Shameless plug II. The holiday that dare not mention its name, at The Ranting Kid.

Signs and portents. Saturday, Martha, our elderly across-the-street neighbor, was puttering about her front yard, and at the end of her session of raking and pruning, she walked up to the two McCain - Palin signs near the sidewalk, pulled them up, and put them in the garage.

I cocked my eyebrows. Was this the iceberg-tip of a silent, hidden trend? I almost shook off my sloth to fire up Movable Type and crank out a blog post:

Republican doom – McCain support in the heartland crumbles!

But I didn't.

This morning, Martha opened up the garage again and put the signs back up. Apparently she didn't want them blown away by the 60mph winds we had yesterday.

Surprise last minute surge – McCain comes storming back!

Revolutionaries. Us, that is, apparently. And not just revolutionary, but part of the very avant garde. Because we were in on this "dawning Age of Frugality" thing a long time ago. Business Week has just discovered a revolutionary cell in Pennsylvania:

"...a family of four lives in a white, colonial-style house in a manner that once would have been considered All-American but more recently has been seen as just plain weird: They're frugal."

Well, we've definitely got the "weird" part down. And I think we'd count as "frugal", as well.

"They walk most everywhere, they rarely eat out, they sometimes buy clothing at consignment shops, and they turn the lights off when they leave a room."

The horror!

These are all excerpted from a story about a family living what seems to me to be a thoroughly ordinary middle-class suburban American life. In fact, what strikes me most about their story isn't their cutting-edge revolutionary frugality, but rather their prior behavior, which, I suppose, may be average enough, but still caused alarm bells to go off in my head (alarm bells indicated by '!'):

"During the days of soaring home prices and easy credit, they took out a $101,000 home-equity loan(!) on a previous house and spent lavishly on a lifestyle upgrade—going on three cruises(!!) in two years and taking the kids on annual pilgrimages to Disney World(!). "After 9/11 it became patriotic to shop, and we became as patriotic as anybody," laments Behre, sitting in the dining room after a meal of chicken stir-fry—washed down with tap water(!)."

Tap water? What is this ... tap water? Oh, that's right, the stuff I've drunk at home for the last 45 years.

Things nearly spun out of control after they upgraded to a better house. Despite raiding their retirement funds(!) to help with the down payment, they ended up with higher monthly payments.

So, anyway, people such as those highlighted in the story, and, I guess, us, are now "harbingers of a dawning Age of Frugality", which apparently means living like normal prudent people.

"... baby-boomer children grew up without psychological scars from the Depression. And the boomers' children have come of age in an era of abundance, easy credit, and a taste for luxury. So it's no wonder that the sudden need for thrift comes as an upsetting shock for many. Some are calling for a massive public education effort on the level of the anti-drunk-driving and anti-smoking campaigns that have been so successful. "We want to build a culture that's more hospitable to thrift, so it's not seen as odd but fostered and nudged along," says Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, co-author of For a New Thrift: Confronting the Debt Culture, a new report from The Institute for American Values, a think tank."

What I'd really like to see is a culture where people don't give a ...hoot about being seen as odd, or living within their means... but barring that, I suppose that re-learning the lessons of the Depression will do. It's odd, though; both M. and I have parents that grew up during the Depression, and while they never obsessed about it, they clearly knew the value of money and how not to waste it, and for the most part I see M. and I as having learned that lesson from them, however imperfectly. I'm not sure why we were able to absorb that cautionary tale and so many others apparently were not.

To be sure, there are odd moments on the journey to a thriftier lifestyle. To demonstrate, Bill Behre pulls out a mobile phone and twists it back and forth so the light glints off of rhinestones glued on by daughter Annie before she got a new phone. Behre's own phone was ruined in a rainstorm, so he's using this gaudy hand-me-down until he can get a free replacement in March. "This is the ultimate in frugal," he says.

Ditch the cell phone, and then get back to me about "frugal", ok? Jeez.

Sticking to the program requires vigilance. When Ingram does drive, she calculates the relative costs of traveling a few more miles to get gas for a few cents cheaper (I thought everybody did this– DF). ...In the old days, the family overspent their checking account by an average of $300 a month—dipping into the home-equity funds to make up the difference(!!!). Now they're in the black by about $800 a month. Since making their big changes, they accelerated payments on a car loan and managed to pay it off. ...

Ingram has started a blog, The Lean Green Family, where she encourages others to be more frugal.

That's why we aren't worldly successes, Moira: we haven't yet learned to hector others about the bleedin' obvious. We should write a book!

"I hope that someone else gets it, because I don't." Professional investor guy Jeremy Grantham on the current unpleasantness:

I have a theory that people who find themselves running major-league companies are real organization-management types who focus on what they are doing this quarter or this annual budget. They are somewhat impatient, and focused on the present. Seeing these things requires more people with a historical perspective who are more thoughtful and more right-brained -- but we end up with an army of left-brained immediate doers.

So it's more or less guaranteed that every time we get an outlying, obscure event that has never happened before in history, they are always going to miss it. And the three or four-dozen-odd characters screaming about it are always going to be ignored.

If you look at the people who have been screaming about impending doom, and you added all of those several dozen people together, I don't suppose that collectively they could run a single firm without dragging it into bankruptcy in two weeks. They are just a different kind of person.

So we kept putting organization people -- people who can influence and persuade and cajole -- into top jobs that once-in-a-blue-moon take great creativity and historical insight. But they don't have those skills.

[...]

I want to emphasize how little I understand all of the intricate workings of the global financial system. I hope that someone else gets it, because I don't. And I have no idea, really, how this will work out. I certainly wish it hadn't happened. It is just so intricate that all I can conclude, by instinct and by reading the history books, is that it will be longer, harder and more than we expect.

---

[From here, via here.]

Monkey Butlers!

BART
And every night the monkey butlers will regale us with jungle stories.

NELSON
How many monkey butlers will there be?

BART
One at first. But he'll train others.

---

[Via Althouse.]

Derek's Hard Times - or, Hey, This is My Ice Floe, Go Find Your Own. Derek Lowe's recent Hard Times: A Manifesto caught my eye in part because, with the judicious replacement of the words "chemist" and "drug research" with "software" and "software development", the issues it raises are identical to those that come up in my neck of the woods. The 'hard times' of the title refers to the bleakening prospects of native-born American pharmaceutical chemists, as the big pharms downsize and ship R & D overseas.

Boiled down to its sticky residue, Derek's main point is as follows:

Everyone knows – including the people in Shanghai and Hyderabad – that the difficult, high-level research is still not being done there. [Routine chemistry] is definitely cheaper to do outside the country... on the average, you can bang out compounds for less money by outsourcing. That’s not going to change, either.
So what’s left for us here in the US? The hard stuff. The risky stuff. The science that needs well-paid experienced people hovering over it the whole time. We get to take on the stuff that can’t be outsourced.
This is ... a terrible time to be an ordinary chemist in this industry. That goes for the ordinary biologists, too. We’ve all got to demonstrate why we’re worth what we want to earn, and doing something that can be done for half the price somewhere else isn’t going to cut it.

All of these arguments apply, pretty much one-for-one, to the making of computer software as well. In my experience, a lot of the 'simple' stuff has already gone to Mumbai or Hyderabad. What's left behind, mainly, is the high-end work, things that people really need advanced degrees for; fundamental software design and new product research; marketing; and management.

For the most part, it's true that right now this stuff – a lot of it, at least – "can't be outsourced". Aspiring programmers have to come to Western universities just to get trained to do the work, and so there just isn't the critical mass of experienced engineers | programmers | developers | whatever in our offshore locations to enable the bean-counters to send the work over there.

Of course, eventually, as other countries develop large populations of programmers, and those programmers gain experience, it seems pretty reasonable to think that the high-end advantage of the U.S. and other western countries will steadily erode, and the list of things that "can't be outsourced" will steadily shrink along with it. The market for U.S. programmers – or chemists – would necessarily seem to shrink. Not sure what the strategy will be then.