Random things: American Self-Portrait, What Power Looks Like, Hill | Holliday, Toll Editorial

Here’s what I’m reading this weekend:

Running the Numbers: An American Self Portrait

Chris Jordan creates incredible artwork that shows the impact of mass consumption:

As an American consumer myself, I am in no position to finger wag; but I do know that when we reflect on a difficult question in the absence of an answer, our attention can turn inward, and in that space may exist the possibility of some evolution of thought or action. So my hope is that these photographs can serve as portals to a kind of cultural self-inquiry. It may not be the most comfortable terrain, but I have heard it said that in risking self-awareness, at least we know that we are awake.

Hill | Holliday

Hill | Holliday is a Boston PR/marketing form with clients including Dunkin Donuts, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Liberty Mutual, and AOL. I really like how the homepage of their site is their blog. Links to about, work, and contact appear right at the top, but below that you really get a picture of the firm’s people, culture, and work.

What Power Looks Like

David Rothkopf looks at the inner workings of a group of the global elites he terms the “Superclass” – heads of financial institutions, government agencies like the Federal Reserve, politicians, even those at the top of the nonprofit world – and their ability to quietly work together with stunning efficiency:

There was nothing in writing, no rules, no formal process, and while no one asked the Fed to act, the Fed let everyone in the markets know it was acting.

The beauty of the process was its absolute efficiency, seeing what a tight circle of large firms with “some global reach” could get done, fast—with an executive committee of only four running the weekly conference call until the crisis was past.

“There is no formal mechanism we could have used to force this on anybody, so we had to invent it. I think the premise going forward is that you have to have a borderless, collaborative process. It does not mean it has to be universal, every jurisdiction or every institution,” said Geithner. “You just need a critical mass of the right players. It is a much more concentrated world.”

Pick on the Big Guys

Owen D. Gutfreund, a professor of history and urban studies at Barnard College, publishes a hard-hitting editorial in the The New York Times about the refusal of our current legislative environment to enact forward-thinking proposals that target traffic congestion, pollution, and non-fuel efficient vehicles:

How do we escape the trap we’re in: an obsolete and counterproductive transportation policy that has led to clogged roads and broken-down highways, and a political system that seems incapable of dealing with these problems?

…here’s the answer: charge a premium for expensive and inefficient vehicles. Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, has already taken this step, tripling toll charges for S.U.V.’s. We should take this one step further, requiring that vehicle registrations include designation in tiered classes, taking into account weight, sales price, emission rating and gas-mileage efficiency. Tolls would be levied according to these classes. Smaller, cheaper and more environmentally friendly cars would pay less, while drivers of more expensive, wasteful and higher-polluting cars would pay more.

This is everything a tax structure should be: fair and progressive, while rewarding socially beneficial consumer decisions and penalizing selfish, destructive ones. Also, it provides a fairer allocation of the actual highway costs among users, since heavier vehicles produce more wear and tear on road surfaces, requiring thicker pavements and more frequent repairs.