Advice Of The Pandemic, Ranked!

Among the by-products of the pandemic has been a tsunami of advice, especially about living your best life in lockdown. Was it any good?

Advice: if you're working from home, keep your routines
Early on, the news reports were that people working from home were flailing: cleaning the kitchen when they should be working, bingeing shows when they should be eating, eating when they should be cleaning the kitchen. Was this ever true, or was it just irresistible to imagine people collectively unable to get their shit together?

The advice was predictable and perfectly capitalistic. Keep your routines, they said. If you usually dress up and wear full make-up to work, get up in time to dress up and do your make-up, they said. If you usually commute to work, walk around the apartment for 30 minutes before you sit down at your desk. Take a virtual coffee break with your co-workers.

I thought to myself: who would be so stupid as to add the old burdens of their old life to the new burdens of their new life? Me, I worked in my exercise clothes and took naps over lunch. Did this advice work for anyone?



Verdict: terrible.

Advice: go easy on yourself
This one is complicated because clearly, for some people, "go easy on yourself" was the perfect advice. I'm here to tell you about the rest of us.

As for so many people, in March 2020 my job became an endless series of Zoom-style meetings, unanticipated problems, and difficult conversations. Early on, I thought "I'll go easy on myself" -- instead of trying to do things during weekends or early evenings, I'd spend the time "resting" or "hanging out."

Three weeks of this and I was mired in despair. My always-present sense of my life drifting away and passing me by intensified; thoughts in the "what am I doing and what is the point anyway" category buzzed around my brain like a bunch of gnats. I felt the mold between the bathroom tiles mocking me. With extra free time, my irrational body self-criticism meter ramped up from the blue "Guarded" category into the orange "High Alert!" range.

The advice to go easy often reminds me of some advice my mother once gave me about cleaning. I was complaining that on the occasions when I was on my own and cooking, I hated having to cook *and* having to clean up, which does feel to me like an outrageous burden at the end of a long day. My mom -- whose motto in life was "If you don't want to, you don't have to" -- told me I should clean up the dishes in the morning, and that if I didn't want to wake up to a messy kitchen, I should just "put the dishes in the oven" after dinner. I'm sorry, but dirty dishes in the oven? What kind of a bizarre suggestion is this?

Anyway, to stay sane in the pandemic, I switched into "mental discipline" mode. I scrubbed the floors. I did a zillion live-stream workout, yoga, and ballet classes. I made an elaborate system of calendar alerts. I recommitted to Duolingo.

Obviously, for some people this particular challenge didn't arise, because they were working massive hours or juggling child care or whatever, and obviously "go easy on yourself" makes total sense in that context. For other people, "go easy on yourself" was just what they needed to hear for whatever reason. It just didn't work for me.  

I feel like there's a lot of pointless social aggression out there between the "go easy" people and the "mental discipline" people. Can we please have a détente on this issue?

Verdict: variable.

Advice: create a Zoom social spot
This is the idea that if your job is virtual meetings and your social life is virtual meetings, you should do those two things in two different physical spaces in your home.

I love this advice, because it is geared toward people with lizard brains and I am 100 percent a person with lizard brain.

Virtual interactions give me a special kind of social anxiety. I'm not sure why, but one possibility is that when I'm with people, I'm used to relying a lot on subtle physical and facial cues in figuring out how to interact. Also, I feel like in a room with people, I enjoy the small pauses and silences -- I've always been good at being together and being quiet -- but somehow on a screen, I feel like I have to fill the air with talk, like some kind of demented TV show host. Ugh.

Because I have lizard brain, the layers of Zoom-social-anxiety particular to work-Zoom are queued right up for me when I'm in my work spot -- the chair, the wall behind me appearing on my own screen, the light bouncing off the desk in just such a way. What a relief to take the laptop to the dinner table for the friend-Zoom!

Verdict: the best.
 

Coronavirus, Capitalism, and the Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

Content warning: this post gets a little dark by moments, so if you're not in the right frame of mind, maybe read it later, or don't read it at all.

The pandemic crisis is prompting a lot of reflection about the dysfunctions of a capitalist system, which I guess is a good thing, though I'm pessimistic about much in the way of positive change. The richer classes are finally like -- "wait -- my food and well-being depends on these people! Are they OK? What if something happens to them?!"

Often when I think about the dysfunction of capitalism, I think about the short story "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas," by Ursula Le Guin. The story describes a beautiful well-functioning town in which almost everyone is well and happy, but in which all the good things depend on the utter misery of one small child -- a child who is forever locked in small basement room in squalid conditions and constant suffering.

People talk about the various justifications and injustices of capitalism in many ways, but one common one has to do with overall prosperity: more wealth is created by capitalism than in alternative systems, it is argued, and this wealth improves people's lives. Here the details get a little fuzzy, about whether that wealth has to improve everyone's lives or what exactly.

From a practical point of view, I think it's fair to say that if actual contemporary western capitalism creates wealth, it is doing so in a system that relies on horrible and exploitative conditions for many. It's never been a secret that agricultural workers, people who work elsewhere in the food supply chain, cleaners, gig economy workers, and others work long, long hours in sometimes brutal conditions for little pay -- often working multiple jobs. One of the wake-up calls of the pandemic has been that carers in nursing homes are working multiple jobs at various homes, just to make ends meet, thus increasing the likely spread of disease. And we've written on this blog of the way that modern electronics production relies on getting minerals in exploitative and violent conditions.

How the denizens of modern capitalism frame their faith in overall prosperity with the existence of this suffering and violation of rights has always interested me. The situation is obviously complex, but I think one possibility has to do with the ways that various values create small shifting zones of coherence and acceptability. Inside these little zones things seem to work OK, which makes us forget that things are really not OK at a deeper level.

For example, with respect to the social contract in modern capitalism, I expect that many people who believe in the importance of prosperity/overall GDP/economic growth also endorse some informal version of the following: those who work hard at a full-time job should be able to support themselves or maybe even a family; those at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder should be able to improve their situation with care and hard work; wages should reflect a fair wage for the work involved. Put more abstractly: people care not only about prosperity but also about fairness, equality, and expressions of mutual respect.

One thing that happens in everyday capitalism, I think, is that in certain small zones and in the experience of certain people, the system seems to make these values come together. If your parent came to the US from a life of poverty in Europe in the early 20th century and worked hard to send you to good schools, and you prospered from the contingencies of the 1950s to rise up to the middle-class, then from one perspective it looks like it all comes together: the society's prosperity goes along with the opportunities that the individual takes advantage of; rewards follow.

As is often discussed, this little zone of coherence is just that -- a little zone. For many people, it doesn't work this way at all. They work harder and harder and wages drop; ill health brings catastrophe despite best efforts; racism and discrimination radically diminish options and possibilities.

In this sense, the middle class and those who are even more well-off are somewhat like the denizens of Omelas: we're in a good situation made possible by someone else's horrible situation. Some defenders of capitalism are even kind of explicit about it, arguing against universal basic income on grounds that poor people will then be less motivated to do the crappy jobs that society needs someone to do.

When I talk about capitalism being morally dysfunctional in this way, sometimes my interlocutors are shocked, and they point out to me the horrors of alternative systems. But I think the one doesn't exclude the other. Even if capitalism is the best system out there, it can still be radically unethical. Sometimes in life you have no good options. And even if it is the case that other systems are worse -- then it's even more important for us to talk about the wrongnesses of our system so we can at least try to mitigate them or something.

In the Le Guin story, the residents all learn about the existence of the child in misery during their adolescence, and some go to see the child in person. Most weep and rage but realize they can't do anything about it and go back to normal life. Others, though, do not go back to normal life. What they do is walk away. Le Guin says, "The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas."

Like Le Guin, I can't imagine what it would mean to walk away from modern capitalism. In most basic literal terms, an alternative physical space would either be engaging in more capitalism, by buying up land, or infringing on the rights of other people whose land it is. In my darker moments, I fear that to walk away from Omelas would require ending my existence altogether.

But I try to remind myself: we're not in a fictional story land where the fates have decreed that our well-being and our failings are locked together forever, with our happiness inherently resting on others' suffering. We're in the real world, where things are complicated and confusing and can often be changed.

As the pandemic forces people to confront the situation of essential and vulnerable workers, let's remember that there are a lot of people for whom capitalism leads not to opportunity but to misery. Let's keep in mind that caring about overall economic growth and prosperity means facing up to this fact rather than getting to ignore it.

I fear that keeping these things in mind is going to get harder and not easier in the near future, as economies contract, business close, and times get tough. But we have to do it -- because unlike the people in the story, we don't have the option of walking away.

My 400-Mile Public Transit Experience: A Multifaceted Analysis

Last weekend I went to a conference at Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. Because I've been learning about the contribution that flying makes to climate change, I decided to travel to the conference by alternative means. Here is my story.

The trip:
I took a train from Kitchener, ON to Windsor, ON leaving around 7:15 on a Thursday after class, changing in London, and getting to Windsor around midnight. I stayed over in Windsor, then got up Friday and took the cross-border Detroit-Windsor tunnel bus. I got off that bus and walked about 20 minutes to the Detroit bus station, then at 1:05 pm I got on a Greyhound that got into South Bend around 6:30 -- which should have been time for exercise but which I took to be time for wine and food and rereading Lucky Jim at one of the seventeen Irish themed pubs nearby.

The conference was all-day Saturday and in the morning, Sunday. Then I did basically the same thing in reverse, except I took a taxi instead of the tunnel bus and I had to catch the train from Windsor at 5:30 Monday morning.

The transit experience:
The main thing about the transit experience is wtf is with putting train and bus stations way out in the middle of fucking nowhere? To get to the Detroit station you walk past blocks and blocks of concrete and fences and nothing. There's no coffee or food in the station, or visibly near the station (though I did use Apple Maps to make my way eventually to "King Coney" Coney Island Diner which turned out to be awesome). Right, because what long distance bus traveler needs food or coffee?

I thought Detroit was bad, but then the South Bend bus station is at the airport. Literally -- it is inside the airport. Thus forsaking, for no gain, the main benefit of public transportation, which is that you normally don't have to make some special trip in some special expensive taxi or something to get to the station, because in a normal city, normal people put the station in the middle of the city where the people are.


I realize the aim is to optimize. And that the little bus-taking needs of little bus-taking people just don't add up to anything. But come on -- it's supposed to be a station, not a distribution center. We are people, not boxes of Cheerios.

The personal experience
The main thing about the personal experience was the number of small exchanges I had with people that involved small exchanges of generosity and how surprisingly life-affirming that was. On the bus to South Bend, a woman asked me for a mirror, revealed that she didn't have a phone, then ... I don't want to tell her story even anonymously, but let's just say it turned out she was on her way to a different city for one of those things you do when nothing else in your life is remotely working in any way. She needed to call a place, she needed to transfer prescriptions. We chatted and I loaned her my phone. And she called the place and talked to the people. And she called Walgreens. And then she called her friend. And by the end of the trip the planning and the prescriptions were all sorted out.

In South Bend someone let me share a cab at the very last minute, after a hotel concierge said to me slowly "We find Lyft and Uber are fastest. Don't you have Lyft and Uber?" In Detroit, I went back into the station to use the ATM because the taxi driver was like "Uh, yes cards but I could really use the cash so I could get gas today." I don't know how to describe it, but being able to move cooperatively through these small obstacles with other people made some of the world's other awfulness seem momentarily less bad. And I don't know why driving and flying never seem to have that texture for me, but for whatever reason, they don't.

The pointlessness of the gesture experience
When you take a long bus trip that you could easily have avoided with a pleasant flight from the cute Island Airport via straight shot to Chicago, you have a lot of time to ponder the pointlessness of your choice. People are flying to other cities for destination bridal showers, FFS. I know that in context, my individual sacrifice does not contribute to a solution in any measurable way, and that solving the climate crisis is going to require more than individuals making individual choices.

Still, It didn't feel pointless. Generally, I am disturbed and weighed down by the degree to which for middle-class people on up, the lifestyle leading to climate catastrophe feels so easy and seamless. It freaks me out when I'm in the airport and the easiest thing is to buy heavily packaged snacks and use thirteen single-use plastic containers in a row and pay twenty dollars for a sandwich. I know it is capitalism's job to make me feel this ease, and I bristle. So I found weird small comfort in the idea of a 400-mile trip feeling difficult, like yes, it's a 400-mile trip for a person, which is a difficult thing, and it felt difficult. Plus there were water fountains in all the stations for my reusable water bottle.


More relevantly, it feels to me like between now and some hopeful imaginary future in which things work better, things are going to have to change, and we have to start somewhere changing what we think of as normal activities. Some things I'm not so good at, but taking the bus? As we know, that is often within my wheelhouse.

I've talked to some friends and colleagues about the flying thing, and I got a variety of thoughtful responses, including the idea that individual choices aren't the crux of the matter, which is, in some sense, true. But some people also have said "Well, we're doomed anyway. So." and that one I have trouble with. I mean, yes, probably. But even if that is true in the long run, doesn't it matter whether the coastal cities are flooded in 50 years rather than 30? Or whether kids who are five now get a reasonable world when they're 50? Isn't a slightly less bad climate crisis better than a slightly worse one?

I haven't stopped flying, and I'm going to fly to California to see family, a trip that seems non-negotiable to me in terms of having a life because I love them and need to see them. But I'm taking the advice to make each trip count, and I'm going to do more things there and see more people. Partly this will involve a roughly twelve-hour transit trip from the Bay Area to SoCal. I'm checking out the Flix Bus. I'll keep you posted.

Statistics, Randomness, And My Misspent Youth

I've just been reading Nassim Taleb's Fooled by Randomness. It is a fun read, but at the risk of sounding intellectually immodest, I feel like it is full of things I already knew. Rare, unexpected, and often bad things can happen. It is easy to be fooled by statistics. It is easy to be fooled by life in general. You never really know what's going to happen. Plan accordingly.

Taleb's main target audience is traders and others who think they're succeeding and failing because of skill and insight or lack thereof. He says they are often just the victims of survivorship bias and other forms of bad reasoning. Survivorship bias is when you look at the winners and assume that whatever they did made them winners, while failing to look at the losers and what they were doing. Everyone might be throwing darts at the Wall Street Journal stock pages. Some might be winners, and tautologously, some will be winners relative to others. If you focus on the winners and blindly follow their strategy or their stock picks, you'll be SOL.

More broadly, the book is about unpredictability and how unexpected and surprising things can derail your life. This is something I knew from a young age, mostly because it features prominently in both fiction and reality. You might study for years then develop a brain tumor. You might train as an athlete then get hit by a car. You might raise your kids on organic food and still one of them might die -- from food poisoning, or a really bad flu, or ... anything, for god's sake. If I hadn't had the predictability of unpredictable events hammered home to me enough by the time I was fifteen, I definitely absorbed it when my father died suddenly -- and unexpectedly! -- from a heart attack at that time. He was forty-eight years old.

So I absorbed the epistemological lesson early. From a practical point of view, Taleb says that in the face of uncertainty, a reasonable response is to be risk-averse, and I completely agree. As I understand it, for a trader this means seeker smaller steadier gains, but to be honest I sort of zoned out on that part of the book because I am almost aggressively uninterested in thinking about investment strategy.

At this point you may be wondering: So, Patricia, did you become a risk-averse young person? Why yes -- yes I did! I skipped class, stayed up late drinking with friends, majored in two abstract and relatively useless majors (math and dance), drove around in my mom's ancient and poorly maintained VW Rabbit, and engaged in various activities we won't describe here but that are usually represented as paradigm cases of adolescent devil-may-care behavior.

To me, these were risk-averse activities. My reasoning -- which I stand by today -- was that the pleasures of impulsive behavior have an excellent chance of working out in the immediate moment, while the pleasures of planning and carefulness are distant in time and thus far less likely to actually work out.

The pleasures of hanging out with friends with you should be in class, eating cake for lunch, drinking and smoking, dancing at parties, spending a beautiful sunny day with a romantic interest instead of writing papers, etc. -- when you're a bright-eyed eighteen year-old, these are very dependable pleasures in the short-term run. Sure, they often lead to unhappiness in the long run. But whatever -- the long run is unpredictable. That is the whole point.

To forego these pleasures in the moment to get better grades, avoid lung cancer at middle-age, or even just try to live a longer period of time seemed to me like a crazy and extremely risky strategy. What if you followed all the rules and got hit by a bus at age 20? FFS. To me, my life strategy was based on getting while the getting was good -- a paradigm example of risk-averseness if ever there was one.

Over time, I stopped being so impulsive. Partly it was because the pleasures of short-term pleasures got less intense for me as I got older (as they do for so many people), and I started getting bored. Partly it was because I started to experience the negative effects of doing whatever I wanted to do in the moment: my health declined, I worked at shitty jobs like waitressing, and I had no health insurance. Partly it was because I formed close relationships with people who wanted me to flourish in the long term, which made me want to flourish in the long term as well.

For whatever it's worth, none of these reasons has to do directly with the kind of caring about the future me that is supposed to characterize rational risk-averse thinking in the standard model of human decision-making.

When people talk about risk-averseness and the rationality of overcoming impulse, I feel like there are assumptions in the background: that what it makes sense to do is plan for the future, store up your chestnuts for the winter, try to live to a ripe old age. But from the unpredictability-of-life perspective, those assumptions are peculiar and it's more the other way around. When you do whatever thing you want to do in the moment, that pleasure -- even if it's just the pleasure of a desire immediately satisfied -- is yours, and no one can take it away from you. It's a sure thing. Whereas the long term? You never really know what's going to happen.

The Pointlessness And Paradoxes Of Responsible Consumerism: Apple Edition

I woke up this morning and one of the first things I saw was this headline "Apple’s New Proprietary Software Locks Will Kill Independent Repair on New MacBook Pros."  

This is bad. It's bad for sustainability. It violates the "right to repair." It put small repair shops out of business. It's bad for schools, who fix computers at large scale, and people in rural areas who are not well-served by Apple's own technicians. 

I had one of those vaguely admirable but ultimately ignorable impulses toward responsible consumerism, and I started thinking about breaking my Mac habit. I had long been toying with the idea of learning to use Linux, as a small way bucking the consumer tyranny of the big tech companies. And I thought this could be the moment, the thing that set all that in motion. I felt the momentary warm glow you get when you see some disturbing news item and form some half-baked plan to Do Something.

To learn Linux, I thought, I might buy a used or cheap laptop to learn on. The only computer I have now is my work computer, and for all kinds of reasons I didn't want to use that one. Already my plan was going the way so many responsible consumerism plans go, where you start off wanting to save the planet and you end up buying something. But whatever.

To think about what kind of laptop would make the most sense for this project, I went to iFixit.org. This great site not only has guides for how to fix things, they also rate products with respect to how repairable they are.

I quickly found ratings for phones and tablets, but they didn't have one for laptops. What they did have, though, was a link to Greenpeace's guide to greener electronics.

At the guide, I learned that no consumer electronics company gets an "A" for environmental impact. The only company that gets a "B" or above is Fairphone. As we've discussed before ("I Went Down The Ethical Cell Phone Rabbit Hole,") Fairphone is just phones and they're not even available in North America.

After Fairphone, the best company for environmental impact was ... Apple, with a "B-."

It's a testament to the power of consumer culture how powerfully it hit me that I might be able to satisfy my impulse to responsible consumerism by actually buying something I wanted. I could get a used Mac, and use it to learn Linux. I could even tell myself that this plan was most rational, because if I did ultimately shift over to using Linux all the time, having a Mac would allow me to access the documents I've created in software like Pages, which is Mac only. 

I went to the Apple website to check out what refurbished laptops they had. The have no refurbished MacBook Airs available -- probably because these are affordable and reliable and everyone wants one. What they do have is MacBooks, the fancy high end super thin no-ports machine. I had wanted a MacBook when they came out. Hmmm...

I don't know what to say about the ridiculous of starting with an I'll-show-you-Apple Mac-avoidance plan and ending with MacBook shopping, except that it doesn't feel like a one-off to me. It feels sort of like an experience I have all the time.

I guess the moral of the story is that when you live in a society where people are paid millions to convince you that shopping is the answer to your problems, you tend to think that shopping is the answer to your problems.

Is Everyone's First Job Now Public Relations?

Since I write a blog, I get an amazing number of PR emails. I get emails about books, research findings, new movies, and things like that, but often it's more of a vague invitation to interview a person or write about a thing so people will pay attention to it. For example, I recently got an email line with the subject heading "55% of Sugar daters prefer to meet over coffee for the first date." It's a bit of information, an invitation for an interview, all in the service of publicizing a service for I won't name here since that would be, in effect, providing public relations. These emails are all from senders like "Brianna Smith," PR coordinator for "XYZ media."

I used to be amazed that it was worth the while of so many people to seek out PR from this minor blogger. I know it's all automated, but someone has to click through to my website to find my email address. But as time went on I realized: PR is now everything. PR is getting people interesting enough in your thing so you can do your thing. PR is getting people on board with your start up so you can make a company. PR is getting your side out there, as Amazon did recently when people on Twitter said they should pay their employees more ("No, we're very well-paid," someone was paid to say).

I know PR has always been sort of the essence of capitalism. If you've read Trollope's great Victorian novel "The Way We Live Now," you know that hype has been the linchpin of economic activity for a long time. The novel tells the story of a huge finance boon-doggle in which rich guy August Melmotte uses schemes to increase the share price for a massive railway project -- a project that no one ever really intends to complete, but that everyone wants to profit on through the manipulation of other people's beliefs. It's all a big PR job.


But for a range of complicated reasons, I feel like PR has seeped into everything. Enrollment in the humanities is down, despite the fact that why people believe what they believe has become the main question of the early 21st century -- and despite the fact that employers say that communication and cooperation skills are the skills people need for modern jobs. Everywhere I turn, I hear that we need to do better at PR: Philosophy needs to tell its story, humanities needs to explain and justify itself more effectively, courses need to be advertised, everyone needs to court their alums to give money, so we're not dependent on the money we get from servicing our customers -- that is, from teaching our students.

Now, it feels like it's not only that the goods of a system that have to be advertised, but even the role that a particular person or part plays in the system. Instead of just competition among systems, it's that systems themselves are increasingly based on competition. For example, it used to be that the book industry worked on the concept that a publishing house would have an array of kinds of titles, and they would use the established success of some titles to support the work of less-known authors. Sure, publishing houses competed with one another, but with a house, you could have some judgment calls. Now it just feels like it's just every individual person is evaluated based on their immediate prospect for money-making, so the competition has seeped down, and everyone has to do PR, to convince other people that the thing they're doing is the hip new thing.

At an individual level, as we've discussed before, with the "entrepreneurial self," everyone has to be their own PR person, and whether you are likable has a profound effect on your prospects in life. Likability acts as a conduit for other forms of discrimination like racism and sexism, but it has a dimension all its own: if you're just kind of an unlikeable person, well, too bad for you.

I don't mind doing a bit of PR. But it can't take over everything. How can you have a thing, if all your time is spent on advertising?

The World Is Ending. What Should I Wear?

Since a young age, I've had a keen sense of living in a radically screwed up and unjust world. I remember when I learned in elementary school about the American enslavement of people from Africa, about killings in war, about the brutal genocide of Native Americans, and about the likelihood we were all going to die in nuclear war, and I was like Gee we are fucked up. I'm not saying I understood the proper range of things -- I was a white kid in the US suburbs -- just that I knew things were deeply not OK.

When I was a young adult, you would have known from just looking at me that I felt this way. My self-presentation was ... weird. I guess style-wise it was mostly a mix between punk and something like goth, but it was more non-conformist than that. My clothes from the thrift store were often shabby and falling apart. I wore boots with my summer dresses, which for some reason drove people crazy. I let my hair become knotted into permanent tangles -- not like dreads, but like just a person who doesn't brush her hair. I had a lot of piercings, before that became a normal thing.

Looking back on my arrival at philosophy PhD school years later, one mentor said, "Well -- we thought you were really out there."

Over the years since, my self-presentation has become much more conformist. For one thing, I found that teaching undergraduates pushed me way toward conformism. There are many things that make teaching stressful and anxiety-producing, and for me one of them has to do with relating to a pretty wide range of people. I've never been that popular person, I'm not an extrovert, and the things that interest me often don't interest other people (and vice-versa!). Navigating the student-teacher relationship alongside the complexities of self-presentation non-conformism is too emotionally complicated for me.

Another pressure toward conformity has to do with my relationship to femininity and the way that changes with getting older. I've always been somewhat a girly-girl, and I love dresses and feminine clothes. Some of my earliest memories involve trying to talk my mother into buying me various skirts and cute crop-tops and heels -- her style of feminism pushing hard in the direction of denim and "clothes you can do things in."

It's one thing to be both girly and non-conformist when you're young, but I feel like it gets complicated when you get older. I'm a professor, but sometimes when I'm not "dressed up," strangers ask "Are you a student?" I know, whatever, but it gets annoying. Plus, it's easy to look good when you're young, even if you're wearing weird clothes, because duh -- young people are cute. Not so easy as time goes on.

Now that I look more conformist, though, it's disturbing to me that people might look at me and think that I'm a happy part of the system, or that I think things are mostly just peachy, or that I'm optimistic about the future. As time has gone on, I feel like more people now share the feelings I had back in the 1980s, that things are radically not-OK, and maybe I'm also more aware of people who feel this way. Racism and police brutality continue to be outrageous. Workers in the US need to earn $22.10 per hour to afford to rent a modest two-bedroom apartment; according to Forbes, the median US hourly wage is $16.71. Looming climate change has made dystopianism a mainstream mood. It's not just for goths anymore.

Whenever I'm on this train of thought, at some point I think to myself: why are you thinking about self-presentation, when action is what matters? Isn't it silly to be worrying about how you look, when what matters is what you do?

But I think they both matter. Years ago a student came up and asked me something about a slightly non-conformist thing, and I was like "of course!" and she was like "well, I didn't know, because you you look so normal." And I was like "Hmmmm." Plus, in our Instagramish age, where everything has to come with a photo, self-presentation has become a central form of communication. 

I'm not really sure what would be next. On the one hand, I hardly wear makeup, and I don't dye my grey hair, and it's a measure of how bizarre the world is that these things really are seen as non-conformist. But on the other hand, I'd like to do more. Maybe I should learn to sew and start wearing jeans with brightly colored fringe. Maybe I should put sparkles on everything I own. Maybe I should become that kind of ultra-femme who transcends conformist femininity. Maybe I should start wearing only sports-wear -- which would be conformist for some people, but pretty non-conformist for a woman in academia. Obviously, I don't have an answer or a plan, and hence the question of the title is really a question. The world is ending. What should I wear?

Why Does Buying Something Feel Like Such A Thing?

I've had a kind of self-imposed moratorium on buying stuff, because 1) I already have most the stuff I need and 2) there are other things I can use that money for and 3) the environment. I'm not boasting or treat-deprived: I still spend a lot of money on things like coffee and wine and having people make food for me -- because preparing food in advancing and bringing it with me some place is somehow an activity I've never been able to manage.

Since I'm not treat-deprived, I've been surprised at the urge to buy stuff and by the texture of the anticipated pleasure of buying stuff. I kind of gave myself an exception-clause for buying clothes for exercise or dance class, because 1) I actually did need more exercise clothes and 2) who doesn't want to look good while they're dancing?

As a woman of a certain age, it's not every day I find exercise clothes that I think make me look good, so when I found a cool Nike mesh top that fit me perfectly, with cool sleeves between short-sleeves and three-quarter length sleeves, I was pretty excited and I bought it on the spot. Yes, I waffled about supporting Nike, yes, I did the merry-go-round of weighing the options of trying to buy a shirt from some other company and whether they would treat their workers better, and yes, I went briefly down the rabbit hole of what it meant to support a giant corporation. Those thoughts didn't get me anywhere. In the end, I was like, "If it's good enough for Serena Williams, it's good enough for me."

I wore it, and I liked it so much, I thought I might buy another one in another color, or at least swing by the Nike store to check that out as a possibility. I thought about what times I'd be over by the mall or whatever and how I could squeeze that in, and it felt like such a prospect of a treat. Like really something to look forward to at the end of a day.

The more I thought about the idea of another shirt, though, the more it seemed like a bad idea. I was trying to buy less -- did I really need two mesh shirts? Plus, if I bought a shirt now, it'd be less reasonable to buy some other slightly different shirt later, since I'd already have enough. And wouldn't it be more fun to have a potential future shirt, with all the open-ended and unseen magic that could entail, than a repeat of a shirt I already have, already fading from being washed, hanging in my closet?


I decided not to buy the shirt. But, bizarrely, the idea that I had something to buy stuck around in the back of my mind. I continued to think about when I'd be near the mall, so I could go to the Nike store. I kept fitting it into my imaginary future days, and when I pictured it, I felt such a ping of pleasure at imagining the process. 

And that is what was so surprising to me. I'd already decided against buying the shirt, and yet the prospect of having something to buy --the sheer prospect of a purchase -- felt like something to look forward to. As I thought about it, I realized this is a common thing for me, to feel like buying something is somehow a thing, it's something to look forward to in itself, the buying being some kind of additional pleasure to the object itself -- an object that may well, for various reasons, ultimately be a bit disappointing.

It's surely not news that buying stuff can be a pleasure in itself, adding to or even transcending the feeling of the thing purchased. Why else would we live in a world where people's houses are full of stuff? But, still, I found myself weirded out by it. Why? Why should paying money and getting a thing feel like a thing? What kind of thing is it? Does it feel like a treat, like a cupcake? Or is it more like the pleasure of an accomplishment -- oh, I'm taking steps to feather my nest?

In a previous post I wrote about how the frictionlessness of payment systems makes people experience more pleasure in buying, and so they spend more and feel less invested in the purchases they end up with. But I pay with cash a lot. And honestly, even though I find it much harder to part with cash than to pay by card (as do we all, I guess), even the buying with cash experience feels like a pleasure, or at least a thing -- a thing to be registered on the positive side, something to be planned for and something to look forward to.

In any case, given that there are so few things I need and want to buy, I've been surprised at how often my mind goes to "buy something" as a pick-me-up for a low mood and how weak the rationality part of my mind works in response.

The Culture Theory Of Labor Economics

Given the role that the issue played in the US election last year, I've been really interested to follow the recent news about the coal mining industry. You may remember Clinton cheering about how they were going to put a lot of coal mining companies out of business, with the tone-deaf assumption that everyone would regard this as a Good Thing. I'm sure you remember Trump talking about bringing it back.

From one point of view, the issue might seem to be relatively simple. A shift to other energy forms would be good for the environment, and what the former coal miners then need is new jobs in other industries. As long as economic growth is happening, it can be a win-win. From this point of view, reluctance on the part of coal miners might be seen as irrational and obstreperous.

But it's interesting in this context to consider a few recent articles discussing the miner's point of view. This Reuters article describes miners who are resisting retraining and discusses their reasons. Among them: Mining pays well. Other industries are unfamiliar. There’s no income during retraining. Even if you put in all that effort to learn something new, there is no guarantee of a job afterward.

When it comes to replacements, they point out that coal jobs are seen as preferable to those in natural gas, because the mines are close to home, while pipeline work requires travel. One government official is quoted as hoping for "big companies like Amazon or Toyota."

These are all real reasons. And given what we know about working in an Amazon warehouse, it is any wonder people are resistant to that?

A deeper discussion of worker preferences and their implications for the economy is found in this New York Times piece about mining and environmentalism in Minnesota. It's complicated, but the basic story is that miners want mining jobs while environmentalists want to turn the area into a tourism location and beauty spot -- preserving the natural landscape and also providing new and different jobs.

I was struck both by the miners' calculations about their alternatives and by their cultural commitment to their way of life. For one thing, tourism jobs are really different from mining jobs. Tourism jobs are seasonal, and unreliable, and often not well-paid, while mining jobs -- at least so far -- have been solid and remunerative.

But it's not all cold calculation. Mining jobs are also seen as respectable and masculine, work you can take pride in, while tourism jobs are seen as subservient. One politician summed it up this way:

"[The miners] see it as fundamentally a question of dignity for families that have worked blue-collar jobs for generations ... 'I don’t want to be anybody’s Sherpa.'"

When I first read that I felt a little defensive. There's an implication that cooking, cleaning, and showing people around are somehow not "manly" -- the implication being that their OK work for women but that men are somehow above all that.

But I can also understand it. Especially in our society, where workers' rights and protections have been eroding, cooking, cleaning, and showing people around jobs often do have aspects associated with low status. Often you have to take orders, do things you otherwise wouldn't want to do, act nice, act happy to see people. Women in these jobs have had to put up with that kind of bullshit forever. It's not surprising that someone who hasn't had to doesn't want to have to start.

There are no easy answers, but I think one thing these articles show is that understanding the decisions of workers can't happen in a cultural vacuum. It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that rational self-interested economic agents will do what seems to make "economic" sense. But even economics doesn't really tell us that. It tells us that people will maximize their own preference satisfaction.

As everyone has known forever, preferences are not just for things like "have more money" and "work fewer hours." They're also for amorphous things like respect, status, and community. Far from being squishy considerations that affect only the non-economic realm, these preferences affect the most starkly economic decisions there are.

So an analysis of labor has to include not only the obvious economic factors like money, but also cultural factors. I know "way of life" is not an easy variable to put into a quantitative analysis, but until we find a way to factor it in, we're just going to keep getting things wrong.

I Went Down The Ethical Cell Phone Rabbit Hole

Fairphone: modularity FTW.

I want a new phone. I don't need a new phone. I have a perfectly serviceable iPhone 6 that is about two and a half years old. But I never liked my iPhone 6. It's too big for me: I can't use it with one hand, which drives me crazy when I'm using it to read a book or when I'm trying to keep one hand in my pocket because it's freezing outside. When I got it, they hadn't had the brainstorm of the iPhone SE normal-size-phone concept. I also want a new phone because, like everyone else, I am a cog in the consumer paradise machine we are all caught up in.

I know that getting a new phone would be ridiculous along several dimensions. The most obvious is the negative impact that new phones have on the world. Some of these are obvious environmental impacts. But there are also issues related to conflict mines, where profits from minerals fund violence and war, children are working in dangerous conditions, workers sometimes handle toxic chemicals in contexts where workers have few protections. These latter impacts are negative impacts directly on people.

I often think about electronic gadget production when I'm teaching about theories of ownership in philosophy class. In one theory, ownership is historical. You have a right to what you get through voluntary exchanges, and the state of wealth distribution is just when it arises out of such exchanges. When exchanges are unjust -- through slavery or coercion or stealing or whatever -- the just distribution is the one that would have resulted had those injustices not happened.

As we've discussed before, it seems that if you take this literally, you'd end up with some dramatic conclusions, like the obligation for all non-Indigenous people to leave North America. But there are also smaller questions, like what about your phone?

I got my phone by paying for it in a voluntary transaction, but if you trace all the elements of the phone back, you get slavery and coercion and all the other things. What would it mean to truly own your phone under this theory of ownership?

Thinking about all this, I decided to see if there was an ethical phone available. I searched (with Duck Duck Go!) for "ethical cell phone." I found a lot of bad news, but I also found a phone. The "Fairphone." The Fairphone is an "ethical, modular smartphone." It's modular so that when it breaks, you can fix it easily, and use it longer, and recycle the parts. It's "ethical" in the sense of the supply chain and worker conditions. 

The complexity of the phone situation really comes to light when you see how many challenges Fairphone encounters. According to this article, they have sourced four out of thirty minerals in an ethical way. There is still child labor in the supply chain, because they get some minerals from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Tin mining is still hugely environmentally destructive, even when done in a better way. The article concludes that Fairphone is making great progress, but still the concept of "ethical smartphone" is an oxymoron.

I probably wouldn't love the Fairphone. It's not a very attractive object, which is not surprising given that there's no Jonathan Ive equivalent hovering over everyone insisting on beauty. But whatever. It doesn't matter, because, surprise, surprise! the Fairphone doesn't even exist in North America. It's only available for Europeans.

Obviously, the thing to do is to not get a new phone. Compared to a lot of people, I don't even use my phone that much, so it's a testament to the power of advertising and consumerism that I'm even finding that any kind of challenge.

How Many Awful Things Are In This One NYT Education Story?

The Times ran a story over the weekend about "teacher-influencers" -- elementary school teachers who are using technology in classrooms and connecting with Silicon Valley companies to trade influence for perks. The story focused on the potential conflicts of interest, which, sure, of course, but I was amazed how many other awful things there were.

The story starts off fine, talking about how this one teacher has reorganized her classroom into flexible-use space and has the class run social media accounts. When I was a kid I learned math in a flexible-use and flexible-time kind of way and it was awesome, so sure, if that's working for you and your students, great.

Then you get to the "teacher-influencer" business. The main teacher being profiled has a personal brand and makes deals with companies like Seesaw, which facilitates students sharing work in various forms electronically. Of Seesaw, she says, "I will embed it in my brand every day."

In return for promoting their products, teachers get personal perks like meals, travel, or Amazon gift cards, but also perks for their students and schools, like technology goodies. At a time when schools are so poor that "teachers shell out an average of $600 of their own money every year just to buy student supplies like pencils" (!!!), every little bit helps.

OK, how depressing is it that underfunded schools have to rely on brand ambassador teachers to get even basic things they need? I feel like if that were happening in a different country, people like Nicholas Kristof would be all over it with hand-wringing and "we have to take action now" because this crazy injustice and exploitation just can't continue.

Then I got to the part about the 3D printing. One teacher-influencer "used a $1,299 3-D printer" in conjunction with an assignment on the book To Kill a Mockingbird. One student used the printer to make a gavel in connection with their presentation, "representing the struggle for justice in the novel."

Wait, what? Are they seriously telling me that in the modern world, we're going to engage with the themes of a book about race, injustice, and culture in the American South by 3D printing a gavel? I don't care if it was meant to "supplement" a more substantive engagement with the book in the presentation. That time should be spent doing old fashioned things like talking with other people about the complicated ideas in the book. Plus, how non-creative is the idea of making a gavel to represent justice? Even the "innovative" part becomes dull and unoriginal!

I was also creeped out by the social media lessons, which focus on helping students "understand how to maintain an upbeat online image." One third-grader said "You don’t want to post something bad, because if you want a job, those people are probably going to look at your social media page and they are going to decide if they’ll let you have the job."A sign on the classroom wall says, "I am building my digital footprint every day."

WTF? If that was in a futuristic dystopian novel, you can imagine David Denby calling it a "fanciful" but unrealistic detail.

I really don't blame the teachers for any of this -- they're obviously super-committed and trying as hard as they can to teach students what they need to know. And maybe learning about an "upbeat" social media image is what they need to know. Just yesterday, Arwa Mahdawi was writing in the Guardian about how social media presence is becoming a must-have for getting a job, with one ad for an independent contractor requiring you to "identify, assign, edit and publish at least 10 articles per day" and also have an "amazing personal Twitter feed."

We're always hearing about "innovation" in education and how important it is, and people are always moaning about how teachers are reluctant to innovate because they're stuck in their ways. But often it's unclear how the good things in education can be protected and improved on, especially when it comes to technology. If you're trying to teach students to think about ideas and communicate verbally and in writing, there really isn't much better than the slow process of being in a room together, talking, and giving them individualized feedback. What teachers need to do that is support and proper funding. A 3D printing of a gavel, advertised later on Twitter, isn't really an important part of that process.

The Problems Of The Environment Are Not (Only) Problems Of Individual Consumer Obligations

Vincent van Gogh, Olive Trees, via Wikimedia Commons.

I was interested to see this piece by Umbra Fisk on Naked Capitalism about how "withdrawing" and living "off the grid" were bad solutions to environmental problems.

When I first saw it, I confess that in true modern style I had expected it to confirm some beliefs I already had: that living in cities was environmentally friendly, that living in the country often involves a lot of driving and so on, and that spending a lot of time doing outdoorsy activities could be harmful.

I wrote about some of these issues a couple of years ago.  For one thing, it turns out that if you think of elevators as a way of getting from one place to another, they are very energy efficient, because of counter-weights. As the New Yorker put it back in 2008:

"Without the elevator, there would be no verticality, no density, and, without these, none of the urban advantages of energy efficiency, economic productivity, and cultural ferment. The population of the earth would ooze out over its surface, like an oil slick, and we would spend even more time stuck in traffic or on trains, traversing a vast carapace of concrete."

I love that image, of the elevator saving people from oozing out all over the earth's surface -- like we're some kind of skin disease or something.


Another interesting thing is that as reported in the NYT, hiking and camping and related activities are "the fourth-leading reason that species are listed by the federal government as threatened or endangered..."

To a certain extent, the NC piece did confirm my existing beliefs. Because of public transportation and other kinds of infrastructure, living in cities can be more environmentally friendly than living "off the grid" or moving into a tiny house.

But in another way, the piece actually pushed me to realize ways that I had failed to take my thinking to the next step. Because the main gist of the piece is really about the relative pointlessness of all those small individual habits we form, the limitedness of thinking just about yourself and your consumer activities, when really you should be trying to think more in terms of community and contributing to large structural changes. The theme of the essay is "get to know your neighbor."

And I realized I really had been framing my thinking about this in a highly individualized way, thinking of myself as a consumer, and then considering what my obligations were in terms of my individual choices.

It's not that that kind of thinking is wrong. Of course it's good to carry your water bottle, and repair your things and, of course, take the bus (like I do!).

But to frame the problem as an individualistic consumer obligations problem is a mistake. It's a mistake we're all likely to make, because we live in a society that for complex reasons is constantly reminding us of our position as individual consumers and never reminding us of our position as anything else.

So yes, ask yourself about sustainable practices for your life. But as the essay says, don't forget to also ask: "How do you cultivate respectful, meaningful relationships with the people who will help you fight fossil fuel infrastructure?"

The Global Economics And Inner Morality Of Drug Mafias

Regular readers know of my admiration for Roberto Saviano, who wrote the amazing book Gamorrah about organized crime in Italy. Now I've just been reading his latest book ZeroZeroZero, which is about how organized crime -- especially that associated with the movement of cocaine and other drugs -- functions in the global economy.


It's no surprise that massive drug cartels operate like large and powerful businesses -- after all, that's why they call them "cartels." But Saviano also argues that the global economy of crime is hugely intertwined with the global economy of everything else -- so much so that you could almost think of cocaine as the essential commodity, the consumer good that not only drives the world's economic changes but also profoundly affects global politics and, by extension, the everyday lives of people around the world.

It's a complicated argument to make, and at least some readers wish it could have been made less impressionistically. But I found it fascinating. Saviano tries to tell the tale of cocaine by tracing out highly individualized stories and connecting them to the bigger picture. Though the stories of the individual narcos are vivid and extreme, I was in some ways even more interested by the narrative concerning Wachovia bank, money laundering, and the whistle-blower Martin Woods.

You can read about the Wachovia story at the Guardian here. Billions of dollars from drug money was filtered through Wachovia in direct violation of all kinds of laws, side-stepping all kinds of internal guidelines. Woods, hired to be an internal senior anti-money laundering officer for Wachovia in 2005, kept telling his superiors that something was up, and kept getting shushed and eventually harassed. Finally, Woods meets someone outside Wachovia who is willing to review the evidence, and the bank's defenses come crashing down.

Saviano's take on it is partly that of course it is massively in the bank's interest to look the other way. All the incentives were, and presumably still are, in that direction. To me, it is hilarious to consider this in the light of the comments at Naked Capitalism about how banks are harassing small-time customers who want to use cash rather than cards, sometimes with the excuse that monitoring and preventing cash transactions is necessary to prevent money laundering.

From the point of view of moral philosophy, the book has much to ponder about self-interest and society, and especially about the bonds that enable people to keep commitments to one another even as they perpetuate the most cruel and inhuman behavior imaginable.

Not surprisingly, those commitment are embedded in Hobbesian webs of threats and violence that ensure that people do as they're expected to do. These kinds of stories always make me reflect on the newer "self-interest" theories of morality, where the idea is that if everyone does what's actually in their (enlightened) self-interest, things will work out for the best.

In a passage from an old article in the New York Times that still rankles me, Steven Pinker tried a version of this moral jiu-jitsu. Trying to say that self-interest will lead people to act morally, Pinker wrote,

"If I appeal to you to do anything that affects me — to get off my foot, or tell me the time or not run me over with your car — then I can’t do it in a way that privileges my interests over yours (say, retaining my right to run you over with my car) if I want you to take me seriously. Unless I am Galactic Overlord, I have to state my case in a way that would force me to treat you in kind. I can’t act as if my interests are special just because I’m me and you’re not, any more than I can persuade you that the spot I am standing on is a special place in the universe just because I happen to be standing on it."

The idea being something like "Gee whiz, if I want you to be nice to me, I'll have to be nice to you! Unless I'm Galactic Overlord, but of course that doesn't apply to any of us."

Among other things, this just always seemed to me so naive about the nature of power. You don't have to be Galactic Overlord to be able to boss other people around; you just have to have power over them, wherever that comes from. Then, self-interestedly, you can do whatever you want. In fact, self-interest can often recommend perpetuating harm and violence.

Early in ZeroZeroZero, Saviano tells the truly horrifying story of a guy who is actually a DEA agent and who manages to infiltrate deep into the drug cartels of the "Golden Triangle" -- Sinaloa, Durango, and Chihuahua. When he is found out, the people he has betrayed realize that, rationally speaking, they must punish him in ways that will serve as a powerful reminder for anyone who might dare to try something similar. It can never, ever happen again. As Saviano says, "No one was ever to forget how Kiki Camarena was punished for his betrayal."

[If you're sensitive about violence skip this next paragraph]: Toward that rational end, "Camarena was tortured at Gallardo's ranch over a 30-hour period, then murdered. His skull, jaw, nose, cheekbones and windpipe were crushed, his ribs were broken, and a hole was drilled into his head with a screwdriver. He had been injected with amphetamines and other drugs, most likely to ensure that he remained conscious while being tortured."


Of course, the whole thing was taped. How else could it work as a warning? In fact, one of the prime strategies the criminals in Saviano's stories use to keep people afraid and keep them in line is YouTube, with videos of torture posted as warnings. The whole thing is a paradigmatic use of rational thinking-- incentivizing others to do what is in one's interest.

So really, you don't have to be Galactic Overlord for self-interest to recommend that you abuse others. You just have to have power.

At one point, describing a lengthy discourse from a mafioso, Saviano points out that he's heard "dozens of speeches on Mafia moral philosophy." And I thought, "Wow, that is really what it is." Is any philosopher studying the moral philosophy of the Mafia? I don't know. I can only say that, really, somebody really ought to get on it.

If We're So Rich, Why Do We Feel So Poor?

For the last class in my course on ethical theory this term, we discussed some passages from a book called Ethics for a Broken World. This book has a brilliant concept: it takes place in a future world that has been broken by catastrophic climate change, and presents imaginary lectures that discuss, as we do other historical periods, the philosophical writings of our era.

In the book, our world -- the world of 21st century western liberal democracies -- is called "the affluent world." Clearly, relative to the broken world, we are utterly affluent. In the broken future, there aren't enough resources for everyone to live. There are "survival bottlenecks," which necessitate "survival lotteries."

Looking back from the future, the affluence of our world seems astonishing. We have enough resources for everyone to survive, and we frequently spend enormously on gratuitous entertainments like flying around just to see new places.

Of course, you don't have to look back from a broken future to realize the affluence of 21st century western liberal democracies. We are richer than we were in the past -- maybe richer than ever before. We are richer than some countries, and way, way richer than others.

According to this, if you make more than $34,000 USD, you're in the top one percent of the world's richest people. If that's even sort of right, then in some sense, relatively speaking, we are living in an affluent society.

So why, if we are so relatively affluent, do we feel so economically crunched? Why does it seem like everyone is freaking out about not having enough money? Why is everyone so indignant about the bits of money that go into sensible projects like fighting climate change, improving elementary education, and helping refugees?

The obvious answers have to do with cost of living, changes from the status quo, and inequality. Yes, things cost a lot in modern liberal democracies, so what seems like "a lot of money" may not translate into a lot of buying power. Plus, what feels like "a lot of money" is often relative to some previous point in time, and since the economic crisis, we feel we're doing less well than a few years before. And rising inequality means "we" experience non-affluence in very different ways.

But I think there are also some subtler effects.

First, when it comes to living human life, it's not the case that "everything is relative": there are things and activities that everyone needs to survive and there and also things and activities that everyone needs just to feel part of their social and cultural world.

In our society, you need food and shelter, but you also need other things: to feel part of our social and cultural world, you have to be able to get around, you have to have access to the internet and other forms of news information, you have to have access to banking, and so on and so forth.

And here's the thing: in our society, when it comes to these things we need, it's not like there are a range of ways to do it and if you're poor you do it one way and if you're rich you do it another. It's more like -- there are pretty expensive ways to do it or you're just SOL.

For example. You want a TV? There used to be old technology that made TVs pretty expensive. Then new technology came along, and the old technology got pretty cheap. For a while there you could buy a TV with the old technology for almost nothing. Then they stopped selling those. Now it's back to a TV is a pretty expensive thing.

Same with cars, which are astronomically expensive and which you need to get around if you're not lucky enough -- and rich enough! -- to live in a densely populated area with public transit. Same with housing. Houses are bigger and nicer, so you can get a nice one if you have the money or ... not.

This is where rising inequality makes such a difference. If enough people over a certain level means consumer demand shifts, and the only version of things you can do is the expensive one. If you can't afford the expensive one, you're in trouble. This is one way we are so deeply economically interdependent, even when we don't want to be.

I think this phenomenon is part of why the post-economic crisis time feels like such a huge problem rather than a dip in an already affluent set up. When times are even a bit flush, we ramp up -- we create systems in which the things we need to do work in a certain kind of way and demand a certain level of resources.

Then when things shift down -- even a bit -- we can no longer use those systems. It is, legitimately, a crisis, even if in some sense there is still a lot of money around.

Of course, another reason that virtually everyone, at all points up the economic ladder, feels like OMG we don't have enough money has to do with this obvious but usually unspoken fact: in advanced capitalism, the whole point of the system is to make you feel like you don't have enough money.

Especially in an affluent world, where you have to convince people to buy, what is advertising, except a massive scheme to convince people that they're inadequate as they are and that they would be less inadequate if they had this or that thing? 

You put it all together, it's really no wonder we're all feeling so poor. In a way we have so much, and in another way, we don't have what we need. Those things seem contradictory but in a deep sense I think they're not.

Sensory Neuroscience, Snackology, and the Market Failure of Food

I don't know if you saw this article in The New Yorker last week about how the sound of a potato chip, the music in a bar, and the color of your coffee mug can seriously alter the flavor of your
food.

If you think I'm exaggerating you should read the article. They recorded sounds of potato chip crunching, and when they amplified those sounds and sharpened them, people rated the chips as fresher and better tasting. Mellifluous organ music changed a creamy ale into a bitter one. When coffee's in a white mug it tastes "nearly twice as intense but only two-thirds as sweet" than when it's in a clear glass one.

Thoughts:

1. This is obviously a philosophical topic, leading immediately to questions like "what is taste, anyway?" More specifically, these results press on us the question of whether the perceptual experience itself changes in the presence of other stimuli or whether we just interpret the experience to ourselves differently in the presence of other stimuli.

If the importance of this question isn't immediate to you, consider that it's a specific instance of the more general question: do we perceive a shared pre-existing world or does everyone kind of live in their own reality? It doesn't really get more profound or disturbing.

2. It's long been known that presentation affects experience. This is why people like me are always going around saying things like "HEY PEOPLE: STYLE IS AN ACTUAL THING." I don't know if it's the long arm of the protestant reformation or what, but I feel there is huge resistance to this idea.

For example, I'm always hearing people talk smugly about how they value substance over style, or the importance of not getting distracted by style, like it's some kind of moral superiority if you drive a plain-looking car or you wear only Dockers (see: "On the Self-Satisfaction of the Casually Dressed.")

I use a Mac, and I love my Mac partly because of small details like the way the font smoothing on the "Pages" app looks. It's so good. I could not be more sick of people having opinions about this, like somehow my selection on aesthetic grounds reflects a poor character.

3. The whole idea of an ale that's creamy when there's xylophone music and bitter when there's organ music reminded me of this post on rationality and preferences. There I mention the example of the person who prefers to eat lobster for dinner, but not if they've just seen the lobster swimming in the tank.

These preferences could seem irrational. But as discussed in the post, it doesn't have to -- all you have to do is attribute to a person different preferences depending on whether they've just seen their dinner. Is that artificial and ad hoc? Maybe not. If you're someone who likes bitter ale, and you prefer X ale to Y, but only when the organ music is on -- given this research, that's seems to me like as real a preference as you're going to get.

4. But the most disturbing thing in the article is the same thing that always seems to come up in the early twenty-first century when we talk about science, namely: who wants to know?

Of course the whole point is food technology.  Of course in 2015 you can't do research like this without funding from the same marketers and food technologists that want to use your findings to sell more things. The scientist in the article estimates that 75% of his research is industry-funded. 

That is, the main thing that's going to happen as a result of this research is you can get people to buy more potato chips if you make the sound of the crunch different without having to bother about things like actual freshness.

Let me be clear: if people want to put their soft drinks in red cans because red-means-sweet, what do I care? Knock yourselves out.

But you know it's not going to stop there. You know that it's going to turn into red peppers that sound crunchy but are mushy and stale inside and crap like that, and pretty soon everything will be like the apples arms-race toward redness and away from flavor, and the market failure of food will become even worse, and eventually nutritionists will move beyond saying "to be healthy, just cook food at home!" to "to be healthy, just grow everything yourself from heirloom seeds!"

5. The article says this:

"We are accustomed to thinking of food and its packaging as distinct phenomena, but to a brain seeking flavor they seem to be one and the same."

Welcome to the modern world. Have a good time!

The Illusion Of Rational Choice And Its Political Implications

From this ABC news story, 2011

I'm teaching a course this semester on philosophy of social science, and one of the most interesting ideas we've encountered has to do with the idea of people as purposive rational actors,  working to satisfy their own preferences at the least cost possible to themselves, who engage in bargaining and negotiation with one another to get the things they want and need.

It's a pretty fundamental idea to some social science methods -- especially in economics, but also more generally, because it plays a role in helping to figure out what people are doing and why. There are many questions about modelling human behavior through this family of ideas associated with rational choice. For example, as many people have pointed out, it makes morality somewhat obscure. If you keep a commitment to another person because you've promised to do so, or if you do the right thing at a tremendous cost to your own happiness, it seems bizarre to say you've just acted to satisfy your own "preference."

But the issue that came up in our readings, though related to that, was somewhat broader. That week we were talking about the question of whether social science can take up an objective, impartial, scientific stance toward its subject, or whether humanistic interpretation is always necessary to understand human behavior.

In arguing for the latter position in a 1971 paper, Charles Taylor points out that when we understand people as rational bargaining actors -- as he thinks we do in the more scientific approach -- we always risk interpreting them incorrectly.

For one thing, he says, not all societies even have practices that would be obviously analogous to our own practices of bargaining and negotiation. But more deeply, much important human behavior isn't like this. And when we theorize it using this set of concepts, we get it wrong.

There are many kinds of examples, but Taylor gives an interesting one in the analysis of protest movements. He says that theory of rational choice entails that we analyze these movements in terms of individuals' aims, and that in this case we have two possibilities: either protests are "bargaining gambits," or they are simply madness.

But, Taylor says, sometimes a protest is neither of those things. Taylor sees around him a profound dissatisfaction with the way things are, an alienation, a sense that things are deeply not what they should be. A protest borne of this sense would not be correctly analyzed as a bargaining gambit: it may be utterly unclear what the possibilities are. And if things are not what they should be, it would not be correctly analyzed as madness.

Though Taylor wrote this in 1971, when I read it I immediately thought of the Occupy movement, and especially of the deafening chorus that met that movement, where everyone was shouting, "But what are your demands?! If you haven't got specific demands, your protest makes no sense!"

Many people said in response that it wasn't about demands, that wasn't the point. Of course the movement had many strands and ideas, but I don't think it's farfetched to say that among these was the thought that things are deeply not what they should be.

Interpretation through the lens of rational choice and bargaining makes it impossible to arrive at this conclusion about the social meaning of the protests. But that interpretation has become so ingrained in our culture, we almost can't interpret it any other way.

I don't know how and when exactly this happened, but somewhere along the way the idea that humans are basically purposive rational actors working to satisfy their own preferences at the least cost possible to themselves became so entrenched in our thinking and talking, it's hard to even frame the alternatives. It's become almost like a tautology: well, you chose that thing, so either you preferred it and acted wisely, or you preferred something else and acted stupidly.

I think one reason this idea of people as rational actors is so hard to challenge is that if you're just looking at behavior, data, all those things we've embraced in the modern world as alternatives to old-fashioned listening and literature, the theory of people as rational actors is almost impossible to really falsify. As is often pointed out, any behavior can be made to come out as rational: you just have to attribute to the person a preference for the outcome, and voilà!

But behavior that doesn't fit -- and especially behavior that seem to signify that things are deeply not what they should be -- is everywhere, not just in the modern world but as part of the human condition. When things get bad and someone can't see their way out, they freak out: they become enraged, or riddled with anxiety, or they just decide to do something, anything, to derail the situation. It's a very human response.

Whether you're talking about an unhappy marriage or the state of the modern world, this kind of "protest" behavior is common and well-known. But with our theory of human behavior, we can't even see it for what it is, because we're stuck in the bargaining gambit theory of the world.

I think Taylor is right when he says that the problem goes beyond a "mistake" and gets into the category of "illusion": the version we see looks totally normal to us, even though it is the version reflected in a fun house mirror.

Why Blaming "Corporate Greed" Is Misplaced and Naive

Edvard Munch, Workers on their Way Home, via Wikimedia Commons

It always bugs me when I see references to "corporate greed" as part of an explanation for why some bad worker-related thing is happening. It especially bugs me when lefties and progressives refer to it. Because it seems to me that referring to "corporate greed" is basically buying in to the whole "individual responsibility" anti-legislation anti-labor rhetoric that lefties and progressives usually think of as "the other side."

I was reminded of this last week when the New York Times ran this story describing how Disney laid off all these tech workers and replaced them with people from other countries on H-1B visas who would be cheaper to pay. The kicker was that to receive their severance packages, the employees had spend three months training their replacements.

In the commentary on this story, people regularly mentioned corporate greed as part of the explanation for how something like this could happen (see, e. g., the comments to this blog post). The idea being, I guess, that an ethical corporation treats its labor force as people -- people they're in a certain relationship with, and to whom they owe consideration and obligations.

It's a nice idea, but I think it fails to grapple with the deeply competitive set-up of capitalism as it exists in our world -- where it's basically guaranteed that if you're not equally ruthless as your competition, you'll fail.

In fact, in the business section of papers like the Times, the rhetoric is all about how to be nimbler and more flexible than your competition, so you can increase profits, so you can make shareholders happy. Especially if your industry is competitive, if you can't do those things, you're over.

So now, faced with that situation, the reason corporations are supposed to treat their employees well even if it costs more is ... that the people in charge are somehow good inside? And who is supposed to say "the buck stops here," exactly? The middle manager who's been charged with cutting costs? Is that person supposed to say "Oh yes, I know I'll be fired, but it's OK." Or the president of the board? Is that person supposed to say "Oh yes, I know the competition will undercut us with such lower prices that our company will go under, but it's OK."


This seems to me the same kind of "individual responsibility" thinking that props up so many ideas I find offensive, that somehow each person is supposed to rise above the crazy social pressures they find themselves in, that somehow if you decide to do something because you find it's the best of a bunch of shitty options, that somehow "Oh, well you *chose* it so you're *stuck with it*."

The pressures of capitalism are long known. Adam Smith understood that businesses would have huge incentives to collude with one another and misbehave in various ways, leading to bad outcomes. Smith figured that with the right laws and institutional frameworks, you could prevent that misbehavior. 



I don't know if that's true or if the problem goes deeper than that. But I do think appealing to the inner moral compass of individual business persons is pretty much a non-starter.

Economics, Ethics, and Piracy: Why Downloaders are Homo Economicus

Det grå fyr (The Grey Lighthouse), painting of the lighthouse in Skagen by Danish artist Christian Blache, via Wikimedia Commons

To me one of the worst hypocrisies in the modern world is the way that people who'd roll their eyes about ethics in most domains then turn around and use ethical shaming against the people they want to control.

Generally if you try to bring ethical considerations into a discussion where people are using economics and business reasoning, there'll be a general mood of eye rolling. Oh, ethics. Don't get in the way please -- we are doing grown-up business here.

But once the little people aren't doing what they want -- no one hesitates to play the ethics card.

For example, when it comes to downloading and internet piracy, corporate representatives who'd otherwise be first at the extreme capitalism table suddenly turn around and show us their school-marm side. Oooh, downloading! You bad person, you!

If you think about it for even a minute, content downloaders are doing exactly what the economic model predicts that they would do. They are acting to maximize their own self-interests. Their interest is in getting content for the least cost, and that is what they are doing.

Content downloaders are homo economicus.

What I didn't realize until I started learning more economic theory is that there's actually a framework for thinking about the kind of things that make internet content susceptible to the effects that it is. You can read details at this post but I'll go through the basics here.

Basically, "rival" or "rivalrous" goods are ones where if one person's consumption of that good decreases the amount another can consume. Food is a rival good, and in a sense most physical objects are, since if one person is using them another can't, at least not at the same time.

Under this definition, internet content is non-rival, since one person's consuming it doesn't decrease another's ability to consume it.

A good is "excludable" if there are ways to prevent people from consuming it. You can put food behind a wall and lock the door so it's excludable - and same with most physical objects.

And it's very difficult to stop people from sharing internet content, even when you really really really want to.

Goods that are neither rival nor excludable are called "public goods," and the usual examples are national defense, fresh air, and lighthouses. Technically, at least, it seems internet content also fits the description of a pure public good.


Isn't it interesting how little discussion you hear about this? 

To propose this discussion is not in any way to deny that artists and intellectuals should be paid for their work. Of course they should be. It's just to point out that there are various ways of making that happen, and we sure do hear a lot about some of them (DRM, huge lawsuits against poor people) and very little about the others.


What are those others? Public goods can be supported through grants, through government funding, through payments from consumers who opt to pay in for various reasons. Maybe everyone could have a minimum income.

In a sense, the alternative model is how some intellectual content already works. Professors get salaries, and produce intellectual content -- adding to the already compelling reasons that such intellectual should be freely shared. You can read a further discussion of alternatives in the body and comments of this post.

Are these good options? Honestly, I don't know. But isn't it strange how seldom we talk about them? Instead, we're subjected to a barrage of moralizing, largely from giant corporations -- who obviously have a huge interest in the old models -- and who wouldn't hesitiate to crush or mock anyone who used ethical reasoning in any way against their interests.

What a bunch of hypocrites.

The Impotence Of Rational Thought, Or, You Know It's Somebody's Job To Make You Feel Bad, Right?

Self-Loathing Comics! How did I not know about this?

I don't know if you read the piece in the Guardian last week by the feminist who "confesses": "I feel guilty but I hate my body."

I thought it was a good and interesting piece, and I'm sure the point of view expressed is -- well, shall we call it "relatable"? Is that the right word for millions of women of all ages and body types screaming "Oui! Oui! Moi aussi!"

But personally, I wasn't surprised at all to hear that a feminist woman hated her body. What could be less surprising than any woman hating her body in the 21st century? Why is it a "confession"?

I guess it's supposed to be a confession because somehow as a feminist she's supposed to "know better," but I've always thought that was pretty much a dead end kind of thought. I mean, who thought "knowing better" was the key to all mythologies? How often are intense feelings like self-loathing impacted by rational thinking? Like, never?

If you ever want to experience the impotence of rational thought, just try to think yourself out of anything like self-loathing, or feelings of inadequacy, or really any negative emotion in which you compare yourself to others.

Your thoughts will just sit there like cartoon bubbles, inert, powerless, hovering over you. Your cartoon bubble might say in 18 point bold point font: "you are good and smart and beautiful!" You might try to think it. You might reason it out. You might even come to think it is true. Still, you get that thought into your brain alongside some bad feelings, it's like a bug going into a the ring with an elephant. "Oh, it was cute you had that though but ... oh."

I was also struck that there's so little reflection in the essay about the various causes. In keeping with our highly individualized times, it's a very individual essay, about what is and isn't "wrong" with certain kinds of eating and certain kinds of thinking about eating.

I always think that in these situations that it's important to remember - among other things - the wide array of forces assembled against you. I mean, in addition to all the usual suspects, you have to remember that it's practically the first commandment of capitalism that you have to feel bad about yourself.

Can we pause to remember there are armies of people whose whole job it is to induce you to feel like you are not good enough, not smart enough, not beautiful enough -- and while we're at it, you smell, and you're fat, and your dick isn't big enough?

After all, the insecure consumer is the consuming consumer. And the consuming consumer is the lynchpin of the new categorical imperative: "economic growth." If you're not feeling inadequate, you probably won't buy as many things.

Obviously, I do not mean to imply that somehow in a world of equality and mutual respect and free love that people would go around feeling magically happy and self-loving and so on. People don't NEED capitalism to feel awful. They can do it by themselves. And they can do it to each other, very effectively. And obviously, I do not mean to imply that there is nothing gendered about body-loathing and disordered eating, because obviously there is.

I'm just saying that when you feel bad, it's worth taking a moment to remember that among the many factors and causes the set-up is not neutral. They're using sophisticated tools, honed through eons, to target your emotions. Against that army, how is your little rational thought going to get any traction whatsoever?

News flash: it's not. In a world of competition for everything, when you feel bad, someone actually benefits. It's not a problem with an individual solution. And it's not something you can think your way out of.