14 DAY TRIAL // In the modern world, words such as incentives, profit, entrepreneurship, competition, innovation, and economic growth have become clear indicators of capitalism, and of a Western lifestyle. This economic system has become so widespread and rooted in the collective consciousness, that people have been conditioned to think a civilized society equals an open market, one of the main (theoretical) traits of capitalism. Therefore, each time someone brings up the nefarious influence that this system has on certain aspects of life, they feel compelled to label that someone – a blogger or a scientist, it doesn't really matter – as either a fascist, a socialist or a communist.
When people appeal to these types of words to label one man's, or one group's, honest efforts of bringing something up for debate, they essentially cut any possibility for these issues to be discussed. And this can be extremely nefarious in the long-run, especially in science-related fields. Over the years, many have argued that capitalism and innovation don't go well hand-in-hand, and that private sponsorship of the scientific community leads to a host of negative side-effects, including data manipulation and the production of false study results, to please the funder. This is unfortunately beginning to become a very common aspect in science, even if instances in which those responsible are apprehended are few.
Imagine the following situation: You are a researcher looking into the possible side-effects that a certain drug may cause on the heart. The drug itself is meant to treat the spleen, for example, but you need to make sure that people are not putting their lives at risk by using it. After you decide to run this experiment, you realize that you are in dire need of funding. Your nation's government doesn't really have the means to support your work, and so you need to get the money from private sources. The question is, if the company funding you is the same as the one that produced the medicine you are investigating, how is this not a conflict of interests? If your results are against the drug, how will this fare with the people giving you the money?
This is just a very general example, but unfortunately situations such as this occur, and the connections between results and the companies looking for these results are not always clear. There are also experts who want money, and would therefore manipulate data in order to meet criteria drawn out for them by the people paying them, and there are respected scientists who would never touch the conclusions of their datasets, regardless of whom these results would hurt. But the big industry – the main offspring of capitalism – has its own methods of getting under your skin, whether you like it or not.
In the European Union, a recent investigation has established that the tobacco industry, which is worth billions of dollars per year, has successfully influenced the very manner in which authorities take decisions related to major EU policies. By using so-called think tanks and consultancy companies (third parties) to indirectly influence the results of discussions, British American Tobacco managed to create a new framework for the Union's “impact assessment” (IA) analysis, which determines what the potential economic, social and environmental consequences of future laws might be. In this manner, the tobacco industry managed to shift the focus of policies from public health to making profits.
From a strictly capitalistic standpoint, their efforts are extremely-well founded in theory, and have been conducted masterfully. The issue is that, from a human perspective, it is unethical to endanger the lives of hundreds of millions to promote the monetary gains for only a small group. And therein lies the essential contradiction of capitalism. Everyone touts it as the most advanced and “civilized” economical model out there, but it is constructed primarily around centering wealth into the hands of a few. Proponents of this system argue that this approach has the ability to lift living standards across the general population, but how this is achieved is beyond me.
But I was really curious as to how these people believed a fair redistribution of wealth would be achieved under capitalism. So I gathered a group of friends who knew more on the subjects than I did. They study economics, sociology, politics, international relations, and history, and I wanted to place all these facets of capitalism in a single, clearer image. In this “study,” I learned that capitalists consider the fact that only a few people become wealthier a good thing. They argue that a rise in living standards for the upper class is also spread to the lower classes, by some means.
But history has proven that this simply doesn't happen. Rather, the upper class continues to accumulate wealth, and further increases the divide between them and the middle-classes. Surprisingly, this also happens in Communism, with the exception that the difference is not between classes, but between party members and officials on one side, and the rest of the population on the other one. But, while these aspects are debatable, and have represented a topic of discussion between economists for at least a century, the social aspects of capitalism are more clearly and immediately visible.
I'll focus on Africa for this, as it is a great example of how capitalism can destroy, rather than build. The first thing you need to understand is that a free market, a free economy, and a limited role of the state in regulating various aspects of industry is not always a good thing. This is a fundamental truth for African nations, which house the poorest people on the surface of the planet. But these populations are not poor because they chose to be, or because they make no efforts to rid themselves of this stigmata, but because they are kept these way by policies set in place by people saying they are trying to help.
The main architect in this is the United Nations, which is considered by many to be a grandfather figure of sorts, but which is nothing but an endless fight between competing interests. The UN conducts dozens of larger or smaller programs in Africa, all aimed at curbing diseases and poverty, at providing fresh water and food, but somehow they seem to fail. The reason for this was accurately identified by a recent study from Oregon State University Associate Professor of Geosciences Laurence Becker. He shows in his paper how a free market is precisely the reason why Africa remains hungry.
“We have to understand these are often people with little formal education, no extension systems or bank accounts, often no cars or roads. They can farm land and provide both food and jobs in their countries, but sometimes they need a little help, in forms that will work for them. Some good seeds, good advice, a little fertilizer, a local market for their products. A truly free market does not exist in this world. We don't have one, but we tell hungry people in Africa that they are supposed to,” the expert wrote in his paper.
But I'm getting side-tracked again. The point of all this is that there are aspects of capitalism that do not work all the time, some that really do, and some that change the way things should be done. Returning to the field of science, private funding has always been the cause for most rebuttals and scandals. The same holds true for various think-tanks, which argue that there is insufficient proof to test that nicotine is addictive, that smoking causes cancer, that global warming is a fabrication, and that the Earth is flat, and not revolving around the Sun. While for most people these are ludicrous imaginations, they hinder the scientific process considerably, and in the end affect us all considerably.
Take the latest scandals against global warming. They are centered primarily around two aspects – the stolen email from the Climate Research Unit, and the mistake the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) made when assessing how fast glaciers in the Himalaya will melt. Global warming skeptics are currently clinging on to these two arguments to promote their agenda, whereas just one year ago, they were posting comments around the Internet showing that climate change is not real because East Antarctica was not melting, but getting cooler. Now, when scientific studies have (unfortunately) proved them wrong, they moved on to other arguments.
But what I find absolutely remarkable about their arguments – as one who has studied this things – is the direction in which all of these skeptics peddle. The people behind these efforts have a thorough training in a concept called plausible deniability, which they use skilfully. This concept is a preemptive strike doctrine of sorts, which, when put to good use, can have remarkable consequences. And the organizations and corporations behind the new efforts to stifle international measures against global warming are driven by monetary gains, no doubt about this. What is also very interesting for me to observe is how they get common people to rally to their cause.
What they do is very simple. They peddle the idea that global warming is a conspiracy, promoted by the renewable industry, that it is an effort of the world government to gain more control on the population, and that the introduction of carbon credits would somehow destroy the world. This is all well and good, except for a major glitch in their argument. The renewable industry at this point only has a small share of the market, and simply doesn't have the funds required to pay lobbyists, senators, scientists and so on to come up with these results. But you know very well who does.
So, bottom line, we have the oil industry moving against the concept of global warming. This much we do know for sure, as they have made no secret of it. But now, rather than making efforts to match their so-called studies to real scientific data, they changed the register. These corporations – again, driven by the urge for never-ending profits – realized they cannot win scientifically, and have started setting people against scientists, as if science was the devil. This is being constantly done on TV stations, were people are pitted against their doctors, or other profession categories. So it is done very skillfully, and I can't really blame people for falling for it. Without a background training in what propaganda is and how it works, it's very difficult to realize that it's happening. Now, this is called public diplomacy.
To recap, we have the big oil industry, with sufficient money to pay lobbyists and politicians, and with a vested interest in not seeing climate change regulation adopted, who use their money to accuse the scientific community of taking money from the renewable energy industry. While I do appreciate a nice cat-and-mouse game in international politics from time to time, I do not appreciate it being conducted without the public interest in mind. From what you've read above, I think the difference between the goal of capitalism, and those of the general public is fairly clear. What I don't get is how some people can be made so stubborn in their conviction by flimsy evidence, and a few appeals to emotions, that they disconsider everything else that points to the contrary, in just a heartbeat.
For anyone who has studied how politics and economy works, these games of power are immediately transparent. The arguments global warming critics bring to the table don't even make sense from a logical perspective. A global conspiracy is out of the question, the people they name as standing to gain from carbon taxes and global mitigation measures don't have the kind of money they need to affect things, and the volume of peer-reviewed scientific work that point to a different conclusion than that of critics is massive. In other words, the possible reasons they cite for global warming being a manipulation are utter non-sense. What I'm going to say next is probably going to offend some, but the knowledge can be found in history books. The same approach to pitting people against science was taken by the Christian church in the dark ages, and the result was centuries of intellectual blank.
I just want to make one thing perfectly clear. You cannot have an opinion on a complex phenomenon such as global warming without realizing the complexity of the interactions forming between systems that determine it. The ice caps, the oceans, the atmosphere, greenhouse gas emissions, the ozone layer, oceanic currents, and so on, all of these contribute to determining the temperatures on our planet. To hide behind the fact that one winter is colder than the other, or that a certain glacier is increasing in size, is simply childish, and denotes people who would use anything as justification that it's alright to keep doing what they have been doing for years. Consuming a lot more than is needed is something that capitalists impose in the mind of the public since birth, as this is the only way to keep a capitalist-type economy going.
The rule of supply and demand would destroy such a market in an instant if people, once they bought everything they needed, would stop buying. There would be no demands, factories would close, people would be fired, and the economy would collapse. So proponents of capitalism took the high road, and began a campaign of simply making the population buy more useless things. This is especially true in the United States, were shopping is considered to be American – by extension, if you don't buy, you are un-American, therefore not a patriot. What the two have to do with each other is beyond my ability to comprehend.
These are the foundations on which the Western world is built. There are severe inequities in the way wealth is gained, and in how it's distributed, and critics to capitalism, or to its influence in certain areas of everyday life, are painfully aware of this. However, just like the oil industry hinders positive results on global warming, proponents of capitalists apply a preemptive strike doctrine, accusing those who point out the flaws in their system of being Communists, Socialists or Nazis. This is obvious in the case of President Obama, whose attempt at reforming a deeply-unequal and inhumane healthcare system has “won” him the label of being a Socialist.
And most of the people who accuse him are completely in the dark about what Socialism actually means, how it works, and what its effects are. In theory, it is considerably better than capitalism, but practically it has its flaws. Capitalism is also good in theory, but its major flaw is that its goals can easily be high-jacked by ill-willed people. The same holds true for democracy, the form of government that is most of the time promoted right alongside capitalism. Obama saw that American healthcare system as what it was – an approach to providing health services that was oriented on profits rather than on the public health, and which demanded money from the population so as not to let them die.
This is inhumane and unethical, but it generates profit. Somehow, rather than focusing on these important aspects of the conversation, the discussion was somehow moved to why wealthier people should pay from those who were least favored by life. Well, there are two answers for this. One, it's the humane and ethical thing to do (not let your fellow man die when you can help), and second, a healthcare system is for all citizens in a country. If the government is the representative of the public interest, than it shouldn't allow private, profit-driven companies to set their own prices, and deny coverage at will. These corporations, which have made the healthcare system the most expensive in the world, and one of the least efficient, are not interested in making people better, but in producing money.
Bill Gates said about two years ago, “Creative capitalism – it is not just about dollars, it is about the power of innovation. Capitalism has done a great job, but the foundation takes to areas where the mechanism has fallen short. You cannot write checks to get good governance. I do think that great wealth is distorting. My view is that every company should take 5% of their deep innovators, their researchers and really get them to see the needs of the poorest- in their area of work. In almost any industry you can say that there is something that they can do, some expertise that they can bring.”