So we value our bottom line without factoring in the value of our time, which results in things like my mom driving eleven miles out of her way to save 12 cents on a gallon of milk, or people buying homes that require a two hour commute so that they can have four bedrooms, or someone accepting a job offer because it pays 10% more even though it will require 20% more time.

Talk about front-butt.

I could go into some Marx, talk about Taylor, time-units, alienation-from-self, shit like that. I know that when I first encountered these topics, they seemed so academic, which is to say, deeply irrelevant (unless I could somehow weave them into a zine rant de la semaine, at which point they became profoundly illuminating).  At some point I’ll go more into how I’ve settled more deeply (and contentedly) into myself since eliminating the vee-hickle from my life and how this is related to smaller triangles, the creative class, the rise and fall of empires, and your mom.

But for now I’d like to share a snip from an unpublished paper regarding micro-lending and social work by R. J. Barinbaum:

In the Grameen model, the [lending] risk is lessened by the social capital built through the group process. But, “many group-based micro-credit programs in the U.S. have failed to recognize that Third World Micro-credit relies heavily on the cohesive and personal trust that are shared by the members” (Bhatt and Tang, p 9, 1999). Communities in the U.S. often lack the social capital that is created out of repeated interactions, reciprocity, and shared norms of conduct.

Theory ANP? It goes down like this:

1. As a society, and as individuals, we try to be all efficient-like and look for ways to improve our bottom line, but fail to factor in the value of our time (and, in other ways, our personal happiness)
2. So as our society fluxes, it becomes more atomized, exurbian, and “efficient.” We shop at big boxes, no longer walk to our downtown for a gallon of milk and a library book, zoom zoom zoom around on interstates instead of human-scaled spaces. We turn ourselves into human units.
3. Societal fabric weakens. The alienation from self that allowed a society in point two to exist in the first place deepens as point two’s faux-topia is fully realized. Shit is fucked up.
4. Individuals caught in the weak net of welfare are equally — if not more — atomized from those around them. Because Moses mowed over their homes and put them into cinder blocks? Because television is a mediated interface and supplants human to human connection? Because we force children to travel great distances in order to balance out the racial ratio in our schools?  Answering those queries would be scope creep.
5. So when a concept like micro-lending is proven to lift individuals out of poverty, turns out that Third World countries are better suited to capitalize (Nita = punny!) because the fabric of our society is so frail that we might not be able to make it work.

The fix? Be the path. Own the pipes. Etc. Etc. Etc.  Question mark, question mark, question mark.

I’m still working on the grand unifying ghost-mastah plan.

What you got?  Help a girl out.