My plans to become a farmer
And music is better together
Dear Friends,
In this week’s newsletter:
Why I, too, fantasize about being a farmer, even though farming sucks
Oil is bad for democracy; what about battery minerals?
How do we know when new technologies create more problems than they solve?
Music is better together
I admit, I occasionally indulge in the cliched fantasy of escaping office life for the farm.1 “What are you going to do next,” they ask. “Oh, I’m thinking of becoming a coffee or maguey farmer,” I say to gauge their reaction. At least once a month, I come across an article about some finance or marketing exec who cashes out to become a farmer or rancher. The impulse is so strong that even struggling Paramount Network managed to produce a hit TV series that has suburbanites dressing like cattle ranchers.
Farming is one of those things that becomes appealing when you no longer have to do it.2 In 1800, 99% of Americans lived on a farm and 83% of workers were farmers. By their own accounts, it sounds like it was a dreadful way to live. Just 50 years later, farmers dropped down to 55% of the workforce, as their children moved to cities and began working in factories. Today, farmers make up less than 1% of U.S. workers.
Sure, industrialization would have never happened without the Scientific Revolution. But more than science, we needed coal and oil.3 Even today, when Tesla opens a solar-powered charging station in Tibet for some good PR, nearly all EVs in China are powered mostly by coal.4
New technologies solve our past problems and leave us with new problems, but does our quality of life actually improve? Holden Karnofsky spent a good amount of time researching that very question and I find his argument persuasive: the quality of life for most humans became considerably worse with the invention of agriculture 12,000 years ago and then finally improved past pre-agricultural quality of life around 1950. With some reservations, life as a hunter-gatherer doesn’t sound so bad —and certainly much better than working as a slave on a tobacco plantation, or a teenager (still!) working long hours a week in a factory. Writing in 1987, before he became a celebrated author, Jared Diamond called the invention of agriculture, “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”
No point crying over spilled milk, right? We became an agrarian society. Which allowed us to become an industrial society. Which allowed us to become a knowledge society. And now we’re using that knowledge to 1) decarbonize the planet, 2) build artificial intelligence systems that could become more knowledgeable than humans, 3) prepare other planets for colonization in case we ruin ours. Quality of life is undeniably better today than it was 100 years ago. And what will happen over the next 100 years is a total mystery.
The EV Boom
I generally dislike city driving, despise my commute, and loathe looking for parking. And yet, I still catch myself getting sucked into car review videos on YouTube about the newest EVs. My employer has an entire philanthropic strategy focused on accelerating EV adoption. When my colleagues were drafting the strategy in 2020, only one out of every 20 new cars was electric. This year it is one out of every five. And by 2030, the IEA predicts it will be one out of every three. California has banned the sale of gas-powered vehicles by 2035 when the IEA says half of all new cars globally will be EVs. That is an astonishing pace of technological adoption.
Cities were filthy and disease-ridden when horses were still the primary mode of transportation in 1910. The invention of the automobile led to cleaner and healthier cities. Until it also led to climate change, segregated neighborhoods, and 1.35 million vehicular deaths per year. It was a technology that solved one problem and created many more. EVs will solve problems too: The transition from oil to electric promises to reduce the total amount of energy by half, according to Tesla’s 2022 impact report. Yet once again, EVs create new problems while solving old ones.
Thursday’s Washington Post had the best overview I’ve seen of the minerals required to produce an EV, where they are mined, and where they are produced — with lots of links to in-depth reporting about the effects of transition mineral mining in Guinea, Indonesia, Bolivia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
When my colleagues from the Environment Program launched their Zero Emission Transportation Strategy in 2021, there wasn’t a single mention of transition minerals or their effects on local communities. Today, they are working with a consultant to explore whether they ought to encourage ethical mining of transition minerals, which are necessary for the green transition, without causing undue harm to workers, the environment, and democracy.
The ‘Green’ Resource Curse
For nearly 20 years, the strategy I work on at the Hewlett Foundation has worked on the so-called resource curse. As visualized below, in countries where most government funding comes from taxes, citizens are more likely to scrutinize how their governments spend money. But in countries where most government funding comes from oil and mining — Venezuela, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Angola — local communities are more concerned with getting their share than monitoring how elected officials spend it.
With the transition from oil and coal to lithium, cobalt, bauxite, and manganese; the map of the resource curse is shifting quickly, and governments are wrestling with how to take advantage of the opportunity while protecting against the dangers. From tax subsidies in the U.S. to nationalization in Chile, governments are trying out a range of approaches to stay competitive through the green transition without causing harm to workers and the environment.
Is there a way to protect democracy in countries affected by the transition mineral bonanza? Will local communities benefit, or will elites pocket the money to pay for luxury apartments in London and Monaco? Governance experts5 have recommended three types of interventions to battle the resource curse: transparency, cash payments, and participatory budgeting. They argue:
If government contracts with mining companies are public, maybe journalists and watchdogs will monitor where the money goes and investigate allegations of corruption.
For years,
has advocated that transparency isn’t enough and more countries ought to adopt the Alaskan model — sending an annual check to all residents for a percentage of overall oil revenue.Some governments have tried out participatory budgeting to give local residents a say in how their government spends money from mining revenue on local development projects.
I was most excited about the third approach. Instead of sending everyone an annual check, why not bring the community together to not just complain about local problems but actually put money into doing something about them? In 2018, I commissioned Guillermo Cejudo and a team of researchers in Mexico to study a pilot project in northern Mexico that let local residents decide how to allocate 7.5% of mining revenue to the local projects they select. The history of mining in the two towns they studied is fascinating, but sadly they found the intervention to be a dud. In the end, it built up locals’ expectations for change but the municipal government lacked the administrative capacity to deliver the projects, deepening disappointment with the government and democracy itself. Like so much, it failed from bad project management.
So maybe Todd Moss is right, and simply writing an annual check to each household is the best way to ensure that corrupt elites don’t take off with all the money from the transition mineral bonanza. But we don’t have to give up on democracy, public spaces, and collective projects. Ideally, some percentage of mining revenue would go directly to citizens, another percentage would build up the administrative capacity of local governments, and the last cut would go to a participatory budgeting program to decide on local projects that contribute to community and collective well-being.
Back to Mexico and PB
Just as I started to fund this work on participatory budgeting in 2017, a wave of populist authoritarians were elected, and the world’s attention shifted to defending rather than deepening democracy. Still, there are some compelling arguments that deepening deliberative democracy is the best way to defend it. One of the fortunate outcomes from that 2017 research on participatory budgeting was the emergence of People Powered, a global hub of researchers, advocates, and public officials interested in improving how they practice deliberative democracy. It’s all extremely idealistic, and I say that as a compliment.
Next week is their international meeting in Mexico City, which will convene deliberative democracy experts from all over the world. I will join them and look forward to being infected by their practical idealism. Also, tacos.
Elon Musk and Henry Ford
100 years from now, how will we assess the impact of the EV? How will it compare with the last 100 years of the gas-powered automobile? The most likely answer, it seems to me, is “Who cares?” Rarely do we consider today if we are better or worse off with cars. We just are. What is the legacy of Henry Ford? It’s probably more tied up with anti-semitism and the Ford Foundation than the production of the Model T, Fordism, or the five-day workweek. And while we now speak about Tesla’s Gigafactory with awe, no one remembers Fordlandia, Henry Ford’s utopian factory town in Brazil’s Amazon jungle. Who would have guessed that the rise of the automobile would eventually create a political platform for Ralph Nader to advocate for mandatory seat belts? Surely, tomorrow’s EVs will lead to new problems, policies, and upstart politicians that we can’t begin to envision today.
🧰 A useful tool: Blended Spotify Playlists
I’ve been pleasantly reminded recently that nothing beats live music with good friends and a good buzz. But we can’t always be in the same place at the same time. And so …
I first tried out Spotify’s “Blend” playlist feature when it came out in 2021, and then I forgot about it. Only this past week did I rediscover the feature and I’m hooked. They don’t make it so easy to find. First, click on the Search tab, and then press “Made For You.” There is a section called “Made For Us” where you can “Create a blend” and send the invitation via text to a friend. Actually, you can choose up to ten friends.
So last week I created Blend playlists with Iris, Mario, Kevin, Revaz, Marsha, Kiet, Damon, Brian, and Sparsh. Every day each playlist updates with a playlist of songs that you both listen to, or songs that one of you listens to that Spotify predicts you’ll both enjoy. Every day I have been discovering new songs that I love, and now I have a list of live shows that I didn’t know I wanted to see with some close friends. If you have more than one Blend playlist, Spotify creates a “Friends Mix” that shows you the most popular recent songs from across all of your friends. Who would have guessed that both Brian and Revaz recently listened to Elliott Smith’s “Angel in the Snow”? (Actually, I totally could have predicted that.) I wasn’t surprised that The Clash’s “Lost in the Supermarket” is a crowd favorite, but I was surprised by Julia Jacklin’s “Be Careful With Yourself,” which I had never heard.
Happy Sunday and have a great week!
David
Maybe that applies to everything. Anyway, it was very weird to be reminded that even back in 2009 I was simultaneously reading about agriculture and artificial intelligence; maybe things don’t move as quickly as we think.
My friend Ted Nordhaus has a fun essay in Jacobin that explains how the backyard, organic, slow-food agriculture of Alice Waters is a fun hobby, but will never feed the modern world.
Daniel Yergin’s book The Prize about how oil shaped the 20th Century has got to be one of the top-five most informative books I’ve read.
Hopefully will soon change.
I read an article like a year ago that more Millennials are getting into farming!