Memorial Day: Fear and Greed, Part 3
Just as there are Useless Lists of Jobs Beneath Wealthy People, there are fears and phobias that the emerging markets don't have on their list of priorities. That can be an opportunity for exploitation. Yesterday's post described how EPA's Environmental Justice team came on board to make sure that "a clean local environment" was a right for every American citizen.
I learned today about careers in actuarial science (CNN). It's about the statistics of risk and benefit, which (those who know me, know) I attribute to most of my life success. (Taking credit for good luck, others call it). Wikipedia 2012.05.28
According to the article, actuaries are one of the most sought-after degree holders, with virtually 0% unemployment. What I'm curious about is what a professional actuary would say about "recycling" and "reuse" endeavors, with their associated benefits and risks, in a developing nation?An actuary is a business professional who deals with the financial impact of risk and uncertainty. Actuaries provide expert assessments of financial security systems, with a focus on their complexity, their mathematics, and their mechanisms (Trowbridge 1989, p. 7).Actuaries mathematically evaluate the likelihood of events and quantify the contingent outcomes in order to minimize losses, both emotional and financial, associated with uncertain undesirable events. Since many events, such as death, cannot be avoided, it is helpful to take measures to minimize their financial impact when they occur.
One of the saddest stories I remember from Peace Corps in Africa was a young woman who spent a year teaching farmers to cultivate fish ponds. Her favorite and most apt farmer/student lost his 1 year old son, who drowned in the fish pond she helped to dig, and she quit the service and returned to California. Perhaps an actuary would say that the protein in the diet is worth the risk, if you learn from the lost life and make the fish ponds a little safer. (Yes, this is similar to the story of the boy I helped bury who drowned in his father's well. Not digging wells is not an option. I taught by twins to swim by the time they were two years old).
Unlike the Peace Corps volunteers, the villagers really don't have much of an option to move to San Francisco. If they try illegal emigration, that has its own risks. My best friend from Africa married my Peace Corps replacement and they moved to the USA. He was a muslim who fell into drinking in the USA, lost his family, and has been in and out of prison.
Finding a scapegoat for the things that killed us today is rarely useful. The amount of fear that we can realistically project onto something that may kill us seven years from now is also practically useless, unless we find a scapegoat to leverage... the answer to that "unless" depends on the wealth of the scapegoat. The environmental justice and Stewardship philosophies may not be built upon this attraction to leveraged wealth... but they cannot help but be influenced by it.
We can blame ourselves, or government, for the fish ponds. We can blame corporations for the stewardship of the toxics. But like actuaries on a battlefield, the entrepreneurs I've met in slums and emerging markets don't wait around for someone to blame. They find the most value they can, the smartest way that they can. It's not waiting for a big multinational corporation to pay for a modern shredder. It's not taking back an exhausted 1980s TV from Lagos for repair. The best thing they can do is get a laptop which needs the fan cleaned, or a computer with a dead capacitor, and repair it, earning a months wages in forty five minutes. It may be safer for the white volunteer's shiny conscience to escape that, or say they shouldn't have had to make that choice. I didn't leave, and don't intend to.
When a risk is a consequence of trade, and the trade is a good or service between someone wealthy and someone poor, it might be about exploitation and it might be about race. But sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. The actuarial science of life for the developing world says that Foxconn and contract management and low wages are a better path out of the poorest ditch than the promises of Mao or Al Qaeda. Having a boss sucks. But having a fair boss, or a good trading partner, doesn't suck nearly as much.
Memorial Day: Fear and Greed, Part 2
EPA tried to simplify things a few decades ago with a "Solid Waste Hierarchy". The first was "recycle, then incinerate, then landfill". That drew an environmentalist backlash, and the "new hierarchy" in 1990 Earth Day was "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle". Neither hierarchy anticipated the international trade issues and controversies.
Reuse and repair beats recycling. Ghettos and barrios are the best places for that work... Just as auto and engine repair is no longer done in Manhattan. But that collides with a social fairness "tab" we have open, and in the late 1990s "Environmental Justice" became EPA's forray into social issues.
Definitions from wikipedia 2012.05.27
The attention of government regulatory staff was to be divided equally, to protect us all. This shifted the radius or loci of EPA from protecting high property values to protecting humans equally.
In this paradigm, the value of protecting the environment is utilitarian. How many people are in contact with the environment being protected?
This is not a song for the woods, or rain forests. It's only the giving that makes you what you are.
Reuse and repair beats recycling. Ghettos and barrios are the best places for that work... Just as auto and engine repair is no longer done in Manhattan. But that collides with a social fairness "tab" we have open, and in the late 1990s "Environmental Justice" became EPA's forray into social issues.
Definitions from wikipedia 2012.05.27
In other words, this environmental outcome concerned the human perception of environmental risk... people who were poor had the same vote on EPA attention as the rich people. A clean and safe environment was seen as a human right, a protection of people.The United States Environmental Protection Agency defines EJ as follows:Environmental Justice is the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies. EPA has this goal for all communities and persons across this Nation [sic]. It will be achieved when everyone enjoys the same degree of protection from environmental and health hazards and equal access to the decision-making process to have a healthy environment in which to live, learn, and work.[5]
The attention of government regulatory staff was to be divided equally, to protect us all. This shifted the radius or loci of EPA from protecting high property values to protecting humans equally.
In this paradigm, the value of protecting the environment is utilitarian. How many people are in contact with the environment being protected?
This is not a song for the woods, or rain forests. It's only the giving that makes you what you are.
Memorial Day: Fear and Greed Part 1
The more I try to crystallize the issue in this blog, the more it is about trade and exchange between rich and poor. The exchange is a value, and the fear of exploitation is a value. Some make their value in the margins of exchanges they make, others make their money through their authority over those transactions.
Whether we draw two big circles on a map and call them "OECD and non-OECD", or seven circles for continents, or 193 nations, or circles which show cities and peasants in those countries, or draw lines within a city between the high property values and the ghettos, it's ultimately about the transfer of wealth and value. When a rich man employs a poor man, or a poor man buys something from a rich person, or a daughter marries across an economic line, opinions and suspicions sharpen.
Is trade between wealthy and poor exploitation, or opportunity? Who is the authority or referee?
Jim Puckett says in his interviews in CBS 60 Minutes and Frontline that the deck is stacked against the poor in any exchange. The economic have-nots will be abused and worse off due to the trade of second hand goods. This line of thinking has some friendly listeners in the "environmental justice" arena, and the anti-globalization movement of Seattle.
I was a critic of how the USA's most toxic industry - hard rock non-ferrous mining - moved to rain forests where no one complains about the cyanide, mercury, and other toxic runoff. Those concerns brought me into the recycling field, in fact. And here I am in a battle of wits with a fellow environmentalist over how our raw material policy should play out worldwide.
My concerns about hard rock mining, however, were never pinned on a false hope of economic segregation. Boycotting and segregating people we are uncomfortable or uncertain about has led to many "trail of tears", and many burned bridges. Doing the right thing means doing something, but it isn't to throw a garbage can through the collective window of the recycling industry. Fair trade makes more sense, and is not something Basel Action Network should try to make people afraid of.
In his editorial response to my first widely published column, "We Shouldn't Have to Make that Choice" (reprinted in E-Scrap in 2009), Jim Puckett said that he didn't think Fair Trade meant "poisoning people". Toxics is a scare word. Jim was clearly trying to make people afraid of the economic exchange. He tells people that replacing or upgrading a part is hazardous, toxic, polluting. He knows he's wrong, he just doesn't recognize why he's doing it. It is not, as he claimed, about a "loophole" of reuse. If it's resolved, his authority diminishes, and he's not ready to retire.
Create concern, especially visceral concern (photos of children). Promote yourself as an authority to reduce this concern. Sell certification. Profit!
You do not create "environmental justice" by creating a vacuum or boycott of trade. Justice is, by definition, a judgement call, a negotiation, and a settlement. You do not stop exploitation by labeling people and segregating them.
Whether we draw two big circles on a map and call them "OECD and non-OECD", or seven circles for continents, or 193 nations, or circles which show cities and peasants in those countries, or draw lines within a city between the high property values and the ghettos, it's ultimately about the transfer of wealth and value. When a rich man employs a poor man, or a poor man buys something from a rich person, or a daughter marries across an economic line, opinions and suspicions sharpen.
Is trade between wealthy and poor exploitation, or opportunity? Who is the authority or referee?Jim Puckett says in his interviews in CBS 60 Minutes and Frontline that the deck is stacked against the poor in any exchange. The economic have-nots will be abused and worse off due to the trade of second hand goods. This line of thinking has some friendly listeners in the "environmental justice" arena, and the anti-globalization movement of Seattle.
I was a critic of how the USA's most toxic industry - hard rock non-ferrous mining - moved to rain forests where no one complains about the cyanide, mercury, and other toxic runoff. Those concerns brought me into the recycling field, in fact. And here I am in a battle of wits with a fellow environmentalist over how our raw material policy should play out worldwide.
My concerns about hard rock mining, however, were never pinned on a false hope of economic segregation. Boycotting and segregating people we are uncomfortable or uncertain about has led to many "trail of tears", and many burned bridges. Doing the right thing means doing something, but it isn't to throw a garbage can through the collective window of the recycling industry. Fair trade makes more sense, and is not something Basel Action Network should try to make people afraid of.
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| Tech, Toxics, and Ju-Ju: Leverage fear, create authority |
Create concern, especially visceral concern (photos of children). Promote yourself as an authority to reduce this concern. Sell certification. Profit!
You do not create "environmental justice" by creating a vacuum or boycott of trade. Justice is, by definition, a judgement call, a negotiation, and a settlement. You do not stop exploitation by labeling people and segregating them.
SSFF Joke
Did Facebook public offering hype set it up for a perceived fall? SSFF?
Two penny-pinching hillbilly brothers are looking at a bad year. They were going to be eatin their seed corn. They decide to pool their resources and use their trump card - inside knowledge on the fastest running horse in Kentucky.
They decided to pool what money they had and bet it on the local horse. They were so excited that they got into a bit of a quarrel over who would go to the Derby and place the bet. They couldn't afford to both make the journey, it would eat up the bet and reduce their winnings. They flipped a coin and made a plan.
The winner would do whatever it took to go to the Derby as cheaply as possible. He was to beg for food, hitchhike and walk, to save every dime they had to bet on this horse.
(note: This summer I intend to weed out and take off line the weakest blog posts going back to 2005... the ones that SSFF.)SSFF is my inside baseball reference to a big announcement gone bust. SSFF comes from a joke my parents found absolutely hysterical back in the 1970s. The only other source I found for the SSFF joke, online, was the transcript of a performance in North Carolina by a negro singer, born in 1908, who was telling the joke in 1981.
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| See wikipedia for attribution of Tony McCoy's fall |
They decided to pool what money they had and bet it on the local horse. They were so excited that they got into a bit of a quarrel over who would go to the Derby and place the bet. They couldn't afford to both make the journey, it would eat up the bet and reduce their winnings. They flipped a coin and made a plan.
The winner would do whatever it took to go to the Derby as cheaply as possible. He was to beg for food, hitchhike and walk, to save every dime they had to bet on this horse.
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