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Check out our key concepts here, which will help you to apply a critical thinking lens to this topic, and articulate your ideas about it. These concepts are highlighted.

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A Guardian book review, considering whether we need to reassess the concept of money, and its role in society.

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A Guardian book review, considering whether we need to reassess the concept of money, and its role in society.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How does removing the term ‘money’ from our personal lexicon help us to understand the way the economy works more effectively?

KEY TERMS Widespread idea, Valid explanation, Counterintuitively, Evidence-based conversation

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In the classic 1946 film It's a Wonderful Life, depositors demand their money from a small-town building society. Its manager, George Bailey (in an unforgettable performance by James Stewart), explains that the money is not in the building society's vault; it has been lent to other people in the town. "The money's not there," Bailey pleads. "Your money's in Joe's house ... And in the Kennedy house, and Mrs Macklin's house, and a hundred others."

Bailey's explanation reflects a widespread idea of how banks work.

According to this idea, banks gather funds, such as through retail deposits and wholesale borrowing, then lend out those funds - or a proportion of them. This picture of banking permeates popular culture and popular notions of finance.

In 2008, during the crisis that rocked the foundations of western capitalism, the author and Harvard professor Niall Ferguson published The Ascent of Money. His goal was to explain the underpinnings of the global financial crisis and put it in its historical context.

Ferguson's book repeated uncritically the It's a Wonderful Life explanation of how banking works. Seventeenth-century banks, he explained, had pioneered what would become the foundation of modern finance: "fractional reserve banking". That mode of banking exploited the fact that "money left on deposit could profitably be lent out to borrowers. Since depositors were highly unlikely to ask en masse for their money, only a fraction of their money needed to be kept in the [bank's] reserve at any given time."

The George Bailey-Niall Ferguson explanation of banking is widely held, and, long ago, it was a valid explanation of how banks worked.

Just as banks lend money into existence in the form of IOUs, governments spend it into existence

But as a descriptor of banking today, it is incorrect. Banks don't lend out money from reserves or deposits or other sources of pre-existing funds. Counterintuitively, the loans come first.

When you borrow money and your bank credits your loan account, the account balance is created anew, "from thin air", not from or in relation to existing deposits or other existing money. And as you repay the loan principal, the money created at the time of the loan gradually disappears, reverting to its previous form of airy nothingness.

The Bailey-Ferguson picture of bank lending is back to front, and the nature of bank deposits is also widely misunderstood. The unnerving reality: a positive balance in your bank account does not correspond to a stock of "money" held somewhere for you, over and above the account balance. The account balance is all there is. It is the record of a promise from the bank, effectively an IOU.

Your deposit account is a liability for your bank and, as a depositor, you are no more than one among many of the bank's unsecured creditors.

In normal times a promise from a private bank is nearly as good as a promise from a government or a central bank. But in a crisis the promise is worth much less, and can be worth as little as nothing at all.

These differences in understanding are the tip of an iceberg of confusion that also extends to public finance and fiscal policy.

According to the standard picture of public expenditure and revenue raising, governments can only spend if they first gather money through taxes or asset sales or borrowing. The reality, however, is again the reverse. Just as banks lend money into existence in the form of IOUs, governments spend it into existence.

(From time to time, governments and central banks also make loans, such as for monetary policy and economic development purposes. In those instances, governments and central banks lend money into existence just as private banks do.)

As with money created through bank lending, money created through government spending does not persist and circulate indefinitely through the economy. The slightly shocking and dispiriting reality is that, when you pay your taxes, the money doesn't go into an account or a vault. It is vaporised. The tax payments cancel out the money that was created at the time of the original government spending.

These differences in understanding are not peripheral or inconsequential. Their implications extend far beyond the practical administration of banks and governments.

The standard view dominates the politics of taxation and fiscal responsibility. It also prevails in sections of the academy, where some economists are wedded to the idea of money continually circulating through the economy as a persistent element in a closed system. In reality, money is regularly being created and destroyed, and economic models that don't reflect that fact are not even slightly useful.

(The New Zealand economist Alban William Housego "Bill" Phillips became famous for the Phillips curve, postulating a relationship between rising inflation and unemployment. In 1949 he invented the monetary national income analogue computer, or Moniac. Also known as the financephalograph, this heroically clunky contraption used real liquid, hydraulics and pipes to illustrate how Phillips thought a sealed, circular, money-fuelled economy worked.)

Misunderstandings about money and banking affect the incentives and tactics of the largest private banks, and how well citizens and taxpayers hold governments and financial regulators to account. They prevent us all from having an adult, evidence-based conversation about debt, taxes and monetary policy. Without such a conversation (knowledgeably adjudicated by finance writers and journalists) citizens will forever be bit-part players in capitalism - the irresistible targets of participants with better information.

Protecting customers, taxpayers and the community as a whole from the excesses of modern banking requires a new understanding of the roles of banks and governments in finance; a new understanding of loans, deposits and derivatives as one family of financial contracts; and a new awareness of the privileged position of private corporations in the global financial system.

Crucially, society as a whole needs to think differently about the nature of money -possibly by first discarding the term itself. "Money" encompasses a range of phenomena that have intrinsically different purposes and risks. Commercial bank deposits are materially different to banknotes, for example, which are different to reserve funds. Money as a concept is increasingly outdated and misleading.

A better understanding of money would open up the possibility of important innovations such as lending-only and deposit-only institutions; new mechanisms of financial prudence and oversight; and an integrated monetary and fiscal policy that uses monetary and fiscal levers in concert.

A new financial conversation would make the causes of inter-generational inequities more explicit, and it would allow the community to rethink allowing "too big to fail" banks to earn, year in year out, enormous risk-free profits.

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'Outdated and misleading': is it time to reassess the very concept of money?

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It's regularly being created and destroyed - and economic models that don't reflect that fact are not even slightly useful

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A Guardian article, considering whether it's more correct to now refer to 'globalisation' as 'glocalisation.'

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A Guardian article, considering whether it's more correct to now refer to 'globalisation' as 'glocalisation.'

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Not bad. But not great either. That summed up the mood as the World Economic Forum ended in Davos last Friday with a panel on the state of the global economy. Not bad because most countries outperformed expectations of a year ago. Not bad because sharply rising interest rates didn't plunge the US, the eurozone and the UK into recession. Not bad because the war between Israel and Hamas has failed to send oil prices shooting above $100 a barrel.

Not great because central banks face a balancing act between cutting interest rates too quickly and reigniting inflation, and keeping them too high and plunging their economies into recession. Not great, because the early weeks of 2024 have led to a wider Middle East conflict, with implications for one of the world's main trade routes. And not great because - as Davos showed - the global economy is deeply fractured.

Inevitably, there is a risk that things will turn out badly in 2024. One leading global policymaker, speaking privately, said that repeated blows since 2020 mean it would be wise to be braced for the next surprise shock. Only the most incurable Davos optimist would quibble with that.

Washington and Beijing are in a grim struggle for economic supremacy. The gap between north and south is widening, and liberal democracy is being challenged by a new breed of autocrats. The planet continues to heat up. In a week that marks the 100th anniversary of Lenin's death, there are once again competing visions of what constitutes progress and success.

Even so, the death of globalisation has been much exaggerated. The reach of the multinational companies and the banks that continue to flock to the World Economic Forum were evidence of that. As is the rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI), part of a tech revolution that cuts across borders and which is leaving national regulators floundering in its wake. A year ago, ChatGPT was in its infancy. This year, AI was central to the Davos debate, with those hailing its potential to help solve pressing problems - such as the climate crisis - ranged against those warning of its risks.

So globalisation is not dead, nor even on its last legs. The same goes for the demise of western liberal democracy. To be sure, productivity has been weak and living standards have been squeezed in recent years. Germany's finance minister, Christian Lindner, raised eyebrows when he said his country was the tired man of Europe. But there are good reasons why there are no TV pictures of migrants or asylum seekers trying to get into Russia or China.

What is true is that having been pushed on to the defensive, global capitalism is morphing into something different. Peak globalisation - along with peak Davos - happened a while ago, around the time of the global financial crisis of 2008, but it has been the repeated shocks since 2020 that have changed the dynamic.

Everything that has happened since the arrival of the Covid pandemic has pointed to a new paradigm: some call it de-globalisation, others call it - perhaps more accurately - " glocalisation ".

An ugly term, glocalisation is not the global free market, and it is not autarky (a nation that operates in a state of self-reliance), but something in between. It involves shorter supply chains, an emphasis on building back domestic manufacturing capacity, and a more strategic role for government. As with any form of mixed economy, the degree of glocalisation varies from country to country.

Where once Davos lionised frictionless supply chains stretching from China to the developed countries of Europe and North America, now there is a recognition that low cost is not everything and that there is value in governments knowing that they will not run short of vaccines, protective equipment, computer chips and energy. The attacks on cargo vessels in the Red Sea, necessitating much longer journeys around the Cape of Good Hope is the latest example of how vulnerable long supply chains have become. As Christine Lagarde, the president of the European Central Bank, said at the final Davos session: "We were relying on efficiency over security a little too much." Lagarde noted, correctly, that a bit of rebalancing was no bad thing.

The long-term causes of glocalisation lie in the increasingly fractious relationship between the US and China - a relationship that has been deteriorating since Washington woke up to the threat posed by China's rapid growth and its clearly signalled plan to use its economic power to challenge America's global hegemony. The US Chips Act and the Inflation Reduction Act are both examples of American determination to rebuild its industrial base through active government intervention.

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But while the shift towards on-shoring previously outsourced production would have happened anyway, it has certainly been accelerated by the events of the past four years: a pandemic, then supply chain bottlenecks, a surge in inflation, and the war in Ukraine.

The upshot is that industrial policy is no longer a dirty word, even in Davos. Indeed, there was plenty of interest at the WEF in what Labour's plans to boost the supply side of the UK amounted to.

Nick Stern, author of the seminal report on the economics of climate change, thinks there is a potential sweet spot where the demands for stronger growth and the fight against global heating intersect. AI, he says, can act as an accelerator to help developing countries both with climate change mitigation and adaptation. He is not blind to the pushback by the fossil fuel industry against steps to combat global heating, but thinks the positives outweigh the negatives.

Stern insists investing for good green projects would be good for growth and fiscally responsible. A green light for Labour's green growth plan, in other words. And glocalisation in action.

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Globalisation, though not dead, is fading: 'glocalisation' is becoming the new mantra | Larry Elliott

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Industrial policy such as a green growth plan is no longer a dirty word as nations realise shorter supply chains and a strategic state role are necessary

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A Conversation article, looking at the Red Sea Crisis, and how it creates a crisis for global commodities. 

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A Conversation article, looking at the Red Sea Crisis, and how it creates a crisis for global commodities. 

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British people are known around the world for their love of tea. This is borne out by the statistics: a staggering 50 billion cups of tea are consumed on average in the UK every year.

Most of this tea is made using black tea leaves, most of which are not produced in the UK. Thus, shipping disruption caused by attacks on merchant vessels in the Red Sea, through which an estimated 12% of global trade passes each year, has sparked fears of a national tea shortage.

The attacks, which are being carried out by the Yemeni Houthi rebel militant group in support of Hamas, have forced shipping companies to redirect around the southern tip of Africa - a journey that can take up to three weeks longer.

Two of the UK's biggest suppliers of tea, Tetley and Yorkshire Tea, have announced that they are monitoring their supply chains closely for any potential disruptions. And customers have reported reduced stocks of tea in supermarkets across the UK.

It is no surprise that tea is vulnerable to supply chain disruption. The tea supply chain is a complex global network, involving producers, processors, auctions and wholesalers, packers, distributors and retailers.

The UK imports primarily unprocessed tea from countries in south Asia and east Africa. This tea is then packaged and blended within the UK for both domestic and export markets. Only around 10% of the packaged tea sold in the UK is supplied by companies from overseas.

But tea is one of many items to be caught up in the supply chain crisis. The disruption is affecting supplies across various other sectors too, including electric cars and liquified natural gas - and it could prove costly.

The UK is particularly reliant on natural gas for the production of carbon dioxide, a gas that is essential for everything from NHS operations to keeping food fresh while it is transported.

Not so unpredictable

The disruption caused by the Red Sea attacks is considered by some to have been an entirely unpredictable occurrence of what is known as a "black swan" event. But this crisis is the latest in a long line of shocks to global supply networks that have occurred over the past decade.

Whether it was the 2011 tsunami off the coast of Japan, Brexit, COVID, US trade sanctions on China, or the war in Ukraine, the fact of the matter is that supply chains are now experiencing disruption more often than they used to.

There are two reasons for this. First, organisations have become increasingly reliant on distant countries for the manufacturing and supply of routine and critical components.

Sometimes this decision is made because of the natural advantage these countries hold. For example, China currently accounts for 93% of the global production of so-called rare earth elements, which are used in the components of many of the devices we use every day. But most of the time these decisions are driven by an organisation's pursuit of lowering its cost of operation.

Second, a focus on just-in-time production, where businesses focus on producing precisely the amount they need and delivering it as close as possible to the time their customers need it, has reduced the buffer against supply chain shocks.

Building resilient supply networks

Organisations need to diversify their supply chains by developing alternate sources of supply. Many businesses already spread their source of materials over multiple suppliers across different regions to ensure quality, the continuity of supply, and to minimise costs.

For less complex components, such as packaging (cardboard, plastic bags and bubble wrap) or raw materials (metals and plastic), multiple sourcing is often practised through competitive tendering and reverse auctions; where the sellers bid for the prices at which they are willing to sell their goods and services.

However, for more complex products, the development of alternate sources of supply needs to be done strategically. One of the most important steps to improve supply chain resilience is to reduce reliance on global suppliers through processes called "onshoring", "nearshoring" and "friendshoring".

Onshoring is where components are sourced from suppliers located within domestic national borders. Nearshoring is a similar strategy where a company moves its supply to neighbouring countries. And friendshoring is where organisations transfer their production away from geopolitical rivals to friendlier countries.

The US, for example, has traditionally relied on Taiwan and South Korea for its supply of semiconductors (computer chips). But geopolitical tensions with China, coupled with a global shortage of semiconductors, have forced the US to look for suppliers in countries closer to home, while also exploring the potential of moving chip manufacturing to the US.

Geographical and climate factors restrict the onshoring of tea cultivation to the UK. But these supply strategies could help businesses manage the risk of supply chain disruption to other, potentially more critical, commodities.

Making supply chains more agile

The frequency with which global supply chains are now becoming disrupted means that organisations must rethink their supply chain strategies, evolving from being efficient and lean to flexible and agile.

An agile supply chain strategy will require businesses to maintain adequate inventory levels to guard against a situation where stock runs out. These inventory levels must be informed by real-time - or as close to real-time as possible - data on customer demand.

The disruption to the UK's tea supply highlights the vulnerability of supplies of everyday essentials to unexpected events. But businesses can make sure they are better prepared for the occurrence of an unexpected event by enhancing the resilience of their supply chain through diversification and agility.

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Red Sea crisis: with fears of a UK tea shortage, worries are brewing over other crucial commodities

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Tea supplies are under threat as a shipping crisis continues in the Red Sea.

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A Guardian article, looking at how garment workers in Bangladesh face violent reprises when they ask for fairer pay and conditions.

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A Guardian article, looking at how garment workers in Bangladesh face violent reprises when they ask for fairer pay and conditions.

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When Masuma Akhtar arrived at the garment factory where she works on the outskirts of Dhaka on 31 October, she was expecting a normal shift. Instead, she was met with brute violence. "The moment I walked through the factory gates, a group of armed men began beating me with wooden sticks," says Akhtar. "I fell down on to the ground. Even then they wouldn't stop beating me."

Akhtar, 22, is a seamstress at Dekko Knitwears in Mirpur, where she spends long days churning out clothes for western fashion brands, including Marks & Spencer and C&A.

Bangladesh is one of the world's biggest producers of fast fashion, pumping out millions of tonnes of clothing every year to meet the demands of the world's most popular clothing brands, which are drawn to this small South Asian country where orders - and the labour needed to fulfil them - come cheap.

Although most fast fashion brands that source from Bangladesh claim to support a living wage, they are only required to pay the workers who make their clothes the legal monthly minimum wage, which is one of the lowest in the world and has remained set at 8,000 taka (£58) since 2018.

Negotiations over a new minimum wage for garment workers in Bangladesh have sparked mass demonstrations on streets across the capital. The protests have escalated since the government announced a minimum wage increase for the workers, from 1 December, to 12,500 taka (£90), far below the 23,000 taka a month workers say they need to keep their families from starvation.

Factory owners and police have responded to workers' protests with threats and violence. The beatings she received by armed men at Dekko Knitwears left Akhtar with a broken arm. "They hit my back, my thighs and my arms repeatedly," she says. Now, without use of one of her arms, she is unable to work. "I don't know how I will survive the rest of the month," she adds.

Masuma Akhtar's arm was broken when she was beaten by armed man at Dekko Knitwears in Mirpur. Photograph: Sazzad Hossain

Other workers at Dekko Knitwears say that the men beating them concentrated on their hands and arms. "They started hitting us mercilessly," says Bushra Begum, 25, another worker. "My livelihood depends on my hands, and they targeted them viciously."

Her colleague Rita Anwar, 26, tried to run away but was chased down the road by three men. "I am covered in blood clots," she says, pulling up her sleeve to reveal her injuries. "My back is black with bruises. The pain is so much that I can barely walk."

Before they left, the men issued a warning: the workers were not to take part in any more protests - or they would face consequences.

They can threaten and beat us but if we accept their ridiculous wage proposal, we will starve to death anyway

Naima Islam

As protests in Dhaka turned increasingly violent, three garment workers have been killed, allegedly after being shot by police in the first wave of protests. And last Wednesday, another woman died after being shot in the head.

Factory owners also threatened to shut down production and withhold wages by applying a "no work, no pay" rule. Over the weekend, more than 150 factories closed "indefinitely", as police issued blanket charges for 18,000 workers in connection with the demonstrations.

Workers were warned of dismissal if they continued to protest and the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association, a trade body, called for all factory recruitment to be paused, making it difficult for protesters to find work elsewhere.

But despite the violent crackdown on workers, those who have spoken to the Guardian are determined to see the fight through to the end.

"They are trying to silence us but we won't back down," says Naima Islam, a machine operator at Columbia Garments. "They can threaten and beat us but what they don't understand is, we have nothing to lose. If we accept their ridiculous wage proposal, we will starve to death anyway."

Islam, 28, is one of thousands of protesters who have had police reports filed against them, which trade unionists fear may soon lead to mass arrests. Many believe it is an attempt to forcefully suppress the wage increase movement.

But that hasn't deterred Islam and her co-workers. "We are not asking for much. This entire industry is built off our backs - the least we deserve is the bare minimum to survive," she says.

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Nazma Akter, president of local trade union Sommilito Garments Sramik Federation, condemns the violence against protesting workers. "The Bangladesh government must ensure workers are able to exercise their rights to freedom of association and collective bargaining without fear of violence, reprisal, or intimidation," she says.

Garment workers block a key intersection during a protest in Dhaka on 12 November. Photograph: Abdul Goni/AFP/Getty Images

In a statement, Marks & Spencer said: "These are very serious allegations and we are urgently investigating them. We would never tolerate violence or intimidation of workers and set out very clearly in our global sourcing principles that workers must be guaranteed freedom of association and a safe workplace, as well as fair and transparent wages. As a member of the Ethical Trading Initiative, we have supported the tripartite minimum wage negotiations between the unions, Government Wages Board and the Employers' Association - and we continue to support cross-sector calls for an increase that provides a decent standard of living for workers."

A spokesperson for C&A said: "We are aware of the incident that took place in Bangladesh, and we are in close contact with the supplier to investigate. We condemn all types of violence, and we have a longstanding commitment to ensure the safety and health of all workers in our supply chain."

PVH did not respond to a request for comment.

Dekko Knitwears and Columbia Garments were approached for comment but did not respond.

Fashion brands sourcing from Bangladesh have said they support workers' calls for a higher minimum wage. In a joint letter in September, brands including Asos, Primark and H&M, wrote that they recognised their role in "supporting wage developments". But rights groups argue that this means little if brands don't agree to pay their suppliers more.

Yesterday, Human Rights Watch and Clean Clothes Campaign called on brands to take responsibility for their workers' wages and pay their suppliers more. Aruna Kashyap, associate director for corporate accountability at Human Rights Watch says: "Wage increases have consequences for suppliers' costs and eat into their profit margins."

"Brands themselves are driving low wages with their unfair pricing and purchasing practices," she adds. "To preserve their own profits, brands are putting themselves first."

Names have been changed to protect identities

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Bangladesh garment workers fighting for pay face brutal violence and threats

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Workers describe hands and arms being targeted in 'merciless' beatings as protests over low wages turn increasingly violent in Dhaka

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A Big Think article, in which Michael O'Sullivan argues that globalization is doomed.

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A Big Think article, in which Michael O'Sullivan argues that globalization is doomed.

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Is globalization doomed? Economist Michael O’Sullivan believes so.

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Why one expert believes it is knocking on death’s door.

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A Guardian article, looking at how Egypt's nomad visas are luring foreign workers, but creating inequality. 

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A Guardian article, looking at how Egypt's nomad visas are luring foreign workers, but creating inequality. 

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Egypt’s economic woes lure digital nomads – but cast others out to sea

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While the Red Sea resort of Dahab draws those who earn dollars and can work anywhere, a third of Egyptians live in poverty and see a perilous voyage to Europe as their only hope

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An Aeon animation, portraying US immigration as rings on a developing tree.

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An Aeon animation, portraying US immigration as rings on a developing tree.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE This is a rather beautiful way of portraying immigration numbers, showing them as the thickening rings of a growing tree. Is this a helpful way of communicating the reality of this political issue? What insight (if any) do we gain from this that we don’t from looking at straight statistics? Why do you think the creators of this animation chose to represent immigration in the form of a tree – and how does that influence the way we process the data?

KEY TERMS Political data-visualisation

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With the overheated rhetoric around immigration dominating the political sphere, an imaginative, historically rooted perspective can be something of a tonic. This short video from Pedro M Cruz, a data-visualisation designer and assistant professor at Northeastern University in Boston, uses nearly two centuries of United States census data (1830-2015) to convey the country's population growth through immigration. Cruz depicts these accumulating figures as an ageing tree trunk, with each new ring accounting for a decade of population growth, and each coloured cell representing 100 immigrants from a cultural-geographical region. According to Cruz, the tree metaphor 'carries the idea that these marks in the past are immutable' and it 'embodies the concept that all cells contributed to the organism's growth'. As with so many renderings of US history, indigenous populations are conspicuously absent from the tableau. Still, Cruz's skilfully deployed data doubles as a resonant work of cultural commentary, offering a rich and often surprising look at the ever-evolving makeup of the country.

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For a radical new perspective on immigration, picture the US as an ancient tree | Aeon Videos

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With the overheated rhetoric around immigration dominating the political sphere, an imaginative, historically rooted perspective can be something of a tonic. This short video from Pedro M Cruz, a data-visualisation designer and assistant professor at Northeastern University in Boston, uses nearly two centuries of United States census data (1830-2015) to convey the country's population growth through immigration.

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A Guardian article, investigating how garment workers in places such as El Salvador have lost out on $4bn of severance pay.

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A Guardian article, investigating how garment workers in places such as El Salvador have lost out on $4bn of severance pay.

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Garment workers have lost out on $4bn of severance pay, says rights group

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The employees, who made clothes for western clothing brands, were legally entitled to the money after losing their jobs

# data[].attributes.headline
A Guardian article, looking at how garment workers in Bangladesh face violent reprises when they ask for fairer pay and conditions.

# data[].attributes.subject
A Guardian article, looking at how garment workers in Bangladesh face violent reprises when they ask for fairer pay and conditions.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
When Masuma Akhtar arrived at the garment factory where she works on the outskirts of Dhaka on 31 October, she was expecting a normal shift. Instead, she was met with brute violence. "The moment I walked through the factory gates, a group of armed men began beating me with wooden sticks," says Akhtar. "I fell down on to the ground. Even then they wouldn't stop beating me."

Akhtar, 22, is a seamstress at Dekko Knitwears in Mirpur, where she spends long days churning out clothes for western fashion brands, including Marks & Spencer and C&A.

Bangladesh is one of the world's biggest producers of fast fashion, pumping out millions of tonnes of clothing every year to meet the demands of the world's most popular clothing brands, which are drawn to this small South Asian country where orders - and the labour needed to fulfil them - come cheap.

Although most fast fashion brands that source from Bangladesh claim to support a living wage, they are only required to pay the workers who make their clothes the legal monthly minimum wage, which is one of the lowest in the world and has remained set at 8,000 taka (£58) since 2018.

Negotiations over a new minimum wage for garment workers in Bangladesh have sparked mass demonstrations on streets across the capital. The protests have escalated since the government announced a minimum wage increase for the workers, from 1 December, to 12,500 taka (£90), far below the 23,000 taka a month workers say they need to keep their families from starvation.

Factory owners and police have responded to workers' protests with threats and violence. The beatings she received by armed men at Dekko Knitwears left Akhtar with a broken arm. "They hit my back, my thighs and my arms repeatedly," she says. Now, without use of one of her arms, she is unable to work. "I don't know how I will survive the rest of the month," she adds.

Masuma Akhtar's arm was broken when she was beaten by armed man at Dekko Knitwears in Mirpur. Photograph: Sazzad Hossain

Other workers at Dekko Knitwears say that the men beating them concentrated on their hands and arms. "They started hitting us mercilessly," says Bushra Begum, 25, another worker. "My livelihood depends on my hands, and they targeted them viciously."

Her colleague Rita Anwar, 26, tried to run away but was chased down the road by three men. "I am covered in blood clots," she says, pulling up her sleeve to reveal her injuries. "My back is black with bruises. The pain is so much that I can barely walk."

Before they left, the men issued a warning: the workers were not to take part in any more protests - or they would face consequences.

They can threaten and beat us but if we accept their ridiculous wage proposal, we will starve to death anyway

Naima Islam

As protests in Dhaka turned increasingly violent, three garment workers have been killed, allegedly after being shot by police in the first wave of protests. And last Wednesday, another woman died after being shot in the head.

Factory owners also threatened to shut down production and withhold wages by applying a "no work, no pay" rule. Over the weekend, more than 150 factories closed "indefinitely", as police issued blanket charges for 18,000 workers in connection with the demonstrations.

Workers were warned of dismissal if they continued to protest and the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association, a trade body, called for all factory recruitment to be paused, making it difficult for protesters to find work elsewhere.

But despite the violent crackdown on workers, those who have spoken to the Guardian are determined to see the fight through to the end.

"They are trying to silence us but we won't back down," says Naima Islam, a machine operator at Columbia Garments. "They can threaten and beat us but what they don't understand is, we have nothing to lose. If we accept their ridiculous wage proposal, we will starve to death anyway."

Islam, 28, is one of thousands of protesters who have had police reports filed against them, which trade unionists fear may soon lead to mass arrests. Many believe it is an attempt to forcefully suppress the wage increase movement.

But that hasn't deterred Islam and her co-workers. "We are not asking for much. This entire industry is built off our backs - the least we deserve is the bare minimum to survive," she says.

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Nazma Akter, president of local trade union Sommilito Garments Sramik Federation, condemns the violence against protesting workers. "The Bangladesh government must ensure workers are able to exercise their rights to freedom of association and collective bargaining without fear of violence, reprisal, or intimidation," she says.

Garment workers block a key intersection during a protest in Dhaka on 12 November. Photograph: Abdul Goni/AFP/Getty Images

In a statement, Marks & Spencer said: "These are very serious allegations and we are urgently investigating them. We would never tolerate violence or intimidation of workers and set out very clearly in our global sourcing principles that workers must be guaranteed freedom of association and a safe workplace, as well as fair and transparent wages. As a member of the Ethical Trading Initiative, we have supported the tripartite minimum wage negotiations between the unions, Government Wages Board and the Employers' Association - and we continue to support cross-sector calls for an increase that provides a decent standard of living for workers."

A spokesperson for C&A said: "We are aware of the incident that took place in Bangladesh, and we are in close contact with the supplier to investigate. We condemn all types of violence, and we have a longstanding commitment to ensure the safety and health of all workers in our supply chain."

PVH did not respond to a request for comment.

Dekko Knitwears and Columbia Garments were approached for comment but did not respond.

Fashion brands sourcing from Bangladesh have said they support workers' calls for a higher minimum wage. In a joint letter in September, brands including Asos, Primark and H&M, wrote that they recognised their role in "supporting wage developments". But rights groups argue that this means little if brands don't agree to pay their suppliers more.

Yesterday, Human Rights Watch and Clean Clothes Campaign called on brands to take responsibility for their workers' wages and pay their suppliers more. Aruna Kashyap, associate director for corporate accountability at Human Rights Watch says: "Wage increases have consequences for suppliers' costs and eat into their profit margins."

"Brands themselves are driving low wages with their unfair pricing and purchasing practices," she adds. "To preserve their own profits, brands are putting themselves first."

Names have been changed to protect identities

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Bangladesh garment workers fighting for pay face brutal violence and threats

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Workers describe hands and arms being targeted in 'merciless' beatings as protests over low wages turn increasingly violent in Dhaka

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A Guardian photo-essay by Lucien Migné, looking at the work of marginalised groups around the world whose livelihoods have remained largely untouched by the modernisation of work

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A Guardian photo-essay by Lucien Migné, looking at the work of marginalised groups around the world whose livelihoods have remained largely untouched by the modernisation of work

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For a moment, the workers disappear in the clouds of dust that billow across the white limestone plains as the old circular saws they handle cut through rock in a deafening noise.

Every day thousands of men and boys, some as young as 12, travel in the back of pickup trucks to the limestones quarries of Al-Minya, about 300km (186 miles) south of Cairo in Egypt. They slice the limestone into bricks by pushing the machines with saws across the lunar landscape.

The old equipment is unsafe and the work is extremely dangerous. Wearing scarves and sunglasses to protect themselves from the dust, many workers have respiratory diseases and complain of severe eye pain. In the summer, the temperature in the quarries can reach 50C.

"There are regular accidents. Some men have lost arms, legs and their lives," says the French photographer Lucien Migné, who travelled to the quarries in 2022. The workers "are aware of the risks, but they feel they don't have a choice". The limestone quarries are the main source of employment in the region. Workers can earn up to 120 Egyptian pounds (£3) a day, but risk paying the price with their lives.

From Egypt and Ethiopia to Bangladesh, Migné's work tells the stories of forgotten and marginalised people, whose livelihoods have remained unchanged by the rapid computerisation of society.

Migné focuses on what he describes as "feudal" power dynamics between the world's rich and poor, which come to the fore in how people work. "It's about shedding light on these working conditions with the idea that the photos can perhaps empower someone to act."

Throughout his reportage, Migné says he has been "astonished" by stories of human resilience in the face of strenuous, insecure and low-paid work.

In the Manshiet Nasser district of Cairo, a Coptic Christian community has been collecting, sorting and recycling the city's waste for nearly a century. Known as Zabbaleen, which means literally "garbage people" in Egyptian Arabic, the group are stigmatised for their religion and their work, and many live in extreme poverty.

And yet, the Zabbaleen have created one of the most efficient waste recycling systems in the world - providing one of Africa's most populous cities with a critical service. Women sort the waste while men recycle materials in informal, family-run workshops. The city produces waste faster than the Zabbaleen can process it and the work continues through the night. Many have respiratory diseases, probably caused by the toxic fumes given off when plastic is melted into small pellets that can be reused.

"It's gruelling and backbreaking work. But people aren't complaining. Like in every job, people talk and laugh," says Migné. "I found that people lived in great dignity. They consider what they do a job like any other. As long as there's a job to do, then it's good to take."

In Ethiopia's northern Tigray region, Migné met people struggling to survive after two years of war and a year of fragile peace.

More than 1 million people remain displaced by the conflict. Smallholder farmers have lost their crops, livestock and sources of income because of the war. "I have seen people dying of hunger," he says. "People here want the world to notice them."

In the Gheralta mountains, Leter Kidam sows teff seeds. She doesn't have enough money to buy fertilisers and expects a poor yield. Her daughters have to help her work the land if they are going to have anything to eat. "Here, if you do nothing, you will have nothing," says Migné.

In the south of the country, the semi-nomadic Borana people, who traditionally live from their livestock, have lost nearly all their cows and goats for a different reason: five consecutive years of drought. To survive, many have decided to leave their rural land and live in refugee camps in cities.

Didwardy, 16, Elguda Guyo, 56, and Tume Belisso, 30, live in a camp in the town of Dubuluk. They now earn a salary from a wealthier farmer managing hay reserves in preparation for the next dry spell.

"Many of the Borana people I met were suffering the loss of their traditional way of life and culture. Their independence in work was directly tied to this way of life," Migné says.

Migné wants his work to bear witness to disappearing trades, jobs and cultures. "The world is changing faster than ever before. Photography enables [us] to leave a trace of what has been."

This has been a pressing task in Bangladesh, where Migné documented the lives of people working at the Lion Circus - the largest circus still travelling the country. Once very popular, circuses now attract dwindling numbers of spectators and the tradition could soon disappear.

The Lion Circus's tight-knit troupe comprises several families, who live on the fringes of Bangladeshi society. With up to three shows a day, the work is physically demanding. The troupe lives in shacks made of corrugated iron at the back of the circus tent. The children don't go to school but are brought up collectively by the troupe and learn the circus acts from a young age. Here, work, family and culture are colourfully and joyfully intertwined.

"I love to show that beyond the daily hardship, there are family lives and strong social ties," says Migné. "In the west, as people increasingly work online, these strong bonds which for centuries have underpinned people's working lives are being eroded."

The photos, he hopes, can be a reminder of what wealthier societies are losing.

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Danger and dignity in some of the world's vanishing trades - a photo essay

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From Egypt to Bangladesh, photographer Lucien Migné has documented the work of marginalised groups whose livelihoods have remained largely untouched by the modernisation of work* All photographs by Lucien Migné

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A Conversation article, looking at how war in Gaza is wiping out Palestine’s education and knowledge systems

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A Conversation article, looking at how war in Gaza is wiping out Palestine’s education and knowledge systems

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Gaza's education system has suffered significantly since Israel's bombardment and assault on the strip began. Last month, Israel blew up Gaza's last standing university, Al-Israa University.

In the past four months, all or parts of Gaza's 12 universities have been bombed and mostly destroyed.

Approximately 378 schools have been destroyed or damaged. The Palestinian Ministry of Education has reported the deaths of over 4,327 students, 231 teachers and 94 professors.

Numerous cultural heritage sites, including libraries, archives and museums, have also been destroyed, damaged and plundered.

But the assault on Palestinian educational and cultural institutions did not begin in response to the Oct. 7 attack. Israel has a long record of targeted attacks on Palestinian institutions that produce knowledge and culture. That history includes targeting and assassinating Palestinian intellectuals, cultural producers and political figures.

What is scholasticide?

The destruction of education systems and buildings is known as "scholasticide," a term first coined by Oxford professor Karma Nabulsi during the 2008-2009 Israeli assault on Gaza. Scholasticide describes the systemic destruction of Palestinian education within the context of Israel's decades-long settler colonization and occupation of Palestine.

Recently, a group of scholars working under the name Scholars Against the War on Palestine broadened the definition to include a more comprehensive picture of what is happening during the current war. They outline the intimate relationship between scholasticide and genocide.

They say scholasticide includes the intentional destruction of cultural heritage: archives, libraries and museums. Scholasticide includes killing, causing bodily or mental harm, incarcerating, or systematically harassing educators, students and administrators. It includes besieging, closing or obstructing access to educational institutions. It can also include using universities or schools as a military base (as was done with Al-Israa University).

The magnitude of destruction has led them to conclude: "Israeli colonial policy in Gaza has now shifted from a focus on systematic destruction to total annihilation of education."

As genocide scholar Douglas Irvin-Erickson says: the original definition of genocide as first drafted by Raphael Lemkin in 1943 included the idea that "attacking a culture was a way of committing genocide, and not a different type of genocide."

The International Court of Justice

During the recent genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), South Africa argued that Palestinian academics were being intentionally assassinated.

Legal representative for South Africa, Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh, told the court:

"Almost 90,000 Palestinian university students cannot attend university in Gaza. Over 60 per cent of schools, almost all universities and countless bookshops and libraries have been damaged and destroyed. Hundreds of teachers and academics have been killed, including deans of universities and leading Palestinian scholars. Obliterating the very future prospects of the future education of Gaza's children and young people."

On Jan. 26, in a landmark ruling, the ICJ ordered Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza.

Attempting to eliminate Palestinian futures

Scholasticide is not an event. It's part of a colonial continuum of attacking and destroying a people's educational life, knowledge systems and plundering material culture and cultural heritage.

The targeted killing of the educated class is intended to make it difficult for Palestinians to restore the political and socio-economic conditions needed to survive and rebuild Gaza.

This systematic destruction is at the core of the settler colonial " logic of elimination." It has also been applied to Indigenous Peoples in Canada, the United States and elsewhere. This logic drives a settler population to replace Indigenous peoples in their aim to establish a new society.

For example, this logic was exercised during the 1948 Nakba. Thousands of Palestinian books, manuscripts, libraries, archives, photographs, cultural artifacts and cultural property were looted, destroyed or damaged by Zionist militias. In 1948, Palestinian schools were destroyed or damaged or later appropriated for use by the new Israeli state.

Resistance: Palestinian history and culture

Despite the ongoing attempts to erase Palestinian history, culture and memory, Palestinians have found ways to resist their erasure. In the 1960s and '70s, an anti-colonial revolutionary tradition, produced and influenced by intellectual and political thought, was strengthened.

It helped to create infrastructures for the survival, mobilization and development of the Palestinian people and their national movement. It cultivated transnational relationships of solidarity. It helped displaced Palestinians, separated across geographies, to preserve their identity and reorganize themselves politically.

The intellectual and political thought of this period was passed onto the generations that followed. It influenced educational and political programs, cultural development and practices of resistance. Especially during the First Intifada from 1987-1993. This enabled Palestinians to stay steadfast in their struggle against colonial violence across time and space. Palestinian education and culture form the backbone of the right to self-determination. This is why Israel frequently targets Palestinian education and culture.

Palestinians have endured several periods of intense attacks on their cultural and educational life. This includes the June 1967 war, Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon during which a number of the Palestinian Liberation Organization's institutions were destroyed and the First and Second Intifadas.

Following Israel's destruction of the Palestine Research Center in Lebanon in 1982, Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish said:

"He who steals land does not surprise us by stealing a library. He who kills thousands of innocent civilians does not surprise us by killing paintings."

The colonial theft continues unabashed. Cultural heritage has been annihilated, damaged or plundered in this war. During the bombing of Al-Israa University in January, Israel also targeted the National Museum. Licensed by the Ministry of Antiquities, the museum housed over 3,000 rare artifacts, which were looted.

Most academic institutions around the world remain silent about Israel's scholasticide. But others are speaking out. Globally, this includes Librarians and Archivists with Palestine and some academic associations and faculty groups. The ICJ's recent order to Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza may motivate other scholars and institutions to consider breaking their silence on scholasticide.

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The war in Gaza is wiping out Palestine's education and knowledge systems

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Scholars say Israel's destruction of Gaza's schools, universities and museums are part of an ongoing project to destroy Palestinian people, identity and ideas.

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A Guardian article, looking at how education is the key to unlocking Africa's potential.

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A Guardian article, looking at how education is the key to unlocking Africa's potential.

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The African Union (AU) is marking 2024 as its first Year of Education. This could not have come at a better time. Commitment to education has marked the continent's progress since the 1960s era of independence. Now more than ever, this resolve must transform Africa into the world's powerhouse for the 21st century.

In 60 years Africa has made considerable progress in education, with more children finishing school. Primary school completion rates across the region between 2000 and 2022 rose from 52% to 67%. High school dropout rates slowed too, with 50% of pupils completing lower secondary, up from 35%, and 33% in upper secondary education, up from 23%, while the number of tertiary education students has risen from fewer than 800,000 in 1970 to above 17 million today. More girls are in school than ever before.

But as we usher in this year of education, we must acknowledge that any hard-won gains fall short of preparing for tomorrow's opportunities and risks.

After the Covid pandemic, millions of children, adolescents and youth were out of school across sub-Saharan Africa. Only one in five children achieve the minimum proficiency level in reading by the end of primary education. Girls are particularly disadvantaged in the only region in the world not to have achieved gender parity in enrolment at any level in the education system, with one in three girls married before they turn 18. This trend, while troubling, is not irreversible.

To build the Africa we want, we must finance quality education that equips all our children with the knowledge and skills to succeed in the labour market of tomorrow, and to secure a peaceful, prosperous and stable future.

National budgets remain the principal source of education funding, but these often struggle to cover essentials such as teacher training, salaries, books and administrative costs.

Today, 40% of all Africans are under 14. Another 100 million will be born by 2050. With education, young Africans can fuel a colossal powerhouse

Since 2020, education budgets in nearly half of low-income countries diminished by an average of 14%. At the same time, more than 20%of total spending went to servicing debt. While the pandemic affected education budgets, before the crisis only about 20% of governments on the continent met international benchmarks for spending between 2017 and 2019.

While trimming education spending might relieve budgets in the short term, it is depriving economies of long-term prosperity.

To support domestic financing of education and prevent this backsliding, donors, multilateral institutions and the private sector can step up, pursuing all possible means - including debt relief - to help finance the quality education that African children need. For African governments, spending smarter is also imperative.

Without it, our continent's development will stagnate when it should be racing ahead, powered by its youth, natural resources and green energy. Africa is the world's youngest and fastest-growing continent. It currently accounts for 14% of the world's working-age population. That is set to rise to 42% by the end of the century.

Today, 40% of all Africans are under 15. Another 100 million children will be born here by 2050.With education, young Africans can fuel a colossal powerhouse. Yet, of the 1 million Africans entering the labour market every month, fewer than 25% find a job in the formal economy.

Since the Global Education Summit in 2021, 21 African heads of state have signed the Declaration on Education Financing that demands exemplary levels of investment. The AU year of education can re-energise members in committing to adequate domestic financing.

Multilateralism is essential to finance transformative education, which is why we support multi-stakeholder collaborations such as the Global Partnership for Education (GPE). Over 20 years, GPE has contributed $6bn (£4.8bn) to support education funding in sub-Saharan Africa.

Today, African influence is asserting itself globally - the AU has a seat at the G20. This influence can expand with its growing young population if matched with a quality education that unlocks the potential of every girl and boy.

Nelson Mandela recognised the foundational importance of learning when he said: "It is not beyond our power to create a world in which all children have access to a good education. Those who do not believe this have small imaginations."

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Africa is the world's youngest continent - education is key to unlocking its potential | Nana Akufo-Addo and Jakaya Kikwete

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With 40% of all Africans aged under 15, smarter funding for schools can help young Africans fuel a colossal powerhouse

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This Smithsonian article tells the story of how one family is trying to revive the indigenous Hawaian language. 

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This Smithsonian article tells the story of how one family is trying to revive the indigenous Hawaian language. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What role does language play in shaping our identity and worldviews? What do we lose when we lose a language? Why do some organizations and agencies seek to deliberately destroy the knowledge associated with indigenous societies?

Key terms Suppressed, Culture, Forced assimilation, Worldview

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Pelehonuamea Suganuma and Kekoa Harman were bright-eyed high schoolers in Honolulu when they first crossed paths, in the 1990s. The two were paired for a performance-a ho'ike, as such shows are known in Hawaiian. Both teenagers had a passion for hula and mele (Hawaiian songs and chants), and they liked performing at the school they'd chosen to attend-Kamehameha High School, part of a 133-year-old private network that gave admissions preference to students of Hawaiian Polynesian ancestry. Still, one part of Hawaiian culture remained frustratingly out of reach for Pele and Kekoa: the language.

Over many generations, the native tongue of the islands had been systematically eliminated from everyday life, and even the Kamehameha Schools weren't able to bring it back. Part of it was a lack of interest-students seemed to prefer learning Japanese, Spanish or French. But more important, Hawaii's educators generally hadn't yet figured out how to teach Hawaiian vocabulary and grammar, or give eager youngsters like Pele and Kekoa opportunities to immerse themselves in Hawaiian speech.

A few years later, Pele and Kekoa found themselves together again. Both of them enrolled in a brand-new Hawaiian language program at the University of Hawaii at Hilo. The two former schoolmates became part of a pioneering cohort that was innovating ways to bring Hawaiian back to life. They helped develop some of the first truly successful Hawaiian language programs throughout the state's islands. Along the way, they started dating, got married and had four children, and raised them to speak fluent Hawaiian.

Today, Pele teaches at a Hawaiian-language K-12 school and Kekoa teaches Hawaiian language and culture at the college they both attended. At home, their family speaks almost exclusively Hawaiian. The Harmans are proud of the revival they helped carry out in just one generation. But Unesco still lists the language as critically endangered, and there's a long way to go before it's spoken again as a part of everyday life. "There's a false sense of security sometimes," says Pele, "that our language is coming back."

* * *

The Hawaiian archipelago-a string of islands born from volcanic activity-was untouched by humans for millions of years. Polynesian navigators discovered it as early as A.D. 400, and by the year 1200, their descendants had organized themselves into settlements called ahupua'a.

The first colonizers arrived in the late 1700s, led by Capt. James Cook, who'd set out on behalf of the British Empire to find a northwest passage between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. These explorers were soon followed by Americans-many of them Protestant missionaries-who settled the islands in large numbers throughout the 19th century. As part of their efforts to convert Hawaiians to Christianity, missionaries needed to teach them how to read the Bible in their native tongue. And that meant introducing palapala -the written word.

For centuries, Hawaiian had been an oral tongue-one steeped in mo'olelo (story, legend, history). But after missionaries helped create a written version of the language, the local people took to it. They established more than 100 Hawaiian-language newspapers, according to some records. By 1834, more than 90 percent of Hawaiians were literate-up from virtually zero just 14 years earlier.

Yet these strides in Hawaiian literacy were soon overtaken by efforts to erase Hawaiian culture altogether. American tycoons had also come to the islands, planting lucrative crops like sugar cane and coffee. To work the fields, they brought in foreigners-especially from Japan, China and the Philippines. (By 1896, people of Japanese descent made up roughly a quarter of Hawaii's population.) A new social and political hierarchy arose, largely with white Americans at the top.

These outsiders helped to phase out the Hawaiian system of governance. They replaced traditional foods like taro with rice and imported wheat. They started issuing fines for performing hula, the ancient Hawaiian form of dance and expression. And as the 19th century was winding down, the Americans overthrew Queen Lili'uokalani, Hawaii's last monarch. They annexed the archipelago as a territory in 1898.

By the time Hawaii became a state, in 1959, fewer than 2,000 people could speak Hawaiian fluently. Most of them were elderly; very few were children. The language seemed on the brink of being forgotten.

* * *

But there were still people left who remembered. Both Pele and Kekoa were close to their great-grandmothers-women born in the early 1900s, who spoke some Hawaiian, even though they were raised to think of their mother tongue as inferior to English. The great-grandmothers were the last members of each family to retain any fluency. Pele's and Kekoa's parents were the first generation to speak no Hawaiian at all.

Kekoa grew up on Maui-an island named after a demigod who's credited in Hawaiian tradition with pulling the entire archipelago up from the ocean floor. When Kekoa was a kid, his grandmother, who passed away a few years ago, used to take him to Hawaiian musical and hula performances. She'd make leis for tourist-targeted luaus, and he'd help her gather and string the flower garlands. "I loved going to those events," Kekoa says. "They fostered a sense of 'It's beautiful. It's fun. I want to be around that.'" Outside of these excursions, he lacked an outlet. He was never drawn to sports or other conventional activities foisted on American boys.

As Kekoa approached his teens, his parents gave him the option of becoming a boarder at Kamehameha Schools' main campus-roughly a hundred miles and several sea channels northwest of Maui, on the island of Oahu. Moving away from home isn't easy for any 13-year-old-not least for a Hawaiian whose life is defined by family, or ' ohana. But Kekoa went. Pele was drawn to Kamehameha Schools for similar reasons. One of her grandmothers was Mary Kawena Pukui, co-author of the Hawaiian Dictionary, the standard reference for the Hawaiian language. Her grandmother had dedicated her life to the study and preservation of Hawaiian culture-yet she was haunted by what Pele calls "the trauma and disconnect" of forced assimilation. Seeing her grandmother wrestle with this inner conflict made Pele hungry to "do Hawaiian things in a school setting."

Kekoa graduated from high school in 1995. He spent a year at college at the University of Puget Sound in Washington, then transferred to the University of Hawaii at Hilo.* Pele, who graduated from high school in 1997, ended up at the same campus around the same time. As it happened, 1997 was the year the Hawaiian legislature mandated a new program at the Hilo campus. It was called Ka Haka 'Ula O Ke'elikōlani, named after Ruth Ke'elikōlani Keanolani Kanāhoahoa, a woman from an ancient Hawaiian dynasty who was the governor of Hawaii during the mid-1800s. She was a defender of Hawaiian culture-although she came from a wealthy family and understood English, she lived in a traditional grass-roofed house and spoke only Hawaiian. The new program at Hilo had the motto O ka 'ōlelo ke ka'ā o ka Mauli: "Language is the fiber that binds us to our cultural identity."

Enrolling in this new program, Pele and Kekoa spoke Hawaiian as much as they could outside of class to become fluent. They "talked story" with their professors in the hallways. Their teachers hosted little get-togethers every week-Pau Hana Fridays, as they were known, the local equivalent of TGIF. ( Pau hana is a popular colloquialism across Hawaii: Pau means finished, while hana means work.) At these gatherings, the students fumbled with the language over card games, with music in the background and snacks on the table. "That's how we got comfortable," Pele says.

Those early days of the Hawaiian language renaissance had a sort of free-for-all flair. With a shortage of fluent Hawaiian speakers in the general population, the burgeoning network of Hawaiian-immersion schools drew on undergraduates from the program Kekoa and Pele were enrolled in. Kekoa started teaching at a preschool, part of a growing network called Aha Pūnana Leo, which means "nest of voices." Pele taught at Ke Kula 'O Nāwahīokalani'ōpu'u Iki, called Nāwahī for short-the first Hawaiian-immersion K-12 charter school, tucked along the slopes of the Big Island's Kilauea volcano, on the Hilo side.

Pele and Kekoa began dating in 1999 and married roughly two years later, on a date that coincided with a full moon. "It was a good day spiritually," Pele said. Hawaiian customs were integrated throughout the gathering-from the pule (blessing) delivered by Pele's great-grandmother and the couple's Hawaiian-language vows to the lei exchange and the guests' ho'okupu (offerings) of music and dance. Pele held a bouquet assembled by the professor who'd hosted the Pau Hana Fridays, comprising various plants found on the Big Island-a sprig from the koa tree, for example, which symbolized strength. Pele performed hula for Kekoa, dancing to a song composed by her great-grandmother.

Pele still teaches at Nāwahī. Its enrollment has increased by 10 percent every year, expanding the student body from 30 to more than 400. She has served as the school's math and social studies teacher as well as its elementary-level Hawaiian-chant and dance teacher. She and Kekoa also run an after-school hula program there. Last year, Nāwahī celebrated its 20th class of high school graduates. Kalāmanamana, the Harmans' eldest daughter, was among them.

This past April, Kekoa earned his doctorate in indigenous language and culture revitalization from the University of Hawaii at Hilo. Because of Covid-19, few people were able to be there in person to see him defend his dissertation, about the late hula master Joseph 'Īlālā'ole. But more than 100 people watched the proceedings over Zoom, many of them wearing aloha shirts and standing against backdrops of misty lawns.

The defense began and ended with mele-the songs and chants he and Pele were learning when they met. Each member of the Harman family performed a dance, including Kalāmanamana, who is now an undergraduate at Dartmouth but had come home to shelter in place with her parents. The defense itself, with questions from UH Hilo scholars, all took place in Hawaiian.

* * *

A decade or so ago, strangers passing the Harmans at the mall or grocery store used to be shocked to hear an entire family conversing in Hawaiian. They sometimes asked with concern whether the children spoke English. These days, the couple's three oldest children are 14, 15 and 19 (their youngest is not yet a year old) and they no longer get "stalked" for speaking Hawaiian. If anything, the onlookers are full of admiration. The number of Hawaiian speakers is markedly on the rise now. The last official estimate in 2016 put the number at 18,400. Back in the late 20th century, that number was around 14,000-and that was when the last generation of native Hawaiian speakers was still alive.

"Given our kids, our own programs, the students we've put out, we've made a lot of waves, a lot of progress," Pele says. The fact that their daughter and many other Nāwahī students have gone on to elite schools thousands of miles away "validates for a lot of people our way of life, the path that we've chosen."

Still, the Harmans worry about the future. Fostering a love of Hawaiian felt more intimate back when they were part of a small band of students, laughing their way through the Friday night dinners. Many of the students at Nāwahī spend Friday nights on Instagram and Fortnite and take their access to Hawaiian as a given. In fact, there's still no guarantee they'll remain fluent. Students have few opportunities to continue speaking Hawaiian after they complete their K-12 schooling.

As the Harmans see it, Hawaiian will survive only if people value the culture around it. After all, Hawaiian doesn't have the same marketing value as a massive international language like Spanish or Mandarin. Hawaiian is a language that describes local geographical features and captures an ancient worldview. It's the language Kekoa's and Pele's older relatives used to speak as they brought little gifts to friends' houses, or shared the mahi mahi caught on a fishing trip, or went holoholo -taking a walk and chit-chatting. "Now we have a generation of Hawaiian speakers, but if we don't also teach them those behaviors and beliefs, that fluency will only go so far," Kekoa says. "Hawaiian isn't just a language but a way of life."
*Editor's Note, December 14, 2020: An earlier version of this story noted that Kekoa attended college in Puget Sound, Washington. In fact, Kekoa attended the University of Puget Sound in Washington.
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The Inspiring Quest to Revive the Hawaiian Language

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A determined couple and their children are sparking the renewal of a long-suppressed part of their ancestors' culture

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A Conversation article, looking at how war in Gaza is wiping out Palestine’s education and knowledge systems

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A Conversation article, looking at how war in Gaza is wiping out Palestine’s education and knowledge systems

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Gaza's education system has suffered significantly since Israel's bombardment and assault on the strip began. Last month, Israel blew up Gaza's last standing university, Al-Israa University.

In the past four months, all or parts of Gaza's 12 universities have been bombed and mostly destroyed.

Approximately 378 schools have been destroyed or damaged. The Palestinian Ministry of Education has reported the deaths of over 4,327 students, 231 teachers and 94 professors.

Numerous cultural heritage sites, including libraries, archives and museums, have also been destroyed, damaged and plundered.

But the assault on Palestinian educational and cultural institutions did not begin in response to the Oct. 7 attack. Israel has a long record of targeted attacks on Palestinian institutions that produce knowledge and culture. That history includes targeting and assassinating Palestinian intellectuals, cultural producers and political figures.

What is scholasticide?

The destruction of education systems and buildings is known as "scholasticide," a term first coined by Oxford professor Karma Nabulsi during the 2008-2009 Israeli assault on Gaza. Scholasticide describes the systemic destruction of Palestinian education within the context of Israel's decades-long settler colonization and occupation of Palestine.

Recently, a group of scholars working under the name Scholars Against the War on Palestine broadened the definition to include a more comprehensive picture of what is happening during the current war. They outline the intimate relationship between scholasticide and genocide.

They say scholasticide includes the intentional destruction of cultural heritage: archives, libraries and museums. Scholasticide includes killing, causing bodily or mental harm, incarcerating, or systematically harassing educators, students and administrators. It includes besieging, closing or obstructing access to educational institutions. It can also include using universities or schools as a military base (as was done with Al-Israa University).

The magnitude of destruction has led them to conclude: "Israeli colonial policy in Gaza has now shifted from a focus on systematic destruction to total annihilation of education."

As genocide scholar Douglas Irvin-Erickson says: the original definition of genocide as first drafted by Raphael Lemkin in 1943 included the idea that "attacking a culture was a way of committing genocide, and not a different type of genocide."

The International Court of Justice

During the recent genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), South Africa argued that Palestinian academics were being intentionally assassinated.

Legal representative for South Africa, Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh, told the court:

"Almost 90,000 Palestinian university students cannot attend university in Gaza. Over 60 per cent of schools, almost all universities and countless bookshops and libraries have been damaged and destroyed. Hundreds of teachers and academics have been killed, including deans of universities and leading Palestinian scholars. Obliterating the very future prospects of the future education of Gaza's children and young people."

On Jan. 26, in a landmark ruling, the ICJ ordered Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza.

Attempting to eliminate Palestinian futures

Scholasticide is not an event. It's part of a colonial continuum of attacking and destroying a people's educational life, knowledge systems and plundering material culture and cultural heritage.

The targeted killing of the educated class is intended to make it difficult for Palestinians to restore the political and socio-economic conditions needed to survive and rebuild Gaza.

This systematic destruction is at the core of the settler colonial " logic of elimination." It has also been applied to Indigenous Peoples in Canada, the United States and elsewhere. This logic drives a settler population to replace Indigenous peoples in their aim to establish a new society.

For example, this logic was exercised during the 1948 Nakba. Thousands of Palestinian books, manuscripts, libraries, archives, photographs, cultural artifacts and cultural property were looted, destroyed or damaged by Zionist militias. In 1948, Palestinian schools were destroyed or damaged or later appropriated for use by the new Israeli state.

Resistance: Palestinian history and culture

Despite the ongoing attempts to erase Palestinian history, culture and memory, Palestinians have found ways to resist their erasure. In the 1960s and '70s, an anti-colonial revolutionary tradition, produced and influenced by intellectual and political thought, was strengthened.

It helped to create infrastructures for the survival, mobilization and development of the Palestinian people and their national movement. It cultivated transnational relationships of solidarity. It helped displaced Palestinians, separated across geographies, to preserve their identity and reorganize themselves politically.

The intellectual and political thought of this period was passed onto the generations that followed. It influenced educational and political programs, cultural development and practices of resistance. Especially during the First Intifada from 1987-1993. This enabled Palestinians to stay steadfast in their struggle against colonial violence across time and space. Palestinian education and culture form the backbone of the right to self-determination. This is why Israel frequently targets Palestinian education and culture.

Palestinians have endured several periods of intense attacks on their cultural and educational life. This includes the June 1967 war, Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon during which a number of the Palestinian Liberation Organization's institutions were destroyed and the First and Second Intifadas.

Following Israel's destruction of the Palestine Research Center in Lebanon in 1982, Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish said:

"He who steals land does not surprise us by stealing a library. He who kills thousands of innocent civilians does not surprise us by killing paintings."

The colonial theft continues unabashed. Cultural heritage has been annihilated, damaged or plundered in this war. During the bombing of Al-Israa University in January, Israel also targeted the National Museum. Licensed by the Ministry of Antiquities, the museum housed over 3,000 rare artifacts, which were looted.

Most academic institutions around the world remain silent about Israel's scholasticide. But others are speaking out. Globally, this includes Librarians and Archivists with Palestine and some academic associations and faculty groups. The ICJ's recent order to Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza may motivate other scholars and institutions to consider breaking their silence on scholasticide.

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The war in Gaza is wiping out Palestine's education and knowledge systems

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Scholars say Israel's destruction of Gaza's schools, universities and museums are part of an ongoing project to destroy Palestinian people, identity and ideas.

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A Guardian article, looking at how education is the key to unlocking Africa's potential.

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A Guardian article, looking at how education is the key to unlocking Africa's potential.

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The African Union (AU) is marking 2024 as its first Year of Education. This could not have come at a better time. Commitment to education has marked the continent's progress since the 1960s era of independence. Now more than ever, this resolve must transform Africa into the world's powerhouse for the 21st century.

In 60 years Africa has made considerable progress in education, with more children finishing school. Primary school completion rates across the region between 2000 and 2022 rose from 52% to 67%. High school dropout rates slowed too, with 50% of pupils completing lower secondary, up from 35%, and 33% in upper secondary education, up from 23%, while the number of tertiary education students has risen from fewer than 800,000 in 1970 to above 17 million today. More girls are in school than ever before.

But as we usher in this year of education, we must acknowledge that any hard-won gains fall short of preparing for tomorrow's opportunities and risks.

After the Covid pandemic, millions of children, adolescents and youth were out of school across sub-Saharan Africa. Only one in five children achieve the minimum proficiency level in reading by the end of primary education. Girls are particularly disadvantaged in the only region in the world not to have achieved gender parity in enrolment at any level in the education system, with one in three girls married before they turn 18. This trend, while troubling, is not irreversible.

To build the Africa we want, we must finance quality education that equips all our children with the knowledge and skills to succeed in the labour market of tomorrow, and to secure a peaceful, prosperous and stable future.

National budgets remain the principal source of education funding, but these often struggle to cover essentials such as teacher training, salaries, books and administrative costs.

Today, 40% of all Africans are under 14. Another 100 million will be born by 2050. With education, young Africans can fuel a colossal powerhouse

Since 2020, education budgets in nearly half of low-income countries diminished by an average of 14%. At the same time, more than 20%of total spending went to servicing debt. While the pandemic affected education budgets, before the crisis only about 20% of governments on the continent met international benchmarks for spending between 2017 and 2019.

While trimming education spending might relieve budgets in the short term, it is depriving economies of long-term prosperity.

To support domestic financing of education and prevent this backsliding, donors, multilateral institutions and the private sector can step up, pursuing all possible means - including debt relief - to help finance the quality education that African children need. For African governments, spending smarter is also imperative.

Without it, our continent's development will stagnate when it should be racing ahead, powered by its youth, natural resources and green energy. Africa is the world's youngest and fastest-growing continent. It currently accounts for 14% of the world's working-age population. That is set to rise to 42% by the end of the century.

Today, 40% of all Africans are under 15. Another 100 million children will be born here by 2050.With education, young Africans can fuel a colossal powerhouse. Yet, of the 1 million Africans entering the labour market every month, fewer than 25% find a job in the formal economy.

Since the Global Education Summit in 2021, 21 African heads of state have signed the Declaration on Education Financing that demands exemplary levels of investment. The AU year of education can re-energise members in committing to adequate domestic financing.

Multilateralism is essential to finance transformative education, which is why we support multi-stakeholder collaborations such as the Global Partnership for Education (GPE). Over 20 years, GPE has contributed $6bn (£4.8bn) to support education funding in sub-Saharan Africa.

Today, African influence is asserting itself globally - the AU has a seat at the G20. This influence can expand with its growing young population if matched with a quality education that unlocks the potential of every girl and boy.

Nelson Mandela recognised the foundational importance of learning when he said: "It is not beyond our power to create a world in which all children have access to a good education. Those who do not believe this have small imaginations."

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Africa is the world's youngest continent - education is key to unlocking its potential | Nana Akufo-Addo and Jakaya Kikwete

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With 40% of all Africans aged under 15, smarter funding for schools can help young Africans fuel a colossal powerhouse

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A Variety review of a film about missionary John Chau, who died whilst trying to spread Christianity to the ‘unreached’ people of North Sentinel Island.

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A Variety review of a film about missionary John Chau, who died whilst trying to spread Christianity to the ‘unreached’ people of North Sentinel Island.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Watch this trailer about the new documentary about John Chau, to gain a basic understanding of what happened to him in 2018. What two questions are asked about John Chau in the second paragraph of the article, and what does this reveal about the difficulties of telling his story objectively? How does missionary work differ from that done by anthropologists? What different factors motivated John Chau to try to make contact with the Sentinelese people? To wrap up: How should we balance our desire to communicate (what we believe is) useful knowledge with an awareness that that knowledge may not be desired or required?

KEY TERMS Biases and beliefs, Civilization, The Great Commission, Religious fanaticism, Imperialist agenda

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‘The Mission’ Review: While Netflix Drowns in True-Crime Docs, Nat Geo Embraces a World Without Answers

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In ‘The Mission,’ Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine delve into the mystery of John Allen Chau’s fatal mission to convert the isolated Sentinelese people.

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A Big Think video, in which the philosopher Peter Singer explains how we could all use ‘ethical altruism’.  

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A Big Think video, in which the philosopher Peter Singer explains how we could all use ‘ethical altruism’.  

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How does Peter Singer extend the drowning child scenario? What is the effective altruism movement, and why do you think it became a global phenomenon? What real and hypothetical examples does Peter Singer give of effective altruism, and do these make you question the extent to which you apply an altruistic approach to life? Why do you think there is a dissonance between the care we take when making ordinary purchases, and the care we take when donating to charity? To wrap up: Could you do more to become an ‘effective altruist’? What is stopping you from doing so?

KEY TERMS  Effective altruism, Inequality, Happiness

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Peter Singer, author of "Famine, Affluence, and Morality," discusses the benefits of effective altruism and our moral obligation to help others.

Effective altruism focuses on raising the minimum living standards and encourages everyone, not just the wealthy, to give and find happiness in contributing to a better world. Singer breaks down the history of the effective altruism movement and shares the example of Zell Kravinsky, who donated most of his wealth and a kidney to a stranger, exemplifying the practice.

Singer also emphasizes the need to do thorough research before donating to any cause to ensure the greatest good.

PETER SINGER: Back in the 1970s, I wrote an article called "Famine, Affluence and Morality," which was encouraging us to be altruistic and suggested that if we were affluent then morality required that, we help people to some degree. Which I used the story of rescuing a drowning child in a shallow pond, and I said that, "If you saw such a child and you were the only person there to stop the child drowning but you didn't do it because you were wearing expensive clothes you didn't want to ruin, that would be a horrible thing to do. But if you agree that that's a horrible thing to do when the child is in front of you, then what about when the child isn't in front of you but is in a different country, but you can still be very confident that your donation will help them?"

That article got widely reprinted in a lot of philosophy anthologies, so it got used in a lot of classrooms, and among those philosophy students were two, Toby Ord and William MacAskill. They both read the article and they were interested in altruism. From very small beginnings, they built up this Effective Altruism Movement, which is now a global movement. It has followers in many, many countries, has been responsible for moving billions of dollars into more effective causes.

Effective altruism suggests that, "If you are gonna be altruistic, then you should try to be as effective as you can with what you're doing." Our species evolved in circumstances when hard times were unpredictable: there might be droughts and famines, so it was good to increase our hoard of food if we wanted to survive. And somehow, the genes for doing that remain in us. I'm not against people putting things away in case things get economically tougher, but we can do that with some of our wealth and we can be quite confident that we'll have enough and we may still have more, even beyond what we need to prepare for the future.

Zell Kravinsky was an interesting man who had an ability to make money from real estate investments. But he didn't really want the money. He was quite comfortable living with his family in a suburban home near Philadelphia. So he decided that he would give almost all of it away. Zell decided to start looking at the possibility of donating a kidney. He went to a hospital in Philadelphia and told them that he wanted to donate a kidney to a stranger- and they looked at him as if he was a bit crazy. Eventually, he did persuade them that he would like to donate a kidney to just the next person in line who was compatible. On his estimate, there was only a 1 in 4,000 chance that donating a kidney would lead to his premature death. His kidney saved a life, and he thinks that if he hadn't done that he would've been valuing his own life at 4,000 times that of a stranger.

The term 'effective altruism' actually is something that developed after Zell Kravinsky had donated both his money and his kidney; although he certainly is way out there as an outlier, it does describe what he did. So whatever your resources are- they might be money, they might be time, they might even be one of your kidneys- but if you are going to donate something like that, make sure it does the most good that it can.

We all have this attitude to everyday purchases. If your phone has died and you need a new phone, you're gonna ask around or go online. And if you came home and showed your phone to a friend and your friend said, "How much did you pay for that?" And you tell them, they say, "What? I could have got that for you for half the price." You'd feel pretty stupid. But strangely, that attitude doesn't apply to charities. So if you go and give your money to a charity, let's say it's a charity that's raising guide dogs for blind people, and you don't do research before you do that, you don't ask, "Is there some other way I could help blind people that would help more people for less money?" If you did ask that, you would find that giving money for guide dogs is not the best value for your money because it costs a lot of money to raise a guide dog. It's costs about $40,000 in the U.S. It's a good thing to do, but you can restore sight in someone who has cataracts and you can prevent people from going blind from trachoma which is a preventable cause of blindness. So what that suggests is if you wanna do good, do some research, go online find the most effective charities and give to them.

Effective altruists have been encouraging of high-net worth individuals when they give and for obvious reasons. People like Bill and Melinda Gates have done a huge amount of good in the world. For example, funding the extension of vaccination and immunization against various diseases, preventing deaths from diarrhea. There are a lot of things that they've done that have saved a very large number of lives, and that's true of some other high-net worth individuals as well. But some people are troubled by the connection between effective altruists and high-net worth individuals because they see effective altruism as not tackling the inequality in the world which they see as the basic cause or a cause of extreme poverty. I don't myself really accept that objection. For one thing, what to me is important is that, we raise the minimum level at the bottom; that we try to make everybody moderately well-off so that nobody is starving, nobody is dying from lack of basic healthcare. Everybody can educate their children. There's a whole lot of things like that. You might still say, "Well, we could make those who are worse off, better off by redistributing the wealth of those who are very wealthy." But probably wouldn't make much difference anymore. Once you've got people above those levels of serious poverty, and it might well stifle innovation because private foundations can be more innovative and more daring than governments generally are. Governments tend to be more risk-averse.

Effective altruism is not only for the rich. I'm certainly interested in encouraging everyone who has something to spare. Let's say that you buy a bottled water when there's safe water coming out of the tap. Or let's say you go and sit in a cafe to drink some coffee when you could have made coffee at home for less money. You can think about, "Is there something else I could be doing with this?" There's a strong correlation between people who give and people who are happy; that you're able to make that contribution to the world and to others who are less fortunate than you is a really rich source of happiness. In addition to that, they'll be developing a good habit, should you then start to earn more money and become more prosperous and be able to give more- so that eventually we have both the ability and the will to make sure that nobody is in extreme poverty, nobody is suffering unnecessarily and we are providing well, not only for our own generation but for future generations too.

NARRATOR: Want to dive deeper? Become a Big Think member and join our members-only community. Watch videos early and unlock full interviews.

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What is effective altruism? Philosopher Peter Singer explains

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Effective altruism isn't just for the rich. Philosopher Peter Singer shares how we can all be better at doing "good."

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A long but useful Aeon article, discussing the extent to which we can solve ethical problems via mathematical logic. 

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A long but useful Aeon article, discussing the extent to which we can solve ethical problems via mathematical logic. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How should mathematics not be used to resolve ethical issues? Why is it important that ‘moral mathematics’ is practical, and responsive to uncertainty? How can moral mathematics support longtermism? How convincing do you find the evidence and examples offered by the author? Overall, do you agree that “Moral mathematics forces precision and clarity… And it helps us draw conclusions from our ethical assumptions”?

Key terms Moral concepts vs. quantitative concepts, Decision-making, Practical, Uncertainty, Objective, Longtermism

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How to solve moral problems with formal logic and probability | Aeon Essays

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Subjecting the problems of ethics to the cool quantifications of logic and probability can help us to be better people

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This Big Think article deconstructs how maps are used to show the migration of people, and how their language and designs are often loaded with meaning. 

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This Big Think article deconstructs how maps are used to show the migration of people, and how their language and designs are often loaded with meaning. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Get students to study the red and blue maps, and see how their understanding of immigration alters. They could produce their own maps with the same data, experimenting with colour, icons, and other graphic representations. Overall, how possible is it to present data objectively? Do biases always interfere?

Key terms Objective data, Preconceptions

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One map can say more than a thousand words. That's why we shouldn't believe all they're telling us. See, maps have a problem. They appear neutral, objective, authoritative. But that's exactly all that they're not. Each map reflects the many choices the cartographer has made, consciously or not, both in terms of content and form.

And so, without us even noticing it, maps can confirm bias, entrench prejudice and perpetuate injustice. Take for instance the topic of migration, guaranteed to raise the volume of the after-dinner conversation at any party. In a recent article, Dutch news website De Correspondent argues that the cartographic depiction of migrant flows into Europe reinforces the negative attitudes many Europeans have towards migrants.

Image: Frontex - Risk Analysis for 2020

Here's a map taken from the 2020 annual report by Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, showing the illegal border crossings into the EU for 2019. As part of the official report on illegal immigration, this map is the source of many others in the European media.

While it may seem nothing more or less than a factually correct cartographic representation of objective data contained in the report, De Correspondent argues that there are several things wrong with this image.

The arrows are reminiscent of battlefield maps, suggesting that Europe is under attack. This is aggravated by the use of the color red, which signals danger.

The arrows are huge - larger than some countries. This homogenises a diverse group of people, and inflates the perceived size of the issue.

The 'straightness' of the arrows indicates a clear purpose; but most migrants experience a much more circuitous and dangerous path, not always concluded successfully (or alive).

The title refers to 'illegal border crossings', not mentioning that migrants hardly have legal means of entering the EU.

This all serves to affirm certain preconceptions about migration into Europe: the continent is being flooded by a huge influx of hostile aliens. "It's no coincidence that political parties opposed to migration use maps like these in their communication," the article states.

Image: De Correspondent, reproduced with kind permission.

Can maps confer the same information without confirming those biases? De Correspondent took the Frontex map and translated it into its own house style; and then produced a kinder, gentler alternative:

The colour is a more soothing blue rather than the aggressive red.

The map's new title ("These are the routes via which irregular migrants reach the EU") no longer focuses on the illegal aspect of the entries.

The military-style arrows are replaced by circles.

While the 'blue' map at least makes an active effort not to walk into the same bias-confirming trap that the 'red' one does, it still tells only part of the story. No mention is made of the conflicts that motivate migrants to risk their lives in journeying to Europe - nor indeed of the many lives lost along those routes.

Image: De Correspondent, reproduced with kind permission.

Perhaps a map is not the right way at all to present information on migration, De Correspondent argues. Here's another illustration: a simple bar chart, showing the number of irregular border crossings for each of the preceding six years. Following the dramatic refugee influx of 2015, that number has gone down significantly and consistently for each of the following years.

This offers a radically different perspective on the same reality - and one less likely to be reproduced by anti-immigration parties.
For more background (and more maps), see the original article at De Correspondent (in Dutch), which was based on an article in the journal Mobilities: The migration map trap. On the invasion arrows in the cartography of migration (in English). Strange Maps #1045 Got a strange map? Let me know at [email protected] .

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One map can say more than a thousand words. That's why we shouldn't believe all they're telling us. See, maps have a problem. They appear neutral, objective, authoritative. But that's exactly all that they're not. Each map reflects the many choices the cartographer has made, consciously or not, both in terms of content and form.

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An Aeon essay, looking at six different narratives of the nature and effect of globalization. 

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An Aeon essay, looking at six different narratives of the nature and effect of globalization. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE First, what are students’ thoughts on the effects of globalization? Which of the six narratives does this most closely align to? Do they agree with the author that these are each “narrative contains some truth but does not tell the whole truth”? How does applying a ‘fox-like approach’ help us to ‘embrace multiple perspectives’? Should we become ‘foxes’ in all areas of knowledge?

Key terms Fox vs. hedgehog, Perspectives, Polarization, Truth

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Isaiah Berlin understood the parable of the fox and the hedgehog - 'the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing' - to illustrate two styles of thinking. Hedgehogs relate everything to a single vision, a universally applicable organising principle for understanding the world. Foxes, on the other hand, embrace many values and approaches rather than trying to fit everything into an all-encompassing singular vision.

Debates about economic globalisation are often dominated by hedgehogs - actors who interpret and evaluate the dynamics and consequences of globalisation through a single lens. Take the narrative that dominated the debate about globalisation in the West from the collapse of the Soviet Union until the global financial crisis in 2008. On this view, economic liberalisation promised to grow the pie so that everyone - developed and developing countries, rich and poor - would be better off. This confident perspective touted free trade as a win-win outcome that would create peace and prosperity for all.

In recent years, this view has been challenged by a variety of narratives that stress that economic globalisation produces many losers. Right-wing populists lament the decay of America's rust belt, warning of the need to protect the native working class against the offshoring of manufacturing jobs and the onshoring of immigrants. Left-wing populists and critics of corporate power protest that globalisation's advantages often accrue mainly to rich people and powerful multinationals, hollowing out the middle class. The COVID-19 pandemic and the climate crisis have heightened anxiety about the resilience and sustainability of our economies.

We are at a critical juncture: a relatively long period of stability in mainstream thinking about economic globalisation has given way to a situation of dramatic flux. During such periods, narratives assume particular relevance because they offer new ways for actors to understand what the problem is and what should be done about it.

The interplay of different narratives could be the starting point of a nuanced appraisal of the complexities, uncertainties and ambiguities of economic globalisation. More often, however, debates about economic globalisation devolve into stand-offs among hedgehogs who emphasise the validity of their perspective while seeking to expose their opponents as economically illiterate, politically dangerous or morally bankrupt.

A prime example of such a standoff was the reaction by establishment figures to the critiques of free trade and immigration that animated Donald Trump's presidential campaign in the United States and the Brexit movement in the United Kingdom. Many curled up into a ball of spikes, disparaging opponents for their stupidity and self-interest. But proponents of the insurgent narratives have been no less at fault: they have drawn much of their energy from their ability to present a radically different perspective, often at the cost of nuance and a willingness to compromise.

None of this is to say that the perspectives brought to light by the hedgehogs are not valid and valuable. Some of them harness the empirical and theoretical tools of particular academic disciplines to build our knowledge of the global economy, polity and environment. Others articulate a particular value system and spell out its ethical ramifications for organising the global flow of goods, people, capital, data and ideas. Each of these perspectives expresses a different viewpoint and sheds light on a piece of the puzzle.

Yet debates dominated by hedgehogs hinder us from moving forward. These debates tend to oscillate between two extremes. On some issues, proponents of different narratives seem to inhabit different worlds, with little or no interaction (silos). Some know a lot about inequality, for instance, but little about great-power competition or how the two might relate. At other times, the advocates of rival approaches clash forcefully, but the sides are so deeply entrenched in their own worldviews that genuine dialogue seems impossible (polarisation).

In order to grapple with complex issues such as economic globalisation, we need to develop more fox-like approaches that seek to overcome the silos and polarisation that are the hallmark of contemporary debates. The fact that hedgehogs have been dominating public debates about economic globalisation not only impedes our understanding of complex phenomena but makes it difficult for us to appreciate and accommodate the different values at stake. It is time for a more foxy approach.

The first step to developing such an approach is to understand what the hedgehogs have been saying about economic globalisation. In our book Six Faces of Globalization: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why It Matters (2021), we identify six main narratives driving debates in the West about the virtues and vices of economic globalisation. These narratives provide the storylines through which people perceive reality and communicate their understandings and values. They fall into three broad categories: win-win, win-lose and lose-lose narratives.

The establishment narrative has been the dominant frame for understanding economic globalisation in the West over the past three decades. It sees globalisation as an unstoppable but overwhelmingly beneficial force. It focuses on rising productivity and declining poverty rates, emphasising economic efficiency and the virtues of countries and companies playing to their comparative advantage. This 'everybody wins' view has been espoused by many institutions that serve as the guardians of the international economic order, such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization.

The establishment narrative has now been dislodged from its dominant position. In the decade following the global financial crisis, previously marginalised narratives have made their way to the centre of political debate. While the establishment narrative assumes that everyone wins, four other hedgehog narratives argue that economic globalisation produces both winners and losers. Where they differ is in who wins and who loses, what causes these distributive outcomes, and why they are problematic.

On the Left of the political spectrum, we see two narratives that emphasise how gains from economic globalisation have flowed upward to rich individuals and multinational corporations. On the Right of the political spectrum, we find two narratives that see the gains from globalisation flowing sideways to foreigners and foreign countries.

The Left-wing populist narrative focuses on the ways in which national economies are rigged to channel the gains from globalisation to the privileged few. Even as countries have seen their economies grow, many have also experienced a sharp increase in inequality, with a growing divide between rich and poor and a hollowing-out of the middle class. Whereas some proponents point the finger at chief executive officers, bankers and billionaires (the top 1 per cent of the global population), others take aim at the educated professional class and the upper middle class more broadly (the top 20 per cent). Either way, the poor and working class have lost out.

Proponents of the related corporate power narrative argue that the real winners from economic globalisation are multinational corporations, which can take advantage of a global marketplace to produce cheaply, sell everywhere, and pay as little in taxes as possible. These companies use their power to shape international rules in areas that advantage them, such as trade and investment, while lobbying against effective international cooperation on subjects that might disadvantage them, such as taxation. According to this narrative, economic globalisation produces many losers - workers, communities, citizens, governments - but only one winner: corporations.

The sixth hedgehog narrative argues that we are all at risk of losing from economic globalisation

The Right-wing populist narrative shares with the Left-wing version a deep distrust of elites, but the two narratives part company on what they blame the elite for: whereas Left-wing populists fault the elite for enriching themselves, Right-wing populists deride the elite for failing to protect the hardworking native population from threats posed by an external 'other'. The Right-wing populist narrative thus has a strong horizontal us-versus-them quality, whether expressed through concern about protecting workers from the offshoring of jobs or guarding them against an inflow of immigrants who might compete for those jobs, live off the welfare system, or threaten the native community's sense of identity.

The geoeconomic narrative focuses on a different kind of external threat: the economic and technological competition between the US and China as great-power rivals. Although both countries have gained from economic globalisation in absolute terms, in relative terms China has closed the gap on the US. The US increasingly perceives China as both an economic competitor and a security threat, lending the geoeconomic narrative an urgency that it did not have during the Cold War. Instead of applauding international trade and investment as enhancing economic welfare and increasing prospects for peace, the geoeconomic narrative emphasises the security vulnerabilities created by economic interdependence and digital connectivity with a strategic rival.

Sometimes these different narratives overlap. For instance, many members of the Trump administration embraced both the Right-wing populist narrative and the geoeconomic one, while presidential candidates such as Elizabeth Warren embodied both the Left-wing populist critique and the corporate power one. At other times they diverge. For instance, the protests against the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership in Europe were much more strongly motivated by the corporate power narrative than the Left-wing populist one. Different narratives focus on different concerns. While the Right-wing populist narrative laments the loss of the manufacturing jobs of the past, the geoeconomic one focuses on winning the race in the technologies of the future, such as fifth-generation (5G) networks and artificial intelligence.

These win-win and win-lose narratives differ from the sixth hedgehog narrative, which argues that we are all at risk of losing from economic globalisation in its current form. This lose-lose narrative portrays economic globalisation as a source and accelerator of global threats such as pandemics and the climate crisis. Some versions focus on how global connectivity increases the risk of contagion of both viruses and supply chain shocks. Others warn that the skyrocketing carbon emissions associated with the global diffusion of Western patterns of production and consumption are endangering both people and the planet.

This global threats narrative emphasises our shared humanity; its proponents call for global solidarity and international cooperation in the face of common challenges. They argue that we need to redefine the goals of our economies to enable individuals and societies to survive and thrive within the limits of our planet. This can mean emphasising resilience over efficiency in our supply chains and sustainability over profit-seeking in our economies. Without change, they warn, we run the risk that everybody loses - though some people and countries are likely to lose first and worst.

Trained in a world that values hedgehogs, the most common question we encountered in our research was 'So, which narrative is correct?' We also found that proponents of the individual narratives were quick to point out the ways in which their narrative was right and others wrong - a classic hedgehog move. Both approaches missed a deeper point.

As with any partial representation of a more complex reality, each narrative contains some truth but does not tell the whole truth. Each narrative highlights important aspects of the process of economic globalisation and expresses values that are deeply held by significant numbers of people. Each narrative reveals and obscures. Rather than defending one narrative as the correct one, we need to adopt more fox-like approaches that embrace multiple perspectives, holding them in tension and combining their insights.

At the analytical level, adopting a more fox-like approach helps in developing better understandings of complex issues. As the political scientist Philip E Tetlock explains in his book Expert Political Judgment (2005), what experts think matters far less than how they think. Tetlock finds that hedgehog-like thinkers who know one big thing are often overly confident and inclined to (over)extend the explanatory reach of their expertise into new domains. Yet they are often far less accurate in their predictions than fox-like thinkers who stitch together diverse sources of information to produce more provisional conclusions.

Take the backlash against the French president Emmanuel Macron's diesel tax as an example. From the perspective of the establishment and global threats narratives, the tax made perfect sense: making fossil fuels more expensive is a market-based way of reducing carbon emissions. The policy failed, however, because Macron did not consider how the tax would appear from the populist perspectives that fuelled the 'yellow vest' protests. Right-wing populists saw the tax as an affront to rural ways of life by city-dwelling elites, while Left-wing populists noted how it burdened poorer populations without equally targeting the habits of the rich, such as flying.

If the art of advocacy lies in convincing others to view the world through the lens of your preferred narrative, the art of policymaking requires examining issues through diverse lenses. The question of whether a country should use the telecommunications company Huawei for its 5G networks is not just about whether Huawei's products are cheap, reliable and economically efficient; it is also about whether a country is comfortable entrusting its critical infrastructure to a company that is subject to the Chinese government in an era of increased security concerns and geopolitical rivalry. Similarly, understanding the spread and impact of the virus SARS-CoV-2 requires an appreciation of the systemic risks arising from global connectivity as well as the variability resulting from domestic inequalities.

The synthesising mind takes in information from disparate sources, knitting it together into a more coherent whole

A fox-like approach can also help overcome some of the mutual incomprehension that plagues economic debates. A fox-like approach encourages us to step into the shoes of the proponents of narratives with which we disagree. It does not require us to adopt their narrative - we may still contest some of the narrative's empirical claims, value judgments and policy prescriptions. But if we attempt to see economic globalisation through the lens of another narrative in a charitable and empathetic way, we will gain a better understanding of that narrative's internal logic, appeal and prescriptions, and a clearer vision of the blind spots and biases of our own preferred narratives and policy options.

To develop more fox-like approaches, we need to get better at integrative thinking. This is difficult in today's environment. Universities typically organise their research and teaching along disciplinary lines and thereby encourage depth, specialisation and mastery over breadth, connectivity and creativity. Policymakers often work in a relatively siloed fashion as different departments take charge of a problem and keep a tight hold of the drafting pen. Yet complex phenomena such as economic globalisation involve a multitude of interconnected issues that do not fall neatly within the disciplinary and subject-matter lines along which much of our knowledge production is organised.

The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann was of the view that: 'In the 21st century, the most important kind of mind will be the synthesising mind.' The synthesising mind takes in and evaluates information from disparate sources, knitting it together into a more coherent whole. The ability to hold (at least) two diametrically opposed ideas or narratives in one's head and, instead of simply picking one, produce a synthesis that is superior to either has been found to be a common quality among exceptional business leaders. Increasingly, we are seeing trade policies in Washington, DC, Brussels and beyond that seek to integrate insights from different perspectives instead of simply championing the establishment narrative or replacing it wholesale with another narrative.

Although Trump's defeat revived optimism among some commentators about a reset on economic globalisation, the new US president Joe Biden's approach integrates insights from multiple narratives. Biden's trade agenda embraces the establishment narrative's enthusiasm for trade's potential to generate prosperity while tempering it with a commitment to prioritising the welfare of US workers (a concern of both Right-wing and Left-wing populists), an awareness of the need for greater regulation of corporate power (including in the areas of taxation and antitrust), and a determination to compete aggressively with China economically and technologically while attempting to cooperate on global threats such as the climate crisis and pandemics. The Biden administration has continued many of Trump's protectionist and geoeconomic trade policies, while also seeking to work with allies and reaching out to China on issues of common interest, such as the climate crisis.

Similar movements are evident in Brussels. Long a staunch proponent of the establishment narrative, the European Union has been updating its trade policy to achieve greater resilience with respect to critical goods, spearhead its own semiconductor manufacturing to protect its industrial position, and impose a carbon border adjustment mechanism to pursue greater sustainability within a global trading system. Europe is also seeking to incorporate insights from different narratives in its approach to China, with the European Commission declaring that:

China is, simultaneously, in different policy areas, a cooperation partner with whom the EU has closely aligned objectives, a negotiating partner with whom the EU needs to find a balance of interests, an economic competitor in the pursuit of technological leadership, and a systemic rival promoting alternative models of governance.

If we move past either/or arguments about which narrative is right, where might more integrative thinking about economic globalisation lead us? Although we do not have a definite answer, our survey of competing hedgehog narratives suggests that the debate's centre of gravity is shifting away from the old establishment consensus in at least two respects: questions of distribution, both within and between countries, are increasingly central; and noneconomic values, whether environmental, social or security-related, are increasingly qualifying or outweighing a primary focus on efficiency and growth.

When it comes to distributive questions, advocates of the establishment narrative traditionally endorsed a two-step approach. The first imperative was to maximise the size of the pie by opening markets to international trade and investment. Distributional questions about how the pie was divided were left to the domestic level. Economic thinking in this mould focused on increasing efficiency so as to promote economic growth for the country as a whole. A growing economy meant that the winners could compensate the losers and still be better off. Whether the winners actually did compensate the losers was a matter for messy politics rather than elegant models.

A common theme that emerges from the other narratives is that distribution is highly significant. It is not enough to increase the size of the pie; the way the pie is sliced is just as important, and sometimes more so. Left-wing populists zero in on the distribution of wealth and opportunity among socioeconomic classes within a particular country. For them, growth is pointless if it is not broadly shared. The Right-wing populist narrative argues that distribution also matters horizontally in geographic space. It contrasts dynamic cities that move ahead with rural communities that decay when factories close.

Relative gains may also be important at the international level. The geoeconomic narrative notes that, although China and the US both gained from economic globalisation in absolute terms, China's relative success in closing the gap has sharpened strategic competition between the two. Instead of producing a win-win situation that increased peace and prosperity for all, the changing global balance of power now threatens peace and prosperity. Distributional questions, both within and among countries, are becoming central to policymaking.

We need to find ways to more openly discuss and balance different values in our pluralistic societies

Another common theme in the narratives pushing back against the free-trade orthodoxy is the focus on values other than economic efficiency, whether they be human wellbeing, environmental protection, community cohesion or national security. The establishment narrative tends to either ignore nonmonetary values or treat them as reducible to economic measures. The challenger narratives argue that overall 'welfare' cannot be represented solely in economic metrics; sometimes other values are more important than wealth and might not be commensurable with money. Even if disability payments, welfare handouts and cheaper products mean that laid-off manufacturing workers are materially better off than their parents, what they have lost in pride and status will likely outweigh any material gains.

The idea that values other than wealth maximisation matter is an essential element of the global threats discourse. Environmentalists and their allies ask us to recast economic growth as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. They remind us that not all economic growth contributes to human wellbeing, especially when it is pursued without respect for planetary boundaries. 'Today we have economies that need to grow, whether or not they make us thrive,' notes the economist Kate Raworth; 'what we need are economies that make us thrive, whether or not they grow.'

Noneconomic values also animate the other challenger narratives. The Right-wing populist narrative prizes the ties that bind families, communities and nations, and it values tradition, stability, loyalty and hierarchy. Its advocates see work as important not just for providing an income but also for conferring a sense of identity, self-worth and dignity, which in turn helps in building stable families and communities. Even if trade encourages greater efficiency and cheaper production, it can damage the social fabric, particularly when change is rapid and highly concentrated in specific geographic regions or industrial sectors.

Sometimes economic growth is helpful in achieving these noneconomic goals; sometimes it stands in tension with achieving them. Proponents of these nonestablishment narratives concur that we cannot focus solely on growing the size of the pie or even on dividing it fairly - we must also acknowledge that the things that we value might not form part of a single pie. This conclusion means that we need to find ways to more openly discuss and balance different values in our pluralistic societies. As the philosopher Michael Sandel explains:

Liberal neutrality flattens questions of meaning, identity, and purpose into questions of fairness. It therefore misses the anger and resentment that animate the populist revolt; it lacks the moral and rhetorical and sympathetic resources to understand the cultural estrangement, even humiliation, that many working-class and middle-class voters feel; and it ignores the meritocratic hubris of elites.

There is no one view that accurately captures the virtues and vices of globalisation. Instead of buying into the worldview of a single hedgehog narrative, we need to develop more fox-like ways of thinking about complex issues. This approach requires an ability to appreciate the insights of and values held by proponents of different narratives, as well as a culture of respectful debate where different tradeoffs are openly assessed. How should we weigh tradition against economic progress, the wealth of the nation against the wellbeing of particular regions or groups, and the importance of nationality against the value of global and cosmopolitan identities, for instance?

Debates about economic globalisation need to move past either/or battles about which narrative is right. The ability to integrate insights from different narratives and a willingness to explore synergies and navigate tradeoffs will become hallmarks of successful policymaking. Efficient supply chains are no longer good enough; we need them to be secure and resilient as well. Climate policy must not only be economically and technologically feasible; it must also be equitable and inclusive. The choice is not US-China cooperation, competition or confrontation, but how to navigate all three in different domains and at different times.

Looking at an issue through many narrative lenses requires a lot from us, both cognitively and normatively. But it is also the best chance we have of devising approaches that respond to the kaleidoscopic complexity of today's challenges.

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There are six main narratives of globalisation, all flawed | Aeon Essays

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Isaiah Berlin understood the parable of the fox and the hedgehog - 'the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing' - to illustrate two styles of thinking. Hedgehogs relate everything to a single vision, a universally applicable organising principle for understanding the world.

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A Big Think video, featuring a TOK regular Paul Bloom, who reiterates why he is ‘against empathy’. 

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A Big Think video, featuring a TOK regular Paul Bloom, who reiterates why he is ‘against empathy’. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Should empathy be the basis of moral judgements?

Key terms Moral guide, Moral capacities, Distinct, Rational compassion, Reconfigure

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PAUL BLOOM: I'm against empathy. I'm not against empathy for everything, I think empathy is a lot of fun when you're watching a movie, empathy for a fictional character. I think empathy is an important part of all sorts of exciting activities, but I'm against empathy as a moral guide. I think we could do better. The sense of empathy I'm most interested in is when you, in a sense, put yourself in another person's shoes and feel what they feel. Psychologists call this 'Emotional empathy.' A lot of people think this is core to being a good person.

A few years ago, I wrote a book called "Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion," and I argued this form of empathy, though it might seem wonderful, is actually a very poor moral guide. Who do you feel empathy for? Who do you most naturally put yourself in the shoes of? Well, we know the answer to this from study after study, after study- we naturally feel empathy for people who look like us, who speak our language, who we feel are safe, and because of that, empathy is, of all of the human feelings, perhaps the most biased and parochial. When you put a book out with a title "Against Empathy," you gotta expect a certain amount of blow back, and a lot of people responded to me with their own experiences and their own arguments, sometimes people agreed with me, sometimes they argued against me.

So one argument against the purpose of my book is: Although empathy could have negative effects, could be biased, could provoke us into violence, could cause all sorts of trouble, it also could have good effects, and I concede this in my book. And so some people have said, "Look, if you add it all up, the positive benefits of empathy outweigh the negative." I'm not always convinced about that sort of math, but even if it were true, we have moral capacities that are better than empathy. Another objection is that empathy, whatever you think of its role when it comes to war and charity and broad, moral decisions, is a necessary part of an intimate relationship. One philosopher in a critique of me said, "If my wife comes in and she's mad at somebody at work- it's all well and good for me to say, 'I love you very much and I understand where you're coming from,' but isn't what she wants me to share her anger, get angry with her?" And my response to that is, 'It's kind of right.' I don't deny that.

There are cases where what we look for in a relationship with others is that sort of shared feeling. You're mad, you want me to be mad too. My critical response is there's all sorts of cases where that's not what we want. My favorite example here is anxiety. I go to my partner and I'm very anxious, I'm stressed out. Do I want her to start sharing my feeling of anxiety? To look at me and say, "Oh my God, it's horrible. Yeah, it's horrible." No! I want her to be calm. I want her to say, "I love you. Calm down. Let me tell you how to think about it differently." Sometimes what we want from people isn't a mirror of us, it's rather, another intelligent, caring, loving person responding to us as a distinct being, and working to make our life better. And I think, sometimes, empathy is exactly what we do not want.

Now, if I'm gonna say this, I have to come up with something that will replace empathy, I'm not saying we should give up on morality. So my book is called "Against Empathy," but the subtitle of my book is "The Case for Rational Compassion," and therein lies the substitute, I think. And the substitute is two parts: One is rationality. If I'm going to help somebody, I have to know what's the best way to help them, sometimes what might seem to be the best way to help them simply makes things worse. Sometimes figuring out what to do to make the world a better place is an extraordinarily difficult task, too big for one brain, and we do our best when, as communities, we work together to think about that. So that's rationality. Rationality itself is great at pursuing ends, but it doesn't provide ends, it doesn't provide goals.

What you need is compassion- you need to care. So what I argue in the book is that our best decisions, our fairest, our most equitable ones, are done through a combination of a rational judgment of how does one make the world a better place plus compassion, love, caring. But not the sort of love and caring that requires you to put yourself in another person's shoes. Even if empathy is, on balance, has a positive effect, compassion does better. If we could reconfigure our moral attitudes to be less biased, less parochial, more with our head and less with our heart, we would do better.

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PAUL BLOOM: I'm against empathy. I'm not against empathy for everything, I think empathy is a lot of fun when you're watching a movie, empathy for a fictional character. I think empathy is an important part of all sorts of exciting activities, but I'm against empathy as a moral guide.

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A Salon article, which looks at how important it is to bridge the ‘empathy gap’ in order to understand the world from other perspectives. 

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A Salon article, which looks at how important it is to bridge the ‘empathy gap’ in order to understand the world from other perspectives. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What ‘empathy gap’ is explored in this article? What happens when we refuse to bridge empathy gaps - specifically, on our ability to understand the world? In which areas of knowledge is it particularly important to do so?

Key terms Empathy gap

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By her own admission, Natalie Egan spent years living in a bubble. As a successful entrepreneur with highly coveted venture-capital suitors, her experience was far from the norm. At the time, Egan, a transgender woman, looked to the world like a man in an industry dominated by men.

"We're naturally wired with empathy, but I think the particular dynamic I was in can really isolate people from reality and the rest of the world," she told me when we spoke on the phone.

Then she came out as a trans woman, and the empathy gap became clearer to her than it had ever been. As she started to move through the world perceived as a woman instead of as a man, she couldn't help but notice how differently people treated her.

"I went from being in a privileged space to being on the outer edges of one of the most marginalized communities in the world," Egan said. In a sense, Egan had always known what it was like to be an outlier, but now she would be fully living her life that way. The differences made themselves apparent almost immediately. She suddenly noticed things about her peers in the startup space that she hadn't noticed before-for example, the way they talked about people outside their circle. Egan was still in that circle, but she could now see it differently: Egan herself was subject to offensive language and jokes made at her expense. She remembers experiences while shopping or attempting to conduct a business meeting when people wouldn't look her in the eye. This is a familiar situation to countless LGBTQ people around the country. And it hurt. But Egan still had the advantage of her education, experience, and network. So she decided to approach the issue of this apparent empathy gap with a startup, and Translator was born. At first, it was meant to be a social network for the transgender community, but pretty soon the mission expanded by necessity. As Egan shopped the idea to investors, she kept running into roadblocks: so many people simply didn't understand the problem she was trying to fix. So, ever flexible and adaptive, Egan reframed again: Translator would take on the job of making the empathy gap clearer, and then try to close it. She wanted her peers in the business world to understand just how divergent from each other the experiences of people of different genders in the industry could be. Translator soon morphed into a vehicle for technology-assisted diversity-and-inclusion experiences for organizations and corporations of all sizes. The company uses chatbots, apps, and customized virtual-reality experiences to expose employees at organizations like the New York City Department of Education and NBCUniversal to the experiences of women, gender-nonconforming people, people with disabilities, and people of color around and among them.

When we spoke on the phone, Egan asked me to imagine sitting in a typical diversity-and-inclusion training. I wanted to yawn just thinking about it. In my experience, this usually means sitting in an uncomfortable chair for an uncomfortably long time listening to a long list of uncomfortable scenarios-some of which I have experienced myself, and some I never will: being touched inappropriately, being referred to with a slur, being constantly interrupted by male colleagues, etc. To make things more interesting-and, hopefully, effective-Translator concentrates on a force at the root of most of this behavior: unconscious bias, or the tendency for all of us to internalize and often perpetuate stereotypes about those who are different from us. We might not have conscious thoughts of bias, sexism, racism, or stereotyping, but the culture we live in sometimes makes those things inevitable on an unconscious level. Activists and entrepreneurs like Egan hope to make those unconscious biases more obvious, ideally making them easier to quash.

Translator approaches this in a few different ways, but Egan says the most effective are those that incorporate technology into interactive group activities. One activity commonly used in diversity-and-inclusion workshops is "the privilege walk." Participants line up and take steps forward or backward based on how they identify with statements read by a facilitator. I would take steps forward for "One of my parents works a white-collar job" and "I was told that I was smart and capable by my parents," and steps back for "I've been paid less or treated less fairly because of race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual identity," for example.

I wouldn't move at all for "I was raised in a single-parent household" or "I went to school speaking a language other than English" because those don't apply to me. At the end of the exercise, the different struggles and advantages of everyone in the room become stark based on where they stand. It can be powerful, but it can also be very upsetting-potentially unproductively so-for people who aren't prepared to really understand the context and implications of the exercise. Feeling anxious, embarrassed, and guilty can make empathy pretty difficult.

Translator offers a privilege-walk exercise, but it's conducted anonymously, via smartphone. The results are shared with the whole group, but names are erased. In another module, a Translator facilitator asks people to list all the stereotypes they feel others associate with them, or that they might associate with themselves. A common answer, especially from men and participants of color, Egan told me, is "threat." Instead of doing this on paper, Translator does it through an anonymous web- based app. Suddenly what was once an awkward exercise of reading vulnerable lists in front of coworkers becomes more private, and therefore sometimes more honest. It also has the counterintuitive effect of requiring participation while preserving privacy. Everyone's answers are displayed to the group on a host screen, the anonymized data showing how many people listed each stereotype.

"The group has the experience of learning without having anyone in particular volunteer information," said Egan. Critics argue that this strategy removes responsibility from the exercise, but Egan thinks it actually benefits the most stereotyped people in the room by not "otherizing" them in discussions about marginalization.

In one session with two hundred participants, in less than four minutes the app had captured more than 1,200 stereotypes. The screen at the front of the room showed a huge word cloud of all the words. It was alarming. It looked like about 25 percent of the people in the room believed they were stereotyped as "weak." One woman raised her hand. She looked to be on the verge of crying.

"I thought I knew everyone here," she said. "I had no idea how differently we all see ourselves."

"It was such an interesting statement," Egan said. "She's in a room with two hundred people she had been working with for years. That moment where she realized she may look around and say, 'We all have privilege but we're all kind of the same people,' all of a sudden that got completely blown apart. She was exposed to so many different perspectives of how we see ourselves in the world. That, for her, was a really powerful moment."

Egan admits these exercises sometimes make people angry. "People realize their privilege, but then they're also in a very awkward position in the room with a lot of people who may not have the same level of privilege," she explained. "We had one individual really express in a training how angry they were, not with anyone else, but with them- selves. They said, 'Well, what do I do with my privilege?' He had this epiphany moment in front of everybody."

Now Translator is working on an even more visceral experience. The company is building bespoke VR experiences for its clients, including ViacomCBS and Slack. Egan described a potential VR experience that will put employees in a work-related situation, a social situation, and on a dark street at night, and help them understand their own biases about different types of people they might come across in each. Rather than simply asking yes-or-no questions, the experience will have the user swipe their hand left or right, engaging them on multiple planes. The feelings that come up in tests of this experience are not always pleasant or charitable, but that's the point. And Egan told me that for people open to the experience, it can have a transformative effect.

"It's amazing, when you change the context, how much people's attitude and behavior shifts," she said.

In describing this phenomenon, Egan evoked what she sees as the three pillars of empathy: self-awareness, peer awareness, and action taking.

"Those three things are hard to bring together in a single training or a single experience, but VR can really help you do that," she said. Self-awareness is immediately impacted by the fact that, during a VR experience, you don't feel like you are yourself. That activates a type of thinking that's hard to simulate just by imagining someone else's experience. "Layer on the idea of identities in context, and you now understand your identity a little better, and it lets you understand the identities of others around you as you interact with them."

This layering also allows Translator to collect a larger amount of data that helps clients see if the experiences are actually making a difference. Egan acknowledges that Translator can't eradicate unconscious bias in an organization, but it can make people more aware of it and at least start conversations about empathy. This is where the communication aspect of empathy comes up once again.

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The empathy gap, and what it's like being trans in the workplace

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An entrepreneur set out to make clear how divergent our workplace experiences are