Interview with Beckmann's Bakery Owner Peter Beckmann

Peter Beckmann, owner of Beckmann's Bakery, is also a People Power business member. Ride your bike to their retail shop at 2341 Mission St in Santa Cruz, and receive a 5% discount!

How long have you been riding a bike?

I started when I was 8 or 10 years old, 43 years ago. Of course I didn't have to. In Germany you don't really need a car or a bike. I walked to school or took the tram.

These days, as the owner of Beckmann's Bakery you could afford to drive?

Yes but it is so nice. I've been going to school. I ride to the University and get a work out at the same time. Whenever I don't need to go out of town I just use my bike.

You've taken a hiatus from the bakery and are pursuing an advanced degree in economics. As a bicyclist, do you see any ties between economic theory and transportation.

Transportation has many economic issues. The trend today is to squeeze more money out of the system by privatizing the profits and socializing the losses. That works at many levels. For example, the benefit we have of driving on cheap roads with cheap gas is something that the whole world has to pay for. The effects of global warming—the whole world pays for that. Or on a national level, health issues created by automobile use are paid by the general public in taxes. Human-based development is more expensive to build, but in the long run, it is more economical for society and for home owners. One principle in economics is negative externalities, which refers to all the negative costs of an economic transaction not usually included in the prices of goods and services. If prices reflected true costs to society, the world would become much saner, with regard to transportation and many things. Prices would reflect the true cost of whatever we are doing. One common argument against it is that the true costs are hard to quantify—the adverse effects of carbon dioxide over the next 20 years, for example. So mainstream economists say if you can't quantify it, you might as well not deal with it. Then there is also a whole psychological issue of having to drive a car to be a real person. That is what you call conspicuous consumption—consumption for social status.

Who benefits from that?

Capital in general, and corporations. If we all stopped consuming for social status today, our economy would collapse. So the whole credit industry encourages the transportation system. You can buy a car today on a minimum wage job. It's easier to buy a new car than a used car with no money. That's how economics in an unhealthy way supports unhealthy transportation. How skewed is that system? You can get a $50,000 loan to buy a car, but you can't get one to buy a bicycle.

Do you believe we need to widen the freeway to shore up the economy?

That's not necessarily true in Santa Cruz. We are more of a resource-based economy. We don't need Granite Construction. With the University, the beach, and farming, we'd be OK. I mean we'd shrink, of course, but we'd be fine. We'd learn to live within our means. I try to do that by living simple, by not consuming too much. Bicycling is part of that, besides trying to be ecological.