Over-reaction?

I live fairly close to the junior high featured in this story, in which an eighth grader was arrested after bringing an air gun to school. Schools in this district have a zero-tolerance policy for guns or anything that looks like a gun, and this student ran afoul of this policy. He was arrested for disorderly conduct.

While I certainly understand the fear that has run through our society, especially where children are concerned, is it possible that we've gone too far? We have school buses taking children across the street, because we can't trust that they will cross a street without calamity. Once a year, we have an event where children who bicycle or walk to school get a goodie bag as a reward, which doesn't prevent Mom or Dad from stoking up the gas-guzzler the other 179 days of the school year. We have zero-tolerance policies for T-shirts, toy guns, and who knows what else.

What concerns me is the message that we send by criminalizing stupid behavior. I'm sure the school spends a lot of time propounding the various rules and policies, so it's pretty dumb for a kid to bring anything that resembles a gun to school. On the other hand, kids are stupid, that's a big part of being a kid - it's certainly fair to punish a child for such an offense, but this knee-jerk reaction of arrest, suspension, possible expulsion strikes me as, pardon the expression, overkill.

We could use such an incident as a teaching experience without putting a 13-year-old "into the system," especially because it is unclear the extent to which that helps. Most school shootings have not occurred when the student has pulled a gun out of his locker; they tend to bring weapons to school and use them immediately.

I realize there are legal issues, that school districts hope to avoid lawsuits by showing they did everything possible to forestall violence. And I'm sure more than one educator values this response because it provides the strongest possible lesson.

But I wonder if it's time for some students, somewhere, to do a little consciousness-raising. It might be instructive for every student in a school to bring a toy gun (they would need to quite clearly be toys) to school and see if the school could really advocate arresting and expelling the entire student body. I'm not advocating this - I admit to having somewhat mixed feelings as I balance my concern for security with propriety - but it might serve as an object lesson, and get us discussing where that balance truly should be.

Of course, as long as the "permanent record" is seen as the key to life success, that kind of gesture is unlikely to happen. Still...

Talking to our friends

There's been a lot of discussion the past few days about whether we should talk to our enemies, as Obama has stated he plans to do, or whether that's a form of appeasement, as Bush and McCain contend. This is an issue which has bubbled up previously in the campaign, Clinton was quite critical of Obama, but, since Bush's speech in Israel, it's become front-burner stuff.

Matt Yglesias has a post, titled Prestige, that asks, "What are we afraid of?" I'm going to delve into this a little more deeply, if only to try to work out what the implications of talking to, say, Iran would be. The contention of Bush, McCain, and Clinton is that speaking directly to nations that have expressed enmity toward us (or Israel, apparently the only ally we feel quite this strongly about; after all, we continue to be in bed with China despite their hostility to the government of our putative friend Taiwan) gives those nations worldwide prestige, enhancing their status in the eyes of other countries.

I asked a friend of mine who was born overseas what the reaction would be in her country if the United States were to talk with Iran. She felt that it would be a matter of, "What is the U.S. doing?," but Iran itself would not be elevated in any way.

And that's the crux of the matter to me. It's something of a game theory problem, in that we have actions we can take and responses the other side can make. To analyze it requires us to figure out what the alternative to talking is - saber-rattling, economic sanctions, war. I'll talk through it lieu of making a table.

Let's take Iran, and assume our primary goal is to halt their nuclear weapons development program. First, we need to be certain that they have such a program; it would not be unprecedented for a country to insist they had a WMD program to maintain their prestige, even though they didn't have one at all. It would be ruinous to impose sanctions or wage war, hurting the citizens of a country, if they actually didn't pose a threat.

So we'll stipulate that they have such a program. One key is that, if we start by talking, the other actions are not precluded. We can always stop talking and bring out the cruise missiles if needed. Negotiation might succeed, and, if it does so, we will do the least harm to the least people.

The other actions might well ratchet up real tension, will probably spill over into the region as a whole, and are harder to withdraw. Saber-rattling and sanctions are not guaranteed to work, as we have seen in Cuba. War, while effective, carries its own set of problems, as we well know.

So talking has a lot going for it. But, there's the contention that sitting down with Ahmadinejad will enhance his stature in the rest of the world, that the act of shaking hands with the American president will bless the Iranian's viewpoint.

First of all, we're the big dog. Whatever propaganda Iran might try to get out of a meeting, the reality is that we can still wipe them off the face of the earth any time we'd like. That the mythical "world community" might give props to Mahmud pales in the face of the facts.

Second, and more importantly, I have serious doubts that there is a big prestige factor at work. Our allies, particularly in the face of our actions in Iraq, will probably welcome a more subdued approach; it seems unlikely in the extreme that Britain will embrace Iran because we spoke with them. And those people who are already against us, sure, maybe they'll cheer on Iran, but there's some chance they're already doing that (not a very big one; Iran is not very popular).

So what's the problem here? Shouldn't we engage with the world, friends and enemies, until it's clear that other actions are needed? Aren't we big enough to do that? No one wants America to be foolish, but unilateral behavior seems to create at least as many problems as it solves, and we definitely need to stop that.

Rose-coloured spectacles

I have just come across a column in Britain's Guardian by Will Hutton titled, "Forget the naysayers - America remains an inspiration to us all." The premise is that the current American pessimism is unfounded, that we shouldn't dwell on:

The fashionable view is that the American economy is a busted flush, a hollowed-out, deindustrialised shell housed in decaying infrastructure that delivers McJobs and has survived courtesy only of a ramped-up housing market and the willingness of foreigners to hold trillions of dollars of American debts.

China and India are set to overtake it in the foreseeable future. At best, the US will have to get used to living in a multipolar world it cannot dominate. At worst, it will have to accept, along with the West, that the new economic and political heart of the world is Asia.

Instead of this bleak picture, we must believe that:

[T]he next 50 years will be as dominated by the US as the last 50. The US will widen its technological and scientific dominance, sustain its military hegemony, launch a period of reindustrialisation and continue to define modernity both in culture and industry.

Hutton bases this a contention that the U.S. far outstrips the rest of the world in the really vital things that drive success, "universities, research base, commitment to information and communications technology and new technologies along with a network of institutions that supports new enterprise." He cites a number of statistics that demonstrate America's dominance.

Further, America is aggressive about fixing its current economic problems, has a dynamic political process fueled by the current presidential race, and "a belief that no problem can't be fixed." The only possible competitor, China, has nowhere near the institutions to support change; India is too far behind to catch up in less than centuries; maybe the EU can become "a genuine knowledge economy counterweight to America."

Hutton does allow that there are continuing problems:

It runs its financial system like a casino. It is a grossly unfair society. Its road and rail systems have been neglected for decades. University entrance has become too expensive. It has fetishised deregulation. Money corrupts its political process. To compromise the rule of law in order to 'win' the war on terror was stupid.

But no worries:

[N]one of those problems can't be fixed and the US is about to elect a President who will promise to try, in a world in which it remains the indispensable power.

If you've read this blog for any length of time, you probably can already guess my response: I really hope all this is true, but I think our problems create risks that undermine such a positive view. But I'm not the only one. Consider these quotes:

American democracy today is an offense to democratic ideals.

The object of the U.S. corporation is now naked and unashamed: it is to maximize financial gain for those who own it.

The U.S. system is not only socially unjust but also calamitously economically inefficient.

These quotes are from a 2002 book called The World We're In by British author...Will Hutton. In six years, Hutton seems to have turned completely around from a profoundly negative view to a belief that America really is the last best hope. And we all know what has happened in the past six years: a resource-wasting war of uncertain goals and outcomes, a chipping away at the democratic ideals that underpin the institutions Hutton extols, a dramatic increase in the power and wealth of the American corporation and those who run them, and so forth.

So what has changed? What has turned a respected journalist like Will Hutton into a defender of the United States? I would really like to know what has happened to his world view; is it fear of something else that has driven this U-turn?

Why is housing different from jobs?

George Will writes today (well, today in the Chicago Tribune, yesterday in the Washington Post) about the housing situation, and this conservative of conservatives points out that the decline in house prices helps some people, the young couple trying to buy their first home, as much as it hurts others. Will is a little late to the party on this one, as quite a few commentators of all stripes have been pointing this out for some time (for one post by one writer, see Dean Baker here).

Will makes an odd offhand connection to global warming in his column, but goes on to say:

Homeownership is, up to a point, a barometer of social health: Ownership deepens an individual's sense of having a stake in the health of the neighborhood and the larger community.

This statement is pretty much indisputable, though I think there is a small trend running counter to this: When homeowners start to flip and serially move up and use equity as a springboard to further investment, they're probably not making much of a commitment to the community. But that's a minority, as most people move somewhere to make a life, get their kids in the schools, and put down roots. Clearly, the encouraging of ownership through favorable tax treatment and easy mortgages helps with that (whatever negatives may accompany those policies).

But stable jobs accomplish the same goals. Everything you can say about home ownership you can apply equally to the stability of careers. I live in a Chicago suburb that appeared, some years ago, to be on the verge of becoming a major technical center (I wrote about that failure about a week ago). The number of people who were enticed to come to Naperville are now finding that the jobs are elsewhere, so they're left either to move again or to endure lengthy commutes. Either way, these people aren't able to contribute fully to the vitality of the community.

Yet, if you were to suggest to George Will that we do something to encourage stability of jobs, through tax inducements or anti-offshoring legislation, he would be the first to cry about the sanctity of the free market, or the evils of corporate welfare.

I'm not saying I'm in favor of massive tax breaks to get companies to retain jobs (especially since it seems those agreements are invariably written in the corporation's favor), I'm just saying the philosophy is inconsistent. If we are to enact legislation to "mitigate bad consequences" for the innocent, as Will contends, then we need to be willing to consider similar legislation in the job market.

Freedom has its limits

About a month ago, I posted on the in vogue theory that we're moving to a free model for, well, everything. This has been pushed by Chris Anderson of Wired, but others have also weighed in with their belief that bandwidth and storage and software are moving to a free model, where value-added activities provide revenue. I expressed doubt about this, that Google mail space is not actually part of a market, but something subsidized by other activities. The new theory is akin to saying that cereal boxes are moving to a zero-cost model, since you're only paying for the cereal inside.

For more evidence of this, consider the web site griddlers.net. Griddlers are puzzles, also known as Tsunami, Paint by Numbers, or Nonograms, in which a grid is surrounded by numbers that are used to deduce which squares in the grid should be filled. It's pretty interesting, somewhat mathematical, certainly more intriguing than Sudoku. I have delved into these somewhat, being an inveterate puzzler, and they're pretty addictive. And the best web site I've seen is the aforementioned griddlers.net (I'll call it gnet from here for convenience), which is extremely well programmed.

gnet has been free during its five or six years of existence, never using ads to generate revenues (other than some mentions of their own griddler products). A while ago, they created a new application, and, rather than offering it free, they decided to move to a subscription model:

Our goal is for Griddlers to continue to be the highest quality site of its kind. We have been thrilled by your response. It has remained free, because we want to share this enjoyment with everyone. But, all of this success comes at a cost.

The increased use puts a very heavy load on our server. If we want a site that performs well and can continue to grow and improve, we need to upgrade soon and this will be expensive.

Even though all the puzzles on our site are free, after considering many options we decided to make the New Applet availabe uniquely to subscribers. If you want to use it fully, you’ll need to become a subscriber.

All Griddler-lovers will be welcome on the site whether you subscribe or not. Most of the features you currently enjoy will still be available. New features will be created especially for our Subscribers.

To reiterate what they said above, the existing functionality was still available to non-subscribers (except they did sharply reduce the number of puzzles a free user could save). But it was pretty obvious that innovation was going to be slanted toward subscribers. A subscription is not particularly onerous, $40 a year, but it was still a dramatic change to the model.

About a week ago, they made another change: the selection filter to omit puzzles that have already been solved was taken away from non-subscribers. For people who have done a lot of puzzles, this is a major change, as now they have to search through every puzzle in a category to find one they haven't done yet. The explanation:

During rush hours you can see 1300-1400 people online. They try to find their solved puzzles amongst 50,000,000 records and select their type of puzzles from dozens of thousands of records. By all means it is a huge task.

Our resources are limited. As much as we try to upgrade the site, the speed of growth is faster then us. Note, that all the work on the site has been done voluntarily. However, maintaining and hosting a large site like ours cost money. Making a subscription is actually giving life to the site.

What is interesting here is how this bucks the so-called trend. This site has been free, then features were added that are available only to subscribers, now functionality is being removed. And this is why the "free" model is unsustainable - everyone has to agree that everything is free before any one thing can be. If gnet were receiving free server space, they might not have to make the changes.

One wonders how this site started. Did the founders start it as a hobby, then found it got away from them? Perhaps the initial development was interesting enough to do for free; now that the tasks are largely maintenance, they'd like to be compensated.

I don't find anything wrong with the model they're adopting. They're still providing some service to those who won't or can't pay, but one does wonder how much functionality they can remove from the free version before their customers become dissatisfied (actually, from the comments that were left about this change, some people are already planning to walk away, though I would think it will be a small number).

But this is the same model as, for example, we're seeing now in Chicago about telecasts of Cubs baseball games. The team used to offer 144 games a year (out of 162) for free on broadcast television. Now the number's down to 60, with the rest offered on cable, and the 15% or so who don't have cable are out of luck.

It's dangerous to take a couple of examples and assume they represent a trend, but it is also risky to assume that "everything will be free." I'm sure griddlers.net could adopt an ad-driven model, but, for some reason, they haven't. My guess is that modern technology will actually permit different kinds of models, that some sites will insist on subscriptions for full functionality, others will become free (with copious ads or attempts to sell added value), some may go to transaction-based pricing.

But the attempts of some big thinkers to get us to accommodate ourselves to an inevitable "free" model may well reflect their desire to be in on the next big thing far more than a realistic appraisal of where we actually are going.

Headline

Chicago Tribune, front page, above the fold, May 14, 2008:

Clinton: Race isn't over

As an issue for me to exploit

(OK, the second line isn't in the actual paper...)

James Carville and Mary Matalin - goodbye

...an act of betrayal. Mr. Richardson’s endorsement came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out for 30 pieces of silver, so I think the timing is appropriate, if ironic - James Carville

If she [Hillary Clinton] gave him [Barack Obama] one of her cojones, they'd both have two - James Carville

So the tiresome James Carville, the self-styled Ragin' Cajun, has once again shown himself as the media whore he is in the second quote above (the first was from March when Bill Richardson endorsed Obama). I understand the press is tired of this campaign, tired of going through the contortions necessary to avoid actually understanding and discussing issues, but to continue to go to this massively irrelevant figure for his "insight" is simply lazy.

Every few weeks, Tim Russert trots out Carville, former Democratic strategist, along with his wife, former Republican strategist Mary Matalin (oh, ho, ho, they truly are strange bedfellows, har, har), for their commentary on the presidential campaign. Their appearances are train wrecks.

Carville, with his folksy Cajun accent and shiny bald head, cannot escape the charismatic envelope of his former employers, the Clintons; he loves, loves, loves them. Last month, he came up this gem:

It's also fair to say this is probably the best, most courageous toughest presidential candidate that we're ever seen anywhere, anyplace in our lifetimes, OK?...She is--she is--her personal performance in this campaign, her personal tenacity has been awesome.

Oddly enough, this is part of a criticism he's making about the Clinton campaign, but he passes that off by pointing out that Bush ran a good campaign in 2000, and, "look what that got us." (And his point is, what? That we should excuse a poorly-run campaign because well-run campaigns inevitably lead to disaster. It certainly doesn't sound as if Jim's doing any more political consulting any time soon.)

And what an amazing statement! Carville was born in 1944, which is before 1968, which is when presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy was shot and killed during his campaign, so the use of "courageous" seems a bit much. More than a bit much, it's an insult to people who actually do need to show courage to do their jobs, to live their lives.

The biggest downside to Hillary losing is that she will go back to the Senate, probably in a position to exert even more power, and she can sign a book deal worth, what, maybe $10 million, to give her self-serving view of the campaign. Hillary's a lot of things, good and bad, but courageous is near the bottom of the list.

But, of course, that's just Carville being Carville. As are his odd performances on Meet The Press, in which he will grub for attention, usually by thrusting his hand Russert-ward (pick me, pick me), only to come out with some banality - it's just he can't stand to let anyone else have the floor for more than about two minutes. And, after issuing yet another bon mot, he looks around the studio to see who's laughing (no one's laughing out here, Jim).

And his wife is no better, but certainly different. Her flat affect and nasal whine suggests nothing so much as narcotization; she only really springs to life when talking about the man she loves, Dick Cheney. Her basic approach is to greet any talk of the Democratic campaign with a wheezing, "and that's why John McCain is going to be our next president."

I have seen a lot of the coverage during this campaign, and there are actually reporters and commentators who seem engaged in the process. Any of them are worth more notice than this over-exposed pair of windbags who seem to exist only to be seen. I know that Carville co-hosts a radio show (on sports!) with Tim Russert's son, but, at this point, I would rather see Luke Russert's dry cleaner on Meet The Press.

Supposedly, Carville continues to act as an advisor to the Clinton campaign, but I cannot imagine what, other than folksy faux-outrageousness, he can bring to that effort. It's time to send Jim and Mary back to New Orleans and accept that their time on the stage is over.

CEOs - a more complete look

I was reading a few of my own past posts, and realized that I have been pretty much unremittingly negative on the subject of the modern CEO. I have portrayed them as greedy and heedless of the havoc they create, and have only alluded to the idea that I don't consider them evil:

For me to explain why, for the most part, I don't consider them inherently evil, just people who have perverse incentives to do evil things, is not the post I want to write today. I'm not sure that they're amoral or sociopathic, though you'll find no shortage of people who believe so. Rather, I believe them to be a group that lives in a world in which social norms have been suspended, people who are able to rationalize almost any action as long as it leads them in the direction they want to go (yes, I understand that many people would consider that the embodiment of evil, and I won't argue).

I have picked on a few CEOs in particular, those who have said or done things that were demonstrably stupid or self-serving, like Randall Stephenson of AT&T:

My real criticism of Mr. Stephenson is that anyone who makes his kind of money should be a problem-solver. If your goal is to hire 5000 people, then you find a way to do it. You raise the starting salary. You provide a good working environment. You offer education benefits. You hire good customer service personnel away from other companies. You do something to find the source of the problem and take steps to solve it.

What you don't do is stand in front of a business group and whine about it. Let's say you give an assignment to one of your employees, maybe you tell a regional manager to increase sales in his area by 10%. When he or she comes back to you in a year and says, "I couldn't do it, my customers are too dumb to know that they should sign up for our wonderful services," would Mr. Stephenson find that an acceptable reason?

So it was clear to me that Mr. Stephenson didn't see the retrieval of these jobs as a real priority, as a problem to be solved.

And I certainly stand behind those statements, and others I've made. But I feel some need to draw out my logic on the subject a little further, as my expressed view up to now has not been particularly nuanced.

The first passage I quoted is essentially what I believe, that CEOs live in a world that provides them incentives for the actions they take. We have decided, through our continued election of public officials who believe that government's role is to step back and let business do its work (or even to support business), that financial might is inevitably right. We have allowed something of a moral calculus to emerge which says that people get lots of money because they deserve it, and they deserve it because the market has decided that's what they get (a bit of circular reasoning that closes off all subsequent discussion).

So your average CEO has two priorities:

1. The company needs to make as much money as possible
2. I need to make as much money as possible

[Those priorities are not necessarily listed in order.]

Their observed behavior follows inevitably from those priorities, and, as such, there is nothing pathological about it. Randall Stephenson doesn't whine about being unable to fill call center positions with Americans because he's frustrated, he does so to provide cover for keeping those jobs in lower-cost India, which is completely consonant with his goals.

The problem I have with this is that we expect these people to be different, that people in the media and people in Congress and people on the street expect these moguls to have answers to questions, solutions to problems, and treat them with enormous respect.

So Charlie Rose interviews the head of Cisco, who says the only way Americans can remain competitive is to obtain more education. Note that he doesn't pledge to hire any of these new graduates. The obvious inference is that he wants a domestic supply in case the Chinese and Indians decide they want too big a piece of the pie, but no one brings that up.

Congress invites Bill Gates to testify on the subject of H-1B visas. He's treated as a statesman, as an expert on labor law and immigration policies, and, unsurprisingly, picks the policy that will most benefit Microsoft (and himself).

The question is, why do we expect anything else? I know that we desperately want to believe that someone has answers to the problems that we face, and business people are great at presenting themselves as problem-solvers.

But the problems they're great at solving are not, how do we retain America's position in the world, or how do we educate the youth of America, or how do we square the rise of the multinational corporation with national interest overseas? Yet we go on asking these "experts" for their input, probably because we can't think of anybody else.

We have to stop this. Donald Trump may know how to put up a building, but it is downright misleading to ask him for his advice on the curriculum in the third grade. All Carly Fiorina knows about health care plans is that it's been a long while since she had to worry about what kind of coverage she has.

Business executives are limited people; it's how they've been trained, it's how they've risen to the top. There is no reason to think that they have any better advice about education or foreign policy than Derek Jeter could provide on the situation in Yemen, and we need to stop thinking they do. All information they give us is self-serving, which is fine - we have to stop believing it's something more.

The magic that is Carly Fiorina

From the "Are they lying or are they stupid?" files:

I think, I hope, that the American people are getting sick of lies. Not the kind in the spin room after a debate when the supporters all tell the slack-jawed media how well their candidate did; we're used to that and don't much care any more.

No, I'm talking about the blatant bald-faced lies that candidates or their surrogates tell when they want to appeal to a certain constituency. You want to make yourself look tough and experienced, you tell the world that you braved sniper fire. You want to appear to care about the struggles of motorists, you offer up a gas tax "holiday" that will do little for anyone except reduce the money in a fund to maintain an already decrepit infrastructure. You play up your "35 years of experience" when anyone can see that a good portion of that time was spent in photo ops and banquet appearances.

And I pray that Americans are finally tired to death of stuff like this, of being told that black is white and up is down, in which people who know better behave as if the people are flat-out stupid, unable to discern what is right in front of them.

If so, I think John McCain has a big problem. Because he sent Carly Fiorina, failed business executive, out to do battle with George Stephanopoulos on yesterday's This Week on ABC. I've written about Carly before, I'm not a fan; I expressed it this way on March 30:

Carly Fiorina, 53, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, who held a great deal of responsibility for the decline of once-proud Lucent Technologies through her vendor financing schemes. After leaving Lucent in a huff because she didn't get the top job, she took over HP, continued their drop in quality while merging it with equally decrepit Compaq; upon failing to make the combined company work, Fiorina was dismissed by the HP board. She is now rumored, for no reason anyone can understand, to be a possible candidate for the vice presidency under John McCain.

She is one of the cornerstones, along with Phil Gramm and Pete Peterson, of the campaign to make us think that McCain is up to speed on economics, a topic about which he has seemed totally uninterested.

As she settled in with George, he asked her about the gas tax initiative ("economists know nothing") and health care ("the market will provide"), and then he came around to the movement of profits overseas (and the tax break we give American companies as long as they never bring those profits back) and the offshoring of jobs.

When you evaluate anything Carly has to say about offshoring, keep in mind that she did a ton of it while at Hewlett-Packard, fired a lot of people who actually knew something about the technologies she was touting, and even called it "right-shoring." So we already know she's pretty cavalier with the whole American job thing.

But what she did say with George was remarkable for its obtuseness. She contended that there are two reasons that companies offshore jobs: the onerous tax burden on American companies, and the lack of Americans to get and maintain their skills. Her solution, right out of the Republican playbook: cut those taxes and free American companies to keep those jobs right here.

Leave aside that this proposal makes absolutely no sense (how would lower taxes in the U.S. be able to compete with no taxes on the money made abroad?). What is significant is that she omitted the actual reason that companies offshore: that labor is cheaper overseas.

No matter what you think of offshoring or McCain or Fiorina herself, this is a remarkable omission. How stupid do these people think we Americans are when they expect us to swallow the idea that moving a $30/hour job overseas to someone making $.50/hour has no effect on the decision to move it? It shows a complete sense of contempt for logic to insist that taxes and education are the only factors.

Even if you believe that offshoring is a good thing, you have to be disturbed that this level of thinking is what passes for economic wisdom in a future McCain administration. Because, make no mistake, Carly is angling for a prominent position, a taxpayer-financed job in which she will be free to ignore such trivialities as facts. I would be appalled if I were a McCain supporter that he couldn't find anyone who can make a case based on reality; as it is, all I can see is another four or eight years with a group of people who can willfully ignore even basic truth in order to further their agenda. And that's mighty scary.

Review - T is for Trespass

There is a two-edged sword when an author creates a series: there is the built-in advantage of crafting stories around a known quantity versus the possibility that the character will get stale. That's especially a risk when much of the storytelling comes from the perspective of the main character. It's easy for the reader to get tired of the persona. There are techniques that can be used to minimize character fatigue: Doyle did it by having John Watson "write" the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, so we never heard the inner voice of Holmes.

Sue Grafton has been writing the stories of California private investigator Kinsey Millhone for 25 years, and, as one can tell from the title, is up to the 20th book with T is for Trespass (2007). I haven't read every single one along the way, something closer to half of them, but I generally have enjoyed them. But there is a creeping sameness, as Kinsey does not change much from book to book (Grafton chose to have the books lag real time; the series began in 1982 as did the story, but the current book is only inching into 1988).

So you have two threads at work in series like this. You have the continuing saga of tough, but not quite hard-boiled, Kinsey, as she deals with relationship issues and her cast of recurring characters, and you have the book as mystery. Patricia Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta series has managed to fail on both counts, with the last entry, Book of the Dead, a particularly unappetizing mix of unpleasant characters and paper-thin plot (see my full review here).

But Grafton has, for the most part, avoided the negatives. Kinsey Millhone is not someone you look to for a big character arc, and her neighbors and friends have comforting familiarity. The plots weave around one another in realistic fashion; Kinsey doesn't have the luxury of focusing solely on one case. The main plot, the abuse of an elderly neighbor, is handed well.

To me, there were two main flaws in the book, irritating without being disqualifying. The ending seems hurried, as if Grafton had to wrap things up. The building sense of menace is dissipated too quickly. And the main villain isn't quite as frightening as we might hope, more along the lines of "the banality of evil."

Nevertheless, this book is a fine read, nothing that will provide a reader with a new perspective on the human condition, but entertaining - you'll enjoy spending a few hours with Kinsey Millhone.

Yet another thing...

I don't fully understand. From Matt Roush's column in TV Guide:

Question: I've really been debating recently: Lost or Battlestar Galactica. Lost is probably the most innovative and original drama on network TV in a long time, and I'm a bit surprised it even got made. I think there is a chance it will go down as one of the best shows in history. But at times it's more flawed then people think. There are occasionally episodes that go nowhere ("Tricia Tanaka is Dead," for example.) Sometimes there are the flashbacks no one cares about, like Jack in Thailand, and the dialogue can be very predictable, unlike the story. But when Lost is on its game, it is amazing. (And it usually is, especially this season.) But I've recently been watching Battlestar Galactica, and I wish I had started sooner. The story is dense, yet not nearly as much as Lost, which is both good and bad. The acting overall is better in my opinion, yet Lost has many great actors as well. What makes Battlestar so good, though, is the solid writing. It's much more poignant than Lost since it deals with issues of politics and religion. Overall, they are both great shows that more people should be watching— Grant

Matt Roush: So why are you comparing them, exactly? They both live in the genre of the fantastic and high concept, but are so distinctive individually I don't really see the point. One is an epic mystery adventure in which action is informed by character, revealed through flashbacks and flash-forwards and other manipulations of time. The other is an epic science-fiction quest that, as it has developed, has grown increasingly interior as it addresses the nature of humanity through spirituality, mortality, evolution, politics and war. I can't really fault the writing and acting on either show. They're both so staggeringly ambitious, and if you find one more satisfying than the other, that's a matter of personal taste and not really worth sparking an either-or debate. I don't pretend to understand absolutely everything going on with either show these days, and I'm OK with that.

I don't think the new TV Guide is as good as the old one. I liked the smaller format, and they attempted, from time to time, to talk about important issues concerning this important medium. The new one is heavy on pictures, and gives a remarkable amount of coverage to a few shows (if you don't watch Survivor, American Idol, and Dancing with the Stars, there isn't much for you to read).

However, Roush's answer to this question is excellent, but the larger question is, why must we rank everything? In sports, it makes sense to figure out who's "best," so we have tournaments (or polls) to determine the winner.

But in so many other areas, what's best is either irrelevant or idiosyncratic. In the case above, it's irrelevant whether Lost or Battlestar Galactica is better; they're both (I assume, I've never seen BG) riveting stories with high production values and good acting. It absolutely doesn't matter which one is "best."

In other cases, "best" is idiosyncratic, that is, it's what's best to you. If you believe that According to Jim is the best show in the history of television, it just happens to strike some chord in you, then it's best...to you. And that's fine.

Is it some need for external validation? Does Grant want Matt Roush to confirm his opinion that one is better than the other (it seems he's leaning to BG)?

But, in this case, it's truly unnecessary. Watch 'em both, Grant; don't choose until someone makes you.

Blogging is fun

I wasn't naive when I started this blog. I had read enough other blogs to know that the level of comments is often quite disappointing, that, for every interesting discussion where disparate ideas fly back and forth, there are a hundred (a thousand?) where the discourse is essentially, "Oh, yeah, I'm right because I'm right."

Obviously, I expected that, if I ever did attract any attention, and if I commented on political and economic matters, there would be comments that would disappoint me, dissent that would come without basis, and I was prepared for that. I preferred to think that disagreement would come from people armed with solid evidence, I even looked forward to that; I've learned a lot in my life, changed opinions as new facts or new situations presented themselves, and I'm always willing to listen.

What, I guess, has surprised me is the philosophy of those who have disagreed with me. (It shouldn't have, but I guess I never did much meta-thinking about the ludicrous exchanges I've seen on other blogs.) It's a philosophy so opposed to my own that I have real trouble understanding it.

You see, I have developed beliefs over a period of time. But I try to stay grounded in realizing the things I know (if I kick the ball, it will move in the direction of the kick), the things I don't know (how, really, does consciousness work?), and the things I believe based in part on what I've experienced, but mostly on inference based on a preponderance of evidence. If I state in this blog that I know exactly the right number of H-1B visas to issue each year, whether it be 0, 20,000, or a million, then I need to back it up with some evidence (or at least be willing to; it's unlikely that I can recreate my full thinking in every blog post).

But, for that vast category of things that fall into the third class, evidence can certainly sway my opinion and, since I am most interested in getting closer to truth, I am quite pleased to entertain any such evidence. If I write that we should scrap the entire H-1B program, and someone says, no, the best 2,000 people we let in each year actually do generate more jobs than they cost, and they have something more than simple regression to back that up, then I might well go along with that. But I wouldn't then support an argument that says we should increase the quota to 200,000 on the off chance we'll find those 2,000 - I would say instead that we need to develop some method to identify the 2,000, and let them in.

So, to have had a couple of disagreements the past couple of weeks is not surprising to me, but to have had them based on utterly specious premises, or a deliberate misreading of what I am stating, is profoundly disappointing. My recent dust-up on another site with a fellow who insisted that, because his personal situation is fine, everyone else's is as well was a waste of time. He offered no evidence beside his personal story and those of a couple of family members, but ignored the larger trends. Had he argued that the larger trends would be subsumed to something even larger, that the American economy is inevitably self-correcting and our current problems transitory, it might have been possible to have a discussion. He didn't, and it wasn't.

My current conflict, which can be seen here and here if anyone wants to go through it, started with the simplest of assertions (that, if you split off a certain segment of the population and could measure it as we measure the aggregate economy, that segment may already be in a recession). The respondent proposed that it was incorrect to redefine the term "recession," that it applied only to the economy as a whole.

This is fair, if limited, and I commented back that I was willing to use a different term for a non-recession recession, but it still argued for some policy intervention. At that point, the discussion flew off the rails, but the respondent never offered up another fact, just an increasing level of invective, wholly inappropriate to the point.

I spent a little time looking around the Net to see if this was unusual for this respondent; indeed, it is not. This is a person who has had his comments taken off several sites for, apparently, the same kind of escalating nonsense that I saw.

I have no way to understand why someone seeks out someone else's post, then uses it as a springboard not to make an argument, but to be willfully inflammatory and simplistic. I know there's a lot of anger and bitterness in the world, but to translate that into the kind of behavior we see too often in the Web 2.0 world is foreign to me. Even though I want to foment discussion that will expand my thinking, my knowledge base, I begin to understand why reasonable bloggers need to moderate comments. I hope it doesn't come to that, I really don't want to spend that time, but a blog is a little like a virtual home, and I don't need other guests to feel their visit is ruined by a couple of clowns standing in the corner.

Is there a time clock?

Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast writes a good post this morning called "What Hillary Clinton forgets," questioning whether she is really more electable than Barack Obama (because some of the big states aren't going to go for her in the general election anyway, and Rush Limbaugh's idiotic idea of urging Republicans to vote for her). Jill goes on to discuss Hillary's "right" to stay in the race, which is a false idea promulgated by Clinton supporters - no one has questioned her "right," they've questioned her wisdom in doing so. (And isn't that interesting, that the Clinton-ites prefer to assert a right in lieu of good judgment, sort of where we stand today with a goodly segment of the women's movement and other identity politics proponents.)

We are pointed to a post from yesterday on Huffington, in which Thomas Edsall discusses what Hillary has to gain if she drops out now; the Obama campaign would make up her current losses, and she would enhance her position in the party, very possibly getting the Senate majority leader post. Others have talked about the party positioning her for a run as New York governor.

This idea has been floated for several weeks now, that Hillary will get some major consolation prize if she drops out and starts working for the good of the party. My question: What's the time limit on this offer?

When does the party switch from providing inducements to exacting punishment? Is there a moment when her continued corrosive attacks on Obama outweigh whatever value her support would give?

If the party has not made it clear to her that there's a time limit on all these getting-out prizes, she has no real reason to get out. She's already pushed it past reasonable boundaries. One can hardly blame her if she thinks that the golden apple lies at the end of the race no matter how far she runs. It allows her to believe in her self-styled image as a "fighter."

So get it together, Democratic Party. Tell Hillary that she gets out now, that this farce has gone on long enough. Get out Thursday, get all your money back and the Senate majority leadership. Get out Friday, get half your money back and Senate whip. Any later than that, no money and the party moves George Clooney to New York to run against you.

The tide is high

From WWW Tide and Current Predictor:

5/8-9:
Alcatraz Island
High Tide
23:16 UTC
09:36 UTC

Low Tide
03:39 UTC
16:44 UTC

Elbow Point, Australia
High Tide
01:25 UTC
13:59 UTC

Low Tide
07:08 UTC
20:36 UTC

In my previous post, I talked about the corrosive effect of absolutism on public discourse and effective action. Here I want to talk about something specific in the comments on my Monday post, namely, the idea that the disparities of wealth in the capitalist system lead inexorably to growth for all: "as the disparity grows, all are all lifted up."

This philosophy is most often expressed in a saying attributed to an Irish Prime Minister: "A rising tide lifts all boats." (See Wikipedia for more on the origin of this adage.)

The saying is generally used to support "growth" policies, in particular tax cuts (where the saying justifies an imbalance as to who receives the cuts) and free trade. The idea is that economies are like harbors, in which the tide elevates everyone.

Maybe it's time to retire this phrase, and the idea behind it. As we see above, San Francisco and Australia can have very different tidal effects, as can any two places sufficiently distant from each other.

That this discussion even needs to be held given the persistence of poverty in the world is remarkable; it is obvious that the tide can go up and up, Fundy-esque, in certain places, and the ocean can remain flat in another, and this can persist for years, decades, centuries.

[This brings us back to the Rubin-Reich discussion as to whether we make the pie bigger first, then divvy up the pieces, or vice versa - I've talked about that before.]

A rising tide does not lift all boats everywhere at the same time, and believing it does is simply a substitute for the hard work of moving the water from place to place. Of course, if you believe that some magical force is putting the water where it "deserves" to be, you can disregard this discussion.

Absolutism

I've been having an interesting discussion in the comments based on my Monday post, where I commended Paul Krugman for understanding that the technical definition of recession is largely irrelevant when many Americans are hurting, threatened with the loss of their homes or their jobs, uncertain as to what to do to dig themselves out of increased uncertainty (Megan McArdle is currently writing a set of posts criticizing Elizabeth Warren's ubiquitous talk on the "Coming Collapse of the Middle Class"; my guess is neither is totally right, which leads us into the topic of this post).

A person named sbvor has taken issue with the post, arguing that we are not in a recession (I'll take the liberty of assuming that sbvor is male; pardon me if I am wrong). He cites the definition of the National Bureau of Economic Research:

A recession is a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales.

[I stop here to point out that this definition is wholly insufficient; it fails in several places, mainly in its use of ill-defined terms like "significant" and "a few," and its lack of guidance as to what to do when two of their five measures are positive, three negative. It leaves far too much room for interpretation of when a recession actually occurs, rendering it close to irrelevant.]

Without going into the entire exchange, I'll touch on one part of sbvor's comments (and my response):

I also sense in your initial post a disillusion with what is most obvious about the Capitalist system (that it produces disparities of wealth). What the media never tell you, least of all, Paul Krugman and The Old York Times, is that, as the disparity grows, all are all lifted up. Any attempt by government to “redistribute” the wealth inevitably drags everybody down. Sure, the gap is reduced. But, the net result is grinding poverty for all. If you’ve never visited a Communist country, do so. There, you will see your idyllic vision of fiscal equality (except, of course, for the Communist Party members who live in luxury).

My answer to that:

I also know that communism is a far inferior system, but you are creating a false dichotomy and ascribing it to me.

To say that capitalism is not perfect and requires some non-free market mechanisms is not at all the same as saying that we must move to communism.

Additionally, it takes a misreading of the equations of the free market to contend, as you do, that disparity inevitably creates greater wealth for those at the low end (or even in the middle). There is nothing that guarantees that, and one can easily posit a kind of neo-feudalism that is entirely consistent with free market principles.

You and I probably disagree on what the American Dream constitutes, and, until we can define that, I have to assume that your view of it is thriving, mine not so much.

What this post is about is the "false dichotomy" I mentioned. sbvor believes we are not in a recession, which is his right; I was arguing (as was Krugman) that the term was irrelevant to what most Americans are experiencing.

He goes on to argue that government action inevitably "drags everyone down." That is also his right, there are many people who believe that to be true. I believe that to be simplistic, and easily disprovable.

But the objectionable part, to me, is the belief that, if I believe that sharing some amount of the common wealth is desirable, I automatically become a Communist. And that's just the kind of thinking that has made the politics of this country contentious and unpleasant. sbvor has chosen to adopt a philosophy (I have the impression of libertarianism) that colors his views of not only economics but of people who do not share his "pure" stance. Any deviation from that orthodoxy implies that the person willing to consider other options is a Communist.

Of course, this is a form of the ad hominem fallacy coupled with a straw man argument, but, what is worse, it forestalls all further discussion. I'm willing to concede that the level of government intervention in the economy is open for discussion and negotiable, but the absolutist mentality will not allow for that.

Similarly, the discussion as to whether or not we're in a recession falls apart as soon as we realize that one side is saying that a recession is the only way to define economic trouble; if we're not in one, by the definition, we must be doing OK. I just don't believe that.

Earlier, I mentioned Megan McArdle, who is currently trying to dismantle the arguments that Elizabeth Warren is making about the increasing threats to the middle class. McArdle somewhat self-importantly has anointed herself as the person who must stop this ("Mine is a high and lonely destiny").

This post is not the one to go into the two sides: my point is with the attitude, as McArdle assumes that, in taking down specifics of Warren's points, she invalidates the premise, that the middle class is struggling. Once again, we see absolutism, the idea that either the middle class is heading for disaster, or that this is just alarmist talk, not worth consideration.

Most complex issues do not allow for simplistic, one-size-fits-all solutions, and we desperately need to elevate the level of discourse beyond that. Instead, we stake out our positions on one side of the big wall or the other, and we're done, content in our eternal rightness (leading to self-righteousness). Thus, we solve no problems, find no room for compromise, and make no progress. That's a pretty sad turn of events in a country that prides itself on its can-do attitude.

Where's Tom Friedman?

Anyone reading this is probably familiar with Thomas L. Friedman, foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times, notable for his best-selling book The World Is Flat. The book, which I reviewed a couple of months ago, has stirred up a lot of controversy, mostly for its seeming pro-globalization attitude (enhanced by Friedman's gee-whiz appearances on talk shows and his prose, in which a frisson of excitement goes through him at seeing brilliant Indians arriving at work).

For those who believe they will profit from globalization, TWIF became a virtual primer on what to do and how to do it. I have to believe that it has been passed down corporate hierarchies as much as any other three books combined (with the possible exception of the execrable Who Moved My Cheese?).

However, for those who believe that globalization opens up some issues that the U.S. is ill-equipped to handle, Friedman's book is seen as Exhibit 1 in the "let's do it and see what happens" sweepstakes. It has been criticized for its unwillingness to engage sufficiently with the very real disruption globalization can create, and not just in the United States.

Whichever side of the fence you stand on (I tend toward the latter; while I am not as critical of TWIF as some, that the first 200 pages [and most business executives would be hard-pressed to get through even that much of the near-500 pages] is so incredibly rosy takes away a lot of my respect for Friedman's identification or some very real trends), there is no denying that the book was an important one, and that Tom Friedman has been associated indelibly with the issue of globalization and the changes it has wrought.

Friedman's been off finishing up his next book on how American needs to have a green revolution, and how it will "renew America." I admit to being a little skeptical about this (as I wrote last week, nothing has convinced me yet that going green will enhance the economic situation of the U.S. - not to say that we don't have to do it, regardless of cost), but I don't want to prejudge his arguments.

As you can tell, I have a decidedly mixed reaction to Tom Friedman. His puppy-dog naivete strikes me as inappropriate given the challenges he himself has outlined, but he has gone out and done some solid reporting (and for those who dislike his writing style, here and here, for example, I think of it as fairly good for a modern newspaper guy).

So imagine my surprise to read a column by Friedman that struck me as pretty much dead on. I certainly think this is right:

People want to do nation-building. They really do. But they want to do nation-building in America.

They are not only tired of nation-building in Iraq and in Afghanistan, with so little to show for it. They sense something deeper — that we’re just not that strong anymore. We’re borrowing money to shore up our banks from city-states called Dubai and Singapore. Our generals regularly tell us that Iran is subverting our efforts in Iraq, but they do nothing about it because we have no leverage — as long as our forces are pinned down in Baghdad and our economy is pinned to Middle East oil.

He contrasts Singapore's airport and Berlin's central train station with JFK Airport and Penn Station, and wonders how "a great power" could have allowed things to slip this far. He quotes the president of Harvard:

“China, India, Singapore ... have adopted biomedical research and the building of biotechnology clusters as national goals. Suddenly, those who train in America have significant options elsewhere.”

He sees America as a nation in trouble:

We are not who we think we are. We are living on borrowed time and borrowed dimes. We still have all the potential for greatness, but only if we get back to work on our country.

While none of this is exactly news, especially to those of us who have been writing about such things already, to see the happy huckster expressing this doom and gloom in the pages of the New York Times is pretty remarkable.

Of course, I have to mention before I finish that it would have been nice for Friedman to acknowledge his own contribution to this phenomenon. The World Is Flat, while certainly not the cause of globalization, did make it look pretty darned desirable. The connection between the corporate executives who decided to abandon the nation that helped build their companies in search of profits, and the increasing weakness of that nation, well, that seems clear to me. Not to Tom, I guess.

Walk with me down the corridor

Citizen Carrie (at Carrie's Nation) has yet another interesting post about the state of Michigan wanting to give a massive tax break to a silicon manufacturer to get them to build an expansion to their facility. It's a fairly typical corporate welfare story, the kind where the big company threatens to take its ball and go home if it isn't given, well, anything it wants. Once it gets the tax break, the jobs will flow into the community (interesting how the magic multiplier is always invoked when jobs are brought to a community, never when they're taken away - wouldn't you once like to see an honest headline like, "XYZ Corp to layoff 3,000; 15,000 in local businesses expected to lose jobs").

But Carrie deals with that issue just fine. What caught my eye was this:

This is all part of a master plan to turn the Michigan into a high-tech nirvana, where a few hundred jobs here and there will supposedly make up the shortfall created by the thousands of manufacturing jobs that have already left the state.

Michigan may be a little late to that party, but, here in Illinois, we've already had a taste of becoming the next Silicon Valley, and we spit it out. Some years ago, we created the Illinois Technology and Research Corridor, which essentially was Interstate 88 as it ran from Oak Brook to Aurora (roughly spanning DuPage County). The state put brown signs up on the highway touting this miracle area, and there were high hopes that we would see a wealth of innovation that would flow into the community and create a new center of accomplishment. This was going to put Chicago on the high-tech map.

We were going to build on the two government labs, Argonne National Laboratory and Fermilab, which would generate spin-off companies. Furthermore, there was a major presence by the pre-eminent private research company, AT&T Bell Laboratories.

And how well has this worked? Let's take a look at the Wikipedia page for the Illinois Technology and Research Corridor, and see how it's doing. First, the two labs: Fermilab is in serious financial trouble, as Congress has refused to fund it at a maintenance level, much less making it into a crown jewel of the U.S. R&D system. It's no different for Argonne; their funding has been cut (story here).

Wikipedia cites three educational institutions, Illinois Institute of Technology, DeVry University, and Northern Illinois University. IIT is a fine school, but it has never been the source of new technology the way a Stanford or an MIT has been. DeVry is essentially a vocational school for computer programming. And NIU, which has produced a lot of fine teachers and accountants, has never been known as a research institution. (Wikipedia does omit several schools that have a presence in the corridor, but none offers any game changers in technology.)

So we're left with the companies. There is a degree of hand-waving on the Wikipedia page, as several companies nowhere close to the nominal corridor are included on their list (Abbott Labs, Motorola, TDS, Exelon). Others have no significant technical presence; Boeing may have moved their headquarters to Chicago, bringing a few hundred executive positions, but they don't do significant technical work here. Microsoft is on the list, but they're not developing products here.

And the other companies are in decline, reducing their presence in the Chicago area. Alcatel-Lucent is the current owner of what is left of Bell Laboratories, but they have mostly-empty buildings amid continual rumors that they will pull out of the area altogether. Tellabs has laid off 2/3 of its workforce since the end of the Internet bubble, and is promising to get rid of still more. (The one exception may be BP, which operates a large research facility along I-88, but it has never really established itself as a leader among technical companies in the area.)

That's it. The vaunted Illinois Technology and Research Corridor has failed, not bringing Silicon Valley to the Heartland (what some have called Silicon Prairie). There is no tech boom, no mass migration of the best and brightest to Chicago, just a lot of empty buildings and wasted tax incentives (Tellabs was given millions to move its corporate headquarters 5 miles - no huge bounty for the city of Naperville there).

There's the lesson for our friends in Michigan, and anywhere else that thinks that erecting highway signs and providing tax incentives will transform that irritating farmland into high-tech business parks. It doesn't work. There are a host of reasons, most particularly a lack of critical mass of brains and innovation, but Chicago is not a high-tech center, and it's highly unlikely that Saginaw, Michigan will fare any better.

But the companies that get these incentives, that are, in effect, being paid to make profits, they'll likely do just fine. And the politicians who cut the ribbons and talk up their contribution to the "great people of our state" will do just fine. Why their health should be a matter of public policy is beyond me.

You might be in recession

I've said before that, as far as I can tell, much of the country has been in a recession for some time. Very simply, if 30 million people are doing really, really well, and 270 million people are doing worse and worse, the country (the aggregate United States) may not be in a recession, but the country (the people of the United States) is.

The formal definition may or may not be met (though we rarely truly know that until well after the fact), but the recession is here, and most of us can feel that. It's nice (well, somewhat satisfying) to see Paul Krugman coming around to that.

Make the solution fit the problem

As I have mentioned before, the majority of my career has been spent in software development. Quite often, I have seen people try to solve problems inappropriately.

[Let me point out something here. Many people have a mistaken view of what software development is. It should be, simply, the solving of problems, usually business problems, by any means necessary. Some require a solution based solely in the writing of computer code; most need a solution based in the real world with assistance from the computer.

One of the saddest developments along the path of my career is the way software development has become ghetto-ized, partitioned off into a silo of code, code, code. What should be an opportunity to revisit the way one does business has become code first, think later. Too many people think, I can make the code do this, rather than, I can help the customer do this. The Internet boom failed for a lot of reasons, but the biggest was that people tried to find solutions, whether or not there was a problem, instead of finding problems.]

Generally the inappropriate solutions come from mis-scoping, the attempt to make a "big" solution fit a small problem, or to find a quick and dirty solution for a big problem. The former usually comes from a desire to implement something a developer has read about and wants to try ("Let's rewrite 100,000 lines of server code in Ruby on Rails"), the latter from management pressure to cut corners ("Can't we just slap in a little open-source stuff - search the Net").

I'm drawing examples from my domain because I know it best, but we see this kind of failure all the time. The replacement of Coca-Cola with New Coke is the canonical example of a large corporation trying to solve a problem that didn't exist (I'm oversimplifying here, the problem was the failure of market share to grow as desired, but the "solution" was clearly too large). Many, if not most, business failures come from an inability or unwillingness to properly scope a problem and devise a right-sized solution.

When you combine this mismatch of solution to problem with political philosophy and "success bias" (the tendency to believe something works just because it's associated with something that succeeds - once), you end up with activities enshrined in policy that result in subsequent failure.

Just in the last 24 hours, I've seen a couple of examples of this kind of thinking. First, this post from Signal vs. Noise, which extols an online community called Ravelry that asked their members for donations. They succeeded remarkably: "In 3 weeks, 3,457 Ravelers gave donated a total of $71,000 to Ravelry. Not only did we receive an amazing financial boost, we also received a flood of love."

Second, last night 60 Minutes did a report on a group called "Partners in Health," which was a marvelous story about Dr. Paul Farmer and his group. Dr. Farmer's organization has brought medical care to people who desperately need it, saving countless lives in nine countries. The report focused on the work they're doing in Haiti, having opened a free medical clinic and provided doctors to this unbelievably poor area in the Western Hemisphere.

These are marvelous things, and are true examples of the spirit of private giving that is inspirational in the same way as fundraisers for ill children and aid to the Asian tsunami victims are. These are tributes to the essentially generous nature of human beings who could easily look the other way.

But there is an underlying danger to all of these efforts. They are all localized, one-off solutions to a specific problem.

Will the next online community be able to raise $3,000 a day? Aren't there more than nine poor countries that desperately need medical care? Do all illness-stricken children get bowl-a-thons? Will the Myanmar cyclone victims (10,000 at last count as of this writing) get the same aid from developed countries as the tsunami victims did?

There are problems that demand collective, concerted action, that should not be left to the ability of an organization to hold charity balls or walks for the cure, but must grow out of the will of us all. No matter what you may have gleaned from reading this blog, I have been a conservative all my life - I believe in the power of the market and the individual.

But I grew up in a context of collective action, and my beliefs were a counterweight to that. Now, since the Reagan revolution, collective action is seen as un-American, as against the principles of this nation.

But it isn't. It's a matter of fitting the solution to the problem. If a Web community needs funds, it's probably right to ask for donations. But, if someone's seriously ill, and can't afford treatment, or a desperately poor country is ravaged by a natural disaster, the only rational way to help is through larger intervention, not by holding a telethon.

Government was invented by people to solve problems; otherwise, we would all be independent actors and much of our progress wouldn't have happened. It's the same as when we talk about free-market solutions to health care or energy policy; that approach simply won't work, because these problems are too big and have too much lead time to wait around for market incentives to make those solutions attractive. It's popular to say it will get done, but it requires a sense of magic that I have trouble relying upon.

Progress(?) in videos

A-Ha - Take On Me (Video)

Madonna - 4 Minutes

Two music videos, both concerning a couple in peril, both using state-of-the-art special effects. One is 23 years old, by a group that essentially had only that one hit in the United States. The other is new, by three of the biggest names in music.

By any measure, the second, 4 Minutes by Madonna, should be far more successful. We should marvel at the modern effects, made possible by modern computing power. The first, Take On Me by the Norwegian group a-ha, should seem crude in comparison.

So why does the Take On Me video seem so much fresher? It uses rotoscoping, the same technique used in those peculiar commercials of Charles Schwab. In effect, the animator draws over a filmed image to create near-real animation.

On the other hand, 4 Minutes uses CGI to depict a strange flesh-eating crystalline distortion of reality that is sweeping across the world. It features a rap by producer-of-the-moment Timbaland, followed by singing and dancing from Madonna and Justin Timberlake.

Yet I find Take On Me far more satisfying. Perhaps it is due to the happy ending, the fresh-faced youth of Bunty Bailey and a-ha lead singer Morten Harket as opposed to the synth-heavy tune, the unnecessary Timbaland rap, and the ultimately nihilistic ending of 4 Minutes, but, for whatever reason, I just feel good after watching Take On Me.

Maybe the biggest difference, though, is that the earlier video tells a story, and the technology is used to serve that story. 4 Minutes, on the other hand, seems to have some kind of narrative, but it is buried under images and quick-cut Madonna/Timberlake dancing and some bizarre skin-flaying effects. One is left empty after watching four minutes that amount to nothing.

Dye that collar and get rich

I guess I'm in an environmental mood, as this post is something of a follow-up to yesterday's, in which I criticized the proponents of cap-and-trade systems for carbon emission control for mischaracterizing these schemes as market-based when they're really not. To clarify, I'm not against programs to combat global warming, and cap-and-trade has some real advantages, but I think its supporters blunt the argument for it when they use false advertising simply to lure in the market zealots.

Today, I'm going to change gears slightly and look at another claim of the green revolutionaries, that, far from being a GDP killer, changes in our environmental policy will usher in a brave new world of so-called green-collar jobs. Taking one candidate's plan as an example, Hillary Clinton's initiatives will "help transform our economy and create at least 5 million jobs from clean energy over ten years."

I'm not picking on Hillary here, I'm using her program to talk about this because it's the most elaborately worked out one I could find (Obama's is very similar, but not as detailed, and McCain seems to feature a lot of hand-waving). (The details of her plan are here.) I'm not going to go through it in detail, but I want to pick out the parts that have to do with job creation.

These claims are summarized by Eric Pooley in a TIME article as:

The green jobs that cap and trade could help create would be a big employment sector—including production of wind turbines, pollution scrubbers and more.

Hillary's plans also talk about another category of jobs, those in construction and installation of these new green products, and swings by engineering and consulting without specific quantification. Unfortunately, these rosy predictions aside, there are two major criticisms that can be made.

1) Incremental or replacement?
There is an underlying assumption that these new green-collar jobs will simply appear with the right combination of tax breaks and innovation. Pleasant as that might be to believe, it is not clear that would happen.

Let's say that liquid hydrogen becomes the winner in the "How do we fuel our cars?" sweepstakes. Hey, we'll need thousands of drivers to get the liquid hydrogen from the plant to the new hydro stations, that'll be plenty of jobs.

Yes, it will, but what will happen to the existing gas truck drivers? Oh, right, they'll become the hydro truck drivers. It's difficult to see exactly how this switch will generate more jobs (unless hydrogen is less dense than gasoline, requiring more trucks, but also requiring more fill-ups - not a total win).

Right down the line, in every job category that has been mentioned, I have seen no appraisal of how the switch to green technology will create more jobs than old non-green technology. I accept the obvious truth that the environmental industry will grow; I'm not sure how that generates more jobs than we have today.

(One possible counter-argument: by sending less money to overseas petro-nations, we'll be keeping more of our money in the U.S., allowing us all to become rich. That's possible, but mitigated by my second point.)

2) American jobs?
We're going to add jobs by building "wind turbines, pollution scrubbers and more." Presumably this will happen in the same way that we've added jobs by producing consumer electronic goods in the U.S....

Wait, we moved those jobs overseas a while back. Just because it's a green revolution doesn't make the pressure to offshore new jobs any less. If it makes financial sense to let Korea or China make our plasma televisions, it almost certainly makes just as much sense to let those same countries make our turbines and scrubbers. We run into the same issues with environmental manufacturing as we have with any other manufacturing, and any plausible plan needs to address that.


There's another aspect to this - what if the breakthrough in the green revolution doesn't come in the U.S.? We're going to ramp up our educational systems to produce the environmental engineers of the future, but, presumably, we're going to continue to educate the world's children in that area (as in all others). Therefore, there's no guarantee that our efforts to upgrade the workforce will actually upgrade the American workforce. We don't have intellectual property laws covering what someone learns in our colleges, where an Indian MIT grad who finds the next advance is forced to work for an American company until we've wrung every piece of innovation out of him or her.

I'm not advocating restriction of providing educational opportunities to the rest of the world, but we need to think about what will happen if the next big energy discovery comes out of China or Kazakhstan or Norway. We may not be dependent on the Middle East sheiks any longer, but seeing solar-dollars or hydro-dollars flow out of the country instead of petro-dollars hardly seems a slam-dunk improvement.

I'm gonna cap your carbon

I don't write much about environmental issues, global warming and the like, because I'm no expert and offer no special knowledge. I believe that global warning is real, and the debate (largely muted by now) as to whether it's natural or man-made is unhelpful, even specious. Even if it were true that the increase in temperature is largely an outgrowth of natural forces, we've built our society around the conditions we have; New York City developed with sea level at a certain point, and, if that changes, the city will be in trouble.

So if we can do something to mitigate the effects of global warming, we should, but the solutions will have to fit into a context of political and economic reality (Fareed Zakaria, on Charlie Rose last night, said that the U.S. will have to built green energy plants in China and India to replace coal; to his credit, he acknowledged that it would be a tough sell politically - I think he underestimated that).

The answers seem to be coalescing around a consensus, that the nation must invest in research for clean energy, that we need to increase the fuel economy standards, that we must talk up the benefits to adopting everyday measures to cut harmful emissions, and, most particularly, that we should institute a cap-and-trade program for carbon emissions. While this is probably a good idea, there is one grating central idea that underlies all these discussions (there was a pretty good summary of the current cap-and-trade situation in TIME magazine written by Eric Pooley).

I could summarize cap-and-trade, but I'll let Wikipedia do the job this time:

A central authority (usually a government or international body) sets a limit or cap on the amount of a pollutant that can be emitted. Companies or other groups are issued emission permits and are required to hold an equivalent number of allowances (or credits) which represent the right to emit a specific amount. The total amount of allowances and credits cannot exceed the cap, limiting total emissions to that level. Companies that need to increase their emissions must buy credits from those who pollute less. The transfer of allowances is referred to as a trade. In effect, the buyer is paying a charge for polluting, while the seller is being rewarded for having reduced emissions by more than was needed. Thus, in theory, those that can easily reduce emissions most cheaply will do so, achieving the pollution reduction at the lowest possible cost to society.

I'll not get into the charges and cross-charges that surround the general idea of cap-and-trade, especially as it compares to direct taxation. What I want to talk about is why this mechanism is so attractive to people in the modern-day political climate.

That can be simply expressed (Pooley: "That's the trade in cap and trade, and it harnesses the power of the
marketplace to fight warming, a concept that helped Republicans like McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee, fall in love with the idea."). This is something that you hear all the time, that cap-and-trade is a market mechanism, and therefore superior to other forms of emission controls.

But, of course, this is nonsense. Cap-and-trade is market-esque, in that half of it is something that appears to be a market. After all, trading is the essential market activity, isn't it? But there's still that nettlesome word cap in the term, and that clearly has nothing to do with the market at all. Whenever an external body creates limitations to a market (or, as in this case, creates the market from nothing), we simply do not have a true market in the economic sense.

I understand there's a need to sell the idea of restricting carbon emissions, especially when it appears that there will be a cost, certainly in financial terms and probably in lifestyle changes, but to push one particular scheme ahead of others because it is "market-based" is spurious.

There's a difficult reality coming, and it's very unlikely that magic will occur and the pain eliminated. The easy way is to continue living as we have, burn oil and gas and coal, fueling a long-driving exurban life.

But it's ever more obvious that the easy way is no way at all. Things will change, and the nation that has been riding the highest on the status quo will have to change the most. That will be a tough realization for the United States, but a necessary one. Invoking the magic of the market won't ease any of the pain, and is intellectually bankrupt to boot.

Click me, choose me

I wrote a post earlier today in which I continued a discussion on how disappointing (to some people) the progress on the Internet has been, how it's failed to solve big problems, how innovation seems to have been lost.

Maybe part of the reason is that we have used the Internet in ways like this. Here is an article on the 30 fastest declining occupations. Instead of writing them in an old, Web 1.0 list, the Boston Globe thought it would be more fun to put them in a gallery, so that each one could have its own page and a picture (check out the picture of wood, or the one with file folders).

Is anyone really going to click through all 34 pages to see every one of these? Having gotten all the way to page 33, are you then going to check out the fastest-growing jobs, another 33-page gallery? (This one features a guy listening to headphones to illustrate computer software engineers.)

And, just to pick on the Boston Globe a little more, here is something even more pointless: a gallery of 25 pages in which the reader is asked to participate in a click poll to determine, yes, which celebrity of a presented pair is taller. You can decide whether Ashlee Simpson or her sister is taller, or Sean Connery vs. Pierce Brosnan. (I'm surprised there isn't a legal disclaimer pointing out that your vote will not actually change the height of any celebrity.)

This is how we use this remarkable technology, for faux-interactive galleries and polls. Coming tomorrow to the Boston Globe: Which number is larger? Which country name has more occurrences of the letter 'e'? Whose tattoo is that? (Oops, they've already done the last one.)

Pick me, choose me, love me

[My title comes from the most urp-inducing moment ever on Grey's Anatomy.]

If you ever wonder why people run for office, you need only look at the current controversy concerning the gasoline tax. (I won't get into the utter folly of the plan itself, plenty of others have already handled that.)

No, my point is that even such a useless bit of pandering gets immediate blanket coverage by the media, merely because it's being offered up by a presidential candidate. This is part of the hierarchy of ideas, which shows that there is no meritocracy even in the marketplace of thinking.

I can come up with the best idea on this blog, innovative thinking, well-presented. But I have very little rep in that market, so the idea just sits out there on a server. Another blogger, say Matt Yglesias, might come up with something, and it might cause a stir in the blogosphere for a few hours, but the interest will taper off quickly and be forgotten tomorrow.

Two months ago, Congressman Dingell of Michigan proposed increasing the gas tax by 50 cents a gallon to reduce consumption. That received a little attention, but not too much. But, let McCain talk about doing something pointless, and let Clinton jump on the bandwagon (flying in the face of he idea that she's such a policy expert), and it's big news.

And you know, that's pretty heady stuff. When you can say any fool thing that pops into your head, and it instantly becomes a major discussion topic for your nation, that's got to be hugely exciting, a real boost to the ego. Hard to believe that isn't at least part of the reason these candidates "put themselves through" the rigors of the campaign.

Are you sure it's not suckitude?

From Why does everything suck?, a trenchant post titled Too Much Suckage, in which Hank Williams discusses how disappointing the Web is, in that it is not producing anything truly useful:

Are we all so devoid of creativity and insight that the best we can come up with is some new mashup on some old mashup all mashed up?

The answer is almost certainly yes.

Williams links to three interesting posts, one notes of a talk given by Tim O'Reilly at the Web 2.0 Expo, another by Paul Graham that essentially calls out the venture capital (VC) companies for not finding the next Google, and the last by Umair Haque that calls out pretty much everybody, in an impassioned call to action (which he parochially restricts to Silicon Valley).

Haque's is the one most on topic, if the topic is the basic uselessness of most of the innovation we're seeing today. He feels that the "radical innovators," whether they be VC firms or technical wizards, aren't doing enough:

There are huge shocks rolling across the global economic landscape. Here are just a few. Food prices are skyrocketing. The financial system is melting down. Energy, of course, is more and more toxic, and costly. We are all, make no mistake, dancing on the precipice of economic cataclysm.

It is the obligation of radical innovators to create new value by solving these problems - or cede capital and resources to those who can.

But today's revolutionaries are sheep in wolves' clothing. They're lost in the economically meaningless, in the utterly trivial, in the strategically banal: mostly, they're cutting deals with one another to...try and sell more ads. That is, when they're not too busy partying.

I have no doubt that these people have a point. I certainly get the feeling that most of what I see is derivative; everyone is adding social networking to their websites, because, of course, I want to bond with every other person who checks on Cubs scores.

But I think that these people are asking too much from the Internet, especially as it's been rolled into the fervor over the so-called Web 2.0. I'm not precisely sure what that is, but no one else is either; the definition seems to be coalescing into the user interactive aspect of the Internet.

And most of that is junk. Look, I write a blog, so obviously I feel there's some value in doing so. I like reading other people's blogs. But, if they all went away tomorrow, I'd survive. The ability to leave comments on, for example, newspaper stories has less value still. I admit it's kind of neat to get some feedback from a columnist I've enjoyed reading, but it's not so neat, obviously, that I'd pay anything for it. Slapping a comment section on everything may seem cool, building new communities and all, but the general level of comments makes it far more of an ordeal than providing an opportunity to interact with fellow thinkers.

I love the idea that economic cataclysm is going to be solved by using the Internet; it sounds very neat and clean and cool, but it's highly unlikely. Economics comes out of real activities, real added value, not out of a virtual mental frame. There's a reason that buzz-worthy Second Life hasn't made any money, there's no there there. Nothing has received more press than MySpace/Facebook (they're pretty much the same thing), but there is no clear context for generating revenue. Even such a "success" as YouTube is not as much a success as the average bicycle shop, if you measure success by feeding one's family.

We've been told time and again that the Internet has brought us a revolution, but let's get serious. Where's the revolution? It's been used mostly as another marketing channel by people with things to sell. There's a lot of boring chitchat about potential Lost spoilers, or people's uninformed opinions about the Dancing with the Stars results.

It undoubtedly has made some things more convenient, but I don't think we've even reached the point yet at which the sudden disappearance of the Internet would be catastrophic. It may become that central someday, but I don't believe it's close to that now.

The closest analogy to the Internet is television. When television came to the living room, it was heralded as a great boon to education, a way of exposing Americans to politics and making them better citizens, an extension of human minds.

What have we actually received from television? Maybe a little of that here and there, but, mostly, it's a pure entertainment medium. You can tell that when you see the priorities of the broadcast networks - how much convention coverage will there be this summer? After all, you can't expect the selection of our leader to take precedence over another episode of Deal or No Deal.

And the Internet is heading the same way. It can be used for shopping, for watching television or movies, for having "conversations" that would bore you in a tavern. But that's a far cry from solving global famine, or the energy crisis, and I think we're very, very far away from the point where it can even begin to help with those problems. The people above who are disappointed with the failure of the Internet to wave its magic wand are asking an awful lot of it.