Theme: politics, economy
Difficulty: hard

How the Free Market Killed New Orleans
By Michael Parenti

The free market played a crucial role in the destruction of New Orleans and the death of thousands of its residents. Forewarned that a momentous (force 5) hurricane was going to hit that city and surrounding areas, what did officials do? They played the free market.

They announced that everyone should evacuate. Everyone was expected to devise their own way out of the disaster area by private means, just like people do when disaster hits free-market Third World countries.

It is a beautiful thing this free market in which every individual pursues his or her own personal interests and thereby effects an optimal outcome for the entire society. Thus does the invisible hand work its wonders in mysterious ways.

In New Orleans there would be none of the collectivistic regimented evacuation as occurred in Cuba. When an especially powerful hurricane hit that island in 2004, the Castro government, abetted by neighborhood citizen committees and local Communist party cadres, evacuated 1.5 million people, more than 10 percent of the country’s population. The Cubans lost 20,000 homes to that hurricane---but not a single life was lost, a heartening feat that went largely unmentioned in the U.S. press.

On Day One of the disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina, it was already clear that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Americans had perished in New Orleans. Many people had “refused” to evacuate, media reporters explained, because they were just plain “stubborn.”

It was not until Day Three that the relatively affluent telecasters began to realize that tens of thousands of people had failed to flee because they had nowhere to go and no means of getting there. With hardly any cash at hand or no motor vehicle to call their own, they had to sit tight and hope for the best. In the end, the free market did not work so well for them.

Many of these people were low-income African Americans, along with fewer numbers of poor whites. It should be remembered that most of them had jobs before Katrina’s lethal visit. That’s what most poor people do in this country: they work, usually quite hard at dismally paying jobs, sometimes more than one job at a time. They are poor not because they’re lazy but because they have a hard time surviving on poverty wages while burdened by high prices, high rents, and regressive taxes.

The free market played a role in other ways. Bush’s agenda is to cut government services to the bone and make people rely on the private sector for the things they might need. So he sliced $71.2 million from the budget of the New Orleans Corps of Engineers, a 44 percent reduction. Plans to fortify New Orleans levees and upgrade the system of pumping out water had to be shelved.

Army Corps of Engineer personnel had started work to build new levees several years ago but many of them were taken off such projects and sent to Iraq. In addition, the president cut $30 million in flood control appropriations.

Bush took to the airways (“Good Morning America” 1 September 2005) and said “I don’t think anyone anticipated that breach of the levees.” Just another untruth tumbling from his lips. The catastrophic flooding of New Orleans had been foreseen by storm experts, engineers, Louisiana journalists and state officials, and even some federal agencies. All sorts of people had been predicting disaster for years, pointing to the danger of rising water levels and the need to strengthen the levees and pumps, and fortify the entire coastland.

In their campaign to starve out the public sector, the Bushite reactionaries also allowed developers to drain vast areas of wetlands. Again, that old invisible hand of the free market would take care of things. The developers, pursuing their own private profit, would devise outcomes that would benefit us all.

But wetlands served as a natural absorbent and barrier between New Orleans and the storms riding in from across the sea. And for some years now, the wetlands have been disappearing at a frightening pace on the Gulf‘ coast. All this was of no concern to the reactionaries in the White House.

As for the rescue operation, the free-marketeers like to say that relief to the more unfortunate among us should be left to private charity. It was a favorite preachment of President Ronald Reagan that “private charity can do the job.” And for the first few days that indeed seemed to be the policy with the disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina.

The federal government was nowhere in sight but the Red Cross went into action. Its message: “Don’t send food or blankets; send money.” The Salvation Army also began to muster up its aging troops. Meanwhile Pat Robertson and the Christian Broadcasting Network---taking a moment off from God’s work of pushing John Roberts nomination to the Supreme Court---called for donations and announced “Operation Blessing” which consisted of a highly-publicized but totally inadequate shipment of canned goods and bibles.

By Day Three even the myopic media began to realize the immense failure of the rescue operation. People were dying because relief had not arrived. The authorities seemed more concerned with the looting than with rescuing people, more concerned with “crowd control,” which consisted of corralling thousands into barren open lots devoid of decent shelter, and not allowing them to leave.

Questions arose that the free market seem incapable of answering: Who was in charge of the rescue operation? Why so few helicopters and just a scattering of Coast Guard rescuers? Why did it take helicopters five hours to lift six people out of one hospital? When would the rescue operation gather some steam? Where were the feds? The state troopers? The National Guard? Where were the buses and trucks? the shelters and portable toilets? The medical supplies and water?

And where was Homeland Security? What has Homeland Security done with the $33.8 billions allocated to it in fiscal 2005? By Day Four, almost all the major media were reporting that the federal government’s response was “a national disgrace.” Meanwhile George Bush finally made his photo-op appearance in a few well-chosen disaster areas---before romping off to play golf.

In a moment of delicious (and perhaps mischievous) irony, offers of foreign aid were tendered by France, Germany, Venezuela, and several other nations. Russia offered to send two plane loads of food and other materials for the victims. Cuba--which has a record of sending doctors to dozens of countries, including a thankful Sri Lanka during the tsunami disaster---offered 1,100 doctors. Predictably, all these proposals were sharply declined by the U.S. State Department.

America the Beautiful and Powerful, America the Supreme Rescuer and World Leader, America the Purveyor of Global Prosperity could not accept foreign aid from others. That would be a most deflating and insulting role reversal. Were the French looking for another punch in the nose? Were the Cubans up to their old subversive tricks?

Besides, to have accepted foreign aid would have been to admit the truth---that the Bushite reactionaries had neither the desire nor the decency to provide for ordinary citizens, not even those in the most extreme straits.

I recently heard someone complain, “Bush is trying to save the world when he can’t even take care of his own people here at home.” Not quite true. He certainly does take very good care of his own people, that tiny fraction of one percent, the superrich. It’s just that the working people of New Orleans do not number among them.

------- Michael Parenti's recent books include Superpatriotism (City Lights) and The Assassination of Julius Caesar (New Press), both available in paperback. His forthcoming The Culture Struggle (Seven Stories Press) will be published in the fall. For more information visit: www.michaelparenti.org.

Майкл Паренти
КАК СВОБОДНЫЙ РЫНОК УБИЛ НОВЫЙ ОРЛЕАН

Свободный рынок сыграл решающую роль в разрушении Нового Орлеана и в гибели тысяч его жителей. Имея в своём распоряжении заблаговременное предупреждение о страшном урагане, грозящем городу и его окрестностям, что же предприняли власти?
Они играли в свободный рынок.

Они объявили, что все обязаны эвакуироваться. Каждый должен был выработать свой собственный путь спасения из зоны бедствия и реализовать его личными средствами, точь в точь как рекомендует свободный рынок, как поступают люди, когда стихия обрушивается на рыночные страны третьего мира.

Прекрасная штука этот свободный рынок, в котором каждый индивидуум преследует свои персональные интересы и таким образом приносит наибольшую пользу всему обществу. Именно так действует и приводит к успеху невидимая рука.

Не будет ничего подобного в коллективно организованной эвакуации, каковая имела место на Кубе. Когда необычайно мощный ураган обрушился на остров в прошлом году, правительство Кастро при поддержке местных коммунистов и гражданских комитетов эвакуировало 1.3 миллиона людей, более 10% населения страны, без единой жертвы – впечатляющий подвиг, в основном оставшийся незамеченным американскими СМИ.

В первый же день бедствия, вызванного ураганом Катрина, стало абсолютно ясно, что сотни, возможно тысячи жизней американцев были потеряны в Новом Орлеане. Многие люди «отказались» эвакуироваться, сообщали репортеры СМИ, из-за своего «упрямства».

Потребовалось минимум 3 дня, чтобы относительно зажиточные телерепортеры стали осознавать, что десятки тысяч людей не смогли убежать просто из-за того, что им некуда было бежать или у них не было средств, чтобы организовать своё бегство. Не имея денег на аренду машины и не владея собственным транспортом, им ничего другого не оставалось, как сидеть на месте и надеяться на лучшее. В конце концов свободный рынок ничем не смог им помочь.

Большинство этих людей были малоимущими афро-американцами, вместе с более малочисленными белыми бедняками. Надо помнить, что бОльшая их часть имела работу до того, как ураган «Катрина» нанес свой смертельный визит. Это то, что присходит с бедными людьми в этой стране: они работают, обычно на тяжелых и низкооплачиваемых работах, частенько совмещая несколько работ одновременно. Они бедны не оттого, что ленивы, но потому, что вынуждены выживать имея низкие доходы, будучи задавленными растущими ценами, арендной платой за жильё и регрессивным налогообложением.

Свободный рынок повлиял и другими путями. На поветске дня Буша – урезать до основания правительственные службы и заставить людей полагаться на частный сектор во всех своих нуждах. Поэтому он сократил $71.2 миллиона из бюджета новоорлеанской инженерной службы – 44%-ое сокращение. Планы по усилению новоорлеанской плотины и модернизации насосной системы были соответственно похоронены.

Буш заявил по радио, что никак невозможно было предвидеть это несчастье. Это ещё одна его ложь. Многие предсказывали бедствие в Новом Орлеане, рекомендуя усилить плотины и насосную систему, укрепить побережье.

Проводя свою кампанию по удушению общественного сектора, бушистские реакционеры позволили осушить огромные заболоченные территории. Снова старая добрая невидимая рука свободного рынка должна была всё устроить как надо. Осушители болот, преследуя цель повышения своих личных прибылей, неминуемо должны были принести всем нам благо.

Но дело в том, что болота служили абсорбентом и барьером между Новым Орлеаном и бурями, приходящими с моря. В последние годы болота исчезали пугающими темпами на огромных территориях побережья. Но всё это мало беспокоило реакционеров из Белого дома.

Что касается спасательной операции, то тут приверженцы свободного рынка любят говорить, что спасение самых невезучих из нас должно быть предоставлено частной благотворительности. Это было любимой присказкой Рональда Рэйгана, о том что «частная благотворительность сделает работу». И в первые дни урагана «Катрина» это и в самом деле была политика властей.

Федеральное правительство отсутствовало на горизонте, к делу же подключился Красный Крест. Его призыв: «Не посылайте еду и одеяла, посылайте деньги!». Тем временем Пат Робертсон (крайне правый протестанский фундаменталист, призвавший недавно к ликвидации президента Венесуэллы Чавеса – пер.) и Христианская Служба Вещания призвали делать пожертвования и провозгласили «Операцию благословление», заключавшуюся в посылке широко разрекламированных но совершенно бесполезных консервов и библий.

На третий день даже близорукие СМИ начали понимать, что спасательная операция оказалась полным провалом. Люди гибли из-за отсутствия помощи. Власти больше беспокоились проблемой мародерства, а не гибелью людей. Собственность важнее человека – главный принцип поборников свободного рынка.

Но вставали вопросы, на которые рынок не мог дать ответ: Кто отвечает за спасательные работы? Почему так мало вертолетов и спасателей? Почему вертолетам потребовалось 5 часов, чтобы забрать 6 человек из больницы? Когда наконец спасательная операция наберет силу? Где были федеральные власти? Национальная гвардия? Где были автобусы и грузовики? Убежища и туалеты? Лекарства и вода?

В момент очаровательной иронии пришли предложения о помощи от Франции, Германии и ряда других стран. Россия предложила послать 2 самолета с продуктами и другими вещами для пострадавших. Естественно, все эти предложения были быстро отклонены Белым домом. Америка Прекрасная и Великая, Америка Высший Спаситель и Мировой Лидер, Америка Поставщик мирового процветания не может принимать чью-то помощь со стороны. Это было бы недопустимым оскорблением и обиднейшим перевертыванием ролей. Что эти французы опять хотят получить по носу?

Ну а кроме всего, принять зарубежную помощь означало бы признать горькую правду – что бушевские реакционеры не имеют ни желания ни порядочности для того, чтобы позаботиться о простых людях, даже когда те испытывают тяжелейшие трудности. К тому же люди могут окончательно убедиться в том, что Джордж Буш есть ни что иное, как платный агент корпоративной Америки.
Перевод Ильи Иоффе

Theme: hobbies, cooking, leisure
Difficulty: medium

A Nice Cup of Tea
By George Orwell
Evening Standard, 12 January 1946.

theme: computers, hacking
difficulty: medium


Famed "computer terrorist" teaches anti-hacking
By Rebecca Harrison
2006 Reuters Limited

"Computer terrorist" Kevin Mitnick is one of the world's most famous computer hackers and became a cause celebre after breaking into networks and stealing software at companies including Sun Microsystems and Motorola.

Now Mitnick, from the United States, travels the world teaching companies how to guard against people just like him.

He argues that while sophisticated technology can help keep networks clean from viruses, it is useless if hackers can con a company's employees into handing over passwords by posing, for example, as colleagues.

"Hackers find the hole in the human firewall," Mitnick told an information technology security conference on Wednesday in Johannesburg, South Africa. "What's the biggest hole? It's the illusion of invulnerability."

"Social engineering" -- as hackers call tricking people -- formed the main thrust of his career, in which he penetrated some of the world's most sophisticated systems often by persuading unwitting staff to hand over top-secret information.

Mitnick, now in his early 40s, started hacking phone systems in his teens before moving on to computers, but says he never stole money or caused deliberate damage and hacked just for the thrill of it.

The hobby earned him a place on the FBI's most wanted list and an almost five-year stint in U.S. jail in the 1990s.

On his release he was initially banned from surfing the Web, and has since written two books about hacking and started an IT security consulting firm.

Now the companies he once stole secrets from pay him to hack into their systems and show them how to improve security.

Mitnick said hackers conduct meticulous research into companies and their staff, even swotting up on the hobbies of target employees to better win their trust.

And firms underestimate how easily hackers can get hold of personal information -- like driver's license numbers, social security numbers and mothers' maiden names -- which are often used by banks or other companies to screen customers.

To prove it at the conference, he found former U.S. President George Bush's social security number, driver's license number and the maiden name of Hollywood actor DiCaprio's mother within 15 seconds.

"The problem is that it is a good human quality to give people the benefit of the doubt, and unless you've been burned, or you're paranoid, then you will probably trust them," he said.

Companies must guard against smooth-talking hackers by making their staff aware of the risks, developing simple company policies on data protection, and getting the best technology, which will at least "raise the bar" for hackers.

"It's not about being paranoid, but it's about being very aware, and very alert," he said.

theme: mathematics, news article
difficulty: medium

The Clay Institute Prize
[url]http://www.claymath.org/millennium/[/url]

Following Andrew Wiles’s astounding achievement in solving Fermat’s Last Theorem, the race has been on to find a new contender for the most challenging problem in mathematics. The prime candidates have included the Poincare and the Hodge conjectures, both of which have remained unsolved for many years. Perhaps the most famous candidate is the Riemann Hypothesis, a problem first published in 1859. Nearly a century and a half later, these three problems, along with 4 others, have been judged by Clay Mathematics Institute (CMI) to be so notorious that that there is a $1 million reward for each problem solved dead or alive.

In his famous lecture of 20th August 1900, the German mathematician David Hilbert announced 23 outstanding problems he believed to be of importance in the development of mathematics. In honour of Hilbert’s lecture, the Millennium Mathematics prize was announced at a meeting of the CMI in May 2000, exactly 100 years later.

The problems were chosen for their longevity and their resistance to previous attempts to solve them. The seven problems are: The Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture, the Hodge Conjecture, Navier-Stokes Equations, P vs. NP, the Poincare Conjecture, the Riemann Hypothesis and the Yang-Mills Theory.

Unsurprisingly, none of the seven problems are expected to be solved in the immediate future. Hence the lack of a deadline for this competition. Rather, the problems have been created to promote a wider interest and appreciation of mathematics, as well as providing inspiration for a future Andrew Wiles.

Read more about the problems here.

theme: psychology, management
difficulty: hard
11 chapters
"Getting Things Done" Guru David Allen and His Cult of Hyperefficiency
By Gary Wolf 09.25.07 | wired.com

-1-
The invention of the minute hand is often attributed to the great Swiss clock maker Joost Borgi, whose work in the late 16th century coincided with a burst of technical innovation in clock making that would eventually bring whole new opportunities for guilt and shame. Along with all your other problems, you could now be late.

"There's a big owie out there," says David Allen, who specializes in curing the psychic pain caused by the pressure of time. Allen's work has become the touchstone of the life-hacking movement, a loosely knit network of psychological self-experimenters who share tips about how small changes in human behavior can bring big rewards in happiness. Allen's book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity has steadily climbed the best-seller lists since its release in 2001, but the best evidence of its influence is not the 600,000 copies in print but rather the endless network of spinoffs, how-to guides, software versions, and online commentaries by readers who interpret, criticize, and extend his theories.

-2-
Allen's approach is not inspirational. Instead, it is detailed and dry. But within his advice about how to label a file folder or how many minutes to allot to an incoming email there is a spiritual promise. He says there is a state of blessed calm available to those who have taken careful measure of their habits and made all the changes suggested by reason. Nirvana comes by routine steps, as an algorithm drives a machine.

Allen is not a dramatic presenter. A fit, sandy-haired, soft-spoken man who only recently traded his glasses for contacts, he can be funny and wry, but his normal mode is discursive. "Our inspirational factor is a wink," he explains one night over dinner in a small restaurant in Chicago. "We say, ‘Buy a labeler for your files and you will transform your life,' wink."

Allen is in Chicago to give one of his daylong seminars, for which several hundred people will pay nearly $600 each for help putting GTD, as his method is known, into practice. Many readers of Getting Things Done apply one or two of the book's tricks, like the process Allen recommends for emptying an overstuffed email inbox, and then they stall. Some of them come to seminars like this. Allen himself is unsure if it helps. He realizes that his system can be difficult and that he's often accused of going overboard with elaborate schemes. He responds with a shrug. "Look, the workings of an automatic transmission are more complicated than a manual transmission," he says. "To simplify a complex event, you need a complex system."

-3-
While the instructions in Getting Things Done are baroque, the underlying ideas can be summarized in an axiom and three rules:

THE AXIOM

Humans have a problem with stuff. Allen defines stuff as anything we want or need to do. A tax form has the same status as a marriage proposal; a book to write is no different than a grocery list. It's all stuff.

THE RULES

1. Collect and describe all the stuff. Everything must be inventoried without distinction or prejudice. Errands, emails, a problem with a friend: It all must be noted for processing. Small objects, such as an invitation or a receipt, go into a pile. Everything else can be represented with a few words on a piece of paper ("find keys," "change jobs"). Once the stuff is collected, processing begins. Anything that requires two minutes or less is handled on the spot. The remainder is governed by the second rule.

2. All stuff must be handled in a precise way. Allen offers dozens of clever tricks for classifying, labeling, and retrieving stuff. Expert users of GTD never leave old emails cluttering their inbox, for instance. Nor do they have to rifle through a bunch of paper to see if there's anything crucial they've left undone. Emails to be answered are in a separate folder from emails that merely have to be read; there's a file for every colleague and friend; stuff that must be done has been identified and placed on one of several kinds of to-do lists. Allen calls his to-do lists next-action lists, which are subject to the third rule.

3. Items on next-action lists should be described as concretely as possible. Breaking down stuff into physical actions, Allen says, is the key to getting things done.

The system Allen describes can be made of anything: ink on paper, data in a computer, magnets on a board. The important thing is not the materials but the way the parts connect. In essence, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity is a flowchart for stuff, and the book's most important page contains no paragraphs. It is just a diagram, with more than 20 nodes and arrows showing how to process our thoughts.

The very complexity of Allen's method — its relentless, small-scale cleverness — is doubtless one of the things that recommends it to the many technical people among his fans. But there's something else at work. Allen is remaking the self-help tradition for the information age. The contrast with earlier schemes is instructive. The two most influential self-organization gurus of the 1980s and 1990s were Stephen R. Covey and Hyrum W. Smith. Covey is the author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People; Smith is the founder of the company that created the Franklin Day Planner. (The two men merged their companies in 1997.) While Covey and Smith each offer many practical tips, they both start with philosophical reflection.

"Begin with the end in mind," writes Covey in 7 Habits, advising us to craft a mission statement that captures the fundamental purpose of our life. Smith, in The 10 Natural Laws of Successful Time and Life Management, reminds us that Ben Franklin "first identified his governing values, then he made a concerted effort to live his life, day in, day out, according to these values." This emphasis on values, and more generally on the spiritual meaning of life, is the common thread through the genre, back to the original American self-help entrepreneur.

Allen has almost nothing to say on these topics. He likes to describe his system as a "bottom up" approach, by which he means that life's values emerge from its tiniest component actions, rather than a top-down approach that starts with deep thought. He compares the person working at a desk with a person walking through the forest. There is a surfeit of things that one could possibly pay attention to, and the primary task is to pick out, from the surrounding environment, those signals that require processing. "Any email could be either a snake in the grass or a berry," he says. "Which is it?" To resolve this question by reference to one's highest purpose would be inefficient. When it comes to processing incoming signals, Allen recommends sorting by the most immediate criteria: How long will it take, what is your location, what devices do you have at hand, what other people are present? These direct, contextual cues do not demand any profound insight. Tasks can be assessed extremely rapidly and executed without friction. Where earlier gurus tried to help their followers make their deep personal commitments explicit and easily accessible to memory, Allen is selling a kind of technology-enabled forgetting. The life-hackers like it because it stimulates their ingenuity. They have optimized versions for the iPhone, for Entourage, and for sets of manila folders. Once self-management has been broken down into a set of routines, it can be implemented in any number of high tech or low tech systems.

Allen says his goal is to be free from worrying about anything he has to do. His techniques allow him the pleasure of having, much of the time, nothing on his mind. "People are afraid of the void, afraid of negative space," he says. "But having nothing on your mind is one of the most awesome experiences."

-4-
The only thing Allen was allowed to have in his possession at Napa State Hospital was a spoon. "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was pretty accurate," he says of the time he spent as a mental patient, "and Napa was one of the good hospitals."

Allen arrived in California in 1968 to start a PhD program in American history at UC Berkeley. At 22, he was adventurous, well-traveled, a bit immature. He got married shortly after enrolling, and he remembers himself as rather too hungry for approval. "I had a motorcycle, but not the coolest one," he says. "I took drugs, but I wasn't the most outrageous. I got along with everybody."

These were dangerous years for young men unsure of their authenticity, and one day at a party Allen sat down next to a charismatic liar named Michael Bookbinder. He'd been a Formula One racer and also a paratrooper. He played flamenco guitar and knew karate. His costume included silk shirts with huge collars and puffy sleeves "in the manner of a gay buccaneer," as an acquaintance later recalled. He wore pancake makeup. He was a heroin user.

Bookbinder and Allen became close. Bookbinder taught him karate, and soon Allen was using heroin, too. He left his marriage, abandoned his academic training, and eventually found himself out on the street, practically penniless, "crucified psychically," as he would later put it, "absolutely at the bottom physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually." Worried about the radical change in his behavior, some of Allen's friends had him committed in 1971. At the mental hospital, Allen received stark lessons in simulated obedience. He learned to hide his psychiatric medication under his tongue instead of refusing it or spitting it out, and he studied what the medical staff seemed to want of him, so that they would pronounce him cured. "I made a decision to institute a high state of cooperation with the world again," he says.

After a brief period of hospitalization, he was released. Teaching karate to earn money, Allen struggled to pull his life together. One day, a student told him of receiving assistance from a spiritual master who balanced her aura. Allen sought him out. "In 10 seconds I knew he had something to teach," Allen says. "And in 35 years I haven't yet gotten to the end of it."

-5-
The man who put him on a new path was then at the inflection point in a long and varied spiritual enterprise. Roger Hinkins was born during the Depression in a poor mining town in central Utah. By the early '70s he had been introduced to Eckankar by its founder, Paul Twitchell, learned esoteric philosophy from a correspondence course, changed his name to Sri John-Roger, started a series of spiritual seminars, and given up his work as a high school teacher to found a church called the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness. The movement's theology holds that John-Roger is the Mystical Traveler, a benevolent consciousness guiding mankind, who in the past has appeared as Jesus, St. Francis of Assisi, and Abraham Lincoln, among others. Some of the devotees lived in a Los Angeles mansion called the Purple Rose Ashram of the New Age. Allen was, and still is, a minister in the church.

When Allen met him, John-Roger earned money by selling transcripts of the Mystical Traveler's teachings, known as Soul Awareness Discourses. But in 1977, as a general reaction against the more colorful elements of the counterculture set in, he explored new directions. With a devotee named Russell Bishop, John-Roger launched the Insight Seminars, a largely secular program that soon found its way into major US corporations. Insight was not alone in bringing New Age philosophy into corporate training during the next decade. By the mid-'80s many corporate employees were being sent to classes and seminars taught by quasi-religious self-improvement groups like Lifespring, Transformational Technologies, and other branches of what was known, collectively, as the human potential movement. David Allen became an Insight trainer, and by 1983 he was consulting at Lockheed, where he began to filter the powerful techniques of the personal-growth movement through the pragmatic grid of corporate human resources.

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Allen gets things done in his personal headquarters, a modest office in the guesthouse behind his home.
Photo: Robyn TwomeyThat the inventor of their favorite system of personal organization has a decades-long devotion to New Age thinking causes fits of squeamishness among GTD fans. "If indeed GTD was conceived, implemented, and marketed with the intentions of drawing people into the MSIA cult," wrote one member of the popular productivity forum, 43folders.com, "how do we, as conscientious individuals, avoid becoming prey within the trap?" Allen explains that while he won't hide his beliefs, he doesn't want his personal faith confused with the message he has for people today. "The Marriott family supports the Mormon Church," he points out, but nobody refuses to sleep in their hotels.

Of course, a hotel is not an installed thought process, which is the way Allen describes GTD. Given that users of his system entwine GTD with their daily habits, it's only natural that they would wonder about its antecedents. GTD is pitched to rationalists. Such people tend to be cautious when considering schemes to change their life.

But in truth, Allen is not running a cult-recruitment program, nor is he merely putting a secular gloss on New Age tradition. He is reworking this tradition, increasing its utility as he narrows its scope. In Getting Things Done, the overreaching claims of cultlike programs disappear, leaving mainly the ingenious mental tricks. In many branches of the New Age and human potential movements, for instance, students are taught to relieve themselves of unwelcome thoughts. In Werner Erhard's est and in its descendant, Landmark Forum, mental noise is "a racket." Scientology says that the static in our heads is caused by "engrams." In GTD the problem is stuff.

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At his seminar, Allen asks the audience to try to capture all their stuff by writing a list, and at the end of a few minutes he tells us to look at the list and think about the way it makes us feel. He guesses that our feelings include a mixture of grief and relief. The relief, he suggests, comes from the simple fact of making the list. But where does the grief come from? "These items represent agreements you haven't kept with yourself," Allen says. "What happens when you break an agreement with yourself is that your self-esteem plummets."

Allen recommends that we take regular comprehensive inventory of our intentions, which he calls open loops. Any open loop requiring more than one action is a project, and projects, naturally, go on a list. The project list is not a reminder of values or deeply held beliefs. Rather, it is an exhaustive external repository meant to capture every single thing that you may want to do. The project list must contain everything, otherwise unlisted items will return to our minds at unwelcome moments and cause suffering. A New Age cliché holds that every intention generates a chain of spiritual effects we ignore at our peril. This is karma. In GTD, karma makes the last stage of its journey from a Hindu theory of cosmic justice to a rational tool in the American self-help kit. Karma is now just an open loop.

One of the very best tricks Allen recommends involves reworking one of the New Age movement's most dubious ideas: the theory we can control destiny with our mind. From Phineas Quimby, the 19th-century mind-cure doctor, down through a powerful line of magical optimists including Mary Baker Eddy, Norman Vincent Peale, and the producers of The Secret, an inflated sense of the power of thought is characteristic. Werner Erhard's followers would tell people at est seminars that they had thought themselves into cancer.

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Allen's practical suggestions on how to turn thoughts into reality sharply distinguish him from his predecessors. His advice is so simple as to appear simpleminded. He insists that nothing should ever appear on a to-do list that is not a specific, concrete action expressed at the most practical level of detail. Do not write "set up a meeting," for instance. Instead, write "call to set up a meeting." "If you just say you are going to set up the meeting," he says, "then that leaves a question open: How are you going to do it? Are you going to call? Are you going to email? It's like having a monkey on your back that won't shut up." Allen's voice shifts into a more taunting register. "How are you going to do it? How are you going to do it? Somebody shut up the monkey!"

The difference between issuing an invitation by email and issuing it over the phone seems perversely minuscule. But in practice, as Allen points out, the question of how to communicate is often freighted with unarticulated anxieties. His mandate to resolve apparently trivial issues serves as a kind of research tool, bringing to light aspects of work that are otherwise felt only as vague concerns. And when it is difficult to find a simple physical action that can advance a project, it is a sign that the project may be unrealistic or even impossible. This is an excellent thing to know in advance.

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Allen is careful to attribute credit for his focus on specific action to a business consultant he met in the early '80s named Dean Acheson (no relation to President Truman's secretary of state). But the emphasis on gaining efficiency through precisely described actions has a legacy almost as long as positive thinking. In 1906, the same year the great Yogi Ramacharaka (aka William Walker Atkinson) published his seminal work of magical optimism, Thought Vibration or the Law of Attraction in the Thought World, Frederick Winslow Taylor took over as president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Taylor, whose book The Principles of Scientific Management introduced the concept of efficiency to a whole generation, was famous for using a stopwatch to time manufacturing tasks as a way of demonstrating how much more productive workers could be. Workers hated Taylorism, especially when it was implemented through brutal piece-rates and a general reduction of wages. But Taylor's emphasis on breaking down everything into small steps, and his prediction that a choreography of work could lead to previously unimaginable efficiency, formed the basis of a hundred years of managerial high hopes.

One of Taylor's most controversial proposals was that labor and analysis should be strictly divided. The boss plans, and the hired man executes. Workers who don't need to think ahead can go faster, while observant managers benefit from unfettered clarity. One way to understand Getting Things Done is to see it as Taylorism for knowledge workers, those poor — or privileged — souls who must handle both sides of this equation in the same consciousness. The boss is nowhere in sight, and yet the demands never cease. As ever-more complicated communication networks both extend our reach and hem us in, Allen's strict routines supply exact instructions on how to manage ourselves.

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Allen lives in a modest house on an acre of land in Ojai, California. The oaks are very old, as is the giant Aleppo pine in his front yard. There is a greenhouse for the orchids his wife, Kathryn, raises, and a shed for the bonsai trees Allen regularly kills while trying to master the craft. He enjoys learning bonsai, because it takes years to fully understand the consequences of his actions, and this strikes him as salutary. Now that his company, which handles trainings and a growing Web business, has grown to 32 employees and $6 million in annual revenue, he is constructing a building in downtown Ojai to house it. His personal headquarters is still in the small guesthouse at the back of his property, with indoor-outdoor carpet on the floor, a plain desk in the entryway for an assistant, and a 100-square-foot office where he works when not on the road.

A photograph of this office shows up in his presentations, where it illustrates the point that Getting Things Done is not about special equipment. Almost everything in the room is ordinary. There are six Herman Miller two-drawer filing cabinets, a low desk that takes up the better part of two walls, an inbox, a heavy-duty stapler, a to-read file, a laser printer, a scanner, and sound-recording equipment for the interviews he conducts by telephone and publishes on his Web site. On this workday Allen is wearing jeans, a knit shirt, loafers, and a quilted vest. Like other successful small proprietors, he has a custom license plate on his car that advertises his business. It says GTD GUY.

Allen is grappling with all the normal challenges of a person who does not have a deep hierarchy above or below him, who is required to make countless small decisions, and who has limited ability to pass mundane tasks off to others. He sets his own goals and uses his own methods to achieve them. Allen's list of open loops includes getting GTD adopted in schools, learning to type 80 words a minute, becoming better at small talk, and achieving a high net worth. This ambitious mind-set, with its combination of boldness and conventionality, says something about where Getting Things Done is coming from, and to whom it is aimed. The book is for people who are striving hard. "The people who take to GTD are the most organized people," Allen says, "but they self-assess as the least organized, because they are well-enough organized to know that they are fucking up." Allen would no more crowd his mental environment with unprocessed email in his inbox than he would go to bed in filthy clothes, or stop brushing his teeth. "The scuzz factor gets too high," he says.

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Allen's words, with their suggestion of personal shame, hint at something that goes beyond mere practicality. They suggest an increase in the demands of civilization, a change in what sociologist Norbert Elias called our habitus, by which he meant our normal psychological organization, our comportment. As these changes become the norm, they turn invisible. It takes some effort to remember that a medieval nabob in fine clothes probably ate with his hands and blew his nose onto the floor, or that self-help authors of an earlier age had to point out that it was rude for dinner guests to spit unchewed food into their hands. Today, we have different problems to work out. Allen speculates it will soon be thought remarkable that civilized human beings once walked around with their brains polluted by stuff.

Among the normal array of equipment in Allen's office, one item stands out. It is an hourglass with two minutes of sand. Any clock would serve equally well to mark the strict interval GTD gives us to process something the first time we handle it, but Allen's hourglass is as much a talisman as a practical tool. In a medieval painting, it would symbolize death. Here, the hourglass is a symbol of virtue. It regulates our attention. It guards our self-esteem. The guru of Getting Things Done is living by the standards of the future, and his hourglass is an icon of an emerging civilization whose exacting demands we may all someday be expected to meet.

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