Subtitle: "Indigenous people are left poor as tech world takes lithium from under their feet"
The article then goes on to say that the companies aren't "taking" anything. They've signed contracts with the government and tribes to rightfully mine lithium. Sure some people want a larger cut of the pie but the companies aren't doing anything unethical and the article is clearly biased from the get go.
A contract alone does not make it ethical, especially when virtually every government has a track record of exploiting the natural resources of indigenous peoples without allowing them to negotiate terms for themselves. It might be legal, but a great deal of violence and injustice against indigenous peoples has been legal.
The article states the indigenous people _did_ negotiate for themselves:
"Yolanda Cruz, one of the leaders of the village of Catua, said she signed the contract with Minera Exar but now regrets it. At the time, she valued the opportunity to create jobs for her village. But she now worries “we are going to be left with nothing,” she said."
That's fair, it's better than the usual business that surrounds resource extraction in indigenous communities. I'll concede that. But I won't concede that "a contract was signed" => "it was ethical". The asymmetry of information, the inadequate accounting of externalities, and the duress of poverty all can make something legal unethical.
In any case, I think you're wrong saying that the article is biased. One of the quotes in the article is even a remark that there is a good and bad side to mining. It's not incorrect for the article to say that "Native people are left poor as..." because resource extraction doesn't create lasting wealth. Once the lithium is gone, the communities will still be poor while the West benefits far more from the resource inputs into its industries on a long term scale.
It is not hard to construct an argument that resource extraction is fundamentally unethical on grounds like this. Whether or not one agrees with it is another matter. I don't think making this argument is more biased than the presumption that companies negotiating with communities with far fewer resources than them is ethical until proven otherwise because there's plenty of historical evidence that it's rarely the case.
>The asymmetry of information, the inadequate accounting of externalities, and the duress of poverty all can make something legal unethical.
Under that criteria, it'd be impossible to do business with any group that has lesser legal funding. Neighborhood organizations, common families, local businesses. All probably have inadequate legal representation when interpreting and signing these agreements.
Of course when a country needs dollars to pay off crushing external debts selling it's natural resources to foreign companies is a very important thing.
They do this everywhere in the country. Most parts of Argentina are dry because the Andes block most of the humidity. Large mines use a lot of water. Indigenous people and farmers (lots of wines grow in deserts, but also olives etc.) no longer get the water they need.
This is why we have the IMF. To make financial crack junkies out of countries that are controlling the resources. Thank god there's a republican government now and the ban on lending money has been lifted now they've paid off the vulture funds.
Uh, no. How does that work? Does signing a contract saying I don't have First Amendment protections remove it (assuming we're citizens of the US of course)?
Contracts are a tool to record arrangements between private parties. They're given leeway in law, but they do not make things "legal". They can even be found to include illegal arrangements, and generally cannot "take away" rights granted by law.
Maybe, and certainly unethical and unacceptable are not synonymous, but no that is not where the line of thought leads. It only leads to not accepting dotted i's and crossed t's as the final word.
I can't be the only person (red state-raised American, even!) to have had serious difficulty reconciling Business, as She is Practiced—including exactly what you mention—with the basic ideas of fairness and justice we're all immersed in from birth. The whole thing, top to bottom, makes me feel pretty icky, and it's only that everyone else acts like it's OK that keeps me operating in ordinary society (which is, I'm pretty sure, a substantial moral failing on my part)
No, by that line of thought things that are legal are not necessarily ethical and vice versa. The weird contrapositive you seem to assume it implies only says something about you, not about the statement you responded to.
No, its the Court Systems perogative to pick which contract to enforce. You can outlaw a contract based on feels/facts but the enforcement of valid contract must remain objective.
Did I mention coercion? I mentioned unconscionability, which is a different legal concept. You ought to look it up, but it's basically tricking someone into signing a terrible deal so as to gain contractual leverage over them. The terribleness of the deal can often be obscured using deceptive accounting methods. Just because it was voluntary doesn't mean it was equitable; if the mining company is doing great and the people whose land is being mined are not doing similarly well, then clearly something about the deal is asymmetrical.
For the love of common sense, law does not function on feel. Contracts are objective. What you describe would change the meaning of contract according to feel of a party or even 3rd parties.
Not really, particularly in criminal law there a wide variety of punishments to "make an example" to deter others from similar conduct, with little effort to make the punishments uniform.
Similarly in contract law, the ideal contract is the one you sign and then never look at again. If you have to go back and discuss the terms then there's already been a loss of trust; the courts are just there to pick up the pieces.
> particularly in criminal law there a wide variety of punishments to "make an example" to deter others from similar conduct, with little effort to make the punishments uniform.
Its uncertainity intended by law itself. All abided parties are most likely comfortable with it. No one would rely on this certainity.
Put it simply, You cant expect more certainity than the contract/law itself defines.
> If you have to go back and discuss the terms then there's already been a loss of trust; the courts are just there to pick up the pieces.
The loss of trust is exactly the scenarios where contracts are most useful. The contract would most likely have cancellation clause, which means it should terminate expectedly without any suprises assuming contract itself is objective (That is, It should not grant uncertainity like criminal laws).
So "Natives getting fixed amount in return for Li mining" is an example of objective contract.
In many legal systems, there are laws that disallow certain types of contracts, even if they are supposedly entered into voluntarily. Some things are considered bad enough to not allow. Coercion is hard to define, especially with power differentials as huge as you find between multinationals and small communities.
Small communities can afford good lawyers to look at their contracts and represent them, especially if the lawyers get in on some of the upside of the contract.
I don't imagine indigenous people have very much plans for Lithium too. I think the characterization of taking probably keeps alive that colonial bent on such things.
Indigenous people usually subsist off their environments, which are disrupted and potentially destroyed by extractive industries.
It takes a certain sort of person to screw the indigenous out of not only their traditions and culture by destroying their source of food and other supplies, and then turn around and say they don't deserve to profit off that destruction because they're simple and provincial.
They get some profit. Whether or not that's "enough" is up to the eye of the beholder.
Are the benefits of living in Argentina society, bolstered by shared oil revenue, good enough for the people who born in the Andean salt flats region? That's a political question, not a moral one.
Additionally, I don't like how this is being framed.
Titling this as happening to 'indigenous peoples' instead of "Citizens of Argentina" and talking about the destruction of culture, as opposed to 'evolution' or 'melding with multicultural society'. Or people 'subsisting' instead of merely being poor. "Provincial" instead of 'uneducated'.
It slants the whole conversation in a direction I think is utterly unfair.
Indigenous people have pretty shitty representation in government, and this applies pretty much wherever you go. It's completely possible for them to get screwed even if the government were totally happy with the mining contracts... actually, I'd be astonished if that weren't the case.
Governments often coordinate the share of natural resources between members of the same nation, and anytime the share isn't 100% going to the people that coincidentally happened to live upon a oil deposit or lithium deposit, then they'll complain that they are being shorted on the deal.
Yet most people question why a natural resource extraction should result in a windfall for 300-1000 people at most, and leave the rest of the nation without any immediate benefit.
We can question why X people get more and Y people get less, but that's really getting into the scope of the politics of a foreign nation which I bet none of us are really capable of discussing.
There is a large difference in power and knowledge between these two sides, which is the heart of the ethics argument.
The people living on top of the resources may have legally relinquished their rights to it and the intact land it's buried beneath, but the drafters of those contracts have a lot of room and leverage to act in bad faith in order to exploit them. This can prevent these people from escaping a cycle of subjugation because they are given mere subsistence instead of wealth in return for their resources.
Legality of things like this are often just procedural facades to release mineral extraction companies from accusations that they are doing something wrong, harming someone or, sadly, indirectly enslaving vulnerable people.
There is a large difference in power and knowledge
between these two sides, which is the heart of the
ethics argument.
This is exactly the point where these conversations break down. The natives negotiated a contract for fixed rates, not proportional rates of payment. The advantage of fixed rates is that you know what you are going to get, the advantage of proportional rates are that you get more if they get more.
Had the Lithium extraction here turned out to be really really hard and the payment to the communities was nearly all of the profit the mining companies were making after extraction, the natives would not complain. But when it is a small fraction of the profit, it is "unfair".
So what is the right answer? Well in one view of the world the correct answer is to build a mining company with the indigenous population so that they can start providing a commodity that the rest of the world wants to buy. That creates a local boost to the economy and employs as many native people as want to be employed.
That seems great until the lithium runs out. Then you end up with a derelict mining town.
I think people who clap back like this assume the indigenous groups were able to negotiate with full, symmetrical information and legal leverage. The article reflects history in this regard, suggesting that they did not.
I don't know if you can draw that conclusion from the article. The questions I would look into would be whether or not the agreements were negotiated pre-Tesla or post-Tesla. If they were negotiated pre-Tesla I could see both sides with a very different picture of lithium demand than has emerged in the post-Tesla market place. The other question I would look into was the legal leverage. Generally these contracts are negotiated at the governmental level (which is pretty much all the legal leverage you can get) and while there are cases where the government negotiations might be questioned (like alleged Copper rights in Africa going to China[1]) it isn't clear that there is a ethical lapse in the Lithium case.
Finally of course there is the "So what" aspect of it, I don't think anyone seriously argues that the US or other strong powers simply mow down the sovereignty of countries because they abuse their own citizens. If you want to advocate for a single world government that is another issue entirely.
The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics strikes again.
"The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don’t make the problem worse, even if you make it slightly better, the ethical burden of the problem falls on you as soon as you observe it. In particular, if you interact with a problem and benefit from it, you are a complete monster." https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...
could you elaborate? i don't quite understand your comment but want to understand it. do you mean your citation regarding the copenhagen interpretation to be applied to us consumers, the mining companies, or the newspaper? and how does your second comment relate to that? genuinely interested.
The mining companies, by getting involved, are being blamed for pre-existing poverty among the Atacamas. They are contributing, but they are not contributing enough.
What's with wrapping this up in such rhetoric? To make it sound smarter or "more right"? If the conclusion is no such ethical binding exists, say that. This comes off like it was written by a sophomore studying physics just completed their mandatory philosophy course.
This feels like a whole lot of pointless justification. "Oh, the world is making me feel bad about something. Well, screw you world! I don't have to, because you're not a real law!" for lack of a better way to describe it right now.
FWIW, The Washington Post is owned by Amazon/Jeff Bezos. Not to say they can not biased, but I doubt as an organization, they carry as much bias against tech for gutting their business model.
You make a good point, but in any case involving profits from land or natural resources, there's a question of political economy. Many of the best thinkers, since at least the Enlightenment, have held that land ought to be treated as a common resource that all can benefit from. Norway, for instance, has taken that wisdom to heart, and now have a trillion dollar sovereign fund put aside for the public.
I agree, people and corporations are always focused on short term profits. Perfectly understandable. But that's why it's the government's job to focus on what's good for a country in the long run.
Ah yes, the good old philosophy of communism. Great thinkers have been espousing some variation of it since Plato.
You'd think that after thousands of years these "great thinkers" would learn that nothing good will come from taking private property and making it a "common resource" (read: property of the state)
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest a journalist's opinion that the jobs and small financial inducements offered might not be adequate compensation for local residents has more to do with the fact that lithium mining tends to pollute the local environment and causes water shortages than the assumption that newspapers are biased against hardware companies (whose products they all use) because Google hurts their ad revenue.
The "Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics" becomes relevant if one is convinced that mining companies are totally honest, reasonable negotiators who's primary concern is solving the local communities' problems and not extracting maximum resource at minimum cost. Personally, I don't believe that. YMMV.
"primary concern is solving the local communities' problems and not extracting maximum resource at minimum cost"
That's a clear false dichotomy: either people have no self-interest, or else they must be the bad guys. But almost everyone in any market operates primarily from self-interest. If a company that was losing money offered you your current job at twice the salary, would you say no, because you placed their interests above your own? Of course not. If you didn't take it, it would most likely be because you worried the company would go broke and lay you off, a clearly self-interested motivation. And the communities here - if someone offered them far more than the lithium was worth, would they turn that down? I really don't think they would. So either being mainly motivated by self-interest doesn't make someone bad, or else almost anyone who buys or sells anything is bad.
I think a more appropriate example scenario would be something like this: You are driving through the desert with a truck full of food and water. You come upon an old couple whose car has broken down, hundreds of miles from the nearest town. They beg you for help, offering anything for some water. As a shrewd negotiator, you assess the current market situation and offer a gallon of water in exchange for the woman's diamond earrings and the man's gold ring. This is a win/win scenario! They get to stay alive a little longer, and you get a great deal on some jewelry. No coercion needed, and since both sides entered into the deal voluntarily who can complain! As you drive off, you smile to yourself at the thought of how wonderful it was that everyone acted in their own self interest and managed to improve their situation.
That analogy isn't quite right. It would be more apt if the couple instead of having diamonds and gold had, well, lithium. What is that couple going to do with lithium? For that couple, that lithium is effectively worthless, even factoring in if circumstances were better, but the food and water is priceless. Both sides do legitimately benefit from that transaction, even if one side is legitimately upset about how much more the other benefits from the arrangement.
It's reasonable to desire that resources extracted from a country or region should benefit the people of that country or region more than the companies extracting those resources. The problem is that that is a classic tragedy of the commons, making it unreasonable to expect or hope that that sort of problem gets solved on an individual basis. Yes, let's hold mining companies to task for not further helping impoverished communities near mines, but let's not mistake that it is the government of Argentina that allowed this to occur to begin with.
I didn't create any false dichotomy, I simply noted your original middlebrow dismissal of the article was based on the absurd premise that its criticism of a mining company for causing a problem and lowballing with compensation was analogous to the criticism meted out to those whose philanthropic proposals "observe or interact" with problems they couldn't fully solve. The mining company doesn't stand accused of observing problems whilst not doing enough to help, it stands accused of creating problems whilst paying off just enough to get a contract.
Nobody is suggesting the mining company is the "bad guys" for having an interest in making a profit. They are suggesting they might be the "bad guys" for allegedly exploiting the naivete of local residence to pay a pittance to wreck their environment.
Exploitation pretty much means making someone's situation a bit better - when justice demands far more than that. Nor is it clear that the companies aren't doing permanent harm.
So let me see if I am reading you right. The "problem" here is powerful multinational corps using their power to negotiate exploitative deals with vulnerable populations. I'm with you so far. What I'm not clear on is who you think is being unjustly blamed for it. The newspapers are observing this and reporting on it - are you saying they are getting blamed for causing the problem or not doing more to stop it?
>But what if – what if noticing a problem didn’t make it any worse? What if we could act on a problem and not feel horrible for making it just a little better, even if it was an action that benefited ourselves as well? What if we said that in these instances, these groups weren’t evil – it’s okay to notice a problem and only make it a little bit better.
In other words, if you find a young girl trapped in a well, knowing she would die without you, you are morally just if you keep her there, fed, watered and use her for your 'amusement' because her other alternative was death.
The following documentary "de eerlijke onderneming" [1] was broadcasted on Dutch TV. The title translates to "the fair company", there's a lot of English in it as well. It is about a man, Bas van Abel, who started a company called Fairphone. He tried tried to source a phone of completely fair materials. That means that all the materials including the cobalt and the little technical parts are paid fairly for, as well as the people who made them.
What I learned from the documentary is that you can't change overnight a huge system (like, how little rights people in China have, how production in China cannot be avoided, or the gang wars and child labour in Africa) even if you want to. You need to lower your standards to the status quo of the social environment you are working with, and improve it from there, little by little. Plus, you will experience setbacks. Also, his goal was pretty much impossible for various practical reasons so he had to lower expectations.
Their profit margins are very low for standards (IIRC < 10 EUR per smartphone), yet the price/performance of the phone is also low compared to flagship devices like latest SGS or iPhone. Playing devil's advocate this means that, by definition, every owner of a smartphone is doing less good than Fairphone, and now that you know the above, you "know you are a monster". One could even argue Fairphone are monsters since they profit.
For the record, I wouldn't put it like this. I think there's a lot of shades between such harsh, black and white statements.
That is a wonderfully useful metanarrative. Sticking it in my pocket to dismiss things where I need a philosophical justification for not caring about others in the future.
"Demagoguery is an appeal to people that plays on their emotions and prejudices rather than on their rational side."
I'm sure you're just quoting this conveniently exonerating 'truth' for honest reasons.
Note: demagoguery works exceptionally well when using seemingly rational, preferably contrarian, arguments with a public that considers itself very rational and wouldn't dream of being persuaded by a narrative because it confirms their prejudices.
Capitalists should be wary of this sort of short term consequentialist argument. Since the marginal utility of money decreases with wealth... (fill in the rest.)
>> The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it.
At first I was thinking it's ridiculous to consider someone as well part of the problem if they observe a problem and do nothing. But doing something could be as simple as calling the police.
Well... but that is also a way of interacting with the problem! Calling the police can make matters much, much worse for the people involved, especially when those people are part of some culturally or economically marginalized group. Doing nothing may be a better choice than calling the police.
I find it sad that some people don't believe 'Native People' are able to make their own decisions such as agreeing to having lithium mined on their territories. Extremely patronizing - stereotyping large swaths of people as incompetent, for what purpose? To push a political narrative.
The article cites two 'native people' involved in the decision making process who both believe they weren't sufficiently well informed to have decided correctly, as well as noting that many weren't involved in the consultation process and weren't happy. Is it more patronising to consider they might not have been sufficiently well-informed of resource extraction economics or environmental impact, or to overlook their opinion of the process entirely in pushing a counter narrative?
Claims are being made that more lithium is being extracted than originally negotiated. Communities weren't being paid. Negotiations weren't in the open, where all the local tribes even knew what was up.
How is that claiming "Native People" aren't capable of making decisions around having mining in the first place? It's after the fact complaints about the contracts not being adhered to or now in the future needing to be renegotiated in the open.
The tone on HN is surprising. Given all the shady stuff perpetrated by business folks that we read about here all day, the tone is "well they did it to themselves." full stop. This is western civilization siding with its own way of life first, when it knows it is flawed.
I find it sad that you are concern trolling here. It is not patronizing to recognize the huge information asymmetry between a multinational mining corporation and a representative from an indigenous community. In addition to the information asymmetry there is a huge power difference, both of which result in negotiations that aren't always fair.
I was arguing against the concern troll's idea that it is patronizing to point out the asymmetry of power between the multinationals and the indigenous folks. I didn't even use the word unethical, let alone assert something was unethical.
We must live in countries with wildly different legal systems. Here in the United States, contract law includes concepts like unenforceable clauses, duress, lack of capacity, etc. Many of those concepts are related to the concepts of fair/unethical, and have plenty of bearing on whether the contract can be enforced, even after it is signed.
Just looked up typical mining royalties and found this:
The CMR royalty is based on a company’s annual profits from mining. It is typical of
Canadian mineral royalties, which are mainly profit based, and all of which have some
specific peculiarities, often related to embedded incentives. In the case of the CMR, its
main characteristics are:
? a stepped ladder of royalty rate –
? no royalty on the first $10,000 of annual profits;
? 5% of annual net profit between $10,000 and $5 million;
? escalating in 1% increments per $5 million of net profit, to maximum 14%
(for net profit above $45 million);
? subject to an overall maximum rate on all net profit of 13% (for profit
above $220 million);
> Exar plans to start constructing a $400 million lithium-brine plant here next year. Eventually reaching [...] about $250 million annually, at today’s prices.
> By the time the plant is running, Exar will have paid about $250,000 to the indigenous groups. And after that, the six communities would share a total of about $178,000 each year.
> Many indigenous residents were unaware of the contracts, learning about them from Post reporters who were able to review the documents at the provincial mining office.
How much of the problem boils down to education and information asymmetry? -- (e.g fracking here in NA.) -- Terrible contracts signed by small under-educated communities who only later find out they're getting screwed.
I wonder are there organizations that help small communities understand their own bargaining power and long-term impact when structuring such deals?
According to the numbers in the article, the lithium in one Tesla equals about 17,000 smartphones. I mean it's pretty obvious when you think about it, but I hadn't stopped to think about it until now.
The article then goes on to say that the companies aren't "taking" anything. They've signed contracts with the government and tribes to rightfully mine lithium. Sure some people want a larger cut of the pie but the companies aren't doing anything unethical and the article is clearly biased from the get go.
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