More on bitterness

I wasn't going to comment on this issue again, the comments by Barack Obama on bitterness, having done so just a few days ago. But it doesn't seem to be going away, as polls come out indicating that Obama is either holding to a single-digit deficit to Clinton in Pennsylvania, or has gone down by 20 percentage points.

And as I read the usual sources, it is clear that Obama's observations, which seemed correct if poorly stated, have engendered a wide range of opinions. For example, 2Truthy, whose passion and ragged eloquence I admire on Losing the War on Humor, is incensed about the comments, comparing his supporters to Nazi sympathizers. Leaving aside whether this falls under Godwin's law, I would like to speak to 2Truthy's criticisms.

First of all, I share his concern, if not so vehemently, that Obama is no panacea; he is a product of the same system that produced pretty much every current politician, and the idea that our problems will magically disappear January 20, 2009 is ludicrous. There are many issues that are being ignored in this campaign, by all the candidates, and many common economic assumptions are held by all that have been proven not to work quite as the academics say (or they assume away the inconvenient realities). I remain a guarded supporter of Obama because, we have to have a president, and I think that, of the three, he has the highest probability of working closer to the truth. I accept that I could be wrong, that he may just be the unknown on whom I'm projecting my hopes, but I prefer that to the ambitious Clinton or the obtuse McCain.

2Truthy parses the statement in detail. First, there is the feeling that "bitter" is not a sufficiently strong word, that "'bitter' doesn't begin to describe the state of mind most Americans are in." This strikes me as a definitional matter, since I have always found "bitter" a very strong word to describe a state of mind. That Obama recognizes this much, as opposed to the Clinton/McCain oblivion when it comes to the feelings of the average assailed American, is, to me, some progress.

Second, the reference to guns. Here I think 2Truthy misses the point somewhat; my sense is that this reference (as was the one to religion) was about the ways in which Americans are treating their angst with diversions. As I mentioned in my earlier post, Obama could have mentioned football or NASCAR or any of the other consuming pastimes that keep Americans from feeling that their lives are over.

Third, religion. I didn't see Obama's remark as religion-bashing, he was pointing out, clumsily, that religion is used for comfort, and I don't see how that can be objectionable, except in the current way that any comment that mentions religion at all is contentious. Anyone who has ever felt closer to God in a time of tribulation is religious in that sense, and that's not an attack.

Fourth, "antipathy to people who aren't like them." To argue that people (not just Americans) tend to blame those who are different for their problems is self-apparent. Absolutely, that sentiment has been inflamed by leaders anxious to cover up their unwillingness to represent their people, but it's natural - who will blame their neighbor when there is an "Other" to soak up the bad feelings? 2Truthy's view on this, and I can't say I fully followed this line, seems to neglect this truth.

Fifth, that people are against immigrants and trade "as a way to explain their frustrations." This is, to me, probably the most objectionable part of Obama's words, mainly because it simplifies a complex matter. The idea that real concern about policies that have enriched some people at the expense of others is simply a coping mechanism ignores reality. The public may not be discussing trade policy in terms of regression coefficients, rent-extraction mechanisms, or labor endowment, but they do understand that it's not working for them. They certainly understand that an influx of low-wage immigrants tends to lower wages for all, and that's Econ 101.

So, unlike 2Truthy, I don't see Obama's comments as social Darwinism in action, but as a mixture of obvious truths and "common wisdom." At least he's not arguing, as so many do, that the "fundamentals are strong, and we're on the verge of turning the corner."

Others have weighed in on the truth of Obama. James Howard Kunstler, in his entry for 4/14, and Jane Smiley, in a Huffington Post item, both write with anger about the reaction to what seems to them to be rare truth. Kunstler:

Nevertheless, in the manner lately prescribed for those who slip up and speak truthfully in public (and in contradiction to the reigning delusions), Obama was pressured to apologize for his statements.

Smiley:

So now, Barack Obama tells the truth about conditions as we know them--that the countryside and the small towns are dying in many places in our country, and that the corporatocracy doesn't care enough to do a thing about it. He points out that immigrant-baiting, gay-baiting, gun-baiting, and religious pandering have helped to destroy those towns and that countryside, that those being destroyed have been cynically enlisted by their very own destroyers to provide the votes that help accomplish the destruction.

And each is passionate about Clinton's exploitation of this issue. Kunstler:

The evermore loathsome and odious Hillary Clinton, co-owner of a $100 million personal wealth portfolio, seized the moment to remind voters what a normal, everyday gal she is -- who would never look down on the small-town folk of Pennsylvania the way her "elitist" opponent had -- forgetting, apparently, that the Clinton family's consigliere, James Carville, famously described the Keystone State as a kind of redneck sandwich with Pittsburgh and Philadelphia as the bread, and Alabama as the lunch meat in between....A President Hillary will also go a long way to defeating the popular delusion that a world ruled by female humans would be heaven-on-earth. (It would be more like one of those chaotic single-parent households in Section-8 housing, ruled by a harried and distracted mom, with a shadowy man in the background molesting the little ones while she was off working at the WalMart.)

Smiley:

I cannot believe that after the last seven and a half years, I can even get this angry. Yes, I know she is pandering to her audience. Yes, I know she will do anything to get elected. Yes, I know that she and Bill Clinton are corrupt to the core, and that I should have never expected anything better of her. But, please, any of you angry white women who still support this craven shill, don't mention it to me.

I can't add anything to those.

But what does surprise me is the reaction of Kevin Drum at Political Animal. He is usually a little more attuned to these things, and I think he missed the point in his post:

Once you clear out all the meta-clutter, though, what really strikes me as odd about Obama's statement is that, on its merits, it's largely untrue, isn't it? Economic distress probably is responsible for growing anti-trade sentiment (though the Midwest has never exactly been a bastion of free trade support), and maybe for a bit of the increase in anti-immigrant sentiment too (though I think this has been more cultural than economic, and is primarily rooted in the simple fact that we have a lot more illegal immigrants today than we did 15 years ago). But does anyone really think that stagnant wages and globalization are responsible for rural gun culture? Or the rise of the Christian right? Or an increase in bigotry? This stuff just doesn't seem to be related to recent economic distress in any serious way at all.

Did he read what Obama said? I saw no contention that stagnant wages created "rural gun culture," just that people retreated into an embrace of what they already valued when besieged by an economy that had no use for them. Drum seems to think that the point is that recent economic problems have created a surge in the Christian right, but, as Obama pointed out, this is the culmination of a 25-year process (in some cases, more than 25). There is ample evidence that politicians shamelessly used economic woes to inflame the political involvement of Christians.

At any rate, it's interesting to see these different views. What real effect this might have on the campaign remains anyone's guess.

Setting the lines

I went out for a run right after my previous post, and I was feeling uneasy about it. Essentially, as part of an observation about workplace environment and business practices, a post I had been working on for a while, I weaved in a response to the chap who runs 37signals.

It is a measure of the difference between well-considered writing and the quick response of the blog format that the first half came off better than the second. I happened across the Signal vs. Noise blog and felt that the current topic fit mine, so used it to illustrate my point.

But I did so poorly, using a term to describe this gentleman that was inappropriate, and it bothered me as I thought subsequently about it. I am passionate about the issues I care about, and I certainly have strong opinions, but I have always tried to maintain a sense of decorum and respect, what I would want applied to me. Most definitely, I have grave concerns about the things George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have done to this country, but name-calling doesn't help, and isn't my style. I can speak strongly, and have on this issue, without resorting to cheap slurs.

So I have edited that post to remove the term, but that's a bit of a cheat. I have also posted a comment (repeated below) on the original thread. This brave new world of instant publishing is a challenge to get right, but, if I'm having problems with it, I must extend the same understanding to others. (And, you know, Signal vs. Noise is a pretty good blog.)

I recently posted a comment on my own blog which included a response to this thread. Without getting deeply into the matter, I violated my own rules as to proper debate. I have some disagreements with some of what Jason has posted here, and I stand by those; I think his perspective may be a bit skewed by his own experiences - that may change as he is buffeted by change in the future.

However, I went farther than I wished, and, instead of commenting on the substance of his remarks, I used a term that was intemperate. I should not comment on his tone unless I can handle my own. So I apologize to Jason, and hope that his view of the workplace spreads, because, unlikely as it sounds, it matches my view far more than I expressed.

We're just practicing

I've worked in a lot of different environments, from straight-laced, suit-wearing corporate to cheek-by-jowl shared cubicles, from being plunked down in the midst of a call center to private offices for every person. I've toiled for companies that had concierge service, and for companies that wouldn't give away a paper clip. I've worked for companies that offered major resources for self-education, and companies that would begrudge your spending 10 minutes on the Internet to find a better way to accomplish a task.

Having spent most of my career as a software developer (or in jobs associated with software development), I've had ample time to examine the ways in which programmers can work effectively. Moreover, I've seen fads come and go, most driven more by the desires of the business than the needs of the workers. For example, I worked in a company that laid off so many people that there were vast tracts of empty cubicles, rows and rows of dark spaces where only the abandoned machinery was left. I suggested to my manager that, perhaps, for productivity and morale purposes, we might move from our two-to-a-person cubicles to some personal space. He reacted as if shot, telling me that he could never suggest such a thing to his management because, "there were rules." (I think part of his reaction was that he saw it as a major perk that he got his own cubicle.)

There have been studies on productivity over the years, but, strangely enough, the gold standard for programming productivity experiments was done 30 years ago, in IBM's Santa Teresa Laboratory. Gerald McCue's paper remains a primary reference. Without getting into the specific results, so quaint do they seem now (private offices, sufficient storage room, etc.), what is so striking is that a major corporation actually created a whole lab to study this issue. There was a sense, back in 1978, that making programmers as productive as possible was a worthy objective.

Needless to say, that is no longer a business objective. The assumption now is that people will accommodate themselves to whatever work environment they're given; minimizing overhead is paramount, and the office designer plays a key role. (There's a larger issue here - can a company really be successful if it's constantly engaged in reduction, rather than expansion? They've elevated cost-cutting over profit-growing, and that doesn't seem like a good long-term strategy...right, long-term, ha, ha.)

What we've moved to is soft solutions, the idea that creating a pleasant meta-environment beats creating an actual environment, especially when there is very little cost to the company. These are the sorts of things that fall under the term, "work-life initiatives." Programs like flextime, telecommuting, and family leave are touted as major productivity enhancers.

Naturally, most of these things are granted by the company, rather than seen as anything to which an employee has a right (family leave being an exception, but it took contentious legislation to get that done). So, if you build your life around one of these options, be prepared to change at any moment that the company decides to pull it.

Something that I've noticed, especially with new technology companies, is a sense of self-congratulatory righteousness when they decide to bestow these programs on their employees. 37signals is a Chicago web development company, noted most for their development of the Ruby on Rails platform. Their blog, Signal vs. Noise, is an entertaining look at one company that goes back to at least October 2006 (it may be older, but the Looking for something older? link leads nowhere, which is kind of amusing for a web development company).

Jason Fried is the CEO, and the main poster, and he has reported on 37signals' experiment with the four-day workweek. Hey, it's a success, and proves, at least to Jason, that "urgency is overrated...self-imposed and morale-busting." He explained their institution of this policy last month, where he also touted their program to "fund people's passions," where the company helps pay for things like flying lessons, and discretionary spending accounts, because they trust people.

I'm generally in favor of such alternatives to the status quo, but there's a "hey, look what we invented" quality to these posts that ignores that such experimentation has been around for quite a while. You have to ask at some point, if these are such universally wonderful policies, why haven't they been adopted by every company? If they work, they should convey a competitive advantage, forcing all others to offer them. But that hasn't happened.

Not to say that I'm ruling out general corporate timidity. I worked for a company that had every other Friday off one summer, and never mentioned it again (questions about it the next year were not warmly regarded). There was no evidence that it worked poorly, that customers were ill-served. My guess is that the increasingly corporate managers they hired just didn't like it.

But people are also people, and most of these policies offer many possibilities for abuse and resentment. If the company is helping Mark with his flying lessons, others will want to be sure their dream is being funded at the same level. And the discretionary accounts will work for a while, but having no policy as to their use invites problems down the road. Contrary to the beliefs of some, rules and laws don't just spring up to irritate good people, they're necessary to guarantee equity and the overall goals of the entity.

[Note: added to the obnoxiousness of the sense that 37signals is the first company to think of these enhancements is a kind of arrogance bred of success. An exchange from comments to the post, Urgency is poisonous:

Commenter: I’m certain you already know how lucky you are to be able to set your own deadlines. Most of us in the real world, however, work for a customer.
Jason Fried: Ah, the mythical, absolute “real world.” The real world is the one you choose to live in. Your world is no more real than my world. I’m sorry you’re trapped in yours.

More from Jason:

Clients expect what you tell them to expect....It is up to you to set expectations. Clients don’t set expectations, you do.

And even more:

Oh yeah? When is that deadline? On Friday at 6pm? And if you aren’t live by 6:01pm Friday what happens? All the work that’s gone into what you are building is just thrown away? Or do reasonable people say “How about Monday or Tuesday? Can we get it out by then?” And if they don’t say that, and they pull your money because you didn’t hit a specific deadline with no wiggle room then consider yourself lucky. That working relationship was doomed from the start. A missed deadline and killed deal was just a symptom of a deeper infection. I can’t image a worse working relationship than one devoid of reason, fairness, and understanding. Anyone who wants to pull the plug on you because you are human is barely human themselves.

Not that I wish ill on someone who is trying to create a good work environment, but for a CEO to show such massive misunderstanding of the world in which he lives is breathtaking. What interests me here is how a blog can demonstrate the thinking of a Gates-in-the-making, someone who is creating his own little solipsistic world around himself. We don't have evidence as to how a Randall Stephenson got the way he is, but we can actually watch a Jason Fried become self-absorbed. Interesting.]

[Edited note: I was a little harsh just above. I'm not a fan of name-calling, even on the anonymous Internet and, in thinking about it, I've edited the preceding paragraph. I still think the comments show some myopia about the world most of us live in, but I went too far.]

The mood of bitterness

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations. [Barack Obama]

When I was young, one of my favorite trivia questions was, "What is the second largest city in Illinois?" Some people would say Peoria, some Springfield, some Evanston, but very few would get the right answer, Rockford.

Rockford was one of the success stories of the 1950s and '60s, with a strong manufacturing base and independence from the massive influence of Chicago. (I'm oversimplifying here, of course; Rockford undoubtedly was helped by its proximity to Chicago, but, 90 miles away, it was never governed by the fates of the big city the way that the current #2, #4, and #5, Aurora, Naperville, and Joliet, respectively, are.) But we know what happened to any northern American city that relied on manufacturing. The New Economy smacked these places down, and few have recovered any significant vitality.

Oh, Rockford has plans to rebuild (as detailed here in a somewhat dated Chicago Tribune article). The two basic prongs of this approach seem to be closer ties to Chicago and attracting tourists through the construction of a river walk. My belief is that, at 90 miles, Rockford is too far from Chicago to become truly bound to it, especially as Chicago deals with high real estate and gas prices. What looked like a growing megalopolis is beginning to look like a place in serious need of retrenchment, and I doubt that exurban sprawl is going to encompass Rockford.

And they're going to build a river walk, the last refuge of frustrated urban planners. I live in Naperville, which built a riverwalk about 25 years ago as a civic improvement project. But all attempts to make it the centerpiece of a major tourist attraction are futile; it's a nice area, but the river is unimpressive and the scenery no better than many other places. Naperville's a nice place to live, to be sure, but it is not going to be a destination for world travelers any time soon. Rockford is even a tougher sell.

It's not clear to me that some of the cities like Rockford can even continue to exist over the long haul. When the majority of the working population are employed selling things to one another, you have a stagnant, at best, community. I wish Rockford no ill, there are some beautiful spots nearby, but, in this brave new economic world, it may not have a useful niche.

But home is a powerful thing, and one generation ago, Rockford was thriving with a strong future. Who could know then that the children and grandchildren of the productive workers would be facing the dismantling of their way of life, a life they worked very hard to achieve?

Are residents of Rockford bitter, as life has passed them by, their jobs and futures gone overseas, no leader with a plan to right the course? I don't know, but if some of them aren't, I'd be very surprised. For them, and for others in all the cities and towns across this country who followed the rules and worked hard to carve out a piece of the American Dream, only to see it taken and put in the pockets of the schmoozers and glad-handers who sit in the corporate suites or walk the halls of the Capitol, how could there not be bitterness?

Yet, let a presidential candidate say that, acknowledge the palpable sense of loss and frustration that pervades much of America, and he's jumped on with both feet. Obama's mistake: just once letting the veil drop and admitting that American self-love conceals a darkness at its heart. Truth, if it conflicts with the narrative, is the enemy; far better to live the lie, believe the magic, and hold up our fingers and chant "We're Number One" as we slide ever faster into the morass. Live the dream, sell the dream, be the dream, as reality slips up behind us and smacks us in the head.

Could Obama have stated the themes of his second paragraph better? Sure, he could have, but it is not wrong to accept that people do retreat into narrow portions of their lives in order to escape an unconfrontable reality. He used guns and religion to illustrate this, and those are toxic waste areas for open discussion. He could have said sports or cooking shows or any of a number of other diversions, but the point would have been the same, and it would have been valid.

Does the media attempt to engage the content of this topic? Absolutely not. A recent Chicago Tribune article explained the challenging retail market by writing, "Americans appear to be in no mood to shop," as if saving The Sharper Image from bankruptcy is just a matter of attitude. Consumer confidence is seen as the story, not the underlying challenges that have undermined that confidence.

Robert Reich, whose success would give him every right to buy into the Social Darwinism that is the coin of the realm, writes about this very topic today. This former Clinton secretary of labor, who admits he didn't do enough to help his fellow Americans, believes (rightly, I think) that the anger and bitterness has been used, inflamed into blame against almost anyone but the people who deserve it, those who have sold out their countrymen for riches or power. And Reich points out how the media, by stepping back and taking their neo-objective look at "reality," has contributed to a sense of inevitability and impotence, and that just further inflames the anger.

Reich apparently was appalled by this morning's Meet the Press (curiously, he calls Tim Russert "one of the smartest guys on television - I've never met Russert, I would assume Reich has, but I've never thought he came across as such a smart guy - smart aleck, sophist, self-impressed, maybe). He must not watch it very often, particularly with James Carville and Mary Matalin, the political odd couple that needs to find something else to do (Carville has little to say other than how much he "dearly, dearly loves" the Clintons, and Matalin's worship of Dick Cheney is embarrassing).

Reich:

Does Russert really believe he’s doing the nation a service for this parade of spin doctors talking about potential spins and the spin-offs from the words Obama used to state what everyone knows is true? Or is Russert merely in the business of selling TV airtime for a network that doesn’t give a hoot about its supposed commitment to the public interest but wants to up its ratings by pandering to the nation’s ongoing desire for gladiator entertainment instead of real talk about real problems.

Hmmm, I wonder. But Reich goes on to describe the "downward spiral" that many real people know is occurring, and actually dares to point out that bitterness is not even close now to what it could become. He concludes, "Eighty percent of Americans know the nation is on the wrong track. The old politics, and the old media that feeds it, are irrelevant now." We can only hope.

Tiger has the "right" to continue

As I write this, Tiger Woods is six strokes down in the Masters, and has only three holes left to make it up. But we know he's the best golfer, and he's won the really important holes, and Trevor Immelman has no chance at the Grand Slam, and a Tiger win will bring that much more interest to the sport, so I think he should just play on and on into the night (through Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, and Indiana, and so on). Eventually, they'll have to give him the green jacket, just for persistence.

Promotions

I'm going to cannibalize myself today. About a month ago, I responded to a post on the excellent The Corporate Cynic blog. Sadly, he has a real life, so posts all too infrequently (though he does, as a result, keep the signal/noise ratio quite high). Anyway, he was kind enough to find a comment of mine helpful in assembling his own fine post on the subject of corporate promotions.

His point was that the worst of all promotions was when a "Born Jerk" gets to a management position, then feel validated by the promotion and spread their toxicity through everything they do. I absolutely agreed with that, but left as a comment a slightly different perspective based on my worst manager ever, the story of a "Made Jerk." I'm going to copy my comment as I wrote it back on March 17 (including the throw-in topic at the end, which probably deserves to be developed into its own post at some point):

I am quite glad that I could serve as an inspiration for your post. Don’t be surprised when I do the same, use you as inspiration: first, because I really “enjoy” what you’re writing; second, because the pressures of daily blogging often have me casting about for anything I can find. (Enough about me…)

As a follow-up, let me offer a couple of observations about management, at least in the IT world.

The mechanism you’re discussing is quite common, but there is something else that occurs quite frequently. I’ll tell it as a story of one particular manager (I’ll call him R), but it is not a singular phenomenon.

R was, at best, a mediocre technical mind (I worked with him on two companies before I worked for him at a third). He did not work very hard (IT isn’t normally a 9 to 5 job, except for him), and he never did any of the extras, reading journals, learning at home, that are done by most of us in the field. He found a narrow technical niche, milked it for an unspectacular career.

Then R lucked in. He wangled a job at a high-growth company at a time when their standards were pretty low. A few months into his tenure, his boss left abruptly, a few weeks from a major software release. Upper management panicked and, rather than going on a major search even among other employees, decided to promote from within. It came down to a choice between the two senior developers, and they chose R - in some sense, that was logical, because the other guy was integral to actually getting the product out, whereas R was a fifth wheel.

I joined the group a couple of months later (I didn’t really want to work for R, but I thought that I was positioning myself for a management position in this growing company - whoops!). And what I found was not your “Born Jerk.”

You see, R is a really good guy. You’d love him as a neighbor, he’d lend you his stuff and even help you use it. He’s just not someone who ever should have been allowed into a technical field (I’ll omit that story for length).

And he was remarkably humble a couple of months into his management career. He was kind of awe-struck at leading a group of MSs and PhDs (he has neither), and truly believed that he was just a member of a team (albeit with an inflated title and salary).

But over the next six months or so, I saw him change. I mean, he has important VPs coming to him and asking for his opinion (another thing atypical about R, he had an exaggerated respect for anyone above him in the org chart, that is, he “humbly prostrated himself,” not what you commonly see in IT), so he must be good. That they would ask the same questions of an orangutan in his cubicle never occurred to him.

He became duplicitous and manipulative; being a nice guy at heart, he was hilariously bad at that, but he thought it was expected. He began taking credit for things he couldn’t have thought of with 60 extra IQ points. And he became a total joke, so much so that new group members couldn’t understand how those of us who had known him before still had some carry-over respect for him.

Long story short (OK, that ship has sailed), two-thirds of the company was laid off in the wake of the tech bubble’s bursting, but R is still there five years later, making six figures, and he hasn’t improved a whit (the prevailing theory is that upper management won’t admit a mistake - “we promoted him, our decisions are always right, therefore he must be good”).

Which brings me to my second point, and it’s one you may well have written about before (I haven’t gotten around to reading all your back posts yet): One of the biggest issues facing American business is what I call the “evaluation crisis.”

The ability to evaluate the value of people is, perhaps, the most important challenge for management and, in every such situation, they’re dropping the ball. Whether hiring, promoting, giving raises, or deciding whom to lay off, it is clear that very few know what they’re doing.

I won’t belabor the point, already having written a little too much for a blog comment, but, when I look at the decisions made by a cadre of “big executives,” decisions that have nothing to do with the real caliber of an individual, I am continually appalled. We who, for example, write code for a living have a pretty good idea as to who else can do it, so we know how often management doesn’t have a clue.

If we still had a burgeoning job market, that might be OK - we would be mis-evaluated and move on to something bigger and better. But, at a time when, in the IT field, we are facing the challenges of H-1B visas and offshoring, we’re talking about an inability to evaluate having a major effect on careers. There are a lot of talented people out of work or underworked because one person with power and no judgment made a decision about their career. I can’t believe that it doesn’t have some long-term effect at some point.

I could write a lot more about R, and probably will at some point. I'm not sure if I was able to convey the complete loss of morale that came, over time, with working for someone who was so ill-suited to his position. But, for today, I will leave it as it is without elaborating.

Embracing economic change, even if it kills you

Via Mark Thoma, a post by Lane Kenworthy on why Democrats should try to get Americans to "embrace economic change." He lays out 12 points of the argument. Let's look at them:

1. Economic globalization tends to benefit Americans as consumers. We get to choose from a wider array of products and services, and the increased competition among firms tends to reduce the prices we pay.

2. Economic globalization also benefits some Americans as workers. The prices their employers pay for inputs are lower, and the number of customers is larger. Both may increase employment and/or wages.

3. Economic globalization hurts some Americans as workers. Some lose their job; others experience stagnant or falling wages.

These strike at the heart of the consumer/investor vs. employee/citizen dichotomy we've talked about before. He fails to mention the effects on investors (mainly positive, but small), and the risks to citizens (mainly negative, potentially large). As for point 2, this seems arguable. Since labor is an input to employers, there would be downward pressure on wages, and I don't really see how the number of customers will necessarily affect wages (though it may well increase employment, unless there is an alternative to employing Americans).

4. Access to the U.S. market tends to benefit citizens in poor countries, in the form of more jobs at higher wages. This is good for Americans on both altruistic and self-interested grounds.

Undoubtedly, the first sentence is true. The second may also be, though I fail to see how much weight I should give it. It's an unsupported statement, which troubles me.

5. It is economically and politically wise to have government policies in place that help those hurt by globalization to adjust. These include unemployment insurance, portable pensions and health insurance, retraining, job placement assistance, wage insurance, infrastructure improvement for hard-hit communities, and a higher and inflation-adjusted minimum wage and Earned Income Tax Credit. In addition, government can support job creation via a large-scale investment in renewable energy and/or an employer subsidy. By compensating the losers, these policies make globalization win-win. And in doing so, they lessen opposition.

This is the standard list of redistribution policies that will make the loss of our industries and careers palatable to the masses. I've written about this before, heck, everyone's written about this before, and this grab bag of programs is almost certainly not sufficient. What it constitutes is a long list of politically-dubious "should"s, none of which get at the heart of the problem. Training experienced engineers to become home health care workers may end up being necessary; that doesn't make it desirable.

Investments in renewable energy, or biotechnology, or journeys to Mars - all sound great, but, since we would undoubtedly turn funds over to private industry to get them done, the same pressures would exist to minimize costs and maximize revenues, so we can't know that the situation for the average American would improve.

However, it is syllogistic to argue that making globalization win-win would make it acceptable; the problem is in doing that, and I'm not convinced this laundry list of programs would make it happen.

6. Technological advance has properties similar to globalization; it tends to benefit us as consumers and some of us as workers, but it also hurts some of us as workers. So too does the ability to move, buy, and sell across state borders within the United States.

I'm not sure why these are together, and I'm not sure that the second point is a big problem (are there really major problems with inter-state tariffs?). The issue of technology is a big one, and I think Kenworthy is wrong to conflate it with job movement. (For example, are the benefits of #4 fully realized if we substitute workers with machines?)

7. The policies described in #5 are just as appropriate for those hurt by technological change or internal economic movement as for those hurt by globalization. We would want these policies even if there were no cross-country trade or offshoring at all.

8. These policies are likely to be easier to sell politically if framed as a response to all forms of economic change, including globalization.

9. We already have most of these policies, but they are inadequate in coverage, funding, and coordination.

These three are true as far as they go, but, again, I doubt that making all those programs perfect would overcome the inherent problems. We have seen massive changes in the way work is done in the world, with barriers of all kinds falling under the effect of the Internet and UPS and so on. This will lead to social changes of a type we haven't seen since the great migration northward of the early 1900s, and a few government programs are unlikely to mitigate those.

10. Part of the reason these programs are inadequate is that debate about economic globalization tends to get stuck on the question of free trade vs. managed trade. Three groups have an interest in framing the debate in these terms. One is Republicans who find it helpful to argue that Democrats are protectionist and therefore against the interests of American as consumers. The second is lobbyists for firms that stand to benefit from protection. The third group is people who work in manufacturing and offshorable services. They hope that blocking trade and offshoring will help protect their jobs. Democrats want their votes and hence often say they’ll address globalization in part by restricting it.

Regardless of whether the proposed restrictions are relatively minor (minimal labor and/or environmental standards) or extensive, once this door is opened it almost inevitably takes center stage in the debate. Far less attention, if any, gets devoted to the adjustment and cushioning side. As a result, the political constituency and momentum for these policies tend to be far smaller than they could be.

11. For Democrats, it might not be harmful politically to shift toward a position that embraces economic change — in other words, that forgoes managed trade. Democrats could then ask voters whether they prefer globalization and technological advance with less government help (the Republican position) or with more. But even if it hurts them politically in the short run, an approach that focuses on responding to globalization via adjustment and cushioning rather than managed trade is, in my view, the right thing for Democrats to do.

12. This does not mean Democrats ought to rule out trade restrictions altogether. What it means is that they should leave them off the list, or put them at the very bottom, of strategies for addressing job loss and wage stagnation. And labor and environmental standards should be discussed mainly in the context of foreign and/or environmental policy, rather than trade policy.

Basically, these add up to the standard free trade arguments, and tell us that Democrats should embrace free trade as thoroughly as any Republican, but talk up the adjustment policies. Later on, he confronts the idea that we should put the "cushions" in place first, arguing that we'll never get them if we insist on them.

So we end up with essentially the same discussion as always, in which we make the pie grow before we figure out how to cut it. But we know that we'll never get around to really solving it, not when we can put some relatively low-cost, feel-good programs in place that won't cost big contributors anything.

More importantly, the kind of programs that Kenworthy is talking about detract from truly free trade. There will be huge resistance if we use general tax revenues to pay for the cushions - why should consumers pay for that? But, if we charge "overseas profit taxes" or the like, then we don't get the full benefits from free trade.

Sadly, there are probably no simple solutions. This is a problem that stems from the nature of the change in our economy; Chinese are willing and able to work for 50 cents an hour, and our workers can't. That's the essential nature of what's coming, and these programs that nibble at the edges of that reality won't fix that.

Review - Gaming the Vote

Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren't Fair (and What We Can Do About It) (GtV) by William Poundstone is a maddening book, full of interesting stories about voting, but flawed as a book. (Before you ask, William is a cousin of comedian Paula Poundstone.)

One of the fascinating results in mathematical economics is the proof by Kenneth Arrow of what is called the impossibility theorem, which demonstrates that, given a set of desirable criteria, no voting scheme can be devised that is totally fair. Obviously, this applies to voting in which there are three or more candidates; normal pick-one voting works fine for two-candidate races. One of the most common demonstrations is to show that transitivity is violated: A may be preferred to B, B to C, and C to A, which strikes most of us as wrong.

GtV begins with a lengthy recap of the 1991 Louisiana governor race in which former governor Edwin Edwards manipulated the incumbent governor out of the runoff, where Edwards defeated former Klansman David Duke. The book contains other stories of cases where the "wrong" candidate was elected, even for president - the 1912 campaign, in which Teddy Roosevelt split off the Republican vote from Taft, giving the White House to Woodrow Wilson, is the best known.

Poundstone has written a lot more books than I have, so I'm going to assume he has his reasons for jumping around in his topic. For me, though, I found it tedious. After the long prologue about Louisiana (which is a fascinating story, with outsized personalities, and Poundstone didn't really capture it), GtV launches into the theory behind the problem. The story jumps from person to tiny bits of math and back to person, in what I can only feel is a sop to the popular reader. You come out with the flavor of the Arrow impossibility theorem without any deep understanding; the impression is simply that normal plurality voting (voting for your favorite) is flawed beyond redemption.

If you want a flavor for this book, let me quote from the table of contents. Here is a list of topics in order from one of the chapters: ""syphilis; slavery; mother murder; Lyndon Johnson; farm animals; television; Rush Limbaugh; Arthur Finkelstein; the $12 Man; Jesus," and on and on. This list, by the way, gets us from page 95 to page 97. It is an impressive feat to weave these disparate topics into three pages, but it takes away from the coherence of Poundstone's arguments.

And there is an underlying argument here. After taking us through the often-entertaining stories of the origins of Borda Count, Condorcet voting, instant-runoff voting, and so forth, Poundstone shows us why these are all inferior to range voting.

Range voting is the kind used on Amazon to rate books, where there is a fixed scale (0 to 5, but it can be as much as 0 to 100 in Poundstone's examples) and a voter can pick any number for any of the candidates. For example, if Hillary were to stay in the current presidential race (and there's no guarantee that we can get her out), a voter who didn't want to perpetuate the Bush legacy could (on a 0 to 10 system) give Obama 10 points, Hillary 9, and McCain 0 or 1. In theory, this system minimizes the chance that voters will vote strategically instead of due to their real preferences.

DtV presents some, but not conclusive, evidence that range voting is superior to all other voting schemes. That may be true, but it remains to be seen how we explain the results of a sample presidential vote (on a range voting advocacy site, http://rangevoting.org), in which the winner among all U.S. presidents is...Chester A. Arthur. The result comes from, as of this writing, 2428 ballots. Perhaps some of those people are fooling around, but you have to wonder about results in which the list of presidents over 80 (on a 0-100 scale) are W.H. Harrison, Polk, Taylor, Grant, Garfield, Arthur, B. Harrison, McKinley, and Eisenhower. (If you're curious, those ranked under 30 are Cleveland, Wilson, F. Roosevelt, Truman, and L. Johnson.)

Specific examples aside, there really isn't enough here to convince anyone that range voting minimizes the probability of Arrow's theorem creating undesirable results. The conclusion seems to be that it's worth a try, but that politics will get in the way. After all, political candidates and consultants have adjusted to the existing system, and it will be difficult to effect change. (In a curious omission, Poundstone tells us that Cleveland, Cincinnati, and New York all adopted single transferable voting in the early part of the 20th century, but doesn't explain how politicians were convinced that these systems were preferable.)

So I have to give a thumbs-sideways review here. I was already reasonably familiar with the formal literature on voting schemes, being a reformed math guy, and GtV is a pleasant, gentle introduction. As a book, however, it was repetitious (we understood the problems with Condorcet voting the first time), disorganized (there are references to things that weren't previously mentioned), and, at times, simplistic. So, read it if you're interested in voting schemes, but understand that you'll have more reading to do if you want to appreciate the fullness of this topic.

Goodbye to the middle

Three months ago, I opined that "GDP of the bottom 85-90% of the country may be in sharp decline." I have since revised my thinking on that topic; it's even worse than that, much of the country has been in recession for several years. (I don't know what the true percentage is. There's no doubt that the people at the very bottom have been hurt the most during the Bush years, but the pain is certainly spread into the upper middle class - 85-90% still sounds right to me.)

This is something that's hard to measure, I don't know how we would judge output, or GDP, of a segment of the economy. But when we see increasing economic inequality (a Gini index higher than any other comparable country, currently somewhere around 45, where 0 is perfect equality, 100 perfect inequality), increasing returns to certain small segments of the population, and the increasing amounts of family debt, it's hard to believe that the average American household is prospering in today's New Economy.

Despite my firm belief in this proposition, that vast swaths of the country have been in a years-long recession, I had little evidence to back it up...until now. Via Mark Thoma, David Leonhardt of the New York Times:

[T]he now-finished boom was, for most Americans, nothing of the sort. In 2000, at the end of the previous economic expansion, the median American family made about $61,000, according to the Census Bureau’s inflation-adjusted numbers. In 2007, in what looks to have been the final year of the most recent expansion, the median family, amazingly, seems to have made less — about $60,500.

This is an absolutely phenomenal result, one that is unprecedented over the time the government has been recording such things. Leonhardt expresses what he calls, "the most basic test of an economy’s health: does it produce ever-rising living standards for its citizens?"

Of course, that sounds good, but I don't see any evidence that anyone sees that as the basic test. We measure aggregates like GDP without understanding that much of that product is going into fewer hands. We rush to the newsstand to see the Forbes 400 or the richest celebrities, as if Oprah's vast wealth somehow reflects something about the nation as a whole. We hear eminent economists tell us that the fundamentals of the economy are strong, even as hope for the future, for our children, diminishes. We grab our national debt-increasing stimulus checks and toddle off to the store to buy a bigger Korean television set.

Oh, sure, when we're surveyed, as many as 81% of us say we're on the wrong track, but a lot of people think we're just one government program or lottery win away from fixing that. In part, that's a result of what's been called American Exceptionalism, the idea that we've been singularly blessed to stand astride the world and win all the prizes. But hubris is a poor substitute for actually building our economy.

Leonhardt offers a solution, "job-creating investments in biomedical research, alternative energy, roads, railroads and education." This is the sort of thing the candidates throw out on the trail, and they sound good.

But I ask my usual question, "What's the mechanism?" How are these investments going to take place in the current, free-market-rules-all system we have? And what's the guarantee that these investments will be made here? Isn't it far more likely that we will offshore as much of the work as we can, particularly in biomedical research (already firmly ensconced in other countries) and alternative energy (the engineers are mainly in China, last time I checked)?

I don't see any of the candidates we have bucking the basic system; they're products of the one we already have. At some point, I'm going to write a long post on education; suffice it to say that, when you're not losing jobs to a lack of education, but to a lack of willingness to work for $10/hour, more schooling isn't going to do much for you, especially if you have to go into debt to finance it.

Add to that the transfer of risk from institutions to individuals, and you have a recipe for continued decline. I see no trend that indicates that we are going to find a way to "save" the middle class, just a prolonged slide into meeting the rest of the world as it comes up. That may all be very egalitarian and all, but it's going to come as a huge shock to all Americans who believe it's ever upwards all the time.

It's all free

I've meant to write something more about Chris Anderson's appearance on Charlie Rose back on March 6th. I commented back then how impressed I was that Charlie actually expressed skepticism about Anderson's iPhone model for the future of business, "designed in California, made in China." (There are two threads here, Anderson's myopia that this was a viable direction for the American economy, and Charlie actually getting contrarian. Of course, Charlie gets that way only when dealing with other journalists; whenever someone else, like a CEO, is on, Charlie mostly lobs the softballs. I guess we'll take what we can get.)

What I didn't get around to posting were my thoughts on Anderson's main point, that we're moving to a new free model for everything. That is, business will be driven by giving away things, much in the way that we all use Google and pay nothing for it. Microsoft will be forced to a free model, according to Anderson, in which they won't sell copies of Office, but be forced by market pressures to give it away. "The truth is that zero is one market and any other price is another. In many cases, that's the difference between a great market and none at all."

Of course, if you're giving something away, it's not actually part of a market at all, but that requires you to understand the nature of a market. While it may be true that transistors are virtually zero-cost, and Google can give you unlimited storage, it is not clear that Google mail space is actually part of a "market." Their revenues come from somewhere else, which allows them to subsidize this no-cost storage.

That's about as far as I got with my notes for this post originally, then I wandered off to other things. But I've been saved by Hank Williams (no, not that one), who has eloquently deconstructed Anderson's argument in a post on his blog, Why does everything suck? For those more interested in the economic aspects of life, there are some posts there you'll probably want to skip, but there are some really well thought-out ones about the new economy (and interesting ideas about more technical matters as well).

We know why you don't fly

Via Kevin Drum, Jon Stewart:

With this administration, if a passenger blows up a plane, it's a failure in the war on terror. But if the plane just blows up on its own — eh, it's the market self-regulating.

Funny, but obviously untrue. After all, American Airlines has canceled more than 1500 flights over the past two days, as they inspect their MD-80 airplanes - "At issue is how cords have been used to secure bundles of wires in the plane's wheel wells." An FAA inspector apparently found some problem on Monday, and, not wanting to incur an FAA penalty, grounded all those planes.

What I find interesting is the corporate spin, the tap dance to assure everyone that this is just a minor requirement, nothing that affects safety. AA's spokeswoman was on TV last night to let us know that this was not an actual issue that puts people at risk, just a minor compliance matter. From AA's website:

Additional inspections of our MD-80 fleet are being conducted to ensure precise and complete compliance with the FAA's directive related to wiring in the aircraft's wheel wells. Please be assured that safety of our customers is, and always will be, American's first priority.

In other words, it's just the FAA being picky, nothing bad, not to worry.

If that's true, why did they have to pull all the planes out of service immediately? Couldn't they have staged these re-inspections over several days, doing them at night when the fleet is pretty much idle? Why would they take the risk of ticking off thousands of travelers for a minor look-see?

Two answers present themselves to the last question. One is that AA simply doesn't care about serving its customers, perhaps feeling that they have no credible alternative. The other is that the problem is far more acute than they're letting on. I'd put up a click poll, except that I suspect the answer is, "Both."

Tears for Randy

As we have already pointed out, our friend Randall Stephenson, the Chairman, President, and CEO of AT&T, received $22 million in compensation for 2007. That's pretty impressive, considering the fact that he can't even figure out how to find 3600 Americans to fill customer service jobs. He promised to bring 5000 jobs back to this country in 2006, now regrets it, and spends his time (worth more than $2500 an hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week) bemoaning the lack of qualified workers in the United States, calling them "defective" (via Citizen Carrie, an MSN article).

Let's be fair, though; Randy probably went to a prestigious school, one that colored his judgment as to the value of the education that other Americans get. Let's see, he went to the University of Central Oklahoma. That ranks as a fourth-tier school in the US News & World Report rankings. Not exactly what I was expecting, but he was probably really good there.

Moving on, we should remember that Randy didn't become chairman and CEO until June of 2007, so we can hope he does a little better for himself this year (of course, it would help if the stock price would go up, as it's actually down since he took over). Let's move on to this year's proxy statement. What is always amusing is to look at "All Other Compensation." Randy gets $14,000 for "Financial counseling"; remember, those fabulous jobs he can't fill pay $15/hour, so Randy will pay about half an FTE for money advice. His "Auto benefits" total $21,047. At standard IRS mileage rates, that's about 43,400 miles worth, which is a lot of driving. "Personal use of Company aircraft" - $89,919 (why, that's three call center employees). "Home security" - $15,455.

But as we all know, wealth is relative. Randy's not comparing himself to the rest of us, he's looking around. So he probably feels really bad when he realizes he was only the third-highest paid employee of AT&T in 2007. The former president & CEO of AT&T Mobility, Stanley T. Sigman, received $36.9 million. And Randy's predecessor, the man who moved the corporate headquarters of AT&T from St. Louis to San Antonio out of pique at being blackballed by a country club, Ed Whitacre, collected $78.3 million.

So we should find some sympathy for poor Randall L. Stephenson, a man who is outearned at his own company by two guys who don't even work there anymore. This likely explains why he can't rouse himself to fill those jobs. He can't stop thinking about how Stan and Ed's compensation would pay for all 3600 workers he's so desperate to find, leaving an extra $7.2 million for other things (a little more home security, perhaps?).

Back to work

I've long contended, to anyone who will listen, that the unemployment rate seriously mischaracterizes the extent to which the labor market ill serves the needs of the nation. In particular, those people who contend that the lower unemployment rate of the United States as compared to Europe proves the superiority of our dog-eat-dog economy to the "welfare state" are citing, I believe, incomparable statistics.

I have read, though I admit to not being able to find a citation, that in the last few years, the unemployment rate as reported was considerably lower in the U.S. than in Europe, but the employment rate was about the same (at least in some countries of Europe).

My theory is that the U.S. systemically undercounts the unemployed, because the rate tends to miss those people who no longer collect unemployment insurance. Also, for cultural reasons, if an American is contacted for an employment survey, there is a tendency to say "self-employed" or "consultant." On the other hand, in Europe the government (for better or worse) is far more involved in the daily lives of its citizens, thus has a better chance of counting the unemployed more accurately.

I haven't said anything yet about the underemployed; there are two possible types, those who want to work more hours, and the people who are working in jobs well beneath their abilities. These numbers are harder to capture, and I can't think of a reason that the populations of the U.S. and Europe would be considerably different. However, we shouldn't forget these people when we talk about the health of the labor market.

Paul Krugman of the New York Times has a post showing the U6 unemployment rate, a measure that attempts to determine "labor underutilization." The graph is fascinating; it shows the unemployment rate getting worse for more than the past year, and the current rate about 9%. This metric feels a little more consistent with the European figures we see, at least to me.

On the other hand, take Larry Kudlow...please. He has written about the good side of recessions: "Recessions are therapeutic. They cleanse excess from the economy." Since he's willing to concede our present recession exists on the basis of the jobs-loss report, one can only assume he considers the employed to be part of that excess. Oddly enough, it is easy to find a somewhat more moderately-toned post by Kudlow - one wonders about the differences (and I won't get into his main solution, the cutting of corporate taxes, today - I don't believe that it would have the wondrous effects he predicts).

At any rate, it seems we should take all these numbers with a very large chunk of NaCl. They're all pretty fluid until well past the time they're actionable, and can be used to support almost any economic theory. I think it's pretty obvious that there are a lot of people hurting, and the call for greater numbers of H-1B visas and liberal offshoring isn't likely to help. Of course, those calling for those policies aren't too concerned about that lot of people, are they?

Review - Red Mandarin Dress

The night advanced, I awake,
no way to renew my walk
along the old garden:
a tired traveler stranded at the end of the world,
gazing homeward, heartbroken.

The Swallow Pavilion is deserted.
Where is the beauty?
Swallows alone are locked inside, for no purpose.
It is nothing but a dream,
in the past, or at present.

Whoever wakes out of the dream?
There is only a never-ending cycle
of old joy, and new grief.
Someday, someone else,
in view of the yellow tower at night,
may sigh deeply for me.
- "Swallow Pavilion," Su Shi

Very few mysteries feature such a poem, but there is little conventional about the remarkable series of Inspector Chen mysteries written by Qiu Xiaolong, the most recent of which is Red Mandarin Dress (2007). This is the fifth in the series set in Shanghai, and brings us to the mid-1990s.

Let's get to the major negative first. As a mystery, this book comes up short. You don't need to have a degree in criminology, just some experience watching the TV show Criminal Minds, to figure out the basics of the plot very early on. Added to a preposterous coincidence, the facts of the crime and the criminal just don't add up to much. The earlier books in the series were better as crime procedurals.

But the plot isn't the main point of this series. I sense that Qiu chose a policeman as his protagonist more because of his mobility, his freedom to talk to people from different ways of life, than because of any burning desire to write crime dramas. Inspector Chen is an unusual figure, a man torn between the desire for justice and his other life as a poet and translator (no accident that Qiu is a poet and a translator, I should think).

The real fascination here is watching a society in radical transition, as China moves from communism to capitalism, as it attempts to throw off Maoism without accepting collective guilt for the abuses and atrocities under that system. The orderly lines of Confucianism are giving away to the chaotic randomness of free-market economics, even as the bureaucratic forces of authoritarianism attempt to maintain their hold on society. The descriptions of life in Shanghai, as modern high-rise developments coexist with single-family shikumen that have been subdivided into multi-family dwellings, are vivid.

The late film critic Gene Siskel used to say that his favorite movies were those that transported the viewer into a different world. My favorite fictional works work in the same way for me. The difference can come from style (as in the books of James Ellroy) or plot. Red Mandarin Dress takes the reader into a different kind of thought, a world that, while recognizable as similar to ours, is actually quite altered. I don't know that there is an innate Chinese-ness that is so separated from ours, but the turmoil through which that society has gone over the last 50 years has created a mindset that only a skilled author can convey to us. Qiu does that well, and I highly recommend this book.

Foreign aid to CEOs

I've tried mightily not to be unfair to American CEOs. I have known a few in the course of my working life (and even more CEO wannabes), and they're a mixed bag. I've met only one who might possibly be called a visionary in any way; the rest have been fairly myopic individuals, focused narrowly on their businesses with little larger perspective. (And I doubt that it's a coincidence that the one standout came of age in the 1920s and '30s.)

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).

What I do want to do is switch gears and talk about something else for a moment. I've read a lot of books and articles lately that talk about the lamentable record of the United States when it comes to foreign aid. (For a lengthy discussion of this point, see here.) It is claimed that, for all our wealth, we help out too little, coming up well short in direct government aid to the people of developing nations.

Our cheapness is somewhat mitigated by our private generosity, but it's clear that we still come up behind Sweden, Denmark, and many others, especially surprising considering our creation of programs like the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after World War II. The question is, how can we have so much and give so little?

I can think of two arguments, each of which has some validity. First, we are not a society that believes in public solutions, that, especially since Reagan, sees government as the problem. To tax our citizens and give that money to other countries is counterproductive (so the argument goes), since government can't be trusted to pick winners in the geopolitical game. This has been especially true since the end of the Cold War, as there is no longer a strategic advantage to "proving" the superiority of democratic free-market capitalism.

Second, so much of our aid was mis-directed. We've all heard the stories of tinpot dictators diverting vast sums of food aid to building palaces, so even our best-intentioned programs have failed miserably in effectiveness.

Each of these arguments has reduced the desire of Americans to support direct outlays to foreign governments. Any candidate running on a platform that stressed the payment of foreign aid to other countries would soon find how unpopular that is.

But many of the aforementioned books and articles stress the desirability of these programs, and justify them in various ways, including the reduction in Islamic hate and terrorism. Something you will often read is that, even if only a fraction of the aid gets by the ruling class, it will still help the people - 2% of $10 million will make such a difference to lives that it compensates for the wasted 98%.

The counter to this, of course, is that well-designed programs, under the auspices of the United Nations or an NGO, one that puts people on the ground to monitor the giving of the aid, can up that 2% to something that is really helpful. Since foreign aid is not a specialty of mine, I will leave this topic here.

Back to the United States, and its reluctance to help the poor and downtrodden in other lands. While it is undeniable that our direct aid is underwhelming, we do have an effective and growing foreign aid program: the offshoring of American jobs and the granting of H-1B visas. All of these efforts to give work to people from other countries essentially provide millions of uncounted dollars to those people - a particularly American free-market way of providing aid to other nations. (Note: I'm not forgetting the thousands of students who take slots in our universities, particularly our public ones, and who benefit accordingly; that certainly presents a risk as more of them take their diplomas and go home, but it's not necessary for my current argument.)

Since the employees in or from other countries do not make as much money as those Americans who used to hold those positions (otherwise there would be little incentive to make use of these techniques), there is "extra" money swirling around. Let's look at who gets that money.

The country to which jobs are outsourced benefits (by the way, I'm not overlooking the difference in H-1B programs, but money does flow back through remittances, and the workers eventually flow back with more marketable skills, so the benefits are roughly the same) through the employment of their people and the building of their industries. The people who get the jobs benefit, even if they do receive only 20-30% of the wages that an American would get (in a form of labor utility arbitrage, the wages are still better than the alternative jobs would provide).

In the United States, the benefits are largely under the control of corporate executives. It is likely that prices will come down somewhat, which benefits consumers, but there is ample proof that the lower prices are a small fraction of the returns from outsourcing. Profits will probably go up somewhat, as costs are lower, but it is not clear that they go up by as much as the actual returns from moving the jobs, so investors do not get the bulk of the advantage. Executives could invest those savings in the company, using this opportunity to innovate and make a better world.

But I think we all know where many of the benefits tend to go - right into the pockets of executives. Bonuses are paid to the cost-cutting geniuses (who found about offshoring by reading The World is Flat or Fortune magazine), facilitating the purchase of that fourth vacation home or 15th luxury car.

So far, all I've discussed are the gains. Does anyone lose? Of course. There is an unquantifiable risk to the average American as skills and data are sent offshore; should we be comfortable with mortgage information sitting in the servers in Bangalore? We have convinced ourselves that our coworkers will forever be our geopolitical friends, and I hope that's true, but it still presents a risk.

Any other losers? Oh, right, I almost forgot the workers who lose their jobs, and, in many cases, their careers. They pay a heavy price indeed for all these great society benefits. But it benefits other countries, so we have a trade-off. We're taking money away from American workers and giving it to other people.

Wait a second, that sounds like foreign aid. And that's exactly what it is, except that, instead of using taxes and spreading the burden of helping others across the whole population, we're concentrating the expense in the factory workers and call center employees and software developers who are forced to create their lives again.

So we have a system in which a relatively few (but growing) number of Americans are giving up a lot to provide foreign aid, and the individuals who are benefiting the most are...corporate executives. And the most of the most goes to those sitting at the top of the corporate pyramid, the CEOs.

We have foreign aid moving from Americans to people of other nations, with fat cats in the middle taking a big chunk of it for themselves. This is just like the old system, except that, instead of dictators building mansions with our money, we have American CEOs building mansions with our money.

I guess it's a little better, since the construction jobs are going to Americans...

Review - The Sanctuary

The Sanctuary by Raymond Khoury is a book in the tradition of The Da Vinci Code: plucky heroine, uncertain loyalties, and wisdom of the ancients that would rock the world if it came out - some will do anything to possess it, others would do anything to protect it.

Khoury is a screenwriter, and this book demonstrates that sensibility. If you can read its 432 pages in 90 minutes or so, it may seem fast-paced and exciting, and you could see that, in the hands of a good director, especially one who could cut out some of the numbing repetition and driving around, it might be worthwhile.

But it is a book, and does not take full advantage of that. I'm not averse to long asides in a book like this about history, or geography, or religion (though many readers are). Perhaps as a concession to those readers, The Sanctuary does very little to draw us into the sweeping multi-era period that it covers. If we're not going to reap the fruits of Michener-like research, we're left with plot, characterization, and setting.

And what can you expect of characterization here? Thrillers tend to set the bar pretty low in that arena, but Khoury doesn't clear it. The central idea of the book could lead to some insightful thinking about how the radical discovery would change anyone who was a part of it; we blow by that idea in favor of stereotypes (which, again, are acceptable in a movie, where we have to peg our characters quickly).

As for place, there is some mild interest in the settings, but they are not quite vivid enough to overcome the cardboard people.

Then there's plot. Many people hate the novels of Ludlum, but, at his best, his books are propulsive, leaping from place to place with an exciting recklessness. Often, there's nothing more to his plots than that someone is being chased, but he does engage the reader. Khoury doesn't display that talent. The action scenes are routine, and the central motivator of the book is completely predictable. What little suspense there is often dissipates far too early.

There are also some major language errors. Maybe those bother you, maybe they don't, but it takes me right out of the plot when I read, in a book by a major publisher that employs editors, that someone "poured over the book." I have to stop and think what liquid they've just applied to the ancient text, and that's mighty distracting.

I didn't particularly care for The Da Vinci Code, so it's easy to see how I might be uninterested in a pale copy of it. I continue my quest for a historical thriller that has some meat on the bones; sadly, The Sanctuary isn't it.

Incoming!!

I don't want to pick on Hillary Clinton, really I don't. I've previously discussed why I'm, not fully enthusiastically, behind Barack Obama in this election. I don't ignore his flaws, I wish he had more experience, and I don't like the details of some of his programs, but I do think he offers the best hope, out of the three candidates, for moving this country ahead. He won't deal fully with all of the issues, no product of our current political mechanism will, but he may be able to bring a sense of unity to the nation that will allow us to deal with our future challenges.

That said, I caught Hillary's appearance on the Tonight Show last night, and she opened with a joke.

It is so great to be here, I was so worried I wasn't going to make it. I was pinned down by sniper fire.

I understand the theory that you defuse an uncomfortable situation with humor, and that, especially in campaigns, you want to control a bad moment by grabbing it.

But, even if you're not quite as apoplectic as Christopher Hitchens about Hillary's "misspeaking" about her trip to Bosnia, I don't see how you can be anything less than uncomfortable about her joke. How would this be any different from Bill Clinton coming on to Jay's show and saying, "I was worried I wasn't going to make it, I was having sex with that woman"?

We shouldn't confuse self-deprecation with honesty; sure, Hillary can laugh about it, but that doesn't change the fact of the lie. There was no sniper fire, just a little girl at the airport reciting a poem.

Words are the currency of the politician, especially one running for office, as they can not implement anything in their travels about the country. And just as I wouldn't find it funny to hear a surgeon joke about a botched bypass operation, neither do I find it humorous when a politician, particularly one appealing to us on the basis of her experience, so completely misrepresents something in an attempt to gain credibility, then yuks it up with Jay.

Hillary, apologize for being untruthful, how about that? Then we'll get back to an important campaign, and the voters can decide how much to discount your future truthfulness and claims of experience.

The power of monsters (or the monster of Power)

A few weeks ago, I criticized Samantha Power, erstwhile adviser to Barack Obama, for calling Hillary Clinton "a monster." I wrote then, "She's seen the effects of letting real monsters act freely. While America may have done too little during many of the world's genocides, that's a long way from equating Hillary with machete-wielding evildoers."

In reviewing Power's book ("A Problem from Hell") earlier this week, I failed to link the book to the "monster" comment properly, probably because I didn't have anything to say. The book is a damning indictment of America's neglect of genocide around the world, but Hillary doesn't show up at all. Bill Clinton is blamed for his deficiencies in dealing with Rwanda and Bosnia, but credited, to some extent, for leading the way in intervening in Kosovo. But there is no mention of his "co-president."

Now comes Christopher Hitchens in Slate and, whatever else one can say about Hitchens (I weighed in last week with some ideas about his book), it isn't that he holds wishy-washy opinions. He writes about, as he puts it, "her flagrant, hysterical, repetitive, pathological lying about her visit to Bosnia." I, like many others, found the juxtaposition of her words ("landing under sniper fire," "ran with our heads down") and the video, where the First Lady and her 16-year-old daughter saunter off the plane, hilarious and sad. (Hilarious for obvious reasons, sad because I find it discomfiting to watch anyone abase themselves, even when it results from non-entitled desperation and disappointment.)

Hitchens contends that Hillary, in misremembering sniper fire, must be either a sociopathic liar or a deluded fantasist (or both), thus making her unsuitable for the post of president (I resist the temptation to make a comment about, as Garrison Keillor calls him, the Current Occupant).

It's what he goes on to say that is troubling. As has been well chronicled (and not just by Power), Bill Clinton made certain promises about Bosnia that he failed to keep. Whether genocide or not, Bosnia in 1992 was a hellhole, and the Clinton campaign promised to do something about it. History tells us that didn't happen. Why not?

Apparently, Hillary, not wanting to get bogged down in a Vietnam-like situation at a time when it would interfere with her signature health care plan, pushed her husband to turn his back on Bosnia. (She only visited four years later, when the fighting was largely over.) Hitchens cites a couple of pieces of evidence to support that.

I can't evaluate that, as I'm sure Hillary could trot out people who would argue otherwise. But there is a disturbing trend developing here, that Hillary tried to bend the White House agenda around her health care initiative; we have now heard that both NAFTA and Bosnia took a back seat.

One of the key jobs of a president is to balance and prioritize, to deal with a multitude of issues without letting any one of them dominate the agenda or fall through the cracks. If the accounts are true, Hillary would seem to have some issues on that score. If a health care plan, important as that might be, can force everything else to the back burner, then you have nothing better than a president who, say, would let a war in Iraq distract him from every other pressing concern.

As for Samantha Power, we may now have an explanation for her "monster" comment. It could well be that, despite a lack of reference to it in her book, she blames Hillary for the inaction on Bosnia (perhaps Rwanda as well), and truly does, for right or wrong, believe her to be a monster.

The magic market

Andrew Leonard in Slate posts about the comments Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke made to Congress this morning. In it, Bernanke made fairly dire remarks about the economy as a whole and the Bear Stearns situation in particular. I'll let you read that for yourself; it's basic confirmation that the Fed felt Bear Stearns might bring down a good portion of our financial structure, so had to put up taxpayer money to guarantee that wouldn't happen. I admit to mixed feelings about this decision, so I'll talk about something else.

The Chairman says, "Normally, the market sorts out which companies survive and which fail, and that is as it should be."

Of course, this is nonsense. We see example after example of government structures, laws, and institutions being used to "help" companies survive. Take United Airlines...please. Chapter 11 allowed them to stiff shareholders, offload their pensions, and emerge financially secure (if no better operationally) than before. Their executives came out better than whole, but it's by no means certain that the overall economy is better off for propping up this wretched airline.

Slippery slope

I'm not fond of slippery slope arguments. The idea that, if you accept one thing, then you must accept the next, and so forth into infinity, and the infinity is unacceptable, so you cannot accept the first, is logically untenable. It also leads to questionable policy when governments use it (if we let the Communists take Vietnam, then they'll take Hawaii...).

However, slippery slope arguments need to be carefully differentiated from implication arguments. While the line is not always clear, it is fair to create a chain of implications (B follows A, C follows B, D follows C; A; then D), even if it is difficult to create all of the implications.

This musing on logic comes as a result of a letter in today's Chicago Tribune. I wouldn't normally make a big deal about a single letter, but I think the sentiment expressed is one that a surprising number of people, including our administration and possibly one of our presidential candidates, hold:

This is in response to the recent article in the Chicago Tribune that carried the headline "Attacks rage in Baghdad; Shiites loyal to Sadr denounce crackdown" (Page 1, March 28).

It was disturbing to open my Chicago Tribune to a front-page photo from Iraq with that accompanying headline.

This highlighted to the world the deeds of those who wish to bring defeat to this nation.

The terrorists are news savvy.

They do listen to what politicians are saying.

They do pay attention to how the media are reporting the war.

Terrorists groups must love the Tribune and other media publications as they assist the enemy in their media games.

Bad news and sensational headlines from Iraq might sell papers here in the United States.

This same bad news also gives hope to the enemy.

The terrorists are well aware that negative news coverage here in America will increase the calls to withdraw from Iraq.

Time and patience are on the side of the terrorists.

Unfortunately many Americans seem oblivious to the fact there is a global war being waged by Islamic jihadists.

Iraq is just one theater in this war.

And this war threatens not only America but all of Western civilization.

The terrorists are listening.

Words do matter.

Newspapers must be held responsible for the impressions they create in the minds of their readers.

So here is my possibly slippery slope argument: Should the media have withheld coverage of the World Trade Center attacks because it gave "hope to the enemy"? Would we really be stronger if the only coverage we received was happy news, making the terrorists think that we were unaffected by their challenge? The parallels to Bush's "call to go shopping" are unmistakable.

Perhaps the most remarkable sentence in the letter is the last. Newspapers have enough problems these days without being held responsible for whatever ideas pop up in the heads of anyone with 75 cents to spend. There are questions of objectivity and fairness with which the best newspapers struggle, not always successfully; if they go further and only write stories that create favorable impressions, they won't be doing their job at all.

More to the point, they won't be informing the public of those things that permit democracy to work. It's difficult to imagine what our nation would be like if we didn't have journalists providing a counterpoint, no matter how often flawed, to the official spin. I can be critical of journalists at times, but I have never once questioned that their job is necessary and important. It's a shame that fear causes other people to see it differently.