My Learned Colleague: Mr. Beck

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The alleged pitfalls of the public education system in this country are nowhere more evident than in the person of Glenn Beck. While he and his cadre of like-minded opinionators pound away at the idea that Johnny can't read because his elementary school teacher is both deficient in teaching skills and paid too much, the painful truth is that many young people struggle with socio-economic challenges, parental neglect and legacy intellectual capacity limitations. They will face a lifetime of substandard conditions due to the insufficiency of that education. For them they have a reason for their lack of attainment. Such is not the case for Mr. Beck. His case is characterized by a willful ignorance and pride of buffoonery.

While I suppose he is capable of identifying various colors and counting to higher than 21 on his digits, I doubt that he can delve deeper into the hues so as to distinguish between the primary and the secondary colors. Similarly while he can recite the numbers by rote he seems to have never learned that in every equation there is an Equals Sign. The more complex relationships among factors escape him. The concept of major contributory factors and negligible ones is one of those relationships.

In his protected world of close walls and echoes, he can say anything that comes to mind and be assured that no one present will challenge him. He is the man in the sound-proof booth hearing nothing from the outside.

These attributes make it possible for the man to say that the fermenting of corn into Ethanol in the US is causing world hunger, will result in starvation, rampant hyper-inflation and food riots across the globe. He does seem to understand the connection between what he says and the practice of food hoarding and the buying of gold as a hedge against that hyper-inflation and the shortage of ground beef that is coming because the US make some Ethanol from corn. No so coincidentally several of his sponsors cater to the anxieties of Americans who listen to Mr. Beck.

In one of his broadcasts he pointed out the relative profit margins of Apple Computers and unnamed oil companies. Apple, he asserts makes 47.9% profit on an iPad, while oil companies make < 8%. Here is that first lack of deeper reasoning that escapes the man. Apple had an annual gross sales in 2010 of $18.50 bn. Exxon-Mobile had sales of $52.959 bn, Royal Dutch Shell was $35.34bn, ConocoPhillips was $19.75bn, BP Oil (is down but was) $25.12bn in 2009 and Chevron was $32.055bn. This makes a partial total, just for these oil companies, $168.17bn. This number is 9.1 times higher than Apple. At 7.9% (just less than 8% as touted) the profits are $13.3bn for the oil companies and at 47.9% for Apple the number is $8.86bn. The other 'order of magnitude' factor that Beck neglects is that no one NEEDS an iPad in order to go to work, go shopping or go to religious services.

The matter of corn prices figures prominently in his and everyone else's analysis of Ethanol production. The difference is his is simplistic to the point of non-relevance. The rising cost of corn in the markets is his reason that the US must drill for more domestic oil. There is a significant cost of corn production that is tied to the cost of diesel fuel, i.e. foreign oil suppliers, speculators and refineries. It required diesel fuel to plow, sow and reap a harvest. It requires diesel fuel to move the corn to market, mill it and make food products that are stocked on our shelves. The rising cost of oil is a major contributor to that cost of corn.

And we cannot forget the impacts of market demand. There are 1.3 billion Chinese and about 1.2 billion Indians all of who want a part of both oil production and the corn crop. Their businesses bid in the global market to get the portions they want. This has the effect of driving up the prices. Indians are not adverse to eating chicken and the Chinese have a new found taste for beef and automobiles. It takes about ten pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef. If the world were truly in need of the corn to eat, we would eat it directly and not feed it to our livestock. Such inter-connections are a mystery to people like Mr. Beck who can only see one linear path from A to C through a B.

While the only thing that happens in a vacuum is a thought in the head of the person who boasts his lack of education as a virtue, the use of resources in a global market does not. If we need more corn or other ferment-able plant matter, we can plant more of it. We can put fallow acreage into production. We can use chemicals on non-food corn that will be burned in our engines. We can replace crop subsidies with purchasing the increased yields. And finally, we can change the crop to a different one anytime we need the corn to eat.

In our imperfect world we must use the forces of the market, controls of government, the technologies of our scientists, the persuasion of wise proponents, cooperation of numerous points of view and the compassion of influential people to make sure we all can eat, be sheltered, kept warm, obtain and maintain a level of comfort without sacrificing any segment of humanity. All these people and forces combine to produce a complex equation that definitely has in it an Equals Sign.