• home
• archives
• about

Tales from the Dark Side

you can learn a lot when people hate you

Posted 2011-12-21 13:01 in business, consumerism, culture, human nature, humor, marketing, politics, postmodernism, social networking

Not too long ago, I went to a party being thrown by Rob, a sociology graduate student and friend of mine in Madison. Soon after I arrived at the party, he introduced me to a fellow sociology grad student “Peter”, who he thought I would like to meet.

Before I could say anything, Rob tried to connect us: “Peter, this is my friend Rahul— he’s a marketer. Rahul, this is Peter. Peter is a socialist.”

A socialist? “You mean like Barack Obama?” I cracked, trying to break the ice. For the record, what Rob said— quite possibly among the most awkward introductions of all time— was not intended as a joke. Peter actually was a card-carrying socialist.

“Oh, you mean like Barack Obama?” I cracked, trying to break the ice.

Peter did not laugh at my Obama joke, which was intended to point out the ridiculousness of trying to label a US President a socialist when real dyed-in-the-wool socialists see him as nothing of the sort. Instead, Peter tilted his head and gawked at me inquisitively, perhaps as if I had just descended from an alien planet or if I was a bizarre, mythical object he had previously only read about.

I suspect that Peter thought my comment was in earnest. I suspected that despite the fact that we had just met, Peter had a lot of prejudices about me, and I probably had a few about him (though less than he probably thought).

Despite this most auspicious of beginnings, Peter and I didn’t actually talk at all. Though he showed few outward signs of contempt, I knew that there was far too much baggage associated with being a marketer even for normal people, much less for a guy who genuinely believed that the entire capitalist system was perverse and corrupt (or is that just a stereotype of a socialist view of capitalism?). I really wanted to have a chat with the guy, but there was already too much between us, and we melted back into the crowds around us.

Over the years, I’ve had any number of encounters like this. Like:

- The fellow who was buying a bookshelf I was selling, and was about the most chipper man you could ever possibly hope to meet— until I told him I was selling it because I was going away to business school, upon which he morphed into a frothing attack dog whose demeanor literally frightened me. He dropped the price he was offering me from $20 to $5 and growled as he drove away.

- The guy who refused to talk to me like a normal person because I suggested that Wal-Mart was not “evil.” I gave examples of positive things Wal-Mart has done, and gently suggested that consumers are also responsible for American consumption habits. At this point, he basically deemed me a subhuman and just barked out a barrage of anti-corporate warhorses at me without allowing me to respond to them.

I have a lot more stories like this that I’ve compiled over the years, and I sense that these stories are not unusual for people who do what I do, particularly if you run in the circles that I run in. I don’t see this as an entirely bad thing. I try to be an ambassador for the “dark side,” as some have dubbed my line of work. Sometimes you can reach people just by being civil, thoughtful, and responsive to their concerns. Other times, people have already made up their minds and choose not to view you as a human anymore.

Regardless, I value these experiences because time has revealed to me that the world advances not as a monolithic block of people who all think the same thing, but as an evolution of cultural tensions that, while frustrating, keep the world in check and prevents society from changing too radically too quickly. And these tensions from the front line of the culture wars make for good stories too.

Comment [1]

Disconnected: the Perils and Paradoxes of the Global Value Chain

how we unwittingly opened the flood gates to highly ‘contagious’ risk

Posted 2011-03-28 18:14 in biology, business, culture, economics, energy, environment, ethics, human nature, marketing, politics, sustainability

Note: An abridged version of this article was published in Foreign Policy Digest in March 2011.

Newton’s theory of universal gravitation was founded on nothing that the ancient Greeks didn’t know. The germ theory of disease could have been advanced and confirmed centuries before it was, if someone had made the right connections. It follows that there must be yet undiscovered generalizations that are “overdue” right now. Quite possibly, we have all the necessary facts needed to deduce how to prevent cancer or the location of a tenth planet, but no one is putting them together in the right order. More than that: Maybe we’re missing all sorts of logical conclusions about the world. They could be implicit in everything we see and hear, but might be just a little too complex to grasp.
- William Poundstone, “The Labyrinths of Reason”

Question: Why did we not see the financial crisis on the horizon beforehand? Why couldn’t steps have been taken to prevent it?

Unpredictability through Predictability
We live in a complicated world. So complicated, in fact, that few anticipated the financial crisis that crippled the world economy in a span of a few short years. There was nothing stopping us from seeing its impending destruction looming, but yet our most esteemed economists, businesspeople, and politicians all failed to recognize it. Why did we not see this crisis on the horizon beforehand? Why couldn’t steps have been taken to prevent it?

To understand the answers to these questions requires us to first face something unsettling: the arrangement of our financial and economic systems is almost as mysterious, complex, and labyrinthine as any of the natural sciences we study on this planet. In many ways, we have even less capacity for understanding economic systems because natural sciences are governed by processes that are reproducible and testable in laboratory settings, while economics is not well suited to such studies, being governed by irrational and unpredictable human behavior within a changing environment that is continuously impacted by literally billions of other factors at once. We are excellent economic historians, adept at developing post hoc explanations that put it all in perspective after the fact, we are not all that skilled at doing it in advance— which is precisely when we really need it.

There are people who understand small parts of the economic whole very well, but there is no one in a position to single-handedly put it all together at this very moment.There are people who understand small parts of the economic whole very well, but there is no one in a position to single-handedly put it all together at this very moment; each minute portion is sufficiently complex that grasping the entirety would require the instantaneous processing of tremendous amounts of constantly changing information, and a capacity for superhuman absorption of knowledge. We don’t even have computers that can manage the herculean task of collecting and crunching those kinds of numbers at the rate necessary for us to make sense of it in advance.

The Paradox of the Globalized Society and Breakage of the Ecological Feedback System
The overarching complexity that has come to define our economic world is somewhat paradoxical, because we tend to think of the ascent of rapid transit, satellite links, and Internet telephony as forces acting to shrink the globe and increase levels of communication and understanding across political borders. However, in many respects, these same forces heavily obscure the mechanics of the global economy through the sheer multiplicity of interregional and international relationships, corporate partnerships, and business dealings, leading to an impossibly tangled and web-like global supply chain.

Just 50 years ago, an everyday household item in the United States was likely to be made from raw materials, labor, and resources that came entirely from the United States; it is now common for products to be cobbled together using the resources and labor of many different companies housed in many different countries. Aggregated over an exponential rise in the number of consumer goods available in the global marketplace, we can easily see how it has become much more difficult to understand exactly what went into making any particular object: Where did the materials come from? How far were all the parts shipped? Were the materials sustainably produced? How much net pollution was created in the creation of this product? Were there human rights abuses associated with any part of the manufacturing of this product? As intermediary steps are introduced to the process of taking a product from production to consumption, the feedback mechanism between economic action and global consequence becomes increasingly unclear.

The feedback mechanism between economic action and global consequence is becoming increasingly unclear.Case in point: on the outskirts of Delhi, India, there is a tiny, impoverished village called Tila Byehta whose economy revolves around the stripping and processing of e-waste imported from countries like the United States. E-waste consists of discarded computers, cell phones, and other electronic devices which contain highly toxic but expensive and critically important metals that can be reused to make new electronics. While Tila Byehta benefits economically from processing this e-waste, we also know that e-waste is highly carcinogenic, causes permanent neurological and reproductive damage, and has the propensity to contaminate groundwater. But that matters little to the peasant workers in India who are more interested in their next meal than they are about long-term health consequences.

The dominant paradigm in our global supply chain is tantamount to transnational NIMBYism.At a structural level, why is this village halfway across the globe littered with highly toxic waste shipped from the United States? The answer is that America’s social and economic footing on the global stage facilitates the ability to pay others not only to take on the work of manufacturing and production, but also to absorb the costs, whether that is implicitly (as in the environmental costs of mining copper for computer components in Chile or the human rights concerns involved in manufacturing motherboards in China) or explicitly (by making trade deals to ship hazardous waste to India). In other words, the dominant paradigm in our global supply chain is a kind of transnational NIMBYism, where the U.S. consumer can consume all the value while being completely alienated from the social and environmental costs.

It is possible to see through this example how modernity’s creation of rationalized industries has led to consumers being almost entirely shielded from both the production and post-consumer sides of the equation for any given product or service. It has also allowed those controlling the means of production to be able to run factories by proxy, without necessarily having to witness firsthand the extent of the damages they are tacitly responsible for.

The implications of this are profound. In an era of escalating environmental hazard, low-latency feedback mechanisms in which our actions can be immediately seen as being causally-related to undesirable social outcomes are crucial to prevent us from unwittingly entering into dangerous and unsustainable practices.

Imagine that for every consumer good you purchased, you were forced to discard all related waste and packaging into your own home.Here is a thought experiment to illustrate this point: Imagine for a moment that for every consumer good you purchased, you were forced to discard all related waste and packaging into your own home. There is a very good chance that this model would radically change your entire approach to consumption; for all value you consume, you must also accept and absorb the costs in a manner that forces you to recognize the consequences of your choices. It may make life harder in some ways, but it renders it far less likely that you will be ambushed by an unpleasant surprise down the road, since you can see what you’re doing as you’re doing it. Living in the Western Hemisphere, we many not care about e-waste in India at the moment, but the earth is not in homeostasis; it is an interconnected ecosystem where events in one place can have serious downstream impacts elsewhere.

Systemic Risk and the Inevitability of Failure
The movement towards “glocalization” has embraced the idea that we should “think globally, but act locally.” The sentiment is well-intentioned. As consumers, we should be reflecting on how our actions affect our planet outside of our political boundaries and geographic locales, while simultaneously focusing on doing our part within the confines of our immediate surroundings. But as an American, unless you specifically take action to understand what goes into making a computer monitor and what happens after you discard it, there is a good chance that you will never even be exposed to the concept of e-waste, much less that it is a growing problem that is causing serious injury to human populations. Because it is not happening in consumers’ own backyards, it is only advocacy groups and ideologically-minded consumer-activists who are actually going to be thinking of human rights abuses in Chinese factories or e-waste seeping into water in India when they are reflecting on monitors. Everyone else will be thinking about features and prices.

Unfortunately, our system as it is arranged discourages us from having to think about such things since we rarely have to deal with real consequences directly. But even worse, our supply chains are so long, convoluted, and non-transparent that it is virtually impossible to get information even when one wants it. Contrast this with the natural arrangement of traditional societies, where geographical proximity to production and consumption activity intrinsically bestowed upon a society the ability to monitor and adjust behavior to maintain balance with the ecosystem and to ensure the health of the society as a whole.

It is becoming increasingly hard to view consumption-driven failures like the BP Gulf oil spill or the Sendai nuclear crisis as geographically-limited disasters instead of catastrophic game-changers.We should all be concerned about the impacts of our consumption choices because at some level, we all may have to deal some day with the consequences, no matter how invisible they may be in the short term. It becomes increasingly hard to view consumption-driven failures like the BP Gulf oil spill or the Sendai nuclear crisis simply as one-time disasters causing serious but geographically-limited impacts. Once we take into account both natural global ecology and the globalized supply chain, we see that such failures can easily become catastrophic game-changers.

With high levels of interdependency, a failure in one area creates unpredictable effects that ripple throughout unrelated industries, societies, and environments. The BP oil spill, for example, was not just a disaster for BP’s oil drilling and stock price. It impacted the fuel supply chain, which influenced oil markets and increased transportation and heating costs for everyone who buys fuel. The spill ruined the Gulf fishing industry, decimating thousands of jobs. The Gulf Coast’s tourism industry was destroyed, and may be gone for a long time to come. The animals that were killed by the oil were an integral part of the food chain, and thus affected the reproduction of marine life all over the Atlantic. And these are all just the first level of entities affected by this one disaster. Imagine the exponential effects that this might have once we take into account how the aforementioned groups interact with other groups and industries that normally have no direct connection to the Gulf. Most likely, you were somehow affected even if you live nowhere near the Gulf Coast.

Painting Ourselves Out of the Corner
The BP disaster, the nuclear crisis in Japan, and the financial meltdown illuminate how we are rapidly moving into a future where we, as individuals linked into the global supply chain and the global flow of capital, are perpetually exposed to serious systemic risks. Yet, despite the alarming disconnect between consumption patterns and very real threats of global ecological catastrophe, it is difficult to imagine how our civilization might ever revert to a system in which we take steps to mitigate the systemic risk we have introduced through the global value chain. We have come to rely on this chain in every sphere of our lives; we require newer and faster computer components for our economic growth, and thus need the copper that is strip-mined from developing countries; our transportation infrastructure leaves us heavily dependent on foreign fossil fuels; nearly every item that populates our Wal-Marts and Targets is sourced and manufactured many thousands of miles away to maintain affordability; and many of us enjoy eating fruits and vegetables that are completely out of season, something that the global supply chain is happy to provide, to name but a few things.

Trying to put a dollar value on natural processes is a lot like trying to put a dollar value on having your sense of sight; its work is so utterly irreplaceable that to assign a monetary value is almost pointless.Unfortunately, our leaders and indeed most of us tend to be fixated exclusively on growth, profit, and convenience motives rather than balancing them with a hard look at social and environmental costs— especially when these costs tend to be intangible, elusive, and difficult to monetize. How do we put a dollar figure on a systemic problem like the decline of the honeybee population when the role of bees in crop pollination is so central and taken-for-granted that no one in the agriculture industry ever conceived of the possibility that someday they might go away? Trying to put a dollar value on natural processes is a lot like trying to put a dollar value on having your sense of sight; its work is so utterly irreplaceable in the global economy that to assign a monetary value is almost pointless. Currently, the value of natural processes in the U.S., as far as anyone has ventured to estimate, has been ballparked at $33 trillion a year. The entire U.S. GDP is estimated at $14.26 trillion.

It’s only when we look at numbers like that that we can recognize the impossible frailty of the global ecosystem, and how we could all easily be facing an catastrophe of unparalleled proportions should something go wrong.

Unfortunately, the unpleasant reality is that there isn’t a simple solution we can implement without severely scaling back many of the positive changes that have come with globalization and modernity. Some relevant ideas have been discussed that could aid in solving this problem; each has a set of advantages, disadvantages, and headaches in instituting, but all are worth thinking about:

• Stronger incentives for corporations to not outsource labor and manufacturing
• VAT taxes that incorporate social costs into product prices
• Data that quantifies social impacts of products, which consumers can access at point-of-sale
• The “locavore” movement, encouraging consumers to voluntarily limit consumption to products they know are made entirely within a certain geographical proximity

These suggestions are serious ones, but yet they all seem quite inadequate; facile solutions for problems requiring drastic shifts. Regardless, whatever we do, it’s important that we do something, and ensure that we are encouraging politicians, manufacturers, businesspeople, academics, and consumers to develop engaging methods of reuniting the isolated regimes of production, consumption, and post-consumption in our global ecology.

While that process lumbers on with the regrettable torpor we afford only to the critically important issues of our day, it will, in the meantime, become harder and harder to predict when we’ll suddenly realize that we’re in way over our heads. There is, of course, the distinct possibility that we’re already there and we just haven’t put it all together yet.

Comment [4]

A Cautionary Tale of Corporate Social Responsibility

on understanding and addressing motives

Posted 2010-12-16 14:54 in branding, business, business models, economics, energy, environment, improvements, marketing, politics, research, sustainability, transportation

A few years ago, I was consulting for a well-known company with a large vehicle fleet. Higher-ups were interested in the company’s environmental impact, and wanted to know the best way to reduce their carbon footprint given “X” dollars of investment. They were thinking of maybe of replacing their vehicles with hybrids. My team and I, being the intrepid businesspeople that we were, collected figures, ran some numbers, and came to a solid and convincing conclusion about what they should do.

Standing before company execs, we went through a number of concise charts and calculations demonstrating our work. Then we stated— with some sense of pride for our thoroughly researched and unintuitive conclusion— our genius strategy: on retirement of vehicles, the company should replace its gasoline powered vehicles with diesel powered vehicles.

It was in the moment of silence that followed that I believe we lost them.

Sure, we told them:

• Diesel vehicles are much cheaper than hybrids and one could thus buy many more of them with the same amount of money
• Diesel engines are much cheaper to maintain and replace
• Hybrid batteries have high carbon footprints of their own, and disposal is a serious and largely unconsidered issue
• Diesel fuel is cheaper than gasoline

But ultimately, we sensed that something hadn’t quite translated. There were some questions and some comments by the company’s representatives, but they didn’t look convinced or excited by our presentation. The question of what happened, of course, is blindingly obvious to the onlooker. The company had already made up its mind about its strategy— they were going to get hybrids—, and our proposal simply did not fit into their plan. More to the point, we simply took their words about wanting to reduce environmental impact at face value, without taking careful stock of what their motives might be.

If you look at the business environment with regards to carbon footprints, the United States tends to be fairly hands-off at the moment. Generally there aren’t very many penalties for generating negative externalities as long as your company happens to create jobs and contributes to the economy. That is, no company is going to face government intervention because employees create air pollution while they drive around; the penalty for driving around comes almost exclusively in the form of fuel expenses and maintenance costs of the vehicles. Thus, any potential benefit that comes from reducing carbon footprints comes from these cost savings— and from creating a positive impact in the PR department.

Ah! The PR department. That was the critical element that we had missed. Somewhat naively, we had overlooked that the main intent of the carbon footprint reduction initiative was not the reduction itself, but in looking good for doing it. We had yet to learn that part of marketing is understanding that it’s as much about the story you can tell as it is about the reality. And the bottom line here was that “we care about the environment so we’re going to buy, errrr, smog-spewing diesel trucks” was not as compelling a story as “we care about the environment— that’s why we’re replacing our gas-powered vehicles with green technology hybrids!”

In other words, while doing the right thing is without a doubt a good thing, effective sustainability campaigns will definitely need to place the image factor high on the set of priorities. Something to keep in mind.

Comment

Cultural Limitations of Growing the Emerging Bicycling Market

why building bicycle infrastructure is only a partial solution

Posted 2010-11-20 15:01 in business, culture, economics, energy, environment, experiences, law, marketing, politics, research, sustainability, transportation

PROLOGUE: THE NEED FOR RETHINKING THE CONVERSATION ON ENERGY AND BICYCLE GROWTH
At the recent Energy Hub Conference, held in mid-October in Madison, WI, Skip Laitner, Director of Economic and Social Analysis for the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE), argued in a keynote address that the vast majority of our nation’s conversation about solving energy problems assume that it’s all about employing amazing new technologies like solar power, hybrid vehicles, wind power, microscopic energy-producing organisms, and the like. Point taken— in fact, just moments before his talk, the audience was subjected to a five-person panel of scientists and businesspeople who took turns promoting their new and wonderful energy technologies, and who tried to convince us that their innovations were going to be key elements in the high growth energy markets that drive the American economy and which will prevent the energy disaster looming on the horizon.

Laitner, however, was skeptical of this viewpoint. He argued, quite convincingly, that we need to wipe clean the slate on which we have written the dominant narratives about energy independence and we need to rethink it from the bottom up. One of his central points was that that we need to seriously think not about creating more energy, but in using what we have more efficiently. In general far too much attention has been paid to looking to the future technologies, and too little has been spent in understanding and addressing, in his words, the “cultural and anthropological” aspects. In short: We have a tendency to think of improvement in terms of technology, not in terms of behavior.

It is in this spirit of rethinking that I write this essay, in the hopes that it can better articulate why bicycling, a practice that in theory could be very instrumental in accelerating energy independence, requires a new approach in promoting its growth. I hope that in examining this issue and proposing marketing strategies, I can do my part to illuminate how the growth of the bicycle market can be not only be hugely profitable, but also culturally valuable to the American populace in a number of salient ways, not least in reducing energy dependence.

UNDERSTANDING THE BICYCLING MARKET AND ITS BARRIERS TO GROWTH
One of the highest product growth markets in the United States from 2000 to 2008 was bicycles.¹ Indeed, the number of bicyclists on American streets has grown exponentially, and the prominence of bicycling in the mainstream consciousness has been increasing quite rapidly. Lance Armstrong is now a household name, and his athletic abilities have been held in high regards by Americans, who view him who is reinforcing American excellence on the world stage in competitive games like the Tour de France.

However, the growth of bicycling is starting to plateau; it experienced a rapid rise, but is now butting up against formidable barriers. The bicycle industry and bicycling-related groups are now finding themselves facing a seriously uphill battle in breaking bicycles into the American mainstream.

Three Major Sources of Consumer Resistance to Bicycling
As an avid cyclist myself, I have spent much time considering how advances in bicycle ridership could occur, and I have uncovered three distinct areas that require attention:

1. Serious attention to improving bicycle design
2. Improved transit infrastructure and bicycling amenities
3. Greatly increased focus by bicycle companies on understanding the cultural barriers in bicycle growth, and addressing them in meaningful ways

The first of these issues is one that I have written about before, and which might be of interest. To quickly summarize, it seems apparent to me that most R&D and innovation at bicycle companies go towards efforts like reducing bike weight. While this is certainly something that is of concern to road bicyclists and many others that currently make up the core market of bicycle buyers, this is not a concern for the massive potential market that U.S. bicycle companies seem to be completely oblivious to. There are other, seemingly minor concerns regarding bicycle design that I strongly suspect are at least partially responsible for preventing an explosion in bicycle sales that would exponentially grow the entire bicycle market. While it is critical to understand this argument, it is not the focus of the essay here.

The second of these issues, the lack of bicycle infrastructure, tends to be the one that bicyclists fixate on. There are constant laments from cycling quarters that not enough money is being spent by city, state, and federal governments on improving transit infrastructure for bicycles despite its growing popularity. As a result, cyclists and bicycling advocacy groups have been relentless in pushing new projects like bike paths, bike lanes, and other amenities for cyclists. While I agree that these amenities would be nice, pushing this angle also implicitly argues that bicycling is an alternative form of transport that requires special and additional facilities to accommodate. This is a false assertion, and one that needs to be seriously questioned. Bicycles could easily make use of infrastructure that is already in place, and theoretically, even infrastructure that cars couldn’t use (like sidewalks and narrow alleyways). The United States has already built more than 4 million miles of public roads, almost all of which are currently allocated to cars. However, the ownership of this space by cars is not generally a legal designation so much as a cultural and psychological one, which brings me to the third point, which I think is the one that most seriously needs to be addressed: cultural barriers.

The recent increases in bicycling have rather unexpectedly hit a sensitive cultural nerve for something that might appear from the sidelines as an innocuous hobby. This is because bicycling is a phenomenon that touches heavily on a number of issues that are central to American culture, identity, and outlook, and like many of the other highly controversial issues on our collective table, is creeping rather nastily into the messy purview of the culture wars. In this article, we will examine many of the issues surrounding the controversies and cultural warfare that has erupted somewhat unexpectedly from bicycling, while situating the conversation in a socio-historic context. My hope is that understanding the resistance to bicycling from the mainstream can help bicycling manufacturers and advocacy groups reposition cycling to be a more attractive pursuit to the mainstream consumer than it traditionally has been.

RECURRING THEMES IN OUR CULTURAL DIALOGUE ABOUT BICYCLES
With the socio-cultural context of American streets as a backdrop, it is interesting to note that there has been a massive increase in interest in bicycles over the past decade. The reasons for this are not entirely clear, but it likely has a lot to do with young people being more environmentally-conscious than their parents, economic woes forcing people to adopt cheaper forms of transport, our culture’s increasing focus on ‘authentic’ lifestyle choices as being more status-conferring than traditional wealth-oriented consumption patterns, and the internet’s help in fomenting communities. It doesn’t hurt that city planners have been spending more time thinking about how cities can better reflect the needs of people through initiatives that encourage civic pride.

As a result of this, there has been a great increase in bike-related stories in news outlets. In recent years, I’ve lost track of the number of articles about bicycling public policy, government proposals about allocations of money to bicycling projects, details of bicycling accidents, opinion articles about bicycle culture, advocates raising the merits of bicycling, and other bike-related coverage that I’ve come across without even looking for them. Clearly, something is happening in the public consciousness with regards to bicycling. I’ve noticed that many of these stories—and the comments made about them on sites that allow user comments— involve explicit or unstated tensions, pitting bikers against other members of the community. The following are themes that I’ve collected, and which I think it is extremely important for bicycle advocates and bike manufacturers to take note of and to address in a serious and focused manner if we are to look at cultural barriers.

• Biking as a rejection of modern society and the societal expectations of 21th century citizenship
  In the summer of 2010, an article appeared in the online version of a Madison, WI newspaper describing current Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood’s desire to spend more money on transportation infrastructure that meets the needs of all consumers, not just ones that have typically benefited in the past. Translation: there are a lot of bikers (and walkers) out there, and we can further encourage biking (and walking) with improved infrastructure; while this might negatively impact motorized vehicle traffic, we need to think about the needs of society as a whole. I’ve read many news stories like this, and invariably, the comments sections are littered with comments by warring parties bemoaning either a) the hitherto under-recognized needs of individuals who do not want to use or do not have access to motorized vehicles, or b) the need for individuals falling in column ‘a’ to grow up and get with the times. One comment I read stated, with some degree of hostility, that “bicycles are an 18th century form of transport.” The implication being, of course, that people who use them are living in the past, and are refusing to come to grips with the advent of newer, better, faster, and more modern technologies. By choosing this mode of transport, it is suggested, these anachronistic contrarians are clogging our roads and hindering America’s technological, economic, and social progress.

• Biking as an obstructionist takeover of a space assigned to cars
  Critical Mass is an organization that promotes bicycling and bicycling culture. As an organization that is prominent in major cities like San Francisco, they do a great job of getting bikers together for what amounts to organized protests. Once every few weeks, for example, they like to get hundreds of bikers together to take over heavily-trafficked main streets during particularly inconvenient times— like rush hour on Friday afternoons. By thrusting themselves into this public space while preventing the regular flow of motorized vehicular traffic, they essentially force motorists to take note of bicycling as a movement. Unfortunately, the tactics involved in this act basically amount to some rudimentary form of cultural terrorism. Even more unfortunately, like most forms of terrorism, it’s built on the frustrations of people who realize that getting their message across in non-confrontational ways is a fruitless endeavor, which is why they feel forced to do it in this way. To their credit, Critical Mass does bring biking to the forefront of the minds of people who otherwise don’t care— but ironically, their approach does little to create sympathy towards their cause, and does much to create antagonism. What besuited businessman stuck in bicycle-created gridlock on a Friday afternoon is going to think good thoughts about bicycles?
  
  It’s not just Critical Mass members that face the wrath of angry motorists. For a society in which patience is not a commonly-held virtue, and for which instances of road rage are in rapid ascent, it does not surprise me that the sight of a bicyclist is inherently rage-inducing for many motorists. A bicyclist on a road probably fires the same neurons as a sluggish driver who waits too long when the light is green. As a result, bicyclists are often viewed by motorists as individuals who are obstructionists in a space that is designated for cars. They get in the way and prevent the smooth flow of traffic at the speeds motorists like. Few people like driving at 15mph, and the venom against cyclists ties into the combined frustration of traffic, low patience for delays, and perceived invasion of space by outsiders who aren’t playing by the rules set by society. Interestingly, in most states, bicycles are given equal status as cars, at least on urban streets and state highways. Usually bicycles are not allowed on freeways, presumably for safety reasons. Yet, stories of bicyclists facing harassment and marginalization on the streets are quite common. In high school, a classmate of mine bragged about chucking a bottle of urine on a bicyclist on a rural road; behavior like this may not be condemned by the public as much as a similar story about an assault on a pedestrian because the bicyclist is perceived as someone challenging a largely unquestioned notions about who owns street space.

• Biking as an explicit challenge to a cultural status quo
  If you get to talking to people about food (everyone’s favorite topic!), one thing you’ll find very quickly is that many otherwise sensible people ridicule vegetarianism. On its surface, it’s hard to argue against it as a personal choice. Even if you think animals don’t have feelings and that they are here for human benefit, it really has little impact on anyone else if someone chooses not to eat meat. But once you look a little deeper into it, it’s clear that the attitude against vegetarianism has less to do with the lifestyle or personal choice, and more to do with meat-eaters perceiving vegetarians as making some moralistic statement about consumption, a statement that gives moral superiority to vegetarians over omnivores. The discomfort of feeling looked down upon, or perhaps even morally outdone is enough to make many meat-eaters dismissive of vegetarians, and by proxy, vegetarianism as a whole. Many vegetarians I’ve met claim that they don’t express hostility, condescension, or moral superiority towards their meat-eating brethren, but still feel as if others dump that baggage on them anyway. Having been a vegetarian myself for 3 years in my mid-20s, I understand the feeling. Because the overwhelming majority of people are omnivorous and our collective diet is so meat heavy, it’s hard to convey to others that your consumption habit is not necessarily a political statement but a personal choice; it so defies the dominant culture that it is bound to be viewed as a rejection of mainstream society, and as some kind of battle cry— even if it isn’t.
  
  Bicyclists seem to fall into that same category of a marginalized group whose consumption habits defy mainstream cultural expectations. The United States has an extremely dominant car culture, so it’s hard for people who are heavily embedded in it to see the motives of the people who either reject car culture or who embrace bicycle culture. On its face, cycling has the appearance of a political movement because of its phenomenal growth, and because of the view of the car as the dominant mode of transport in this country. As a generally center-right nation, we have a fairly strong aversion to the idea of messing with the status quo, and we tend not to look favorably upon those who attempt this (at least outside of the business realm). Aside from the rose-colored glasses through which we view historical figures like Martin Luther King, Jr., we usually view people who challenge the status quo outside of a business context as either naive idealists, Che Guevara-style revolutionary wannabes, or meddlesome gadflies. Bicyclists seem to be tarred with all three of these dubious and unflattering epithets.

• Biking as a flagship cause of liberal politics or a means of forwarding a liberal takeover of public space
  Bicycling as a cause has come to be strongly associated with liberal politics in a way that simply rankles many conservatives irrationally, regardless of any objective social, environmental, or health benefits increased biking might provide our society. There is little doubt that due to certain historical and demographic realities (e.g. that many adults took up bicycling during their time in college), much of the public sees the interest in promoting biking as a preoccupation of a certain class of liberal elite— well-educated trust-funders who come from privilege and have a disdain for the white working class, the Protestant work ethic, and conservative values. It also doesn’t help that bicycling is associated with those elitist, socialist Europeans, whose entire continent many parochially-minded Americans apparently view with broad disdain for being effete, weak, and pretentious.
  
  In fact, with these ideas in mind, many anti-biking factions genuinely view the pro-biking movement as a maneuver by a cancerous cell of socialists to hijack public resources for their nefarious political agendas and “special interest” needs— a theme that has repeatedly come up in opinion articles, responses, and conservative talk shows. This is regardless of the fact that legally speaking, motor vehicles are generally not privileged over bicycles, and that infrastructural changes would uniformly benefit all citizens (of course, whether or not you see these changes as benefits or a wasteful diversion of resources is a different matter entirely).²

• Biking as expression of anarchy, lawlessness, and the flouting of society’s values and social norms
  One of the most commonly expressed frustrations motorists have with bicyclists is their apparent disinclination to follow the rules of the road. Watching as bicyclists blow through stop signs; ignore traffic lights; ride alternately on sidewalks, roads and lawns; cutting across several lanes of traffic; and riding the wrong way on one-way streets, many motorists see bicyclists as representing an element of lawlessness, anarchy, and a lack of common courtesy.
  
  Bicyclists often don’t have good excuses for their lack of adherence for the laws. Observing from the sidelines, it is possible that this is a by-product of our car-friendly infrastructure coupled with American attitudes about non-motorized traffic on streets. In short, bicyclists don’t feel welcome on streets because they are car space, and they don’t feel welcome on sidewalks because they are pedestrian space. As a marginalized group, bicyclists feel as if they don’t belong anywhere, and are thus compelled to adopt a somewhat Machiavellian attitude that sidesteps following traffic laws. The unspoken question is: why follow traffic laws if you aren’t also being actively protected by them? Bicyclists also defend their actions by arguing that the potential for injury or damage that stems from ignoring traffic rules largely apply only to the cyclists themselves, not to others; that is, a car can inflict massive damage on human life, property, animals, and things that have nothing to do with the driver of the car, but a cyclist is mainly just going to be injured himself if he breaks the laws. Of course, this isn’t entirely true; cyclists can certainly hurt others, but—without defending lawlessness—it is true that the likelihood of a serious incident generally are much smaller.
  
  What is interesting in observing this tensions, however, is that law-violating bicyclists seem to be expressing certain elements of the same frustrations that motorists have; namely, that they are impatient with the lack of movement on highways and arteries, and tired of having to deal with traffic slow-downs and obstructions. But unlike motorists, whose impotent rage at being stuck in traffic needs to be grounded, bicyclists can actually bypass the traffic and ignore the elements that cause the slow-downs. Of course, most drivers would likely do the same if they could get away with it, but the unwieldiness of cars, the potential for damage, and legal repercussions prevent it— while the agility of the bike actively facilitates it. Unfortunately, the overwhelming proclivity of bicyclists to take advantage of this fact only makes motorists more angry; the idea that some people on the road seem to view themselves as not being subject to the same laws as everyone else, and are able to easily benefit from breaking those laws (rarely with consequence) is often deeply upsetting and rage-inducing for motorists.

• Biking as an effete/unmasculine/pretentious pursuit
  People already are annoyed with bikers for various reasons already described, but there’s also something about groups of people wearing skin-tight spandex that doesn’t quite translate to mainstream sensibilities. There’s also something convincingly cult-like and laughable about a bunch of identically dressed people parading around town together in a way that completely defies even the lowest-brow fashion sense. Maybe that’s why so many dismissive comments about road bikers revolve around their distinctive and decidedly eye-soreish garb. It’s hard for me to personally defend the bike clothing as fashion, because it’s obviously meant to be functional (the spandex wicks away moisture to prevent chafing). Nevertheless, the fact that this clothing is such a massive departure from the clothing that the general population chooses to wear is interpreted by motorists as reflecting a certain spacey, cultlike cluelessness. Such “fashion” statements (even if unintentional) tend to engender dismissiveness from outside observers.

EXAMINING CAUSES OF CONSUMER RESISTANCE
Without a doubt, over the past decade, there has been a rapid ascent in DIY culture that has privileged simplicity, customization, authenticity, and other crucial characteristics of consumer goods; these qualities are ones that make bicycles an attractive, cheap, and fashionable mode of transportation amongst members of certain demographics and psychographics. However, there is much resistance to widespread bicycle movements in areas outside of progressive hubs like Portland, Oregon; Davis, California; Boulder, Colorado; and Madison, Wisconsin. As I have already mentioned, some of the problem is infrastructural in nature (though truthfully, the U.S. has some 4 million miles of paved road, almost all of which is dedicated to motor vehicle traffic— an allotment that could be reapportioned given public support), and some of the problem is due to what I consider antiquated bicycle design; but a large part of the problem is cultural. As a society that has been heavily indoctrinated into car culture, we simply have a strong aversion to this alternative transport mode for reasons that aren’t easily addressed. For non-cyclists to begin adopting bicycling as a primary form of transport currently requires certain psychological adjustments that, depending on the person, range from minor to massive. The following are the specific barriers that are expressed through consumer resistance, and which play on the ideas mentioned above. For many, the idea of using a bicycle as a legitimate form of transport:

• Violates certain deeply engrained cultural beliefs about transport propriety
  Namely, that the road is for cars and motorized vehicles only

• Requires many potential cyclists to re-evaluate their sense of identity
  Am I the type of person who would be a bicyclist? Remember that to people who are not used to doing it, riding on main streets is somewhat of a renegade concept and may require them to view themselves as people who challenge status quo, which many are not comfortable with. Also, because many of the strongest advocates of bicycling currently are young people, people who have reached middle age might feel demographically excluded from participation

• Creates discomfort with political or group associations
  Even if one follows road rules, if one belongs to a group of people that is widely considered the spoiled children of urban anarchy, it could be problematic for those who walk on the side of law and order, and value being associated with that image. To make things worse bicycling is now so closely associated with liberal politics, people who feel uncomfortable possibly being identified as such, or uncomfortable associating with those whose alleged political views are antithetical to their own may find biking problematic to their image.

• Highlights safety issues
  Again, the cultural assumption—and the obvious corporeal reality— that roads are car space factors heavily into the unwillingness of broader segments of people to adopt bicycling as some component of their portfolio of transportation options.
  This reality became quite apparent to me in Madison, WI, where there is an annual (sometimes semi-annual) event called Ride the Drive in which large segments of major streets in the city are closed off to car traffic. In 2010, 50,000 people came out to bike around the city that day (to give you an idea of the magnitude of this event, Madison is a city of approximately 200,000). I took the opportunity to speak to participants at this year’s Ride the Drive event, and many confessed that although they own bicycles, they don’t use them as much as they’d like because they simply don’t feel comfortable with all those cars around, especially when many drivers are distracted with phones or aren’t looking out for cyclists.

CREATING MARKETING STRATEGIES TO COMBAT CULTURAL RESISTANCE AND TO GROW THE BICYCLING MARKET
Clearly, there are many barriers to the growth of bicycling, and many different ways that growth can be facilitated. Here, I describe how a successful approach to popularizing bicycles— in addition to manufacturing better bicycles and improving city infrastructure— must adopt marketing strategies that encompass holistic views of the cultural elements of bicycling, and the behavioral inhibitions that face many potential and current bicycle consumers. What follows here is not meant to be an exhaustive exploration of marketing strategy, but rather a brief sampling of the types of avenues that should be explored by bicycle manufacturers, bike advocacy organizations, and bicycle consumers.

• Legitimation of Bicycling by Respected Government/Non-partisan/Apolitical Agencies
  Because the American cultural assumption is that cars are street space and that if you aren’t in a car, you should stay out of the street, many people are inculcated from childhood to believe that as bicyclists, they shouldn’t be on the streets. For this reason, it is important to average citizens that biking activities be legitimated by politically-neutral government agencies; the go-ahead from these groups government agencies is reassurance and encouragement that it is okay to be on the streets, even if you are not in a car. Some city governments advocate cycling once or twice a year with “bike to work weeks,” which give people who don’t bike much a green light to do it. More work of this nature and more frequent such events are absolutely necessary to convey the understanding that bicycles do belong on city streets, and that respectable organizations think so.

• Converting Advocacy from a Political Movement to an Apolitical Business or Social Organization
  One of the best ways to grow the bicycle market is not by focusing on how to market bicycles per se, but rather, to focus on developing bicycle communities. The ones currently in existence revolve largely around bicycle advocacy through political processes. These have been organically-generated movements that arose from the fact that bicyclists have traditionally been somewhat disenfranchised on public streets, and these organizations served to raise awareness of bicycle issues, a cause near and dear to their members. However, at this stage, it is no longer beneficial for these groups to move in this fashion; indeed, I propose that their work might actually be harming their cause rather than helping it. Like with PETA, the explicitly confrontational tones that surround organizations like Critical Mass do not generate sympathy for the bicycling cause; instead, they contribute an unpleasant sense of haranguing the public, which preaches mostly to the choir, and may even eliminate goodwill from people who might otherwise be sympathetic. I propose that bicyclists and bicycling companies should create regular (i.e. daily) bicycling events that not only invite the general public to join, but place leadership roles in the hands of eager volunteers. Such events might be long rides around town, or perhaps organized rides from residential areas to business parks during the morning commute. The importance of the social element cannot be understated; it is legitimating, it is gives an opportunity to meet others, it conveys the sense that one is being left out of something interesting if one doesn’t join, and it can help create a sense of inclusion that doesn’t favor only certain types of people (e.g. age, political persuasion, gender, etc). Clearly, some thought should be put into how this goal can be achieved but there is no doubt that something needs to happen somehow on this front. I personally would propose some kind of social networking website that links bicyclists regionally, a one-stop site that combines maps, routes, group cycling events, group commuting times, etc. Done properly and with the simultaneous backing of all the major bicycle companies, this can eliminate a number of cultural barriers like safety issues, social issues, political fears, etc. Importantly, connections between people who can make things happen— even in the absence of bike corporation money— can be made, which could change everything.

• Promoting Local Races / Group Biking Experiences
  Just as professional sports like the NBA and the NFL have been instrumental in turning the tides against racism, and television programming about gays and lesbians have been instrumental in changing Americans’ attitudes about homosexuality, establishing periodic regional bike races and group biking experiences would help greatly in exposing citizens to biking as a legitimate sport and bicycles as a non-threatening and perhaps even endearing presence. Targeting high school students for participation in such races might be a particularly good avenue because it involves young people (who eventually go on to continue the activities they enjoy throughout their lives) and it gets their parents and neighbors excited too. Moreover, America has a longstanding tradition of pitting various regional high schools against each other, and this is one more avenue for it to happen. Demonstrating the excitement and athletic prowess involved in racing, bike races could also be interesting periodic festival-style events in any town, especially if coupled with other festivities. Bicycling companies, working with various food and beverage companies, should go to extraordinary lengths to promote these types of races across the country, first starting in medium to large-sized metropolitan areas. In general, the more exposure and familiarity the general public gets to bicycling events, the more likely they are to accept bicycling as a normal and admirable pastime. Indeed, another angle that is worth thinking about is the deliberate playing-up of the turbulent lives of specific cyclists, to ensure that they join the ranks of celebrity gossip fodder (think: Brett Favre, Shaq, Tony Hawk, Venus and Serena Williams).

• Cultural Rebranding through Aesthetic Appeals
  Unfortunately, many Americans tend to think of bicycling—unlike, say, football— as a sport that attracts wimps and pretentious arty types. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Thirty years ago, video games were almost the exclusive purview of the dorkiest kids in high school, but now we find that all kinds of people play video games. To present bicycling as a pursuit that could involve anyone— even non-dweebs— is important. One possible inroad into this could come in the form of the visual aesthetic of bicycles and clothing. Currently, neither have much in the way of ego-expressive qualities built into their aesthetics. You can glance at a car and instantly have an idea of what kind of person would drive it. Very often, you can have a look at someone’s wardrobe and quickly understand with a good degree of confidence how that person views him/herself. The same should be true with bicycles and bicycle clothing, to ensure that all feel welcome, and a set of options can be procured that are consistent with one’s self-image. Vehicles are a big part of identity in the United States, and work should be done to explore whether expanding the aesthetic dimensions of bikes and clothing can make the pursuit of cycling more appealing to those it currently has no appeal for.

• Transcending Political Barriers through Economic, Health, and Civic Benefits
  The following do not address specific cultural barriers, but can be pushed as part of a larger outreach campaign. These elements can serve as ways to offset negatively viewed aspects of bicycling with clearly messaged benefits.
  
  Economic Incentivization
  For many people, moral arguments about the merits of bicycling have little weight. For example, individuals who were not persuaded by environmental arguments to drive less were persuaded in the late to thousands to drive less because of rapidly rising fuel costs. Ultimately it is very difficult to make the sorts of moral arguments that bicyclists like to make to those who do not subscribe to the politics or the political views that are central to the rationale that many within the movement subscribe to. It is often easier to convince someone who is not philosophically aligned to engage via another route that more directly affects their personal concerns (which is what a good marketer should always do).
  
  In a suffering economic climate in which unemployment is high, disposable income is decreasing, and there is a generally high level of instability, the argument for bicycles as a primary form of transport can be made more salient through explicit demonstrations of cost-effectiveness. Cars and car maintenance costs are very high, and through proper messaging, arguments can be made that bicycles provide a more effective use of money in transport. Ivan Illich’s 1974 book “Energy and Equity” suggests that the average American spends several hundred extra hours a year working just to own and maintain a car, time that could be spent in other ways (there are obvious complications involved in employing this calculation in a practical setting, but it is interesting nonetheless). It should be noted that economic incentivization may not be effective as a singular strategy; it should be employed in tandem with other methods of promotion.
  
  Health Incentivization
  As the obesity crisis reaches epic proportions, and while demands on American workers put a premium on time, many Americans find it increasingly difficult to find time to exercise. The use of the bicycle as a primary form of transport combines the economic benefits and health benefits in one package, and depending on the distance one has to travel for work and the geographic density, could actually save time. Bicycles can and should be aggressively promoted by bicycle companies as alternatives to gyms, ones that can be seamlessly integrated into one’s work day; instead of spending more time locked in a building, biking gives a person the opportunity to experience the outdoors during a time when he/she would be otherwise trapped in a car. Bicycle companies would be wise to band together and promote this message through advertising on television, magazines, contests, and channels that involve health-conscious consumers. This message would be much more powerful in conjunction with a social networking website that can quickly convert the message from well-intentioned thought to action.
  
  Promoting Economic Revitalization and the Reclaiming of Civic Space
  What became stunningly vivid to me during the aforementioned Ride the Drive events, where cars are banished from major streets, is the realization that cars take up an immense amount of real estate in a city—not just in terms of the literal space of the 2-4 lane city streets that cars dominate, but the more subtle psychic space of residents. The knowledge that cars are around forces us to be vigilant at all times when we’re anywhere near a street. There are giant metal behemoths whizzing by at 25-90 miles an hour wherever we go. In shopping areas, we have wait for traffic to pass or we have to go to a crosswalk before we can cross a street to go to a shop. We have to breathe the polluted air and listen to the constant noise of humming motors and honking horns.
  
  Conveying the idea that cars have been instrumental in the decline of public space, the suggestion must be offered that increased use of non-motorized traffic would have the effect of promoting community and the reclaiming of space that was once dominated by motor vehicle traffic. With enough reduction in motor vehicle traffic, or an eventual massive overhaul of the apportionment of street space, it could even be argued that giving children the space to play in front of their own homes will reduce instances of delinquency and other unwholesome activities that detract from city life.
  
  Most importantly, however, work should be done to asses the economic benefits of creating shopping areas in which only minimal traffic is present. There are only a handful of areas in the country like this. In Madison, WI, this area is 6 blocks long and does not allow motor vehicle traffic except for the occasional bus or police car. It is a very lively area filled with people and bicycles, and an area that is much more pleasant and conducive to spending long periods of time than similar areas that cater to cars. If cities can reliably create areas that produce economic benefits through this means, this can be a powerful signal for other cities to also build them and encourage non-motor vehicle traffic. Studies from urban planning should be compiled to understand the impact of pedestrian malls on economic climates.
  
  Stigmatization
  In addition to legitimating government organizations, it is important to involve organizations like the American Lung Association, groups who aren’t easily categorized into politicized “special interest” groups. The ALA in particular is one that should be greatly concerned about air quality issues; the pollutants stemming from cars have had a far greater deleterious effect on Americans than cigarettes. Other organizations like MADD, the American Heart Association, and Noise-Free America might be interested in collaboration too.
  
  The reason for getting these organizations involved is because social pressures can be very strong incentives for shifts in consumer behavior. For example, cigarette smoking was quite common until organizations like the ALA got involved and created a heavy stigma on smoking. Since then, smoking rates have dropped dramatically, and I’m inclined to think it had less to do with health benefits (especially since obesity rates have gone up) and more to do with these organizations essentially making smokers feel like bad people. The same has happened to some degree to SUV drivers, who increasingly feel some level of shame for being alone in a 6000lb. vehicles on the freeway. It’s not necessarily a pretty strategy, but increased effort in making bicycling feel like a civic responsibility that bestows upon cyclists a “warm glow” of respectability, and which simultaneously tars drivers with a negative stigma might be what it takes to grow the bicycle market. Medical organizations in particular seem like good agents of non-politicized stigma creation.

CONCLUSION
For cultural reasons, promoting the adoption of bicycles is not going to be an easy sell. Cultural attitudes are notoriously hard to overcome and are ingrained in entire thought patterns. Nevertheless, there are many reasons to believe that overcoming the hurdles can happen through a careful understanding of the cultural barriers and taking active steps towards addressing those barriers through effective marketing strategy. It will take some money, but a lot of work, planning, and relationship-building at the agency and aggregate level.

The above strategies are only a few ways to address the central issues. More effort should be put in my bicycle manufacturers and bike advocacy organizations in crafting strategies that take into account the cultural forms of resistance I have elucidated above. For reasons I have described, they are just as important (maybe more) as pushing for better dedicated bicycle infrastructure.

Do you have good ideas on how to address the cultural barriers to bicycle growth? Any important cultural barriers I have missed? Please let me know in the comments.

¹ National Bicycle Dealers Association. “U.S. Bicycle Market Overview,” 2008.

² The comparison of this particular theme is one that reminds me strongly of the origins of America’s attitude towards its drug policy. I’ve spent a fair amount of time reading up on the economic aspects of American’s longstanding (and largely failed) war on narcotics, largely because understanding how this war has been executed vividly demonstrates how ineffective demonstrations of brute strength are against all known economic and marketing theory. Yet, it’s hard for anyone who has spent any time reading about this topic to walk away without the feeling that generalizations about the politics of drug users had a major impact on how policy has played out. The use of drugs during the 60s and 70s was associated with liberals, hippies, intellectuals, and minority groups. All their talking about revolution and social upheaval was not an association that, say, the Nixon administration was eager to be bedfellows with— regardless of what objective studies said about these drugs. I strongly suspect that in a similar way bicycles are maligned in an unwarranted fashion by those on the conservative end of the political spectrum.

Comment

The Business, Politics, and Culture of the Illegal 'Superfood'

the burgeoning raw milk controversy and how it ties into the broader culture wars

Posted 2010-09-27 11:32 in business, culture, human nature, law, marketing, politics

Over the past few months there has been a tremendous amount of controversy brewing about what the government is describing as a dangerous substance, one for which there is a rapidly-rising demand for, and which experts claim has no legitimate medical value. If you guessed that this substance is some kind of narcotic, think again. It’s milk. Specifically raw milk. How could there be such a big controversy over milk?

At the crux of it are two opposing sides. On one side is a group of people who believe that there is no reason that they should not be able to drink raw milk if they want it. People have been drinking raw milk for centuries, and it’s just milk after all. It’s natural, it’s accepted by society, it’s everywhere. The other side is represented by the government and food/sanitation experts, who argue that raw milk is simply unsafe. Cow udders being so close to the area where waste is excreted, it is much more likely to have deadly bacteria in it, and besides there are no added benefits to drinking raw milk, so all milk should be pasteurized (heated to the point of killing bacteria) before sale. Period. Thus, many states have now implemented a ban on the sale of raw milk. There has thus erupted a highly charged debate about the merits of raw milk, a debate that has spilled over into the mainstream public sphere, and which has led to a number of angry protests and demonstrations.

On the surface, this debate seems a bit comical and overblown; a war over milk? But the topic has been steadily gaining attention in the national press and in consumer groups over the past couple of years— so much so that farmers have been marketing ways to circumvent American laws outlawing the purchase of raw milk. One such way involves cow time-shares, which allow a city-slicker to temporarily rent a cow. Renters can then capture the cow’s milk and drink it, without technically buying the milk per se (the money is for the rent).

What I find fascinating about the hullabaloo about raw milk is the way that the dialogue neatly encapsulates many of the war horses of the ongoing culture wars and exposes certain American cultural attitudes towards food, changing trends in how people view the food marketplace, and shifts in how companies approach the marketing of food. Let’s examine these issues further.

Perception of Government Overreach
The current Tea Party movement is the latest in a long stream of movements pitting consumers against the forces of government tyranny and overreach. Interestingly, the narrative of callous bureaucrats who capriciously control our personal freedoms is one that has had incredible traction across the political spectrum, from issues ranging from gun control, the war on drugs, abortion, welfare, health care, food and drug safety, helmet laws, and pretty much everything else under the sun. Not surprisingly, the issues involved in government legislation form the basis of the American culture wars.¹ As a result, pretty much everyone at some point feels that government intrusion, conducted under the nebulous umbrella of “protecting the public interest”, has interfered with their ability as consumers to exercise free choice. Most people don’t really care about the systematic tendency of the government to enforce laws of restriction, except when something they want is restricted; then suddenly, legislative actions and legal codes are viewed as broadly overreaching and totalitarian.

The language that has been used by raw milk enthusiasts suggests a subscription to the idea that government fears (incited by food and dairy experts) about the safety of milk are misguided, alarmist, and the work of pencil-pushing outsiders who simply don’t get it. Again, the argument comes that people have been doing this for centuries, so why the sudden fear about sanitation? Also, say the pro-raw milk lobby, if someone wants to risk their health, what business is it of the government? No one is proposing making other risky activities like skydiving illegal, after all.

The Justification and Legitimation of Consumer Choice
With the aforementioned conflict in mind, it’s interesting to note how the cultural view of the government suppression of raw milk, in a way, mirrors that of the decades-old culture war involving marijuana. On the one side, the government argues that marijuana— which initially came to light in our society as a recreational narcotic— is dangerous and has only harmful applications. On the other, proponents argue that it not only isn’t harmful but has tremendous value for our society.

As suppression of marijuana eventually reached epic proportions involving government crackdowns and raids (which, incidentally, have occurred with respect to raw milk facilities and retail outlets as well), the recreational aspect of the drug, a facet that initiated the debate and which involves the basic concept of consumers being able to make their own choices, actually took a back seat in the pro-pot narrative; that is, there became a stronger story within the pro-marijuana factions about how marijuana is not a recreational drug, it’s actually something that has other virtues— like the pain-reducing properties for cancer patients and the fact that the industrial fibers that can make sturdy ropes and clothing. Most recently, the addition of the November 2010 ballot initiative in California about legalizing cannabis was founded on the idea that the legalized pot trade could be an economic panacea.

All these applications might be accurate descriptions of the social values of marijuana and industrial hemp; however, the focus on these “legitimating” applications sidesteps the redress of the argument at the heart of the issue for the pro-marijuana lobby: do consumers have the right to choose to use a product that epidemiological data appears to suggest is a relatively harmless (though not entirely without risk) vice? Unfortunately for the pro-pot advocate, to bring up the “consumer choice” argument for a taboo subject in the absence of some “legitimate” use is an automatic dismissal of credibility. As such, there has been a proliferation of pro-pot propaganda that focuses not on the fundamental validity of the government’s stance, but on the “legitimate” contributions marijuana offers society.

Likewise, the pro-raw milk groups, tired of having to battle bureaucrats whose simple message of “it’s dangerous” becomes increasingly difficult to retaliate against, are starting to employ a similarly slapdash “it-does-everything!” narrative in order to legitimize their desire to choose raw milk. At this stage of the raw milk debate, we’re hearing about how raw milk is not just a drink, it’s one of the rare “superfoods.” It has antibodies that help boost your immune system to unparalleled levels. Its powerful enzymes reduce the load on our bodies. It has massive amounts of beneficial bacteria. It just tastes better. While there may or may not be some legitimacy to these claims, it is interesting to view that once the government stepped in about raw milk sales, the raw milk faction’s narrative about raw milk shifted from one about consumer choice and preference (a story which, in this battle, fails to gain traction) to one about various health and social benefits.

Employing Legitimating Narratives
Because raw milk advocates apparently cannot forward their agenda purely on the level of defending consumer choice, they are forced to employ narratives that either exemplify their own beliefs about the values of raw milk, or which cater to latent beliefs of the society at large. Indeed, the narratives that raw milk advocates have jumped to highlight the larger social trends that we increasingly find animating the sphere of food marketing. The following sections detail these broader narratives.

Pharmaceuticalization of Food
A recent radio story featured an indignant woman complaining that the government should have no right to bar her from consuming raw milk, a drink she referred to quite casually as an “enzymatic nutrient-rich superfood.” This comment brings me to a question: what exactly is a superfood anyway? If we are to believe Michael Pollan’s view of the modern food industry, the concept is simply the by-product of an evolving philosophy we have come to use in understanding food. That is, the marketing of food has turned us towards a model of food as pharmaceutical. We have come to a point where we no longer view food as food alone; instead, we think of it as a convenient (or inconvenient) aggregation of beta carotene, lycopene, vitamin c, fiber, fat, cholesterol, and other nutrients transported to us in the form of a broccoli floret, a tomato, or a cheeseburger. Pollan argues that we have now been culturally trained to think of food products less within the context of an overall balanced diet, but individually as a bunch of isolated nutrients that we use to mentally mix an optimized nutrient cocktail containing the certain nutrients we’ve heard about such that, over time, we can slow the processes of aging and health decline, and maybe live forever.

Thus, as pharmaceutical companies have cornered the market on medical cures, food companies have moved into the preventative care market. This philosophical shift has become so ingrained in the Western worldview that you might not have noticed that the commercials associated with most foods not being marketed as a form of junk food (i.e. any food marketed to people over the age of 30) are uniformly littered with references to specific vitamins and nutrients, along with vague or implied medical claims about what these nutrients will do for you. Increasingly, food companies are finding that they need to promote these nutrients and various nutritional claims (“No Transfats!”) to get consumer attention.

The aforementioned shift didn’t happen by itself. While the Protestant work ethic did create in Americans a strong attitude towards working hard in the past, more recently Americans have been noted for another, perhaps less endearing quality— impatience. When we want something, we want it now. As a result, we have a cultural proclivity towards magic bullets. We apparently believe that wearing $150 basketball shoes will actually make us jump higher or play ball better without us having to invest any additional effort practicing; many seem to think that using the secrets of Rich Dad, Poor Dad will, overnight, grant them access to lives they only could have dreamed of before; we have a tendency to believe that we can get “ripped” (and fast!) simply by owning products like the Perfect Pushup device (advertised on late-night television), without us having to sweat very much. Likewise, we believe that eating certain “superfoods” will magically give us perfect health overnight. Apparently raw milk has joined the cadre of those foods now.

The Distrust of Processed Foods
In the wake of increasing awareness of processed food and its apparent role in facilitating the numerous impending health disasters in America, grocery store shelves are awash with words like “natural”, “organic”, “whole food”, “non-GMO”, and “raw.” Coupled with the paradigm shift that focuses heavily on the nutrient content of food, the by-product has been a narrative that glorifies the unprocessed, the untampered-with, the pure. Farmers’ markets have seen an explosion in popularity; Michael Pollan has achieved papal status exposing the economic and health dangers involved in the marketing of food (one of his snappy adages is if it’s a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t); and the corn syrup industry has even recently lobbied to change the name of their product to “corn sugar” to combat its pilloried status as the paragon of everything wrong with the modern food industry.

In addition, there has been a renewed focus on how unprocessed foods just taste better. A new brand of foodie-ism has emerged, eschewing the expensive restaurant and championing the lost worlds of flavor that can be harnessed by the enterprising chef through the combination of fresh ingredients and easily-learned home culinary wizardry. Raw milk falls neatly within this purview, being described as being “milk the way it’s supposed to be” and also retaining all the flavor apparently lost in commercial pasteurization process.

Authenticity
The phrase “having a relationship with [one’s] food” has seen exponential increase over the past decade; it has fed into the massive increase in farmer’s market attendances and the soaking prices seen within them; it’s at the heart of popular movies like Food, Inc., bestselling books like In Defense of Food and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and food movements like the locavore and slow foods movements. But what does “having a relationship” with one’s food mean? It seems to have to do with the idea of not commodifying food; not viewing food as a commercial construct or as a[n] SKU number. It’s about reconnecting with the land and the origins of the things on our tables; it’s about reconnecting with lost innocence and simplicity. It’s reconnecting with the authentic.

With consumers’ increasing recognition (and alarm) that everything in the modern world is simulated, marketed, forged, commercial, etc., there has been an anxiety for consumers to grab onto whatever is authentic, and which seems to come from a context that has maintains freedom from crass economic interests (Andrew Potter’s 2010 book “The Authenticity Hoax” is a well-explicated treatise on the issue). Raw milk contains within it that authenticity. This is not ordinary supermarket milk, a product (in every sense of the word) that is so divorced from its agrarian roots that it is mass-produced by biologically-augmented cows in industrial farms run by multinational corporations. Raw milk is back-to-the-earth; it’s a relationship with the farmer; it’s doing things the way they used to; it’s about quality, not commerce.

Ironically, despite the fact that the people to whom this raw milk phenomenon is appealing tend to be wealthier and better educated than typical grocery store milk consumers, the science behind its illicit status tends to be viewed by them with suspicion and dismissiveness. All this talk about bacterial threats is a modern invention; no one worried about bacteria in their milk a few centuries (or even decades) ago. That line of argument is just part of the highly ordered realm of not only the food industry, but the modern world in general; the talk of deadly bacteria is emblematic not of progress in recognizing pathogens, but of our changing vernacular, the wholesale loss of connection to our food, the rationalization of everything through formal, mechanized commercial processes. In that light, the fervor surrounding raw milk comes into focus more as a kind of political protest to widespread processes of “McDonaldization” (to borrow a phrase from George Ritzer) than a health or gastronomic statement.

Significance of the Raw Milk Narrative in Marketing Strategy
The raw milk controversy is not particularly novel in the sense that it seems to rehash many of the same themes that have formed the heart of almost all heated national debate for the last 30 years— what rights are we entitled to as consumers in a society built on laws and networks of social interdependency? Where this story does seem remarkable is the apparent innocuousness of the subject matter— which is the reason why the way this particular story will pan out is going to be more important than it might initially seem.

In the past, the culture wars have largely centered around notably taboo subjects like drugs, abortion, and gay marriage; but as we see the tentacles of the culture wars start wrapping themselves around seemingly trivial matters like raw milk and the right to dry movement — issues that are not associated with factions perceived by the mainstream as representing threatening rogue elements (e.g. drug cartels, abortion doctors, ‘socialist’ politicians, blasphemers, gun manufacturers, etc.) and which are instead associated with interests of middle-class Americans (e.g. farmers, soccer moms)— it will become increasingly hard for us as a society to delineate and agree where government should and shouldn’t be able to go, and on what grounds they can or can’t do it. In the past, drawing these lines was more straightforward because it was easier to successfully argue on emotional, not logical, grounds about the limitations of government interference (“we can’t let the drug cartels win!”). But when all the parties involved start looking like sympathetic figures, legislating begins to get very sticky.

At this point, it becomes a fairly complex and convoluted political and philosophical question; what exactly does democracy mean, and what does giving consumers freedom of choice entail?

¹ Of course, the narrative about the government being a grossly unjust behemoth trampling personal freedoms in search of power and rights for special interest groups is one that seems to be conveniently employed when one’s pet interests are at stake through some systematic “crack down”, but almost never when the same government “cracks down” on a politically oppositional interest— an action that is almost always met with unbridled enthusiasm.

Comment

Is Recognition of Human Empathy the Solution to our Environmental Problems?

according to Jeremy Rifkin, we’re on the verge of a massive revolution

Posted 2010-02-19 11:36 in biology, consumerism, culture, economics, environment, human nature, improvements, marketing, politics, sustainability

There’s a fascinating interview with writer Jeremy Rifkin over at the New Scientist website. In it, he lays out why he thinks there is going to a be a massive shift in human consciousness as a result of new forms of information accessibility combining with the human ability for expressing empathy. This revolution, in his estimation, will solve the energy and environmental problems our world is facing. Borrowing from evolutionary biology, philosophy, marketing, and many other fields, Rifkin sees hope in the current turmoil where others don’t.

Incidentally, Rifkin’s vision of changing human behavior runs completely contrary to that of Steven Levitt (of Superfreakanomics fame), who as I stated in a previous entry is stuck in neutral with his “solve problems created by technology with more technology” rut.

Comment

Incentivization and the Superfreakanomics Controversy

Why Levitt and Dubner’s take on climate change is too limited a view

Posted 2009-12-26 12:40 in book reviews, environment, human nature, politics

In 2005, a pop economics book called Freakanomics climbed the nation’s bestseller list. Written by University of Chicago economics professor Steven Levitt and New York Times journalist Stephen Dubner, the book claimed to unlock mysteries surrounding many social phenomena. For example, chapters explained through the lens of statistics and economic theory, why drug dealers live with their parents and the reasons for the popularity of certain baby names to particular races of people. The explanations given in the book were interesting and thought-provoking, and earned a great deal of critical acclaim and popular press.¹ Whatever the legitimacy of the claims made in the book, there was always a sense that Levitt was a sharp guy; he came from a respected academic institution, and was well-known in his field.

Earlier this year (2009), the highly-anticipated followup to their bestselling book, entitled Superfreakanomics, was released. But even before the book had hit shelves, a massive amount of public controversy had built up— much of it very negative. Many critics who had formerly been gushing about the authors suddenly had lost all respect, viewing the book as a compendium of contrarianism, arguments made to deliberately jostle one’s sense of intuition about things— in a bad way. For example, Levitt and Dubner argued that drunk-driving is safer than walking home drunk. Not only did this incense organizations that had made so many strides against this sort of behavior, but many found there to be surprisingly weak chains of logic in their methodological approaches.

But where the book really enraged the scientific community at large was in their highly controversial chapter on global warming. Climate change is already a hot-button topic; one that has generated a large level of heated public debate. Levitt and Dubner decided to throw gas on the flame by claiming that the only serious way to address the problem is to engage in geoengineering. We should, they argue, release large amounts of certain chemicals into the atmosphere; these chemicals will absorb the problems created by excess CO2 and begin a global cooling process. There’s a lot you could say about their “solution” in terms of the science (which they claim supports them, but which many strongly dispute); for starters, it’s dangerous to so offhandedly suggest a solution on this scale that could have serious downstream problems. Efforts in using human measures to balance biological processes have often had unforeseeable and difficult to correct consequences (one example being the recurring problems we have had with invasive species). But I’m not in the loop enough with that world to argue those points. What irks me is that they specifically downplayed the idea that change in human behavior was warranted or possible at all. In an interview, Levitt was quoted as saying:

If you look at the history of modern mankind, I think you will be hard pressed to find any particular problem that was serious that was solved by a behavioral change, as opposed to by a technological solution…

As a social scientist and student of economic behavior, I find this assertion not only misguided, but ill-conceived as well. First, it is built on a false premise: that there are two types of change, behavioral and technological. This is untrue; often, behavioral change goes hand in hand with technological change. How is it fair to say that our society’s transition to motor vehicles, or our adoption of cellular telephones are solely the purview of technological change? Sure there are clear technological changes involved, but simple shifts in technological wizardry do not, by themselves, account for widespread shifts in adoption rates (for example, natural gas vehicles have been invented, but few people actually own a natural gas powered car). For any technological advance to take root, it has to be accompanied by behavioral changes.

The second reason, which dovetails perfectly with the aforementioned reason, is that because people do make behavioral changes that aren’t part of technological changes. It’s not clear what serious historical events Levitt is talking about when he says that he doesn’t have confidence in people changing behavior, but there’s tremendous, almost incontrovertible evidence that behavioral change can happen in the absence of technological change. Here’s one simple example: high gas prices in 2007 drastically reduced the amount of driving done by the average American. This might seem like a trivial rebuttal, but the reality is that external conditions force people to change behavior all the time. Here, the fact that prices went up disincentivized people from driving around needlessly. Technology played no part in this. Admittedly, it can be argued that this is not a “serious” situation on the scale that Levitt is referring to in that quote, but aside from climate change, what serious situations of global proportions that involved 6 billion— or even 50 million— atomized individual actors has plagued this planet in the past? I can’t think of one. Regardless, it’s not hard to see that many situations, particularly ones involving imminent crises, effect rapid changes in human behavior. For Levitt— an economist— to make an argument asserting the pre-eminence of technology as a force is a little surprising to me.²

I don’t mean to discount the role of technology at all. But just as often, it comes down to our governments and society to create the conditions necessary for behavioral change. Sometimes this happens on its own, sometimes it happens through deliberate processes. Regardless, my argument against Levitt’s assertion is one that I thought should have been obvious to someone of Levitt’s stature; as an economist, his entire field is about incentivization. Surely he, of all people, would know that you can change behavior— not simply by asking for change, which is the straw man he seems to be knocking down— but by changing incentives structures and changing the conditions that push individuals towards the choices they make (perhaps he should have taken some lessons from his colleague at the University of Chicago Richard Thaler, whose book Nudge discusses this idea at length).

Though I can’t make any arguments about geoengineering because I simply don’t know enough about it, I will say that saying that Levitt and Dubner’s attitude towards behavioral change is somewhat defeatist and cynical; I agree, it can be difficult to change behavior, but it’s important to realize how it can and can’t be done. Simply asking for it doesn’t typically work, as people have resistance to change; but creating conditions that encourage behavioral change is exactly how the world and our society was able to transform so dramatically over the past few millennia, and how we can expect it to be shaped in the future.

¹ I can’t say that I cared much for the book myself (again making myself the oddball amongst my peer set), mostly because the title was misleading and the book had no applied value whatsoever. It was fairly interesting if viewed as a trivia book, however— putting aside any questions regarding its accuracy.

² Surprising at least initially, until I realized that mainstream economic theory didn’t even introduce concepts about the behavioral irrationality of the consumer until just a few years back. This shocking and bewildering oversight will eventually lay waste to the entire field if it is not immediately adopted into the economic mainstream. The field is already getting a lot of heat because of the recent economic meltdown, which was due in large part to irrational consumer processes that were not even considered by the big names in economics!

Comment [1]

The Symbolic Value of a Beer

how much meaning is embedded in a single beverage?

Posted 2009-07-31 11:03 in branding, culture, marketing, politics, postmodernism

The so-called “Beer Summit” occurred today. The premise of this meeting between Barack Obama, Henry Louis Gates, and James Crowley— a Cambridge police officer— was the culmination of a lot of recent speculation about latent racist attitudes, profiling, and the state of race relations in America. The event hinged on an incident in which Gates was trying to get back into his house after apparently being locked out, and being challenged by a white police officer for appearing to be breaking-and-entering. Allegations about police making assumptions about black men committing crimes were made and it soon turned into the subject of a national debate.

But Obama, ever the diplomat, invited the parties over to the White House garden for some beers (one each) and a bit of mano-a-mano discussion. A lot could be said about the political nature of this event, but what I’m interested in is what apparently the media made a big fuss about: the beer that each individual was going to choose to drink at this event.

It’s fascinating that a single beer could be so embedded with symbolic meaning. This is the nature of the post-modern world, in which many brands are reservoirs of symbolism and fit so prominently into the public’s schemas about social groups. As I mentioned in a previous post, David Foster Wallace once commented that he’d read books in which a character’s personality could be succinctly conveyed simply by naming the brand of T-shirt the character wore. That’s how much meaning we associate with certain brands. Thus, it was a matter of apparent great symbolic import what beer these gentlemen were having on this momentous occasion.

Gates, a Harvard professor, chose a Samuel Adams Light, while Crowley chose a Blue Moon (with an orange slice). Obama, ever the epicurean (what with his much-ridiculed taste for arugula), chose Bud Light. This invites the question of why, if you were the ostensible leader of the free world, you would ever choose a Bud Light. Maybe I’m more of a beer snob than I realize, but of all the world’s beers I could choose, Bud Light would be somewhat at the bottom of my list. Perhaps I am being a bit presumptuous here, but it seems highly unlikely that a man of Obama’s stature and taste would voluntarily choose a Bud Light if given unrestricted choice.

But of course, we have to think about the symbolic value of his choice. Bud Light is the best-selling beer in America, and has been since 2001; apparently it accounts for a massive 22% of case sales in the United States! It carries with it so many symbolic, populist overtones. It’s what any blue collar American would drink. Not like that elitist, hoity-toity microbrew stuff, and especially not one of those foreign beers that wasn’t brewed on our shores.

According to a Republican strategist quoted in an article from Bloomberg, Obama is “trying to send a message that he’s an average American… [He could] complicate that by making an exotic choice, or an import, or too expensive.” Indeed, imagine what the news sources would say if he drank, say, a Heineken, a Sapporo, or a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. He was already skewered by Fox News’ Sean Hannity for asking for Grey Poupon at a diner several months ago.

There is a rather unexpected complication to Obama’s choice, however. Budweiser was sold to the Belgian company InBev back in July 2008, making Bud Light not quite an American beer. Sure it’s brewed here and it’s a traditionally American brand, but it’s no longer owned by an American company, so perhaps it can’t be viewed as wholly American as say, Coors.* Nevertheless, I think most Americans probably still view Budweiser as a culturally American beer and don’t really know much or care much about the location of the headquarters of the huge international beverage conglomerate that owns it.

Bud Light, viewed strictly on symbolic terms and with the intent of being an uncontroversial choice for a nation who, during the 2004 presidential election was inexplicably obsessed with choosing the candidate who one would most like to have a beer with, was a good selection. It’s a best-seller, has no particular subculture attached to it, and is sold pretty much everywhere. It’s hard to beat that. As Al Ries, an Atlanta-based marketer told Bloomberg, “Leading brands tend to be a very safe choice for a politician because, in a sense, they’re saying to the public, ‘You picked it, not me. I’m just reflecting your choice.’”

Interestingly, little commentary has been made on Crowley’s choice. The police officer was easily the most blue-collar fellow at the table, and chose what is probably the most “elitist” beer (if such a concept can be meaningfully applied) in terms of popular conception. Most people likely have not even heard of Blue Moon as it is the type of beer that is typically served in “uppity” and yuppy-type hangouts, not roadside dive bars. In reality, however, Blue Moon is rather surreptitiously brewed by Coors, though they do not advertise this and do not have the Coors name listed anywhere on any Blue Moon products. The company (rightly) assumes that the Coors name will reduce the brand equity of this macrobrew masquerading as a microbrew.

Gates’ choice was a sensible one; he lives in Cambridge, just outside of Boston, and he chose a beer that is brewed in Boston, perhaps a symbolic nod to his affection for the area despite his recent conflicts.

All in all, somewhat interesting choices made by all three gentlemen. I would, however, have loved to hear what kind of public commentary would have been made had Obama chosen the ultimate in a confounding beer with multiplex meanings: Pabst Blue Ribbon. Is he kowtowing to rednecks? Bikers? Hipsters? Cheapskates? In a perfect world, he would have chosen it, and it would have been a wonderful and puzzling mystery to unravel.

^{* You could tell that around the time of the sale of Anheuser-Busch to InBev that the company got kind of nervous about how its customers might perceive this traitorous act of selling out a quintessentially American brand to Europeans; they responded by creating and heavily advertising something called Budweiser American Ale, repeating the world “American” many times in the ads to reinforce the idea that this was a American drink.}

Further reading:
1. The Bloomberg Article
2. “How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding” by Douglas Holt

Comment

Business, Social Justice, and the Problems of Fairness

Posted 2009-03-28 11:03 in biology, business, business models, economics, human nature, politics, sustainability

If you observe traffic in India long enough, you’ll arrive at the conclusion that there are no road rules in India. But this is not true. There is one rule that dictates driving behavior: Might is right. To Westerners, this is a discomforting thought, because it bypasses the systems of social justice that we are used to in the West. Shouldn’t you, as a small car, have the same rights on the road as a mammoth SUV? Shouldn’t you, as a pedestrian, be able to cross a crosswalk without fear of being flattened by a speeding vehicle?

Most Westerners probably think so. Fairness and equality is ingrained in our outlook on the world. We look for courts and governments to level playing fields for us. If someone smashes our car in an accident, we use the law to restore ourselves to the situation we were in before the accident. We call that justice.

The ideals of social justice, fairness, and equality are lofty; it’s hard not to get upset when you hear stories of unfairness (persons being wrongly convicted of crimes, people losing all their money in elaborate frauds, etc.), and it’s even harder not to demand justice when something like this happens to you. Yet, I have recently begun to understand the sorts of costs that this has had on our society, both in an economic sense, but also in a psychological sense. I fear that despite the high-minded ideals of social justice, it does not always serve us well as a society to rectify every injustice leveled against us.

I wonder about how the concept of justice fits into an evolutionary context. Does it fit in it at all? Evolution would suggest that some individuals (organizations) are better suited for prevailing conditions than others. The weak and frail will be consumed by the environment, and the strong will soldier on, and grow. Evolution is the law of nature for all beings, and it is a law that is the supposed lifeblood of capitalism. Despite this, our system (at least in the U.S.) continually ensures that those who cannot compete— fairly or not— can be sustained artificially by a system that will nurse them regardless of their strength or potential to compete effectively in the future. This is not true for all firms, but it’s true for many. Think of GM and Ford, think of AIG, think of the ridiculous amount of subsidies given to industrial farms.

You might be wondering where I am going with this. What does bailing out companies have to do with social justice? Remember why the government is currently bailing companies out; it has very little to do with the companies themselves. It has everything to do with the idea that some people unfairly lost their life savings in them, and hundreds of thousands of people will unfairly lose their jobs, and the resulting economic meltdown will unfairly ripple throughout society and affect people who had nothing to do with it. So what is the solution? A lot of people feel that ‘investing’ billions of dollars into these organizations will re-establish justice to not the auto company, but people who might have been impacted by their problems. All those hapless investors won’t lose their hard-earned money. All those dedicated auto-workers who labored at GM for 35 years won’t lose their jobs. And all those bystanders won’t be leveled in the narrowly-averted nuclear winter.

I can’t help but anthropomorphize this situation a bit by comparing it to the way a parent welcomes back the proverbial prodigal son with open arms despite the kid’s waywardness. At least to some degree, we expect this from good parents. Madonna’s song “Papa Don’t Preach” has the narrator begging her religious father for support instead of judgment despite what in his eyes is her grievous sin of becoming pregnant as an unwed teenager. But we’re talking about supporting wayward organizations here, which will have broad social impacts. Welcoming back companies that recklessly screwed over investors and their own employees should not necessarily be supported in return, though it’s tempting to do it because of the other parties that might be affected by a failure to do so. So let’s start with why it may not be a good idea to bail out these companies, and then move on to why it’s even bad for the related parties.

There’s a good chance that Madonna learned her lesson and won’t get pregnant again, but the guys at GM are more akin to heroin addicts than teenagers who made some bad decisions. They’ve been supported by government money so long, are so far from market-orientation, and so incapable of the sorts of organizational change that are necessary for detoxification that it seems impossible to give them any sort of support without tacitly feeding their addictions. Sure, you can give GM money to go rehab, but there’s absolutely no indication that they’re interested in rehab. They want to stave off the looming disaster on the horizon for one more day. If perhaps they showed the least bit of interest in market orientation and willingness to be innovative, it might be different. But that’s not the case at all. They simply expect to be saved because they always have been, and the government plays into their hands largely out of habit.

Despite this, no amount of money given to the company is going to restore the lives of the victims of corporate irresponsibility, and no amount of money alone will prevent the threats of insolvency from being constant and recurring events. Of course, we are often victims of the sunk-cost fallacy, which suggests that because we’ve already wasted so much money on these companies and they’ve already created so much chaos, that we should escalate our commitments to them to hoist them from the tarpit from which they’ve carelessly driven into (again)— which is precisely the wrong tack in this situation. The best thing to do is to walk away and never look back, despite their anguished screams.

I know that many people would be affected negatively by this course of action. I realize that many retirements will be ruined, many workers will hit the skids, and their kids may never be able to attend college. I understand and empathize with this hardship. But what worries me is that trying to correct these unfairnesses actually set us up to create exponentially more of them, and make us more susceptible to future crises of the same or greater magnitude— and it has nothing to do with the actual transfer of money, and everything to do with economic incentives.

Put bluntly, these organizations are drains on the system, and further feeding them and the people who they have hurt is an even bigger drain on the system. That said, I understand that we live in a society, and we can’t always think about things in these terms. I don’t advocate, for example, that we stop all social services, which many perceive as drains. But it’s damaging to the business environment and ultimately consumers to support businesses just because we always have. It not only encourages organizations to be reckless about their management habits, but it encourages those who work for them and invest in them to behave carelessly and greedily. Aggregated over a nation and over decades, it’s primes us perfectly for future disasters of equal or greater magnitude.

Put the right incentives in place, and you can avoid this sort of thing. If you knew that no one was going to bail you out, your company would probably act in a much more controlled manner. If you were investing your life or your live savings in that company, you might spend a bit more time scrutinizing the management practices of that company. Which is what these organizations and people are supposed to be doing in the first place.

Consider this: a herd of antelope will never try to nurse or save an injured antelope, regardless of whether it was maimed by a predator or by another antelope. To do so would jeopardize the future of the rest of the herd. Standing around and attending to the injured puts them all at risk. And indeed, some antelope will need to serve as fuel for the predators. These predators probably aren’t viewed positively by the antelope (if they have such a capacity), but in a way, they are actually protecting the antelope society as a whole because they enable a systematic checks-and-balances that promotes a balanced ecologic sphere that keeps the antelope’s environment stable. Without this, the antelope would overpopulate and eat themselves to famine. Then all of a sudden, the seeming prosperity would reveal itself to just be an elaborate illusion, and they’d see that actually there wouldn’t be enough food or resources to go around. Does this sound at all familiar?

Comment

A Thought Before the 2008 Presidential Election

Posted 2008-11-03 08:41 in human nature, politics, postmodernism

What is the link between the following ideas?

• The world is 5,000 years old
• George W. Bush and his minions planned and orchestrated 9/11
• People on welfare spend all their money on alcohol and drugs
• Barack Obama is a socialist and a Muslim (despite having a Christian pastor)
• Marijuana is a dangerous drug and usually leads to harder, even more dangerous drugs

Give up? All these things have no basis in fact. Yet, they are all beliefs that people rabidly cling to no matter what evidence comes up to contradict them.

Like the people who believe these things, some moral and political crusaders spend so much of their lives trying to reinforce and justify their pre-existing opinions that they can’t evaluate new information without experiencing profound cognitive dissonance; they then cling to their pre-existing opinions even tighter to ensure the security of their own identities. These people are called extremists, fundamentalists, jihadists, terrorists, racists, bigots, ideologues, and morons.

To these people, the world is not a complex place; it is a place of black and white, good and evil, right and wrong, “it is” or “it isn’t.” The real world is not this; it is a place of often unsettling gray and ambiguity. And to grapple with it in a meaningful way requires serious independent thought, self-reflection, and a willingness to admit that your thoughts might be inaccurate and plain wrong at times. Reality can conflict even with one’s most basic, gut-level knowledge of “truth.” This is deeply troubling to most people. But we all need to take steps to confront the fact that truth has a way of changing depending on what we know. Perhaps if we take the time to learn more, we can change. Alas, most people do not have the capacity to search for truth or the desire to change; they want to hold on to their old, limited conceptions of the world. And to force them on others.

I heard a reporter talking to a college-age boy about his choice for president. “McCain,” the boy remarked. “He doesn’t want to take from the rich to give to the poor.” This comment was made with the underlying assumption that doing this was wrong. He then went on to admit that he came from an affluent background and that played into his decision. It was a moment that caught me a little off guard, because the unstated subtext of his comment (that perhaps he himself was not even aware of) was that if he were someone else— perhaps a poor person— he might have made a different choice.

But then, if our conception of righteousness is so fluid, and subject to change based on our own current situation and how our opinions might personally benefit us, how then can our thoughts and opinions on issues have any value other than the demonstration of opportunistic self-interest? Should our opinions not reflect attitudes that we would hold regardless of their personal impact on us, or what our situation is?

Perhaps it would be useful to consider the words of Mahatma Gandhi, whose life continues to be an inspiration to me:

“In my life, my commitment is to truth, not consistency.”

Comment [1]

Categories

• behavioral economics
• biology
• book reviews
• branding
• business
• business models
• consumerism
• culture
• economics
• energy
• environment
• epistemology
• ethics
• experiences
• finance
• human nature
• human resources
• humor
• hyperreality
• improvements
• law
• links
• marketing
• operations management
• pictures
• politics
• postmodernism
• religion
• research
• semiotics
• social networking
• sustainability
• transportation
• unanswered questions
• unfinished thoughts

External Links

• Rahul Kamath
• Market Wisdom Twitter Feed
• Paul Graham
• Seth Godin
• The Consumerist
• The Customer is not Always Right!

Search

© 2010 rahul kamath | powered by: textpattern |
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.