The greatest documentary I’ve seen since “The Corporation” is delivered by Annie Leonard, an expert in sustainability, in a video.
The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns, with a special focus on the United States. All the stuff in our lives, beginning from the extraction of the resources to make it, through its production, sale, use and disposal, affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues and calls for all of us to create a more sustainable and just world. It’ll teach you something. It’ll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.
Everyone should watch the full length video, but here is a quick teaser:
After watching the full video you’ll be itching to do something about it. Here is a quick summary of 10 things she suggests you can do: Power down, Waste less, Spread the word, DeTox your life, Unplug from media and Plug In the community, Drive less, Recycle, Buy Green, Buy Fair, Buy Local, Buy Used, and most importantly, Buy Less.
A couple of years ago I had the opportunity to be invited to one of those social clubs for executives that were so popular a few decades ago. No the health club type, but the lounge with really expensive furniture where gentlemen of the highest social spheres get together to read the newspaper and change the world. When I read Martin Varsavsky effort to once create a site for the smartest people in the world, I couldn’t help but chuckle and imagine them all sitting in such a lounge, smoking their cigars, drinking coffees made of exotic beans and entertaining the notion of maybe one day putting their brilliant ideas to work. Sorry, I shouldn’t dismiss the effort as I know Mr. Varsavsky is a first class entrepreneur and would’ve accomplished many things.
The idea I’m challenging is the fact that you need to get many people together in order to accomplish something meaningful. Even in this blog I have used the notion that a community of Global Citizens would create tremendous value, but now realize that such an organization doesn’t need to have a certain size before it is effective. In fact, large communities tend to be refuges for passive members that enjoy the benefits of the community but create little value, a well known effect of today’s popular social networks.
While not everyone has access to an expensive lounge to enjoy their exotic beans, it is becoming more and more popular to put some effort into finding good fair trade coffee. Increased access to information about the repercussions of big coffee producers on local communities has awaken a certain level of social responsibility. Unfortunately, with the number of people subscribing to this idea, companies have taken note and have developed entire marketing campaigns trying to exploit this trend.
Take for example Cocoacamino, a chocolate label that claims to follow Fair Trade practices and even provides extensive information about La Siembra, a co-op of farmers which even though it has a spanish name, is located in Ottawa, Canada. Fair Trade is all about the trade, so you have to be suspicious when a Canadian label claiming to adhere to this principle is buying the product from a local producer. Furthermore, I happen to know a thing or two about how farmers in Canada accomplish their quotas and in many cases (although I can’t speak for this particular one) it is by exploiting migrant workers living under very controlled conditions.
Enough of criticism. What can be done about this? It takes global citizens with knowledge of the world around them. For example, I happen to know a few farmers in poor regions of Mexico. They do have a real co-op and would be thrilled to be able to sell their product to a brand looking to adhere to real Fair Trade principles. Do you know anyone with the skill and access to a market to make a successful product? That is all we need. Little connections like this one.
I would pay premium for coffee or chocolate like this.
Update: On April 2008, La Siembra was listed in the WorldBlu Most Democratic Places. I guess I should’ve researched their organization a bit more before using them as example in this post. I’ve been in direct contact with farmers in the South of Ontario and their lives are thorn apart by a system that tries hard to make them invisible. Any transparency efforts in this industry should be praised.
The Toronto Star has been running a series entitled War on Poverty. Although the focus of the series is on the local problem (as it should be), the issues and ideas are likely to be global. To the main question as to Why is the gap between rich and poor widening, the newspaper suggests:
Part of the explanation is that the share of corporate profits as a percentage of GDP has increased at the expense of wages. According to the Bank for International Settlements, wages as a share of national income in the United States, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Canada, the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden and Switzerland declined from 63 per cent in 1980 to less than 59 per cent last year. In the same period, corporate profits as a share of GDP in those countries increased from around 11 per cent to more than 15 per cent. That means a greater financial share wound up in the hands of corporate owners and less in the hands of workers.
In canadians & globalization I had posted about the reactions of the public to the theme, which represent well the situation reflected in some of the stats on human development trends. If you want to get frustrated, just consider these:
The top 300,000 Americans collectively made as much income as the bottom 150 million Americans
The top 1% received 21.8% of all reported income, a record only behind 1928 when they received 23.9%. A year before the Great Depression
The top 0.1% reported an average income of US$5.6 million, an increase of almost one million thanks to rising stock markets and business profits.
Critics will say that the people doing well are the ones moving the economy, therefore they need all kinds of incentives and protection to keep things in order, but one argument that I haven’t seen used too often is related to the hidden costs of their success. If a particular oil company has record profits at the expense of environment degradation, poor work conditions or bullish pricing of their end product we must calculate the cost of restoring nature and dealing with generations of unhealthy people. Or think about some huge global merchant deciding to compensate its shareholders at the expense of an aggressive salary policy which leaves thousands of families just above the poverty line. A poor diet resulting from these conditions will likely have a permanent effect on the ability of their children to learn, therefore to get better jobs when they grow. I’m sure if we were to compare the savings from not paying the proper salary versus the cost of opportunity lost as a result of a less productive individual, the problem would be a no-brainer to any economist. All those costs are diluted over millions of people and eventually paid in the form of sacrifices, hunger, medical bills & frustration. The fact that these costs are not passed to the corporations is a flaw of the system. In principle any resource taken in the creation of a product should be paid for.
The more I think about his, the more I realize there is nothing wrong with the economic model we use, except for the fact that our accounting has been careless to say the least and we’ve been hiding way too many costs in the form of poverty. Maybe it would be possible for people to determine what costs they are carrying on behalf of irresponsible corporations and organize class action lawsuits to recup part of those costs, or maybe convince the government to install the necessary taxes to make sure that money goes back to where it belongs. I’m sure the gap would stop widening then.
In the utmost global citizen, I talked about the value of being a global citizen. Now I would like to address what I consider is the single most important mission of this project: building a community of global citizens. Why? It is clear to me that many of the social structures on which the world depends today are evolving to dilute the authority given by traditional institutions that work within the boundaries of any particular nation. We should expect new groups to appear that inherit the role of those institutions but act in a global context. Knowing who are the people better prepared to assume these roles is a valuable task that we must pursue as a society.
I must clarify that I’m not naive to believe that such a community doesn’t exist already. In fact, over the last few months, as part of the process of writing this blog, I’ve come across many virtual communities that cluster individuals with an affinity for global themes.
Migrants: this is an area where I’ve seen a lot of activity. It is only natural for people moving to a foreign country to want to reach out to their compatriots. How big is this community? In immigrant population I mentioned 190 million immigrants worldwide. Of course a very small number are online, but they all wish they were in order to maintain a link to their countries of origin. This is why another goal of this project is to help this group get online.
Third Culture Kids: or the “second generations” of those migrant families. They have grown knowing at least two cultures and as a result are better suited to embrace global culture. This is a well documented social effect.
Foreign Workers: those that while don’t migrate definitely are exposed to other cultures as a result of their jobs, and are capable of comparing industry performance across geographies.
Frequent travelers: many very active online communities of travelers exist. Mostly sharing their experiences on the multitude of destinations they touch.
While I think there is a certain challenge in attracting people currently participating in these communities, I don’t necessarily think their participation must be exclusive of one or another. However, I’m convinced that aggregating all these communities in such a way that a certain cosmopolitan rank can be analyzed is an exercise that would create value beyond what these people can get within their own isolated communities.
Once we are able to create such a community and determine who the global citizens are, I believe the gathering of the top 100 people to discuss matters of global implications would create value that many organizations would be willing to pay for. What do you think such group could accomplish?
With a double-page graphic representing the most numerous groups of migrant professionals going from one country to another, Wired Magazine barely skims the problem of migration:
More than 20 million migrant professionals now work abroad. [...] The US, Canada, and Australia enjoy the steadiest supply of doctors and scientists from places like India and China. Meanwhile, more than 80 percent of Haiti’s top minds are leaving the island, and countries like Ghana and Mozambique are watching nearly half their educated masses bail.
I didn’t want to settle for Wired’s limited perspective, so I got a copy of the International Migration Outlook from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. This report doesn’t focuses on professionals (and after reading it, I’m wondering how accurate Wired’s interpretation is), but provides a much more complete picture of the problem. Take a look at some of the conclusions:
Countries with highest legal lont-term entries as a percentage of population are Switzerland, New Zealand, Australia & Canada. Finland & Japan are on the opposite side of the scale. Irregular migrants are not considered in this report, otherwise the United States would have much higher numbers.
Immigrants represent around 25% of labour force in Switzerland and in Australia.
Foreign workers usually face important challenges in integrating into the labour market.
The issue of migration is one of the most recurring themes in this blog, so finding these types of statistics help convey the magnitude of the problem when words are not enough. At the same time they threaten to trivialize a rather complex issue. Beyond understanding the number of people coming and going, staying or returning, I believe having a current measure of the influence we have on the cultures of those places we touch is far more important than counting us.
In the spirit of exploring this idea, think about the last time you talked to a foreigner who acted as an ambassador to their culture and really made you appreciate it or change your mind about it. Then take a few seconds to participate in our weekly poll (see sidebar). Or if you prefer, leave a comment.
It’s only fair to promote a real debate on the issues that concern us. Through this blog, I’ve always talked about the negative impact of globalization, so to fuel the debate I had to find a voice that cheers loudly for it: George Reisman is a well known economist, author of Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics. A new article posted on his website capitalism.net entitled Globalization: The Long-Run Big Picture provides a first-class defense of the theories behind globalization, saying that it that
has the potential to raise the productivity of labor and living standards all across the world to the level of the most advanced countries
It’s hard to argue against such a wonderful picture, with people in Africa, India & China enjoying the same quality of life than those in North America or Europe. He even makes such utopia seem very reachable
by incorporating billions of additional people into the global division of labor, and correspondingly increasing the scale on which all branches of production and economic activity are carried on, globalization makes possible the unprecedented achievement of economies of scale.
I have to admit my lack of formal knowledge in most economic theories, so someone will have to read the full article to determine its merits as an academic exercise. However, the statement that in 100 years, globalization would’ve accomplished its mission of raising the productivity of labor and per capita output in the rest of the world by a factor of 20, is naive at best.
The danger of doing math with such big numbers is that it is too easy to loose sight of the singularities that completely corrupt the results.
While no one can deny that the European Union and the U.S have some of the best standards of living, it is important to take note that they are also home to the wealthiest people on earth. If we were to analyze the ratio of GDP that comes from the top 100 richest people over the years, we would probably find that their influence on the global economy grows at a much higher pace than the rest of the population. This means that as the economy continues its amazing climb through the trillions, a higher proportion of it will belong to a selected minority, cancelling the positive effect that it should have on the rest of the population.
Division of labor is one of the fundamental principles that fuel globalization. The more people in the pool, the better such division can be performed. Ideally, the whole world would be cooperating to produce the maximum output possible. However, in the name of such utopia too many corporations run wild, careless of their environments, without cooperating with the societies in which they exist. So much for a wonderful theory.
A recent exchange with Richa Govil from Infosys led me to a couple of posts on their blog: The War for Talent Heats Up and Talent Wars, cont’d…. Their blog provides an insight into globalization from the perspective of those on the other side of the equation, supplying the talent to the corporations looking for ways to remain competitive.
My position in the matter of outsourcing was established in the post the outsourcing culture, and while it may be assumed antagonistic to the views of a company like Infosys, I found some support to the ideas presented earlier in their own blog:
Business communities in any country (at least at the mid to senior management levels) tend to be small. Even India with its billion people, relies on a much much smaller business community and business graduates to run its companies. It seems that young workers in India have not yet developed the maturity to realize this fact. With the over-abundance of opportunities this behavior appears to be the right choice (or even the logical one by some calculations). But this will prove to be a short-sighted approach when the economy turns as it eventually must.
The particular behavior they talks about is the perceived unprofessionalism of those workers that may not feel bound by a contract as a result of how many opportunities there are. It seems is becoming quite common for people to continue looking for opportunities even after accepting offers at a particular company. In a market with such a high demand for talent is only to be expected that people will adjust their attitudes.
However, I would also like to suggest an alternate explanation: after exhausting the original talent pool that led to the outsourcing boom in India, they may have created an important shift in the work culture, making it easy for youngsters to earn a quick technical diploma in order to participate in the labour market without really having an interest in anything else but benefiting from the apparent chaos caused by corporations deploying their armies of headhunters and cheap-labour tactics. You can say that some people learned how to fool the system, creating a difficult landscape for businesses, but more importantly damaging the work culture of an entire industry.
The greatest documentary I’ve seen since “The Corporation” is delivered by Annie Leonard, an expert in sustainability, in a video. 
. A new article posted on his website 
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