Religion, Ideology and Mindfulness, Part III: the Incommensurability of Religious Experience

Observing Mindfulness

The assertion that a religious experience is incommensurate with a “regular’ experience is common to believers of many persuasions. To be incommensurate is to be on a different level altogether. When two things are incommensurate, they don’t share a common measure and so cannot be compared. The rules that apply to one side are irrelevant to the other.

The conviction of incommensurability protects beliefs from critical scrutiny to the extent that these beliefs are thought to stem from religious experience. Rules of logic and evidence cannot disprove truths that are revealed through such experience. What appears to be false or inconsistent is only so to those who are unable to detect the deeper, revealed truths.

As Keith Yandell puts it in The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Cambridge University Press, 1994):

“…when doctrines appear to be refuted, the temptation to appeal to incommensurability, to ineffability, to self-authentication, to doctrines as mere pointers or ladder steps, apparently is irresistible.” p 321 Although the incommensurability of religious experience may lead believers to devalue the life and experience of nonbelievers, ideological factors are often involved in the degree to which a religious community rejects the life and values of those outside the community.

Ok, now I’m switching from considering mindfulness as a religious movement to considering mindfulness as an ideology. As defined in a previous entry, “ideology” is “a relatively comprehensive and coherent set of convictions (a “vision”) about how humans and the world works, which is powerful enough to influence one’s thinking, feelings, evaluations, and actions.”

According to Teun A. Van Dijk in Politics, Ideology and Discourse – an entry in the Elsevier Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2005) – the following “ideological square” has been found to be pervasive in ideological discourse:

  • Emphasize Our good things
  • Emphasize Their bad things
  • De-emphasize Our bad things
  • De-emphasize Their good things

So, how well does mindfulness ideology fit the specifications of an ideological square? To a tee.

Markets and CEO Pay

Politics and Economics

There is no such thing as the “true” value of units exchanged in a market place. In the market place, value boils down to the point of overlap between what buyers are willing to pay and what sellers are willing to accept. Value is not a property of the object but of the transaction. On the buyer’s side, value is informed by consideration of opportunity costs, alternatives, scarcity, and current market rate (among other things).

People are paid differently for their services. When the pay is in the stratosphere – as in the case of some CEOs – many of us become outraged. “That’s obscene! They don’t deserve that!” The disgust tends to focus on the individual receiving the pay. But pay is another way of saying market value and market value is determined by both sides of a transaction. So an equally indignant question could be “Why were the shareholders willing to pay one person so much money?!”

That changes the focus though. It’s easier to vilify those on the receiving end of huge pay packages – evil CEOs! But it’s shareholders who agree to these packages – and they want to pay big. In fact, shareholders have gotten increasingly generous since SEC reforms forced companies to be more transparent about executive pay. As James Surowiecki put it: “…shareholders, it turns out, rather than balking at big pay packages, approve most of them by margins that would satisfy your average tinpot dictator. Last year, all but two per cent of compensation packages got majority approval, and seventy-four per cent of them received more than ninety per cent approval.”

Granted, in making my point, I’ve used the term “market value” somewhat loosely. The technical definition is: “the estimated amount for which a property should exchange on the date of valuation between a willing buyer and a willing seller in an arm’s-length transaction after proper marketing wherein the parties had each acted knowledgeably, prudently, and without compulsion.” (International Valuation Standards 1 – Market Value Basis of Valuation, Seventh Edition).

Actually, the technical definition is of use here. The SEC regulations making CEO pay more transparent were an attempt to create conditions conducive to proper market valuations – that is, conditions in which “the parties had each acted knowledgeably, prudently, and without compulsion.” The idea being that executive wannabes won’t be able to demand outrageous pay packages because transparency will give the shareholders the necessary information to make reasonable pay decisions. Hah!

So, the shareholders are equally to blame for high CEO pay. Who are these shareholders? They are us. Or, at least, about half of us. That’s right: according to the Fed, in 2013 48.8% of Americans owned stocks (directly and indirectly). That includes money invested for 401Ks and pension funds – ultimately money that will benefit a much broader swath of American society than the despised 1%. Who are the villains now?

How to Feel Better

Scientific Encounters

A few readings and thoughts.

Quoidbach, Jordi, Berry, Elizabeth V., Hansenne, Michel, and Mikolajczak, Moïra Positive emotion regulation and well-being: Comparing the impact of eight savoring and dampening strategies Personality and Individual Differences Volume 49, Issue 5, October 2010, Pages 368–373

From the Abstract:

“…regulatory diversity (i.e., typically using various strategies rather than a few specific ones), was beneficial to overall happiness. Our findings suggest that there are several independent ways to make the best (or the worst) out of our positive emotions, and that the cultivation of multiple savoring strategies might be required to achieve lasting happiness.”

Useful “savoring strategies” included focusing attention on the present moment, engaging in positive rumination, and telling others about positive experiences. The authors conclude: “Hence, our findings contribute to the increasing body of evidence emphasizing the importance of the flexibility of biological and psychological processes for well-being…. our research suggests that practicing as many savoring strategies as possible, whilst avoiding the many faces that dampening can take, is likely the best way to regulate positive emotions.”

The bottom line: no one size fits all. Flexible use of diverse strategies is the way to go. The following meta-analysis came to a similar conclusion:

Aldao, A. Nolen-Hoeksema, S and Schweizer, S. Emotion-regulation strategies across psychopathology: A meta-analytic review. Clinical Psychology Review 30 (2010) 217–237

From the Abstract:

“We examined the relationships between six emotion-regulation strategies (acceptance, avoidance, problem solving, reappraisal, rumination, and suppression) and symptoms of four psychopathologies (anxiety, depression, eating, and substance-related disorders).”

 The authors found in their review of 114 studies rumination and suppression generally made things worse, problem-solving and, to a lesser degree re-appraisal, made things better, and acceptance didn’t have much of an effect. They note that their “findings suggest that certain strategies (i.e., rumination, suppression, avoidance, problem solving) might be more strongly related to mental health than others (acceptance and reappraisal). The relatively small relationships between psychopathology and acceptance and reappraisal are surprising, given the prominent role of these constructs in two major therapeutic approaches: acceptance-based treatments and cognitive-behavioral therapy, respectively.” (232)

 The authors also found that “non-clinical populations showed less of a relationship between specific emotion-regulation strategies and psychopathology than clinical populations” and speculate this “is because the non-clinical populations are more likely to move flexibly between emotion regulation strategies, and this skill is at least as important as the use of any one strategy in determining psychopathology.” (233)

There it is again: flexibility. No one size fits all. Experiment and find out what works. Which brings me to the next study – hot off the presses:

Skorka-Brown, J. Andrade, J., Whalley B. And  May, J. Playing Tetris decreases drug and other cravings in real world settings  Addictive Behaviors Volume 51, December 2015, Pages 165–170

From the Abstract:

“…Previous laboratory research has found that playing Tetris reduces craving strength. The present study used an ecological momentary assessment protocol in which 31 undergraduate participants carried iPods for a week and were prompted 7 times each day, by SMS message, to use their iPod to report craving. Participants reported craving target and strength (0–100), whether they indulged their previous craving (yes/no), and whether they were under the influence of alcohol (yes/no). …Playing Tetris decreased craving strength for drugs (alcohol, nicotine, caffeine), food and drink, and activities (sex, exercise, gaming), with a mean reduction of 13.9 percentage points, effect size f2 = 0.11. This effect was consistent across the week. This is the first demonstration that visual cognitive interference can be used in the field to reduce cravings for substances and activities other than eating.”

So playing Tetris is another useful strategy for increasing well-being. Like other animals, humans enjoy that rush of dopamine. I’m thinking that a little Tetris provides a sufficient dopamine boost to weaken cravings – a form of desire management.

Self-denial alone is rarely enough when dealing with unwanted impulses and desires. In addition to inhibition (“Just Say No!”), successful self-regulation often requires we replace what we want to change with something else, ideally something we find rewarding or pleasurable.

Inhibition without replacement tends to trigger “ironic processes” where the more we want a thought or emotion to just go away, the more it haunts us.

 

 

Religion, Ideology and Mindfulness, Part II

Observing Mindfulness

Note: Throughout these posts, I will frequently illustrate points with quotes from Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness, Kindle Version, Revised Edition 2013; Bantam Books, New York.

By way of quick review: In Varieties of Religious Experience, William James defines religion as “…the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine” (p.38), with the ‘divine’ being “such a primal reality as the individual feels impelled to respond to solemnly and gravely, and neither by a curse nor a jest.” (p. 45). According to Clifford Geertz, religion creates “an aura of utter actuality. It is this sense of the ‘really real’ upon which the religious perspective rests” (Interpretation of Cultures, p. 112; my italics). Borrowing from Robert Jay Lifton and Willard S. Mullins, ideology is a relatively comprehensive and coherent set of convictions (a “vision”) about how humans and the world works, which is powerful enough to influence one’s thinking, feelings, evaluations, and actions.

Mindfulness is both an ideology and a religion. In this commentary, I will often refer to the mindfulness as one or the other, but I don’t intend to use awkward compound words like “religio-ideological”.

In mindfulness discourse, “non-judgmental awareness” is a way of experiencing the world that reveals its true nature. Using the terminology of James and Geertz, non-judgmental awareness is a kind of religious experience that reveals the really real. To be mindful is to be aware is to know the truth. From Kabat-Zinn’s Full Catastrophe Living (FCL):

“I define mindfulness operationally as the awareness that arises by paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.” Introduction to the Second Edition, Kindle page 394

“This feeling, this apprehending, is another way of knowing for us, beyond merely thought-based knowing. We have a word for it in English: awareness. Making use of this innate capacity for knowing, we can investigate, inquire, and apprehend what is so for us in profoundly liberating ways.” Introduction to the Second Edition, Kindle page 387

“Knowing what you are doing while you are doing it is the essence of mindfulness practice. The knowing is a non-conceptual knowing, or a bigger than conceptual knowing. It is awareness itself.” Chapter 1, Kindle page 1120

“…how difficult it is just to listen to the body or attend to our thoughts simply as events in the field of awareness. …As we have seen, the great delusion of separateness that we indulge in, coupled with our deeply conditioned habits of mind, the scars we carry, and our general level of unawareness, can result in particularly toxic and disregulating consequences for both our body and our mind.” Chapter 16, Kindle page 5102

In the discourse of mindfulness, it is through mindful awareness that we catch glimpses of the true interconnectedness of everything in the world (as opposed to the “great delusion of separateness”). This is the world of the really real – the realm of religion.

For those who believe in this particular vision of an interconnected world, awareness is not just a way of experiencing things – it’s a “way of being”. In fact, mindfulness practitioners may find the idea of “experience” too small to capture the profound liberation and the deep “non-conceptual knowing” that awareness is considered to bring. According to this perspective, the standard sense of “experience” reflects a sort of alienated subjectivity (“the great delusion of separateness”), in which we live and suffer alone. In contrast, moments of mindful awareness are “true moments of wholeness” where we are being with the interconnected world (FCL Chapter 4, Kindle page 1964).

Nor, according to FCL, is “awareness” the same as “paying attention”. True awareness arises by paying attention in a particular way (non-judgmentally, in the moment, with acceptance, etc.). But it is much more than a type of attention. Awareness is transformative; awareness can lead to wisdom; awareness reveals and begets harmony, interconnectedness and being. Paying attention alone is or does none of these things.

As a form of religious experience, “awareness” isn’t just any old experience – it is a portal to the really real. To quote and paraphrase Geertz, as religious experience, mindful awareness reveals “a general order of existence” clothed with “an aura of factuality” (The Interpretation of Cultures, p.90).

Footnote: Without being too fancy about it, my definition of “experience” is from wiktionary.org: event(s) of which one is cognizant. These events may include all sorts of things: actions, thoughts, feelings, intuitions, perceptions (at various levels of integration and binding), sensations, proprioception, spatial relations, etc. Some within the mindfulness world might take exception to the assumption of awareness in this definition (“cognizant”) given the “half sleep of unawareness” in which the unmindful masses are thought to be habitually immersed (FCL, Chapter 27, Kindle page 8047).

Decision-Making, The Brain, and You

Politics and Economics

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”     –Rainer Maria Rilke

Fine for the world of contemplation – but what about the world of consequences? Both action and inaction have consequences. To the extent that these consequences matter to us, we have to decide what to do and what not to do – often under conditions of uncertainty and risk.

None of this has to do with “free will”. Even if we wanted to, we can’t refrain from making decisions. The brain is a decision-making machine. Different brain regions are involved in different types of decisions. Whatever brain region is involved, the neuronal processes are pretty much the same: neurons compile and weigh incoming evidence; neurons make rapid and complex probability calculations based on the accumulating evidence. Voila: a decision! We make thousands of them every day.

Insofar as we cannot read the future, we cannot know with certainty the chain of effects put into play by our decisions. Decisions are partly acts of faith, including the decision to do nothing. Even if we are standing still, we are taking a leap into the unknown.

For more on the neuroscience of decision-making, see: http://www.brainfacts.org/sensing-thinking-behaving/awareness-and-attention/articles/2009/decision-making/)

 

Crime, Deterrence, Prison…Oh My!

Politics and Economics

Here’s a summary of the U.S. Department of Justice National Institute of Justice’s “Five Things about Deterrence” July 2014:

  1. The certainty of being caught is a vastly more powerful deterrent than the punishment.
  2. Sending an offender to prison isn’t a very effective way to deter crime.
  3. Police deter crime by increasing the perception that criminals will be caught and punished.
  4. Increasing the severity of punishment does little to deter crime.
  5. There is no proof that the death penalty deters criminals.

DOJ Source: Daniel Nagin, “Deterrence in the 21st Century,” in Crime and Justice in America: 1975-2025 (ed. Michael Tonry, University of Chicago Press, 2013).

Bottom line: more police, less prison time. The DOJ piece says prison doesn’t have much deterrence effect – but if it had no deterrence effect, being caught would have no deterrence effect. How much prison or jail time is enough to make one think twice before committing to some criminal act? I’m thinking one or two years on average, maybe five years max for non-violent crimes. These sentences would be more in line with incarceration policy in other developed countries (see, for instance, Finding Direction: Expanding Criminal Justice Options by Considering Policies of Other Nations by the Justice Policy institute).

Since lengthy sentences have little deterrence value, why should prison time for non-violent crime ever be more than a few years? Let’s reduce prison sentences for non-violent offenders and put the money saved to what truly has deterrence value: more police. And then couple greater police presence with more effort to re-integrate ex-cons into society. Reinstate eligibility for school financial aid. Expand tax credits for employers hiring ex-cons. Increase job placement services and other forms of integration assistance after release.

We should also let out many of the aging prisoners who pose little threat to public safety, even though they originally committed violent crimes. Violence is mostly a young man’s game. Just 14% of violent felons are 40 or older. Recidivism rates also decline with age and, ironically, those with the lowest rearrest rates are those who had been in prison for homicide.

If we let out a bunch of old codgers and reduced prison sentences for most non-violent offenders (about half of the state and federal prison population) so that the overall prison incarceration rate goes down by a third and could then transfer the savings to police salaries, how many extra police would that pay for? About 200,000 – increasing US police numbers from 780,000 to 980,000.

Think about how 25% more police would boost crime solve rates. Right now these rates are abysmal: in 2013 the US crime clearance rate in the United States for all crimes was 40.6% with the following breakdown: 14% for motor vehicle theft, 13% for burglary, 21% for arson, 22% for larceny, 29% for robbery, 40% for forcible rape, 58% for aggravated assault, and 64% for murder and non-negligent homicide.

Of course, a higher solve rate would initially increase the jail and prison populations – but in pretty quick order – thanks to the robust deterrence effect of increased police presence – crime rates would go down, as would the number of incarcerated.

How I arrived at my figures:

Per the Bureau of Labor Statistics: the median annual pay for a correctional officer is about $40,000. In 2012, there were about 470,000 correctional officers in the US. The median annual pay for police officers is about $57,000. In 2012, there were about 780,000 police officers in the US. It costs an average of $31,000 year per inmate incarcerated (ranging from $15,000-$60,000, depending on the state). There are about 1.5 million federal and state prisoners. (I’m leaving out jail inmates for this discussion- it’s complicated enough, thank you).

The above figures would work out to a current state and federal prison budget being about $45 billion. However, a Center for Economic and Policy Research report (The High Budgetary Cost of Incarceration by John Schmitt, Kris Warner, and Sarika Gupta; June 2010) say it’s about $52 billion, so I’ll go with the higher figure.

Translating reductions in sentence length to reductions in overall prison population to reductions in prison budgets is not a straightforward process, so I’m again going to rely on the CEPR Report. According to this report, lengthy prison sentences are largely responsible for the currently high US incarceration rates and if incarceration rates went down to 1993 levels, there would be savings of almost a quarter of total correction budgets. That means about $12 billion in annual savings that could be used to pay for more police.

How many police would that pay for? About 200,000, increasing police numbers from 780,000 to 980,000.

 

Economic Growth and The Environment

The Environment

There’s a U-shaped relationship between per capita GDP and the quality of the environment. “Measures of the quality of the environment do indeed fall in the initial stages of economic growth, but this trend turns around at about $5.000 per capita GDP, with many measures of environmental damage showing improvement from $8,000 onwards.” (Quote from filipspagnoli – although the link doesn’t seem to be working anymore.) Once a country achieves a certain standard of living, inhabitants become less focused on doing whatever it takes to survive and start caring more about the world around them. Poorer countries tend to chop down forests, richer countries to plant them.

Economic growth also promotes technological innovations that reduce GHG emissions, especially in electricity generation, manufacturing, and transportation. Economic growth leads to increased urbanization and falling birth rates. Concentrated human populations are better for the environment than dispersed populations, because more room becomes available for wild habitat. Add in highly productive intensive farming and you’ve got even more land freed up for the flora and the fauna. With fewer humans, less land devoted to agriculture and less dispersion of human populations (e.g., urbanization), you get more and more re-wilding and re-foresting.

But isn’t economic growth associated with higher CO2 emissions and increased materialistic consumption? To a point – but we are witnessing both the decoupling of growth and CO2 emissions and the dematerialization of advanced capitalist societies. So what was true about economic development at one time is not necessarily the case anymore. For instance, in developed economies, young people care more about digital products and less about physical possessions. “Things are disappearing right before our eyes,” writes Russell Belk in Extended Self in a Digital World (Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 40, No. 3 (October 2013), pp. 477-500). Fewer things, less environmental damage.

Of course, economic growth will not solve all environmental problems, nor are its effects entirely benign. But growth is not the bugaboo a lot of environmentalists make it out to be. Harness and manage growth – don’t try to stop it.

Cognitive versus Existential

Explorations Outside the Box

My beef with cognitive approaches to motivation, emotion, and behavior: cognitivists  tend to consider what happens in the head as products of what goes on in the head, with the implicit opposition to what happens  “objectively” “in the world”.  I see what happens in the head as tethered to the world that exists beyond the head.

Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, in Modernity, Cultural Change, and Democracy, assume a similar perspective. They contrast  “existential” to “cognitive” as sources of values.   They discuss the concept of existential insecurity, in which survival is not taken for granted because of lack of economic development. They then propose that the shift from survival to self-expression values in developed societies follows from existential security rather than propagation of self-expression values (e.g., through authorities, elites or the media). One is not taught self-expression values, one does not learn self-expression values; self-expression values take root when the existential conditions are right (of course, the examples of others may have influence, but only if one is receptive and one can only be receptive if one is existentially secure).

 

Book Review: Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

Scientific Encounters

Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. By Sendhi Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir. Time Books, Henry Holt & Company LLC, New York, NY

Scarcity is about a perceived mismatch between what is available (supply) and what is desired (demand). You pay more attention to things associated with scarcity, whether it’s scarcity of guesses, friends, time, or income. Scarcity creates a mindset affecting what we notice, how we decide and how we act. A bit of scarcity can be productive: it concentrates the mind. Too little scarcity (i.e., abundance) can lead to procrastination and general slackerdom: why do today when there’s no hurry? Why be upset about a loss when there’s a lot more where that came from? Too much scarcity (e.g., poverty) can lead to short-term thinking, impulsiveness, and tunnel vision. Extreme scarcity taxes our cognitive bandwidth: executive functions and self-regulatory resources take a real hit.

So far, so good. The authors’ thesis is compelling and well-supported and could become a prolific generator of testable hypotheses. The scarcity construct could also be profitably applied to fields of inquiry beyond economics and psychology. For instance, it would be fascinating to study how the sense of scarcity (too much or too little) influences mate-seeking behavior in areas with lopsided sex ratios.

On the other hand, the authors overstate their case. They minimize the effect of other factors (especially anxiety and environmental unpredictability) on human behavior, at one point saying that the scarcity-induced bandwidth tax “explains everything”, referring to the short-term thinking of poor farmers. The authors also indulge in a lot of “rathering” (to use Daniel Dennett’s term), e.g., saying lack of skills is not a problem for poor people; rather, it’s just that scarcity has overtaxed their cognitive bandwidth. Why not both? After all, if scarcity involves a perceived lack of resources and skills are a personal resource, then possession of skills reduces scarcity.

The authors’ tunnel vision regarding scarcity makes some of their policy suggestions woefully misguided. For instance, since the scarcity mind-set “explains everything”, they say farmer training or new crops will do little to help poor farmers. Excuse me? In the 1930s, in our own country, poor farmers made tremendous strides in productivity exactly through technical education provided by the Department of Agriculture.

(Of course, to the extent that improvements in skills, crops and technology encourage consolidation of small farms to achieve greater efficiencies, poor farmers would still suffer hardship through lack of competitiveness with larger farms. But the problem has shifted from poverty per se to the issue of whether farming small plots of land can ever be anything other than a marginal mode of existence. That is a complicated matter involving various  trade-offs and is beyond the scope of this review.)

And then the authors pooh-pooh interventions to increase self-regulatory strength (i.e., “willpower”), saying there’s little evidence supporting the efficacy of such training. Say what? There’s a ton of empirical support for these kinds of interventions. For a good review, see Self-Regulation and Personality: How Interventions Increase Regulatory Success, and How Depletion Moderates the Effects of Traits on Behavior.

Bottom line: I still recommend this book. While the authors exaggerate its importance, the scarcity mindset hypothesis still has lots of explanatory value and is an important consideration when formulating possible solutions to difficult societal problems.

Environmentally Friendly? Think Again. Part III

The Environment

This is a continuation of a series on how certain sensibilities within the environmental movement could lead to policies that, if applied on a broad scale, would result in net environmental harm.

Shade-grown coffee. Connected to above: sharing the land is less efficient than sparing the land and agricultural inefficiency translates into more land needed for agriculture, which if small landholders are doing this, means they will cut down more and more trees around their farms when times are bad. This is what happens with small “shade-grown” coffee farmers, e.g., Tree Cover Loss in El Salvador’s Shade Coffee Areas Allen Blackman, Beatriz Ávalos Sartorio, Jeffrey Chow RFF Discussion Paper 07-32 May 2007. Also, shade-grown coffee extends coffee production into forested land, decreasing biodiversity in those areas and result in net increase of Co2 emissions. See: Intensification of coffee systems can increase the effectiveness of REDD mechanisms Agricultural Systems Volume 119, July 2013, Pages 1–9.

Get Back to the Land. Rural living in developed countries requires greater energy and land usage per capita. Rural living in developed countries promotes poverty and with increasing development, more car driving. Poverty in rural settings leads to environmental degradation and the loss of wild habitat. In developing countries, rural poverty in agricultural areas is associated with increased birthrates. See, for instance: Global Profile of Extreme Poverty. Prepared by the Secretariat of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network. 15 October 2012.

 Anti-Corporate/Anti-Business. Larger businesses promote economies of scale, higher wages (known as the big firm wage premium), and de-materialization of production, logistics and transportation (meaning fewer emission per unit produced). Of course, there needs to be a mix of large, moderate and small businesses, and monopolistic power should be avoided. But all entities promote their self-interest – that doesn’t make them inherently evil or harmful. Balance of power, reasonable regulation, competition and a diversity of voices in the political process can do much to mitigate the excesses of big companies. To the extent that large successful businesses are more efficient (productivity- and energy-wise) and promote higher standards of living, the better for our planet and for our ability to tackle global warming.