Brandt's Notes

A couple weeks ago I finished Elena Kostyuchenko's " I Love Russia ".  It drew my eye at the book store.  It had a compelling cover (a half naked child, hunched over in front of a Lenin statue).  The inside flap gave more.  This book is about the hard stories in Russia.  Elena worked for one of the last few independent Russian newspapers, but neither she nor the newspaper are in the country any longer.  Reading the book made it clear why. Within These Pages, Many Things... The book itself reads like an assemblage of Elena's stories, her journalism.  It's title "I Love Russia" becomes significant over time.  She's talking about the Russian people, the geography, the history, but mostly about those on the fringes who, to quote Jimmy Stewart, are the rabble that "do most of the working and paying and living and dying" in Russia (Moscow and Saint Petersburg, by far the two largest cities, account for only about 15% of the Russian population). ...

I recently read Linda Jaivin's 2021 book, " The Shortest History of China ".  Why?  Because I'm late to the game.  So many economists (and economics pundits) speak confidently about a wide range of topics.  A new one every week!  Not only do they jump around economics topics, but also seemingly unrelated topics... and impressively any country around the globe that happens to be in the headlines.  It's all a bit deflating.  Supposedly in intellectual life, there are 'foxes' and 'hedgehogs'.  Foxes are those who know some things about everything, and hedgehogs are those that know everything about something.  As I've grown up, I've realized I'm not really good at being either.  So here arrives this book! I've mostly come to terms with having very little awareness of other cultures.  This is a symptom of having gone to The New School.  The New School is the #1 US school in terms of students from outside the US.  And it's not e...

When talking about sources of energy, it feels like coal doesn't get the attention it deserves.  It's dirty, underground, and rife with danger and labor disputes in remote areas of Appalachia.  Coal can feel old fashioned the same way a wood burning stove feels quaint.  When was the last time you used coal?  In the past year you may have pumped a car with gasoline, used a natural gas stove, and maybe seen neighbors installing solar panels or even started a camp fire.  But coal?  There's a slight chance that you've grilled with charcoal, but that's about it.  It feels removed from American life as clean air and climate change concerns have swelled.  But coal hasn't just been left underground.  Upon reading Barbara Freese's "Coal: A Human History," it made me aware of the fact that coal could be playing a bigger role in our lives than ever before. Background: across the pond Freese's book, though brief, does a great job painting visuals of diff...

When the lockdowns from Covid faded away and the CDC ended mask mandates, we entered a new era.  We entered a post-Covid world.  The economy, too, began to look like something new and unfamiliar.  The primary feature so far appears to be very high inflation.  The inflation rate in the US hit over 8% by the beginning of 2022.  This was the highest it had been since inflation skyrocketed in the early 1980s. A bit of history... As an economist interested in finance, energy, and history, this set off alarm bells.  Those last two major spikes in the table above were associated with periods of high oil prices.  This period is otherwise known as the 1970s energy crisis.  And for good reason.  In 1973, the countries supplying oil banded together to create OPEC and started an oil embargo in response to the Yom Kippur War.  Later, in 1979, the Iranian revolution did the same, reducing the supply of oil and dramatically raising prices worldwide....

I recently finished the workplace memoir "Roughnecks, Drillers, and Tool Pushers: Thirty-three Years in the Oil Fields" by Gerald Lynch.  This book is many things, but it's mostly a firsthand historical account of one man's career working in the oil fields from the mid-1920s until the late-1950s.  This book had personal significance to me, as my father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and many uncles and cousins have worked in the oil industry.  I was raised listening to stories of oil drilling misadventures, never truly knowing what terms used meant (B.O.P., crown block, rat hole, casing, tool pusher, etc.).  This book forced me to do my research as I read, googling each term, lest I was not able to appreciate the litany of colorful stories in this charming book.  The book itself follows Gerald Lynch who, as a young man, gets an opportunity through family to work at the lowest levels on an oil derrick in northeast Texas.  Over the years he grows from a wil...

I recently finished the sweeping history of oil by Matthew Auzanneau, "Oil, Power, and War."  Originally published in 2015, this work was translated into English (from French) in 2018.  This book's existence stands apart from the prevailing available literature on the history of oil for a variety of reasons.  For one, it creates a counter-narrative to the preeminent work on the history of oil, "The Prize", by Daniel Yergin.  Secondly, while Yergin's book won the Pulitzer, "Oil, Power, and War" hardly has a handful of reviews in English available online.  Lastly, the book attempts to upend a number of debate topics around oil.  As a few examples, when most are worried about climate change, it focuses on peak oil; when economics focuses on internal sources for financial crises, it suggests oil is at the source of 20th century economic growth and its panics; and while others count the days to oil's peak, it claims we've passed it. The book its...

As part of my new series on Humanist economics, which we can broadly define as the study of the economic impact of threats/opportunities to human needs, a good place to start is a broad review of what has been written to date. Wikipedia defines 'Humanistic economics' as a 'persons-first' set of adjustments to economic theory and practice, prioritizing people over profits.  It is also specifically concerned with how the economic discipline defines people, which they see as more complex.   E.F. Schumacher Beyond definitions, there appears to be a few suggestions regarding the history of these ideas.  One suggestion is Small is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher (1973) as an appropriate starting point.  The available summary of this book appears highly practical, with less focus on theoretical arguments and more emphasis on his perceived threats to humanity and suggestions on what various societies should prioritize.   Schumacher the person is an interesting t...

A special interest of mine in graduate school was an attempt to merge my concern for humanity in general with my concern for the economy.  Or, in other words, to think of economic needs as one of many important human needs; that human needs in general are greater than and inclusive of our material needs. Maslow A simple example can be drawn from Maslow's hierarchy of needs.  A psychiatrist, Abraham Maslow created a model to show universal needs at the bottom and more 'acquired' emotions toward the top.  Although Maslow never organized these needs into a pyramid, they are now popularly arranged to look something like this - Looking at the arrangement of needs, the question is, which of these layers are provided within the economy?  Well, it depends.  The methods of production, distribution, buying, selling, and use of goods and services varies substantially between countries and time periods.   Let's consider me, today, now.   Looking at the b...

 In an effort to track the latest news about the oil/energy sector and the future of Houston, I've reviewed articles from the past week.  In short, it looks as though local oil and gas companies are having extraordinary profitable years due to the impact of the Ukraine war on supplies and their reluctance to invest further.  Also competing views on future energy regulations continue to be a significant political point of contention. 1. The Dallas Fed held an event on energy and the economy.  Of note, are comments that: the oil and gas sector is producing at 60% of pre-pandemic levels oil and gas leaders blame -  labor shortages,  pipeline capacity,  lack of new oil and gas investment (primarily due to environmental pushback), oil company tentativeness to expand given recent busts, ESG benchmarks decoupling "prices and products" 2. Several states have set targets to switch homes to 100% electric heating systems, to reduce reliance on natural gas.  ...

Here we continue our series which asks:  "what will happen to Houston, the energy capital of the world, if the response to climate change requires us to move away from oil and gas".  In previous posts, we took seriously the claim that Houston could end up like Cleveland, a once booming industrial city whose population has been on a downward spiral for several decades.  One question was why would major companies leave a metro area taking jobs with them, like with Cleveland ?  Here we explore this question in detail.  -- Let’s assume oil and gas declines as a proportion of energy consumption globally over time.  What will happen to the major companies that extracted, refined, and distributed it for so long?  As of 2022, Houston is home to about 25 “Fortune 500” companies.  About half of those are in the oil and gas business.  In total about 5,000 energy firms are in Houston and about 31% of all US jobs in oil and gas are there as well.  Th...

Speak to any Houstonian about the threat of climate change to the city and you'll get a similar response: Houston's economy isn't based on oil like it once was.  It's diversified.  We have the medical center, we have many Fortune 500 companies, NASA, the shipchannel, as well as manufacturing and retail.  The city survived the oil price slump of the 1980s and came out better for it. But was it enough? Maybe not,  according to the Dallas Fed .  Looking at employment change percentages, author Jesse Thompson points to the areas of most significant decline during the pandemic: oil/gas, construction, manufacturing, and information services fared the worst.  That oil and gas (and support industries) still make up 1/3rd of employment in the Houston metro area, and that it alone accounts for nearly that percent in wages is evidence to it's continued importance. Further, the charts he presents show how many of these lost jobs in the pandemic (1/5th of all those in o...

  " The city of Cleveland has had a colorful history. The Cuyahoga River, which runs through the city, famously caught fire in 1969 thanks to rampant pollution, and it wasn't the first time. In 1978 it became the first U.S. city to default on its debts since the Great Depression. Cleveland sports fans have had to endure more anguish than those in any other city. The city has been dubbed with a less than endearing nickname: the Mistake by the Lake.  This year Cleveland takes the top spot in our third annual ranking of America's Most Miserable Cities. " -Forbes Magazine, 2010 This post is part of a series on the future of Houston, Texas (the "energy capital of the world") as it faces climate change and a changing world economy. In the last post I started analyzing a claim that Houston may end up like Cleveland, a city that once was among America's largest but has now shed more than half of its population in the last 50 years. The two major trends worth con...

"Whatever else it may become, Houston will still be an oil and gas town for many years. Detroit still manufactures cars. Pittsburgh still makes steel. Plenty of U.S. cities have accepted that their best years are behind them and supplemented their legacy industries by finding a new economic equilibrium—one based to a great degree on, say, health care, higher education, a port, and a NASA facility. Cleveland, for example. I’m describing Cleveland. But who wants to live in Cleveland? " -Evan Mintz, Texas Monthly In my last post, I discussed two differing views on Houston's future.  One predicting that Houston's fortunes will reflect the country as a whole (a "prophetic" city).  Another where Houston will be particularly hard hit by climate change and our economic response (a "pathetic" city).  The author that posed the latter, Evan Mintz, suggested in the quote above that Houston may level out like rust belt cities before it; more specifically, Houst...