Losing Face & Communicating Effectively

I'm starting to develop a deeper understanding of what it means to be a good communicator. To my mind I've practiced a few key skills for a long time - providing and seeking out feedback, expressing my plans and information to other parties in various ways, eliciting their plans, etc. - but at times I now think I missed the forest for the trees.

The key to good communication is not just observing best practices. That's certainly part of it and a good start. Without an explicit understanding of the overarching goal, however, those habits quickly descend into mindless process, so ritualistic in nature it cannot be intelligently applied to the unique circumstances of different situations.

To excel beyond that one must keep in mind that the ultimate point of communication is to ensure that all parties concerned have the same understanding of a particular topic. At the material level this is an isomorphic mapping of the most important features of the topic among the neurons of all involved. This is literally what the phrase "on the same page" means.

For a long time I thought it was sufficient to do my part to make mutual understanding merely possible. After that, the onus fell on the other parties involved. In some situations this is still appropriate. Excellent communication, however, requires that one go beyond that. In that regard, communication becomes much like more involved forms of education, where you ensure that your audience has retained the information you've presented to them. The sort of hands-off approach typical of laissez faire, college-level education isn't appropriate here. If someone has difficulty understanding the material, the responsibility to identify that difficulty and clarify the material falls with the instructor. As a result, effective communication should focus more on multimedia, take advantage of different learning styles, and more actively seek confirmation of understanding than the conventional course lecture.

There was one other thing that historically held me back from becoming a better communicator. That was my aversion to asking questions. Questions at some point in my mind had become the tool of those unable to pick something up the first time. I now see that I was wrong to be so absolutist in my attitude. Questions reinforce mutual understanding, serve as a mechanism for confirming it, and - to those adept at communication - illustrate intelligence and skill. If you're concerned about those who value sharpness as I did, making clear that you're asking questions to ensure mutual understanding can win you their esteem.

To the extent one reaches out to their audience and is willing to potentially lose face as a communicator, there is a certain selflessness in exercising communication skills. One might even think of it as a trade off between short-term and long-term gain. By taking the effort to establish upfront the certainty of details among all parties involved, one can avert costly mistakes and adjustments in the future.

Occupy Wall Street

Like many movements, Occupy Wall Street inspires me with its level of civil engagement but leaves much to be desired. I won't be the first to point out that it could benefit from narrowing its scope to a concrete, productive goal. Indeed, if it doesn't its sole legacy may be disillusionment. My main goal here though is to address a couple aspects of the discourse unraveling around it.

I got around to checking out OWS's declaration and what really drew my attention were the characterizations, both from the side of the protesters as well as their critics.

Who are the corporations?

Corporations are made up of individuals. Just like any organization, they're heterogeneous, consisting of people whose views vary widely. Just as there are individuals who don't have the interests of society at heart in these settings, there are also individuals who share the values embodied by this protest in certain respects. I am one of them.

Any view can dominate at a given level in an organization and thus inform the direction corporations take. Even in their capacity as legal entities corporations differ. I'll give just a couple examples of how corporations don't hold to how they're being portrayed here.

The first is Calvert Investments, which specializes in socially responsible investments and thus helps businesses that don't place profit over people get ahead in the market. The second is Whole Foods, which helps to promote more sustainable lifestyles. Though there's arguably some greenwashing involved in their operations, they're renowned for the treatment of their workers and are certainly an improvement upon the preexisting status quo. Like churches, nations and book clubs, you'll find both good and bad corporations and you should always be wary of letting the whole come to represent its constituent parts and vice versa.

Who are the activists?

There's a tendency in American society to identify a movement with one political extreme or another the moment it strikes the slightest semblance and to caricature its participants accordingly. Critics of Occupy Wall Street and related movements have described their participants as lazy, uneducated, voluntarily unemployed, irresponsible, spoiled and financially supported by their parents. Hippies and hipsters.

There are some to be found who satisfy those definitions, of course. What concerns me though is an incapacity I frequently observe for anything but gross generalizations. I doubt anybody's saying all the participants fall into these categories, but I'm skeptical that even the majority does, in the same way that I'm skeptical that the Tea Party consists mostly of selfish, racist, gun-wielding evangelicals.

To be sure, there are people at the Occupy movements who drive me up the wall, but there's a whole world out there and you can find anything you're looking for. As a case in point, I take myself. I'm interested enough in Occupy Wall Street to at least attend, but I'm educated (I received no funding from my family) and hold a professional job at a corporate entity that I happen to find morally irreproachable.

The Targets

Targeting groups of people whose morals can't be accurately and consistently characterized is bigotry. As I elaborated above, there are both good and bad corporations. There are also both good and bad rich people, with Warren Buffett and Bill Gates immediately coming to mind as examples of wealthy individuals who render a service to society commensurate with their extraordinary affluence.

Even if we can pinpoint the "bad" corporations or the "bad" people in them, is that the appropriate target? There will be exceptions, but I think the main factor behind the frustrations expressed at OWS is preferential treatment of people and organizations that are already so clearly empowered. The enemy here is not big business or the rich, but the mechanisms in place that allow some of them to live with less accountability than their smaller counterparts. It's the arrangement that allows the largest banks to benefit from bad business decisions and taxes billionaires less than the middle class.

As preferential treatment has its roots in political corruption, if the movement is to adopt policy goals, campaign finance reform should probably be one of them.

The Collusion

This movement couldn't have been precipitated without the financial crisis. And the financial crisis couldn't have been precipitated without three culprits, which Raghuram Rajan outlines so clearly in his book Fault Lines: government, corporations (banks), and the consumer.

Government's to blame for pushing better access to credit through Fannie Mae and other organizations as a fix for growing wealth disparity and thus distorting returns in the securities market; the financial sector for responding to those distortions and pursuing unsustainable business models for a quick buck (then pursuing them further to establish systemic importance and thus ensure their longevity despite their decisions); and those consumers who overborrowed to live a life they couldn't afford.

There are improvements to be had in the private sector, as well as in the private sector's relationship to the government and the public. Nevertheless, there are also issues we need to address outside of it, with our government and with ourselves. To be more concrete, I'll advocate here what I have so often elsewhere: leverage what power you have, however small, as an economic actor.

Companies and people don't grow rich on their own; someone has to give them the money. By refraining, or more effectively, opting for or providing a better alternative, people can shape fates and behavior. Disagree with a bank? Move your account to a more responsible one. Keep your money in a sock. Leverage your power as a friend or family member to increase the likelihood that those you come in direct contact with will do the same. Expose wrongdoings and commend good deeds as you see them in conversation and on the internet.

But don't be an imposing jerk because that never works.

It's through this feedback that we can hope to transform an existing foundation into something better, instead of uprooting the establishment with potentially nothing to fill the vacuum. Take the lessons of failed revolutions and shock therapists to heart: it's easy to destroy something, but it's much more difficult to create something better out of it.

The Math Problem & The Chemistry Problem in Sustainability

So far my posts have mainly focused on reducing your ecological footprint by minimizing persistent waste, particularly plastic. This is an example of what I will call the chemistry or chemical problem in sustainability. Screening plastic from your consumer basket constitutes part of "closing the loop," that is, only participating in the proliferation of materials that can currently be broken down and reused indefinitely. Another component of our efforts will have to address what I'm referring to as the math or numbers problem.

Even if all nondegradable and nonrecyclable materials ceased to be produced and dispersed in our economy and ecology, this would be no guarantee of sustainability. It would allow for the wholesale redistribution of resources for different purposes, but it would not mean they would be enough for ours. Our longevity as a society could easily remain jeopardized by the sheer quantity of our demand for these remaining renewable resources and an inability to satisfy it.

I can take the most basic of these resources as an example: fresh water. It is likely the most essential ingredient to survival that we risk losing access to. Although fresh water is continually produced by natural cycles and treatment, the scale of this process might be outstripped by perceived needs. In order to secure fresh water and similar resources that society will require to go on existing as we know it, we will have to manage our use, perhaps by checking demand, to ensure our needs won't exceed rates of production.

The same holds true for all other renewable resources. Though they can be renewed, lest we destabilize our society, we must not entirely consume them before such turnover can be had. Unfortunately, there is reason to believe that prices as they are determined under our current economic arrangements do not provide the proper incentive to behave this responsibly. Indeed, water, air and favorable weather are consumed publicly and as such easily fall victim to the tragedy of the commons, a phenomenon that has most notably played out in global climate change and our shortcomings in addressing it.

I am not suggesting that all resources should come into private ownership, even if such a thing were possible. I certainly don't think that anybody should have to pay for the right to breathe and I luckily have yet to meet someone whose morality is informed by economics in this way. At the same time, we do need to establish better feedback mechanisms that will inhibit those behaviors that stand to lead to our self-destruction. Attempts to establish markets through cap-and-trade programs were a good place to start and would be the economical thing to do.

Grey Areas

I have proposed defining environmental issues in these two ways, but they are by no means mutually exclusive and there is a region of blurriness between them. In fact, many of our current environmental challenges suffer from both of these conditions. Above I discussed how overconsumption can deplete resources, and that’s how what was originally a problem of numbers can lead to one of chemistry. Take deforestation for example. It has already compounded the chemical problem of greenhouse gases by reducing the planet's ability to absorb them. In addition, though I doubt this day will ever come, if left unchecked this process could lead to the extinction of trees along with all the services they offer. This would mean little for the composition of the atmosphere if other plants could pick up the slack, but what if they too were gone? Or what if trees - or even just particular species - provided services nothing else could?

To make my point clearer, imagine there exists an organism A that is the exclusive producer of product A. If product A is essential to the healthy functioning of our economy, the loss of organism A would translate into serious damages, not to mention the effects on other systems involved. Product A could be anything - a nutrient, a drug, carbon sequestration.

Similarly, if an organism B is the sole decomposer of waste B, with its destruction we lose the digestive pathway for that waste and continued production of it will inevitably clog our biosphere in much the same way that cholesterol clogs arteries. Now, humans are innovative and nature is adaptable. We might be able to invent an industrial process in time to make up for the extinction of this vital form of life. If we fail, however, nature might eventually fill the gap, but we won't last long enough to witness it.

Overconsumption taken to this extreme is a threat to all things that rely on self-replication. Fresh water can be extracted from salt water or produced as a result of the water cycle; its creation does not necessitate preexisting fresh water. On the other hand, a bacterium, despite all our advances in biotechnology, still only comes from other bacteria, unless you think you can recreate the random processes responsible for its evolution. Thus, self-replicating resources always require a starter amount, the decimation of which converts what was once an issue of scale into a potential chemical complication.

The other area where these two types of problems overlap is in addressing one with a solution that causes the other. The case of the math problem causing the chemistry problem is immediately more obvious to me than its opposite. This stems from the fact that so much of our progress has been based on getting more from less. As a consequence, although we haven't always been aware of it, we have been willing to expedite production and related duties using harmful methods. Instead of actually getting more for less, this strategy often results in getting something now and paying later - or more commonly having someone else pay later.

The shortcomings of this approach are manifest in the current condition of the world's oceans. Among other things, they suffer from toxification, a result of our aim to more efficiently deliver food stuffs. In order to get products into the hands of people cheaply and quickly we have resorted to the use of plastic packaging. However, because plastic is so cheap it is easy for people to nonchalantly throw away. This would not necessarily be a problem except that, due to its chemical nature, plastic now comprises the ocean's toxic garbage patches.

It is in this way that we again exchange a numbers problem for a chemical one. The latter in turn can exacerbate the situation and make it worse than it originally was, leaving us with both problems. To that effect, the application of plastic in overcoming barriers to better distributing food has compromised the productivity of ocean fisheries. For reasons such as these I find it hard to justify inducing chemical issues to address numerical problems.

Unified Solutions

Nevertheless, getting more from less is the only way to solve the numbers problem. With world population approaching 7 billion we must achieve gains in productivity to meet its basic needs, not to mention capitalize on the prospect of higher living standards. What doesn’t make sense is exchanging the quality of our public health for these gains, since that defeats the purpose of obtaining them. In spite of this, that phenomenon persists because it leads to islands of greater material wealth and better health amid regions that are forced to bear the costs. As a consequence the latter unnecessarily suffer deterioration in those same areas.

One need only look at attempted solutions to numbers problems to see how easily they can pan out in these ways. The histories of DDT, CFCs and PCBs all too clearly illustrate how inadequately we account for the effects new compounds will have on environment and society. When not stemming from individual self-interest, toxic pollution and its accompanying health effects have resulted from a lack of foresight. I doubt that the initial producers of plastic, for instance, could have known that the versatile substance they were making a living from would today be leaching toxins into our lives. For this reason, it is worth taking a more conservative approach to our choice of materials in problem solving. Many of them will have to come in time-tested forms to ensure that they are biologically innocuous.

In achieving sustainability we face the dual challenge of increasing productivity and preventing the worst effects of toxic pollution. During the industrial revolution, gains in efficiency could not be achieved without environmental degradation. That dynamic by its very nature could never be more than a temporary one and we now have the resources at our disposal to transform it. To start with, as many companies and individuals are already doing, more can be done to replace conventional plastics with bioplastics or otherwise supplant toxic chemicals with biotics, but we can also downsize the scale of our material consumption. Only by thus addressing both the math and chemical problem can we sustainably resolve productivity issues. Until this dual consideration is incorporated into practice on a grand scale, significant increases in quality of life will not be achieved. Instead we will witness to a greater degree than we do today localized increases in affluence attained by pushing costs onto others. Fortunately, the realm of human activity is not a zero-sum game. It’s thanks to this that the average quality of human lives has improved over time and we can go on believing in progress.