Yesterday I read a thread on ambient artist Biosphere‘s Facebook page that made me reflect on the ongoing economic revolution centered on replication and automation. Biosphere posts that he is weary of his music being pirated and feels resentful (a natural and understandable sentiment) and is met with a flurry of comments.
Most of his fans are supportive, but many roll out the same tired arguments attempting to justify their own stealing or somehow blame the artist, including:
Living On One Dollar (now available on Netflix streaming)
Recently I watched and enjoyed the documentary film “Living On One Dollar” (available on Netflix streaming). Four American young men (two researchers and two filmmakers) live in rural Guatemala for a summer, strictly committing to a budget averaging US$7/week per person (randomized day to day to $0-$9 for the group). As you might predict, they have a hard time of it, and suffer from hunger, malnutrition, parasites, fatigue, and demoralization. On the brighter side, they form friendships with the locals, help others and are helped, learn a great deal about rural poverty, and produce a film well worth seeing.
Some things are cheaper in rural Guatemala than they are in the U.S. and Europe, but not by much. The men spent their meager budget on rice, beans, firewood, and transportation to and from the market. Bananas were an occasional treat. After weeks of near starvation the locals taught them to buy a small plastic bag of lard and add some to their mashed beans. They slept on a dirt floor and were bitten by fleas every night. At least one of them contracted both Giardia and E. coli. from contaminated water. For much of the time they were uncomfortable or miserable.
The locals seemed to live a little better. Some had saved up (by way of savings groups) to purchase wood stoves. One man in the village had a janitorial job in a nearby city and had used his regular income to improve his house and help his neighbors. Still, many of the locals suffered from this extreme poverty. One man described how when he had no money he witnessed his children stop growing. Some families had enough money to buy food for their children but not enough to buy them supplies for school. The film reminded me in a visceral way of something I already knew intellectually but had not considered in depth: very poor people have more choices, and much more difficult choices, than the top 80% (about 1 in 5 people around the world live on a dollar a day or less). A wrong decision has more serious consequences (like death); the very poor just can’t afford to take risks the way wealthier people can.
Microfinance
Many of the Guatemalan villagers had benefited from small microfinance loans (the local organization was Grameen). One woman borrowed a small amount of money to start a weaving business, and was thus able to resume her studies (she wanted to eventually become a nurse).
I was left with the impression that microfinance is a powerful and effective tool for alleviating poverty, especially when complemented by local savings groups. Any kind of financial flexibility is a huge boon for the extreme poor.
What Can the Top 80% Do To Help?
The four young men who made this film are big-hearted types, and care about the plight of their neighbors. During their time in the Guatemalan village they teach both English and Spanish (many of the locals speak only a Mayan dialect) and have since committed to continue making films to expose the plight of the extreme poor. This kind of film-making is important because it provides viewers the opportunity to get to know individuals who live in extreme poverty. We tend to feel more empathy when we get to know fathers, mothers, and children by name, people with their own dreams and aspirations, people just like us (as opposed to a monolithic group: people who live on less than a dollar a day).
So what can the rest of us do? At least four things:
1) We can support/vote for safety nets in our own country.
2) We can support/vote for universal benefits in our own country.
3) We can support microfinance organizations like Grameen and Kiva if we want to help internationally.
4) We can buy goods and services from poor countries (“Fair Trade” goods don’t necessarily help the extreme poor any more than goods without that label, but exports in general can truly boost national economies).
Poverty and Priorities in the United States
In the United States, many people are considered to live in poverty. However, we are a rich country, and most who are considered impoverished have a roof over their heads, have enough to eat, have access to emergency healthcare, and own a television.
After the Great Depression, the U.S. implemented safety nets, and they worked. Extreme poverty (living on a dollar a day or less) does not exist in the United States. Some among the chronic homeless in the United States arguably have a lower quality of life than the rural poor in Guatemala, but even the homeless in the U.S. have less food scarcity.
Our challenge in the United States is one of massive income inequality, and poor services for the most disadvantaged (such as the mentally ill). Some of these problems can be alleviated with expanding universal public services (such as preschool, higher education, and healthcare). Though the United States lags in these areas compared to Europe, there is reason for optimism. Oklahoma leads the way in terms of providing universal early education. Utah is solving homelessness with its “apartment first, questions later” strategy (drug and alcohol treatment programs turn out to be more effective if a person has a roof over their head). Even though our healthcare system ranks last among wealthy western nations, many U.S. citizens receive affordable healthcare via Medicare, Medicaid, and other federal programs.
Are we heading in the right direction in terms of social welfare for the poor? Conservative Americans are concerned about the immorality and unfairness of “government handouts,” but investing in early childhood education, making sure everyone can get basic healthcare, and getting homeless people off the streets are no-brainers; such “handouts” raise quality of life for everybody. We should prioritize these kinds of universal benefits; they are the low-hanging fruit in terms of alleviating suffering, investing in our nation’s future, and being the kind of country that inspires pride and patriotism.
Cult of the Individual, Cult of the Free Market
There is a brand of individualism and extreme libertarianism rampant in Silicon Valley, but also in other parts of the United States, fueled by the author Ayn Rand.
Ayn Rand’s books are like Lord of the Rings for conservatives. They are pure fantasy. Utopian political fantasy, but fantasy nonetheless. Ayn Rand’s fiction exalts the power of the individual and the free market and vilifies collectivism to such an extent that residents of the fictional settlement Galt’s Gulch in Atlas Shrugged never even lend things to each other — instead they negotiate a rental agreement. Everyone must pay their own way. Rand’s books fuel the philosophies of dozens of influential U.S. capitalists and conservative politicians, including Peter Thiel, Rand Paul, and Paul Ryan.
I bring up Rand because many people influenced by her actively campaign against social welfare programs that alleviate poverty. If they had their way, safety nets would be abolished and life for the poor in the United States would much more resemble life in rural Guatemala.
The free market creates wealth; few dispute that. What it doesn’t do is distribute wealth, and as it turns out the wealth doesn’t “trickle down” at all. Instead it tends to concentrate at the top. Technology accelerates that process; technology increases productivity and makes most jobs redundant, but that productivity boon only benefits business and capital owners (not workers). The Ayn Rand fantasy of pure individualism and an unregulated free-market, once conceived as a bulwark against totalitarian communism, now does more harm than good.
To hear how the average European perceives this insanity, listen to Tim Ferriss interview British polymath Ed Cooke (I think the Ayn Rand exchange is in part 2 but both parts are worth listening to). If the libertarian conservatives increase their political power (and they might), the United States could see a dangerous acceleration of income inequality, a gutting of social safety nets, and a dramatic rise in homelessness. Cooke deconstructs the “cult of the individual” quite eloquently.
Let Them Eat Cake
Yesterday on my way to the bank I walked through an intersection in Oakland. Every lane divider was occupied by a man with a sign asking for spare change (if you’re curious about the demographics, two were young and white, one was middle-aged and black). Later I drove to San Francisco and saw at least half a dozen people sleeping in doorways.
The local situation is mirrored globally. 80 people now own as much as the world’s bottom 50% (each of those extremely rich people owns as much as about 44 million other people in the bottom half). According to Piketty the situation is heading towards even more dramatic wealth concentration.
How does it end? There are two ways … the wealthy and middle classes find ways to push opportunity and quality of life down the economic spectrum, or …
Take your pick!
In the United States, the phrase “family values” tends to be associated with a conservative “1950’s style” family structure and lifestyle, including a heterosexual marriage, a bread-winning father, a homemaker mother, and multiple children.
There’s nothing wrong with that kind of family, but it’s not accurate to consider this kind of family as “normal”. Most families in the United States don’t look like this.
The way the term “family values” is used politically angers me — it attempts to marginalize families with gay parents, single parents, even couples who elect not to have children.
What makes a “real family”? Love and commitment. That’s it.
Maybe it’s time to reclaim the phrase. What if “family values” simply referred to the particular values that your family holds?
The idea is simple: sit down with your family and discuss what’s important to all of you. What values can you agree on? What does it mean to be a member of your family?
This isn’t a new idea, but rather a trend that’s gaining momentum. I can’t remember where I first read about this particular exercise, but here’s another post that describes it.
Our daughter is six, and you can see a six-year-old’s voice in the some of the items below. First-graders tend to make fun of each other mercilessly, and she decided she didn’t need that at home. So for now, we’ve agreed to not make fun of each other.
Our daughter sees these more as “rules” — she doesn’t quite get what a value is. Kia and I see the list as aspirational. It’s what our family looks like on a good day (or week).
What is your family about? Articulating your values is powerful. Co-defining your values pulls your family together, like gravity (but doesn’t bind you, like glue).
Values ripple out. Your small (or big) family unit may be more influential than you realize. Values are contagious. Like cold viruses, values spread through children.
Here’s the list my own family came up with (in no particular order, redundancies and family slang included). If you do the exercise, feel free to post your own results below.
What does it mean to be a member of our family?
* we celebrate all of the Jewish holidays, Christmas, Thanksgiving, Halloween … we are equal-opportunity observers (and yes I’m an atheist — but I don’t think religious practice needs to be tied to beliefs)
What was the result of completing this exercise?
As I mentioned above, our daughter has assigned herself the “enforcer” of the “family rules.” Even though she is selective and self-serving in her enforcement, her reminders do sometimes get us back on the right track.
What happens when you explicitly define your values is that inevitably you start to notice discrepancies between your stated values and your behavior.
A less-developed mind will shout “Hypocrisy!” and condemn the value setter.
But what’s the alternative? Lower standards? Not stating and therefore not knowing what your other family members hold dear?
Some “falling short” is inevitable. But it’s also inevitable that once you search your heart and then mentally focus your feelings into values, you’ll find yourself moving towards them.
Explicitly stated values vs. habitual behaviors create friction and tension within the mind. That leads to growth.
So slowly, day-by-day, we’re getting a little closer to what we all consider to be ideal family relations and activities.
In addition to growth, I have a secure feeling that I know what we’re about, as a family. It won’t be the same as your family (though there might be a lot of overlap). Each family is unique.
Conscious Growth — Personal vs Familial
Defining our values as a family made me consider what my own personal values are. The exercise served as a catalyst for my own personal growth. I ended up following-up with a series of exercises where I defined and prioritized both my positive and negative values (things that I want to have both more of or less of in my life). I’ll describe this process more in a later post.
Values as Cultural DNA
I sometimes think about my eight great-grandparents, and how they influenced me. I only knew one of them personally, and of course she was a really old lady when I was a little kid — I never got a good sense of what she was about.
But I know those eight people shaped me, not only through bits of DNA, not only via their life events that activated or inactivated various genes via epigenetic methylation, but through values, implicit and explicit, that they held and lived by. My strengths, my weaknesses, my hopes and fears, everything about me was greatly influenced by those eight people — even though I only met one of them.
Their values were passed down to my grandparents, to my parents, and then to me. No doubt some changes were made along the way. Sometimes we reject our parents’ values, because those values suck. But that kind of change takes tremendous self-analysis and effort, and even then we can find ourselves walking in our parents’ footsteps.
Take the time to consider your own values, and what values you’re passing on to your children (or whatever children you come into contact with in your life, even if they’re not your own). Make the passage of “cultural DNA” a little more conscious, a little more intentional.
A while back I wrote about why we chose to send our daughter to an under-performing, high-poverty public school in our neighborhood. Basically, a high rate of parental involvement and good teachers allayed any fears we had regarding low test scores (the concept of relative rank¹ was also a factor). Our daughter is now thriving in first grade, both academically and socially. School standards are high, and PTO fundraising has helped develop programs in art, poetry, and science (ideally tax dollars would pay for these things, but California schools are still struggling financially).
Yet Another Reason to Avoid the Affluent Schools
Recently Kia forwarded me this article which points out that vaccine opt-out rates in California have been on the rise for the past seven years. This had resulted in both measles and whooping cough epidemics. Research clearly showed that higher vaccine refusal rates fueled the epidemics.
Why are parents opting out? Fears linking vaccines to autism is the most likely reason, even though such research has been completely refuted. We still don’t know definitely what is behind rising autism rates in the U.S. (rates vary significantly by state). SSRI use during pregnancy is one possible factor, though a Danish study noted that depression itself is a risk factor, and that there was no difference in autism rates of children born to depressed mothers who had been taking SSRIs and those who had not. It’s also possible that more children are being classified as being on the autistic spectrum — a change in diagnostic trends. Bottom line, we still don’t definitively know. But vaccine avoidance isn’t helping anything, and is having devastating effects on herd immunity.
What’s herd immunity (or community immunity)? If your child is vaccinated, they’re safe against that disease, right? Unfortunately not. While being vaccinated reduces the chance of infection if a child is exposed to a disease agent, an additional benefit come from not being exposed in the first place. In other words, the protective effects of vaccines are cumulative, depending on what percentage of the kids are vaccinated.
Notably, wealthier communities, and wealthier schools within those communities, tend to have higher vaccination opt-out rates via the “PBE” (personal belief exemption). Marin county, the wealthiest county in the Bay Area, had an average 8% PBE opt-out rate (San Geronimo Valley Elementary in Marin had a whopping 79% PBE rate). Private schools also have higher PBE rates than public schools (on average).
Less affluent public schools (like our daughter’s school), tend to have a PBE rate of only 1%. Now there’s some community immunity!
Does Affluenza = Influenza?
Not all wealthy communities have high PBE rates. The San Francisco average is quite low (1.64%). Maybe Marin County, the land of crystal healers and psychics, just has lower scientific literacy.
Vaccines are not entirely risk-free. [CDC.gov] But in terms of cost-benefit analysis, the tiny risk of most vaccines is worth the protective effect against the disease. Just as importantly, you’re not only protecting your own child, but your child’s classmates.
If you’re considering NOT vaccinating your child, I can empathize. I considered it too — there are scary stories out there on the internet, real (but rare) cases of children being injured by vaccines. But please ALSO consider the risks of the diseases themselves, and check the published research in terms of the actual probability of serious injury. It’s far more probable a vaccination will save your child’s life than cause them any harm.
¹ On relative rank … sending your child to a school comprised mostly of elites can negatively warp their confidence and self-worth. If most of your child’s classmates are richer, smarter, more socially connected, more sophisticated, and/or more competitively oriented, your normal or above-average-under-normal-circumstances child might end up feeling a bit beaten down. Relative rank matters. On the other hand, if your child’s school is comprised of a more diverse cross-section of society, it’s more likely they’ll get a chance to shine in at least one area.
Wall Street bankers enjoying OWS in 2011.
This post is about citizen action, public protest, and being a trim tab. It’s about how the common citizen wields more power than ever before in human history. I’ll get to that. But first I’m going to take a quick look at history from the perspective of the commoner vs. the sociopathic elite.
Five Waves of Coercive Power
One way to look at history is as a series of power struggles between the hoi polloi (the common folk who tend to treat each other decently) and “masters of the universe” powermongers (the far smaller group who tend to be more sociopathic/less empathetic by nature).
The latter group has taken on different manifestations throughout the ages, depending on what kinds of (coercive) power are effective, and who has the subset of skills to accumulate that kind of power.
Warlords, for example, inspire the loyalty of armed strongmen and terrorize the common folk into paralysis and submission.
Somewhat later in history (with much overlap; warlords still exist today), monarchs acquired and hoarded power via feudal rule (with knights and samurai as playground bullies), familial inheritance of gold, land, and title, and to some extent protection of the common folk from barbarian hordes (aka the armies of other monarchs). Some charismatic monarchs inspired romantic loyalty among the commoners (especially if taxes weren’t too high and executions infrequent). Monarch warlords, such as Alexander of Macedon, expanded their territory (and sometimes national borders) in great swaths via epic military campaigns.
Wave three of sociopathic powermongers takes the form of The Church (not the saints and luminaries who have legitimate spiritual awakenings and dedicate their lives to inspiring and helping others, but rather the institutions that ossify philosophy into dogma, punish those who stray from doctrine, suppress knowledge and discovery, and rule by fear). The Catholic Inquisition is the most iconic example of abuse of power by a religious institution, but no religion is exempt. Possessing the official moral high ground is an ideal platform for perpetrating abuse.
Wave four is fascism, which is not a political system but rather a political pathology that occurs when sociopaths within a government consolidate power and attempt to destroy their detractors. The tools of fascism are surveillance (of known enemies, and everybody else to discover unknown enemies), the encouragement of xenophobia, violent suppression of political protests, covert assassinations, and constant war. Fascism can manifest within communist states, democracies, and republics alike (no doubt libertarian or anarchist states could also exhibit fascist tendencies, if such states existed). A total descent into fascism results in a dictatorship (Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, etc.), but “free democratic societies” also oscillate across the fascism spectrum (extreme examples in the United States include McCarthyism, violent suppression of the Civil Rights Movement, covert support of military dictatorships in Central and South America, and NSA surveillance of citizens).
Wave five of power consolidation by the sociopathic elite is corporatocracy, which is not the simple existence of the corporation as a legal business entity, but rather the perversion of the corporate entity into a tool for extracting wealth and labor from the poor, raiding the commons, evading taxation, avoiding personal responsibility for criminal activities, manipulating governments, screwing the consumer, and other shenanigans. Not all corporations do these bad things, and most people who work for corporations are good people. Still, controlling the state via corporate power is the current method of choice for the modern wave of sociopathic elites.
A corporatocracy works in the economic context of capitalism. Picketty points out that unmitigated capitalism is unsustainable, but so is any other form of unchecked power and resource hoarding by the sociopathic elite. The hoi polloi eventually realize what’s going on and claw back most of the power (with institutions like democracy, rule of law, human rights, public services, asset taxation, and distributing power among different branches of government). We’re slower, dumber, and less motivated than the sociopathic elite, but there are far more of us and we work together well once we’ve reached our limit of being abused and exploited.
I think the influence of corporations on government (especially investment banks), at least in the U.S., peaked in 2011. Occupy Wall Street, if it did nothing else, made it clear to the hoi polloi who the elite were (Wall Street investment bankers, mostly). While the investment bankers drank champagne and laughed at the raggedy protestors from their balconies (literally — see image above), OWS paved the way for federal investigation and prosecution of bank fraud, more progressive income and capital gains taxation, and stricter banking regulations.
The Glass-Jawed Enemy
As enemies of the commoners go, corporations-gone-bad are the easiest opponents so far. Compared to standing up to Genghis Khan, the Vikings, The Inquisition, or the Stasi, fighting corporations is easy!
Consumer-facing corporations often go down after one punch. Michael Moore realized this when he pressured Kmart to stop selling ammunition back in 2001, and succeeded.
These days consumer-facing corporations can be swayed with a few letters or tweets. Target recently reversed positions on customers carrying guns into stores, thanks in part to Twitter campaigns like this one. Target wants moms to shop at Target. If moms don’t want guns in Target, Target says no to guns in the store. Squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Corporations that don’t deal directly with consumers, like mining companies and investment banking firms, are less likely to yield to public pressure and social media campaigns. So are companies with their backs against the wall, like SeaWorld (the recent documentary Blackfish clearly demonstrated the horrors of keeping orcas in captivity, but without captive cetaceans SeaWorld has no business). But even in these cases, public (or employee) outcry eventually leads to legal investigations, increased regulations, fines, and audits, which for fraudulent companies leads to bankruptcy and dissolution.
To reiterate, corporations are not the enemy of the people. The corporate entity in the context of well-regulated capitalism is an engine of wealth creation, a golden goose that generates marvelous gadgets, streaming entertainment, cheap energy, the world’s knowledge at our fingertips, and other modern wonders. The enemy are the sociopathic elite who use the corporate entity to steal, exploit, destroy the environment, evade social responsibility, and generally be evil.
Tough and Evil
The non-consumer facing, privately controlled corporation (invulnerable to both shareholder pressure and consumer sentiment) is the strongest haven of the sociopathic elite. In this group we find Bechtel, Koch Industries, and Cargill, corporate actors who seem to openly delight in destroying the environment, exploiting the poor, and endangering the public.
Organized crime syndicates that function like corporations (and in many cases are tightly interwoven with real corporations) also generally don’t care about public opinion and social media.
But even those corporations and corporate fronts must operate within the context of nation states and their legal systems. Despite the Koch war against the minimum wage, the minimum wage is going nowhere but up. Cargill may keep ignoring safety and environmental regulations forever, but they will also keep getting sued and fined.
Why not a “three strikes and you’re out” law for law-breaking corporations? Keeping a corporate charter should be a privilege dependent on good corporate citizenship.
Keep Fighting the Good Fight
The important thing to remember when fighting for justice, the environment, and human rights is that corporations are made up of mostly good people who generally want to keep their jobs, cover their asses, and not work too hard. This makes corporations vulnerable and easy to manipulate (even privately held corporations).
For example, if we, the hoi polloi, make it more difficult for corporations to sell products containing bee-killing neonics than not selling them, the corporations are going to go with the path of least resistance. It’s only a matter of time.
Will the Sociopathic Elite Always Rule the World?
Yes, probably. But this isn’t necessarily bad news.
Even in a free democracy that values human rights, individuals who rate highly for traits like narcissism, self-importance, callous disregard for other people’s feelings, and a desire for power will probably end up in positions wielding political and/or economic power. Who else would want these jobs?
It’s the job of the hoi polloi to make sure that no single position or agency has too much power, and that institutions and entities that are ripe for the abuse (lightly regulated corporations) are constrained by law to protect the environment, worker, community, consumer, and general public, and to play fairly against other market entities.
Corporations won’t always be the preferred tool of the sociopathic elite. Eventually the crackdown on corporate bad behavior will be too wearisome to deal with, and the sociopathic elite will find a new entity or institution to abuse. Personally I think it will probably have to do with the abuse of artificial intelligence and/or cryptography (perhaps the sociopathic elite will use BitCoin or similar to avoid taxation and gain unfair market advantages).
Even if there is a macro trend towards the hoi polloi clawing back power from the sociopathic elite with each wave of coercive power, corporate abuses may still get worse before they get better. The outcome depends on citizen action (voting, letter writing, protests, exerting pressure via social media) and the subsequent reactions by our lawmakers, law enforcement agencies, and courts. The outcome is not written.
So if you witness a corporation behaving badly, do something about it. You may find the fight to be easier than expected.
If you have a story about pushing back against bad corporate behavior, please share below.
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