My brother Troy, a philosophy professor, likes to talk about economics. I suppose it's relaxing for him, in his line of work, to take a break from rigid designators and such, and to chat instead about Pareto efficiency and inflation, and how it's old people who hate it, mostly, because the thought that a box of Cracker Jacks should cost more than 3 pence disgusts them. And so forth.
Anyhow, Troy has a pet economics theory which he tells to anyone willing to listen because the theory allows him to talk about bicycles. He is, obviously, an amazing person and a wonderful conversationalist, and I'm not just saying that because he's my brother and likes to talk about bicycles.
His theory is simple:
More expensive goods are literally lighter goods; the more developed an economy, the lighter its goods.--Big Troy
So now we get to talk about bicycles. Ah hem.
Bike builders (like me) pay a premium for light parts--parts made of carbon fiber, titanium, scandium, magnesium, and other exotic materials. Big Troy tells me that some crazy philosophers might even go so far as to say that bikes have souls--truly, an exotic and thankfully weightless material.
I had to pay a fair amount for my componenets. I chose SRAM's respectable Force line of components: brakes, shifters, crank, chain, casette, and deraillers.
Big Troy, never one to compromise, chose SRAM's top of the line Red groupset. This half pound SRAM Red does not have (that SRAM Force does) cost him a fair amount of money.
Scott Addict Frame and SRAM Red Components
My components sit in a box in my bedroom. I tell myself that six months ago, they were the lightest components available, that Lance never road anything nearly as light as my SRAM Force, that my components weigh half as much as Eddy Merckx's, and probably a third as much the components Coppi road.
But that is hardly the point. The point is that they could be lighter. That all-important half pound that separates Red from Force. It bugs me. That I'll have a little weight just hanging there, serving no function, holding me back.
One cannot be a moral person, a lover of humanity, and be a weight weenie. I am a Peace Corps Volunteer. I have to remind myself this. I love humanity more than the dream of bicycle weightlessness, of travelling on a cushion of pure soul. And yet I can't help but be drawn to the purity of this vision.
There are other, more difficult ways of dropping weight (and inevitably cash). On the table:
Appendix Removal. The appendix is the Federal employee of the body; it weighs at least a pound and doesn't do anything except watch shit flow by. Ridding myself of my worthless appendix would cost me somewhere around $12,485. This is a high cost/per pound ratio; perhaps too high. But this thing looks kind of nasty:
Appendicitis
It probably does something important if it looks nasty.
Lose weight. I can't do much to change myself except lose weight, and that requires a lot of work and not eating. I don't like that, and I lack the discipline.
Buy a lighter bike. So it's back to the bike--what can money buy me? I was drawn to this:
World's Lightest Bike at under 1818 grams (4 lbs)
The frame is made of styrofoam over steel rods.
Looking at the pitiful thing, I'm not sure if it was meant to be ridden. The web site mentions that the wheels are glued together. That's not exactly reassuring.
Part of this building process, I'm coming to realize, requires building me. Or, rather, it's re-building me: stripping off the fat, atrophying unnecessary muscle, and becoming strong in the right places.
Everyone does this generally, I suppose. If there had been bicycles in St. Paul's time, I'm sure he would have used cyclists instead of runners in his "I have run the good race" pep talk. There's something mortifying--in the original sense of the word--about cycling. The flesh is weak, so it must go. That's the purity of bike building.
3 comments:
Thanks for shout out, Calvini.
My 'theory' is all about justifying my own personal spending habits, but I'll put it in the world-saving, moralizing terms that make me feel better about myself.
Two things we're told:
1. If everyone consumes the way Americans consume, the earth, stripped of all natural resources and beauty, will choke on its own methane. Average American consumption cannot be multiplied by 6 billion. Not on this planet anyway.
2. American levels of wealth will spread to the third world. (It's already happening.)
How to reconcile these two facts? Wealth and consumption needn't overheat and raze the earth. If people spend their wealth on the right things. Which things? LIGHT ones: designer handbags, software, music, e-books, bikes, and conceptual art. That's the idea.
If Gunner Millionaire makes buys boats, mcmansions, and monster trucks, we're doomed. If he buys vintage vinyl, vacuum tubes, and a pinarello prince, we'll survive the economic explosion.
Body Mass Index is a crude measure. It's a function height and weight only, and doesn't distinguish the skinny fats like myself from the hardbodies like Calvinin. But it's still useful. I propose a similar measure, flawed but simple. It's price per pound.
We like cheap things, cheap per pound. So when we shop, we try to get more food per dollar, more pounds of mulch per dollar, more square footage per dollar. But I'm proposing the opposite. We'll only survive if we use our newfound global wealth to buy low-weight, high-price things, rather than buying MORE of the cheap stuff.
Of course, we could always give to charity and live the way we've been living. But are we really going to do that?
As I said, this is all an elaborate way of justifying my own obsessions with high-end audio and this bike I'm building up. My own consumption habits are exactly what I recommend, but that's not because I'm trying to do the planet a favor. I just prefer to live in 400 square feet of space with great music and a 14 lb bike.
Price per pound, people!
By the way, Calvini's jealousy over my SRAM Red is pretty funny, because even if my bike weighed an ounce, I couldn't hang onto his wheel.
typos, typos. i'll never be a full professor!
I wish you'd say a little more about this somewhere (in print).
When we talked, you mentioned Buckminster Fuller and we also talked about Greenspan's comments about the increasingly light American economy. Also interesting are Warren Brookes observations about the "economy of the mind." (http://www.american.com/archive/2007/april-0407/uncle-sam2019s-fabulous-diet-plan)
I could lend you pulpit here in Inside Bureaucracy Today, but then only you and I'd be reading it. Not much weight.
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