Even in Kyoto

A couple of nights ago, I reached a chapter in Thinking, Fast and Slow where Kahneman talks a bit about his involvement in the beginnings of the field of behavioral economics, which involved some work with Richard Thaler in addition to his ongoing collaboration with Amos Tversky. As Kahneman put it, Thaler had been collecting examples of instances where people's economic behavior was irrational, as a study of where neo-classical economic ideas failed.

The example listed in the book was about an economics professor in Thaler's department who collected nice bottles of wine. This professor would never pay more than $35 for a bottle, and then at the same time he would be extremely reluctant to part with a bottle for anything less than $100. What could explain this huge gap between his buying and selling prices? Long story short, after a series of experiments to try and puzzle out what's going on, this phenomenon got labeled the endowment effect. In short, humans tend to assign more value to objects when they own them.

So then, yesterday, I squandered spent a bunch of time reading articles from a special issue of the journal Nature about The Circular Economy. This is something that I tend to think about often, in an abstract sense, in relation to how I exist as a human being on this planet, because I find it more aesthetically pleasing to perceive myself as a participant in a series of cycles rather than as a consumption machine.

[I will point out that this is an idealized perspective, however, because there are a number of large-scale biological/biogeochemical/astronomical processes that we humans can't experience as cycles. The one that sticks out for me is phosphorus, which becomes available through weathering or mining, and gradually travels out to the oceans, where it eventually sinks to levels where it's basically inaccessible to living things. That said, there are many places where there are untapped opportunities to slow the rate of linear processes, and we humans need to keep working on them.]

One of the articles, in the Books and Arts section, talks about the history of the circular economy concept and recent revivals in things like the cradle-to-cradle design movement. Frankly, I've always found this notion a little too high-level and abstract. The historical piece also points out some problems with this perspective. Here's the paragraph of interest:

There are problems, too, with the circular model itself. Martin Charter, director of the Centre for Sustainable Design at the University for the Creative Arts in Farnham, UK, notes a “lack of overall clarity over the concept. Perhaps just 100 companies worldwide have adopted a true circularity mindset as a core strategy.” As for the circular mantra of switching to the digital, data centres waste an average of 90% of the energy that they consume (30 billion watts, equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants) and account for 17% of technology's carbon footprint. Although the circular 'business case' looks remarkable (global management consultants McKinsey and Company estimate that it could add US$2.6 trillion to the European economy by 2030), the fact that business remains central to the vision is a vulnerability. The growth economy impedes sustainability. In 2014, for instance, Chevron and a number of other big oil companies retreated from investments in renewables because of poor returns. Business competitiveness and 'disruption' can hinder the collaboration that is central to eco-design. UK design engineer Chris Wise has noted that the practice of using 'least materials' is at odds with the construction industry's prime aim of selling more materials (C. Wise et al. Nature 494, 172–175; 2013). The 'rebound effect', in which designed efficiency leads to greater use or consumption, is a related conundrum.

Another article, however, takes a different angle on things. Entitled "Make recycled goods covetable," it comes back to some key points about ownership and materialism, and the aspects of human psychology that humans have to grapple with if we are to do a better job of managing the rate and nature of flow of material goods. It begins, "Humans are unique in the animal kingdom in their capacity for materialism. We make, use and trade objects for their symbolic value as much as their functionality," and carries on from there. The crux of the argument is that human biases towards valuing exclusivity and authenticity undermine principles of recycling and reuse. I think you can probably see how this whole line of reasoning might also be related to the endowment effect, described at the beginning.

But for me, these lines of thinking caused a big flashback to the Alien She exhibit at the Portland Museum of Contemporary Craft, in particular to the display of handbags from the Counterfeit Crochet Project. The Nature feature also includes a piece on a related phenomenon, the growing popularity of Repair Cafes.

I bring these things up because I have to wonder about how humans value and relate to handmade items compared to designed/manufactured goods. Contemporary life calls for a mixture of the two types, but I have this feeling that general aesthetic satisfaction would be higher and waste production would be lower if peoples' priorities shifted towards the handmade. This is one way of achieving the "exclusivity and authenticity" outlined in the article on making recycled goods covetable.

The other way is hinted at in the Japanese art of Kintsugi, a thing which keeps popping up for me as an "Oh, that's clever!" thing on social media. The act of working to repair an object, whether the repair involves gold dust or otherwise, changes one's relationship with that object.

I have this sense that I might be wired to respond more strongly to these things than many people, just based on my creative impulses (and most definitely my upbringing! Especially my mother's wonderful influence). But I also think these are aesthetic qualities that can be drawn out of other people, too, under the right circumstances. There is great satisfaction to be derived from creation and repair, as well as from ownership of well-made and unique items.

Interestingly, the article on reuse notes that the endowment effect appears to be stronger in individualistic societies where there are more rather than fewer possessions, suggesting that possessiveness may be driven by gaps between those who have and those who have-not. Thus the endowment effect is enhanced when there's hightened awareness of inequality in individualistic societies. The author thus suggests that, for economic harmony, ignorance and/or greater equality are important factors to consider.

While I find some of the extremes of minimalism to be unrealistic and silly (Guy Who Owns Five Things!!), I do find reasons for hope in the movement, as in the DIY movement in the US and the raging popularity of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. They are signs of cultural changes in how people relate to their stuff and what's important in this whole experience of life.

Yesterday, I skimmed through a blog entry about minimalism that made an important distinction between "minimalism" and "voluntary simplicity." The need to distinguish between the two has stuck with me, because I identify much more strongly with many of the ideas behind voluntary simplicity than the ideas behind minimalism.

For example, where someone interested in minimalism might start keeping all their lists on an iPhonePadBook-indle, someone interested in voluntary simplicity might just as readily keep lists on the backs of envelopes that would wind up in the recycling bin otherwise.

I remember when voluntary simplicity started to take off. It was sometime in the 1990's, and I think it coincided with the re-release of Duane Elgin's book on the topic (which I haven't read). For me, a lot of the ideas are associated with things emphasized by the church I grew up in, and in particular that church's focus on social justice issues (what I'd rank as THE most valuable thing I've received from a Catholic upbringing, and NOT to be confused with any air of colonialism). These were strongly reinforced by my visit, in 1994, to our church's sister parish, Nueva Trinidad, in El Salvador (they've just recently had a celebration of this continued relationship, which was great to see!).

There I was, at the beginning of high school, visiting a country that had been ripped apart by civil war. We witnessed evidence of the consequences of civil war firsthand. Our sister parish, for example, was located in a part of the country that had been decimated by the war; people were forced to flee across the border into Guatemala to escape the violence. There were buildings riddled with bullet-holes, and few animals anywhere. When I visited with the youth delegation from our church, the community was attempting to rebuild (physically AND emotionally), and community members welcomed us with open arms. They gave us a place to stay and things to eat, and hosted a dance party and other celebrations for us. We had so much fun playing with the kids there.

El Salvador was my first trip outside of the US, aside from brief excursions into British Columbia. While part of the purpose of the trip was to bring supplies to our sister parish, another purpose was to give us a chance to witness, firsthand, what life in another country was like. It becomes much harder to take opportunities in the US for granted after one sees what people have to do just to survive in other contexts - for instance, kids desperate to sell candy or wash car windows on busy roads, just so they can make a few pennies to be able to survive until the next day. People washing their clothes in a river flowing with trash and raw sewage. But people who are generous, full of life and ideas and interests and with a thirst for knowledge and experience.

All of this means that some elements of this Minimalist movement make me queasy at times. People who smugly pack just a credit card and laptop for their next plane trip to Italy, for instance. Sure, that's minimalist, but it isn't simple living. Simple living is choosing to travel locally instead, taking the bus, walking, or riding a bike. It's checking books out from the library instead of buying a Kindle. It's buying used things instead of new ones, figuring out how to repurpose them, and sharing with others. It's hauling things by bicycle every day instead of showing off a brand-new, flashy fixed-gear bike. It's not as glamorous as those fancy transformer apartments that are being constructed for small spaces in New York City, but I'd hope the intentionality of simple living gives it more meaning and makes it more fulfilling in the long run. And it's not about buying that magazine Real Simple (which is just so hilariously ironic).

There seems to be some confusion on this topic in the Tiny House movement as well. That makes me want to ask, is it really better to build a new, freestanding structure, instead of living in an apartment or retrofitting a home so it's shared? Altogether, it makes me glad to see things like that interview.

Last Wednesday evening, D, L and I attended an event put on by the Phoenix Permaculture Guild. It was a presentation by a guy named Scott Kellogg, who is a co-founder of an Austin-based organization called the Rhizone Collective.

Do you ever have one of those experiences where at first you feel like the information that is presented is relatively simple and straightforward, and only later realize that actually learned a whole lot? Well, that was kind of what this presentation was like. It was a presentation/workshop called Radical Urban Sustainability Training, where the overall idea was to teach us about cheap and innovative methods to make urban living more sustainable.

One of the most interesting aspects of the whole thing was how it incorporated knowledge about microbiology and other living systems into design plans. Kellogg pointed out, for example, that drinking water is chlorinated to kill bacteria/harmful microbes, but that this also affects beneficial bacteria in soil ecosystems. So when people irrigate with chlorinated water, they often do as much harm as good. He also said that one of the main reasons why worm castings are so great for gardens is because worms don't kill microbes during digestion, so their castings are still rich with all sorts of delicious bacteria.

But Kellogg also talked about the opposite side of dealing with microbes, particularly the case of composting human waste (which can be pretty dangerous if done incorrectly) and also simple systems for water sterilization. And I should mention that he also described some systems that can be used to treat most types of household wastewater, keeping it from unnecessarily undergoing the extensive municipal treatments that are designed for treating everything from household wastes through industrial wastes.

One subject that he commented on towards the very end of his lecture really stuck with me. Someone in the audience asked about the application of many of the ideas/methods to other countries, and Kellogg said that, based on his experiences, such applications won't be nearly as cheap/simple in developing nations as they are in the United States. That's mostly because of the amount of excess waste that Americans produce--companies here pay to dispose of still-valuable resources, which makes those resources cheap/free for people who can creatively repurpose them. In contrast, landfills in so-called developing nations are thoroughly picked-over, so that little reuseable material is ever left behind. The described technologies could certainly be applied, but they won't be nearly as cheap as they are here.

And the last aspect that I want to mention is Kellogg's perspective on alternative energy, because it's in marked contrast to the emphases that are receiving a lot of public attention these days (systems that seem designed to line the pockets of corporations inasmuch as they provide alternative energy sources). He pointed out that alternative energy sources that are heavily technology-dependent will never become very widespread, because they are dependent on advanced technology for their manufacture. For example, even if we could get solar panels shipped out to some place in the middle of the Amazon rainforest, they would eventually become difficult/impossible to repair. And such technologies often break before they manage to pay for themselves in purely monetary terms anyway.

No, the energy solutions will have to come from elsewhere. Instead, Kellogg said that the Rhizome Collective has been focusing on low-tech alternative energy sources. For example, they created a solar water heater by taking a regular water heater, stripping it of its insulation down to its black iron core, and placing it into a stripped-down refrigerator. When this system is kept in the sun, the dark metal does a fantastic job of capturing energy from the sun to heat the water. The refrigerator insulation then keeps the water warm enough through the night so that one can take a warm shower in the morning. At present, old water heaters and old refrigerators are abundant in the US of A, and here's a system that's cheap and simple to build (=also simple to repair) and could replace one of the devices that consumes the most electricity in many households.

And all of that is probably just the tip of the iceberg. I believe that we need more people capable of this kind of thinking/innovation/inspiration if we truly seek to create a sustainable future.

Well, I finished Nickel and Dimed on Sunday, while watching ants, so I wanted to give ya'll my final opinions on the book. Although I'm still tired of investigative journalism (try saying that ten times fast!), Barbara Ehrenreich does make some good points. The sections about her work in Portland, ME, were particularly interesting--she works in a nursing home and for a housekeeping service. Her pointed remarks about the disrespect that members of the middle- and upper-classes show towards those they perceive as lower-class are worth noting; Ehrenreich observes that she sees the same distribution of intelligence levels among those working in the service industry as she sees in her other life as a middle/upper-class journalist, and yet employers and customers alike often treat service workers with so much disrespect. Higher-income Americans have achieved an unprecedented level of material well-being because they rely on underpaid laborers who produce the material goods and services.

My mother has been involved in a group at her church that's exploring the idea of social justice in everyday life. Namely, they are considering how their day-to-day decisions and behaviors affect the well-being of other people and the planet. The social justice aspect of the Catholic church is one of its most valuable aspects, in my mind. I don't often hear people discussing similar subjects outside of the context of the church, and this saddens me greatly (actually, boolean263, discussions with you have been an exception to this (: ). Sure, people will speak of wanting to save the environment, but what are you really saving it for, anyway?

I think that everybody should spend at least some time working in the service industry, because such jobs can reinforce the need to always have respect for others, and to be patient so you don't end up on gfrancie's hit list (although I really enjoy reading about the ridiculous people you meet). I was lucky enough to work for 4 years at a small-business dry cleaner's, where we could pass along the disgruntled customers to the owner, who would deal with them appropriately. She had no qualms about firing bad customers and telling them to never come back. It was an empowering workplace in that respect, but I also learned a lot from the regular customers who were courteous and pleasant, and from my boss, who spent every day performing hundreds of small kindnesses that her customers only rarely noticed, and only more rarely acknolwedged and appreciated.

Since finishing that book, I've picked up The Tapir's Morning Bath, a book about Barro Colorado Island, which is a research station run by the Smithsonian Institute that's located in the middle of the Panama Canal. I visited BCI last summer after finishing the tropical field biology course in Costa Rica, and reading the book is making me miss the tropics all over again. Meanwhile, my housemate T, who's in Costa Rica right now, can't wait to get back to the U.S. and a comfy bed and good food.

Well, I think I've been lounging around in my pajamas for long enough for today. I hope you all have splendid days!