Reflections on Issue Eleven

How Unequal Does It Feel?

Thank you to everyone who had a chance to read Issue Eleven over the past week. For those who have yet to read it, the reflections from other readers below may be a good starting point, or you can read “How Unequal Does It Feel” first.

The Understory reflections between issues are intended to share thoughtful comments from readers that expand upon and challenge parts of the previous issue. I am immensely grateful for the comments added this week, and hope they provide further value in affirming your own commitment to consuming less.

As Shared by Darin Petersen

“There’s a need for a Common Good Capitalism that seeks to understand that people do not serve the market on the contrary that markets serve the good of the people. Some of these thoughts have recently started to be resurfaced through Peter Block and separately the senator from Florida, Marco Rubio.”

For those looking to deepen their understanding of Darin’s comments about “Common Good Capitalism,” we can turn to the book An Other Kingdom: Departing the Consumer Culture by Peter Block, Walter Brueggemann, and John McKnight and Marco Rubio’s speech given at The American Catholic University in November 2019. While I have not read An Other Kingdom yet, I found this post about Block’s perspective on a compassionate economy helpful in both understanding the perspective, as well as being able to contrast it with Rubio’s. Rubio states that, 

“Common-good capitalism is about a vibrant and growing free market. But it is also about harnessing and channelling that growth to the benefit of our country, our people, and our society. Because after all, our nation does not exist to serve the interests of the market. The market exists to serve our nation and our people. And the most impactful benefit the market can provide our people, our society, and the nation at large is the creation and availability of dignified work.”

While Rubio recognizes the current American economic system “is leaving too many people behind” and “inflicting damage on our families, communities, and our society,” it seems he falls short in understanding the structural inhibitions towards a more equitable society based on privatization rather than common public goods as mentioned by Juliet B. Schor. While recognizing that GDP growth does not lead to greater equality, he also evokes competition with China and that “socialism would be even worse” to delineate the boundaries of structural reform he is unwilling to cross. And so it was refreshing to uncover the distinctions with Peter Block’s vision of common good reform. While they seem to share language, Block proposes an alternative system while Rubio wants to maintain the system with changes at the edges rather than the centre. As Block shares:

“...an alternative system is all around us. It goes by many names: Economics of Happiness, Generosity Economy, Genuine Wealth, Gift Economy, Core Economy, Co-operative Economy, Social Economy. Sharing Economy. We are calling it a Compassionate Economy. All of these names place the common good, the well-being of all, at their center.”

Block recognizes that what is required is both “shifting the consumer assumption,” while also creating a “compassionate economy” that serves as an alternative to a market economy. Block favours cooperation over competition, commonwealth over privatization, gifts instead of deficiencies, corporate purpose as social first (which Rubio also embraces), and elevating local over expert knowledge. 

In contrasting the seemingly aligned two perspectives, Block advocates for a new economic rationale, while Rubio wants to largely preserve what we have with a bit more sharing and regulation to make things feel better. While both Block and Rubio use shared language, it seems to me that their proposals for “common good” in actuality have little in common. 

See Darin’s comment in its entirety and add your reflections to his

As Shared by Mitch Taylor

“I am particularly impressed with Juliet Schor's insights regarding our need (right now) for a collective movement towards correcting our societal values regarding the consumption of public goods that should be available to everyone equally, such as education, health care, arts and culture, mass transportation, recreation/parks and leisure time activities (to recall a few of her points). Our current consumerism models take money out of the system so that funding for public goods and services goes chronically underfunded. That could be solved with a societal resolution to make everyone pay their fair share of taxes. Until there is a complete reform of taxation so that all individuals and corporations accept their responsibilities to pay their fair share of taxes, the underfunding of public goods and services will continue to suffer.”

In public debates around taxation, the conversation typically misses the chance to quantify the opportunity costs of what is lost by perpetual underinvestment in public goods in favour of private distribution. In many of the Western economies (apart from Scandinavia and to some degree Canada) we have become allergic to policies limiting our “freedoms” without recognizing how little freedom many citizens have based on the quality of their schools, health care systems, environments, communities, and local economies. We’re told that infinite choice and competition supported by the free market system of neoliberal economics will create greater prosperity and equality. By recognizing this damaging logic and how far it has led us astray from societal happiness and well-being, we begin the attitudinal shift in our worldview to consider the kinds of alternative systems proposed by Schor, Bhutan, Raworth, and Block.

See Mitch’s comment in its entirety and add your reflections to his

As Shared by Peter Tavernise

“The monkey study is interesting but I prefer studies of human behavior. In the neurobiology of coaching class I'm taking (just winding up) the study that blew my mind this week was Fredrickson and Losada 2005, “Positive Affect and the Complex Dynamics of Human Flourishing.” We had been studying limbic resonance, and synchrony as it develops between any two or more humans. For instance, musicians' left brains are more in synch with each other's left brains when playing music together than their own right brains are with their left brains. Their heart rate, breathing rate, and even blink rate can begin to synch up. Limbic resonance is otherwise known as the concept of emotional contagion—emotions are catching.

In the Study, Fredrickson and Losada studied months worth of emails by high performing, medium performing, and low performing teams. What they found each set of teams had in common was the ratio of positive to negative emotional tenor to their communications, so they began to count the number of occurrences of those in every email. What they found was that for those lowest performing teams, they were in a never-ending death spiral of negativity, territorialism, defensiveness, and because that was all everyone reflected back to each other, there was no way out. For the medium performing teams, they averaged up to 3:1 positive to negative aspects of their communications. The tipping point is anything over 3:1 - then you get high performing teams, where the mutual reinforcement is positive, mutually respectful, fulfilling, creative and fun.

This underscores the radical responsibility we all have to what our mood is in any given moment, and how we are choosing to project that into the field between us and any of our teams. This is especially true for leaders, to whom others are looking for emotional cues on how things are going, what threats and opportunities there may be. The study changed my commitment to how I will be operating for the rest of my life, and also will be something I will bring into coaching frequently to help illustrate to people the incredible potential impact even one person can have in breaking out of the death-spiral and increasing the ratio of positive to negative messaging.”

I am looking forward to spending more time with this important research. Huge thanks for sharing it and the findings, Peter. Reading your summary left me wondering whether their findings also apply to behavioural mimicry, not just attitudinal synchronicity? Specifically, whether the positive framing around consumption in our society reinforces and helps to justify our unsustainable levels of consumption? We observe others who we respect and trust consume with little transparency into the externalities of their behaviour, and follow their “lead” to acquire status as well as fulfillment from that consumption. On the contrary, what if consumption was continuously negatively framed for its effects on health and the environment?

“Along those lines, we need to recognize that a huge contributor to our current situation is that billions of dollars are spent every year on the most advanced and sophisticated (and ever more micro-targeted) advertising and marketing to us of a way of being (consumerism) which is fundamentally premised on the assertion that we are not enough. That our lives are missing not just one thing, but many many things without which we cannot be happy or fulfilled. We can never be enough, unless we buy what they are selling, and in ever increasing amounts (the latest software rev, the latest phone). Imagine if that international marketing budget were halved and the other half went to messaging that we are enough, and helping us link our attention to what truly feeds us. Creativity, family, the outdoors, exercise, shared humanity and reciprocity. Bhutan has it right!”

At a broader level, we attempt to outsource our happiness and well-being with the consumption of goods and harmful media. Rebecca Solnit and others make the argument that we have been bombarded with external possibilities for need fulfillment (of course, need creation as well), which has masqued our more fundamental needs and participation in creating our own sense of belonging through community relationships. Schor uses this premise to argue that our problem is not income, but rather how resources are distributed and shared. Unless we can decouple consumption from happiness in expectations and practice, we will continue to underinvest in those things that make us happy even with higher incomes. All the research has shown that once wages reach above a certain level of subsistence, happiness levels plateau or even decline due to misplaced values and expectations of private consumption. Schor calls this “crowding out alternative uses of income,” which is both material as well as in how we use our time.

See Peter’s comment in its entirety and add your reflections to his

As Shared by Monique Morden

“I just finished a book that chronicles groundbreaking research of two psychologists into the irrational decisions of humans and how that upended economic theory and research—The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds . It explores the close partnership of Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, whose work on heuristics in judgment and decision-making demonstrated common errors of the human psyche. The book revisits Michael Lewis' interest in market inefficiencies, previously explored in his books Moneyball (2003), The Big Short (2010), and Flash Boys (2014). It shows how your reference point and comparisons to others or other outcomes affects how you make decisions. It was super interesting and tied into the behaviours of ourselves compared to others. If you want to see this in action, go spend time in a high school and see how peer pressure, stays seeking and a desire to conform are predominant. It is extremely hard to combat that. But you show that the overarching goal of society needs to change which will take many individuals and years to achieve. In this time of political division and the potential regression on issues such as the right to choose and racial equality, we will need a plan, patience and perseverance to get there.”

I am a huge fan of Michael Lewis’ writing generally, The Undoing Project specifically, and the behavioural research of Kahneman and Tversky. Much of the research cited in Issue Eleven as well as past issues would never have been possible without their direct research and the creation of behavioural economics as a field. Unsurprisingly, the study that Peter referenced cited Kahneman’s research. Kahneman and Tversky taught us that homo economicus was a fictionalized and flawed persona, and that by abandoning it, we could better understand why humans behave the way they actually do rather than how they rationally should behave. Being aware and naming the heuristics that create cognitive biases in so many aspects of our lives is the first step in behavioural course correction. By recognizing the way status and competition affect how, how much, and what we consume, we might overcome our own biases and thereby decrease our own ecological footprints.

See Monique’s comment in its entirety and add your reflections to hers

As Shared by Noah Russell

“I appreciated Adam’s reference to Bhutan’s measurement of Gross Domestic Happiness as a national effort to both recognize the value of a happy populace but also the very fact that what is measured is afforded our attention. It raises my vehement frustration with GDP as a measure of nations’ prosperity; in a world of increased and well-noted inequality of wealth distribution, growth of GDP necessarily flows predominantly to the top. Modern monetary policy is underpinned on the idea of perpetual growth, allowing us to borrow today against the increased prosperity of tomorrow.”

The question Noah and Kate Raworth raise is what economic mindset will give us the best chance to thrive with equal levels of happiness—independent of whether or not we are growing? Whether it is Gross National Happiness or the Doughnut, I am convinced that we need different operating models to both aspire towards and measure our progress. Perhaps it is in a multiplicity of models rather than the choice of a single one that will give us the best shot of a way out of the current GDP trap that we’ve been living with for nearly a century after Kuznets invented it. After all, even Kuznets himself warned Congress in 1934 about the dangers of using GDP as a measure of societal welfare. 

“Consumer competition and the quest for status might seem very real but the question of who is responsible for perpetuating the problem, the obedient consumers or the persuasive marketers is up for debate. Even concerned individuals, cognizant of the impact of a consumerist world on the environment, are offered “green” alternatives by market-world; drive an electric Tesla to forgo the gas-guzzling automobile or buy organic instead of GMO produce. The option of non-consumption or recognizing what we can actually do without doesn’t even seem on the table. So how do we stop the cycle of consumerism in the face of the marketing machine and the noise of created human need?”

Even under the hypothetical scenario that Peter had proposed above of half the marketing dollars being diverted to non-consumptive campaigns, the problem of consumption fundamentally lies within our own psyche and the orientation of our society around status. While exceedingly difficult due to both its pervasiveness and customization, ignoring marketing is possible. Fundamentally, we value consumer choice over freedom, displaying a willingness to forgo more significant human freedoms such as within the public sphere in favour of private consumption. This confounding of choice with freedom either reaches a dead-end of being unfilled or fuels increased consumption as reward-seeking behaviour as indicated by Gabor Mate’s research.

“Education, both formal schooling and our familiar upbringing seem the only possible spot to help individuals recognize alternative pathways. Catch children early enough and teach them to appreciate the world, to choose quality over quantity, to see less as more, to appreciate the silence of solitude over the racket of the media machine and to value the natural world. But who will teach them these traits? What can motivate the change if not profit or threat of immediate peril? If our current generation of teachers and parents are all participants in the system, what is needed to get them to reject the prescribed market pathway and to choose a different route? Perhaps it starts with a recognition of what Happiness is not and a journey of discovery, for both individuals and collective society, to find rediscover where Happiness is.”

See Noah’s comment in its entirety and add your reflections to his

I hope this week between issues provides the space for further discovery and reflection. Go forth and make a difference in the week ahead. See you next Saturday with Issue Twelve.

Adam