Utopia Hypothetical, Cont.

My last post described a situation where everyone was individually wealthy, but that doesn't necessarily make for a utopia.  I wanted to explain why I put it there -

The definition of a utopia is "an imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect."  There are some things I don't think any society can make perfect -

People longing for something they don't have the talent for.  Like someone who wants to be a famous artist, who doesn't have the skills or talent or what-have-you to become one.

Relationship problems (friends, family, lovers, etc.)

I could add things such as 'health problems', but it's hard to say how much can be solved with technology in some future point.  So most likely there's still going to be something outside our control, healthwise, but it could be to a larger or lesser degree than we imagine.

These are things I don't think any society can ultimately resolve, though perhaps that's just my personal lack of imagination.

Having everyone independently wealthy, however, would lead to all sorts of 'perfect' possibilities.  Assuming we've got the technology/resources to continue manufacturing desirable goods, and that people willing do the work that can't be automated, and so on and so forth.

How so?  Mainly because everyone, and not just the few, would have the resources to do what they truly wanted to.  They wouldn't be stuck in some mediocre, dead-end job just to pay the bills.  Wouldn't be wasting 8 hours a day (and possibly an hour or two of commute time) doing something tedious and mind-numbing because it's the best they think they can get. 

There are all sorts of frustrating things we endure on a daily basis, that we just accept as 'the way it is' because we don't see any other choice.  N. N. Taleb (author of The Black Swan), had an interesting article discussing why and how businesses require employees...and use it as a form of control.

This has an interesting resonance with other things - the term 'wage slave', which sometimes differentiates the modern economy from our agricultural past where each farmer was essentially theri own small business owner.  (There's a loss of independence, and consequences associated with that, which affect us all today.)  The issue with modern slavery, and with businesses who exploit workers to make bricks, burn charcoal, and so on and so forth.  There's even been some discussion/debate over whether Google and other Silicon Valley companies are re-inventing the rather disastrous company town.

I started with N.N. Taleb's article because he attributes this drive for control to business needs.  That is, a business needs to be sure they can offer their goods and services on a consistent and reliable basis...and independent contractors may not be as reliable as a business could wish.  (In the example he gave, a pilot was offered quite a lot of money to break contract and take a client on a unplanned trip.)  This is a rather non-judgmental explanation for the incentives for controlling your employees...

And it brings up questions about power, control, and how we can have a modern society that meets our desire for fast, reliable service while at the same time creating a world where people can live their lives to the fullest.

Facing Evil

A couple of decades ago I was lucky enough to visit Europe, which was pretty awesome at the time.  Amongst all the usual happy touristy things, however, I made a point of visiting a former concentration camp in Germany.  I think it was actually Oranienburg, just north of Berlin.  You might ask why I would go to something so - depressing.  I mean, I'm in Europe.  I visited London.  Paris. Barcelona. Berlin.  Got to see the Eiffel Tower.  And here I am going to a place that will only make you feel awful about humanity.

I went because I feel it's important to acknowledge these thing.  To face them.  To admit that they exist, they can exist here.  Now.  And that evil doesn't often come with neon signs and devil horns.  There's a phrase out there, made somewhat famous, about the banality of evil.  When I deployed to Iraq and worked with an alleged murderer, part of what was so shocking was that this involved someone I had actually met.  Personally.  (I periodically check up on the case and as you can see, he was acquitted...so I'm discussing the impact of the event on me rather than making any real judgment on whether or not he did it.)

The thing is - nobody wants to believe that people we actually know and work with can be bad.  It's always some stranger out there.  Someone you hear about on the news, and never meet in real life.  We can make all sorts of judgments about the people we've never met, harshly claim that they are evil incarnate...and be completely blind when it comes to someone we actually do know.  After all, would someone so awful do something nice, like build a soccer stadium, or joke around and play basketball.  In some ways, I think the worse evil comes from those who have so distanced themselves from the results of their actions that they can obfuscate the cause.  If everyone is to blame, nobody is to blame. 

It's important to me that anyone in a leadership position understand the role they play in creating the work environment.  For signaling what is acceptable and what is not.  For holding people accountable, and making it clear who is responsible (or, alternatively, making it too easy to deny responsibility).

I suppose that's part of why I'm interesting in (boring, to most) things like organizational behavior. 

So anyways.  Here we are in this complicated, fascinated world.  A place where people can think all sorts of different things, feel justified in supporting all sorts of different policies.  And yet we don't want to admit that we can do something to make things different.  Sure, we're vaguely aware that modern slavery exists.  And if some news story flashes and we hear that Nike has slaves making shoes, we might decide not to buy Nikes until we hear they've fixed their supply chain.  But good luck making sure every purchase you make was done without slave labor.  (The attempt to do so is prohibitive.  I shudder to think how long a shopping trip would take if I had to look up every item.)  And even if you think you've checked, in this day and age where finished goods are made by a variety of different companies how can you ever truly know?  Even good companies may not realize how their suppliers produce things.


It's a lot of work.  Much easier to just worry about gorillas getting shot, or share pictures of cute little cats.  (No, not trying to cynically discuss how awful people are.  I share pictures of cute cats too.)

I'll probably post more on this topic later.  I want to explore the disjunct between what we claim we'd do (i.e. stand against evil wherever it is) and what we actually do.

Modern Slavery, and Thoughts Thereof.

Boy Drinking Tea near Brickmaker.  Helmand Province, Afghanistan

When I was reading about modern slavery, the author mentioned slavery amongst some brickmaking families in Pakistan.  The way it works is this: someone comes and offers a great job.  "Come work here, the pay is great!".  When someone takes the job they will find that they 'owe' money for transportation to the work site.  Plus the site is so remote that it's hard to buy food and living essentials.  Those are provided by the business, at a higher rate than normal. 

The worker soon finds that he (primarily a 'he') keeps sinking into debt.  This might be the case regardless - some brick making businesses are better than others -  but dishonesty on the part of some managers makes it worse.  These workers can't read or write, and so they have no way of verifying that their debts are being documented correctly.  Or that attempts to pay if off are counted correctly.  So even the hardest workers, ones who have no family emergencies to pay for, don't go into further debt because of unexpected illnesses or a planned wedding, will sometimes wind up deeper in debt because of this dishonesty.

While in debt the worker can't leave.  Can't quit and go find a better job.  Can't take out a loan and go to school.  The business might trade his debt (and thus his labor) off to someone else, but it never truly goes away.  If the worker causes trouble or tries to leave, the owner can try to call in the debt right then and there.  As long as the worker keeps working, the owner may let the debt ride.  This debt can also be passed on from generation to generation.  So someone might be making bricks simply because their father or grandfather took a job that promised great wages and wound up sinking into debt.

While I took the picture above in Afghanistan (and not Pakistan), I wonder if there were some other questions I could have or should have asked when we visited this brick maker.  I somehow assumed it was a mom and pop business, though in this culture the mom wouldn't be an owner.  It just looked like a family run business, since the kids were clearly part of a family working here.  Now I wonder who actually owned the business, and how well the family was paid.

As I've been reading up on this, I find myself wondering "How can people do this to each other?"  How can you be so divorced of empathy, compassion, respect for life and human dignity...how can you be so blocked off from our natural desire for connection...that you would create a system that depends so much on making other people's lives miserable?  And not just the worker's life, but the lives of his or her children?  The entire family?

I know enough to say that it's not exclusive to any one group or culture.  Our own history of company towns show some eerie similarities, though some of the companies had high ideals for creating a town like this.

What Kevin Bales indicates in his book Disposable People is that our modern economy makes it hard to know where and how such practices makes it into our modern economy.  It's made me think about what a fair cost is for a lot of things.  He mentions that oftentimes the business owners are divorced from the day to day running of that business, they just put pressure on the middle managers to save money...and some of those managers find the only way to make profit is to "reduce expenses" i.e. find ways of paying less for labor, since other expenditures are fixed.  And so we have charcoal burners in Brazil working in a similar fashion.  (I have carefully avoided talking about the sex trade, as there are other factors involved there...but some of the same dynamics are at play.)

What is a fair cost?  Maybe we really should be paying a couple of dollars more for those chocolate bars, as one example, that claim fair pay for the workers.  Or (to bring this closer to home) maybe an extra 17 cents for a Big Mac isn't such a big deal, if it allows workers to make enough to raise a family without food stamps and welfare.  And Walmart, which is one of the largest employers, shouldn't pay a wage that also requires welfare to raise a family.

"But what about the free market?" you might ask.  Aren't these the wages dictated by supply and demand?

And how can we expect these companies to compete if they raise our wages, when companies can go elsewhere to pay even less?

If companies were barely breaking even I would think that's a valid point.  Can't expect somebody to stay in business if they're not making any money.  Yet this concept of 'rents' interests me, because the difference between the sale price and the cost of making something can sometimes be substantial...and who gets what portion of that 'rent' says a lot about our economy today.

Shifting gears a bit,  I want to throw something else out there.  Back when Spain was extracting a lot of gold from the Americas most nations thought wealth came from hoarding gold.  The more gold you had in your treasury, the better off you were.  Part of Adam Smith's genius was pointing out that a good economy did not come from hoarding gold, but from a free market economy.  (btw, he also thought the government should be responsible universal education and public infrastructure).

I would love to see some studies asking whether the modern equivalent of 'hoarding gold' is doing the same thing.  That is, just as I've seen article after article talk about how wages are stagnant and the middle class is shrinking I've also seen repeated articles mention that various groups (large corporations, the 1%, etc) are sitting on piles of money.  Some of that is probably  necessary.  No business wants to go under because they lack liquidity during a crisis (that's happened to a couple big names already).  Yet how much of that is good business practice, and how much of that is the equivalent of hoarding gold?

As for the free market economy, I'm not entirely sure we're seeing it at play here.  Certain groups seem to have captured the market, to the point where they're able to influence the economy more than would happen otherwise.  For example, could Walmart seriously find workers if those workers were unable to get welfare to make ends meet?  At some point people will say 'it's not worth working my butt off when I can't make ends meet on the wages I'm getting'.  Or even "why should I work hard just to make sure some CEO or shareholder can buy a private yacht?"

Actually, I think people are already saying that...which is why this ties in a bit with immigration.  Illegal immigrants sometimes take the jobs that Americans don't want, because those jobs pay too little to appeal to someone who grew up here.  Businesses, rather than increasing their wages, hire illegals instead.

A few final thoughts.  I don't believe businesses should be charities.  Keeping unproductive people on the job hurts everyone.  At the same time, I think we've already made the decision (as a society) that we don't want people fired for lack of jobs to wind up homeless and dying on the streets.  Hence the social safety net, such as it is.

We're facing some major transitions today.  Automation - and globalization in the more industrialized economies - is taking away a lot of the jobs that used to be there for what's called an 'unskilled' population. (Even though it's called unskilled, experience and skill can make a big difference in improvement, so it's technically not.  I've seen this at work, where we have some pretty simple jobs anyone is capable of doing...and yet it's hard to find the right person for the role.)  I don't want to be a Luddite, and throw away this technology just to keep people employed.  I think that's a waste of resources.  I also think that very few people enjoy doing the boring, monotonous jobs that are best suited for automation.  (It seems sad to say that all a thinking and feeling human being is capable of is to do some repetitive and brainless task.  I kind of feel they should be paid more not because it requires a special skill, but because it's such a waste of human potential.  Reminds me of a science fiction book that had a restaurant that was considered classier and more expensive because it used real human servers.) 

And so I wonder what an economy like that would look like.  One where most people have the skills to do the higher level jobs, where only a few people work the 'unskilled' ones that can't be automated - and are paid well for it - and where our products cost what they 'should' in so doing.

Some things would probably be much more expensive, but if it's made using the charcoal  made by the Brazilians I mentioned above, isn't that an artificially low cost?  Or if a t-shirt is now twice as expensive, but the price we're used to came from ]mistreated garment workers, is that truly a fair price?

And how much would truly destroy a business, versus just changing what portions of the pie everyone gets?