Date: 2024-12-26 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00015718
WORDS AND MEANING
SUSTAINABLE AND UNSUSTAINABLE
The Unsustainability of the Word 'Sustainability'
SUSTAINABLE AND UNSUSTAINABLE
The Unsustainability of the Word 'Sustainability'
Original article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/modeledbehavior/2012/06/13/the-unsustainability-of-the-word-sustainability/#4f4a36c25f95
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
(October 2018) I thought this article might be useful in explaining why it is better to talk about 'unsustainability' rather than sustainability in the context of the economy, the society and the environment. It is amusing but not very helpful.
(December 2022) I have revisited this material some 4 years after I first came across it. The subject here is very important, but the thinking is not very helpful. Sadly this is the norm. None of the 'thinking class' have figured out a way of actually getting something done about the issues that need to be addressed.
I am trying to think of this as a management challenge. I spent the first two decades of my adult life working in professional and corporate organizations. I became a very young CFO and in this role had to be all I could to improve the profit performance of the company. I became successful at this because I used my knowledge of accounting, not to 'fiddle the books' but to learn about the operations of the company and what had the potential to be improved. Initially the staff did not like me because I was pointing out where their operations were not as good as they could be, but when they actually fixed the problems that had been identified, and they got credit for fising them, I became a lot more popular.
I think it is dangerous to be a slave to the numbers. So while I always make the maximum possible useful use of numbers and the data, I also believe that numbers need a certain amount of reality checking. In other arenas this is sometimes referred to as 'ground truthing'. My technique has always to engage in what I referred to as 'management by walking around'. Accounting data is a bit like the proverbial iceberg, only 10% of the iceberg is visible, 90% is under the water and invisible. Walking around with ones eyes open adds a lot to the understanding of the numbers and the opportunities to solce problems and improve.
Early in my career, and in my first job as a financial 'controller', we were a major customer of DuPont, the chemical company. They enaged with my company to deliver a staff training course called 'obeervation and perception'. They started off by going round our facilities with a video camera shooting all sorts of stuff that they were seeing. They then had small groups of the staff go round the plant and make notes about what they had seen. It was literally an 'eye opener'. None of us had seen but a small part of what the DuPont experts had seen ... even the best of us. It is one of the most valuable lessons I ever had ... and accounts for my ability to see problems ... and more important ... possibilities over the ensuing many decades ... more than five !!!!!
Peter Burgess
Adam Ozimek Contributor ... Modelled Behavior Contributor Group ... Adam Ozimek is an economist at Moody's Analytics, where he covers labor markets and other aspects of the U.S. economy.
Jun 13, 2012, 09:08pm (Accessed October 8, 2018)
There's a petty joy in watching your intellectual opponents overreach to the point of self-parody. I felt some of that petty joy while reading a recent articlefrom New York Times food columnist Mark Bittman. In it Bittman discusses the plight of workers in the food service industry. Before I get to the self-parody part I want to talk about the crux of his article.
Of course there's nothing wrong with worrying about low wages. But first note that industries that employ service sector workers tend to be competitive, with lots of local employers competing to hire labor, and so are not very likely to be price setters but rather price takes. So it's not like they are extracting monopsony rents.
So why the blame of the businesses that employ these workers? If as a society we collectively object to people earning less than a certain amount, then why should the moral burden of paying the bill fall on the businesses that hire them? Yes, the businesses benefit from those workers, but so too do the workers benefit from the businesses. And so do the customers. And so do their landlords, and the grocery stores they shop at, and the school districts to which they pay taxes. Life is full of mutually beneficial exchanges, it is unclear from a moral perspective why the burden should fall on those with whom workers exchange labor for wages.
Worse than the condemnation of employers for failing to pay a high enough wages (whatever high enough might be) is blaming them when we as a society do decide to subsidize poor people. I've seen paragraphs like this from Bittman a thousand times before:
There are societal considerations as well as moral ones: Food workers use public assistance programs (including, ironically, SNAP or food stamps), at higher rates than the rest of the United States work force. And not surprisingly, more than a third of workers use the emergency room for primary care, and 80 percent of them were unable to pay for it. These are tabs we all pick up.They are tabs we all pick up because we have decided it is worth it. It was voters collectively, not just the employers of low income workers, who elected to spend this money. Why should the bill fall on employers? Furthermore, the amount of assistance needed to achieve a given standard of living would be less if those who sell food, rents, housing, and clothing to low-income households charged lower prices, but do we blame them for 'the tab'?
There may be good economic arguments for having employers bear some of the burden of raising worker salaries, and in fact in a future post I'm going to argue something like that, but you won't find those arguments from people like Bittman. Instead just moralizing and vague blaming. But all of these arguments so far from Bittman are common, and none rise to the level of self parody. That, he saves for his final paragraph:
If you care about sustainability — the capacity to endure — it’s time to expand our definition to include workers. You can’t call food sustainable when it’s produced by people whose capacity to endure is challenged by poverty-level wages.I suppose Bittman's thought is if you haven't been convinced at this point that 'sustainable' is a meaningless word then you never will, so he might as well wring a few more drops of positive affiliation out of it. One must wonder though, in what sense are the current low wages in the food service industry unsustainable? Are these workers going to implode if they have to endure more years of these wages? Or is Bittman himself going to implode out of angst? And how many more years? When will the implosion(s) occur?
As Bittman uses the word and intends it to be used it is nothing but a meaningless buzzword loosely associated with progressive policies. Of course sustainability can be a meaningful word, but if used meaningfully, and not as Bittman does, it's pretty indefensible. David Friedman made this case best when criticizing his university's sustainability policies:
...I think a reasonable interpretation, based on the word itself and how I see it being used, is that it means doing things in such a way that you could continue doing them in that way forever. If so, the idea that sustainability is an essential, even an important, goal strikes me as indefensible.
To see why, imagine what it would have meant c. 1900. The university existed, it had a lot of students and faculty. None of them had automobiles. Many, presumably, had horses. Sustainability would have included assuring a sufficient supply of pasture land for all those horses into the indefinite future. It might have included assuring a sufficient supply of firewood. It would, in other words, have meant making preparations for a future that was not going to happen.
In any case, I encourage Bittman to continue watering sustainability down to meaninglessness. Better to be a meaningless word than an indefensible one.