SPREAD THE WORD

A nice piece in the end-of-year Economist about the Bible and the Koran: "The Battle of the Books.". It ends with an interesting point about how Christians can sometimes complain that while Muslims are free to worship, proselytize, and build mosques most everywhere, Christians are often barred from doing the same in certain parts of the world. Ever the free market champion, the article notes that protection from competition has produced weaker "home teams." And this is a true statement.

But another missing element to this point is the role persecution plays in God's economy. He used persecution to push the 1st century church out of its comfort zone and out into the increasingly bigger concentric circles mandated in His original charge (Acts 1:8). He notes that those who are persecuted are blessed (Matthew 5:10-12). He even has a set number of martyrs in mind (Revelation 6:11).

Or take what happened in China after the Communists kicked out all the out-of-town Christians in the mid-20th century. Those Chinese Christians within the borders did what the mostly Western missionaries couldn't: they proclaimed and lived out the Christian faith in distinctly Chinese ways, winning far more converts in the ensuing few decades than the outsiders had won in the centuries beforehand.

So whether or not the playing field is even for the Bible and the Koran to be distributed ought not be of concern to Evangelicals. However tilted the playing field is or isn't, Evangelicals should understand that it is God's field, the harvest plenty, and the laborers sadly few, and do as He says and pray for more laborers - and like those who first heard that command, be ready if we are our own answer to that prayer (Matthew 9:37-38).

Many Players, One God

The end of a calendar year is a natural time to reflect back. From a
work standpoint, it's been a really good year. Business has been
good, we're in demand, and the topics are all quite interesting. I've
written in this space about the diversity of those topics at times,
but what has struck me upon further reflection lately is the diversity
of the clients seeking answers on those topics. Through work, I've
gotten a chance to work with governments, non-profits, community
development corporations, universities, real estate developers,
waterfront stewards, lobbyists, and even a forensic lab.

So I've met a lot of people, and heard their perspective on their
contribution to this complex thing we call our region; and yet for all
people I've met and knowledge I've gained, the biggest insight for me
is how many more people I don't know and how much else I don't know.
But I do feel I have a better grasp of how things work, and even how
things ought to work; and to the extent that I as a consultant can
push the football in that direction, and help my clients make their
contribution, that makes me feel good.

Most of all, I am learning to have the perspective that while there
may be many players and many interconnections, there is truly one God
over all. More knowledge can lead to more despondency, as one begins
to realize just how entrenched evil can be and how arduous the road to
even small progress can be. Or it can lead to more humility, and from
that more calling out to God and trusting Him to work justice and good
in our cities and our communities. Would that 2008 I continue to meet
people and learn things, but most of all for it to lead to more of
that humility and thus leave more room for God to be as big as He is,
in my life and in my world.

Marketing Jesus

I appreciated our pastor's perspective from the pulpit this morning,
concerning what it is our church - any church - needs to do to reclaim
vitality and press forward amidst malaise, conflict, and erosion.
After all, the mainline church in America is bleeding congregants, as
less and less people attend traditional church regularly and the real
juice seems to be in newer and flashier types of set-ups. Do we
Presbyterians need an extreme makeover? Do we need to get with the
times? Do we concede that this generation is post-Christian, and make
do with who we do have in the doors?

Emphatically no on all three counts. The big-picture perspective is
that God is still in the business of saving souls and redeeming
structures, even us sinful Christians and our broken churches. The
real Jesus is much more earthy, in-your-face, and (gasp) relevant to
21st century America than many realize; its just we Christians have
done good job coating a layer of dust over God's Word and a lousy job
of living it out in radical and contemporary ways.

Are soothing messages, easy on-ramps, and exponentially growing
congregations even necessarily good things? Perhaps not. Jesus
Himself, and those He praised most, had some pretty stinging words for
the religious establishment. He said not to bother following Him
unless you died to self and sold your possessions. And His fan base
winnowed to zero by the end of His life.

Of course, we know how His story on earth ends: not with irrelevance
and defeat but with triumph and exaltation. Yet another Christian
paradox, and one we should be mindful of when we consider what it is
we need to do as congregations to represent His life in our corporate
lives. Yes, we need to market Jesus, in terms of proclaiming Him and
making Him accessible to those who need Him. It just may look awfully
different than we might have constructed on our own, save the example
of His own life.

ONE STEP CLOSER

Is it just a matter of time before Bloomy throws his hat into the race? Let's hope so.

"Bloomberg, Like-Minded Politicians to Meet."

MALL, RATS

A nice piece in the end-of-year Economist about the rise and fall of the shopping mall: Birth, Death, and Shopping." For someone who is 90 percent done with a two-year study of urban retail in Philadelphia, I am particularly drawn to the delicious ironies and poignant recollections contained in this article. Like how malls were first designed to be urban retailers' second, suburban location, only to lead to the starvation and death of many of them. Or how the mall's popularity rose with white flight and fell as the suburbs diversified. Or how the most interesting mall concepts today are simultaneously pursuing artificiality and reality.

Please don't misunderstand me to be an anti-mall snob. Having grown up in the suburbs, I have my own teen-year nostalgia about malls: riding the bus to a faraway mall to buy Garfield posters, people-watching at another mall with my girlfriend over frozen yogurt, and storming a third mall during the height of Christmas shopping with my ten best friends to take a series of staged photos are three memories that come quickly to my mind. And today, I'm just as much of a consumer as the next person. I just think that, for anyone who is interested in urban issues and in demography and in business, following the trajectory of malls is a fascinating way to gain insights into all three.

A Bigger Faith for a Bigger God

In his bestselling Christian book, The Prayer of Jabez, Bruce
Wilkinson exposits from a tiny passage amidst a sea of genealogies in
1 Chronicles. His interpretation of the phrase, "Oh, that You would
bless me indeed, and enlarge my territory," has been taken by
Christians to mean anything from asking God for a bigger house to a
bigger ministry.

I have no theological training to determine whether it is true to the
text or not, but I'd like to propose an alternative point of view.
Would that we Christians ask God to enlarge our understanding of His
lordship in our lives and in our world. Too often in 21st century
American Christianity, to believe in Jesus has been to draw a faith
boundary that includes only our Easter sunrise breakfasts, our worship
jams, and maybe our willingness to call on Him for help and patience
when our cars break down or our kids are fighting.

This is a boiling down - of the expansive, multi-generational,
structural, and communal story that is described in the Bible - to an
individualistic, self-centered, and short-term perspective; one that I
do not believe adequately represents the true God and the true faith.
Perhaps we need to stop praying for bigger turf, to the extent that
turf means physical possessions or vocational responsibilities or even
spiritual service, and start praying for bigger turf, to the extent
that turf means whatever we understand God to be God of.

Easier said than done. There have been many days when I wished I
could contain my faith to a more manageable circle. My life may
shrink as a result, but then I don't have to be burdened with the
kinds of questions God's existence deserves.

For example, this year I've been fortunate to explore client work that
has intersected with some very interesting issues, like affordable
housing and transportation financing and economic development. As a
Christian, I view such topics from a faith lens; only my deeper
exploration has left me more wanting rather than more satisfied, in
terms of seeing God in the midst of these issues. I know God would
want the poorest among us to not get shafted by society, but I now
understand the mechanisms for alleviating that burden to be much more
complicated and fuzzy than I first assumed. What does it mean to
believe God enough to do something about social injustice, when that
injustice is so entrenched and nuanced and multi-layered? God has
enlarged my understanding, but I am all too often left less hopeful as
a result.

Or take this week's assassination of Pakistan's former prime minister,
Benazir Bhutto. It's one thing for us Christians to pray in our
pulpits and around our dinner tables for peace in this and other parts
of the world. But what does it mean that God really is Lord of human
events, and can and does use faithful (and sometimes, not so faithful)
people to implement peace and reconciliation? What does it look like
for Pakistani Christians to incarnate that peace, and for Christians
around the world to lobby their leaders to act in ways that move
towards that peace? A smaller faith prays for peace and then moves on
to listening to the sermon or commencing dinner; a bigger faith
puzzles over what can be done to take part in that peace.

Being open to God pushing the boundaries of our faith outward can be
incredibly mind-spinning, even if one considers more personal and
intimate issues. Does God care if I drive a SUV? (Yes, but He also
cares that the batteries that power Priuses are likely just as if not
more toxic to the environment.) Are there ways I have not completely
ceded to God's lordship my career aspirations and professional
trajectory? (In my case, most certainly yes.) Have I thoughtfully
considered what God would have me to do with the money I give to
church and charity? (And, bigger question, even if we tithe: there's
the other 90 percent that God is owner of, that we may or may not be
spending according to His will.) Do I speak and act differently with
my Christian circles than with my non-Christian circles? (A dead
giveaway, at least in my life, that I've shunted God to certain
compartments of my life, disbelieving His relevance in other
compartments.)

To be sure, there is a time for unplugging from the grid, so to speak.
Satan can use our busyness and worry just as much as our laziness and
apathy to divert us from heavenly purposes. There is nothing wrong,
inherently, with leisure: with rough-housing with your kids or playing
Scrabulous or, gasp, blogging. I would just hope for myself and for
other Christians who are alive today, that we would strive for a
bigger faith, knowing we have a far bigger God than what our current
faith indicates. O God, bless this generation in this way, enlarging
our territory in terms of our understanding of Your lordship over the
totality of our lives and our world.

THE STATE OF BLACK PHILADELPHIA

Earlier this month, the Urban League of Philadelphia released "The State of Black Philadelphia," a report they put out every five or six years. (I ghost-wrote an article on the digital divide in their 1996 version.)

Now that I write these kinds of documents for a living, my standard for evaluating such reports is much higher, and I must say this version passes with flying colors. There a few nicely written articles in the front, and then a thorough walk-through of indicators in five categories: economics, health, education, civic engagement, and social justice. These indicators are the sum of a number of sub-indicators, and themselves sum to a total equality index.

I encourage you to order yourself a free copy, and not only read it but consider what you might be able to put into motion vis a vis the report's recommendations section. Everybody wins when everybody has a chance.

In Honor of Two Fellow Whartonites

Sherman Ma and William Whitney are inextricably linked in mind to each
and to my Penn experience. Sherman was assigned to mentor me, which
meant we traded letters before I arrived on campus and he showed me
around when I first arrived. He showed me the ropes and answered my
unceasing questions about which classes to take; through him, I also
found a sweet room in the Quad that I ended up living in my sophomore
and junior years.

Dr. Whitney was both of our advisors, and the very first Whartonite I
talked to when I visited Penn my senior year in high school. He
immediately took an interest in me, and his helpfulness, kind spirit,
and enthusiasm for Wharton were a major reason I decided to leave
California to come to Penn. He was a great advisor during my four
years at Wharton, and we have stayed in touch ever since then.

Needless to say, I owe a great debt to both these men. So it
delighted me to no end to receive Wharton's 2007 "Report to Investors"
and read about Sherman's recent contribution to the school towards the
creation of a scholarship in Dr. Whitney's honor. In the report,
Sherman is quoted as saying, "At the time, I didn't grasp the
significance of Dr. Whitney's stories and parables, and it was only
later that I understood the wisdom of his advice. He has taught me
and many others the importance of developing a meaningful perspective
on life."

I wholeheartedly concur. Dr. Whitney walked us green freshmen through
micro- and macro-economics, management, and game theory, among other
topics. He was ever ready to do what he could do - and he had a lot
of pull - to help us get into the classes we wanted to take. To me
and others, he exuded the kind of warmth and wisdom you want in an
advisor. And he was ever the encourager, pushing us to stretch and
grow in many ways; it was on his suggestion I wrote my senior thesis
on the intersection of faith and business in my four years at Wharton.

Sherman Ma and William Whitney may or may not be readers of this blog,
but to those of you who are, please know that I am but a composite of
many people who have taken the time to help me, including the two of
them. And I'm so glad to know that they will continue to have
influence at Wharton in perpetuity through this endowed scholarship.
Kudos to the both of them.

GREEN TRANSPARENCY

Here's a nice trend: big companies proactively disclosing their greenhouse gas emissions and pushing their suppliers to do the same: "Carbon Copy." It reminds me of that device that is being marketed nowadays, that glows different intensities to denote the amount of electricity that an appliance is using, to help call attention to energy waste and encourage users to unplug or reduce: when it's in your face, you tend to notice and from there figure out ways to minimize. Kudos for Walmart, Procter & Gamble, and others for getting ahead of the curve on this one. Would that we all, in our much smaller ways, be similarly accountable for our energy consumption.

2007 PREDICTIONS, REVISITED

"Only last year's predictions were so spectacularly wrong that I'm ashamed to repeat them here." So went my 2008 predictions post earlier this month. Ah, but what's the fun in burying my poor prognostication abilities? So here's a blow-by-blow review of my 2007 predictions gone awry:

1. The front-runner for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination
will not be named Clinton or Obama.

It's pretty clear it's a two-horse race on the D's side, so I'm absolutely wrong here.

2. There will be some significant troop withdrawal from Iraq, and it
will be triggered by good news and not bad news.

Well, instead we had a surge, and it has produced relatively positive results, so while my prediction is wrong, I'm OK with that.

3. Britney Spears will get married but Jennifer Aniston will not.

I'm afraid to Google Brit to find out if she got married, so I'm going to assume I was wrong on Brit, and I'm pretty sure I was right on Jen.

4. Google will buy out Second Life and turn it into a 3-D,
interactive search engine.

This still could happen, since Larry and Sergey have like a gazillion dollars at their disposal, but methinks Google is as of now still running with what it has already, which is Google Earth.

5. Apple will start to lose its luster while Walmart will start to
silence its critics.

Hmmm . . . I may be on to something here: Apple's $200 discount on its iPhone got its followers all hot and bothered, while Walmart has won some praise for its green efforts.

6. The US's biggest entertainment splash and its biggest technology
innovation will both come out of South Korea.

Are iPhones manufactured in South Korea? Otherwise, I am wrong and wrong.

7. Arnold Schwarzenegger will run for president and film an action movie.

I'm still holding out for Terminator 4.

GREED VERSUS CHARITY

The provocative title - "Can Greed Save Africa?" - only made me lament all the more that I had to keep putting off reading last week's Business Week on account of busyness. But last night I finally got around to the issue and the article, and it confirmed for me that mutually profitable business transactions are vastly superior to one-way philanthropy in lifting people from crushing poverty. Witness this bite from the article:

"Masoud Alikhani is no moral crusader; he thinks the 'We Are the World' movement of the 1980s, which sought donations to end African hunger, 'made beggars of whole nations.' The burly 66-year-old is among the new wave of investors at the tenuous nexus of venture capital and agribusiness in Africa. Five months ago he pitched a large hedge fund in New York on the merits of ESV Biofuels, as his company is called. The fund's partners agreed to take a tour of the facility in January. 'We are capitalists and opportunists,' says Alikhani. 'We are doing this to make money. That's the only way to help.'"

Deliciously, while charity may not lead to economic empowerment, capitalism may lead to charity:

"Inhassune's revival is already under way. Mosquito control, power lines, and potable water have quickly arisen from a barren stretch of bush. 'I'd be the last person in the history books to go down as a philanthropist,' says Renier van Rooyen, ESV's South African on-site manager. 'But you cannot run a business when your workers are out with malaria or sick from dirty water.' On a warm weeknight, villagers greet the season's first rainfall with dancing and singing. 'There was nothing here before,' shouts Ineve, a fieldworker, over beating drums. Others proudly brandish newly issued government ID cards. ESV employees have been lining up behind the schoolhouse for hours to register to vote for the first time in their lives."

So take care the next time you denounce capitalism as greed gone bad. It can be used for such purposes, to be sure, but it can also lead to wonderful things. Those who have benefited from the win-win transactions that have characterized many commercial efforts in Africa would wholeheartedly agree.

STOP THE KILLING

One of my former students lost a family member this month, and wrote a thoughtful and powerful post on the blog he started with two of his other friends who were in our program: "Family Statistic." Here is someone who has been through a lot - he's served in Iraq, for example - and is dumbfounded not only at the violence in this city but at the lukewarm response most of us have offered in response. I appreciate the emotion and the indignation that is contained in this post, and offer my condolences during this time of mourning and loss. This young man's blog begs the question: how many more of us have to lose family members before we wake up to the fact that we have a problem of catastrophic proportions?

NANO GOOD AND BAD

By now, you've probably heard of nanotechnology. At its core is the
notion that things exhibit fundamentally different behavior when
shrunk down to impossibly small dimensions, largely due to the change
in the ratio between mass and surface area. A couple of recent
articles caught my eye in terms of synthesizing the potential good and
bad associated with this booming field. The Philadelphia Inquirer ("Big Boost for Tiny Technology") notes that centers with the latest equipment
bring in researchers from around the world who want to rent it for
their studies; our firm did a report last year in which we noted that
having this sort of equipment not only generates rental revenue for
your institution but gives you a first look at what researchers from
around the world are doing, which gives you a huge leg up in an
increasingly competitive and accelerated industry.

If nanoscale research means huge federal dollars and smart people
beating a path to your doorstep, that sounds like something everyone
wants to get in on. And in fact, everyone is. But The Economist
warns that perhaps not enough attention is being paid to the potential
hazards of research at that scale: "A Little Risky Business." Not that this stuff is inherently
dangerous, but that we haven't sufficiently proven that it isn't. It
sure would stink if we inserted nano-particles into our face cream,
medicine, and internal organs, only to find out the stuff is toxic.

Most of the goings-on in this field are happening in cities, which
best agglomerate the brains and buildings needed to do this sort of
work, and which house the kinds of research institutions that dominate
the field. Time will tell what percent of knowledge jobs are
affiliated with nanoscale research, and what proportion of consumer
products benefit from its findings; but here's hoping there's more of
the good and less of the bad when it comes to this burgeoning field.

DO-GOODERS WITH SPREADSHEETS

Not sure how I missed this when it first came out, but I finally caught this nice article with a delicious title: "Do-Gooders with Spreadsheets." It's about a wonderful organization called Ashoka that finds and funds social entrepreneurs doing cool things around the world. Yet another very good example of the necessary intersection between good hearts and good minds. Kudos to Ashoka and to its fellows.

FOR CASINOS

Finally, a reasoned response to all the hullabaloo about casinos in Philadelphia: "Why Casinos Won't Ruin Philadelphia or Riverfront." I know a lot of people whose opinions I wholeheartedly respect who are on the other side of the argument as me, but I have to say most of the opposition comes off to me as smug in its moral indignation. They'd tell you casinos, especially if you live near one, will be the end of civilization as we know it.

I'd prefer to go with what Mayor Street's task force determined (of which two of my bosses were members, in the interest of full disclosure), which is that casinos will represent tidy windfalls for the City, enabling taxes to be cut in other places so that we can be more competitive to residents and businesses alike. I'd also prefer to go with what our firm found when it studied the issue from a real estate standpoint and found that casinos actually have a marginally positive, not significantly negative, affect on nearby property values. And, to be frank, I'd like to be an occasional patron, and happen to think that a couple of casinos make for a nice addition to the entertainment options we have to choose from around here.

But my beliefs apparently put me in a distinct minority on the topic. Thankfully, I've found at least one other like-minded soul as it relates to the casinos. And now that the legal hurdles have been cleared, it looks like we'll all get to see just what impact - positive and negative - these two venues will have on Philadelphia.

What Am I Working On

I'm a little tardy on my quarterly "what am I working on" post, but
that's OK because there's only one new thing I've been assigned since
my last post, a quick forecasting piece for a firm that's looking to
put in a bid to take over a major toll road on the East Coast.
Besides that, I've been busy to the gills with projects already
discussed in this space, spanning such topics as affordable housing,
commercial corridors, higher education, real estate development,
government outsourcing, workforce development, and minority
procurement. Thankfully and mercifully, these big assignments look to
tie up in the next few months, so hopefully there'll be some new
things to report on next quarter.

2008 Predictions

It's about that time of the year for me to revisit last December's predictions and throw out some new ones. Only last year's predictions were so spectacularly wrong that I'm ashamed to repeat them here. So let's just skip ahead to next year:

1. Russia will destabilize to the point that it will soar past Iran and Iraq as the US's number one foreign policy conundrum.

2. China will experience a spectacularly catastrophic environmental event embarrassingly close to the Beijing Olympics.

3. Facebook will find the path to profitability - and an even higher valuation - by cleaning up its interface and facilitating click-through purchases of products and services; example: books on your virtual bookshelf and favorite electronic gizmos can be dragged and dropped into a shopping cart.

4. College football will have a scandal that makes Mike Vick, Tim Donaghy, and steroids look forgettable by comparison, and it will involve sex, money, and race.

5. Bottled water will further plummet in popularity as a result of a fatality associated with tainted water.

6. The presidential and vice presidential teams in the November general election will include a woman (Clinton), a Hispanic (Richardson), a Mormon (Romney), and a Jew (Bloomberg).

7. Two words: Apple TV.

AN EMPTY DAY FOR BASEBALL AND ME

I've been a baseball fan for as long as I can remember. The library near my house? I probably read every one of the 101 or so baseball books on the stacks, some more than ten times. I can rattle off obscure stats from even more obscure players from well before even my dad was born.

So the past year or so have been awkward for me, what with all the talk about steroids. I have largely been skeptical about all the accusations: the long ball is what sells nowadays; big contracts mean athletes have a lot more to gain from staying in shape well past what used to be the typical peak age for a player; aluminum bats convince college players to swing for the fences; pitchers throw harder in search of more K's. In other words, there were rational reasons for the inflation of player bodies and home run records.

The Mitchell Report is making me realize that for all the validity of those and other arguments, really why I bought all that is because I didn't want to think cheating was going on at such a wide-scale level. I didn't want the past ten or so years of my life to be a mirage when it came to cherished baseball-related memories. I didn't want to believe that baseball could be anything but the game I grew up loving for all of its purity, simplicity, and Americanness.

But the facts don't care what I want to think or believe. And so, faced with the reality that I can no longer explain away all of this evidence, I have to say that I feel quite empty. It's a sad day for baseball and me.

Greater Good

Here's a recent blurb from a message David Oh sent to his campaign
supporters, which illustrates that even as he was trying to win office
in order to serve the greater good, so he is committed to running in a
way so as to serve the greater good:

"As you may know, even though I lost the race by 122 absentee votes,
there is an outstanding issue of voter fraud. I do not know that it
will have any impact on the outcome of my election, but I feel
obligated to deal with it rather than leave it out there to harm
future candidates and possibly subvert the will of our voters."

That's how political corruption is in a culture like Philadelphia's:
we'll live with a little grease, but if starts getting too slimy, we
speak up. 2007 was a great year for speaking up; it's just too bad
not quite enough voters spoke up for David.

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER

I admit that growing up in an upper-middle class family and attending an Ivy League school, I used to harbor some snobbery versus community colleges. Shame on me, for this tier of higher education is only going to grow in importance: an increasingly knowledge-based economy fundamentally means less and less meaningful jobs that don't require some sort of degree, and community colleges are usually the most accessible on-ramps to that degree, whether accessibility is measured in terms of being able to financially afford it or being able to academically hack it.

And there's absolutely no shame in getting your studies in at a community college, not when putting your mind to it can lead to very lucrative careers in a whole host of knowledge economy jobs in high-growth industries like health care, social services, and engineering. After all, in our agricultural or industrial days, what importance was there for the typical worker to pick up classes in the evening on the side; but nowadays, it's almost a prerequisite that we all have to keep on sharpening the saw.

So I was highly inspired by all the good talk about Community College of Philadelphia at its first annual Pathways breakfast, hosted by its foundation and featuring a number of CCP grads who have gone on to do some pretty impressive things, as well as Bill Cosby, who brought the house down with his jokes and induced more than a few somber nods with his wise musings on education and race and opportunity in America. Kudos to all the honorees, and kudos to CCP for fulfilling its mission to make education accessible to all. Count me among your fans now - I should've gotten to the party sooner, but I'm glad to at least be here.

A Pretty Easy Carbon Offset

I'll never be accused of being a tax-and-spender, but I have to tell
you that one area that I'm all about higher taxes is on carbon. Most
economists will tell you a carbon tax is a much preferred behavior
modifier and revenue raiser than the cap-and-trade approaches a lot of
policymakers are pushing for. Unfortunately, anything that's called a
tax is DOA nowadays.

Which is unfortunate, because a carbon tax is not at all a painful
tax. I just went to carbonfund.org to renew my carbon offset (six
months late, by the way; you may recall I wrote about this site last
June). I punched our family's utilities consumption, gas mileage, and
plane trips into their calculator, and it told me I could completely
offset my family's carbon consumption for less than $100.

There are a lot of ways taxes could get $100 from me. Let's assume we
avoid taxes on utilities, since a lot of people struggle to pay
utilities bills, and since it's such a life essential that any
behavior modification would be on the margins. Our family drives 8000
miles a year; so a one-cent vehicle mile tax would extract $80 from my
family. Tack on $5 per person for our annual flight to California,
and there's another $20. Voila - $100 in tax revenues from the Huang
family.

I haven't run the numbers for other car and plane amounts, but I have
to think it's all pretty painless to a family's bottom line. In other
words, if you implement tax increases on the orders of magnitude
described above, you completely offset everyone's carbon consumption.

Politicians, I know tax increases are unpalatable, but the ones
required to become carbon-neutral are really not that painful. What
is painful is the future we'd be leaving to our children and our
children's children if we didn't do anything about it.

Between Cyrus and Darius

A great, great Bible story that was referenced in the book our small
group is reading: the one in the book of Ezra about the Israelites
rebuilding the temple under the reign of Darius. The story starts
when Cyrus looks at old laws and realizes the Israelites have
permission to return to Jerusalem to rebuild the temple.

So he gives authorization, and the scattered remnant can hardly
believe their luck. But no sooner have they returned than they are
badgered by naysayers who effectively stall the project indefinitely.
Hopes raised and then crushed are sometimes harder to swallow than a
steady state of hopelessness.

But the story doesn't end there. Later, two prophets push the next
king, Darius, on this topic, and he looks back and decides that what
is right is not only that the Israelites be cleared to rebuild but
that he'll pay for it! What an improbably turn of events.

I share this because I feel there are many times in the life of the
people of God today that we are between Cyrus and Darius. We remember
promising times but currently sit in the ruin of dashed hopes. We
need to remember the book of Ezra, and recall the faithfulness of God
even as the people of Israel were between Cyrus and Darius.

It might have seemed a long time to wait, but when God worked it all
out, He exceeded previous hopes in unimaginable ways. Let us
therefore exercise patience and trust as we wait between Cyrus and
Darius.

TAX ENERGY, NOT SALARY

Unfortunately, sometimes it takes a place as liberal as San Francisco to do the sensible thing: "Newsom proposes 'carbon tax' for warming." Mayor Gavin Newsom wants to up the commercial utilities tax and lower the payroll tax. Which is precisely what you want to do if you are a government: get businesses to conserve their utilities and to put as much of their payroll within your boundaries as possible. In almost every other place, energy-related taxes are artificially high and payroll taxes prohibitively high, and as a result we are wasteful with our natural resources and stingy with our human ones. Would that more cities and states, and the federal government as well, figure this out.

IF GORE SKIPS THE LIMO, SO CAN YOU

All this talk about building more transit infrastructure has a lot of people saying, "Yeah, but I'm wedded to my car." Well, let me tell you, if a former Vice President and Nobel Prize winner can take the train from the airport and walk from there to his downtown hotel, then so can you. And he's giving up a motorcade to do that, too.

"Dear Zachary" to premiere at Slamdance Film Festival (Park City, UT)

I've given this space over to my high school friend and movie maker
Kurt Kuenne before on this subject, so I'm happy to do it again and
happier still that this project of his has come so far. Please
consider attending and/or donating.

---------- Forwarded message ----------

Hello everyone,

Kurt here; Happy December to you! I hope the holidays have started
off wonderfully for you.

I have some wonderful news to share: "Dear Zachary: a letter to a
son about his father" - my documentary about the lives and murders of
my dear friends Dr. Andrew David Bagby (1973-2001) & his son Zachary
(2002-2003), and the heroic struggle of Kate & David Bagby to change
the system that facilitated Zachary's murder - has been selected to
premiere at the Slamdance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, held
January 17-25, 2008.

For those of you on this email list (and there are plenty) who are
not in the film business and may not be familiar with Slamdance,
suffice to say this is a pretty big deal. Slamdance is held
concurrently with the Sundance Film Festival right on the same street
in Park City; it was founded 14 years ago by a group of upstart
filmmakers as an alternate venue for the best films that didn't quite
get into Sundance, and has over the last decade become a world-class
event of its own, part of the same media frenzy as Sundance, just as
hard to get into, and often paving the way for terrific distribution
deals for its films which have, in some cases, eclipsed the
distribution achieved by films from Sundance. They received over
1200 feature film entries this year and are screening just 29 films,
only 14 of which are documentaries -- and "Dear Zachary" is one of
the 14. The festival programmers told me that they were absolutely
honored to be premiering the film, and we're likewise thrilled and
honored to have the slot. The film shows at Slamdance Saturday,
January 19th at 6 PM and Thursday, January 24th at 3:30 PM. Ticket
details haven't been posted just yet, but will be soon on the
Slamdance website:

www.slamdance.com

"Dear Zachary" has also already been invited to screen in the
Documentary Competition at Cinequest, the San Jose Film Festival, the
following month, running February 27-March 9, 2008. Cinequest, now
in its 19th year, was named one of the top 10 film festivals in the
world by the Ultimate Film Festival Survival Guide. It's an event my
films have been fortunate to have been a part of consistently over
the last decade, and I'm thrilled that the film will be seen there.
This will also be a wonderful place for the enormous number of
friends and "extended family" Kate, David & Andrew have in the San
Jose Bay Area to see the movie for the first time. I'm honored and
thrilled that they are including the film, and I hope to see a lot of
you out there; Cinequest doesn't post their line-up on their website
until late January/early February -- and hasn't even decided on a lot
of it yet, but they contacted me early to say they really wanted this
movie. So I won't have dates and showtimes for you for a little
while, but will be in touch when they're available. (Check their
website, www.cinequest.org, for info as it becomes available.)

While this is very exciting, these are just first steps; I hope the
attention that the film gets by premiering at these venues (and the
numerous other festivals I'm sure the film will play over the next
year) helps ease the process of getting this film out there to the
general public at large more quickly. But as I've been saying for
the past several years, no matter what happens, I'm going to make
every effort to get this movie seen far and wide, particularly in
Canada, where I believe we will ultimately be successful in reforming
the bail laws that allowed an accused probable pre-meditated murderer
to take our little Zachary from us. I've been tremendously pleased
with the response to this film at test screenings this year; post
film discussions with the audience often lasted 2 tearful hours, with
strangers breaking into tears and saying that they now felt like they
knew Kate, David & Andrew and had lived through the experience. The
movie is having the effect I hoped for, and I think that in
conjunction with David Bagby's best-selling book about this tragedy,
"Dance with the Devil", it's going to have quite a bit of positive
social impact in the coming years. I'll keep you updated as things
progress.

I want to thank all of you so much once again for your tremendous
support of this movie during the past year - whether financially,
verbally, through providing services, interviews, photographs, old
videos, working on the movie in some capacity, writing about it or
just through hugs and kind words - if you're on this email list, you
have, in some way, helped to make this possible. This film was
funded entirely by donations and good will, and all proceeds from the
film's distribution will be going toward the Dr. Andrew Bagby
Scholarship in Family Medicine at Latrobe Area Hospital in
Pennsylvania and the Dr. Andrew Bagby & son Zachary Bursary at
Memorial University of Newfoundland. We're still trying to raise
another $10,000 or so to help with the costs of promoting the film
(preparing exhibition copies for festivals, festival entry fees,
DVDs, promotional printings & mailings, a publicist, errors &
omissions insurance, etc.), so if any of you are looking for an end
of the year tax deduction :) - or perhaps thought about donating last
year but never got around to it - you can still donate at
www.dearzachary.com for the next little while. (Contributions to the
film are tax deductible! :)

Thank you again to everyone for helping make this possible; this is
your movie, and I look forward to sharing it with you. I'll be able
to get DVDs out to you all in the early part of next year, after the
initial festival premieres, but I do hope you get to share the
experience with an audience very soon.

All the best,

Kurt

www.dearzachary.com

THE MOST IMPORTANT ECONOMIST OF THE 21ST CENTURY

The latest addition to my book wish-list: "Creative Destruction's Reconstruction: Joseph Schumpeter Revisited." Feel free to buy this for me for Christmas. Although I don't deserve it: 1) I've been more naughty than nice this year, and 2) it would be at least fourth in my nightstand queue, meaning it might be several weeks (months?) before I could tell you how it was.

PENN IN THE NEWS

Both of the news mags I subscribe to (Business Week and the Economist) ran splashy articles in part about Penn and its president, Amy Gutmann. However, both insinuated that the spending spree of the Ivies is a little out of control; witness the titles of the articles: "The Dangerous Wealth of the Ivy League" and "Just Add Cash." To their credit, both magazines note the Ivies stepped-up effort to extend sufficient financial aid to deserving low-income applicants, as well as the multiplier effect on research on so many all-star brains are assembled in one place.

Still, it's fair to ask whether the rich getting richer, in terms of prestigious universities and the students they serve, is a good thing for society. It's also fair to wonder aloud what'll happen if scientific research in this country ends up getting concentrated into just a handful of elite institutions that can afford the big facilities and salaries. Count me among Penn alum who will keep their eye on their alma mater to make sure all this clout is used for good and not evil.

CITIZENS GATHER IN PHILADELPHIA

The Great Expectations project held its citizens convention this afternoon at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, and it appeared that the youngest attendee by far was a two-year-old Chinese girl. That's right, I either get "Best Dad" or "Worst Dad" for schlepping Jada downtown in the slushy rain. Given that she fell asleep on the way back and then cried as we got home because she was cold and wet, if I had a vote, it would be for the latter!

But while she was there, she got to see citizenship in action: people of all ages and ethnicities taking time out of their weekends to gather in small groups and discuss such issues as taxes, crime, and poverty. I saw more than a few familiar faces in attendance, including Sam Katz, who ran for mayor in 1999 and 2003, and who I wanted to but didn't get a chance to say thanks to for his endorsement this year of David Oh for City Council.

I couldn't participate in any discussions myself, but I wanted to make sure I brought Jada. Why? Because she's why I get involved in stuff like this: because it's not just for me, it's for the next generation. And so I want her to say that we're working hard now to make a better Philadelphia for later. And maybe, just maybe if I bring her to enough of these things, she'll grow up to be this kind of citizen, too.

BE THANKFUL

There is a delicious irony about Thanksgiving kicking off the
Christmas season in most peoples' minds. Not only has Thanksgiving
become more about turkey and football, but it is immediately followed
by that great orgy of retail shopping called Black Friday. By the
time Christmas day actually hits, we're wired and tired from the
stress of gifts, decorations, and family. Gratitude is too often the
last thing we feel by then.

If there's one thing I want to focus really hard on this season, it's
thankfulness. Discontentment is an insidious emotion that has a way
of creeping into every aspect of our lives in this country and in this
day and age. Whether it is seductive images on TV and the Internet or
the myth of the "perfect"
girlfriend/boyfriend/wife/husband/mom/dad/children, we can very easily
become disillusioned with our own immediate family, because they are
unacceptably . . . human. We complain about our jobs and our economy
even though our unemployment rate and our commercial robustness is the
envy of the entire world. We are never satisfied with our
possessions, ever chasing after things newer and faster and shinier:
never mind that there are more people in the world who live on less
than what many of us spent on cell phone service than there are who
live on more.

As a free market capitalist and an organizational strategist, I'm not
saying that consumerism and high expectations are bad. It is a good
thing that there is a depth and breadth of selection in the typical
chain drug store that would astound most of the rest of the world's
population, or that we should want more from our employers and our
retailers and our governments. But when we are consumed as consumers to the point of
perpetual dissatisfaction, then we truly have made our consumption
like an addictive drug that offers the high we need, only to bring us
so low we think we can only feel right again with another hit.

It is good to be critical and demanding. But it is not good to be
ungrateful and entitled, at least not with the many riches we enjoy in
this time. I don't know that my holidays can be completely without
stress. But, by the grace of God - and say that literally and seriously and not flippantly - here's to a holidays in which I am completely satisfied
and genuinely thankful.

ECONOMIC MOBILITY

A very well-done set of papers by Pew Charitable Trusts on the topic of economic mobility, as part of its Economic Mobility Project. It confirms for me that education is the most important and most effective resource to redistribute if we are concerned with inequality of opportunity.

On that note, a nice albeit ill-titled article by the Inquirer today re: affordable housing for teachers in New York City: A Housing Project for NYC Educators." When you start at $42,000 a year and can't find even a one-bedroom for less than two G's a month, that's a hard on-ramp for even the most bright-eyed idealist. If we're looking to teachers to make our schools better, and to our schools to give the hardest off among us a fighting chance at upward mobility, we should figure out some effective policy mechanisms for making sure we can get and keep good teachers.

EDUCATION

The good news: my alma mater, Lynbrook High, is the 73rd best high school in America, according to US News and World Report. The bad news: our arch rivals, Monta Vista High, rank ahead of us, at 57th. Still, I find myself ever grateful to have attended such a good high school and enjoyed such a good high school experience. Now that I'm quite familiar with what not so good high schools look like, I don't take for granted the leg up I got because I happened to live in a good school district. Just another reason we need to figure out how to make sure everyone has access to a good education.

Bad Samaritan

I was riding the subway with a co-worker this week, and we got on the
subject of homelessness, and what programs and policies would best
address the needs of the homeless and of the communities in which they
are found. I happen to take a fairly contrarian view on the topic,
and was expounding to my colleague about the merits of my position,
and how it was truly the one that made the most sense in terms of
compassion for those in need.

I was in the middle of congratulating myself internally for being so
enlightened when my smugness was interrupted by the woman sitting
behind me, whose beverage spewed every which way, including my hair
and coat. I was about to turn around to see what had happened when
she unleashed a series of colorful invectives that would have made a
sailor blush. I don't wuite remember what exactly she said, but
imagine that it was something like "I can't believe I spilled my
drink," only with every other word being a cuss word. Quite frankly,
I didn't need to turn around, for simply looking forward, I saw people
facing us with bemused or bewildered looks on their face.
Accordingly, I inched forward ever so slightly.

Finally, the tension in the subway car was broken by a couple of older
women sitting across from us, who offered the cursing woman a
handkerchief as well as their sympathy that she had lost her soda. It
occurred to me that such a gesture was a small portion of what the
Good Samaritan did for the man left for dead on the side of the road
in that famous story Jesus once told. Which would make me the Levite
and priest who knew more spiritually than the Samaritan did but did
less to show it in terms of concern for their fellow man.

It certainly is easier for an educated person like me to know what is
right to do than to actually put it into practice in the messiness
that is our world. As you may know if you know the story of the Good
Samaritan, Jesus clearly instructs us not only to stop for the men
left for dead, but go out of our way in expending time and money to
assist them. And this is what I find so challenging about living in a
city: there are ample reminders of how seldom we act in such a way, as
Jesus would have us to act.