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The Price We Pay for Bezos and Gates? Less Moral Societies
The longer we let inequality define our contemporary daily lives, new research helps us understand, the more the unethical behavior all around us will seem to reflect just the way our world naturally works.
May 08, 2024
Just what exactly happens when a society becomes substantially more unequal, when a few become fabulously richer than the many?
Defenders of our deepest pockets have a ready answer. What happens when wealth starts concentrating at a society’s summit? Nothing we need worry about. In fact, the richer our richest become, these cheerleaders for grand fortune posit, the better the lives the rest of us get to lead.
Or so the American Enterprise Institute’s James Pethokoukis would have us believe.
“Rather than wishing for a world without billionaires, as some radical thinkers do,” Pethokoukis declared last month, “we might want to think about the immense value that uber-successful entrepreneurs provide.”
People who live in highly unequal societies feel “a lower sense of control” and look less askance at unethical behaviors, either from others or from themselves, than do people who live in distinctly more equal societies.
“Without the possibility of amassing significant wealth,” this think-tanker went on to add, “we wouldn’t have benefited from the contributions of entrepreneurs like Bezos and Bill Gates.”
But those “contributions,” researchers have made plain over recent years, have all come at an exceptionally high price. People who live in societies with wide gaps between the wealthy and everyone else turn out to live briefer lives than people who call more equal societies home. People who live in more equal societies, meanwhile, tend to live happier lives than their unequal-society counterparts. They face less crime. Their economies crash less often.
Epidemiologists and economists the world over are exploring all these sorts of phenomena. So are sociologists and political scientists. And, over recent years, psychologists have been jumping big-time into the fray, as an analysis from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management has just highlighted.
One example: Recent studies from Northwestern’s Maryam Kouchaki and her colleagues Christopher To from Rutgers and Dylan Wiwad, a former Kellogg postdoc, have been illuminating how unequal distributions of income and wealth are serving to increase “the acceptability of self-interested unethical behaviors.”
Why do unequal societies tend to be more accepting of this “immoral behavior”? Kouchaki and her colleagues have been exploring that question. They’ve dug deep into huge international data sets that go back decades. They’ve also conducted experiments to dig even deeper into the psyches of both high- and low-inequality societies.
One of these fascinating experiments, involving some 800 participants, used images of ladders to help show how levels of inequality can impact attitudes on the importance of behaving ethically. The research team showed the participants five different ten-rung ladders. Each ladder represented a different society, with each ladder rung representing 10% of each society’s population. The top rung represented the richest 10%, the bottom the poorest.
Upon each rung, the researchers placed images of money bags to indicate the total net worth of households in each particular 10%. In the most equal of these five ladder societies, no one rung carried many more money bags than any other rung. In the most unequal ladder societies, just the opposite. In these unequal societies, the overwhelming bulk of the money bags sat on the ladders’ top-most rungs.
Northwestern’s Kouchaki and her colleagues then asked their experiment’s participants to choose the ladder image that best reflected the distribution of wealth in their own real-life society. They also asked these participants to rate how acceptable unethical behaviors—everything from cheating on exams to illegally downloading software—have become in their own real-life societies.
The bottom line from this particular experiment matched up with the findings from all the rest of this research effort: People who live in highly unequal societies feel “a lower sense of control” and look less askance at unethical behaviors, either from others or from themselves, than do people who live in distinctly more equal societies.
“Overall,” Kouchaki and her colleagues conclude, “our results suggest inequality changes ethical standards.”
Other recent psychological research has come to the same core conclusion.
“When are people more open to cheating?” asked the Canadian researchers Anita Schmalor, Adrian Schroeder, and Steven Heine in a paper published earlier this year. “Economic inequality makes people expect more everyday unethical behavior.”
The longer we let inequality define our contemporary daily lives, this new research helps us understand, the more the unethical behavior all around us will seem to reflect just the way our world naturally works. Economic inequality, in effect, normalizes unethical behavior. The sun will always rise and set, we come to assume, on a deeply unequal world that no mere mortals can ever change.
We need, some observers of our fraying social fabric suggest, more people in public life noble enough to champion basic ethical norms. True, we do need those champions. But what we need even more: a world of distinctly more equal societies.
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Why We Need to Abandon Industrial Farming
Many will argue that chemicals are needed to feed the population, but this is a false dilemma.
May 29, 2023
Our world is being propelled into a techno tyranny where a small band of billionaires owns our information, our water, our energy, and increasingly—our food. The billionaire doing more than most to shape the future of what we eat is Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Not content with being the largest private farmland owner in the U.S., Gates is hell-bent on creating a new green revolution for Africa. Just like the last green revolution in the 1960s, Gates aims to end world hunger by supercharging industrial farming through planting hectare after hectare of "magic seeds" in order to resist bugs and adapt to the climate crisis.
Anyone familiar with the original green revolution in the 1960s may be feeling a tingling sense of déjà vu. Back in 1960, approximately 37% of people living in developing countries were undernourished. Fast forward to 2019 and the number had fallen to 8.9%. This is an achievement that rightly won Norman Borlaug a Nobel Peace Prize. Borlaug—the father of the green revolution—spent his life working to reduce global hunger, and he can hold his head high for a mission accomplished. Unfortunately for Borlaug and the rest of humanity, his method for reducing world hunger was to create genetically modified monocrops which were reliant on massive amounts of pesticides, synthetic fertilizer, and water. This led to the consolidation of farms with the wealthier farmers able to afford the necessary inputs. Those who could not, lost out.
Today, the average farm in the United States is $1.3 million in debt. Noneconomic impacts have been even worse. Our soils are dying, insects are going extinct, bird and mammal populations are crashing, and we are fast approaching a time when demand for water outstrips supply by 40%. While Borlaug may be resting in peace, the unforeseen impacts of his green revolution mean the rest of us may find it difficult to do so. And due to the Messiah complex of billionaires like Gates, we are about to fuel the destruction again. It doesn’t have to be this way. There are other futures we can choose.
We are in the middle of the sixth extinction with as many as 274 species going extinct every day—we have lost an average of 68% of all bird, fish, mammal, amphibian, and reptile species in the past 50 years.
Before we look at an alternative solution, let’s look at the problems industrial agriculture is causing. We are in the middle of the sixth extinction with as many as 274 species going extinct every day—we have lost an average of 68% of all bird, fish, mammal, amphibian, and reptile species in the past 50 years—and the decline is continuing at more than one percentage point per year. Agriculture is the largest cause of these declines—86% of those species threatened—with animal agriculture (60%) the salient perpetrator. A simple switch to plant-based diets could free up enough land that we could leave 50% of our planet to nature, just as the late biologist E.O. Wilson emphasized was necessary in his book Half-Earth. We could also sequester at least 14.7 GtCO2e per year—which is more than double what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states is necessary to remove to limit warming to 2.7°F (1.5°C) by mid-century.
While the majority of our extremely compromised attention is focused on the fast-dwindling species we can witness disappearing, many of the species being lost are out of sight and out of mind. Of the 69,003 vertebrate species, 69% have had their risk of extinction assessed whereas the number of insects to have been assessed is just 0.8%. While the plight of the polar bear might sell more advertising space than Sloane's Urania, E.O. Wilson was correct in his assumption that it was “the little things that run the world.” They might be small, but combined, insects weigh 17 times more than humanity, and whether it be pollinating plants, maintaining soil structure, or dispersing seeds, our insect friends pack a prodigious punch.
Unfortunately, industrialized farming—in addition to light pollution and our warming world—is pushing our tenacious troops to the brink. It is estimated we are losing 2.5% of insect biomass each year and we risk living on a bug-free ball by 2100. While a shift toward plant-based diets will free up the land to provide copious habitat, a shift toward genuine organic farming will ensure insects can thrive on the land unhindered by insecticides. The soil under our feet will also benefit.
In 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote that “a nation that destroys its soils, destroys itself.” The United States is firmly on course for the former, and how long it can avoid the latter is debatable. To the average eye, soil looks like barren brown blobs, but up close and personal, contains a staggering quarter of all biodiversity. It prevents flooding, and drought, and is essential for providing clean water. Just a handful of soil contains billions of microscopic organisms. Sadly, the past tense needs to be used now, because the soil under our feet is being degraded at a staggering 30 soccer fields per minute. That’s around 24 billion tonnes of fertile topsoil being lost every year. Half of our topsoil has disappeared since the industrial revolution. The main reason for this degradation—as with insects—is Borlaug’s package. It’s not just the soil that is being affected, but its inhabitants too. Earthworms help to keep soil healthy and on land that is sprayed with pesticides, they grow to just half their weight and don’t reproduce as well as those where pesticides are not used.
So, how can we get out of this mess? Gates and the billionaire brood wish to convince us that further industrialization is the only answer to feeding 10 billion people. Are they correct? Or are they purely profit-driven? Considering we already grow enough food for 10 billion people yet have 828 million going hungry every night suggests industrialization is not the answer. Many people simply can’t afford to pay for food. If Gates and his ilk are really serious about ending world hunger, perhaps they could cough up the $259 billion that Oxfam claims it would cost. This is a drop in the ocean for the world’s richest; unfortunately, it’s difficult for them to profit from, so it may never happen. Likewise, they could quietly ask supermarkets to stop wasting 30% of all food grown or pay their money-hungry friends in government to stop paying subsidies to harmful industries. It seems highly unlikely that an escalation of the sterile monocrops dependent on fertilizer, pesticides, and herbicides is going to reverse the damage.
Something much more likely to succeed would be a return to our roots. The share of people employed by agriculture has dropped precipitously since 1800. U.S. agriculture has gone from almost 60% of the workforce to 1.36% in 2019. In Britain, barely 1% help to satiate hunger. Globally—since 1991—the share of agricultural employment dropped from 43.7% to 26.76% in 2019. As artificial intelligence begins to strip humans of their worth, imagine if humans began working the land once again. What could be earthlier than returning to the land and reconnecting human animals with the natural world that gives them life?
Removing oneself from the deafening noise of car horns and replacing it with bird song wouldn’t be the only benefit. Organic farmers need less mechanization than conventional farmers and so need less money to get going. Once up and running, they also require fewer inputs and again this reduces overheads. While research into organic versus conventional yields provides varying results, when the time comes to sell the produce, organic produce sells for between 13-22% more than those reliant on chemicals. This is necessary because organic farming requires more labor but remember: This is the whole point. Young Americans between the ages of 24 and 40 are already doing this with around 30,000 opting to relocate each year since 2014. Can you imagine millions of people opting to return to revitalize rural areas? The benefits to these communities left behind by globalization would be immense.
With the climate crisis upon us, it is imperative for young people to get into politics to try and direct their futures down a sustainable path.
Around the world, whether the U.S., U.K., or Japan much of the population living in urban areas tends to be more progressive than those in rural areas. As we have seen with the polarization of the United States, this divide desperately needs to be bridged. What better way than for progressives to move back to the heartlands and get their hands dirty along with those with more conservative leanings? With the climate crisis upon us, it is imperative for young people to get into politics to try and direct their futures down a sustainable path. This is far more easily achieved in lowly populated areas where communities can hold politicians' feet to the flames.
Many will argue that chemicals are needed to feed the population, but this is a false dilemma and it’s worth noting that much of this propaganda comes from the chemical companies themselves. The transition isn’t without hurdles though. The world can thank Sri Lanka for their disastrous attempt at going organic without adequate planning or training for farmers. We can and must learn from their mistakes. We shouldn’t forget, either, that Borlaug himself made this argument 60 years ago when he warned that by “predicting doom for the world through chemical poisoning, the world will be doomed not by chemical poisoning but from starvation.” In the space-race-’60s, perhaps this was hard to argue against. In 2023, however, it is not.
Even if we accept that organic yields are 15% lower than conventional farming, with an area the size of Brazil and North America combined freed up by our switch to plant-based diets or the adoption of cellular meat, we could easily accept lower yields. We don’t necessarily have to accept lower yields though. A 2022 meta-analysis that looked at 30 long-term experiments from Europe and Africa found that ecological intensification (EI) practices had a generally positive effect on staple crop yields. EI refers to the utilization of natural processes instead of human-made inputs such as pesticides and fertilizers to sustain or enhance food production per unit area. These practices include increasing crop diversity, adding fertility crops to add nitrogen naturally, and planting flower-rich habitats around fields to provide natural enemies for crop pests.
Forget food revolutions, forget green revolutions, what we need is not a revolution but an evolution—of consciousness. And we won’t get this in cities saturated with advertising, we won’t get this online, we won’t get this with AI robot vacuums, but we will get it surrounded by nature.Keep ReadingShow Less
Artificially Intelligent Chatbots Will Not Replace Teachers
The best innovation is still people.
Dec 07, 2022
Education pundits are a lot like the guy in the "Distracted Boyfriend" meme.
It's interpersonal relationships that guide the journey and even the most sophisticated chatbot can't do that yet and probably never will have that capacity.
They're walking with teachers but looking around at the first thing possible to replace them.
This weekend it's AI chatbots.
If you've ever had a conversation with Siri from Apple or Alexa from Amazon, you've interacted with a chatbot.
Bill Gates already invested more than $240 million in personalized learning and called it the future of education.
And many on social media were ready to second his claim when ChatGPT, a chatbot developed by artificial intelligence company OpenAI, responded in seemingly creative ways to users on-line.
It answered users requests to rewrite the 90s hit song, "Baby Got Back," in the style of "The Canterbury Tales." It wrote a letter to remove a bad account from a credit report (rather than using a credit repair lawyer). It explained nuclear fusion in a limerick.
It even wrote a 5-paragraph essay on the novel "Wuthering Heights" for the AP English exam.
Josh Ong, the Twitter user who asked for the Emily Bronte essay, wrote, "Teachers are in so much trouble with AI."
But are they? Really?
Teachers do a lot more than provide right answers. They ask the right questions.
They get students to think and find the answers on their own.
They get to know students on a personal level and develop lessons individually suited to each child's learning style.
That MIGHT involve explaining a math concept as a limerick or rewriting a 90's rap song in Middle English, but only if that's what students need to help them learn.
It's interpersonal relationships that guide the journey and even the most sophisticated chatbot can't do that yet and probably never will have that capacity.
ChatGPT's responses are entertaining because we know we're not communicating with a human being. But that's exactly what you need to encourage the most complex learning.
Human interaction is an essential part of good teaching. You can't do that with something that is not, in itself, human--something that cannot form relationships but can only mimic what it thinks good communication and good relationships sound like.
Even when it comes to providing right answers, chatbots have an extremely high error rate. People extolling these AI's virtues are overlooking how often they get things wrong.
Anyone who has used Siri or Alexa knows that--sometimes they reply to your questions with non sequiturs or a bunch of random words that don't even make sense.
ChatGPT is no different.
As more people used it, ChatGPT's answers became so erratic that Stack Overflow--a Q&A platform for coders and programmers-- temporarily banned users from sharing information from ChatGPT, noting that it's "substantially harmful to the site and to users who are asking or looking for correct answers."
The answers it provides are not thought out responses. They are approximations--good approximations--of what it calculates would be a correct answer if asked of a human being.
The chatbot is operating "without a contextual understanding of the language," said Lian Jye Su, a research director at market research firm ABI Research.
"It is very easy for the model to give plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers," she said. "It guessed when it was supposed to clarify and sometimes responded to harmful instructions or exhibited biased behavior. It also lacks regional and country-specific understanding."
Which brings up another major problem with chatbots. They learn to mimic users, including racist and prejudicial assumptions, language and biases.
For example, Microsoft Corp.'s AI bot 'Tay' was taken down in 2016 after Twitter users taught it to say racist, sexist, and offensive remarks. Another developed by Meta Platforms Inc. had similar problems just this year.
Great! Just what we need! Racist, sexist Chatbots!
This kind of technology is not new, and has historically been used with mixed success at best.
ChatGPT may have received increased media coverage because its parent company, OpenAI, was co-founded by Tesla Inc. CEO Elon Musk, one of the richest men in the world.
Eager for any headline that didn't center on his disastrous takeover of Twitter, Musk endorsed the new AI even though he left the company in 2018 after disagreements over its direction.
However, AI and even chatbots have been used in some classrooms successfully.
Professor Ashok Goel secretly used a chatbot called Jill Watson as an assistant teacher of online courses at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The AI answered routine questions from students, while professors concentrated on more complicated issues. At the end of the course, when Goel revealed that Jill Watson was a chatbot, many students expressed surprise and said they had thought she was a real person.
This appears to be the primary use of a chatbot in education.
"Students have a lot of the same questions over and over again. They're looking for the answers to easy administrative questions, and they have similar questions regarding their subjects each year. Chatbots help to get rid of some of the noise. Students are able to get to answers as quickly as possible and move on," said Erik Boylestad Nilsen from BI Norwegian Business School.
However, even in such instances, chatbots are expensive as yet to install, run and maintain, and (as with most EdTech) they almost always collect student data that is often sold to businesses.
Much better to rely on teachers.
You remember us? Warm blooded, fallible, human teachers.
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