Generosity: Real and Imagined

Following up on the holiday theme, lets look at some data related to cultural generosity as manifest in international aid. Using data from a recent World Public Opinion survey, the Washington Post's Ezra Kleen crafted the following graphic:



There is a lot going on here. On the one hand, American's perceive themselves as a generous people and, I think, that sensibility is reflected in the magnitude of the "should spend" allocation. On the other hand, there is a perception that the government is actually spending roughly double what they "should spend." This is remarkably consistent with a
Gallup poll documenting the belief that Uncle Sam wastes 50 cents on the dollar. This sentiment explains the effectiveness of the simplistic political rhetoric claiming it is possible to balance the budget by getting rid of waste, fraud and abuse. Finally, there is the implicit point that Klein constructed the graph to illustrate -- that American's would be willing to give more to foreign aid if they actually understood how little was currently being spent. I doubt that is true. Indeed, if the question were phrased differently I suspect you would get very different results. For example, asking Americans to estimate the amount of money actually spent on foreign aid rather than the proportion of the budget, would, I suspect, yield a number substantially lower than the actual dollars involved.

Sociology for the holidays

In the spirit of the season, a brief respite from our traditional offerings. Christmas lights are an accepted and middle class phenomenon in North America. In Britain, not so much. They are seen as distinctly working-class and there are numerous sites devoted to mocking both the displays and the 'chavs' who spend money they don't have on them.

And, where there is a social division, there is likely to be a sociologist. Enter Tim Edensor and Steve Millington, two British sociologists, who have written 'Illuminations, Class Identities and the Contested Landscapes of Christmas' (Sociology 2009; 43; 103-121; DOI: 10.1177/0038038508099100). The abstract provides a nice summary of the article -- minus the interesting details.

In the last two decades, illuminating the outside of a house with multi-coloured lights has become a popular British Christmas practice, typically adopted within working-class neighbourhoods and thus producing a particular geography of illumination.This article explores how such displays have become a site for class conflict mobilized around contesting ideas about space, time, community, aesthetics and festivity, highlighting how the symbolic economy of class conflict moves across popular culture. We focus upon two contrasting class-making practices evoking conflicting cultural values. First, we examine the themes prevalent in negative media representations of Christmas lights, notably the expression of disgust which foregrounds the working-class stereotype, the `chav'. Second, we analyse the motivations of displayers, exploring how the illuminations are imbued with idealistic notions about conviviality and generosity.

Mark Greif, author of “What Was the Hipster? A Sociological Investigation” had an essay in the NYT Review of Books draws on Bourdieu to examine similar themes. Here are some of the key passages:

“Distinction,” published in 1979, was an undisputed masterwork. In it, Bourdieu set out to show the social logic of taste: how admiration for art, appreciation of music, even taste in food, came about for different groups, and how “superior” taste was not the result of an enchanted superiority in scattered individuals.
....
Over several years in the 1960s, Bourdieu and his researchers surveyed 1,200 people of all classes and mined government data on aspects of French domestic life. .... The statistical results were striking. The things you prefer — tastes that you like to think of as personal, unique, justified only by sensibility — correspond tightly to defining measures of social class: your profession, your highest degree and your father’s profession.

The power of Bourdieu’s statistics was to show how rigid and arbitrary the local conformities were. .... Taste is not stable and peaceful, but a means of strategy and competition. Those superior in wealth use it to pretend they are superior in spirit. Groups closer in social class who yet draw their status from different sources use taste and its attainments to disdain one another and get a leg up. These conflicts for social dominance through culture are exactly what drive the dynamics within communities whose members are regarded as hipsters.

Climate Change, Who cares?

Globescan, an international public opinion research company best known for their Greendex project aimed at measuring sustainable consumption , just released the results of a global poll documenting interesting trends in concern about climate change. The following excerpts place those findings in a larger context.

The 26-country poll asked more than 13,000 people to rate the seriousness of a range of environmental problems including climate change. Results revealed that the proportion of those who rated climate change as a "very serious" problem fell from 61 per cent last year to 53 per cent this year, after many years of increasing concern.

Other findings from the poll show that the proportion of people across tracking countries who believe that "the dangers of climate change are exaggerated," has increased from 42 per cent in 2008 to 48 per cent this year.

North-South divide

Chris Coulter, the senior vice-president of GlobeScan, says the world is witnessing a North-South divide over climate change, with levels of concern remaining stable or growing in emerging economies and declining in Europe and North America.

"The combined effects of economic recession, the confusing results from last year's Copenhagen climate conference, and the controversy surrounding climate science seem to have shaken the belief of people in industrialised countries that climate change is an urgent problem that needs to be addressed," he says.

.....

A more worrying shift, according to Hohnen, has been the recent assumption of the mainstream financial press that climate change is now unstoppable.

"Last week's Economist magazine led with the cover 'How to live with climate change'. After years of saying climate change was nothing to worry about, even conservative analysts now see that major changes have been put in train."

As this viewpoint becomes more widespread, it could have a dramatic impact on climate policy, Hohnen says.

"Rather than trying to stop or slow climate change, more efforts may now be put into adaptation. This means more sea dykes, weather-proofed buildings and intensive agriculture. To finance this, capital will be pulled back to reinforce local infrastructure and self defence measures. If this happens we will see profound implications for international trade and finance."

.....

If governments do not come to an agreement in Cancun there is a danger that individual countries will go into what Paul Hohnen calls 'bunker mode', where rich countries increasingly invest in their own protection and reduce prospects for a global agreement.

"If a global deal isn't reached soon, where all countries do their share, voters in rich countries in the North are not going to agree to their tax money being used for climate change prevention in the South. While that may not be scientifically or ethically sound policy, it's not hard to imagine it becoming a popular political line. The irony will be that this will probably be first heard from former climate sceptics."

The two other big pieces of context? China is outpacing the US in climate mitigation efforts. In the past year, while US efforts to manage carbon were dying in Congress, China’s incentives for clean-energy development have been so abundant that the Obama administration threatened to file a complaint with the World Trade Organization branding the aid a violation of global trade rules.

Second, the US has set the negotiating bar at the current Cancun talks very high. This can be taken two ways, as recognition of the severity of the problem or as a crass political move designed to insure the current talks are labeled a failure. According to Todd Stern, the chief American climate change negotiator,

the United States was seeking a “balanced set of decisions” that makes measurable progress on the six issues now before the conference: emissions reductions, technology transfers, adaptation, verification, financing and forest preservation. The issues formed the core of the Copenhagen Accord negotiated last year, and an agreement that does not make comparable progress on all of them is not acceptable.

Given the fragile state of the negotiations, the declining public support in the western democracies and the tortured backstory associated with the development of current negotiating texts in each of the six areas, getting agreement on all six seems unlikely (to put it mildly). Whatever the reasoning, the practical outcome of such a position will probably lead to a perceived negotiating failure and reinforce the bunker mentality in which rich, relatively unaffected nations, invest large sums in mitigation efforts and the poor, more directly and immediately affected nations of the global south, are left on their own.

Whatever you think of the WTO, it is tangible proof that a binding global regime is possible. At some point in time, given the global nature of emerging environmental problems, countries will recognize the need for a similar global regime to deal with environmental matters. But, for the medium term, it seems like every country is going to be left on its own.

Freudenburg on the Gulf Oil Spill and more

Noted environmental sociologist William Freudenburg is, unfortunately, in ill health. This hasn't affected his productivity, however, as he completed his most recent book about the Deep Water Horizon drilling accident, Blowout in the Gulf, in a mere 60 days. Despite the rapidity with which the book was written, it doesn't suffer in depth as the work is informed by Freudenburg and Gramling's combined 60 years of research on the oil industry and energy issues. As Charles Perrow noted in his review of the book:

Freudenburg and Gramling put the spill into the perspective of energy dependence, take us gracefully through technical details blurred by the popular press, grasp the local and national politics (offering some political detergents of their own along the way), and give the spill what will likely be its most masterful handling. The authors' years of work on oil drilling and the carbon economy get a dramatic payoff in this very timely book.

Freudenburg presented a lecture based on the book, Learning Lessons from Disaster? The BP Oil Spill and the Future of Energy in America on November 15 and the webpage has a link to a video of the lecture. Unfortunately, the 'rtsp' based link didn't work for me, but the folks at Santa Barabara were nice enough to provide this alternative http based link that did. The talk has four significant sections: 1)a brief discussion of the recently released findings from the Presidential Commission looking into the accident, 2) some basic background on oil, its formation, and the drilling process, 3) a discussion of risk and risk management and, in particular, an analysis of the extent to which BP's behaviours differ from those of other industry players, and ends with 4) a detailed history of US energy policy aimed at illuminating the question of why the US is in the position of drilling for oil in water more than a mile deep. While the effects of his health are evident (Freudenburg delivers the lecture sitting down), he remains the energetic and engaging speaker he always has been. There are reasons his undergraduate lectures frequently end with applause, and those reasons are clearly exemplified in this talk.

Finally, Freudenburg was honoured at Freudenfest 2010: a day long collaborative discussion and celebration of his contributions to sociology, environmental studies, and society held November 6, 2010, at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

The Freudenfest webpage includes a program of the events, powerpoint slides from the following presentations, and a gallery of images taken at the event.

*The Said and Unsaid: Disproportionality and How it is Supported through Discourse, Debra Davidson, Dept. of Rural Economy, University of Alberta

*Working with Bill, Robert Gramling

*Social Change in Natural Resource-Based Rural Communities: The Evolution of Sociological Research and Knowledge As Influenced by the Contributions of William E. Freudenburg, Richard S. Krannich, Dept. of Sociology, Social Work and Anthropology, Utah State University

*Transcending Human Exemptionalism: Freudenburg's Sociology in Which Nature Matters, Raymond Murphy, University of Ottawa, Canada, and Riley Dunlap, Oklahoma State University, USA

*Resource Dependency and Diversity: From Findings to Metaphors (and Back Again?), Richard C. Stedman, Dept. of Natural Resources, Cornell University

*Political Science: The Intricacies of Activism Among Coastal Restoration Scientists, Lee Clarke, Rutgers University

Environmental syncronicity

Those with a predisposition toward Jungian psychology will find meaning in the synchronous juxtaposition of these two events:

1) Over at the Oil Drum they are declaring victory in the fight for recognition of peak oil and rolling out plans for a kinder and smaller internet presence.

For the past 5 years, The Oil Drum has been a home base for many high level discussions about the details and implications surrounding an early peak in global crude oil production as well as topics on society and energy in general. The entire site was started, and continued, by volunteers, in what might be described as a loose anarchy glued by social capital and a desire to puzzle solve the complexities surrounding energy depletion. Over time, on these pages, our contributing staff and especially the many readers who joined the discussions, have pushed the envelope in publicly analyzing what was/is one of the central issues of our time - the opportunities and constraints facing society during the upcoming energy transition.

In many ways our initial mission is over. The fact that oil depletion is real and urgent is no longer a 3+ standard deviation viewpoint (see recent IEA World Energy Outlook).

2) Meanwhile, Worldchanging has announced they are archiving the website and going out of existence by the end of the year.

We have some news.

Seven years ago, Alex Steffen and Jamais Cascio started Worldchanging with the intention of providing access to the tools, models and ideas for building a better future. They wanted to push the concept that solutions-based thinking could transform the debates about sustainability and social innovation. With a scrawny little blog, a brilliant crew of fellow travelers and a lot of moxie, an initial group of us set out to change how people think about (and prepare for) the future.
....
But all things change, and so it happens with Worldchanging. The organization is taking steps to close its doors and dissolve as a 501c3 nonprofit organization by the end of 2010. It is our goal to see the archive of work here maintained, though the form of that archive is still uncertain.

Why is this happening? Worldchanging readers were generous over the years and an important part of our ongoing operations, but we were never able to secure major foundation support, so Worldchanging relied most heavily on income generated from Alex Steffen’s speaking engagements (Alex gave more than 400 talks over the past five years) and the Worldchanging book. The strenuous travel schedule it takes to deliver that many talks, though, was unsustainable, both personally for Alex and in terms of the impact it had on Worldchanging’s ability to develop new work. It was clear we needed a new model if we were going to stay in operation.

Early this year a new board was brought on to reshape the organization and pursue a more traditional nonprofit development model (based more on grants, gifts and major fundraising drives), with many new board members recruited in just the last few months to help us re-imagine operations and launch these new plans. Unfortunately, despite everyone’s best efforts (and a successful October event), funding ran out before such a transformation could happen. Given the financial realities we faced, the board and staff have agreed that it is time to bring Worldchanging to a close as gracefully as possible.

They will be missed.

Global Warming and 'Over-Resonance'

11.16.2010 - Dire messages about global warming can backfire, new study shows

A study from UC Berkeley appears to prove the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann: that dire warnings about ecological disasters, such as global warming, can cause "over-resonance", i.e. a reactive state that actually backfires and undermines an adequate response to the crisis.

Luhmann's Ecological Communication (1989) proposes that social systems lack the capacity to accurately perceive environmental conditions. The usual response of society to environment is "under-resonance," i.e. the social system does not recognize problems in the environment, or just barely. However, when economic, political and scientific systems present information about ecological crisis in an alarming way, it causes social "over-resonance," an "effect-explosion" in which paradoxically, social systems become paralyzed and unable to respond effectively to the problem.

The study from U. C. Berkeley found that when facts about global warming were reported in an alarming way to subjects, they indicated that they doubted the veracity of the report, even among those whose ideals of a "just world" were fairly high. Furthermore, the overwhelmed subjects were less likely to take corrective action to address the problem.

Conversely, when subjects were presented with the same facts on global warming but provided with possible solutions, subjects were more likely to indicate that they believed in the veracity of the report and that they would modify their behaviour to address the problem.

Geoffrey West on Scaling Rules

Physicists really like simplicity and elegance. And, as a result, they have a wonderful knack for coming up with interesting ways that show how things that appear to be different are really the same.

(Warning: obscure sociology reference impending.) Simmel would love them. (Explanation of obscure reference: Simmel, the progenitor of formal sociology and what has subsequently become network analysis, was treated poorly by the German academic establishment -- in part because his lectures were so popular. Those lectures typically took the following structure: Look at thing A, Look at thing B, Look at thing C. Surprise A, B and C are really the same thing!)

That is the same general approach that West takes as part of this Yahoo Labs Big Thinker presentation exploring the scaling rules of cities, businesses and other things only discovered when you watch!

Unfortunately, the viewer doesn't display time, so I can't identify precisely where to find the interesting bits, ..... but somewhere between a fifth and a quarter into the talk you find this slide which is attached to an interesting observation:

a) there is a systematic relationship between the size of a biological organism and the amount of energy that it requires that b) remains the same over the entire 27 orders of magnitude of biological phenomenon (i.e., from below the cellular level to the blue whale). An increase in size of the system by 4 orders of magnitude requires only 3 orders of magnitude increase in energy input.

At about the 1/4 point, after talking about a number of other scaling relationships, Wests suggests that it is networks that underpin these relationships and the existence of the mathematical relations is a product of natural selection (which has optimized the design and selected for the most efficient) and the mathematics of network processes.

At about the 1/3 point, he notes that similar scaling processes occur not only when looking between species, but also when conceptualizing networks made up of the same object. Thus, the same principals that hold for a single tree also hold for the forest as a whole. Thus, for example when looking at all the different trees in a forest, there is a consistent relationship between the diameter of the trunk of a particular type of tree and the number of trees of that type in the forest.

He then turns to a discussion of growth -- based on the idea that incoming metabolized energy serves two functions a) the maintenance of existing cells and b) the growth of new cells. The first half of the talk, dealing with biological systems, is summarized in the following slide:

The central point is that the relationships are found in biology because natural selection has operated on the systems and selected for those which are optimized. Thus, the question for the second half of the talk becomes whether or not social systems show the same patterns. If they do, then they are likely sustainable. If they don't, problems are likely.



This slide, around the half way mark, summarizes the results of his empirical findings -- that social organization scales in terms of three different types of relationship rather than the single one characterizing biological systems.





And here, in contrast to biological processes that scale at a less than linear rate, we see the consequences of that aspect of social process that scales at a greater than linear rate. Thus, where biological systems that are large go slower than those that are small, social systems that are large operate at a pace that is faster than those that are small.

At this point, around 2/3 of the way through, it gets really interesting. In contrast to interpreting the exponential growth in terms of the standard Limits to Growth argument, West notes that you can 'reset' the initial conditions and, hence, modify the curve, through the process of social innovation. But, drum roll for the long awaited punchline,to do this and keep the system operating requires it to be 'reset' on a more and more rapid basis. In other words, there is a need not just for new innovation, but for more rapid and more fundamental innovation, as the system grows. This structure, like trying to run on a treadmill that is continuously accelerating and from which you will ultimately fall off, is unsustainable.

West closes with a discussion of corporations and the tension between infrastructure (governed by biological type scaling laws that are less than linear) and innovation (governed by scaling laws greater than one) and why companies, in contrast to cities, tend to die out.

There are lots of interesting parallels between West's argument and those of Tad Homer-Dixon and his notion of the ingenuity gap. Homer-Dixon argues that the fundamental problem we face is that the requirement for ingenuity is rising faster than our ability to supply it and, hence, there exists an ingenuity gap. I've always conceptualized the main driver behind the increased requirement as the increasing complexity, scale and fundamental nature of the problems we face. Or, in panarchy terms, the co-creation of increasingly higher-level (slower, larger scale) adaptive cycles. West provides a slightly different explanation for the increased requirement for ingenuity -- tracing it to the increasingly rapid need to 'reset' the growth curve.

Big Fight in Marine Science!

Scientific American has an interesting article describing an argument over whether or not a key indicator of biodiversity in fisheries is flawed.

A tenet of modern fisheries science may be unfounded, suggests a study of how catches are affecting marine ecosystems. The finding has sparked a heated debate about how best to measure humanity's impact on the ocean.

A landmark study in 1998 found that we are 'fishing down the food chain' worldwide -- in other words, exhausting stocks of top predators such as cod before switching attention to smaller marine animals. This has since become accepted wisdom. But a study published in Nature today suggests that the indicator on which this claim is based -- 'mean trophic level' or MTL -- is severely flawed.

The authors of the 1998 paper have hit back, with one of them branding the latest research "completely invalid". But Trevor Branch, lead author of the Nature study and a fisheries scientist at the University of Washington, Seattle, stands by the work. "At a global level we are not fishing down," he says. "The results are quite clear on that."

Branch says that fishing down may have occurred in some local areas, for example as happened with cod in the Atlantic. But in other places -- such as the Gulf of Thailand -- fisheries first targeted creatures low in the food chain, such as mussels or prawns, and are now 'fishing up'.

Individuals wanting the bloody details can read the article and/or consult the original article and comment in Nature, The trophic fingerprint of marine fisheries. As for the policy implications of the work:

Timothy Essington, a fisheries researcher at the University of Washington, Seattle, whose work was cited by Branch, argues that for a detailed picture of what is happening in ecosystems, MTL must now be used in combination with other measures. Pauly's original paper took a "20,000-feet view", he says. "What we're seeing now is the view from that altitude isn't very clear."

Essington compares looking at MTL to a physician taking a patient's temperature. If the temperature changes dramatically it is probably an indication that something is wrong, he says. But if the doctor decided on a treatment based on temperature alone, "you would never go back to that doctor again".

Spencer Weart on the Climate Wars

In tribute to the anniversary of Climategate, Spencer Weart (author of The Discovery of Global Warming) placed the events into a larger historical context. Here is what he said:

The controversy was one more step in the trends we have seen operating since the mid 20th century. First, the decline in the prestige of all authorities and would-be authoritative organizations. Second, the great expansion of the scientific community coupled with an increasing interdisciplinarity: strengths which brought a weakness in that that there were no longer any universally respected spokespeople (like Millikan, Einstein, or even Sagan); it is characteristic that the spokesman for the I.P.C.C., Pachauri, was unknown before he took the position, was not even a scientist, and indeed was accepted for the post by the Bush administration precisely because of these deficiencies. Third, the decline of science journalism; where Walter Sullivan and his like had admired the scientific community and were respected in turn, many of the media people who now attempted to explain science, such as the “weather” reporters on television, scarcely understood what they were dealing with.

These trends had been exacerbated since the 1990s by the fragmentation of media (Internet, talk radio), which promoted counter-scientific beliefs such as fear of vaccines among even educated people, by providing facile elaborations of false arguments and a ceaseless repetition of allegations.

The scientific community — for it was not only the I.P.C.C. but the entire scientific community whose reliability was now called into question — was unprepared for the attacks they now faced. We can easily speculate about the personal and social characteristics that to this day make many scientists unfit for aggressive personal controversy. But it will suffice to point out that unlike, for example, any political organization or business corporation, the I.P.C.C. lacked a well-funded and expert public relations apparatus. Even the universities, notably East Anglia, showed a complete lack of understanding of the basic need to respond promptly with a coherent statement of the full factual history of their problems.

To make matters worse, some scientists, and still more people among environmental and other organizations, made statements not supported by what was reliably known. An example was implicit or explicit claims that hurricanes were increasing as a result of human interference with the climate. There was no way for the general public to know whether scientists actually made such claims, still less whether the claims were made honestly or disingenuously. Thus a single error, such as the obviously wrong claim that Himalayan glaciers would vanish within decades, could be suspected to be a deliberate falsehood.

That said, the media coverage represented a new low. There were plenty of earlier examples of media making an uproar without understanding the science (recall, for example, how the director of the Brookhaven National Laboratory was forced to resign because of a leakage of tritium with a total radioactivity less than that in a theater exit sign, see p. xxx). But this was the first time the media reported that an entire community of scientists had been accused of actual dishonesty. Such claims, if directed for example at a politician on a matter of minor importance, would normally require serious investigation. But even in leading newspapers like The New York Times, critics with a long public record for animosity and exaggeration were quoted as experts. As we know, the repetition of allegations is sufficient to make them stick in the public’s mind, regardless of whether they are later shown (or could easily be shown at the time) to be untrue. Thus one more step was taken toward the disintegration and disasters of the late 21st century. … um, just kidding… I hope…

While Weart does a good job of placing the events in a larger historical context, he still seems render these processes (e.g., decline in the authority of scientists, the rise of media promoting 'counter-scientific beliefs') as distinct elements rather than multiple parts of a basic cultural transformation .... i.e., postmodernism.

Coal: Act Locally, Think Globally .... NOT!

Interesting article in the NYTimes on the global trade in coal. The basic point: while developed countries move to limit the use of coal as a fuel for electrical generation in order to reduce emissions, that very same coal is being sold to China. Moreover, where the coal was traditionally burned close to where it was mined, now it is shipped thousands of miles -- with the additional cost in emissions. And, to make it even more problematic, as demand has grown so has the price and, hence, more production and new mines. In short, local action to reduce emissions is going for nothing at the global level as those emissions are merely being relocated.



The graph above shows that the vast majority of countries are either importing less coal or exporting more of it. The one major exception, China, which has gone from a net exporter to a net importer in the two years between 2007 and 2009.



As the above map shows, there are a large number of countries involved in the trading of coal. The bulk of the shipments to China, however, come from Australia and Indonesia.