Posts Tagged ‘TED.com’
What if greenies are right? (part 2) Why Mad Max gets in way of seeing the future
What would a future in which we changed our ways and didn’t trash the planet look like?
How about a 1960s lifestyle where we consumed less but had computers and the benefits of clean technology? But it’s hard to get a handle on how this, or alternative liveable futures, would look.
In part this is because the world’s filmmakers have been totally crap at depicting desirable and believable future worlds.
They’ve favoured dystopian (ie repressive ugly worlds) a la Mad Max and my old fav Blade Runner, rather than anything approaching utopian, or if utopian then it’s only on the surface, hiding an ugly truth lurking below (eg. Logan’s Run when life is all fun and games till you turn 30 then…).
And it’s when you start thinking about what the future should look like that Tim Jackson’s ideas, at least for BigCake, start to come unstuck.
Re-reading my last post on Jackson, I think the guts of the parting of ways is in Jackson’s portrayal of mankind’s choice: Trash the system or trash the planet.
Is it an either or? Or is it I’m in some form of denial about what needs to be done, like an alcoholic who realises they have a problem with drink, but figures they can manage it?
For sure we are in danger of trashing the planet. But do we need to trash the system to stop this happening?
Not convinced.
We need to do more (a hell of a lot more) to save our beloved planet, but Jackson’s argument reminds me a lot of the old expanders versus restrainers argument.
UK Guardian correspondent George Monbiot sees climate change as the first great battle (a battle to “redefine humanity”) between these two camps.
Framing the world this way is both useful and a waste of time. Useful because at simplistic level it captures the guts of the debate. But in the end it’s about as much use as capital versus labour, left v right, good v evil, black v white.
In the real world there are grays. Like BigCake you can be a restrainer and a expander at the same time..
So trash the planet or trash the system? Don’t think so, maybe trash the planet a whole lot less and trash the system a whole lot more.
Anyway this is by way of a (long) introduction to the final part of the Tim Jackson talk on TED where he looks at solutions.
He asks: What’s the point of living?
Are we “these novelty-seeking, hedonistic, selfish individuals? Or might we actually occasionally be something like [a] selfless altruist…”
Psychology says there is a tension between self-regarding behaviours and other regarding behaviours. And these tensions have deep evolutionary roots. So selfish behaviour is adaptive in certain circumstances – fight or flight.
A look at the map of the human heart reveals the crux of the matter. “What we’ve done is we’ve created economies. We’ve created systems, which systematically privilege, encourage, one narrow quadrant of the human soul and left the others unregarded.
“And in the same token, the solution becomes clear, because this isn’t, therefore, about changing human nature. It isn’t, in fact, about curtailing possibilities. It is about opening up.
“It is about allowing ourselves the freedom to become fully human, recognizing the debt and the breadth of the human psyche and building institutions to protect [the] fragile altruist within.”
Now if I was in the audience, Tim would be losing me. He’s turning all utopian.
He asks what would economies look like if they had a vision of human nature at their heart?
One example he gives is the 4000 community-interest companies that have sprung up in the U.K. over the last five years and a similar rise in B corporations in the United States enterprises that have ecological and social goals written into their constitution. He gives an example a company that gives 80 percent of its revenues to a rainforest protection project in the Amazon.
It’s a different kind of enterprise for a new economy. Investment isn’t about the relentless and mindless pursuit of consumption growth. Investment has to be a different beast, protecting and nurturing the ecological assets, investing in low-carbon technologies and infrastructures.
We have to invest, in fact, in the idea of a meaningful prosperity, providing capabilities for people to flourish with prosperity meaning more than having food, clothing and shelter. It has social and psychological aims — family, friendship, commitments, society, participating in the life of that society.
And this too requires investment, investment, for example, in places, places where we can connect, places where we can participate, shared spaces, concert halls, gardens, public parks, libraries, museums, quiet centres, places of joy and celebration, places of tranquility and contemplation…
All things the bad old system does, but yeah could do more.
What if greenies are right? Growth: we can’t live with it, can’t live without it. Another great TED talk
Sometimes I get scared that the hardcore greenies might be right.
There’s a challenging talk up on my old fav, TED.com, by Tim Jackson who studies links between lifestyle, society and the environment. Basically he’s an economic growth sceptic.
In the talk he has a great line: “This is a story about us being persuaded to spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need, to create impressions on people we don’t care about.”
And that’s a modern economy in a nutshell. Debt, free markets, consumerism, advertising etc simply help keep the show on the road.
The TED talk also touches on a number of BigCake themes:
• The growing gap between rich and power
• The coping mechanisms of more debt and more work to maintain living standards and
• The allure of the ‘zombie’ economy’.
But it also confronts another belief – that the human race is smart enough to recognise that modern economies have created a hole and that we are clever enough to dig our way out.
BigCake’s always believed we can do this within the current system.
But Jackson reckons the human race has a choice: Trash the system or trash the planet.
What follows is an edited version of the first 10 minutes of his 20-minute TED talk. Part 2 to come.
Imagine, he says a world in 2050 of 9 billion people all aspiring to Western incomes.
How fast do we have to move – how clever do we need to be – to deliver our carbon targets?
Our current carbon intensity of economic growth [that is emissions per dollar of real gross domestic product] is about 770 grams of carbon.
In 2050 it has to be 6 grams of carbon – a 130-fold improvement.
That is 10 times faster and further than anything we have ever achieved in industrial history.
May be we can do – who knows.
Believing these numbers is crucial if you want to buy into Jackson’s argument. I haven’t been able to find any arguments to the contrary and anyway, he’d have to by way out to be wrong, so I’ll go with them for now.
Also as he writes elsewhere “efficiency improvements are continually offset by increases in scale”.
Back to TED Jackson says the only thing that has remotely slowed down the relentless rise of carbon emissions over the last decade is recession.
We are caught in a trap – a dilemma – of growth. We can’t live with it; we can’t live without it.
Our best avenue to escape from this is a kind of blind faith in technology, in our cleverness and in efficiency.
But shouldn’t we just check first that the economic system we have is remotely capable of delivering this kind of improvement.
The system works thus: Firms produce goods and provide us with incomes and then we can spend those incomes on goods and services.
This look harmless enough. The key feature is investment which equals a 5th of national income in most economies. It stimulates further consumption growth.
It also seeks out novelty – a process of creative destruction, continually chasing expanding consumer markets.
Human beings apparently love new stuff (and ideas and experiences). In every language, stuff is a symbolic language we use to tell each other stories, for example how important we are.
This ties in with the posts I’ve been writing about growing inequality based on the book ‘The Spirit Level’ which roughly says problems in rich countries are not caused by people not being rich enough, but by the scale of material differences.
So, says Jackson here’s a system that is locking economic structure with social logic. It’s an engine of economic growth driven by a sense of anxiety, what Adam Smith called “a life with shame”.
Now you need the hybrid car, the HDTV, two holidays a year in the sun, the net book, the ipad…[The zombie economy]
And even if we don’t want them, we need to buy them because if we don’t buy them the system crashes.
To stop it crashing over the last decades we have expanded the money supply – expanded credit and debt so we can keep buying stuff.
But is this really how people are?
We run up against a couple of anomalies.
In the crisis what do people want to do – they want to look to the future, they want to hunker down. Spend less and save more.
But saving is exactly the wrong thing do from the system point of view.
The system is at odds with who we are as people.
[More to come]
Hat Tip – NZ Institute
Blame evolution – it makes monkeys out of us all when it comes to financial decision making
When we humans make crap financial decisions – from the Global Financial Crisis through to holding on to bum shares too long – is it because we are greedy, silly, don’t have all the facts, have put Alan Greenspan in charge?Or could it be that we have been hardwired by evolution to mess up?
An interesting and disturbing study shows it maybe the latter. When it comes to figuring out risk/reward situations, we are lumped with 35 million years of inept strategizing.
Laurie Santos, who runs Yale University’s Comparative Cognition Laboratory, studies primate psychology and monkeynomics, looking for the roots of human irrationality by watching the way our primate relatives make decisions.
You may not be surprised to hear that we share many of our irrationalities with monkeys.
But according to Santos this also applies to financial decision making, something we think we’d be better at than monkeys.
What follows is an edited version of a 20-minute Santos speech on TED.com.
She says: Humans are smart, but we can be incredibly dumb in some aspects of our decision making.
In the last few years we have seen unprecedented examples of ineptitude:
• Environmental disasters
• Financial market troubles.
We like to think that the mistakes we make are the result of bad apples.
It turns out that what social scientists are actually learning is that when most of us are put in specific contexts we will make very specific predictable mistakes.
How come? Why can’t we figure this out?
There are two possibilities:
1. It’s not really our fault. We have created environments that are too complicated for us to understand, for example financial markets. The easy solution to this is to figure out what we can’t deal with and get rid of it.
2. But maybe it’s not our environment that is messed up. Maybe it is us that is designed badly. People tend to make the same errors over and over again. It feels like we are built to make certain errors in certain ways.
If it is us that is messed up, it is not clear how we can go about dealing with this situation.
How can you tell if it is possibility one or two?
We looked at monkeys. They are smart and cute and lack all the stuff that is messing us up.
And they broke off from the human branch of primates about 35 million years ago.
If you put a monkey in the same situation as humans do they make the same mistakes as us?
We started our work at the start of the Global Financial Crisis. We wanted to see if monkeys do the same dumb things we do.
But monkeys don’t use money so we taught them how to use money (tokens) to buy food.
We asked if monkeys would spontaneously – as if this was really their currency –pay attention to price and create a monkey market place?
The interesting stuff was when we collaborated with economists.
The monkey findings basically matched, not just qualitatively but quantitatively, what we saw humans doing in a real market.
The question was do monkeys mess up in the same way we do?
Anecdotally we saw things that showed they might: we never saw any evidence of saving and there was evidence of larceny.
We wanted to speed things up a bit so we said, let’s give monkeys the same kinds of problems that humans tend to get wrong.
In a human risk test, if you gave people $1000 each, most people would play it safe if asked them to chose between a toss of the coin – heads you get a thousand dollar more; tails you lose the lot – and just getting another $500.
Most people say, why should I be risky when I can get $1500 for sure, I’ll go with that.
So what?
The so what comes when we think about the same problem set up a little bit differently. You have to decide how you are going to lose money.
I’ll give you $2000 to put in your pocket.
How about a choice between a risky loss – heads you keep the lot, tails you get nothing.
Or play it safe and hand over $1500 and keep $500.
When presented with these options, people don’t chose to play it safe.
People’s appreciation risk varies according to where they started.
What’s going on – we appear to have two biases at a psychological level:
• One is that we have a really hard time thinking in absolute terms
• Secondly we find it very easy to think in relative terms.
This affects our thinking about whether options are good or not.
Loss aversion – we really hate it when we have to lose out on some money. We will switch our preferences to avoid this.
Subjects get risky because they want the small shot that there won’t be any loss.
That means when we are in a loss mindset, we can be more risky.
This plays out in lots of ways with humans:
• Holding on to shares that are losing value
• Why people hold on to their houses in a falling housing market because they do not want to sell at a loss.
Do monkeys show the same biases?
Like humans do they choose to play it safe or go risky for the possibility of getting a big bonus?
Qualitatively and quantitatively they choose the same as humans.
This is crazy – it shows the monkey are evaluating situations in relative terms and treating losses differently than they treat gains.
What does it mean. It means monkeys are like us.
The original question was: where do these kinds of human of errors come from.
What we have learned is that biases might be a deeper part of us than thought. In fact they may be due to the very nature of our evolutionary history.
It means that these duncey strategies might be 35 million years old.
We know that old strategies like this can be really hard to overcome.
When your shares fall, or your house price plummets, you are not going to be able to see that in anything but old evolutionary terms.
That means crises that lead to investors to do badly are going to be really hard to overcome.
The good news – humans are not only smart, they are inspirationally smart. We are so good at overcoming our biological limitations.
But we have to recognise that we have these limitations, accept them and figure them out and then we might be able to achieve our own human potential and to be the noble species we all hope to be.
[Photo credit - Evil Death Monkey Possessed by Spirit by Nekominn/Flickr]