What is TTIP and why should we be angry about it?

 

Anti-TTIP graffiti in Brussels, Belgium. Photograph: Francois Lenoir/Reuters


Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian

 “Sometimes,” says a character in David Foster Wallace’s novel The Pale King, “what’s important is dull. Sometimes it’s work. Sometimes the important things aren’t works of art for your entertainment.” It is worth bearing that in mind as we consider TTIP, the most boring thing we’re supposed to get angry about since – ooh … was it PFI schemes that nobbled hospitals, eviscerated schools and left Britain £222bn in debt? Or was it the asymmetrical constitutional ramifications inherent in the West Lothian question? Or George Osborne’s incomprehensible pension changes involving auto-enrolment annuities, tax wrappers, pots and draw-downs? Christine Lagarde’s last press conference about the Greek debt crisis? Maybe it was your last mobile phone bill.

Add up the boredom you experienced on each of those occasions, multiply the result by the international coefficient of tedium (which, as you know, is 27.5) and that’s how bored the international trade deal known as TTIP will make you.

The Guardian’s expert on obfuscation by bureaucratese and acronym, Steven Poole, recently argued that TTIP could be a conspiracy to pull some very thick wool over our eyes. We live in an age when we’re so accustomed to being entertained that we haven’t the temperament to do the difficult work of penetrating the wool of boring. So we’re going to take that wool, roll it into a ball and leave it for the cat to play with. No, don’t look at the cat. Look at me. Focus.

FacebookTwitterPinterest Ignacio Garcia Bercero (left), the EU chief negotiator for TTIP, and his US counterpart Dan Mullaney. Photograph: Thierry Charlier/AFP/Getty Images

So, what is TTIP?

Remember when acronyms starting with two TTs were lovely things such as TTFN (ta-ta for now)? TTIP isn’t like that. It stands for Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. Last month, the European parliament voted to allow the European commission to continue negotiations with the United States to create the world’s largest free-trade zone, which is what TTIP is all about.

Conservative trade spokesman Emma McClarkin said: “I welcome the fact that, following weeks of parliamentary ping-pong and attempts by socialist and protectionist MEPs to derail the process, we finally have a clear backing for TTIP.” Right, stop thinking how much fun parliamentary ping-pong sounds, particularly if a cat joins in.

What McClarkin is looking forward to is greater regulatory harmonisation and a consequent boost for business, some of it, incredibly, British. Today, for instance, the US and EU have different regulations testing the safety of cars, drugs and soft furnishings. That imposes costs on transatlantic exporters of cars, drugs and soft furnishings – especially, you would think, on exporters of upholstery for drug dealers’ cars. One possible consequence of harmonisation could be a boost for British car exports. Imagine: one day Americans will be driving trim little Nissans made in Sunderland rather than ludicrous Hummers concocted in the bowels of hell.

There are other projected benefits. US ambassador to the EU Anthony L Gardner argues that TTIP is, if you’ll pardon the expression, geopolitically pertinent, and that it would “provide an economic equivalent to Nato” that would settle “the rules of world trade before others do it for us”. Think about it this way: right now, Vladimir Putin can, if he chooses, strip to the waist for a photo op in which he turns off the gas pipe from Russia to Europe. That’s not good enough. Instead of being dependent on nasty Russian gas and oil, then, as a result of TTIP, the EU might become dependent on lovely American and Canadian gas and oil. That’s one reason behind the EU’s call for a dedicated chapter in TTIP on energy and raw materials. Instead of Russia isolating the EU, the EU could isolate Russia. Sweet.

We have been invited to pronounce TTIP “tea tip”. Don’t these knuckleheads have any sense of history? The world’s most famous tea tip was in Boston in 1773, and that resulted in the marvellous era of transatlantic cooperation known as the American War of Independence.

TTIP is not to be confused with TPP, which is the Trans-Pacific Partnership, involving 12 countries including the US, Australia and Brunei, and which, like TTIP, is still under negotiation.

There is also, incidentally, something called Ceta, which stands for Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement. It is like TTIP but for Canada and Europe and, so far as I understand it, means that Europeans will soon be bathing in maple syrup while reading Margaret Atwood novels. Which is probably nicer than it sounds. Ceta is due to be ratified by the European parliament later this year but the document is currently undergoing a process of what is called “legal scrubbing”, which sounds like the sort of thing Americans do to their chickens, but in fact is another species of the kind of gobbledegook rampant in modern life and means minimising the document’s exposure to legal action.

But that’s not all. There is also Nafta, the North American Free Trade Agreement. It was established in 1994 and, proponents of TTIP think, demonstrates the kind of inspiring benefits and harmonisation of standards that might result if TTIP comes into force. Think of it this way. Just as, thanks to Nafta, for the past 21 years Americans have been saying “aboot” and forming their own mariachi bands, Mounties have been wearing sombreros and Mexicans putting maple syrup on their quesadillas, so in the future, thanks to TTIP, Americans might drink coffee from cups the size of thimbles, while Europeans might wear 10-gallon hats even though, on average, we’ve only got six-gallon-sized heads and so would look ridiculous.

But seriously. How is TTIP going to affect me?

TTIP will hit Europeans like you in the pocket, critics argue, so you need to pay attention. While the European commission estimates that, by 2027, TTIP could boost the size of the EU economy by £94bn or 0.5% of GDP, an economic study by Jeronim Capaldo of the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University argues that the commission’s econometric modelling is jejune and that, in fact, TTIP will clobber Europeans. Capaldo predicts 600,000 European job losses as a result of TTIP, a net fall in EU exports, declining GDPs for EU member states and a fall in Europeans’ personal income.

Why people are so angry about TTIP?

Because Americans are, with all due respect, disgusting slobs always chasing a fast buck and thus very different from us fragrant Europeans who are, like Mary Poppins, practically perfect in every way. One worry is that the main goal of TTIP is to remove EU regulations that stop its citizens being poisoned, killed or subject to rampant pollution so that more profits can be made by corporations on both sides of the Atlantic.

Do you have concerns about TTIP?


For instance, critics argue that if TTIP involves, as the EU hopes, a commitment that would guarantee automatic licences for all future US crude oil and gas exports to Europe, that would result in a boom in US fracking to keep Europeans powered with shale gas, not to mention greater exploitation of oil from Canadian tar sands. Such developments, argue critics, would undermine not just the EU’s fuel quality directive but ruin what is left of the planet worth ruining.

Consider one aspect of TTIP that is giving European critics the particular pip. It involves another acronym, so steel yourselves. That acronym is ISDS, which stands for “investor-state dispute settlement”. This procedure would allow companies to sue foreign governments over claims of unfair treatment and to be entitled to compensation. Similar provisions in other treaties have allowed, for example, tobacco conglomerate Philip Morris to sue Uruguay and Australia for enacting anti-smoking legislation, and a Swedish energy company to take legal action against Germany for phasing out nuclear power.

  An American chicken farm … US food is subject to different regulations. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images

Critics say ISDS provisions undermine the power of national governments to act in the interests of their citizens. According to John Hilary, the executive director of War on Want, leaked documents show that medical and health services, social services, education, post, finance, telecommunications, transport, energy, water, environmental and cultural services are all on the table in TTIP, meaning that American corporations may have full access to them.

That is why there is a big banner outside the US embassy in Berlin that says (try saying this in the whiniest German voice you can muster): “Demokratie ist keine Handelsware,” which means democracy is not for trading.. Of course there is. It is also why there is some unacceptably unfunny graffiti in Malmö that depicts Barack Obama grinning oleaginously as a wooden horse marked TTIP is dragged into Europe.

In the UK, there are fears that ISDS could threaten the NHS because it might allow private firms running hospital services to sue the government if it chose to return the services to the public sector. The French government has already negotiated its film industry’s exemption from these provisions, so why can’t the NHS be, critics ask?

But the idea that ISDS is subverting democracy in favour of wicked corporations is a conspiracy theory, argues the European Policy Information Center, which – unforgivably – is already spelling “centre” the American way. Epicenter (as this group is acronymically known) is made up of groups, such as the UK’s Institute of Economic Affairs, that are in favour of TTIP. It argues that we shouldn’t worry about ISDS provisions. Why? Because the clause is a time-honoured means whereby corporations protect their investments, and does not undermine EU or member states’ right to pursue legitimate public policy objectives.

Or consider food regulations. While the EU has an impressively alliterative “farm to fork” strategy, for instance, regulating each link in the food chain, Americans pump their cattle and pigs with growth-promoting hormones banned in the EU. As a result, most US beef can’t be sold in the EU.

Worse, Americans use 82 pesticides banned in the EU. They wash their chicken in chlorinated water to kill bacteria. Ninety per cent of their soya, cotton and corn is genetically modified, while the EU allows member states to ban GM production. France, for instance, has banned GM, and Gauloises-smoking, beret-wearing toughs now patrol French fields to ensure that the excrescence of GM never sullies la belle France again.

So how could we possibly abandon these glorious European standards? The spectre of what lavishly moustachioed French farmer/anti-globalisation activist José Bové calls la malbouffe Americaine (rubbish American food) lurks behind the fears of this trading alliance. “Yeah?” retort Americans. “So how come you dumbass Europeans got mired in a horse-meat scandal in 2013 if your food regulations are so darn tootin’?” Which, you have to admit, is a good comeback.

Or consider data privacy rights. Don’t Americans realise that us Europeans don’t care to be snooped on by the NSA or have Google peer 24/7 into our very souls? MEPs are worried that TTIP might undermine EU data protection laws, and that’s why they have called for an “unambiguous, horizontal, self-standing provision” in it to guarantee citizens’ right to privacy.

Can something be horizontal and self-standing at the same time, you ask? It seems, I concede, unlikely.

A nurse holds a bag of saline solution … There are fears that trade deals could threaten the NHS. Photograph: Dimitris Legakis/Athena Pictures

Who is angry about TTIP?

Groups as disparate as War on Want and Ukip are united in anger about TTIP, though for different reasons. The Institute of Economic Affairs and the Conservative party are united in not being angry. The Labour party is – surprise! – conflicted.

Let’s consider Labour first. Labour MEP Jude Kirton-Darling, while arguing that ISDS is a “para-judicial and opaque system of private arbitration [that] allows companies to sue governments at great cost to the taxpayer”, also says that TTIP “could present us with a unique chance to regulate globalisation and to promote EU standards”, as well as “providing a much-needed boost to local economies, support to SMEs and new and exciting jobs and training opportunities”.

As for Ukip, Farage and his chums oppose TTIP because they think it’s a smokescreen. It’s not about trade, stupid, it’s about promoting “the political pretensions of a wannabe European superstate” and “setting up a parallel system that undermines national courts and national legal systems”, as the party’s international trade spokesman William Dartmouth MEP said in the European parliament last month.

After the vote went against Ukip’s stance last week, Dartmouth said that the only way citizens can defeat TTIP now is to vote to leave the European Union. But that’s Ukip’s answer to everything.

As for War on Want, its views are more typical of the pressure groups, unions, charities, NGOs and environmentalists that oppose TTIP. There are, for example, 480 such groups affiliated to the Berlin-based Stop TTIP campaign, whose supporting organisations include trade unions like the NUT, NGOs such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace and, my personal favourite, the Pirate Parties of Greece, Germany, Slovenia and the Netherlands, which have no leaders but a splendid flag. The campaign has a 2.3 million-signature petition calling on the EU to “stop these sinister trade deals”, by which it means both TTIP and CETA.

One of War On Want’s major concerns is that TTIP is being negotiated in secret. And with good cause: what nobody seems to have pointed out yet is that if TTIP negotiations do continue, as expected, until next year at the earliest, often in secret with (I suspect) all sorts of complicated car switcheroos, dead letter drops and tooled-up security johnnies in shades talking furtively into their wrists, the costs of negotiations might outweigh any supposed benefits of what they’re negotiating about.

But are TTIP negotiations being conducted in secret? Giacomo Lev Mannheimer of Istituto Bruno Leoni argues that is another conspiracy theory. And, indeed, he points to the dismal truth that there are lots and lots and lots of TTIP-related documents about its benefits, impact on public services, food and agriculture rules. Mannheimer makes a good point, though critics argue that the real meat of negotiations takes place elsewhere and ordinary European citizens don’t get a say in them.

What Mannheimer doesn’t consider is the more disturbing truth that there is an inverse relationship between the number of funny videos on YouTube and the user traffic on European commission websites relating to TTIP.

Indeed, if TTIP is about liberalising the parameters of boring, there are some of us who are prepared to fight back. And when I say “fight back”, I mean kick back on a sofa watching kittens get tickled.

Failures in Maths Teaching

Pervez Hoodbhoy in The Dawn

Our generals say India’s spy agency RAW is up to its nasty tricks again. No evidence provided but, okay, we’ll buy the story for now. There are two good reasons. First, it’s safer not to question the wisdom of generals. Second, they speak from deep experience, having long played the spy-versus-spy game across borders.

So let’s provisionally assume that India’s spies have engineered the odd bomb blast here and there, and send occasional gifts to the BLF or other militant Baloch movements.

But RAW’s alleged antics are pinpricks compared to the massive and irreversible brain damage that Pakistan’s schools, colleges, and universities inflict upon their students.

Imagine that some devilish enemy has perfected a super weapon that destroys reasoning power and makes a population stupid. One measure, though not the only one, of judging the lethality of this hypothetical weapon would be lower math scores.

No such scores are actually available, but for over 40 years my colleagues and I have helplessly watched student math abilities shrivel.

Only the wealthy customers of elite private schools and universities, tethered as they are to standards of the external world, have escaped wholesale dumbing down. As for the ordinary 99pc, with the rare exception of super-bright students here or there, some form of mental polio is turning most into math duffers.

Does being poor at math really matter? After all there are plenty of intelligent people everywhere, even brilliant ones, who hate math and therefore are bad at it. But this is only because they had dull and uninspiring teachers who never taught them that math is a beautiful exercise of reason, one step at a time. Once on track, you quickly realise that math is the most magnificent, surprising, and powerful of all human achievements.

The success of the human species over other forms of life on planet Earth depends squarely on mathematics. Without math the pyramids could not have been built, navigation would be impossible, electricity could not have been discovered and put to use, factories and industries would not exist, computers and space exploration would be unimaginable, etc.

Here’s how bad our situation is: in a recent math class, I had rather typical 18-20 year-olds from non-elite schools. They had studied geometry but their teachers had not exposed them to the notion of proof — the step-by-step process in which one starts with a proposition, carefully constructs arguments, and then triumphantly arrives at the conclusion.

Instead, they were taught math as a hodgepodge of recipes. A few they remembered, the rest were forgotten.

I nearly wept to see that barely three to four students out of 60 could prove the angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees. None could prove that similar triangles have proportional sides. Quite a few had difficulty with fractions, some did not know how to take the square root of four or nine or unless armed with a calculator, and translating even simple real-life situations (like compound interest) into equations was difficult. Twelve-year-old kids in Japan or Europe would have done better.

Their teachers are still worse. Earlier I had the misfortune of teaching math courses to college math teachers. In their late 30s or early 40s, most were staid and stable family men who had come to university, expecting to get a higher degree and hence a higher pay grade.

But for all their years of teaching math, they were blanks. Diluting my nominally ‘advanced math’ course to a beginning level course did not help. My conscience could not allow a single teacher to pass.

Could the use of English — a difficult language for all except ‘O’ and ‘A’ level students — reasonably explain this dreadful situation? I am sympathetic to this point of view and therefore use Urdu exclusively in my physics and math lectures, both in distance learning modules and in real-time teaching (except when a university’s regulations require that I teach in English). But this barely solves 10-20pc of the problem.

So then is the math curriculum at fault? It certainly can be improved but almost the same topics in math and science are listed in Pakistani curricula as would expectedly be covered by a similar cohort internationally. In fact, primary school children in Pakistan are expected to carry a bigger burden than overseas kids.

The impediment to learning proper math is just one — wrong learning goals, wrong attitudes. Mathematics does not require labs, computers, or fancy gadgetry. But it does demand mental capacity and concentration. Nothing is true in math unless established by argumentation based upon a rigorous chain of logic, with each link firmly attached to the preceding one. The teacher who cannot correctly solve a math problem by following the defined logic will suffer loss of face before his students.

Contrast this with the madressah model wherein truth is defined by the teacher and prescribed books. The teacher’s job is to convey the book contents, and the student’s job is to appropriately absorb and memorise. There are no problems to be solved, nor is challenging suppositions or checking logical consistency either encouraged or even tolerated.

Limited to religious learning, such learning attitudes are perfectly fine. But their absorption into secular parts of the education system is disastrous. The hafiz-i-science or hafiz-i-math, which are copiously produced, carry exactly zero worth.

Giving logic a back seat has led to more than diminished math or science skills. The ordinary Pakistani person’s ability to reason out problems of daily life has also diminished. There is an increased national susceptibility to conspiracy theories, decreased ability to tell friend from foe, and more frequent resort to violence rather than argumentation. The quality of Pakistan’s television channels reflects today’s quality of thought.

For too long education reform advocates have been barking up the wrong tree. A bigger education budget, better pay for teachers, more schools and universities, or changing instructional languages will not improve learning outcomes. As long as teachers and students remain shackled to the madressah mindset, they will remain mentally stunted. 

The real challenge lies in figuring out how to set their minds free.

How friendship became a tool of the powerful

William Davies in The Guardian

Imagine walking into a coffee shop, ordering a cappuccino, and then, to your surprise, being informed that it has already been paid for. Where did this unexpected gift come from? It transpires that it was left by the previous customer. The only snag, if indeed it is a snag, is that you now have to do the same for the next customer who walks in.

This is known as a “pay-it-forward” pricing scheme. It is something that has been practised by a number of small businesses in California, such as the Karma Kitchen in Berkeley and, in some cases, customers have introduced it spontaneously. On the face of it, it would seem to defy the logic of free-market economics. Markets, surely, are places where we are allowed, even expected, to behave selfishly. With its hippy idealism, pay-it-forward would appear to go against the core tenets of economic calculation.

But there is more to it than this. Researchers from the decision science research group at the University of California, Berkeley have looked closely at pay-it-forward pricing and discovered something with profound implications for how markets and businesses work. It transpires that people will generally pay more under the pay-it-forward model than under a conventional pricing system. As the study’s lead author, Minah Jung, puts it: “People don’t want to look cheap. They want to be fair, but they also want to fit in with the social norms.” Contrary to what economists have long assumed, altruism can often exert a far stronger influence over our decision-making than calculation.

Such findings are typical of the field of behavioural economics, which emerged in the late 1970s. Like regular economists, behavioural economists assume that individuals are usually motivated to maximise their own benefit – but not always. In certain circumstances, they are social and moral animals, even when this appears to undermine their economic interests. They follow the herd and act according to certain rules of thumb. They have some principles that they will not sacrifice for money at all.

It seems that this undermines the cynical, individualist theory of human psychology, which lies at the heart of orthodox economics. Could it be that we are decent, social creatures after all? A great deal of neuroscientific research into the roots of sympathy and reciprocity supports this. Optimists might view this as the basis for a new political hope, of a society in which sharing and gift-giving offer a serious challenge to the power of monetary accumulation and privatisation.

But there is also a more disturbing possibility: that the critique of individualism and monetary calculation is now being incorporated into the armoury of utilitarian policy and management. One of the key insights of behavioural economics is that, if one wants to control other human beings, it is often far more effective to appeal to their sense of morality and social identity than to their self-interest.

This is symptomatic of a more general shift in policy and business practices today. Across various fields of expertise, from healthcare to marketing, from military training to finance, there is rising hope that strategic goals can be achieved through harnessing the power of the “social”. But what exactly does this mean? As the era of social democracy recedes further into the past, the meaning of the term is undergoing a profound transformation. Where once the term implied something concerning society or the common good, increasingly it refers to a technique of psychological intervention on the individual. Informal social connections and friendships are being rendered more visible and measurable. In the process, they are being turned into possible instruments of power.

Using the social to make money

Over recent years, generosity has become big business. In 2009, Chris Anderson, former editor of Wired magazine, published Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Anderson argued that there was now a strong business case for giving products and services away for free, in order to forge better relationships with customers. Giving things away for free becomes a means of holding an audience captive or building a reputation, which can then be exploited with future sales or advertising. Michael O’Leary, boss of Ryanair, has even suggested that airline tickets might one day be priced at zero, with all costs recovered through additional charges for luggage, using the bathroom, skipping queues, and so on.

What Anderson was highlighting was the potential of non-monetary relationships to increase profits. And just as corporate giving can be used as a way of boosting revenue, so can the magic words that are used in return. Marketing specialists now analyse the optimal way of saying the words “thank you” to a customer, so as to deepen the social relationship with them.

The language of gratitude has infiltrated a number of high-profile advertising campaigns. Around Christmas 2013, Lloyds TSB, one of the British banks to bemost embarrassed by the 2008 financial crisis, launched a campaign consisting entirely of cutesy images of childhood friends enjoying happy moments together, concluding with the words “thank you”, written in party balloons. There was no mention of money. More bizarrely, Tesco, whose brand has suffered in recent years, released a series of YouTube videos in 2013 with men in Christmas jumpers singing “thank you” to everyone from the person who cooks Christmas dinner, to those driving safely, to other companies such as Instagram and so on. Tesco, it was implied, sprays gratitude in all directions, regardless of its own private interests.

There is inevitably a limit to how much of a social bond an individual can have with a multinational company. Businesses today are obsessed with being social, but what they typically mean by this is that they are able to permeate peer-to-peer social networks as effectively as possible. Brands hope to play a role in cementing friendships, as a guarantee that they will not be abandoned for more narrowly calculated reasons. So, for example, Coca-Cola has tried a number of somewhat twee marketing campaigns, such as putting individual names (“Sue”, “Tom”, etc) on their bottles as a way to encourage gift-giving. Managers hope that their employees will also act as “brand ambassadors” in their everyday social lives. Meanwhile, neuromarketers have begun studying how successfully images and advertisements trigger common neural responses in groups, rather than in isolated individuals. This, it seems, is a far better indication of how larger populations will respond to advertising.

All this – along with the rise of the “sharing economy”, exemplified by Airbnb and Uber, offers a simple lesson to big business. People will take more pleasure in buying things if the experience can be blended with something that feels like friendship and gift-exchange. The role of money must be airbrushed out of the picture wherever possible. As marketers see it, payment is one of the unfortunate “pain points” in any relationship with a customer, which requires anaesthetising with some form of more social experience. The market must be represented as something else entirely.

Digitising the social

Yet the greatest catalyst for the new business interest in being social is, unsurprisingly, the rise of social media. At the same time that behavioural economics has been highlighting the various ways in which we are altruistic creatures, social media offers businesses an opportunity to analyse and target that social behaviour. It allows advertising to be tailored to specific individuals, on the basis of who they know, and what those other people like and purchase. These practices, which are collectively referred to as “social analytics”, mean that tastes and behaviours can be traced in unprecedented detail. The end goal is no different from what it was at the dawn of marketing and management in the late 19th century: making money. What has changed is that each one of us is now viewed as an instrument through which to alter the attitudes and behaviours of our friends and contacts. Behaviours and ideas can be released like “contagions”, in the hope of infecting much larger networks.

FacebookTwitterPinterest Illustration by Pete Gamlen

The most valuable trick, from a marketing perspective, is how to induce individuals to share positive brand messages and adverts with each other, almost as if there were no public advertising campaign at all. The business practice known as “friendvertising” involves creating images and video clips that social media users are likely to share with others, for no conscious commercial purpose of their own. The science of viral marketing, or the creation of buzz, has led marketers to seek lessons from social psychology, social anthropology and social network analysis.

Businesses have long worried about their public reputations and the commitment of their employees. It also goes without saying that informal social networks themselves are as old as humanity. Despite the countercultural rhetoric of the “sharing economy”, what has changed is not the role of the social in capitalism, but the capacity to subject it to a detailed, quantitative, economic analysis, thanks primarily to the digitisation of social relationships.

In the longer term, the most profound cultural and ethical implications of this may be how we come to view ourselves and those around us. As data about social ties becomes easier to collect and access, and as concepts of duty and altruism become increasingly understood by economists (as the pay-it-forward study exemplifies), the temptation to ask self-interested, strategic questions about one’s own social circle will arise. Applying the mentality of cost-benefit analysis beyond the realms of the market is often controversial to start with, but can quickly become normal. Government economists today have no problem calculating the price of human life or the natural environment, if it is useful for purposes of policy appraisal.

Could we come to view our own personal acts of generosity and friendship in a similarly utilitarian sense? The evidence to support such an egocentric logic is growing rapidly. The area where there could be most to gain from such calculations is in the domain of health: social contact is good for us, in both body and mind. Just be sure that it is contact with the right people.

Using the social to improve health

In February 2010, I found myself sitting in a large hall, with a huge golden throne on my left, and the future leader of the Labour party, Ed Miliband, to my right. We were watching images on a screen that reminded me of the fractal videos that used to be sold by “herbal remedy” salesmen on Camden market in London in the early 1990s. Also present were a number of government policy advisers, all straining to appear as relaxed as possible – a status game that goes on in the corridors of power, played to indicate that one is at home there. (The game was won under the coalition government by David Cameron’s former adviser, Steve Hilton, who was notorious for wandering into meetings barefoot.)

There were about 10 of us in the room, one of the more baroque offices in the Cabinet Office, and we were all staring at the screen, transfixed by the movement of individual lines and dots that were being displayed. Standing next to the screen, clearly enjoying the impact that his video was having on this influential audience, was the American medical sociologist Nicholas Christakis. Christakis was on a speaking tour, promoting his book Connected, and had been invited to present some of his findings to British policymakers during the dying days of Gordon Brown’s government. As a sociologist with an interest in policy, I had been invited along.

Christakis is an unusual sociologist. Not only is he far more mathematically adept than most, but he has also published a number of articles in respected medical journals. The images we were watching on the screen that day represented social networks in a Baltimore neighbourhood, within which particular “behaviours” and medical symptoms were moving around. Christakis’s message to the assembled policymakers was a powerful one. Problems such as obesity, poverty and depression, which so often coincide, locking people into chronic conditions of inactivity, are contagious. They move around like viruses in social networks, creating risks to individuals purely by virtue of the people they happen to hang out with.

FacebookTwitterPinterest Illustration by Pete Gamlen

Christakis is part of a growing movement within the policy world. While marketers desperately seek to penetrate our social networks in order to alter our tastes and desires, policymakers have come to view social networks as means of improving our health and wellbeing. The “social neuroscience” pioneered by John Cacioppo of the University of Chicago suggests that the human brain has evolved in such a way as to depend on social relationships. Cacioppo’s research suggests that loneliness is an even greater health risk than smoking. Practices such as “social prescribing”, in which doctors recommend that individuals join a choir or voluntary organisation, are aimed at combating isolation and its tendency to lead to depression and chronic illness.

Driven particularly by neuroscience, the expert understanding of social life and morality is rapidly merging into the study of the body. One social neuroscientist, Matt Lieberman, has shown how pains that we have traditionally treated as emotional (such as separating from a lover) involve the same neurochemical processes as those we typically view as physical (such as breaking an arm). Social science and physiology are converging into a new discipline, in which human bodies are studied for the ways they respond to one another physically.

At the Cabinet Office presentation, there was something mesmeric and seductive about Christakis’s images. Could entrenched social problems really be represented by graphics of this sort? Christakis’s technical prowess was certainly alluring. In the grand tradition of American GIs bringing chewing gum and nylon stockings to the British during the second world war, his hi-tech social network analysis seemed novel and irresistible.

But what I found slightly surreal that day, aside from the gold throne, was the freakish view of this particular inner-city US community that we were privy to. Like the social analytics companies, which try to spot consumer behaviour as it emerges and spreads, there we were in London observing how the dietary habits and health problems of a few thousand relatively deprived Baltimore residents were moving around, like a disease. It felt as if we were viewing an ant colony from above. The fact that these flickering images represented human beings, with relationships, histories and agendas, was almost incidental.

It would seem a little perverse to suggest that policymakers ignore this evidence of the impact of social networks and altruism on health. If medical practitioners can change the behaviour of just a few influential people in a network for the better, they can potentially spread a more positive “contagion”. Yet there is a danger lurking in this worldview, which is the same problem that afflicts all forms of social network analysis. In reducing the social world to a set of mechanisms and resources, the question repeatedly arises as to whether social networks might be redesigned in ways to suit the already privileged. Networks have a tendency towards what are called power laws, whereby those with influence are able to harness that power to win even greater influence.

One example of this is known as “emotional contagion”. Psychologists working with social analytics can now track the spread of positive and negative emotions, as they travel through social networks. This was the topic of Facebook’s controversial experiment using newsfeed manipulation, the results of which were published last summer. Different moods, including anger and depression, are now recognised to be more socially contagious than others. But what will we do with this knowledge? The anxiety, as social life becomes swept up by quantitative analysis, is that happy, healthy individuals might tailor their social relationships in ways that protect them against the “risk” of unhappiness. Guy Winch, an American psychologist who has studied this phenomenon, advises happy people to be on their guard. “If you find yourself living with or around people with negative outlooks,” he wrote on the website Psychology Today, “consider balancing out your friend roster.” The impact of this rebalancing on those unfortunate friends with the “negative outlooks” is all too easy to imagine.

The fabric of social life is now a problem that is addressed within the rubric of health policy, and there is something a little sad about that. Loneliness now appears as an objective problem, but only because it shows up in the physical brain and body, with calculable costs for governments and health insurers. Generosity and gratitude are urged upon people by positive psychologists, but mainly to alleviate their own mental health problems and private misery. And friendship ties within poor inner-city neighbourhoods have become a topic of government concern, but only to the extent that they mediate epidemics of bad nutrition and costly inactivity.

The irony is that, for all the talk of giving and sharing, this is potentially an even more egocentric worldview than that associated with the market. The cornerstone of orthodox economics, dating back to Adam Smith, is that self-interest in the marketplace is ultimately beneficial for society. The era of social optimisation looks set to stand this claim upside down: being social in your everyday life is worth it, because it will ultimately deliver benefits back to you. The trouble is that our appetites for this new commodity can spiral out of control.

Addicted to contact

Over the past decade, the ubiquity of digital media – and social media in particular – has become a lightning rod for media hysteria. The internet or Facebook can be blamed for the fact that young people are increasingly narcissistic, unable to make commitments to one another or concentrate on anything that is not interactive, and so on. There is indeed some evidence to suggest that individuals who use social media compulsively are more egocentric, prone to exhibitionism and grandiose behaviour. But rather than treat the technology as some virus that has corrupted people psychologically and neurologically, it is worth standing back and reflecting on the broader cultural logic at work here.

What makes social media so compulsive, even addictive? It is the experience of social life, stripped of all its frustrations and obligations. People who cannot put down their smartphones are not engaging with images or gadgetry for the sake of it: they are desperately seeking some form of human interaction, but of a kind that does nothing to limit their personal, private autonomy.

 FacebookTwitterPinterest Illustration by Pete Gamlen

What we witness, in the case of a social media addict, is only the more pathological element of a society that cannot conceive of relationships except in terms of the psychological pleasures that they produce. The person whose fingers twitch to check their Facebook page when they are supposed to be listening to their friend over a meal is a victim of a philosophy in which other people are only there to please, satisfy and affirm an individual ego from one moment to the next. This inevitably leads to vicious circles: once a social bond is stripped down to this impoverished psychological level, it becomes harder and harder to find the satisfaction that one wants. Viewing other people as instruments for one’s own pleasure represents a denial of the core ethical and emotional truths of friendship, love and generosity.

One grave shortcoming of this egocentric idea of the social is that none (or at least, vanishingly few) of us can ever constantly be the centre of attention, receiving praise. And so it also proves with Facebook. As an endless stream of exaggerated displays of positivity or success, Facebook often serves to make people feel worse about themselves and their own lives. The mathematics of networks means that most people will have fewer friends than average, while a small number of people will have far more than average. The tonic to this sense of inferiority is to make one’s own exaggerated displays of positivity or success, to seek the gaze of the other, thereby reinforcing a collective vicious circle. As positive psychologists are keen to stress, this inability to listen or empathise is a significant contributor to depression.

If wellbeing resides in discovering relationships that are less ego-oriented, less purely hedonistic, than those an individualistic society offers, then Facebook and similar forms of social media are rarely a recipe for happiness. It is true that there are specific uses of social media that lend themselves towards stronger, more fulfilling social relations. One group of positive psychologists has drawn on its own evidence of what types of social relations lead to greater happiness, to create a new social media platform, Happier, designed around expressions of gratitude and generosity, which are recognised to be critical ingredients of mental wellbeing.

What remains unquestioned by such efforts to redesign social networks for greater wellbeing is the underlying logic, which implies that relationships are there to be created, invested in and – potentially – abandoned, in pursuit of individual optimisation. The darker implication of strategically pursuing positive emotion via relationships is that the relationship is only as good as the psychic value that it delivers. “Friend rosters” may need to be “balanced”, if it turns out that one’s friends are not spreading enough pleasure or happiness.

Neoliberal socialism

Our society is excessively individualistic. Markets reduce everything to a question of individual calculation and selfishness. Unless we can recover the values associated with friendship and altruism, we will descend into a state of ennui.

These types of claims have animated various critiques of capitalism and markets for centuries. They have often provided the basis of arguments for reform, whether moderate attempts to restrain the reach of markets, or more wholesale demands to overhaul the capitalist system. Today, the same types of lament can be heard, but from some very different sources. Now, the gurus of marketing, behavioural economics, social media and management are first in line to attack the individualistic and materialist assumptions of the marketplace. But what they are offering instead is a marginally different theory of individual psychology and behaviour, in which the social is primarily an instrument for one’s own medical, emotional or monetary gain.

What we encounter in the current business, media and policy euphoria for being social is what might be called “neoliberal socialism”. Sharing is preferable to selling, so long as it does not interfere with the financial interests of dominant corporations. Appealing to people’s moral and altruistic sense becomes the best way of nudging them into line with agendas that they had no say over. Brands and behaviours can be unleashed as social contagions, without money ever changing hands. Empathy and relationships are celebrated, but only as particular habits that happy individuals have learned to practise. Everything that was once external to economic logic, such as friendship, is quietly brought within it.

How would one break out of this trap? The example of “social prescribing” by doctors is an enticing one. While it starts from a utilitarian premise, that individuals can improve their wellbeing through joining associations and working collaboratively, it also points towards the institutions to make this happen, and not simply more cognitive or behavioural tips. If people have become locked in themselves, gazing enviously at others, this poses questions that need institutional, political, collective answers. It cannot be alleviated simply with psychological appeals to the social, which can exacerbate the very problems they aim to alleviate, once combined with digital media and the egocentric model of connectivity those media facilitate. There is a crucial question of how businesses, markets, policies, laws and political participation might be designed differently to sustain meaningful social relationships, but it is virtually never confronted by the doyens of social capitalism.

It is not very long since the internet offered hope for different forms of organisation altogether. As the cultural and political theorist Jeremy Gilbert has argued, we should remember that it was only a few years ago that Rupert Murdoch’s media empire was completely defeated in its efforts to turn Myspace into a profitable entity. The tension between the logic of the open network and the logic of private investment could not be resolved, and Murdoch lost half a billion dollars. Facebook has had to go to great lengths to ensure that the same mistakes are not made – particularly by anchoring online identities in “real” offline identities, and tailoring its design around the interests of marketers and market researchers. Perhaps it is too early to say that it has succeeded.

The reduction of social life to psychology, or to physiology as achieved by social neuroscience, is not necessarily irreversible. Karl Marx believed that by bringing workers together in the factory and forcing them to work together, capitalism was creating the very class formation that would eventually overwhelm it. This was despite the “bourgeois ideology” that stressed the primacy of individuals transacting in a marketplace. Similarly, individuals today may be brought together for their own mental and physical health, or for their own private hedonistic kicks; but social congregations can develop their own logic, which is not reducible to that of individual wellbeing or pleasure. This is the hope that currently lies dormant in this new, neoliberal socialism.

In rich Qatar, an Indian restaurant lets poor eat for free

The Dawn

 

DOHA: In a dusty corner of Qatar's booming capital, a sign outside a modest restaurant popular with migrant labourers reads: "If you are hungry and have no money, eat for free!!!"

Sixteen kilometres (10 miles) from the gleaming glass towers of Doha, one of the richest places on the planet, sits the “Industrial Area” of small-scale workshops, factories and low-cost accommodation.

It is only a 40-minute drive south of the centre of the Qatari capital and its luxury shops, upmarket brands and expensive restaurants.

But the “Industrial Area”, rarely seen by outsiders, is a different Qatar—one which provides essential labour and materials for the country's massive and relentless expansion.

It is at the margin of Doha life, both geographically and metaphorically, but home to a restaurant called Zaiqa doing something apparently unique for the oil-rich Gulf state.

Workers cook food in 'Zaiqa'.— AFP


About three weeks ago the Indian brothers who own Zaiqa decided to put up a small makeshift sign offering free food to customers who cannot afford to pay.

“When I saw the board I had tears in my eyes,” said one of the owners, Shadab Khan, 47, originally from New Delhi, who has lived in Qatar for 13 years.

“Even now when I talk about it, I get a lump in my throat. “He said the idea came from his younger brother, Nishab.

The 16-seater eaterie stands on the prosaically named Street 23, sandwiched between another restaurant and a steel workshop.

It is a busy area—opposite is a mosque and then a road where large trucks hurtle past.

Inside, on brightly coloured tablecloths, “authentic Indian cuisine from the heart of Delhi” is served 24 hours a day, seven days a week. A fish curry costs six Qatari riyals ($1.65, 1.50 euros), an egg roast is three riyals and a spinach dish of Palak Paneer is 10 riyals—for those who choose to pay.

Workers serving the customers.— AFP


The need for free food in Qatar is particularly acute among labourers and those working in heavy industry.

It is estimated that there are anywhere between 700,000 and one million migrant workers in the tiny Gulf kingdom, out of a total population of 2.3 million.

Rights groups have criticised companies in Qatar for not paying workers on time or, in some cases, not at all. The Qatari government, under pressure to introduce salary reform in the run-up to the 2022 World Cup, vowed earlier this year to force companies to pay wages through direct bank transfers.

Even those who do get paid will be intent on sending most of their money back home, said one of Zaiqa's diners, Nepalese mechanic Ghufran Ahmed.

“Many labourers earn 800-1,000 riyals ($220-$275/200-250 euros) per month.

They have to send money back to home. It's expensive here so there are people who need free food,” he said.

Shadab stands outside the restaurant.—AFP


Shadab, who is a filmmaker as well as a restaurant owner, said those asking for food are mostly construction workers from countries such as India, Nepal and Bangladesh.
Just bread and water

"We realise a lot of people out here do not get paid on time and do not have money, not even money to eat," he said.
"So there were people who would come here and just buy a packet of bread. And they would eat the bread with water."

"So, we realised those people don't have money for anything else. They just buy a packet of bread, which comes to about one riyal. So, we would try to offer them food." But it is not easy, added Shadab.

"Self-respect", he said, means many refuse to take something for nothing.

As a result, in the three weeks since the free food experiment started, “the number of people coming here to get free food is like two or three people a day at the most”.

Shadab Khan, one of the Indian owners of the Zaiqa restaurant, poses for a photograph outside his restaurant in southern suburbs of the Qatari capital Doha.—AFP


As if to emphasise Shadab's point, two workers entered the restaurant while AFP was there but left in case their complimentary lunch should become public knowledge.

In another sign of how people fuelling the Qatari boom are struggling to live, it was recently revealed that some Doha market workers were forced to live in their stalls as they cannot afford rents.

For Zaiqa too, there is a black cloud on the horizon.

The restaurant's future is threatened by a dispute over rent with the property owner and may have to close down. Shadab and his brother have a different plan for their next restaurant.

“We are putting a refrigerator outside, so this refrigerator won't have a lock. It will be facing the road and it will have packets of food with dates on them,” he said.

"So anybody who wants to take it, he doesn't have to come inside."

List of 40 free educational websites

1. ALISON –  over 60 million lessons and records 1.2 million unique visitors per month
2. COURSERA – Educational website that works with universities to get their courses on the Internet, free for you to use. Learn from over 542 courses.
3. The University of Reddit – The free university of Reddit.
4. UDACITY – Advance your education and career through project-based online classes, mainly focused around computer, data science and mathematics.
5. MIT Open CourseWare – Free access to quite a few MIT courses that are on par with what you’d expect from MIT.
6. Open Culture – Compendium of free learning resources, including courses, textbooks, and videos/films.

7. No Excuse List – Huge list of websites to learn from.
8. Open YALE Courses – Open Yale Courses provides free and open access to a selection of introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University All lectures were recorded in the Yale College classroom and are available in video, audio, and text transcript formats. Registration is not required
9. Khan Academy – Watch thousands of micro-lectures on topics ranging from history and medicine to chemistry and computer science.
10. Zooniverse – Take part in a huge variety of interesting studies of nature, science, and culture.
11. TUFTS Open CourseWare – Tufts OpenCourseWare is part of a new educational movement initiated by MIT that provides free access to course content for everyone online. Tufts’ course offerings demonstrate the University’s strength in the life sciences in addition to its multidisciplinary approach, international perspective and underlying ethic of service to its local, national and international communities.
12. How Stuff Works? – More scientific lessons and explanations than you could sort through in an entire year.
13. Harvard Medical School Open Courseware The mission of the Harvard Medical School Open Courseware Initiative is to exchange knowledge from the Harvard community of scholars to other academic institutions, prospective students, and the general public.
14. VideoLectures.NET – the title says it all – amazing video lectures on many topics.
15. TED – Motivational and educational lectures from noteworthy professionals around the world.
16. Shodor – A non-profit research and education organisation dedicated to the advancement of science and math education, specifically trough the use of modeling and simulation technologies. Included in this site are instructional resources, software, interactive lessons, explorations and information about workshops for students, teachers and learners of all ages on mathematics and science. Make sure you check Shodor Interactive – a great collection of interactive math, geometry, fractal, probability, algebra and statistics activities.
17. Udemy FREE Courses – hundreds of experts teach on Udemy every month including New York Times best-selling authors, CEOs, Ivy League professionals and celebrity instructors. Courses include video, live lectures and tools to help teachers interact with students and track their progress. There are many free courses that can teach you business online, law, programming, design, mathematics, science, photography, yoga and many more.
18. Maths & Science – Courses, tests and learning materials about mathematics and science for students from 1 to 12 grade.
19. edX.org – Free courses designed specifically for interactive study via the web, provided by MIT, Harvard, Barkley, Georgetown, Boston University, University of Washington, Karolinska Institute, Kyoto University and many more.
20. iTunes U – Apple’s free app that gives students mobile access to many courses. It offers many free video courses, books, presentations and audio lectures.
21. Liberty Classroom – Owned by bestselling author Tom Woods. Offers some free courses in history and economics, but at the price of one movie ticket a month you can gain access to a lot of useful information. Not completely free, but totally worth it…
22. Drawspace – Hundreds of free drawing lessons.
23. Codeacademy – Easy way to learn how to code. It’s interactive, fun and you can do it with your friends.
24. Duke U – Duke offers variety of free courses on iTunesU.
25. Scitable – A free science library and personal learning tool that currently concentrates on genetic, the study of evolution, variation and the rich complexity of living organisms.
26. My own business – Offers free online business administration course that would be beneficial to new managers and to anyone who is interested in starting a business.
27. Kutztown University’s free courses – The Kutztown University of Pennsylvania’s Small Business Development Center offers more than 80 free business online learning. Kutztown’s courses are individualized and self-paced. Many of the courses feature high-end graphics, interactive case studies and audio streams.
28. Open Learn – Gives you free access to Open University course materials.
29. Free Computer Books – Free computer, mathematics, technical books and lecture notes.
30. Academic Earth – Free video lectures from the world’s top scholars.31. American Sign Language Browser – Teach yourself sign language online
32. BBC Languages – Teach yourself a new spoken language online.
33. unplugthetv – Randomly selects an educational video for you to watch.
34. Lifehacker – Learn to hack life! Tips and tricks for improving all areas of your life.
35. JustinGuitar – Hundreds of free guitar lessons as well as some basic music theory.
36. DuoLingo – Learn a new language for free while helping to translate the web.
37. Layers Magazine – Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Flash, Premiere Pro, In Design and After Effects tutorials.
38. Creative Flow – list of OVER 950 Photoshop tutorials to keep your skillset up to date.
39. Open2study – Open2Study delivers free, high-quality education online. You can study subjects with real value, and in just four weeks you can learn something new, explore the next step in your career, challenge yourself or simply satisfy your curiosity. These subjects are provided by leading Australian institutions, and are taught by academics and leading industry professionals who love to teach. All you need is an internet connection and the desire to study.
40. OEDb – Choose from over 10,000 free online classes