The Writers Coin

The recession has his everyone in this country in one way or another. We all know someone that has lost his/her job or is going through tough times financially because of the current credit crisis. But Detroit has been hit hard like no other place in the country. The automotive industry, which has been identified for so long with the city, is falling apart and so are the thousands of jobs so many people relied on for sustenance.

At least that’s what the media says.

I happen to know some people that actually live on the outskirts of Detroit and I wanted to get their perspective on what the city is going through and how they see the future playing out.

First up, we have “Chris.” Chris is in his late 30s, is married with three young girls, and works as an accountant. As an aside, he also plays ice hockey and he will lay you out if you get in his way—I’ve seen it happen.

What changes have you noticed (good or bad) around the Detroit area over the past few months as the economy has worsened?

I honestly haven’t seen much that’s good. I see a lot of “for sale” signs on homes and a lot of “for lease” signs on commercial buildings. I see “sketchy” businesses that one might typically see in depressed areas. Businesses such as pawn shops, pay day loans rent to own, credit repair, short term auto insurance, etc. And they’re popping-up in areas that have historically been considered affluent. I see the closing of high end restaurants as well.

Do you have friends or acquaintances that have been impacted? If so, how are they dealing with it? Are any of them leaving Detroit? Are you seeing any specific industries being impacted more than others?

It has certainly become more common to hear of friends/acquaintances that have lost their jobs or taken buy-outs. I’ve heard some, but not too much, about people leaving the state to take new jobs or to expand their business due to lack of work. The majority of people that lost their jobs that I know still want to make a go of it in Michigan and are still receiving or living off severance payments or buy-out money. But at some point, nobody wants to be the last one here to turn out the lights.

Obviously the automotive industry is getting killed. But it’s not limited to GM, Chrysler, and Ford and their tier 1, 2, and 3 suppliers. It also extends to service industries that cater to the automotive industry such as advertising, professional services business/management consulting, hospitality, and the like. And it obviously trickles down to consumer-related businesses as well such as home builders, and restaurants.

You once mentioned that if things continued to get bad, you would want to get a gun. Were you serious? Are things really going to get that bad?

It probably won’t get that bad, but better safe than sorry. Just kidding—my wife would never allow a gun in our house. But we are thinking of investing in more home security. The pessimist side of me pictures many foreclosed and abandoned homes in our subdivision. I picture squatters or homeless people taking refuge in those houses. I see lots of people with very little to lose. And I want to make sure that my family is safe.

As a father of three, has the situation in Detroit made you nervous about the stability of your family? Have you ever considered leaving?

Not only do I love Michigan and what it has to offer in terms of the natural landscape (lakes, woods, etc.) and the changing of the seasons, but I also like the down-to-earth Midwestern mentality. We are also extremely fortunate to have immediate family within just a few miles of our home. I cannot picture us leaving our family behind (but I’ve been told that they’d just follow us if we left [he's joking here too everyone]). That said, I want my kids to have the best opportunities and I want to live wherever they decide to ultimately raise their families. I wouldn’t be against leaving if we could go somewhere that has a brighter outlook assuming all family went with and assuming we’d still enjoy all four seasons (i.e. not Arizona).

You once mentioned to me when you were shopping for your new car that you knew you wanted to buy American. It stuck in my head quite a bit because I feel like most people these days want a deal regardless of where a car is made. I have a feeling that when things get better, this kind of patriotism will be more and more common. What’s your take on that? Should people buy American today when the car companies may not be around in a few years?

I have always been patriotic but I am also a  believer in capitalism and free markets. I wouldn’t buy American if the quality was significantly worse than foreign manufacturers as that would perpetuate the problem and I’d get a bad deal. But since I live in a state that is dominated by the domestic manufacturers and I believe the quality gap is no longer significant, so I will continue to buy American. As it relates to the risk of bankruptcy and consequently the risk of the automakers not being around to honor warranties, I guess I’m willing to take that risk; for now.

US car makers: should they get bailed out or not? Do they deserve all this help when they got into this mess themselves in the first place?

This is a sore subject for me.  The scrutiny that GM and Chrysler are receiving from the politicians is disproportionate relative to the bailout money received when compared to the size of bailouts provided to other industries (banks and insurance companies) and the scrutiny (or lack thereof) that they receive. I think the politicians are doing this as somewhat of a charade so they can appear hard-nosed against an industry that they think they understand as having a somewhat contained impact if it were to fail. The auto industry helped build America and the middle class.

In hindsight, sure the auto industry was not as cost conscious as it should have been when times were good and competition low, but the government may have even contributed to the problem somewhat as it supported legislation to bolster the unions. It’s the legacy costs associated with the unions that make it difficult for the domestic automakers to compete. There’s so much hypocrisy in this. What about the lucrative benefits and perks that the politicians receive (e.g. defined benefit plans, great health care coverage, etc.)? How can they point fingers at the auto execs for use of private jets when Nancy Pelosi uses one each weekend to fly home at tax payers’ expense? Again, ridiculous.

Let’s play worst-case scenario: you’ve lost your job and are having trouble finding another. What would you do first: get a job in a totally unrelated field or leave Detroit?

I could not make enough money to support my family in the manner we are accustomed if I were to change to a totally unrelated field. I’m fortunate to have skills that are transferable across industries though so hopefully this won’t be an issue. The company I work for now is not part of the automotive industry. But if push came to shove and Michigan became completely unviable, I would obviously then be forced to leave the metro Detroit area.

You’ll notice a lot of questions deal with leaving Detroit. I’m an optimist and think that Detroit will eventually come out on the other side if certain things go their way. What do you think is in store for Detroit? What do you think needs to happen for the city to make a comeback?

I definitely think you have to separate the discussion of the city of Detroit’s future from the suburbs and rest of Michigan. Personally, I’m not optimistic about the city of Detroit itself. I think the damage to Detroit has been done and I have very little confidence in city government and its citizens in being able to improve things. The unemployment rate in Detroit is now almost 25%.

On the other hand, there are other parts of Michigan (e.g. Detroit’s suburbs, Ann Arbor, Grand Rapids, etc.) that have a lot to offer (e.g. great universities, a growing health care industry, natural resources, tourism, strong leadership, etc.) that will contribute to the rest of Michigan’s ultimate success. In fact, while I don’t’ believe things have bottomed-out yet, I think there will be some real opportunities in Michigan (outside of Detroit).

Thanks to Chris for sharing his thoughts!

Next up I’ll be posting thoughts from another friend: a newly-minted dad in his early thirties who works as a lawyer. See part II here.

Image by djtansey

The latest New Yorker has a profile on romance writer Nora Roberts—turns out she’s one of the most prolific writers around. She also gets paid a LOT to do what she does. I don’t read romance novels and I have no interest in reading any of her books, but one thing in the profile stood out to me. She was talking about not ever quitting on a story.

I will beat it. I will wrestle it to the ground. It will not defeat me.

I love this attitude. I have so many stories and ideas for stories just languishing in some folder under my desk because I’ve fallen out of love with them. They”re old and don’t feel exciting anymore, so I just file them away and tell myself it’s the ideas that aren’t good enough.

But really it’s me that isn’t trying hard enough.

What I need to do is take a page out of Nora Roberts’ playbook and take these stories as challenges. Make them work. Make them good. Wrestle them to the ground until they tap out.

Let’s say you’re a famous journalist that writes for The New York Times. You’ve written several books (The Lexus and the Olive Tree, The World is Flat, etc.) that have become best sellers and now you want to write your next book. Thanks to your contacts, your experience, and you’re fame, you have unprecedented access to top-level government officials and experts on all kinds of subjects from around the world. And as you try to figure out what the topic for your next book should be, you finally settle on the topic you think is the most important and most urgent.

Your next book, you realize, could help turn the tide when it comes to global warming and the energy crisis in this country.

Your next book could save the world.

And as you’re putting together your notes and all your research, you have to figure out what the best way to make your argument is. Will be by showing the world the startling numbers you’ve uncovered that show we are on a collision course with—literally—the end of the world? Or do you play on people’s emotions to get them to really feel how urgent this whole situation is? I mean, don’t pictures of starving children work better than statistics of how many kids die every day from starvation?

(By the way, the answer to that question is yes)

That’s the position Thomas Friedman must’ve found himself as he was writing his latest book: Hot, Flat, and Crowded. It’s about global warming, it’s about politics, and it’s about the role the United States will or will not play in the world.

Which is interesting, because as we learned from How We Decide, the struggle between the rational and the emotional is a complicated one. Friedman decides to appeal to both (a smart choice)—although this duplicity gives the book a kind of duality that at times makes you feel like you’re reading a call to arms. Most of the time, however, you feel like you’re reading a textbook for a college class that—while it’s very interesting—can get a little dry.

The Emotional Argument

Friedman goes after our emotions right off the bat in the first chapter. Which gives you a false sense of how the rest of the book is going to go.

After I finished the first chapter I was telling my wife how great my book was and how I couldn’t wait to get an hour or two to read as much as I could. It’s filled with compelling storylines: the United States is in a lot of trouble and there’s only one way to fix it. There are good guys and there are bad guys. But fear not! There is a way to fix all of it—and not only is it going to save the world, it’s going to make the US the country every person in the world admires and holds up as a shining example.

Remember those days?

The beginning of the book gets you all hyped up, which is great, but he Friedman knows he can’t just get by on rhetoric. He has to deliver the facts, and there are lots of them in this book.

The Facts & Numbers

There’s a lot of ground to cover here (we are talking about the end of the world as we know it), so Friedman decides to break all his data down into five major problems:

1. Increasing demand for scarce energy supplies: There isn’t enough energy to go around without killing the planet
2. Tons of money going to oil-rich countries or “petrodicatorships:” Do we want to be at the mercy of whatever country has oil, regardless of their policies?
3. Climate change: CO2 levels are at a point where we don’t know what will happen
4. Energy poverty: Too many people don’t have electricity
5. Biodiversity loss: Species are dying out

There is lots to cover here, and I’m not going to go into a bunch of details on each one—I’ll save that for those of you who will want to read the book. But among all the facts and figures Friedman drops in here (which is the majority of the book), here are some interesting nuggets that’ll give you an idea of how he presents his case.

Cattle Belching: Friedman gets into so much detail that he even discusses the environmental effects of cattle belching. According to Friedman, “A herd of cattle belching can be worse than a highway full of Hummers.” Yikes!

China and India (and everyone else) finally are getting to live like Americans. This one is especially interesting to me. Developing countries are starting to live the lives of Americans—A/C whenever they want it, computers, TVs, big cars, etc. The problem is that if China and India adopt the American lifestyle, the planet is doomed. Seriously. So we have to make sure they don’t live the lives we’re currently living right now—it’s too dirty. Is that fair?

Chop sticks! I love eating Thai food with chopsticks, but check this stat out: “China itself uses 45 billion pairs of disposable chopsticks a year, or 1.66 million cubic meters of timber.” Sorry China, time to eat with your hands from now on.

Connection between oil price and freedom. This one is kind of freaky. Friedman gets a hold of some strange indicators that somehow measure the freedom within a country. They look at rule of law, political parties formed, newspaper activities, etc. And then he charted that against the price of oil and found a directly inverse relationship. As the price of oil went up in oil-rich countries, the level of freedom came down. Why? Because these countries become so powerful when oil prices go up that they don’t have to play ball. They can be jerks but the rest of the world is at their mercy—it’s like having a real jerk as your drug dealer. You still want the product so you’ll deal with whatever you have to to get your fix.

The Bahrain Case study. That last one got you thinking, didn’t it? What if an oil rich country ran out of oil—how would they behave then? Well, probably like Bahrain did. They overhauled their educational system and changed the laws to make it easier for outsiders to invest in the country. They had themselves a little revolution because they knew those fat oil checks weren’t going to be there for long. So they had to do something about it. They had to play ball with the rest of the world. Iran and Saudi Arabia don’t have to do that. Yet.

Weathermen and politics. A lot of people still see global warming and the “green movement” as a political thing. I like to talk about the science part of it, not the politics. But apparently weather people around the country that have tried to discuss the effects of global warming are getting lambasted from their viewers for injecting their political point of view into their forecasts. People are upset because they just want the weather, not “politics.” But who else can tap people on the shoulders and say “that huge flood last week? That was because of increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere”? No one, that’s who. These weather people are damned if they do and damned if they do.

Biodiversity isn’t just about “saving species.” Look at this from a practical point of view. How would you “sell” people on the idea of species conservation? Telling them how beautiful a gold-encrusted flapping duck is won’t cut it. But biodiversity has a very real, very practical side: it’s about giving ourselves the tools to adapt to whatever comes at us in the future. We’re not sure how current CO2 levels will affect us, but we’ll need all the biodiversity we can get in order to try to find cures and medicines to deal with what’s to come. The less diversity there is, the fewer cures we will find.

It may already be too late. This is the scary part. Sometimes you’ll read a paragraph and feel like it’s too late. This call to action is a few years too late—we’re headed for the abyss and even if he hit the brakes right now (which isn’t likely), we’d still fall off the cliff. Scary.

If you take one thing from this book. I love it when authors make it this easy on readers. Here is what Friedman wants you to take from his book:

We are not going to regulate our way out of the problems of the Energy-Climate Era. We can only innovate our way out, and the only way to do that is to mobilize the most effective and prolific system for transformational innovation and commercialization of new products ever created on the face of the earth—the U.S. marketplace.

This gives you a glimpse into how practical and sober Friedman’s argument is. He doesn’t think that we should all do this for the goodness of the planet—that sell would never work. But if we make it about profits and making money—that is what can cause the kind of change and innovation he’s talking about. Sad, but true.

Regulation works: China as an example. China is often seen as a totalitarian government with little for the US to imitate. But there’s actually one thing we should take from them, and that’s regulation. China can (and has) laid down the law about certain things—like car efficiency standards. They pass laws in the snap of a finger and just like that cars are more efficient. Plastic bags get outlawed at supermarkets and boom—1.3 billion people are no longer using plastic bags. The US government is used to telling us and giving us what we want instead of what is right for us and the environment. We need to be a little bit more like China.

What Works Best?

It may seem odd that I’m focusing on this whole issue of numbers vs. emotions when it comes to this book—so let me explain why. There are a lot of people out there that don’t think global warming is a problem. There are people that think it’s a problem but that little things like changing light bulbs and recycling are enough for us to do. Then there are people that agree with Friedman on the severity of this problem but don’t know what to do or how to spread this message of urgency.

That, to me, is at the most important part of this book. As Friedman says, the only way we’re going to navigate through this problem and arrive at solutions that will actually matter is by pushing our leaders and our government to act. So the biggest lesson to take from this book, once you confront the unmistakable fact that the planet will be fundamentally different (and not in a good way) if we don’t do something drastic as soon as possible, is finding the answer to one question: what can I do?

Once we realize that all we can do is affect our leadership so they do what they need to do to set up laws and price signals and other strategies like them, then we come to the conclusion that we need to find a way to pass this sense of urgency on to others. To as many people as possible. Because this green revolution won’t happen from the top down, it’s going to have to start from the bottom up, and that means citizens like you and I demanding change.

Sound corny? It is. But that’s only because I haven’t found a way to get this across without being corny or preachy (which I refuse to do). All I can say for now is this: if someone you know isn’t buying into the urgency behind climate crisis, give them this book and tell them to read it.

They’ll thank you once we’re done. We all will.

Images by Jim Linwood, the_toe_stubber, Ambuj Saxena,  FreeWine, Harold Laudeus, auburnxc, babasteve. 

Other book reviews:

• Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell
• The Snowball, on Warren Buffett
• The Creative Habit, by Twyla Tharp

I want to share a couple of really nice links I ran into this week:

• Ben Casnocha has a great post on fear and confidence that’s well worth the read, especially for Mike Tyson/boxing fans. It’s an issue that most of us would rather just put aside and not deal with because fear is supposed to be something that only “weak” people feel. But in reality, we’re all scared of something in our day-to-day lives and this is a nice post on what that fear really means and how it can drive us.
• My very good friend Andrew has done a lot of work on his site and you can tell. Check out AndrewDavidNelson for an inspirational look at travel, music, photography, and just life in general. I wish my site were more like Andrew’s in that he didn’t build it to make money or to show off. You can tell he’s just expressing himself and it is bursting with sincerity and creativity. Meanwhile I have an huge ad for LendingClub on the right. I guess to each his own, but make sure to check out his site if you want an escape from the day-to-day. Especially his travel stuff…he’s taken some amazing trips.