Sweet life

Soon it will be Deepavali.

For a guy who lives a secular life, it seems to be quite a preoccupation with tracking the major religious observances--even of the Jewish kind.  Maybe I need a therapy of sorts to bring out my inner, repressed, religiosity.  And then maybe I, too, will become a "sadhguru" but without having killed anyone.  Nah! ;)

There was one thing about Deepavali that was heavenly for me--the sweets that my mother made.  When we were kids, my brother and I were hell bent on figuring out where mother had hid the Deepavali sweets from our greedy eyes and mouths.  We always succeeded, and enjoyed the sneak-previews of the delights that awaited.

My favorite was the phenomenally awesome sweet that mother made with cashews.  And, those days, it was pretty much home-grown cashews--most of the nuts came from the tree within our compound. I could--and did--eat them all day long.

But then, somewhere in my growing up, I became duller and more boring than I have always been. I became the party-pooper.  The killjoy.  Major Buzzkill.  "No, thanks" became my middle name, and my consumption of sweets dropped! ;)

The more I live and learn, the more I am thankful that such an attitude change happened, and that I became sweet- and food-conscious.  Else, there is a fair chance that I would have become a part of the ever growing reports on obesity and diabetes.

Sugar is a major cause of this pubic health issue.  Not only in the United States but all over the world.  Sugar in the traditional sweets, which one can buy every single day, unlike the rarity of the old days.  And, sugar is seemingly an additive in everything that we eat and drink.  Which is why the evil industry is trying to get more sugar into baby foods too.  Bastards these companies are, yet again demonstrating that market and morals rarely ever intersect!  Like this:

A yogurt-based Happy Baby snack for children contains a teaspoon of sugar per serving, with four servings per pouch. Happy Tot’s organic bananas and carrots fiber and protein bar contains 2 teaspoons of sugar per serving.

In order to truly understand the seriousness of this, go to the kitchen and measure out 2 teaspoons of sugar.  That itself will shock you.  And then put all that sugar in your mouth, and imagine what that might do if a 2-year old were given that much sugar.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that nearly 14 percent of 2- to 5-year-olds are obese (above the 95th percentile for body mass index), a percentage that is higher for African Americans, Hispanics and low-income Americans. A new study says that in the United States, childhood obesity alone is estimated to cost $14 billion annually in direct health expenses.

If your defense at this point is that parents should know better, and that we should not blame the industry, it means that you are a big part of the problem.

Caption at the source:
A milk-based "toddler drink" contains 3 1/2 teaspoons of sugar per serving. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)

Oh well ... General Malaise will do what he can--continue to blog and rant!

Driving Miss Crazy

Like anybody, I too am always delighted when my analysis is on the mark.

Let me explain.

A few days ago, in responding to a comment at this post, I wrote:

First, the equation of decreasing car sales with loss of employment. I would rather interpret this way: The hundreds of thousands (or lakhs) of rupees that would have been spent on cars will now be spent on other things, which will generate employment. The "loss" is primarily for those who invested in automobile manufacturing. I have no sympathies for those big investors, who know all too well about the market and profit and loss.
Second, some of us have been hypothesizing that in highly densely populated cities--which is all of India--the cost of car ownership is immense. Car sharing, which has been made possible by the likes of Uber and Ola and others, makes it possible for the upper-middle class to move around in cars without owning them.

As much as I don't care for the likes of Uber, those services are here to stay and will continue to grow.  Therefore, betting on the auto industry to sell more vehicles to a younger generation doesn't seem wise to me.  While I am no investment guru, I interact a lot with young people, and read commentaries, based on which even three years ago I wrote that teenagers perhaps don't dream of cars anymore.

Today, I read in the news that the finance minister of India is blaming millennials and services like Uber for the massive slump in the auto industry in my old country!

To which I have only one response:
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Source

The minister made this comment in Chennai for a good reason--it is the Detroit of India, where the auto industry is huge.  But, it is remarkably stupid for a finance minister to blame young people for not buying automobiles.  Seriously?  Is the government now going to mandate that thirty-somethings buy cars, or else?  Next they will frame it as a patriotic duty to buy cars?  Like how my President here tweets and talks about "Patriot Farmers" who are being screwed by his trade wars?

A year ago, when I was in India, an old high school classmate suggested that I use Uber or Ola.  He, like me, is no millennial.  And is a highly affluent fellow.  Even he regularly uses Uber to get to work, he said--better than hiring a driver, and far better than "self-driving."  Another advantage?  He could talk without distractions while on the road--he was, in fact, in an Uber ride when he made that suggestion to me.

I tell ya, if only people listened to me and my analysis of how the world works! ;)

A prime post about Amazon

A few years ago, when talking with a student, I asked him about his part-time job.  I knew he worked for UPS for a few hours every week.

He had quit UPS.  Which is when he said something that I found to be interesting.  He said that he would never get hired again by UPS because he quit.  Apparently UPS's policy is comparable to that of the husband who throws out his wife after her first known affair. UPS gave him a chance to work there, but he left.  So, UPS does not ever want him back.

That day my respect for UPS went up. A lot.

And then two years ago, I read this at one my favorite sites:

It might seem strange, but UPS delivery vans don’t always take the shortest route between stops.

Of course it intrigued me.

UPS have moved away from trying to find the shortest route and now look at other criteria to optimise the journey. One of their methods is to try and avoid turning through oncoming traffic at a junction. Although this might be going in the opposite direction of the final destination, it reduces the chances of an accident and cuts delays caused by waiting for a gap in the traffic, which would also waste fuel.

How about that!

Driving and delivering is serious business.  And fraught with perils.

Which is why Amazon uses unregulated businesses that don't care about their drivers or others.

UPS and FedEx, the traditional powers of the logistics world, are deeply invested in safety. ... Both firms are also heavily regulated by the government, and many of their trucks are subject to regular federal safety inspections and can be put out of service at any time by the Department of Transportation.
But Amazon’s ingenious system has allowed it to avoid that kind of scrutiny. There is no public listing of which firms are part of its delivery network, and the ubiquitous cargo vans their drivers use are not subject to DOT oversight.

There is no free lunch--there is a hidden cost to every damn thing.

Amazon denies any responsibility for the conditions in which drivers work, but it has continued to contract with at least a dozen companies that have been repeatedly sued or cited by regulators for alleged labor violations, including failing to pay overtime, denying workers breaks, discrimination, sexual harassment, and other forms of employee mistreatment.

I have always refused Amazon's offer for Prime.  I have never ever felt that I needed to have anything that urgently.  If ever there is an urgency, I drive over to the nearest store for whatever it is that I need it that badly.  When people--family or friends or students--talk up Prime, I nod my head and move on.  No point debating with them.  No point in sharing these kind of articles also with them!

[The] Sprinter-style vans Amazon requires its delivery providers to use weigh several times more than most passenger cars, they fall just under the weight limit that would subject them and their drivers to Department of Transportation oversight, unlike most FedEx and UPS trucks.
In a sign of how business is booming, Amazon last summer bought 20,000 of these vans from Mercedes-Benz to be leased, through fleet managers, to its dedicated delivery companies around the country.

The business of big business is about business--not about humans!  Dumb fucks we are!

Loser lines and fast lanes

I was perhaps 10 or 11 years old when the family, including paatti (grandmother), went to Tirupati.  For a visit with the presiding god.  We stayed in one of the cottages owned and operated by the temple trust.

It was a carefully planned trip--as it always was the case with anything that father did--that included special and expensive tickets for us to bypass the long lines of the faithful, and head straight into the temple to spend quality time with the god during a pooja.

I could not understand how a god could allow such separate and unequal treatment of people. His own followers were sifted through the sieve of affluence?  I mildly voiced my question, which went nowhere.

And when paatti twisted her ankle and could not join us for the special pooja, I wondered if it was a lesson from god. Ah, yes, those were the early years when I was a true believer--teenage and rebellion hadn't kicked in yet ;)

The practice of paying for the privilege of getting quickly to the temple gods, and even boasting about it later on, continues in the old country where privileges such as caste never ever seem to go away.  For instance, I read in the newspaper, The Hindu, that there are special tickets that the faithful can buy in order to catch a glimpse of the idol that is brought out every forty years at the Varadaraja Perumal Temple in Kanchipuram.

If one can buy the access to god through money or influence, well, the market can easily take care of that in everyday life, right?

The concept is thought of as an American phenomenon but is now spreading worldwide. Queues can effectively be skipped everywhere from airport security to music festivals. Just buy a fast-track ticket or “VIP access” pass.

An "American phenomenon"?  Did the writer even bother to check the conditions in India's temples? ;)

Does the phenomenon dictate a two-tiered society? It seems the answer is “yes” – but as columnist Baggini points out, that two-tiered society always existed.

Yes, it has always existed.  And it will continue on. After all, even the gods don't care!

At the Varadaraja Perumal Temple (Kanchipuram)

Caveat Emptor

I had some quick learning to do when I transitioned from electrical engineering to graduate studies in topics about which I was fascinated but were all brand new.  Every day I was encountering new phrases that might have been elementary to some but were the metaphorical Greek and Latin to me.  And sometimes they were literally in the Latin.

This was also in the prehistoric days before Google. Before the internet as we understand it today.  Which meant that any time I ran into new phrases, it was darn difficult to figure out what the hell it meant. Sometimes, despite my ultra-self-consciousness and introvertedness, I managed to get myself to faculty's offices and ask them to clarify.

One of the phrases that initially stumped me was caveat emptor.  I chanced upon a faculty searching for a book in the library.  Lowdon Wingo.  I had never come across such a name ever.  He was ancient even back then.  (He will one supercentenarian if he were alive now)  I gathered up all my courage and asked him what caveat emptor meant.

Buyer beware!

That, by itself, gave me a lot to think about the market system.

If the buyer is not carefully looking through the product details, then?  So long, sucker!  Uncle Sam doesn't really care about the human buyer, but is always far more keen on the most important person ever--the corporation!

Economic life in the US has not changed all that much over these years.

Across a span of cosmetics, including makeup, toothpaste and shampoo, to items ranging from household cleaners to fruit juice to cheese, hundreds of potentially harmful ingredients banned in the EU are legally allowed in the US. ...
“Generally, the EU has got it right. In the US we have a strong favouritism towards companies and manufacturers, to the extent that public health and the environment is being harmed. The pendulum has swung in an extreme way and it’s really going to take a general awakening by the public.”

Caveat emptor!

Want an example? "In cosmetics alone, the EU has banned or restricted more than 1,300 chemicals while the US has outlawed or curbed just 11."

Why is it so here in the US?

The clout of powerful industry interests, combined with a regulatory system that demands a high level of proof of harm before any action is taken, has led to the American public being routinely exposed to chemicals that have been rubbed out of the lives of people in countries such as the UK, Germany and France.

I don't  understand such a behavior.  Don't American industry leaders and lobbyists have children and grandchildren that they worry about?  Why would they not want to make sure their little ones will have an awesome future?  Why would they want to condemn those innocent kids to caveat emptor?

I know; that was a rhetorical question.  That was answered well in Thank you for smoking, remember?

Oh well ... so, is there any hope?

“I’m hoping for dramatic changes in our politics but there’s little chance of that,” said Bergstein. “The federal government is barely functioning, so consumers have to realize they have the power to become more vocal and demand change. The awareness is still not there, though.”

Caveat voter!

It is all foreign to me ...

One of the many benefits to flying halfway around the world and making myself a home here in the United States is this: Over the years, I have had meaningful interactions with people from all over the world.  There is no doubt whatsoever that this has made me a better person.

Look at some examples that I have even blogged about:  Kugan from Sri Lanka. Siddiqui from Pakistan. Shahab from Iran. It has been a wonderful learning experience.

And there is a lot more to learn.  One life ain't enough.

Consider the Uighurs.  Yes, I have blogged about them too (like here.)  It was wonderful to have an Uighur student in class, who kept in touch with me for a few years even after she graduated.

Something new pops up all the time, even about Uighurs.

First, look at the person in this photo:

Source

She could be French, right? Or Spanish. Or Persian.  Or Turkish. Or even an Indian.  Yes?

"In France, people spoke to me in French, thinking I was French," she says. "In Italy, they spoke Italian to me."

And she is ... Uighur model Parwena Dulkun.

Yep, a Uighur.  Which means that she is Chinese.

The only country where she isn't mistaken for a local is her own.
"In many Chinese cities, people think I'm a foreigner," Dulkun says, giggling.
She uses these moments to educate her countrymen.
"They try to speak English to me, and I answer in Mandarin," she says. "Cab drivers always turn around and ask me what country I'm from."
She says she smiles proudly and concludes her lesson by announcing: "I'm Chinese."

She giggles, while many others might get upset at being mistaken for a foreigner in one's own country.

While politically it has not been good for Uighurs to be under the Party, the world of commerce apparently cannot have enough of them--as models!

Xahriyar Abdukerimabliz, a 19-year-old model from Urumqi, says:

"Not to brag, but we are very good-looking," he says. "Our facial features are naturally attractive. We've got great eyebrows, big, beautiful eyes and double eyelids that weren't created by a surgeon."
Abdukerimabliz blinks, revealing his naturally creased eyelids. More and more Chinese are undergoing surgery to create a crease in their upper eyelids that about half of all East Asians are born without. Abdukerimabliz's "double eyelids" are topped with striking eyebrows, a long nose and expressive eyes that look either Asian or European, depending on his mood — or pose.

The market system, like god, works in mysterious ways! ;)  Which is also something that I learnt in graduate school, after getting rid of my commie colors in the old country. ;)

Morals and the market

I often tell students who are awake in my classes that by default the market does not care for morals.  The market cares not whether you are a saint or a sinner. It does not care whether you are selling bread or cocaine.  It simply is.

I then remind them that the same market can also be made to enforce morals.  It can be done.  How to get that done is simple: Put your money where your mouth is.  If that moral high ground is important to you, then as a consumer behave accordingly, and if enough do the same then the market will respond.

But then you have heard many times how this ends, right?  I don't get no respect and nobody listens to me! ;)

The hassle is that most people do not walk that proverbial talk.

That walk-talk divide exists everywhere of course.  Which is why, for instance, the pussy-grabbing trump gets an overwhelming endorsement from the white evangelicals!  More than a year ago, when we were watching the reality show personality in the primaries, I quoted from the Harvard Divinity School:

GOP-registered evangelicals will not vote for Hillary. You could make a very good argument that Hillary is much more a person of faith and closer to evangelicals on her understanding of God than Trump. 

The reality show narcissist is now in the Oval Office thanks to those evangelical voters!  If evangelicals won't practice their faith, then what can one expect in other mundane aspects of life, like in buying and selling stuff, right?

Enforcing morals comes down to practicing those morals.  We cannot expect the pussy-grabber to enforce laws against sexual harassment.  Could the market work any better?

It works, but only if consumers make that clear.

Bill O'Reilly continued to rant on from his Faux News pedestal despite the sexual harassment stories (remember the falafel episide from years ago?) because he was bringing in money. In the millions.  His crappy books sold and brought in money. In the millions.  The market--which is essentially decisions by individuals--didn't care about how he treated women.

The corporation, therefore, did not care.  They paid out to the accusers and continued with O'Reilly jerking off in his television show.

Years go by.  Audiences flock to the psychotic's show.  Because of the demand, the advertising dollars flow in. He continues to abuse women. The corporation funnels some of the revenue into payments to settle with the women who file charges against the horrible human being (well, of the many at Faux News.)

And then the market spoke--major advertisers withdrew from the show, and the loss of dollars translated to an enforcement of morals.

Today, the asshole is gone.  Fired.

The resulting drop in advertising revenue must have changed the established harassment calculus of Fox News, which has for years seemed to have no problem paying its way out of the host’s past harassment allegations. It was worth at least $13 million extra to keep an alleged repeat abuser on staff, but apparently it wasn’t worth whatever projected loss might have resulted from this latest turn of public opinion against him.

After yet another kiss of death from the pussy-grabber himself!

Of course, it is not easy to enforce morals via the market.  But, it can be done.  Hurting the balance-sheet is a powerful approach.  If only we did this more often instead of merely talking the big talk.

And, oh, how can we ever get the evangelicals to understand morals?

If you are so smart, ...

Two friends from the old California days visited with me.  I cooked lunch for them and had everything ready because I knew they didn't have a whole lot of time to spare.

Later, I recalled to the friend how amazingly capable one of them in particular is.  She can fix machines, automobiles, work on wood, do glass etching, do any kind of home building work, create and maintain well designed gardens at homes, manage people and projects, and more.  Compared to her, I am a one-note player--and barely even that much.

In my classes, sometimes I explicitly remind students that who they are as humans is not defined by the grade they earn in my classes.  I tell them that if people were to grade me on how much I know about gardening, home repairs, auto maintenance--especially changing tires, craftwork, art, music, swimming, ..., my grade will be a big, fat, F.  There is more to life than the smarts--as in intelligence--I tell them.  I really do.  But, I am confident that they do not listen to me saying that either.

The older I get, the more I think I detest the primacy of "intelligence" as if that is the measure of a human.  I have even joked in some classes that while we think of Einstein as the smartest guy ever, he had no idea about Tamil and could not speak even a sentence in that language, while a two year old in Tamil Nadu can rattle off quite a few Tamil sentences.  The smart guy that he was, Einstein himself made a memorable, quote-worthy, comment about this, remember?

My point is that "intelligence" is highly specific.  It is just that a few particular kinds of intelligence are valued in a market economy, while others are not--ask any poet who can craft verses on the fly how much the market values her intelligence!

But, as with everything else, I am in a rapidly shrinking minority:

Meanwhile, our fetishization of IQ now extends far beyond the workplace. Intelligence and academic achievement have steadily been moving up on rankings of traits desired in a mate; researchers at the University of Iowa report that intelligence now rates above domestic skills, financial success, looks, sociability, and health.

The older I get, the more I value the good-heartedness in people.  They can be Harvard grads, but if they seem to be incapable of empathy, well, they do not deserve my time.

We must stop glorifying intelligence and treating our society as a playground for the smart minority. We should instead begin shaping our economy, our schools, even our culture with an eye to the abilities and needs of the majority, and to the full range of human capacity.

Exactly!  But, oh yeah, I keep forgetting that the market economy does not care about "the full range of human capacity" and instead only wants to know how much money you can make.  If you are so smart, how come you ain't rich, right?

When Michael Young, a British sociologist, coined the term meritocracy in 1958, it was in a dystopian satire. At the time, the world he imagined, in which intelligence fully determined who thrived and who languished, was understood to be predatory, pathological, far-fetched. Today, however, we’ve almost finished installing such a system, and we have embraced the idea of a meritocracy with few reservations, even treating it as virtuous. That can’t be right. Smart people should feel entitled to make the most of their gift. But they should not be permitted to reshape society so as to instate giftedness as a universal yardstick of human worth.

Oh well, yet another way in which the imagined dystopian future is already here.

Money! Money! Money!

The old Soviet system couldn't care a shit about gods; after all, they were implementing the ideas of a thinker who declared that religion was the opium of the masses.  Commies were godless and were anti-market.

The pro-market America was all about god and bible-thumping politicians.  "God bless America" became a mantra that if not faithfully rendered made one a dirty commie.  Can you imagine an American President not concluding a serious address to the nation with a "God bless America"?  It is like how beauty pageant contestants wish for world peace ;)

In that lies an interesting irony. The faith in god requires many beliefs, including that there is a higher purpose to life, with the path leading to god.  The market, on the other hand, is built on the exact opposite idea--there is no purpose to any damn thing.  If you want to sell and if there are buyers for it, the transaction happens.  If you can't sell, you lose.  If you make money out of it, so be it.  The market simply is.  The commies, on the other hand, firmly believed in a political economic system that served a higher purpose.  They were, ahem, religious about it.

Perhaps it would be more consistent if the god-believing "non-commies" designed their political economy in order to serve a higher purpose, while the godless "commies" lives in the anything-goes system.  But, inconsistency is what life is, I guess.

Apparently god likes the purpose-less free market of anything, and cursed the godless "higher purpose" commies to collapse ;)

The sudden death of the command and control Soviet economy features a lot in Svetlana Alexievich's Secondhand Time.  One of the people, who talks to the author dropped out of the university after his second year, says "the market became our university ... Maybe it's going too far to call it a university, but an elementary school for life, definitely."

I feel sorry for my parents because they were told flat out that they were pathetic sovoks whose lives had been wasted for less than a sniff of tobacco, that everything was their fault, beginning with Noah's Ark, and that now, no one needed them anymore.  Imagine working that hard, your whole life, only to end up with nothing.  All of it took the ground out from underneath them, their world was shattered; they still haven't recovered, they couldn't assimilate into the drastically new reality.  My younger brother would wash cars after class, sell chewing gum and other junk in the subway, and he made more money than our father--our father was a scientist. A PhD! ... This was how capitalism came into our lives ...

Whether or not we believe in gods and religions, every one of us--consciously or subconsciously--attempt to create a meaning for the insanely short times that we have in this cosmos.  When that meaning is shattered, the existential crisis becomes unbearable.  When people here in the US suddenly lose their jobs for no fault of theirs, the existential struggle is as real as the Russian PhD who was not needed anymore.  The tragedy is that the pro-market but god-believing people, who vastly outnumber us infidels, rarely want to spare a dime and help ease that existential struggle of the "losers."  But then that's what the "free market" is all about, I suppose.

You think you are stressed?

This post is a continuation from yesterday, which was triggered by the interview with Hope Jahren.  Jahren says there about her current research interest:

Right now, I’m interested in stress. We’ve done a lot of experiments around stressing plants to see how they recover and how they manage stress and things like that, which is funny because they’re actually pretty sadistic experiments. I mean, you can torture a plant until it’s this close to dead and then bring it back. You can do all kinds of things you could never get permission to do to animals, and it would be horrible to even think about doing such things to people—but plants are very much fair game in terms of any experiment you want to propose. Especially little small plants and stuff; which gives a kind of scientific freedom in terms of studying life. 

In the normal course of a day, we don't think much about torturing plants, while we have all kinds of issues with torturing animals.  (Well, unless you are a Dick Cheney or a Donald Trump, in which case you don't think twice about torture!)  Plants are life forms, too.  We kill them. We routinely eliminate weeds.  As Jahren puts it, "plants are very much fair game."  

But, there is more to the plant stress than that aspect.  

The interesting thing that we’re coming to is, what is stress? How do you define stress? One thing we’ve noticed is there’s a disconnect between what I think will stress the plant and how it actually reacts. So how do you measure stress? The same life event happens to two people—two people of the same species—they’re not going to react the same. So I can say well, I won’t give these little guys water for a few days, and then I’ll measure how much they didn’t grow, and then I’ll compare the stress between them. But I’ve already projected my own assumption about what stress should be into that experiment—lack of growth. I’m having a lot of fun thinking really deeply about how subjective the experience of stress is. Subjective in terms of human subject is one thing, but subjective in terms of individual experimental plants—that’s a whole other mind box that has to open in order to go there. So that’s what I can say about what I’m really excited about now.

A friend's father, who is a big time backyard gardener, routinely stresses his tomato plants--by not watering them until the time--and the plants always produce more tomatoes than one can imagine.  The stress makes the plant more fertile?  After all, producing the fruits means producing seeds for the next generation, right?

The anthropogenic climate change could add various kinds of stress to plants.  Maybe some will be stressed more than others.    I like the way she phrases it, especially because of the reference to work, earnings, and time:

if I quadruple your salary but I don’t give you any more vacation time, you can’t take that around-the-world tour even if it seems cheap to you, because you can’t get the time off. So now it’s not money that’s limiting; it’s time. Plants have a similar thing in that nitrogen can become limiting, water can become limiting when temperatures go up. There may be less water available in very critical places. So the economy of plants can also tip based on these secondary limitations. That’s also very interesting to us. But I think we need to start wrapping our heads scientifically around some of these scenarios that nobody wants.

Interesting, right, to think about what the limiting factors are? 

Even more fascinating a thinker Jahren is--she is not merely a science person:

When I was deciding what to do with my life, I felt a need to write. I was very drawn to books in a powerful way. I wanted to study them, with a capital “S.” When I got to college I learned very quickly that if I became a writer society would let me die on the street. And if I became a scientist I would always have a roof over my head and a job, and my labor would be something that people needed. That difference has always struck me as so arbitrary, because I was willing to put my soul into all those activities but it became very clear to me that society viewed one of them as important and one of them as optional. So, let’s think about that for a minute. If you’re a scientist, if you have scientific skills, society believes on some fundamental level based on what I just said that you deserve to eat, you deserve to sleep in a dry place, you are entitled to all these things. Now, if we conceptualize science like we do art—something creative that anyone has the potential to do, maybe not everybody is great at it, but it’s this approachable thing that people write books, etc.—why should they be rewarded for that in the same way? What if we really did view science like that as this thing that anybody can do? How would we conceptualize the value of it? Would we lose that protection? Would we lose this protection that scientists have from the street? From hunger? From unemployment? From irrelevance? So it always strikes me as hypocritical that especially when we start talking about how “oh we need all these people to become scientists and we’ve got to get them interested,” as if people’s personal yearnings are at fault. As if people aren’t already yearning for meaning and discovery and things like that.

 A wonderful thought experiment all by itself to "conceptualize science like we do art."  Jahren says that the purpose of science is "to feed the soul in the same way that art is."  I tell ya, there are some wonderful thinkers out there.  The world is better off thanks to them.

Teach your children well. To code. And they'll love you!

My first day at university where I now teach, I met my fellow-newbie faculty colleagues.  One of them was a physicist, with what seemed like an intense New York way of speaking.  When talking with him, I found out that he was the physics department--there was no other physics faculty at the university.  I was shocked, of course, especially when that was my first ever love.

At small universities like ours, physics is not one that we care to educate students about.  As with many aspects of higher education, this too is something that disappoints and depresses me.  In a related context, I recently wrote in an email to a couple of colleagues, "Whatever happened to the old-fashioned notion of exploration of ideas in a liberal education setting?"

We have moved far, far away from exploration.  As this young commentator puts it, "exploration for its own sake is under siege" while writing about the assault on exploration whether it is the arts, or philosophy, or outer space:

The problem is that both space exploration (as well as all other undirected scientific inquiry) and the humanities are in danger, and the conceptual line we draw between them is obscuring the fact that it’s the same danger, and that it comes from the same source: a cleaving to market-determined value and a desire for immediate return on investment.
We could argue about whether that desire is a consequence of the instant-news environment, the Great Recession and the economic pressures of globalization, or the myopia resulting from the need for political wins.

If there seemingly is no answer to "what job can you get with that, and how much will that pay?" then apparently it is not worth for society to fund it?  After all, we could be exploring the universe for ever, and could hunt for extra-terrestrial intelligence until we are all dead, and not being able to monetize the investment within a few years means that those are not worth exploring!  This approach is rapidly filtering down to the high school level where, for instance, even learning a foreign language is now considered to be wasteful compared to learning a programming language!  Should we wonder then that right from when they are kids, there is a push to teach them how to code!

Such a contemporary approach to education and knowing, and the push for specialization in order to "grow the economy," cannot possibly help us in the long-run.    Buckminster Fuller said it best:

Specialization has bred feelings of isolation, futility, and confusion in individuals. It has also resulted in the individual’s leaving responsibility for thinking and social action to others. Specialization breeds biases that ultimately aggregate as international and ideological discord, which in turn leads to war.

We need to understand how we relate to other humans, to other life forms, to the rocks and the rivers, and to outer space.  But, we cannot expect all these to miraculously happen if we take away exploration from education.  All we will end up with, as a former colleague used to say, is a society of automatons!

The mirror says I am selfish, nasty, brutish, and short. Mirrors lie, of course!

In Two days, one night, Marion Cotillard's character--and we, the audience--are presented with a tough challenge.  She is laid off, and the only way she can get her job back is if her co-workers will give up their bonuses.  Will the workers watch out for their own selfish interests, or will they push her out?

A few years ago, the faculty union at the university where I work voted to strike if their salary demands were not met.  (Full disclosure: I have never been a member of any union.)  Those were the recessionary years after the tech bubble burst and after the fateful events of 9/11.  In the tight budget context, the university did what it had to do in order to balance the books and pacify the faculty--it laid off a few staff, while scrounging around for money.  I wrote to the then president of the union (he is the boss even now) "are we trying to square the circle here?"

While I am no commie who believes in a "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" ideology, I always find it bizarre that even the pink and red unions operate in ways that clearly pitch workers against workers.

Whether or not there are unions at a place of work, when budgets are tight leading to threats to workers' compensation, it is strange that workers would rather see some of their colleagues laid off than to take a a cut in their pay.  I suppose if the richest who have in plenty will not engage in any sense of sacrifice, then why should we expect the middle- and low-income workers to be any different, right?

Whole Foods, for instance, which for years has prided itself on the wages and benefits that the employees receive is now laying  off a few workers because, well:

Whole Foods announced it was eliminating 1,500 jobs—about 1.6 percent of its American workforce—"as part of its ongoing commitment to lower prices for its customers and invest in technology upgrades while improving its cost structure." The focus on cost-cutting isn't surprising—Whole Foods stock has lost 40 percent of its value since February, thanks to lower-than-expected earnings and an overcharging scandal in its New York City stores.

(Another full disclosure: I have always hated the hype about Whole Foods and, thus, I am perhaps enjoying the trouble the company is in!  I don't care much for its founder either.)

It's not unusual for a publicly traded company to respond to a market swoon by pushing down wages and sending workers packing. But Whole Foods presents itself as a different kind of company. As part of its "core values," Whole Foods claims to "support team member [employee] happiness and excellence." Yet at a time when the company's share price is floundering and its largest institutional shareholder is Wall Street behemoth Goldman Sachs—which owns nearly 6 percent of its stock—that value may be harder to uphold.

Easier to uphold when everything is going great, but one heck of a challenge when the trends are unfavorable.

One way it can truly win is by continuing to do what it does especially well: Providing solid-paying work and above-average benefits to its employees. Even if that ultimately means laying some off, presenting relatively generous severance packages is a good thing, too.

Is it?

Nothing makes economic sense anymore, especially when I think about how the low-wage workers are forced to compete against each other, even as the overall income distribution gets increasingly skewed:

I guess deep down we--the richest and the union worker alike--are all intensely selfish creatures who could not care a damn about the others?  How depressing!

Breast milk for the brain

There is a reason why I don't summarily dismiss the concerns that people--typically the sincerely religious--have about issues like contraception, abortion, blood transfusion, organ donation, and more and, hence, their opposition to them.  I understand their worries that all those--and more--further diminish our existence to a mere composite of materials.  An assembly of components that then dilute, or even wipe away, the meaning of our existence and the answer to fundamental questions about life and the universe.  After all, like them, I too often find myself questioning what this is all about, even through my secular and atheistic progressive lenses.

Inquiring into our existence means that I am left wondering about a whole bunch of things, every single day.  To such an extent that sometimes I wonder if I will be better off if I stopped thinking.  I watch a movie and I think.  I listen to a song and I think. I read something and I think.  I think about what I think.  Of course, all the thinking is for naught when I am but a wannabe.  But, I think about that too--on how much I am a wannabe, a fake! ;)

In trying to make meaning of this existence, I have a hard time understanding many of the "developments" like the market for breast milk.  We live in strange times of sperm donors, egg banks, breast pumps, and now even frozen breast milk. It appears that an overwhelming majority are accepting of these new material constructs our existence, while I--an atheist--am with a minority, who are usually uber-religious, thinking and worrying if all these are, ahem, kosher.

So, yes, in this scientific and technological world of ours where capitalism governs our lives, a market for human breast milk has been created.

What are the sources of supply to meet this demand? One source is donations that happen though the 19 locations of the Human Milk Banking Association of North America, as well as other donor organizations. But there are also for-profit companies emerging like Prolacta Bioscience and International Milk Bank which buy breast-milk, screen and test it, sometimes add additional nutrients, and then sells it to hospitals. There are also websites that facilitate buying and selling breast-milk.

This market is one where prices are fairly clear: the for-profit companies typically offer moms $1.50- $2 per ounce for breast milk, and end up selling it to hospitals for roughly $4 per ounce. Quantities are less clear, although for a rough sense, the nonprofit Human Milk Banking Association of North America dispensed 3.1 million ounces of breast milk in 2013, while a single for-profit firm, Prolacta, plans to process 3.4 million ounces this year.

Seriously, you don't think this is one strange world that we have created, and will be passing it along to future generations?  We spend a lot of our time on all things trivial, but we don't pause to think about what it means to the meaning of our existence if there is a market for breast milk?  Either I am messed up, or we are all messed up ;)

Consider the following from that same source:

Earlier this year in Detroit,  a company called Medolac announced a plan to purchase breast milk. It received a hostile open letter with a number of signatories, starting with the head of the Black Mothers' Breastfeeding Association. The letter read, in part:

[W]e are writing to you in the spirit of open dialogue about your company’s recent attempts to recruit African-American and low-income women in Detroit to sell their breast milk to your company, Medolac Laboratories. We are troubled by your targeting of African-American mothers, and your focus on Detroit in particular. We are concerned that this initiative has neither thoroughly factored in the historical context of milk sharing nor the complex social and economic challenges facing Detroit families. ... Around the country, African-American women face unique economic hardships, and this is no less true in our city. In addition, African American women have been impacted traumatically by historical commodification of our bodies. Given the economic incentives, we are deeply concerned that women will be coerced into diverting milk that they would otherwise feed their own babies.

The breast milk market is then ripe for "outsourcing"?  Similar to how there are wombs for rent in India, will the market then establish a breast milk supply chain?  

I worry that most fellow-humans do not seem to want to think about such trends that are overwhelming us.  Perhaps because most people do not want to think about why we exist?  They don't care about all these?  It is not that I have answers to most (all?) of the questions that pop up in my head.  I have no answers at all.  None.

Hmmmm ... wait a second.  Maybe I am messed up because of the breast milk that nourished me.  Which means, we know who is to be blamed for my thinking about all these--the same one who is to be blamed for my fascination with coffee, with cooking, with cleaning, ... ;)

Source

 

How does sex work get priced?

A while ago, the Economist published a story with this warning up front:

We rarely feel the need to alert readers to explicit content. But our discussion of the online sex trade requires frank language, and some may find the topic distasteful.

Yes, the Economist!

The warning was in place for a good reason; it had charts like the one below and words that can be challenging when a kid is around:

While the vast majority of us are clueless about this industry, we know well that sex is traded as much as various illegal drugs are.  If you are like me, you wonder how they decide to price things?  From a supplier perspective, how do they know what to charge?  What if they are underpricing their services?  What if they can raise their prices, have fewer customers, and still generate higher incomes?  From a demand perspective, how do the Johns know what is a good deal?  Do they comparison shop and, if they do, where are those prices listed?

You see how fascinating the world is?  Every single day is about asking new questions, and finding out that I have no clue whatsoever!

The magazine noted,

Women who are considering entering the industry often seek advice online from those already in it before making up their minds.

Today, I read in another British publication, The New Statesman, which historically has been way left of the Economist, in which a porn actor. Stoya, writes about the need for transparency in how actors are paid.

one thing we rarely talk about openly is pay. Which makes us a lot like many other workers.

Are you thinking about what I am thinking?  How do they even find out about the job openings in the first place?  The magic of the "invisible hand," I suppose!

A well-known performer who had her heyday in the late 2000s once told me that her rate for a double penetration scene was $12,000. I’d just started performing and was under exclusive contract with a single studio – a situation much more like being a direct employee than an independent ­contractor – and had no experience with agencies or booking my own freelance gigs to check this figure against.
Her rate seemed plausible, though – ­being penetrated by two male-bodied people at the same time, one in the anus and one in the vagina, certainly seemed to carry a higher risk of mechanical trauma. Double penetration scenes were rare, as were performers willing to be the receptive partner in them, and rarity tends to add value in any market.
So, when I decided that I wanted to perform in a double penetration scene and the owners of the studio I was with asked how much I wanted to be paid for it, I told them I wanted $12,000. We settled in the middle. Years later it turned out that the performer who had set my expectations so exorbitantly high was actually paid 12 – or possibly 14 – hundred dollars for those sorts of scenes.

Studio contract? Independent contractor?  Freelance gigs? WTF is doubly appropriate here ;)

She writes that "the lack of transparency around rates and my belief in an outrageous lie worked in my favour."  How does the market put a price on a sex act?  This is way too bizarre!

Capitalism, near as I can tell, involves a lot of companies trying to get as much out of a worker as they can for as little pay as possible. In these relationships, the worker should aim for the most pay they can get for the least work. There’s a very important emphasis on “can get”, though, because a luxuriously high rate does absolutely no good if no one is able or willing to pay it.

Stoya articulates one of the toughest issues in market economics--pricing.  That mystery of the marketplace is also why Google hired away an authority on pricing as its Chief Economist.  Yes, the World Bank and the IMF have Chief Economists, and so does Google!

Why does Google even need a chief economist? The simplest reason is that the company is an economy unto itself. The ad auction, marinated in that special sauce, is a seething laboratory of fiduciary forensics, with customers ranging from giant multinationals to dorm-room entrepreneurs, all billed by the world's largest micropayment system.
Google depends on economic principles to hone what has become the search engine of choice for more than 60 percent of all Internet surfers, and the company uses auction theory to grease the skids of its own operations. All these calculations require an army of math geeks, algorithms of Ramanujanian complexity

I don't suppose Google and Varian will want to help out Stoya ;)

Source

The older I get, the more I hate college football

In the market economy, we certainly know how to put a price on anything and everything, irrespective of how much we value that item or the work that a person does.

Take for instance the snow that has been piling up in Boston.  Imagine if the workers whose job it is to clear the roads and streets did not show up for work. Or threatened to go on a strike.  We immediately see the value of the work they do, right?  These are real services they provide, without which quite of bit of life in Boston will come to a standstill.  One would think that they will be highly paid.

source

Or, take elementary school teachers as an example.  We trust them with what pretty much every parent would consider to be the most precious in life--their children.  Teachers who have immense opportunities to shape or ruin their children's futures.   One would think that they will be highly paid.

Instead, you and I and the other billions of humans collectively prefer to pay people for services that we could easily do without.

Take, for instance, the latest news about a college football coach. At the university in the town where I live.

The University of Oregon will pay at least $17.5 million to keep winning football coach Mark Helfrich on his home turf for another five years.

$17.5 million!  Other than this guy who is now spending some of his fortunes on a road trip, I doubt whether any reader of this blog really knows what $17.5 million mean.  I have no freaking clue how to understand that kind of a money.

$17.5 million for coaching a football team.

The market, my friend, knows how to put a price but has no fucking understanding of value!  This is the system that we are stuck with.  Especially when the people can't get enough entertainment in their lives.  To heck with the children in the second grade, but goddammit we shall have entertainment 24x7!

You want more references to understand the distorted and screwed up emphasis on entertainment?

Helfrich’s annual salary is now about six times the UO president’s compensation.

Let me recap.
The coach is for a football team, whose existence is made possible by the university whom the players represent.
Without the university, there will not be students.
Without students, no football team.
The university is there to educate students.
One would think that, therefore, the educator-in-chief, the university president, would be the highest paid officer, right?
But, the coach earns six times what the president is paid!

According to the USA Today coaches salaries database, Helfrich — whose previous annual salary of $2 million ranked 52nd nationally and 10th in the Pac-12 — is now fourth among his Pac-12 counterparts and tied for 22nd nationally with an immediate base-pay raise to $3.15 million.

That, my friend, is how "the market" works!  But, we are stuck with it because the great alternative was infinitely worse.

Keep this in mind the next time you try to convince me, or somebody else, or even yourself, on the glories of the market!

BTW, because a $17.5 million can barely cover the caviar bill:

Some of the fringe benefits in Helfrich’s contract include:
Two courtesy cars.
Membership to the Eugene Country Club and the Downtown Athletic Club.
Use of a skybox suite and 12 tickets to home football games; four tickets to home games of Oregon’s other varsity sports.
Travel for his spouse to regular-season road games and for his spouse and children to postseason games.

Meanwhile, the road cleaning crew in Boston gets ready for another dump on Thursday.  The elementary school teachers spend their own money for supplies.  We pay bullshit jobs quite a bit, and make sure we would attack the real value adders if they asked for an Oliver Twist-more!

in our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it.  Again, an objective measure is hard to find, but one easy way to get a sense is to ask: what would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it’s obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish.

We are fucked up!

ps: I am sure there will be some who will claim that these are not representative of a free market.  But, hey, that claim is no different from die hard Marxists' claim that the USSR was not practicing true Communism.  So, no point talking about some Utopian version of anything that does not exist on this planet.

Snake-charming Indians we are not!

"Did you see that snake on the road?" I asked.

We had taken a country-road, a back road, instead of the highway.  After the tasty picnic-lunch by the lakeshore, when exiting I saw a board that indicated this other approach to the destination.  Of course, I was immediately tempted to take that route instead of driving on the freeway.  But, not driving alone meant that I had to poll the rest and factor in their views.  Damn this democracy! ;)

Every once in a while, democratic approaches do yield good, and correct, results.  The people agreed. We were off on the country road.

The pleasure of driving slowly, on a sunny pleasant day, in a setting with scenic views, far exceeds anything to be gained by speeding along with the masses.  Taking in things slowly, we notice the world around us that we certainly would not otherwise.  And even then, it all depends on where we are and what our window is to the world.  I had the front seat view, which gave me a perspective that was different from the passenger in the rear looking out on the sides.  It is a wonderful metaphor, by itself, on why our respective takes on various aspects of life also differs, right?

Thus, I saw the snake on the ground that the rest did not.  I am sure there were plenty that they could have observed that I would have missed out on.

None of the other four in the car had noticed the snake.  I had to show them that, even though I have an intense dislike for snakes.   I hate them.

A quick u-turn.

"It is in the middle of the road. Do you see that there?  Maybe a vehicle already has gone over it and it is dead now" I said as we watched from the safe shoulder space by the road.

And then it slithered.  Damn creepy it was!

As vehicles rushed by, the snake, which was smack in the middle of the road, seemed to want to get away from the danger to its life.  Of course; it is about survival. That instinct to survive which is in all of us.

The snake hating crowd we were, well, we started to worry about the snake.  We saw how one wrong move and it would be dead.  We started yelling loudly and were even shouting out instructions to the snake on where it should go, fully knowing we were of no help at all.

The snake, meanwhile, hissed at the passing vehicles.  The head often rose up and angled as if it wanted to bite the potential attacker.

The tension in all of us was way more than what we had bargained for.  It was clear that we did not want to witness the impending gory death.  Another u-turn and we were on the road again to enjoy the pleasant afternoon.

"Is there anything that we can do to help the snake?" asked one.

"I'm sure it is roadkill by now" I said.  "Every other week, I seem to see a dead deer by the roadside when I drive to campus.  This is what happens when we humans invade their territories."

We build roads.
Construct dams.
Dig up the soil.
We do everything in order to pursue our self-interest.
Roadkills are in plenty, literally and metaphorically.
If only there were a better way for that pursuit of happiness!

More on the Bangladesh factory catastrophe ... clothes cheaper than food!

In an earlier post, I noted the logic that if we as consumers want to pay nothing more than $14 a shirt, then it can happen only with the kind of conditions that led to the catastrophe in Bangladesh.  The New Yorker's James Surowiecki's point is the same:

The problem isn’t so much evil factory owners as a system that’s great at getting Western consumers what they want but leaves developing-world workers toiling in misery.

How much have American consumers benefited from textile manufacturing in countries that are desperate for economic growth and development that will bring in jobs?

U.S. consumers have become accustomed to spending relatively little on clothing compared with other items—and getting a lot for their money. Americans last year devoted just 3% of their annual spending to clothing and footwear, compared with around 7% in 1970 and about 13% in 1945, according to Commerce Department data.

The decreasing proportion of the annual spending doesn't mean we buy less clothes.  It is the other way around: we buy a lot more clothes than ever before but at remarkably low prices:

"Apparel prices are lower in absolute terms now than they were in the 1990s," says Dean Maki, an economist at Barclays

Compare this fashion expense with food:

Since 1990, clothing prices in the U.S. have risen just 10% compared with an 82% jump in food prices during the same period, according to Jessica Tenvose, an economist with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which compiles the Consumer Price Index. If adjusted for inflation, clothing prices would show a decline.

Our fickle sense of fashion, and an appetite for attire, means that the market works in overdrive to make that happen. That led to flexible manufacturing processes, writes Surowiecki:

Flexible supply chains are great for multinationals and consumers. But they erode already thin profit margins in developing-world factories and foster a pell-mell work environment in which getting the order out the door is the only thing that matters. Locke says, “Often, the only way factories can make the variety and quantity of goods that brands want at the price points they’re willing to pay is to squeeze the workers.” Suppliers in the garment industry rarely have contracts that last more than two seasons. “If you don’t deliver on time,” Locke says, “you don’t get the next order.” The problem is made worse by the fact that many of these factories are simply poorly run, with managers who generally have little training. This means that profits are smaller and there’s less money to pay workers or to invest in better conditions. And since in many developing countries, including Bangladesh, labor unions are frowned upon, there’s no one to speak up for workers in these factories. So safety becomes an afterthought at best.

Now, it is not that I want us American consumers to apologize and feel sorry for such trends.  Instead, as I noted in that post, if only we are willing to pay a few more cents per shirt, which can then go a long way to both pay higher wages and to enforce occupational safety.

In my post, I agreed with the following quote:

Real reform will mean paying a lot more than $14 for a shirt.

US and European retailers are working on responses to this crisis in their own ways, and I am sure soon they will work out a mutually agreeable set of conditions.  Meanwhile, the Bangaldesh government is also responding:

April's collapse of the eight-story Rana Plaza, one of the world's worst industrial accidents, has put pressure on Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's government to address concerns about working conditions in Bangladesh. Ms. Hasina's administration said on Sunday that it planned to soon raise the minimum wage in the sector from $38 per month, about a quarter of China's wage. It closed 18 garment factories for safety violations last week and is planning broad inspections of other facilities.

And that is exactly what Surowiecki also had to say:

Even so, while there is much that companies can do themselves, the real lesson of the past two decades is that if labor standards are actually to improve government has to play a role. Private power alone won’t cut it: as long as consumers and companies insist on the lowest price and endless variety, there’ll always be factories that are willing to cut corners to get the business.

We have a long way to go.  But, in our haste to do something good, I hope we will not drive out the manufacturers from Bangladesh; that will be terribly counter-productive because as horrible as the situation is, it will be worse if these jobs didn't exist.  

Saira Banu, a seamstress from a factory in Rana Plaza who suffered broken ribs in the collapse, says she would like to quit. But Ms. Banu, who is in her 20s, says she doesn't want to return to a previous job as a housemaid, an informal position that isn't covered by a minimum wage and pays about $20 per month. "I'd like to find alternative work," she said. "But I don't know what I can do."

As my dissertation adviser once remarked in class, only the rich can afford to be unemployed.

Caption at the source:
Rozina Akter, a seamstress injured in the factory collapse, said she will go back to work as soon as she can, adding, 'Not all buildings will collapse.

The Bangladesh clothing factory disaster and us. Not the US, but us

We consumers want to pay the lowest price possible for whatever we want to buy.  The market works, and works furiously, to get us products at those low prices.

This drive for low prices has led to China's rise as the world's factory.  In an earlier post, I wondered whether China's "cheap" manufacturing is worth all that.  I noted there:

We consumers all over the world are not willing to pay anything towards maintaining the environment, leave alone improving its quality.  Simultaneously, we seem to be addicted to inexpensive goods that come from China.  Even from a simple economic understanding, we can hypothesize that somebody is paying a price that we are not.

In China's case, there is one huge price that we already paying the piper: the effect on the natural environment.  Smoke and smog, and erosion, and more.

China's economic growth and development means that slowly wages have risen there, which then has spread the "cheap" manufacturing elsewhere, to poorer countries like Bangladesh.  Unlike China's environmental cost that we don't pay for because it is largely out of our sight, the drive towards lower and lower prices is a lot more visible in Bangladesh.  The latest was the collapse of the multi-level factory that has resulted in a body count that has already exceeded 550!

As consumers, we might be able to ignore the impacts on China's environment, but the loss of human lives in Bangladesh makes us pause, at least for a while, forcing us to re-evaluate our drive towards low prices.  What is the cost breakdown of the typical t-shirt manufactured in one of those factories?

Twelve cents!

To get prices that low, workers see just 12 cents a shirt, or two per cent of the wholesale cost. That’s one of the lowest rates in the world—about half of what a worker in a Chinese factory might make

But, those twelve cents are also why these jobs exist in Bangladesh.  This low wage is:

a major reason for the explosion of Bangladesh’s garment industry, worth $19 billion last year, up from $380 million in 1985. The country’s 5,400 factories employ four million people, mostly women, who cut and stitch shirts and pants that make up 80 per cent of the country’s total exports.

We forget that Bangladesh is one awfully poor country.  Matt Yglesias writes while situating "Bangladesh's GDP per capita in the context of American history":

It's common to compare Bangladesh to America's own sweatshop era in the late-19th century, but Krugman shows that Bangladesh is actually much poorer than that.

Yes, Bangladesh can do a lot more than it currently does to enforce labor regulations and occupational safety protocols.  But, ultimately,

Real reform will mean paying a lot more than $14 for a shirt.

We consumers have the power to influence favorable working conditions and lives for Bangladeshi workers, or workers anywhere, for that matter.  But, we have to be ready to put our money where our mouth is:

Babul Akhter, president of the Bangladesh Garment and Industrial Workers Federation, said buyers have a responsibility to check the safety and security of those making the clothes they order, but most overlook this.
Abdus Salam Murshedy, former president of Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association, adds: "The buyers and brands look for the most competitive offer. We cannot pay appropriate wages [to workers] unless we get proper prices for the orders."

It is easy to criticize "those greedy corporations" when they are merely responding to us greedy consumers!

As I noted in another post, it is bizarre that human life in some parts of the planet is held more valuable than human life elsewhere:

I find it terrible that a human life is not the same anywhere on the planet.  There seems to be a collective ennui when it comes to the loss of the lives of humans who were doing nothing but tending to their daily lives in some parts of the world.  The innocent civilians who die by the hundreds and thousands in many, many countries of the world do not make it even to the back pages of the papers, leave alone the front pages.

This Bangladesh incident will slowly move away from the front pages to some obscure spots, and will eventually disappear.  Soon it will be the holiday shopping season and we consumers will line up outside the locked stores for the early bird prices.  We will trample fellow-humans as we rush to pick up that remarkably low-priced product from China or Bangladesh.

The customer is always right!


New Portable Sewing Machine Lets Sweatshop Employees Work On The Go

Doing good via the profit motive?

In what seems like eons ago, back in graduate school, when I began my formal intellectual exploration into the role of market and planning (government) in society, I read Amartya Sen's "The profit motive."  Since then, I have attempted to read Sen's works whenever he writes at levels much lower than he is capable of so that even blokes like me can pretend to understand.

The only book of Sen's that I ever purchased was The Argumentative Indian, which is right now on the bookshelf in my office.  A student, "Z," often jokes--yes, more than once it has been--that I should pretty much wear that book title as a name-tag so that strangers will immediately walk away from me.

Oh, I have digressed far away from the profit motive.  One of the challenges has always been with situations, which are in plenty, when the profit motive alone doesn't seem to work.  In fact, in quite a few contexts, the pursuit of profit generates a whole bunch of headaches too.  Troubling issues.

A couple of years ago, as we were struggling to recover from the Great Recession, Sen commented in this essay:

The economic difficulties of today do not, I would argue, call for some “new capitalism”, but they do demand an open-minded understanding of older ideas about the reach and limits of the market economy. What is needed above all is a clear-headed appreciation of how different institutions work, along with an understanding of how a variety of organisations – from the market to the institutions of state – can together contribute to producing a more decent economic world.

In other words, there is a lot yet to be understood regarding the appropriate roles for the state and market in society.  It is ultimate job security in my intellectual interests then!

Thus, it was more than interesting to read in the Harvard Business Review about how a market-based approach can do good to society.  Especially in Africa.

(BTW, I notice that the latest issue of the Economist has a special section on the positive development in Africa.  Will read that through tomorrow.)

This HBR piece begins with: "If you knew how to help feed the hungry — would you?"  Yes.  Of course, yes!

In that essay, the CEO/Chairman of General Mills describes the partnership framework that GM has developed with the UN's bodies, the USAID, and NGOs, and writes:

Though some may see this work as philanthropy, we see it as creating shared value with local African businesses. For example, Nyirefami, in Tanzania, is a company that mills flour. General Mills knows flour. We've been in the milling business more than 140 years, and with Gold Medal, we're still America's leading flour brand. PFS volunteers were able to provide Nyirefami with the technical expertise needed to install a quality control lab, and improve washing and pre-drying operations. With that, Nyirefami increased their milling capacity five-fold, paving the way for the company to buy more grain from local farmers, while also earning the highest level of food certification available in Tanzania.

The fact that he is qualifying the venture with "though some may see this work as philanthropy" itself is a dead giveaway that while not without profits, it is not entirely with profit alone as the motive.  He then goes on to list a few  ways in which businesses can "apply what you do best to reduce poverty and increase economic activity in the developing world."

And then there was another piece in the HBR where the author writes that highly profitable companies like Apple and Google drank a whole lot of milk from the taxpayer teats and now they aren't willing to help the taxpayers.  Reminds me of the many stories I have heard in India of children not helping their aging parents; I suppose this behavior means that corporations are people after all!

Anyway, the author has some sharp words for these behemoths:

Many of the revolutionary technologies that make the iPhone and other products and services "smart" were funded by the U.S. government. Take, for instance, the Internet, GPS, touchscreen display, as well as the latest voice-activated personal assistant, Siri. And Apple did not just benefit from government-funded research activities. It also received its early stage finance from the U.S. government's Small Business Investment Company program. Venture capitalists entered only after government funding had gotten the company to the critical proof of concept.
Other Silicon Valley companies, like Google, have profited in a similarly immense fashion: Google's algorithm was funded by the National Science Foundation. Many of the "new economy" companies that like to portray themselves as the heart of U.S. "entrepreneurship" have very successfully surfed the wave of U.S. government-funded investments. Hence, one secret to Silicon Valley's success has been its active and visible hand, in stark contrast to the Ayn Rand/Adam Smith folklore often bandied about.

In other words, not merely a story of a man, a plan, and an angel investor.  The author raises an important question:

A crucial question to be answered is not just whether the present system is geared toward the government showing a lot of the entrepreneurial courage, but why it is systematically badmouthed, despite its many successes.

Let me remind you that this is in the Harvard Business Review and not Mother Jones!

We are a long way from figuring out the institutional arrangement.  All we know is that we cannot flourish without giving the profit motive the necessary opportunities.  We also know that an excess of that is a disaster.  We are equally aware that government is not all bad, but that too much of it is very bad.  Where does that magical line exist separating government activities from those of the private sector?

Even Amartya Sen can't figure that one out!