By Jesse Jenkins, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger

The large decline in U.S. emissions in 2008 and 2009 due to the economic recession ensures that if the House-passed Waxman-Markey climate legislation becomes law, the bill's emissions reduction cap will require no reduction of carbon emissions over the first two to five years of the program. The resulting oversupply of emissions permits will allow regulated firms to continue business as usual emissions through as late as 2018, according to a new analysis by Breakthrough Institute based on new Energy Information Administration emissions projections that take into account the impacts of the global recession.

The analysis further establishes that very modest utilization of the offset provisions of the Waxman-Markey bill, as little as one-tenth to one-quarter of the levels of offset utilization projected by the Congressional Budget Office and the Environmental Protection Agency respectively, will allow emissions in regulated sectors of the U.S. economy to proceed at business as usual levels through 2020 or beyond. Depending upon how quickly U.S. emissions recover over the next decade, firms would need to purchase on average as few as 124 million tons of offsets annually in order to comply with the emissions reduction caps through 2020, substantially less than the 526 million and 1,223 million tons of average annual offset utilization between 2012 and 2020 projected this summer by CBO and EPA respectively.

In conjunction with the free allocation of a high percentage of emissions allowances under Waxman-Markey, and lower global demand for offsets from recession-hit EU and U.S. firms, substantial over-allocation of emission allowances in the early years of the program will likely lead to a cap and trade program awash in both cheap emissions allowances and offsets during at least the first decade of implementation. Under such conditions, the functional carbon prices for the first decade or more under Waxman-Markey are likely to hover at or even below the $10 per ton floor on allowance auction prices (rising slowly each year) established by the bill.

Continue reading "Climate Bill Analysis Part 20: Over-Allocation of Pollution Permits Would Result in No Emissions Reduction Requirement during Early Years of Climate Program" »

By Johanna Peace, Breakthrough Fellow

It's strange to hear of "insourcing"--the transfer of manufacturing jobs into the United States instead of out--but that's exactly what's happening with Denmark's wind giant Vestas, according to a New York Times article yesterday.

According to the report, a combination of global recession and domestic stimulus spending on clean energy is adding up to a boon for the American clean energy manufacturing industry.

In Europe, Vestas has seen several nations slow down their rates of added wind capacity, and flagging government support combined with financial difficulties has impeded the construction of new projects. By contrast, the United States built 8,500 megawatts of wind capacity in 2008 to Britain's 500, and demand for turbine technology is high. So for opportunities in a more robust wind market, Vestas has begun to look across the Atlantic.

Continue reading "US Must Not Blow Its Chance as Foreign Investments Bring Wind Jobs Ashore" »

Driven by record-high gas prices in the first half of the year and the economic crisis that hit in the later half of the year, United States greenhouse gas emissions plunged by the largest amount in decades, according to preliminary data released today by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, which drive global climate change, fell to 2.8% in 2008 to 5.8 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2-e), the lowest level of emissions in any year since 2000. Total U.S. energy consumption also fell 2.2% in 2008, the EIA reports.

(Sorry for poor image quality, blame the source: the EIA)

Continue reading "U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions Plunge in 2008" »

As we predicted back in March, Cap and Trade is going under Down Undah. Several outlets are reporting that Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has promised to shelve the implementation of his proposed cap and trade system until 2011 in an apparent effort to quell concerns that the carbon pricing plan will impact the Aussie economy and shore up support for the controversial proposal in the testy Australian Senate.

To date, Rudd and his center-left Labor Party have already offered numerous industry-friendly concessions, including free allowances for major polluters as part of a so-called "global recession buffer." It wasn't enough to find the necessary votes, so today, Rudd announced even more concessions, including: more polluter giveaways; a delayed start for the program's cap and trade scheme, which won't go into effect until July 2011; and a fixed price for carbon emissions permits of just $10 (AUS) per ton of CO2 for the first full year of the program after that (through July 2012).

Continue reading "Australia Shelves Cap and Trade" »

Even with all that has intervened since the summer of 2008, including an historic election and the onset of the worst global recession in decades, the memory of the oil price shocks of the past year are not far from our minds. We'd better keep that memory fresh, because a recent McKinsey report warns that a second major oil shock looms just over the horizon, ready to hit the global economy hard as soon as it begins to recover.

McKinsey's analysts look at a variety of economic scenarios and warn that the global oil supply-demand balance will tighten as soon as the global economy begins to recover, as soon as 2010-2013 (depending on degree of global downturn). At that point, the global supply-demand situation will closely resemble the situation found in 2007 and the first half of 2008, when prices soared to over $140 a barrel, hitting pocketbooks and the global economy hard.

McKinsey predicts that a second oil price shock could cost the global economy $1.5 trillion or more, hitting us hard just as we're trying to stand back up again.

Continue reading "New Oil Shock Poised to Strike as Economy Recovers" »

James K. Galbraith has a tour de force piece in the Washington Monthly on the economic and financial crises, what's at their core and what's necessary to move forward.

Galbraith echoes and reinforces many of the criticisms and recommendations Breakthrough has been offering on the economy for the past six months: more public spending (a lot!); nationalize the banks so they can be cleaned up and re-privatized; and ultimately, spark a new engine of economic growth in the birth of a new clean energy economy.

Galbraith isn't shy either about criticizing President Obama and Treasury Secretary Geithner for stimulus.  It's not bold enough, it reflects the middle of the road economic consensus (and is therefore too timid), and it reflects a misguided attempt at bipartisanship.  Here's the choice quote there:

Second, the new team also sought consensus of another type. Christina Romer polled a bipartisan group of professional economists, and Larry Summers told Meet the Press that the final package reflected a "balance" of their views. This procedure guarantees a result near the middle of the professional mind-set. The method would be useful if the errors of economists were unsystematic. But they are not. Economists are a cautious group, and in any extreme situation the midpoint of professional opinion is bound to be wrong.

Continue reading "Galbraith on the Economy: Time to Go Big or Go Home" »

Both speaking to the public today at separate events, President Barack Obama and Energy Secretary Stephen Chu highlighted the administration's plans to make unprecedented investments in clean energy innovation.

Speaking at the White House, President Obama continued to advance his post-environmental, innovation and investment-oriented energy agenda.

After a spot-on introduction from articulate energy innovation advocate and MIT President Susan Hockfield (see related post), President Obama highlighted the unprecedented energy innovation investments in the stimulus bill and reiterated his pledge to invest $15 billion annually in the development of new, clean and efficient energy technologies.

Obama also promised a ten-year commitment to make the federal Research and Experimentation Tax Credit permanent in order to encourage greater private sector investment in the kind of innovation that truly drives long-term economic growth.

Continue reading "President Obama and Secretary Chu Deliver Double Dose on Energy Innovation" »

Investments in clean energy innovation offer the nation's "best strategy" for economic recovery and "the only route to the breakthrough technologies we need" to tackle the nation's pressing energy and climate challenge, said MIT President Susan Hockfield today at a speech delivered at the White House.

Hockfield, an outspoken champion of clean energy innovation, spoke at the invitation of President Obama, who followed Hockfield's remarks with a speech outlining his plans to make unprecedented investments in clean energy technology and innovation.

"[S]ince World War II, by far the largest and most important source of US economic growth has been technological innovation, much of it springing from federally funded ... research," Hockfield said, echoing much of the work we've done at the Breakthrough Institute to advance public investments in clean energy innovation.

Facing both economic recession and pressing energy and climate challenges, clean energy innovation is critical, Hockfield argued:

"The R&D and technology investments that President Obama proposes have equally profound potential as an economic catalyst. That would be good news in any economy. But today, it provides a lifeline. ...

Not incidentally, these same investments [in energy innovation] also offer the only route to the breakthrough technologies we need to address the daunting challenges of energy security, rapidly accelerating energy demand and climate change."

In January, Teryn Norris and I cautioned about the "Danger of Green Stimulus" and called for "a shift from green jobs to a broader focus on green technology," a called echoed by Dr. Hockfield in the inspirational conclusion of her remarks:

"In hard times, America always invents its way to a brighter future. We have done it before, and we can do it again. For Americans out of work today, new "green jobs" will help. But for tomorrow, we need new green industries. And the only way to build those industries is by investing ambitiously now in basic and applied research."

Couldn't have said it better myself, Dr. Hockfield.

Since this is the third time now we've highlighted Susan Hockfield's spot-on remarks at the Breakthrough Blog, I think it's time she joins Energy Secretary and Nobel laureate Dr. Stephen Chu and dons the (entirely unofficial) mantle of "Honorary Breakthrough Institute Senior Fellow." Read on for her full remarks...

Continue reading "MIT President Hockfield at the White House: Investing in Energy R&D "Best Strategy" for Economic Growth" »

A story about the GOP's governors in Sunday's New York Times paints a picture of the current Republican Party through the prism of the stimulus debate. The future of the GOP could very well be determined by whether it is the centrist or conservative governors who map out the party's next steps:

Republican governors split sharply during the weekend over how to respond to the economic crisis, a debate whose outcome will go a long way toward shaping how the national party redefines itself in the wake of its election defeats of recent years.

The divisions were evident at the annual winter meeting of the National Governors Association here as the Republicans differed both in their approaches to their own states' budget shortfalls and in their attitudes toward President Obama's $787 billion stimulus package.

Many pundits and political reporters have postulated that any revival of the GOP will likely come from the Party's governors, who have the double advantage over their Congressional counterparts of 1) a smaller stage with which to experiment with new policy ideas that are necessary for any Republican rebirth and 2) the blessing of not having to go head to head with Barack Obama--who still commands a stunning level of public support--in the course of their daily work.

Continue reading "The GOP's Big Question" »

The New York Times reports that even as President Obama signs the economic stimulus bill into law today, he and his aids are indicating that the President has not ruled out the need for continued public spending to stimulate economic recovery:

The president said he would not pretend "that today marks the end of our economic problems."

"Nor does it constitute all of what we have to do to turn our economy around," Mr. Obama said at the signing ceremony in the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. "But today does mark the beginning of the end, the beginning of what we need to do to create jobs for Americans scrambling in the way of layoffs."

Obama's press secretary, Robert Gibbs told reporters on the way to the stimulus bill signing, "I think the president is going to do what's necessary to grow this economy." The Times reports that he then added, "[While] there are no particular plans at this point for a second stimulus package, I wouldn't foreclose it."

This rhetorical shift suggests that Obama recognizes that economic recovery will be a long process that will require sustained action and last deep into his first term. The President seems to be beginning to prepare the public for that reality as well.

Continue reading "Obama: Sowing Seeds for Stimulus 2.0?" »

James Hansen of NASA has written an op-ed for the Guardian that, more than any other piece of his that I've seen, expresses his political philosophy. In a phrase, that philosophy can be characterized as "scientific authoritarianism." Scientific authoritarianism, as I am using it here, holds that political decisions should be compelled by the political preferences of scientists. It is a very strong form of the "linear model" of science and decision making that I discuss in The Honest Broker.

Hansen believes that the advice of experts, and specifically his advice alone, should compel certain political outcomes. He opens his op-ed in the Guardian with this statement:

A year ago, I wrote to Gordon Brown asking him to place a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants in Britain. I have asked the same of Angela Merkel, Barack Obama, Kevin Rudd and other leaders.

Continue reading "The Political Philosophy of James Hansen" »

In an op-ed in the Boston Globe today, Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Susan Hockfield championed long term federal investments in technologies and technology-based sectors as an engine of long term economic growth.

Hockfield invokes World War II and Cold War investments in education and fundamental and applied research and development, citing the many technological innovations--in electronics, aerospace, computing and communications and others--that directly resulted from these investments. These innovations, she points out, and created industries and growth sectors that provided decades of prosperity for the American economy. Hockfield writes:

With stimulus plans now in place, Congress and the Obama administration must plant the seeds of longer-term economic growth. Economists broadly agree that more than half of US economic growth since World War II has come from technological innovation, much of it stemming from federally funded, fundamental research. In the late 1990s, for example, US productivity grew at more than 3 percent per year. The revolution in information technology - a direct outgrowth of federally funded research - was pivotal to this extraordinary growth.

Citing the potential for future technological breakthroughs to help America overcome pressing national challenges, she continues:

Finding new energy answers may be the most pressing concern, given the implications of the current energy mix for the economy, national security and climate change. To help unleash an innovation wave in energy technology, the United States must go beyond the priorities of the stimulus package, which aims to create tens of thousands of "green jobs"; it must now invest in the kind of research and innovation that will ultimately spin-off millions of jobs by building a new economy. This includes investing in early- and later-stage research on the most promising technologies; funding new R&D centers to accelerate critical breakthroughs; equipping research labs with state-of-the-art instrumentation for advanced research, prototyping and demonstration of emerging technologies; and training a new energy talent base.

With debate over the stimulus coming to an end, progressives need to begin using the recovery bill as a springboard to advocate for a new model of governance that values sustained federal investments that can yield broad societal benefits and fuel economic growth. It is great that MIT's respected president is moving the discourse around creating a new progressive economic philosophy for forward.

(Read the whole op-ed after the jump)

Continue reading "MIT President Champions Federal Innovation Investments" »

After the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed in the lower chamber of Congress with absolutely no support from House Republicans two weeks ago, it was hard to predict what shape the debate would take in the Senate. But with perspective, the course of the Senate debate offers lessons for how we could secure investments in making clean energy cheap, and transform American politics in the process.

Just as it seemed that debate over the stimulus might stall, Ben Nelson, a Democrat from Nebraska, and Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine took the lead in an effort to bring a centrist approach to the bill in order to secure bipartisan support. What came out of this effort is a bill that slashes necessary and fast acting stimulus in the form of aid for state budgets and money for education, among other spending measures, while expanding tax cuts that will help the more affluent disproportionately to middle and lower class Americans.

Continue reading "Energy, Economy, and How to Rebuild the Center" »

An article in last week's New York Times delved into Japan's "Lost Decade," - the prolonged period of economic stagnation that hit the nation in the 1990s - and explores what lessons for U.S. stimulus efforts can be learned from Japan's efforts to restart their economy. The article's findings echo some of the arguments Breakthrough has been making regarding the stimulus debate. Japan's stimulus missteps reinforce the argument that our recovery program should be focused on modern infrastructure--not traditional public works--in addition to spending on other national priorities such as energy and education.

The Times story begins with a look at which types of public spending helped Japan grow out of its recession, and which types stifled recovery:

[I]t matters what gets built: Japan spent too much on increasingly wasteful roads and bridges, and not enough in areas like education and social services, which studies show deliver more bang for the buck than [traditional] infrastructure spending.

"It is not enough just to hire workers to dig holes and then fill them in again," said Toshihiro Ihori, an economics professor at the University of Tokyo. "One lesson from Japan is that public works get the best results when they create something useful for the future."

Continue reading "Lessons from Japan: How to Avoid A "Lost Decade" in America" »

Here is a remarkable display of incoherence. According to a report commissioned by Greenpeace and discussed by The Christian Science Monitor, the economic stimulus package now under debate by the U.S. Congress will reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

What does the report mean by "reduce"? It means that some future emissions that might have occurred will be avoided. Emissions will therefore increase, just not as much as under some other scenario. The difference between that other scenario and the scenario implied by the stimulus package represents a "reduction" in emissions. Yes, you are reading that right.

Continue reading "Cutting Emissions While Increasing Them" »

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is not sailing through the legislative process quite as easily as many pundits had anticipated. The stimulus received no votes from House Republicans last week, and this week GOP Senators are joining the tumult. The bill has become embroiled in a few debates that are more political than economic, and is certainly demonstrating what President Obama means when he says he wants to bring a spirit of bipartisanship to Washington.

Yesterday, Senate Republicans proposed an incredible array of tax cuts and incentives--some trying to encourage consumers to make bigger purchases like tax credits for car and home purchases, as well as a big increase in plain tax cuts. The GOP has been in the media criticizing the spending aspects of the bill as not being timely enough or just generally less preferable then tax cuts (although it's pretty clear there's a healthy dose of ideology mixed into this economic-sounding argument).

Meanwhile, a bipartisan group of conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans have also come together to try their hands at reshaping the stimulus. The New York Times reports:

Continue reading "The Politics of Bipartisanship Stimulates Debate over Stimulus" »

By Adam Solomon Zemel and Jesse Jenkins. Also posted at HuffingtonPost

Barack Obama's stance on energy issues is not the easiest to discern. While Obama the orator's language regarding energy has been inspiring - he's eloquently spoken of the need take bold steps and transform America's energy system - it is still not clear that Obama the President's policy ideas are similarly transformative. For a perfect case study, let's look at the seemingly ambitious goal to double renewable energy announced as part of President Obama's stimulus and recovery plan.

Early on, before the Inauguration, Obama gave his address announcing the key components of his stimulus plan. For clean energy, the big punch line was this:

"To finally spark the creation of a clean energy economy, we will double the production of alternative energy in the next three years."

On the surface, this sounds like an ambitious and transformative goal. Doubling alternative energy production in just three years sounds like quite a feat. But, as usual, the devil is in the details, and it all depends on what Obama actually means when he says "double alternative energy production."

Continue reading "From Rhetoric to Reality: Is Obama's Clean Energy Goal Really That Ambitious?" »

There's an interesting, if frustrating, piece by David Leonhardt in the New York Times Magazine this week on the need for a strategy for long-term growth, not just short term stimulus. In it he makes a critique of green jobs -- and offers up pollution pricing orthodoxy.

"Green jobs can certainly provide stimulus. Obama's proposal includes subsidies for companies that make wind turbines, solar power and other alternative energy sources, and these subsidies will create some jobs. But the subsidies will not be nearly enough to eliminate the gap between the cost of dirty, carbon-based energy and clean energy. Dirty-energy sources -- oil, gas and coal -- are cheap. That's why we have become so dependent on them.

The only way to create huge numbers of clean-energy jobs would be to raise the cost of dirty-energy sources, as Obama's proposed cap-and-trade carbon-reduction program would do, to make them more expensive than clean energy. This is where the green-jobs dream gets complicated."

It seems that this analysis is only half-right.

Continue reading "Carbon Pricing is No Engine for Sustained Growth" »

A recent report by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, headed up by Robert Atkinson, indicates that the technology investments in the proposed stimulus plan could create close to one million jobs. This report provides a powerful political and economic argument that any available options for technology investment beyond the $37 billion already included should be exhausted as part of the stimulus.

The report suggests that $30 billion to computerize health records, expand wireless broadband to rural areas, and create a new smart electric grid--the existing technology investments in the stimulus--would yield 900,000 jobs. The New York Times wrote about this report on Monday, accurately noting:

"Beyond creating jobs, advocates say, government investment in these technology fields holds the promise of laying a lasting foundation for more business innovation and efficiency, while helping to create new digital industries."

Continue reading "Technology Investments in Stimulus Will Yield A Million Jobs" »

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 passed through the lower chamber of congress today, putting the stimulus on track to be signed into law before Presidents Day Weekend. The entire Republican caucus was joined by 11 Democrats in opposition of the bill, passing with a vote of 244-188.

The voting record represents a setback to President Obama's vision of bipartisan governance. Despite meeting with the GOP caucus in order to field questions and hear concerns, Obama was unable to get any House Republicans to vote for the stimulus. TheHill.com reports:

Despite hinting that they might agree with Obama's initial call for a stimulus bill, Republicans in the end balked, and did so forcefully and unanimously, especially after the addition of more than $350 billion in spending by House appropriators.

It seems that Obama's decision to back off tax cuts that drew initial criticism from Congressional Democrats may have played a role in the complete lack of support from the Republican Caucus.

However, there are signs that a provision that has been added into the Senate's version of the stimulus, an adjustment of the alternative minimums tax, could succeed in garnering the votes of House Republicans when the bill arrives back for a final vote in the House. The tax code adjustment would hold down middle-class income taxes for 2009.

A version of the bill is currently working its way through the Senate, and is expected to garner more bipartisan support in its vote next week.

Read more about Breakthrough's thoughts on the stimulus:

• Passing the Recovery Test or: The Basic Political Reality for Climate Legislation in 2009
• Obama Stimulus: For Clean Energy, a Patchwork of Investments
• Obama Backs Off from Controversial Tax Cuts
• On Obama's Stimulus: Don't Look Back, Forge Ahead to a New Century of Prosperity
• How Deep is Public Support for Obama's Stimulus?
• Obama's Stimulus Plan: A Foundation for Growth?
• The Danger of Green Stimulus
• Forget Roads and Rebates: Why the Stimulus Should Invest in Innovation and Productivity

Todd Stern will be named by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as the U.S. State Department's special "Climate Envoy," news outlets reported today. Stern's climate credentials include a stint as a senior negotiator representing Bill Clinton's White House at the Kyoto Protocol talks, a role he'll likely reprise at the upcoming Copenhagen climate talks this December.

As a high level negotiator at Kyoto in 1997, Stern helped forge an international climate reduction framework that has been largely ineffective (see Michael and Ted's essay, "Scrap Kyoto", here [pdf]). Stern's appointment thus makes one wonder: has the Clinton-era negotiator learned the lessons of the past 12 years and is now prepared to offer a new direction at the Copenhagen talks? Or does Stern's appointment signal that the Obama administration's official thinking on international climate policy is still stuck in the winter of 1997?

Continue reading "Will New "Climate Envoy" Bring More of the Same for the US in Copenhagen?" »

Dalton Conley, Breakthrough Senior Fellow, sociology professor at NYU and author of the upcoming book "Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety," sat down with Ted Nordhaus to answer some questions about social and economic inequality in America, and the impacts of the current recession on recent socioeconomic trends in the United States. Don't miss the chance to see Conley speak tomorrow, January 27th, at Berkeley Arts and Letters with Michael and Ted introducing.

Q&A:
Ted Nordhaus:
You have written extensively about the impacts of rising social and economic inequality on American culture and society. What would you identify as the key drivers of rising inequality?
Dalton Conley:
Wage inequality has increased for a variety of reasons, perhaps the most important being what economists call "skill-biased technological change" meaning that the new economy skews rewards heavily toward folks who have the most hi-end cognitive and emotional skills and credentials (i.e. educational degrees). But total inequality has increased also because of family dynamics: more and more families are two-earner households with high-earners marrying high-earners, thereby doubling (almost) household inequality.

Nordhaus:
Over the last few decades, up until the current recession, America has experienced both consistently high levels of economic growth and rising levels, by some accounts unprecedented levels, of economic inequality. How are those two phenomena related and do you think it is possible to have a high growth economy without rising levels of inequality?
Conley:
The rewards of growth have been typically unequally distributed in the U.S. For instance, the last time we experienced inequality levels equal to contemporary ones was 1929, right before the crash. So it remains to be seen what the impact of the current bear market will be. There are, however, examples abroad of societies that have managed to obtain standards of living similar to (or better than) ours without such extreme inequality. Northern Europe comes to mind.

Nordhaus:
What do you think the impact of the current recession will be on social inequality? Are we likely to see declining levels of inequality and if so, what impact would you expect that to have on Elsewhere U.S.A?
Conley:
I think inequality may lessen if the evaporation of all this abstract wealth holds fast. However, already public policy has been directed to restoring the old ways. Even if inequality declines, I still think folks will be haunted by economic anxiety. In good times we fear that others are doing better than us in relative terms. In bad times, we fear losing what we have in absolute terms.

Nordhaus:
You write more specifically about the ways in which rising inequality is self reinforcing. The more money affluent Americans make, the higher the opportunity costs of not working become. The resulting greater incentive for affluent Americans to work more, not less, then exacerbates income inequality all the more. Would you expect a recessionary economy in which income inequality was declining to result in a reversal of this dynamic? With the opportunity costs of family time and leisure declining, would you expect affluent Americans to take more time away from work and with their families? What impact might that have on Americans who work in the service sectors to which affluent Americans have in recent decades outsourced so much of their lives?
Conley:
I could see a potential upside of more folks living a slower lifestyle--cooking at home more and outsourcing less childcare and other aspects of what was once family life; this might be an upside of a tepid economy. However, the monkey wrench in all this is the fact that we are burdened with enormous household (and national) debt thanks to our recent consumption binge. So most of us--thanks to credit card bills or mortgages that exceed the value of our homes--don't have the option of working less and enjoying simpler pleasures we had forgotten about. We are going to be working for our interest payments and feeling perhaps even more pressure to earn.

Nordhaus:
You write a lot about the ways in which modern life, and particularly the market, has increasingly erased many of the old modernist dualities - work and leisure, public and private, market goods and public goods - mostly in the negative; but aren't there real benefits to many of these trends as well, in terms of the creation of all sorts of technologies and new personal/professional spaces that allow for greater flexibility and control over when, how, and where we work, play, shop, and lived?
Conley:
Definitely, but the skills we need to manage these are new. The ability to multi-task--i.e. attend to several streams of interactive data exchange while not losing any of those threads, is perhaps as important as perisistence, brains or other skills that are prized. I am not trying to be judgemental and make some nostalgic claim that things were "better" in the days of yore; rather, I am merely trying to describe a new social landscape that comes with plusses and minuses.

Nordhaus:
You also write about the rise of the intravidual - about the ways in which the collapse of so many of those dualities has led to a fracturing of the self. Is this really a new development? How is this different than Whitman's observation that we "contain multitudes" penned more than a century ago? Haven't we always contained multitudes and multiple selves?
Conley:
That may be the case. However, I think back then there was still a clear(er) division between front-stage (i.e. public persona) and back-stage (our private self). Today with Facebook updates (and so on), public cell phone conversations, and the blurring of home and work, this dichotomy has eroded, combining with other dynamics I describe in the book, to lead to a greater--perhaps--fragmentation of our consciousness, I argue.

Nordhaus:
How do the social safety net and the institutions necessary for its provision need to evolve to address America's increasingly complex social and economic arrangements?
Conley:
We have to face the fact that the social safety net devised in the 1930s (and even the 1960s amendments) were made in the context of a much less affluent society where household budgets were much more devoted to basic necessities. Today what we "need" is much greater (education, high quality health care, family care and so on) and often relative in nature (better schools -- better than what?). These are much more difficult to provide using the old-school social insurance model.

---
About the book:

Over the past three decades, our daily lives have changed slowly but dramatically. Boundaries between leisure and work, public space and private space, and home and office have blurred and become permeable. How many of us now work from home, our wireless economy allowing and encouraging us to work 24/7? How many of us talk to our children while scrolling through e-mails on our BlackBerrys? How many of us feel overextended, as we are challenged to play multiple roles-worker, boss, parent, spouse, friend, and client-all in the same instant?

Dalton Conley, social scientist and writer provides us with an X-ray view of our new social reality. In Elsewhere, U.S.A., Conley connects our daily experience with occasionally overlooked sociological changes: women's increasing participation in the labor force; rising economic inequality generating anxiety among successful professionals; the individualism of the modern era-the belief in self-actualization and expression-being replaced by the need to play different roles in the various realms of one's existence. In this groundbreaking book, Conley offers an essential understanding of how the technological, social, and economic changes that have reshaped our world are also reshaping our individual lives.