Disturbing trends ….

I don’t know how else to title this one, but I am going to try to summarize some ideas we’ve discussed in class and some others related to the class’ subject matter, and how they relate to development. Development is seen (by those who seriously study it) as an effort to effect positive change that improves living standards, dignity and respect, more equally distributes power and decision making, etc. But not all development takes societies in those directions, and in fact many social processes in our world today can turn development successes into isolated enclaves amid larger trouble spots. We’ll look at a few of them:

• Schumacher and Buddhist Economics
• Polanyi and the Great Transformation
• Indigenous cultures and adaptive traits
• Mohanty and globalization

Ernst Schumacher and Buddhist Economics

Ernst Schumacher was an economist, and the coiner of the term ‘appropriate technology.’ He had some ‘radical’ ideas about the growth of large-scale, often inhuman industrial technologies. Yes, they respond to society’s drive for efficiency, but they create many problems as well, and in the end, in our need to try to control them, do they become our masters? Schumacher saw that, like technology, economics was value-laden. What if, he wondered, different cultures had different economic systems? What if, for instance, there was such a thing as ‘Buddhist economics’ (which of course, there isn’t, but what if)? What would it look like? Our Western economic system clearly reflects cultural values not shared by all.

Views on work

In the west, workers often see work as a necessary evil, as what economists might call a ‘disutility.’. Employers may see it as an item of cost, one they try to minimize through the wage structure. The idea situation for employers is to have output without employees (automation), and for employees to have income without work (welfare? Game shows?).

From the Buddhist perspective, work has value in and of itself. It is a source of personal fulfillment, livelihood, and community. There would be no appreciation of leisure without work, of night without day, of good without evil. Schumacher illustrates with the carpet loom, a manual-powered tool for weaving fabric, versus the power loom, which according the Schumacher automates the process, but also ‘does the human part of the work.’ There’s nothing left but to push buttons. Think of Ghandi’s definition of development as ‘the realization of human potential.’ Is human potential realized through factory wage labor? A job? Conversely, is a job in a factory better than transplanting rice in a paddy? Weighty issues . . . During the steep rise in energy prices in California a while back, aluminum companies played a big role. They located in the Northwest because they need massive amounts of electricity, and the Northwest has some of the cheapest electricity rates in the world (via hydropower). They still insisted on cheaper rates, as good customers. When the price crisis hit, these companies such as Alcoa, made more money by selling off their surplus, subsidized power, than by producing aluminum. They actually shut down operations. Workers stayed home, were paid to do nothing. This turns the Buddhist concept of work on its head–money for nothing, so to speak.

Full employment (remember what Dudley Seers had to say)

In the West: The capitalist system depends on surplus labor, which keeps wages low, competitive, and allows businesses to better control costs. If we can afford unemployment (for ‘social stability’), then we need to provide welfare compensation. If not, we allow the development of an informal sector–remember what authors have said–women selling street food are not so much fulfilling some pent-up demand in the economy–they’re just surviving, and they will likely take some business away from either more expensive vendors, or from restaurants in the formal sector. Thus the system depends on some level of unemployment. In a Buddhist economy, full employment would be the basis of economic planning. Anything less than that would be seen as a failure to meet the needs of the people in society.

Consumption

In the West, this is how we measure standard of living; the ones with the most are the best off, right? (fossil fuels have allowed for huge consumption – U.S. with 5% of population consumes 20% of world’s resources). In the West, land, labor and capital are the means, and consumption is the end, the goal, the prize, for many. From a Buddhist perspective, using non-renewable resources is nothing short of parasitism. Consumption is but a means to an end; the goal is balance between well-being, comfort; living more in harmony with the natural environment, in intimate contact. Renewable resources, living within one’s means, sustainable livelihood; simplicity–these are the things that matter. Consumption can actually serve as a distraction toward those goals. If we consider stress levels in agrarian societies, versus faster-paced high technology societies, it’s not clear that consumption buys happiness. What is clear is that those living standards that rank so high in the HDR report depend on resources found in countries of the South …

Economic production

In the West, we’re after efficiency, right? Doesn’t matter where it comes from, how we get it (look at WalMart–everyday low prices!). What are environmental effects of a global economic system of trade? Animals get raised, food produced here, but it may be processed in the Midwest, sent back via truck. Does this make sense? Think in global terms. What are the ‘hidden’ costs? From a Buddhist perspective, production should occur locally, from local resources, and people would live within the constraints of the local environment (when we consume, it has to come rom somewhere-we dump, we create disorder somewhere else).

A note on violence. It comes with Western economic model. The dam project, strip mining, animal confinement, fossil fuels (cars, noise, accidents, death,–our way of life kills many more people), tobacco, etc. Consumption is the end, and we are consummate consumers – this is what we learn in school, at home! It’s okay to destroy a mountainside to mine coal, okay to destroy a valley to mine uranium, other minerals; okay to strip soil to do annual agriculture with heavy machinery.

Violence to nature leads to violence between people, according to Schumacher . . . in struggles for resources.

Karl Polanyi and the Great Transformation

Karl Polanyi says that markets are exchanges between buyers and sellers. To understand this concept, you might try to work through a few examples. They are based on self-interested, income-maximizing behavior. Somehow, all of these self-interested individuals do their buying and selling, and entrepreneurs their investing, and we end up with markets with somewhat predictable prices, supply and demand. All of this individual behavior leads to rather large markets for goods, services, etc. It’s pretty remarkable when you think about it.

Markets seem to function best in the production of goods and services. They may not work well for women, as we’ve seen–they may be ‘gendered institutions.’ Women have more difficulty participating in them (because of time poverty and other reasons), may have more trouble understanding how they work, gaining access to the capital necessary to even get started.

Polanyi said that, owing to the needs for industry, investors needed to have access to the factors of production, and the markets needed to be fairly ‘self-regulating’ (that is, based on supply and demand). If I want to build a factory, I’m going to need some combination of land, workers, and likely equipment and building material (capital). I’m not going to invest in these things if the markets for those goods are uncertain. What is needed are markets for land, labor and capital, that allow investors to put these three to their most efficient economic use. If I find land, I can build my factory. If wages are high, I may try to automate as much as possible, or try to get the government to assist in some way to lower the wage structure (high rates of unemployment would help, which also means that welfare programs shouldn’t look too appealing for those able-bodied out of work, right?). If interest rates are high (interest is essentially the price of money), I may also think twice about building, buying a house, etc. In a self-regulating market, if this leads to decreased investment (i.e., demand for money), then rates should fall, increasing demand.

Polanyi says, however, that land, labor and capital are ‘fictitious’ commodities. We put price tags on them, and that affects how we use them, and essentially makes them subordinate to market production. In other words, land then tends to be used for economic production. People’s labor tends to be used for more efficient economic activity. Money gets used once again for production. Things that markets don’t produce well, such as government or libraries or schools, may require taxation in order to adequately fund.

Polanyi contends that by the middle of the 19th century, industrialized societies had been transformed. They had created markets for land, labor and capital, that were necessary for capitalism and industrialization to reach its full potential. Before this time, in traditional cultures and societies, markets essentially reflected the cultures within which they existed. Reciprocity, for instance, was an important mechanism for exchange of goods and services. But in a market economy, society is subservient to the market. Think about it–why are you all here in school? To round out your minds?? Or find gainful employment through further development of your ‘human capital?’ And when you seek work, you may have to move–the more education we have, the more credentials, the less in demand we are in the general population, and chances are we’ll have to move to find work–labor markets are fluid. This has effects on family structure among other things. What happens in the third world when people migrate to cities? Is the effect similar?

Polanyi also makes the point that when land, labor and capital become market commodities, we begin to see a shift in the role of economies in societies. Rather than the economy being subservient to the culture, the culture begins to reflect the economic imperatives, in this case of capitalism and a market economy.

Indigenous cultures and adaptive traits

We’ve talked in here about the notion that, rather than look at traditional agrarian societies as failures, if we see how they’ve adapted we begin to understand that their ability to survive and live within the means of their environments is often remarkable. Okay, now let’s look at many traditional societies, and the traits that have allowed them to survive:

• Reciprocity. In a village setting, reciprocity is essential. Families that have bad crop years need help to survive, and they can count on it from other households in the village. Why? because those households know that when they are in dire need, those they helped will reciprocate. This puts a damper on individual households accumulating wealth–they might have to give it up to other households in need. And if they refuse to help, they might suffer other consequences. For instance, one of the sons steals a cow from another household, and the cow’s owner has to decide whether to involve the police or not. Or perhaps households want to cement their economic ties with other households, ensure that their sons or daughters can find wives or husbands, for instance.
• Redistribution. Similar to reciprocity, but not the same. In cultures surviving on the margins, goods, services, land, etc. not being used should be made available for those who need it to use. This leads to a redistribution of resources–it runs against the notions of capitalism–if you’re allowing others to use your resources, they’re not available for you to invest should the opportunity arise.
• Sacrificing self-interest for a greater collective good. In a society (or on a planet?) where survival is the most important thing, even thinking about individual self-interest may be beyond the capacity of some–things are viewed through community, lineage, family.
• Minimizing risk. Rather than maximizing income, which is the way markets work, traditional societies tended to minimize the risks, for instance of bad harvests. Rather than plant the high-yield grain variety, they may go with one more likely to resist drought, insect infestations, etc. Farmers in the West can afford to maximize income and produce for the market because when they have a bad year they can always get a line of credit from the banks, or emergency aid from the government. Most societies don’t have those luxuries to fall back on, and would instead be facing famine or starvation.
• Resilience. Think of resilience as the capacity to respond to change. In general, traditional cultures have persisted in part because they have been suspicious of change. But change more and more is from external forces, ironically often from well-intentioned but often misguided development efforts.

So, do these traits, which are quite adaptive in an agrarian setting, help cultures survive in a globalizing world, where market economies are becoming increasingly pervasive and important? Do they give them any kind of comparative advantage, or instead put them at a disadvantage if the goal is maximizing income? If they are no longer adaptive, will they continue to be transmitted from one generation to the next (as genes that are adaptive get transmitted)? Or is there a risk that, over time, we are losing cultural diversity, losing some of the adaptive traits that helped societies survive over generations, centuries, perhaps even millennia? If the marketplace doesn’t reward these traits, then perhaps these cultures must learn new rules for this game, new means of survival.

We are in fact seeing erosion of cultural diversity, the loss of languages, cultural practices, etc. Think of what Polanyi said–societies become subservient to the market system. How does this fit with what Schumacher said–what if we created economic systems that reflected our cultural values?

Chandra Talpade Mohanty, feminism, and globalization

Mohanty–who we’ve read before (‘Under Western Eyes‘ …), believes that the language used to describe women’s movements and global inequalities is misleading. Not a new theme for us. ‘Development’ is a loaded and ethnocentric term. So is ‘progress,’ ‘advance,’ as are ‘First World’ to ‘Third World’ (which have become proxies for absence or presence, and depth, of poverty). While people who’ve spent much time in the ‘Third World’ understand what that means in terms of the poverty experienced daily by most people, this language is poorly understood by politicians and decision makers who nevertheless use it to justify, yes, ethnocentric approaches to, yes, ‘development.’

Mohanty prefers a couple of different terms for their more meaningful political connotations: ‘North’ versus ‘South’ countries, or the ‘One Third/Two Third’ worlds (no, this isn’t a reference to Dr. Seuss …). More meaningful because they better represent who lives where, and how–it is not a binary relationship–most of the people–the ‘two-thirds’– live in the countries of the South. Most of the resources and economic prosperity belong, quite literally, to those in the countries of the North, the ‘One-thirds’ (in the sense their residents can acquire what their own societies don’t produce). Mohanty refers to ‘social justice’ as the means, the framework or philosophy, for redressing some of the inequalities and injustices that continue to confer advantages and privilege upon the one-third.

‘Development’ has been accompanied by a spread of different epistemological assumptions–a fancy way of saying that our ways of knowing about the world come from different sources of knowledge. The ‘Western’ approach is very rational, based on science and logic and evidence. Though this is tempered in societies by religious understandings of the world, based more on belief, faith, and critical works or texts (the Bible, Torah, Q’uran, Lao Tzu, Bhagavad-Gita, etc.). Indigenous knowledge (as we’ve talked about it, ‘local knowledge,’ what people know and pass down from one generation to the next, often based on tradition, trial-and-error, etc.) usually combines the religious and experiential–an animist culture for instance wouldn’t consider separating religious views from its understanding of nature. Ancestors are buried on the ground where they live, it isn’t just a patch of real estate for possible sale. It has deep meaning for the culture. Economic models tend to view this as an obstacle to investment, rather than a fundamental cultural truism.

Mohanty cites Vandana Shiva as one of the feminist scholars who has most eloquently pointed out how the countries of the North, while often diminishing the importance of indigenous knowledge systems–especially as it relates to the ‘development’ of the countries of the South and some of the ethnocentric assumptions made–includes various interest groups, often private companies and corporations, whom have sought diligently to ‘pirate’ and appropriate the knowledge of indigenous peoples, where it would create some highly profitable revenue streams (think of ethnobotanists sent to tropical forests to find plant extracts used by locals that could be synthesized into drugs to treat all manner of conditions).

The economic system that allows this to happen is capitalism, and much of what these firms do can be justified as legal. There is no requirement that capitalism operate in a predatory, even parasitic manner that allows powerful groups to basically ‘capture’ government agencies and use them to do their bidding, scouring the globe for labor and resource bargains. But in its current corporate form–and corporations are reflections of the power or a goal-oriented organization–that’s often what happens. When firms are rewarded for producing high returns on short-term investments, why should we expect them to do otherwise in competitive markets? Governments could of course change the rules and reward corporations for managing for the long-term, for enviornmental sustainability, morale of the workforce, etc. But . . . refer back to the point about government being ‘captured’ by industries often designed to regulate their behaviors.

What’s wrong with the appropriation of knowledge and ‘property rights,’ you ask? Well, these companies aren’t paying those who developed this knowledge, but are profiting from it. As consumers aren’t paying the full price of the deforestation of the tropics when they buy that faux teak kitchen table. Or the effects of increasing concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from industrial activity, or the costs of wars fought over scarce natural resources (oil comes to mind). The point Shiva makes is that the multilateral organizations that ‘facilitate’ trade between countries represent the interests of the North, and therefore run counter to the interests of countries of the South in deciding how they will use their resources (I’m glossing over some pretty serious corruption here–though it’s hardly the province of the South). We’ll just let ‘free markets’ and foreign currencies decide who gets what, and for how much, regardless of which populations have been using the resource bases for centuries.

Understanding capitalism and its current globalized form is essential to understanding the problems of trafficking and violence perpetrated on women. Trafficking becomes a business, with costs to minimize (kidnapping is easier in poor, marginalized societies, cities, neighborhoods, etc.), profits to take and re-invest, and in this case (because it’s illegal), bribes to pay.

Where do women fit in? Mohanty writes:

Making gender and power visible in the processes of global restructuring demands looking at, naming, and seeing the particular raced and classed communities of women from poor countries as they are constituted as workers in sexual, domestic, and service industries; as prisoners, and as household managers and nurturers (p 398).

In other words, women’s opportunities, their life chances–and not all women equally by any stretch–are structured by forces well beyond their control, forces that are driven not by equality, or by moral principle, but by profit and (very often) large, well-organized and politically-connected corporations. Mohanty also points out the strong racial divides, the fact that most of the world’s poor are non-white, are most of the world’s incarcerated are disproportionately non-white.

So, with capitalism and the current era of globalization, goods are produced in locations where labor is cheap and shipped for consumption and disposal to places where consumers have disposable income (or at least credit cards!). Social movements must recognize that global capitalism does not bode well for the world’s poor (or for the planet and its finite resources), and that women are on average the poorest of the world’s poor. Add to this complexity the problems of rapid climate change, and there is, or at least should be, a chilling sense of urgency.

Mohanty echoes the chorus of calls for new words, new ideas, a new language, and means for the two-thirds to make their voices heard, make their majorities understood, and join as equal partners a debate about political and economic systems that create much wealth, distribute it unevenly, and create pollution and resource problems for everyone, now and in the future. The opposite? Social and economic justice. You probably know someone who derides these terms. They are likely on the receiving end of political economic system’s fruits, possibly not even aware of how the other two-thirds of the world live.

This isn’t the terminology that traditional societies, the sustainable ones, used, and I won’t try to romanticize them as bastions of prosperity and equality. All societies have their dysfunctions and groups that are not being treated equally. But there is something to be said for living within one’s means, for being suspicious of change coming from the outside, for understanding that sometimes prosperity of the parts–though often expressed in the flowering language of triumph, meritocracy and exceptionalism–comes at the expense of welfare of the whole.