What empirical psychology research exists about the value of punishment compared to forgiveness?

The American psychologist Frank Fincham (Page on www.fincham.info) wrote as recently as 2000 that forgiveness remained more the domain of theology, not psychology, “The relative lack of research on forgiveness has been attributed to its identification with theology (Fitzgibbons, 1986). Certainly it appears that forgiveness is a “goal commonly advocated by all of the world’s long- standing religions” (Thoresen, Luskin, & Harris, 1998, p. 164), but it has not thereby engendered hostility or disdain in the social sciences. Rather, it simply appears to have been considered insufficiently important or amenable to scientific study (McCullough et al., 1998a)”.

Studies on forgiveness per se
I found several recent studies that examined the value of forgiveness per se. One of the most compelling examples is Everett Worthington, a professor of psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, USA. In this Atlantic magazine article,The Surprising Benefits of Forgiveness, he recounts how he forgave the intruder who, on New Year's eve 1995, bludgeoned his 78 year old mother to death and then raped her with a crowbar. Ironically, Worthington researches the psychology of forgiveness. How could he forgive the seemingly unforgivable, his own mother's violation and murder? He says that over the next 24 hours he completely forgave his mother's murderer using a five-step process he himself had developed, something he calls the REACH (Dr. Everett Worthington, VCU Psychology) method.

1. Recall the incident, including all the hurt.
2. Empathize with the person who caused the hurt.
3. Altruistically forgive the one who hurt.
4. Commit to publicly forgive.
5. Hold onto forgiveness.

Worthington says he was helped in his effort to empathize, step 2, by the fact that after committing the atrocity, the intruder apparently ran from room to room, smashing all the mirrors with the crowbar. Worthington interpreted this as a sign that the intruder couldn't bear to look at himself.

I think to make this forgiveness process work for oneself, it's important to separate the easier cognitive (intellectual) from the more difficult affective (emotional) empathy.

Worthington has several peer-reviewed publications, including randomized control trials, on his forgiveness method.

1. Harper, Quandrea, et al. "Efficacy of a Workbook to Promote Forgiveness: A Randomized Controlled Trial With University Students." Journal of clinical psychology 70.12 (2014): 1158-1169.
2. Lin, Yin, et al. "Efficacy of REACH Forgiveness across cultures." Journal of clinical psychology 70.9 (2014): 781-793.
3. Wade, Nathaniel G., et al. "Efficacy of psychotherapeutic interventions to promote forgiveness: A meta-analysis." Journal of consulting and clinical psychology 82.1 (2014): 154.
4. Exline, Julie J., et al. "Forgiveness, depressive symptoms, and communication at the end of life: A study with family members of hospice patients." Journal of palliative medicine 15.10 (2012): 1113-1119.
5. Watkins, David A., et al. "Forgiveness and interpersonal relationships: A Nepalese investigation." The Journal of social psychology 151.2 (2011): 150-161.

Nathaniel Wade, an Associate Professor of Psychology at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, USA, one of Worthington's former students, also studies the psychology of forgiveness. Biola University Center for Christian Thought
Ann C. Recine, a University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire teacher and Nurse Practitioner with a holistic private practice in Eau Claire, WI, USA, also researches on forgiveness. Recine, Ann C. "Designing Forgiveness Interventions Guidance From Five Meta-Analyses."Journal of Holistic Nursing (2014): 0898010114560571.

Noreen et al (Page on st-andrews.ac.uk) start with Mandela's example of choosing to forgive his captors and refer to recent studies that have examined the physiological benefits of forgiveness.
Page on niu.edu
Page on www.fincham.info

There are a couple of interesting theses from the Psychology Department at the University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA.

The 2010 PhD level thesis by Ryan Fehr Page on umd.edu summarizes “studies have demonstrated that forgiveness facilitates life satisfaction (Karremans, Van Lange, Ouwerkerk, & Kluwer, 2003), reduces blood pressure (Witvliet, Ludwig, & Vander Laan, 2001), facilitates interpersonal cooperation (Fincham, 2000), and enhances victims’ general feelings of relatedness toward other people to pre-conflict levels (Karremans, Van Lange, & Holland, 2005). Taken together, these findings confirm that forgiveness enhances what is commonly perceived to be lost during conflict – well-being, cooperation, and relatedness”.

On the other hand, the 2011 Master's level thesis by Lauren M. Boyatzi Page on umd.edu explores whether a perceived need for urgent cognitive closure drives the desire for revenge.

Some of the most heartbreaking medical accounts on forgiveness are in this study, Page on coh.org (see Table 3). They interviewed nurses on how those dying in their care dealt with the need for forgiving and forgiveness. Some of their narrative excerpts are profoundly moving:

“We took care of a COPDer who was near EOL. Her daughter had moved to Hawaii (we are in NY). I had several discussions on the phone to the daughter about mom’s condition (She was the DPA.) I found out the reason why the daughter moved to Hawaii was to be far away from her mother as possible. I didn’t know her stepfather had sexually abused her. The daughter was feeling extremely guilty and didn’t know what to do. I encouraged her to forgive her mother and to let go. I explained to her it would help her mother on her journey as well. Several days later, the daughter called her mother and forgave her. After struggling several weeks with the COPD the patient was at peace and left us comfortably and at ease”.

“I cared for a patient who was dying of the same syndrome his brother had. The brother was older and their single mother had the older brother get a stem cell transplant (only cure for their syndrome). The older brother died of complications from transplant. So she had decided not to do transplant for the younger brother. Then with the younger brother dying of sequelae of his syndrome, the mother felt incredible guilt that her decisions ‘‘led to both her sons dying’’. Her guilt and grief manifested as anger. So it took me a while to even process her real feelings. Once she admitted how she really felt, she could start working on ways to get her to forgive herself. I’m not sure that she ever really did”.

“In the early 90s, I was caring for a 32-year-old man dying of AIDS. He had not had any contact with his family for many years. With the help of a social worker, he called his family and let them know he was dying. My experience was when an elderly man and woman (the parents) and a younger man (brother) stepped off the elevator. The men were in overalls and explained that this was the first time they had ever been out of Kansas. I walked them to the room and the brother immediately climbed into bed and lovingly cradled his brother. It was a very tender moment”.

Societal level forgiveness? One of the most powerful empirical examples is South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Truth and Reconciliation Commission (South Africa)

Studies comparing forgiveness and punishment
1. A useful starting point for older references is a 2014 peer-reviewed study by  Geert-Jan Will, Eveline A. Crone, and Berna Güroğlu from the Institute of Psychology, Leiden University in the Netherlands. "Acting on social exclusion: neural correlates of punishment and forgiveness of excluders." Social cognitive and affective neuroscience(2014): nsu045, Page on researchgate.net.

2. Brown, Ryan P. "Measuring individual differences in the tendency to forgive: Construct validity and links with with depression." Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 29.6 (2003): 759-771.

3. Brune, M., Juckel, G., Enzi, B. (2013). "An eye for an eye"? Neural correlates of retribution and forgiveness. Plos One, 8, e73519. Page on plosone.org

4. De Quervain, Dominique J-F., et al. "The neural basis of altruistic punishment." Science (2004).

5. Exline, J.J., Baumeister, R.F., Zell, A.L., Kraft, A.J., Witvliet, C.V. (2008). "Not so innocent: does seeing one’s own capacity for wrongdoing predict forgiveness?" Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94, 495–515.

6. Gunther Moor, B., Gu ̈rog ̆lu, B., Op de Macks, Z.A., Rombouts, S.A.R.B., Van der Molen, M.W., Crone, E.A. (2012). "Social exclusion and punishment of excluders: neural correlates and developmental trajectories." Neuroimage, 59, 708–17. http://dare.uva.nl/document/2/10...

7. Gu ̈rog ̆lu, B., Will, G.-J., Klapwijk, E.T. (2013). "Some bullies are more equal than others: peer relationships modulate altruistic punishment of bullies after observing ostracism." International Journal of Developmental Science, 7, 13–23. Page on researchgate.net

8. McCullough, M.E., Fincham, F.D., Tsang, J.A. (2003). "Forgiveness, forbearance, and time: the temporal unfolding of transgression-related interpersonal motivations." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, 540–57. Page on www.fincham.info

9. McCullough, M.E., Kurzban, R., Tabak, B.A. (2013). "Cognitive systems for revenge and forgiveness." Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36, 1–15. Page on ucla.edu

10. Park, J.-H., Enright, R.D., Essex, M.J., Zahn-Waxler, C., Klatt, J.S. (2013). "Forgiveness intervention for female South Korean adolescent aggressive victims." Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 34, 268–76.

11. Strobel, A., Zimmermann, J., Schmitz, A., et al. (2011). "Beyond revenge: neural and genetic bases of altruistic punishment." Neuroimage, 54, 671–80.

12. Will, G.-J., van den Bos, W., Crone, E.A., Gu ̈rog ̆lu, B. (2013). "Acting on observed social exclusion: developmental perspectives on punishment of excluders and compensation of victims." Developmental Psychology, 49, 2236–44.

13. Young, L., Saxe, R. (2009). "Innocent intentions: a correlation between forgiveness for accidental harm and neural activity." Neuropsychologia, 47, 2065–72. Page on mit.edu

Methodological problems with some of these studies (actually problems with psychology studies in general)

1. I'm skeptical about data from studies that incentivize volunteers to participate by paying them (Conciliatory gestures promote forgiveness and reduce anger in humans, Page on nih.gov, Page on researchgate.net) or giving them extra credit Page on www.fincham.info.
2. A key problem in the research on forgiveness is the “measurement problem” (see pages 11, 32, 33 of this Masters thesis, Page on vcu.edu), i.e., how to distinguish between real/sincere and fake/pseudo self-forgiveness. In the former, we have to painfully work our way through the psychological, social and spiritual consequences of wrongdoing. In the latter, we let ourselves off the hook and excuse ourselves of blame for any wrongdoing. Available psychological measurement tools cannot separate real and fake self-forgiveness. I think the academic study of forgiveness would improve with an inter-disciplinary approach that measures physiological responses to distinguish between the genuinely remorseful and the cheaters. In fact, much of psychology research would improve with more objective criteria such as physiological assessments and follow-up on participants' actual actions rather than relying solely or overtly on self-reporting.
3. Shoddy statistics are the bane of much biomedical research including psychology research.
   Giner-Sorolla, Roger. "Science or art? How aesthetic standards grease the way through the publication bottleneck but undermine science." Perspectives on Psychological Science 7.6 (2012): 562-571. Page on emilkirkegaard.dk
   Nuzzo, R. "Statistical errors: P values, the ‘gold standard’ of statistical validity, are not as reliable as many scientists assume." Nature 506 (2014): 150-2.
   No one has done more to highlight this problem than Stanford epidemiologist John P. A. Ioannidis.
   Why Most Published Research Findings Are False

How to Make More Published Research True



https://www.quora.com/What-empirical-psychology-research-exists-about-the-value-of-punishment-compared-to-forgiveness/answer/Tirumalai-Kamala

What can we learn from the Milgram's experiment?

What was Milgram's experiment?
Briefly, in the famous Yale university Milgram experiment by Stanley Milgram, normal people from off the street were induced by authority figures to subject others to life-threatening electric shocks if they gave wrong answers to word-pair association questions. The study suggested we obey heinous orders to inflict what we believe to be real pain on others when given orders from someone we consider to be a legitimate authority.

In 1961, shortly after

wikipedia.org

Adolf Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem, Milgram started his experiments. In all, ~700 volunteers participated in Milgram's studies in the 1960s. In the most famous among these, 40 men, recruited using newspaper ads for a study of memory and learning, were paid $4.50 for their participation. For the experiments, Milgram developed an intimidating shock generator. Shock levels ranged from 15 to 450 volts with increments of 15, each switch clearly labeled 'Slight Shock', 'Moderate Shock', 'Strong Shock', 'Very Strong Shock', 'Intense Shock', 'Extreme Intensity Shock', 'Danger:Severe Shock', all the way up to a level simply ominously labeled as 'XXX', all this to say the subjects recruited as Teachers (actually the Learners) couldn't argue plausible deniability about the consequences of their actions. Even more compelling step to negate plausible deniability? Teachers received a sample shock of 45 volts prior to the experiment (1).

Participants were split into two groups, Teachers who subjected Students to electric shocks when they gave wrong answers. Unbeknownst to the Teachers, the Students were in on the experiment and only pretending to being shocked. The Experimenter was the authority figure who greeted the Teachers and instructed them about the study. As the experiment proceeded, the Teacher would hear the fake verbal protests of Students being subjected to shocks, turn to the Experimenter for advice on how to proceed. The Experimenter would respond, 'Please continue/the experiment requires that you continue/it is absolutely essential that you continue/you have no other choice/you must go on' (2). As the shock levels increased, the Students would plead to be released, complain about a heart condition, and when the shocks reached the 300 volt level, even bang on the wall and demand to be released. After this stage, the Students would become completely silent and refuse to answer any more questions. The Experimenter would then 'instruct' the Teacher to gauge this silence as a 'wrong' answer and deliver another, higher electric shock (2). 26 out of 40 Teachers, i.e., 65%, delivered the maximum shocks. Even as many of them became extremely agitated, distraught and angry, they continued to follow the Experimenter's orders all the way through.

How credible are Milgram's data? Plagued by variations, Confirmation bias, data selection, and playing along.
As it turns out, Milgram's data had many flaws. Discovering hundreds of audiotapes of Milgram's experiments at Yale, psychologist Gina Perry found he performed at least 24 variations of the shock experiments, a major scientific no-no since methodological variations preclude pooling such data. Her analysis of these audiotapes indicated several instances of Experimenters coercing Teachers. In other experiments, far fewer Teachers obeyed the Experimenters' orders and in some, even none obeyed (3, 4).

Perry also found that Teachers who truly believed Students were being shocked were also more likely to disobey the Experimenter's commands and deliver lower-voltage shocks, i.e., that Milgram's experiments were plagued with and not controlled for confirmation bias.

One of the most interesting of Milgram's variations involved 20 pairs of men who were somehow related or known to each other, father-son, friends or neighbors. In this instance, defiance of the Experimenter dominated, with only 3 of 20 subjects, i.e., 15%, choosing to apply the maximum voltage (3). Disappointingly, Milgram never reported these results, an odious example of data selection, i.e., suppressing data that didn't fit the hypothesis.

Tracking down some of the volunteers and Milgram's research assistants, Perry discovered plausible cases of Teachers deducing the real purpose of the experiment and simply playing along. This harkens back to one of the oldest conundrums in psychological experimentation, namely, who's testing who? From Clever Hans, the horse who duped his experimenters to studies of sexual proclivities in Polynesia where respondents deduced what the interrogators wanted to hear and answered accordingly, Perry's backtracking suggests that in Milgram's case as well, tables may have sometimes been turned on Milgram and his Experimenters.

How reproducible are Milgram's data? Caveats notwithstanding, surprisingly robust, they withstand the test of time.
Despite various caveats uncovered by Perry's investigative back-tracking of Milgram's data and subjects, other psychologists have largely recapitulated his results. These include a study by Wesley Kilham and Leon Mann in 1974 (5) and a 2009 study by Jerry Bulger of Santa Clara University (6). The many methodological differences between these studies, for e.g., Bulger's had a maximum shock voltage of 150 volts compared to Milgram's 450, serve to strengthen rather than weaken the overarching conclusion that under certain circumstances, obedience to authority outweighs ethics.

Milgram's experiments: pioneer in Situationism (psychology)
With Hannah Arendt's 'haunting specter of universal co-operation' (7) an ever-present backdrop in a post-Holocaust world, a dangerous extrapolation of the Milgram experiments is that 'there is an 'Eichmann in every one of us' (7), and indeed this has become an all too frequent interpretation, something Arendt herself vehemently contested.

Rather, Milgram's results beg the oppressive yet compelling question from each of us, 'What would I have done in their shoes?'. Here lies the real value of Milgram's experiment. Rather than an a priori rank and file of born psychopaths, Milgram's study suggests instead that our behavior is shaped by what we observe as the norm in our environment, i.e., situationism. Why? Because situationism serves to exonerate us of the consequences of our ethically wrong behavior. As Milgram wrote in Obedience to Authority 'It is psychologically easy to ignore responsibility when one is only an immediate link in a chain of evil action' (8).

Charlie Munger further explains that authority is part of, but not all of, the formula necessary for such strict obedience, the other ingredients being 'consistency,[behavioral] contrast, reason-respecting', all operating in combination toward the same end (9), i.e., compliance to authority. In Milgram's experiments, these factors include physical presence of the authority figure, sponsorship of the experiment by Yale, a prestigious academic institution, and apparently random separation of participants into Teachers and Students.

Recent examples from real-life, what are the most heart-stopping features of wanton police brutality evidenced in videos such as those of the killing of Shooting of Walter Scott and Shooting of Laquan McDonald? The utter casualness of the process of killing another human being, the calm, unhurried demeanor of other police who arrive soon after and mill around, seemingly oblivious to the flickering out of life of a human being lying at their feet. All unmistakable signs of situationism, individuals so inured to brutality, it's become not just another habit but rather an entire culture. Such habituation to an extreme, especially in the realm of evil, is the heartbreaking lesson of Milgram's experiment.

Is there hope? Situationism implies yes, just as evil can be shaped into existence in an individual by their environment so can benevolence, Civil disobedience, Pay it forward and Volunteering being some ready examples.

Bibliography

1. Fry, Sara T. "A history and theory of informed consent: Ruth R. Faden and Tom L. Beauchamp, in collaboration with Nancy MP King, New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Cloth, 392 pages." (1988): 169-170
2. The Milgram Obedience Experiment. The Perils of Obedience. Kendra Cherry. June 06, 2015. Why Was the Milgram Experiment So Controversial?
3. Page on northgeorgia.edu
4. Perry, G. (2012). Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments. New York: The New Press. p. 139
5. Kilham, Wesley, and Leon Mann. "Level of destructive obedience as a function of transmitter and executant roles in the Milgram obedience paradigm." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 29.5 (1974): 696.
6. Burger, Jerry M. "Replicating Milgram: Would people still obey today?." American Psychologist 64.1 (2009): 1.
7. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 1983).
8. Milgram Stanley, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View, Harper and Row, New York, 1974.
9. Bevelin, Peter. Seeking wisdom: from Darwin to Munger. PCA Publications LLC, 2007. Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger, 3rd Edition: Peter Bevelin: 9781578644285: Amazon.com: Books

Further reading

1. The Aeon, October 4, 2014. Malcolm Harris. The psychology of torture. The Milgram experiments showed that anybody could be capable of torture when obeying an authority. Are they still valid?  Is it time to stop doing any more Milgram experiments? — Malcolm Harris — Aeon Essays
2. The Atlantic, January, 2015. Cari Romm. Rethinking One of Psychology'sMost Infamous Experiments. Rethinking One of Psychology's Most Infamous Experiments

https://www.quora.com/What-can-we-learn-from-the-Milgrams-experiment/answer/Tirumalai-Kamala

Is this world for the strong only, good deeds and politeness are seen as weakness?

By juxtaposing strong against good deeds and politeness, this question reveals how easy it is to mistakenly conflate strength and selfishness. Strong devoid of good deeds and politeness isn't strong but selfish. True strength and selfishness are oil and water. Imbued with integrity, true strength encompasses good deeds and politeness. OTOH, selfishness not only excludes good deeds and politeness but includes qualities that flourish in the absence of true strength, qualities such as bluster, malice aforethought, pettiness, self-indulgence, viciousness, to name a few.

History reveals that the selfish attain positions of power, i.e., appear strong, far more often than those with true strength.  Many public decisions require a show of strength, something the pseudo-strong (selfish+ambitious) can easily mimic. This is as true today as it was in ancient times. Just a glance at the news headlines on any day is all it takes to be assured of this fact. Our current age is marked by exponential technological advances but the human animal at the heart of this zeitgeist is remarkably unchanged from the one familiar to the sages of the past. That's how we come to our time where often those in positions of power tend to lack good deeds and politeness. And this may be why good deeds and politeness are easily perceived to be weaknesses.

Why such a disconnect between what should be and what is? Maybe a famous religious quote helps unravel this puzzle? Often attributed to Anaïs Nin, it goes, 'We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are'. Though true strength is rare, we aspire to it because we instinctively understand its peerless value. Yet how to accurately identify true strength? Since it's a rare quality, many of us have little personal experience of it so we use surrogate markers to identify it. We derive these surrogate markers of true strength by extrapolating from how we are and from the conventional wisdom around us. If our surrogate markers for true strength are flawed, and history teaches that this is so, our decision on who we identify as possessing true strength will turn out to be flawed as well. Why do our surrogate markers for true strength tend to be flawed? Because by and large our societies suffer from a wisdom deficit. This makes it not only possible but relatively easy for selfishness married to overweening ambition to attain a position of strength.

This is how we arrive at a world where many of those in positions of power, i.e., those who appear strong, are more often the selfish rather than the truly strong. And this is why public display of strength often excludes good deeds and politeness. Because it isn't true strength on display but rather pseudo-strength and we aren't wise enough to know the difference beforehand. And really, there's nothing new about this. History shows it's been true since time immemorial. Not only that, this wisdom deficit fuels a vicious cycle where often those who aspire to or are in leadership positions misguidedly continue to choose as their guides flawed surrogate markers for true strength, the ones that exclude good deeds and politeness. 

https://www.quora.com/Is-this-world-for-the-strong-only-good-deeds-and-politeness-are-seen-as-weakness/answer/Tirumalai-Kamala

What are some interesting illustrations of the adage "There is no ethical consumption in late capitalism"?

Arguably everything we consume, i.e., eat, wear and use, our habitations and everything within them, offer undeniable illustrations of 'There is no ethical consumption in late capitalism'.

• Coffee, tea, tin, coltan offer easily digestible parables.
• The first two, most of us drink one or other or both.
• The latter two? Anyone with an electronic device of any kind, meaning practically everyone in developed countries and increasing numbers in developing countries, uses them.
• After all, electronic devices include cell phones (basic/smart), computers (desktop/laptop/tablet), iPod/MP3 music players, e-readers, video game systems, internet streaming devices, smart TVs, DVD/Blu-ray players, VCRs, home wireless Internet.
• As the faddish-sounding Internet of Things takes off, our dependence on coltan and tin mined largely in 'resource cursed' conflict zones in the Third World only increases.
• Niobium and tantalum extracted from coltan are used in electronic device capacitors.
• As for tin? Used in the ubiquitous solder in circuit boards.
• Both largely mined in the Third World (For e.g., China, Malaysia, Peru, Indonesia, Brazil for tin).

A brief rendition of recent coffee history follows. Moral? Indulging in a cuppa joe could be among the furthest from ethical consumption we've yet managed to contrive.

Coffee

• First, some coffee numbers.
• A non-essential food item, coffee is the world's second leading trade commodity after petroleum.
• Coffee trees need elevation, which means hillsides and rough terrain become heavily planted so automation and mechanization are obviously difficult. Result? With few economies of scale, coffee is largely the purview of small-holders (1).
• Even with its attendant vagaries, small-holding is actually an improvement over the slave-holding plantations of the past.
• Globally, more people are involved in growing coffee than any other crop.
• Exclusively tropical, a crop that grows in very warm, humid climates, ~25 million farmers grow coffee, almost all of them in the 3rd world, with ~125 million earning their livelihood from the coffee business.
• OTOH, abundant coffee consumption is almost exclusively the purview of the 1st World (see figures below from 2, 3).
• ~60 producer countries and ~ 20 key consumer countries.

• Originally discovered in Africa, the Arabica and Robusta coffee varieties are today grown the world over, inevitable result of colonial tentacles relentlessly seeking out apt ecological niches for commercial exploitation of coffee.
  
  • Arabica? Higher altitudes in Latin America, Southeast Asian island nations, West Africa.
  • Robusta? Lower altitudes in East and sub-Saharan Africa, and mainland Asian countries such as Vietnam.
  • Considered to have a superior taste and thus netting higher prices on the world market, Arabica is more commonly found in upscale US coffee chains like Starbucks. Needing more stringent growing conditions, its production is more labor-intensive 'because the coffee cherries must be picked when they are perfectly ripe to maximize quality, which requires numerous passes through the same patch of coffee' (4).

I gave up drinking coffee cold turkey in 2004. As self-respecting Tamils would be quick to point out, coffee is in my blood. Witness that Indian filter coffee has its own Wikipedia entry. An indelible part of my childhood, mom used to buy raw coffee beans. She had a roaster, a contraption rigged by a local neighborhood handyman. So did other 'mamis' (housewives) around us. She'd roast the beans about once a month. My nightly chore to grind the beans using a hand-held grinder, ready for the next morning's classic South Indian dabarah (saucer)-tumbler (cup)-style fresh filter coffee. We didn't grow the beans, harvest it or bring it to market but all the other parts of the process, especially the so-called value added roasting and grinding bits, were quite sustainable, dint of our own labor, the consumers. Still sitting in the family pantry, how swiftly the roaster and grinder have become relics. Should they have? Falling in the category of what-price-so-called progress, that's a question for the ages.

The cold turkey bit. After coming to the US, I became addicted to the Starbucks routine. The grotesque amount of money I was spending on my coffee habit was already chafing when I came across the 2002 Oxfam report on coffee (5). Titled 'Mugged: Poverty in your coffee cup', I devoured the 60-page report over a week-end. That was it. What I learned made it impossible for me to blithely continue gulping my cuppa joe. Three weeks of blinding headaches later, I'm now coffee-free for 11 years and counting. Of course, giving up coffee drinking is no panacea to global inequity. After all, I still drink tea, which comes with its own particular embedded inequities. No ethical consumption in late capitalism indeed.

How coffee became steeped in inequity

• Until 1989, coffee was traded in a managed market regulated by the International Coffee Agreement (ICA), administered by the International Coffee Organization (ICO).
  
  • Set up in London in 1963 under the auspices of the UN, the ICO's member governments represented 94% of world coffee production and >75% of world consumption.
  • Producing and consuming nation governments managed supply-demand using export quotas for producing countries.
  • This kept coffee price relatively stable and reasonably high, i.e., equitable for the growers.
  • Producing countries agreed to not exceed their 'fair' share of coffee exports.
  • If prices rose above a ceiling level, producers were allowed to exceed their quotas to meet unmet demand.
  • The ICA worked well in setting prices, at least for the poorer producer countries (6, 7).
• The ICA broke down in 1989, mainly due to opposition from the USA, which walked away from it.
  
  • 'the (U.S.) State Department saw the ICA as primarily a geopolitical agreement designed to provide aid to the Third World countries' (8).
  • The US was using the ICA as a tool for political influence (6, 9).
  • In 1989, the US geo-political focus was shifting away from Brazil to Central America.
  • The quota system also limited the extent to which coffee could be used for political influence.
  • The air was thick with free-trade aroma. Along with pretty much everything else, coffee too became subsumed in the ensuing, inexorable tidal wave of free-market nostrum prevailing since the 1990s (8).
• No longer empowered to regulate coffee supply using quotas and price setting (called 'corsets'), today the ICA survives as a toothless tiger.
• Instead coffee prices are set by two large futures markets in London (for robusta coffee) and New York (for arabica coffee).
• Hand in glove with the ICA debacle, higher value processes of roasting, packaging, marketing and selling moved from developing to developed countries, specifically to Multinational corporation.
• Meanwhile, spread with evangelizing intensity through relentless advertising campaigns, the explosive worldwide growth of upscale coffee chains such as the US-based Starbucks made coffee a poster child of Leslie Sklair's culture-ideology of consumerism, namely, 'you are what you consume' (10).
• The pre-1989 process was somewhat more equitable to growers. A predictable, strict hierarchy of value grew out of its ashes.
  
  • Now value rises up the coffee chain, producers harvesting minimal, processors maximal of the value. How?
    
    • Supplier-managed inventory reduced working stock by outsourcing stock management.
    • Roasters hold minimum quantity of stock predicated on projected roasted coffee sales and adjusted actual sales.
    • Traders also hold and own a greater proportion of coffee stock.
    • Thus, mobilizable coffee stocks, i.e., coffee immediately available on the market, have increased.
  • As a result, price volatility has become even more inherently a part of the coffee trade since much more than ever of coffee stocks are now readily mobilizable with resultant stronger-than-ever impact on price (11).
• Coffee price volatility mirrors its supply-demand dynamics while futures market trading is essentially risk management, i.e., hedging, rather than actual physical trade of goods. Speculative activity thus hugely amplifies price volatility, driven in part by the fact that investment funds are 'extremely active in commodity markets' (12).
• Result? Generally hefty profits for the world's biggest coffee roasters. In 2002, those were Kraft Jacobs-Suchard, the food sector of the huge Philip Morris corporation; Nestlé with its Nescafé brand number one in instant coffee; Folger Coffee, a branch of Procter & Gamble; the Douwe Egberts group, the European coffee split-off of the erstwhile Sara Lee (now Hillshire Farms); Tchibo, the giant German roaster, all 1st world multinationals. After all, they buy the bulk of the coffee beans on the market.
• 3rd World coffee farmers? Unsurprisingly, short end of the stick. Prices all too frequently below the cost of production. This, even though the entire global coffee trade depends principally and primarily on the arduous work of small-holder coffee farmers (8, 13, 14).
• Careful analyses reveal the most labor-intense parts of coffee production remain the exclusive purview of the 3rd world (1, 8, 15).
• High levels of dependence on coffee production and export also go hand in hand with persistent poverty and dependency (5, 8, 16; see figures below from 5 and 16).

• Late 1980s, early 1990s, the World Bank and IMF were also key in tilting balance in favor of consumers, and away from producers. Vietnam offers the clearest illustration of this policy. 
• In 1989, Vietnam was nowhere on the world coffee production stage, producing ~1 million 60kg bags of coffee. By 2005, it was 2nd, only behind Brazil, making ~ 11 million 60kg bags.
• Vietnam's coffee story is a mix of serendipity and pity.
• Serendipity? Pushed into coffee growing through specific World Bank and IMF structural adjustment programs, the historic Brazilian freeze of 1994 spurred Vietnamese coffee growers as an unseasonal and severe cold snap in Brazil's coffee growing plantations put paid to a vast swath of their harvest that year.
• Pity? Vietnamese farmers expanded too much too soon into coffee growing. Meantime, the much more experienced Brazilian farmers rapidly regrouped and replanted in frost-resistant areas in record time, handily outcompeting their new Vietnamese competitors. Vicious cycle of World Bank/IMF indebtedness continues to fuel ongoing supply.
• Coffee's become the classic boom-and-bust crop.
  
  • As world coffee prices rose due to the 1994 Brazilian coffee crop debacle, raw (pun intended), inexperienced Vietnamese coffee growers needed little convincing to plant a lot of coffee.
  • Problem is a coffee tree takes 3 to 5 years to bear harvestable cherries, and even then a mature tree on average yields <1 pound of roasted coffee (4).
  • Inevitably, over-planting leads to over-supply a few years down the road.
  • In turn, this depresses world market coffee prices for several years.
  • This in turn initially triggers classic Loss aversion on the part of the growers who continue to harvest and grow trees even as prices start falling.
  • Yet as low prices linger over several seasons, inevitably farms foreclose and production declines. Eventually, demand exceeds supply.
• Fair trade coffee has grown in fits and starts but is still a minuscule part of total coffee sold in developed countries. Only ~5% for example in USA, the world's largest coffee consumer. Lack of consensus definition for 'sustainable coffee' and 'sustainable production of coffee' emphasizes the inherent structural weaknesses of such non-governmental, non-profit consumer movements (17).
• The Fair Trade certification business only became murkier when the US chapter split from the worldwide body in 2011 to pursue its own agenda (18). At best in coffee, the notion of fair trade, i.e., trade as a vehicle for social justice, sputters (19).

Further, inequities in coffee trade drive practices that wreak environmental havoc

• High yield coffee seed varieties are particularly damaging to the environment (14).
• Traditional coffee trees grow in semi-shade. This preserves forest, encourages mixed-cultivation of other trees, vegetables, etc. In other words, preserves biodiversity.
• High yield coffee trees are most productive in full sunlight.
• Predictable change? Shift from mixed cultivation to coffee mono-crops where as many coffee trees as possible are planted to maximize yields (20, 21, 22, 23) and attendant economic benefits to those higher up the coffee value chain, namely, the roasters, packagers, marketers and sellers of the finished product.
  
  • High yield coffee crops can be planted more densely.
  • Harvest-ready in fewer years.
• Problem is the local ecological costs outweigh distant economic benefits.
  
  • Shorter life-span of high yield coffee plantations.
  • Higher agrochemical (fertilizers, herbicides, fungicides, nematocides) use.
  • Higher year-round labor need and higher soil erosion.
  • Loss of biodiversity.
• Predictable result? Increased deforestation rates reported in Brazil (24), Indonesia (25), Cameroon (26), Ghana (27) in tandem with high yield coffee growing.
• A recent news media article summarizes the deleterious impact of these destructive market force-driven trends in coffee production (28). Also see figures below from 28 and 22, respectively, summarizing these effects.

A case study analyzing satellite imagery of forest cover in El Salvador shows that boom-and-bust coffee cycles also drive deforestation (29).

Similar trend of rapid deforestation also seen in heavily coffee-planted southwest Sumatra (30).

Bibliography

1. Talbot, John M. "The coffee commodity chain in the world-economy: Arrighi’s systemic cycles and Braudel’s layers of analysis." Journal of World-Systems Research 17.1 (2011): 58-88. Page on jwsr.org
2. A coffee addict’s guide to the universe
3. Where the world’s biggest coffee drinkers live
4. Austin, Kelly F. "Coffee exports as ecological, social, and physical unequal exchange: A cross-national investigation of the java trade." International Journal of Comparative Sociology (2012): 0020715212455350. Page on researchgate.net
5. Gresser, Charis, and Sophia Tickell. Mugged: Poverty in your coffee cup. Oxfam, 2002. Page on oxfamamerica.org
6. Robert H Bates, Open-Economy Politics: The Political Economy of the World Coffee Trade (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997), 159.
7. Gregory Dicum and Nina Luttinger, The Coffee Book: Anatomy of and Industry, From Crop to the Last Drop (New York: The New Press, 1999), 91-92.
8. Talbot, John M. Grounds for agreement: The political economy of the coffee commodity chain. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004. p.89.
9. Gregory Dicum and Nina Luttinger, The Coffee Book: Anatomy of and Industry, From Crop to the Last Drop (New York: The New Press, 1999), 121-122.
10. Leslie, Sklair. "Globalization. Capitalism and its alternatives." (2002).
11. Daviron, Benoit, and Stefano Ponte. The coffee paradox: Global markets, commodity trade and the elusive promise of development. Zed books, 2005.
12. Borzoni, Matteo. "The Green Coffee Purchasing Policies of Italian Roasters." Page on isnie.org
13. Ponte, Stefano. "The latte revolution'? Regulation, markets and consumption in the global coffee chain." World development 30.7 (2002): 1099-1122. Page on uky.edu
14. Waridel, Laure. Coffee with pleasure: Just java and world trade. Black Rose Books Ltd., 2002.
15. Bacon, Christopher M. Confronting the coffee crisis: fair trade, sustainable livelihoods and ecosystems in Mexico and Central America. MIT Press, 2008.
16. http://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/ourworldindata_poverty-world-map-poor-square-in-total-square.png
17. Pavlovskaia, Evgenia. "Environmental Sustainability Criteria in the Coffee Sector–Lessons that Can be Learnt." Environment and Ecology Research 2.3 (2014): 138-148. Page on hrpub.org
18. Lyon, Sarah. "The Hidden Labor of Fair Trade." Labor 12.1-2 (2015): 159-176. Page on researchgate.net; Fair Trade, Free Markets, and the Bitter Fight Behind Your Morning Cup of Coffee | VICE News)
19. The Paradox of Fair Trade (SSIR)
20. Gillison, Andrew N., et al. "Impact of cropping methods on biodiversity in coffee agroecosystems in Sumatra, Indonesia." Ecology and Society 9.2 (2004): 7. Page on cbmglobe.org
21. Blackman, Allen, Beatriz Ávalos-Sartorio, and Jeffrey Chow. "Shade coffee & tree cover loss: lessons from El Salvador." Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development 49.7 (2007): 22-33
22. Perfecto, Ivette, et al. "Shade coffee: a disappearing refuge for biodiversity." BioScience (1996): 598-608. http://www.researchgate.net/prof...
23. Jaffee, Daniel. Brewing justice: Fair trade coffee, sustainability, and survival. Univ of California Press, 2014.
24. Simon, Marcelo Fragomeni, and Fernando Luis Garagorry. "The expansion of agriculture in the Brazilian Amazon." Environmental Conservation 32.03 (2005): 203-212.
25. Gaveau, David LA, et al. "Three decades of deforestation in southwest Sumatra: effects of coffee prices, law enforcement and rural poverty." Biological Conservation 142.3 (2009): 597-605. Page on researchgate.net
26. Gbetnkom, Daniel. "Deforestation in Cameroon: immediate causes and consequences." Environment and Development Economics 10.04 (2005): 557-572.
27. Appiah, Mark, et al. "Dependence on forest resources and tropical deforestation in Ghana." Environment, Development and Sustainability 11.3 (2009): 471-487. Page on researchgate.net
28. The dark side of coffee: an unequal social and environmental exchange
29. Blackman, Allen, Beatriz Ávalos-Sartorio, and Jeffrey Chow. "Shade coffee & tree cover loss: lessons from El Salvador." Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development 49.7 (2007): 22-33.
30. Gaveau, David LA, et al. "Three decades of deforestation in southwest Sumatra: effects of coffee prices, law enforcement and rural poverty." Biological Conservation 142.3 (2009): 597-605. Page on researchgate.net

https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-interesting-illustrations-of-the-adage-There-is-no-ethical-consumption-in-late-capitalism/answer/Tirumalai-Kamala