Tag: Globalization

In-Groups, Out-Groups, and Responsibility

In-Groups, Out-Groups, & Responsibility

Posted on by jabittan
There is evidence to suggest that in the Untied States our culture is becoming more individualistic and less collective. This has interesting impacts for how we see and think about our responsibility toward each other. A more individualistic society may say that the best way for us to be responsible for the good of society is to be the best that we can possibly be. We are responsible for how healthy we eat, responsible for how much we contribute to economic productivity, and responsible for how good of a role model we are for young people. A more collective society may think that we are more responsible for whether other people are able to eat healthily, whether others are able to find productive employment, and whether there are sufficient activities for young people to participate in to be around good role models.
 
 
This contrast is interesting because it highlights a distinction between who we are responsible for. In the most extreme of individualistic cultures we may not be responsible for anyone other than ourselves, not even for our family members. In the most extreme collective cultures, we may be responsible for the wellbeing of the entire universe.
 
 
In the book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari suggests that in reality most human cultures generally end up in some place of feeling responsibility for themselves and for an in-group to which the individual belongs. He writes, “evolution has made Homo sapiens, like other social mammals, a xenophobic creature. Sapiens instinctively divide humanity into two parts, we and they. We are people like you and me, who share our language, religion, and customs. We are all responsible for each other, but not responsible for them.” The argument is that evolution would not support the most individualistic society, because the single individual would not be able to pass on their genes as well as an individual supported by a strong tribe with social responsibilities among the in-group. Simultaneously, a group that was too collective in responsibility would be spread too thin to foster evolutionary advantages in terms of who felt responsible to support others.
 
 
But there is still a lot of flexibility in terms of how this personal versus group responsibility manifests. Humans seem to discern between people like them who they feel responsible for and people dissimilar to themselves who they do not feel responsible for. It is interesting how in the United States we are becoming more individualistic, seeing ourselves first as responsible for our individual self and less responsible for the collective while the world becomes more globalized and dependent on everyone – as our current supply chain issues demonstrates. Somehow, it seems, the challenge for us is to expand the scope of who we are viewed as being responsible for while maintaining a reason to still be responsible for ourselves as individuals. Perhaps this isn’t possible, perhaps it simply layers more responsibility over the individual, but as we continue to globalize and become more globally dependent on each other, we have to find a way to understand that we are responsible for others, even if evolution appears to have made us xenophobic and hasn’t given us a sense of responsibility for people who seem different from us.

Limitations of Money: Market Outsiders and Impersonal Systems

Posted on by jabittan

Something I have noticed in my own life recently is that I am less patient and less personable with random strangers in stores. My wife and I do most of our grocery shopping on the weekends, but typically each week we have a meal planned that will turn out much better if I pick up a single ingredient the day we cook that meal rather than four or five days ahead of time during our weekend shopping. This means that usually at least once a week (more if I forgot an important item) I am running to the store after work. During these trips I’m usually in a little hurry to pick up what I need, get through the afternoon rush hour traffic quickly, and make my way through the store and everyone else who is at the store after work to get home and start cooking. I know what I want at the store, where it is in the store, and I’m not really interested in chatting with a random person who I may never see again about the weather, local sports, or some peculiarity of the grocery store. Sometimes I feel bad about it, but I just don’t feel like engaging in personal chit-chat with the grocery store employees or other shoppers. I’m simply on a cold and heartless shopping mission.

My story reflects one of the limitations of money and markets. It enables trust between people and helps organize and order our lives, but it doesn’t really build community or relationships between people. This heartless impartiality of money is a fair critique and it is one of two primary critiques that Yuval Noah Harari presents against money in his book Sapiens. Harari isn’t denouncing money, but he is demonstrating that money and economics are an insufficient explanation for human global expansion and dominance. Humans live as a globally connected species, forming relationships and connections with people from Alaska to Japan to South Africa to England and back again. Money and modern economies helped us forge this global path, but there are things within the human experience that lie beyond the reach of money and the markets that currencies enable. To explain how we got to where we are today, we have to consider economics, but also look beyond money.

“Human communities and families,” Harari writes, “have always been based on beliefs in priceless things, such as honor, loyalty, morality, and love. These things lie outside the domain of the market.” There are certain things we cannot buy and sell, or at least if we do, we are aware that they are not exactly genuine. Purchasing honor, love, or loyalty is more like a quid pro quo rental agreement. I provide you with certain financial incentives and you signal a certain amount of honor, love, or loyalty back toward me. Like modern college football coaches, as soon as a better financial opportunity comes along, all the rhetoric around such values is out the window and all those values are instantly transferred to someone else. Humans don’t cooperate on large scales and build massive societies and institutions simply because someone payed a lot of people to do so. Something more intangible to human existence is necessary.

Markets and money don’t seem to be able to reach those intangibles. Money fosters cooperation and trust between people, but doesn’t necessarily get people to connect and relate to one an other or feel any sense of mutual respect and geniality between one another. My grocery store example demonstrates this. The store trusts that my plastic card will transfer sufficient digital numbers to the store in exchange for the steak that I am taking with me. But I don’t have any real loyalty or good will toward the store and it’s employees. Harari continues, “for although money builds universal trust between strangers, this trust is invested not in humans, communities, or sacred values, but in the money itself and in the impersonal systems that back it. We do not trust the stranger, or the next-door neighbor, we trust the coin they hold. If they run out of coins, we run out of trust.”

Money can break down barriers between groups of people. It can facility trade, cultural sharing, knowledge spread, and tolerance. But it isn’t enough for humans to be a globally peaceful and cooperative species. Money is off limits in some domains, as there are certain things that lie outside the realm of markets. Money doesn’t build meaningful relationships between people in a way that forms long lasting and deep trust and engagement between people. It seems to have been necessary for human global dominance, but insufficient to explain exactly how we have arrived at the modern world we inhabit today.

Interconnected Inequalities

Interconnected Inequalities

Posted on by jabittan
Inequality isn’t something I have thought of at a truly deep level, but its consequences are becoming more apparent to me the more I learn about the world. I grew up believing that anything was possible for anyone, and that anyone could become president of the United States or successful in their own endeavors as long as they worked hard. While I still do believe that we can all become successful through hard work, and while I do think we should still encourage some form of this myth, I don’t fully believe the myth myself. I think that luck and structural factors of our lives play a huge role, in other words, inequalities matter.

 

In the myth that I grew up believing is that inequality was purely a result of one’s natural skills and how hard one worked. It was an end product, not an input. Many people choose to see the world this way, especially, in my experience, if they themselves are lucky, wealthy, and privileged. Inequality simply doesn’t matter in this worldview, and it is in some ways a good thing, reaffirming that the successful people are smart, hardworking, and deserve what they have.

 

I now think that our interconnected inequalities are much more serious that I had believed. Inequality is visible, and it is understood across the globe. It shapes how people think about themselves, about their futures, about the way other people value them, and about what they can and cannot be. A character introduced in Sam Quinones’ book Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic speaks to this reality. A character by the name Enrique opens the book and Quinones writes, “Growing up in a poor Mexican village had attuned Enrique to the world’s unfairness. Those who worked hard and honestly got left behind. Only those with power and money could insist on decent treatment.”

 

From this mindset Enrique chose the only way out of his situation (being the son of a poor sugar cane farmer in Mexico) that he thought could get him money, prestige, and power. He chose to become a heroin dealer. His story is told in the book, and in the opening introduction we see Enrique feel guilty about his life choices, but confirm to himself that it was his only way out of destitute poverty as he watches a group of farm-hands/construction workers be deported in an airport.

 

It is global inequality that drove Enrique to drug trafficking. Through no fault of his own, Enrique was born into a family in a poor village, and the clearest path toward employment for him was pursuing his family’s sugarcane business. A career that meant hard work, near subsistence wages, and little respect. Sure, he could have found other options and become a rags to riches/slumdog millionaire story, but expecting everyone to do so ignores the reality of the message that inequality pushes in the face of those born into such adverse situations. Enrique learned that people didn’t treat him and his family with respect, but saw the respect shown to people in the town with more means.

 

Enrique eventually came to the United States to chase money and status back home in Mexico. The inequality he first saw in his home village never left him. He found inequality everywhere, and the interconnected inequalities between the United States and Mexico in many ways created his lifestyle and enabled his drug dealing.

 

I don’t have a solution to our interconnected inequalities, but I think we need to acknowledge them. I am sure that some level of inequality is inevitable, and likely even healthy, but I’m also convinced that the inequality we see between people and between nations is part of what drives much of our global conflict and grief. So much of the world’s inequality seems completely unnecessary, and in many ways should be addressed head-on, so that people at the bottom don’t believe that the only way to improve their lives is through illicit means, and so that people at the very top don’t use resources in such wanton ways to signal how wealthy and successful they are at the expense of others.

Making Global Local

Posted on by jabittan
The first time I heard about globalism was in an English class as a freshman in college. Since that time, globalization has gotten a lot more attention and has come to represent people’s fears about automation and job loss, but also people’s ambitions as new markets across the world become more accessible to trade and innovation. Whether we like globalization or not, we must acknowledge the way that markets and societies are changing so that in our own minds globalization doesn’t remain the mysterious boogeyman that it so often is today.

 

In The New Localism, Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak discuss globalization and how our cities and metropolitan regions, as opposed to our states or federal institutions, are the most well poised to adapt to an increasingly globalized market and supply chain. The also ask what it means for civil institutions to adapt and change to globalization writing, “The connection between globalization and localism as an arena of enhanced civic action has not been as well explored as the general theme of global economic change and populism.”

 

Since 2016, we have been asking ourselves why a global wave of populism seems to have overtaken normal political processes in the US and UK. Why authoritarian leaders have seemingly become so well entrenched in Turkey and Russia, and why so many people across the globe are willing to protest traditional and seemingly rational governments. What we have not looked at as closely, is how local level leaders can make a huge difference on a global scale and how cities and metropolitan areas can shape policy that influences people’s lives at a greater scale than what we see with movements by populists and authoritarians.

 

Individual states in the US are reversing marijuana policy against the will of the Federal Government. Individual cities are designing their own immigration policy contrary to the demands of the Federal Government. And industries clustered in metropolitan areas are not waiting for new laws and regulations to make decisions that will impact people living within the US and across the globe. The scale of action is local, and that means that cities are the ones who set the agenda for globalization, rather than the larger state governments or federal institutions. How this will ultimately change those larger civil institutions is still a mystery, but in my opinion, local action can dismantle the energy and grievances of populists and authoritarians. Local action can drive economic performance and growth, pacifying the unrest we see at national levels. Globalization might be a phenomenon that connects networks and places all over the Earth, but its effects are felt locally, and good local management and innovation can help make globalization a positive and constructive force.

Competing in a Global Economy

Posted on by jabittan
“While competing in this global economy requires new thinking, many cities continue to pursue zero-sum economic development strategies that subsidize stadia and steal businesses rather than incent innovation,” write Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak in The New Localism. Our world’s globalized economy scares a lot of people. Add to globalization new technological innovations and the automation of a lot of jobs, and we find threatened people, threatened cities, and threatened industries. The proper response to such threats is adaptation and change, but a more common human reaction is fearful recalcitrance. Rather than go through reinvention, rather than develope new skills, and rather than embrace new changes, cities, states, countries, and the people within them double down on the familiar and the known, using policy to entrench themselves in the familiar jobs of yesterday.

 

Katz and Nowak continue, “These strategies are rarely aligned with smart education and workforce strategies that give workers the technical skills they need to succeed in growing occupations. And reinvestment in neighborhoods, downtowns, and water-fronts still has a long way to go to make up for decades of disinvestment, depopulation, and decentralization.” 

 

Stealing jobs, offering tax incentives to get companies/sports teams to move, and passing policy which prevents companies from automating away common jobs is not a strategy built for success in a globalized world of changing technology. To be competitive in a world where companies can move easily, where ideas can take root anyplace, and where jobs and technology are changing the way we work, cities and governments need to find new ways to build human capital and new ways to get innovative ideas into the economy quickly. Approaching the world and the economy as a zero-sum competition prevents innovation and encourages the short term thinking that leads to the poor strategies mentioned above.

 

The only way to truly adapt to the changing globalized world is to innovate. Protectionism leads to eventual disruption and greater anger on the part of the people whose industry and jobs are being disrupted. Those who lose out to automation without any training or skill development to help them adapt are understandably frustrated, but the proper response is not to dig our heels into the dirt to pull back on innovation and change. The proper response is to embrace change and help people innovate and learn alongside new technology, new jobs/industries, and new institutions.

New Governance

Posted on by jabittan
The definition for governance, according to a quick Google search is the action or manner of governing. Governance is the how behind the what. It is all about the manner and form that people and societies adopt to determine what will be legitimate in the managing, overseeing, and organizing of a society. Whenever we have a group of people, we have some type of governance in place, even if there are no formal rules, regulations, or titles among the group.

 

As opposed to formal constitutional governments, where the structure and rules of government and its boundaries are well defined, the idea of governance is fluid. Humans don’t have the mental capacity to think of every possible situation, combination of events, and potential conflicts that may arise within a group of people, so while government tends to set a forum for regulations and organization, governance comprises a complex web of interactions that adjust and exist in flux from situation to situation. In the United States today, as the world becomes more globalized and as dynamic cities have begun to exercise the economic muscles, governance is changing to adapt to new realities.

 

In The New Localism, Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak talk about the ways governance is changing. “Governance is being driven by collaboration rather than coercion,” they write, “stewarded by diverse networks rather than by elected decision-makers alone, and characterized by iterative problem solving rather than by rigid and prescriptive rule-making.”

 

Governance is inherently collaborative in a democracy, and today, the collaboration needed to advance policy and drive society forward is more collaborative than in the past. Authority within a structure of governance comes from collaboration among the people with the will and the power to make decisions. In the past, authority may have come from a position or title, but today, that is not enough. We are tackling more challenging problems and adding extra dimensions to what used to be simpler problems. We have additional hurdles, additional concerns about environment and equity, and additional veto points in any decision that we make. Enhanced collaboration between diverse networks is the only way that governance can occur in the new age of local governmental power.

The Challenge of Trying to Enlarge the Pie

Posted on by jabittan
I often feel that we are moving so fast toward the future that we are advancing beyond our means. I think we are in some ways exceeding the capacity that we have evolved to fit, and this is creating great challenges for humans across the globe. We have new technologies, new social structures, and new understandings of our places in the world and in the universe more broadly that exceed the type of living that we evolved to succeed within.

 

A passage from Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson’s book The Elephant in the Brain highlighted this for me. They write, “Despite the fact that it’s possible to cooperate, politically, in ways that “enlarge the pie” for everyone, this is the exception rather than the rule – especially for our distant ancestors. In most contexts, for one coalition to succeed, others must fail. Importantly, however, members within a coalition can earn themselves a larger slice of the pie by cooperating – a fact that makes politics such an intoxicating game.”

 

The line about our ancestors being incapable of expanding the pie for everyone is important. Without much technology, without shared languages and translation, and in a state of constant threat from nature, it is easy to see why our early ancestors were limited to a state of competition with each other for social status, sex, and resources. There simply were too few humans, too few easily accessible resources, and too few scalable technologies for everyone to be sufficiently comfortable and connected.

 

We now live in a new world, where literally 7.5 million people in the San Francisco metropolitan statistical area are constantly thinking about ways to build new technology to scale to improve the lives of all people, not just the people they are connected with. We understand that our actions can have global manifestations, and that we need global solutions to address climate change and other existential threats. Our technology and ways of thinking have surpassed the world our ancestors lived in, and have created a new game for us to play, however, we are still stuck in the zero-sum mindset of our ancestors, asking what we can do to get a bigger share of the pie for our narrow coalition.

 

Understanding why we fall into thinking about narrow coalitions is important. Recognizing the way our brains work and why they are limited helps us see new potentials. Understanding how we can change our thoughts and how we and others will react in a world that offers so much more is key to actually living up to our new potential as a global species.

The Challenge of Trying to Enlarge the Pie

Posted on by jabittan
I often feel that we are moving so fast toward the future that we are advancing beyond our means. I think we are in some ways exceeding the capacity that we have evolved to fit, and this is creating great challenges for humans across the globe. We have new technologies, new social structures, and new understandings of our places in the world and in the universe more broadly that exceed the type of living that we evolved to succeed with.

 

A passage from Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson’s book The Elephant in the Brain highlighted this for me. They write, “Despite the fact that it’s possible to cooperate, politically, in ways that “enlarge the pie” for everyone, this is the exception rather than the rule – especially for our distant ancestors. In most contexts, for one coalition to succeed, others must fail. Importantly, however, members within a coalition can earn themselves a larger slice of the pie by cooperating – a fact that makes politics such an intoxicating game.”

 

The line about our ancestors being incapable of expanding the pie for everyone is important. Without much technology, without shared languages and translation, and in a state of constant threat from nature, it is easy to see why our early ancestors were limited to a state of competition with each other for social status, sex, and politics. There simply were too few humans, too few easily accessible resources, and too few scalable technologies for everyone to be sufficiently comfortable and connected.

 

We now live in a new world, where literally 7.5 million people in the San Francisco metropolitan statistical area are constantly thinking about ways to build new technology to scale to improve the lives of all people, not just the people they are connected with. We understand that our actions can have global manifestations, and that we need global solutions to address climate change and other existential threats. Our technology and ways of thinking have surpassed the world our ancestors lived in, and have created a new game for us to play, however, we are still stuck in the zero-sum mindset of our ancestors, asking what we can do to get a bigger share of the pie for our narrow coalition.

 

Understanding why we fall into thinking about narrow coalitions is important. Recognizing the way our brains work and why they are limited helps us see new potentials. Understanding how we can change our thoughts and how we and others will react in a world that offers so much more is key to actually living up to our new potential as a global species.

Physical Conflict and Military Economies

Posted on by jabittan
I’m currently reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer. Shirer takes us on a journey from the rise of the Nazis in Germany through the Second World War to Hitler and Nazi Germany’s defeat. I’m only a couple of hundred pages in, and just finished a section about Nazi Germany’s economy in the period leading up to war. A question I had was how a downtrodden and economically distressed nation managed to become economically sufficient and even able to build itself up to host the Olympics in 1936.  A military-industrial complex turned out to be the answer. German rearmament “creatively” funded and controlled by the state pulled Germany out of its terrible recession to the great detriment of humanity.

 

We know what soon followed in Germany beginning in 1939 after their economic turnaround driven largely by war preparations. Wars and armies have given us many scientific advances and breakthroughs, but they also support dangerous world views that will limit us in a globalized world. “The sooner we start thinking globally, as a planet-spanning species, rather than as isolated warrens of very different creatures, the sooner we’ll be able to do away with physical conflict entirely, instead spending our valuable time, energy, and resources on productivity and progress,” writes Colin Wright in his book Becoming Who We Need To Be.

 

Nazi Germany, the United States, and other nations have at different times fueled their economies by building up their army and military capacities. Scientific advances, new technology, and better safety equipment have come from the research and development of modern armies. At the same time however, armies exist to protect us from a dangerous “them” and allow us to entrench the idea that we are different from someone else and will need to use our physical strength to defend ourselves against their dangerous attacks. There is certainly a threat out there and a potential loss of innocent life if we don’t have something to protect us, but I think Wright and others would argue that we direct a lot of resources toward defending ourselves when we could be directing resources toward fostering better connections and further development of all humans globally.

 

Wright and I seem to be on the side of “a rising tide lifts all boats.” The more we can do to improve everyone, from the most globally poor in desolate and devastated parts of the world to those who live in the most productive countries, the more our own lives will benefit. The alternative view is that the world is zero-sum, meaning that the pie is only so big and for anyone else to have more, we would have less. The zero-sum frame doesn’t see humanity as a global force but rather as collective groups of individuals who each have their own resources, skills, and abilities. Each pocket of humanity is responsible for its own well-being and advances, and each nation must do its own work to make itself great.

 

My argument is that approaching the world in this way will ultimately lead to fewer scientific advances, delayed development of the nations that need it the most, and instability that will breed resentment toward nations at the top and potential terrorism. That instability will create fear and further drive the need for a substantial military for protection, further driving a wedge between the nations that are successful and those who are not. What I want to see is a world that includes everyone, partly because we don’t know where the next genius to develop the next world changing technology will come from, and partly because each human should have their own chance to flourish and live a full life with reasonable living standards. This can only be done if we see ourselves globally as a single humanity and not as dangerous enemies.

A Harmful Sentiment

Posted on by jabittan
I am fascinated with tribalism. We all have a part of us that looks around at the world and recognizes who is like us, who is different from us, what people are part of our family, and how people in our group behave. Everyone in our in-group stands above the people in our out-groups. Those “others” seem to take on any negative qualities that we want to assign to them. People who are less wealthy than the people in our tribe are less intelligent or lazy, and that is why they are not as well off. People who are doing better than our tribe financially are greedy or privileged elites and don’t really understand what it is like to be a true American. Our tribe, however, is full of hard working, smart, and all around good people.

 

We all seem to share these tribal tendencies, and they can be harmful when we start to pull into our own group and ascribe negative qualities to all the other groups out there. Colin Wright addresses our tribal behaviors in his book Becoming Who We Need To Be by looking at “America First” from a tribal perspective. Wright describes the benefits of a globalized community and population. Using the insights, developments, and tools created around the world to raise the standard of living for everyone, and not just to use discoveries in one part of the world to improve that part of the world. He writes, “People in the US should be taken care of, certainly, but to paint our relationships in those terms [America First] implies that we have to be utterly selfish and introverted in our dealings with others, when in fact, being more open and generous will bear much greater fruit. That sharing our strengths and celebrating the strengths of others is somehow detrimental to our well-being is an ignorant idea easily sold to a mistrustful populace.”

 

Wright argues that America First trumps up some of the worst aspects of our tribal nature. It highlights who is in our tribe and who is outside of our tribe and focuses solely on increasing the status of those in our tribe. The sentiment abandons the idea that improving the lives of everyone will improve our own lives, and seeks only to expand the economy, fortunes, and standards of living within our own tribe. This may work and we may have great prosperity for the few who are part of our tribe, but putting ourselves ahead of others so openly and blatantly while also denigrating those outside our tribe may create extreme mistrust and anger. Stability, fairness, and long-term well-being may be sacrificed in our selfish quest to primarily enrich ourselves.