For Thankgiving 2018: Yes, You Are Probably Better Off Than Your Parents*

On social media, I sometimes try to "referee the internet".  That's what I call engaging in political debate or argument. I like dialectic. Constructive argument is better than smile-and-wave, or sweep-under-the-rug, etc. If you have the right touch, the friendship survives.

One of the arguments that is ongoing is over the pessimism vs. optimism for globalisation.

Other species, and the environment, I'm tragically not optimistic about.  My optimism about human lives is actually, in part, to get us to focus on worrying about things that really matter.  Also, I think that unnecessary panic and pessimism, whether to Trump or Bernie, distracts us from making investments that might really matter.

So here goes. When we look at an optimistic video, like GapMinder (Hans Rosling), about more girls going to school, fewer diseases, less poverty, the statistics and facts are clear.  Here is an interesting graphic - The World Poverty Clock.

57,913 people escaped poverty today (income levels increased)
11,508 people fell into poverty (especially in places like Venezuela, Nigeria, Syria and Yemen)

World Poverty Clock Screenshot

The graphic shows red (newly poor) and black (newly rich) stick figures, and shows countries in red or black according to how their own population is faring.  I have some funnier videos at bottom.

Here's the argument people most often push back. Many people believe that the current generation of AMERICANS or EUROPEANS is less likely to be better off than their parents generation.

But there are two ways to pose the question. Are we living better than a previous generation? And if so, how did we afford it?

Boogeyman E-Waste: Stats the Charitable Industrial Complex Won't Share

Well, in another week I may or may not be in Championsgate (Orlando) Florida for the next E-Scrap Conference.  I've long made peace with not speaking or presenting at the Resource Recycling conference... speaking to groups of peers who mostly feel they know what you know is a more thankless task than many realize.

This blog is inspired by Max Rosers 2017 paper, "Our World in Data."



If the conference isn't cancelled due to Hurricane Irma (there will be about a week to clean up the airports), I'll go to attend the E-Life documentary screening, and to make the usual noise about the boogeyman approach to environmental awareness.

Holy Slashdot! Look at the Certainty over Fake Data!

So sure of themselves.  Feel the righteous indignation peculating the internet...  It gives environmentalists super powers.   Enfused with the right amount of coffee, the enraged altruist can hurdle statistics and peer reviewed studies and protect Africa from the proven innocent.  In our latest episode, e-waste bans will protect Americans from a future "epidemic of cyber crime!"


Race!
Income!
Epidemic!
Globalization!
Exploitation!
Environmental waste!

Insert your cognitive risk here: ________________________

Below are responses to my post in Slashdot.org ("news for nerds, stuff that matters") about the three studies (Kahhat/Williams, UNEP, and BAN's own adviced Kenya Study) which report that 80-90% of imported electronics goods (paid for by the importer, after all) are reused, while 85% of the "e-waste" filmed at Agbogbloshie, etc. is generated by Africans after decades of reuse.

Mon dieu!  The outrage!  People really sure that if it comes from developed nations, and is purchased by "backwards" Africa, that it's gotta be bad.   Lots of caffeine evident in discussions of e-waste.  The superpower of Certainty!  The power of Smug.

Seems (according to one self-identified ewaste pro) that I "have got a chip on my shoulder".  Or another quips that that I haven't read "customs reports", or I'm "missing the point", and that even if the imports are mostly good, that "it's still a useful myth to shame Westerners into doing the right thing" (that being... to boycott black people?).    My usual favorite shows up - that eventually working equipment will become e-waste.   ERGO... Egyptians shouldn't be allowed to purchase working equipment until they have e-waste processes established.  (Let's try applying that to the next i-Device sold in USA)...

Meanwhile, BAN.org director Jim Puckett agreed with me, face to face, that there were no CRTs at the end of the Hong-Kong-CBS-Wasteland trail, and that the SKD factories he objects to are reusing and recycling the elective upgrades ... he just objects to the parts refurbished.  He hoped the poor will "leapfrog" us, he once told me.

Now, as good as those contract manufacturing factories may be, it's the principle of repairing and refurbishing them prior to export which BAN professes.  Puckett hopes he will create USA CRT monitor refurbishing jobs by requiring "pre -repair" facilities to remove bad capacitors (or working ones that may be upgraded by better ones), effectively eliminating any incentive for the sale to overseas repairpeople.  Banning the export, we'll repair them here!  Tell that to California, which didn't even TEST the working ones when exports were banned - they just shredded them, and now California companies have requested permission to landfill the shredded glass.  That's what created the sellers market, forcing Africans to buy from people willing to stoop to doing business with them.

Safer to stand back, and to clap when they are arrested.  Chains... prison bars... defamation...

Boycotts!! Boycott the poor dammit!!!  It's the only solution to globalization!!!

Why I'm Pro Globalization

First, the anti-Globalists have to admit there's not much we have to say in the matter.

Pretending that the USA and Europe can isolate themselves, and that Asia, Africa, and Latin America's 6 billion people are going to develop better or more slowly without us is an a priori joke.  There simply is no solution to "globalization" and kvetching about it is like complaining about getting old.  Hippy grandparents yearning for the good old days of starvation and smallpox in poor countries is not my scene.  Wealth is increasing (see chart below) in countries which trade most.

No thank you, Daisy Racism

So, if the cat is out of the bag, so to speak, are ideas like alter-globalization and fairtrade going to do better if the rich and well regulated consumers get on the sidelines and boycott the emerging markets?  Of course not. The poor benefit more when they have more choice of people to trade with.

Third, having lived in Africa and having opened a recycling factory in Latin America, and having traded millions of dollars of goods with Asia, I can tell you that the Tin-Tin comics image of the emerging world is about as accurate as Uncle Toms Cabin in describing Atlanta.   The image of "primitive wire burning" recyclers around the world is intensely over-played, to the point of racial profiling, and belongs with "Arab terrorist" and "American cowboy" and "Japanese kamikaze".  All those anecdotes exist, but if that's your primary image of Dubai, Houston or Tokyo, you are ignorant.  Ignorant means "stupid with hope for a cure", though I'm sometimes afraid the condition is chronic.

Boycott as a response to "globalization" is like burning libraries to prevent pornography.  It's that damn stupid.  As a lifelong environmentalist who had devoted my life to recycling, I am ashamed to the point of tears that the "green movement" has harbored racist images of fixers and tinkerers, technicians and geeks.  We hurt the American economy when we shred items of value which could have been exported, and we hurt the buyers who then buy used product from Hong Kong or Shanghai with fewer choices.  Worse, when we shred up rare earth magnets and turn circuit boards into "fluff" to avoid superior hand disassembly, we help mining.
Mining is what builds the roads that kill the gorillas.  Mining "non-toxic" tin from Indonesian coral islands is what kills the sharks.  White eco-witch-doctors need to stop prescribing death.

If you are a "green" environmentalist, and you have friends who are global isolationists, tell them to get on a fair trade bandwagon, because boycotts are the new segregation, giving sinister meaning to "the new black".

Give the developing world a choice of jobs besides warrior, miner, poacher, sex worker... let them refurbish and recycle, give them incentives and tools, implement contracts to reduce child labor by paying adult wages.  Give boy scout badges for recycling to the poster children, and say "shame on you" to "watchdogs" who exploit poster children for money and don't share a dime with the kids.

I'm a globalist because I have friends in Africa, Latin America, and Asia who I met through trade, and we treat each other as equals, and we have all benefited.  My children eat with their children, my wife meets with my partners and their sisters and brothers.  None of this would have happened if I had been afraid to cross the tracks and trade with brown people.  I see my friends profiled, and I'm called names for expressing my loyalty to them.  Very harsh names.   I was too young to join the Civil Rights marches in the American south. But I learned enough about those marches, from my home in Arkansas, that I can spot a person using "inference" to make recycling, repair, and trade look  like it's causing poverty.

Morality, Favors, and Contracts

I believe in practicing "thought experiments", like Einstein did with physics, about ethics and morality.   It's something we did in a meaningful freshman philosophy seminar at Carleton College (where I intended to be a philo major... but that's another story).


This week I had a frustrating conversation with a teenager in our family.   He asked me for a favor dropping him off somewhere by car.  It reminded me I needed someone to go to our Fair Trade Recycling Intern Adelaide's apartment to bring my bicycle back home, and I proposed an exchange - I drop him off at practice, and he brings my bike back from her apartment.

Parents of teenagers know the slippery slope of negotiations.  Below is a lesson in how to negotiate, which can be applied to contracts, etc.

1. Even though no one knows I do it, even though it's not appreciated, I silently do this favor.  It is not even "for God" (though that's a legitimate inspiration).  I'm just wired to do this favor for someone who will owe me nothing, not even realize I did it.  My left hand knoweth not what the right hand giveth.
2. Even though you appear to have nothing, and are unlikely to ever be in a position to help me back, I do this favor, and you say "thank you".  The lion releases the mouse.
3. I do this favor knowing that you have some power, position, possibility of one day returning this favor to me.   It would be foolish of me to refuse.
4. I do this favor and ask for another favor in return.
5. I do this favor conditionally, that you do a specific favor for me in return.  If you don't, I won't.
6. I accept your favor, but I decline doing a favor for you.
7. I take, steal, or force the favor from you.

Religion, morality, ethics, and contract law.  These social exchanges, between billions of people, occur every second.  Some of us profit from it.  We are more likely to profit the farther down the scale we go.  Society is rigged to put the brakes on that, and to look upon us "favorably" the higher on the scale we behave.

How does a Recycler compete in ethical terms?   What happens if you behave ethically, but the person you are exchanging favors with is accused of being a bad actor?  A primitive, unsavory, wire burning informal heathen?   Does your best favor become a negative?