we use per person.  In other words, as Americans you and I are using far more than our share of world resources.  On average, 5 times more.  If every human lived like the average American, we would need 5 times more resources (land, energy, materials, water, and capacity to absorb pollution) than actually exist.  I'd be willing to bet that if you are reading this, you are doing far better than the average American.
2 times more than ones share is certainly incomparably better than 5 times more; but it is still really not sustainable.
We are able to live this way only at the expense of other people somewhere else, both in the third world, and people of the future (including, depending on age, ourselves).

The thing is, the big things really aren't as bad as we tend to assume.

The one really big question to ask ourselves, as responsible and concerned people, is: how much will this change/purchase/decision affect my overall quality of life?
Not just "will it make life a little easier?" but "will it make me more fulfilled?" or "will it substantially decrease stress?".  How would you feel looking back on your life someday if you had never done/purchased/chosen whatever?  Would it even be an issue?

The Big Things:

Don't own a car
Don't eat animal products
Live within walking (or bicycling) distance to work and groceries
Live in as small a space as possible, preferably an apartment building

I realize that one thing people may use as an objection is having kids. A family with 3 kids needs to transport up to 5 people at once.  Nearly all compact and many sub-compact cars have seating for 5.  Since most households with two drivers have two cars, this could also be accomplished with one 2 seater and one 3 seater. Not to mention child seats and trailers for bicycles.  As far as space, there are several families with kids who live in the trailer park I live in.

Even more significant is having kids in the first place.  This issue seems to be all but taboo among environmentalists even though its the single most significant one.  If we had 1/5 the number of Americans, we would be sustainable, even at the same level of excessive consumption.  Because of the resources we use per capita, it is fair to say that we are far more over-populated than, say sub-Saharan Africa from a global perspective.  Every new American uses 20 times what a new sub-Saharan African uses in a lifetime.  To be sustainable, each new generation can not continue to be bigger than the one before (fortunately the average number of children is getting to 2, or neutral growth.)  There are a lot of kids in this country that need adopting.
In fact, I should add not having kids to the Big Things.

Not everyone is going to do all of those things.  At the least though, we can all make an effort to get as close as possible.

If you own a car, take public transit on the daily commute anyway.
Perhaps eat meat so as not to insult the in-laws when they spent a long time cooking for you.
Perhaps you can't afford to live close enough to work to walk, but arrange it so you live as close as possible.  Living way out in the suburbs in order to afford a bigger house doubles the harm; and, ironically, is more likely to decrease overall quality of life as the commute increases stress and decreases free time.
It also costs more than an equally cost (smaller) home closer to work, both in its increased energy costs and costs associated with the commute.
If you already have kids, don't have more.  If you are thinking about it, at least consider adoption.

Which brings me to the other major issue.

We often associate being ecologically responsible with being middle class (Whole Foods and the Prius come to mind).

In one of my college ecology classes, the instructor told us about how he once spent an extra $500 or so on the "extra-efficient" engine of a new Honda Civic.  He had calculated how much fuel he saved over the life of the car, and concluded that he never recovered the extra cost.  His point was that high efficiency often costs more upfront, and this cost may or may not ever be recovered.
However, I think the more important comparison is between the Civic, in either configuration, and a full size car, or an SUV, either of which would have cost many thousands more, and gotten far worse mileage than even the "in-efficient" Civic.
With few exceptions, being more efficient, more environmentally friendly, costs far less than the alternative - not only in the long-run, but up-front as well.

A Prius may cost more than similarly sized cars, but the Geo Metro got the same mileage, and cost under 10k.  Better yet, even a top of the line premium bicycle costs no more than a few thousand, and eliminates the need for fuel, maintenance and insurance.
A plant based diet is cheaper for the same reason it is more sustainable; the animals we eat themselves eat food that could be feeding humans, and the majority of those calories go into the animals own metabolism. 
Obviously a small house costs less than a large one, and living close to work costs less than a 60 minute commute.
Obviously not having a child is incomparably less exspensive than having one.

Similarly, buying everything used (aside from food, stuff that gets used up like soap, and maybe underwear) costs a small fraction of buying new, and is far superior in terms of environmental impact, not only to buying standard new products, but also is far superior to buying the more expensive "green" products which have become so popular recently.

I don't mean to make people feel guilty.  My hope is that people think about things differently, and make changes that don't take away from their lives, but make them more sustainable.

Keep doing all the little things.  Just remember that spending extra money isn't enough by itself.  Instead of buying carbon credits, drive less.  I promise after the first few weeks you won't miss it.  (If you do, try a month.  If you still do after that, go back to the car with m blessing).  Driving less miles will always make more of a difference than buying a hybrid.  If you can't afford a hybrid, don't feel bad.  Make up for it by driving less.  If you can, that's great, most have far lower emissions than average.  But drive less anyway. 
This is something I need to remind myself too.  My truck runs on veggie oil, and sometimes I feel lazy and figure what the heck, its veggie oil, I'll just drive.  But it isn't 100% clean either, and I should ride my bike.  Sometimes I do.  Not always. 

I should amend the list
Drive less.  Much less
Eat animal products rarely if ever
When you move, make the commute a primary consideration (studies have shown a short commute contribute more to life satisfaction than a big house does)
Buy used whenever possible.

With all the money you save from those things, go ahead and spend the extra on "green" products, buy carbon credits; or just treat yourself to something decadent, and enjoy it to the fullest.  After that, if you have a little time left over, maybe check your tire pressure and unplug the cell phone charger.

-

Here are few links where you can roughly estimate how much you personally are using.  They are not all that detailed, and they give slightly different answers due to asking different questions and making different assumptions, but they give you an idea and a place to start from.  All of our goals should be "1 Earth", because that's all we have.

http://ecofoot.org/
http://www.myfootprint.org/en/
http://ww2.earthday.net/footprint.php

Just in time for Christmas

• Dec 17, 2007

Just in time for Christmas

The history and impact of American over-consumption, in easy to digest cartoon form


The Story of Stuff




A much more detailed and in depth documentary (these ideas were actually much more deliberate than most would assume)


The Century of The Self"

Prius v. my own Hypocrisy

• Jun 20, 2007

Prius v. my own Hypocrisy

Auto ads today would have you believe that 30-35 mpg is amazingly good.

35 is awful!
We have the technology to have affordable passenger vehicles that get 100mpg.
I'll avoid the technical details, but the potential is absolutely there. Without being a hybrid. Seriously. Trust me.

A small part of it is the industry's refusal to do it.
But the primary reason they don't exist is us.

You and I, my friend.

I just read an article in Mother Jones about this guy who volunteered with Habitat for Humanity - that is, until they wanted to put a couple of affordable homes in HIS neighborhood! Then he began to protest and look for legal recourse against his former organization's work.

We look down on him, but we are all him. We are happy to help, as long as the cost to ourselves is negligible.

We are unhappy with a car that takes 20 seconds to go 0-60, maxes out at 85, has room for only 1 passenger, a small trunk, seats with minimal padding, no A/C or heat, manual transmission, manual steering, no power brakes, no power anything.

And so I look at how popular the Prius is; even though the Insight was available years earlier, and gets nearly twice the average mileage (35-40 vs 70); even though 90% of or trips have one or no passengers, even though the speed limit is 65 and we rarely exceed it by more than 15mph or so - we want to know that we could carry 4 passengers at 95mph, and so the Insight doesn't sell, and is discontinued, while the Prius, with its pathetic 35-40 has a waiting list.


And what I realized is:
I drive. My (motor)bike gets 55-60mpg; good, about as good as available for a freeway speed capable machine sold today. That's still a lot of gas getting burned, a lot of pollutants in the air. Just to save me an hour of travel time here and there. Yes, my truck runs on 100% vegetable oil - but it has its own form of pollution, and it still has to come from somewhere, it has to get transported. I ride my bike to work...most days. Which means sometimes I don't. Yes, I have an ultra-efficient home - but it saves me money, plus I enjoy it.
So what, really, am I sacrificing?

And so, in my self-righteousness, I am exactly like the Prius owner.
I work for a non-profit and split my tips with the Coalition; but I don't volunteer (and I have no intention of starting to).
I am vegetarian, but mainly because the thought of eating flesh is sickening.

I guess it is a part of the human mind to despise most those people whose faults match our own most closely.

The people who abhor welfare usually inherited wealth or at least education and connections.
The anti-sex are secretly perverted, and the strongest homophobes are often as not gay. Narcs steal from the evidence room, and the woman who sent hate mail to the guy from the example above who stopped volunteering for Habitat, her home is just as expensive as his.
The deeply religious feel guilt for all their own sins (Christianity's appeal is that all sins are forgiven, as long as you have faith).

I always found the religious to be the most hypocritical and disturbing of all.
To apply the trend I have found, that must mean I am secretly religious myself...


... ... ...




Nnnoope!

Not even a little.

So, I guess that destroys my whole theory about indignant hypocrisy. Sometimes we just dislike something because its stupid; it doesn't have to be projection. That's good. I feel better now. Damn Priuses.

In response to my last entry

·                     Dec 7, 2006

In response to my last entry

Thearticle in my last entry was written in 1932

74 years ago, and as accurate a portrayal of modern life today as it was then. 
Only the USSR he speaks of has fallen, adopting our system of "free market"
In the US production increases every year - an increase in per capitaGDP of over 7 times, or almost 10% per year; yet work hours have been constant ever since - slightly increasing for most, decreasing for some, balancing out to an average of... exactly the same: slightly more than the 40 hour week which was made standard not long before the essay was written.
Since productivity has increased 7 fold, while hours have remained constant, presumably median real income (after accounting for inflation) would presumably have also increased 7 fold.
In actuality, median pay has increased around 2.1 times from 1948 to 2004 (earliest data I can find).
The one thing this otherwise excellent essay misses is that, while the land holding privileged class of royalty has been eliminated, they have been replaced indirectly by the societal acceptance of virtually unrestricted investment returns and inheritance.
Through them the primary owners and controllers of major corporations have taken the place of a class which does not have to do any real work but can instead charge ordinary people for the privilege of living and working on their land or in their companies.
It is much more their choice than the workers themselves that, for example, when the pin making machine is invented and production per person doubles, the work force is halved instead of individual hours.
It is to the advantage of the company - or, more specifically the owners and investors - who do no actual work but keep a percentage of the earnings - to have fewer people with more hours, as there is always a per person cost in taxes and benefits above the cost of wages.
With the introduction of the labor saving device, the employing company couldchoose to have all employees work half as often with the same total pay.  The employees are only given the choice of cut hours at reduced pay or 50% lay offs.  Given that, they prefer to retain the 8 hour day.  Were the company to continue to pay the same weekly rate for less hours (or double the hourly rate and halve the hours) it would not lose any money.  It would be exactly where it had been all along.  If it had been sustainably profitable before, it would continue to be.
However, the assumption in our society is that the company gets to reap the full benefit of the new invention.
Thus the increase in GDP over the years is primarily concentrated in the hands of those who need it least.
It is not actually true in most years that "the poor get poorer while the rich get richer"
A more accurate statement would be "the poor get slightly richer while the rich get much much richer", which is really just as bad.



There are over 400 Americans with more than 1 billion dollars.
Few enough to fit in a large banquet hall or conference room.
Between the 400 richest individuals is personal ownership of 1.25 trilliondollars.
(worldwide there are 793 billionaires, with a total of 2.6 trillion - more than half are Americans)
The total GDP for the US is around 12.5 Trillion.
In other words, 400 people control 10% of all the wealth in the country.
Divided equally among the population, 12.5 trillion would mean $41,600 per person (including children and other non-workers)
These people, on average, have $3,125,000,000; or... 75,120 times the share they would have with equal distribution of wealth.
It may well be that some of these people, now or in the past, worked harder than the average person.
But 75,120 times harder?  Were they working a 3 million hour work week?  Do they contribute 75 thousand times more to society than average?
Draw your own conclusions:
(From Forbes Magazine)

"Developer John P. Manning used political savvy to build a $1.1 billion fortune in part by brokering low-income housing projects. Chesapeake Energy founders Aubrey McClendon and Tom L. Ward are two of the oil fortunes added to the list.

Pouring 40 million caffeinated drinks a week landed Starbucks honcho Howard Schultz on our list of America's 400 richest. Manny Mashouf placed his skimpy women's wear on TV shows like Party of Five and Ally McBeal; today he has a $1.5 billion fortune in Bebe clothing stores.
Also gracing our list for the first time are Lehman Brothers Chief Richard Fuld ($1 billion), hedge fund manager David E. Shaw ($1 billion), mutual fund guru Jonathan Lovelace Jr.($1.1 billion), Houston Rockets owner Leslie Alexander ($1.2 billion), leveraged buyout tycoon Leon Black ($2 billion), Google veteran Omid Kordestani ($1.9 billion), Colony Capital's Thomas Barrack ($1 billion), New York City real estate moguls Stephen Ross ($2.5 billion) and Tamir Sapir ($2 billion), and the husband-and-wife computer chip team of Weili Dai ($1 billion) and Sehat Sutardja($1 billion).
Black Entertainment Television founder Robert Johnson, who rebuilt his fortune with investments in real estate and restaurants, is among the 14 returnees to this year's list. Netscape pioneer James Clark is another retread; he reinvested his tech proceeds into Miami condos and construction outfit Hyperion Development Group following the burst of the tech bubble six years ago. Also returning is Little Caesar's founder Michael Ilitch ($1.5 billion), car dealership owner Robert Friedkin($1.2 billion), investors J. Christopher Flowers ($1.2 billion) and Alfred P. West ($1.2 billion), and banking and real estate maven Paul M. Milstein ($3.5 billion).
Once again the biggest gainer is casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, with a net worth up $9 billion. Adelson's Las Vegas Sands stock is up 125% since its public offering in December 2004. He has made almost $1 million an hour since the 2004 Forbes 400 list was published."
$1 million  an hour.

Episode 2; in which I respond about fuel-efficient cars

[Another letter to the editor, responding to an article about supposedly fuel efficient cars, claiming that having much higher mileage than the current generation of cars would take significant technological breakthroughs and cost a lot of money]

• Jul 29, 2006

Episode 2; in which I respond about fuel-efficient cars

General Motors makes a small VAN which gets 40+MPG (better than the average small car or hybrid in the US) which costs under $5,000.

The GM Sunshine

Of course, it is only sold in China...

Kawasaki makes a motorcycle which gets between 60 and 70 MPG (The EX250R) - which also can go 0-60 in under 6 seconds and tops out at 100MPH - which costs $3,000.  
These vehicles are substantially SIMPLER than most cars, with no hybrid systems, no turbochargers, not even fuel injection.  What the two have in common is light weight, and low power. 

The average US family is 3-4 people, so there is no reason a three or four person "clown car" would not fit the needs of most Americans.  Besides for that most US households have 2 vehicles, and the average trip is less than two people (driver and passenger) so a motorcycle, scooter, or ultra small car could be a families' commute vehicle, with a secondary car for weekend trips.

The only way for America to break its dependence on foreign oil will be for us to realize the difference between luxury and necessity.  We may need to pick the kids up after school, but we don't need to do it in a 6000lb 200hp car that gets 25mpg.