The U.S. health care system is full of monopolies (Axios)
Image: Open Markets Institute; Chart Axios Visuals
Tuesday, June 11, 2019
The U.S. Health Care System is Full of Monopolies
The U.S. health care system is full of monopolies (Axios)
Image: Open Markets Institute; Chart Axios Visuals
Monday, June 10, 2019
Fashions Fade, But Fleabag Is Forever
This is a love story. A dangerously elegant woman (noble stock) in lips the color of a dying rose (not a lipstick, but a blend of oils, waxes, and pigments based on MAC’s Dare You), hair a roaring bob, a cigarette perched on her Erté fingers, stands pensively against a brick wall (real?), the burnished light (not real?) casting the kind of shadow that fills in the blanks — and the cleavage. This is Fleabag (of the Amazon series of the same name, written by and starring Phoebe Waller-Bridge), taking a breather behind a restaurant during a fraught family dinner, a fourth-wall-demolishing millennial café owner who could pass for a femme fatale in a film noir. A big part of that latter fantasy is the navy blue jumpsuit she’s wearing (Love, $50), or, more accurately, embodying. The keyhole at the front is more like a door ajar, two strips of material like curtains begging to be parted while threatening to close. Her shoulders jut out, her back is exposed — this is as naked as chic is allowed to be. It is a sleeveless, backless, armless, chestless (well, sort of) number that requires legs for days. To wear it the way Fleabag does, you basically need to be Fleabag, which means you basically need to be Waller-Bridge, whose androgyny (she dressed as a boy when she was a kid), sexiness (she dressed what we think of as the opposite of a boy when she discovered them), and sylphlike stature are as impossible to mimic as the rest of her.
When everyone ran out to buy that jumpsuit last week, that is what they wanted: everything it entailed, from the lights illuminating the scene right down to the It Girl inside it. In her ode to the jumpsuit, The Cut’s Kathryn VanArendonk — who bought two sizes just to be sure — wrote not so much about how it looked as what it meant: “It’s revealing in a way that feels like a choice rather than a plea.” A British fan then polled Twitter: “Will buying the Fleabag jumpsuit solve my emotional problems AS WELL as making me look bomb?” The only answers she provided were “Yes” and “Absolutely.”
“I think people don’t always view contemporary costuming as hard, and it’s really hard,” says Emma Fraser, creator of the TV Ate My Wardrobe blog. “It’s not just about throwing together an outfit,” she explains, it’s using clothes as “an extension of who that character is.” The last time a television star’s style migrated en masse into off-screen culture may have been The Rachel in the ’90s: the shaggy hairdon’t of the Friends’ everywoman played by Jennifer Aniston, whose face was normal enough that every woman thought a mere haircut could be a conduit for a New York City life that didn’t suck. Fleabag gives us an updated version of that same generational aspiration — the bold red lip, the navy jumpsuit, the “achievable” look and life. Describing the character’s allure, Fraser inadvertently defines the millennial: “Everything can be a mess, but you can still kind of be put together.” Watching television can be like window-shopping, shallow characters being little more than clothes horses for pricey brands, so seeing a layered antiheroine whose affordable accoutrements are inseparable from who she is feels revolutionary. And who, these days, doesn’t want to be part of a revolution? As Waller-Bridge herself texted Fleabag costume designer, Ray Holman, (referencing Twitter): “The jumpsuit is a movement.” (...)
As much as the first season of Fleabag is about loss, the second is about love. And isn’t it like that messy bitch to fall for the one guy she can’t have sex with. When we first meet the priest (aka “the hot priest,” played by Sherlock’s Andrew Scott), it’s not clear he is one. He’s unknown to Fleabag, just a random sweary guy at the table of her family dinner. He’s not wearing the dog collar (the audience shouldn’t have any preconceived notions, says Holman). Instead, he is rumpled, in a lavender linen shirt designed by Oliver Spencer, master of the relaxed Brit look (as if that isn’t an oxymoron). Father looks good, but not too good. “He’s quite poor,” the costume designer explains. “He’s not a rich Catholic priest so he doesn’t have many clothes and the clothes he has, they’re old.” He’s not the point anyway. This episode belongs to Fleabag. Fleabag and her jumpsuit (and, okay, her priest boner).
by Soraya Roberts, The Cut | Read more:
Image: Steve Schofield, Amazon / Illustration by Homestead
[ed. Here it is: Fleabag: Season 2 (YouTube). See also: The Case for Boring Office Clothes (The Atlantic).]
When everyone ran out to buy that jumpsuit last week, that is what they wanted: everything it entailed, from the lights illuminating the scene right down to the It Girl inside it. In her ode to the jumpsuit, The Cut’s Kathryn VanArendonk — who bought two sizes just to be sure — wrote not so much about how it looked as what it meant: “It’s revealing in a way that feels like a choice rather than a plea.” A British fan then polled Twitter: “Will buying the Fleabag jumpsuit solve my emotional problems AS WELL as making me look bomb?” The only answers she provided were “Yes” and “Absolutely.” “I think people don’t always view contemporary costuming as hard, and it’s really hard,” says Emma Fraser, creator of the TV Ate My Wardrobe blog. “It’s not just about throwing together an outfit,” she explains, it’s using clothes as “an extension of who that character is.” The last time a television star’s style migrated en masse into off-screen culture may have been The Rachel in the ’90s: the shaggy hairdon’t of the Friends’ everywoman played by Jennifer Aniston, whose face was normal enough that every woman thought a mere haircut could be a conduit for a New York City life that didn’t suck. Fleabag gives us an updated version of that same generational aspiration — the bold red lip, the navy jumpsuit, the “achievable” look and life. Describing the character’s allure, Fraser inadvertently defines the millennial: “Everything can be a mess, but you can still kind of be put together.” Watching television can be like window-shopping, shallow characters being little more than clothes horses for pricey brands, so seeing a layered antiheroine whose affordable accoutrements are inseparable from who she is feels revolutionary. And who, these days, doesn’t want to be part of a revolution? As Waller-Bridge herself texted Fleabag costume designer, Ray Holman, (referencing Twitter): “The jumpsuit is a movement.” (...)
As much as the first season of Fleabag is about loss, the second is about love. And isn’t it like that messy bitch to fall for the one guy she can’t have sex with. When we first meet the priest (aka “the hot priest,” played by Sherlock’s Andrew Scott), it’s not clear he is one. He’s unknown to Fleabag, just a random sweary guy at the table of her family dinner. He’s not wearing the dog collar (the audience shouldn’t have any preconceived notions, says Holman). Instead, he is rumpled, in a lavender linen shirt designed by Oliver Spencer, master of the relaxed Brit look (as if that isn’t an oxymoron). Father looks good, but not too good. “He’s quite poor,” the costume designer explains. “He’s not a rich Catholic priest so he doesn’t have many clothes and the clothes he has, they’re old.” He’s not the point anyway. This episode belongs to Fleabag. Fleabag and her jumpsuit (and, okay, her priest boner).
by Soraya Roberts, The Cut | Read more:
Image: Steve Schofield, Amazon / Illustration by Homestead
[ed. Here it is: Fleabag: Season 2 (YouTube). See also: The Case for Boring Office Clothes (The Atlantic).]
Her Evangelical Megachurch Was Her World
Her Evangelical Megachurch Was Her World. Then Her Daughter Said She Was Molested by a Minister (NY Times).
Image: Ryan Longnecker
[ed. You have to sign a forced arbitration contract to be a member.]
[ed. You have to sign a forced arbitration contract to be a member.]
Sunday, June 9, 2019
The Invisible Primary
In the United States, the invisible primary, also known as the money primary, is the period between the first well-known presidential candidates with strong political support networks showing interest in running for president and demonstration of substantial public support by voters for them in primaries and caucuses. During the money primary candidates raise funds for the upcoming primary elections and attempt to garner support of political leaders and donors, as well as the party establishment. Fund raising numbers and opinion polls are used by the media to predict who the front runners for the nomination are. This is a crucial stage of a campaign for the presidency, as the initial frontrunners who raise the most money appear the strongest and will be able to raise even more money. On the other hand, members of the party establishment who find themselves losing the invisible primary, such as Mitt Romney in the 2016 race, may abandon hope of successfully running.
During the invisible primary appeals are made and meetings held with the political elite: party leaders, major donors, fundraisers, and political action committees. In contrast to the smoke-filled room where a small group of party-leaders might at the last minute, in a small meeting room at a political convention, determine the candidate, the invisible primary refers to the period of jockeying which precedes the first primaries and caucuses and even campaign announcements. The winners of the invisible primary, such as Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush in 2016, come into the first primaries and caucuses with a full war chest of money, support from office holders, and an aura of inevitability. Winners of the invisible primary have the support of the leaders of their political party and, in turn, support the political positions of their party; they are insiders, part of the party establishment. They do not always win, as Hillary Clinton did not in 2008. There is little or no campaign advertising using TV, particularly by the candidate, during this period, although online advertising may be used to build mailing lists of grassroots supporters and small contributors.
During the invisible primary appeals are made and meetings held with the political elite: party leaders, major donors, fundraisers, and political action committees. In contrast to the smoke-filled room where a small group of party-leaders might at the last minute, in a small meeting room at a political convention, determine the candidate, the invisible primary refers to the period of jockeying which precedes the first primaries and caucuses and even campaign announcements. The winners of the invisible primary, such as Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush in 2016, come into the first primaries and caucuses with a full war chest of money, support from office holders, and an aura of inevitability. Winners of the invisible primary have the support of the leaders of their political party and, in turn, support the political positions of their party; they are insiders, part of the party establishment. They do not always win, as Hillary Clinton did not in 2008. There is little or no campaign advertising using TV, particularly by the candidate, during this period, although online advertising may be used to build mailing lists of grassroots supporters and small contributors.
by Wikipedia | Read more:
Georgetown Carnival, Seattle 2019
[ed. Georgetown Carnival, Seattle. 2019. Click on the "Read more" link below for more pictures. 2015 Carnival pics can be found here. All photos: markk]
Saturday, June 8, 2019
The Kill Zone
Earlier this week, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin joined a growing number of public officials concerned about the impact of Internet monopolies when he called on the Justice Department to look into the power that digital platforms like Google have over the US economy. “These are issues the Justice Department needs to look at seriously,” he told CNBC, “not for any one company, but obviously as these technology companies have a greater and greater impact on the economy, I think that you have to look at the power they have.”
Mnuchin’s comments followed a 60 Minutes report that examined the enormous power Google wields over potential competitors thanks to its monopoly in online search and search advertising. “If I were starting out today, I would have no shot of building Yelp,” said Jeremy Stoppelman, co-founder and CEO of Yelp, during the segment. Yelp has long argued that Google has abused its dominance in local search to favor its own services over competitors such as itself, and is currently attempting to convince European competition authorities to launch a fresh antitrust case against the company.
“If you provide great content in one of these categories that is lucrative to Google, and seen as potentially threatening, they will snuff you out,” added Stoppelman. “They will make you disappear. They will bury you.”
The sentiment that startups effectively have no chance of competing against the “Big Five” tech giants—Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft—is one that has become increasingly common among tech entrepreneurs and venture capitalists in recent years. “People are not getting funded because Amazon might one day compete with them,” one founder told The Guardian. “If it was startup versus startup, it would have been a fair fight, but startup versus Amazon and it’s game over.” As the author and media scholar Jonathan Taplin pointed out in an interview with ProMarket, the very notion that someone could start a new search engine that competes with Google “is just laughed at by the venture capital community.”
Investors and entrepreneurs, said the venture capitalist Albert Wenger during a panel discussion at the Stigler Center’s annual antitrust conference last month, are now wary of entering into direct competition with giants like Google and Facebook. Both companies, along with Amazon and Apple, effectively have a “Kill Zone” around them—areas not worth operating or investing in, since defeat is guaranteed.
Tech platforms, after all, have endless resources at their disposal to either purchase or crush new upstarts they perceive as threats. Increasingly, startups that operate in areas coveted by tech giants face a similar choice: sell—or get crushed. The Big Five have made over 436 acquisitions in the last decade, with little to no challenge from antitrust authorities. When startups refuse to sell, they find themselves facing an unlevel playing field. Snapchat, which turned down a $3 billion acquisition offer from Facebook in 2013 (and a $30 billion bid from Google in 2016), is a case in point: after it failed to acquire Snapchat, Facebook simply cloned many of Snapchat’s key features, using its vast reach to completely undercut its growth. This is not an uncommon occurrence.
“The Kill Zone is a real thing,” said Wenger, a managing partner at Union Square Ventures and an early investor in Twitter. “The scale of these companies and their impact on what can be funded, and what can succeed, is massive.” He went on to quote one angel investor who told him that he only invests “in things that are not in Facebook’s, Apple’s, Amazon’s or Google’s kill zone.”
The kill zone, noted Wenger, is not a new phenomenon. Microsoft had a similar kill zone around it when it dominated the tech industry in the late 1990s. “It was a similar playbook, where Microsoft would see, ‘What kind of things are doing well on my platform?’” he said. “Then they would just absorb those into the platform itself. That is a playbook that’s being exercised by Amazon, by Google, by Facebook, by all the big digital platforms.”
All this has profound implications for the startup ecosystem and for the future of innovation. Is the dominance of digital platforms, routinely hailed as the most innovative companies in the world, actually hindering innovation? Much of the Stigler Center panel, moderated by Fortune magazine’s executive editor Adam Lashinsky, revolved around this very question. In addition to Wenger, it featured patent expert Elvir Causevic, managing director and co-head of Houlihan Lokey’s Tech+IP Advisory practice; Glen Weyl, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a senior research scholar at Yale’s economics department and law school; and Matt Perault, director of public policy at Facebook.
While opinions as to how to address the power of digital platforms and spur innovation varied wildly, most of the panelists seemed to agree on one basic premise: the size and scope of digital platforms has become an impediment to innovation.
“Small Companies No Longer Have Access to Patent Protection”
Innovation used to be associated with small companies and entrepreneurs. There’s a reason why the garage has taken such an important place in the mythology of the tech industry: Silicon Valley, as we know it, is the product of entrepreneurs starting companies in their garages, from Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard in the late 1930s, through Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in the 1970s, to Larry Page and Sergey Brin in the 1990s.
But the vaunted garage is little more than a myth in today’s Silicon Valley. The rise of digital platforms has been correlated with a historic decline in startups: new business formation in the US has declined by more than 40 percent since the late 1970s and is near a 40-year low. At the same time, as the New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo pointed out last year, the technology industry has gradually become “a playground for giants.”
Many economists are naturally concerned about this decline in entrepreneurship: startups are an important driver of both jobs and innovation. A lack of startups is often associated with rigidity and a lack of economic dynamism. Another result, however, is that big firms have seemingly taken the mantle as the most innovative in the world.
“The label of innovation has been grabbed by Big Tech,” said Causevic, who argued that big tech firms use the US patent system to stifle innovation. “We’ve taken the focus off of rewarding genius and innovation to rewarding capital and scale.”
Historically, he noted, large companies used to abuse the patent system to entrench their position. But the patent system also served an important function: it provided small innovators with an effective tool to fight big firms that tried to infringe on their patents. Recent changes in US patent laws, however—in particular the America Invents Act (AIA) that was signed into law by President Obama in 2011—have created a situation where “small companies no longer have access to patent protection.” In order to deal with patent trolls, he said, the AIA has “eviscerated” the ability of small companies to enjoy patent protection, making it lucrative for big tech firms to be on the side of anti-patent enforcement.
“You have nothing to lose. You’re better off just infringing. As a matter of fact, it might be less expensive to infringe than it might be to pay royalties, given how the current case law is set up,” said Causevic. “Throughout my career, it was always the patents that made the big difference when the little guys [fought] against the big guys. Now you don’t have that.” It’s not only small companies that are affected by this, contended Causevic—even middle-market firms are at risk.
To illustrate this point, Causevic used the recent example of Apple and Immersion. Immersion, which developed the feedback technologies that are used in many wearable devices, sued Apple in 2016, alleging that Apple’s iPhones and iWatch devices were infringing on its haptic feedback patents. The companies reached a settlement earlier this year. “That technology was largely invented by Immersion, a middle-market company that has been been around for 20 years, has 1,000 patents. Apple worked with them, paid them a license for years, but decided to stop paying and said, ‘No, we’ll just do it ourselves,’” said Causevic. “[Immersion’s] market cap dropped 60 percent and Apple did a piddly settlement with this company for peanuts. The company’s really in a lot of pain. It used to be a $500 million company.”
The larger question, said Causevic, is not really the patent system per se, which he acknowledged might be outdated, but the question of how to reward innovation and what type of innovation gets rewarded. “Do we want to reward innovation or do we want to reward capital, and network, and market power?” he asked.
A “Lack of Imagination” Among Antitrust Enforcers
Weyl, co-author of the new book Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society, laid much of the blame on the lack of antitrust enforcement in the past 40 years. Enforcers, he said, have focused too much on consumer welfare instead of competition, and thus failed to anticipate how crucial new industries might develop. This manifested in the approval of a number of mergers that fundamentally altered the course of the digital economy: Google’s purchase of DoubleClick in 2007 and Waze in 2013, Facebook’s acquisitions of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014, and Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype in 2011.
“Had those companies not been absorbed,” said Weyl, “they might have changed the texture of the way that competition took place within those relevant marketplaces. In fact, the prospect of that happening was part of the basis of the funding and expansion of those companies.”
Mnuchin’s comments followed a 60 Minutes report that examined the enormous power Google wields over potential competitors thanks to its monopoly in online search and search advertising. “If I were starting out today, I would have no shot of building Yelp,” said Jeremy Stoppelman, co-founder and CEO of Yelp, during the segment. Yelp has long argued that Google has abused its dominance in local search to favor its own services over competitors such as itself, and is currently attempting to convince European competition authorities to launch a fresh antitrust case against the company.
“If you provide great content in one of these categories that is lucrative to Google, and seen as potentially threatening, they will snuff you out,” added Stoppelman. “They will make you disappear. They will bury you.”
The sentiment that startups effectively have no chance of competing against the “Big Five” tech giants—Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft—is one that has become increasingly common among tech entrepreneurs and venture capitalists in recent years. “People are not getting funded because Amazon might one day compete with them,” one founder told The Guardian. “If it was startup versus startup, it would have been a fair fight, but startup versus Amazon and it’s game over.” As the author and media scholar Jonathan Taplin pointed out in an interview with ProMarket, the very notion that someone could start a new search engine that competes with Google “is just laughed at by the venture capital community.”
Investors and entrepreneurs, said the venture capitalist Albert Wenger during a panel discussion at the Stigler Center’s annual antitrust conference last month, are now wary of entering into direct competition with giants like Google and Facebook. Both companies, along with Amazon and Apple, effectively have a “Kill Zone” around them—areas not worth operating or investing in, since defeat is guaranteed.
Tech platforms, after all, have endless resources at their disposal to either purchase or crush new upstarts they perceive as threats. Increasingly, startups that operate in areas coveted by tech giants face a similar choice: sell—or get crushed. The Big Five have made over 436 acquisitions in the last decade, with little to no challenge from antitrust authorities. When startups refuse to sell, they find themselves facing an unlevel playing field. Snapchat, which turned down a $3 billion acquisition offer from Facebook in 2013 (and a $30 billion bid from Google in 2016), is a case in point: after it failed to acquire Snapchat, Facebook simply cloned many of Snapchat’s key features, using its vast reach to completely undercut its growth. This is not an uncommon occurrence.
“The Kill Zone is a real thing,” said Wenger, a managing partner at Union Square Ventures and an early investor in Twitter. “The scale of these companies and their impact on what can be funded, and what can succeed, is massive.” He went on to quote one angel investor who told him that he only invests “in things that are not in Facebook’s, Apple’s, Amazon’s or Google’s kill zone.”
The kill zone, noted Wenger, is not a new phenomenon. Microsoft had a similar kill zone around it when it dominated the tech industry in the late 1990s. “It was a similar playbook, where Microsoft would see, ‘What kind of things are doing well on my platform?’” he said. “Then they would just absorb those into the platform itself. That is a playbook that’s being exercised by Amazon, by Google, by Facebook, by all the big digital platforms.”
All this has profound implications for the startup ecosystem and for the future of innovation. Is the dominance of digital platforms, routinely hailed as the most innovative companies in the world, actually hindering innovation? Much of the Stigler Center panel, moderated by Fortune magazine’s executive editor Adam Lashinsky, revolved around this very question. In addition to Wenger, it featured patent expert Elvir Causevic, managing director and co-head of Houlihan Lokey’s Tech+IP Advisory practice; Glen Weyl, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a senior research scholar at Yale’s economics department and law school; and Matt Perault, director of public policy at Facebook.
While opinions as to how to address the power of digital platforms and spur innovation varied wildly, most of the panelists seemed to agree on one basic premise: the size and scope of digital platforms has become an impediment to innovation.
“Small Companies No Longer Have Access to Patent Protection”
Innovation used to be associated with small companies and entrepreneurs. There’s a reason why the garage has taken such an important place in the mythology of the tech industry: Silicon Valley, as we know it, is the product of entrepreneurs starting companies in their garages, from Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard in the late 1930s, through Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in the 1970s, to Larry Page and Sergey Brin in the 1990s.
But the vaunted garage is little more than a myth in today’s Silicon Valley. The rise of digital platforms has been correlated with a historic decline in startups: new business formation in the US has declined by more than 40 percent since the late 1970s and is near a 40-year low. At the same time, as the New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo pointed out last year, the technology industry has gradually become “a playground for giants.”
Many economists are naturally concerned about this decline in entrepreneurship: startups are an important driver of both jobs and innovation. A lack of startups is often associated with rigidity and a lack of economic dynamism. Another result, however, is that big firms have seemingly taken the mantle as the most innovative in the world.
“The label of innovation has been grabbed by Big Tech,” said Causevic, who argued that big tech firms use the US patent system to stifle innovation. “We’ve taken the focus off of rewarding genius and innovation to rewarding capital and scale.”
Historically, he noted, large companies used to abuse the patent system to entrench their position. But the patent system also served an important function: it provided small innovators with an effective tool to fight big firms that tried to infringe on their patents. Recent changes in US patent laws, however—in particular the America Invents Act (AIA) that was signed into law by President Obama in 2011—have created a situation where “small companies no longer have access to patent protection.” In order to deal with patent trolls, he said, the AIA has “eviscerated” the ability of small companies to enjoy patent protection, making it lucrative for big tech firms to be on the side of anti-patent enforcement.
“You have nothing to lose. You’re better off just infringing. As a matter of fact, it might be less expensive to infringe than it might be to pay royalties, given how the current case law is set up,” said Causevic. “Throughout my career, it was always the patents that made the big difference when the little guys [fought] against the big guys. Now you don’t have that.” It’s not only small companies that are affected by this, contended Causevic—even middle-market firms are at risk.
To illustrate this point, Causevic used the recent example of Apple and Immersion. Immersion, which developed the feedback technologies that are used in many wearable devices, sued Apple in 2016, alleging that Apple’s iPhones and iWatch devices were infringing on its haptic feedback patents. The companies reached a settlement earlier this year. “That technology was largely invented by Immersion, a middle-market company that has been been around for 20 years, has 1,000 patents. Apple worked with them, paid them a license for years, but decided to stop paying and said, ‘No, we’ll just do it ourselves,’” said Causevic. “[Immersion’s] market cap dropped 60 percent and Apple did a piddly settlement with this company for peanuts. The company’s really in a lot of pain. It used to be a $500 million company.”
The larger question, said Causevic, is not really the patent system per se, which he acknowledged might be outdated, but the question of how to reward innovation and what type of innovation gets rewarded. “Do we want to reward innovation or do we want to reward capital, and network, and market power?” he asked.
A “Lack of Imagination” Among Antitrust Enforcers
Weyl, co-author of the new book Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society, laid much of the blame on the lack of antitrust enforcement in the past 40 years. Enforcers, he said, have focused too much on consumer welfare instead of competition, and thus failed to anticipate how crucial new industries might develop. This manifested in the approval of a number of mergers that fundamentally altered the course of the digital economy: Google’s purchase of DoubleClick in 2007 and Waze in 2013, Facebook’s acquisitions of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014, and Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype in 2011.
“Had those companies not been absorbed,” said Weyl, “they might have changed the texture of the way that competition took place within those relevant marketplaces. In fact, the prospect of that happening was part of the basis of the funding and expansion of those companies.”
by Asher Schechter, Pro-Market | Read more:
[ed. See also: Adversarial interoperability: reviving an elegant weapon from a more civilized age to slay today's monopolies (Boing Boing).]
Friday, June 7, 2019
Kauai 'O'o
This is the song of the last male Kauai ‘O'o, singing at a partner that does not exist anymore. Recorded in 1987, this was the last time the song of this species was heard. It has since been declared extinct.
Overlooked No More: Elizabeth Peratrovich, Rights Advocate for Alaska Natives
It was hardly the first affront. They had grown up in a segregated Alaska: separate schools, hospitals, theaters, restaurants and cemeteries. But for Elizabeth Peratrovich and her husband, Roy, Tlingit natives, the sign they spotted one day in late 1941 in Douglas, just across the channel from downtown Juneau, was the final straw.
“No Natives Allowed” read the notice on a hotel door.
“The proprietor of Douglas Inn does not seem to realize that our Native boys are just as willing as the white boys to lay down their lives to protect the freedom that he enjoys,” they wrote in a letter to Ernest Gruening, the territory’s governor, signaling the start of their campaign to fight discrimination in Alaska.
Calling such open bias “an outrage,” the couple continued, “We will still be here to guard our beloved country while hordes of uninterested whites will be fleeing South.”
Gruening agreed with the Peratroviches, and they joined forces. In 1943, they attempted to usher an antidiscrimination bill through Alaska’s two-branch Territorial Legislature. It failed, with a tie vote of 8-8 in the House.
In the two years that followed, the Peratroviches redoubled their efforts, urging Native Alaskans to campaign for seats in the Legislature and taking their cause on the road to gain support. They even left their children in the care of an orphanage for a summer so that they could travel across the state more freely.
By the time the new bill reached the Senate floor, on Feb. 5, 1945, Congress had increased the size of the territory’s Legislature, two Natives had been elected to it, and Alaska’s House had already approved the bill. Though the odds of passage were high, the bill set off hours of passionate debate and drew so many onlookers that the crowd spilled out of the gallery doors.
Senator Allen Shattuck argued that the measure would “aggravate rather than allay” racial tensions.
“Who are these people, barely out of savagery, who want to associate with us whites with 5,000 years of recorded civilization behind us?” he was quoted as saying in Gruening’s 1973 autobiography, “Many Battles.”
When the floor was opened to public comments, Peratrovich set down her knitting needles and rose from her seat in the back.
Taking the podium, she said: “I would not have expected that I, who am barely out of savagery, would have to remind the gentlemen with 5,000 years of recorded civilization behind them of our Bill of Rights.”
She gave examples of the injustices that she and her family had faced because of their background and called on the lawmakers to act. “You as legislators,” she said, “can assert to the world that you recognize the evil of the present situation and speak your intent to help us overcome discrimination.”
Her testimony, The Daily Alaska Empire wrote, shamed the opposition into a “defensive whisper.”
The gallery broke out in a “wild burst of applause,” Gruening wrote. The 1945 Anti-Discrimination Act was passed, 11-5.
Gruening signed the bill into law on Feb. 16 — a date now celebrated by the state each year. The legislation entitled all Alaskans to “full and equal enjoyment” of public establishments, setting a misdemeanor penalty for violators. It also banned discriminatory signage based on race.
It was the first antidiscrimination act in the United States. It would be nearly 20 years before the federal Civil Rights Act would be passed, in 1964, and 14 years before Alaska would become a state.
by Carson Vaughan, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Alaska State Archives
“No Natives Allowed” read the notice on a hotel door.
“The proprietor of Douglas Inn does not seem to realize that our Native boys are just as willing as the white boys to lay down their lives to protect the freedom that he enjoys,” they wrote in a letter to Ernest Gruening, the territory’s governor, signaling the start of their campaign to fight discrimination in Alaska.Calling such open bias “an outrage,” the couple continued, “We will still be here to guard our beloved country while hordes of uninterested whites will be fleeing South.”
Gruening agreed with the Peratroviches, and they joined forces. In 1943, they attempted to usher an antidiscrimination bill through Alaska’s two-branch Territorial Legislature. It failed, with a tie vote of 8-8 in the House.
In the two years that followed, the Peratroviches redoubled their efforts, urging Native Alaskans to campaign for seats in the Legislature and taking their cause on the road to gain support. They even left their children in the care of an orphanage for a summer so that they could travel across the state more freely.
By the time the new bill reached the Senate floor, on Feb. 5, 1945, Congress had increased the size of the territory’s Legislature, two Natives had been elected to it, and Alaska’s House had already approved the bill. Though the odds of passage were high, the bill set off hours of passionate debate and drew so many onlookers that the crowd spilled out of the gallery doors.
Senator Allen Shattuck argued that the measure would “aggravate rather than allay” racial tensions.
“Who are these people, barely out of savagery, who want to associate with us whites with 5,000 years of recorded civilization behind us?” he was quoted as saying in Gruening’s 1973 autobiography, “Many Battles.”
When the floor was opened to public comments, Peratrovich set down her knitting needles and rose from her seat in the back.
Taking the podium, she said: “I would not have expected that I, who am barely out of savagery, would have to remind the gentlemen with 5,000 years of recorded civilization behind them of our Bill of Rights.”
She gave examples of the injustices that she and her family had faced because of their background and called on the lawmakers to act. “You as legislators,” she said, “can assert to the world that you recognize the evil of the present situation and speak your intent to help us overcome discrimination.”
Her testimony, The Daily Alaska Empire wrote, shamed the opposition into a “defensive whisper.”
The gallery broke out in a “wild burst of applause,” Gruening wrote. The 1945 Anti-Discrimination Act was passed, 11-5.
Gruening signed the bill into law on Feb. 16 — a date now celebrated by the state each year. The legislation entitled all Alaskans to “full and equal enjoyment” of public establishments, setting a misdemeanor penalty for violators. It also banned discriminatory signage based on race.
It was the first antidiscrimination act in the United States. It would be nearly 20 years before the federal Civil Rights Act would be passed, in 1964, and 14 years before Alaska would become a state.
by Carson Vaughan, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Alaska State Archives
[ed. Overlooked is a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.]
Consumer Financial Loan-Shark Bureau
How Payday Lenders Spent $1 Million at a Trump Resort — and Cashed In
In mid-March, the payday lending industry held its annual convention at the Trump National Doral hotel outside Miami. Payday lenders offer loans on the order of a few hundred dollars, typically to low-income borrowers, who have to pay them back in a matter of weeks. The industry has long been reviled by critics for charging stratospheric interest rates — typically 400% on an annual basis — that leave customers trapped in cycles of debt.
The industry had felt under siege during the Obama administration, as the federal government moved to clamp down. A government study found that a majority of payday loans are made to people who pay more in interest and fees than they initially borrow. Google and Facebook refuse to take the industry’s ads.
On the edge of the Doral’s grounds, as the payday convention began, a group of ministers held a protest “pray-in,” denouncing the lenders for having a “feast” while their borrowers “suffer and starve.”
But inside the hotel, in a wood-paneled bar under golden chandeliers, the mood was celebratory. Payday lenders, many dressed in golf shirts and khakis, enjoyed an open bar and mingled over bites of steak and coconut shrimp.
They had plenty to be elated about. A month earlier, Kathleen Kraninger, who had just finished her second month as director of the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, had delivered what the lenders consider an epochal victory: Kraninger announced a proposal to gut a crucial rule that had been passed under her Obama-era predecessor.
Payday lenders viewed that rule as a potential death sentence for many in their industry. It would require payday lenders and others to make sure borrowers could afford to pay back their loans while also covering basic living expenses. Banks and mortgage lenders view such a step as a basic prerequisite. But the notion struck terror in the payday lenders. Their business model relies on customers — 12 million Americans take out payday loans every year, according to Pew Charitable Trusts — getting stuck in a long-term cycle of debt, experts say. A CFPB study found that three out of four payday loans go to borrowers who take out 10 or more loans a year. (...)
In Mick Mulvaney, who Trump appointed as interim chief of the CFPB in 2017, the industry got exactly the kind of person it had hoped for. As a congressman, Mulvaney had famously derided the agency as a “sad, sick” joke.
If anything, that phrase undersold Mulvaney’s attempts to hamstring the agency as its chief. He froze new investigations, dropped enforcement actions en masse, requested a budget of $0 and seemed to mock the agency by attempting to officially re-order the words in the organization’s name.
But Mulvaney’s rhetoric sometimes exceeded his impact. His budget request was ignored, for example; the CFPB’s name change was only fleeting. And besides, Mulvaney was always a part-timer, fitting in a few days a week at the CFPB while also heading the Office of Management and Budget, and then moving to the White House as acting chief of staff.
It’s Mulvaney’s successor, Kraninger, whom the financial industry is now counting on — and the early signs suggest she’ll deliver. In addition to easing rules on payday lenders, she has continued Mulvaney’s policy of ending supervisory exams on outfits that specialize in lending to the members of the military, claiming that the CFPB can do so only if Congress passes a new law granting those powers (which isn’t likely to happen anytime soon). She has also proposed a new regulation that will allow debt collectors to text and email debtors an unlimited number of times as long as there’s an option to unsubscribe.
Enforcement activity at the bureau has plunged under Trump. The amount of monetary relief going to consumers has fallen from $43 million per week under Richard Cordray, the director appointed by Barack Obama, to $6.4 million per week under Mulvaney and is now $464,039, according to an updated analysis conducted by the Consumer Federation of America’s Christopher Peterson, a former special adviser to the bureau. (...)
Triple-digit interest rates are no laughing matter for those who take out payday loans. A sum as little as $100, combined with such rates, can lead a borrower into long-term financial dependency.
That’s what happened to Maria Dichter. Now 73, retired from the insurance industry and living in Palm Beach County, Florida, Dichter first took out a payday loan in 2011. Both she and her husband had gotten knee replacements, and he was about to get a pacemaker. She needed $100 to cover the co-pay on their medication. As is required, Dichter brought identification and her Social Security number and gave the lender a postdated check to pay what she owed. (All of this is standard for payday loans; borrowers either postdate a check or grant the lender access to their bank account.) What nobody asked her to do was show that she had the means to repay the loan. Dichter got the $100 the same day.
The relief was only temporary. Dichter soon needed to pay for more doctors’ appointments and prescriptions. She went back and got a new loan for $300 to cover the first one and provide some more cash. A few months later, she paid that off with a new $500 loan.
Dichter collects a Social Security check each month, but she has never been able to catch up. For almost eight years now, she has renewed her $500 loan every month. Each time she is charged $54 in fees and interest. That means Dichter has paid about $5,000 in interest and fees since 2011 on what is effectively one loan for $500.
by Anjali Tsui, ProPublica, and Alice Wilder, WNYC, Pro Publica | Read more:
Image: via
In mid-March, the payday lending industry held its annual convention at the Trump National Doral hotel outside Miami. Payday lenders offer loans on the order of a few hundred dollars, typically to low-income borrowers, who have to pay them back in a matter of weeks. The industry has long been reviled by critics for charging stratospheric interest rates — typically 400% on an annual basis — that leave customers trapped in cycles of debt.
The industry had felt under siege during the Obama administration, as the federal government moved to clamp down. A government study found that a majority of payday loans are made to people who pay more in interest and fees than they initially borrow. Google and Facebook refuse to take the industry’s ads.
On the edge of the Doral’s grounds, as the payday convention began, a group of ministers held a protest “pray-in,” denouncing the lenders for having a “feast” while their borrowers “suffer and starve.”But inside the hotel, in a wood-paneled bar under golden chandeliers, the mood was celebratory. Payday lenders, many dressed in golf shirts and khakis, enjoyed an open bar and mingled over bites of steak and coconut shrimp.
They had plenty to be elated about. A month earlier, Kathleen Kraninger, who had just finished her second month as director of the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, had delivered what the lenders consider an epochal victory: Kraninger announced a proposal to gut a crucial rule that had been passed under her Obama-era predecessor.
Payday lenders viewed that rule as a potential death sentence for many in their industry. It would require payday lenders and others to make sure borrowers could afford to pay back their loans while also covering basic living expenses. Banks and mortgage lenders view such a step as a basic prerequisite. But the notion struck terror in the payday lenders. Their business model relies on customers — 12 million Americans take out payday loans every year, according to Pew Charitable Trusts — getting stuck in a long-term cycle of debt, experts say. A CFPB study found that three out of four payday loans go to borrowers who take out 10 or more loans a year. (...)
In Mick Mulvaney, who Trump appointed as interim chief of the CFPB in 2017, the industry got exactly the kind of person it had hoped for. As a congressman, Mulvaney had famously derided the agency as a “sad, sick” joke.
If anything, that phrase undersold Mulvaney’s attempts to hamstring the agency as its chief. He froze new investigations, dropped enforcement actions en masse, requested a budget of $0 and seemed to mock the agency by attempting to officially re-order the words in the organization’s name.
But Mulvaney’s rhetoric sometimes exceeded his impact. His budget request was ignored, for example; the CFPB’s name change was only fleeting. And besides, Mulvaney was always a part-timer, fitting in a few days a week at the CFPB while also heading the Office of Management and Budget, and then moving to the White House as acting chief of staff.
It’s Mulvaney’s successor, Kraninger, whom the financial industry is now counting on — and the early signs suggest she’ll deliver. In addition to easing rules on payday lenders, she has continued Mulvaney’s policy of ending supervisory exams on outfits that specialize in lending to the members of the military, claiming that the CFPB can do so only if Congress passes a new law granting those powers (which isn’t likely to happen anytime soon). She has also proposed a new regulation that will allow debt collectors to text and email debtors an unlimited number of times as long as there’s an option to unsubscribe.
Enforcement activity at the bureau has plunged under Trump. The amount of monetary relief going to consumers has fallen from $43 million per week under Richard Cordray, the director appointed by Barack Obama, to $6.4 million per week under Mulvaney and is now $464,039, according to an updated analysis conducted by the Consumer Federation of America’s Christopher Peterson, a former special adviser to the bureau. (...)
Triple-digit interest rates are no laughing matter for those who take out payday loans. A sum as little as $100, combined with such rates, can lead a borrower into long-term financial dependency.
That’s what happened to Maria Dichter. Now 73, retired from the insurance industry and living in Palm Beach County, Florida, Dichter first took out a payday loan in 2011. Both she and her husband had gotten knee replacements, and he was about to get a pacemaker. She needed $100 to cover the co-pay on their medication. As is required, Dichter brought identification and her Social Security number and gave the lender a postdated check to pay what she owed. (All of this is standard for payday loans; borrowers either postdate a check or grant the lender access to their bank account.) What nobody asked her to do was show that she had the means to repay the loan. Dichter got the $100 the same day.
The relief was only temporary. Dichter soon needed to pay for more doctors’ appointments and prescriptions. She went back and got a new loan for $300 to cover the first one and provide some more cash. A few months later, she paid that off with a new $500 loan.
Dichter collects a Social Security check each month, but she has never been able to catch up. For almost eight years now, she has renewed her $500 loan every month. Each time she is charged $54 in fees and interest. That means Dichter has paid about $5,000 in interest and fees since 2011 on what is effectively one loan for $500.
by Anjali Tsui, ProPublica, and Alice Wilder, WNYC, Pro Publica | Read more:
Image: via
Biotech Cockaigne of the Vegan Hopeful
August 2013: The future of meat appears in London. At least, that’s how the media event I’m watching online has been billed. A hamburger made of bovine muscle cells grown in vitro is unveiled, then served to a panel of tasters while a studio audience of journalists watches. A promotional film describes the various ills that “cultured meat” promises to solve, ills caused by eating animals at industrial scale. Industrial animal agriculture possibly produces 14 to 18 percent of global emissions of greenhouse gases. The byproducts of animal agriculture can pollute waterways and soil. Livestock, especially bovine livestock, is inefficient at turning plant foods into protein. Concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) are a potential source of zoonotic diseases; furthermore, subtherapeutic dosing with antibiotics to speed animals’ growth builds antibiotic resistance in pathogens that can grow in feedlots.1 Billions of animals suffer in our meat production infrastructure, and the moral weight of that suffering depends on whom you ask, and on his or her philosophical views about animals. Today’s event conveys the implicit promise that “cultured meat” may solve all these problems. The short promotional film concludes with the words “be part of the solution.”
A second promotional film describes how the burger was made: The process started with a biopsy of cow muscle cells, followed by careful stimulation of a stem cell–driven, natural process of muscle repair, as cells were fed with growth media under carefully calibrated laboratory conditions. Gradually, what functions as a healing process in vivo (i.e., in living animals) becomes a meat production process, in vitro. Thus, the potential of stem cells to create new tissue becomes the biological grounds for a promise about the future of protein.
But this is only a test—or, only a taste. In vitro techniques cannot yet perfectly reproduce in vivo animal muscle and fat, and thus cannot perfectly reproduce what consumers recognize as meat. Cultured meat has yet to become delicious. Nor is the technology scalable. The techniques and materials are still too expensive. The burger taste-tested in London took months of lab time to make, and the entire project (materials, technician salaries, etc.) cost more than $300,000 US. If the holy grail of cultured meat research is to develop a product that can replace “cheap meat,” that is, the kind of meat that is produced at industrial scale and sold at fast-food restaurants, then the goal seems years or decades away.
If we succeed in growing meat—meat that never had parents, meat that was never part of a complete animal body—we will do more than change human subsistence strategies forever. We will also transform our relationship with animal bodies, beginning at the level of the cell. Mark Post, the Dutch medical researcher who created the burger with the help of a team of scientists and technicians, seems hopeful and confident. He laughs good-naturedly with the journalists when they articulate their doubts. Of course, he acknowledges, it would be easier if everyone just became a vegetarian, but such a mass shift in human behavior doesn’t seem likely.
A Tale of Hope—or Hype?
October 2018: Scientists, entrepreneurs, and promoters are working to make cultured meat a reality. There is still no cultured meat on the market, but a handful of startup companies, many of them based in the San Francisco Bay area, promise that they will have a product to sell—presumably still not at the same price point as a fast-food hamburger or chicken nugget—in a matter of months or a handful of years.
I spent the years between the first in vitro hamburger unveiling and late 2018 conducting ethnographic research on the cultured meat movement, and I still cannot tell you if cultured meat will grace our tables soon. To the best of my knowledge, the two main technical challenges in cultured meat research have not yet been surmounted. One challenge is the creation of an affordably scalable growth medium not derived from animal sources (the current mix contains fetal bovine serum) and the other is the ability to create “thick” and texturally sophisticated tissue, such as that found in steak or pork chops, as opposed to growing two-dimensional sheets of cells and assembling them into meat. And beyond these technical challenges, cultured meat’s pioneers will need to find a way to make production “scale up” to the point where the cost of an individual serving of meat drops close to, or even equals, the cost of the conventional equivalent. In short, we don’t yet know what kind of technology story this is. Are we en route to success, or are we watching a cautionary tale in progress, one about hope and hype?
Much like self-driving cars, the advocates of which hope their use will reduce car crashes, cultured meat is promoted by those who believe in its practical and ethical benefits. But cultured meat is also like the self-driving car insofar as opinions vary as to whether a single technology can resolve a complex and, in some senses, social problem that involves not only engineering challenges but also the vagaries of human behavior. Like medical therapies based on stem cells, cultured meat excites the imagination and creates hope, but the hype seems to be running years or decades ahead of the reality. (Cultured meat itself is an offshoot of the effort to create tissues for transplant to human patients, an effort that goes by the name “regenerative medicine.”)
Cultured meat may one day come ashore on the high-tech equivalent of the Island of Misfit Toys, where flying cars rust next to moldering piles of food pills, but it hasn’t yet. One of the forces keeping it afloat, both financially and in the popular imagination, is many people’s deep investment in the defense of animals. The cultured meat startups are linked by a loose social network of educated professionals, often vegans or vegetarians, who believe that cultured meat may accomplish what decades of animal protection activism has not, alleviating the suffering of animals in our food system. Not all venture capital investment in cultured meat research is inspired by a desire to protect animals, of course; there are investors interested in the potential environmental “cleanliness” of cultured meat, and those angling for a profit, just as profit orientation is part of the package for any investor. But the most vocal proponents of cultured meat speak more eagerly about the defense of animals than they do about the defense of the natural environment or human health, although they readily acknowledge that cultured meat (many of them call it “clean meat,” or use other terms) happily addresses all three needs at once.
Meet the Utilitarians
In addition to resources, the advocates of cultured meat have a philosophy ready to hand. Many of them are self-described utilitarians, readers of the works of philosopher Peter Singer, in particular his 1975 book Animal Liberation. In that book, Singer followed classical utilitarian philosophers like Jeremy Bentham by arguing that the way to determine the moral standing of animals is not by assessing their intellectual capacities relative to those of most humans but by asking if animals can suffer as humans do. Answering that question in the affirmative, Singer suggested that it was “speciesist” to deny moral standing to the suffering of animals. Many regard Animal Liberation as the bible of the contemporary animal rights movement, despite the fact that the book does not defend the rights of animals per se. Contrary to the thinking of some other philosophers concerned with animals, such as Tom Regan, Singer does not assert the inherent rights of animals, or (in what philosophers term a “deontological” fashion) define the maltreatment or even the use of animals as morally wrong. “I am a vegetarian,” Singer has written, “because I am a utilitarian.” Rather than focus on the inherent worth of a human or animal life, a utilitarian will ask how that life is contoured by experiences of suffering or happiness. These notions, unlike those such as inherent worth, are the conditions a utilitarian can measure with some hope of improving the world. Whether they share Singer’s ordering of concerns (first utilitarianism, then animal protection), many of cultured meat’s promoters have taken up Singer’s approach as a philosophical support for their work.
Utilitarianism combines the following features: It is consequentialist insofar as it judges right and wrong by considering the outcome of our actions, not preoccupying itself with the nature of those actions themselves. It is a doctrine of ends, not means. It is universalist insofar as it claims to take into account every being’s interests equally. It is welfarist in that it understands and measures people’s well-being in terms of the satisfaction of their needs. And it is aggregative in that it considers everyone’s interests added together with the goal of maximizing happiness and minimizing suffering for the greatest number. Individuals count only as part of the whole. Each one counts for one, never for more than one.
If this account of utilitarianism’s parts seems schematic, it is worth saying that many utilitarian accounts of the world can seem like line drawings or blueprints. As the philosopher Bernard Williams noted, this philosophy “appeals to a frame of mind in which technical difficulty…is preferable to moral unclarity, no doubt because it is less alarming.”That is to say, for a utilitarian it is better to have a complicated job of balancing multiple interests than to be unsure what would count as a desirable outcome. Utilitarianism appeals to those who dislike moral ambiguity and to those who focus on outcomes; this characterization also applies to many actors in the world of cultured meat who eagerly anticipate an end to animal agriculture.
by Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft, The Hedgehog Review | Read more:
A second promotional film describes how the burger was made: The process started with a biopsy of cow muscle cells, followed by careful stimulation of a stem cell–driven, natural process of muscle repair, as cells were fed with growth media under carefully calibrated laboratory conditions. Gradually, what functions as a healing process in vivo (i.e., in living animals) becomes a meat production process, in vitro. Thus, the potential of stem cells to create new tissue becomes the biological grounds for a promise about the future of protein.But this is only a test—or, only a taste. In vitro techniques cannot yet perfectly reproduce in vivo animal muscle and fat, and thus cannot perfectly reproduce what consumers recognize as meat. Cultured meat has yet to become delicious. Nor is the technology scalable. The techniques and materials are still too expensive. The burger taste-tested in London took months of lab time to make, and the entire project (materials, technician salaries, etc.) cost more than $300,000 US. If the holy grail of cultured meat research is to develop a product that can replace “cheap meat,” that is, the kind of meat that is produced at industrial scale and sold at fast-food restaurants, then the goal seems years or decades away.
If we succeed in growing meat—meat that never had parents, meat that was never part of a complete animal body—we will do more than change human subsistence strategies forever. We will also transform our relationship with animal bodies, beginning at the level of the cell. Mark Post, the Dutch medical researcher who created the burger with the help of a team of scientists and technicians, seems hopeful and confident. He laughs good-naturedly with the journalists when they articulate their doubts. Of course, he acknowledges, it would be easier if everyone just became a vegetarian, but such a mass shift in human behavior doesn’t seem likely.
A Tale of Hope—or Hype?
October 2018: Scientists, entrepreneurs, and promoters are working to make cultured meat a reality. There is still no cultured meat on the market, but a handful of startup companies, many of them based in the San Francisco Bay area, promise that they will have a product to sell—presumably still not at the same price point as a fast-food hamburger or chicken nugget—in a matter of months or a handful of years.
I spent the years between the first in vitro hamburger unveiling and late 2018 conducting ethnographic research on the cultured meat movement, and I still cannot tell you if cultured meat will grace our tables soon. To the best of my knowledge, the two main technical challenges in cultured meat research have not yet been surmounted. One challenge is the creation of an affordably scalable growth medium not derived from animal sources (the current mix contains fetal bovine serum) and the other is the ability to create “thick” and texturally sophisticated tissue, such as that found in steak or pork chops, as opposed to growing two-dimensional sheets of cells and assembling them into meat. And beyond these technical challenges, cultured meat’s pioneers will need to find a way to make production “scale up” to the point where the cost of an individual serving of meat drops close to, or even equals, the cost of the conventional equivalent. In short, we don’t yet know what kind of technology story this is. Are we en route to success, or are we watching a cautionary tale in progress, one about hope and hype?
Much like self-driving cars, the advocates of which hope their use will reduce car crashes, cultured meat is promoted by those who believe in its practical and ethical benefits. But cultured meat is also like the self-driving car insofar as opinions vary as to whether a single technology can resolve a complex and, in some senses, social problem that involves not only engineering challenges but also the vagaries of human behavior. Like medical therapies based on stem cells, cultured meat excites the imagination and creates hope, but the hype seems to be running years or decades ahead of the reality. (Cultured meat itself is an offshoot of the effort to create tissues for transplant to human patients, an effort that goes by the name “regenerative medicine.”)
Cultured meat may one day come ashore on the high-tech equivalent of the Island of Misfit Toys, where flying cars rust next to moldering piles of food pills, but it hasn’t yet. One of the forces keeping it afloat, both financially and in the popular imagination, is many people’s deep investment in the defense of animals. The cultured meat startups are linked by a loose social network of educated professionals, often vegans or vegetarians, who believe that cultured meat may accomplish what decades of animal protection activism has not, alleviating the suffering of animals in our food system. Not all venture capital investment in cultured meat research is inspired by a desire to protect animals, of course; there are investors interested in the potential environmental “cleanliness” of cultured meat, and those angling for a profit, just as profit orientation is part of the package for any investor. But the most vocal proponents of cultured meat speak more eagerly about the defense of animals than they do about the defense of the natural environment or human health, although they readily acknowledge that cultured meat (many of them call it “clean meat,” or use other terms) happily addresses all three needs at once.
Meet the Utilitarians
In addition to resources, the advocates of cultured meat have a philosophy ready to hand. Many of them are self-described utilitarians, readers of the works of philosopher Peter Singer, in particular his 1975 book Animal Liberation. In that book, Singer followed classical utilitarian philosophers like Jeremy Bentham by arguing that the way to determine the moral standing of animals is not by assessing their intellectual capacities relative to those of most humans but by asking if animals can suffer as humans do. Answering that question in the affirmative, Singer suggested that it was “speciesist” to deny moral standing to the suffering of animals. Many regard Animal Liberation as the bible of the contemporary animal rights movement, despite the fact that the book does not defend the rights of animals per se. Contrary to the thinking of some other philosophers concerned with animals, such as Tom Regan, Singer does not assert the inherent rights of animals, or (in what philosophers term a “deontological” fashion) define the maltreatment or even the use of animals as morally wrong. “I am a vegetarian,” Singer has written, “because I am a utilitarian.” Rather than focus on the inherent worth of a human or animal life, a utilitarian will ask how that life is contoured by experiences of suffering or happiness. These notions, unlike those such as inherent worth, are the conditions a utilitarian can measure with some hope of improving the world. Whether they share Singer’s ordering of concerns (first utilitarianism, then animal protection), many of cultured meat’s promoters have taken up Singer’s approach as a philosophical support for their work.
Utilitarianism combines the following features: It is consequentialist insofar as it judges right and wrong by considering the outcome of our actions, not preoccupying itself with the nature of those actions themselves. It is a doctrine of ends, not means. It is universalist insofar as it claims to take into account every being’s interests equally. It is welfarist in that it understands and measures people’s well-being in terms of the satisfaction of their needs. And it is aggregative in that it considers everyone’s interests added together with the goal of maximizing happiness and minimizing suffering for the greatest number. Individuals count only as part of the whole. Each one counts for one, never for more than one.
If this account of utilitarianism’s parts seems schematic, it is worth saying that many utilitarian accounts of the world can seem like line drawings or blueprints. As the philosopher Bernard Williams noted, this philosophy “appeals to a frame of mind in which technical difficulty…is preferable to moral unclarity, no doubt because it is less alarming.”That is to say, for a utilitarian it is better to have a complicated job of balancing multiple interests than to be unsure what would count as a desirable outcome. Utilitarianism appeals to those who dislike moral ambiguity and to those who focus on outcomes; this characterization also applies to many actors in the world of cultured meat who eagerly anticipate an end to animal agriculture.
by Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft, The Hedgehog Review | Read more:
Image: Alarmy
We Have Nothing to Lose but Our Debts
Amid the bad results for the Left in the European elections, the Greek outcome was particularly poignant. In the last such contest in 2014, Syriza rode the revolt against austerity to become the largest single party, in its final step toward national office. Five years later, in last month’s election, it finished ten points behind the right-wing New Democracy. And where once Syriza promised to spark change throughout the EU, it is now the best student of the neoliberal dogma “There Is No Alternative.”
After four years of slashed pensions, sell-offs of state assets, and even a right-wing turn on foreign policy, Syriza is now also set to lose office. Indeed, not only did Alexis Tsipras’s party enforce an even harsher austerity than its predecessors ever dreamt of, but as snap general elections loom, it is set to become an exhausted opposition to a sharply reactionary New Democracy government. Polls for the July 7 vote suggest the conservatives have a massive lead, and could even secure an absolute majority in parliament.
The hollowing out of Syriza’s base is the expression of disappointment and despair. But there are also signs that some of its voters are turning to left-wing alternatives. Former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis’s MeRA25 party achieved a particularly creditable result in the European contest, less than four hundred votes from electing a member of the European Parliament. As Greece heads to a fresh general election, MeRA25 hopes to elect its first members of parliament, offering a platform for its call to replace austerity with Europe-wide investment.
Jacobin’s David Broder spoke to Varoufakis about the effect of Syriza’s defeat on the wider European left, the prospects of a realignment of EU politics, and MeRA25’s own plans for a “political revolution” in Greece.
Almost all left-wing parties lost votes in the European elections, no matter what their strategy regarding the European Union (EU). For this reason, many analyses of the result have focused on more general obstacles, invoking the “death of the populist moment,” the stabilization of the EU, or indeed the lack of left-wing governments able to challenge its current policy balance. Such readings would all suggest a window of opportunity has closed. Do you think this is the case, or are there still openings?
It is stupendous that there is talk of a vote of confidence in the EU when the far right came first-placed in France, Britain, and Italy. Ten years ago, if you were told this would happen, you’d have said — oh my god. The mainstream media presenting the rise in liberal and Green parties as a vote of confidence in the EU is mind-boggling.
Politically and historically speaking, these parties’ rise is irrelevant. The liberals’ rise owes to Macron in France and Ciudadanos in Spain. These are deeply conservative forces — Ciudadanos even governs together with the far-right Vox in Andalusia. There is nothing liberal about them: they are traditional, austerian class warriors against the working class. Some such forces could be called more liberal, but only in the sense that the German CDU [Christian Democratic Union] is more liberal than the Austrian ÖVP [People’s Party]. This is just a shift within the same liberal-conservative bloc.
The same could be said of the Greens — and here we are really talking about France and Germany, where the Greens are a significant force. These parties are the green wing of social democracy, and their traditional government partners are the Parti Socialiste and SPD [Social Democratic Party], who collapsed due to their connivance in the assault on working-class voters. Indeed, overall the social-democratic/green blocs that led to the governments of François Hollande and Gerhard Schröder have shrunk.
To celebrate the rise of the Greens is to celebrate a lifestyle choice – fiscal conservatives who want to celebrate recycling and who say they like Greta Thunberg when addressing their kids. Indeed, in a debate with Sven Giegold, the German Greens’ leading candidate, in response to my presentation of DiEM25’s ambitious green investment plan of half a trillion euros annually funded via European Investment Bank bonds, I was appalled to hear him retort that there were not enough green projects to fund with so much money. He offered as proof for this the neoliberal creed that if there was such a need, the market would have provided the investments!
(...) Do you think left-wing voters have bought Tsipras’s message that Syriza made the best of a bad situation? Or have they lost faith in the prospect of changing things? And what are the chances of bringing these other forces together?
Ever since he surrendered to the troika, Tsipras was always going to invest in a dilemma put to progressives: “Who do you want to torture you — an enthusiastic torturer, or someone like me who doesn’t want to torture you but will do it to keep his job?” This was his line in September 2015 [in that year’s second general election, after Syriza caved to the troika]. But four years later, after pushing through the most naked, harshest austerity policies anywhere in Europe — including under Greece’s previous governments — he can no longer blackmail progressives with lesser-evil arguments. (...)
The regime did not feel threatened by parties advocating exit from the euro and EU. Our view — that we’re not going to leave, and it’s up for the German government to leave, or to throw us out — is harder for them to deal with. The regime despised us because we neither want Grexit nor fear it. Our call unilaterally to implement perfectly moderate policies without fear or passion destabilized them. It was a danger to their system because of its widespread appeal.
by Yanis Varoufakis, Jacobin | Read more:
Image: Sean Gallup / Getty
After four years of slashed pensions, sell-offs of state assets, and even a right-wing turn on foreign policy, Syriza is now also set to lose office. Indeed, not only did Alexis Tsipras’s party enforce an even harsher austerity than its predecessors ever dreamt of, but as snap general elections loom, it is set to become an exhausted opposition to a sharply reactionary New Democracy government. Polls for the July 7 vote suggest the conservatives have a massive lead, and could even secure an absolute majority in parliament.
The hollowing out of Syriza’s base is the expression of disappointment and despair. But there are also signs that some of its voters are turning to left-wing alternatives. Former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis’s MeRA25 party achieved a particularly creditable result in the European contest, less than four hundred votes from electing a member of the European Parliament. As Greece heads to a fresh general election, MeRA25 hopes to elect its first members of parliament, offering a platform for its call to replace austerity with Europe-wide investment.Jacobin’s David Broder spoke to Varoufakis about the effect of Syriza’s defeat on the wider European left, the prospects of a realignment of EU politics, and MeRA25’s own plans for a “political revolution” in Greece.
Almost all left-wing parties lost votes in the European elections, no matter what their strategy regarding the European Union (EU). For this reason, many analyses of the result have focused on more general obstacles, invoking the “death of the populist moment,” the stabilization of the EU, or indeed the lack of left-wing governments able to challenge its current policy balance. Such readings would all suggest a window of opportunity has closed. Do you think this is the case, or are there still openings?
YV - It is undoubtedly the case that a large window of opportunity has closed — and it was closed here, in Greece, in 2015. Millions of Europeans looked with hope to this country, and it was Alexis Tsipras’s Syriza government (elected that January) that had the responsibility for keeping that window open, and for opening it up further for others. What these millions wanted a break from was not even true neoliberalism, but what I would call bankruptocracy — a new regime in which the greatest power was wielded by the most bankrupt bankers.
Tsipras’s surrender in July 2015 closed that window of opportunity. And there’s no sugaring the bitter pill — the European elections were a complete catastrophe for progressives. Yet at the same time, we should also be clear that there is never a final victory or defeat. New windows are always opening up.
Yet if the troika’s treatment of Greece damaged the EU’s image, and also cast doubt on the prospect of a single state being able to change things, there is little sign of what other forces could challenge the present order. DiEM25 has spoken of constructing broad fronts across Europe, including even liberals and progressive-minded conservatives who see the need to break the EU out of its austerian dogmas. But do you see any evidence that other political forces are actually moving in the direction you suggest?
Firstly, I’ll say that the reason we lost the window of opportunity wasn’t the troika’s treatment of Greece. We shouldn’t blame our enemies for our defeats, just as we don’t blame the scorpion for stinging us — this is in its nature. The blame lies with those who decided to trade the anti-austerity agenda on which they were elected in exchange for a few years in office — all the while having their backs patted by the enemy.
As for the resonance of our arguments, there is an impressive disconnect between a general recognition that austerity was, indeed, a disaster, and the lack of any political program to end it. I have the privilege of speaking to a lot of bankers — for some reason, they like talking to me. They completely accept that socialism for bankers and austerity for the population brought about a major defeat for European capitalism. Social democrats on the ground admit that it has been terrible, as do some conservatives, as well as the Greens and the Left. But the disconnect lies in the lack of an organized political plan to shift us out of this.
Even progressives have failed to get together to advance an alternative — indeed, only DiEM25 put forward the plan for a Green New Deal. The Greens themselves are so conservative, so ordoliberal, and so scared that conservatives will accuse them of being fiscally irresponsible, that they end up recycling ordoliberalism.
But we don’t regret not standing together with the Party of the European Left, which has chosen incoherence. From Italy to Switzerland, Hungary or Britain, the fascists and right-wingers are coherent: they say, “we want our country back,” and that means dissolving supranational organizations and institutions and pointing the finger of blame at foreigners, whether that means Jews, Syrians, Greeks, Germans, or refugees — the “other.” It is a misanthropic dead end, but it is coherent.
That cannot be said of the Party of the European Left, which included not only Syriza — which completely surrendered to the troika — but also the europhile French Communist Party and allied euro-skeptic forces like Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Insoumise, or Podemos, whose policy on Europe and the euro is not to have a policy. (...)
This election saw not just the growth of the far right but also advances for liberal and Green parties, at the expense of social and Christian democrats. But if pro-European sentiment has been mobilized in opposition to right-wing populism, do you think this could be harnessed by the anti-neoliberal left? Wasn’t the rise in support for these parties instead more of a vote of confidence in the EU as it currently exists?
Tsipras’s surrender in July 2015 closed that window of opportunity. And there’s no sugaring the bitter pill — the European elections were a complete catastrophe for progressives. Yet at the same time, we should also be clear that there is never a final victory or defeat. New windows are always opening up.
Yet if the troika’s treatment of Greece damaged the EU’s image, and also cast doubt on the prospect of a single state being able to change things, there is little sign of what other forces could challenge the present order. DiEM25 has spoken of constructing broad fronts across Europe, including even liberals and progressive-minded conservatives who see the need to break the EU out of its austerian dogmas. But do you see any evidence that other political forces are actually moving in the direction you suggest?
Firstly, I’ll say that the reason we lost the window of opportunity wasn’t the troika’s treatment of Greece. We shouldn’t blame our enemies for our defeats, just as we don’t blame the scorpion for stinging us — this is in its nature. The blame lies with those who decided to trade the anti-austerity agenda on which they were elected in exchange for a few years in office — all the while having their backs patted by the enemy.
As for the resonance of our arguments, there is an impressive disconnect between a general recognition that austerity was, indeed, a disaster, and the lack of any political program to end it. I have the privilege of speaking to a lot of bankers — for some reason, they like talking to me. They completely accept that socialism for bankers and austerity for the population brought about a major defeat for European capitalism. Social democrats on the ground admit that it has been terrible, as do some conservatives, as well as the Greens and the Left. But the disconnect lies in the lack of an organized political plan to shift us out of this.
Even progressives have failed to get together to advance an alternative — indeed, only DiEM25 put forward the plan for a Green New Deal. The Greens themselves are so conservative, so ordoliberal, and so scared that conservatives will accuse them of being fiscally irresponsible, that they end up recycling ordoliberalism.
But we don’t regret not standing together with the Party of the European Left, which has chosen incoherence. From Italy to Switzerland, Hungary or Britain, the fascists and right-wingers are coherent: they say, “we want our country back,” and that means dissolving supranational organizations and institutions and pointing the finger of blame at foreigners, whether that means Jews, Syrians, Greeks, Germans, or refugees — the “other.” It is a misanthropic dead end, but it is coherent.
That cannot be said of the Party of the European Left, which included not only Syriza — which completely surrendered to the troika — but also the europhile French Communist Party and allied euro-skeptic forces like Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Insoumise, or Podemos, whose policy on Europe and the euro is not to have a policy. (...)
This election saw not just the growth of the far right but also advances for liberal and Green parties, at the expense of social and Christian democrats. But if pro-European sentiment has been mobilized in opposition to right-wing populism, do you think this could be harnessed by the anti-neoliberal left? Wasn’t the rise in support for these parties instead more of a vote of confidence in the EU as it currently exists?
It is stupendous that there is talk of a vote of confidence in the EU when the far right came first-placed in France, Britain, and Italy. Ten years ago, if you were told this would happen, you’d have said — oh my god. The mainstream media presenting the rise in liberal and Green parties as a vote of confidence in the EU is mind-boggling.
Politically and historically speaking, these parties’ rise is irrelevant. The liberals’ rise owes to Macron in France and Ciudadanos in Spain. These are deeply conservative forces — Ciudadanos even governs together with the far-right Vox in Andalusia. There is nothing liberal about them: they are traditional, austerian class warriors against the working class. Some such forces could be called more liberal, but only in the sense that the German CDU [Christian Democratic Union] is more liberal than the Austrian ÖVP [People’s Party]. This is just a shift within the same liberal-conservative bloc.
The same could be said of the Greens — and here we are really talking about France and Germany, where the Greens are a significant force. These parties are the green wing of social democracy, and their traditional government partners are the Parti Socialiste and SPD [Social Democratic Party], who collapsed due to their connivance in the assault on working-class voters. Indeed, overall the social-democratic/green blocs that led to the governments of François Hollande and Gerhard Schröder have shrunk.
To celebrate the rise of the Greens is to celebrate a lifestyle choice – fiscal conservatives who want to celebrate recycling and who say they like Greta Thunberg when addressing their kids. Indeed, in a debate with Sven Giegold, the German Greens’ leading candidate, in response to my presentation of DiEM25’s ambitious green investment plan of half a trillion euros annually funded via European Investment Bank bonds, I was appalled to hear him retort that there were not enough green projects to fund with so much money. He offered as proof for this the neoliberal creed that if there was such a need, the market would have provided the investments!
(...) Do you think left-wing voters have bought Tsipras’s message that Syriza made the best of a bad situation? Or have they lost faith in the prospect of changing things? And what are the chances of bringing these other forces together?
Ever since he surrendered to the troika, Tsipras was always going to invest in a dilemma put to progressives: “Who do you want to torture you — an enthusiastic torturer, or someone like me who doesn’t want to torture you but will do it to keep his job?” This was his line in September 2015 [in that year’s second general election, after Syriza caved to the troika]. But four years later, after pushing through the most naked, harshest austerity policies anywhere in Europe — including under Greece’s previous governments — he can no longer blackmail progressives with lesser-evil arguments. (...)
The regime did not feel threatened by parties advocating exit from the euro and EU. Our view — that we’re not going to leave, and it’s up for the German government to leave, or to throw us out — is harder for them to deal with. The regime despised us because we neither want Grexit nor fear it. Our call unilaterally to implement perfectly moderate policies without fear or passion destabilized them. It was a danger to their system because of its widespread appeal.
Image: Sean Gallup / Getty
Thursday, June 6, 2019
[ed. See next post. I don't do video games and was surprised to learn that marquee actors like Mads Mikkelsen and Léa Seydoux are somehow involved in the process. I thought it was all CGI stuff or something. This picture from Death Stranding reminds me of George Saunders' short essay the Semplica-Girl Diaries.]
Image: via
Wednesday, June 5, 2019
Book Review: The Secret of Our Success
“Culture is the secret of humanity’s success” sounds like the most vapid possible thesis. The Secret Of Our Success by anthropologist Joseph Henrich manages to be an amazing book anyway.
Henrich wants to debunk (or at least clarify) a popular view where humans succeeded because of our raw intelligence. In this view, we are smart enough to invent neat tools that help us survive and adapt to unfamiliar environments.
Against such theories: we cannot actually do this. Henrich walks the reader through many stories about European explorers marooned in unfamiliar environments. These explorers usually starved to death. They starved to death in the middle of endless plenty. Some of them were in Arctic lands that the Inuit considered among their richest hunting grounds. Others were in jungles, surrounded by edible plants and animals. One particularly unfortunate group was in Alabama, and would have perished entirely if they hadn’t been captured and enslaved by local Indians first.
These explorers had many advantages over our hominid ancestors. For one thing, their exploration parties were made up entirely of strong young men in their prime, with no need to support women, children, or the elderly. They were often selected for their education and intelligence. Many of them were from Victorian Britain, one of the most successful civilizations in history, full of geniuses like Darwin and Galton. Most of them had some past experience with wilderness craft and survival. But despite their big brains, when faced with the task our big brains supposedly evolved for – figuring out how to do hunting and gathering in a wilderness environment – they failed pathetically.
Nor is it surprising that they failed. Hunting and gathering is actually really hard. Here’s Henrich’s description of how the Inuit hunt seals:
The obvious answer is “cultural evolution”, but Henrich isn’t much better than anyone else at taking the mystery out of this phrase. Trial and error must have been involved, and less successful groups/people imitating the techniques of more successful ones. But is that really a satisfying explanation? (...)
Remember, Henrich thinks culture accumulates through random mutation. Humans don’t have control over how culture gets generated. They have more control over how much of it gets transmitted to the next generation. If 100% gets transmitted, then as more and more mutations accumulate, the culture becomes better and better. If less than 100% gets transmitted, then at some point new culture gained and old culture lost fall into equilibrium, and your society stabilizes at some higher or lower technological level. This means that transmitting culture to the next generation is maybe the core human skill. The human brain is optimized to make this work as well as possible.
Human children are obsessed with learning things. And they don’t learn things randomly. There seem to be “biases in cultural learning”, ie slots in an infant’s mind that they know need to be filled with knowledge, and which they preferentially seek out the knowledge necessary to fill.
One slot is for language. Human children naturally listen to speech (as early as in the womb). They naturally prune the phonemes they are able to produce and distinguish to the ones in the local language. And they naturally figure out how to speak and understand what people are saying, even though learning a language is hard even for smart adults.
Another slot is for animals. In a world where megafauna has been relegated to zoos, we still teach children their ABCs with “L is for lion” and “B is for bear”, and children still read picture books about Mr. Frog and Mrs. Snake holding tea parties. Henrich suggests that just as the young brain is hard-coded to want to learn language, so it is hard-coded to want to learn the local animal life (maybe little boys’ vehicle obsession is an outgrowth of this – buses and trains are the closest thing to local megafauna that most of them will encounter!)
Henrich wants to debunk (or at least clarify) a popular view where humans succeeded because of our raw intelligence. In this view, we are smart enough to invent neat tools that help us survive and adapt to unfamiliar environments.
Against such theories: we cannot actually do this. Henrich walks the reader through many stories about European explorers marooned in unfamiliar environments. These explorers usually starved to death. They starved to death in the middle of endless plenty. Some of them were in Arctic lands that the Inuit considered among their richest hunting grounds. Others were in jungles, surrounded by edible plants and animals. One particularly unfortunate group was in Alabama, and would have perished entirely if they hadn’t been captured and enslaved by local Indians first.These explorers had many advantages over our hominid ancestors. For one thing, their exploration parties were made up entirely of strong young men in their prime, with no need to support women, children, or the elderly. They were often selected for their education and intelligence. Many of them were from Victorian Britain, one of the most successful civilizations in history, full of geniuses like Darwin and Galton. Most of them had some past experience with wilderness craft and survival. But despite their big brains, when faced with the task our big brains supposedly evolved for – figuring out how to do hunting and gathering in a wilderness environment – they failed pathetically.
Nor is it surprising that they failed. Hunting and gathering is actually really hard. Here’s Henrich’s description of how the Inuit hunt seals:
You first have to find their breathing holes in the ice. It’s important that the area around the hole be snow-covered—otherwise the seals will hear you and vanish. You then open the hole, smell it to verify it’s still in use (what do seals smell like?), and then assess the shape of the hole using a special curved piece of caribou antler. The hole is then covered with snow, save for a small gap at the top that is capped with a down indicator. If the seal enters the hole, the indicator moves, and you must blindly plunge your harpoon into the hole using all your weight. Your harpoon should be about 1.5 meters (5ft) long, with a detachable tip that is tethered with a heavy braid of sinew line. You can get the antler from the previously noted caribou, which you brought down with your driftwood bow.
The rear spike of the harpoon is made of extra-hard polar bear bone (yes, you also need to know how to kill polar bears; best to catch them napping in their dens). Once you’ve plunged your harpoon’s head into the seal, you’re then in a wrestling match as you reel him in, onto the ice, where you can finish him off with the aforementioned bear-bone spike.
Now you have a seal, but you have to cook it. However, there are no trees at this latitude for wood, and driftwood is too sparse and valuable to use routinely for fires. To have a reliable fire, you’ll need to carve a lamp from soapstone (you know what soapstone looks like, right?), render some oil for the lamp from blubber, and make a wick out of a particular species of moss. You will also need water. The pack ice is frozen salt water, so using it for drinking will just make you dehydrate faster. However, old sea ice has lost most of its salt, so it can be melted to make potable water. Of course, you need to be able to locate and identify old sea ice by color and texture. To melt it, make sure you have enough oil for your soapstone lamp.No surprise that stranded explorers couldn’t figure all this out. It’s more surprising that the Inuit did. And although the Arctic is an unusually hostile place for humans, Henrich makes it clear that hunting-gathering techniques of this level of complexity are standard everywhere. Here’s how the Indians of Tierra del Fuego make arrows:
Among the Fuegians, making an arrow requires a 14-step procedure that involves using seven different tools to work six different materials. Here are some of the steps:
– The process begins by selecting the wood for the shaft, which preferably comes from chaura, a bushy, evergreen shrub. Though strong and light, this wood is a non-intuitive choice since the gnarled branches require extensive straightening (why not start with straighter branches?).
– The wood is heated, straightened with the craftsman’s teeth, and eventually finished with a scraper. Then, using a pre-heated and grooved stone, the shaft is pressed into the grooves and rubbed back and forth, pressing it down with a piece of fox skin. The fox skin becomes impregnated with the dust, which prepares it for the polishing stage (Does it have to be fox skin?).
– Bits of pitch, gathered from the beach, are chewed and mixed with ash (What if you don’t include the ash?).
– The mixture is then applied to both ends of a heated shaft, which must then be coated with white clay (what about red clay? Do you have to heat it?). This prepares the ends for the fletching and arrowhead.
– Two feathers are used for the fletching, preferably from upland geese (why not chicken feathers?).
– Right-handed bowman must use feathers from the left wing of the bird, and vice versa for lefties (Does this really matter?).
– The feathers are lashed to the shaft using sinews from the back of the guanaco, after they are smoothed and thinned with water and saliva (why not sinews from the fox that I had to kill for the aforementioned skin?).
Next is the arrowhead, which must be crafted and then attached to the shaft, and of course there is also the bow, quiver and archery skills. But, I’ll leave it there, since I think you get the idea.How do hunter-gatherers know how to do all this? We usually summarize it as “culture”. How did it form? Not through some smart Inuit or Fuegian person reasoning it out; if that had been it, smart European explorers should have been able to reason it out too.
The obvious answer is “cultural evolution”, but Henrich isn’t much better than anyone else at taking the mystery out of this phrase. Trial and error must have been involved, and less successful groups/people imitating the techniques of more successful ones. But is that really a satisfying explanation? (...)
Remember, Henrich thinks culture accumulates through random mutation. Humans don’t have control over how culture gets generated. They have more control over how much of it gets transmitted to the next generation. If 100% gets transmitted, then as more and more mutations accumulate, the culture becomes better and better. If less than 100% gets transmitted, then at some point new culture gained and old culture lost fall into equilibrium, and your society stabilizes at some higher or lower technological level. This means that transmitting culture to the next generation is maybe the core human skill. The human brain is optimized to make this work as well as possible.
Human children are obsessed with learning things. And they don’t learn things randomly. There seem to be “biases in cultural learning”, ie slots in an infant’s mind that they know need to be filled with knowledge, and which they preferentially seek out the knowledge necessary to fill.
One slot is for language. Human children naturally listen to speech (as early as in the womb). They naturally prune the phonemes they are able to produce and distinguish to the ones in the local language. And they naturally figure out how to speak and understand what people are saying, even though learning a language is hard even for smart adults.
Another slot is for animals. In a world where megafauna has been relegated to zoos, we still teach children their ABCs with “L is for lion” and “B is for bear”, and children still read picture books about Mr. Frog and Mrs. Snake holding tea parties. Henrich suggests that just as the young brain is hard-coded to want to learn language, so it is hard-coded to want to learn the local animal life (maybe little boys’ vehicle obsession is an outgrowth of this – buses and trains are the closest thing to local megafauna that most of them will encounter!)
by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex | Read more:
Image: Princeton University Press
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