Waste and Want by Susan Strasser

An old proverb relates trash and treasure as a matter of perspective. In Waste and Want, Susan Strasser describes American’s changing perspectives on waste from the colonial era to our own day.

In the colonial and revolutionary period of American history, manufactured objects were rare and expensive. Repair and mending were common even among the wealthy because it was difficult and costly to replace objects. In addition, the various types of home industry practiced by both men and women equipped them with skills in handling materials that made them adept at repair. Even when and object was beyond repair, it parts, or the material it was made of, might be usefully repurposed themselves or as part of an assembly. This lack of goods and facility with handling materials made bricolage common. Because things had durable value, people had a sense of stewardship relating to them.

Strasser establishes this as a beginning state. The development of industry and consumerism led to a current state in which all of these have been reversed. We have an abundance of goods, and many of them are inexpensive. We work in factories and offices where we do not develop skills for repair, and particularly have lost familiarity with materials needed for practical bricolage. These and other forces, particularly those related to health and cleanliness, have resulted in waste being something of the home where additional value may be extracted to something that is the realm of specialists that is taken away and handled by government agencies or specialized companies.

There are many stages in this development. It is interesting to me that the value of household waste as raw materials American industry provided a mechanism for poor and rural people to purchase manufactured goods. Even so, as industrialization made more goods available, along with larger quantities of more manageable waste, household waste became less valuable, and reuse and recycling became associated with poverty.

By the end of the 1920s, consumer culture was established in America, and it reinforced the trends identified by Strasser.  Planned obsolescence was developed in the automotive industry, and along with the craze for fashion, it took hold for almost all consumer goods. Even during the Great Depression, when lack of credit and unemployment made doing it yourself attractive, there was an assumption that people had access to new and old consumer goods and their packaging. Even during this period of economic distress, demand for certain types of consumer goods grew. Thrift was reimaged for a consumer age. For instance, refrigerators became commonplace, and instead of being presented as luxury items they were sold on the notion of thrift, allowing housewives to save on food by keeping leftovers and buying in bulk.

People were encouraged to conserve and recycle to support the war effort during World War II. However, this did little to reverse changing attitudes that valued the new over the old and saw little value in trash. People had jobs and money, and wartime rationing created a pent up demand for goods that was unleased after the war. Disposable goods and packaging represented cleanliness and convenience; it was freedom from dirt and drudgery. There was no value in trash, which was taken away by collectors.

There were reactions against this even in the 1950s. They grew into the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, which were skeptical of corporations and consumerism. The environmental movement also grew out of this counterculture. Reuse of second-hand goods became more acceptable for even middle-class families, though few had the skills needed to rework these items to make them seem new or adapt them to current fashion. Little used goods were seen to have some value that could be recovered through yard sales. (I grew up on a stretch of highway that now boasts and annual 100 mile yard sale.)

This counterculture has not resulted in a broad return to a stewardship of things. Strasser suggests that a rising ethic of environmental or resource stewardship may lead to the mitigation of problems related to the abundant trash created by disposable and rapidly obsolete goods. There is no turning back, but we might find new reasons and ways to reduce use, reuse, and recycle.

Stasser, Susan. Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1999.

Happier by Tal Ben-Shahar

Ben-Shahar, Tal. Happier: Learn the Secrets of Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007.

Happier is based on a popular class Dr. Ben-Shahar teaches at Harvard University. The author refers to happiness as the ultimate currency, and in that light, it is not surprising that so many people are seeking more of it.

Ben-Shahar frames happiness as a balance of present and future benefits. Many people sacrifice present pleasure for hopes of a more desirable future; they’re rat-racers. Hedonists seek momentary pleasures without regard for the future. Those who’ve given up on finding happiness in both the present and future are nihilists. Happiness is found in a life that has future benefits that is enjoyable along the way.

Happiness is about more that just pleasure, which is hollow by itself. Happy people lead lives they find meaningful. In a sense, a meaningful life provides the ultimate future benefit. Pairing meaning with enjoyment along the way, present pleasure, leads to happiness. This doesn’t lead to a life free of negative emotions or perpetual positivity; Ben-Shahar thinks that is unrealistic and probably unfulfilling and throughout the book reminds readers of the balanced definition of happiness.

The middle section of the book tackles some of the practical matters of happiness in education, work and relationships. School is all about present sacrifice for future payoff. That mindset can send people in to careers they find to be meaningless drudgery. The same attitudes can come into relationships. Happiness in the real world sometimes means setting aside the expectations of others and society and acting on what you personally find meaningful and pleasurable. Not everyone has the luxury of putting off all obligations and doing their own thing, but nearly everyone can do something to introduce more happiness into their lives.



In closing, Ben-Shahar offers a number of “meditations.” These chapters offer exercises, of both practice and thought, for building happiness on our lives.

The Dawn of Innovation by Charles R. Morris

Over the course of the 19^th Century, the United States transformed from a frontier nation dependent on trade with former colonizing nations to a leading manufacturer and exporter of goods. Charles R. Morris describes how America accomplished this change in The Dawn of Innovation.

The forces that led to the development of an American system of manufacturing were practical and cultural. There were labor shortages, especially for skilled labor. Americans in every field were interested in mechanizing work to get it done with the people and skills available. Americans were also largely middle class, at least in their way of thinking. They had to have the means to cross the Atlantic, and once here wage pressure and the availability of resources quickly made many people middle class. The middle class valued improvement and economic independence. In the U.S. they were free from the limiting class structures of Europe.

The middle class were also consumers. They were interested in the goods and lifestyle associated with wealth, but at prices they could afford. And there were a lot more of them that the handful of rich people who were the consumers of traditional luxury goods. Americans wanted to produce, market and distribute goods on a mass scale that was hard for Europeans of the time to even imagine.

The cloth-making industry was one of the first to bring together the aspects of modern manufacturing: specialization, organization of work flow, mechanization and automation. American cloth makers took—sometimes stole—these things from the British. A leap that the Americans made, but not the British, was to apply these same concepts to all kinds of production.

The organization of work was especially helpful in the U.S., where the skilled workers needed for precision machine making were few. Morris uses the arms industry as an example of American leadership in the transformation from craft piecework to an organized workflow with uniform standards.

Morris also undertakes some myth busting. Eli Whitney is associated with first rifles—really the first manufactured goods—to have interchangeable parts, which is a hallmark of modern manufacturing. Whitney and others promised interchangeability to win contracts with the Army, but he never achieved it; it took him a while to even become a good gun maker. It took decades of work by others to achieve interchangeable parts. This was both a matter of organizing work and developing more precise machining equipment.

Morris shows how innovations accumulated over time to create American manufacturing leadership. He shows how the culture and natural environment were incubators for such development.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Gentleman Scientists by Tom Schachtman

Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick

The Power Makers by Maury Klein

The Society for Useful Knowledge by Jonathan Lyons

Waste and Want by Susan Strasser

Morris, Charles R. The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution. New York: Public Affairs, 2012.

How Not to Be Wrong by Jordan Ellenberg

When people complain about math being too hard or impractical, one might expect a college math professor to take up a defense, which Jordan Ellenberg does in How Not to Be Wrong. He manages to make is his argument without resorting to equations, and with very few numbers.

Math is not all about equations and numbers (though these are important objects in math). Ordinary people do math frequently in the form of thinking with a little more depth, rigor and structure than usual. This is the power of math to help us make better decisions. Though Ellenberg covers a lot of ground in math, science and history, the notion of better decision making through math runs through each chapter.

Along the way, he debunks some common uses of math, even those that are prevalently used among math-minded scientists. For instance, he takes on the notion of statistical significance, which sometimes bothers me, too. Statistical significance by itself is not an arbiter of the truth of something. It has a lot more to do with a particular way of framing arguments and the sensitivity of an experiment. If you have a large enough sample, you’re likely to have statistically significant results, even if those results are insignificantly small. You can “prove” ridiculous, plainly wrong things using an argument from statistical significance because improbable things happen sometimes (actually a lot).

Ellenberg discusses the related subject of probability, which any book like this should. Human beings are pretty bad at grasping probability; it requires deeper, rigorous, structured thinking that sometimes runs counter to our intuition.

Though math is sometimes misused or misunderstood, Ellenberg is bullish on the power of math to help us make better decisions and understand the world more deeply. Math itself is a pretty deep world, and mathematicians have discovered connections between things that seem to be unrelated. That is part of the power of math. Solutions in one are often lead to applications in many others.

Of course, math won’t eliminate uncertainty, though it can help you understand uncertainties better. I’ve spent most of my career in and around government and Ellenberg expresses some empathy for decision makers in the realm of policy, writing, “Maker of public policy do not have the luxury of uncertainty that scientist do. They have to for their best guesses and make decisions on the basis thereof.” This guesswork can be done with humility and honesty, as is fitting in a republic.

While Ellenberg eschews the pile of symbols many people think of as math, he does not avoid deep, challenging questions. It’s not the math you’ll find in journals, but it’s not fluff. He doesn’t call people to join the ranks of academic mathematicians (though don’t give up on the idea just because it seems hard at first), but he argues that people in all manner of professions could benefit from education in math. If you’re interested in becoming such person, How Not to Be Wrong is a good introduction to how mathematicians think about the world.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Better for All the World by Harry Bruinius

The Drunkard’s Walk by Leonard Mlodinow

The Feud that Sparked the Renaissance by Paul Robert Walker

The Numerati by Stephen Baker

Rock Breaks Scissors by William Poundstone

The Unfinished Game by Keith Devlin

War Against the Weak by Edwin Black

Ellenberg, Jordan. How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking. New York: Penguin, 2014.