Economics Takes a Leading Role in the Biodiversity Story

March 8, 2021 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Someone starts telling a story so that those who are listening can start imagining.

We need stories that challenge us with new ways to find political consensus, to confront climate change, to learn from the triumphs as well as the shortcomings of our common past.

Without the liberation of stories like that, we can be paralyzed when confronting the hostility of our politics, the inevitability of a rapidly degrading earth, and the unfinished work of our imperfect but often noble forebears.

And sometimes, as with this particular story, no less than Prince Charles, Boris Johnson and David Attenborough were invited to play bit parts on the story’s opening night (more about that below).

These very different men stood front and center for a few minutes because this story had already invited them into it. When a storyline is bold and surprising, curiosity often finds famous listeners before it blossoms into broader engagement and we’re sharing it with those that we care about too.

A report presented earlier this month begins to tell such a story, skillfully deploying economic theory to get our juices flowing in new directions.

– It admits what we already know: that humanity is taking more from the earth—extracting more of its minerals, fishing more from its seas, destroying more of its diversity, undermining more of its climate patterns, polluting more of its habitats—than the earth can replenish, correct or restore on its own.

– It wonders out loud—in a flight of real-world imagination—about what might happen if we treated Nature’s systems and productive capacity not as “free” for the taking (as we still do almost everywhere today) but as “economic assets” that we must start “investing in” (like we invest in the homes where we live) and managing, as we would any “portfolio.” We’d utilize concepts like “asset value” that acknowledge not only the price that a natural asset commands in the marketplace (its so-called “use value”), but also its “intrinsic value” as part of an ecosystem “that is greater than the sum of its productivities” and contributions. Similarly, we’d account for the “depreciation” of these assets so we could understand their diminishing value to us and their systems as we continue to rely upon them.

– It’s a story that begins to tie “the regeneration of the biosphere…to the sustainability of the human enterprise” (or our economic activities on this planet) in a way that’s never been told before.

– It’s a story whose drama comes from the uncertainty of our survival because, given the current rate of Nature’s depletion and imbalance, the Earth will be unable to sustain life as we know it into the foreseeable future.

This story, formally presented earlier this month by the U.K.’s Treasury Department, was written by Cambridge University professor Partha Dasgupta and is called The Dasgupta Review on the Economics of Biodiversity. You can read an abridged version of it (around 80 pages) or his full Review (at 600 pages) by downloading them here.

The Dasgupta Review begins with the simple observation that: “We are all asset managers.” Professor Dasgupta then describes how we all must learn to manage Nature’s limited and deeply-troubled portfolio of assets in ways that an economist might:

Nature’s goods and services are the foundations of our economies. They include the provisioning services that supply the goods we harvest and extract (food, water, fibres, timber, medicines) and cultural services, such as the gardens, parks and coastlines we visit for pleasure, even emotional sustenance and recuperation. But Nature’s processes also maintain a genetic library, preserve and regenerate soil, control floods, filter pollutants, assimilate waste, pollinate crops, maintain the hydrological cycle, regulate climate, and fulfil many other functions besides. Without those regulating and maintenance services, life as we know it would not be possible.
Biodiversity is a characteristic of ecosystems. It enables ecosystems to flourish and supply [this] wide variety of services… [J]ust as diversity within a portfolio of financial assets reduces risk and uncertainty, so biodiversity increases Nature’s resilience to shocks, and thereby reduces risks to the ecosystem services on which we rely.

As breathtaking a view of “a new world” as Tolkein’s (in fantasy) or Asimov’s (in science fiction), Dasgupta’s storytelling perspective invites us to imagine how governments, businesses, and individuals whose work depends on the vibrancy of Nature’s goods and services, along with the rest of us who enjoy the quality of our lives on this planet, can begin (at last) to sustain “the economic value” of the Earth’s biodiversity for everyone’s benefit. As surprising as it might seem, there has never been anything quite like The Review before.

Well into the 1970’s, we almost universally believed that human ingenuity could free us from Nature’s constraints and limitations. They were the days of “the Green Revolution” which brought rapidly increasing crop yields to smaller and smaller plots of land. They were the days when concerns about “over-population” (such as those voiced by Paul Ehrlich—a contributor to The Review) seemed grotesquely exaggerated. Until quite recently, we’ve acted like the Earth’s ability to fuel our continued “economic growth” and improve our living standards would be inexhaustible as long as human genius helped it along. Today, as we approach the environmental brink, we’re not only confronting our hubris but also beginning to storyboard our way out of the dead-end street where we currently find ourselves.

Even the abridged version of The Review will familiarize you with Dasgupta’s artistry when he identifies Nature’s asset classes and how they impact one another, how the planet’s stakeholders need to “re-invest” some of their profits into portfolio replenishment, and how all of us need to learn more about Nature’s “webs of interrelatedness” so that we’ll be more personally invested in managing these assets in our backyards and beyond them.

The Review is too rich in detail to summarize here and I hope you’ll to read it. But if you need more encouragement, an hour-long video-introduction to its findings, an overview teed up by the forenamed personalities, might convince you.

Why limit your exposure to Britian’s royals by watching another episode of The Crown? For example, I couldn’t remember the last time that I’d heard the real Prince Charles talk about anything important, but he puts himself garumphingly behind the findings of The Review in this film clip. Then, in a startling juxtaposition, there’s a wild-haired Boris Johnson putting his government behind proposals that have easily-imagined economic consequences for his voters (much like an American president announcing “exciting new taxes”), but here he is doing precisely that. And if you need even more convincing, the beloved naturalist David Attenborough writes the introduction to The Review itself.

As a storytelling exercise, here are perhaps the keys to how we can start imagining and then protecting the Earth’s biodiversity. In his video remarks, Professor Dasgupta says the Review’s contributions include:

[a new] grammar for understanding our engagements with Nature, how we transform what we take from and return to it, why and how in recent decades we have disrupted Nature’s processes to the detriment of our own and of our descendant’s future, and what we can do to change that direction.
What then is to be done to direct humanity to a sustainable mode of living, to reducing the gap between what we demand of Nature and what Nature is able to supply on a sustainable basis? It requires that we reduce our demand and help to increase Nature’s supply. It will require measured but transformative change for the task is to so change individual incentives that they direct the choice of our actions to actions that align with the common good.

This will require an implementation effort that easily dwarfs the Marshall Plan after World War II. Sometimes, the scale of The Review’s efforts to marry economic with environmental dynamics can take your breath away.

While economic incentives will be utilized locally to sustain the planet, an international equivalent of the WTO or World Bank will also need to be created to address (say) far-flung extraction practices in the Arctic and Antarctic, in the seas beyond territorial boundaries, and in places like the Earth’s rainforests, all of whose economic benefits are continental if not global in nature. As a piece in the New York Times observed when The Review came out:

International arrangements are needed to manage certain environments that the whole planet relies on, the report says. It asks leaders to explore a system of payments to nations for conserving critical ecosystems like tropical rain forests, which store carbon, regulate climate and nurture biodiversity. Fees could [also] be collected for the use of ecosystems outside of national boundaries, such as for fishing the high seas, and international cooperation could prohibit fishing [and other kinds of resource extraction] in ecologically sensitive areas.

New governance bodies that will monitor and value global assets while also collecting and re-distributing asset-related payments and fees in a kind of global clearing house are difficult–but still necessary–to start imaging, particularly at a time when competition among nations instead of international cooperation is on the rise.

The Review’s recommendations are also built upon a staggering number of economic checks and balances that will need to be administered locally.

A little more than a year ago, because I was unable to wrap my mind around a global model of this complexity without a “grammar” like Professor Dasgupta’s, I tried to imagine how economic incentives might support biodiversity closer to home. I looked at current research on lobster trapping in the Northeastern U.S., how the harvest impacts migrating whales, and whether the lobstermen could be reimbursed for changing their harmful trapping practices by monetizing the whales’ broader ecological value. A 2019 post called Valuing Nature in Ways the World Can Understand was my attempt to comprehend the economics of sustainability in a situation that had a smaller number of stakeholders and far fewer asset variables.

By contrast, the story told inThe Review is both top-down and bottom-up, envisioning at its horizons a dizzying array of parts that will eventually move in a synchronized fashion, but Professor Dasgupta ends his narrative with the same dilemma that probably led me to my post about lobsters and whales. We will never protect the Earth’s biodiversity until we understand the value of protecting it much closer to where we live and work. As he astutely notes, that’s because no international or local enforcement system can protect the diversity of life on this planet. That’s our job.

[U]ltimately, we each have to serve as judge and jury for our own actions. And that cannot happen unless we develop an affection for Nature and its processes. As that affection can flourish only if we each develop an appreciation of Nature’s workings, [my] monograph ends with a plea that our education systems should introduce Nature studies from the earliest stages of our lives, and revisit them in the years we spend in secondary and tertiary education. The conclusion we should draw from this is unmistakable: if we care about our common future and the common future of our descendants, we should all in part be[come] naturalists.

It’s a point that bears repeating. We will only treat the natural diversity that’s around us like an asset when we’ve gained “an affection” for it. Some of us gain that affection naturally but most of us—particularly in the developed world–have to learn it. A story like this one about imagination and survival invites us, both elegantly and engagingly, to do just that.

This post was adapted from my February 21, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe too by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

A Movie’s Gorgeous Take on Time, Place, Loss & Gain

February 9, 2021 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

As a kid, I was a digger. Always outside in the meadow that ran the back of my house, in the woods that huddled behind the half-circle of homes down the hill, or even in the less visited recesses of my yard, I was always looking for something “down there.” But I never found anything like the spines of the Anglo-Saxon long ship that were unearthed in the picture above.

In a post from December called Digging for a Sense of Place, I described how I didn’t really find anything you’d call “archeological” until I got to Philadelphia and came upon what might have been an 18^th century kitchen dump beneath our magnolia tree out back. (My home is a block and a half from an historical marker that tells of British troops camping here before the Battle of Germantown, so I suppose the pottery shards I found there could also have been left behind when these very soldiers moved to their next encampment.) Anyway, while thinking about my relationship to the places where I’ve lived, I also saw some of the roots of my commitment to and indifference about the ravages of climate change—and how I might get that wavering to settle down into something more like steady resolve.

Because our plots of land are relative strangers to us, we don’t embrace them with the same protective bonds that draw us, to say, a child under threat. Instead, they are… little more than addresses, places to arrive at or depart from but not necessarily learn more about, even while we’re spending most of our time there.

Maybe because I’d written this post so recently, I couldn’t believe the coincidence when a British filmmaker presented his movie, called The Dig, on Netflix this week. Told with unsettling beauty, it’s a story about the quixotic excavation of an ancient burial mound on a manor estate in southeast England. With remarkable restraint, it uses its Dark Age discoveries to throw the early bombing raids over Britain during World War II (whenThe Dig takes place) into bold relief.

These bombers, like heavy, lumbering cows, crisscross the skies above the excavation site, falling down to earth on one occasion while simultaneously calling more young Englishmen up into the clouds to risk their lives. Much like them, we also need the memories of our place in the world to anchor an uncertain future. With new viral strains announced almost daily and the need to inoculate an entire planet before “normal” or “safe” can return, it still remains unnervingly unclear how any of us will come out the other end. As with the pilots and diggers of rural England in the 1940s, it might get us thinking about what we’d most like to carry with us–what we’d most like to preserve–as we too face the unknown.

This trailer for The Dig will give you the flavor of its juxtapositions on time, place, loss as well as the kind of gain that becomes possible when you seize the day.

Among many other things, this is an actors’ movie, particularly for Mulligan, Barnes and Fiennes.

Mulligan’s Edith Pretty is weighed down by the emotional and physical ailments that have increasingly burdened her since her husband, a soldier himself, died shortly after they married and their son was born. It is her estate that houses the ancient burial mounds, she’s always wondered what secrets they might hold, and perhaps because of her own dwindling, she finally resolves to find out. Mulligan’s startling performance pushes Edith to the boundaries of her fragile condition and to small bursts of vitality beyond it.

Edith finds the complement she needs “for a dig” in Basil Brown, “a self-taught excavator” who knows “everything there is to know” about the ground and soil of Suffolk since, as he takes pains to explain, his hands have been combing through it for over sixty years. A hard-working man, he learns how to find common ground with Edith across the gapping class divides of rural England in a dance of blunt and sometimes comical exchanges. Basil Brown is played by Ralph Fiennes, who has inhabited everyone from Voldermort to Jonathan Steed (the TV Avengers protagonist) and the English Patient in his years playing leading men on the big-screen. Given those marquee roles, his understated Basil is a departure.

When interviewed about it, Fiennes (himself a Suffolk native) said he spent weeks riding an old bike along the country roads of southeast England to refresh his feelings for the place and its rhythms before filming began. In other interviews The Dig’s creative force, Simon Stone, said he encouraged his actors to ad-lib the script when it felt right to them. For the character of Basil in particular, deep knowledge of the land and the freedom to be spontaneous produce a kind of honest power that is evident throughout this performance, which is the best of his that I’ve seen in his long career.

The eight (or so)-year-old actor Archie Brown plays Edith’s son Robert. A dazzling counterpoint to the mumbling Basil and his frail mother, Robert brings the fireworks of childish excitement and gushing enthusiasm to this dig for buried treasure. In their small community quest, he also discovers a father figure, awakening in Basil the best kind of paternalism when the old codger least expects it. A sequence where Robert takes off from home on his bike in search of Basil is gorgeously realized and almost unbearably sad in its desperate longing. But while the buried treasures here are frequently emotional, there are also splendid discoveries to be made as this ragtag band carves its way beneath the ground.

What The Dig’s spirited amateurs discover became known as the Sutton Hoo Treasure, stored in the buried hull of a sixth-century Anglo-Saxon ship to honor a Dark Age king. As a long-time believer in buried treasure, if I have a complaint about this movie it’s that we get to see too little of this magnificent horde—mostly as it temporarily rests on the mossy beds of wooden crates that are placed, one after another, under Edith’s bed, near a suitcase that had been her husband’s.

She ultimately gives the Sutton Hoo Treasure to the British Museum despite sniveling among the “professional” archeologists and museum curators that provide the film’s suspense (“What will become of this magical discovery at a time when we all need to feel the joy of it?”) Representing an almost entirely unknown chapter of the nation’s memory, there is never really any doubt where it’s headed. The Sutton Hoo Treasure will go to the place where the greatest number of Edith’s and Basil’s countrymen and women can gather around its campfire and face whatever tomorrow holds together.

Well into The Dig, Basil’s bedrock of a wife wonders at his conviction and tenacity, over “just how he is,” not really asking as much as telling him: “Why else would you be playing around in the dirt while the rest of the country prepares for war?”

So it’s fitting that his and Edith’s quiet obsessions play out not in a “post-card pretty England” but in more of a dreamscape of grays and ochers during the day or in a nightmare when it’s dark and raining and Basil is trying to pull reluctant tarps over the excavation site despite being blinded by the spattering mud. What’s at stake here is not the rose-colored surfaces of England’s countryside but what supports that splendor underneath: its long buried past and the quiet furnaces that animate the men and women who have lived for centuries “closest to its ground.”

In an echo of the Anglo-Saxon ship that’s being unearthed, my favorite scene in the movie is of a contemporary sailboat drifting along the same nearby river that carried the burial chamber of an ancient king to what might have been his final resting place 1500 years before. It was like a message-in-a-bottle or maybe a promise of things to come. Like Basil for a moment, I could almost hear the past reverberating into the present and maybe even the future.

When you see The Dig, you’ll know what I mean about “how Basil is,” the silent quest that drives Edith, and how valuable spirit voices like theirs might be in each of us too as we worry and wonder about what’s worth preserving in our fragile world today so we can take it into the future.

This post was adapted from my February 7, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe too by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

The Amish Test & Tame New Technologies Before Adopting Them: We Can Learn How to Safeguard What’s Important to Us Too

October 13, 2020 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Given the speed of innovation and the loftiness of its promises to improve our comfort or convenience, we often embrace a new technology long before we experience its most worrisome consequences. As consumers, we are pushed to adopt new tech (or tech-driven services) by advertising that “understands” our susceptibilities, by whatever the Joneses are doing next door, and by the speculation “that somehow it will make our lives better.” The sticker shock doesn’t come until we realize that our natural defenses have been overwhelmed or we’ve been herded by marketers like so many sheep.

By tech devices and services, I’m thinking about our personal embrace of everything from smart phones to camera-ready doorbells, from Google’s search engine to Amazon’s Prime memberships, from car-hailing services like Uber to social networks like Facebook. Only after we’ve built our lives around these marvels do we start recognizing their downsides or struggle with the real costs that got buried in their promises and fine print.

As consumers, we feel entitled to make decisions about tech adoption on our own, not wishing to be told by anybody that “we can buy this but can’t buy that,” let alone by authorities in our communities who are supposedly keeping “what’s good for us” in mind. Not only do we reject a gatekeeper between us and our “Buy” buttons, there is also no Consumer Reports that assesses the potential harms of these technologies to our autonomy as decision-makers, our privacy as individuals, or our democratic way of life — no resource that warns us “to hold off” until we can weigh the long-term risks against the short-term rewards. As a result, we defend our unfettered freedom until we start discovering just how terrible our freedom can be.

If there were consumer gatekeepers or even reliable guidebooks, they could evaluate the suitability of new technologies not just for individuals but also for groups of consumers. Before community adoption, they’d consider whether a new innovation serves particular priorities in the community, asking questions like:

– Will smartphones make us more or less distracted?

– Will on-line video games like Fortnite strengthen or weaken our families?

– Does freedom from outside manipulation outweigh the value of, say, Facebook’s social network or Google’s search engine, since both sell others (from marketers to governments) personal information about our use of their platforms so that these outsiders can manipulate us further given what they are learning about us?

Gatekeepers that are worried about such things might even urge testing of new technologies before they’re marketed and sold so that: the initial hype doesn’t become the last word in buying decisions; the crowd-sourced wisdom of advance users can be publically gathered and assessed; and recommendations that consider the up- and down-sides become possible.

By welcoming testing data from across the community, this kind of gatekeeper authority would likely gain legitimacy from the strength of its feedback loop. Back-and-forth reactions would aim to discover “what is good (and not so good) for us” instead of merely relying upon tech company claims about convenience or cost-savings. Before endorsing a new device or tech-driven service, these testers would take the time to ensure that it serves the human purposes that are most important to the group while also recommending suitable safeguards (like age or use restrictions). Moderated time trials would be like previewing and rating new TV shows before their general release.

What I’m proposing is a community driven, rigorously interactive and “take as much time as needed” approach to new tech adoption that — to our free-market ears — might sound impossibly utopian. But it’s already happening in places like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana, and has been for generations. Amish gatekeepers and community members continuously test and tame new technologies, making them conform to their view of what is good for them, with startling and even inspiring results.

Startled, then inspired were certainly my reactions to a story about the Amish that Kevin Kelly told Tim Ferriss in his podcast a few years back. It led me to a Kelly essay about Amish Hackers, a post from a different storyteller about an Amish community’s “experimentation” with genetic technologies to fight inherited diseases, and other dispatches from this rarely consulted edge of American life. (Kevin Kelly is one of the founding editors of Wired magazine and a firm believer that wandering beyond the familiar is the most effective education you can get.) I’d argue there are broader lessons to be taken from Kelly’s and other sojourners’ perspectives about how Amish communities have been grappling with new technologies, particularly when you start (as they do) with a sense of awe that skews less towards “what’s in it for me right now” and more towards pursuit of the greater good over time.

As Kelly followed his curiosity, he noticed that the Amish seem to choose all of their gadgets or tech-driven services “collectively as a group.” Because it’s a collaborative endeavor throughout, they have to start with “the criteria” that they’ll use in their selection process.

When a new technology comes along they say, ‘Will this strengthen our local community or send us out [of it]?’ The second thing that they’re looking at is what’s good for their families. The goal of the typical Amish man or woman is to have every single meal with their children until they leave home.

So they also ask: will a tech-driven innovation increase the quality of our family time together, or somehow lessen it?

Since owning your own car will take you away from your community, they frown on automobiles, favoring more localized forms of transit like the horse and buggy. Similarly, because electricity ties you to a public energy grid and makes the community dependent on outsiders, they limit its use, preferring fuel, wind or sun-powered energy controlled from their homes and workshops. At the same time, while Amish beliefs are founded on the principle that their community should remain “in the world, but not of it,” their inward focus has never dampened their curiosity about new technologies or the practical advantages they might gain by utilizing them.

Strengthening family ties dictates the pace and manner of their tech adoption too. While the Amish engage in a broad spectrum of industries, their work places tend to be close to home so that workers can spend meal times with their families. And there are additional benefits to this proximity. Because the Amish are effectively living and working in the same place, the technology they rely upon to forge farm equipment, make furniture or process their produce tends to be friendly to the land and the people living there. In other words, instead of exporting the environmental and social costs of their economic activities, their means of production are also sustainable for the Amish families that live nearby.

While these criteria seem to imply a kind of primitive simplicity, the reality couldn’t be more different. One wrinkle is the way the Amish distinguish between owning technology and merely using it. For example, those who need the internet at work or school might share that access instead so it’s available for an intended purpose (like operating a business or learning) but not for getting lost in distraction whenever, say, a laptop owner feels like it.

Their work-arounds for living and working off-the-grid are also ingenious. Sometimes instead of electricity, they’ll use gas- or propane-fueled appliances and equipment. The Amish also adapt a startling array of machines and other contraptions to use pneumatic or compressed-air power. Of the later, Kelly writes:

At first pneumatics were devised for Amish workshops [where compressed air systems powers nearly every machine], but it was seen as so useful that air-power migrated to Amish households. In fact there is an entire cottage industry in retrofitting tools and appliances to [so-called] Amish electricity. The retrofitters buy a heavy-duty blender, say, and yank out the electrical motor. They then substitute an air-powered motor of appropriate size, add pneumatic connectors, and bingo, your Amish mom now has a blender in her electrical-less kitchen. You can get a pneumatic sewing machine, and a pneumatic washer/dryer (with propane heat). In a display of pure steam-punk nerdiness, Amish hackers try to outdo each other in building pneumatic versions of electrified contraptions.

How some Amish communities began utilizing genetically modified seeds on their farms — after the customary period of trial and error — also illustrate how their priorities drive their decisions. Unlike the huge turbines used in commercial agriculture, their old, but highly effective (and debt-free) farm equipment could not harvest the pest-weakened cornstalks that GMOs were designed to fight. Amish farmers embraced this seed innovation because they could continue to use their harvesters in a cost-effective manner with little apparent downside. On the other hand, the Amish jury is still out on cellphones. But instead of banning them outright, they are still trying to figure out which uses are good for them and which are to be avoided. In his essay, Kelly celebrated their endless beta testing, both here and in many other areas:

This is how the Amish determine whether technology works for them. Rather than employ the precautionary principle, which says, unless you can prove there is no harm, don’t use new technology, the Amish rely on the enthusiasm of Amish early adopters to try stuff out until they prove harm.

When downsides become apparent, they find ways to minimize them (again, sharing phones instead of owning them) or to eliminate them altogether for community members (like young people) who are most prone to their harms. It’s a time-intensive process where an Amish bishop or gatekeeper can always step in to forbid them, but there is usually a dizzying array of experimentation before that happens.

These time trials may place the Amish as much as 50 years behind the rest of us in terms of tech adoption — “slow geeks” Kelly calls them — but he finds their manner of tech adoption “instructive” and so do I.

1) They are selective. They know how to say ‘no’ and are not afraid to refuse new things. They ban more than they adopt.
2) They evaluate new things by experience instead of by theory. They let the early adopters get their jollies by pioneering new stuff under watchful eyes.
3) They have criteria by which to select choices: technologies must enhance family and community and distance themselves from the outside world.
4) The choices are not individual, but communal. The community shapes and enforces technological direction.

As a result, the Amish are never going to wake up one day and discover that a generation of their teenagers has become addicted to video games; that smartphones have reduced everyone’s attention span to the next externally-generated prompt; or that surveillance capitalism has “suddenly” reduced their ability to make decisions for themselves as citizens, shoppers, parents or young people.

Given where most of us non-Amish find ourselves today, we’d likely be unwilling (at least at first) to step back from the edge of the technology curve for the sake of discovering what a new technology “is all about”—for worse as well as for better—before adapting our lives around it.

In Western cultures, individuals as consumers may have criteria for purchasing or adopting new technologies—like lower cost or greater convenience—but it seems almost impossible to believe that we’d ever be willing to bring others (beyond say a parent or life partner) into this highly personal decision-making process.

Indeed, our individualism as consumers seems so complete that it’s difficult to envision any community whose criteria we would willingly subject ourselves to for the common good. Or as Kelly puts it: we’d have to learn an entirely new skill, which is how “to relinquish” technologies and tech-driven services “as a group” until their efficacy, under the group’s standards, could be demonstrated.

So is it unlikely? “Yes.” But impossible? “No.” And what about desirable? I would argue that learning how to take-the-best-and-leave-the-rest when it comes to adopting new technologies is a consumer-wide competence that’s long overdue.

The Amish are clear that strengthening community and family are the primary goods for them. Like us, they’re drawn to “more convenient” and “less costly” too, but only if these lesser priorities can be made to serve their most important ones. At the same time, they’ll work long and hard to find accommodations for the sake of convenience or low cost by crowd-sourcing their experiences and considering all of the necessary angles before deciding how to proceed. They’re also willing to be one step or even several behind the technology curve. And when they can’t get over the hurdle of likely or actual harms with a product or service, they’ll put it behind them and move on without it.

At this point, it bears mentioning that Amish families and communities are not exemplary in terms of “goodness,” and they don’t claim to be. Indeed, their faith tends to make them more aware of their spiritual vulnerabilities than lesser believers, so they’ll readily acknowledge their sinfulness and struggles with temptation. On the other hand, their awareness of sin also distinguishes them from most of the rest of us. Compared to the Amish, we are relatively thoughtless about what is more and less “good for us,” especially in the long run.

That means our next step would be a big one. The unfettered freedom that we “enjoy” around what we buy and end up adopting makes it difficult for us to band together with others and agree to be subject to any group’s veto power. Our ad-based, consumer-driven economies have hooked us on instant gratification to the point that most of us would be unwilling (at least initially) to wait until the other beta testers in our group have finished their work and a consensus for the greater good could be reached.

On the other hand, given the deluge of new consumer technologies that keeps washing over us and the troubling consequences that come with many of them—like the community weakening propensities of “smart” doorbells and the privacy destroying nature of “smart” home assistants—we might be better off if we joined with others to learn more about what’s involved before embracing “the next shiny new thing” and discovering the downsides later.

We could learn the restraint of slowing down, the power of beta-testing new technologies, and the connectedness of considering what we discover with our fellow experimenters before jumping head-first into unchartered waters.

And perhaps most importantly, we could learn how to come to a collective agreement on the criteria for assessing whether a new technology is likely to be good for us, bad for us, or only acceptable with safeguards in place before adoption.

– What priorities would we test against as we experiment with new products and services?

– What assessment criteria would we apply in our consumer reporting about the next smart speakers, cell phone apps, facial recognition tools or geo-tracking devices?

– How could an interactive gatekeeper group like this avoid becoming a 21^st Century version of the Legion of Decency?

On this last point, any consumer protection group would certainly have to tone down the holier-than-thou attitude in its crowd-sourced application of first principles. As tech testers and reporters, the group would need to say: “we don’t know better than you, we’ve just thought about it from various, specific angles, and here’s how.”

Instead of authority residing in an Amish bishop, the wisdom of this group of early adopters and community members could be captured in an evolving body of experience that is informed by both the testers’ feedback (like Yelp’s) as well as by moderating influences on the direction of the debate (like the guidance of Wikipedia editors). Built this way, arguments about what is likely to be good or bad for everyone will always embrace a broader perspective than that of any single tech influencer or seller. In fact, the counter-weight of a consumer protection group to each of us being “on our own” with consequential technology choices would be one of this group’s two greatest strengths.

The other would be pushing a leading edge of tech consumers to decide what is important to them and worth protecting with the strength of their numbers in the free market.

A consumer protection group like this would begin by deciding on the zones it would be committed to safeguarding. They might be our zones of personal privacy (from those who wish to exploit our data for their gain as opposed to ours) and autonomous decision-making (from those who aim to use our behavioral information to manipulate our choices). Group criteria could also include protecting socially or economically vulnerable populations (like the susceptible young or old, or even the self-employed doing ride-hailing, delivery or other gig-economy work) from exploitation or harm by new tech products and services. The group’s overall aim would be to offer a persuasive new perspective to a critical mass of the tech consuming public before we decide to consume a new technology.

Their invitation might sound something like this:

Given our stated priorities, we urge you to slow down your purchases and hold off on your adoption of this new technology until — because it will always take time — its likely impacts can be assessed. We, in turn, will provide you with regular updates as our assessment of the risks and benefits as our experience with this new technology evolves.

Group creation of a public interface that provides criteria-driven, crowd-sourced information about new technology would almost certainly have an additional benefit in the marketplace. As the group’s standing and credibility is established, it’s assessments would likely influence tech companies to be more forthcoming about the potential downsides of their products and services before we’re introduced to them, and even whether they keep fraught technologies on a path to market.

Instead of individual consumers (on the one hand) or government regulators (on the other) trying to figure out how to put the ketchup back in the bottle or toothpaste back in the tube once they’ve made a mess of things, the wisdom of a consumer protection group with “greater good” priorities could serve as a counterweight before a new technology’s stains become permanent.

The group could function like a crowd-sourced Consumer Reports, publishing its assessments on a quality-controlled Wikipedia-type page that every consumer can see, with the aim of laying out the risks (as well as rewards) of new technologies before they’re widely adopted.

The Amish have found a way to test and to tame new technologies so that their priorities of family and community are continuously served.

Aren’t there enough of the rest of us — united in our concern about privacy, surveillance and on-line manipulation — to test and then tame these same technologies?

This post was adapted from my October 11, 2020 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning. You can subscribe too by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

The Other Wonder of Tourists and Survivors

April 5, 2020 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Hello everyone. I’m mostly holding up and hope this finds you holding up too.

Recent weeks, but particularly this past one, have been like being in a foreign country while never entirely leaving the familiarity of home. I wonder if it’s been feeling disjointed like this to you.

When travel takes you to an entirely new place, you notice small differences that would normally escape your attention if you were still back home, things like the music that’s playing in the background, the odd rooflines you’re passing on the bus, or the kinds of shoes that people are wearing. With big things like a new language or culture telling you how far you’ve traveled, you can end up paying closer attention to the smaller differences too.

In an essay he wrote after bringing some of his American students to Ireland for the first time, Liam Heneghan noticed the power that tourists often bring to their observations.

A tourist generally has an eye for the things that, through repetitive familiarity, have become almost invisible to the resident… A tourist can [recognize] … the delicious strangeness of mundane things.

This past week, I’ve felt like a tourist in my suddenly strange country.

Of course, the larger changes and contrasts that shouted “Something new is afoot!” have been apparent for awhile now: how things have gotten quieter and slower, and how the promise of spring keeps contradicting the darker messengers on the news every day. But this kind of quiet and slow, when nearly everything but the march of nature has ground to a halt has, in its novelty, caused me to notice things that I either missed or took for granted as a local before. This week, it’s been surprisingly consoling and enabling to see my home country through a tourist’s wide eyes.

The first way that home had changed is how quiet the city has become. Tires skimming the streets, honking horns, helicopters over Route 1 and I-76, jets streaming towards the airport, sidewalk conversations, pedestrians on their phones, radio sounds—rap, R&B and talk shows mostly, delivery trucks, cars parking, home repairs, street repairs, neighbors coming and going, shouts from the high school’s baseball diamond, a track team running by, that ice cream truck beckoning 3d graders with its annoying song: these sounds that John Cage called the music of a city are no longer being offered in a continuous live stream, if they’re being offered up at all. Even the hourly bells from Penn Charter nearby have gone strangely quiet.

The sounds that survive are now framed by something like silence, as if puffs of snow had blanketed everything around them. For sure, it makes the sirens on rescue vehicles stand out even more, but it also delivers other bells, from that church in Germantown for example, the way they might have told an older city that it’s the middle of the day. Because kids are home from school, their laughing and talking excitedly gains my attention whenever it erupts. If I’m outside and close enough, I can hear the green light at the intersection of Fox and Midvale click. And like fleeing the urban glow can reveal the stars in a sky that’s suddenly gone dark, the bird songs and conversations have also leapt to the fore.

At the same time that we’re learning about essential and non-essential work, maybe the bells ringing, kids chirping, and birds singing are the essential sounds that were getting lost in the shuffle before.

The second way that my home has changed is how it’s turned in on itself.  What’s most familiar to me (my routines and “home-work”) have had to turn their backs, even more than usual, on everything that’s happening “outside.” It seems to me that you can view “sheltering in place” as either being banished from the wider world and losing what it has to offer or as finding a refuge and gaining something you didn’t have before. When the public world becomes a threatening reality, it almost invites you to see whether your private world can provide new sources of comfort: balms and salves that might always have been there but that you’d failed to notice.

I’d recently read that the best workshop (or kitchen or closet) is the one where you can see everything that you need to fix (or cook or wear). The advice was less Marie Kondo and more Yankee practicality, arguing that nothing that you need should ever be buried behind something else and effectively “unavailable.” In other words, the necessary tools and ingredients should always be visible and within easy reach so that they’re “on hand” when you’re ready for them.

Being a tourist in today’s strangeness has enabled me to see the necessities that had been buried in clutter until now and to identify the gaps in needed supplies that I still have to fill. With fresh eyes, I’ve been enabling a kind of preparedness when it comes to day-to-day living whose beauty had escaped me until now and (ironically) that also seems to have escaped many of our leaders as we face a respiratory pandemic without enough ventilators, protective equipment, test kits, hospital beds or medical staff “on hand” while being awash in almost everything that’s non-essential.

The sudden contrast between my public and private worlds has fostered another tourist-like appreciation too. The daily horror of a virus approaching from all directions along with our near helplessness to fend it off puts into bold relief the promise of spring that’s unfolding without any human assistance at all. With different eyes, daily miracles in the trees and on the ground that used to go unnoticed provide me with a deeper hope than even the acts of selfless heroes that life (although not as we’ve known it) will go on.

When the old, familiar world tries to return and the strangeness of the present one recedes, there will be blame enough for this to go around. The question, I suppose, is whether we all bear some of that responsibility and should get on to something that’s far more useful than finger pointing—starting right now.

As we shelter-in-place and social distance, there is another discrepancy between our old and new worlds that provides the ground for those insights. It is how much the familiar world that we used to know has slowed itself down.

There is nowhere to rush to in coming weeks and months; in a very real sense, many of us are already there. Aside from emergency medical and safety net workers, most of us have less paying work if we have any at all, which gives the days a molasses-like quality, concentrating and reserving some of our energy for later on, when it will be sorely needed to rebuild. Even with kids home from school and close quarters, we can still bring the curiosity of tourists to the slow task of contemplating how we’ll need to change our priorities if we’re to thrive and prosper in the next world.

There are easy fixes, like resolving to pay more for local workers (instead of factories overseas) to make essential supplies and then stockpiling these critical reserves. But there are more basic questions about what is, or should be, essential. If China, where the virus started, in fact suffers ten thousand deaths from this plague and America suffers a hundred or two hundred thousand, what does that say about our priorities and way of life and how we might change them going forward? In a democracy like ours, in all democracies, it is for us to decide on what we need most and how our free markets, awesome technologies and representative governments should manage our scarce resources to meet those needs.

Like foreign travel, a shared calamity like this one makes us curious about all manner of things we never seemed to notice when we trusted the familiarity of our old lives and work. Like travel, this virus and our responses to it have torn the blanket off, revealing facets of the ordinary we may have taken for granted while also forcing basic questions about how to move forward more effectively given the lessons we’re learning.

Because we’ve noticed the life force and inventiveness that some of our governors, nearly all of our essential workers, and many DIY by-standers have brought to this calamity, it’s only fair to ask whether we can find ways to harness their extraordinary energies to the energy we’ve been storing so we can build a society that can do a better job of sustaining us than the familiar one we’ve been seeing these last few weeks with different eyes?

Do we have, in Heneghan’s memorable phrase, enough of the tourist’s “other wonder” to imagine and then build a new world on this energetic foundation now that some of the fatal flaws of the world we’re leaving behind have been exposed?

Other-wonder may be this calamity’s greatest gift.  It would be a terrible shame to waste it whenever it arises during these suddenly quiet and slow days that—like the newly planted tree above—promise each of us so much.

Stay safe and in the game. I’ll see you next Sunday.

Now into the second month of this coronavirus, I’ve kept the weekly newsletter format here (from my April 5, 2020 newsletter) instead of adapting it for this post. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and the contents of some of them later appear here. If you’d like to receive a weekly newsletter, you can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

The Good Work of Getting What We Need As Patients

December 2, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Since recent posts here and here about work in healthcare—discussing burnout among health professionals, concerns about misuse of patient data, and questions about who is policing our rapidly changing health system—I’ve continued to follow developments in the field.

Over the past few weeks, some of you have also shared your troubled reactions about how work in healthcare has been evolving.

The net of these developments is that while there are grounds for alarm about the uses of our health data, its proliferation presents some extraordinary opportunities too. Concepts like “precision medicine” become more realistic as the amount and quality of the data improves. More and better data will also help us to live longer and healthier lives. On the other hand, whether AI and other data-related technologies can enable us to improve the quality of the work experience for millions of healthcare professionals is a stubbornly open question.

In this last healthcare-related post for a while, there are two, practical rules of thumb that might give us greater sense of control over how our healthcare data is being used, as well as a couple of ways in which more and better health-related information is already producing better patient outcomes.

The good work of getting the healthcare that we need as patients (both for ourselves and for others that we’re caring for) requires healthy doses of optimism as well as pessimism, together with understanding as much as we can about when excitement or alarm are warranted.

Two Rules of Thumb To Inhibit Misuse of Our Medical Data

The first rule of thumb involves insisting upon as much transparency as possible around the uses of our medical information. That includes knowing who is using it (beyond the healthcare provider) and minimizing the risks of anyone’s misuse of it.

Unfortunately, more of this burden falls on patients today. As health systems increasingly look to their bottom lines, they may be less incentivized to protect our personal data streams. And even when our interests are aligned, doctors and hospitals may not be able to protect our data adequately. As I wondered here a couple of weeks ago: “Can these providers ‘master the learning curve’ [of big data-related technologies] quickly enough to prevent sophisticated consultants like Google from exploiting us, or will the fox effectively be running the chicken coop going forward?”

An article last weekend in the Wall Street Journal called “Your Medical Data Isn’t As Safe As You Think It Is” raised a couple of additional issues. As patients, we may be lulled into complacency by the fact that much of our data is rendered “anonymous” (or stripped of our personal identifiers) before it is shared in big databases. But as this article describes at length, “de-identified” data in the hands of one of the tech companies can easily be “triangulated” with other data they already have on you to track your medical information back to you. That means they remain able to target you personally in ways you can imagine and some you cannot.

Moreover, even if it remains anonymous, your medical data “in a stranger’s hands” may still come back to haunt you. As one expert in data sharing observed, companies that monetize personal data currently provide very little information about their operations. That means we know some of the risks to us but are in the dark about others. Of the known risks around data dispersal, you may suddenly find yourself paying higher health-related insurance premiums or barred from obtaining any coverage at all:

Google will be in a good position to start selling actuarial tables to insurance companies—like predictions on when a white male in his 40s with certain characteristics might be likely to get sick and expensive. When it comes to life and disability insurance, antidiscrimination laws are weak, he says. ‘That’s what creates the risk of having one entity having a really godlike view of you as a person that can use it against you in ways you wouldn’t even know.’

Our first rule of thumb as customers in the health system is to insist upon transparency around how our providers are sharing our medical information, along with the right to prevent it from being shared if we are concerned about how it is will be used or who will be using it.

The second rule of thumb has always existed in healthcare, but may be more important now than ever. You should always be asking: is my medical information going to be used in a way that’s good for me? If it’s being used solely to maximize Google’s revenues, the answer is clearly “No.” But if your information is headed for a health researcher’s big data set, you should ask some additional questions: “Was someone like me considered as the study was being constructed so the study’s results are likely to be relevant to me?” “Will I be updated on the findings so my ongoing treatment can benefit from them?” (More questions about informed consent before sharing your medical data were set forth in another article this past week.)

Of course, understanding “the benefits to you beforehand” can also help you determine whether a test, drug or treatment program is really necessary, that is, if it’s possible to assess the pros and cons with your doctor in the limited time that you have before he or she orders it.

With medical practitioners becoming profit (or loss) centers for health systems that operate more like businesses, the good work of protecting yourself and your loved ones from misuse of your data requires both attention and vigilance at a time when you’re likely to be pre-occupied by a range of other issues.

More and Better Data Is a Cause for Excitement Too

There is an outfit called Singularity University that holds an annual conference each year with speakers who discuss recent innovations in a range of fields. Its staff also posts weekly about the most exciting developments in technology on a platform called Singularity Hub. One of its recent posts and one of the speakers at its conference in September highlight why more and better medical data is also a cause for excitement.

To understand the promise of today’s medical data gathering, it helps to recall what medical information looked like until very recently. Most patient information stayed in medical offices and was never shared with anyone. When groups of patients were studied, the research results varied widely in quality and were not always reconciled with similar patient studies. Medicine advanced through peer reviewed papers and debates over relatively small datasets in scholarly journals. Big data is upending that system today.

For us as patients, the most exciting development is that more high quality data will give us greater control over our own health and longevity. This plays out in (at least) two ways.

In the first instance, big data will give each of us “better baselines” than we have today about our current health and future prospects. According to the Singularity Hub post, companies as well as government agencies are already involved in large-scale projects to:

measure baseline physiological factors from thousands of people of different ages, races, genders, and socio-economic backgrounds. The goal is to slowly build a database that paints a comprehensive picture of what a healthy person looks like for a given demographic…These baselines can then be used to develop more personalized treatments, based on a particular patient.

Although it sounds like science fiction, the goal is essentially “to build a digital twin of every patient,” using it in simulations to optimize diagnoses, prevention and treatments. It is one way in which we will have personalized treatment plans that are grounded in far more accurate baseline information than has ever been available before.

The second breakthrough will involve changes in what we measure, moving organized medicine from treatment of our illnesses to avoidance of most illnesses altogether and the greater longevity that comes with improved health. As these developments play out, it could become commonplace for more of us to live well beyond a hundred years.

At Singularity University’s conference two months ago, Dr. David Karow spoke about the data we should be collecting today to treat a broad spectrum of medical problems in their early stages and increase our life expectancy. He argues that his start-up, Human Longevity Inc., has a role to play in that future.

Four years ago, Karow conducted a trial involving nearly 1,200 presumably healthy individuals. In the course of giving them comprehensive medical checkups, he utilized several cutting edge diagnostic technologies. These included whole-genome and microbiome sequencing, various biochemical measurements and advanced imaging. By analyzing the data, his team found a surprisingly large number of early stage tumors, brain aneurysims, and heart disease that could be treated before they produced any lasting consequences. In another 14% of the trial participants, significant, previously undetected conditions that required immediate treatment were discovered.

Karow’s argument is that we’re “not measuring what matters” today and that we should be “hacking longevity” with more pre-sympomatic diagnoses. For example, if testing indicates that you have the risk factors for developing dementia, you can minimize at least some of those risks now “because of third of the risks are modifiable.”

Every start up company needs its evangelists and Karow is selling “a fountain of youth” that “starts with a fountain of data.” This kind of personal data gathering is expensive today and not widely available but it gestures towards a future where these sorts of “deep testing” may be far more affordable and commonplace.

We need these promises of more personalized and preventative medicine—the hope of a better future—to have the stamina to confront the current risks of our medical data being monetized and misused long before we ever get there. As with so many other things, we need to hold optimism in one hand, pessimism in the other, and the ability to shuttle between them.

This post was adapted from my December 1, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.