Three statistics or pseudo-statistics

1. Today, I ran 5k in 18:48. It was a relatively calm day, not raining, and I was feeling my Weet-bix. This is the fastest that I have run since my final season of collegiate cross-country, and a bit faster than I would have run in high school. I can go faster.

2. Before the 1980s, the US didn't collect statistics on homelessness as it was too uncommon to be worth measuring. Since Reagan, the homeless are a common sight on every city in the US. This point hit home when Anne's sister visited, and was astounded by how clean Wellington was: the streets! the public toilets! the buses! Where were the bums, she asked? Well, we've only got about half a dozen, I replied.



3. International trade, after growing strongly for a couple of decades, crashed spectacularly in the last year. Unsurprisingly, this has a range of physical consequences. The above picture, taken from a remote shore on Southern Malaysia, illustrates one of them: The water offshore rural fishing villages glows at night with the lights from an armada of hundreds of idle container ships and tankers. A Daily Mail article, The ghost fleet of the recession, captures the scope of the shipping crisis:

Here, on a sleepy stretch of shoreline at the far end of Asia, is surely the biggest and most secretive gathering of ships in maritime history. Their numbers are equivalent to the entire British and American navies combined; their tonnage is far greater. Container ships, bulk carriers, oil tankers - all should be steaming fully laden between China, Britain, Europe and the US, stocking camera shops, PC Worlds and Argos depots ahead of the retail pandemonium of 2009. But their water has been stolen.
...
'A couple of years ago those ships would have been steaming back and forth, going at full speed. But now you've got something like 12 per cent of the world's container ships doing nothing.' [Said Briton Tim Huxley, one of Asia's leading ship brokers.]

[T]he slump is industry-wide. The cost of sending a 40ft steel container of merchandise from China to the UK has fallen from £850 plus fuel charges last year to £180 this year. The cost of chartering an entire bulk freighter suitable for carrying raw materials has plunged even further, from close to £185,000 ($300,000) last summer to an incredible £6,100 ($10,000) earlier this year.
...
Some experts believe the ratio of container ships sitting idle could rise to 25 per cent within two years in an extraordinary downturn that shipping giant Maersk has called a 'crisis of historic dimensions'.
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Martin Stopford, managing director of Clarksons, London's biggest ship broker, says container shipping has been hit particularly hard: 'In 2006 and 2007 trade was growing at 11 per cent. In 2008 it slowed down by 4.7 per cent. This year we think it might go down by as much as eight per cent. If it costs £7,000 a day to put the ship to sea and if you only get £6,000 a day, than you have got a decision to make.

'Yet at the same time, the supply of container ships is growing. This year, supply could be up by around 12 per cent and demand is down by eight per cent. Twenty per cent spare is a lot of spare of anything - and it's come out of nowhere.'
...
Christopher Palsson, a senior consultant at London-based Lloyd's Register-Fairplay Research, believes the situation will worsen before it gets better.

'Some ships will be sold for demolition but the net balance will be even further pressure on the freight rates and the market itself. A lot of ship owners and operators are going to find themselves in a very difficult situation.'

This raises a number of interesting possibilities: What if international trade collapses but economies recover? Would that mean that people produce more things for their region, buy more things locally? Perhaps that would be better for the planet, better for social connectedness. (Shipping goods across the world costs the biosphere, through carbon emissions. And it's easier to make a business decision to make workers redundant when they live thousands of miles away and speak different languages.) I'll ignore those for the moment and perform a Benjaminian juxtaposition, instead quoting a most quotable author on the subject of globalization:

All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations.
...
Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.

One thing worth noting, I suppose, is that any future society isn't going to be any less complex than the one in which we currently live. (Barring the return of entropic conditions following a decrease in the energy available to us, or some sort of disaster of a military or viral nature. Peak oil, nuclear war, and swine flu, in other words.) The challenge isn't to eliminate our current interconnected, multidimensional, multicultural world. A world literature, our correspondent notes, is one of the consequences of world trade. The challenge is to reconstitute it so that we no longer need poverty and inequality, or the crisis itself.

Over to David Harvey:

The way I would think of a crisis is as an irrational rationalizer of an irrational system. The irrationality of the system right now is fairly clear: you have masses of capital and masses of labour, unemployed, side by side, in a world that's full of social need. How stupid is that?

He forgot to mention: Masses of ships.