Some thoughts on motivation and responsibility

Today, a major computer network problem disabled most of the mechanical engineering department, and wiped out huge parts (and for at least one person, the entirety) of dozens of people's work--data, computer codes, everything. The problem affected our lab server, too. We store most everything we work on in our lab on this server, and we even back it up after that. We knew that the IT guys were probably being flooded by people shouting and screaming and complaining to and at them the entire day. However, the circumstances of the entire situation, which we talked about and debated endlessly today, were such that our lab group did not find it burdensome on the IT guys for them to get our lab server up and running by the "end of the day". Honestly, though, there shouldn't have been an "end of the day" for them today, for, it is their duty and responsibility to fix things that go wrong, and the expectations are such that when something major like this does go wrong, that, well, work turns into responsibility. Responsibility seems to arise more fundamentally because it seems like someone in the IT department caused the problem. It was sad to hear then that when my lab mate went downstairs at 5:05 pm to see if the computer was fixed, he found the IT office empty and the door locked. Everyone had left, like workers punching their time cards.

It got Mohammad and I talking about motivation and responsibility. As individuals, the only responsibilities we are made to think of are paying taxes, bringing home a paycheck, and promptly spending more than that paycheck using our credit cards. (We are indeed encouraged to do so.) But apart from that, we are faced with few responsibilities. We see no responsibility to our neighbourhoods and communities, no responsibility to our watersheds, no responsibility or obligation to participate in this so-called democracy. We let things happen as they may, each person fending for themselves.

In my entire education, it is only in India that I was talked to about individual responsibility. I wonder how much citizenship and individual responsibility is being talked about in schools in America. Indeed, in our university education system, individual responsibility and citizenship are never mentioned. We are always taught about collectives. We study microeconomics and economies of scale. Depending on your major, you may talk about issues of large scale oppressive systems. Yet, we never study home economics, or responsibility to our neighbours. We are treated as grains of sand, and told that our individual actions and decisions don't matter. But when aggregated over, we suddenly end up with supply and demand curves that dictate large-scale and local policies that affect our individual lives. How do we, as individuals, conduct ourselves responsibly in the world? And how does that responsibility unfold in situations when we've made mistakes?

And so, to come back to the IT guys today who left without reparations after a major fault of their own causing, I wonder, do they lack motivation? I can imagine that someone that has spent the bulk of their life doing something that hasn't satisfied them, or has left much to be desired, has lost motivation. And when you see millions of people drudging away their lives in jobs that leave massive voids in people's happiness and spirituality, expecting responsibility in the workspace can seem utopian. How does the loss of motivation in our lives, stemming from the practical slavery we are put through for our lives, affect the responsibility we feel towards the world and ourselves?

On the human scale

The way our society is structured is such that we try to maximise "efficiency." (I, as well as a guest blogger, have written about this concept of efficiency, and what we lose because of it, here, here, here, here, here and here.) What this leads to, under current notions of economics ("free-market" capitalism with its baseless assumptions of perfect competition, no barriers to entry, perfect information, etc. etc.) and building, is called economies of scale. What this basically results in is the ability to produce the most amount of something for the maximised possible monetary profit. What this also ends up doing, however, is something that is a shared story across the country, and most of the world - the conglomeration of smaller entities into bigger and bigger and bigger and meaner entities - corporate takeovers, industrial farms, massive financial companies too big to fail, etc. We have "globalised" almost everything imaginable - companies, manufacturing, growing, and disease. What we end up creating are entities with "lives" of their own, so big and powerful that smaller humans can get trampled along the way, without redress and remorse. In many places across the country, our buildings have shown similar trends over time. Take a look at this picture of the built environment in downtown Detroit, and how it has changed over time.

 

Apart from the obvious increase in vacant land, we observe that the size of structures, in general, has increased over time. We have ended up building bigger and bigger structures that have a tendency to make one walking through it or standing beside it insignificant. Of course, many of these structures are visual manifestations of institutions and organisations I just described. What this tells me is that we value the lives of careless institutions and organisations over the lives of the humans, plants, animals and nature that guarantee their existence.

Such scales are seen in landfills, too. Here are some pictures and numbers about some of the largest landfills in the nation (you can read the articles here and here).

What I think is necessary to address when talking about issues of our impact on the environment is a look at scale. It is absolutely not possible to tread lightly with big things. Big tractors compact soil, oxen do not. Big power plants require massive amounts of fossil fuels, while living with less energy wouldn't necessitate the rape of mountains. Big buildings take a lot to erect, while smaller ones recognise our place in the world and the grander scheme of things.

What we lose through "efficiency" - feedback

Tim told me this morning that in yesterday's post, I have confused industrialisation with efficiency. He says that we choose and want to be efficient in everything, including non-industrial agriculture and food production. I see what he is saying, and I agree with him. Maybe I have confused or not delineated between the two concepts thoroughly enough. What I am trying to get at is the notion of trying to get more for less (or more for the same amount of input), which is exactly what industrialisation is, and which is exactly what efficiency is. When we choose to apply fossil-fuel based energy and chemicals to agriculture, we think that we may be able to increase "yield," or the amount of output per area of land (which, I emphasise, is not true in practice). But the concept of "efficiency" is also the foundation behind genetic modification and the development of seeds and crops that are better able to survive given inputs of industrialisation. Through this process of increasing "efficiency," we deplete the natural balances of nutrients in soil and water, resulting in poorer tasting food. What is then lost is the experience of food - no one can deny that better tasting food makes you feel better, mentally and physically. If the notion of "efficiency" is to be applied to non-industrial agriculture, it would entail treating the land and what feeds it in a way that doesn't overburden it (exactly the opposite of industrial agriculture), and respecting the land enough so as to get the best tasting food.

To Eleanor's point that efficiency and industrialisation has allowed us to taste foods that only exist in other parts of the world, and that industrialisation feeds the world. There is a grain of truth in what she says, but I think what industrialisation is good at doing is underestimating the costs of itself. "Economies of scale" applied to industrialisation are good at providing "low-cost" food to people, but the costs, especially environmental and social, are completely neglected. When we go to Wal-Mart or Kroger, we do not pay for the costs of petroleum or lost livelihoods of small farmers. (Those costs are indeed covered by subsidies.) Furthermore, even though Americans have continued to spend less and less on food, and it is possible to get entire "meals" at fast-food restaurants for $2, the number of people going hungry locally and globally is still remarkable, and nothing that industrialisation "promises" can address that. It is also undeniable that industrialisation leads to a decrease in the quality of food, and it is debatable whether you can call industrial, fast food "food."

With the issue of flavour, I am speaking to the mental and social impacts that good tasting food can have. Maybe people will eat bad-tasting food if a gun was put to their head, or that was all that was available on a particular day. But once you have tasted good food, the smell, flavour and experience stay with you lifelong. I do not believe we have to sacrifice the quality of food for quantity - Cuba has resisted this sacrifice since petrochemical exports to the country stopped with the fall of the Soviet Union, through innovative approaches of biodynamism and organic urban agriculture.

Cities

"As recently as 1950, only 30% of the world's population was urbanised. Today, more than half live in urban centres. The developed world is now about 80% urban and this is expected to be true for the entire planet by around 2050, with some 2 billion people moving to cities, especially in China, India, southeast Asia and Africa."

This came from a commentary article, "A unified theory of urban living" in Nature, on the 21st of October, 2010. Of course, when we think of cities, we think of concentrations of people, culture, money and energy. Cities, interestingly, share many "universal features," claim authors Luis Bettencourt and Geoffrey West of the Santa Fe Institute and Los Alamos National Laboratory. "Doubling the population of any city requires only about an 85% increase in infrastructure, whether that be total road surface, length of electrical cables, water pipes or number of petrol stations." This is because of efficiency gains and higher quality services that aren't necessarily available in smaller places. We can view this in a neoclassical economic sense - economies of scale.

Paul today pointed me to the latest Radiolab, which is about Cities. In this episode, Bettencourt and West discuss the "economies" of living beings - as animals grow larger and more complex, the amount of energy it takes to maintain cells and live is actually less than it would be if you linearly scaled up the resources needed for smaller animals. In that sense, cities are kind of like animals...or are they? What we fail to realise, say Bettencourt and West, is that as cities grow, and people continue to move to cities, their access to resources increases, as do their wages, and interactions with people with different ideas. This can lead to, counterintuitively, more consumption of resources, although the efficiency with which those resources are consumed is higher than say a suburban area. At the same time, it is very rare that cities die. Now, there are of course, shrinking cities (like Youngstown, Cleveland, St. Louis and Detroit), as John Gallagher talks about in his book, Reimagining Detroit. But if we continue to move to cities, as is the trend noted by Bettencourt and West, will our use of resources decline?