Steve Reads

Attention conservation notice: 1800 words on the very excellent, easy-to-read (I basically started and finished it on a train ride from New York to Boston) Cradle to Cradle, eliding into some questions about why corporations haven’t already arrived at McDonough and Braungart’s solutions, if in fact they’re hyper-rational profit maximizers. Brings in Brad DeLong, Seeing Like A State, and The Omnivore's Dilemma : the failure to latch onto M & B’s ideas with both hands seems like an instance of the capitalist insanity that Pollan diagnoses so well.

McDonough’s and Braungart’s point is most succinctly summarized in one of their chapter titles: “Why Being ‘Less Bad’ Is No Good.” Recycling, they say, just postpones the inevitable resource depletion. Plus, recycling normally only takes you one step through the cycle, or less: recycled paper is substantially less strong than new paper, so it needs to be fortified with chemical additives. They give countless examples of processes that seem good but are in fact just less evil. We’re making ourselves less bad by recycling, but we’re not actually solving the larger ecological problem.

The big way to solve it, they say, is for products to assume from the start that they will be thrown away, and embrace that fact. Paper doesn’t recycle well because it wasn’t designed to be recycled; hence it becomes worse with every generation. So Cradle to Cradle is printed on non-paper; it’s recycled plastic. Subject it to a simple chemical process, or to extremely high heat, and the ink detaches to form completely reusable pages. Products need to be infinitely reusable with limited additional processing. People need to be thinking about their products in perfectly closed ecological loops.

The authors envision a day when products will be gleefully thrown on the side of the road as soon-to-be-decomposed litter. Why not build your plastic containers with a little seed inside, so that when they’re thrown overboard they add something to the environment rather than taking away from it? This may sound pie-in-the-sky, but one of this book’s great joys — which keeps it from flying off into Liberal Fairy-Land — is that the authors are architects and industrial designers who’ve spent 20 years designing eco-friendly products and buildings. They impressively helped re-architect the River Rouge factory for the 21st century. Their hopes are quite a bit grander, though: a day when cars themselves will be perfectly recyclable, when their parts can be disassembled, melted down and built into a new, equally high quality car with minimal labor.

The authors’ natural next step is to develop an environmental certification process by which products would be labeled “cradle to cradle” if they’re designed to be environmentally beneficial even when thrown away. This, it seems, is exactly what they’ve done. (Those of my friends who’ve bought environmentally friendly carpeting because they’re concerned about outgassing might look, for instance, at cradle-to-cradle carpet fiber.)

The larger message is that you can’t just look at a product in isolation, or even at a process like recycling in isolation. Look at whole ecosystems, instead. Celebrate organic diversity. Don’t see the world like a corporation, growing one kind of vegetable because it’s cheaper and believing that your responsibility ends at the factory door.

But again, this would be too pie-in-the-sky for the authors’ purposes, not only because they want to make money, but because they need to enlist corporate support if they’re going to get anywhere with their hopes for social improvement. So a good chunk of the book is given over to showing that corporations actually save money in the not-very-long run if they design cradle-to-cradle products. Not least among the savings is avoiding regulation: if your product is only “less bad,” in that it contains (for instance) less mercury, you’ll still have to submit to a government review to make sure you’re being good enough. But if your product is designed from the ground up to help the environment — or even to be edible — you skirt around these environmental problems by design. Just the cost of avoiding regulation, they say, often pays for the re-engineering.

The natural question, then, is: why haven’t companies been jumping on this? Why do American products celebrate consumption-and-disposal over infinite reusability? The natural response is: because consumption-and-disposal is cheaper. But in many cases it’s not, if McDonough and Braungart are right. Instead, companies’ aversion seems to be part of their famous shortsightedness: in the short run, they’re doing what’s best for their stockholders, but they’re not making the investments that would save them lots of money in the long term. But McDonough and Braungart have seemingly brought nontrivial returns to their corporate clients in the space of a decade or less, so this long term isn’t even the famous Keynesian one. Hence their shortsightedness is really short.

Which is really interesting, if you think about it. Why should companies be so shortsighted? If they’re hyper-rational, they’ll have some discount rate: a dollar a year from now is worth only 1/(1+r) dollars today or 1/(1+r)^n dollars n years from now, where r is the interest rate. So maybe a hyper-rational corporation will turn down some long-term projects, but it shouldn’t consistently overlook its own long-term health nearly as often as people accuse it of doing. This is the sort of thing that Cosma Shalizi talks about; there, he blames it on a mismatch between the wishes of the stockholders and those of the management, to be remedied in a particularly cool way.

There could also be an issue of externalities. Maybe the long-term damages accruing to the world from monoculture produce, for instance, never affect the corporations that are perpetrating the damage. As a matter of fact, it seems to be in Monsanto’s interest to keep their particular agricultural model going, wherein crops develop herbicide resistance that requires ever-larger doses of ever-stronger Monsanto herbicides. They see quite clearly the insanity that this is producing, but their own internal calculations may suggest that the party will go on for decades more before anyone cares.

Reading books like Cradle to Cradle and The Omnivore's Dilemma makes it frighteningly clear that the raw economic logic of capitalism may well be self-destructive. Our children develop respiratory illnesses and food allergies at unheard-of rates; we start to suspect that the way our food, water, shoes, clothing, carpeting and 100 products besides are made has something to do with it. Every company is just doing what it needs to do, not looking at the larger picture, and we’re in the crossfire. Some sort of economic coordination starts to seem not only desirable, but absolutely necessary to prevent collective suicide.

It’s pure capitalist logic that tries to make all meat and produce as identical as possible; it’s cheaper to distribute that way, and the factory farms can exploit economies of scale. Cows wallow in a lake of their own shit, but that’s exactly what the economics says we should have. (In fairness, The Omnivore's Dilemma suggests that government policy, particularly the farm bill, has a lot to do with shaping the rewards that tell capitalist enterprises what to raise and how to raise it.)

Which is why Brad DeLong’s review of Seeing Like A State is a little odd. From what I’ve read of Seeing Like A State, James Scott objects to large centralized bureaucracies’ habit of trying to shape their environment and their people to fit a model, rather than adapting their models to the world as it is. DeLong takes real issue with Scott’s claim that

The destruction of metis and its replacement by standardized formulas legible only from the center is virtually inscribed in the activities of both the state and large-scale bureaucratic capitalism.

DeLong retorts:

[W]hen we look around at modern large-scale bureaucratic capitalism, we see what Scott calls “metis” everywhere. Everything from the flick of your wrist so that the supermarket laser-scanner reads the bar code (try it some time) to the virtual experience at flying 747′s that airline pilots gain in simulators to knowing when you have lost your lecture audience and need to back up to knowing when it too risky to drive the moving van over Donner Pass–all of these are forms of metis. Attempts to design-out metis–to turn workers into efficient, pre-programmed automatons as in the imagination of Frederick W. Taylor–usually fail. They fail precisely because they do not make allowance for the importance of local, practical knowledge. And when they fail businesses that recognized the importance of their workers’ skills take up the slack.

Surely capitalism is good for satisfying a lot of people’s wants, and quite often uses local knowledge to design the best products and services for its customers. Surely much of the time, the best product wins and those companies that don’t give customers what they want die. But I hope DeLong doesn’t find it a fatal chink in the armor to realize that sometimes corporations are guilty of the same centralizing tendencies that he hates so much in governments. I don’t have nearly the conceptual arsenal to argue the point right now, but it seems safe to say that, at the very least, economies of scale often contribute to bigness, which in turn contributes to mass standardization, which leads to treating the world as though it were composed of indistinguishable commodities. For evidence of this last, see the portion of Omnivore's Dilemma where Pollan charts the evolution of corn from what we might today call an “artisanal” product – differentiated by manufacturer — to a more or less standard product that can be traded in the thousands of bushels. Corn was not in fact an indistinguishable commodity, but the needs of commerce forced it to be treated that way, which led people to treat it as though it were, which led to massive monoculture which may one day (please, god that I don’t believe in, let it not be so) lead to crop destruction on the scale of the Irish potato famine.

Again, I don’t yet have the skills to argue this as well as I’d like, but: corporations cannot be relied upon, on their own, to get us out of this mess. There is a big coordination problem. It is in Monsanto’s interest, and ADM’s interest, and Cargill’s interest, to keep the process going the way it’s been going. And there are few enough of them that they can collude without even actually talking to one another. One of them moves, and the others know that they all should move the same way. (I believe Posner talks about this somewhere early in Antitrust Law.)

So I wish McDonough and Braungart much luck, and for the sake of the world I hope they become very rich men by convincing corporations that it’s in their best interests to think globally and locally. I just have to wonder, in the meantime, what it is about corporations that makes M & B’s idea so novel.