Ranthropologist

Tag: economics

  • Shifting Perspective: Kiddie Couture

    Shifting Perspective: Kiddie Couture

    On April 24, 2013, a building in Bangladesh known as Rana Plaza collapsed, killing 1,129 people and injuring 2,515. Rana Plaza housed several garment factories, in which workers – including children – were employed in manufacturing clothing for a variety of brands, including The Children’s Place, Benetton, and Walmart. The collapse triggered a wave of collective shock and outrage throughout the developed world as people were faced with the reality that working conditions in Bangladesh were poorly regulated, often dangerous, and beset with bribes, graft, and abuse.

    At the time of the collapse, the minimum wage for Bangladeshi workers was $38 a month. Following the collapse, international pressure and a series of worker strikes led the Bangladeshi government to raise the minimum wage to $68 a month, beginning on December 1, 2013. The real shock to many people in countries like the United States was having to face the fact that the reason we are able to buy $10 t-shirts and $19 jeans is because workers in places like Bangladesh make the equivalent of 39 cents an hour – and that’s assuming a standard 40-hour work week. In reality, Bangladeshi workers can labor for 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. Of course, the cost of living in Bangladesh is much lower than it is in most parts of the world – but we are fooling ourselves if we believe that this is truly a living wage.

    I bring this up not because I have a solution for the wage slavery taking place in much of the economic periphery – I don’t. I bring it up because I think it’s important for people to have perspective. To that end, I offer the story that made me decide to rant about this topic. ABC news broadcast a story about a new trend in children’s clothing: renting clothes instead of buying them. On the face of it, I think this is a terrific idea. The company offers parents the chance to pay a fee to rent clothes for special events such as weddings instead of having to pay full price for an outfit that will probably only be worn by their child once, and which they will outgrow soon in any case. Great! Sounds like a wonderful way to reduce our impact! But here’s where I got fired up: the company in question, Borrow Mini Couture, only rents high-fashion clothing. They carry brands such as Moschino, Roberto Cavalli, John Galliano, and Fendi – brands that charge hundreds of dollars for a single piece of children’s clothing. The least expensive Roberto Cavalli dress on the website retails for $352 – and it’s sized for a one year old girl. You can rent it for five days for $98 – $30 more than the monthly minimum wage of a Bangladeshi garment worker.

    The ABC piece makes it sound like this company is a boon to parents who want to save money. That very idea makes me want to weep. It’s not about saving money. It’s about aspirational parents being able to say they dressed their tot in couture clothing. Now, I don’t know where these couture brands manufacture their clothes, but that’s not really the point. Even if they are made by workers who are employed in safe, well-regulated factories where they earn enough to make a dignified living, what does it say about us as a society that we would even consider paying hundreds (or thousands) of dollars for a single piece of our own clothing, much less the clothes for our kids? And what does it say about us that there are people who will spend $50 to $100 just to briefly rent a status symbol for their child (or more accurately, for themselves)?

    For the shift in perspective I wish to impart in this rant, I offer this 2-minute video produced by the Toronto Star of children working in the garment industry in Bangladesh. Juxtapose this video with the ABC story and, like me, you might just want to weep – and I hope, want to think about what this means for the world we live in.

  • Technology and Its Discontents: Alienation

    Technology and Its Discontents: Alienation

    As the industrial age took hold in the late 17th and early 18th centuries and began its saturation of the globe, a curious phenomenon began to take place. People who had once labored for themselves – doing what they needed to do to support themselves, their families, and their communities – began laboring for others. They quit their simpler lives and moved to bigger towns, then cities, seeking and finding employment in factories, assembly lines, and sweatshops, laboring to produce things over which they had no ownership. The logical outcome of a capitalist world system began to spread and solidify, requiring that people work for others to support themselves, but have no ownership of the fruits of their labor. Yes, these laborers were paid for their work, but unlike when people engaged in farming, hunting, small trades such as blacksmithing, horseshoeing, wheel-wrighting, candle and soap making, carpentry, and all the simple but vital labors for which people could once get paid, the only thing this new class of laborer owned was themselves. All they could sell was their labor.

    This is the microcosm of what is called industrial alienation. It’s what happens when all people can sell is themselves, and they have no ownership of the means of production. They become a commodity, no different than the raw materials used in manufacturing the things they are paid to make. In the modern world system of capitalism, most people can only sell themselves for the money they need to support themselves and survive. To an enormous extent in the Western industrialized world, this has meant that nearly everybody has forgotten how to survive in the way our ancestors did – by knowing actually how to find and produce food and shelter. Labor has become so extraordinarily specialized in this brave new world that most people no longer have any connection with the basics of survival. Even worse, we have become alienated not just from what we do, but from our very purpose for living. Why are we here? What is the point? Do I even matter? These are not questions asked in cultures where people are still able to support themselves with the knowledge of actual, physical, animal survival. That, itself, is the point: survival. In the face of securing it for yourself and your group, there is no need, no room, for existential questions. Those questions are created by alienation.

    This is a winding road to some thoughts about technology. Humans have always sought to answer the basic question of why we are here, probably since the dawn of the species, and have found a variety of answers (often in the supernatural and religion). Now, though, I think technology is filling the hole of our alienation. Specifically, we are filling our existential emptiness with social media. Posting, Tweeting, sharing, Instagramming – they all provide a sense that we matter. They give us a way to be acknowledged (or so we think) by others. They remind us: I exist. The urge, the compulsion, is so strong that we will risk our relationships, our jobs, our educations, our safety or even our lives to fulfill it by doing all those things while driving, or walking, or cycling, or eating, or watching TV, or at the movies, at work, at school, at a football game, at a wedding, a funeral, anytime, everywhere. Yesterday I could have mowed down a woman glued to her phone, scrolling endlessly, as she walked obliviously down the center aisle of a parking lot. I have sat with friends while they pretend to be engaging with me, but they are staring, staring, staring at the phone. I have been accosted with pictures, videos, websites, texts that the other person insisted I see. And, I have done most of those things myself. I understand.

    Humans are extraordinarily social primates. It is no surprise to me at all that social media has exploded into a frenzy of self-referential attention seeking. Humans are also status-seeking animals, and the feedback we crave from our social sharing is highly addictive. It is a constant lure for us to try to elevate or affirm our status amongst our peers. But as with anything, there can be too much. Just as the buzz of alcohol can make us feel attractive, funny, and smart, so can the buzz of our relentless technological distractions make us feel noticed, important, and liked (if not loved). But the alcohol buzz wears off, and so does the brief high we receive from seeing who has responded to our online presence. Alcohol can become an addiction, and so can technology. It is not a good way to fill the hole left by our alienation.

    I am not immune to the lure of technology, but I am thinking deeply about it and making some decisions about how much I am willing to let it intrude upon my life. I understand that there are also positive aspects to our use of phones and computers, et al (for example, the fact that I can write and share these thoughts). But at the moment I am deeply uneasy, and I am making a conscious effort to concentrate on the world outside the screens.

  • Stereotypes, Generalities, and Banalities

    Stereotypes, Generalities, and Banalities

    Another Super Bowl has passed, and with it has passed several attempts by corporations to trick us into thinking we need to buy what they are selling. We all know that the Super Bowl is about more than the game of football; for many, it is a social opportunity as well as a sporting event. Over the past several years, the commercials have become as big, if not a bigger, draw than the game itself. It seems to me that before this became the standard, the commercials were actually better. Madison Avenue saw it for what it was: an enormous audience of sports fans and their associated hangers-on. No longer did the commercials need to be tailored specifically to football fans; they could be crafted to appeal to the general American public, which included the spouses, friends, and families of the actual football fans. I feel no shame in admitting that for years I, too, was more interested in the commercials than in the game. Now, however, my interest has taken a decidedly different turn.

    Two commercials in particular caught my interest, and they were both produced in the service of the same corporation. Chrysler created one ad for its Jeep division, and another for its Ram truck division. The Jeep commercial features a serious narrative intoned by Oprah Winfrey, telling us that we cannot be “whole again” until our men and women in uniform are back home with their families after completing their heroic service. The Ram commercial is soundtracked with an old speech by famous conservative radio commentator Paul Harvey, who extols the virtues and values of the American family farmer. In both commercials, the money shot of the product being sold is saved until the end. This serves the purpose of luring the viewer into a particular state of mind – one of admiration for our heroes, whether military or farming – and then associates that feeling of pride, nostalgia, and lump-in-the-throat patriotism with the product. Manipulative? Absolutely. Does it work? Absolutely.

    So what’s my problem here? I don’t assume that every Super Bowl ad viewer is credulous enough to fall for the Madison Avenue hype. Most viewers know they are being manipulated, even if unconsciously. But how many people really stop to think about it? I’m sure there are reams of research on effective advertising strategies that trick consumers into believing they need things that in reality, they simply want. However, I do think the kind of shameless manipulation manifested in the Jeep and Ram ads is particularly egregious. What do Jeeps have to do with the socioeconomic realities that make so many young Americans believe their only real hope of success in life is to join the military? These young men and women are not heroes in the sense that this commercial wants us to believe; that is, they are not heroic because they put themselves in harm’s way. They are ordinary people with ordinary foibles, and serving in the military does not, in and of itself, make them “heroes.” (This is also a rant for another day; I believe the word hero needs to be defined much more narrowly and that it is cheapened by applying it to every single person who does a difficult job.) If anything, their heroism lies in accepting an extremely narrow range of choices in life and making the best of it. Jeep has nothing to say about changing the structural realities of our society such that status inequalities are erased and military service truly becomes one choice among many, as opposed to an avenue of escape for those who have very few avenues to pursue.

    I have the same issue, although slightly less so, with the hero farmer portrayed by Ram. Undoubtedly family farming is strenuous and difficult work that is not taken lightly by those who pursue it; but at the same time, being a farmer does not somehow instill men (and the commercial features only men as the farmers, with women and children as support staff) with deeper, or truer, or greater values than the rest of us. I realize that the commercial is not meant to imply that only family farmers have these strong, quintessential American values of hard work and sacrifice; but the symbolism of the farmer is very powerful in our national gestalt. And just like the Jeep commercial, I wonder what, exactly, Ram trucks have to do with these values. In my reading about these commercials I read a comment stating that in reality, Ram trucks are probably out of the price range of the average family farmer today – especially since family farms are a dying breed and those that succeed do so without tricked out Rams that are really luxury cars in disguise.

    So we get back to the original point: tugging at our patriotic and bootstrap individualistic values; wanting to see in ourselves what the commercials stereotype, generalize, and banalize about the essential symbols of American culture; and being tricked into thinking that cars, of all things, have anything whatsoever to do with it. Feel free to admire the values, but think carefully about what they really mean… and think extra carefully before accepting the false, hegemonic notion that you can purchase them.

  • Economic Maladaptation

    Economic Maladaptation

    Near the end of the semester in my Human Origins course, I teach about two concepts: the epidemiologic transition, and the demographic transition. Both of them have to do with overall improvements in quality and length of life in societies that have reached a certain level of knowledge and wealth. In the epidemiologic transition, knowledge and innovations regarding health and medicine combine to reduce the incidence of infectious disease, and generally increase the overall health and longevity of the population. Mortality from non-infectious diseases such as heart disease and cancer increase as life expectancy increases. So, instead of dying young of an infectious disease, you live longer and ultimately perish from a disease or condition linked to old age and/or the consequences of a Westernized lifestyle (such as poor diet and lack of exercise). Combine this with the demographic transition, which sees life expectancy increase, and a drop in death rates followed by a drop in birth rates as societies industrialize and modernize, and you have a perfect recipe for booming population growth. Not every society in the world has gone through both of these transitions, but enough have that what should have been viewed as benefit is now becoming a detriment. Put in evolutionary terms, what was once adaptive is becoming maladaptive. I hypothesize that it is not these two transitions themselves that are to blame, but yet another transition, which I am going to call the economic transition.

    So what is the economic transition? As the world has modernized, starting at least four centuries ago with the age of European exploration and colonization in the 16th and 17th centuries, the global economic system that we know today as capitalism has taken hold. Capitalism, and the quest for profit through the exchange of material goods, is in many ways a beneficial and adaptive system for human groups. However, link it to the natural human desire to achieve status, and then link status to the ownership of material things and the symbols of exchange that make that ownership possible (i.e., money), and add in the longer-lived and massively expanded human population we are dealing with today, and you have a recipe for maladaptive disaster. Capitalism, superficially, is extremely similar to biological evolution and natural selection – call it economic selection. Left to its own devices, the natural consequence of capitalism is to concentrate wealth in the hands of a very few people or groups. This can work in some circumstances, especially when the social group affected is reasonably sized. Competition can lead to greater resource acquisition for the overall group, which is then redistributed by the leaders who had the greatest hand in acquiring it. This is what happens in the Big Man system that used to characterize many native economies in places like Papua New Guinea. The Big Man worked hard and gained followers who worked on his behalf to grow the biggest garden and the largest herd of pigs, and as harvest or slaughter time came, he rewarded his followers for their hard work. Those who worked the most gained the most, but nobody went without basic necessities. Why? Because in small groups, the well-being of the group depends on the well-being of the individuals who comprise it. The Big Man, for his part, was well compensated for his leadership efforts, but he did not end up with portions that were much larger than those of his workers; his gains instead had to do with status and leadership power (which from an evolutionary standpoint tends to correlate with greater reproductive success – to me, this is the underlying impetus for the development of these sorts of systems).

    The Big Man system is a sort of proto-capitalism. Anybody could aspire to be a Big Man, and with enough hard work and charisma, individuals could work their way into the top status tiers of these groups. The key difference is that the Big Man did not keep the majority of the wealth for himself, and he did not attempt what true capitalism attempts today: gather the most wealth possible while paying as little as possible to acquire it (whether for raw materials, workers, overhead, or what have you). The capitalist world system is designed to concentrate wealth. It is theoretically true that anybody can compete in this system, but with 7 BILLION competitors, success is anything but assured, and the structural obstacles to reaching that success are more numerous and complex than I can possibly attempt to explain in one post.

    I still haven’t really explained the economic transition yet, because at least a basic knowledge of economic systems is important. Nevertheless, I can describe it simply as a transition from small-group based competitive yet redistributive systems to a system based on personal financial gain that thrives on the perpetuation of class inequality. In a survival of the fittest economic system, inequality is the only possible outcome. What’s even more insidious about this transition is that even those at the bottom of the class and income scale believe that this is the way it is supposed to be, and that the only way out is through acquisitiveness and consumption. I have already written on this at some length in posts discussing hegemony. This is hegemony in a nutshell. The economic transition is maladaptive because it relies on continued resource consumption, and it is linked to the large and long-lived global population that consumes those resources. The economic transition, if it continues to its logical conclusion, ultimately means the ultimate biological maladaptation for the human species, to wit: extinction.

    I actually didn’t mean for this post to be a treatise on my view of our world’s economic problems, but these things just come out as they come out. This is the starting point for many more specific posts to come. What started my ruminating on this particular topic (other than the fact that I ruminate about it just about every single day) was thinking about our obsession with material things, and wondering how in the world we can save ourselves from ourselves. How can we modify the system so that status comes from the person you are rather than the things you own? How can we actually slow down the economic engine, and adopt a philosophy of economic balance, instead of constant growth? When will we realize that the values of our lives come from experiences, rather than possessions?

    Let me end this post with a question for my readers: what are your fondest memories? What makes you smile when you need a boost? Do these memories revolve around things, or people and experiences? One of my favorite memories, one I call on when I want to feel happy, is from 2001 when I surprised my mom by coming home from Albuquerque for Christmas one week early. I called her from outside her front door. As we spoke, I made it sound like I was still in Albuquerque. I knocked on her door and laughed to myself as she said “Hold on sweetheart, there’s someone at the door.” She opened the door and saw me, and I will never, ever forget the look on her face or how she dropped the phone and grabbed me into a hug of joy. This is a memory that I could never buy, yet it makes me happier than any material thing I have ever owned. I think that if we consciously remember what truly has given us joy in our lives, it may lead us out of the materialism = happiness lie that so many forces are leading us to believe.

  • Follow Your Dreams?

    Follow Your Dreams?

    I was just sitting and mindlessly watching television, and a commercial for a health insurance company came on. It showed adults walking around the streets of a city dressed in costumes – astronaut, doctor, ballerina. The tagline of the commercial was a variation of “Be YOU. Be what you want to be.” It occurred to me as I watched the commercial, and the costumes representing the childhood dreams of people who end up actually becoming waitresses, construction workers, receptionists, and day laborers, that this is an enormous line of bullshit that we are being fed. This commercial reflects the middle-class ambitions of modern Americans, and promotes the idea that the only thing holding us back from realizing our childhood dreams is ourselves. What a load of crap! I had the same reaction when I heard a snippet of Steve Jobs’ commencement speech to Stanford in 2005, in amongst all the news stories about Jobs’ death. This is what he said: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And, most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” I mean no disrespect to Steve Jobs, but he is spouting the same line of hegemonic hypnosis as the health insurance commercial (though I am willing to give him a partial pass, since this kind of cliched spew is exactly what is expected from a commencement speech). Steve Jobs did amazing things that changed the way we interact with our world today, and in many ways I am grateful for that. But Steve Jobs’ amazing success is the exception. It is the plane crash, not the safe landing. It is the thing that makes the news because it is unusual. It is the kind of success that allows the hegemony to be perpetuated, because it gives us an example to point to and say, “That could be me!” Really? Could it really be you? I’m not sure I agree. Hegemony means believing that you can achieve the same pinnacle of success as the richest people in the United States, but it just isn’t true. Yet, here we all are, listening to the “follow your heart, follow your dream” message, and somehow feeling a little empty or inadequate because we are the waitress, or the mid-level manager, or the hair stylist, and chances are we will never be more than that, no matter how hard we work, no matter how much we study or train or dream, because there just are not that many seats at the head table. The people participating now in the Occupy Wall Street and related protests are, I think, finally understanding this reality. It’s not just about working hard. Believe me, immigrants to this country, illegal or not, work really fucking hard. Working class parents with the food service and delivery driver and labor jobs work really fucking hard. Will they ever occupy a position like Steve Jobs did? Probably not. Should they believe the easily digestible pablum about following your dream, or should we finally just be realistic and tell people, “This is as good as it will ever get for most of us.” Our dreams should be about more than what we do to make money… shouldn’t they? Shouldn’t we work on making sure that, even if you aren’t an astronaut or a doctor or a ballerina, you are compensated well enough for what you do that you don’t have to worry about feeding your kids or paying your mortgage or going to school? Shouldn’t we have a system that supports the reality of life for most people in America? Isn’t that what the protestors want? So let’s stop listening to the platitudes, and start sharing a dream about making sure the needs of all the people are met instead of lying and making people think that it is their fault that they aren’t in the one percent at the top of the economic pyramid.

  • The Tyranny of Advertising

    The Tyranny of Advertising

    In my last post, I talked about how I had been living without television for months. Well, it’s back now, and aside from a few guilty pleasures such as “Hoarders” and “Pawn Stars,” it hasn’t made much of a difference. However, I do think that my months without television caused a bit of culture shock for me, kind of like a person who visits an impoverished village and then returns to the superabundance of the United States. As it happens, during the time I was living without television I was also neglecting to read my magazine subscriptions (Health, Runner’s World, and Real Simple were casualties of my busy life; I managed to keep up with Mother Jones and The Nation). But now the dissertation is done and I can watch TV and read my lighter magazines without guilt, and I have noticed something: the subtle tyranny of advertising.

    A big part of my dissertation discusses the concept of hegemony, which is basically the underlying structures of power that serve to perpetuate economic and social inequality. In the case of advertising, economic hegemony is served by convincing us in barely noticeable ways that we need things that we really don’t. On television and radio, advertising attempts to trick us by using labels that make things sound more important than they really are. These are usually phrases that describe self-evident things in ways that make them sound special or unique. For some reason I tend to notice them in relation to food advertising. Carl’s Jr. touts its “hand-breaded” chicken sandwich as something more desirable than a sandwich breaded by a machine. This is similar to “hand-leafed lettuce” or “hand-crafted coffee.” But when you stop to consciously think about that, you realize it’s meaningless. Let’s assume the breading used is the same regardless of whether the labor is done by man or machine, and that it is applied to a fresh chicken breast that is then frozen to be cooked later. Okay. If I put both a hand-breaded piece of chicken and a machine-breaded piece of chicken in front of you and ask you to taste them, will you be able to tell the difference? I’d wager not. Is there something about a piece of iceberg lettuce pulled from the head by hand that makes it taste better than a piece handled (pun intended!) by a machine? No – iceberg lettuce still tastes like iceberg lettuce. Yet this is used as a persuasive piece of advertising that implies a human touch improves the quality and taste of the food, even when the food itself has not been altered in any way. In all truth it probably does make the consumer more likely to want the hand-breaded or hand-crafted food. It sounds like higher quality, and more care, is going into the product. But the bottom line is that Carl’s Jr. is only using that description to increase its market share and not to give the consumer a better product, and the advertising agency that created the campaign is banking on it. We are being fooled and we don’t even know it. And that, my friends, is hegemony.

    Magazines are another story altogether. The actual advertisements are usually pretty obvious, although women’s magazines (and probably men’s) often employ advertisements that look very similar to articles, and you may even start reading them before you notice the tiny-print “ADVERTISEMENT” label at the top of the page. But what’s much more insidious is the advertising in the articles. To wit: you read an article about this summer’s new hairstyle trends. There are a few puffy paragraphs about ponytails or hairclips or what have you, accompanied by product suggestions and pretty pictures. “To get this look, try Revlon Silky Shine Spray, $4 at drugstores.” Or “Get the perfect glossy lip with Lancome Pout Perfection, $18, Macy’s.” These are commercials. IN the article. Try an experiment: grab your favorite light magazine and go through it page by page, and count how many pages do not have a single advertisement or product suggestion. I would bet that you will find maybe 10 percent of the pages are product-placement free.

    This is hegemony. This is what we are led to believe. This is what we think we have to have, and we don’t even know why. This, we are told, is what keeps the capitalist machinery operating – and that part of it is actually true. I’m not saying we’re all automatons without free will, but I am saying that advertising can easily fool even the most skeptical of us. Try a week or two without your TV or magazines, then go back, like I did. I’m sure you’ll see it too, if you haven’t already; and if you’ve noticed it before, it will be even more obvious after you choose to ignore it for a while.

    Now excuse me while I go shine my hair, perfect my pout, and eat my hand-breaded chicken – after all, there’s an economy to grow!