04.16.09
Posted in Policy, Snark and Snarkier, Politics at 2:20 pm by steve
I just bought these great glasses. I put them on and everyone says “My, you look thinner.” Now, when I go into banks tellers smile at me. When I go into restaurants, waitresses smile at me. When I go into gymnasiums people nod approvingly. I walked into my doctor’s office wearing them. They took my weight and blood pressure. The doctor looked at the numbers and said “Well, I wouldn’t really worry about these numbers because obviously they are irrellevant to you. I can see that you aren’t fat.” These are really great glasses. And, in fact, they are so good that they make me want to get out more. Who knows maybe I will eventually come to resemble the new me everyone sees. Or perhaps not.
The magic glasses parable came to me as I was contemplating the article at the Economist (link above) advocating more transparency and less regulation. At first I saw it differently; but I think it is useful to consider the possiblity that our society is simultaneously embracing more government involvement and less transparency in the world of finance. That, in fact, if banks get to magically make risk go away by using less conservative and more abstract valuation models they may be donning the kind of magic glasses we talked about; that may make them look better in the short term. But in the longer term it is bound to make them less stable when downturns occur.
I will be the first to advocate for temporary government involvement because it is better than collapse - which seems the only other alternative. But long term governmental direct participation industry, commerce, and allocation of resources always tempts corruption. Lack of transparency aids in hiding corruption. The only answer is free markets and sound, well enforced regulation. The question for government is not whether it ought to govern (as the whole of the Republican party apparatus appeared to advocate for some time) but how?
The answer is “well.” And the means to that is by discussing policy openly. While I just happen to agree with most of Obama’s policies, it is not his policies that I find so deliciously refreshing as it is his style of governance. He welcomes discussion and is open to dissent. He proposes key principles upon which we can agree and he lets us focus on working out the details in open discussion. This kind of discussion is illuminated by transparency. Transparency - the free and open flow of all information crucial to making a decision - is of vital importance to the proper function of markets and democratic governments. Systematic behaviors that stifle transparency or promote bad judgement in light of good information ought to be considered corrosive to the very liberal principles upon which these institutions are built.
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04.15.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 12:04 am by steve
Why Bristol Palin is Different -
Jon Swift points out that what matters is not teenage pregnancy per se but whether one is librul or conservative. Conservatives know that teenage pregnancy is bad. So it doesn’t really matter too much if they do it. But libruls don’t know it’s bad. That’s evil.
Why aren’t more conservatives standing up and defending Bristol Palin? Why can’t we unequivocally state there should be different standards for liberals and conservatives? One of the problems with liberalism is that they believe everyone is the same and that all morality is relative. But if there is anything that conservatives reject it is the idea of moral equivalency.
Wheel of Fortune
What’s old is new again:
Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench. The people are demoralized.The newspapers are largely subsidized, homes covered with mortgages, labor impoverished, and the land concentrating in the hands of capitalists.The urban workmen are denied the right to organize for self-protection, imported pauperized labor beats down their wages, a hireling standing army, unrecognized by our laws, is established to shoot them down…
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04.11.09
Posted in Culture, Politics at 11:48 pm by steve
When the word came to Shabu that his father’s powerful friends had convinced him that Shabu’s governance had been so terrible, and that his advocacy for the tribe had been so inept that Shabu could no longer rule the great city, Shabu was very angry. He called a great council of his advisers to find out what action to take.
“In the first place, there is no hope of defying your father. He is a god to the most powerful families in both military and commerce. Most of the men loyal to you owe their places in your government to your father; and they are, therefore, more loyal to him than to you. But you can stall for time. Tell him you need four years to prepare the new prince to rule the Great City. “ This was the first item of unanimous consent.
“In the second place,it is imperative that we reward our friends for their support. So we must write IOU’s from the public coffers to those who supported us. These must be such great sums of money that there is no hope that all the people of the great city now living will be able to pay them off in their lifetimes. And so their children will be forced to work as slaves to fulfil the promises we made to our friends.”
And so the arms merchants and the prayermakers and the owners of great estates were given heaps of gold and promises for more gold than was in the whole kingdom.
“In the third place, there is no question of your leaving the Great City in a condition that can be easily governed. You must divide its inhabitants into factions. The rich vs the poor. The north vs. the south. The uplanders vs the valley dwellers. The worshipers of Vall against the heathen. The old against the young. The men against the women. Even the blind must be turned against those who might help them navigate the world in blindness.” Shabu’s men hired prayermakers to shout from the towers of the minarets. In the rich neighborhoods the prayermakers heaped scorn on the poor for being stupid, uneducated, dirty, shifty, lazy, untrustworthy, and poor. In the poor neighborhoods prayermakers heaped scorn on the rich for being greedy, insensitive, lazy, criminal, and abusive of public trust. The educated were turned from issues of policy to issues of personal well-being. The underclasses were taught to trust only the prayermakers. The heathen were taught to despise the simplicity of the faithful. The faithful were taught to dispise the waywardness of the heathen.
“Finally, we must present the new prince with a problem so big that no other problem seems important and so difficult that there exists no acceptable solution. Then, when he takes power we can mock him from every corner of the Great City both for what he does and for what he does not do. And we can mock him regardless of the choices he makes.”
Shabu’s advisers were at a loss to know what sort of problem would be big enough, serious enough to satisfy these criteria. But Shabu had a quiet adviser with a bald head and a gravelly voice named Ynech. “Suppose the great city were on fire.”
“But we have well trained men. We have equipment. We have procedures. We have firebreaks. We have water in great vessels.”
“So, we need to move the trained men into another country to fight a war. We need to hire mercenaries who are actively hostile to procedures and training and who love nothing better than to get drunk while on duty. We need to sell the equipment. We need to store cooking oil in great open pottery vessels all along the firebreaks so that a single rider on a horse with a torch and a great hammer can ride from vessel to vessel at night, lighting the oil and breaking the pots. And in this way he can set light to the whole of the Great City in an hour’s time. Have the prayermakers invent reasons for each of these new policies.”
So it was ordered. So it was done.
Even before the day of that Shabu was to hand governance of the Great City over to young prince Ambao who would replace him, citizens of the city were nervous about the pots of oil lining the great fire-breaks. A few of those pots had already been set alight “to light the darkness and make the city safe at night.” But it was evident there were cracks in many of the pots, especially the ones that were lit. Where were the firemen? The firemen had been sent away. What about their untrained replacements? They were lying in a stupor in the brothels.
What about the idea of men taking up their own fight against the threat? The pots of oil had their own guards whose public purpose was to keep the pots safe. These guards would let no man near the fire breaks. But little known to the citizenry, each guard had hidden a hammer nearby. And on the agreed signal, they would break the pots. It would not take an hour to set the whole of the Great City alight. It would take twenty seconds. Ynech’s plans were always technically brilliant.
Finally the day arrived. Shabu and his small council left the Great City. As soon as they were outside the city walls, the signal was given. And in twenty seconds the whole of the Great City was in flames.
Young Ambao had seen it coming. But he was not in a strong position. If he accused Shabu of orchestrating the fire, he would lose his place to a prince less able and less principled than he. All he could do was to fight the fire. This would not be easy. Not only were the firefighters gone, but a year back Shabu had imported slaves who, bucket by bucket had drained the lake to irrigate a crop of indigo that his minions had processed into dye and sold to Distant City. There was only enough water for drinking and bathing until the next seasonal rains. The only other resource was a huge heap of heavy twill fabric.
So Ambao organized the people of the city into brigades. Their goal was not to put out the fire where it burned out of control - these areas were lost - but to keep the fire from spreading to new places by beating out young flames with the heavy twill cloth. A tiny amount of water was applied to the cloth until it was just damp. Then the cloth would be swung at tongues of flame as they moved into new territory. This effort would save great swathes of the city, even as others were lost.
It was a great gamble since the twill cloth had some value on the open market but there were few out-of-town buyers for Great City real estate. He was destroying a thing of commercial value to save something that was not. So maybe from a purely commercial standpoint it was not a sound decision. But before the rainy season would come winter. And people of the Great City would die of freezing weather if too many of the homes were destroyed. Furthermore, Great City did much business with entities from far places. And if the whole city burned, all of this would be lost. Much more than the value of the buildings would be destroyed by fire. And hundreds of time the value of the cloth would be lost.
Still, it was a gamble. It might not work. Groups of untrained men, women, and children swatting flames with wet twill was not a pretty site. People did not know how to wield the twill well. Some tried to take on flames that could never be put out this way. Others simply folded up the twill and planned to sell it at a profit when the stocks ran out. But many of the citizens fought the flames well and bravely. Many homes were saved. And many places of business with their stocks of goods survived, too.
This did not, however, cause the prayermakers and the other friends of Shabu to issue utterances of praise. Instead, they mocked the efforts.
“Ha! Ambao has undertaken to fight fire with combustable materials! He is a fool. And those who follow him are slaves and idiots.”
Or
“Ha! Look how Ambao is wasting water. All that water is going to be needed for spring planting of indigo, if the rains are late.”
Or
“Great City never burned like this while Shabu was prince of the city. What kind of ineptitude on the part of Ambao caused this conflagration?”
These kinds of questions and comments were yelled from the minarets by the prayermakers. They were shouted from the high windows in the quarters where men of commerce lived. There were even men in the poor neighborhoods who earned their meager livelihoods by whispering these same doubts to whom might listen.
Even as we speak, the Great City is burning. Even as we speak, Ambao is fighting the fire. Even as we speak Shabu’s friends are mocking his efforts.
What must prince Ambao do next?
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Posted in Policy, Culture at 9:10 pm by steve
It’s broken. Not just a little. The media in America is fundamentally broken. The most essential social purpose of media is open public policy discourse. Open public discourse is vital to a democratic way of life. Yet the US has repeatedly failed to attain and maintain a high level of public discourse in most of its media. A few magazines prove an excption. And there are some minor bright spots in TV and radio. What started out being not particularly good has lurched from mediochre to insipid and then veered toward destructive. It is not uniformly so, but to a remarkable extent main stream media is a wasteland. Too many of its offerings actively gnaw at the fragile fabric that holds society together.
The Shallowness Problem
In 1832 Alexis de Tocqueville noted that American newspapers were principally commercial rags. He noted that Continental newspapers were full of thoughtful commentary, political analysis, and generally good writing but that American newspapers had only stripped down stories about trivial events, and ads. He did note that, at least east of the Hudson, people tended to live in vital communities that assembled regularly and engaged in political discourse orally. He admired the vitality and inclusiveness of such a system, even if he imagined the level of discourse to lack sophistication. In some ways, we might suppose it worked just a little like the internet of today, except that common interests tended to be geographically shared then, whereas today they are based more on interests, competencies, and political inclinations.
Much has not changed in America. In all but the most specialized media, trivia trumps thoughtful analysis, commerce trumps all. There is one nationwide newspaper that gets delivered free to a lot of hotel rooms whose level of discourse is so shallow I have never been able to make it through the first paragraph of any story. But I am not a patient reader; maybe the good stuff starts in paragraph 13. We must imagine that this free newspaper meets the needs of its advertizers, else the paper would fail. Yet does’t a newpaper by virtue of its mode of circulation have some obligation to inform?
Quid Pro Quo
It seems to me there is a quid pro quo here. America is a democratic republic. The only way that it can hope to be governed well is if its citizens - the ones who choose the political leaders - make good choices. They do not choose once and then stop. They keep on choosing. This choosing process offers a chance of sweeping corruption, bad behavior, and bad policy out of office. The process only works to the extent that most of the people are both effectively educated and well informed. Montesquieu would point out that they must also be truly virtuous - knowing what is good for society and striving to get that. It’s a crucial point, but part of another discussion. In order for Americans to be well informed, the press is policed almost not at all by the government. This is both good and necessary. But it implies a return obligation. It requires that media operate in a way that does not sabotage good public discourse. It is not a very odious requirement. But it is a strict one.
Substitute Products for Good Discourse
It is a categorical mistake to imagine that the sole purpose of media is to inform the political process. In fact, this may rightly be just the tiniest bit of what it does. But in the grand scheme of things, one can judge all media content the basis of whether it is particularly helpful to a society, innocuous, or harmful. And a society that fails to make this judgment risks self destruction.
There are several sorts of media content that stand in the way of good discourse. One is pablum. It is soporific to good sense and sensibility. Its mode of operation is to lull people to sleep. It is not a physical sleep, but a moral one. It is a kind of secular “opiate of the masses.” In a society full of the pains of inequality and injustice, a modest consumption of such opiates may be a necessary part of the cost of living in a socially cohesive society. I Love Lucy was mindless; but it was fun. But it has the same side effect as an opiate. It makes us want more of the same stuff. And it draws us away from doing harder but more necessary thinking.
In small doses pablum is pretty innocuos. One person’s drivel is another person’s fun, sometimes. There is a scene in a recent indy film that illustrates the point. The main character has a crazy brother whom we find mischievous, bright, fun. He is very quirky, and very lovable. In the middle of the film he commits suicide while watching “Everybody Loves Raymond” because he cannot figure out why anybody would. I understand his quandry. The observation both helps us understand a bit about what pablum is and what it is not. If I am not mistaken, the television show ran for a number of seasons and was considered a commercial success. It may still be running. And judging from the twenty eight seconds I endured of one episode long ago, it seemed about as harmless as it was vacuous. There is no reason to place any sort of sanction on this stuff. We imagine that good editors and program managers know it when they see it. And we must hope that they prevent their particular media channel from being completely overcome by it.
Another form of media product is shill fill. Shill fill is content that masquerades as news or information but whose purpose is primarily commercial. The purest and most open example is the infomercial. But at least the infomercial has the decency to inform us of the provenance of the material, so we may judge it accordingly. There are more subtle forms. If one picked up a newspaper in the mid 1980s and for five years running could find a new story about how high cholesterol was a ticking time bomb and a silent killer, one might reasonably ask whether the story had any connecton to a new family of patented pharmaceuticals designed to lower blood cholesterol. I remember the cholesterol scare of the mid 1980’s. I still have a cookbook or two written by then prominent nutrition writers at prominent newspapers advocating low cholesterol or low fat diets. One writer fumes at how the egg industry stood in the way of progress. Today we find informed writers telling us to eat eggs to lower cholesterol.
There is no question that commercial interests sponsor media that support political points of view most consonant with their interests. Consider rags like “National Review” and “Weekly Standard.” It’s hard to go a week without seeing a number of new articles in each advocating for making our military “Bigger” or “Harder.” I get emails about the same thing every day. But I would not mistake them for good journalism. And these “papers” are very generously supported by a passel of military contractors.
Shill fill can actually serve a public good. But for it to do so properly, it must be written in a way that informs the reader of the special point of view of the writer. And it must be edited with more than a modicum of skepticism. Cholesterol-lowering drugs proved a success in lowering cholesterol. There is more question about whether they saved lives or cured heart disease. The hype generated to make room for the drugs shifted us from eating meat to eating fried potatoes and corn meal. This made us fat. It may or may not have changed our risk of heart disease on account of cholesterol, but it raised the risk of heart disease and on account of obesity and triglyceride levels. The drugs that started this conversation were a raging commercial success. But society has paid a high cost for it.
I can read a prominent city newspaper and find what appear to be shill fill articles several times a year. I may not pick up that paper as often as two days a week. I rarely read more than the front page of two or three sections. I wonder how many articles really are shill fill. Especially if we expand the definition to cover private interests of government officials.
A third category of media product that gets in the way of good public discourse is trash talk. This is typically a radio or television format designed to lampoon “people who are not like us.” It tends to have a more rural audience, although one could argue that at times SNL has wondered into this territory. Rush Limbaugh may be the early prototype. But Rush, at least in his early days, did try to be funny. And while the general thrust of his work I believe is mistaken, some of his points are worth considering. But what started out as lampooning morphed into attacks. And what once were subtle attacks now occasionally turn into open calls or incitations to do violence.
I spent perhaps a minute with Michelle Malkin once. Having stopped viewing television some years before, I had never seen her nor heard of her. I had no idea what I was in for. By forty five seconds I began feeling mounting nausea. By sixty my entire concentration was focussed on suppressing the impulse to put a chair through the televison. No idea what she said. And that’s the point.
It is one thing to lampoon the foibles of people. We all have them. And each group in a society will specialize in its own sort. Sometimes they need to be laughed at. This is probably both a desirable and necessary form of political discourse. Lampooning people simply to put down their behavior or qualities because “they are not like us,” however, has already stepped over the line. This is the stuff of racism and race baiting. And it is not the race part of it that makes it the problem. It is the way in which it destroys respect for ways of being that are different from “ours.”
Fundamentally it has nothing to do with race; it has rather to do with identity groups, tribes. Call it fundamentalism, provincialism, tribalism, ethnic intolerance, red-state wretchedness, wingnutism, whatever one calls it, the act is morally degrading. It degrades the person talking. It degrades the listener. It degrades the target of the trash talk. Each person or group in the equation turns out to be worse off as a result of it. Even the advertizers lose. Their markets are splintered in the process and their brands’ goodwill is defiled. The former raises the cost of advertizing by requiring more careful targeting. The latter simply tarnishes the luster of the brand with everyone. Being respectful breeds respect. Being disrespectful breed disrespect.
A good analyst might be able to produce seven, ten, or five hundred more categories descriptive of media practices that either actively or passively degrade the level of public discourse. But I am going to stop with three because I set out intending to talk about the third one.
Shredding the Fabric of Society
Bad media behavior has a number of insidious effects. First, there is the opportunity cost. Each time something meaningless fills pages, it diverts attention from real problems.
As interested as I am in good political discourse, I imagine my limit to be a few hours of it a week. I am fond of programming that gives me insights about society and my own humanity. I am tempted to reduce “good programming” to “BBC shows produced before commercial TV in Britain.” And good journalism to “the several Economist articles a year that are not obvious apologetics for completely unregulated lassez faire economics.” Sure, there is a lot of good information out there. But very little of it is soundly synthetic. When pieces are good at synthesizing lots of information, they too frequently ignore ideas and evidence that contradicts the point of view. It’s hard to get a really balanced view of an issue. Even most of the pieces in the Economist do a perfunctory job of presenting an opposing view.
But even such feeble pretenses passed out of media practice when the Reagan administration withdrew the “fairness doctrine” that required media outlets that used public airwaves to give multiple points of view on an issue. With the advent of FOX network, we get “all bias all the time.” It’s a network that actively promotes narrowmindedness, provincialism, bias, anger, bigotry, and hatred. And one of its products is trash talk. For example, characterizing people who have a differing point of view as Nazis. Or comparing moslems to fascists with the term “islamo-fascist.”
The real, monstrous cost of trash talk is that it destroys civil society. It tears down bridges that span gaps between groups in society and it builds walls between them. It fosters intolerance. It closes minds. It reinforces prejudices. It encourages ingorance and rewards closed-mindedness. It drives us to be as stupid, and intolerant as we feel naturally inclined to be. It nurtures fundamentalism. It cultivates ethnic hatred. This is the path we must follow if we wish our society to be reduced to the behavior of the Tutsis and Hutus of mid 1990’s Rwanda.
Ethnic hatred is seductive. Every group tends to think of itself as being superior. It is human nature. If there is any social or political area in which America has clearly outstripped the rest of the civilized world it is in its ability to amalgamate disparate cultures - suppressing the tendencies of groups to behave destructively and separately as political entities and economic entities, while encouraging ethnic groups to retain positive cultural practices and identities. It is not the primary reason for success, perhaps; but had America failed here, failure in other areas would have followed. Trash talk threatens failure. Hatred breeds repression. And repression strangles freedom. It’s not a many-stepped process to get from bad discourse to bad government. The latter sticks to the former like a shadow.
The moment we let this impulse toward fundamentalism, tribalism, parochialism be the singular impulse governing political discourse is the day we doom American history to follow the trajectory of the history of the Balkans. Or of Rwanda. In both of these cases ethnic hatred and tension is endemic. A recent book review in the Economist talks about the latest definitive history of Montenegro. It mentions how the book’s author, who was in the state in 1990 witnessed its occupants wantonly killing, pillaging and plundering with a kind of gusto that clearly communicated ” This is what we do. Our ancestors have done it forever; our descents will do it forever more. It is a time-honored and much loved tradition. It is our life; to kill and plunder” This is the end to which trash talk must lead us. Society splinters into tiny mobs whose reason for existence is killing the “other,” pillaging, plundering. It explains the perpetual strife in the Balkans going back 500 or 1000 years or more. And it explains “going Hutu.”
Trash talk will lead us to ends we can neither imagine nor endure. Democracy is not stable under a cascade of trash-talking media. It will come crashing down. And when it does, the government will put a whole new world of programming directors in charge. The irony will be that there is a good chance that they will lack imagination. Programming will become dull and utilitarian, but it may better serve the public interest to some extent than the programming of today that features the Limbaughs, the Colters, and the Malkins. Still, to those who view the media as a cash cow, such events would prove a catastrophic. Thus, it is in the media’s best long-term interest to act with at least a modicum concern for the public interest. If it fails to sustain democracy, it will lose its own franchise in the process. For society at large, the blow promises to be every bit as severe.
Rampant political and economic opression will probably be part of the mix. The nightmare scenario is that the rich upper class might manage to get the miserable lower class to hack the middle class right out of existence, either literally by “going Hutu” or figuratively by voting for disastrous public policies. Perhaps it could not happen today. But the trash talk we now hear has edged perilously close to driving precisely this scenario. What one is left with in this scenario is a banana republic like the worst Latin American countries of long ago where unstable governments swing perpetually between opressive Fascism and opressive Communism. There has been a thirty year economic trend in the US in this direction. And it has been driven by media chants of and ritual offerings to the greedy gods of laissez-affaire economics. Under Dubya the chants and drumming have grown louder. And the offerings of blood and treasure more costly.
This is all speculative. But the recent trend is worrysome. If things go in the same direction and at the same rate for thirty more years as they have done for the last thirty, democracy as we experience it is doomed. We may not have that long. There is no reason to believe that the trend must continue. If we are really lucky, long before that America will experience a series of shocks that will begin a process in which we re-examine the assumptions that set us on a destructive path. And we will begin to make course corrections. Iraq may be the first of them. It may also be the least. So some of the correction is likely to come about without media help.
Recourse
Still, the media plays a vital role in shaping political discourse in America. And if it does not owe a duty to the democratic system to which it owes its very existence or to the people who make up its audience and buy its advertisers products, at least it owes a duty to its shareholders to preserve long-term equity. For one reason or another, the media must act responsibly. If it loses its soul completely, permanently, irrevokably its franchise must follow close behind.
For some years the people who staffed and oversaw the FCC viewed broadcasting as a use of a public resource - the electromagnetic spectrum - which required in return some augmentation of the public good. In this view of the world free speech reigned, but there was a civic obligation a broadcaster had to fulfil. A television or radio station would have to provide a certain amount of programming that met certain public needs to satisfy licensing provisions. This did not require much. It did not guarantee much. But it did require something. It amounted to much more than nothing.
Over the last decade or two, and especially under the Dubya administration, the view expressed publically by the FCC has changed. Today it more closely resmbles the notion that the broadcast system is a public resource to be exploited to maximize profit - like a vein of copper ore. And that any provision that the FCC imposes on broadcaster ought to be exclusively to that end. The result is higher media concentration, less programming variety, more homogenaity, and less local content. And a brand of political discourse that is clearly biased and destructive. Almost all of this may rightly be seen as harmful. Homogenaity, assuming innocuous programming, could actually serve to reverse forces of Balkanization. But most of the rest of the trends sacrifice public social goods for private ones. This defies the purpose of good governance.
The most insidious problem is media concentration. It creates a world in which a single entity or a small group of people controls all of public discourse. Under the best of conditions this is undesirable. Even the best and brightest people are either good and bright only in one tiny area of expertise, or they are less good and bright about lots of things. It takes a lot of experts and a lot of conversation to Most people are mostly wrong. To make matters worse, power corrupts. So if one starts out as a well meaning media mogul, the likelyhood of remaining one for a long time is infinitessimally small.
But the really big problem is that public discourse is made of a huge number of views. Our tendency in America is to think dualistically, giving to each question two possible answers. Our whole dualistic mindset is badly adapted to all political discourse. Real world issues never pose such questions. The hard part of getting hold of and mastering an issue is creating meaningful categories and relationships, then formulating questions based on these categories and relationships. A concentrated media is just barely able to do lip service to the second side of a dualistic problem. It has no hope of framing good questions in a many dimensional concept space.
The more parties there are working on a problem the more hope there is of getting real and effective answers to real social problems - not just faux answers that suit the needs of special interests. A highly concentrated media has no hope whatsoever of doing this well, even if they set out to do so. Especially not in a land where political discourse is already a characterized by tradition of dualistic, shallow and simplistic thought.
So the first part of the solution is to change the political philosophy of the FCC board so that it represents public interests over private ones. Once the FCC is properly constituted to represent public interests over private ones, it might be better at reconning the costs of media concentration and at requiring broadcasters to air programs that encourage broad ranging and vitally varied ideas and formats that either serve the public interest or do not blatantly undermine it.
The second part of the solution, and probably the most important, is for the media to view its mandate to deliver discourse on political subjects that is broad, deep, far ranging, multifaceted, thoughtful, penetrating, well informed, and concensus-building. It must do this because of its perpetual debt it has to a free and stable open society. And to its stockholders. It is a huge responsibilit. There are only a handful of publications that come close to meeting this high standard. And only a few programming channels who have, from time to time done so with certain programs.
Finally, government needs to do someting about trash talk. It is a touchy issue. There are a number of cases in which trash talk is clearly political and by virtue of that is presumed unconditionally protected. My guess is that Limbaugh, though he is mostly mean, his facts are frequently wrong, and he does encourage tribalism, does at least some good in making us aware of questions that are useful to contemplate. For the most part he is subtly divisive; not openly so. I neither like him nor agree with him; but what little I know of his work suggest that he is generally not over the line. There are others who would not agree. And they might be right.
But there are a number of cases in which trash talk is clearly incendiary: it openly provokes violent behavior or attitudes. Spocko’s Brain had a collection of such cases until a large media conglomerate shut down his site with a cease and desist order. Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter come to mind; but I may be confusing my own reaction with that of other people. My guess is that if I watched enough, I could find places where they clearly cross the line; but it is a prejudice, not an informed judgment. If there is no case in which Malkin or Coulter’s language is simply incendiary, herding people into tribes or provoking them to plunder, then there certainly are cases with other radio or television talk shows. And they need to be stopped.
Bad words offend. But they do no lasting damage to the fabric of society. The government has chosen to ban them on air. And this is a supportable position. I find the ban convenient to my own tastes but I am not sure I agree with it. Hate speech, trash talk, language that tribalizes America, however, needs to be banned because it shreds the fabric of society. A free society cannot endure it for long. And once it is shredded, only one thing can put it back together: a terrible, repressive regime. We might have learned this from the disintegration of Yugoslavia. But we didn’t. We might have learned it from the disintegration of Iraq. But it seems we haven’t yet. Let us hope we can learn it before their fates have become ours.
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02.16.09
Posted in Philosophy &c, Book Reviews - Non-Fiction at 6:20 pm by steve
Jim Holt became popular with his “Stop Me if You’ve Heard This: a History of Philosophy in Jokes.” It is, we understand, a clever way of wrapping philosophical ideas in jokes so that people who don’t wish to study philosophy at a university might become acquainted with the ideas of philosophers. The humor draws us to the ideas. It’s an ingeniously fun way to bring people to philosophical ideas. It’s a brilliant idea and a noble undertaking.
Holt, this week, reviewed the ideas in Cricthley’s Book of Dead Philosophers in the NYT book section. This time things are backwards. He sets out to make philosophers look ridiculous but succeeds in becoming the butt of his own joke. He spends most of his review space ostensibly refuting Epicurus’ arguments on why it is not logical to fear death. Epicurus’ argument goes like this:
1) Death is annhililation, so there is nothing to worry about.
2) Whether I die young or old, it doesn’t matter, either way I am dead.
3) Your existence in death is essentially like your existence before being born. There is no more reason to fear one more than the other.
It seems impossible to interpret the sense of “death” in this argument as anything other than the experience simply being dead: that is the best interpretation of the first clause. There is no sense in which the argument addresses what happens before that - how one comes to be dead, the processes, the experiences, or the implications of death on the living. The argument is simply about how one experiences the state of being dead in the first person.
We intend to argue:
1) There is nothing logically wrong with Epicurus’ argument.
2) Whether it is logical to fear death depends upon whether death actually is annihilation.
3) Either way, it is not unreasonable to fear death.
We may end up arguing for a conclusion not incompatible with Holt’s; but we worry greatly about the path he takes, because it persistently confuses the experiences of being alive with those of being dead.
Holt trots out some refutations by Nagel “Just because you don’t experience something as nasty … doesn’t mean it’s not bad for you. Suppose a person has a brain injury that reduces him to the mental condition of a contented baby.” Nagel argues that this is bad in the same way death is bad. Therefore death is bad and to be feared. But this argument fails to see the experience from the point of view of the person experiencing it. If one is actually having the experience Nagel describes, fear plays no role; for in that state one is neither anxious nor fearful nor in pain. It fact, billions of people regularly seek to exist in this state by taking alcohol or other mind-altering drugs. Some arrive and never leave. We may judge that to be bad; or we may not. But the badness associated with it has nothing to do with the way the person in question experiences it.
We might reasonably fear being in that state; but the reason we would fear it is not because of what one might actually experience when in the state. Rather, fear arises from a realization that we would have failed to meet an expectation of how we “ought” to be - namely rational, functional human beings capable of exerting control over our environment. We fear the loss of control. Having control over our environment may be a reasonable expectation of being alive, but it is clearly not a reasonable expectation of being dead. That’s one big difference between Nagel’s two cases.
Holt, in reasoning about the second argument, once again misunderstands the point of view. He asserts, “The second argument is just as poor. It implies that John Keats’s demise at 25 was no more unfortunate at 25 than Tolstoy’s at 82.”
Is Holt arguing that Keats’s experience after death was somehow worse than Tolstoy’s? I wonder how he would demonstrate that? That is what one would have to prove to demolish argument 2). But he does not attempt it. Instead, Holt points out “The amount of time you’re dead matters only if there is something undesirable about being dead.” This, of course, is the nub of Nagel’s argument. And it is why Nagel’s argument comes perilously close to violating the first premise set by Epicurus. Any contradiction here is Nagel’s, not Epicurus.’
Once again, Holt trots out Nagel to refute the third argument “… there is an asymmetry between the two abysses that flank your life. The time after you die is time of which your death deprives you. You might have lived longer…” Or you might have been born earlier.(1) Once again, Nagel’s argument succeeds only when one starts with the assumption that the experience of being dead is to be feared. But that’s not a logically tenable assumption upon which to base the argument; for that is what we are arguing to begin with.
One may reasonably wonder what Epicurus really thought. Was Epicurus seriously proposing that it was unreasonable to fear death? Or was he arguing that there is no logical imperative to fear death? Perhaps he was doing the latter simply to make a point. There is a great difference between the two. Logic is but the grinding machinery, not the food in thought process. If Epicurus was arguing that there was no logical imperative to fear death, his argument relies on the stated assumption that all sensation and feeling cease with death. Experience ends there.
If this assumption is correct, there is no logical imperative to fear one’s own death. It is an argument that has considerable force. And it can help one live a life with less fear of death. That’s can be both a liberating and an ennobling end; and it is an end to which most religions are disposed.
If, on the other hand one believes that one experiences pain after death, then there is reason to fear. The whole of the logical force of Epicurus’ argument rests on the idea that first person experience of all sorts ends with one’s own death.
Nagel and Holt argue as if Epicurus believed that it is unreasonable to fear death; and that, therefore, no reasonable person actually fears death. Their reasoning does not adhere to the bounds set by Epicurus. It is not unreasonable to argue that, despite Epicurus’ logical construction one might reasonably fear the process of dying; for it can be fraught with pain. One might even fear the state of death itself, despite logical arguments to the contrary. The difference is that good reasoning can take into account emotive inputs. In fact, good reasoning must do so.
Hume observed that all properly motivated actions arise from proper feeling; and reason properly serves empathetic emotions. He argued that if one asked “why?” to any explanation of moral propositions often enough and long enough, one always ended up with a statement about happiness or unhappiness. Death makes us unhappy. Pain makes us unhappy. Injustice makes us unhappy. Not just in the first person, but in the second and third person.
Epicurus was interested in happiness, too. If one believes all experience ends at death, it is illogical to argue that one is unhappy when one is dead. This does not make us stop fearing death; it only helps us understand it is not logically consistent to do so. We fear death not because of the logical imperative to do so but because this is physiologically the way we are wired. Fear is functional; but it is not always logical.
Today we are rediscovering that the worst criminals are, in fact, psychopaths. They are not stupid people; in fact, many appear to be remarkably intelligent and logical. They are, however, people for whom proper empathetic emotions are suppressed or absent. They experience perverse pleasure in observing the pain and suffering of others. By contrast, people who are socially oriented and well - adjusted are informed by empathetic feeling. This gives force to the idea that in the real world, moral action is informed by proper empathetic orientation, not by the force of pure logic.
Holt clearly understands the distinction between logical and reasonable, between pure reason and reasoning in the service of empathetic emotions: he exploits it in a rhetorical flourish at the end of the essay referring to the rather fearful “Falangist cry ‘Vive la Muerte’ - long live death.” This is an appeal to our emotions, not to logic.
We have reason to fear that cry since it is a reference not to one’s existence after one has ceased to exist, but to the whole painful process of dying. It is also a reference to our own experience of the tragedy of loss associated with the death of another. But the fear aroused by that cry has almost nothing to do with Epicurus’ argument.
Holt’s argument employs a time-honored philosopher’s trick of using the same word to signify materially different things. In the Epicurean argument, the linguistic token “death” stands for first person experiences after one is dead. Nothing else. There is, however, no point in Holt’s discussion in which Holt is referring to the same thing. Mostly, Holt is talking about experiences of the living in the face of death. (2)
In some cases he uses the same token to refer to death in some abstract, hypothetical case. Or to death as we now imagine it, anticipate it, and fear it. The abstraction includes both the process of dying and the possibility that the death occurs to someone else. For example, if we were to assume that Keats died leaving a wife, young children, and a parent or two to survive him, then there is a great measure of pathetic feeling surrounding his death. If we were to assume that Tolstoy died after all his known relatives and even his own housekeeper were dead, then there is nobody to mourn his passing. This makes Keats’ death more tragic to all living observers. Similarly, we can assume that civilization lost more in Keats’ death than in Tolstoy’s because the latter, presumably, had fewer good pieces of literature left in him.
The tragedy of Keats’ death is realized not by Keats himsel so much as it is by everyone else. Holt pretends otherwise.
Where the Falangists show up, however, “death” refers not only to death in the third person, but also to the process of experiencing the pains associated with dying in the first person. It refers to death of others brought on by violent means, especially by some institution that has no legal or moral authority to do so. It refers to the fearful pains associated with dying a violent death in the first person. It is certainly reasonable to fear, for instance, the process of being hacked to death by partisans. But this process is not at all what Epicurus was referring to.
Holt is confusing the things we experience after ceasing to exist with those we experience during process of transitioning to that state. He is confusing things we experience after the death of others with those we might experience after our own death. One might as well confuse what one remembers of one’s own experience of birth (what is null) with
i) The birth of others
ii) All the things that preceded our own birth.
Doing so logically nullifies the existence of others. And it denies history.
Epicurus’ argument is a logically sound one. To reject it, one must reject the first premise. If one can fully accept the first premise, then one must logically end where Hume did, asserting no logical reason to fear being dead. That, however, very much different from fearing the Falangist cry - it’s as different as being alive and being dead.
NOTES
(1) If one accepts the premise that when one is dead, all experience ceases, then there can be no difference between the experience that precedes life from the experience that follows it. To try to argue that there is would be as silly as mounting a deep inquiry into what happened before the start of the Big Bang - i.e. the start of time. When there is no matter there is no time; where there is no time, there is no “before.”
(2) It may seem like a trivial distinction - the distinction between dying and being dead; but it is no more trivial than the distinction between the process of having your house painted and living in a freshly painted house, or the distinction between the process of getting a root canal and living thereafter with a tooth that doesn’t hurt. A failure to make these vital distinctions can lead to serious errors of judgment. I hate getting root canals and I hate having my house painted, but I enjoy living with the outcomes.
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06.22.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 4:21 am by steve
In his landmark 1993 essayThe End of History? Francis Fukuyama proclaims that the liberal western ideal has triumphed over its two competing ideals, fascism and communism. Along the way he makes a number of assertions that seem reasonable at first blush. For example, he suggests that conflicts in the future will likely be less propelled by political ideals than by other factors such as cultural and religious identity. The breakup of the Soviet Union along ethnic lines and the subsequent military conflicts between these groups suggests some truth in his ideas.
The piece is interesting for its ability to weave together ideas of Hegel, Marx, Hobbes, and Weber. It is also prophetic when it comes to predicting the way neoconservatives would work to portray the Moslem world as being the replacement whipping boy for the Communist one. In 1993 the collapse of the Soviet Union promised the obsolescence of the convenient whipping boy that had served the purpose of creating a crazed, nationalistic populace in the US. It was time to find a new whipping boy. Or else. Or else what? All that neocons had worked for over half a century would collapse for lack of impetus.
It’s interesting reading, but it has its glaring flaws. That Fukuyama believes WWII was actually fought over ideals suggests that he might have read the history of the conflict less critically than is vital for a good scholar. The Germans and Japanese never were fighting for a fascist political paradigm: they were fighting for empire. Nor were the Soviets defending the class struggle during WWII, They were simply defending “mother Russia” against one more in a long string of attacks from the west. The spectre of fascism was raised post hoc to justify the west’s severity of treatment of its foes.
How else could one justify the nuclear attack on Hiroshima or the fire-bombing of Dresden? If one argued that the japanese and Germans were simply bad people, then one was doomed to repeat the conflict. If, however, one argued that Germans and Japanese served an evil regime, then the slaughter of civilians served a noble cause. The argument is an idealogical filter applied by western propagandists. It is a vital lie served up so that we could avoid the error that caused WWII - the error of sustaining ethnic hatred - and so that we could sleep at night without carrying with us the guilt of mass murder. If one made the Germans slaves of an evil fascist regime, one could justify the slaughter of civilians in war and avoid demonizing the survivors and causing another war.
In the course of this essay, Fukuyama proclaims nationalism dead in Europe. It seemed so at the time. History suggests he was a little wrong about this; nationalism has begun a resurgence that is evidenced by the rise of Sarkozy. But Fukuyama fails to observe how vitally alive nationalism is stateside. Or how its vitality owes profoundly to half a century of neocon propaganda. Or how his own piece fits in nicely with the neocon argument for nationalism and militarism.
Even as he crows about the triumph of western liberalism, he advocates for a different ideology. The forces that caused the first two world wars may not be present in Europe; but they certainly are present in the US. And they are being nurtured by the neocon propaganda machine.
It is not until the end of the piece that we realize how this piece might fit into that schema. It is not until the last paragraph that we realize the direction Fukuyama has set for the piece.
The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer-demands. In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history. I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed. Such nostalgia, in fact, will continue to fuel competition and conflict even in the post-historical world for some time to come. Even though I recognize its inevitability, I have the most ambivalent feelings for the civilization that has been created in Europe since 1945, with its north Atlantic and Asian offshoots. Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.
In other words, “I’m a historian. History is about war. It is about wars fought over ideas. There is no war. I am bored. Let’s have a war.”
Is he serious? Does Fukuyama actually believe that all the causes for conflict are past? No physical shortages? No individuals or groups ambitious for more power? Not even the neocons? It’s as if Fukuyama is claiming that all conflict in all of history arose from ideological tensions when, in fact, the first cause of almost any conflict is not ideological at all, but physical. Ideologies arise to justify the violence. Ideology is the cloth that wipes the blood from the dagger and from the hands.
Sure, the American Revolution was blessed with its enlighenment philosophers; but it was fundamentally commercial in nature. The Boston tea party was an act in response to a tax. And the central theme of the Federalist papers is commercial. Sure, the French Revolution was supported by the studied classes, but it was propelled by empty bellies. Sure, the Russian revolution exploited Marxist ideas about class struggle, but it was the desperate conditions of Russia’s serfs at the end of WWI that sustained the conflict. Sure, the National Socialists appealed to a set of values held by the German volk. but the success of the enterprise hinged on a sense of material mistreatment that existed in the German volk. Reparations for WWI were borne by that class. They felt misused by foreigners and bankers. Their rage at misuse was manipulated by a group that appealed to nationalism and to militariism as a response to perceived mistreatment. (Why does this sound so familiar?)
Even the Vietnam war which may have been cast stateside in ideological terms was seen by the people who fought it as a war to overthrow western imperialism. As Americans ought to know best, struggles for home rule are always about local power and local commerce. Since the Vietnamese won that war; it is the historian’s obligation to accurately report the cause of that war in those terms.
Fukuyama’s assumption that ideological clashes cause wars is absurd. Ideology may be used to sweep people along; but it is almost always ambition or physical want that forms the initial basis of the conflict. His assumption that real factors are either unimportant or permanently non-existent is just as absurd.
Physical shortage is not now non-existent. Nor was it in 1993. We are not talking about a wait to get the newest iPhone. Half the world’s population does not have access to safe drinking water. But people are fairly adaptive. The crunch that causes coflict comes first when what material goods a group has are taken away. Then when hunger strikes. People can always be persuaded to take up arms under these conditions.
While the west was not reeling from resource shortages in 1993, current prices for commodities suggest a shortage of pretty much everything dug from the ground. And everything grown in it. We may rightly despise the way Malthus is used to justify mean-spirited policy; but if we take a long-term view of world history, he was right. There actually is a physical limit to how fast humans can reproduce and consume resources. And we are pretty near that limit today. Peak oil will bring with it shortage of everything that has been made possible by an ample supply of cheap energy. And that amounts to food, transportation, and manufactured goods. In short, it amounts to pretty much everything. It is a recipe for conflict.
While it is true that a starving man is easily persuaded to fight for food, even in families completely unfamiliar with physical want there is tension and conflict. There is competition for status, for attention, for resources. Precisely these same tensions extend through society. And they tend to cause physical conflict where one monolithic culture interacts with another.
In the context of conflict and war, the only thing that is in ample supply is ambition. As we have recently begun to learn, in political systems based prinarily on ambition and power - in contrast to systems based on specialization and competency - those who are ruthless and brutal rise to the highest levels in government precisely because they have become good at political manipulations.
But Fukuyama pretends that the causes of conflict have nothing to do with power and ambition or with hunger and want. He touts and mourns the fiction that in the absence of ideological conflicts there can be no physical conflicts. What we might be persuaded to believe is that it would be impossible to have a large-scale conflict without the manufacture of some ideological justification. But in this case the ideological part is nothing but a manipulative tool of the power elite. It is not the first cause of conflict but the final cause.
Finally, Fukuyama suggests a new reason to fight: “boredom.” The British aristocracy gained a reputation for being twits; and “boring” was the worst insult its members could hurl at each other; but even that group never started wars just out of sheer boredom. There was always a commercial angle to the enterprise. Fukuyama, here, tempts us to envision the neocon franchise as being much farther out on the absurdist fringe than even the most dimwitted of the British aristocracy.
It’s sometimes difficult to distinguish between two kinds of acts among neocons:
1) the disingenuous but vigorous advocacy of sheer lunacy in order to promote a self-serving agenda and
2) the earnest advocacy of that same sheer lunacy.
The two sound much alike.
Given that the style of the argument in the last paragraph is so distinct from that of the rest of the piece; and given that it doesn’t really follow from the rest of the argument, one wonders whether Fukuyama tossed it in simply so that the neocons would publish and promote his work. The last paragraph promotes a peculiar kind of sheer lunacy not so readily perceived in the rest of the work.
Nevertheless, throughout the whole piece, “The End of History” assumes ridiculous reasons for war. And if Fukuyama actually believes that war is not caused primarily by a kind of rampant nationalism or tribalism that is aggravated by physical want, he is not really worthy of being called a neocon; for all of the neocon agenda since the early cold war years has been to whip up nationalistic fervor in support of greater arms spending and more aggressive foreign intervention. If the neocons - who learned from Wohlstetter that shilling for the military industrial complex was the most lucrative job one could get with a degree in history - do not understand the utility of nationalism, who might?
Because the liberal ideal Fukuyama is talking about eschews nationalism - seeing it as a primary source of international friction and strife - the neocons have been working to undermine the very liberal ideal Fukuyama is claiming to have won the day. Taken with its bizarre concluding paragraph, this pieice is part of that body of work.
Fukuyama’s work is interesting when seen in light of subsequent history. For a brief, dark moment in history under the clouds of an administration brutally faithful to the neocon vision, America actually began to act like the bully on the block - the kind of nation that picks on the unpopular and fights all comers, great and small. The fight is not for the purpose of furthering the liberal ideal or even for furthering useful foreign policy goals, but for the simple purpose of feeling powerful. (Okay, yes, there is also three or six trillion dollars worth of oil concessions. But, I wonder, is there anyone who would not feel a bit richer or more powerful after acquiring a significant interest in such largesse?)
Sense of power is the animal reason men fight. It is the animal reason men find joy in fighting. It is the animal reason men find relief from boredom on the battlefield. It always has been. It probably always will be.
Fukuyama is correct in one sense, when men find it impossible to find joy and relief from boredom in any form of conflict, it will be the end of history; but at the current rate of evolutionary advancement that’s another few million years off. There will be a lot of violence between now and then.
I might be wrong. Perhaps a few dozen wars on the scale of WWII would speed things along a bit. Until then, we humans will be plagued with the neocon types who whip up nationalism and promote attitudes favorable to starting great conflicts. But if these wars are to serve the evolutionary purpose of driving us toward a less violent age, neocons need to be on the front lines along with mindless patriots. I would give odds that pigs fly under their own power first. In the mean time, don’t forget how to duck and cover; history is still very much with us.
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06.17.08
Posted in Philosophy &c, In the Kitchen, Rant and Rave at 6:51 pm by steve
An Extended Complaint About Kitchen Aide’s Customer Service
Lean thinking was the business rage of the late eighties. Ideas in lean thinking include reducing redundancy, reducing inventory, and reducing the amount of capital one uses to achieve an end. There is much good to be found in lean thinking; but as is true of every good idea it is essential to bring the idea into practice, to use it to inform decisions, but to stay clear of letting it control your business or your life. Lean thinking is one business tool. No matter what its proponents claim it is not the whole of a business.
Let us construct a hypothetical example of a customer service center for a kitchen counter-top appliance manufacturer. Assume it stocks and ships several hundred SKUs. All of them are replacement parts for things like mixers, blenders, toasters, and so on.
Now, let us assume that the management of this enterprise has the lean thinking religion. That is, they organize all of their business approaches around the lean thinking idea, assuming that what else there is to running the business well will take care of itself. Perhaps they lose sight of the idea that the business purpose of the enterprise is to keep parts flowing to customers. Instead, they see only the operational mandate to minimize costs by keeping a razor-thin inventory. Or rather, to arrange a flow of goods from suppliers to customers in a way that reduces the inventory at the service center to zero.
In fact, the optimal solution in terms of minimizing cost of managing the center is to arrange it so that an order for a part and the part itself arrive at the center on the same day. This would allow one to keep zero inventory. And it would provide prompt service for each customer. It’s the best of all possible worlds.
If the scale of the business is large and the number of SKUs is small, it is likely that the average amount of volume for each SKU is relatively large compared to the random noise in order volume. And one can schedule regular deliveries for most SKU’s - maybe weekly or even daily. If one has been in the business for decades, one can develop high-quality time-series forcasting models for parts orders. One can actually hope to approach the ideal situation in which a part and order arrive on the same day.
If the parts are not of some highly time-sensitive nature, then two or three week delivery times may be assumed to be acceptable. In this case, all one needs to do is to arrange weekly or biweekly deliveries of virtually every SKU that might ship. Inventory then becomes nothing but evidence that one has overestimated the order volume of an SKU. A well-managed SKU, then, is never in stock.
In this model, the optimal solution from a cost standpoint is not to carry stock but to carry a standing backorder quantity on all parts. The game is no longer to minimize inventory, but to manage the backorder list in a way that loses the fewest customers. If one gets incredibly good at the game, one needs not stock any parts. And the customer remains oblivious to the fact.
The model above has a glossy kind of appeal that would give lean-thinking fundies wet dreams. And if all one can see in a business is the goal of minimizing costs, there is no other possible model. But is minimizing cost the only game? A business with no costs is no business at all. A business with no customers has the lowest operational costs of all.
Cost minimization is unconditionally good to the extent that it improves efficiency - delivering the same net results with fewer resources. But cost minimization is unconditionally bad when it kills your business. All the stuff that actually matters lies somewhere in between.
You have to actually connect the operational details with the business goals. One of those goals has to be delivering stuff to the customer. Lean strategies that fail to deliver have ceased cutting fat and started amputating limbs. This is where the model begins to fail.
The model above starts with a hidden assumption. It assumes that parts are ordered one at a time. It is not an unreasonable assumption if one is shipping blender parts to housewives. It might work most of the time in this or some other contexts. If one has business practices that always treat the order of any part in a manner that is consistent with this assumption, one has a viable operation. But what happens if someone orders more than one SKU?
I ran into a very interesting example of this in a recent exchange with Kitchen Aide’s customer service department. Last November my wife placed an order for some parts with them, several different SKUs. In April, when they had still not shipped, she cancelled the order. In May I tried again. I started online filling out a customer request. Nearly two weeks later, after getting no response, I called the company. The first call was shuffled through the auto-answering maze. I waited five minutes. Then there were some rings at the other end. Then dial tone.
On the second or third try, after ten or twenty minutes of waiting I got a real person. Long queues is a sign of lean thinking. It screams “The customer’s waiting time costs us nothing.” Not true, but that’s another argument.
I placed an order for the parts. I was told that everything was in stock except for one part, and it was due the next day. Roughly three weeks passed and I did not receive the order. So I called customer service and spoke to Janet.
This time I was told that “all the parts were on backorder.”
“How could this happen?” I asked. “All the parts, save one, were in stock when I placed the order. And that part was due the next day.”
“The order is configured to ship when all the parts are available,” answered Janet. “Some are coming in this week and some are coming in next week.” In other words, parts that should have been shipped to me were shipped to other customers because of the way my order was configured.
I suddenly understood the game. And I explained it to Janet in a forceful and unpleasant way. “While my order waits for food processor blades, all the blender jars are shipped to other customers until there are none left. When the food processor blades arrive, the blender jars are out of stock. But while we wait for jars, the blades go out of stock again. And we are back to where we started. This process repeats itself forever. Or until one cancels the order.”
Janet assured me that what I was explaining was impossible. And that the parts would be in stock maybe this week. Or maybe by the end of this month. Really, I had no cause for concern.
But I have had graduate courses in statistics and in inventory control. I have a good imagination. I have also worked in industry and I have lived among fundamentalists of all sorts: I know how insane things can get. I understand something about what might have happened and why. I was capable of setting up a model of their operation in my own mind and proving to my own satisfaction that unless the system were fooled into treating my order that had four separate SKUs as four separate orders, I would absolutely never receive any part of my order. I was upset that the whole of the customer service organization was completely oblivious to this glaring problem and that it meant that people with smaller orders who ordered after I did always got their stuff first.
The special quality of the idealized operation we described above is that it assures that most parts are on backorder most of the time. It is not an accident. It is not even viewed as an undesireable side effect of minimizing inventory. It is the operational goal of the inventory management system. Now, if regular deliveries always brought in more parts of every SKU than there were backorder quantities, one could still recover.
But if one were designing the system to be brutally efficient on a day-to-day operating sense, then one would take deliveries five days a week. And it would almost always be the case that some SKUs would arrive only on certain days of the week.
On a given week blender jars would arrive on Monday. And they would all ship out Monday. Food processor blades would arrive Tuesday. And they would all ship out Tuesday. And so on. Such an arrangement would distribute labor over the week and achieve certain returns of scale in the process of moving parts from incoming queue into outgoing queue.
So, if a person placed an order that included a blender jar and a food processor blade; and if that person specified not to ship until all the parts were in stock, it was a mathematical certainty that they would never receive their order because it could never ship. The parts would never be in the warehouse at the same time. It was not an accident of the design, it was a goal of the design.
It is at this point that an enlightened business manager might begin to understand how lean-thinking fundamentalism is strangling his business. The lean-thinking model eliminates all sales to customers who order more than one part at a time. It assures that their broken appliances remain broken forever. It drives them to buy from competitors with inferior products who have business processes that allow them to actually ship product against complicated orders.
Now, I am absolutely certain that if some person from Kitchen Aide were to read this essay they would categorically deny every part of it. That’s fine; but as I write this I am still waiting for those parts my wife ordered in November. I am still waiting for those same parts I ordered in mid-May. The explanation may be subtly different; but the results are the same.
In the mean time we bought an Oster blender that turns ice cubes into snowdrifts in a way that my Kitchen-Aide blender never could approach. But it makes such a godawful racket that I fear it will cause hearing loss. And while it boasts “all metal drive” it also has a base that has the look and feel of really cheap plastic. I look at it, and I feel sad because all I can see is the day i throw it out, another tangible symbol of the gap between the hopes we have for products and what they deliver.
We live in a marvelous age where all sorts of stuff is incredibly cheap. We have learned to manufacture efficiently. We have learned to distribute efficiently. But there are still gaping holes in our ability to manage effectively. I just want a blender that can be made to work, even after parts break; and one that does not make me deaf. I’m sure that there exists a solution to this problem; but the first two tries were failures.
When you have to throw away the first two instances of any good before settling on one that works, you begin to wonder whether the current world is not built upon false economies. You begin to wonder whether lean thinking has not just cut the fat but also amputated important organs; the principle organ of thought, for instance.
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06.09.08
Posted in Uncategorized, Social, Culture, Politics at 1:33 pm by steve
Hillary Clinton came within a handful of votes of being the first woman to clinch the Presidential nomination from a major political party in the US. That’s an accomplishment all of us can be proud of. It changed the assumptions of electoral politics and creates many reasons to hope for a bette future. Hillary stands to be the proudest for she put the most at risk. It was her talents more than those of any other single person that led to her success.
Clinton’s monumental achievement came with great investment by people who identified with her ideals and with investment by people who paved the way for her. It would be a grave mistake to imagine that Hillary’s success depended exclusively or even primarily on women; for that would severely underestimate the breadth of support she had. She had support from every identifiable group.
If one is looking at Clinton’s success in terms of gender, one would trace the line of history backwards. In recent history there are womens’ organizations such as NOW that contributed much in terms of effort and in terms of helping us see society in a way profoundly different from how it was seen just fifty years ago. But the arc of change goes back much farther.
In the early twentieth century one finds women campaigning successfully for voting rights. Thier sucdess brought women into the political arena in an explicit way, a way that was unprecedented in agricultural and post-agricultural societies.
Before that one can find the successful reigns of Victoria and Elizabeth as examples of female leaders who proved both more durable, more serious, and more wise than almost all their male predecessors in the same role. During Elizabeth’s reign Shakespeare wrote, the British started permanent settlements in the new world, and the Spanish Armada was defeated. By the time of her successor, England was a very different place. A century ealier it had been a forgettable minor appendage to Europe. A century later it had become one of Europe’s most powerful and influencial nations.
In a similar way, England was transformed under Victoria into the world’s most successful and sprawling empire. In light of recent American history, what is remarkable about this feat was the fact that one could send British aristocrats into foreign lands such as India for decades at a time and they would persistently and energetically pursue primarily the interests of the crown, subjugating and suppressing the impulse to take unfair advantage of the situation. And when corruption occurred, it was generally dealt with in effective ways. The durability and scale of the arrangement is sufficient testimony to the greatness of the enterprise. Victoria’s dogged sense of decency and restraint was crucial to the success of the enterprise. It is almost impossible to imagine England managing the task under a male monarch.
The extraordinary level of common sense we find in the writings of women authors of the early ninteenth century, most notably Jane Austin, does much to aid the cause. Austin digs deep beneath the facades of wealth and privilege to get to the essential qualities of humanity - the qualities that create durable society.
This whirlwind tour we use to suggest that in Anglophone history women have proven themselves repeatedly in the political sphere. There is little question that the world is better off when intelligent, well-educated, and serious women play central roles in culture and politics. There ought to be more of them.
Our purpose here, however, is not to talk about identity politics, but to show how feminism and the values that women preferentially hold are essential in a well-functioning political arena. And to suggest that women and men alike might be better served by focussing less on identity politics than on ideas of justice and fairness.
In some hypothetical ideal world gender would be irrelevant. Leaders would make good choices. And most reasonable people would agree with those policy choices seeing them as effective and just. A good leader would be a leader who could identify the most effective and just policy positions and who could best persuade others to follow, to adopt those policy choices.
When we say effective we are thinking in a sort of utilitarian way, the most good for the most people. Or, when it comes to the obligation of governments to minimize certain kinds of dysfunction and dissatisfaction, the least amount of ill of any given sort for the most people. When we say just, we mean that policies are completely blind to all the sorts of factors that divide people: race, gender, ethnicity, class, wealth, build, amount of hair, and so on. Or, if they are not blind, they compensate to some degree, for societal factors and practices that might be judged unjust. And they do so in a way that knits society together more closely.
Many things stand in the way of such an ideal world. One is that people generally choose to associate with people who are - in some way or another - like themselves. It’s why men associate with men. And women associate with women. It’s why people with common ethnic backgrounds tend to associate with other people with similar ethnic backgrounds. It’s why people tend to hire people who remind them of themselves. It’s also why people tend to vote for people who remind them of themselves. It’s a natural tendency. But it can produce unfortunate outcomes. Because men tend to care most about power, they seek it most vigorously and are over-represented in all the seats of power. Powerful men, then, tend to promote other men for reasons we just explained.
Feminists complain about a persistent, insular, and dysfunctional patriarchy. It plagues politics and corporate governments causing the same kind of pain and difficulty in good reasoning that a perpetual migrain headache might cause.
It’s an accurate observation in many cases. The problem with men arises from the fact that in agricultural and post agricutural societies the culture is almost completely derived from principles of individual property ownership. And property ownership is one of the primary distinguishing characteristics of mating priviledges for males.
In this context it is nearly always (assumed to be) in the male’s best (evolutionary) interest to magnify the power difference between himself and the next male lower on the economic scale. Thus, males tend to build highly vertical heirarchical societies with great inequality. And they tend to be cruel to those of lower status. It’s a tendency that is deeply embeddeed in the psyche; it is one that we inherit from other primates such as the ancestors common to us and baboons. It is one we share with most social mammals including most pack and herd animals.
The grave problem with this culture is that it tends to produce a small number of very rich people and a large number of very poor ones. This leads to social unrest and ferment. And this, in turn, leads to violence. That this is almost entirely absent from North America’s history is an artifact of the huge bounty of natural resources its European settlers have enjoyed by virtue of settling a huge almost empty continent. But when that bounty becomes sufficiently depleted, the process will be observed here, too.
Societies have responded to pressures of shortages in two ways. One is primarily suppressive. Armed forces put down the revolt and suppress violence. Experience in Latin America over the last century might teach us that so long as there is profound inequality and widespread social discontent, there cannot be peace in a society.
By contrast, some societies have worked over the millennia to inculcate a strong sense of interconnectedness and interdependence - one that drives a kind of personal industry. It’s not hard to see this in certain northern European and Oriental societies. One of the side-effects of this culture is that there is more of a sense of shared purpose and shared destiny. The differences between the upper and underclasses are smaller. There is a stronger sense of group identity.
So what does all this have to do with feminism? If one views feminism through a Marxist lens, seeing it as a kind of class struggle in which men are cast as the boursoisie and women as the proletariat, then what we have talked about has nothing to do with feminism. But recall that Marxism calls for the total destruction of the bourgoisie and the elimination of capital. Metaphorically speaking it’s a kind of “kill the patient” practice of medicine. Most males would like to believe that most females might actually be just a little happier with some kind of male presence. If this were so, a different model would be called for. What kind of society are we aiming for? And what kinds of cultural practices will serve that end? These become the central questions.
These questions lead us to explore a little more carefully the complementary roles that men and women play in society. We have already pointed out that the role men play is primarily competitive. By contrast, we might see that historically the role that women have played has tended to be more cooperative. That this tendency exists is a fact of nature. How we channel it is a matter of culture.
The ideas of fairness and justice, of cooperation and interdependence, of an interconnected and roughly equal society are ideas that tend to be more closely linked with the female psyche. It would be wrong to assert that they are exclusively female impulses or ideas. But it would be just as wrong to assert that they are so prominent or find expression so persistently in the male population as they are and do in the female population. On average, women tend to view the world a little less competitively and a little more cooperatively than do men.
It’s a pattern with deep biological roots. The differences can be seen in many mammalian species. It is quite common for sibling females to care for each others’ young. It is a practice observed in primates, in bats, and in felines. We observe here the evolutionary foundation for the general tendency of women to be just a bit more sensitive to the needs of others, to be just a little more cooperative, to be just a little more fair, to identify just a little more with the needs of the downtrodden is a tendency that leads us to reasonably expect women, on average, to be better at creating and executing policies and practices that are fair, inclusive, broadly based, just.
Arguably, it is precisely this impulse that enables humans to form societies. And it is our sense of empathy that makes possible the deep level of cooperation that holds society together.
Society needs to balance competetive and cooperative forces. Competetive forces, properly managed, tend to disribute power. They tend to spur economic and personal development. They tend to drive change. They tend to move people and institutions toward excellence. They even drive societies to exercise cooperation on ever larger scales.
But if they are not managed scrupulously they have a tendency to concentrate power. When combined with a sort of laziness and a sense of entitlement, competition creates social classes and class barriers. And this leads to societal inequities. Cooperative forces can interfere with the negative effects of competitive forces. The happiest and most durable societies strike a careful balance between these two impulses and practices.
When one sees a homeless person freezing on the sidewalk it is a sense of fairness that prompts one to get city council to designate some warm building for the purpose of housing such people on cold nights. And to use tax dollars to heat the building. At one level, to take up the cause of the less fortunate is a simple act of human kindness.
At another level it is an act of enlightened self interest. The economic and societal forces that caused this person to rot in the street no doubt are at work elsewhere. If the collection of such people becomes too large and if their plight becomes too hopeless, discontent and dispair will create violence. At first it will be private and incidental. But eventually it will become public and general, if the underlying causes are not addressed.
It is a sketchy argument, but we have established at least some reason to believe that ideas about fairness, justice, and cooperation strenghthen society and make it a happier and more productive place. Some of the cooperative ideas we talk about are ones that have seen little expression in the political arena in over three decades. They are ideas we need to relearn in context of contemporary political and economic realities.
Feminism’s great success is that it has allowed women to adopt the methods used by men to get and hold on to power. It has made women economically and poltitically powerful as they have never been since the dawn of the agricultural age. This is a great and laudable achievment. It rightly ought to be celebrated. And its gains ought not be easily or frivolously given up. Hillary Clinton’s candidacy is proof of how far modern feminism has brought our society. It gives us cause for celebration.
But the gains have come at a cost. And everyone has paid. In some sense the cost has been paid most by the ones who have gained most from the change. Women who have gained economic power have too frequently had to trade away important relationships. Or they have had to adopt corrosive methods. Or they have had to live dual lives as homemakers and as professionals. The whole experience leaves many feeling empty, drained, exhausted, incomplete.
Men have been slow to make the paths easier for the women they care about. As John Fowles put it “the great failure of feminism has been its failure to free men” from their assumed gender roles. That is not a criticism that any feminist who finds some sense of dissatisfaction with the status quo ought to dismiss lightly. Or any man who loves a woman with any modicum of independent spirit. Yet it is a criticism rarely taken up. Feminists, even when they see all the problems being caused by men seem to imagine that all the solutions lie in women becoming more like men rather than the opposite being true.
The consequence of this has been that many women who gain economic power lose things that women hold more dear; a rich relationship with a spouse, a stable home environment, a secure space in which to raise children. It is an unreasonable cost. In many cases an unbearable cost. And it is little wonder that many women have rejected the whole game. They are not necessarily stupid or lazy or slavish or backwards.
It might mean, instead, that they cling to a set of values that embrace things that many people find more meaningful than power and wealth. They forgo some measure of these things for a kind of personal satisfaction that comes from close relationships. The feminist ideal, if it is concerned with a broad well-being of women must honor this choice and work for societal institutions and structures that ensure those who make such choices do not get left behind economically or politically. Doing this well will encourage men to adapt better to a world of more equally shared experience.
The more hidden consequence of this game is that the most powerful and influencial women, as they moved onto what once was seen as men’s turf, needed to adopt mens’ competitive methods to be successful. They needed to frame their actions in the same dog-eat-dog terms. To a profound and sometimes disturbing extent they had to become men not just in the best senses, but also in the worst of them. The side effect of this practice has been that influencial women have actually been much less effective than their predecessors in promoting ideas of fairness and cooperation in the political marketplace.
The cost has been borne by the poorest 99% of Americans. Unemployment, ineffective systems of health care, crumbling infrastructure, failures in education, ossification of the social class structure, environmental degredation, erosion of the middle class, these are but few of the devastating effects of this shift in focus away from cooperative ideas of fairness and justice that corresponded temporally with the coming of age of the modern womens’ movement.
Even the current banking crisis can be framed in relationship to this idea. If one views banking as being primarily a service for creating and preserving capital on the broadest scale, then the stodgy regulated bank of pre-deregulation days (i.e. pre-1996) could be seen as a powerful social institution in service of a primarily cooperative ideal. It would never create a great deal of financial wealth for the bank itself; but its social purpose was to enable others to build and accumulate wealth. And this it did well, efficiently, dependably. It’s a very conservative point of view. And it is one that puts cooperative and broad societal needs ahead of the needs of shareholders in banks.
As we have already suggested, this is but one of dozens huge policy areas in which America’s most powerful and influencial women, by moving onto the same turf as America’s most powerful men failed to check a potentially harmful policy change.
All of these changes were part of the Reagan Revolution. It is, of course, completely inaccurate and unfair to lay the blame for all of the failures of the Reagan Revolution at the feet of feminists. In fact, women have become an ever increasing portion of the political resistance to that revolution. The Reagan Revolution was simply a kind of reaction to several decades of moderate liberalism. Americans had forgotten the costs of unchecked greed and institutional corruption in government. And the false promises of the that revolution had a kind of seasonal appeal to a vocal, if slight majority. But the return to sanity in public policy will be achieved most expeditiously if women can succeed in changing the cultural values.
If we are to achieve the noblest of ends to which the feminist cause aspires, namely, to elevate the dignity and fulfilment of all people to the highest level possible, it will become important to refocus on the ideas of shared causes, common good, fairness, and justice. And women, as always, are in the best position to start that societal change by demaning fair treatment of each other from their children. ( We say women neither because it is necessarily or uniformly women who wil do this - some men are in a better position - but because we have identified the ennobling cooperative ideas with women. If the message is to stick it needs to come from men just as clearly and broadly as it comes from women.)
Even as the Bush administration proves beyond a doubt the blatant bankrupcy of the pure laissez faire approach to economic development; even as it proves the corrupting power of concentrated media in service of big government and of an avaricious military industrial complex; even as it is locked into a tailspin of lawlessneess and degeneracy; even as it attempts to commit America ot an endless and counteproductive war; even as it proves the wanton destructiveness of its policies on all fronts - political, social, and economic, the traditional approach of feminism fails to attack the doctrine common to all of these failures.
It’s a doctrine eschews all cooperative principles that spring from empathetic impulses and embraces instead world bounded entirely by force and coercion. If feminism is to serve best whom women love most, it must learn to reach us where our noblest impulses originate. It must learn to cultivate and nurture these impulses; to educate them in ethics and civic-mindendnesss. And it must school us again in the study of the arts, for a society that cannot sing or write or paint or dance is a society impoverished beyond imagination. The only mode of expression left is violence.
It must learn to train men and women alike to be able to think in corporate, cooperative terms. It must teach men and women alike to take ethics seriously and to judge all transactions with a view to fairness. It must help us realize the power of associative joy.
The only hope for America as a democratic society, the only hope for the West as a bastion of freedom, the only hope for the ideals of equality and personal dignity enduring as principles of government is for the empathetic ideas, the cooperative ideas, the inclusive ideas that draw us together with the noblest of intentions to displace the meaner spirited ones of the Reagan Revolution - the ones realized in the housing bust, the perpetual war in the mideast, the lawlessness of the executive, the endless trampling of Constitutional rights.
These are the ideals that women preferentially bring to the political arena. Not all women do so. Nor are the ideals absent from men. But women as a group tend to be just a little bit better here than men are as a group. If we focus like a laser on building up the importance of cooperative ideas, of creating members of society who understand not just how to gain advantages but also how to preserve the benefits of a deep and broad societal interconnectedness, we can rebuild a society in which the satisfactions for which feminism rightly aims are expressed more naturally and broadly within society.
If we promote values that women preferentially possess, we shall arrive at a political point where women naturally hold a large portion of the most important positions in government and commerce. Neither men nor women will think twice about gender or race; but only in terms of the right mix of personal characteristics and competencies for these positions. The ultimate goal of identity politics will be satisfied; and the solution will be one that is neither forced or unnatural. The solution will be robust, sustainable, pleasing. It will produce a world that we all can find more satisfying. It will make Hillary Clinton’s success both more durable and more ennobling.
Permalink
06.08.08
Posted in Rant and Rave, Snark and Snarkier, Politics at 9:53 pm by steve
The Secret Plan* to Portray Obama as a Pederast
I was sweeping the floors down at the neocon headquarters the other day when I overheard a few prominent neocons discuss a few dirty tricks that would make Nixon’s “dirty tricks” crew green with envy.
K: What do you think, is “Obama the Marxist” idea getting traction?
F: People are idiots. We tell them a hundred times that Obama is a Marxist and he will be a Marxist.
K: So where are we in that process?
G: Not far along. We need to swing about fifteen percent of the electorate and any movement so far is much less than the margin of error.
K: There’s lots of time before the election. Think we can reach the middle on this one?
G: We can certainly energize the base. We can swing a few of the aging “better dead than red” “yellow dog Democrats” in the South. We can give a lot of traditional Republicans second thoughts about abandoning their beloved GOP. They might go into the booth intending to vote for Obama but emerge having voted for McCain.
K: Whether they realize it or not. (All Laugh.)
G: We expect to count the vote this time around, too.
K: Okay, so the Marxist thing doesn’t completely solve the problem, it just stops the bleeding. What else do we have?
F: There is race. As I said before “I say Obama is a racist. And unless he can prove otherwise, he is one.”
K: Sound’s like children’s game of cooties.
F: That’s politics today, isn’t it, Bill?
K: But of course, you are right, Bill.
G: “I know it’s true, like all fundies:
God wrote it clearly on my undies.”
F: Don’t knock divine revelation; it takes whole peoples where reason dare not go.
K: Race is tricky ground, because if one appeals to race explicitly, the process backfires. But there are dozens of indirect approaches. The swiftboating approach is a good one. Produce fake associates who portray him as racist. Guilt by association is good, too. Portraying his preacher as anti-American was a great start.
F: Why not provoke a few of the more volatile black leaders. High visibility guys like Sharpton or Jackson tend to grate on the independent voter. There are even non-racist Democrats who find the demagoguery of these guys to be strongly distasteful. If guys like this could be broadcast saying outragiously racist things in a speech supporting Obama, we could turn half the white voters in America away from Obama.
G: It’s a thought. Obama would be in the difficult position of having to choose between distancing himself from men who are closest to his core supporters and allowing guilt by association to poison his candidacy. In one case he alienates his base. In the other case he is painted as a racist.
K: We have some good speechwriters who work for Democrats. Let’s see what we can do. If we can get the right connections, we’ll set up a media event.
F: What about the Islamist tag? I mean, he has an Islamic name.
G: Hussein, mother of all bad guys in the Mideast. And Osama, father of all bad guys in the Mideast. Son of a divorced white woman and a black foreigner. How does such an evil person even get to be a candidate? (Chuckles)
K: Pillory Hillary. Rush did most of the groundwork. But you wrote the book on it, Jonah.
G: It was a close call.
K: The Islamist tag seems to work pretty well with the poor white trash. It might make a difference in the heart of the Appalachians. But the real question is whether the independent voter can be persuaded that Barak Hussein Obama is actually an islamofascist. If he chooses Hillary, it will be easier. Even if he himself is not one, he associates with them. End of story.
G: But if he doesn’t choose Hillary?
K: It’s not clear to me that there is a lot to gain from this fight other than to energize the base.
G: But the Sharpton thing can be exploited here. Sharpton is viewed widely as also being antisemitic. So if one could provoke Sharpton to really alienate every Jewish person in America, one might swing a big chunk of the liberal Jewish vote.
K: We’ll work that into the racism project. It will be a good two-fer, racism and anti-semitism. What else?
G: That he is a crook, and a pederast.
K: Crook? What does that get you?
G: I see your point. Nobody gives a shit that Dubya broke the law. Over and over. Law means nothing. But sex: everyone understands sex.
F: You think you can get that to stick?
K: The idea is to sow seeds of doubt, then nail the issue at the last minute. On the issue of Marxism, we just keep repeating the same old stuff. We have dozens of footsoldiers; guys at think tanks, guys who mysteriously resigned from Congress, and so on. On the more scary issues we use more subtle tactics. Like starting the rumor that the guy denies being a pederast.
F: Ha, Ha, why would anyone deny being a pederast if they weren’t one? There simply would be no question.
G: But that’s just the start, right? The rumors of denials will just set up the mental frame for the big putsch.
K: We have radio talk-show hosts and guests who are perfect for the job. They will float the rumors for weeks; and the rumors will be persistently lambasted in the “liberal media.” This will keep the idea in circulation. Meanwhile, find someone who has a bone to pick with Obama personally, someone who has a twelve year old son. Pay them a few hundred thousand to claim that Obama solicited sexual favors from their son. Hold the press conference on Halloween to announce the charges. By the time the law-suits are settled and people understand what really happened, McCain will be out of office.
G: It’s a slam-dunk. I have to give you and your father credit, Bill. Over the last fifty years you have reduced public discourse to pure pablum and reduced the reasoning powers of the public to the sub-moronic level; their capacity for critical thinking is inferior to that of the nematode. Fifty years ago the kind of approach you advocate would have been unthinkable. Today it’s actually the most effective approach.
K: You give me too much credit, Johah. The American impulse to be motivated in political choices by material gains rather than by moral reasoning, and to be people of action rather than people of thought has always made them perfect candidates for this kind of treatment. It’s just an accident of history that we’re the first people in a long time to really capitalize on the gap. So long as Americans choose warriors and giants of commerce as heroes rather than philosophers, true moral leaders, and insightful men of science, our jobs will be easy.
G: I’ll tell you, this is the team to be on. There’s some serious thinking and long term planning going on. Thinking up dirty tricks is diabolically fun. It pays very well. And we never lose.
K: We never lose.
*The conversation is purely fictional. Any resemblance it might bear to persons, institutions, events, conversations orl dirty tricks - real, planned, or imagned by others - is purely coincidental.
Permalink
06.06.08
Posted in Policy, Politics at 11:14 pm by steve
I was in the middle of my first order of salsa from Amazon.com when I got the message “Http/1/1 Service Unavailable.” That was at roughly 11:45. As I write this at 3:14, the service is still down. By some measure, Amazon.com is the world’s largest retailer. Not in sales volume, but in terms of reach. No retailer offers more SKUs. Now, the fact that Amazon.com is down for three hours is not the end of the world. In fact, I may be the only person to notice it. If anyone else did, they would probably do what I am doing, feel a little put out and try again later. But what the service outage does suggest is that the internet, for all it does achieve, is built on technologies not immune to Murphy’s law. This particular failure is not a failure of the internet, but it is a failure of one of the world’s most prominent internet-only businesses.
It reminded me that big things fail. It reminded me of a perpetual worry I entertain, which is that we are not smart enough to manage the technological society we have created. It is not an opinion I have always had; but it is one that has gradually crept up on me. More and more, it seems to me, the world is becoming cheaper, more tawdry, and more prone to great breakdowns.
Before Chernobyl I had the sense that society in all its technological compexity might be sustainable. Sure, almost every important facet of production and distribution - if it was to be understood with any depth - required graduate study in some specialized field. But the educational system was pretty good at promoting competent people, and the number of highly skilled positions need not necessarily extend beyond the pool of qualified people.
Chernobyl marked the start of a change in my attitude that was reinforced by a move from Texas to New Jersey. When I considered the great accident at Chernobyl I understood that anyone who took an undergraduate heat transfer course and who knew what film boiling was would be smart enough to avoid the act that caused Chernobyl to blow up. In the US that would translate to tens of thousands of engineering students per year. When I studied heat transfer as a graduate student, I learned that most of the analytical solutions to difficult heat transfer problems were done by Russian workers. So to the extent that the development of analytical techniques to solve problems develops more robust understanding of the problems, the Russians were arguably in a better technical position. They arguably had a more qualified pool of people to choose from. And Chernobyl was one of Russia’s most expensive pieces of technological equipment. So they would put good people there. So how would one explain the accident? The accident was not caused so much by lack of personal talent as it was caused by lack of institutional wisdom.
One might argue that the meltdown at Chernobyl was caused by two big factors. One was that the Russians were not as obsessed with safety as are people in the West. Solzhenitzyn noted this obsession and thought it made westerners do silly things. We will, one day, argue that the West’s obsession with controlling everything to the point of denying death has hidden costs and that those costs we may one day not be able to afford. The argument is especially useful in considering health care costs. But this tendency to believe that everyone can cheat death does have its payoffs; one is that all nuclear reactors in the West have robust containment buildings that assume the kind of scenario that occurred at Chernobyl.
Another factor might be hubris. It may be something about the way people self-select for occupations. In the West, the engineer tends to be a cautious type of person. In the Soviet Union, technical people were better rewarded and tended to reach star status more regularly. So, perhaps, technical fields attracted a different kind of person. And the institutional pressures were more focussed on producing high-visibility success than they were on avoiding costly failures.
In any case, Chernobyl demonstrated Murphy’s Law, “If anything can go wrong it will.” And ever since that time I have had the creepy feeling that we are not smart enough to manage the technical world we have created. By smart enough I may not necessarily mean as individuals, I mean as a society. Individually, the Russian engineers were smarter than American ones. But somehow the incentives got rigged in a way that made smart people do stupid things. As Deming, the creator of modern day quality control put it “A broken system will defeat a really intelligent person every time.”
The examples of failures are many. And as a technical person, I find some of them astonishing.
At one point in time our household had DSL service through one of the free-world’s largest telecom companies. Each evening at roughly 6:00 the service would simply crash. You could not ping the name server. Multiple visits by tech support people took place. Everyone denied that what was happening could happen. Then they would see it happen. There were phone calls to vice presidents and high-powered tech support people. After some period of time it became clear that the problem had to do with the details of the way the database of IP adresses was updated at the company. Perhaps a hundred man-hours were expended in trying to resolve the problem. In the end everyone gave up. We switched to cable-modem service. It works despite the fact that even though contractors are paid to bury the wires twelve inches in the ground they can frequently be observed lying just beneath the mulch in the garden beds.
And then there is electrical service. Consider that moment a few years ago when the entire northeast went without power for a few days because of a computer switching glitch in a station outside Cleveland, OH. I was spared that outage; but for the previous six summers a bad transformer in my neighborhood took down power service during the dog days of summer for four to eight hours at a time. I would tell my wife “this never happened when I lived in Zambia. If I am going to live in a third world country, I want the cost of living to be lower than it is in New Jersey.”
What quality was it that made electrical service in a third-world nation more reliable than it is in New Jersey? Part of the answer might be that it actually wasn’t; my experiences in the two places may not be representative. But part of the answer is due to a shift in attitude. In the middle of the twentieth century the public assumption about utilities was that they be completely, 100% reliable. It was an attitude that the west projected even into third world nations. Reliable service was just part of doing business in the regulated utility era. Unreliable systems made rate increases impossible; and at the same time, guaranteed rates meant that some amount of redundancy could be built into the system. It certainly did increase the cost of generating and distributing electricity; but it did prove highly reliable.
In the post-Reagan era, by contrast, the reliability issue is not seen as a fixed constraint but as a simple business issue. If a utility outage causes a billion dollars in damages and takes the lives of two hundred people, but the companies involved can escape responsibility for the losses, then there is simply no financial reason to invest in upgrades to power distribution systems that improve or maintain any given level of reliability. Things break down at whatever frequency maximizes profit. Take the argument very far, and before long electrical service becomes something with rolling outages built into the design. One just starts hoping that one will have power for the few hours of the day one needs it most. But the issue of economics ensures that the power will always fail just after noon on all of the hottest days of summer and not be restored until midnight. It produces a nightmarish kind of existence; but it’s the kind that perfectly unconstrained free markets would deliver when they are free of any kind of responsibility to deliver service in a reliable way.
Fortunately, electrical power companies assume liability for some kinds of losses due to power outages; but not all kinds. When I worked in the solar power industry in Michigan, the process equipment that we used would go out of kilter if power went down for even half a second. It took several hours to set up again. We would lose half a day of production, minimum, with each outage. And every thunderstorm in summer had its associated outage. But the power company flatly denied that a power outage existed if the power was out for less than some period of time - ten minutes or an hour.
How many other things break down? Almost everything. I was in a hospital emergency room for a few hours not long ago. At the first station there were six beds and one head nurse. And in the ninety minutes between arriving and being transferred to another station when this one closed, the nurse got three material facts wrong relating to patients in her care. That’s a rate of about one fact in thirty minutes. Or about 4000 mistakes per working year. In this case it turns out that one mistake she corrected. Another mistake was corrected for her at the insistence of a patient. A third mistake had no bearing on the case at hand. But it is just a matter of time before this nurse makes a mistake that costs a life.
Most people in the medical field, fortunately, are somewhat less prone to mistakes; yet collectively, people make mistakes all the time in the medical profession. Medical mistakes are the single leading cause of death. If misdiagnosis is included as a kind of medical mistake, then medical mistakes are responsible for at least three deaths in eight in the US. It’s not because everyone is incompetent as the nurse in question. It is because the systems are not designed with the question of outcomes in mind. Dead patients still pay their medical bills.
With Amazon.com, the whole of the business depends on a reliable internet presence; so one can be assured that the company will do what it can to prevent the kinds of problems that cause the site to go down for three hours at a time. But incentives in other areas of activity are not so clear. The goal of good government policy is to rig the incentives so that businesses actually act in the best interests of their customers; for profit does not always motivate this kind of behavior. It certainly does not in health care. It does not necessarily do so in the case of utilities. It frequently does not in the case of monopolies and businesses with little competition. And as one learns in the second week of introductory microeconomics, in the case of oil and food, profit is maximized when there is not enough to go around. Sometimes things get broken by accident. Sometimes they are broken purposefully for business reasons.
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