The Questions You Ask
Whether telling your own story, stories of other people or stories of a movement/culture/nation/event, the story you tell is always informed by the questions you ask.
I went to study economics in India because I wanted to hear a different story of the reasons behind global economic disparity. In the US, we learned that these economic disparities occurred because of supply and demand and the natural distribution of resources.
Something about this story didn’t make sense to me. When I studied at Jawaharlal Nehru University in India I learned a different story, one of colonial extraction and World Bank policies that required countries in the global south to privatize public industries as conditions for loans, allowing for another form of financial extraction.
I learned about the significance of the introduction of calculus to economic studies. When Adam Smith and Marx were writing, economics was a social science looking at behaviors and tendencies. The field did not have predictive models. Economists were philosophers. They looked at the past and hypothesized about the future.
With the introduction of calculus, taken from Physics, economics took on the weight of science, made up of laws like supply and demand. The results of these models were used for policy decisions and when written about in the papers they seemed like fact, even in the face of many contradictions.
I wondered why the US automotive industry needed to exact tariffs on the Japanese car industry. If Japanese manufacturers were more efficient than US companies and US citizens demanded their products, doesn’t that mean the US needed to change their business models to compete, rather than apply tariffs? Weren’t we seeing free market supply and demand in action?
I learned in my first weeks of class, that our economic models are based on a series of assumptions. The simple calculus used to create these models cannot handle all the variables involved in even the simplest economic transaction. The assumptions, until that time, never incorporated the unwanted impacts of transactions like the cost of pollution, economic inequality, or nation-based trade policies.
Policymakers used arguments of fair trade only when it suited their own country’s businesses. Businesses, not workers or citizens.
THE IMPORTANCE OF ACKNOWLEDGING OUR ASSUMPTIONS
The longer I stay in Berlin, having moved here from San Francisco three years ago, the more I realize what I do not know.
I grew up with the American Myth that we had reached some type of equality based on merit, that men and women were treated equal, and that people who were poor were poor because they didn’t work hard.
None of that sat well with me. So, I decided to explore the world, first moving to Japan, then to India, then San Francisco. Each time I thought I was understanding the world better, becoming cosmopolitan.
Yet Berlin changed that view for me and seeing the media in the US versus my experience in Berlin meeting refugees from Syria. Seeing the policy differences between Syria and countries in Africa. Learning about the divisions that still exist in Germany, between the former West and the phantom East Germany.
In many cases, I had no visible assumptions because I entered spaces of intellectual discussions without knowledge of the existence of various ideas, histories, experiences I was encountering.
THE POWER OF QUESTIONS
So, how do we ask questions that let us hear different stories?
How do we get beyond our assumptions?
I think we need to start asking more questions and to listen more closely. We need to get curious and look more deeply at the places where we think we already know the answers. And sometimes we need to go back into our own histories to see where our ideas came from so we can see the filters that cover our eyes and ears.
CONNECTING STORIES
I’ve come to realize that something I strive for, finding the points of connection between one understanding of the world and another can be very tenuous, ever-shifting, sometimes unexpected, often fleeting.
But as creatives and people, we try to bridge these gaps. These gaps exist between one story and another.
The gap also exists within ourselves and in our ability to question others.
The pursuit of telling stories, our stories and others, is quite noble. There are so many challenges in doing so. But there are so many wonderful stories emerging because of this human drive to be heard, and human drive to listen.
STORIES YOU’LL WANT TO HEAR
I want to share a program that I’ve been listening to since before podcasting. There were times when I sat in my car in a parking lot, the engine turned off but the radio on so I could hear the end of Wisconsin Public Radio’s “To the Best of Our Knowledge.”
That program is still going strong and is still as interesting as ever. Here are links to two episodes I heard this past week that struck a chord with me because these subjects do not get much attention.
I was traveling by train and had many hours to listen (which I did). It was hard to just share these two programs. Check them out where you listen to your podcasts or on their website, TTBook.org and have fun exploring their stories.