When specificity is a roadblock

For today, I will just quote a passage that I came across in the remarkable book, Steady -State Economics: The Economics of Biophysical Equilibrium and Moral Growth (1974), by the ecological economist Herman E. Daly. Please let me know what you think.

Why do we insist on ignoring the ethical character of so many major economic decisions? Why this compulsion to substitute mechanical calculation for responsible value judgment? Perhaps it's because our mechanistic paradigm has reduced values and ethics to mere matters of personal taste, about which it is useless to argue. Quality involves difficult judgments and imposes self-definition and responsibility. Quantity involves merely counting and arithmetical operations that give everyone the same answer and impose no responsibility. Thus university deans make promotion decisions by counting words published and number of citations rather than by attempting a qualitative judgment about the true worth of a scholar's work, which is bound to cause some disagreement. Counting is an easy way out--a retreat from the responsibility of thinking and evaluating quality.

An especially important role in the quantitative short-circuiting of responsibility is played by randomness. Randomness is, in fact, an excellent moral scapegoat. Consider that some 50,000 Americans are killed annually by the automobile. Suppose that the specific identities of these people were known in advance. To save 50,000 specific individuals, we might lower speed limits drastically and return to bicycles for local transportation. To save 50,000 unknown, randomly determined individuals, we do nothing. If a soldier kills specific women and children at close range with a rifle we are horrified; if a bomber pilot kills many more women and children, whose numbers are predictable but whose identities are unknown before the fact, we are only vaguely upset...'Thou shalt not kill thy specific identified brother, but mayest murder random persons at will, in order to achieve thy 'progress,' however shallowly defined.' How much economic growth is based on this expanded version of the shorter, less sophisticated commandment?...We cannot throw responsibility for such collective existential decisions on to the moral scapegoat of randomness with its phony numerical calculations.

The way in which these phony calculations work is via "economies of ignorance and scale," as John U. G. Adams ("...And How Much For Your Grandmother?" Environment and Planning, Vol. 6, 1974) has scathingly illustrated. Consider what happens when we apply the concept of Pareto efficiency to the cost-benefit analysis of a project involving the predictable loss of life. Let Vj be te compensatory money payment to individual j to make him indifferent to the proposed project. That is, if j is to be hurt by the project, then Vj is what he must be paid to accept it, and it carries a minus sign.; if j is to be benefited, Vj is what he must be paid to forgo the project, and it carries a plus sign. If the algebraic sum for all individuals is positive, then there is a potential Pareto improvement; that is, the winners could compensate the loser and still be better off.

Suppose now that individual j would be killed as a result of the project. Consistency with the Pareto criterion requires that he be compensated for the loss of life according to his own valuation. Since most people would put a very high or even infinite cash value on the remaining years of lives, the result is that any project involving predictable loss of specific lives would fail the test of Pareto improvement and could not be justified by cost-benefit analysis. This is so even if more lives are saved than lost by the project, since there is no way for those saved to compensate those killed, and any cancelling out by the analyst of lives saved against lives lost violates the Pareto rule of no interpersonal comparisons.

It is obvious that many projects justified by cost-benefit analysis do result in the predictable loss of life. This is true for any projects that increase air or ground traffic, radiation exposure, or air pollution, for example. What allows cost-benefit analysts to "justify" such projects? It is essentially the fact that we never know in advance the identities of the specific people who will be killed. Th result is that we never have to compensate anyone for his certain loss of life but instead we must compensate everyone for the additional risk to which he is exposed as a result of the project (E. J. Mishan, "Evaluation of Life and Limb: A Theoretical Approach," Journal of Political Economy, July/August 1971). If the population is large, the individual risk becomes very small, perhaps below the minimum sensible, so that everyone is indifferent to such a negligible risk and no compensation at all is required, and the project passes with honors.

Note that in theory we have passes from a case requiring infinite compensation to a case requiring zero compensation, simply by throwing away information, that is, by remaining ignorant of the specific identities of the victims. This is odd, to say the least. In practice, of course, we never have the specific identities of victims beforehand, but that fact does not resolve the theoretical anomaly. The population subset most at risk could often be specified but usually is not, so that the risk often appears more diluted than it really is.

Government, industry, and proxies

In a recent comment on a previous post, it was argued that with the US Environmental Protection Agency, the government is on our side. This may be true to a certain extent; indeed, the US EPA has jurisdiction over some of the most important pieces of legislation to ever come out of Congress - the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the National Environmental Policy Act (part of it). It is also clear that there are employees of the US EPA that truly do care about the environment, and value the data and numbers that science provide, and want to see those data and numbers effectively understood and acted upon. (I know of one personally.) Yet a government agency that works within a government-industry system of violence towards nature can in no way put a halt to environmental destruction; it may only serve to quell it at times.

As I have written about previously, we have surrounded ourselves with proxies of all sorts - we rely on others to grow our food, we rely on others to make sure we are drinking safe water, we rely on others to make shoes for us, we rely on old white men sitting in rooms making decisions about where our money is spent, whether for education or war. As soon as we give proxies, we lose our ability to have adequate control over what is done with our confidence. So, we end up with genetically-modified foods whose impacts are uncertain, we end up with potentially toxic chemicals in our water because of a 'risk-based' approach to chemicals, we end up with sweatshops in foreign nations, we end up with perpetual war. And when I see permits continually granted for fracking in eastern US and mountaintop removal continuing unabated, I conclude from these data that however we've structured our society and government so far just isn't working. How is it that our land can be allowed to be scarred permanently? Any moderately concerned individual would think that such behaviour just isn't right, even if you can't scientifically prove it (because you probably don't have the ability and access to do so). Our best interests, yours and mine, are not in mind, particularly if you have a government and industry adopting a utilitarian approach to promotion of "welfare."

If there is any hope to move away from a continuing destruction of nature, it is this paradigm itself that must be changed. This is the paradigm that allows pollution of air and water and degradation of land. And this is the very paradigm that is being perpetuated elsewhere - we now have "industrialising" countries, where environmental and ecological norms are blindsided by the euphoria of "growth" and "development." This paradigm shift needs to happen first and foremost in our minds. If we delegitimise industrial capitalism, violent extraction of what nature provides, and the social norms that constrain our actions in our minds, we may be on the road to a meaningful collective action that respects nature and its people.

Further thoughts on risk

I have written about risk previously (here, here, here), which stems primarily from our limited mental capacities and a carelessness toward potentially disastrous outcomes. People take risks only if the desirable outcome provides much more "good" for them than "bad." Yet the way we have structured our society is that the potential good, or profit, is always concentrated, and the risks are diffuse and spread out over everyone else. The way corporations and government is set up is that those that make the decisions are furthest away from the non-desirable outcomes of an action, i.e. the risks. For example, after the BP-Macondo Well oil spill, their ex-CEO Tony Hayward, although having been battered in public, got a huge severance package, and millions of shares in BP. What about the risks of oil and exploratory drilling? Well, the Gulf of Mexico and the people and nature there will be bearing the worst outcomes of risk for many years to come. In this case, the risks of drilling exploratory wells were made evident by the spill. But do you know what? Even after the most disastrous oil spill in US history, Transocean, the rig operator, gave bonuses to its top executives for its "best year for safety in the company's history." Here's what an article from The New York Times says...

"Transocean moved on Monday to contain the damage from its description of 2010 as a good safety year, which appeared in a securities filing on Friday disclosing that its top executives received about 45 percent of their targeted performance bonuses for the year. 

Ihab Toma, Transocean’s executive vice president of global business, said in a statement on Monday that 'some of the wording in our 2010 proxy statement may have been insensitive in light of the incident that claimed the lives of 11 exceptional men last year and we deeply regret any pain that it may have caused.'"

When a nation decides to go to war, the risks and non-desirable outcomes of such a decision - potentially increased taxes, deaths of men and women, ecological destruction - are thrust upon the people of the nation, particularly the nation in which the war is being fought in. Those that made the decision to go to war do not ever go to the front lines; they are probably playing golf while others risk their lives for someone else's ego.

We've all heard about the precautionary principle - if an action is potentially dangerous, don't do it. Such is the argument made to stop using the atmosphere, the land and the water as dumping grounds, but to no avail. But it isn't that we aren't implementing the precautionary principle at all. Derrick Jensen argues that the way the precautionary principle is currently implemented is that if any action harms the profits of corporations, that is deemed potentially dangerous, and we don't do it. What if we were to, as Jensen suggests, move the burden of the risk is moved from everyone else to the one who is actually making a profit? People may argue that we have laws in place that "hold people accountable for their actions." Well, it is never the richest or most powerful person that gets into trouble. The less well off does, however. In fact, many leaders have immunity, and that immunity exists because no one would be willing to make decisions that are risky unless the immunity existed.

On rapid responses to technology

To clarify after having received some comments from my last post, what I mean by "technology" is the technology that has been brought into the world in the past few decades, the rate of whose further introduction has followed something like Moore's law. That rate is an incomprehensible one. This is the technology I will continue to talk about in the next few posts.

At our monthly Sustainability Ethics Roundtable, the topic was a timely one, for me at least: Technology, Risk, Ethics and Sustainability, and the discussion was led by Professor Andrew Maynard of the School of Public Health and the Risk Science Center. One of the significant issues with technology that he pointed out is that given the kind of technology being introduced, and the rate at which it is being introduced, we do not have even slightly adequate mechanisms in place to assess whether or not that technology is doing potential harm in the world; we do not have mechanisms in place to respond rapidly to the technology itself. This is somewhat related to what Jon Kabat-Zinn has said, where Kabat-Zinn speaks of an emotional and metaphysical understanding of technology. Regardless, the issue of response and understanding is kind of like the issue of water pollution or air pollution (of course, technology is intimately related to these issues) in which we know toxic chemicals are being released indiscriminately, and yet many laws in place do not allow for adequate protection of those natural gifts and human health. The way that our legal structure is set up, at least around environmental issues, is that significant evidence beyond an ill-defined threshold is required, gathered over a long period of time, before any judgement can be made about the toxicity of a technological process or output. (This raises the significant issue of time scales associated with negative outcomes.) During that time, people have made money, grown in power and grown in influence such that the end result is likely not a discontinuation of the technology, but rather maybe a Pigouvian tax on the technology. Such is the case with technologies that result in greenhouse gas emissions, but in this case, it is politically infeasible to even have a rudimentary tax on emissions.

It seems to me that there are several reasons why we don't have adequate mechanisms and checks on technology in our society, and I hope to elaborate on these in individual posts over the next few days.

• We equate social prosperity with economic prosperity, but we can only achieve economic prosperity if we can consume, and we can only satisfactorily consume if what we consume is something different that what we have already consumed. Consequently, social prosperity boils down to an increasing reliance on technological advancement. This means we feel that more technology is always better than less technology.
• We have convinced ourselves that if we don't do it, someone else will, so we should try to make a buck off of it.
• There is always a vested interest in the development of new technologies, such that its development necessitates its use.
• There is an increasing diffusion in those with access to technology.
• The potential negative impacts have much longer time scales for their emergence and recognition, but the positive impacts (increasing amounts of money) is necessarily shorter term.

There are likely several other reasons, but I don't claim to be an expert in knowing them all. But what I do feel is that we are continuing to live in a world in which we don't learn from our mistakes. We therefore will continue in a world in which we can do no harm, and that the answer to any problem caused because of technology is a newer technology. The Watson computer (or the analytic methods) developed by IBM is touted as only a good thing. But if we tried to ask those very developers the potential negative outcomes of their system, will they have an answer? Will they have adequately assessed the risks (not only in terms of money value) of such capabilities? I hope so. How might we envision a future in which not more is the answer, but appropriate is the approach? Just because technology is good for one thing does not mean it is good for, on, or to something else.

On risk

After a wonderful discussion about food in class last night, Lydia and Samantha stayed after class to keep me company while I ate (the students brought in wonderful food for a potluck). After Samantha left, Lydia and I talked for an hour about, of course, the environment and government, she being in the School of Public Policy. She used a term that was insightful, and one that we don't necessarily think about in our daily lives, and one that I have not used at all in the last year - risk.

We take risks all day, every day. Many of us don't realise that some actions are risky, but that doesn't stop us from doing them. Some of us decide to get into cars, and drive ourselves around. We put our complete faith in other people, hoping that they won't drive, from the other oncoming lane, into your lane, at fifty miles per hour. As a cyclist, you are even more vulnerable, and several people I know have been hit by cars. When we decide to heat food up in the microwave in plastic containers, we accept, whether we want to or not, the risks of plastics and plasticisers leeching into our food. When we decide to pass through a full-body scanner at the airport, there are risks to developing some complication, no matter how small those risks may be. In fact, the standards that are set by the government, be they for car crash safety, whether or not a plastic is microwavable, or for X-ray imaging, are set by evaluating the risks for all of these actions. There is nothing that is not risky with these sorts of standards. Someone, somewhere, will experience side effects of medication - we run that risk. Risk is inherent and calculated into whether or not an oil exploration company will decide to drill into an exploratory oil well - I am absolutely sure those at BP, Halliburton and Transocean had some conversation about the risk. Whether they decided to do something about it or not, that is a different story.

But in our daily lives, how much do we think about the risks of our actions ruining the environment? There almost seems to be a tacit acceptance of those risks in favour of "progress" (1, 2, 3) and "development" (1, 2). Any acceptance of how we have behaved so far only legitimises the acceptance of these risks. On the other hand, what do we risk if we change our behaviour? What do we risk if we did choose to live under the paradigm of sufficiency, rather than efficiency (1, 2, 3) and neoliberal economic growth? We risk the staggering and unquantifiable - we risk living with and within the limits and capacity of Earth rather than forcefully and violently against those boundaries. We risk being better to other people and animals. We risk not filling up landfills to their created capacity. We risk preservation and conservation. Are we willing to take that risk?