Preface

This document is a response to the draft documents posted as part of the Design Regina process. The authors of this response are also the primary authors of Transforming Regina: Planning for 2040 and beyond, which achieved a place in the finals of the Regina Morph My City competition. Readers interested in a detailed analysis of Regina’s development through the year 2040 are encouraged to peruse our full report, which we have made publicly available. Every subject discussed in this response is explored in greater detail in our report.

We are pleased that the City has vigorously pursued the Design Regina process. We believe that inclusive and detailed community engagement efforts like this are crucial for the long-term well-being of our city.

In the interests of brevity, this response has been limited to commentary on aspects of the stated priorities and goals for which we feel some changes should be considered. Thus, this document does not show our appreciation for the majority of the content in the Design Regina documents. We think that they are a very good starting point for future discussions about the future of Regina. In fact, the reader should consider our silence on any particular topic contained within the Design Regina draft documents to be an endorsement of their current content.

Community Priorities

The current listing of community priorities is useful but incomplete. For example, it does not mention the safety or health of residents. Most urban residents care about things like noise, air pollution, and physical danger due to things like fast-moving automobiles. These factors are an inescapable part of their vision of what sort of city they want to live in. A lack of declaration of these very obvious priorities might lead to a lack of recognition of how they might be affected by the goals and specific policies that will be laid out later in the process¹.

Context

A vision of what the world will be like by 2040 is lacking in these documents. Residents and planners who are trying to envision the Regina of 2040 will be limited by their understanding of long-term trends that are shaping the global and national context. Thus, an acknowledgement of these factors is crucial to the proactive design of a healthy, vibrant, and prosperous city.

Important long-term trends

Energy commodities such as oil and natural gas are limited by their geological supply. Globally and continentally, these commodities are trending towards high and volatile prices over the coming decades². Saskatchewan’s economy, like that of most of the developed world, is currently very dependent on these sources of energy to fuel its prosperity. It behooves us to find ways to proactively prepare for the inevitable economic shocks from energy prices. By doing so, we can improve the long-term prosperity of Regina while also improving its resilience to other, unforeseen, shocks.

Despite the ongoing local prosperity due to resource extraction, the expected high value of these commodities in the next few decades will come at the price of high fuel and food prices for the rest of the economy. The ~78% of the economy that is not comprised of these industries will experience the detrimental effects of needing to pay more to maintain their consumption of fuel and food³.

Transportation

In light of the realities of energy supply in the next few decades, the pursuit of auto-centric development today is counterproductive. The shift in priorities of urban dwellers in North America toward transit, carpooling, active transport, and walkable communities indicates that City policies which promote single-occupancy car usage have become undesirable.

Transport Density

A practical overarching goal should be to increase the density of our transportation modes. Transitioning away from single-occupancy vehicles means that:

• we don’t need to build bigger roads,
• our roads will last longer⁴,
• our roads will move more people, faster,
• transit service can be invigorated by increased ridership,
• and residents will benefit from additional active transport infrastructure.

It is possible that the currently stated goal of “Optimize road network capacity” intends to express this same sentiment, but we believe it is worth saying explicitly what sort of transformation the transportation system needs to undergo in the coming decades.

Transportation Goals

We agree wholeheartedly with the stated goals for improving the variety of available transportation modes, the promotion of active transport, and the integration of land-use and transportation planning. These are definitely top priorities.

Curbing single-occupancy automobile usage

This could be achieved through measures such as traffic calming, reducing the subsidy inherent in publicly-provided parking, removing or reducing the minimum parking spot requirements in the City Bylaws, and eventually creating high-occupancy vehicle lanes on expressways.

Promote high-density transportation modes

This goal could be pursued through actions like the creation or promotion of carpool ride-finding software, recognizing CarShares with additional Taxi-like rights, and allowing R-cards to be recharged online and used for other transport modes like Taxis and CarShares.

Specific to public transit, many small actions can improve transit usability, accessibility, and comfort⁵. In addition, the power and flexibility of transit can be enormously extended by introducing jitneys to fill an important niche in city transport⁶.

Promote active transportation modes

Long-term planning is critical to the successful promotion of active transport. A goal of transport planning should be to better utilize the existing active transport infrastructure. A direct way to address the underutilization of active transport infrastructure is to make information available to residents in an accessible and complete format. A local example is how the City of Winnipeg has consolidated information about cycling routes within the city onto a single web page.

A related goal is the development of a more complete active transport network within the city, such as by creating an effective network of dedicated bike lanes and multi-use pathways. It is important to prioritize the placement of new active transport infrastructure in places where it:

• connects to the existing network and
• provides service to areas with a lack of current active transport infrastructure.

Infrastructure

A stated goal is to ensure that lifetime costs are as low as possible while still delivering the service adequately. This is a good goal, but we would like to explicitly increase its scope.

Most of our major infrastructure systems (e.g. roads, water, sewer, stormwater) are networks that facilitate the flow of inputs to designated places. Understanding the quantity and location of these inputs is crucial for the development of cost-effective solutions. Policies in other areas such as land usage and transportation planning often set the stage for the scope and location of the service loads that the infrastructure must accommodate. For these reasons, we believe that a stated goal of the design process should be to explore opportunities for cost-effective upstream policies that reduce the overall cost of infrastructure by reducing inputs.

An important example for Regina is stormwater. When storm water fees are the same regardless of the composition of the surfaces on a property, the property owner has no incentive to reduce the load they are creating for the stormwater system. Utilizing individual parcel assessments (IPAs), the stormwater load from every property can be estimated, and fees can be levied accordingly. Even keeping this system revenue neutral will create a significant economic incentive for the conscientious use of urban land. Landowners can employ extremely cost-effective urban drainage systems such as rain gardens to minimize the the stormwater fees they will pay to the City. Changing to an IPA system will have ramifications far beyond its effect on stormwater system management. A well-implemented IPA system could be used for a recalibration of water and sewer rates, property taxes, and even energy bills (in cooperation with SaskPower and SaskEnergy). Such a deployment would require the involvement of several City departments. Nonetheless, it is something that should be considered carefully because of the long-term benefits to the city it can unlock at low cost⁷.

Land Usage

We would replace goal 1 with: “Achieve a compact, mixed urban form by prioritizing infill development in established neighbourhoods near existing transportation corridors.” Greenfield development is likely to be an unavoidable fact about the future of Regina, but it is not something that the City should strive for.

Development on the periphery of the city will:

• prolong the necessity of automobile usage for errands in the city,
• increase the commuter traffic loads on all roads,
• increase the demand for parking throughout the city,
• increase the distance between average locations within the city, making active transport to specific locations more difficult,
• increase the total area needing to be served by transit.

None of these are desirable or serve as a positive step toward the sustainability, resilience, or vibrancy of Regina.

The existing goals already point out that land usage and transportation should be explicitly planned in tandem. We think this goal is worth reiterating. They should in fact be planned at a single desk if possible. These fields are inextricably connected at a physical level. A holistic understanding of the living city and its possibilities requires that the concepts of land usage and transport planning be melded into a cohesive endeavor. The city as a whole can benefit from a more synergistic approach to how our land is used and how we move around in it.

Urban Agriculture

There is no mention of actual urban agriculture other than community gardens. The City should follow in the footsteps of Kelowna, BC by carefully limiting the use of pesticides and herbicides within the city and explicitly legalizing the use of urban land for growing food for local sale. Kelowna’s law changes have led to the vigorous expansion of urban farming with small-plot intensive (SPIN) farms like Green City Acres growing rapidly, which allows them to contribute to the local economy, transform yards into vibrant and varied green spaces, and improve the well-being of residents though “as fresh as you can get” local produce.

Health & Safety

The stated goals are extremely general. We agree with them all, but believe that they don’t go nearly far enough to elucidate precisely what would be entailed in the achievement of these goals. Here are some suggestions about how they can be extended.

Heath and active transport

The health benefits of active transport have been extensively documented⁸⁹. We propose that the goal: The City will invest in the long-term health of residents though the improvement of active transport infrastructure.

Social Risk

We propose a new goal: Recognizing the dangers of winter exposure and the social priority of resident safety, the City will establish a plan to guarantee shelter and the necessities of life to those individuals without recourse. Goal 2 under Social Development states something similar, but fails to specify concrete outcomes.

Air quality

We propose: Improvements in air quality will be pursued through carefully considered regulation of the sectors most responsible for environmental and health damage through air pollution. Some examples of sectors would be pesticides/herbicides, vehicles, industrial polluters, and construction (materials and processes).

1. The drafted goals do include a health & safety section, which we will discuss in more detail later.
2. Extensive documentation of these facts is available in the works of top energy researchers such as Charles Hall. See also “A preliminary investigation of energy return on energy investment for global oil and gas production.”  Gagnon, Nathan, Charles AS Hall, and Lysle Brinker. Energies 2.3 (2009): 490-503.
3. CANSIM Table 379-0030.
4. Evaluating Public Transit Benefits and Costs, Victoria Transport Policy Institute, 2013, p. 48-49.
5. For more details see Transforming Regina: Planning for 2040 and beyond p 8-9, 51-60..
6. For more details see Transforming Regina: Planning for 2040 and beyond, p 58-60.
7. For more details see Transforming Regina: Planning for 2040 and beyond, p 81-82, 104-105.
8. Inverse associations between cycling to work, public transport, and overweight and obesity: Findings from a population based study in Australia. Li Ming Wen, Chris Rissel. Health Promotion Service, Sydney South West Area Health Service, Australia, 2007.
9. All-Cause Mortality Associated With Physical Activity During Leisure Time, Work, Sports, and Cycling to Work. Lars Bo Andersen, Peter Schnohr, Marianne Schroll, Hans Ole Hein, 2010.

Related posts:

1. Jim Elliott shares his thoughts on sustainability, community, and living green
2. Morph My City Report – Transforming Regina: Planning for 2040 and beyond
3. John Klein: Social involvement and sustainability in Regina, Saskatchewan, and Canada

Hello! This is my first post on Vision of Earth. Glad to be here.

Mark Cazakoff

On November 9th & 10th, SCIC (Saskatchewan Council for International Cooperation) hosted an event in Saskatoon called Harvest and Hunger (introduced in our earlier post: Harvest and Hunger: Brainstorming the future of the world food system). SCIC is an umbrella organization that represents a diverse range of international development organizations. If you’d like to know more about their organization, stop by their web page or like them on Facebook.

The focus of the event was very wide-ranging. The home page asks questions like: Where does our food come from? and Who has power in our food system, and who doesn’t? The Harvest and Hunger event provided a forum to talk about these topics, including presentations by a wide variety of speakers.

I took part in this event, and have been pondering what exactly to say about it for a few days now. The event itself is difficult to distill down, as it touched on so many different topics. So, I have decided to instead focus on my favourite speaker of the weekend, Amy Jo Ehman. Her talk was on the local foodshed, imparting some of the knowledge she’s gained about Saskatchewan’s food system.

Her book Prairie Feast is about her experience eating locally. Her hometown is Craik, Saskatchewan, home of the Craik Eco-Centre and a number of other advocates for sustainability. She also maintains a blog and writes a food column for the Saskatoon Star Phoenix.

A disclaimer: my own opinions on locavorism are still evolving. I currently believe that eating locally is often morally and environmentally inferior to eating products (and thus supporting producers) from less developed nations. However, I was more than willing to hear arguments in favour of eating differently.

Her story of why she decided to eat locally is charming. She knows a farmer south of Craik who raises pigs. So, one day, this farmer happened to offer to raise a pig for Amy Jo. And she said, why not? A bit less than a year later, when she got a phone call from this farmer asking her what she wanted to do with this pig, she was less certain. “A whole pig? I wouldn’t know what to do with it!” But, she felt committed, and so a pig she had. She received the pig, cooked up some pork chops for dinner, and her first words upon biting into her pork chop was, “Why is this pork chop so good?” And just like that, she was converted to eating locally.

Some years after this experience, Amy Jo convinced her husband to try eating nothing (excepting some beverages) but foods sourced from within Saskatchewan for a full year. Ever since her experience with her local pork chop, she had been buying much more of her meat locally. But this was a different scale of challenge, and would require much more knowledge of Saskatchewan farmers and produce.

She ran into a number of difficulties with this year-long attempt.

For one, this was back in 2005. “Locavore” wouldn’t be coined as a word until mid-2005, so she didn’t really have that kind of compact description. And the idea of eating everything locally was radical even in California, let alone in Saskatchewan. So, everyone she knew thought she was pretty strange.

Eating locally is nearly impossible to accomplish by one-stop shopping. Amy Jo drives into Saskatoon regularly anyway for work, so she would often stop off at their farmer’s market. But to buy her dairy, she would have to stop at a co-op, and then at one of a few butchers she knew for local meat. She would have to spend some time looking at the Saskatchewan Fruit Growers Association website, calling ahead to nearby growers and spending some time harvesting/picking crops and produce herself.

Winter was very difficult. She was forced to plan far in advance, pickling and canning for ages.

She kept running into areas where she just didn’t know if a local alternative existed. She had to do a lot of investigation to find out where some products were actually produced. Sifto salt, she learned, was produced in Saskatchewan. She had to buy her grain from an outfit down by Estevan. For dairy, for example, she called some of her contacts from her journalism days, trying to find out if there was actually a source of milk that would always be from Saskatchewan that she could purchase in a store. She knew there was a milk processor around the Saskatoon area, and found that the head office for this producer was now in Montreal. She called many, many times to this office in Montreal, attempting to find out if this processor sold milk in Saskatchewan, without success. Only through journalism contacts did she manage to discover that dairy products with the code 4015 on them were all produced at that facility.

Her problem arose out of the way our food system is organized, globally and in Canada. The food economy, like the rest of our economy, has adapted for minimum cost. In some cases, yes, the place where your food is produced is prominently displayed (oranges from South Africa), but this is very often not the case.

Let’s use some ‘Farmer’s Market’ brand brownies from my freezer as an example. With a brand like Farmer’s Market, you could be forgiven for thinking that they were locally produced (perhaps the chocolate in them was grown in a nearby greenhouse, you might think). It notes that the Farmer’s Market brand is a brand name of Loblaws Inc., which seems to have its head office in Toronto. It tells me on the back that “The Farmer’s Market(TM) brand is your assurance that we have searched far and near to offer you and your family great-tasting quality products and value you can count on.” However, note that it does not actually tell me where these brownies were baked, or where any of the ingredients are from.

I think my appreciation for Amy Jo’s story grew out of her pragmatism and honesty. She has a very realistic view of her reasons for eating locally, and was very informed on the topic of food.

She asked the audience for some reasons to eat locally. Some said that they wanted to support local farmers, while others agreed that local food just tasted better. Some wanted to avoid the waste associated with long-distance shipping. Some people also couldn’t support meat producers that might be supplied via factory farms, and needed to know that the animals were being treated well on the farms that they support.

One person suggested that the carbon footprint of eating locally would be lower. And, after taking down many suggestions, Amy Jo had a counterexample on this topic. She told an excellent story of Kenyan beans in the UK. There was some outcry against these beans by British individuals who suggested supermarkets should stock beans from British green bean producers. But since Kenyan growers produce their beans labouriously by hand, and growing is a much greater contributor to carbon footprint than transportation, Kenyan beans are better for the environment than their British counterparts.¹

What does this mean for Saskatchewan eaters? Unfortunately, it seems to mean that there are no simple answers. There are a few things I can say for certain.

Know more about your food. You are a part of a complex web of food, and you are making choices every day that affect how producers will operate tomorrow. Tomatoes grown in a backyard next door are very different from tomatoes shipped a thousand kilometers. Grass-fed beef is very different from factory-farmed, corn-fed beef.

Find out what food can really be. The difference in quality between seemingly-similar foods can be substantial.

Know what you want from your food. You have many options, and maybe you wouldn’t want to be eating some of the food on your plate if you knew a little bit more about how it was made or where it comes from. Try a pie from a farmer’s market, compare the price to what you would pay from the supermarket, and decide if it’s worth it to you.

1. Prospect Magazine: How green are your beans?

Related posts:

1. Harvest and Hunger: Brainstorming the future of the world food system
2. John Klein: Social involvement and sustainability in Regina, Saskatchewan, and Canada
3. Curtis Dorosh: Green living, building, and volunteering

Harvest and Hunger

The Saskatchewan Council for International Cooperation is hosting an event in Saskatoon on November 10th called Harvest and Hunger. The event sets out to answer three questions:

• Who controls the world’s food? Who has power in the global food system? Who doesn’t?
• What are people doing – both in Saskatchewan and around the world – to create just and sustainable alternatives to the current food system?
• What can we do in Saskatchewan today to contribute to a more equitable food system?

Mark Cazakoff

One of the Vision of Earth team members, Mark Cazakoff, will be attending the event, so if you are attending, feel free to say hi!

In preparation for the event, we have been doing a bit of legwork here at Vision of Earth. Our goal was to gather together some of the best resources we have found for understanding global agriculture. The purpose of this post will be to share some of those resources with all of you. At a later date, we hope to write a more substantial review that knits together a lot of the subject into a single read.

Before we dive into our favourite resources on the subject, let’s do a speed-dating version of answering the above questions.

Question 1

• Who controls the world’s food?
  The majority is controlled by giant multinational corporations whose overriding objective is to deliver profit to their shareholders.
• Who has power in the global food system?
  Everyone has some power.
  Food companies have concentrated political and monetary power that they use to improve their profit-making ability.
  “The People” have even more power, but since they rarely agree on anything, the full force of that power is never felt.
• Who doesn’t?
  A tongue-in-cheek response that is also somewhat accurate is: CEOs of food companies. They have a fiduciary duty to their stakeholders to protect their profits. If they make decisions that put profits in question (or fail to maximize them), they will be sued and their careers likely ruined.

Question 2

What are people doing – both in Saskatchewan and around the world – to create just and sustainable alternatives to the current food system?

There is a lot going on in a world with ~7 billion people in it. There are countless local food producers sprouting up in the world and there are ‘buy local’ (or ‘locavorism’) movements to complement them. There is the organic movement, attempting to establish more stringent standards regarding the use of additive chemicals on food. There is the fast-growing SPIN movement (Small-Plot Intensive Farming), that uses urban plots to grow food for local sale, which was co-founded in Saskatoon. In developing countries, there are many efforts underway to break the poverty trap through improving agriculture outputs. There are many small efforts and trends that are building up to combat the increasing centralization of the world food supply.

Question 3

What can we do in Saskatchewan today to contribute to a more equitable food system?
Not in any particular order, here are some of the easiest and most effective things you can do:

1. Buy local.
2. Buy organic.
3. Buy directly from producers (not middlemen).
4. Grow your own food, it doesn’t take that much work, and there is tons of free knowledge on the web on this subject.
5. Eat less meat (it uses roughly ten times the resources as plants do for the same amount of food).
6. Eat only meat that does not come from factory farms. This is also a healthier choice, since grass-fed cows do not have the E-coli issue.
7. Cook your own food. It is fun, and again the Internet can provide you with infinite recipes to try out. Get together with friends and do cooking parties.
8. Send your charity dollars where they will have great effect. With some genuine and significant help, even the poorest places in Africa (and elsewhere) can be freed from the poverty trap so that they can begin to catch up on their own. (Read the ladder of economic development for more info).
9. Compost all of your food waste.

tl;dr: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” – Michael Pollan

Recommended Readings

IAASTD

The IAASTD report (International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development). The report was created through a massive international effort involving several hundred scientists and civil servants from all around the world. Their goal was:

The IAASTD is a three-year collaborative effort (2005 – 2007) that assessed Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology in relation to meeting development and sustainability goals of:

• Reducing hunger and poverty
• Improving nutrition, health and rural livelihoods
• Facilitating social and environmental sustainability

Clearly, this will be an excellent resource for years to come, and we recommend taking look at some of the summaries of the findings. Since the document is 600+ pages long, it is a bit of an arduous read.

Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan has written two very successful books on the subject of the food system. They are “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “In Defense of Food”. We can highly recommend them both as a good, easy starting point for understanding some of the major issues with the food system in the developed world.

Jeffrey Sachs

We are big fans of Dr. Sachs and his fully-committed campaign to end world poverty and also forge a new path towards global sustainability. In fact, we have since been inspired to write about many of the same issues we read about in his books, including:

• How do we define poverty?
• What is the ladder of economic development?
• Our global human tribe: How we must extend empathy beyond our religion and nation
• What keeps communities locked in the extreme poverty trap?
• National and cultural issues that contribute to poverty and hamper development
• How the common explanations for poverty are incorrect
• Jeffrey Sachs on the high price of ignoring poverty
• Science denial: Vaccines, vitamins and GMOs
• How much would it cost to end extreme poverty in the world?
• Ethics, Slavery and the Ivory Coast

If you are looking for the most thorough treatment of the issue of extreme poverty in the world, we highly recommend Sach’s seminal work “The End of Poverty”. Much of the book deals with issues surrounding food and agriculture.

Expanding upon this perspective, we also recommend his more recent book, “Common Wealth” in which he ties together knowledge from a wide variety of fields (thanks to the fine people at the Earth Institute) to create an over-arching map of what the major world sustainability issues are and how we can begin to solve them. This is a bit more difficult read than The End of Poverty, but we think it is a highly worthwhile endeavor and a good reference for anyone dedicated to making the world a better place.

The Oil Drum

Energy plays a central role in everything we do. This becomes particularly clear when one digs deeply into the subject of agriculture in the past, present, and future. The Oil Drum is a website without equal, as far as we know. On there, you can read detailed analyses of world energy issues by some of the best scientists, engineers, and economists in the field. While we haven’t read even a significant fraction of these articles, we think that The Best of The Oil Drum 2005-2010 provides a very good reading list for anyone interested in large-scale energy issues in the world (and the consequences for every person’s life). Many of the articles in that list are in fact focused on the energy economics of agriculture, and thus would be very useful for furthering the discussion of the world food system.

Assorted blog posts

A short, excellent piece by George Monbiot about sustainable meat production.

Japan’s urban agriculture: cultivating sustainability and well-being is a post at Our World 2.0 which nicely summarizes some of the major issues in urban agriculture today.

Documentaries

Food Inc.

Now an icon of many of the local, organic food movements, the documentary Food, Inc. shows how the centralization and industrialization of the food system (in North America in particular) is leading to massive health, poverty, and food justice problems. This is a very worthwhile documentary with very high production quality.

Fresh

Touching upon many of the same issues as Food Inc., the documentary Fresh does so from a different perspective. While Food Inc. focused a lot on the politics and law of the industrialized food system, Fresh looks at the solutions that people are implementing on the ground today. Perhaps a more hopeful message than that of Food Inc., this is definitely another documentary worth watching.

That’s all for now! Hopefully with these resources people can feel more confident in joining in on this conversation. Stay tuned for further updates after the event.

Related posts:

1. How much would it cost to end extreme poverty in the world?
2. Curtis Dorosh: Green living, building, and volunteering
3. John Klein: Social involvement and sustainability in Regina, Saskatchewan, and Canada

Location of the Ivory Coast (Côte d’Ivoire) within Africa. From Wikimedia Commons.

Ethics and morality are not permanent fixtures of our society. They are constantly evolving and adapting to new social norms and necessities. Today in Canada, slavery is considered to be absolutely immoral. This is, however, a relatively recent development. Two hundred years ago slavery was legal and widely accepted.

At present in the Ivory Coast, slavery is considered acceptable. It is technically illegal there, but due to the widespread use of slaves there, I believe I can say that it is accepted as a fact of life. It can be likened to driving faster than the speed limit in Canada; an illegal but widely accepted act that is often regarded as justified, or at least justifiable.

Western society has proven that the most cost-effective and profitable method of producing agricultural products is with mechanization. When one compares the profit margin on slave produced goods vs mechanically produced goods, it is clear that the most profitable ventures involve mechanization. An average farmer in the western world is significantly wealthier than any slave owning farmer in the Ivory Coast.

Owning slaves is not free. When one considers the cost of housing, feeding, and securing salves as well as the cost of compelling compliance, the overall cost is high. However, few of these costs are financial; they take the form of time and resources. Mechanization on the other hand requires relatively little time and resources once the system is in place, but it does require access to finance in order to adopt.

The history of western civilization chronicles the simultaneous adoption of mechanization and the decline of slavery. This transition did not take place only because of people’s moral concerns about slavery. It took place for economic reasons. The Ivory Coast is subject to the same laws of economics as the rest of the world. These economic forces will eliminate slavery in the Ivory Coast just as they did in the rest of the world. However, the question remains, why has this has not happened yet?

Mechanization is very capital intensive, for the farmers to acquire needed capital they must first have access to capital markets, and have something of value to trade. Currently there are few functioning capital markets in the Ivory coast. This is primarily because capital markets require stability and the rule of law. The people and governments of the Ivory Coast have been unable to provide stability. Their region has endured many recent years of civil war.

Political instability is a disincentive for capital accumulation. Without the rule of law, it is easier for somebody to simply take or destroy your wealth and equipment. Circumstances such as this lead to less investment in goods that can be stolen, such as equipment or even worker skills.

General social unrest, civil war and societal breakdown have crippled the financial markets in this region, making it nearly impossible to secure financing for capital-intensive products. This state of affairs effectively makes mechanization impossible. The low price of cocoa in the global market also makes it more difficult for farmers to accumulate money to pay employees. The absence of money, a medium used for the exchange of goods and services, inhibits the ability of farmers to compensate workers in any meaningful way. If farmers cannot acquire the labour of workers through the exchange of currency, the only option left is the exchange of violence.

“When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns–or dollars.” -Francisco D’Anconia, Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand, 1957.

The existence of slavery in the Ivory Coast is perpetuated by farmers who need a method of harvesting cocoa beans that uses very little money. Slavery replaces currency with violence.

The moral responsibility to end slavery resides with those who have the ability to influence the situation. In the case of slaves picking cocoa beans, the Canadian consumer currently has very little ability to influence that situation. This is because the slave-picked cocoa beans and the non-slave-picked cocoa beans are often mixed together. There is no way to know for sure which beans have been picked by slaves, making it impossible to boycott one particular brand of slave-picked cocoa in favor of a non-slave-picked cocoa. The only option for a concerned consumer is to abstain from purchasing all chocolate which will hurt all cocoa farmers, and will not inform the corporation why you are not purchasing the chocolate. The only way for a consumer to inform the chocolate companies that they are unhappy with the use of slaves in cocoa farms is to inform them directly.

The difficulty for corporations operating in both Canada and the Ivory Coast is in determining how to balance the differing ethical regimes that operate in the two different regions. The corporations have to consider the Canadian ethical opposition to the use of slaves, while at the same time facing the hard reality of slave labour in the Ivory Coast. The corporations are in a position to have a direct influence on the use of slaves. If they paid a higher price for the cocoa, some of the farmers could afford to pay their workers. However, simply paying a higher price for cocoa is not enough to eliminate slavery.

Mechanization, along with the corresponding political and social reforms necessary to allow capital accumulation, is the best way to eliminate slavery in cocoa farming. However, the cocoa companies are not in a position to single-handedly create stability, law and order in the Ivory Coast. That is something that has to come from the people themselves, though such a movement could be nurtured by the international community. With today’s state of affairs, even if the chocolate industry provided farm machinery to the farmers, it would probably be stolen or destroyed by rival groups within the country.

The companies can, however, completely bypass the local farmers and establish company-owned farms. The giant company farms would be able to regulate the cocoa that is produced on their farms and ensure that there was no slave labour involved in its production. Given the oligopolistic nature of the chocolate industry, it would only take a few companies creating giant corporate farms to completely eliminate slavery in the cocoa industry. This is because the large-scale mechanized farms would likely be able to secure preferential contracts and squeeze the slave-run farms out of business. This would however, have the additional effect of destroying the livelihoods of all the current farmers unless they were integrated into this plan or bought out. It is important to note that this approach would require the aforementioned social reforms or relatively expensive private security forces to protect the investments.

The cocoa farmers know mechanization is the key to prosperity, and they aspire to be able to produce cocoa using mechanized agricultural methods. They have been unable to do so because of a lack of funds and security. From the farmers perspective, they are faced with the dilemma of either using slaves to work their fields or losing their farms, their livelihoods, and possibly their lives. In the end, it is the farmers who are ultimately responsible for the decision to utilize slaves, but their decision is unlikely to change so long as they employ the ethics of survival.

Slavery can be an effective means of production. For this reason it has been practiced all over the world for much of human history. In the year 2011 however, slavery has become a heavily marginalized practice because more effective means of production have been developed. As human understanding expands, we discover ways of behaving and of organizing ourselves that more effectively serve to improve happiness and minimize suffering. Our code of ethics must evolve if we are to be capable of taking advantage of our developing understanding of the cosmos.

Ethics evolve, but evolution is blind, without conscious effort ethics can lead us astray as happened in the Ivory Coast. This is why it is important to study ethics and to consciously guide its development. Everybody must be aware of the impact they have upon the civilization they are a part of, and of their ability, through their actions, to either improve or undermine that civilization; which they themselves derive so much of their well being from.

Related posts:

1. Capitalism’s Labour Transitions – An Argument for Social Welfare
2. Chevron Oil Spill off the BC Coast
3. How much would it cost to end extreme poverty in the world?

In this spirit, we will also be sharing our vision at a public presentation. This will be occurring at the University of Regina in ED 193 at 7pm on Wednesday September 12th. The presentation will be oriented towards members of the general public. The Vision of Earth team will present the highlights of our roadmap for producing a more sustainable Rosemont and Regina towards the year 2040.

Related posts:

1. Vision of Earth submission chosen as finalist in Morph My City Competition
2. Lindsey Simpson of TEDxMcGill on volunteerism and planning major events
3. John Klein: Social involvement and sustainability in Regina, Saskatchewan, and Canada

Vision of Earth is comprised of volunteers from a variety of fields. We use our technical skills to deeply investigate various issues that face our society today, focusing on complex and controversial issues that demand patience and knowledge to understand. Vision of Earth’s submission to the competition is the work of five authors.

Ben Harack (BSc Math, BSc Computer Science, BSc Physics, BA Psychology) hails from a small town near Prince Albert, and later moved to Regina for eight years to attend university. Currently pursuing a physics masters at McGill, he spends significant time investigating practical solutions to the intricate and substantial problems facing the world today.

Steven Kuski (BA Economics, BBA Finance) has lived in Regina for about eleven years, attending university for most of that time. He has spent most of his professional life as a civil servant, having worked at the provincial planning branch at Ministry of Government Services and currently as an Economic Statistician at the Ministry of Finance.

Kyle Laskowski (BSc Physics) hails from a small town near Lanigan. He has long held a deep interest in energy systems and sustainability. Pursuing this has led him towards study of the political, economic, and social realities of societies and how they choose to solve problems.

Scott Hoiland (BSc Mechanical Engineering) originally from Saskatoon, has lived in Cambodia working in poverty alleviation. Now working for an international energy and environmental consulting company, he specializes in: energy efficiency, energy supply and carbon markets. He resides in Regina, working with provincial industrial and commercial Demand Side Management programs.

Robert Bailey (MSc Computer Science) has been a Regina resident for 20 years. He is passionate about anthropology and Asian studies, having acquired a minor in Mandarin. He is currently pursuing an MBA at the U of R while working full-time as a software developer.

For further information:
Alana Watson
(204) 930-9333
alana.watson@visionofearth.org

Related posts:

1. Morph My City Report – Transforming Regina: Planning for 2040 and beyond
2. A renewed look at 2010, a sustainable vision for 2011
3. Curtis Dorosh: Green living, building, and volunteering

My first YouTube appearance!

A wonderful video about Moving Planet Montreal was created by Alex Pritz of Developing Pictures. The video features me in my first-ever YouTube appearance! I invite you all to take a look, as it is less than two minutes long. It should be visible just below this paragraph, but if not then you can find it on YouTube: Moving Planet Montreal YouTube Video

I am rather pleased that I sound like I know what I am talking about in this video. The interview that was excerpted for the video was probably less than two minutes long and included a number of interruptions due to helicopters flying over Montreal.

I am also pleased that Moving Planet helped me to start branching out into other forms of media. Thanks to this YouTube video and my appearance on CKUT Radio, I am slowly getting used to seeing my own face and hearing my own voice. It is also interesting that I began posting audio posts or podcasts on Vision of Earth when I was helping to plan Moving Planet Montreal.

Related posts:

1. Moving Planet Montreal
2. Ben’s Interview on Radio CKUT 90.3 FM
3. Envisioning a Green Life: 10 ways you can make a difference

Moving Planet was a worldwide event that took place on September 24th, 2011. It was conceived by the folks over at 350.org as an effort to help the world transition away from fossil fuels.

The Moving Planet event in Montreal (which took place in Parc Jeanne-Mance) was planned by local volunteers. All we got from 350.org was the name and the logos. We did get some very significant help from the David Suzuki Foundation (Montreal chapter) with regards to planning and execution of the event as well as media releases.

Kilometer Drive

The event included what we called a ‘kilometer drive’ in which people could contribute their green-transport kilometers to a collective total. A green kilometer would be one achieved on foot, bike, skateboard, roller blades, unicycle, etc. The goal of the kilometer drive was to demonstrate the power of active transportation.

Our group achieved a total of 496 kilometers by the end of the day, using some unconventional methods such as:

• Juggling
• Juggling a soccer ball with just feet
• Passing a Frisbee between three people
• Singing
• Hand-in-hand
• In another person’s shoes
• Dancing
• Carrying a toddler in ‘airplane’ position the whole way.

Moving Planet Montreal organizers and friends. Photo by Alecska @ followthestory.net

I think it is sufficient to say that we had a great time with the kilometer drive. Next year we think it would be an excellent idea to get active transport groups involved in the planning and execution of the event. Montreal definitely has communities of cyclists, skateboarders, joggers, rollerbladers, etc. We think it is reasonable that some of these groups might be interested in showing off the capabilities (and fun) of their chosen mode of transport.

I like to think of the kilometer drive as a celebration of the tremendous human capability to achieve active transportation. By doing so, we are improving the long-term health of both our environment and ourselves. A transition towards less energy-intensive transportation is a must in the decades to come. It seems extremely unlikely that we as a society will be able to continue to spend such incredible amounts of energy on our personal transportation systems. This seems likely to be true even if we do not factor in the broad and substantial costs of continued fossil fuel usage by our societies.

Grand Picnic

The other major thrust of the event was a ‘grand picnic’. The central idea was that food plays a major role in both our everyday lives and the (un)sustainability of our society. We all brought food and shared it. It was a delicious and fun experience. I wish you all could have been there!

More worthwhile things

After the event, the planning volunteers got together and brainstormed ideas for a media release about the event. I think it is fair to say that Nadine Légaré of the David Suzuki Foundation did the vast majority of the work on this front, but we did help a bit! A quote from me appears in our completed media release, which you can find here (in French): Le rassemblement mondial Planète en mouvement, un succès au Québec

I am also rather proud of a sheet I circulated containing what I think are the ten most important things you can do to live a ‘Green Life’ and help our society towards genuine sustainability. I made a distinct effort to keep the list concise and clear, so hopefully you will find it to be a good read. You can find it at: Envisioning a Green Life: 10 ways you can make a difference

Lastly, a couple weeks before the event, CKUT Radio interviewed me about Moving Planet Montreal and Vision of Earth.

Happy Movement!

Related posts:

1. Moving Planet Montreal video by Developing Pictures
2. Envisioning a Green Life: 10 ways you can make a difference
3. Ben’s Interview on Radio CKUT 90.3 FM

I brainstormed this list for the Moving Planet Montreal event on Sept 24th, 2011. I think that if a person can do all of these things, they are well on their way to living a very ‘green’ life!

Envisioning a Green Life

1. Walk, jog, bike, skateboard, or rollerblade to commute or for fun. Be healthier and live longer!
2. Take metro, bus, or rail. Not possible? Carpool. Not possible? Drive a moped or another micro-vehicle.
3. Own a vehicle with a block heater? Get a block heater timer! (Can pay for itself in a couple months of use.)
4. Winter: Wear heavier clothes indoors. Insulate. Pile snow against house during extreme cold. Build outdoor freezer. Leave hot water from shower or bath in tub till it cools, then drain.
5. Summer: Open windows and roller shades for cool nighttime, close during midday and afternoon. Hang dry clothes. Wear light clothes.
6. Eat more vegetables and less meat. Energy, water and land inputs for 1 kg of meat ~= 10 kg of vegetables. Eat socially. Have potlucks. Buy organic.
7. Buy local foods, furniture, clothes, etc. Strengthen the local economy. Reject consumerism by focusing on what you truly value. Spend ethically.
8. Renovate your home to be more energy efficient using healthy materials. Building? Build green, focusing on solar heat and light. Google: “Annualized geo-solar”
9. Question all media you consume. Be conscious of propaganda, logical fallacies, and advertising. Educate yourself about what you care about!
10. Get involved in your society. Democracy does not end at the ballot box. Learn and grow – bringing your society with you into a better future.

If this list has your curiosity piqued, you should definitely check out our much more thorough list here: Personal and social change for a green energy future

Now my version in broken French:

Imaginer une vie vert

1. Marchez, courez, vélo, skate, ou roller de commuer ou pour le plaisir. Meilleure santé et vivent plus longtemps!
2. Prendre le métro, le bus ou le train. Pas possible? Covoiturage. Pas possible? Conduire uncyclomoteur ou un autre micro-véhicule.
3. Propriétaire d’un véhicule avec un chauffe-bloc? Obtenez une minuterie chauffe-moteur!(Possibilité de payer pour lui-même dans quelques mois d’utilisation.)
4. Hiver: Porter des vêtements plus lourds à l’intérieur. Isoler. Accumulation de neige contre la maison pendant une période de temps très froid. Construire congélateur extérieur. Laisser l’eau chaudedans la baignoire jusqu’à ce qu’elle refroidisse, puis les égoutter.
5. Eté: Ouvrez les fenêtres et stores pour la nuit fraîche, fermer pendant midi et après-midi. Suspendre les vêtements secs. Portez des vêtements légers.
6. Mangez plus de légumes et moins de viande. L’énergie, l’eau et des terres utilisées pour 1 kg de viande ~ = 10 kg de légumes. Mangez socialement. Avez potlucks. Acheter bio.
7. Achetez des aliments, des meubles et des vêtements locaux. Renforcer l’économie locale. Rejeterle consumérisme en se concentrant sur ce que vous avez vraiment de valeur. Acheter éthique.
8. Rénover sa maison pour être plus économes en énergie en utilisant des matériaux sains. Construire vert, en se concentrant sur la chaleur solaire et la lumière. Google: “annualisé de géo-solaire”
9. Question tous les médias que vous consommez. Soyez conscient de la propagande,erreurs logiques, et la publicité. Renseignez-vous sur ce que vous vous souciez!
10. Impliquez-vous dans votre société. La démocratie ne s’arrête pas à l’urne. Apprendre et grandir - ce qui porte votre société avec vous dans un avenir meilleur.

Si cette liste vous intéresse, vous pouvez également être intéressé par: Personal and social change for a green energy future

Related posts:

1. Curtis Dorosh: Green living, building, and volunteering
2. Moving Planet Montreal
3. John Klein: Social involvement and sustainability in Regina, Saskatchewan, and Canada

The high point of my week was being invited by Ryan Young for an interview on Ecolibrium on CKUT 90.3 FM in Montreal on Tuesday, Sept 6th.

The 25-minute interview was slated to cover both Vision of Earth and an upcoming event that I am helping to plan in Montreal: The Moving Planet Picnic and Kilometer Drive.

You can download or listen to a copy of the radio show here, the interview starts at about 4 minutes 20 seconds. It then lasts for about 26 minutes.

Interview topics

• Cradle to Cradle ideas and Regenerative Design, including William McDonough’s TED Talk, and the excellent book Cradle to Cradle.
• The Moving Planet Montreal event. – discussion of picnic and active transportation celebration.
• The book that Vision of Earth is writing about Saskatchewan Energy Future. (Basically we are trying to write up years worth of research on Saskatchewan and thought into a cohesive narrative for the interested layperson.)
• Discussing some sustainability issues in the Saskatchewan context, including the rapid urbanization, the rise of corporate farms, and the possibility of seeing tar sands development in Saskatchewan as well as Alberta.
• Concerns about mainstream media coverage of sustainability issues in North America. Brief discussion about false and misleading news in Canadian media vs that in the US.
• Sustainability movements in Montreal and at McGill University in particular.
• *My favourite: The peer review culture we have created (and continue to refine) at Vision of Earth.

“If a person reads Vision of Earth, what I can guarantee is we are doing our very best to knit these strands of experience and knowledge together to form what is hopefully a very cohesive and complete picture of the world.” – Ben Harack

Related posts:

1. Curtis Dorosh: Green living, building, and volunteering
2. John Klein: Social involvement and sustainability in Regina, Saskatchewan, and Canada
3. Jim Elliott shares his thoughts on sustainability, community, and living green

Answer: Not that much actually.

In his book, The End of Poverty, Jeffrey Sachs made some careful estimates as to what it would cost to end extreme poverty in the world in about twenty years.

If you are unfamiliar with what the term ‘extreme poverty’ means, check out our piece on defining poverty.

Ending world poverty

To end extreme poverty worldwide in 20 years, Sachs calculated that the total cost per year would be about $175 billion. This represents less than one percent of the combined income of the richest countries in the world.

In fact, this cost is 0.7% of the total income of the 30 countries who comprised the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 2005 when Sachs wrote The End of Poverty. For his calculations, he used the 2002 values for their collective wealth. This is relevant because while there have been some rough economic times since 2002, OECD total income is still somewhat higher now than it was then.

ODA as percentage of gross national income (Wikimedia Commons)

This level of aid has in fact already been promised by the developed nations through the Monterrey Consensus. This consensus guarantees 0.7% of gross national product (GNP) as official development assistance (ODA)¹.

However, fiscal commitments have lagged far behind the agreement. For example, the US only gives 0.18% of GNP as ODA, a much lower value that the Scandinavian countries.

In order for poverty to be ended in the next few decades, the US needs to ramp up to about $75 billion per year in ODA. This would be their contribution if they deliver 0.7% as promised.

The US could end poverty

The United States is spectacularly wealthy. With a GNP in 2009 of about $14 trillion, the US is a huge chunk of the total GNP of the OECD, which is about $40 trillion². The sheer size of the US economy means that even though they only give 0.18% of their GNP as ODA, they still give the most total money of any nation on the planet.

US Military spending

ODA by country

The military budget in the USA is about $680 billion per year³. A large amount of other funding is directly connected to military spending in the states, bringing the total closer to $1 trillion per year⁴.Even if we assume the lesser of these numbers, annual defense spending in the US is about four times as much money as is needed to begin rapidly ending extreme poverty in the entire world. If some of the US military’s monstrous budget could be channelled towards humanitarian goals, then extreme poverty in our world could quickly become a thing of the past.

Total US Gov’t spending

In 2011, the US Gov’t will spend about $3.4 trillion. Ending world poverty would require about 5.1% of the current US federal budget.

We certainly acknowledge that the US government is facing problems with their budget recently. To put it bluntly however, their problems are primarily political and ideological rather than monetary. The US economy is gigantic and currently has very low tax levels for many of the richest segments, including corporations and extremely wealthy people. If corporations and the extremely wealthy are made to cough up their fair share, the US will be well on its way to fixing their budget issues.

Bush Tax Cuts

Over the decade from 2010 to 2020, the continuation of the Bush-era tax cuts for only the super-wealthy (who make more then $250,000 per year) will cost about $700 billion. Considering all income levels, these cuts will cost about $3.7 trillion.⁵⁶

Even just repealing the Bush-era tax cut on the extremely wealthy people would pay for about 40% of what is needed to end extreme poverty in the world.

Repealing the entirety of the Bush tax cuts would raise about $370 billion per year, or about twice as much money as would be needed to end world poverty.

It is our hope that the people of the United States take back control of their country from the corporations and the ultra-rich. We then believe that the natural humanitarian inclinations of the American citizenry will then be more free to help the world achieve prosperity.

The United States could become a humanitarian superpower by helping to build the world of tomorrow and sowing deep international goodwill in the process.

1. Is it ODA? OECD.org. Accessed August 26th, 2011.
2. OECD Factbook for 2009. Accessed August 25th, 2011.
3. Military budget of the United States. Wikipedia. Accessed August 25th, 2011.
4. Budget breakdown for 2012: Military budget of the United States. Wikipedia. August 25th, 2011.
5. Bush tax cuts: What you need to know. CNN. Accessed August 26th, 2011.
6. Decision Time: The Fiscal Effects of Extending the 2001 and 2003 Tax Cuts. Pew Charitable Trusts. Accessed August 26th, 2011.

Related posts:

1. Capitalism’s Labour Transitions – An Argument for Social Welfare
2. What keeps communities locked in the extreme poverty trap?
3. Voted for Koch on the Corporate Hall of Shame

The audio versions are read by the authors of the post.

Our first post offered in this format is Wage reduction through inflation. We do plan on adding audio versions of more of our content rather soon.

Our current plans are to provide audio versions for some new material as well as some of the most popular posts on Vision of Earth. Do our readers have any posts that you would particularly like to see in audio format?

Related posts:

1. Moving Planet Montreal video by Developing Pictures
2. Vision of Earth’s New Forum

Around the year 2000, I was sitting in a high school history / social studies class taught by my father.

We were in the middle of a couple-week stint in which he was focusing on the events in Afghanistan during the 1980’s. (Some of you may be wondering what happened in Afghanistan during the 1980′s. We will get to that.)

A student raised their hand and asked how these events could possibly matter to us. This was the proverbial “Why should we care?” statement.

A couple months later we were all shocked by the events of September 11th, 2001.

To this day, this series of events continues to intrigue me.

I admit to being rather proud that my dad is knowledgeable enough about the world to have accurately narrowed in upon some of the salient issues of our age in his teaching.

Also, this highlighted the general sentiment that whatever doesn’t seem to directly affect you does not matter. Prior to his classes, and even during them, students were seriously questioning the relevance of some of what we were learning to their own lives. The attacks of 9/11 brought some of these issues into the public eye. I expected that the knowledge that my dad had been teaching would become widely known in the US and Canada.

And yet that is not what happened. As far as I know, very few people, even among the very educated, are aware of what happened in Afghanistan in the 1980’s.

Hopefully this post will help a bit with that.

Afghanistan in the 1980′s

This story is rather well-told in the excellent movie Charlie Wilson’s War (starring Tom Hanks – my respect for his work continues to grow).

At the height of the cold war, the Soviet union invaded Afghanistan. The invasion lasted from 1979 until 1989.

Fearing a Soviet victory, the United States began covert funding of freedom fighters in Afghanistan early in the conflict. Early on in the program, the budget was $5 million dollars.

A number of Americans, including Congressman Charlie Wilson, pushed hard for more extensive funding of the mujahideen forces. They knew that the Soviet helicopters were heavily armored against weapons of the sort that the Afghans were using on them.

The US struck a deal with Saudi Arabia such that any funds sent by the US to support the mujahideen would be matched by the Saudis. The freedom fighters were eventually supplied with surface-to-air rockets that could destroy Soviet helicopters. The tide of the battle began to turn.

Funding was increased, and then increased again. It eventually reached $500 million from the US alone. This was matched by the Saudis. This was the biggest covert war in history. A billion dollars was pumped into weaponry that would be used against the invading Soviet army.
The Soviets lost appalling numbers of helicopters and tanks. They were forced to retreat from Afghanistan.

This is recognized as one of the more major conflicts of the cold war, and is thought by many to have been instrumental in the eventual downfall of the Soviet Union.

Aftermath

Once the war was over, the US immediately stopped sending money to the Afghans. With no military incentive, the funds went from $500 million to zero. The Afghans were left with an utterly destroyed country and a spectacular amount of weaponry and guerrilla warfare knowledge. Their country descended into chaos for a number of years, eventually coming to be ruled by the Taliban.

Fast forward to the 2001-present Afghanistan war.

Is it surprising that the war in Afghanistan still smolders now in its tenth year? Is it surprising that the Afghans have managed to destroy large amounts of military hardware. Is it in any way surprising that they are incredibly effective guerrilla fighters?

Is it surprising that they do not thank the US for the help against the Soviet invasion? At this point it is worth noting for clarity that the US’s help was covert, that is, it was hidden. It was hidden by funneling the armaments and money through third parties. It is reasonably likely that many Afghans did not know how much the US helped them in the 80′s. Even if they do know, that is not the whole story. After the Soviets left, the US simply stopped funding anything. They did not even send token support for building roads, schools and infrastructure.

In my opinion, this demonstrated tremendous disregard by the US. The Afghans were, after all, the ones who fought and beat the Soviets in an incredibly bloody and destructive war. The Afghans had served essentially as front-line soldiers in a conflict between the US and the Soviet Union. One would think that they deserved some humanitarian support to rebuild their shattered society after they had served their purpose.

This story must be known more widely. By paying no attention to the humanitarian crisis of the Afghans, the US is complicit in the eventual rise to power of the Taliban. By buying so many weapons for the Afghans, the US is partially responsible for the immense amount of violence that has taken place since the Soviet army left Afghanistan.

Humanitarian action must become one of the primary elements of foreign policy.

Neglect of the world’s humanitarian problems, when we could easily solve them, will cause us continual global grief for decades to come.

Related posts:

1. How much would it cost to end extreme poverty in the world?
2. Voted for Koch on the Corporate Hall of Shame
3. Capitalism’s Labour Transitions – An Argument for Social Welfare

This piece is intended to answer some of people’s questions about how inflation affects what they are being paid.

First of all, what is inflation? Inflation means that money is worth less and less over time.

Example: You live in a country that has inflation (as most countries do, for good reasons which we will not discuss here). If you have $100 dollars right now, you have an incentive to spend it now. If you wait for a year (or a few years), that same $100 will not be able to buy quite as much as it could when you first got it.

The value of a dollar goes down slowly over time.

Inflation and wages

What does this mean for wages? Well, if you are not getting raises that are equal (or higher than) inflation, then you are actually earning LESS each consecutive year.

Examples: Both of these theoretical people live in the same country. Let us assume that this country has a 2% inflation rate per year. (This is a good assumption since most countries aim for an inflation rate around this value.)

Alfred manages to negotiate a raise of 1.5% for this year. Since he doesn’t know what inflation is, he doesn’t realize that at the end of the year, he is actually being paid less value than he was at the beginning of the year. This is because his wage raise of 1.5% is lower than the inflation value of 2%.

Tina understands inflation, and has used this understanding in her negotiations with her employer. She has thus negotiated a wage increase of 3% for this year. She knows that her real wage increase is 1% because 3% – 2% = 1%.

Every wage earner should know this. It is crucial for understanding how much you are really being paid.

Real Wage

We used the concept ‘real wage’ above. A real wage takes into account the effects of inflation.

Real wages in the United States. Image from the Wikimedia Commons.

Example: Joe the boot maker earned $30,000 last year. He managed to get a raise of 2%, so this year he is making $30,000 times 1.02 = $30,600. It looks like he is earning more than last year, but since inflation is 2%, he is actually earning the same amount of value. His real wage has not changed because his raise and inflation are the same amount. He has the same amount of buying power that he had last year.

Wage Stagnation

This is what can happen when inflation rises about as fast as wages do. While people are earning more dollars, they are not earning more purchasing power.

This is really important to understand in the United States. The US has experienced over 40 years of real wage stagnation.

This means that in the last couple decades, the real wage paid for an average hour of work in the US has not increased.

This effect is related to the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the richest few people in the US. The extremely rich people in the US have had their share of the national wealth and income rise dramatically in the last couple decades. These benefits have not been shared equally.

These facts help us understand why it is important for us to begin addressing the growing inequality in American society.

For more information on economics concepts, take a look at our post about Key terms and definitions in economics.

Related posts:

1. Capitalism’s Labour Transitions – An Argument for Social Welfare
2. Releasing some posts in mp3 format
3. How much would it cost to end extreme poverty in the world?

Upon hearing of this poll, I went in and voted for Koch Industries. My recent studies of the US political and media scene have shown that they are behind much of what I dislike in American politics and media.

Coincidentally, I also learned today that Charles Koch has issued a response to the excellent piece by Warren Buffett about how the USA should stop coddling the super rich.

Koch’s response, which has been written about by Lee Fang over at Nation of Change, was:

Much of what the government spends money on does more harm than good; this is particularly true over the past several years with the massive uncontrolled increase in government spending. I believe my business and non-profit investments are much more beneficial to societal well-being than sending more money to Washington.

So…basically Mr. Koch is saying that it is fine for him to only pay a fraction of the tax percentage that is paid by the middle class. Why? Because he thinks his business and investments do a better job than the government. This is certainly one of the most arrogant statements I have ever heard come out of a businessman – and that is saying something!

Koch’s non-profit investments tend to be partisan think-tanks and other actions that further his political agenda. All this while the middle class tends to foot most of the bill for keeping the country running while he and his super-wealthy friends make billions of dollars off the other 99.8% of the population.

One would think that a wealthy business owner would realize the tremendous importance of stable and reliable government as a basis for economic prosperity. However, it is clear that Koch would vastly prefer furthering his own interests and growing his own personal wealth than considering shouldering some of the fiscal burden that is increasingly falling on the middle class – the people who are finding it harder and harder to pay.

This is just one incident involving one extremely wealthy person. The entire corporate world tends to systematically abuse people – and get away with it. Unfortunately, there are political and economic ideologies in this world that tolerate and even applaud such behaviour from corporations. I think that each of us has the responsibility of honestly looking at what these actions are doing to our societies.

We need to make some changes to humanize the role that corporations play in our lives. We need to ratchet back the madness and focus on learning about (and doing) those actions that truly serve our collective long-term prosperity.

If you are new to the subject of the problems caused by corporations in our world, then I highly suggest the excellent documentary The Corporation, which is available on YouTube in 23 parts.

Related posts:

1. How much would it cost to end extreme poverty in the world?
2. Applying free market ideas to politics: How fares the US?
3. Story Of Afghanistan That Everyone Should Know