Saturday, November 30, 2019

ANS -- Evolution Made Us Cooperative, Not Competitive

This one is short and heartening.  You'll enjoy it.  It's about the dominance of cooperation over competition, and how trees and fungi help each other.  
--Kim



Evolution Made Us Cooperative, Not Competitive

The story we are told about Darwinism isn't really true

Douglas Rushkoff
Nov 6 · 3 min read

Nature is a collaborative act. If humans are the most evolved species, it is only because we have developed the most advanced ways of working and playing together.

We've been conditioned to believe in the myth that evolution is about competition: the survival of the fittest. In this view, each creature struggles against all the others for scarce resources. Only the strongest ones survive to pass on their superior genes, while the weak deserve to lose and die out.

But evolution is every bit as much about cooperation as competition. Our very cells are the result of an alliance billions of years ago between mitochondria and their hosts. Individuals and species flourish by evolving ways of supporting mutual survival. A bird develops a beak which lets it feed on some part of a plant that other birds can't reach. This introduces diversity into the population's diet, reducing the strain on a particular food supply and leading to more for all. What of the poor plant, you ask? The birds, much like bees, are helping the plant by spreading its seeds after eating its fruit.

Survival of the fittest is a convenient way to justify the cutthroat ethos of a competitive marketplace, political landscape, and culture. But this perspective misconstrues the theories of Darwin as well as his successors. By viewing evolution though a strictly competitive lens, we miss the bigger story of our own social development and have trouble understanding humanity as one big, interconnected team.

The most successful of biology's creatures coexist in mutually beneficial ecosystems. It's hard for us to recognize such widespread cooperation. We tend to look at life forms as isolated from one another: a tree is a tree and a cow is a cow. But a tree is not a singular tree at all; it is the tip of a forest. Pull back far enough to see the whole, and one tree's struggle for survival merges with the more relevant story of its role in sustaining the larger system.

We also tend to miss nature's interconnections because they happen subtly, beneath the surface. We can't readily see or hear the way trees communicate. For instance, there's an invisible landscape of mushrooms and other fungi connecting the root systems of trees in a healthy forest. The underground network allows the trees to interact with one another and even exchange resources. In the summer, shorter evergreens are shaded by the canopies of taller trees. Incapable of reaching the light and photosynthesizing, they call through the fungus for the sun-drenched nutrients they need. The taller trees have plenty to spare, and send it to their shaded peers. The taller trees lose their leaves in the winter and themselves become incapable of photosynthesizing. At that point, the evergreens, now exposed to the sun, send their extra nutrients to their leafless community members. For their part, the underground fungi charge a small service fee, taking the nutrients they need in return for facilitating the exchange.

So the story we are taught in school about how trees of the forest compete to reach the sunlight isn't really true. They collaborate to reach the sunlight, by varying their strategies and sharing the fruits of their labor.

Trees protect one another as well. When the leaves of acacia trees come in contact with the saliva of a giraffe, they release a warning chemical into the air, triggering nearby acacias to release repellents specific to giraffes. Evolution has raised them to behave as if they were part of the same, self-preserving being.

This is section 8 of the book Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff, which is being serialized weekly on Medium.  

ANS -- Capitalism is Dangerous for Your Mental Health

This is an important article.  The basic premise is that the rise in suicide and addiction and depression is caused by the worldview of capitalism.  Because capitalism emphasizes competition over cooperation, we start to live our lives as isolated competitors, etc.  Read it!
a bit long, but quite clear.  From January apparently.  
--Kim


Capitalism is Dangerous for Your Mental Health

What if it's not we who are sick, but an entire society that is incompatible with humanity's social needs?

Jimmy Wu
Jimmy Wu
Jan 10 · 10 min read
Apartments in Ivanovo, Russia. (Natalya Letunova, Unsplash)

alf of all adults in the U.S. will develop at least one mental illness during their lifetime, with 45 million experiencing psychiatric disorders in any given year. Suicide rates are currently at a thirty-year high, substance abuse has become epidemic, and a new culture of online connectedness thinly masks a phenomenon of social isolation. From city to suburbia, virtually everyone has either suffered or knows someone who has.

Most instances of mental illness go untreated, owing to a combination of social stigma and lack of access to care. The more fortunate among us will be prescribed regular meetings with a therapist who promises to fix us and help us adjust ourselves to polite society, possibly with the aid of medication to correct our "chemical imbalances."

But with the symptoms so widespread in our population, we ought to ask: what if correcting ourselves is not enough? What if the problem runs much deeper: that distress, misery, and loneliness are woven into the very fabric of our social system? We have long known that our social conditions — everything from our physical environment, to socioeconomic background, to prevailing cultural beliefs — exert overwhelming influence over our psychological well-being. It's time, then, that we started to be precise about what exactly is at the root of the mental health crisis; it's time we identified this system by its name: capitalism.

An Anxious Society

At the heart of many mental health problems is a perceived lack of control over one's circumstances, or fear of external forces. According to Irish psychiatrist Peadar O'Grady,

The term 'anxiety' is used particularly when the threat is not immediate or is unclear, but it is fear by another name… Whether the particular mental illness does not involve major disorganization of thought or perception (traditionally called neurosis) or is severe with disorganization of thought or perception (psychosis) or brain functioning (Delirium and Dementia), fear is often a central component of suffering and distress.

In this light, the connections between political economy and mental illness become clear; what is capitalism, after all, if not a system that rests upon the great majority of the population living in constant fear and insecurity? For forty years, wages have been stagnant or falling for most households, while those who are fortunate enough to have a steady job typically work longer hours than the average medieval peasant. Sky-high rents push neighbors out of their homes, wrenching apart communities and putting people on the streets. Social media keeps us ever more connected online, while walling us off in the real world. Pressures and expectations set by corporate marketing departments degrade our self-image and induce eating disorders in teenagers. Public spaces are scarce and increasingly privatized, locking out those without the means to pay for the luxury of human interaction (how many places can you think of where you can sit down for an hour and chat with a friend, without buying something or paying a fee?).

The Psychology of Markets

Yet capitalism's reach extends much further than its economic effects; it also shapes our ideology and how we perceive our place in the world. Modern-day capitalism, with its unshakable faith in deregulated markets, privatization of the public sphere, and austerity budgets, has of course contributed to our financial misery, leading to mass hopelessness and anxiety. But far from being confined to economic policy, contemporary capitalism (often called "neoliberalism") also embodies a philosophical belief that self-interest and competition, not cooperation, should pervade every aspect of our lives. In short, our world is shaped in the image of the market. For those in distress, Margaret Thatcher's oft-cited mantra, "There is no such thing as society," sends the most disturbing possible message: "You're on your own."

The psychological toll of this market-extremist thinking is ubiquitous and measurable. A long line of social science research has shown that unemployed people are much more likely to become depressed; after all, under the reigning ideology, our self-worth is measured by our economic output. Moreover, since the market is (we are told) a level playing field, with no single actor appearing as the obvious coordinator, those who happen to be losers in this global scramble ostensibly have no one to blame but themselves. In such a world, it is extremely dangerous to fall below average — to be deemed inadequate, too lazy or incapable of pulling one's weight, dependent on government handouts, and ultimately a burden on society.

Most of us intuitively understand this game and its stakes, which is why we set out very methodically to climb the corporate ladder and keep our resumes in top shape. This careerist mentality also seeps into our social interactions, as we are constantly spiffing up our Facebooks, uploading perfectly saturated Instagrams, and flouting our wokeness in Twitter arguments, all to market ourselves and develop our personal and social brand. These are not the actions of a human being in their natural state, but rather a creature modeling itself after the capitalist firm, an institution bestowed with the legal mandate to relentlessly maximize profits — social, ethical, and environmental consequences be damned. The corporation checks off so many of the traits usually assessed for psychopathy — manipulativeness, shallow affect, lack of long-term goals, aversion to responsibility — that legal scholar Joel Bakan called it, in his book The Corporation, "a pathological institution." If we ever encountered a person who sought only to pursue self-interest, they would be regarded as psychopathic; yet increasingly, this is precisely what we are doing and becoming.

An Engine of Alienation

Beyond these direct threats to our material and psychological wellness, modernity also seems to be accompanied by an inescapable feeling of general emptiness, isolation, and lack of meaning, which so many existential philosophers and social theorists have attempted to capture and understand. Some, such as Durkheim, studied how religious communities (or lack thereof) contribute to suicidal tendencies. One historical figure too often omitted in contemporary discourse, however, is the young Karl Marx. In his "theory of alienation," developed in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and other texts, Marx showed that the meaninglessness and isolation of modern life is baked into capitalist economic relations.

To do this, Marx asked us to imagine the pre-industrial artisan — the shoemaker, the baker, the tailor — who worked not for a capitalist, but for themselves. Such an independent producer retained control over their work and the entire creative process, so that their product was something they could be proud of and see themselves in; moreover, they had the satisfaction of seeing their product go to immediate use, fulfilling a human need. "Our products," Marx concluded, "would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature." Labor was a point of joy, meaning, and human connectedness.

Workers at a Seagate hard disk factory in Wuyi, China. (Wikimedia Commons)

Not so under capitalism, when one toils in the factory or office for a wage. Here, the worker is a replaceable commodity who does what the boss demands; as a result, labor is used not as an outlet for creative self-expression, nor to fulfill the needs of our fellow human beings, but rather to produce a profit. The daily act of work serves as proof of our unfreedom rather than of our humanity; the very product that rolls off the production line appears as an object alien to us, rather than as a manifestation of our individuality. In Marx's words: "The activity of the worker is not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another. It is a loss of his self."

The loss of meaning and agency at work — where we spend most of our waking hours — is a huge blow to the psyche in and of itself. However, the capitalist system generates alienation on an even grander scale. As social beings gifted with powerful mental faculties, we are naturally wired to cooperate and to create. But because capitalism forces us to fight over jobs and resources, we view each other not as collaborators and companions, but as competitors. In time, this system would come to dictate our social relations; now, in an era of competition and profit maximization, we see each other as objects — as means to our various ends, rather than multi-dimensional beings. Indeed, research done by social psychologists such as Tim Kasser have found that individuals who internalize "the materialistic ethos of corporate culture" exhibit "more anti-social activities" and "lower empathy." In short, the capitalist wage relation alienates us from our product, while the superstructure of the labor market alienates us from one another.

Reflecting on the present day, is this not precisely what has transpired? We hate our jobs and have little control over what we do — and often have no idea what purpose it serves anyway. Work feels draining rather than satisfying, because we understand that those hours do not belong to us; our lives begin when work ends. In the pittance of spare time we have left, we try to consume ever more stuff, hoping to satisfy our craving for ownership and expression. But alas, commodities don't provide lasting fulfillment; only genuine human interaction and authentic self-expression can. The solutions presented by capitalism inevitably fail to cure the malaise capitalism itself created.

Medicalizing the Psyche

What can be done about all this? Today, the severity of the mental health crisis is now widely recognized. There is an international movement comprising public health experts, social workers, and academics, who have set about very seriously and sentimentally to raise awareness of mental illness, to destigmatize the seeking of professional help, and to improve access to care.

Yet the contemporary medical reaction to this epidemic almost never asks the difficult but necessary questions: Why are people physically and emotionally isolated? Why do we feel such lack of control over our own destinies? Which structures in society give rise to these conditions?

Because it lacks a critique of the social systems at the heart of the crisis, the mental health community remains singularly focused on symptoms rather than causes, and ends up peddling palliatives, not cures. As anyone who has seen a psychotherapist knows, the premise is that the subject is "sick" and therefore needs to be fixed, whether by medication, adjustments in lifestyle, or ultimately changing one's mindset. In recent years, members of the psychiatry community have come out against the social ideology of the field, and especially of the dominant paradigms of therapy such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. As psychoanalyst Robert Fancher writes in Health and Suffering in America,

The basic norm of cognitive therapy is this: Except for how the patient thinks, everything is okay. Reality is not pathogenic. Just think straight and life can be good enough. A person should…convince herself of a generally optimistic view of how life works in this time and place — and confine her imagination to possibilities consistent with this. She should quell passions that would put her at odds with the status quo. She should not let her mind drift off into thoughts about life that might make her conclude that she…is unlikely to find fulfillment.

Once we have reduced this complex social phenomenon to the apolitical realm of individual medicine, it follows that the solution to the broader mental health epidemic is presented as merely public "awareness" and "destigmatization" — essentially efforts to funnel people into the therapy pipeline.

But as we have seen, mental distress arises in large part because of the discrepancy between human needs — connection, security, meaning — and the alienating social conditions offered by society. It is the plight of the initially sane person reacting to a mad world, to which the modern psychiatry industry would have us believe that the solution is to improve the individual, whether through therapy sessions or psycho-drugs. The late cultural theorist Mark Fisher summarized the situation thusly:

The privatisation of stress is a perfect capture system, elegant in its brutal efficiency. Capital makes the worker ill, and then multinational pharmaceutical companies sell them drugs to make them better. The social and political causation of distress is neatly sidestepped at the same time as discontent is individualised and interiorised.

Goodna Mental Hospital, Queensland, Australia. 1950. (Wikimedia Commons)

Therapeutic Struggle

How can we go beyond mainstream psychiatry, and build a movement to advance mental health at the societal level? Today, there are slivers of hope: a growing awareness among psychiatrists that social and cultural norms influence mental health and diagnoses; psychology research that critically examines the effects of neoliberal policy and values; and renewed interest in worker cooperatives, which promote greater worker happiness. All of these directions should be explored, nurtured, and funded.

Ultimately, however, we will need to think bigger. Psychiatry, no matter how well-intentioned, is largely structured as a capitalist enterprise, and does not address the causes of the problem. Worker cooperatives, meanwhile, are still subject to the competitive dictates of the market. The present situation calls for a new, radical politics that de-commodifies as much as possible, including and especially human labor. In other words, in the end we must still confront and defeat capital, the cancer that poisoned modernity.

And there is no time to lose: part of the reason why fascism is on the rise across the West is because it gives people meaning, social cohesion, and a sense of purpose. This is of course a cohesion built around the exclusion of marginalized people, but it is a seductive offer that technocratic liberals are ill-equipped to confront. Fortunately on the socialist left, we have arguably the most powerful ideological tools available. It is curious and sublime, though perhaps not coincidental, that the very act of leftist politics is one of social healing, of solidarity and collective struggle — the very opposite of isolation and alienation. It is our task to bring this emancipatory language and action back into the political realm.

Friday, November 29, 2019

ANS -- Meet the Leftish Economist With a New Story About Capitalism

This is an article not about economics, but about an economist.  She has some "new" and creative thinking for a way forward. Both Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been interesting in her theories.  (plus it agrees with some of what Joyce has been saying)
A sample paragraph:  
  "In two books of modern political economic theory — "The Entrepreneurial State" (2013) and "The Value of Everything" (2018) — Dr. Mazzucato argues against the long-accepted binary of an agile private sector and a lumbering, inefficient state. Citing markets and technologies like the internet, the iPhone and clean energy — all of which were funded at crucial stages by public dollars — she says the state has been an underappreciated driver of growth and innovation. "Personally, I think the left is losing around the world," she said in an interview, "because they focus too much on redistribution and not enough on the creation of wealth."  "
--Kim


Meet the Leftish Economist With a New Story About Capitalism

Mariana Mazzucato wants liberals to talk less about the redistribution of wealth and more about its creation. Politicians around the world are listening.

Mariana Mazzucato in Bellagio, Italy. She argues against the long-accepted binary of an agile private sector and a lumbering, inefficient state.
Mariana Mazzucato in Bellagio, Italy. She argues against the long-accepted binary of an agile private sector and a lumbering, inefficient state.Credit...Isabella de Maddalena for The New York Times
  • Nov. 26, 2019

Mariana Mazzucato was freezing. Outside, it was a humid late-September day in Manhattan, but inside — in a Columbia University conference space full of scientists, academics and businesspeople advising the United Nations on sustainability — the air conditioning was on full blast.

For a room full of experts discussing the world's most urgent social and environmental problems, this was not just uncomfortable but off-message. Whatever their dress — suit, sari, head scarf — people looked huddled and hunkered down. At a break, Dr. Mazzucato dispatched an assistant to get the A.C. turned off. How will we change anything, she wondered aloud, "if we don't rebel in the everyday?"

Dr. Mazzucato, an economist based at University College London, is trying to change something fundamental: the way society thinks about economic value. While many of her colleagues have been scolding capitalism lately, she has been reimagining its basic premises. Where does growth come from? What is the source of innovation? How can the state and private sector work together to create the dynamic economies we want? She asks questions about capitalism we long ago stopped asking. Her answers might rise to the most difficult challenges of our time.

In two books of modern political economic theory — "The Entrepreneurial State" (2013) and "The Value of Everything" (2018) — Dr. Mazzucato argues against the long-accepted binary of an agile private sector and a lumbering, inefficient state. Citing markets and technologies like the internet, the iPhone and clean energy — all of which were funded at crucial stages by public dollars — she says the state has been an underappreciated driver of growth and innovation. "Personally, I think the left is losing around the world," she said in an interview, "because they focus too much on redistribution and not enough on the creation of wealth."

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Her message has appealed to an array of American politicians. Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts and a presidential contender, has incorporated Dr. Mazzucato's thinking into several policy rollouts, including one that would use "federal R & D to create domestic jobs and sustainable investments in the future" and another that would authorize the government to receive a return on its investments in the pharmaceutical industry. Dr. Mazzucato has also consulted with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, and her team on the ways a more active industrial policy might catalyze a Green New Deal.

ImageSenator Warren has incorporated Dr. Mazzucato's thinking into several policy rollouts.
Senator Warren has incorporated Dr. Mazzucato's thinking into several policy rollouts.Credit...Joe Buglewicz for The New York Times

Even Republicans have found something to like. In May, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida credited Dr. Mazzucato's work several times in "American Investment in the 21st Century," his proposal to jump-start economic growth. "We need to build an economy that can see past the pressure to understand value-creation in narrow and short-run financial terms," he wrote in the introduction, "and instead envision a future worth investing in for the long-term."

Formally, the United Nations event in September was a meeting of the leadership council of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, or S.D.S.N. It's a body of about 90 experts who advise on topics like gender equality, poverty and global warming. Most of the attendees had specific technical expertise — Dr. Mazzucato greeted a contact at one point with, "You're the ocean guy!" — but she offers something both broad and scarce: a compelling new story about how to create a desirable future.

Originally from Italy — her family left when she was 5 — Dr. Mazzucato is the daughter of a Princeton nuclear physicist and a stay-at-home mother who couldn't speak English when she moved to the United States. She got her Ph.D. in 1999 from the New School for Social Research and began working on "The Entrepreneurial State" after the 2008 financial crisis. Governments across Europe began to institute austerity policies in the name of fostering innovation — a rationale she found not only dubious but economically destructive.

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"There's a whole neoliberal agenda," she said, referencing the received free-market wisdom that cutting public budgets spurs economic growth. "And then the way that traditional theory has fomented it or not contested it — there's been kind of a strange symbiosis between mainstream economic thinking and stupid policies."

Dr. Mazzucato takes issue with many of the tenets of the neoclassical economic theory taught in most academic departments: its assumption that the forces of supply and demand lead to market equilibrium, its equation of price with value and — perhaps most of all — its relegation of the state to the investor of last resort, tasked with fixing market failure. She has originated and popularized the description of the state as an "investor of first resort," envisioning new markets and providing long-term, or "patient," capital at early stages of development.

In important ways, Dr. Mazzucato's work resembles that of a literary critic or rhetorician as much as an economist. She has written of waging what the historian Tony Judt called a "discursive battle," and scrutinizes descriptive terms — words like "fix" or "spend" as opposed to "create" and "invest" — that have been used to undermine the state's appeal as a dynamic economic actor. "If we continue to depict the state as only a facilitator and administrator, and tell it to stop dreaming," she writes, "in the end that is what we get."

As a charismatic figure in a contentious field that does not generate many stars — she was recently profiled in Wired magazine's United Kingdom edition — Dr. Mazzucato has her critics. She is a regular guest on nightly news shows in Britain, where she is pitted against proponents of Brexit or skeptics of a market-savvy state.

Alberto Mingardi, an adjunct scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute and director general of Istituto Bruno Leoni, a free-market think tank, has repeatedly criticized Dr. Mazzucato for, in his view, cherry-picking her case studies, underestimating economic trade-offs and defining industrial policy too broadly. In January, in an academic piece written with one of his Cato colleagues, Terence Kealey, he called her "the world's greatest exponent today of public prodigality."

Her ideas, though, are finding a receptive audience around the world. In the United Kingdom, Dr. Mazzucato's work has influenced Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the Labour Party, and Theresa May, a former Prime Minister, and she has counseled the Scottish leader Nicola Sturgeon on designing and putting in place a national investment bank. She also advises government entities in Germany, South Africa and elsewhere. "In getting my hands dirty," she said, "I learn and I bring it back to the theory."

Image
The leader of Britain's Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, has been influenced by the work of Dr. Mazzucato.
The leader of Britain's Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, has been influenced by the work of Dr. Mazzucato.Credit...Phil Noble/Reuters

During a break at the United Nations gathering, Dr. Mazzucato escaped the air conditioning to confer with two colleagues in Italian on a patio. Tall, with a muscular physique, she wore a brightly colored glass necklace that has become something of a trademark on the economics circuit. Having traveled to five countries in eight days, she was fighting off a cough.

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"In theory, I'm the 'Mission Muse,'" she joked, lapsing into English. Her signature reference is to the original mission to the moon — a state-spurred technological revolution consisting of hundreds of individual feeder projects, many of them collaborations between the public and private sectors. Some were successes, some failures, but the sum of them contributed to economic growth and explosive innovation.

Dr. Mazzucato's platform is more complex — and for some, controversial — than simply encouraging government investment, however. She has written that governments and state-backed investment entities should "socialize both the risks and rewards." She has suggested the state obtain a return on public investments through royalties or equity stakes, or by including conditions on reinvestment — for example, a mandate to limit share buybacks.

Emphasizing to policymakers not only the importance of investment, but also the direction of that investment — "What are we investing in?" she often asks — Dr. Mazzucato has influenced the way American politicians speak about the state's potential as an economic engine. In her vision, governments would do what so many traditional economists have long told them to avoid: create and shape new markets, embrace uncertainty and take big risks.

Inside the conference, the news was uniformly bleak. Pavel Kabat, the chief scientist of the World Meteorological Organization, lamented the breaking of global temperature records and said that countries would have to triple their current Paris-accord commitments by 2030 to have any hope of staying below a critical warming threshold. A panel on land use and food waste noted that nine species account for two-thirds of the world's crop production, a dangerous lack of agricultural diversity. All the experts appeared dismayed by what Jeffrey Sachs, the S.D.S.N.'s director, described as the "crude nationalism" and "aggressive anti-globalization" ascendant around the world.

"We absolutely need to change both the narrative, but also the theory and the practice on the ground," Dr. Mazzucato told the crowd when she spoke on the final expert panel of the day. "What does it mean, actually, to create markets where you create the demand, and really start directing the investment and the innovation in ways that can help us achieve these goals?"

Earlier in the day, she pointed at an announcement on her laptop. She had been nominated for the first Not the Nobel Prize, a commendation intended to promote "fresh economic thinking." "Governments have woken up to the fact the mainstream way of thinking isn't helping them," she said, explaining her appeal to politicians and policymakers. A few days later, she won.