Are Science and Human Nature at Odds in Climate Change?

“Climate change is the greatest challenge of our time,” says Thomas F. Stocker, co-chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations-sponsored group of scientists who presented their rather definitive report on September 27, 2013. “In short,” Stocker observed, the anticipated change “threatens our planet, our only home.”[1] Not only are the stakes painfully high; human nature itself must come through, perhaps beyond its very nature, for homo sapiens species to make it through the twenty-second century.

The natural human proclivity to seek a (schizogenic) maximum rather than be content with sustaining an equilibrium steady-state had been all too evident in production management alone during the industrial revolution. So too was the human approbation of instant gratification, including attempts to obviate the costs incurred. Accordingly, the 2013 report provides the rather unwelcome news that “(h)uman influence has been detected in warming of the atmosphere and the ocean, in changes in the global water cycle, in reductions in snow and ice, in global mean sea level rise, and in changes in some climate extremes.”[2]

                                                     The red and purple areas saw increases in avg. temps. Image Source: IPCC

In fact, the report claims, “It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.”[3] Reflecting advances in the science (e.g., the models), the report “finds a 95 to 100 percent chance that most of the warming of recent decades is human-caused, up from the 90 to 100 percent chance cited in the last report, in 2007.”[4]  Even as the confidence in these findings is improved by 5 percent, such clarified empirical knowledge does not necessarily translate into a brighter future.

 

The likely consequences, according to the report, is a range of potential warming of between 2.7 and 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit, should the carbon dioxide level double from the amount in already in the atmosphere in 2013. According to the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in the E.U. the 2013 report is more conservative in its underlying assumptions than the previous report in 2007.

“To stand the best chance of keeping the planetary warming below an internationally agreed target of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) above the level of preindustrial times, . . . no more than one trillion metric tons of carbon can be burned and the resulting gas released into the atmosphere,” according to the 2013 report.[5] Just over half that amount had already been emitted since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and at the rate energy consumption was growing, the trillionth ton would be released somewhere around 2040.

That as of 2013 more than three trillion tons of carbon were still left in the ground as fossil fuels set the human species up for a confrontation with its own nature along the following lines: Can we keep our paws off the cookies freely within our reach that would make us sufficiently obese that we could die from our overeating? Moreover, just how strong is the species’ self-discipline as against the lure of the pleasure garnished from additional albeit baleful consumption? That 2012 saw record carbon emissions into the earth’s atmosphere suggests a rather dramatic disconnect between what the scientists report and how policy-makers, business practitioners, and consumers react. Incredibly, the two were going in opposite directions!

The flaw is likely in human nature itself. Specifically, the disproportionate worsening of an on-going, un-rectified situation receives too little weight in the human decision-making process on whether to engage immediate correctives (or even damage-control). “Continuing rapid emissions now is kicking the climate can down the road, leaving climate change for our children and grandchildren,” said Christopher B. Field, a scientist working at the time on another intergovernmental study on climate impacts. He added that the can “gets to be bigger, heavier and harder to move with each kick.”[6] Why would rational human beings kick the can nonetheless?

The answer could simply be that for the homo sapiens species through roughly 60,000 years, natural selection favored those humans who focused on the next meal or running away from the tiger closing in. Cognition and perception being limited, attention to solving problems that would turn harmful only much later could be expected to suffer. Put another way, for the vast majority of the species’ existence, societal problems inflicting only or primarily long-term harm did not exist because complex social living arrangements did not exist beyond the intimate relations of a small clan. We cannot expect natural selection to “turn on a dime.” After tens of thousands of years, suddenly humans live in large nations and work in big corporations. Our very design, while being well-adapted to the hunter-gatherer “stone age” human existence, has not sufficiently adapted (yet) to the radically changed agricultural and urban ways of life.

The sapiens name of our species means “knowledge” or “wisdom” in Latin. Such a prideful label notwithstanding, it is worth pondering whether human reason can compensate sufficiently for the lag in adaption. Does reason discount long-term costs (especially those that are low-probability but severe), or is human desire, still oriented to hunter-gatherer needs, as if still going forward even though the species only recently quickly turned left, performing the task? Nietzsche would likely point out that reasoning is simply contending instinctual urges striving to overcome each other. Unfortunately for modern man, the urges have been born and raised in a very different context and are behaving as though they were still in it. It could be that the quick (reckless?) development of complex social arrangements (politically, socially, and economically) will turn out to be our species’ undoing. That is to say, the sheer magnitude of the discounted long-term harm of our own doing could easily come about well before the process of natural selection will have had sufficient generations to effect enough adaptation to rid us of the tyranny of an antiquated human nature.

 

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[1] Justin Gillis, “U.N. Climate Panel Endorses Ceiling on Global Emissions,” The New York Times, September 27, 2013.

[2] “Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis,” The IPCC Fifth Assessment Report.
[3] Ibid.

[4] Gillis, “U.N. Climate.”

[5] “Climate Change 2013,” IPCC Report

[6] Ibid.

AIG’s Benmosche on Bonuses amid the Bailout

Robert Benmosche, former CEO Of American International Group (AIG)—one of the biggest corporate recipients of government bail-out (TARP) funds—likened the resistance by the American public and some government officials to partial bonuses being paid to hundreds of employees in the ill-fated financial products unit as akin to a racial lynching. Rather than debating the merits of the bonuses, I want to dissect Benmosche's statements for clues to his underlying mentality. 

The complete essay is at AIG's Benmosche on Bonuses amid the Bailout.

Traditional To Online Publishing: Why Is the Transition So Gradual?

Forging onward to where no one had gone before, the second decade of the 21^st century just catching its breath, the internet in 2011 was already generating the seeds that would subtly yet dramatically revolutionize the world of publishing. Even with traditional publishing houses already making plans to get into digital format as part of an envisioned hybrid market, the alternative of "blogging a book" (by subscription, or profiting off email lists or links to one's "real" books or services) could be expected to reduce manuscript submissions.  Additionally, the higher royalty percentages proffered by digital publishing companies that minimize costs by adapting the old "vanity press" model (without charging authors) could be expected to take a big bite out of the editorial and proof-reading model of the traditional publishing houses. To be sure, even just from their initial adaptations to broaden out to the digital format, such houses were not necessarily expected to become extinct as a species. Nevertheless, the future of publishing could already be seen as happening on the web. The enigma here pertains to why the economic slope toward easier (i.e., sans gatekeepers) and more lucrative publishing has been so sticky.

 

The juxtaposition of very different technologies illustrates the tectonic shift underway. Image Source: Alphapublication.com

 

Undoubtedly, some people found the unfathomable possibilities glimpsed from the internet to be all too alluring. Meanwhile, others held on for dear life to the melting icebergs of traditional publishing as though out of some instinctual reflex hardwired into the human genome. Viewing the shift as a Hegelian leap forward historically in the unfolding spirit of freedom already from the vantage-point of 2013, I found myself mystified as to the sheer gradualness of the massive shift. Inertia? Fear of the unknown? Stifling incomprehension of things very different? Whereas global warming had seemed to hit its threshold rather quickly and the internet was travelling at a rapid velocity through change—perhaps even warping the time-space dimensions in its universe—I found myself wondering when the threshold point of water pouring in would finally sink the vaunted publishing houses that seemed only to be fortifying themselves by closing doors more on passengers deemed marginal (profitwise).

 

I don’t believe the nature of the holdup is merely the refusal of the status quo to give into new theories, as described in Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Rather, I think the answer goes back to the staying power, evolutionarily speaking, of tens of thousands of years when homo sapiens lived and passed on genes in a steady-state environment without the artifices of complex societies.  Simply put, just as global warming in the Artic was surpassing the adaptive ability of some northern ecosystems already in 2013, the pace of qualitative change in publishing opportunities was travelling past the speed of the human cognitive-neurological capacity of sense-making, not to mention comprehension and responding to the new stimuli.

Like dinosaurs, traditional publishers could only feel their moorings loosening and wonder what hidden force was causing the tremor. Indeed, the very ground underneath was already slowly moving, with much more kinetic energy to come. Like rats on the Titanic just after the shutter from impact, writers with the least to lose were beginning to sniff around the novel ebook alternative, barely able to make out the foggy shape ahead of an industry without traditional publishers, or at least without their annoying yet presumably necessary gate-keeping function. Vintage labels being required for tenure, young scholars teaching at academic institutions could not very well follow the rats. Meanwhile, tenured scholars were generally too accustomed to their well-worn ways to grasp the potential in publishing online, whether essays (or even chapters in-process) on a blog or entire ebooks linked to a blog and Facebook. With Google getting into the knowledge dissemination “business” and non-profits like Coursera providing free online courses taught by scholars at some of the best universities around, the internet platforms were poised to offer those scholars with some academic freedom and freedom of mind various means to revolutionize not only publishing scholarship, but also doing research and teaching. As in the case of the traditional publishers, the “rub” lies in the capacity of the human mind to move from a long-standing paradigm to think along a new line based in assumptions that would have seemed nonsensical ten or so years earlier.

 

Attached to the industrial framework undergirding the status quo in the modern world that was slowly giving way to another (post-modernity?), traditional publishers reacted by instinct to the sense that the tide was beginning to go out. Specifically, the reactive, knee-jerk strategy hounded costs by letting marginally-profitable authors go in order to prop up profits. It does not necessarily follow that the resulting level of quality would be higher.

 

By 2013, being published online was a formidable alternative to submitting a manuscript to an editor. That some well-established authors had already taken the plunge, even walking from their long-established publishers out onto clear ice with little way of ascertaining its thickness gave the up-and-coming writers enough confidence that they, too, could venture out on the ice without falling through.

 

Whereas the world of traditional publishing was built around scarcity, which could be controlled in order to gain pricing power, the internet platforms thrive in the midst of abundance. Whereas traditional editors are oriented to controlling the content that gets through, the tech mentality is geared to easing the way to publishing so as to maximize content. Whereas traditional publishing depends on mass production of content that can fetch a good price—the manufacturing model of the industrial revolution being still the immediate context—online media companies view themselves as providing services while the users contribute the content.

 

I suspect, however, that the scarcity-abundance dichotomy is overdrawn. Eddies of original content online may in fact be able to capture revenue, assuming that particular users do not “steal” the content by posting it on alternative sites open to the public. Although illegal in terms of copyright law (unless the author allows for duplication or reposting), “stealing” does not seem to quite fit the world of the internet where information is so freely available. Indeed, copyright law itself may turn into a leaky sieve that must inevitably give way on the internet. As in the case of laws forbidding pot, any presumed sense of control may finally be deemed illusory. Assuming sufficient enforcement of copyright law and the existence of writing that is well-crafted, unique, and of value to readers, the internet may turn out to be a spectrum of information ranging from free to highly monetized. Blogs that are essentially diaries will probably remain open-access, whereas on the other extreme ebooks will be priced sufficiently that writers can make a living from them (perhaps by building a large readership up first through a cost-leadership strategy).

 

Even for a given contributor of content, the spectrum may apply. Established scholars, for example, might sell an ebook for a decent price to recoup all the work that went into the research and writing. The same scholar might embed lecture videos in free blog posts that together make up a “book” or “course” that serves as a vehicle by which to bring certain ideas to as many minds as possible. Just as there are pitfalls in “stealing” suddenly not making sense, the potential for leaps in creativity  can be glimpsed just from the sudden obsolescence of  “book” and “course” in figuring out just what something never before seen online is.  “For this world in its present form is passing away.”[1]

 

According to Michael Wolff, traditional publishers focus “on what ought, or what ought not, to be said.” They hold the cards—the control—and they relish it. Like horses with blinders on, they “can only look on in wonder and stupefaction” at what blogging and ebook platforms have been doing.[2] Particularly baffling, attempts to control scarcity in the midst of abundance in order to gain pricing power can only be futile. From the standpoint of the industrial mass-production framework that assumes scarcity, that it is the content that is the product and has market value, and that mass production is necessary to capitalize on economies of scale, it’s all about controlling the scarcity to gain pricing power.  Where the dissemination of content cannot be controlled, the traditional editor would sooner face exhaustion than make the cognitive leap to the new assumptions that don’t seem to make sense.[3]

 

In short, as the web evolves like an ecosystem trying to keep up with accelerating climate change, the apparently sudden arrival of new species on the internet naturally confronts the eye and leaves the human mind grasping for linguistic straws that are too brittle to bend and thus to make sense out of the foreign things. As a result, the lag or gap between the emergence of a potentially fecund online opportunity and actual usage on a large scale can be considerable. I suspect the mind of a homo sapiens can only take so much of the unrecognizable before disorientation as an obstacle in itself to be surmounted kicks in. Because the internet is not based on the old assumptions of the industrial revolution, the human mind is particularly vulnerable to crashing when trying to use new apps or platforms and stubbornly resistant to rebooting using a different operating system and browser. By implication, tech people could help the rest of us out by putting more effort into including basic explanations of what it is that they have created and how to get started.   

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[1] 1 Cor. 7:31.

[2] Michael Wolff, “’Reader’s Digest’ For the Digital Era,” USA Today, September 15, 2013.

[3] If you have seen the ending of the film, The Others (starring Nicole Kidman), you have an idea of how disorienting it can be to have one’s fundamental assumptions turned inside-out. It is as though societal assumptions somehow get infused into our very being. Not only do we resist any extractions and replacements, many of us may instinctually freeze-up from the sheer extent of disorientation in stumbling upon the unrecognizable alien.

Business Culture Forming Higher Education

“Publish or perish” is the infamous mantra of those intrepid scholars who work at research universities and many prestigious Liberal Arts & Sciences colleges dotting the map of the world. The need to demonstrate regular output is perhaps nowhere more stressed (hence, stress) than in the United States. As if the declining number of tenure positions (amid increasing reliance on adjuncts, not coincidentally) at colleges and universities in the U.S. were not enough of a challenge for the newly-minted doctors aspiring to the intellectual freedom that goes with the protection of tenure, that the young scholars are increasingly being subjected to an "assembly-line" process wherein faculty administrators treat their junior colleagues' published journal articles like chocolates on a conveyer belt puts scholarship at odds with itself and thus is utterly self-defeating from the standpoint of society gaining new knowledge.

The full essay is at "Business Culture Forming Higher Education"

The Blogosphere: A Nebula Spawning Nascent Business Models?

It is certainly no understatement to say that the world of publishing will never be the same. In fact, change may have already become the new constant in the industry by the time ebooks took off, thanks mainly to the phenomenon known as “blogging.” I suspect this term is already obsolete, due to the differentiation that has taken place under the rubric, and yet we are like turtles even just in noticing the need for change to keep up with change.  How, in other words, might blogging catch up to itself?

The term “blog” has come to cover such a vast terrain of writing genres and purposes that additional descriptors are often necessary to convey a blogger’s particular niche.  For example, Robert Reich, a lawyer who teaches at Berkeley, draws on his professional expertise and government experience in blogging on public policy. He cross-posts on the Huffington Post so his ideas will reach more people. Meanwhile, a retired grandmother undoubtedly exists out there in the blogosphere, writing about her grandchildren—what they have been doing lately, perhaps even a picture of what one drew in art class and a video of another learning how to skate. Being on Facebook to keep in touch with old friends who live far away, the grandmother might provide links to the text, pictures and videos on her home page. Because the lawyer and grandmother are doing very different things, the terms “blog” and “blogger” have become inadequate to the task of distinguishing the various types of blogs. That is, the terms have become too vague as descriptors (and even misleading).

How, for instance, might we distinguish the bloggers whose blogs are essentially businesses from the bloggers who blog as a hobby? How can we distinguish between essays written by professionals and scholars and diary entries written by teenagers? I suspect that because blogging began closer to the latter (as depicted in the motion picture, Julie and Julia), the term itself (as well as “a blog”) carries a certain “inertia-bias” that subtly undercuts the credibility of content beyond “what I did today.” Given the rate of change in the “industry,” I would have expected the “comet trail” to be shorter (i.e., less residual reputation). In short, we need some new terms to differentiate the branches now that they have grown so far from each other; merely pointing to the tree trunk is no longer sufficient to indicate a particular branch. A better analogy might be the expanding space of the universe eventuating in more distance between galaxies. At some point, two clusters (of galaxies) should be classified as in different regions of space—space itself having expanded sufficiently—because one locater term alone will have become too vague for either cluster to be located easily. 

Generally speaking, blogging has come to reflect the complexity and diversity that exist within our species. What Robert Reich “blogs” about is eons away from the blogging depicted in Julie & Julia. I instinctively resist admitting to people that I “blog” because I have seen the dismissive response. So I tend to tell people that I write essays applying academic theory to current events in ethics, business, and government. “They can be found at my web-site,” I demur—gilding the lily so as to stave off any implication that I’m posting recipes on a blog. I referred to my site as a newsletter until someone told me that more credibility goes with the term, “a blog.” As Jack Nicholson said in one of his films, “Never a break!”

The other area where the blogosphere has been slow to catch up with itself—as if it were travelling close to the speed of light in slower time—is monetization. I suspect that dirty word has suffered from the residual tail of inertia wherein “diary” or “political pundit” is still the default for “blog.” Who in their right mind wants to pay to read what some stranger did the day before, or what Joe the plumber thinks about Congress (Joe ran and lost—so much for Palin’s pig-tails). However, where Robert Reich is applying his legal or governmental knowledge and experience, he has every right to expect his writing to fetch a good price. I have drawn the line between essays like this one that are only loosely analytical and others that involve academic work on my part. At some point, the presumption that what I have spent decades learning should be free (as if by some right) becomes insulting.

Therefore, along with the new terminology that is necessary to distinguish between disparate sites, the monetization spectrum from ebooks to online diaries needs to be demarcated—say, for example, in distinguishing between a scholar’s book or article in the making, a lawyer’s critique of a court ruling or a proposed law, a novel in the making by a new writer, a budding political pundit’s view on how government officials are doing, and a teenager’s advice on the perfect date or how to hit a home-run (or both!). From a monetization standpoint, these qualitatively-different contents should not all be monetized at the same subscription price (or amount of advertising). In fact, not all of them should be monetized! Staying with the terms “blog” and “blogging” prevents us from making such distinctions, which I contend are intrinsic, albeit clogged up. Under the circumstances, I am amazed that some “bloggers” have been able to treat their “blogs” as businesses and can rely on them to make a living. Considering the fusion of not only books and courses, but also “radio shows” and videos with websites (or “blogging”), pressure will only build until value meets price.[1]

      The "Crab" nebula is 6,500 light-years from Earth and 5 light-years across. The nebula is the remnants of a massive star that collapsed and exploded (i.e., a supernova). New suns and planets form out of the elements. Viewed from Earth as a "visiting star," the nebula was first recorded by Chinese astronomers in 1054 CE. Interestingly, that was the time of the Great Schism between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches. 

Lest it be said, “Oh, the market will do that,” the blogosphere can be likened to a stellar nebula in which only the faint outlines of heavenly spheres are as yet discernable to the naked eye. We might have a nebula in search of business models not yet extant. Hence, this essay is a sort of plunger designed to push the clogging pulp through the pipes and out of the way, so new water can flow, facilitating a new movement. What is needed of course is brain-power, not shit, matching the thought that went into the software that gave rise to the blogosphere in the first place.

Like global warming outstripping the ability of ecosystems in the far North to adapt, the blogosphere is so foreign to us that our ability to adapt to it cognitively (and strategically as entrepreneurs) has so far been outstripped; so too has our perceptual and cognitive ability to update terminology. Assuming rather simplistically that market competition will somehow squeeze out new, more discerning terms, and novel business models, each capable of connecting to a particular type of "blog" in the still-forming industry, is naive. Instead, innovative strategic and "critical" (i.e., assumption-questioning) thinking, along with trial and error, is necessary before competition can have a chance to fine-tune or reject the various models that have been introduced. Treating all the requisite innovation as technological is like ignoring dark matter in solving gravity equations.[2]

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1. MOOCs, or very large online courses, demonstrate just how difficult it is to create a viable business model when the industry is so new and unlike any existing industry. I suspect the model wherein users are charged only if for verified-identity certificates will fail because they do not enable college-credit. More of a difference is necessary from the content that available without charge. Of course, the college or university whose faculty member teaches the MOOC benefits from the publicity, and the MOOC non-profit could perhaps support itself via advertising and/or charging the participating universities a fee (though that might discourage participation).
2. "Blog" picture source: www.dailyblogtips.com

Insurance Companies Gaming the States’ (Flawed) Regulatory System

In September, 2013, New York pulled out of a framework that the States had agreed to try out. Known as “principle-based reserving,” freed insurance actuaries from having to follow statutory requirements in their calculations, allowing the actuaries “to use their own data and assumptions."[1] That compromise has resulted in such a loose framework that it had made the “gamesmanship and abuses” in the industry ever worse, according to Ben Lawsky, the financial services superintendent of New York. A sample of sixteen insurance companies were found to have increased their reserves by a combined total of only $668 million, far short of the $10 billion that would have been required had the companies had to follow the statutory formulae.

The full essay is in Cases of Unethical Business, available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.com.  

Bank Profits Hit Record as Wages Stagnate in the U.S.: A Tale of Two Cities

In the United States, executives have been compensated much more than their own non-supervisory workers. This has been so in not only absolute terms, but also relative to other countries. As a first step to getting to an explanation, the sheer magnitude of the gap in the U.S. must be digested.

          The magnitude of the difference between the U.S. and all the other countries listed here suggests that the ratio of 475 to 1 is artificial rather than natural.  Moreover, the different ratios point to differences in underlying cultural values. Image Source: www.politifact.com

According to the Associated Press, American “banks earned more from April through June [2013] than during any quarter on record, aided by a steep drop in losses from bad loans.”[1] The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. reported that the banking industry earned $42.2 billion in that quarter, up 23 percent from the second quarter of 2012. Banks' losses on loans decreased 30.7% from a year earlier to $14.2 billion, the lowest in six years, and lending increased 1 percent from the first quarter. Losses on loans fell to the lowest level since the third quarter of 2007. Home equity loans showed the greatest declines in losses.[2]

CNNMoney reported that the nation’s biggest banks were expected to hand out more in compensation (including $23 billion in bonuses) in 2013 than they had done in 2009. The total compensation of CEOs had increased by 876 percent between 1978 and 2012.[3] The FDIC report shows that the largest banks continued to drive the industry's profits while smaller institutions have struggled. Banks with assets exceeding $10 billion, including Bank of AmericaCorp., Citigroup Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Wells Fargo, accounted for about 82 percent of the industry's earnings in the second quarter of 2013. Most of them had recovered in part from federal bailout money and record-low borrowing rates—neither one warranting higher compensation. For instance, the Fed’s bond purchases had been keeping long-term interest rates low.

On the very same day the FDIC announced the record profits, fast food workers across the U.S. walked off the job to protest low wages and poor treatment. Roughly “200 protesters including employees from McDonald's and Wal-Mart and members of the Chicago Teachers Union and the Service Employees International Union gathered outside the Rock N' Roll in downtown Chicago. Sixty cities joined in with their own protests. "It's not livable," Tyree Johnson, who said he's been a McDonald's employee for 21 years, charged. "I've been dedicated to McDonald's for the past 21 years. I still make $8 an hour. "I'm tired of choosing between paying rent and eating," said worker Tamara Best-Watkins to the crowd. "I'm tired of choosing between taking my daughter out and paying rent." Speaking at the protest, U.S. House representative Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) noted that McDonald’s CEO “makes in two or three hours at work what his employees make in a year.”[4]

With the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour having remained unchanged since 2009,  the demonstrators demanded a $15-per-hour minimum wage and protections against retaliation for joining a union.[6]  Hourly wages for nonfarm workers had fallen 3.8 percent in the first quarter of 2013; that drop surpassed any other since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began keeping track of wages in 1947.[7] Hourly worker pay had risen just 1.9 percent in 2012, even as the consumer price index increased 1.8 percent. That was the third-weakest annual increase in hourly pay since 1947, topping only the 1.4 percent gain in 2009 and a 1.8 percent gain in 1994.[8]

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, an eighteenth-century European philosopher, would label such fiscal inequality as artificial, rather than natural. Even though artificial inequalities are not hard-wired into human nature, we may have made them virtually impossible to expunge from the American political economy. Perhaps just viewing the widening gap as artificial could be a first step back from the brink of social instability and maybe even revolution, in spite of the odds established and enforced by the military-industrial complex.

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1. The Associated Press, “Bank Profits Hit Record $42.2 Billion in Second Quarter,” The Huffington Post, August 29, 2013.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.
4. Kim Bellware, “Fast Food Workers Protest in Chicago for Living Wages, Better Treatment Amid Nationwide Strikes,” The Huffington Post, August 29, 2013.

5. The Associated Press, “Bank Profits Hit Record $42.2 Billion in Second Quarter,” The Huffington Post, August 29, 2013.

6. Mark Gongloff, “U.S. Suffers Biggest Pay Drop on Record, as Workers Squeezed Tighter,” The Huffington Post, June 5, 2013.

7. The Associated Press, “Bank Profits Hit Record $42.2 Billion in Second Quarter,” The Huffington Post, August 29, 2013.

8. Mark Gongloff, “U.S. Suffers Biggest Pay Drop on Record, as Workers Squeezed Tighter,” The Huffington Post, June 5, 2013.

Political Protests in Wisconsin and the Middle East: A Common Denominator?

Imagine some of the blue-collar unionists in Wisconsin's Capitol in February, 2011 suddenly "losing it," insulting officers of the Capitol Police keeping an eye on the protest going on in the rotunda. Due to a video made public (and related news stories), a clan of officers taking down just one protester, who was actually there merely to observe a protest two years later, we don't have to imagine such a scene, albeit "downsized" from that of protesters en masse being attacked.   

     From the video: The young man being thrown to the floor and jumped on had last made reference to his right of peaceful protest, which the police presumably punished him for anyway. How much power do rights have if force refuses to recognize them?  Image Source: thenorthwestern.com

Had there been a full-blown confrontation in February, 2011, imagine how quickly the barefoot dancers would have run in horror past all the blood, open wounds, and death. The distance between Madison and Manama back in February, 2011 would have been significantly narrowed, but not eliminated. A common denominator does indeed exist: the propensity of human nature to abuse a monopoly of power and to view other people as objects rather than ends in themselves.

The entire essay is at "Political Protests"

All-You-Can-Eat Buffets: An Unethical Sandwich?

Restaurant chains that advertise their “all you can eat” buffets, such as Golden Corral and Old Country Buffet, present us with an interesting case in human resource management and business ethics. The structure of the system is particularly interesting from an ethical perspective.

                         Locations of Golden Corral restaurants in the U.S. Hardly an insignificant chain. Image Source: Find.mapmuse.com

The full essay is in The full essay is in Cases of Unethical Business: A Malignant Mentality of Mendacity, available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.com.

U.S. Justice Department Opposes American-US Air Merger: Justice as Fairness?

After a decade of “rapid consolidation” in the U.S. airline industry, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit in mid-2013 to block the proposed merger between American Airlines and US Airlines. The question I investigate here is whether the government’s opposition to this merger is fair to the stockholders and employees (including managers) of the two airlines. Given the undoubted proliferation of empirical studies on the probable impacts of the merger on the industry (e.g., competition), the ethical question of justice as fairness may have slipped between the cracks.

At the time, the merger was expected to create the world’s largest airline, not to mention the largest American (or US) airline. Even though the government had blocked the merger of AT&T and T-Mobile two years earlier and forced Anheuser-Busch InBev to significantly change the terms of its takeover of the brewer of Corona earlier in 2013, the New York Times characterized the antitrust division of the U.S. Justice Department as having “a newly aggressive approach.”[1] The division had allowed a “nearly unfettered run of mergers in recent years.”2] Even the regulators were on board.
 

                                                  Should these two airlines merge?   Image Source: NYT

Beginning in 2008—the year of the financial crisis—the Justice department approved the mergers of Delta and Northwest, United and Continental, and Southwest and AirTran. “While those mergers helped the industry return to profitability and brought more stability, they also led to higher fares, regulators said. A union between American and US Airways would take the consolidation too far, . . . hurting consumers and leading to substantially less competition and higher airfares and fees, and to less service to many airports.”[3] Eric Holder, the U.S. Attorney General, said his department was determined to ensure “robust competition in the marketplace.”[4]

According to the Justice Department, the merger would result in four airlines controlling more than 80 percent of the U.S. market for commercial air travel. Whether there has been much real competition in what may actually be oligarchic markets in the U.S. is a question for another day. Here, the question is whether being the last in line, reaching the counter just after closing, is fair. Of course, the analogy breaks down in part because American and US Airways did not have to wait for the other mergers to have been approved. The question, better stated, is whether being the merger likely to reduce competition below a threshold is fair to the owners and employees of the two airlines, given the fact that the Justice Department had approved other mergers in the industry in the preceding five years.

That the “vast majority of domestic airline routes were already highly concentrated” suggests that maybe the Justice Department should not have gone on a sort of spending spree in allowing all of the preceding mergers.[5] Put another way, if the overwhelming number of existing routes were already highly consolidated, why all of a sudden was another merger too much due to its impact on competition? Is there much competition in a highly concentrated market? If not, then why didn’t the government draw the line earlier, opposing one or two of the earlier mergers? Robert Mann, a former airline executive, has characterized the Justice Department as “late to the game with concerns over airline industry consolidation.”[6] Given that American sought the merger to avoid bankruptcy, should the stockholders and employees of American as well as US Airways suffer from the government hitting the brakes because it had been speeding?

On the other hand, consequentially speaking, the proposed merger was expected to harm consumers, perhaps even more than the previous mergers had. The consequences of the last guy putting a card on top of a house of cards are very different than the preceding consequences—hence the last guy. In this sense, having a threshold of risk makes sense. The risk to competition had become too great, even if this was due to the preceding mergers. That the government should probably have raised the hurdles higher for those mergers does not mean that government should stand aside as consumers have to pay “hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars” more as a result of the proposed merger, according to William Baer, the assistant U.S. attorney general in charge of the anti-trust division.[7]

Who should pay—the consumers or the stockholders and employees of American and US Airways? Is there a third option that is not averse to the financial interests of any of these groups? If not, who should pay? If the airline industry was already heavily consolidated, presumably at the expense of competition, implementing Holder’s aim would entail going beyond disapproving the proposed merger to pro-actively break up all of the existing major airlines based in the United States. The airlines coming out of such an act would have different ownerships as well as managements and boards of directors. All of the mega-airlines would be treated the same in being broken into two or three airlines each.

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1.  Jad Mouawad, “U.S., Filing Suit, Moves to Block Airline Merger,” The New York Times, August 13, 2013.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

Rousseau on Inequalities in Society: An Instance of Kantian Enlightenment?

Kant defines enlightenment as “man's emergence from his inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another.”[1] By making public use, Kant means “that use which anyone may make of it as a man of learning addressing the entire reading public."[2] By sufficient freedom, Kant has in mind that the ideas that threaten the power of the guardians or institutional/societal rules are not barred.  

For example, an enlightened Roman Catholic priest would publish ideas questioning and even criticizing Church dogma when he is acting as a scholar, even though he would fulfill his duty in his conduct as a priest by defending those very teachings. A priest could thus go public as a heretic as long as he does so on his own time as a scholar and member of society, and an enlightened bishop would tolerate the scholar’s freedom to think and publish outside the box.

                                                                                       Image Source: builddiscipline.com

Rousseau would object to Kant’s prescription for how to become enlightened and Kant would object in turn to Rousseau's preference for the state of nature over society and the associated expansion of reasoning. Does Rousseau fit Kant's concept of enlightenment even though Kant would object to some of Rousseau's ideas? 

To read the entire essay, including whether Kant would have to admit that his notion of enlightenment applies to Rousseau, please click on "Rousseau as Enlightened?"

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1. Immanuel Kant, AnAnswer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? (World ebook Library).

2. Ibid.