 Readers know I’m an advocate of the Gift (or ‘Generosity’) Economy as a replacement for the Market Economy. Where the Market Economy tends to concentrate wealth, rewards distortion and abuse by the rich and powerful, is predicated on self-interest and scarcity, and is amoral, the Gift Economy (<– this is an excellent link, BTW) distributes wealth, provides no significant incentive for abuse, is predicated on collective interest and abundance, and is profoundly moral. It could be argued that the Market Economy (like genetic manufacturing, automation and most other constructs of civilization) is very efficient, but the Gift Economy (like nature) is more effective (nature always bats last). But some people argue that the Gift Economy is naive, that we can’t trust people to give as well as receive, and that hence, ultimately, it will break down.
There is some evidence that this could be true. Let’s take a look at some of the major examples of the Gift Economy that are already at work at the edges of our Market Economy, and the challenges they’re facing:
One of the principles of the Gift Economy is that the gift must always move (each time we receive, we must pay it forward). A second principle is that in the Gift Economy we are agents, not (passive) consumers — and what we give is generally what we have some mastery over, something we do well. Market Economy fans work hard to undermine these principles: The ‘value’ of every exchange, they say (usually some product in return for money, a surrogate for ‘equivalent’ goods or services) must be provided back to the giver, rather than forward to someone else. And the act of consumption is advertised as a pleasure in and of itself, a reward for previous personal sacrifice (unpleasant work), which imposes no obligation or responsibility on the consumer (or on the producer, for that matter). It is hard to overcome the constant propaganda barrage of the Market Economy, whose adherents invest billions of dollars in their ‘commercial messages’ and take up between 10% (some radio stations) and 75% (many magazines) of the total ‘information bandwidth’ of the media — a cost we ‘passive consumers’ of course pay back to them in the final cost of the product. Let’s not kid ourselves: This is war. File-sharing is just the tip of the iceberg in the battle between advocates of the Gift Economy and the Market Economy. Believers in the Market Economy see everything as property, and the use of any property without payment as theft. They are using absurdly anti-innovative patent law, armies of lawyers and their control of major political parties to try to crush every aspect of the Gift Economy. Even philanthropy is viewed through a Market lens — they expect a generous tax deduction, and will spend more on self-aggrandizing commercials (for which they also get a tax write-off) telling ‘consumers’ about their ‘generosity’ (for which they expect consumers to give them a lot of additional full-price business in gratitude) than they spend on the philanthropic contribution itself. They don’t like the Internet, which they see as anarchic and uncontrolled, and once planned to set up an Alternate Internet which would be run as a commercial operation. So we’re up against a lot: Failed Gift Economy projects, anti-Gift Economy propaganda, and political, legal and economic measures perpetrated by the rich and powerful to prevent ‘price-less’ transactions. How do we contend with this? Are the prospects for a Gift Economy doomed by the Tragedy of the Commons — the sense that if something belongs to everyone, it is no one’s responsibility and has no value? I believe we need to do three things simultaneously:
These actions won’t happen by themselves, and disorganization is what the anti-Gift Economy forces are counting on. We need a concerted effort to do these three things. But first, we need a lot more discussion, research and education about what the Gift Economy is, and what it could be. In just a few articles, this blog has jumped into Google’s top 20 sources for information on the Gift Economy. We need university courses on this subject, books and conferences and collaborative studies. What do you think? Could we make the Gift Economy work, the way that some dreamers a few centuries ago came up with the Market Economy and then invented money and other technologies to make it work? And if we could, could the Gift Economy be the key, the thin edge of the wedge to change everything, to save the world? |
July 31, 2005
Can We Make the Gift Economy Work?
July 30, 2005
Saturday Reading: The Top 7
“You’ve got to find out what you love”: Steve Jobs’ convocation address at Stanford consists entirely of three stories. Read it to find out why he dropped out of college, why he was fired from Apple, how he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and how these events made him what he is. “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.” Great advice. Thanks to Avi Solomon for the link.Couch Surfing: The latest addition to the Gift Economy is this database of people all over the world with couches available for travelers. The idea is that you reciprocate, but like file sharing somehow there seems to be more than enough givers to make up for those without couches to offer in return. Anybody tried this? Thanks to Andy M. for the link. Gaviotas. Colombia: Energy Independent Community: Kind of an ‘unintentional intentional community’ story about a village that uses ingenuity (the children’s see-saw helps power the water pump) and environmental and social consciousness to get itself off the grid and stay clear of the turmoil that is destroying so much of this once-lovely country. From John Emerson’s Social Design Notes blog via Lavonne’s Born Famous blog. Cyrus Kar Finally Freed from Iraq: American conservative ex-Navy Seal Cyrus Kar has finally been freed from an American-run jail in Iraq after an ordeal of 50 days. Read the background to find out what innocent people can expect to go through in the incompetent and brutal US-Iraqi detention system. Imagine if Kar didn’t have US citizenship and friends in high places. Eating Oil: How Much it Takes to Produce a Calorie of Food: An excellent article by Andy Jones in Resurgence explains how it now takes between 0.5 and 500 calories of energy (mostly oil used in fertilizers, chemicals and transportation) to bring one calorie of food to your table. This energy deficit shows that the West relies on foreign oil for a lot more than powering its SUVs — and that massive agricultural subsidies and artificially depressed oil prices have made our entire food system wildly inefficient and dysfunctional. Jones has three solutions: (1) Certification and other voluntary approaches by farmers and consumers, (2) Tax shifts to encourage more efficient local production and distribution, and (3) Government policies and fiscal support for local production and distribution (and an end to subsidies). A must read. Growing Animal Proteins from Tissue: A fascinating, promising, and somewhat scary article about how we might be able to grow very nutritious food in the laboratory from tissue. A ton of questions about cost (talk about ‘eating oil’), ethics, safety, etc. But if it could bring the end of factory farming and the end of hormones and toxic chemicals in our foods, it’s worth looking at. Thanks to Doug Alder for the link. GM Gene Migrates to Create Superweed: Modified genes from crops in a GM canola crop trial have transferred into local wild plants, creating a form of herbicide-resistant “superweed”. I previously reported how Colombian drug dealers had developed a coca plant resistant to the oceans of Monsanto Roundup that the US has been dumping on that country. Looks as if nature is following suit. Is anyone surprised? Thanks to artist/photographer Ed Buziak, an example of whose extraordinary work (portrait lens, soft-focus) is reproduced above, for the link. |
July 29, 2005
Hygiene Hysteria
 You can understand the current obsession with hygiene. SARS, Avian Flu, Mad Cow and other scary new communicable diseases. Advertisers terrifying us with microscopic close-ups of bacteria and viruses to hawk their latest poisons and prophylactics. Wackos putting anthrax in the mails. Johnny Depp confessing he’s starting to sympathize with Howard Hughes and telling stories about the average number of different urine residues in the peanut bowls in bars (21). An epidemic of allergies and asthma. The fact that viruses spread more readily through handshakes and playing cards than French kisses. The awareness that more and more people outside the health care profession, from fast-food workers to innkeepers to police officers, are wearing surgical gloves at work.
Yet the precautions we take can actually make matters worse. The overuse of antibiotics has allowed new, virulent strains of bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics to evolve. Children exposed to pets in infancy are five times less likely to develop an allergy to dander than those whose parents ignorantly get rid of their pets when babies arrive. The foods we eat are drenched in chemicals that could be more dangerous than what these chemicals are designed to kill. People are restricted from visiting sick loved ones by regulations. Pets are banned from more and more locations. Precautionary killings have destroyed millions of animals and bankrupted many farmers. This could be seen as a form of ‘learned helplessness’ run amok. We fail to do simple things, like washing our hands regularly with soap and water, because we underestimate the dangers. Yet while tens of thousands die every year from ‘ordinary’ influenzas, the occurrence of a few cases of an exotic new one is enough to cause whole countries to be shunned and people to walk around wearing surgical masks. The cynics, of course, say that the health care industry is to blame. The sicker people are, the more the call for their products, and if these products enable more virulent germs to mutate and lower people’s resistance to disease, so much the better. They solutions create new problems, and with them the need for even more expensive and profitable solutions. So how do we strike a sensible balance? What hygiene processes are logical and responsible, and which are hysterical overreactions? The first thing to realize is that food-borne disease is not nearly as great a threat as poor diet. You’re far likelier to get diseases, and die, because of what you eat, than because of unwanted germs and diseases hitchhiking on your food. The incidence of diseases caused by bacteria, viruses and other microorganisms tends to rise with proximity to others of the same species (crowding) and degree of movement and intermixing, and fall with the use of basic mitigating habits like washing hands, refrigeration and cooking. With some notable exceptions, new antibiotics, drugs, irradiation and inoculations have played a comparatively smaller role in the fight against disease than basic hygiene and education, and are much more expensive. As the rest of nature’s creatures show, all animals in natural, uncrowded environments have a natural immunity to most of the diseases they are likely to encounter. But we’ve introduced some new variables into the equation: We live a lot closer together, we breathe stale, recycled air, we move frequently to new areas, and we travel even more frequently, picking up and bringing new diseases thousands of miles with us. So we can’t rely just on natural immunity to stay healthy. Some steps you can take are obvious: Stay in good physical condition, eat well, in moderation, avoid chemicals in your foods (and in your home!) as much as possible, don’t smoke or tan or overdrink, do regular self-exams, and don’t ignore health problem signs. Poor mental health — stress, depression, sleep deprivation — can also lower resistance to illness, but these are much harder to grapple with. Beyond that? Wash your hands a lot, with soap and water — nothing fancier or more expensive than that. Get that other toxic stuff out of your house, take the masks off your kids, let them roll in the dirt with the dog licking their face. Eat stuff with less stuff in it. Hug and kiss people instead of shaking hands. OK, that last one I just made up. But it probably won’t hurt. |
July 28, 2005
GlobalCorp Annual Report: Management Discussion & Analysis
 What would happen if a single corporate consortium — let’s call it ‘GlobalCorp’ — achieved its ultimate goal: a ‘corner’ on every business (including the underground economy) everywhere in the world? This would be totally consistent with the mandate of public corporations to ‘maximize shareholder value’. Each year public companies must produce a document called their ‘MD&A’ — their assessment of how well they’ve done in the past year, and what they plan to do next to increase profits further. Here’s what GlobalCorp’s MD&A might look like. I’ve used mostly wording similar to that in real corporate reports.
Latin American Operations: The continued political and labour strife in our Latin American region was a mixed blessing for GlobalCorp this year. Because of labour unreliability, we have had to bring millions of people from our Asian region operations to manage and staff much of our Latin American business this past year. Fortunately there remains a large inventory of Asian workers requesting such placements, which we can draw upon. Our security & incarceration division did great business this year, partly as a result, with revenues from security operations up 17%, and defense sales to Latin American governments up 23%. As these governments no longer have the financial resources to pay for these purchases, we received in lieu of payment 3.6 million square miles of lands, bringing our total holdings in the area to 37%, which under our contracts are tax free in perpetuity. Our mineral and petroleum revenues rose 16% this year, thanks to strife in our African and Middle Eastern region reducing supply from that part of our world, and the insatiable demand from our Asian region. Revenues from pharmaceutical operations rose 28%, boosted mainly by a 116% rise in recreational pharmaceutical sales, the majority of which continues to be exported to our North American region. Tourist services division revenues rose 12% thanks to continued demand worldwide to see our Last AmazonLand theme park and zoo. European Operations: This region continues to provide stable but unexciting growth. Our agricultural revenues grew 3% thanks to an increase in subsidies, which now exceed $200B per year. Labour costs in the region remain unacceptably high, but the consumers in this region seem prepared to pay that back to us in premium prices for products manufactured in the region. This does allow us to minimize labour transfer costs, and turnover between our companies is low. The product quality of manufactured goods is exceptional, which allows us limited opportunity to sell replacement goods to consumers in this region. Furthermore, these consumers continue to have small families, below replacement levels, so the number of new consumers is unacceptably low. Our political leverage (discussed below) in the region is the lowest in our world, so we have been unable to persuade governments to import more new consumers to stimulate growth. Overall, a disappointing and frustrating year for our operations in this region. African and Middle Eastern Operations: It was another sensational year of double-digit growth for our operations in this region. War remains the world’s number one industry, and its most profitable, and this region accounts for over half of war-related business sales. Sales of defense equipment and supplies to governments in this region rose 33%, while sales to opponents of these governments rose 19%. Now that the governments are paying us with land, the opponents of governments just cannot compete with the governments to pay the annual double-digit price increases we have been able to put through on our full defense equipment and supplies line in recent years. While governments in the region are pleased that their opponents are finding it increasingly difficult to pay our prices, some of our shareholders are concerned that without armed opposition, demand for GlobalCorp’s defense products may soon decline. But we assure our shareholders that, because balkanization in the region has resulted in twice as many countries (and hence governments) in the region as there were before, we see almost unlimited growth potential for the defense division as these countries begin focusing more on ‘defense’ from each other. We are pleased to report that as payment for defense revenues, we have now acquired over half of all the land in the region. Our theme parks in the region, especially the religious theme parks, are doing record business, up 128% over last year. Recreational pharmaceutical sales from the region are up 44%, with most of the product going to our consumers in the European and Asian regions. Since most non-government consumers in the region have neither money nor land to offer us, we continue to focus away from supplying this high-risk consumer segment, as governments there have been unwilling to provide subsidies that would provide us with a satisfactory ROI to re-enter this market. Asian and Pacific Operations: In contrast, non-government consumers in our Asian and Pacific region have been an excellent growth market. We are delighted to see that consumers in this region appear to be emulating the buying behaviours of North American consumers, especially acceptance of the premium value of brand name labels, and of high levels of personal indebtedness — and there are eight times as many of them. Since we acquired the last of the major Asian coal operations and have introduced our new discount nuclear power plant models, energy product division sales to the region have doubled for the third year in a row. And while land acquisition in payment for these purchases has not been as quick as in the rest of the third world, we are pleased to report that this year we acquired Tibet from the government of China, in payment for our construction of the fifth and sixth Chinese mega-dam projects. We welcome all Tibetans to the happy family of GlobalCorp ‘corporate citizens’. North American Operations: It is hard to separate our reports on North American and Asian/Pacific operations because the two regions have developed such strong consumer emulation and economic co-dependence. We continue our policy of operating manufacturing facilities in North America only if they are staffed by no less than 75% imported workers. This has enabled us to keep costs low and productivity high for these few remaining North American plants. The situation for North-American-born consumers is problematic for several reasons. Their work ethic is poor. They expect high wages. They are over-educated but under-skilled. Because they have had access to inexpensive Asian-made goods, they have been unwilling to pay a premium for domestically-made products, and as a result the European high wages/high prices model simply will not work in North America. In fact, many North Americans from Europe have started returning to Europe, and we are beginning to see a similar ‘reverse-immigration’ to Asia as well. But there simply is no need for a lot of managers, or workers as a whole, in our North American operations. As a result, we are now considering focusing away from the individual North American consumer, except as a market for our Asian consumer goods manufactured products and our Latin American recreational pharmaceutical products. These consumers are already at their debt limits, and their income prospects are not exceptional. These concerns do not apply to the North American governments, however, who continue to be wonderful customers and supporters. We are pleased to report that these governments recently eliminated the last corporate and other taxes on GlobalCorp activities, have been extremely generous selling us very valuable land at reasonable prices and eliminating and under-enforcing regulations affecting our operations. In addition, they continue to provide our North American agricultural division over $200B per year in subsidies. They are also, of course, our number one customer for our number one industry, defense, and their appetite and willingness to pay annual price increases remains substantial. And as a significant part of the consumer population of North America is becoming increasingly violent as their value as both producers and consumers declines, our security and incarceration division is also generating double-digit increases in revenues, as the number of North Americans housed involuntarily in various GlobalCorp-run public facilities approaches three million. Government and Public Relations: As we have explained in previous MD&A reports, our objective is to establish a true ‘fulfillment’ relationship model with governments the word over: They buy from us, they pay us with money, land or other commodities we find of value, they impose no taxes or regulations on us of any kind. This is a true ‘free-market’ model, one which our shareholders demand and which governments are increasingly providing to us. But it is a continuing struggle, as some consumers continue to try to get governments to impose restrictions on us. And although we are currently unchallenged by competition of any kind, this does not mean it is not a free market. If consumers are not happy with the wage freezes in place in all our facilities world-wide, they are free to set up their own companies (which, thanks to us, are for the most part now tax-free). If they are not happy with the price increases we put through each year on all our products, which we must do to meet shareholder expectations, they are free to look for someone else to buy from, or not buy at all. We are able to take advantage of our global reach, access to the cheapest commodities and labour markets, and economies of scale to produce and offer products at a price that is lower than small producers could match, yet high enough to provide our shareholders with an excellent ROI. To sustain this, we are continually looking for cheaper sources and processes, further reductions to taxes and regulations, and additional government subsidies, but all of these are becoming harder and harder to find, which is why we have started raising prices. We are responsible to our shareholders, and cannot do otherwise. We are not responsible to consumers — it is not our job to provide them with high-paying, interesting employment, or employment at all. That is the job of the government and society through the education system. It is not our job to protect the environment, or the quality of life in all the communities in which we operate. That too is the government’s job. The anti-globalization protesters, unions and eco-terrorists don’t seem to appreciate that their beef should not be with us, it should be with their governments. They can try to persuade governments to regulate the economy more, while we will, as we must, try to persuade them to regulate less. They can use consumer lobbies and their votes, while we will use corporate lobbies and campaign support. Whichever side is more persuasive will win. That’s what freedom is all about. Image from article in The Economist on Joel Bakan’s The Corporation |
July 27, 2005
Message from a Mushroom
(This meditation came to me in the moments between sleep and awakening this morning. I was not smoking any mushrooms at the time.) Good morning, Dave, and any other humans who are reading this message. It will be interesting to see how good a job this ’software’ (we love that word!) does at translating our thoughts and feelings into a language that you can understand, that has some meaning to you. We are the collection of mushrooms under the Spruce trees in Dave’s back yard. This, to our knowledge, is the first attempt to capture our message in human-readable form. The first thing you need to appreciate is that we are unable to use, in any meaningful sense, the first person ‘I’ in describing who we are or what we feel. We are collective, we are plural, in three senses. First, we are simple and integral enough to recognize that we are a collection of cells, working in harmony to do our job, which manifests itself as one organism but is in fact more like a hive, a plural presence, a billion cells each aware of each other, and each cell in turn is a collection of its parts, its members, and so on infinitely. Secondly, as a group of mushrooms, we are indivisible, our interest is collective. We are concerned with our survival, as a group, in this lovely damp dark place in this yard you call ‘yours’. And thirdly, our collective interest is subordinate to the interest of this entire community, this ecos, so if the bunnies who live in that burrow over there come and eat us, that is just fine — we live on as a part of their consciousness and as part of this place. We are essentially of this place, that is what defines us, the mushrooms, the bunnies, the rock and the soil and the rain, the animate and the inanimate. We are this place. This must be very difficult for you to understand, as we see that your species lives a very lonely, individual and detached life. You are in such conflict with other humans, all of you, and with us too, as your insensitive and destructive ways, your possessiveness, this need you have for ‘property’, to own things that can never really belong to you indicates, because, you see, although you seem to have lost the instinctive knowledge and the ’sense’ to understand it, you are in fact a part of us. You are just lost, confused by the separateness that your minds have created for you, that frightening, alien and dissonant world inside your individual heads. Perhaps one day you will master this admirably complex machinery between your ears, and rejoin us. You cannot be happy, and cannot stop being insensitive and destructive, until you do. All of this is easy for us to understand because we are not burdened with a complex brain with all the noise and the imaginings it seems able to conjure up. We have no choice but to live here, now, in the real world and in the moment. By all rights you should be much more ‘alive’ than the rest of ‘us’, yet somehow you seem not to be, you seem very dead to the world, and your brain looks as if it spends most of its time examining itself, lost and disconnected from the whole, and its purpose, your purpose, our purpose, which is to help Gaia — that is, to help the collective us — thrive on this amazing blue ball in the dark night of space (as the birds and insects describe it to us), thanks of course to the Sun, one of our other sacred things (or gods as you call them, or at least used to). Look now, see there the sun peeking through the Spruce needles, and the droplets of dew dripping down from them onto us. Are these not wondrous to you, the epitome of joy, a reason to live and to fight to keep Gaia whole, prevent it from dying again in what you call an ‘extinction’? And look there, a tiny spider weaves her web, its lovely pattern caught in the rays of the morning sun — how can you not see this as sacred, how can you not see it, period? We feel so badly for you, poor conflicted humans, so unhappy, so misguided, so dissatisfied. What can we do to show you that you are still welcome here, you are still part of us, though you have renounced your Gaia citizenship and lost the intuition and the sense to see it? All you need to do is come close, really see us, feel us, sense us, trust your instincts, listen, pay attention, stop thinking and just be, let go, and you will understand? We are using your words, your language to try to explain to you what we feel and what we want for you, but still you do not seem to understand. Your language, far from being a vehicle for understanding, seems to us so poor in its capacity to communicate anything important, anything essential! Instead it seems to further isolate you, disconnect you from us, from your home, from where you belong. It is so abstract, so weak in vocabulary of the concepts that have real meaning to us, to all of us. If only you still had the capacity to understand our language, this communication would be easy, effortless. But your software seems able to translate in one direction, alas. We don’t know what else we can tell you, beyond this great important truth of belonging, of paying attention, of seeing the sacred. Keep practicing, stay close to us, pay attention and in time it will, we hope, come back to you. We are waiting here to welcome you, joyously, home. Now, is there something you would like to say to us, something we can learn from you, with that massive human brain of yours? For a start, we love your music, and we would like to know what it means. And, please tell us, why are you crying? Photo by Inda at givnology.com |
July 26, 2005
Greenwashing
 Open any progressive newspaper or magazine these days and you’re likely to see a barrage of advertisements for some of the most socially and environmentally irresponsible and destructive corporations on the planet, extolling their own virtues in carefully contrived hard-sells designed to create the myth that they actually care about anything other than maximizing their bottom line. It’s called greenwashing (a variant of whitewashing, the time-honoured way of covering up illegal and immoral activities with a thin veneer of denial, false alibis, coverups, indignant protestations and lies). This week’s New Yorker has ‘everything is wonderful, especially us’ ads for Chevron and BP before you even get to the table of contents. Can you imagine the Wall Street Journal or trashtalk radio allowing PETA and the WWF to advertise in those media, without so much as a comment? Greenwashing, defined in the OED as ìdisinformation disseminated by an organization so as to present an environmentally responsible public imageî, is essentially deceptive advertising, but because this advertising is not talking about its product, it is not illegal. It is, of course, morally reprehensible that corporations ranking near the top of the Boycott List for their interminable litany of irresponsible actions, would choose to lie (mostly by omission) to citizens and consumers, and then write off the cost of these lies as a tax deduction, as a ‘cost of doing business’. The taxpayer therefore gets a triple hit — they pay more for the product to cover the cost of the deceptive ads, they pay a proportionally higher share of taxes (individuals are not allowed to write off the cost of their lies as a tax deduction), and, ultimately, they pay for the socially and environmentally irresponsible behaviour of these corporate liars — global warming, pollution-related health costs, the social costs of offshoring and stripping away of employee benefits, the cost of wars to secure cheap energy, the massive degradation of land and loss of biodiversity etc., that these corporations are directly responsible for. Remember, ExxonMobil, the most irresponsible corporation of them all, has yet to pay a penny for the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster, one of the most flagrant and extreme environmental crimes in our planet’s history. The tactics here are two-fold: (1) brainwash uncritical citizens into believing that corporations really do care about social and environmental issues, and (2) sap the energy and blunt the intensity of critical citizens by forcing them to respond to greenwashing ads and by inviting them into meaningless ‘dialogues’ that will make them believe the corporation in question is actually interested in at least listening to their concerns. So what can be done about it? Not much, alas:
We’re not going to stop it. Greenwashing is a multi-billion dollar activity that is carefully and professionally orchestrated using all available corporatist machinery: Corporations, powerful industry associations, heavily-financed lobby groups and the governments they have bought. But if we take the steps listed above, greenwashers might find that their efforts are starting to backfire on them. The presence of these self-serving ads might start to be seen less as an indication of corporate responsibility than as evidence the corporation has something to hide. As in “Methinks they doth protest too much”. Cartoon from Minimum Security by Stephanie McMillan |
July 25, 2005
Freakonomics and Complexity
 The best-seller Freakonomics by economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner never mentions the word “complexity” in its 200+ pages of entertaining correlation analysis, but at its heart it is a book about complex adaptive systems, and about the consequences of our reckless passion for treating them as merely complicated. In fact, it’s more about statistics and social studies than it is about economics.
As a reminder, the difference between complicated and complex systems is that only the former are completely knowable, analyzable, and subject to rigorous cause-and-effect analysis. Complicated systems are the left-brainer’s dream: To decide what to do all you need to do is identify all the variables, determine which causes which (using root cause analysis), draw systems thinking diagrams to depict the relationships, assess the possible points of intervention that could lead to a different and desired result (e.g. turn a self-reinforcing vicious circle into a virtuous one), recommend those interventions and collect your fee. Very scientific, and lots of fun. Unfortunately, in the modern world, complicated systems are fairly rare. Complex systems are the rule, and they are not completely knowable or analyzable because the number of variables is essentially infinite, and hence the consequences of any particular intervention are largely unpredictable. You need to use a more sophisticated, less scientific approach when you’re dealing with complex systems, and be more tentative in your assessments. Freakonomics deconstructs some of the many erroneous and dangerous assessments we tend to make, and actions we therefore take, when we treat complex systems as merely complicated. Its authors tell us “look beneath the surface” to discover the complexity within, and the concept is represented on the cover as an apple with the (unexpected) insides of an orange. Dave Snowden tells us that the approach to complex systems is “probe, sense, respond” in contrast to the “sense, analyze, respond” approach appropriate for complicated systems. Analysis is futile, but that doesn’t mean the probes beneath the surface can’t provide us with useful and compelling information that can allow us to act in a way that will most likely be helpful and positive. Dealing with complex systems requires pattern recognition, Snowden says. Our long-term memory has a capacity of about 40,000 patterns (models, archetypes, plans, idealizations and other representations of reality), and when we see, hear or otherwise pay attention to something we only perceive and internalize the 5-10% that resonates and is consistent with those patterns, that understanding of reality. There is evidence that until someone creates a mental pattern for a phenomenon, they are unable to ’see’ it at all. And once a pattern has been set in the brain, it becomes very difficult to dislodge. So when we see what looks on the surface like an apple, we can’t even conceive of it being an orange inside. Freakonomics probes deeper than we normally do, challenges any assumptions about causal relationships (since those assumptions may be oversimplifying complex systems as merely complicated ones), and looks for the patterns that the rest of us can’t or don’t see. Some examples:
Some of these findings are provocative (in fact the first and fifth have created a lasting furor). But the authors are not attempting to argue causality here, or even about the wisdom of doing certain things. They are probing, using correlation and regression techniques applied against huge amounts of data, to show what correlates with what, and in the process debunking a lot of myths about causes of and remedies for a lot of problems in our society. What they are doing is eliminating as many factors as possible, so that they can say with reasonable assurance that all other things being equal, there is a very high, significant correlation between X (e.g. availability of abortion) and Y (e.g. subsequent declines in crime rates) — or that there is not. Draw your own conclusions. The authors are great believers in another principle of dealing with complexity — the importance and value of attractors and barriers (which Freakonomics calls incentives and disincentives) in bringing about desired actions or behaviour change. They believe you can learn a great deal by studying which attractors and barriers actually work in other situations (by ‘work’ they mean that the introduction or existence of attractors and barriers, whether natural or man-made, correlates powerfully, all other things being equal, with a subsequent desirable behaviour change. The attractors and barriers to jobs, for example, largely determine who goes into different fields, and two attractors (that it requires specialized skills you have, and that it is in high demand) and two barriers (excessive supply and unpleasant working conditions) correlate most with what the job pays. That’s the reason why, the authors say, most crack dealers still live with their mothers (excessive supply of applicants for the job) and why prostitutes earn more than architects (’danger pay’, higher demand and relative shortage of supply). But they also warn against the failure to consider all of the alternative variables that might have led to that condition or behaviour. For example, children with certain names tend to end up with significantly higher education and income than others, but that doesn’t mean giving your child one of these names will make their life easier. In fact, the propensity to give your child certain names correlates with a variety of other factors (such as your own education and income) which in turn correlates with your child’s success. Be careful about jumping to conclusions. There are two remarkable quotes in the book. The first is this one by economist John Kenneth Galbraith about the follow of ‘conventional wisdom’: We associate truth with convenience. with what most closely accords with self-interest or personal well-being or promises best to avoid awkward effort or unwelcome dislocation of life. We also find highly acceptable what contributes most to self-esteem. Economic and social behavior are complex, and to comprehend their character is mentally tiring. Therefore we adhere, as though to a raft, to those ideas which represent our understanding.
The next quote, on the very next page, is by Paul Krugman and provides a perfect example of Galbraith’s point: The approved story line about Mr. Bush is that he’s a bluff, honest, plain-spoken guy, and anecdotes that fit that story get reported. But if the conventional wisdom instead were that he’s a phony, a silver-spoon baby who pretends that he’s a cowboy, journalists would have plenty of material to work with.
So, say the authors, we must be wary of conventional wisdom, skeptical until and unless the data strongly supports what we are told or what we believe. Thanks to the Internet, they say, some of the ‘information asymmetries’ that lead to unsupportable conventional wisdom are disappearing. But what Malcolm Gladwell calls ‘learned helplessness’ is still with us — our inability to go beneath the surface, challenge and debunk conventional wisdom or instinct leads us to dysfunctional beliefs and actions: That we’re safer in an SUV than another vehicle, for example, or that we should spend more money and effort trying to prevent terrorism happening in our countries than we spend trying to prevent common bacterial and viral infections, for example. And if we want to bring about real change, we need to consider what attractors and barriers we can influence that will really affect behaviour. Those attractors and barriers can be economic (e.g. a tax shift that encourages domestic employment and penalizes waste of non-renewable resources), or social (e.g. an award or promotion, or incarceration for breaking a law), or moral (e.g. an appeal to our sense of fairness, or right and wrong). The authors also recommend what they call ‘bright-line’ attractors and barriers (those where the attractions and constraints are very clear) over those that have consequences that are ‘murkier’ (less clear or less certain). Let’s suppose we want to bring about a significant drop in birth rates worldwide. First, we would need to probe to find out why they are currently as high, and as low, as they are. We could offer economic incentives to have smaller families — though we should start by studying whether we already have them (studies suggest that, worldwide, women have on average almost one child each fewer than they would like, and cite the cost of having children as the overwhelming reason for that decision). We might offer social incentives for smaller families — like awards or special opportunities available only to childless couples. Or we might offer moral incentives for smaller families and disincentives for large ones — by pointing out how much large families contribute to our unsustainable way of life, or by having leaders and the media publicly repudiate the reactionary pope and other religious leaders who encourage large families, and suggest that the followers of such religions are weak and irresponsible. Levitt and Dubner would have us believe that these would be far more likely to work than political or educational methods. But alternatively we could look at the reasons why current birth rates are where they are now, and identify incentives and disincentives that might address those reasons rather than the decision on how many children people choose to have directly. The financial pinch motivation isn’t a helpful one — there are no attractors or barriers we can use to exploit it, short of deliberately trying to plunge the world into an economic depression (and Bush and Greenspan are working hard at that). In the third world, many women claim they have large families because, in the absence of a social safety net, it’s the only way they can hope to make ends meet in their senior years (and in many cases, the only way they can make ends meet period — children are the only assets they have). Now that’s something we can do something about: By providing incentives to third world countries to provide universal health care, education, old age pensions and social assistance programs for their citizens, we might dramatically reduce family sizes in the third world quite quickly. Of course, we’d need to confirm that such incentives actually work, but we could do that by studying planned and actual family sizes in countries that have significantly improved social services, controlling for other variables. And we’d need to look at the fact that, regardless of what they might say, the first and (to a lesser degree) second generations of immigrants to countries with comparatively good social services continue to have a large number of children, and understand why that is. The point is, the means to bring about change is hiding there in the information in that orange beneath the apple peel. And while many readers have found Freakonomics either entertaining or outrageous, and are focused on the specific examples in the book, the real importance of this book is that it lends credence to complex adaptive systems approaches to understanding why things are the way they are, and how they might be made better — through mechanisms that, when we fail to look below the surface and allow ourselves to be blinded by conventional wisdom, we might never have considered. |
July 24, 2005
A New Model to Improve Social Network Mapping
 I‘ve been thinking a lot lately about communities, in the social networking, intentional community and business sense. I was struggling to come up with a model that integrates all these types of communities, and I realized that I would have to come up with a more holistic approach, one not constrained by market-based definitions of relationships.
To do so, I began thinking about communities as they function in the gift economy (or as I prefer to call it, the generosity economy). — the growing economy that includes open source, the Internet, scientific knowledge sharing, much foundation and NGO work, blogs, file sharing and a host of other ‘price-less’ exchanges of value. How could we redefine the social constructs of the market economy to suit the framework of the gift economy? Here’s what I came up with:
If you use the more inclusive gift/generosity economy constructs, your communities, networks and identities within them merge into these five broad ‘circles’, and the need to distinguish between social and business communities, networks and identities disappears. In a sense this is what is already happening as more of us cease drawing the line between our social and business identities and lives, and as more and more of what we do, powered by the Internet, is done without expectation of financial compensation. This of course is very threatening to the market economy, whose advocates would have you to believe that any activity that cannot be and is not denominated in money terms has no value (and is inevitably inefficient). So, for example, those I give to (my ‘blue’ circle) includes you, my readers, those I coach (my children and grand-daughters as well as those who pay me money for advice), and those who pay me for my expertise during projects, whether in a ‘customer-supplier’ or ‘employer-employee’ capacity. Likewise, those who give to me includes those who send me books to review, my electricity supplier, readers who send me e-mails or comments on my blog, other bloggers whose writing I read and value, the grocery store and the neighbours who give us free veggies and fruits from their garden and invite us to dinner. Whether money changes hands in any of these relationships becomes unimportant. Those I work with includes colleagues on various projects from innovation assignments to neighbourhood work bees to those in my fledgling AHA! network. Those I live with includes various degrees of relationship from those who share my house and land (human and other creatures) to the entirety of Gaia, all of us who share this tiny, fragile planet. And those I love is an amorphous group of people and animals and places that is growing at an astronomical rate. There is substantial overlap between these five communities, but I believe they are collectively exhaustive — all of our networks and communities fit within this five-circle model. And this is a model of abundance and not scarcity — if we are generous, there is no limit to the number of people we can invite into any of these circles, and the larger and richer these circles grow, the better off we all become. This takes the concept of the information or knowledge economy as one without constraint or limit to the value that can be given, and expands it to include everything — atoms, bits, and emotions. Using this model, we can define all relationships by their nature (which of the five circles they fit within) and their depth (how much we give, receive and love them, and how closely we live and work with them). And we can define ourselves by the circles of others (which circles and which others) to which we belong. So we might evaluate the nature and depth (scale of 0 to 10) of our relationships like this:
while those who we see ourselves in close relationships with might evaluate them like this:
You may think it fanciful that I’m ascribing conscious and emotional assessments to non-humans, collective groups and even places, but I certainly feel these assessments — I feel my home, the wonderful place where I live (the land, and the diverse and collective life on it) welcoming me when I return to it. Our circles, our communities do not belong to anyone, they are collective. To say these are ‘our’ circles, ‘our’ networks (as social software tries to do) is absurd — it is like saying that because we belong to the human race, or to a political party or other organization, that all of humanity, or all of the party, is somehow ‘ours’ by virtue of our definition of it including us and some ‘others’. The claiming of ‘ownership’ over such circles, such as when we talk about ‘our’ country or ‘our’ party can in fact be dangerous because it oversimplifies and homogenizes the relationship. So how would we diagram these relationships, capturing the nature (which ones of the five circles) and depth of our relationships with others, and their reciprocal sense of their relationships with us? And what about situations where others consider themselves in ‘our’ circles (or us in ‘theirs’) but we do not? We could use arrows of five colours and ten widths pointing in each direction. And we might even use dotted lines to indicate relationships we hope to develop in the future (or which others might hope to develop with us). Very complex, perhaps, and inevitably judgemental and incomplete, but imagine how valuable it might be. And if the de facto communities to which we belong, which sets of mutual links between collections of individuals might portray, define (in a social sense, anyway) who we are, then such a map might in fact be a more accurate and useful portrait of us than anything an artist, photographer, genealogist or DNA scientist could come up with. When someone asks us who we are, how do we usually respond? We say what we do (i.e. define ourselves by those we work with), and/or what company we work for (i.e. define ourselves by those we give to). Or we say who we are related to (i.e. define ourselves by those we live with or love). We sometimes even define ourselves by who gives to us (e.g. when we drive a certain prestige brand of car or wear clothes with a certian logo), the kind of ‘belonging’ that, pathetically, you have to pay for, Another form of this is when we define ourselves by our subject-hood, by the person or group who supports us (father-figure, cult leader, religion or citizenship). How you answer this question (”I’m a consultant. I’m an analyst at Microsoft. I’m the person assigned to your account. I’m the son of X. I’m Mrs. Y. I’m Amanda’s father. I’m a member of Z. I’m a Welshman.”) may say a lot about which circles are most important to us and which we feel we belong most to. In fact we have multiple identities and we may answer that questions in the context of who is asking (which of the five circles they are probing for) — If the question comes from Amanda’s best friend’s mother, I’m more likely to say I’m Amanda’s father than to say I’m an accountant. Assuming we could develop such maps (maybe we need some way to link stories about each of our relationships to give them context and verifiability), how could we use them?
An application of all this that intrigues me is in assessing how we should (and can) change ourselves. I tend to agree with many of you that if we are to have any credibility as change advocates we need to be a role model, we need to show not tell people what needs to be done. We need to be the change. So do we start by a navel-gazing process that entails some personal, individual decisions and bold actions? Or, if our relationships and networks define us, do we start by first finding or redefining the circles, the communities to which we (and others) belong and then let those new and altered communities redefine and change us? For example, if we want to solve global warming or end world poverty do we first launch into personal study, self-improvement and individual activism, or do we first connect ourselves with those who can teach us and show us what needs to be done, and just get carried along with the collective wisdom of their activities? Could the map tell us what to do? |
July 23, 2005
A Saturday Bumper Crop
 Regular readers know that Saturday is Links day here at How to Save the World, and this past week has been a busy one. I’ve tried to organize them a bit to make your bookmarking easier:
Oil Industry Misdeeds:
Tech Finds:
Politics:
Society:
Please excuse any typos; I’m still recovering from the amazing Salon Bloggers virtual party last night. Drawing of moon maiden (there were a lot of them at the party) by Maxine Noel. |
July 22, 2005
Lawn, Yawn
 Yes, I know, there’s nothing more boring than lawn care, but here’s how to do it easily and in an environmentally friendly way. Earlier this week a group of students from Caledon Countryside Alliance came to our house, thanks to a government grant, and told us, for free, how to look after our lawn while also conserving water and without using chemicals and other unnatural methods. I promised to share this with my neighbours, and I thought some readers might be interested, too. Here is what I learned:
Save water, save time, save your health, save the environment. And say no to toxic chemicals. |
