 In the last year, Canada’s largest brewery, largest retailer, three of its largest mining companies, one of its largest steel companies and two of its largest forestry companies have been sold to foreigners. Now, the largest media and telecom conglomerate is about to be sold. The natural resource companies were sold at big premiums compared to prevailing stock price. The other companies, long-struggling, were sold for a song.
Despite the fact that the acquiring companies were generally from jurisdictions that would not have tolerated a comparable takeover by a Canadian company, the Canadian government, the corporate establishment, and the public have hardly raised a peep about this massive sell-off. Until Tuesday, that is, when Thomas Caldwell, the combative head of a large Canadian securities firm, took out full-page ‘open letter’ ads in the business section of Canada’s three largest newspapers headed “The Sellout of Corporate Canada”. His outrage was directed at the executives and ‘managers’ who pocketed millions of dollars in ‘compensation’ for these sell-offs, generous even compared to the high salaries they were earning. The motivation of the buyers was simple: They wanted the land and natural resources, finite, non-renewable resources poised to soar in price as they become scarce. They wanted the other companies for brand, market, and the elimination of competition in their respective oligopolies. The victims are the Canadian environment and the (non-executive) Canadian workers. Both are expendable externalities that are not factored into the purchase equation. To the corporatists, they have no value. The payments to the Canadian executives, people paid to steward their corporations, in Caldwell’s opinion, bordered on legal bribes. He claims it is wrong for executives to benefit from the sell-off of organizations they are supposed to be managing. The problem with this logic is that, if Canada made it illegal for Canadian executives and managers to be compensated for the sale of their companies, the buyers would simply repackage the deals as ‘long-term management agreements’ under which the executives would stay on at their hefty salaries but essentially do nothing to ‘earn’ them. There is a long tradition of doing this in takeovers, a kind of extended early retirement that makes the deal look somehow more ethical. Anti-combines law has essentially not been enforced in Canada for over thirty years, because it became too political to try to decide how many companies might be needed in an industry (in Canada? Globally?) to ensure competition. It was easier to say “the world is going global and size and consolidation is needed for any company to compete in a global marketplace”. This is nonsense, but it has been said often and long enough that most people now accept it. It is also true that there are basically no Canadian-owned or Canadian-controlled companies in any of the global oligopolies. The real obscenity, I think, is the sale of our land and scarce resources to indifferent rapacious foreigners, and the utter lack of effective anti-pollution and anti-waste regulations to prevent foreign and Canadian companies from fouling our land, air, soil, water, and ultimately our food with toxins and garbage. And our willingness, once hoodwinked by NAFTA and the WTO, to allow junky foreign goods (often made from Canadian materials sold raw and cheap) to be dumped in our country without recognition of their damage to Canadian enterprises who cannot compete because we require them to pay decent wages and to maintain a modest level of social and environmental responsibility. And the salaries and benefits some executives receive that are out of proportion to the value they provide (since, as James Surowiecki has explained, the distorted ‘market’ is the sole determinant of this remuneration). So the answer, in my opinion, is not to demand ethical stewardship behaviour of Canadian managers, or to resurrect politically paralyzed anti-competition review boards. A better answer is to require owners of land and natural resources to live in the community where that land and those resources are located. And to tax ‘bads’ (pollution, waste, use of non-renewable resources, to discourage their use, and imports, to level the playing field for domestic producers) and excessive wealth (to redistribute it, to eliminate poverty and the inequity that underlies a host of social problems, and stop rewarding greed) — and cancel grievous ‘free’ trade agreements and taxes on employment and clean, responsible business. And to teach and encourage entrepreneurship, so we have better choices than the crap produced by most multinational oligopolies. These answers would be simple to enact and straightforward to administer. No subjective debate over the morality of particular transactions required. Rather than just trying to prevent corporatist oligopolies from doing their worst, we should make it easy for people who care todo better. Category: Corporatism and ‘Free’ Trade
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July 31, 2007
Workarounds for Oligopoly
July 30, 2007
What We Care About
 In response to my Saturday post, reader Chaitanya sent me a quote from the late Stephen J. Gould:
This is important. More than half of the nearly 7 billion humans on this planet now live in cities, in ecosystems that are disconnected from the resources and places and plants and animals that they depend on for food, water and energy. To that extent, cities are ‘artificial’ environments — they are not sustainable without resources that come entirely from outside them, ‘mysteriously’ (because the people in the city have no direct personal experience or knowledge of how their food, water and power gets to them). Children in cities can be excused for thinking food ‘comes’ from the grocery store, that water comes magically from the tap, and that electricity comes from the switch.
We cannot expect people to care about factory farmed animals’ misery, because to them it is invisible. It is no more ‘real’ than what they read about in story books. We cannot expect people to care about the end of oil or the end of water or the end of electricity or the end of telecommunication because they don’t see or know where these things come from, and their scarcity is a mere abstraction. I have spoken to people who lived through the Great Depression, and deliberately read first-hand accounts of the incredible suffering and deprivation that those people lived through, and their astonishment that things they had ‘taken for granted’ could disappear so quickly. But this is lost knowledge, and we cannot expect people to care about it now.
We cannot expect people to care about the loss of biodiversity, about species extinction, about the death of the oceans. This is too cerebral, probably even if you depend on hunting or fishing for your livelihood. We cannot expect people to care about global warming, despite Al Gore’s powerpoint slides. It’s the specific, the personal that we care about, not the broad, conceptual issues. As Frederick Barthelme says in his wonderful advice to writers wanting to engage their audience: “Apropos the big issues, note that parents don’t sit around getting heartbroken about abortion, they get heartbroken because they killed the baby.”
You can of course watch a National Geographic special that shows a baby animal dying of starvation because of human encroachment on their territory, or poisoned by some man-made toxin, but it is still abstract: You didn’t cause this, and besides, it’s a million miles away, and how do you know it was human encroachment or poisoning that caused it. Change that channel, fast! Who wants to see that stuff we can’t do anything about, and which wasn’t our fault anyway?
We cannot expect people to care about deforestation or strip mining or the atrocity of tar sands extraction. That kind of stuff happens someplace else. And the trees have to go to make room for houses eventually anyway, right?
The continuation and rapacity of our industrial economy, and the continuing exponential growth of human numbers, depend utterly on this disconnection, in lands that have been stripped of everything that made them natural places, and expecially our cities (including the suburbs, the exurbs, and the monoculture farm hinterlands that sprawl outwards at an ever-accelerating rate, until only the deserts, the arctic, the mountain tundra and other ‘natural wastelands’ unfit for human habitation are left.
Lawns and gardens and parks full of non-native species soaked in fertilizers and herbicides and pesticides are no substitute for natural places. We cannot expect people to “forge an emotional bond with nature” when this is what they think nature is. We can be backyard birdwatchers or zoo-goers or humane farmers or urban tree-planters or love our companion animals, and get some inkling of what nature is, but not long enough or deeply enough to form an emotional bond to it.
We can sense, from doing these things, or from watching March of the Penguins or from a weekend hike, that there is something important ‘out there’. But then we are brought back to our urban ‘reality’, and we have things that we must do, and when they’re done we’re too tired to do things that perhaps should be done.
We don’t care enough. And that’s perfectly understandable. How can we love what we do not see, feel, smell, hear, taste, know?
John Gray would tell us that it’s too late to change this. More and more of us, in proportionate and absolute terms, are now so disconnected from nature that we cannot care enough to bring about the huge changes that would be necessary, that are necessary. I have been at conferences full of brilliant, sensitive people who want to make the world a better place (mostly through technological invention) who, when I speak to them of the importance of having a deep connection with nature, look at me as if I’m from Mars. They want to make cities more livable. They want pets to be treated humanely. They want to find new resources and technologies to sustain the unsustainable lives they live now. They want to reduce violence and crime in their neighbourhoods.
When I was 21, fighting the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline proposal back in the early 1970s, I managed to get an audience with the Liberal federal minister of natural resources, and I explained how the proposed pipeline would destroy caribou migration routes and melt the fragile Arctic permafrost. He looked at me, amazed, and said simply “Who cares about the permafrost?”
I did not answer. I was too stunned. At that time, there were some people who cared about the permafrost, and we won a temporary victory. But this year, a generation later, the government is poised to approve the pipeline, because they need the clean energy to power the extraction of dirty oil from the Alberta Tar Sands. Thanks to global warming, the permafrost is already melting, and the northern migration of swarms of insects has made life so miserable for the caribou that the herds are thinning. Like the polar bears who can no longer find firm ice to hunt from, they are wasting away and giving up. Soon they will all be gone, and we won’t have to care any more, the few of us who did.
So I continue to grieve for Gaia. But that does not prevent me from living a life of great joy, or from doing what I can to make the world a slightly better place. The emotional bond I have with nature is strong, and cannot be broken — in fact it grows stronger every day, as I learn more and strengthen my connection with all-life-on-Earth. I shall continue to fight for what I love, even though I know it is a losing cause. It is enough to try.
To those who understand, I offer my love, my sympathy, my silent nod of recognition and connection and appreciation. To those who do not, who can not, I offer my respect and understanding, and hope against hope that you will somehow come to re-discover what you are missing, and join us. We cannot care about what we do not know personally, and how can we know nature personally when we grow up in a world opposed to and disconnected from her?
Category: Understanding How Gaia Works
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July 29, 2007
Sunday Open Thread – July 29, 2007
 Lightning Branches, by Andrew Campbell (a depiction of Now Time) What I’m thinking about, and planning on writing (and podcasting) about soon: Our Youthful Skeletons: The NYT has unearthed some letters written by Hilary Clinton in her youth. I shudder at the thought that this could happen to me, and I suspect Hilary’s not too thrilled either. Now that everything we write is archived online, what scrutiny, what unfair out-of-context youthful writings will be dredged up to embarrass and discredit politicians and celebrities in a generation? Will we one day have the right to purge the Net of early writing? Will it even be possible? The Three Seductions of Organized Religion: Absolution, salvation, and uncritical community. Damned appealing promises. Are these why so many people continue to belong, even fervently, to organized religions? Out of Time: The realization that time is not linear, is not just a dimension like the dimensions of space, could change our perception and understanding of everything. When we spend so much of our life inside our own head, what happens when the foundation of that life suddenly vanishes? When we measure our accomplishments, the progress of our lives, in terms of clock time, what happens when we find that measure is a chimera? Blog-Hosted Conversations: Starting the last week of August, once a week, this blog will feature 30-minute conversations, initially on the subject of “What is your model of a better way to live, and what capacities do we need to develop or re-learn to live that way?” Open Thread Question: |
July 28, 2007
Saturday Links for the Week – July 28, 2007 – the Cultural Anthropology Edition
 What’s Important This Week: The World Without Us: Alan Weisman speculates on a future world without humans. Wonder how it compares to Ronald Wright’s vision? (image above is from Weisman’s book) Who Cares About Factory Farmed Animals’ Welfare?: The factory farmers say they do what they can. Their customers say they are getting better because customers demand it. The animal welfare groups say it’s because of them that the situation isn’t worse. Most ‘consumers’ still don’t want to know. Why We Don’t Care: Seth Godin explains why we only give a damn about things that we can relate to personally, even when if we all cared, we could make a big difference. That doesn’t make us heartless, just human. Thanks to Ed Diril for the link. And the Rosy Futurists Still Reassure Us: … that technology will save us, and make everything better and better. Jim Kunstler sets us straight. Thanks to Jon Husband for the link. The Care and Feeding of White Folks: Repost of a 1995 article by Earl Dunovant portrays the appearance of whites on the planet as an experiment gone wrong, and suggests what might be done. Thanks to Dale Asberry for this link, and the one that follows. Parallels Between Soviet Collapse and Current-State US: Interesting presentation by Dmitri Orlov, a witness to the Soviet collapse, on lessons in ‘collapse preparedness’ the US should be learning now. Thought for the Week: [Dave said:] James Taylor said “the secret of life is enjoying the passage of time”. He’s exactly right, but it’s so very hard to learn to do it, and to get yourself into a situation, by simplifying your life, where you can do it. With my intentional thoughts, I get to enjoy these ‘passages’ twice — once as I intend them, and again when they occur.
[Andrew replies:] No, he’s not exactly right – (is anyone about anything that is complex and living?) but i wanted just to interpose that in the context of stress, life, chance and choice etc, the way to increase awareness and aesthetic engagement (connecting begets fruitfulness) in our world(s) is to come to know through engagements with ideas (concepts) that time is manifolded and that it is best accessed as Beamish knows, through the realization (mindandbody) that there are ‘other’ (kinds of) times – like Time – i.e. animals under low stress live in that Now Time we used to talk about. I think what being in Now Time does is it affords us an experience of how we might live with more Free Energy (At de Lange) – that is to say, unlike a clock that monotonously unwinds somehow its trapped-stored energy releasing it like a slave works (a.k.a. a machine) – we might enter into a dance with creation itself so that we feel safe to collapse (creative collapse) releasing small quanta of imagination, creativity, creative perceptions from >< with that amount of energy we don’t need to uphold the whole system, meaning we let go because we decided (free will) that our deeper connection in such a cycle of Time affords us a reciprocal let come from our world – it is saying in effect – we co-create each other, you and i are mutually engaging – i will heal you (Emerson) – make you ‘whole’ (Goethe et al to Bohm and beyond) we are not separate — and if one were religious which i know you are not, then one might begin to glimpse an idea of how ‘miracles’ like resurrections might happen – and if ever a civilization needed a resurrection of some kind — it’s us NOW. [Dave wonders:] Perhaps “enjoying the passage of time” is really just letting go of linear ‘clock time’ and living at least in part in Now Time. It’s not so much that we enjoy the “passage” as that we don’t notice it, we don’t ‘pay attention’ to it. And perhaps then we realize that it is an illusion, a construct. What we enjoy is the ‘passage’ to Now Time. |
July 26, 2007
The Dynamics of Social Networks
 Social networks are by nature complex phenomena — they can never be fully known or understood, and there are an infinite number of variables that affect their evolution and their success or failure. My observation is that they are also very fragile — while some ‘bonds’ of a network may be eternal or resilient, most networks as a whole seem to be in a constant state of flux, and easily disrupted. I’ve been trying to figure out why this is, and what might be done to make whole networks more resilient and more effective. Dave Snowden has pointed out that our networks do not include us as individuals, but rather as identities. This means that you may have people networking with you in your various identities e.g. as a parent, as a co-worker, as a member of a project etc. He says we have both formal (formed for us) and informal (self-organized) manifestations of each of three different types of identity:
Dave argues that informal, self-selected, self-organized networks tend to be more effective than formal networks, for various reasons such as greater trust and less hierarchy. But while formal networks can be controlled and directed to some extent by those with appropriate authority, informal networks are much harder to influence. The best way to stimulate and influence them is through what Dave calls boundary conditions (or rules), attractors and barriers, instituted early in the network’s evolution.
To be effective, informal networks need to have (I’ve amplified Dave’s list somewhat here):
So, for example, if you have identified a customer need in your enterprise, but you are stuck because of some limitations of current technology, you may try to establish or join a network of people, perhaps around the world in different organizations and capacities, who care about that particular technology constraint. In this case success is easy to measure — you either invent or discover something that overcomes that constraint or you don’t. Some members will tell stories about what they have been doing or read about. Others will just lurk — they may not have enough to contribute but be waiting to jump as solutions and approaches to the problem emerge. If you add an attractor ( e.g. a prize) you may get some members to work harder on the problem. If the network gets too small to be doing much, or too short on diversity of members, or too large to keep track of who’s doing what, it may dissolve or fragment. You may be able to impose some constraints on membership to keep this from happening.
This is an example of an informal network that attracts members based on their interest in the specific project, i.e. it is project-based rather than role- or membership-based. Once an effective solution to the technology problem has been found, it is unlikely that the network will endure.
Blog networks probably combine all three types of identity basis: Some people will ‘join’ (e.g. subscribe to a blog’s feed and comment regularly) because they have role affinity — other knowledge management directors or consultants, for example, subscribing to a KM blog. Some will be attracted by membership affinity — a shared belief in or love of something, such as Gaia, or vintage cars. Some will be drawn by project/event affinity — getting Obama elected, for example. My blog covers so much diverse territory that it creates dissonance for some readers ( e.g. those who love my practical articles on KM but loathe my political views). The networks of people it attracts are not always congruent (though I’m surprised and delighted how often they are).
Role affinity draws principally on shared or related actions and behaviours. Membership affinity draws principally on shared beliefs or passions. Project/event affinity draws principally on shared objectives.
What makes informal networks so fragile is that our identities are constantly changing. If I move from a job as Chief Knowledge Officer to one as Facilitator, it’s likely to affect which networks I select to belong to. If I give up on the political process, I’m likely to abandon networks whose members still believe in it. Once the election is over, by campaign networks are likely to dissolve. Shared problems eventually lose interest or urgency, or are given up as insoluble, or get solved. Progress may become impossible to measure or impossible to achieve. Rewards may lose their lustre. Or despite membership constraints, the cohesion of the network may just dissipate to the point there is no focus or purpose left.
While informal networks are fragile, formal networks are, usually, ineffective. There is something in human nature that makes us object to being told who we must network with — it’s like being forced into an arranged marriage. Imposed formal networks depend on hierarchy and power, and on sanctions for refusing to work within the prescribed network. Given our affinity for sharing peer-to-peer, this means communication in formal networks is usually forced and dysfunctional — instructions go down and are (often) ignored, while data is extracted (often) begrudgingly and reported upward. We share knowledge only when and to the extent that we have to.
The most powerful phenomenon in formal networks is workarounds. These are the ways we find to do things effectively despite the formal networks pressuring us to do things (usually) ineffectively. It’s not that those high in the hierarchy want us to be ineffective. They just don’t know any better. They have never done our jobs so they don’t know the best way to do them. And because messengers are shot, they are not told what isn’t working or why, so their decisions are inherently flawed by lack of essential information.
Workarounds are what make the world work as well as it does, despite the dysfunctions of hierarchy and size. Courageous organizations (those that are small enough to be able to do it, anyway) recognize this by not establishing any formal networks, by having no hierarchy. They have no need for workarounds, just trust in people’s ability to figure out how to do their best given the constraints they have to live with.
This doesn’t just apply to the workplace. Family members learn that “it’s better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission” from a domineering parent whose advice makes no sense. Likewise team members with a bad coach. Wherever there are formal networks, there will be workarounds to make them work better than they otherwise would.
All of this explanation of social network dynamics presumes that you subscribe (as I do) to what Lakoff calls the liberal-progressive worldview. Those who have a conservative worldview tend to prefer formality and hierarchy and organized order, and they would have written this article from a completely different point of view.
While they are welcome to do so, the fact is that there are, in many networks, formal and informal, conservatives. These people prefer formal networks to ‘messy’ informal ones. They like to be told what to do and how to do it by someone with the authority to do so, and they trust authority more than they trust the ability of their peers to make decisions. They loathe workarounds.
What does their presence do to the dynamics of a social network?
First, they will be reluctant participants in informal networks, hesitant to trust them. This will inevitably make informal networks less effective, or, more likely, because these conservatives will self-exclude from such networks, making them poorer for the lack of their knowledge, ideas and experience.
Secondly, they will attempt, with the best of intentions, to try to formalize informal networks (to add ‘discipline’ to them), to denigrate them when they run counter to the operation of formal networks, and to disable or at least formalize workarounds.
Third, their obedient success in the organization may make them pariahs among the by-passed informal networkers, and may well drive the informal networkers out of the organization entirely.
So what you end up with in many larger organizations are two modi operandi going on simultaneously and at cross-purposes: One group improvisationally and creatively finding the best way to do things by networking informally peer-to-peer, and working around imposed constraints, and the other trying desperately to make things work as they are ’supposed’ to, according to the manual, the boss’ edicts, and the organization chart, trying to impose ‘best practices’ and block workarounds.
No wonder so many large organizations are such unhappy places, since the dissonance between these two ways of working must be infuriating to both groups. In fact, it is even more complex than that, because most of us sometimes see the value of doing things differently from our normal modus operandi: Liberal-progressives see the need for organizational rigour in areas where there is considerable risk, while conservatives see no harm in informal networks for some creative tasks or as an outlet for frustration with the organization’s rules.
And as liberal-progressives move up in the organization, they generally become more inclined to see the value in formal networks that can exercise their new power and authority (and by embracing them, they often find they move up even faster). Meanwhile, conservatives who’ve been around awhile start to learn what works in reality and what only works in theory, and may tend to become more accommodating of informal networks, workarounds, and those who beg forgiveness instead of asking permission.
They’re like the stern parent who discovers to his astonishment that, when the rebellious kids are given the chance to set their own rules, their self-discipline is far more stringent and effective than imposed discipline ever was.
Every once in awhile I take a look at my networks, formal and informal, and the different identities in which I find affinity with others. They are so complex and so dynamic that they cannot really be mapped. And what’s most fascinating is that, if I asked the people in my networks (in their various identities) to map how they saw their networks involving me, I’m sure they would be utterly different from how I would draw them. Dave who?
Category: Social Networking
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July 25, 2007
Intentional Meditation?
 I‘m pretty hopeless at meditating. I just don’t seem to be able to slow down and focus my mind sufficiently to get the benefits from it. I have, however, found that certain focused activities do get me into a state that is very relaxed, open and attentive:
These are all easy, effortless tasks that let my mind wander, so perhaps I do get close to a meditative state while I’m doing them.
What I like to do in this state is not meditation but rather intention. This entails thinking in detail, step by step, about how I am going to do something (something easy and certain and enjoyable), in the near future. I wrote about my mid-year intentions recently, and these are what I think about. These thoughts are not fantasies, wishful thinking or resolutions. They are realizations , thoughts about things I am in the process of doing, and that I am certain of completing. They are stories in process.
I generally start with short-term (next day or few days) intentions and then if time permits move to longer term (next few months) intentions — beyond that is too far for reasonable certainty, and premature for intention. One day at a time.
So my current meditative intentional thoughts are about:
These are delightful thoughts, full of joy, discovery, learning, creation, letting go and letting come, letting things emerge and make sense. If our life is a movie we each star in, I’m looking at tomorrow’s script, and learning and rehearsing my lines.
James Taylor said “the secret of life is enjoying the passage of time”. He’s exactly right, but it’s so very hard to learn to do it, and to get yourself into a situation, by simplifying your life, where you can do it. With my intentional thoughts, I get to enjoy these ‘passages’ twice — once as I intend them, and again when they occur. I don’t know if this is anything like meditation. The word ‘meditation’ means to ‘turn over’, to take appropriate measures, to consider and do what needs to be done. The word ‘intend’ means to stretch towards. Perhaps my ‘intentional meditation’ is too decided, not sufficiently considered. While I’m thinking, I certainly can imagine possible obstacles to achieving my intention, but I imagine, at almost the same time as these obstacles occur to me, natural workarounds for them.
What do you think? Am I on to something, or too self-confident for my own good? And is this really meditation, or is it a poor substitute, forthose unable to slow down and consider fully and thoughtfully? Category: Let-Self-Change
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July 24, 2007
Personal vs Collective Self-Interest
 The idea of the ‘free’ market economy is that, if each of us pursues our enlightened self-interest, the result will be an optimal balancing of those interests, and an economy that produces what people most need, or at least want. This blog has explained why, as wonderful as that idea may be, it has never been and can never be realized, and our pursuit of it, as if such an idealized notion can work, has led to some colossally dumb ways of doing things. As a consequence:
However, even enlightened economists able to see that the ‘free’ market economy is an unachievable ideal, and a myth, tend to acknowledge that, barring these distortions, it makes sense to pay attention to consumers’ expressions of self-interest, as being a reasonable representation of what people need (or think they need) and want — an expression of the ‘wisdom of crowds’.
But Wisdom of Crowds author James Surowiecki, who went to such pains to explain in his book the need for a surveyed ‘crowd’ to be objective and independent of ‘groupthink’ (if their collective perspectives are to be truly wise), points out in this week’s New Yorker that the self-interest of individuals, taken collectively, can be very different from the collective self-interest of the group as a whole.
As an example he notes that, in a market ‘undistorted’ by regulation, people choose to buy large, gas-gulping, clumsy vehicles (SUVs and light trucks) — because they (mistakenly, as Malcolm Gladwell points out) believe they are safer, that if your car is bigger and heavier than the other guy’s, in an accident you will fare better. But when asked if they would favour regulations that ban such vehicles, they overwhelmingly say yes.
Another example that was reported recently is that, while the majority of business owners want less social and environmental regulation of their industry (because they think it puts them at a competitive disadvantage versus countries that lack such regulation), an overwhelming number would not only support, but would actually prefer, strong social and environmental regulations on business provided they were across-the-board (affecting every competitor equitably) and rigorously enforced.
We can see examples of this everywhere. The expressed self-interest of individual buyers in the absence of regulation is very different from their acknowledged collective self-interest in an equitably regulated environment. It’s not regulation we hate — in our modern crowded society we could not live without regulation (sorry, libertarians, though I like the idea); it’s inequitable regulation, and regulation that is clearly arbitrary and not in the collective self-interest, that we are opposed to.
And because of our (often deliberately fostered) skepticism about the competence of government to do anything effectively (and about its honesty), we tend to believe that all regulations will necessarily be inequitable and ’selectively applied’.
So given that skepticism, we tend to prefer to pursue our (unregulated) personal self-interest, and shrug off the fact that our collective self-interest would be better served if that personal self-interest were restricted, and altered, by effective, honest regulation.
Unequivocably anti-regulation forces (the corporatists) prey off this skepticism, playing us off against each other, and profiting from the inequities and the selective application and non-enforcement of regulations. And laugh all the way to the bank.
Bush’s orders to regulators not to enforce the law, and to dismantle regulations, have therefore gone largely unchallenged, except by a few brave whistle-blowers, who promptly lost their jobs.
The bottom line is that we need to restore integrity to government, and restore authority to regulators to uphold and enforce regulations equitably and not arbitrarily, before we have any hope of persuading citizens to vote for their collective self-interest over their personal self-interest.
We’re smart enough to know that the collective self-interest is better for all of us. The question is whether we’re smart enough and committed enough to fix the shattered hulk of dismantled, corrupted North American governments (I can’t speak for Europe’s governments, though I sense that regulations there are stronger and more or less intact), so that they can make regulation work effectively again in our collective self-interest.
I’m not entirely sure where we’d even begin. No one trusts government anymore. Self-regulation has never worked (you don’t ask the foxes to manage the chicken coop). And corporate charters and mandates encourage unregulated corporations to behave pathologically. Pricing and taxing instead of regulation (as distinct from in addition to regulation) merely punishes the poor
What do you think? The majority apparently want big, heavy vehicles banned from the roads and dramatically increased fuel efficiency standards across the board for all vehicles. They recognize this is in our collective interest. But governments of every political stripe have failed to enact them, and failed to enforce the lax standards that exist. Is there a political, or economic, solution? What might that solution be? Image: theoretical supply demand curves, from wikipedia Category: The Political Process
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July 23, 2007
Too Much Outrage, and Not Nearly Enough
 My favourite cartoon from the ever-provocative Ted Rall I‘ve been trying to figure out why some people love Michael Moore’s new movie Sicko, and others hate it. The wildly divergent reactions, it seems, have less to do with political view and more to do with the perceived solutions (or lack of them) to the outrageous situation that Moore presents — the utterly dysfunctional and egregiously expensive and inequitable US healthcare system. Consider some of the other outrages that the daily news inundates us with daily:
These stories provoke two simultaneous reactions in most people: outrage and a feeling of impotence to do anything about them. Why would people tell us stories that make us so angry and conflicted? Several reasons:
Stories that provoke helpless outrage are infectious, viral. They spread easily and quickly. But as the audience or storyteller, these stories have a toxic effect on us:
Not healthy. After awhile, some of us just turn it off, refuse to pay any more attention to the news. What should we do? While some of these stories are trumped up or exaggerated, a lot of them are horrible truths, and ignoring them just plays into the hands of the perpetrators and their accomplices. A healthier, more effective response would be:
So how would you apply these rules to Moore’s new movie? Don’t go see it. There are better things to do with your time than to get stressed and frustrated about problems that have no answer. What would it take to fix the US healthcare system? The same thing that, eventually, ‘fixes’ any dysfunctional complex system: crisis. When the system gets so overwhelmed, so expensive, so broken, that it falls apart, and there is enough of a sense of near-unanimous urgencyfor creating a new one, it will happen. A few million people outraged and feeling impotent won’t be nearly enough to bring about change. Category: Activism: What You Can Do
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July 22, 2007
Sunday Open Thread – July 22, 2007
 Boathouse at Dawn, Fiji, photo by Ron Romanosky, at webshots What I’m thinking about, and planning on writing (and podcasting) about soon: I’m working furiously on completing the manuscript for my book on Natural Enterprise, which is due at the publisher in three weeks. Until then, articles here will continue to be short, focused and relatively unambitious. More Thoughts on Complexity: The two articles from this week’s New Yorker that I referred to in yesterday’s post have got me thinking about coping with complexity, since that is what they’re really about. If it is true that the choices we make for ourselves in an unregulated environment (’safe’ gas-gulping cars) are radically different from the choices we would make for our society in a regulated environment (no big or gas-gulping cars allowed at all), what does this mean for the future of our political processes and systems? And if investigative journalism shows us facts so damning that we are baffled about our failure to act (or perhaps more accurately, our impotence to act) does this explain today’s whiny, do-nothing political echo chambers and our cynicism about activism, and if so, what can we do about this? Blog-Hosted Conversations: Plan is for 30-minute conversations, once a week, on the subject of identifying and acquiring the essential skills and relationships we need to be models of a better way to live, and what those models might look like. They will happen, but not until the book is into the publishers. Open Thread Question: |
July 21, 2007
Saturday Links for the Week – July 21, 2007
 Rufus & Quack #4 Making Sense Of It All This Week: Leaders and Heroes, Proud of Their Obscene Wealth: The great NYT investigative reporter Louis Uchitelle interviews corporate leaders who really believe they’re worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year, and that their donating a bit of it to charity makes them heroes as well as brilliant leaders. Fascinating, nauseating, essential reading. What We Want for Ourselves, and What We Want for Our Society, are Different: James Surowiecki in The New Yorker makes the most compelling argument yet for why we all need regulation. Extract: The curious fact is that many people buying three-ton Suburbans for that arduous two-mile trip to the supermarket also want Congress to pass laws making it harder to buy Suburbans at all. Whatís happening here?…
Between 1975, when fuel-economy standards were first introduced, and 1984, average fuel economy improved by sixty-two per cent, without any decline in performance.) This is not because of technological difficulties or a conspiracy on the part of the auto industry. Itís because automakers have listened to car buyers, and put their energy into making vehicles bigger and faster, rather than more efficient. In calling for a law requiring better gas mileage in our cars, then, voters are really saying that theyíre unhappy with the collective result of the choices they make as buyers. [This is echoed in repeated surveys of business leaders showing it's not regulation they object to, it's regulation that is not applied across the board or which is unevenly or not enforced.] Why Michael Moore is So Infuriating: Also in the New Yorker this week, Atul Gawande reviews Sicko and notes “Sicko doesn’t really offer solutions…[yet] the movie is so effective in depicting the inhumanity [of the US healthcare system] that it makes our failure to act seem baffling.” He goes on to explain why Edwards’ and Obama’s universal coverage proposals won’t ever see the light of day, and why “failure to act” isn’t baffling at all once you begin to understand the hazards of reforming complex systems. Moore doesn’t offer solutions because there aren’t any. Things are the way they are for a reason. Only a large-scale crisis — like another Great Depression or The End of Oil — will precipitate needed change. Natural Work Needs No Sabbatical: Chris Hardie ponders why companies feel the need to offer and require staff to take paid vacations. Immune System Suppression Won’t Help Us During Pandemics: A paradox of pandemics, poultry flu and some other infectious diseases is that those with the strongest immune systems have the highest mortality rate. This is due to a phenomenon called ‘cytokine storms’, a consequence of hyperactive immune systems that, it was thought, might be worse than the disease it was fighting. Under this theory, suppressing the immune system and preventing these ’storms’ might reduce mortality during pandemics. Alas, a new study says it isn’t so: It’s the disease, not our body’s reaction to it, that most determinesmortality, and compromising the immune system just makes the disease’s job easier. Thought for the Week: From an old Neil Young song On Our Way Home: Though we rush ahead to save our time, we are only what we feel.
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