How can you tell if a multinational media conglomerate has been using your computer?

So, Andrew Keen's book The Cult of the Amateur has stirred up quite a bit of cyberspace dust recently, dividing the (fairly small) world of people who care about the cultural future of the web into the reactionaries (Keen et al), the evangelists (Tim O'Reilly et al), and everyone in the middle (me et al) who just want to watch the Pride of Arizona Marching Band perform "Fitter Happier" and remind Alex Trebek that he's sitting on a goldmine.

I can't decide what I'm more sick of: the webvangelists who can't stop telling us how Web 2.0 will revolutionize every aspect of human thought and culture, or the weblitists who've deluded themselves into thinking that Youtube is to blame for the collapsing standards of Western cultural discourse.

Keen has a disturbing tendency to red-bait, and a fundamentally skewed concept of the purpose of culture and its attendant industries. But I have to admit to sharing some of his panic at the explosion of Web 2.0, albeit for different reasons. Keen views the combination of narcissism, amateurism, and an infinite multiplicity of messages as a culturally corrosive force, quite akin to communism, in his framing. Those things don't bother me so much, since people were amateur narcissists long before Google, and using market strategies to discourage a culture of self-obsession seems bizarre and way off the mark.

What scares me is not a cultural collapse, or a cultural revolution, but a cultural grey-out. (check out Bruno Nettl's The Study of Ethnomusicology for the origin of the term)

Why? Because, as a recent Bear Stearns report confirms, the long tail is growing and user-generated content (UGC) is here to stay. Which means there's money in it. Which means it will aggregate and consolidate. Which means it will blend, desaturate, and flatten out. Don't believe me? Turn on the radio, or watch ABC for a day, or strike up a conversation about politics with someone at a bar. Or, for that matter, get on MySpace. Grey-out, be it rhetorical, aesthetic, ethical, or whatever, has become the norm in mainstream media and discourse, for all the reasons we're familiar with. It tends to follow market activity and, where a desire to consume can be monetized, it bleaches out all but the most palatable and deliverable hues.

There's no doubt that UGC exposes us to fresh and wonderful ways of looking at the world -- made fresh and wonderful primarily by their lack of resemblance to the stifling similarity of mainstream culture. It marks an incredible (if somewhat narcissistic and/or voyeuristic) sea change in our culture. But Bear Stearns knows what they're talking about, and when they anticipate the emergence of new "aggregation vehicles" to deliver this new form of content, they're also anticipating a structuralization and consolidation of UGC into consumable product for wider and wider swaths of the buying population. We might see Youtube as a friendly "aggregation vehicle" right now, with a vast library and a friendly tagging system to sort it, but how's eBay treating us these days? What about Starbucks? That's where the world of UGC is headed, facilitated in large part by the technology and the applied ideology of Web 2.0. Here I'm making a distinction between the anti-corporate, democratic, localized, user-focused ideals professed by Web 2.0 proponents and the reality of Web 2.0's existence in the marketplace -- MySpace (aka Murdoch), Youtube (aka Google), Flickr (aka Yahoo!), and Second Life (aka...well, Second Life. It corporatized itself).

Plus, though corporations play their crucial rule in grey-out, they are not the only actors, nor the most important. The bulk of the responsibility falls on us. I'm afraid that, to some degree, I support Andrew Keen's assessment of human beings as cultural agents. We're great at it, but also we totally suck. When our agency as consumers intersects with our agency as cultural practitioners on a massive scale, the former tends to win out. This, incidentally, explains why for me the struggle is to activate people as economic agents, where their consumption, labor, and values can clash together to a productive end. Ukelele videos and second-life avatars may teach us about ourselves by opening new paradigms of human culture and interaction, but ultimately Web 2.0 is permeated and controlled by consumption. The cost of the product happens to be (more or less) free at the moment, but the basic transaction remains the same. Folks who like to make money are attracted to transactions. They especially love short, repetitive, autonomic, pleasant and convenient transactions, because they get the most bang per buck. UGC fits that mold perfectly.

Is the greyout of Web 2.0 any more worrisome or destructive than the grey-out of FM radio? Not really. But the infuriating paradox in this case is that Web 2.0 is designed to connect you with your special niche in the long tail, giving you respite from the blandness of the rest of the curve. In the old days of Web 1.0 and bulletin boards, the simple effort of finding one's special spot on the tail transformed the action from one of consumption to one of identity formation. The people who made their way to the pre-net equivalent of melodicas.com weren't just melodica consumers, they were melodica people. They occupied their niche, protected it, strengthened it, grew it. The rich culture of thought and activity that surrounded each of these niches contributed to an overall cultural diversity that could give America both the Muppets and 2 Live Crew. When finding your niche becomes an easy, repetitive, temporarily-satisfying task, you become a consumer and markets get interested.

And your niche starts going grey.

(oh, and some help with the title.)

baseball? world bank?

What will Richard Levin's next career be? I always hoped he'd end up the baseball commissioner, under the rationale that a PC neo-liberal economist with no real sympathy or sensitivity to the damage done by market "failures" couldn't do too much damage in the MLB. Head of the World Bank is exactly the kind of position where Mr. Levin's impractical and dehumanized economic views would produce terrible outcomes while appearing (as at Yale) to be progressive in the economic sense.

I respect Levin as a theorist, in so far as his work (what I've read of it) takes a considered and methodical approach to navigating the intersections of political philosophy and economic reality. But his concept of what we're doing on this planet leaves a lot to be desired, which is why his version of democracy -- and, for that matter, his interpretation of what actually constitutes market economics -- differs so significantly from people like me. Being a such a careful thinker, I don't believe he ignores the pervasive and destructive influence of capital and the complicity of the state in ceding control. I think he accepts, perhaps welcomes the situation we're in, and constructs his ideas about markets and society with our current situation as a given.

Anyway, that doesn't make him much different than any of his many, many compatriots in the Academy or the international development community, but nevertheless I'm hoping that, to score PR points, Bush may appoint someone less loyal with more of a humanitarian record. Or, as I said before, I'd pretty much settle for someone with actual development experience. A lot to ask, though.

velveeta = still gross

Kraft is finally going to split off from Altria (aka Phillip Morris USA). According to the NYT, Altria and Wall Street expect this to offer yet another boon to the morally bankrupt individuals and ethically compromised mutual funds that invest in Big Tobacco. The NYT and tobacco PR execs took the opportunity to explain why tobacco, as an investment vehicle, is basically impervious to government regulation, litigation, public opinion, and health concerns. David Adelman of Morgan Stanley noted that "people like to smoke...it's enjoyable and there's not an alternative product."

Well...that's just because you can't (yet) sell stock in living an extra 10 years. But, with all due respect to Adelman's market savvy, I don't agree that there's not an alternative product, and frozen dinners provide a poor analogy. For one thing, frozen dinners aren't just about food cost, they're about storage convenience, shelf-life, and preparation time. If frozen dinners become too expensive, people will certainly switch to another product, but only if it also possesses those other key characteristics.

It's the same with cigarettes. There's more too them than nicoteine delivery, obviously. There's a ritual/habitual aspect, and a social cache as well. I don't smoke, so that's just what I observe, but there may be (there likely is) even more there. Saying that there isn't an alternative product seems simplistic to me. To me, the market elasticity of cigarettes (that people will buy them regardless of price hikes) does less to demonstrate their addictive quality than it does to dramatize these intangible aspects. So, two conclusions:

1) I believe the addictive nature of cigarettes, as well as their other characteristics, could well be replicated in an alternative product.

2) The elasticity of cigarettes may be due in part to a hidden cost that hasn't made its way into public consciousness. Forget about the eleven minutes you lose each time you smoke -- getting treatment for heart disease or lung cancer is expensive.

Also a fun fact from the NYT article: I'd never heard of this Vice Fund before, but if you check out their website, it's pretty entertaining. Like they specifically set out to see how much morally reprehensible ideology they could cram into one website. Blech.

Badass pt.3

Hotel workers are three days into a hunger strike in the Century corridor at LAX. That is pretty badass, not least because (according to my sources on the ground) they're staged directly outside the Westin LAX restaurant. So guests eating breakfast are looking right out at them, and employees from the hotel are coming out on breaks to support the strikers.

LA recently extended its 1997 minimun wage law to cover the Century corridor by the airport, an unusual and somewhat controversial legislative move. UNITE HERE Local 11 fought hard to get the law passed, and the hotel owners/operators and other business will likely mount a referendum challenge. This hunger strike emphasizes the crying need to enforce that law, and also the workers' need for a seat at the table with airport hotel employers.

I don't have much commentary here, except to call attention to the new ground broken by this minimum wage extension. There's not much legal justification for mandating wages in the private sector for a particular geographic area or industry, though it isn't (in California) specifically prohibited. There are certainly economic and moral arguments for implimenting as wide-ranging a living wage as possible, but the legal dimensions remain murky.

My favorite moment in the press coverage:

"This is discriminating against 12 hotels in a very small part of the city," says Harvey Englander, a lobby consultant to the Los Angeles Hotel Association.

Proponents claim that the ordinance is justified because the airport generates the business for these hotels. But the city's "Staples arena generates business for downtown hotels," counters Mr. Englander. "Does that mean City Council should come in and set their wages and benefits?"

He said it, not us.

which implies...

Chicago's new retail living wage law is another kick in the pants for Walmart & other big-box stores. It's especially effective because it challenges those stores to live up to their assertions -- i.e. big-box development supports local economies and creates quality job opportunities. The fact that Walmart, Target et al see this legislation as a significant barrier to store development demonstrates clearly that poverty wages & benefits are part of their business plan. Their low prices (and enormous profits) depend on extremely low labor standards both here and overseas, and these companies remain completely unwilling to compromise on either side.

When John Simley, Walmart's spokesperson, argues that this legislation "means that Chicago is closed to business,” that's what he's saying. A more honest statement would be: "Chicago's closed to our exploitative, damaging business model."

The Brennan Center has detailed information on the ordinance, including the actual language.

send canned food to Bill Ford

If his company keeps tanking it like this, he'll never be able to take home a salary to feed his family.

He hasn't gotten paid by Ford since 2001.

Ford said: “We will be making painful sacrifices to protect Ford’s heritage and secure our future.”

Wow. The man's already given up his salary. Isn't that enough? Next the shareholders are going to demand that he forfeit his millions of dollars in stock options and bonus compensation.

Incidentally, it's vaguely gratifying to know that the recent profit slippage at Ford and GM is due not only to cheaper, superior imported products but to decreased demand for SUVs.

Ha.

How Do You Sleep?

Three recent articles deal with the hotel industry’s Cold War-style amenities escalation. Two from fairly reputable papers, the SF Chronicle and the Washington Post, and a more sympathetic but rambling account in the East Bay Express.

For folks who don’t know about this, here’s the gist from the Chronicle.

Travelers are raving about the enormous, fluffy new beds that the nation's biggest hotel chains are spending millions on as they one-up each other in an escalating mattress war...The same beds that are so kind to travelers' backs are wreaking havoc on hotel housekeepers who wrestle with the behemoths -- not to mention the amazing array of pillows, duvet covers, down comforters, 300-thread-count sheets, shams, bed skirts, bolsters and bed scarves that need daily tending...Federal statistics show it's a real problem, and a study published in July by UCSF researchers found 3 out of 4 hotel housekeepers experience "very severe" pain...The problem, according to union representatives, doctors and those charged with keeping those beds made, is housekeepers are being forced to clean the same number of rooms per shift even as the beds grow ever bigger and more elaborate, requiring more time to change. The housekeepers are hurting themselves trying to keep up.

In upscale hotels, this problem has been obscured for so long that chronic injury and medical complications, as well as frequent over-reliance on pain medication have become the status quo in hotel housekeeping. And it’s not limited to housekeepers. According to the BLS, hotel workers suffer an on-the-job injury rate second only to healthcare workers.

The hotel industry, as it struggles to make amenities more and more luxurious, is literally breaking down the bodies of the women and men (it’s overwhelmingly women, and low-income, immigrant women at that) it employs.

I brought all this up not because if its relationship to my job, but because I think it’s worth probing the concept of luxury, and its “unseen” cost. Luxury is the next frontier, or rather the only remaining frontier, for American companies looking to beat out their foreign competitors (assuming they aren’t interested in challenging the various norms of the market). It’s critical that we recognize both the visible and obscured cost of luxury, in whatever segment of the economy. We have a tendency to equate the cost of luxury with its price, when of course the relationship is much more complicated. This holds true whether we’re talking about sprawl, household appliances, hotel amenities, technological development, or whatever luxury offers consumers something above and beyond their expectation. Paying for the luxury somehow seems to both justify it and distance consumers from its consequences.

To me, UNITE HERE’s rhetoric and framing of housekeeping workloads effectively closes that gap, and thus offers an ideal example for how to approach this kind of problem. It confronts consumers with the less savory side of their own satisfaction. It forces them to recognize not just the impact of their thirst for luxury, but also their basic identity as consumers. Their comfort relies on underpaid, backbreaking physical labor, and their money makes them partially responsible for the welfare of those who serve them.

Lots of implications for the Wal-mart campaign as well, but that’s another thing.

radio trivia

This issue came up recently, and only today did I bother to find the answer to one of the oldest mysteries of teenage life.

Why do songs sound better on the radio?

Anyone out there with a working knowledge of audio processing already knows the answer to this. Those with a defective knowledge of audio processing, like me, have probably developed a complex and ultimately stupid set of explanations for what is essentially a simple phenomena...as I did.

You all know what I'm talking about. That song you loved in Junior High (for me it was "Today," by the Smashing Pumpkins) that always sounded wrong except when it was blasting over your favorite crappy alternative station.

Why do songs sound better over the radio?

The answer is, predictably, corporate greed and a hatred of music. That's my answer to everything, by the way.

Okay, so let's look at the relevant institutional actors.

1) Record Companies - How do they primarily market their music (at least the audible component)? Radio, MTV, Retail listening stations. Above all, they want it to be LOUD. Because, God forbid, the song/video that came before might do more damage to their target demographic's ear canal, and they'd lose the sale. So they pressure record producers to compress, compress, compress. Compression is an artificial way to make music louder by amplifying all the audio material and slicing off the very loudest bits, eliminating the quiet parts and making the whole thing sound louder. They're pre-tailoring it for car radios, listening stations, or any other medium that requires the music to punch through a lot of ambient noise.

2) Radio stations - The FCC gives them 200MHz of bandwidth, and what they can get out of it largely determines their ability to attract an audience. So, they're also worshipping the gods of LOUD, and they also compress. They sacrifice dynamic range for a punch in the gut, because they want to wrench your attention towards whatever music they're playing (same theory for the loudness of TV advertisements). The compression fetish is even more common amongst "oldies" and "mix" stations, because they need all their songs to sound the same. In order to make "Heard it Through the Grapevine" sound as loud and present as "Genie in a Bottle" (just kill me now), they need compression. Also radio stations understand that, for the most part, their broadcasts are projected over crappy speakers. Multi-band compression will boost the bass to adjust for tinny-ness, while putting the whole, squashed mess into a comfortable, non-squawk range for your TV speakers and dentist's office.

3) Artists & producers - They want to sell their records, and they need (1) and (2) to do it. This is a no-brainer.

So it's a symbiotic relationship. Albums are mastered 10 times and polished to achieve that gut-punch no matter what. Stations pick music that is already pre-compressed, or will sound good when squashed to hell.

The result? On one hand, music with dynamic range gets distorted or is never made in the first place. On the other, everything that does get played comes out flat and LOUD. If you wonder why some people tell you that "rock all sounds the same nowadays," that might be the reason. Personally, I think the disgust directed towards Top 40 radio for its homogeneity comes partly from the compression fetish.

Does music sound better on the radio? On objective, audiophile terms, it actually sounds worse. But it all depends what you like.




Wow, that was more boring than I thought.

For some reason, this topic had an air of mystique and nostalgia when I thought about it in my head. Not so much now.


Okay folks, move along, nothing to see here.

To Robert Reich: Watch out for that shark on your way over it

I always suspected that this guy was closet DLC...or maybe not so closet. I haven't read his book or any of his statements as Labor Secretary, just what he's said and written since then.

Robert Reich's Monday editorial, entitled "Don't Blame Walmart," is a piece of cowardly, rhetorical hackitude. And I would know.

You can find more comments from Josh over at Little Wild Bouquet, but I think he went too easy our vertically-challenged friend, so I'm gonna toss my two cents in the ring.

Reich's editorial puts forth three central claims:

1) We should not blame Wal-mart, because "isn't Wal-Mart really being punished for our sins?" The American economy is a "Faustian bargain" that pits our consumer desires against our sense of social responsibility, and the former wins out more often than not.

2) "The only way for the workers or citizens in us to trump the consumers in us is through laws and regulations that make our purchases a social choice as well as a personal one."

3) Instead of "going to battle," we need a "sensible public debate" about ways to balance out our consumer desires with our conscience.


Rather than organize my thoughts, which I regret I don't have time to do, I'm going to just lay out a handful of points which Reich has either fumbled, dismissed, or ignored altogether. Crotchety bastards will want to turn their set up now.

- First of all, assuming that we want any change from this system at all, Reich should know that "sensible public debate" isn't likely to bring it about. Neither, as Reich rightly observes, is "going to battle," but here he has misinterpreted the motives of Wal-mart's opposition. Maybe some folks out there want to shoot Wal-mart in Reno just to watch it die, but I'd assume that most of the community and labor activists fighting big-box retail are doing so to demonstrate that they're willing to put their strength behind the principles they believe in. Wal-mart is targeting their community, and not the other way around. People in Inglewood and Queens and Jonquiere are just standing up for themselves.

- Reich's dichotomy of consumer and citizen need not be as stark as he's drawn it. The idea of a foregone conclusion in the consumer vs. conscience struggle, fixable only by government intervention, is selling all of us short. Reich might remain faithful to Amazon.com while his local bookstore closes its doors, but that just means he's a lazy, fair-weather activist. Just because he (and the majority of Americans) do not make socially-conscious consumer choices doesn't mean they're incapable of doing so. Reich's point was that even he, Clinton's Labor Secretary who knows better, can't win against his consumer demons. Well, all that proves is that he's a wuss, and it's yet more embarassing because unlike most of the people he claims to represent, he does know better.

- "The only way for the workers or citizens in us to trump the consumers in us is through laws and regulations that make our purchases a social choice as well as a personal one." The ONLY way? You've got to be kidding. Okay, even forgiving the fact that Reich shows no knowledge of current organizing, you'd think a Labor Secretary would have some knowledge of American history, which demonstrates over and over that the power of boycotts, strikes, and public pressure campaigns can bring business to its knees, or at least to the bargaining table. Government regulation, meanwhile, has given us free-trade zones and a labor law so toothless it has to feed itself through a straw. I'm not saying we don't need legislative reform, but it'll take organizing strength to get it proposed, passed, enforced, at which point it'll probably still suck and we'll need organizing strength to preserve our rights anyway. So we might as well start building it, since Reich saying "he would support" certain reforms doesn't really do much for the 1.3 million current Wal-mart employees.

- Has Reich actually looked at Wal-mart's labor and economic practices? Matching consumer demand for cheap products may justify a lot of cost-cutting, but Wal-mart is a little out of the ordinary. I think we're within our rights to "blame" them, considering that they systematically discriminate against women, constantly use illegal anti-union techniques, and use their leverage to secure ridiculous tax and zoning agreements that can drive local economies into extinction. Consumers may be largely ignorant, but nowhere in our social contract did we label those practices as acceptable in a free market.

- Reich's column pre-supposes a perfect transparency of information for consumers which, needless to say, does not exist in America. Most of our economy relies on an elaborate process of masking and misdirection. So much so, that the uncomfortable truths of, say, meat-packing and Kathy Lee Gifford, become a point-of-sale joke instead of a legitimate consumer issue. "It says made it Honduras. Some poor kid probably sewed it with his teeth. Ha ha ha ha ha." We need a massive educational effort, not a "sensible public debate", to combat these effects.

- Reich assumes that shopping at Wal-Mart is a conscious decision, in order to justify his claim that consumer desires are to blame for the ills of big-box retail and other corporate greed. Maybe it's a conscious decision for him, or for me, but a significant amount of Wal-Mart customers don't get to choose between Wal-Mart and expensive U.S.-made or fair-trade products. Many people shop there, and, for that matter, work there, because of economic need. Without an organized effort to reveal the effects of Wal-Mart on workers, families, and communities, the only information available to Wal-Mart customers is the price. So of course they pick it, especially if they have no choice. That's not greed, it's necessity, and thus no justification for laying the blame entirely on the consumer's doorstep.

- Finally, Reich's implicit argument is that we are somehow pre-disposed towards personal greed. Hence, the harmful effects of Wal-Mart are a result of our mortal sin. As I said, that's quite an insult to humanity. Certainly we're pre-disposed to laziness and dismissal, and these are serious sins, but not of such a magnitude that they absolve everyone else involved. That is why cultivating awareness and agitating for change -- which involves "blaming Wal-Mart," among other things -- represent a critical part of the struggle to take responsibility for the welfare of our communities and bring justice to all corners of our society.

So, I'm all for a national dialogue on consumer responsibility. I just don't want Robert Reich leading it.

He can stand on a chair in the back.

Part II (dun dun DUHHHHHH)

Alright, here’s the second installment. So I left off refusing to acknowledge the one-to-one relationship of private profit to public good. It’s kind of a staggeringly obvious point, anyway. But it’s worth challenging tired old progressive assumptions on a regular basis to see if they hold up.

Moving on, does CSR do any good? And should we care, by the way? Normally I would say it doesn’t matter all that much, considering the relatively small scope of CSR activities and their impact. But the reason I’m boring you and myself with this Economist article is because CSR is an arena in which the left is actually winning the battle of ideas. Can you say the same for collective bargaining, or equal rights, or progressive taxation? The article laments the fact that we won, and that corporations never fought back, but I believe CSR actually represents business’s stunted, hesitant response to pressure created by the social discourse on corporatization. CSR is so widespread now because people on the left actually convinced the general populace that we ought to expect social responsibility from companies, and that we (as consumers) could use our power to demand it. Sort of.

CSR more or less breaks down into two types: corporate charity and corporate conduct. The article decries corporate charity because it involves giving away someone else’s money. Cry me a river. Given the extremely low donation levels, the existing profit margin, the faulty corporate tax code, and the negative effects of non-philanthropic corporate activity on communities, I could care less about this grievance.

Which brings us to corporate conduct. Crook’s article strenuously objects (hi Sorkin fans) to “codes of conduct” because the standards they enforce cause businesses to abandon contracts in developing countries, and discourage them from investing in Third World capital developers. In fact, Crook blames cut-and-run licensing practice on activist NGO’s and “ill-informed consumers.” This is garbage, and poorly supported garbage at that. Plain and simple, multi-national corporations refuse to part with the profit motive that drew them to overseas investment in the first place, and they’d rather withdraw jobs and capital from developing countries than take even the slightest hit to their bottom line.

Incidentally, Crook’s accusation also ignores three critical ways in which corporate “codes of conduct” benefit both multi-nationals and developing countries. First, operating humane industry in developing countries does help a business’s prestige on the homefront, attracting customers. Second, setting decent wage standards for developing countries increases their purchasing power, and thus their market potential for your products. And third, workers in developing countries will benefit when their governments – in an effort to attract multi-national contracts – commit to higher labor standards.

Of course The Economist would prefer that businesses forget codes of conduct and simply adhere to a decent set of business ethics. The article uses Elaine Sternberg’s parameters of “ordinary decency” and “distributive justice” as a guideline for businesses to replace CSR with ethical behavior. Ordinary decency would prohibit companies from lying, cheating, stealing, murder, etc. Anything patently “indecent.” Crook argues that whether or not they are required to adhere to “decent” standards by law, they must do so in order to succeed. Again, that’s wrong and myopic. First of all, the ability to mask business behavior, combined with consumer indifference (we’ll pretty much buy their products unless it explicity says “We like torturing baby ducks” on the label) means that businesses can certainly conduct unethical operations and still succeed. That’s, like, a Newtonian law. Second, the structure of global capitalism allows business to work ethically while partnering with and directly funding unethical business practice. They’re covered by precedents of non-disclosure, confidentiality, or so many degrees of separation that you just can’t tell if something going on in the Honduran jungle is ethical or not. That’s why we need codes of conduct so desperately. That’s their aim – to prevent unethical business from operating under the radar by committing to investigate multi-national (and local) partnerships to ensure ethical conduct.

Okay, what about distributive justice? The article describes this as the principle of “aligning benefits within the organization to the contribution made to achieving the aims of the firm.” This principle can basically bite me, especially when it’s interpreted as a justification for merit pay and against affirmative action. In my view, the idea of distributive justice does about as much to undermine business ethics as it does to preserve it. But I’m a little shakier on this point, so don’t take my word on that because I have to admit that I have no idea what “distributive justice” is. It sounds like a Steven Segall movie.

What’s the worst thing about CSR, according to Clive Crook? Those dreaded two words: sustainable development. Don’t read this part of the article (if you’re reading it at all), because it’s horseshit. The best argument Crook can make against sustainable development is that it spreads mean, mean lies about business and makes business wait in the milk line until all the chocolate milk is gone. He calls S.D. advocates mis-informed, even though they usually aren’t – especially when it comes to things that business believes it’s not required to disclose. Crook also accuses sustainable development advocates of promoting the idea that business on its own is inherently harmful, and must be augmented with SD programs to prevent Earth from crashing into the Sun or something. It would be a lot more accurate to describe SD as an effort to minimize or eliminate the negative by-products of development. And by the way, most of the time we’re not talking about nit-picking stuff here; we’re talking about sustainable development to prevent asthma, child labor, desertification, etc.

This is rambling a little. My overall point is that the article is right, but for the wrong reasons. Of course CSR doesn’t solve many problems, if it solves anything at all. But I do dispute the claim that it does little or nothing to help people. It’s just not what we should be relying on. Like I said in the first section, corporate benevolence, even if we had to reach down their throats and drag it out, is never a substitute for substantive tax reform, social spending, and of course my personal favorite – hardcore, in-your-face, ass-kicking collective revolt of the organizing variety.

The Economist and CSR

The cover story in last week’s Economist took a skeptical look at corporate social responsibility (CSR). The author made a number of excellent points and a bunch of shitbrained ones as well. It needs a response, though, because even at its strongest moments the argument against CSR smacks of neo-con self justification. And since it’s a well-written article in a respectable magazine, I can’t just say “forget this bullshit, I’m gonna go eat an ice-cream sandwich.” Hence the observations below.

The basic point of Clive Crook’s article is that CSR, while sometimes well-intentioned, misunderstands capitalism and ignores economic processes and impacts. Plus, it’s not the natural or appropriate arena for business. According to The Economist, CSR is “based on a faulty – and dangerously faulty – analysis of the capitalist system [it is] intended to redeem.”

The article argues against CSR in part because it assumes a dichotomy between the shareholders and the public, negating the possibility that what is good for one may be good for the other as well. The editorial section also strongly asserts that “without trying, [a company] does ‘good works’ by conducting honest business.” I don’t know to what degree advocates of CSR would actually dispute this claim, but even so the article presents a few supporting examples:

1. “Employees willingly work for the company in exchange for wages; the transaction makes them better off.” Though the pronoun’s a little indeterminate, let’s assume they’re talking about the employees being better off, and let’s also respectfully suggest that the idea of a universally willing workforce is a little passé, as is the implication that being “better off” is the same thing as being “happy” or “secure.” Having money is better than not having money, but that doesn’t mean that paying poverty wages constitutes an act of “good works.”

2. CSR is unnecessary because “well-run companies will strive for friendly long-term relationships with employees, suppliers, and customers.” Depends on your definition of “well-run.” There are plenty of companies, especially in hospitality and retail, that operate on business plans geared towards a turnover market. Plus, if “loyalty” is what’s being cultivated by the well-run business, wage and price pressures have an unfortunate tendency to make people “loyal” out of necessity. A full-time waitress, hospital employee, or janitor can have a “friendly, long term relationship” with the Armani Exchange window display but their economic circumstances are gonna make them "loyal" to Walmart.

3. Finally, “the selfish pursuit of profit serves a social purpose…this is not the fatal defect of capitalism, as CSR-advocates appear to believe; it is the very reason capitalism works.” See, I personally would argue that it’s both. I’d also point out that it’s not the selfish pursuit of profit that raises (or lowers) our standard of living, it’s the amount of justice and sensibility we use to regulate it.

Okay, so even if we ignore the contrary evidence and hypothetically grant the premise of a one-to-one relationship between private profit and public good, most of us would still like to see some support for this claim. The full survey (later in the magazine), does offer two necessary criteria for private profit to translate into public welfare. According to Clive Crook (this guy’s name is too good to be true), the process requires free competition and accurate social pricing. Well, we have neither, Clive. Free competition is, of course, a theoretical myth, like pure communism. It works at a lemonade stand (or a kibbutz), but not in any form of modern economy. And -- on the subject of accurate social pricing -- despite the article’s lengthy arguments to the contrary, many of our most valuable “commodities” simply cannot be accurately priced, but are regularly underestimated. For easy, do-it-yourself examples of inaccurate social pricing, try applying for a job as a childcare worker or calculating the "value" of not dying from mercury poisoning. Environmental costs and labor value represent two of the many mis-priced items in today's (and yesterday's) economy. One last thing on private profit and public good: even if we could achieve Crook’s two conditions, we’d still have to eliminate all the social structures that affect opportunity and standard of living. I’m talking about wealth concentration, segregation, immigration policy, sexism, etc. etc.

So forget granting the hypothetical premise. I don’t believe there is a one-to-one relationship between private profit and public good. Which, I suppose, makes me automatically more sympathetic to anything that tries to even out the gap, like CSR. But I’m open to examining that, because God knows I don’t have enough training in business operations or market economics to evaluate whether CSR actually does any good. Unfortunately my lunch break’s over, so you’ll have to wait till tomorrow for the second half of this response, which will feature a similar degree of scintillating, incisive analysis.

I’ll try to work more enraged cyberspace trash-talk into the next post, as well. Don't worry, I know what side my bread is buttered on. In that spirit, I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest that some divine presence confiscated Oren Hatch's conscience, humanity, and self-respect, replacing them with a half-eaten churro.