Spiral Economy Trumps Circular Economy: Part 3 "Doing a Good One for the Red Man"

In northwest Arkansas, forensics, speech and debate was a way to get out of town, visit other cities and states, and compete with really smart people (often) in dialectic, rhetoric, and drama.

One of my favorite one-act plays then was Mark Medoff's 1969 "Doing a Good One for the Red Man: A Red Farce". I watched it performed with success by Fayetteville High School '78 Seniors Bill Owens and Michael Rudko... two intellectual giants of FHS.

The one-act play shows the interaction of a dirt poor native American selling stuff to white American tourists, who stop and seek to feel good about themselves for offering to buy things.  Medoff captured the conceit... the liberal do-gooder, a white guy who feels very confident in his role as "savior", is confronted with "white privilege".

After rereading it, the play didn't really age that well.  The tourist is more Archie Bunker, less liberal than I recalled.  But lines like "we've been wearing African and Indian shirts to parties for almost a month now" was fresh stuff.

Criticism isn't attack.  In order to win, we must improve our game, including the one called "circular economy".  We must demand our fellow do-gooders work as hard as if they were making O-rings for the space shuttle.  And just as NASA studies the psychology of astronauts in the isolation of space, we must constantly check the self interests of any constituency our causes attract.

Hastily constructed "cures" for the environment, like Product Stewardship laws, and prescriptions for circular economics, are designed by good-hearted people.  No offense that social engineering can create a viper pit of unintended consequences.

Many African High Schools today still struggle under the leaky roofs I taught lessons under (Cameroon, 1984-86).  But the Arkansas high school I practiced drama for is not as far away from a school in Africa.   Yesterday, via Facebook, two photo posts from two schools (screenshots below), LITERALLY back to back, update me on a school from home, and one from West Africa.

So Western Schools still have drama classes, and African schools still struggle to provide enough desks.  But the latter problem is in part driven by rapid urbanization and increasing access to schools, even as the population of schoolkids increases.

Before a satellite circles the globe, there's homework.   It's necessary to know the weather forecast for a satellite launch.  And if we are to engineer a circular economy, it's necessary to get recycling, mining, and waste cycles straight.  We need to know how pollution got where it is.  

Those who drink the "80% of used goods exports are pollution exported as a ruse of reuse" kool-aid, and design a system around that, wind up responsible for Joe Benson and the destruction of the dream of Africans with mutual funds.  They followed a guy who does not know what he is talking about, and was making it up as he went along.  Sorry if they don't want to throw away all this hard work to save the world and start over... but one's ego isn't the end product.

- - -

Agbogbloshie's number one import isn't waste.  It's photojournalists.   And photojournalists who fly in and exploit the hard working, sometimes destitute, scrappers, can't be allowed to fly home and claim they saved someone.   Their reckless reporting put TV repairman Joe Benson in prison, they led to the seizure of hundreds of thousands of dollars of working second-hand computers of Hamdy in Egypt, they led to the closure of Net Peripheral (the Peace Corps volunteer's 'wet dream' of sustainability, income, and internet), and loss of contracts by Good Point Recycling.

In theory, I'm pro circular-economy.  But this "circular economy" is being promoted by the same WEEE Policy job-hoarding bureaucrats, the same donation-photo-gimmick NGOs, and the same "strategic metals" and "big shred" and "planned obsolescence" capitalist interests as brought us the great #ewastehoax of 2002-2012 (the year the studies all started coming in, backing what my export pals taught me a decade earlier... that there is no money in "waste" migration, only in added value.

Sworn testimony by big metal shredding companies to US Congress...

Sworn testimony to UK House of Commons

No one ever gets testimony from the Geeks of Color.
No one interviews the Agbogbloshie scrapper.
No one finds the parent of the child posed on McElvaney's cruddy monitor.
No one asks anything, no one checks the facts.

I took a call from Awal an hour ago.  I can't always take his calls, we really don't understand each other much.  He was trying to find out when Wahab, the Chendiba Technician buyer, was coming back to Agbogbloshie.  I wasn't sure, think Wahab's in Accra now, but he may have skipped a trip to the scrapyard and gone straight to Tamale.   Wahab and the Techs in Tamale don't really have much to do with scrappers, but Wahab understands the scheme of Fair Trade Recycling, where if the Techs take the scrappers under their wing, more white people may be willing to sell to them instead of boycotting them.

Awal laughed when I told him about the "America Lion" which came to my office a day before... a very large bobcat came to inspect our office in Middlebury, confronting its own reflection in our building's office window.  It's all the buzz on Facebook today (30k+ views).  Employees at Good Point, students at CES de Ngaoundal, we are all connected.  Without the trade - and images are currency - we are engaged in, we would not be.

Doing a Good One for the Red Man was written in 1969, when Medoff was on faculty at University of New Mexico.  It was a product of 1960s liberalism, which showed a self awareness of the cultural gulf between do good trophy hunters, gatherers of mementos, and "spiritual materialism".

At times, there's a competition of vantage points and depth perspectives.  And that's my blog... I'm trying to defend people who are being treated like pawns, but I'm also aware that from another vantage point, I could be exploiting people in another way.  The photo with my student Nana was posed, after all... I wasn't as self-aware of the "currency" of cultural exoticism, though I was clearly aware of the value of photographing my class.  We don't want so much self doubt and growling at the mirror that the next generation gives up, parties hearty, and casts the whole thing aside with trollish conservatism.


Boy.

Spiral Economy Trumps Circular Economy: Part 2 Capitalist Theory

In Part 1, the competitive economic interests of nations, industry, and graduates were weighed in the battle for "good enough" markets.   If 1 billion Africans, 1 billion Chinese, 1 billion Indians, etc. are buying manufactured goods for the first time between 1960 and 2010, that's a lot of material and a lot of money.

1) Value Added New Industrial Goods
2) Value Added Second-hand Goods
3) Clean Graded Raw Materials
4) Raw Materials Requiring Disassembly Labor
5) Waste Dumping

The biggest change in that half decade were #1 New Industrial Goods manufacturing being relocated to the "Global South" in pursuit of greenfield manufacturing and lower labor rates.  Whether that industry was owned and controlled by "home" governments (CCP China, India) or outsourced by Western companies, the net effect had at least one positive outcome.

1) Goods got cheaper for consumers
2) More consumers (in emerging market economies) had income for goods

One effect was growth of the "1%" richest people. I can get my head bitten off for writing this in Vermont, but it's a math problem.  The economy doesn't actually accrue via "proportions".

The less profit I make on one individual buyer, the more extraordinarily rich I can be.  Taking a 20% profit off of 300 million transactions doesn't make me filthy rich.   But taking a 1% profit on 7 billion transactions will make me "One Percenter".  As more people on Earth can afford more stuff, the proportion of income held by the top percent increases.  Most of the "margin" on the 300 million units goes into making them cost $100 per (7 billion) transaction instead of $1,000 per  transaction.

What we want is for little brown boys to be able to buy used gadgets for $50 instead of brand new gadgets for $500 each.  We want them to save their $450 and hopefully, one day, have mutual funds.  But whenever I mention my dream of Africans owning mutual funds in a generation, I get looked at like I've just said hillbillies will in the next generation work in Japanese owned truck factories in Arkansas?  If I'd said that in 1970s, I'd  get that look, but a generation later and Hino Trucks are built in Arkansas.   So yeah, my goal is for kids in emerging market to not only get onto the internet, but to vote in democracies and save money and educate their daughters, and this "ewastehoax" is getting in my way, big time.

What's next?  Africans assembling TVs for Chinese companies?  Oh... done that @Hisense in 2013.