Tagged: Feature

Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler

Mark Bittman does a yeoman’s job of summarizing the meat industry’s impact on the globe in this article. The facts are astonishing, mind-blowing, and will create real shock and awe in your mind if you synthesize them. And in light of the current global food crisis, the idea of reducing our collective meat intake makes even more sense. Please read the article in its entirety – I promiseyou won’t regret it, unless you like to be ignorant that is. Further, Bittman is not a vegetarian, so don’t think he’s predisposed to one side of the argument. His point is that those who choose to eat meat should eat much less to help both the environment and their health. Here are a few teasers from the piece:

  • . . . an estimated 30 percent of the earth’s ice-free land is directly or indirectly involved in livestock production, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, which also estimates that livestock production generates nearly a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases — more than transportation.
  • . . . a study last year by the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Japan estimated that 2.2 pounds of beef is responsible for the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the average European car every 155 miles, and burns enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days.
  • Though some 800 million people on the planet now suffer from hunger or malnutrition, the majority of corn and soy grown in the world feeds cattle, pigs and chickens. This despite the inherent inefficiencies: about two to five times more grain is required to produce the same amount of calories through livestock as through direct grain consumption, according to Rosamond Naylor, an associate professor of economics at Stanford University. It is as much as 10 times more in the case of grain-fed beef in the United States.
  • We each consume something like 110 grams of protein a day, about twice the federal government’s recommended allowance; of that, about 75 grams come from animal protein. (The recommended level is itself considered by many dietary experts to be higher than it needs to be.) It’s likely that most of us would do just fine on around 30 grams of protein a day, virtually all of it from plant sources.

I don’t want to repeat the entire article so that’s all I’ll give you. Seriously, go read it. It takes only a few minutes. I’m not telling you to become a vegetarian, though the change would be good for both you and your neighbors. I’m telling you to audit your meat intake and reduce the amount you eat while increasing the quality of it. That change alone, among all of us, will help redirect food sources to the people who need it most while significantly reducing pollution caused by the meat industry. You have to be a real jerk to order a double cheeseburger meal while people all around the globe struggle to find food daily. Throwing money at the problem is a bandage, not a long-term solution.

How Religion Poisons Everything

A few days ago I finished reading God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, by Christopher Hitchens. I’ve been a fan of his for years, ever since reading his work in The Atlantic during college. Point is, I’m a big fan, and this book did not disappoint.

I’m not going to hop on my soapbox and say, “After reading this book it becomes very clear there’s no god,” but I will say he makes some very convincing arguments against established religion. That being said, I was a little confused at the title. In my opinion, the subtitle, How Religion Poisons Everything, is a more apt title. While Hitchens does make the argument that god is a purely human manifestation, he doesn’t deconstruct spirituality, just a person’s tendency to fall victim to the dogma and b.s. of the rules and regulations associated with any given church, temple, synagogue, mosque or other altar. He can’t prove god doesn’t exist but he is extremely convincing that religions – every one of them – are a product of man’s imagination. An aside: I’m not a very learned student of history, so I found the (perhaps well-known) historical references to political action through the ages that led to a certain religion coming into favor or disfavor to be quite astonishing.

The book is filled with no-nonsense reasoning that religion does more harm than good. What I gathered from the book, and have truly believed for some time, is that while a faith-based belief system may (or may not) help increase the occurrences of small “good” acts, it without a doubt fuels a measurable increase in the number and severity of “evil” acts.

To stop myself from rambling and regurgitating the book in this piece, I decided to cite just two passages. The first is from Chapter Ten: The Tawdriness of the Miraculous (p. 153) – “Those of us who had sought a rational alternative to religion had reached a terminus that was comparably dogmatic. What else was to be expected of something that was produced by the close cousins of chimpanzee? Infallibility? Thus, dear reader, if you have come this far and found your faith undermined – as I hope – I am willing to say that to some extent I know what you are going through. There are days when I miss my old convictions as if they were an amputated limb. But in general I feel better, and no less radical, and you will feel better too, I guarantee, once you leave hold of the doctrinaire and allow your chainless mind to do its own thinking.”

The “chainless mind” is a powerful idea. Essentially, there is no danger is abandoning the fiction that was planted in your head, as a child, without your permission. Even Hitchens admits at times he misses his “old convictions as if they were an amputated limb.” In regards to my ability for free thought, I suppose I benefited from being raised with relatively loose religious pressure, and with a religion of relatively low significance in the Western world. My burden was light and easy to abandon – who knows what would have happened if I were raised in India, or in America but as a Christian? And the reasoning I used to not follow the spiritual path of my ancestors is the very same logic that prevents me from ever accepting a different religious path. Religion defies logic, and I’m a logical being.

The second passage is from Chapter Seventeen: The “Case” Against Secularism (p. 250) – “Humanism has many crimes for which to apologize. But it can apologize for them, and also correct them, in its own terms and without having to shake or challenge the basis of any unalterable system of belief. Totalitarian systems, whatever outward form they may take, are fundamentalist and, as we would now say, “faith-based.”

These three sentences blew me away. Only when the ability to right a system exists in that very system can it be functional. Take democracy for example. When the system is failing its people new leaders and new laws help make things better. Not perfect, but better. Convincing the uneducated and poor that bliss is around the corner if they lend their labor to the plight of more powerful people, people whose motives are much different than those of the believers, is an impressive undertaking, and has been done with almost irreproachable perfection.

I trust that a day will come when truth will reach a critical mass, and that the scale of belief will tip from religion to science. And when that day comes, no one will have the need to fight over an atom, or even with an atom, as was done once, in the name of religion.

For-Profit Social Ventures

Wicked Googlie! I’ve thought about the benefits of for-proft social entrepreneurship for some time and I’m glad to see a company with serious money (Google) is putting some serious dollars ($1,000,000,000) towards it.

I’m an MBA student and my school holds an annual Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation Competition. The problem with the competition is that only non-profit organizations, or ideas for non-profit organizations, are eligible to compete. (Don’t get me wrong, the competition is a great event and I hope it’s successful for years to come.) But, I even took a Social Entrepreneurship class in which I was forced to create a non-profit organization that could support itself by providing a product or service but whose residual income would be filtered not to shareholders, but back to the organization.

What is everyone’s fear about for-profit social ventures? Why can’t people make a buck and do good at the same time? Do for-profit social ventures bring people who want to make money and people who want to help others dangerously close to each other? Hell, if the merger worked if would change the landscape of capitalism. There would be no “pro-business” Republicans versus “pro-employee” Democrats. We’d all get along and business would be good because it would always be helping the less fortunate, who are sometimes, intentionally or unintentionally, the very people hurt by the business’s operations. We know we can’t stop commerce altogether but we also know we need to be more conscious of our behavior and contribute to the social and environmental arenas in which we operate. For-profit social ventures are the answer. They can and (hopefully) will transform the landscape of global business.

Luckily, Google has realized this. “The ambitious founders of Google, the popular search engine company, have set up a philanthropy, giving it seed money of about $1 billion and a mandate to tackle poverty, disease and global warming. But unlike most charities, this one will be for-profit, allowing it to fund startup companies, form partnerships with venture capitalists and even lobby Congress. It will also pay taxes.” Booya. The best part of this is that Google is already getting started. “But Google’s philanthropic work is coming early in the company’s lifetime. Microsoft was 25 years old before Bill Gates set up his foundation, which is a tax-exempt organization and separate from Microsoft.”

The whole point is that companies can insert a new priority into their cash flow cascade, before paying dividends or recording profits. There’s two way this could work. First, companies could dedicate a priority portion of its profits to a non-profit. Second, they could invest in social ventures, like Google is doing. There isn’t enough of a market for option two so I’m hoping option one catches on. The idea, much simplified, goes like this:

Traditional company operations

$ 100 (revenues from selling widgets)
-   70 (all expenses related to doing business)
    30 (net operating income)
-   10 (reinvested into operations, research and development)
    20 (retained earnings, dividends)

Now say the company commits to giving 10% of its profit to the Sierra Club every year. The Sierra Club, like most non-profits, does not have the ability to earn enough money through operations to sustain itself. That’s why it calls for donations from people interested in the environment. Here’s what the simplified financial picture would looks like:

Progressive company operations

$ 100 (revenues from selling widgets)
-   70 (all expenses related to doing business)
    30 (net operating income)
-   10 (reinvested into operations, research and development)
    20 (profits from which donation is made)
-    2 (donation to Sierra Club)
    18 (retained earnings, dividends)

From a purely mathematical sense this makes the company less competitive, especially if it’s public. BUT, in this case $2 out of every $100 earned ended up in the hands of a non-profit which shares values with the company. Taxes (on many levels) were saved on the $2 not paid out in dividends or retained. PLUS, there’s the social benefit of operating a business in the manner outlined in the second example. Goodwill is earned with community and there’s a long-term effect of good that the Sierra Club will be able to do with the money, which is still not entirely quantifiable. Capitalist purists will say that it takes away from the bottom line, plain and simple. These are the same idiots driving record corporate profits at the expense of the American worker. No wonder the drive towards large-scale and innovative philanthropy is being driven by Bill Gates and the founders of Google. The older generation of business people doesn’t get it (except perhaps for George Soros, Warren Buffet and Richard Branson).

Surely the Progressive company operations example is not competitive in the capital markets. But imagine the example becoming the norm. That’s the day the world will truly become a better place. And for those companies who don’t want to donate – innovate the way Google is.

The Nature Of Our Society

Last weekend I learned about a man named Geert Hofstede who conducted a massive survey of cultures between 1967 and 1973 of 40 countries; the survey was updated in 2001 to cover 74 countries. The Hofstede survey measured five dimensions of a country’s cultural paradigm: (1) Individualism (IDV), (2) Long-Term Orientation (LTO) (this category was not part of the original survey), (3) Masculinity (MAS), (4) Uncertainty Avoidance (UAI), and (5) Power Distance (PDI). The detailed definitions of these dimensions can be found at the depths (for iterative purposes) of this page.

The dimensions of many of the countries surveyed match the perception I have of them, including the U.S. One of the most interesting conclusions I drew from looking at the data about the U.S. has to do with the state of our society today. (1) For Individualism the U.S. ranks highest in the world with a score of 91 against an average of 43. This means we’re the country most focused on the individual and “individual rights are paramount within the society”. No surprise. (2) For Long-Term Orientation the U.S. ranks lowest in the world with a score of 29 against an average of 45. This indicates we do not “embrace, long-term devotion to traditional, forward thinking values” and that “change can occur more rapidly as long-term traditions and commitments do not become impediments to change”. Ain’t that the truth.

There’s nothing philosophically wrong with either of these categories in isolation, though the analysis of our culture gets more interesting as other dimensions are considered. (3) In regards to Masculinity the U.S. scores a 62 against a world average of 50. This “indicates the country experiences a high degree of gender differentiation. In these cultures, males dominate a significant portion of the society and power structure, with females being controlled by male domination”. I found this slightly surprising given our extreme position on individual rights . . . I guess it just matters what type of individual you are (some of us truly are created more equal than others). Regardless of the data, it’s evident the U.S. is pretty clearly dominated by males. Countries with many fewer freedoms and protected classes have had more females in leadership positions. (4) For Uncertainty Avoidance the U.S. scored a 46 against a world average of 64, which “is indicative of a society that has fewer rules and does not attempt to control all outcomes and results” – ignoring the paranoia of last few years of course.

All in all these measures pretty clearly describe the U.S. The fifth and final measure, Power Distance, is from where some enlightening conclusions stem. The U.S. scored a 40 against a world average of 55. The lower the number the greater the “equality between societal levels, including government, organizations, and even within families. This orientation reinforces a cooperative interaction across power levels and creates a more stable cultural environment”.

Is this true? Sure, on paper it is. But if our culture is truly dissected only the guise of what this dimension represents is true, but almost every one of us wants it to be true – and that’s the rub. Contradictions to the measure of Power Distance in the U.S. are not overt but they are prevelant. The extreme nature of our individualism and short-term orientation indirectly drive dichotomy in our society. Someone has to lose, no? Our acceptance of uncertainty allows us to stay calm about it while our masculine orientation keeps our entrenched systems in place, for better or for worse. A winning formula no doubt! But do we really have equality between societal levels and does our orientation reinforce cooperative interaction across power levels to create a more stable cultural environment? To this I would answer a resounding “no”. We claim to have equality by doing everything in our power to keep ourselves from witnessing the inequality all around us, not by acting to eliminate the inequality. We gentrify our schools, churches, neighborhoods and voting districts. We defiantly support our equal society in telephone polls and on the Internet but our behavior speaks more boldly. It shows our lack of comfort with the culture we’ve created but are too weak to change.

And so through all of this we turn a blind eye to the true deficiencies of our society. Surely there are palatable negative conditions which arise from the functioning of any system; that is the nature of life. But, the American culture is leaving too many people behind. The system worked when our country was less evolved and the overall strain on the fabric of society was bearable, but the systems protecting our social fabric weren’t intended to take this level of strain. We’re reaching a point where society will not be able to subsidize all the people its politicians (and voters) have left behind, if only through inaction. The next wave of leaders won’t be able to nudge the ship to quiet the masses.

Action Step(s): Read the information on Hofstede’s website. While the information isn’t perfectly descriptive it does explain a country’s culture fairly well. There are many other indicators out there, and I’m sure they hold their own. I only described this one because it is the one I was exposed to recently. So pick a country you think you understand and read about it’s cultural dimensions. Hell, pick a country you don’t know about and do the same. Hofstede’s findings will give you a better understanding of why certain cultures behave the way they do and why certain cultures have evolved the way they have. They will also allow you to better analyze your own environment and hopefully make more informed decisions in the future. I truly believe that if the general awareness of our population rose just marginally most of the evil-doers in our country would lose power within one election cycle. The time is nigh!

The Fundamental Difference

Awareness: For a long time I wondered what made a progressive person fundamentally different from a conservative one, and not too long ago I found the answer. In any situation, regarding any issue, the great divide is a matter of selfishness, no matter how you slice it. While Democratic and liberal are words often used to categorize progressive people and ideas I avoid using them because to me “progressive” implies an inherent level of intelligence and awareness not always found in people labeled Democratic or liberal. Granted, I’d take a liberal over a conservative any day of the week and twice on Sundays but there are many smart, conservative ideas and an equal number of stupid, liberal ideas. With that said, the smart, conservative ideas may be well thought out but the ultimate goal always reeks of selfishness. The world isn’t perfect and if you’re reading this, most people on the planet have it worse than you in almost any imaginable way. Take for example:

Taxes – Most people who are well off and pay taxes at a (relatively) high rate had an advantageous upbringing. There’s no debating this fact. There’s also no debate that most people who earn high incomes do so legally, no matter the loopholes and inefficiencies inherent in our economic system. And in doing so, they want to keep as much of their income as possible for themselves. “It’s mine!” they say. So what? So what is that most people with this attitude ignore that they were given nearly every advantage to succeed in a capitalist society. Socioeconomic segregation, propagated dramatically through sprawl and gentrification, reinforces this ignorance. No one is asking for the more fortunate to give back their advantage and level the playing field. All the more selfless are asking for is for those who have to give a little to those who have not.

Civil Rights – This topic is always a hot one. The first disagreement usually arises regarding whether we live in a Christian society or one inspired, in part, by Christian ideals (which, by the way, are the same ideals of any religion or sound moral code after you strip away the fantasy). The slope gets slippery quickly. Which version of Christianity are we talking about? Some are more liberal than others and some are more interested in protecting “institution” than saving souls. Do the values of Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, secular humanists and other minorities carry any weight. The selfishness of religion is inherent to each version’s survival but it is that selfishness that causes infiltration of another’s space. Guns directly affect others and gays do not, funny how the mention of god helps people sell it the other way.

Those are just two very broad topics analyzed with very loose arguments. Poke all the holes in them you’d like. But, if you take the principles I’ve mentioned and apply them to any issue you’ll find my conclusion to be true. I’m not making a judgment rather merely an observation. The sky is (not always) blue and the grass is (not always) green but most of the time they are; progressives are (not always) selfless and conservatives are (not always) selfish but most of the time they are.

Action: Sacrifice. Make a meaningful contribution to something or someone completely different than you. Step outside of your box and take a chance. Murder your ignorance by giving to or just recognizing an idea that goes beyond what you believe. It’s the only way to reinforce your beliefs. And if you find along the way something doesn’t jive you may have discovered a new truth, or that you’ve been misled. Don’t fear changing your step. You’ll have only yourself to blame if you keep dancing to that old, worn-out song.