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How Investing Turns Nice People Into Psychopaths – Lynn Stout – Business – The Atlantic

4 Apr

… even though most of us are not conscienceless psychopaths, when we make investing decisions we often act as if we are. This observation casts an interesting light on Joel Bakan’s award-winning 2004 documentary The Corporation.” In that film, Bakan argued that because corporate managers believe they must maximize shareholder wealth, a corporation is a “psychopathic creature” that “can neither recognize nor act upon moral reasons to refrain from harming others.” To the extent this is true, shareholders themselves may be largely to blame. As University of Toronto law professor Ian Lee puts it, “if corporations are in fact ‘pathological’ profit-maximizers, it is not because of corporate law, but because of pressure from shareholders.”

The ideology of shareholder value drives corporate managers to make business decisions contrary to prosocial shareholders’ true interests. Of course, some shareholders may indeed be purely self-interested actors–psychopaths–who don’t mind if their companies deceive consumers, maim employees, or pollute the environment. But the hard evidence indicates the vast majority of us would prefer to tolerate at least somewhat diminished returns to avoid such results. And most studies find that SRI investing erodes investors’ returns only slightly, if at all. Shareholder psychopathy is neither natural nor inevitable but an artifact, the unfortunate outcome of collective action obstacles combined with the ideology of shareholder value.

via How Investing Turns Nice People Into Psychopaths – Lynn Stout – Business – The Atlantic.

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The Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans Gives New Meaning to ‘Urban Growth’ – NYTimes.com

25 Mar

New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward was devastated in Katrina. It’s coming back, slowly. What does this slow recovery teach us about resilience?

The closest analogy to what happened in the Lower Ninth, Blum says, is a volcanic eruption on the order of Mount St. Helens. The next closest is the tsunami that hit Japan’s northeast coast a year ago. This is what distinguishes the Lower Ninth from the most derelict neighborhoods in cities like Detroit and Cleveland. Katrina was not merely destructive; it brought about a “catastrophic reimagining of the landscape.” As in Japan, a surge of water destroyed most human structures. In much of the neighborhood, nothing remained — neither man, plants nor animals. The ecological term for this is simplification. “In 2007, before rebuilding started, when you went down there, it was like going to an agricultural field,” Blum says. “Literally it was wiped clean.”

What happened over the intervening years has made the Lower Ninth one of the richest ecological case studies in the world. Ecologists hypothesize that, after a catastrophic event, human communities and ecological communities return at the same rate. But this theory has not been tested in real time. Blum is among a coalition of scientists — ecologists, ornithologists, botanists, geographers and sociologists — that is studying the Lower Ninth’s recovery to learn how man, and the environment, will cope with future catastrophes.

via The Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans Gives New Meaning to ‘Urban Growth’ – NYTimes.com.

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For Lawyer in Afghan Killings, the Latest in a Series of Challenging Defenses – NYTimes.com

25 Mar

Legendary defense attorney, John Henry Browne, agrees to defend Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, charged with 17 counts of murder in Afghanistan.

“People understand that we have created these soldiers,” Mr. Browne said in an interview. “Your tax dollars, my tax dollars are funding this. We all have responsibility there. That’s why the government wants to paint him as a rogue soldier, because the government doesn’t want to take responsibility. I’m not sure if this is a good metaphor, but in the Frankenstein movies, Frankenstein was not the monster. The monster was Dr. Frankenstein, who created Frankenstein.”

“We’re putting these young men and women in impossible situations,” he continued. “I think the general public knows that, and I think this has brought to the public attention a dialogue about the war that the government would rather not have.”

via For Lawyer in Afghan Killings, the Latest in a Series of Challenging Defenses – NYTimes.com.

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The birth of food-phobia – Food – Salon.com

24 Mar

At the root of our anxiety about food lies something that is common to all humans — what Paul Rozin has called the “omnivore’s dilemma.” This means that unlike, say, koala bears, whose diet consists only of eucalyptus leaves and who can therefore venture no further than where eucalyptus trees grow, our ability to eat a large variety of foods has enabled us to survive practically anywhere on the globe. The dilemma is that some of these foods can kill us, resulting in a natural anxiety about food.

These days, our fears rest not on wariness about that new plant we just came across in the wild, but on fears about what has been done to our food before it reaches our tables. These are the natural result of the growth of a market economy that inserted middlemen between producers and consumers of food. In recent years the ways in which industrialization and globalization have completely transformed how the food we eat is grown, shipped, processed, and sold have helped ratchet up these fears much further.

So maybe more of us have to start our own gardens, or till a plot in a community garden. And maybe we need to rethink our way of life, top to bottom so we have more time to prepare our own food.

via The birth of food-phobia – Food – Salon.com.

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Forget the Money, Follow the Sacredness – NYTimes.com

18 Mar

Despite what you might have learned in Economics 101, people aren’t always selfish. In politics, they’re more often groupish. When people feel that a group they value — be it racial, religious, regional or ideological — is under attack, they rally to its defense, even at some cost to themselves. We evolved to be tribal, and politics is a competition among coalitions of tribes.

The key to understanding tribal behavior is not money, it’s sacredness. The great trick that humans developed at some point in the last few hundred thousand years is the ability to circle around a tree, rock, ancestor, flag, book or god, and then treat that thing as sacred. People who worship the same idol can trust one another, work as a team and prevail over less cohesive groups. So if you want to understand politics, and especially our divisive culture wars, you must follow the sacredness.

via Forget the Money, Follow the Sacredness – NYTimes.com.

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Wall Street’s Latest Campus Recruiting Crisis Sparked by Goldman Controversy – NYTimes.com

15 Mar

The best and the brightest don’t want to work on Wall Street anymore.

College students who were once attracted to prestigious banks like moths to bonfires are increasingly turning to other industries in search of success. Insiders say that pained testimonials of industry life can scare off would-be financiers from even applying for jobs at the most selective firms.

“This is a significant problem for Goldman,” said Adam Zoia, the chief executive of the placement firm Glocap Search, whose clients include many aspiring big-bank employees and hedge fund workers. “Their perch of being the investment bank to go to is definitely at risk.”

One former Goldman analyst recently decided to leave the firm after the rewards of a finance job no longer seemed to outweigh the costs. The former employee is now working at a small technology start-up for less money.

via Wall Street’s Latest Campus Recruiting Crisis Sparked by Goldman Controversy – NYTimes.com.

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Monoculture: How Our Era’s Dominant Story Shapes Our Lives | Brain Pickings

6 Mar

F. S. Michaels, Monoculture: How One Story Is Changing Everything.

The Middle Ages was dominated by an ethos of religion and superstition. The Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution was dominated by an ethos of machines and science. Our age is dominated by an ethos of economics.

Neither a dreary observation of all the ways in which our economic monoculture has thwarted our ability to live life fully and authentically nor a blindly optimistic sticking-it-to-the-man kumbaya, Michaels offers a smart and realistic guide to first recognizing the monoculture and the challenges of transcending its limitations, then considering ways in which we, as sentient and autonomous individuals, can move past its confines to live a more authentic life within a broader spectrum of human values.

via Monoculture: How Our Era’s Dominant Story Shapes Our Lives | Brain Pickings.

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Bell Labs, Innovation for the Ages

26 Feb

Bell Labs, Innovation for the Ages

Jon Gertner has an interesting article in today’s New York Times about Bell Labs, the place that gave us the transistor and the Unix operating system, information theory and the background radiation of the universe, among many other ideas and devices. It was perhaps the greatest industrial lab America, or the world, has seen. Ever. So far.

in the search for innovative models to address seemingly intractable problems like climate change, we would do well to consider Bell Labs’ example — an effort that rivals the Apollo program and the Manhattan Project in size, scope and expense. Its mission, and its great triumph, was to connect all of us, and all of our new machines, together.

In his recent letter to potential shareholders of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg noted that one of his firm’s mottoes was “move fast and break things.” Bell Labs’ might just as well have been “move deliberately and build things.”

Perhaps the ecology of innovation has changed so much in the last couple of decades that Zuckerberg’s philosophy is the right one. Perhaps not. So far Facebook is only one idea.

And again: Continue reading →

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Work Less, Help Economy And Environment

26 Feb

Today, the typical employee in the Netherlands works fewer than 35 hours per week, often spread from Monday to Thursday.

In the U.S., a trial program begun in Utah in 2008 compressed the 40-hour work week for state employees to four days. Without the need to commute or turn on the lights, elevators and computers on Fridays, employees helped cut the state’s energy bills and reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by more than 10,000 metric tons — the equivalent of removing about 1,700 gasoline cars from U.S. roads. The workers also appeared to like the lifestyle change: 82 percent wanted to stay on the new schedule. Nevertheless, the program ended in September 2011.

Meanwhile, Germany and France are among nations following the Dutch lead.

via Work Less, Help Economy And Environment.

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Squatter’s Space in Berlin | Urbanscale

25 Feb

Some provocative paragraphs from the newsletter of a an urban design firm in NYC. The underlying theme is a call for a more flexible and resilient use of urban space.

A further instructive example, this one European, might be Kunsthaus Tacheles, the squatted former department store in the Mitte district of Berlin. Until its shuttering earlier this year, Tacheles supported the widest possible array of creative activity; unimpeded by any sort of regulation, the single structure functioned as a mothership for dozens of ad hoc artist’s studios, workshops, performance spaces, restaurants and bars.

Anyone who ever spent so much as an hour on the grounds of Tacheles will remember a few things about the place: its energy, of course. The way it encouraged (and rewarded) curiosity. The multiple modes in and through which you could engage it and the people who made it what it was. The point isn’t that every place can or should be reimagined as a graffiti-bedizened hive self-managed on anarchist lines — though a boy can wish — but that particularly intensive mixed use gives rise to a vivid and resonant micro-urbanity that has to be experienced to be understood.

via Week 39: On space as a service | Urbanscale.

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