There’s a very personal side to the Red Queen’s Race, and that’s what happens to individuals. For example, to people like my wife. As a professor of music and an opera director, she’s theoretically on a nine month contract — except theory is far different from practice. Admittedly, instead of working the 60-80 hour weeks, and weekends, she works during the school year, she’s only working 40 plus hours pretty much every week of her “vacation,” just to handle all the aspects of her job that don’t fit into the year, as well as: (1) counsel incoming freshmen during the three one-week sessions the university has scheduled in order to compete for students; (2) develop three new courses to help implement the new degrees offered by the University and the Music Department; (3) write the two scholarly papers due before school starts again in August; (4) track and assign incoming students; (5) develop the ground plans, staging, and rehearsal schedules for the coming year’s opera productions… and about ten other things, all during her theoretical vacation. She’s far from the only one at the university. In fact, dozens of them all laugh, and not cheerfully, at what they call “the myth of the nine month contract,” because it really amounts to the equivalent of a 25% pay cut, or 25% more in work for no more pay.

But they’re certainly not the only ones with this kind of problem. There’s a doctor I know well, who’s a surgeon and a researcher, as well as a department head, at a major medical center and who spent the last year carrying not only her job, but that of her non-existent assistant [also a doctor’s position], because budgetary constraints meant holding off filling the position for a year. The director of human resources at a major chemical company has told me that the company is always juggling these issues, because of cost and resource constraints.

Certainly, the effect has also hit the fiction publishing field. Writers whose work has won critical plaudits have been forced to move to small presses… or not have their work published at all because of the ever-increasing pressure for efficiency and profitability. Other writers are told that certain kinds of books can’t be accepted because they’re unlikely to meet expected financial and sales goals.

All across the United States, those in management and professional positions are finding themselves handling both their jobs and those once held by subordinates. Middle management positions have been trimmed everywhere, in the name of efficiency. But the work load hasn’t been cut anywhere close to commensurately. On a other economic levels, everyone has heard about all the renegotiated salaries across industry after industry, from pay cuts for pilots and flight attendants, to bankruptcy-forced pay cuts, to the replacement of full-time employees with part-timers without benefits. In fact, the only area where this hasn’t hit is CEO compensation, which for the moment seems to remain above the effect of the Red Queen’s race.

And the bottom line still remains… run faster, because running as hard as you can only leaves you in the same place.

In Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass, which is, incidentally, a classic tour-de-force, the Red Queen tells Alice that running as fast as she can will not take her anywhere. To get anywhere, she must run even faster. The concept of “the Red Queen’s race” crops up occasionally, and Isaac Asimov even wrote a story with that title.

Today, unfortunately, I see western society developing along lines that make a Red Queen’s race all too likely. What do I mean?

A few examples might help. It’s widely known and often cited that working Americans take much less vacation time than people in any other industrialized nation, and the amount of vacation time taken continues to decrease. Yet, the real earnings of average Americans, after adjustment for inflation [and that adjustment, as I’ve noted earlier, does not take into account the full amount of inflation] have actually decreased in recent years. Now, the easy answer, and the one that the demagogues of the left quickly invoke, is that’s because all the “excess” goes to the “rich.” Some of it does, but one could confiscate the amount of “excess” and redistribute it across the population, and it wouldn’t change the overall picture much, and not for long. Spread across the population, those hundreds of billions of assets of the “truly rich” might increase family income by a few thousand dollars — for all of one year, because you can bet that sort of confiscatory taxation would drive those individuals right out of the country. On the other hand, the demagogues of the right claim that the problem is that the government taxation steals money from the productive and gives it to the unproductive. And while it is indubitably true that the U.S. tax system redistributes income, the United States is far less redistributive than most European countries, and the recipients of that redistributed income generally spend every last cent on buying goods and services from others, often creating more income than is “taken” for society as whole.

Yet “real” wages are tending to decline. Why?

First, we’re in a global economy, and now that technology and education are more wide-spread, other countries can produce many goods more cheaply. How are Americans compensating? They’re working longer and harder, rather than reduce their standard of living. Now that cheap credit is vanishing, and the piggy-bank of home equity has been deflated, they’re dipping more into savings and retirement.

Second, energy costs are rising, and that will squeeze U.S. businesses — and employee compensation — even more.

Even so, the Red Queen problem doesn’t lie mainly in income, but in resources and outlays, and it’s exacerbated by our vaunted technology. For example, two hundred years ago, if you got cancer, there wasn’t anything to be done, and you died. If you had congestive heart failure, not all the doctors in the world could do anything, no matter what your wealth might have been. Today, an “average,” run-of-the-mill cancer treatment can easily exceed $200,000 a year. Already, annual Medicare expenditures alone exceed $200 billion, and health care costs are increasing more than twice the rate of other services, and that doesn’t factor in private health care costs or the ever more expensive drugs and treatments.

Likewise, in the past travel and transport were limited, as were goods. The result of the industrial revolution, technology, and globalization is that more and more of the world has the ability to buy more and more goods and services… but the total of those goods and services is limited. Call it, if you will, Malthusian economics, postponed, delayed, and modified, but Malthusian nonetheless.

The real Red Queen’s race is the one that has been around since the beginning of civilization — and one whose effects have been largely mitigated or delayed in the industrialized west for the past century or so. Simply put, we have now reached the point in the development of our civilization where it will shortly become obvious to all levels of all societies that, technology and ingenuity notwithstanding, we cannot physically provide the very best in health care, commodity goods, services, housing, and food to every individual, or even to a sizable fraction of our populations.

Yes, we will be able to provide health care for most problems for most people, but not the range of life-extending and cancer-controlling and other extensive procedures for everyone — just for a comparative few. Yes, we will be able to provide fuel for transportation, but not fuel for four billion personal vehicles [a rate roughly half the U.S. average applied to the entire world, and if you think I’m being unreasonable, just look at the rate of growth of motor vehicles in China]. Yes, we will be able to provide housing, but not the 2,400 average square footage per house for U.S. new housing. And since the United States will be competing in a world market for energy, food, goods, and services, we won’t be able to isolate ourselves from these effects the way we have in the past.

Welcome back to the Red Queen’s race.

Readers of science fiction and, in particular, fantasy often read about the evils of zealotry in fictional worlds, and how it destroys people. Likewise, we in the “enlightened” and industrialized world, particularly the western world, tend to look down on the Islamic “zealots,” and to ignore anything they say which doesn’t agree with our view of the world. Now… don’t get me wrong. I am not an apologist for the excesses of Islam, nor do I have any desire to live in a culture dominated by any version of Sharia, but we tend to forget that western industrialized culture also has its zealots. In particular I’m referring to the far right-wing, the business-model-is-best, policy wonks, politicians, and bureaucrats.

Earlier, I mentioned how the failures of airline deregulation could be traced to the fact that those structuring the deregulation failed to understand or even consider that the industry doesn’t fit into a free market because there are far too many geographic, economic, and structural barriers to free and open competition. But those facts were brushed aside, and now travelers face the possibility of transportation purgatory every time they enter an airport.

Just the other day I read that some economists were re-thinking the “free-trade” ideal, and the idea that free trade was always a blessing. In fact, this group concluded free trade might not necessarily be good for some developing nations, good as it might be for the rest of the world. Then, there are the educational bureaucrats who have been attempting to restructure education on a “business basis,” which results in institutions competing for students on the basis of popularity, the increasing easiness of courses and majors, and in the watering-down of curricula and the continued pressure to increase class sizes to gain economies of scale. Whole departments have been abolished in institution after institution because enrollments were not economic, all with little consideration about the educational role of a university — supposedly its purpose.

We face a tremendous oil crisis today in the United States because the “free-market” policies of our government continually discouraged investment in alternative fuels and in more efficient automotive transport, and it’s likely that at least one of the Big Three automakers will go under financially because a tacit reliance on the economic assumption that cheap oil would always be available, which encouraged U.S. automakers to concentrate on more profitable gas-guzzling huge SUVs and trucks. Yes, that was economics — short-term economics, because in consumer goods, the marketplace reflects the “now,” not the future. That’s just one of the problems with unfettered “free-marketing.” The readjustments when the economics change can be catastrophic, something the advocates of the “business model” fail to point out.

The problem is really fairly simple to describe: Not all aspects of any society fit the “free-market” mold, because while truly free markets are certainly efficient, first, not all societal actions fit into a free market, and, second, sometimes that vaunted free-market efficiency is brutally inhumane and uncivilized. Yet, anyone who raises those issues seriously and suggests that at times regulation and control of activities on a non-economic basis might just be necessary and justifiable risks an ire and scorn from the high priests of the market not all that much different in tone than non-believers in an Islamic nation risk from their high priests — except that in the United States, the market high priests only want the power to sever people from their jobs and benefits when either is “un-economic,” as opposed to severing people from their heads, which is highly possible in the more theocratic Islamic regimes.

In either case, however, just as in too many fantasy novels, the high priests are far more interested in the purity of their beliefs than in the practical welfare of their people, and in that sense, there’s not all that much difference between in the approach of the free-market zealots and the Islamic zealots.

On Sunday, July 6th, Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer played an incredible tennis match at Wimbledon, but what I found most interesting was that no U.S. men reached even the semi-finals, nor did they at the French Open. I also watched the televised celebration of the fourth of July at the U.S. Capitol and was far less than impressed with the performance of “American Idol” Tyler Hicks. On what might seem an unrelated note, the performance of American stock analysts was woefully inadequate in ferreting out and making public the all-too-obvious weaknesses in the mortgage securitization field, and the greed of all too many institutional investors in seeking “quick and unrealistic profits” was a major factor in creating the circumstances that led to the mortgage meltdown and the current recession. And, in the field of F&SF writing, where are the new “great” young American males? I see women with promise; I see comparatively young British writers like Charles Stross. I see a “great” book here and there, but see comparatively little continued production of consistently good books by more than just a few American male writers under 40, while the shelves are exploding with books by American women.

Admittedly, these are semi-anecdotal examples, but from what I’ve seen, they’re definitely representative. In all these cases, American men don’t seem terribly interested in perfecting the full range of talents necessary to excel. Current “top-level” American male tennis players don’t want to put in the hours and effort to perfect back-court ground strokes and work to obtain the conditioning necessary to scrap for every point in the way John McEnroe and Andre Agassi once did. One noted U.S. tennis coach closed his camp with the statement that young Americans didn’t want to work, because it interfered with their social life. Tyler Hicks is good looking, well-dressed, energetic, and enthusiastic, with good dance moves. Unfortunately, he’s supposed to be a singer, and his singing is definitely second-class, if that. So why are Americans focusing so much on appearance and failing to see that his vocal production is lacking? The failure of U.S. financial analysts to consider the full range of factors behind the credit and mortgage boom… and subsequent bust… reflects the same kind of failure — a focus on what is immediate and easy and profitable, rather than on the core requirements for long-term excellence and financial stability — and the results were just as predictable.

All of this applies to writing as well. In its simplest sense, fiction consists of two components — technical skill in putting words on the page and story-telling. Writers who have great technical skill and write beautifully crafted prose with either limited story-telling or none to speak of [such as in the Ghormenghast Trilogy] aren’t complete writers, and won’t sell much, if anything. Writers who are technically deficient but who tell great stories are like the top American tennis players — they’ll make money, but they’ll never be great.

In any field, to excel requires a mastery of the full range of skills, not just what’s easy, or popular, or what brings in the cash, and right now, it seems to me, the interest in popularity and cash is destroying the desire for greatness in all too many fields in the United States, especially those that take great and sustained effort, and particularly among American men.

The necktie manufacturing trade association has closed its doors, because there are no longer enough necktie manufacturers to support it. While I doubt the demise of the association has caused much mourning outside the fashion industry… it does concern me, and not because I always wear a tie. I don’t, except to conventions and other appropriate business and social occasions. But it does concern me because of what it represents. The decline of the necktie might well be likened to the canary expiring in the social coal mine, so to speak.

Fashion is not just the presentation of one’s self through attire. It’s also a form of acknowledgment that there are duties to society which include appropriate clothing. Or put another way, wearing a tee-shirt to church or to a wedding or a tank-top to a restaurant, even McDonalds, is a form of disrespect to those in either place. It’s an attitude best described as “in your face, I’ll wear what I want.”

Interestingly enough, when Rudy Giuliani was mayor of New York City, he forced a crackdown on minor offenses, which initially was met with ridicule. But… the results of this type of policing in New York and elsewhere, not surprisingly to me, have shown that it also decreases other types of crime. That may well be because it reinforces societal expectations on behavior.

My late father-in-law was a trucker at a time when truckers were expected to wear uniforms of the company for which they drove [imagine that!], and frankly, in those days, truckers were a great deal more polite, both in person and in the way in which they handled their rigs. I can’t prove it, but I believe those uniforms reinforced their image and their sense of responsibility.

Dressing in an inappropriately sloppy fashion and just for one’s self when going out in public is another form of self-indulgence, the visual equivalent of bad manners. Bad manners lead to bad behavior. Bad behavior tends to undermine societies and social structures, because all successful and enduring societies are based on a degree of mutual respect between individuals within a society, and bad manners are a form of direct and personal disrespect.

Throughout human history, there have been periods where manners and standards of attire declined. Almost invariably, thereafter so did the society. So, if as a writer, you want to portray a collapsing society, just show one where personal sloppiness and bad manners are abundant, and you won’t be far wrong.

And that’s why I worry about the demise of the necktie and the necktie manufacturing trade association.