Cosmology: An Expanding, Flat Universe and the Search for Reasons Why

Time to look over the cutting edge of what's happening in physics. To the surprise of many physicists and onlookers, the most recent generation of research reveals the universe is not only expanding, but doing so at an increasing rate. More--and notwithstanding the curved-space implications of Einstein's general theory of relativity--the universe is flat. Now, the next generation of research is trying to explain why this is so. Critical to the explanation is the amount and nature of dark energy--and whether the relationshop between dark energy's negative pressure and its positive energy density proves a cosmological constant of -1. Challenging stuff, but fascinating.

In February, The Economist offered a remarkably good and readable survey of the state of affairs in this area of physics research. From that article:

It has been known since the late 1920s that the universe is getting bigger. But it was thought that the expansion was slowing. When in 1998 two independent studies reached the opposite conclusion, cosmology was knocked head over heels. Since then, 5,000 papers have been written to try to explain (or explain away) this result. "That's more than one a day," marvels Saul Perlmutter, of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who led the Supernova Cosmology Project—one of the studies that was responsible for dropping the bombshell. Last October that work earned Dr Perlmutter the Nobel prize for physics, which he shared with Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess, who led the other study, the High-Z Supernova Search. 

---"Cosmology: The dark side of the universe," The Economist, Science and Technology (2.18.12)

But what does that have to do with the flatness of the universe and the hard to reconcile curved-space phenomenon resulting from Einstein's general theory of relativity? More from The Economist:

Many of those 5,000 papers deal with something that has come to be known as dark energy. One reason for its popularity is that, at one fell swoop, it explains another big cosmological find of recent years. In the early 1990s studies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), an all-pervading sea of microwaves which reveals what the universe looked like when it was just 380,000 years old, showed that the universe, then and now, was "flat". However big a triangle you draw on it—the corners could be billions of light years apart—the angles in it would add up to 180°, just as they do in a school exercise book. 

That might not surprise people whose geometrical endeavours have never gone beyond such books. But it surprised many physicists. At some scales space is not at all flat: the power of Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity lies in its interpretation of gravity in terms of curved space. Cosmologists were quite prepared for it to be curved at the grandest of scales, and intrigued to discover that it was not.

So far so good, but where does the amount and nature of dark energy come into play, and why does the relationship of its postive and negative qualities have to prove a cosmological or universal constant?

Relativity says that for the universe to be flat, it has to have a very particular density—which in relativity is a measure not just of the mass contained in a certain volume, but also of the energy. The puzzle was that various lines of evidence showed that the universe's endowment of ordinary matter (the stuff that people, planets and stars are made of) would give it just 4% of that density. Adding in extraordinary matter—"dark matter", not made of atoms, that interacts with the rest of the universe almost only by means of gravity—gets at most an extra 22%. That left almost three-quarters of the critical density unaccounted for. Theorists such as Michael Turner, of the University of Chicago, became convinced that there was something big missing from their picture of the universe. 

Whatever it is that is driving the universe's accelerating expansion fits the bill rather well. Add the amount of energy needed to keep cosmic acceleration going to the amount of matter and energy in the universe already accounted for and you have more or less exactly the density of matter and energy needed to make the universe flat. But there is a catch; for the sums to tally, that "dark energy"—Dr Turner is thought to have coined the term— must be very strange stuff indeed. According to Einstein's theory of relativity, energy in the form of radiation has the same sort of gravitational effect as matter does—the photons of which light is made exert a pressure, and this in turn gives rise to a gravitational attraction. In order to drive its acceleration, then, dark energy must instead have a repulsive effect. It must, in other words, exert a negative pressure. 

Divide dark energy's pressure (negative) by its energy density (positive) and you get something cosmologists label "w". It is easy to see that w must be negative. Observations made since 1998 suggest that w is pretty close to -1. If it were found to be exactly -1, that would make dark energy something physicists call a cosmological constant. A cosmological constant is the same no matter where in the universe you look—an inherent, unchanging feature of the fabric of creation, however much it expands, twists or ties itself in knots.

And the cosmological constant also has it's history inextricably bound up in the history of Einstein's general theory of relativity.

The cosmological constant is another thing first dreamed up by Einstein. On realising that the equations of general relativity allowed for the universe's expansion (or, indeed, contraction), he added a parameter describing just such a constant in order to keep it from doing either. For all his notoriously counterintuitive predictions, an expanding universe was one he was not prepared to countenance, at least not in 1917, when he published his theory. After Edwin Hubble's discovery 12 years later that other galaxies were indeed streaming away from Earth's Milky Way backyard, Einstein dropped the tweak. No doubt miffed that he had not trusted his maths in the first place, he later called the cosmological constant his "biggest blunder". 

By then, though, the cosmological constant had been seized upon by quantum theorists [the physicists who focus on the physics of the smallest things, the sub-atomic particles], themselves in the midst of turning physics on its head. Quantum theory says that the seemingly empty vacuum of space is, in fact, not empty at all. Instead it is constantly abuzz with "virtual" particles flitting in and out of existence. The energy resulting from all this buzzing—vacuum energy—should be a fixed feature of space—in other words, a cosmological constant. 

And, in principle, it could also propel the universe's expansion. Thus vacuum energy and dark energy might be the same thing. But this theoretical neatness runs into a practical problem. A naive approach to quantum theory says that vacuum energy should be a whopping 10⁶⁰ to 10¹²⁰ times bigger than dark energy's estimated energy density. Some physicists call this "the worst prediction ever". Working out why vacuum energy is not so vast has been a problem for physics ever since.

And that brings us around to those who theorize the answer is connected to "string theory."

Cliff Burgess, from Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, and the author of a handful of the 5,000 papers Dr Perlmutter has dug up, thinks he has a solution; the vacuum energy is vast, but it is almost all hidden away in extra spatial dimensions. Unlike the familiar three of length, breadth and height, these extra dimensions are curled up so tightly that they elude detection (though scientists are trying to prise them open in particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva). Extra dimensions are of interest because string theory, a class of mathematical models based on quantum theory that seeks to describe reality in the most fundamental way, requires that there be at least six of them, maybe more. 

What makes Dr Burgess's proposal unusual is that he went out on a limb and suggested that these energy-sapping, curled-up extra dimensions should be as big as a few microns across, gargantuan by string-theory standards. The reason they have not been noticed by chipmakers, virologists and others who pay attention to things on the micron scale, he contends, is that, like dark matter, they are sensitive only to gravity, and relatively oblivious to the other three of nature's fundamental interactions: electromagnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces. This may sound like a cheap excuse but it makes robust mathematical sense. And it makes predictions; at micron scales the attraction between two masses will no longer depend on the square of the distance between them in the way that physicists since Newton have required it to. 

[...] If Dr Burgess is right, vacuum energy and dark energy are the same thing, a cosmological constant, and w is exactly equal to -1. What, though, if it is not? Then dark energy would have to be something that varies in space, time, or both, and is close to -1 today just by coincidence. Names applied to this something else include quintessence, k-essence, phantom energy and a bunch more, depending on which theorist you ask and what properties you think likely. It would be a new fundamental force, one that rears its head only at vast cosmic distances. 

[...]The more precisely w comes to look like -1, the more enthusiasm there will be for cosmological constant theories, which require that value, and the less enthusiasm there will be for fifth forces and modified gravity, part of the charm of which is that they can work with other values. This is where telescopes like Cerro Tololo come in. Existing data from ground-based and space telescopes put w at between -1.1 and -0.9. DES will aim to narrow the margin of uncertainty down to just 0.01. To do so, it will take 400 one-gigabyte snaps a night for 525 nights over five years (the remaining telescope time will be split between other science projects). And it will use an array of clever techniques to analyse the data.

But there's an overarching  problem, possibly an insuperable one, in proving the cosmological constant inherent in the positive and negative qualities of dark energy--at least at this time. The article concludes:

The rub is that no amount of observations can ever pin down the figure for w with perfect accuracy. That would require infinite precision, something impossible to achieve even in an ever-expanding universe. And the whole constant idea falls to pieces if w is even a smidgen off -1. 

More than any other scientific problem the cosmic-expansion conundrum presents scientists with an existential quandary. "It could be a 22nd-century problem we stumbled upon in the 20th century," says Dr Turner. Some researchers may begin to feel time would be better spent on other scientific pursuits. 

Many astronomers, including Dr Perlmutter, are quietly hoping that as DES and the host of other acronyms come online, they will spring another surprise, like the one that first propelled cosmic acceleration into the limelight in 1998. Whether they do or not, though, dark energy—or whatever else is causing the universe to speed up—is probably too big a conundrum for one generation to crack. It will cause boffins to rack their brains for years to come.

There is much more shared in this article:  the details of the more recent research, formulation of next questions and next steps in the research, and the projects and research methodologies organized to address them. It is fully worth your time to read it all.

Link to article:

http://www.economist.com/node/21547760

Has Europe [and the U.S.] lost its soul?--Rabbi Jonathan Sachs

I send this essay/speech by Rabbi Sachs along to a range of people with whom I feel it is important to share it--either because it addresses common Judeo-Christian faith values and understandings, or because it provides understanding of why and how my faith as well as my humanism informs my economic, political and social values and my sense of social responsibility. Rabbi Sachs is thoughtful, insightful and authoritative in his reflections and admonitions. I share fully his understandings and views. I hope you find them informative and worthy, if not affirming of your own.

Please read it. To do so, just click here.

*          *          *          *          *

This piece was sent to me by old friend, David Greenhalgh, professor of education and director of the Ph.D program in organizational development at Eastern University, a Christian university in Eastern Pennsylvania. Thank you, David.

Jonathan Sacks has been Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth since September 1991. Educated at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he obtained first class honours in Philosophy, Jonathan Sacks pursued postgraduate studies at New College, Oxford, and King's College London, gaining his PH. D in 1981 and rabbinic ordination from Jews' College and Yeshiva Etz Chaim. The Chief Rabbi has been a visiting professor at several universities in Britain, the United States and Israel, and is currently Visiting Professor of Theology at Kings' College London. He holds many honorary degrees, including a Doctor of Divinity conferred to mark his first ten years in office, by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The Chief Rabbi received the Jerusalem Prize 1995 for his contribution to diaspora Jewish life, and was knighted by Her Majesty The Queen in 2005. He was made a Life Peer and took his seat in the House of Lords on 27th October 2009, where he sits on the cross benches as Baron Sacks of Aldgate in the City of London.

Many of his books have been translated into French, Italian, Dutch, German, Portuguese, Korean and Hebrew. Those of his titles currently in print in English, include: The Great Partnership: God, Science and the Search for Meaning, The Persistence of Faith, Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations, Covenant and Conversation: Exodus, Covenant and Conversation: Genesis, Future Tense, and From Optimism to Hope.

The Affordable Care Act: A Square Peg in a Round Hole

The Supreme Court is finally reviewing the constitutionality of The Affordable Care Act. Finally. And I too have been reading about it, watching and listening. But I can't add much new or insightful--except one overriding thought that kept suggesting itself through the days of arguments and all that has been said and written about them. And that is, this is what you get when you have to force delivery of a public good--and healthcare is surely that--through market constructs poorly conceived, inappropriate and inadequate to deliver any service equally and dependably to all citizens.

Markets by their nature discriminate by ability to pay--and the more finely tuned their functions become, the more clearly and effectively they discriminate. Trying to jury rig a complex and labyrinthian set of rules, contingencies and incentives to move market processes to clumsily approximate the same result appears very much a fools errand. And now a poorly prepared and politically distracted group of nine old people in robes will likely try to restructure it so that the result makes some sense, but only in that it will touch a few disputed principles and guideposts in the process of juridical review of the legislative process and the legislation produced.

Public goods, like education, social service programs and healthcare, are the natural province of the public sector, and a national health service, or at least a single-payer (government) insurance function, are the only logical and truly workable answers. Upon reading my sentiments expressed in an earlier e-mail, a friend responded that it was like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. So true. The best we can now hope for is a result that sets the occasion for future movement in the right direction. But I have no idea what the Supreme Court will do--and it appears they do not either, struggling as they are to understand the implications of their charge, and the array of poor results and degrees of damage which are their only choices, other than an unqualified finding of constitutionality.

When Everything Is For Sale

From The Atlantic Magazine: Market thinking so permeates our lives that we barely notice it anymore. A leading philosopher sums up the hidden costs of a price-tag society.

We live in a time when almost everything can be bought and sold. Over the past three decades, markets—and market values—have come to govern our lives as never before. We did not arrive at this condition through any deliberate choice. It is almost as if it came upon us... [A]s growing numbers of countries around the world embraced market mechanisms in the operation of their economies, something else was happening. Market values were coming to play a greater and greater role in social life. Economics was becoming an imperial domain. Today, the logic of buying and selling no longer applies to material goods alone. It increasingly governs the whole of life.   

[...] Why worry that we are moving toward a society in which everything is up for sale? 

For two reasons. One is about inequality, the other about corruption. First, consider inequality. In a society where everything is for sale, life is harder for those of modest means. The more money can buy, the more affluence—or the lack of it—matters. If the only advantage of affluence were the ability to afford yachts, sports cars, and fancy vacations, inequalities of income and wealth would matter less than they do today. But as money comes to buy more and more, the distribution of income and wealth looms larger.   

The second reason we should hesitate to put everything up for sale is more difficult to describe. It is not about inequality and fairness but about the corrosive tendency of markets. Putting a price on the good things in life can corrupt them. That’s because markets don’t only allocate goods; they express and promote certain attitudes toward the goods being exchanged. Paying kids to read books might get them to read more, but might also teach them to regard reading as a chore rather than a source of intrinsic satisfaction. Hiring foreign mercenaries to fight our wars might spare the lives of our citizens, but might also corrupt the meaning of citizenship.   

Economists often assume that markets are inert, that they do not affect the goods being exchanged. But this is untrue. Markets leave their mark. Sometimes, market values crowd out nonmarket values worth caring about. 

--- "What Isn't For Sale?" by Michael J. Sandel, The Atlantic (April 2012)

This is an article everyone should read and think about. Everyone. Yes, it is long, but do it anyway. For we have come to a place where it appears economic processes are no longer understood as mechanisms to be managed and regulated to best serve and protect society. Rather, the nature and value of people and society are understood and justified by how they are shaped by and conform to ever more compromised and unregulated forms of market capitalism. And as a result, the very notions of humanistic values, of public goods and services, are under attack and flagging.

But as the introduction noted, this broader understanding or perspective is one that eludes most people. They feel it, but they cannot put their finger on it or explain it. Sandel helps clear up the picture and our understanding considerably. It is interesting to me because my recent thinking has been taking me in those same directions--pondering the fact that the marketplace and the market capitalism has more and more moved toward a self-justifying ideology/religion that defines who we are as a society, where we are placed in it, and by that determination, our personal value.

I was tempted to say there is more a sense of Ayn Rand's Objectivism ascendant. But Ayn Rand would rightfully object, I think. Our marketplace and capitalism is anything but pure; it is distorted by an uneven economic and social playing field that is controlled by dominant financial and industrial forces, and the wealthy individuals created by them. And political power falls in line behind the influence of that wealth. Mediating and ameliorating legislation and regulation are denied or frustrated in application.

It is an anachronistic process that fails to recognize and serve more modern, better-informed notions of humanistic values in the role of society. It ignores the research and realities that demand a more civilized and stronger society--both economically and humanisticly--and the increasing importance of the federal government's role in providing and strengthening the essential building blocks: equal opportunity, education, healthcare,  justice, and support for the aged and unable.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/04/what-isn-8217-t-for-sale/8902/

Khan Academy: The future of education? [60-Minutes]

Many of you know my view is that more effective, universal education must form the core of any effort by America to address her future and challenges successfully (followed closely by universal preventative and basic healthcare). I have followed closely new education ideas and innovations at the margin, but such incrementalism has produced little improvement. In fact, America continues to fall further behind.

Now comes the young, brilliant and undaunted Mr. Kahn and his "Kahn Academy." The former hedge fund analyst hasn't paid much attention to what people say can't be done. He's just doing what he thinks can be done, done better, and at very modest cost. And he's doing it very well. His approach has turned traditional notions of education and teaching on their head, "flipping" the education model, as it has been described. It has taken elementary education by storm, and promises as much for high school and higher education, as well. So promising is it that Bill Gates and others have taken out their check books to fund major expansion of Kahn's work. If you missed the piece on "60-Minutes," if you think this is important, you might consider viewing it here--or viewing it again. (Just click on the highlighted text or the link below.)

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7401696n&tag=contentMain;contentAux

"Socialist": A Black Guy with Power (Doonesbury)

Yes, bending or reshaping definitions to meet one's purpose or view--especially one's political purpose or view--is what we are talking about. Too often, it just seems like that's what it's all about these days. Too often it's all just too cynical--and worse. And sometimes--like Sunday's strip--Doonesbury just nails it.

Greg

       

• Mar 11, 2012    

NBC/WSJ Poll: Primaries Take "Corrosive" Toll on GOP, Candidates

From a recent NBC/msnbc article:

[A] new national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll shows that the combative and heavily scrutinized Republican primary season so far has damaged the party and its candidates. Four in 10 of all adults say the GOP nominating process has given them a less favorable impression of the Republican Party, versus just slightly more than one in 10 with a more favorable opinion. 

Additionally, when asked to describe the GOP nominating battle in a word or phrase, nearly 70 percent of respondents – including six in 10 independents and even more than half of Republicans – answered with a negative comment. Some examples of these negative comments from Republicans: "Unenthusiastic," "discouraged," "lesser of two evils," "painful," "disappointed," "poor choices," "concerned," "underwhelmed," "uninspiring" and "depressed." 

And perhaps most significantly, the GOP primary process has taken a toll on the Republican presidential candidates, including front-runner Mitt Romney, who is seen more unfavorably and whose standing with independents remains underwater. "The primaries have not raised the stature of the party, nor enhanced the appeal of the candidates," says Democratic pollster Peter D. Hart, who conducted this survey with Republican pollster Bill McInturff. "The word you'd have to use at this stage is: 'Corrosive,'" McInturff adds. 

[...] In January's NBC/WSJ poll, Romney's favorable/unfavorable rating stood at 31 percent to 36 percent among all respondents (and 22/42 percent among independents). But in this latest survey, it's now 28 percent favorable and 39 percent unfavorable (and 22/38 percent among independents). 

In fact, Romney's image right now is worse than almost all other recent candidates who went on to win their party's presidential nomination: Obama's favorable/unfavorable ratio was 51/28 percent and John McCain's was 47/27, in the March 2008 NBC/WSJ poll; John Kerry was at 42/30 at this point in 2004; George W. Bush was 43/32 in 2000; and Bob Dole was 35/39 in March 1996. (The one exception: Bill Clinton, in April 1992, was at 32/43 percent.) 

[...] The damage from the Republican primary season – in addition to a rising job-approval rating for President Obama and more optimism about the U.S. economy – has given Democrats an early advantage for November's general election. Indeed, the president's job-approval rating now stands at 50 percent; Obama leads Romney in a hypothetical general-election match up by six points; and Democrats hold a five-point edge on the generic congressional ballot. When it comes to President Obama, the poll contains mostly good news.  

---"NBC/WSJ poll: Primary season takes 'corrosive' toll on GOP and its candidates," By Mark Murray, NBC News Senior Political Editor, msnbc.msn.com (3.4.12) 

There can be little doubt about it. We're seeing the Republican Party for what it has now become. Its limited political spectrum represents the most conservative, often extreme and irresponsible expressions of laissez faire economics, anti-government and anti-tax ideology, intolerant religious traditions, and resentment of immigration and today's realities. And the candidates' range of general appeal runs from marginal to disappointing within the GOP, to unattractive and unacceptable among independents and Democrats.

It isn't a pretty picture. And there can also be little doubt that, to most of the electorate, President Obama is looking like a more knowledgeable, wiser, and more balanced leader of 21st-century America than any among the GOP candidates can even pretend to be.

Jeremy Grantham, Mary Oliver: The Unaccountability, the Threat, of Poorly Regulated Market Capitalism and Human Nature

From Mary Oliver, a poet ever sensitive to such things:

                            Of the Empire 

        We will be known as a culture that feared death

        and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity

        for the few and cared little for the penury of the

        many. We will be known as a culture that taught

        and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke

        little if at all about the quality of life for

        people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All

        the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a

        commodity. And they will say that this structure

        was held together politically, which it was, and

        they will say also that our politics was no more

        than an apparatus to accomodate the feelings of

        the heart, and that the heart, in those days,

        was small, and hard, and full of meanness. 

        --From  Red Bird (2008)

I have long worried about the finite limitations for growth and profits in market capitalism, limitations made clear by basic mathematical projections reflecting global population growth, consumption growth, and the limitations of finite global resources consumed at increasing rates. But no one talks much about it, least of all self-interested corporations and political apologists for them. But it's a simple matter of growth in markets, profits and consumption versus sustainability of resources. And science is now treated as just another voice in the marketplace to be denied or undermined or re-spun when it's message is too inconvenient for threatened financial or political interests. So then, when finite resources are depleted, who will stand accountable?

In a recent post to his blog, AMERICAN FUTURE, friend and former Wall Street analyst, Marc Schulman quoted liberally from Jeremy Grantham on these issues and much more related to them. Marc's piece is titled, "Time and Capitalism," and after a short anecdote, introduces Mr.Grantham and his clear, prescient and compelling essay addressing these issue.

All of this is by way of introduction to a recent essay written by Jeremy Grantham, co-founder and chief investment strategist of the Boston-based money management firm GMO (Grantham, Mayo, Van Otterloo, LLC). The essay, titled "Your Grand Children Have No Value (And Other Deficiencies of Capitalism)" is part of his latest quarterly letter. 

It's not often that a card-carrying capitalist writes about capitalism's shortcomings. His words are thought-provoking, to say the least. That's why I'm posting an extensive excerpt. Here it is: 

Capitalism has gone through a Darwinistic series of trials and errors, which still continues. For the time being, capitalism has tuned itself to rapid growth at almost any cost. Circumstances such as the hydrocarbon revolution and the ensuing population explosion have allowed for both high growth and high profit margins to sustain the growth. Sustained high margins have in turn trained capitalists – or corporate executives if you prefer – to set high hurdles for all investments. The 14% hurdle for discount rates that was considered a minimum in the late 1990s, for example, halves the future value of a dollar every 5 years, so that in 10 years today's dollar is worth 25¢; in 20 years 6¢; and in 50 years one tenth of one cent! It is hardly surprising that any event out that far is ignored. 

For example, let us say that a firm's current actions are going to cost society at large a billion dollars' worth of harm in 50 years. Further, let us agree that all of the costs will definitely be imposed on the company. The company would feel that pain today as equivalent to only a mere $1 million hit to earnings. Why should they care? 

In contrast, the income of typical individuals is likely to compound at most at 1.5% a year, their risk-free investments at an imputed zero % (today's 30-year bond minus inflation), and an equity investment at perhaps 4%, net of inflation and tax. To take the highest of these three rates, the billion dollar pain at a 4% discount rate is going to feel to the average citizen, who faces the bill in 50 years, not like $1 million, but like $100 million. And for some societal purposes, 4% real is far too high. Surely, for example, shouldn't the value, and hence cost, of a child's life in 50 years be identical to the value and cost today? The reader can easily see how a corporation's outlook on potential future damage might be a painful mismatch with that of ordinary individuals and society at large. The consequences of this not only can be disastrous but probably will be. A few painstaking readers might remember my "Farmer and The Devil" story of last July. In it I showed how a good capitalist farmer had to sign a contract in which the Devil guaranteed a quadrupling of the farmer's income through very aggressive farming practices at the hidden cost of 1% a year of his soil. The farmer would enormously profit and eagerly re-up through the first several 20-year contracts only to end up with no soil, no food, and no people at about 100 years out. Yet each time the farmer re-upped, he did the sensible capitalist thing. In this case, Adam Smith's "invisible hand" failed, and fatally so. 

Damage to the "commons," known as "externalities" has been discussed for decades, although the most threatening one – loss of our collective ability to feed ourselves, through erosion and fertilizer depletion – has received little or no attention. There have been no useful tricks proposed, however, for how we will collectively impose sensible, survivable, long-term policies over problems of the "commons." To leave it to capitalism to get us out of this fix by maximizing its short-term profits is dangerously naïve and misses the point: capitalism and corporations have absolutely no mechanism for dealing with these problems, and seen through a corporate discount rate lens, our grandchildren really do have no value. 

To move from the problem of long time horizons to the short-term common good, it is quickly apparent that capitalism in general has no sense of ethics or conscience. Whatever the Supreme Court may think, it is not a person. Why would a company give up a penny for the common good if it is not required to by enforced regulation or unless it looked like that penny might be returned with profit in the future because having a good image might be good for business? Ethical CEOs can drag a company along for a while, but this is an undependable and temporary fix. Ethical humans can also impose their will on corporations singly or en masse by withholding purchases or bestowing them, and companies can anticipate this and even influence it through clever brand advertising, "clean coal" being my favorite. But that is quite different from corporate altruism. Thus, we can roast our planet and firms may offer marvelous and profitable energy-saving equipment, but it will be for profit today, not planet saving tomorrow. 

It gets worse, for what capitalism has always had is money with which to try to buy influence. Today's version of U.S. capitalism has died and gone to heaven on this issue. A company is now free to spend money to influence political outcomes and need tell no one, least of all its own shareholders, the technical owners. So, rich industries can exert so much political influence that they now have a dangerous degree of influence over Congress. And the issues they most influence are precisely the ones that matter most, the ones that are most important to society's long-term well-being, indeed its very existence. Thus, taking huge benefits from Nature and damaging it in return is completely free and all attempts at government control are fought with costly lobbying and advertising. And one of the first victims in this campaign has been the truth. If scientific evidence suggests costs and limits be imposed on industry to protect the long-term environment, then science will be opposed by clever disinformation. It's now getting to be an old and obvious story, but because their propaganda is good and despite the solidness of the data, half of the people believe the problem is a government run wild, mad to control everything. So the "industrial complex" (or parts of it) fights to increase the inherent weaknesses of capitalism. They deliberately make it ever harder to reach the very long-term decisions that will serve us all. The influence of the Tobacco companies in deliberately obscuring the science to protect profits at a huge cost to society in health costs and lives is a perfect analogy to the energy industries that work hard to confuse the public on scientific measures of damage to health and the environment. Yet it is one that is surprisingly forgotten. 

Of all the technical weaknesses in capitalism, though, probably the most immediately dangerous is its absolute inability to process the finiteness of resources and the mathematical impossibility of maintaining rapid growth in physical output. You can have steady increases in the quality of goods and services and, I hope, the quality of life, but you can't have sustainable growth in physical output. You can have "growth" – for now – or you can have "sustainable" forever, but not both. This is a message brought to you by the laws of compound interest and the laws of nature. However, you can try to have both. But many, when given the choice, select "Growth, and to hell with the consequences." Alternatively they adopt a hear-no-evil approach to life and listen exclusively to good news. The good news for such people is that there are always a few experts lacking in long-horizon vision, simple common sense, or whose co-operation has been rented, like "expert" witnesses at a murder trial, who can be dragged out to reliably say that everything will always work out fine. (One famous professor went seamlessly from saying tobacco smoking was just fine to saying continuously pumping out greenhouse gases would also be without consequences). The optimists offer as evidence that we will always be in the best of all possible worlds, not our species' tough million or so years of trial and painful error, but only the last 200 years, when hydrocarbon and other resources have given us a temporary reprieve. This reprieve does not make the finite magically infinite, but the 250 years of the hydrocarbon intermission can feel like forever. Capitalism certainly acts as if it believes that rapid growth in physical wealth can go on forever. It appears to be hooked on high growth and avoids any suggestion that it might be slowed down by limits. Thus, it exhibits horror at the thought (and occasional reality) of declining population when in fact such a decline is an absolute necessity in order for us to end up gracefully, rather than painfully, at a fully sustainable world economy. Similarly with natural resources, capitalism wants to eat into these precious, limited resources at an accelerating rate with the subtext that everyone on the planet has the right to live like the wasteful polluting developed countries do today. You don't have to be a PhD mathematician to work out that if the average Chinese and Indian were to catch up with (the theoretically moving target of) the average American, then our planet's goose is cooked, along with most other things. Indeed, scientists calculate that if they caught up, we would need at least three planets to be fully sustainable. But few listen to scientists these days. So, do you know how many economic theories treat resources as if they are finite? Well, the researchers at the O.E.C.D say "none" – that no such theory exists. Economic theory either ignores this little problem or assumes you reach out and take the needed resources given the normal workings of supply and demand and you can do it indefinitely. This is a lack of common sense on a par with "rational expectations," that elegant theory that encouraged the ludicrous faith in deregulation and the wisdom of free markets, which brought us our recent financial fiascos. But this failure in economic theory – ignoring natural limits – risks far more dangerous outcomes than temporary financial crashes. 

Let me pose a simple question. If there were an extra thousand years of oil supply – of onshore traditional oil – available at, say, a production cost of $200 a barrel in addition to the actual 40 years of mixed-cost reserves that we have today, what difference would it make in today's price? Remarkably, the answer is "none." Today's price is concerned only with the intermediate-term workings of current costs of current barrels and current demand. Yet every rational reader knows that this should not be the case: that the existence of huge reserves (or the lack thereof) should indeed influence today's price in a world concerned about its very long-term well-being. In addition to ignoring the depleting supplies of high quality materials, no concern at all is shown for our current devastatingly erosive and resource-intensive global farming practices. 

As described above, the current U.S. capitalist system appears to contain some potentially fatal flaws. Therefore, we should ask what it would take for our system to evolve in time to save our bacon. Clearly, a better balance with regulations would be a help. This requires reasonably enlightened regulations, which are unlikely to be produced until big money's influence in Congress, and particularly in elections, decreases. This would necessitate legal changes all the way up to the Supreme Court. It's a long haul, but a handful of other democratic countries in northern Europe have been successful, and with the stakes so high we have little alternative but to change our ways. 

It would certainly help if the general public were better educated, especially in science. The same applies, unfortunately, to Congress itself. This body is desperately short of scientists and basic familiarity with things scientific. Our key problems need to be addressed by people very familiar and comfortable with science. It is said that eight of the nine senior leaders in China's government are scientists. At that high a level, of our 535 Congressmen and the President and Vice President, less than a handful – arguably only two or three – would pass the test. (I suppose you could throw in the Supreme Court Justices if you wanted to.) It is said, on the other hand, that about 100 Congressmen do not believe in evolution. Without a respect for science in Congress and with science in the general public declining as an interest, some of the painful new issues are going to be hard to address. (The percentage of students graduating with degrees in science as a proportion of total U.S. graduates is the 60th highest by country these days!) This lack of scientific familiarity is made worse by the fact that everyone loves to hear good news, Americans more than most. 

The tough news we must sooner or later grasp is made tougher by the skilled, energetic denials, well-funded by powerful industries that fear their profits would be threatened. Libertarians seem to feel that even if the bad news were true, the necessary regulations would be so distasteful that they would really prefer that the science were different, and they deem it so, putting desired political theory over science. 

Meanwhile, China gets on with it and science is accepted in what used to be our normal way until the last decade or two. And I suppose they have some unfair advantages, among them leaders with scientific backgrounds and higher science scores for the general public, but they also have the luxury of a leadership that does not face election campaigns. Lucky them. The critical consequences are that they waste no time in challenging climate problems (the same is true of India) and, even more importantly perhaps, they begin to really worry, almost panic, about their long-term access to crucial resources. In contrast to our political log jam and failure to face long-term issues, they have moved rapidly to exploit new sustainable energy sources, to tie down resource deals, and to promote improved resource efficiency. 

The U.S. and Canada are blessed with natural advantages that are unrivaled (at least if you include security, which, in a desperate, resource-constrained, warming world might hurt New Zealand, that otherwise would look hard to beat). Yet the relatively uncontrolled variety of capitalism that exists in the U.S. today may negate many of our advantages. Solutions to these issues – far more important than any others – need a delicate mix of capitalism and wise, democratically-controlled government regulation. That might sound like an oxymoron to far too many people. If we can't make it sound, plausible, and acceptable in the next few decades, then we are in deep trouble for the world really, really needs U.S. leadership on these critical issues. 

Karl Marx went on and on about the tendency of capitalism to so fixate on growth that in time it would forget the need to put on a friendly face for society and would drive home too clearly and brutally its advantage over labor. Ironically, in some way he and Engels looked forward to globalization and the supranational company because they argued it would make capitalism even more powerful, over reaching, and eventually reckless. It would, they claimed, offer the capitalists more rope to hang themselves with or, rather, to be hung with, in the workers' revolution. The rope for the job, they suggested with black humor, would be bought from briskly competing capitalists, eager till the end for a good deal. Well, time marches on and it's going to be hard to have a workers' revolution with no workers. Organizing robotic machine tools will not be easy. However, Marx and Engels certainly got the part right about globalization and the supranational company increasing the power of capital at the expense of labor. To interfere with Marx's apocalyptic vision, we need some enlightened governmental moderation of the new globalized Juggernaut (even slightly enlightened would be encouraging) before capitalism gets so cocky that we have some serious social reaction. 

But for me capitalism's complete fixation on growth at all cost that Marx concentrated on is not as important as the other issues discussed here. Capitalism, by ignoring the finite nature of resources and by neglecting the long-term well-being of the planet and its potentially crucial biodiversity, threatens our existence. Fifty and one-hundred-year horizons are important despite the "tyranny of the discount rate," and grandchildren do have value. My conclusion is that capitalism does admittedly do a thousand things better than other systems: it only currently fails in two or three. Unfortunately for us all, even a single one of these failings may bring capitalism down and us with it.

There are some of course who exude optimism about science's ability to grow into technologies and solutions that will successfully address today's and tomorrow's seemingly insoluble resource and environmental problems. And there has been just enough of that kind of scientific advancement in our recent history--taking understandings, technology and solutions to a whole new level--that it provides a convenient basis for false confidence, or at least hopefulness. But many of these advancements in new technologies have been on the table of wishful thinking for a long time, but show no basis for hopefulness in the time horizon contemplated by dramaticly increasing global population, consumption, and resource depletion.

In closing, I share another sentiment of Mary Oliver, one as much a matter of wishful thinking as anything the technology optimists may embrace. Mary Oliver:

What is the Greatest Gift?

What is the greatest gift?

Could it be the world itself--the oceans, the meadowlark,

 the patience of the trees in the wind?

Could it be love, with its sweet clamour of passion?

Something else--something else entirely

 holds me in thrall.

That you have a life that I wonder about

 more than I wonder about my own.

That you have a soul--your own, no one else's--

 that I wonder about more than I wonder about my own.

So that I find my soul clapping its hands for yours

 more than my own. 

--From Thirst (2008)

 Would that it were more universally true.

Merton & Hafiz: Into Darkness to Light, to Love

Sometimes it's hard to separate one's love of God from love of life, love of creation, love of people, and love of truth, whether spiritual, scientific or historical. Sometimes it all seems to merge into one gestalt, one encompassing perception that defies description. Sometimes we may even start to lose some of our sense of identity in that broader, deeper sense of creation, existence and reality. Further, we may have to acknowledge a different sense of purpose, a growing sense of shared relationship and identity--and it seems to transcend that which changes and passes, and finds more identity with that which endures, perhaps even a timeless shared identity in the infinite and eternal.

But, at some point in that process there necessarily comes many challenges to orthodox thinking and understandings in faith practice and life. The doors get blown off some protected safe havens and refuges from personal change and growth, places too often created by cultural and faith organizations, and even the faithful themselves, because they cannot fully risk following God and truth into the unknown, the unsettling places that cause us to question who we are, what we believe, and what that means for our lives and our speculations about the real and eternal. This is an unnerving, identity-questioning and changing place that most would rather avoid, or escape if they find themselves led there.

I've often talked of the 20th-century Cistercian (Trappist) monk, Thomas Merton, and shared from his writings. I will share more here, along with some poetry by the 14th-century Sufi master, Hafiz. These quotes are excerpted from Merton's book on contemplative prayer. Thomas Merton:

It is natural for one in [certain circumstances] to dread the loss of his faith, indeed of his own integrity and religious identity, and to cling desperately to whatever will seem to preserve the last shreds of belief. So he struggles, sometimes frantically, to recover a sense of comfort and conviction in formulated truths or familiar religious practices. His meditation becomes the scene of his agonia, this wrestling with nothingness and doubt. But the more he struggles the less comfort and assurance he has, and the more powerless he sees himself to be. Finally he loses even the power to struggle. He feels himself ready to sink and drown in doubt and despair. 

This is not the moment for arrogance or proud thrusts of will. The arrogant man will break in the agony of darkness. His meditation will be intolerable, and he will either revolt or despair. We must also recognize that one of the causes of mental or emotional breakdown of novices or young monks is...a lack of identity and spiritual maturity. 

The man of today is more and more vulnerable in this respect. His efforts to seek peace and light are carried on not in a realm of relative security, in a geography of certitude, but over the face of a thinly-veiled abyss of disorienting nothingness, into which he quickly falls when he finds himself without the total support of reassuring and familiar ideas of himself and of his world. Nevertheless, it is precisely this support that we must learn to sacrifice. 

This is the genuine climate of serious meditation, in which, without light and apparently without strength, even seemingly without hope...we drop our arrogance, we submit to the incomprehensible reality of our situation and we are content with it because, senseless though it may seem, it makes more sense than anything else... Here then, we make not the confident and conspicuously generous resolutions of our moment of light, but we abandon ourselves in submission, colorlessness, hiddenness, humility and distress to the will of God. We see there is no hope but in Him, and we leave everything, finally, in His hands. "Take heed, said Jakob Biehme, "of putting on the Christ's purple mantle without a resigned will." 

Dread is an expression of our insecurity in this earthly life, a realization that we are never and can never be completely "sure" in the sense of possessing a definitive and established spiritual status. It means that we cannot any longer hope in ourselves, in our wisdom, our virtues, our fidelity. We see too clearly that all that is "ours" is nothing, and can completely fail us. In other words, we no longer rely on what we "have," what has been given by our past, what has been required. We are open to God and to His mercy in the inscrutable future and our trust is entirely in His grace, which will support our liberty in the emptiness where we confront unforeseen decisions. Only when we have descended in dread to the center of of our own nothingness...can we be led by Him, in His own time, to find Him in losing ourselves. 

[...] The whole mystery of simple contemplative prayer is a mystery of divine love... 

[...] But true [contemplation] is that which transcends all things, and yet is immanent in all...The character of [this Christian contemplation] is pure love, pure freedom. Love that is free of everything, not determined my anything, or held down by any special relationship. It is love for love's sake. It is a sharing, through the Holy Spirit, in the infinite charity [and love] of God. And so when Jesus told his disciples to love, he told them to love as universally as the Father who sends his rain alike on the just and unjust. 

---From Contemplative Prayer, Chs. 15 & 16, by Thomas Merton (1996, 1966)

 That so-called "dark-night" experience is a daunting abyss to stand at the edge of and look into, never mind casting yourself faithfully, trustingly, headlong into it. But, in their faith and contemplative walk, that is just what many are called to do, if they would find shared identity in the light and love of God. We are advised that some do it with greater faith and trust than others, and some cannot do it at all. Some keep taking two steps forward and one step back; and some go just so far and stop, living as their situation provides for them in the new light and understandings of their spiritual way station.

The Sufi poet Hafiz offers this poem that affirms shared experiences and understandings of the contemplatives of different faith traditions. Hafiz:

Love is the Funeral Pyre*

Love is

The funeral pyre

Where I have laid my living body. 

All the false notions of myself

That once caused fear, pain,

Have turned to ash

As I neared God.  

What has risen 
From the tangled web of thought and sinew

Now shines with jubilation
Through the eyes of angels

And screams from the guts of

Infinite existence itself. 

Love is the funeral pyre

Where the heart must lay

It's body.

So then, to what place or what end this most challenging and difficult of divine dances, this spiritual totentanz. Hafiz offers us perspective, if not understanding, in more of his poetry, perspectives and understandings embraced by Merton and spiritual contemplatives of other stripes as well. Again, Hafiz:

In Need of The Breath* 

My heart
Is an unset jewel
Upon the tender night
Yearning for its dear old friend
The Moon.

When the Nameless One debuts again

Ten thousand facets of my being unfurl wings

And reveal such a radiance inside

I enter a realm divine--

I too begin to so sweetly cast light,

Like a lamp,

Through the streets of this

World.  

My heart is an unset jewel
Upon existence
Waiting for the Friend's touch. 

Tonight

My heart is an unset ruby

Offered bowed and weeping to the Sky.   

I am dying in these cold hours
For the resplendent glance of God. 

I am dying 
Because of a divine remembrance
Of who I really am. 

Hafiz, tonight,

Your soul

is a brilliant reed instrument 

In need of the breath of the

Christ.

*From The Gift: Poems by Hafiz, the Great Sufi Master (1999), as rendered in English by Daniel Ladinsky.

Warren Buffett, On a Stronger, More Accountable America

Warren Buffet has always commanded my admiration and respect, a man whose views and values extend well beyond his personal interest to what is good, fair and effective economic and social policy for America. I suppose it helps that my own views and values often track closely to his. 

In a recent Time article, Warren Buffett Is On a Radical Track, by Rana Foroohar, he is profiled and quoted liberally about his prescriptions and preferences for a better, fairer, stronger America. Rather than summarize or paraphrase, I feel it best to let the the author and Mr. Buffett speak for themselves. But, it is a lengthy article, so I've selected a number of quotes from both that resonated most with me.

• Warren Buffett believes in making money. He believes in fairness. He believes in the ability of government to make people's lives better. But most of all, he believes in luck. 

"I've had all this good fortune," Buffett says. "It starts with being born in this country, though. It starts with being born male in 1930.

Genes, luck and birthplace may have helped make Buffett the world's third richest man. But in the past year, his good fortune has also turned him into one of America's most unexpected radicals. He's an ardent capitalist who is demanding higher taxes on the rich and more government spending on the rest to solve our economic problems. Although he is giving away 99% of his $45 billion fortune, he operates less out of a sense of noblesse oblige than noblesse outrage. The country that made him rich is lousy with bailout billionaires, a culture of selfishness and a loss of opportunities. "We can rise to any challenge but not if people feel we're in a plutocracy," he says. "We have to get serious about shared sacrifice."

• Shared sacrifice, to Buffett, means not just higher taxes for the rich--who often pay extremely low rates on money made by moving money around--but also curbs on short-termism. He'd like to see speculative-trading gains taxed at much higher rates. He believes CEOs of publicly bailed-out institutions should be on the hook for everything they own if their institutions go bust. He's only half joking when he says he'd like to see private schools banned so that rich families would be forced to invest in the public K--12 system. (No Buffett in Omaha has ever gone to a private school, he notes proudly.) And he's for a complete overhaul of health care, which he calls "a tapeworm in America," one that cuts corporate competitiveness far more than taxes do.

It's the opposite of the Darwinian capitalism embraced by many prominent conservatives who believe the market is the only means to distribute the economy's assets. "The market system rewards me outlandishly for what I do," Buffett says, "but that doesn't mean I'm any more deserving of a good life than a teacher or a doctor or someone who fights in Afghanistan."

He doesn't want to stop bond traders from making their billions: "Capitalism has unleashed more human potential than any other system in history." But, he says, "we need a tax system that essentially takes very good care of the people who just really aren't as well adapted to the market system but are nevertheless doing useful things in society." Bond traders and corporate raiders of the world, take note: your higher taxes should subsidize bridge builders and child-care workers.

• At 81, Buffett says he's in a unique position to speak out. "If you are a CEO or you have to deal with a conservative board or you have a boss that might get upset by what you say, you can't do what I do. But I don't have a boss. It's hard to hurt me. If you don't speak up now, when are you going to? As my partner Charlie told me, it's like saving up sex for your old age!"

• The reason people listen to Buffett, at a time when being the 0.001% may not seem like the best public relations asset, is that in matters of finance he's very often right. But it's also that he's not like other billionaires.

Buffett lives not on an isolated island of wealth but in Omaha, in a shingle-roofed five-bedroom house on an unpretentious street that looks as if it might belong to a successful dentist. He bought it for $31,500 in 1958. The corporation he runs, Berkshire Hathaway, owns 76 businesses--from a candy company to an electric utility--that throw off $1 billion a month in free cash, and he holds major stakes in many of the country's biggest blue-chip firms, including Coca-Cola, American Express, IBM and Procter & Gamble. Yet aside from his indulgence in private air travel (he named his first jet the Indefensible), he estimates his personal yearly expenses to be no more than $150,000. The company canteen in his small office suite, where he has a habit of walking around turning off lights in empty rooms, features a beat-up wooden table, a faux-leather sectional couch and Formica countertops.

His investment habits are as austere as the decor. In an age of leverage, he likes to steer clear of debt, preferring to keep from $10 billion to $20 billion of liquid assets on hand at all times--"so that I can sleep better," he says. In a world of high-frequency traders with two-hour sell windows, Buffett's investment horizon is somewhere between 10 years and forever.

He grew up in Omaha and Washington as the son of a U.S. Congressman and was once president of the University of Pennsylvania's Young Republicans Club. Now he's President Obama's highest-profile supporter, a crusader for higher taxes on the millionaires' club. As he wrote in an op-ed article for the New York Times last summer, in which he noted that his personal tax rate was lower than that of his office staff, Washington needs to "stop coddling the superrich." Millionaires, says Buffett, should pay more taxes--a lot more. And companies certainly shouldn't pay any less.

• His worry is that in this era of late-stage capitalism, the next generations won't be as lucky as he has been. The problem of inequality is likely, he says, to get worse. When people can't climb up the ladder, it's bad for the economy--and for his companies. He doesn't believe that the U.S. can innovate its way quickly back to a 1950s level of shared prosperity, nor does he think education will entirely close the gap. "The truth is that there will always be a bottom 10% in terms of capacity," he says. "Someone in America who has a 90-point IQ is qualified for many fewer jobs today than he was 100 years ago."

The solution, to him, is obvious. "People who make withdrawals from societies' resources--like me with my plane--should have to pay a lot for it." That means not only higher taxes for the rich and an extremely progressive European-style consumption tax but also fewer loopholes for corporations. Buffett says it's "baloney" that corporate America's tax rates are too high and says companies should not be allowed to repatriate profits tax-free. (It'll just encourage more investment to flow overseas.) In general, he says, "I find the argument that we need lower taxes to create more jobs mystifying, because we've had the lowest taxes in this decade and about the worst job creation ever."

• But [his first wife, Susie] was also responsible for deeper transformations, like Warren's conversion from Republican to Democrat. A civil rights supporter, Susie was involved in helping integrate Omaha in the 1960s, going so far as to front for blacks who wanted to buy houses in white neighborhoods. She took Warren to hear people like Martin Luther King Jr. speak. One speech in particular, given at Iowa's Grinnell College, became a turning point for Buffett. The topic was "Remaining Awake During a Revolution," and one line in particular chimed deeply with the young investor: "It may be true that the law can't change the heart," said King, "but it can restrain the heartless." It was something that Buffett began to think deeply about. Led by Susie, he became more involved in liberal politics, helping overturn anti-Semitic membership rules at the Omaha Club and doing Democratic fundraising at a national level.

• As anyone who reads the financial press knows, Buffett is a "value investor," which means that he seeks to buy companies and stocks that are selling for less than they are fundamentally worth. It's a skill he learned from his Columbia Business School professor Benjamin Graham, whose book The Intelligent Investor Buffett memorized early in his career. Value investing is a task that involves forensic examination of a company's balance sheet. It was one to which Buffett, a numbers geek who'd read every book in the Omaha public library by the age of 11 and who enjoys poring over Moody's Manuals in his spare time while eating potato chips, was well suited. Even now, he can call to mind prodigious amounts of data, from the value of the Dow in 1932 to the number of housing starts needed to equal 2006 rates.

Buffett believes that once the housing market recovers, the U.S. economy will be back on track. "Once we get back to a million housing starts per year"--the current tally is 685,000--"I think pundits will be surprised just how fast unemployment will come down in this country," he says. "There are 4 million people hitting age 22 every year in this country. Sure, you can double up on households for a while, but at some point, hormones kick in, and living with your in-laws loses its allure." Buffett notes that nearly every one of his major nonhousing businesses has had several strong quarters, and Berkshire companies are making a record number of investments, the vast majority of which are in the U.S. "I am 100% sure that people in this country will be doing more business 10 years from now than they are today.

• But Buffett insists his optimism isn't emotional but quantitative: he focuses not on media headlines about America's inevitable decline or cheerleading about innovation and education but on the underlying data. Basic demographics favor the U.S. over nearly every other rich country in the world. And with corporate America so lean and inventories so low, the growth engine, in his view, has to kick in soon.

The numbers over the past few months have been good: jobless claims are ticking down, and consumer confidence is up. That's great news for Berkshire, since Buffett's portfolio is made up almost exclusively of large U.S. companies and American blue-chip multinationals. Even in the midst of the financial crisis and recession that followed, he remained a U.S. bull. Berkshire spent $15.6 billion in the 25 days after Lehman Brothers' September 2008 collapse, buying up many assets on the cheap. Although Berkshire lost 9.6% of its net worth in 2008, Buffett did better than most everyone else and came across as a stabilizing influence during the financial crisis, speaking out on behalf of the government's management efforts. (He wrote a "Dear Uncle Sam" thank-you letter for the bailouts to the Obama Administration in the New York Times.) "You can see what happens when you have a Plan B, as you have had in Europe, where people have dithered and been unable to come together," he notes. "I think Paulson, Bernanke, Geithner, Sheila Bair, President Bush and Obama--they all behaved magnificently.

• I ask Buffett if, when he started, his aim was to be the richest man in the world. "I knew I wanted to make a lot of money. But that's because I knew I wanted to be independent. That was very important to me. The money itself is all going to charity," says Buffett, who in 2006 pledged 99% of his personal wealth to charity, with the bulk going to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. "I'm really just a steward of it for now." Supply siders like Arthur Laffer have tried to paint him as a hypocrite for his giving. A recent Laffer opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal bashed Buffett for, among other things, shielded income like unrealized capital gains (taxed at 0%) and charitable contributions (which are tax-deductible). "Well, I had a net unrealized loss last year," notes Buffett. "But if Arthur has a plan for how he wants to tax unrealized gains, I'd love to hear it. It's an interesting thing for a Republican to put forward!When Buffett isn't giving, he's teaching. Many of the rich and famous seek his counsel about business and philanthropy. Recent visitors include Fiat scion John Elkann and the Baroness de Rothschild, whom Buffett took to Piccolo's, the modest family-owned Italian steak house where we sit eating dinner. "She loved it here," Buffett says. "She had a root-beer float for dessert."

• When Buffett isn't giving, he's teaching. Many of the rich and famous seek his counsel about business and philanthropy. Recent visitors include Fiat scion John Elkann and the Baroness de Rothschild, whom Buffett took to Piccolo's, the modest family-owned Italian steak house where we sit eating dinner. "She loved it here," Buffett says. "She had a root-beer float for dessert."

• But on taxes and the debilitating growth of partisan politics, he doesn't mince words. He was horrified by the debt-ceiling debacle this summer and shocked that Republicans were willing to play a game of political chicken with the goodwill and faith put in the world's reserve currency. He was disappointed that so many financiers who'd supported Obama and received the benefits of the financial bailouts were unwilling to support higher taxes to help close the deficit.

• He's also got a few choice words about the Republican presidential candidates and their ideas about bootstrapping and "merit" economies. "This whole business about Newt Gingrich going down to Occupy and saying, 'They ought to be getting a job,' that's just--you know, maybe they can be historians for Freddie Mac too and make $600,000 a year." When I ask whether Mitt Romney is a job creator or destroyer, Buffett says that while businesses shouldn't hang on to people they don't need, "I don't like what private-equity firms do in terms of taking out every dime they can and leveraging [companies] up so that they really aren't equipped, in some cases, for the future." 

• As for President Obama--should he win re-election--Buffett would like to see him lay out the truth about the road ahead to the American people. "I think that the American people would be pretty responsive to shared sacrifice if it was really shared and they knew what to expect," says Buffett. "I've always thought that part of my job at Berkshire is telling people what they should expect and what they shouldn't expect from us. I don't want to be held to things I can't do. On the other hand, I shouldn't totally downplay what can be done just to create a phony target."

Buffett feels the President missed an opportunity to do that right after he took office. But he's optimistic that it can still be done. "We need to tell people that the road is going to be long. We've got too many damn houses. They're not going to go away. This recovery is going to take a long time. And the financial crisis has exposed a lot of flaws in our system." But the flaws can be fixed. With the right rules, says Buffett, our system can work again. "It's like Martin Luther King said. We aren't trying to change the heart. We're trying to restrain the heartless.

"Isn't that," he asks, "what government is all about?