Drake Bennett

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“Food Feels Different To Many People”

July 3, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

We definitely need GMOs since even if we were friendly to our environment, and we’re certainly not, eventually the climate that allows our agrarian culture would change, and then we would be staring at famine. Even with this scary reality, no one wants to trust Monsanto with the process, the company’s name having become a curse word. From “Inside Monsanto, America’s Third-Most-Hated Company,” Drake Bennett’s Bloomberg Businessweek piece:

“The 32-year-old farmer sits in the bouncing tractor cab, wearing a hooded sweatshirt, a baseball cap, jeans, a Bluetooth headset, and a look of fatigue. The steering wheel is folded up out of the way. When the tractor nears the end of a row, its autopilot beeps cheerfully, and he taps a square on one of the touchscreens to his right. The tractor executes a turn, and he goes back to surfing the Web, watching streaming videos, or checking the latest corn prices. ‘You see how boring this gets?’ [Dustin] Spears asks. ‘I’ll be listening to music for 12 hours. I’ll refresh my Twitter timeline, like, a hundred thousand times during the day.’

Spears is an early adopter who upgrades his equipment every 12 months (next year’s tractor will have a fridge in the cab, he says) and who just bought a drone to monitor his fields. He can afford to: Corn prices are high, and farmers like him can take home hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Still, he thinks such technologies—the smart planter software and sensor array, the iPad app offering planting and growing advice—are only going to get more common. So does the company that makes many of those tools, as well as the high-tech seeds Spears is planting: Monsanto, one of the most hated corporations in America.

In a Harris Poll this year measuring the ‘reputation quotient’ of major companies, Monsanto ranked third-lowest, above BP and Bank of America and just behind Halliburton. For much of its history it was a chemical company, producing compounds used in electrical equipment, adhesives, plastics, and paint. Some of those chemicals—DDT, Agent Orange, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs)—have had long and controversial afterlifes. The company is best known, however, as the face of genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. …

Technology has already dumbed down everything from flying an airliner to filing one’s taxes, and in so doing made those tasks safer and more efficient. But food feels different to many people. ‘You know, when this data-intensive system recommends you buy a certain seed, it’s going to be a Monsanto seed,’ says the author Michael Pollan, a prominent critic of industrial agriculture. ‘So I have a strong objection to letting any one company exert that much control over the food supply. It depends on the wisdom of one company, and in general I’d rather distribute that wisdom over a great many farmers.'”

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“Small Crowds May Actually Be The Smartest”

May 13, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Extrapolating on the Wisdom of Crowds theory, new research suggests that small crowds might be wiser than large ones. Perhaps. But what if it’s a tight-knit community of morons? Would the thinking be good then? What if it’s a politicized group that makes decisions that have immediate benefits for its own members without regard to others or to long-term ramifications? What if we’re talking about a doomsday cult? From Drake Bennett at Businessweek:

“The wisdom of crowds is one of those perfectly of-our-moment ideas. The phrase comes from New Yorker writer James Surowiecki, whose book of that title was published almost a decade ago. Its thesis is nicely summed up in its opening, which describes the 19th-century English scientist Francis Galton’s realization, while attending a county fair, that in a competition to guess the weight of an ox the average of all of the guesses people had submitted (787 in all) was almost exactly right: 1,197 pounds vs. the actual weight of 1,198 pounds, a degree of accuracy that no individual could attain on his own. As individuals we may be ignorant and short-sighted, but together we’re wise.

The implication is that the bigger the crowd, the greater the accuracy. It’s like running an experiment: All else being equal, the larger the sample size, the more trustworthy the result. The idea has a particular resonance at a time when online businesses from Amazon.com to Yelp rely on aggregated user reviews, and social networks such as Facebook sell ads that rely in part on showing you how many of your friends ‘like’ something.

A new paper by the Princeton evolutionary biologist Iain Couzin and his student Albert Kao, however, suggests that bigger isn’t necessarily better. In fact, small crowds may actually be the smartest. ‘We do not find the classic view of the wisdom of crowds in most environments,’ says Couzin of their results. ‘Instead, what we find is that there’s a small optimal group size of eight to 12 individuals that tends to optimize decisions.’

The research started from the fact that, in nature—where, unlike at county fairs, accuracy has life-or-death consequences—many animals live in relatively small groups. Why, Couzin wondered, would so many species fail to take advantage of the informational benefits of the crowd?”

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“I’m Personally Convinced That If It Were Not For Us, We Might Well Have President Romney”

September 22, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Occupy Wall Street gave us a number–99%–that framed the last American Presidential election. The movement is pretty much an afterthought now to most observers, but its founding father, David Graeber, thinks it’s just getting started, mostly because the economic system is still broken, still on the brink. Drake Bennett of Businessweek just did a brief interview with Graeber. An excerpt:

“Question:

Were you disappointed that the Occupy Wall Street movement didn’t accomplish more? 

David Graeber:

I’m personally convinced that if it were not for us, we might well have President Romney. When Romney was planning his campaign, being a Wall Street financier, a 1 Percenter, he thought that was a good thing. That whole 47 percent thing that hurt him so much was something the right wing came up with in response to our 99 percent.

But in terms of changing the whole legislative political direction, I think that’s a lot to ask. We weren’t trying to push specific pieces of legislation. We were trying to create an environment where people could be heard. And I think we did that. We also tried to do something else, which was to create this culture of democracy in America, which really doesn’t have one. And that’s such a major task. The more fundamental the aims of a movement, the longer it’s going to take. We’re organizing in much more constrained and difficult circumstances these days, but it’s still going on. It’s just that people don’t report on it that much.”•

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“Even In Zuccotti Park, His Name Isn’t Widely Known”

December 19, 2011 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

From a recent Drake Bennett Businessweek article about David Graeber, the anarchist anthropologist who is one of the more intriguing anti-leaders of the OWS movement:

“Graeber is a 50-year-old anthropologist—among the brightest, some argue, of his generation—who made his name with innovative theories on exchange and value, exploring phenomena such as Iroquois wampum and the Kwakiutl potlatch. An American, he teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London. He’s also an anarchist and radical organizer, a veteran of many of the major left-wing demonstrations of the past decade: Quebec City and Genoa, the Republican National Convention protests in Philadelphia and New York, the World Economic Forum in New York in 2002, the London tuition protests earlier this year. This summer, Graeber was a key member of a small band of activists who quietly planned, then noisily carried out, the occupation of Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, providing the focal point for what has grown into an amorphous global movement known as Occupy Wall Street.

It would be wrong to call Graeber a leader of the protesters, since their insistently nonhierarchical philosophy makes such a concept heretical. Nor is he a spokesman, since they have refused thus far to outline specific demands. Even in Zuccotti Park, his name isn’t widely known. But he has been one of the group’s most articulate voices, able to frame the movement’s welter of hopes and grievances within a deeper critique of the historical moment. ‘We are watching the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans, a generation who are looking forward to finishing their education with no jobs, no future, but still saddled with enormous and unforgivable debt,’ Graeber wrote in a Sept. 25 editorial published online by the Guardian. ‘Is it really surprising they would like to have a word with the financial magnates who stole their future?'”

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Graeber in conversation with that avuncular capitalist, Charlie Rose;

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Urban Studies: How To Shrink A City

September 8, 2010 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Detroit boomed in the 1920s, as the Industrial Revolution and auto production soared.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and Pittsburgh didn’t shrink in one. Decreasing the scale of a large, struggling city is as challenging, maybe even moreso, than growing one, and a city like Pittsburgh, which once had a thriving working-class economy based on steel, had to get smaller and savvier to survive over the last three decades.

Because of the housing collapse and other factors, quite a number of American cities–many in Michigan and Ohio–will likely need to reimagine themselves on a smaller scale now and in the future. Drake Bennett at Boston.com has an excellent article called “How to Shrink a City,” which looks at this phenomenon. An excerpt:

“Now a few planners and politicians are starting to try something new: embracing shrinking. Frankly admitting that these cities are not going to return to their former population size anytime soon, planners and activists and officials are starting to talk about what it might mean to shrink well. After decades of worrying about smart growth, they’re starting to think about smart shrinking, about how to create cities that are healthier because they are smaller. Losing size, in this line of thought, isn’t just a byproduct of economic malaise, but a strategy.

The resulting cities may need to look and feel very different–different, perhaps, from the common understanding of what a modern American city is. Rather than trying to lure back residents or entice businesses to build on vacant lots, cities may be better off finding totally new uses for land: large-scale urban farms, or wind turbines or geothermal wells, or letting large patches revert to nature. Instead of merely tolerating the artist communities that often spring up in marginal neighborhoods, cities might actively encourage them to colonize and reshape whole swaths of the urban landscape. Or they might consider selling off portions to private companies to manage.”

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