The   November 20^th edition of The Economist features an observation on the growth of data surrounding purchases of bonds, stocks, derivatives, etc. The article notes that since the founding of the Centre for Research in Security Prices at the University of Chicago in 1960, initially funded by Merrill Lynch, the number of academic economic journals dealing with, analyzing, or providing such data has grown from 80 then to over 800 today.

Yet some economists, such as Robert Shiller of Yale University, according to The Economist, dispute the value of such information, noting that even with all the proliferation of data, no one can explain the market melt-down of two years ago.  Others dispute Shiller, pointing out that the market demand for such information proves its value.

In my view, they’re both right, because each is talking about a different aspect of the information.  Shiller is talking about understanding how the securities markets actually work, especially in times when markets perform “abnormally,” while all those who want more and more data are talking about how valuable they find it in making money through trading.

Combine all that data with sophisticated trend analysis and you get knowledge that can make a great deal of money, generally always in short-run situations, but what all that data won’t tell you is when something basic is going to change, and change abruptly.  And those who mine the data are more than happy to be able to use that data 99% of the time to make piles of money. As for the one percent of the time that they’re wrong… well… everything they’ve made the rest of the time covers that – for them.  What their profits don’t do is remedy the vast economic damage that ripples through the economy when one of those unforeseen market meltdowns occurs.

The problem with the computerized use of all this securities market data is that, because it works so well so much of the time for those with the resources to exploit it, there’s little incentive to fund or look into basic research in the field.  In addition, the economists who do all the short-term analysis are, according to Professor Shiller, “idiot savants, who get a sense of authority from work that contains lots of data.”   Again, the problem is that the focus on daily market economics stresses immediate returns to the detriment of long-term understanding… or wisdom, if you will.

And what else is new?

Today is “black Friday,” the day after Thanksgiving when supposedly the Christmas shopping madness seizes the American people and drives them into a frenzy of buying for themselves and others.  While the term “Black Friday” was used at least as far back as 1869, it originally referred to financial crises, but at some point in the mid-1970s, newspapers and media began referring to the day after Thanksgiving as an indicator of what merchants were likely to be “in the black,” or profitable, because of the Christmas buying season. After a time, and particularly in the last decade, this meaning of “black Friday” has usurped all others.

Unfortunately, there are a number of problems with this usage, and especially with the implications behind it.  Because everyone seems to want to concentrate on the economic side, I’ll begin there.  First, the idea of “black Friday” emphasizes consumer buying and consumption as the primary measure of U.S. economic power and success, at a time when the majority of the goods consumed come from other countries.  Second, it ties expectations to a given day of the year. In addition, it creates a mindset that suggests, if a retail business’s holiday revenues are not substantial, then there’s something wrong.  While that may be true for seasonal goods, not all consumer products are seasonal.

Beyond those reasons are the ethical ones.  Do we really want to continue to push the idea of consumer spending as the only – or even the principal – way to keep the economy going, particularly at a time when our entire societal infrastructure, from roads to bridges, to financial structures, to the electrical grid, among others, need rebuilding or total re-structuring?  At a time when Americans, with something like five percent of the world’s population, already consume 25% of its annual output?  Do we want to create a mindset that emphasizes consumption at a time when so many people are struggling to make ends meet?

Then there’s the purely practical question of whether it’s a good idea to emphasize consumption – most of it temporary in nature – when those goods are largely produced overseas, while neglecting building and using capital goods that will generate jobs in the United States.

Black Friday – an economic success or a societal disaster?

As some readers may know, my wife is a professional singer who is also a professor of voice and opera.  Among her many duties is that of teaching aspiring classical singers diction and literature.  One notable type of song literature required of these students is that of “art song,” and a significant percentage of art song consists of poetry set to music by composers.  Various forms of art song, if called by different names, have been composed in many languages, although classical singers usually begin by learning art songs in English, French, German, and Italian.

Earlier this semester, my wife was beginning the section on American and English art song, and out of a class of fifteen students, she found that what they had read in high school appeared to be limited to a bit of Chaucer and Shakespeare, along with Emily Dickinson, and perhaps T.S. Eliot.

None of the students had learned any poetry by such greats as John Milton, William Blake, Shelley, Byron, Keats, Yeats, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rosetti., Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, W.H. Auden, A.E. Housman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Amy Lowell. In fact, none of them even appeared to have read Robert Frost. Moreover, none of them could actually read verse, except in a halting monotone.  This lack of background in poetry puts them at a severe disadvantage, because these are the poets whose words have been put to music in art song and even in choral works.

These were not disadvantaged students. They came out of high school with good grades and good standardized test scores.  Yet they know essentially very little about the historical written arts of their own native language.  In turn, this lack shows up in their narrowness of word usage, metaphor, and general weakness in both oral and written expression. Whether it’s related or not, it does appear that there’s also a correlation between the loss of  solid English instruction and the growth of such phrases as “you know”; “I mean”; “like…dude”; and scores of other meaningless phrases used to cover lack of even semi-precise expressiveness.

Bring back the great old poets… all of them.

Although I was surrounded by books growing up, I can’t recall ever going to a bookstore to obtain a book until I was in college.  I was a frequent visitor to the local library, and there were the paperback SF novels my mother picked up at the local drugstore, but bookstores weren’t really a part of my orbit, and their absence didn’t seem to affect my voracious reading habit.  As an author, however, I’ve become very aware of bookstores, and over the past twenty years, I’ve entered over a thousand different bookstores, in forty-two of the fifty states, over 120 in the space of three weeks on one tour.  And because I was once an economist I kept track of the numbers and various other economics-related aspects of those bookstores.

The conclusion?  Well… there are many, but the one that concerns me the most are the changes in bookselling and where books can be obtained and what those changes mean for the future functional literacy of the United States.

When I first became a published novelist thirty years ago, for example, the vast majority of malls had small bookstores, usually a Waldenbooks or a B. Dalton, often two of them, one at each end of the mall, or perhaps a Brentano’s or another chain. And I was very much aware of them, because I spent more times in malls than I really wanted to, which is something that occurs when one has pre-teen and teenaged daughters.  According to the statistics, at that time, there were over 1500 Waldenbooks in malls nationwide, and hundreds of B. Daltons, not to mention all the other smaller bookstores. Today, the number of Waldenbooks stores totals less than 200 hundred, and the majority of those were closed because Borders Books, the present parent company of Waldenbooks, did not wish to continue them once it acquired the chain, preferring to replace many small stores with larger Borders stores.  Even so, Borders has something less than five hundred superstores.  The same pattern holds true for Barnes and Noble, the parent of the now-or-almost-defunct B. Dalton stores.  The actual number of bookstores operated by these two giant chains is roughly half what they operated twenty-five years ago.  At the same time, the growth of the chain superstores has squeezed out hundreds of smaller independent bookstores.

Prior to 1990, there were somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 book wholesalers in the United States, and there were paperback book racks in all manner of small retail establishments.  Today there are only a handful of wholesalers, and the neighborhood book rack is a thing truly of the past.

Add to this pattern the location of the book superstores.  Virtually all of these stores are located in the most affluent sections of the areas they serve.  In virtually every city I’ve visited in the last fifteen years, there are huge sections of the city, sometimes as much as 60 percent of the area, if not more, where there is no bookstore within miles, and often no convenient public transport. There are fewer and fewer small local bookstores, and most large bookstores are located in or near upscale super malls.  Very few, if any, malls serving the un-affluent have bookstores.  From a short-term economic standpoint, this makes sense for the mega-store chains.  From a cultural standpoint, and from a long-term customer development standpoint, it’s a disaster because it limits easy access to one of the principal sources of books largely to the most affluent segments of society.

What about the book sections in Wal-Marts?  The racks and carrels in the average super Wal-Mart number roughly a third of those in the size of the smallest of the Waldenbooks stores I used to visit, and the range of books is severely limited, effectively to the best-sellers of each genre.

Then, because of recent economic pressures, the local libraries are seeing their budgets cut and cut, as are school libraries – if the school even has a library.

Research done for publishing firms has shown that so-called impulse book purchasing – the kind once made possible be neighborhood book racks and ubiquitous small mall bookstores, accounted for a significant percentage of new readers… and the comic book racks that were next to the book racks provided a transition from the graphic format to the books.

Some have claimed that books will be replaced by the screen and the I-phone and other screen “aps,” and that well may be… for those who can already read… but the statistics show that while fewer Americans are totally illiterate, an ever-increasing percentage is effectively functionally illiterate.

Is that functional illiteracy any wonder… when it really does take a book to start learning to read and when books are becoming harder and harder to come by for those who need them the most?

Decades ago, the late science fiction writer Mack Reynolds wrote a novel depicting a future United States in which citizens received one “basic” vote, and then could “earn” additional votes for various accomplishments, such as earning advanced degrees, completing a period of military and/or public service, etc.  At the time of the book, Reynolds received a great deal of flak for that concept, and I suspect, were anyone to advance such an idea today, the outcry would likely be even greater.

But why?  In point of fact, those with great sums of money already exert a disproportionate amount of influence over the electoral process, especially in the United States now that the U.S. Supreme Court has granted corporations and wealthy individuals access to the media that is only limited by the amount of their resources, in effect granting such entities the impact of millions of votes. The rationale for the court decision, which has in effect been legally sustained, is that restriction on the use of money for advertising one’s political views and goals is in effect a restriction on first amendment freedom of speech rights.  The practical problem with this decision is that, in a culture dominated by pervasive mass media, the result is to multiply the effect of exercising freedom-of-speech rights manifold for those who have large amounts of wealth.  Since, given the costs of effectively using mass media, only the top one or two tenths of one percent of the population can exercise such media-enhanced rights, the result of the decision is to give disproportionate influence to a tiny fraction of the population.  Moreover, as a result of the decision, in most cases, donors to groups and corporations availing themselves of this “right” do not even have to disclose their donations/spending.

The Court’s decision essentially grants greater weight in determining who governs us strictly on the basis of income and wealth.  Are not other qualities and accomplishments also of equal or greater value to civilization?  And if so, why should they not be granted greater weight as well? That was really the question Reynolds was addressing in postulating such a change in American society, and it’s a good question.

Before you dismiss the idea out of hand, consider the fact that the way in which our current system operates grants greater governmental influence to a small group of people whose principal talent is making money.  It does not grant such influence to those who teach, who create, or who perform unheralded and often dangerous military and public service, and as the revelations about Iraq have showed, at times such money-making operations have in fact been based on taking advantage of American soldiers deployed abroad, so that those with great sums of money not only gained electoral influence, but did so at the expense of those who served their country… and many of whom died doing so.

Then… tell me again why we don’t need an electoral or regulatory counterbalance to unbridled use of wealth in trying to influence elections.