In the course of the presidential primary debates, both Barrack Obama and John Edwards made continued references to the growing inequality of income and power in the United States, and in his acceptance speech, Obama singled out the “wealthiest” five percent of Americans for heavier taxes. While I’ve also been concerned about what Edwards called “the two Americas,” the idea of addressing it by increasing taxes on the “wealthy” worries me greatly for a number of reasons.

First, as I noted in an earlier blog post, real “wealth” varies widely by geography and economic setting, and defining who is wealthy by an arbitrary number or percentage is every bit as erroneous as claiming that every member of one ethnic group is money-grubbing or that most young Black inner-city males are gang-members. Claiming that a New York City or San Francisco family [or families in any other number of high-cost cities] where both parents work full time and bring in a combined income of $200,000 are wealthy is absurd. That income can bring a very good life-style in much of America, but in New York and many other cities where tens of millions of Americans live, it’s definitely middle-class and nowhere close to “wealthy.”

Second, using taxation to address income inequality doesn’t work very well, because those who are truly wealthy have the assets and abilities to avoid increased taxation, while those who are merely affluent are the ones who find themselves bearing the burden of lost income. For example, someone who makes, say $5 million a year, and who would face increased taxes of 10%, can pay an accountant $100,000 a year to find away to avoid the taxes, and save $400,000. It makes no sense for family making $200,000 a year and facing $20,000 more in taxes to hire that accountant, nor do they have the financial assets to deploy in alternative strategies, yet for purposes of the politicians, both families are “wealthy.”

According to recently released IRS statistics, less than one half of one percent of Americans are “wealthy,” meaning that they have assets including houses, of more than two million dollars. When a middle-class house in many cities can easily cost over $500,000 for less than 1,500 square feet, having $2 million in assets may make you “affluent,” but it’s far from “wealthy.” Put another way, the “upper five percent” of Americans that Obama wishes to tax more heavily amounts to roughly fifteen million. According to the IRS, only ten percent of those are wealthy.

But the bigger problem with all of this is the assumption that taking money from those who are presumed to have it and putting that money into federal programs will do something to reverse the recent trends in income inequality.

Some claim that greater education will accomplish such a reversal, but during the last three quarters of a century educational opportunities and achievement for the less advantaged have improved, and yet the income gaps between the richest and the poorest have widened. Others suggest that great improvement in reducing barriers to women will help, but while not all of the barriers to women in high positions or in fields historically dominated by men have been removed, women have seen improvements in the opportunities and income available, and the income gap between rich and poor has still widened. The poorest Americans have far better housing than did the poorest Americans of a century ago and far better amenities in those dwellings. Even for the poorest of Americans, life is better than it was a half century ago.

So, with so many improvements, why has the income gap widened?

Have we become a more greedy society? That’s hard to measure, but I find it difficult to believe that people are inherently greedier today than in the time of the Robber Barons.

Is it because of a “winner-take-all” culture that praises and rewards disproportionately those at the top in whatever field? That this has occurred isn’t subject to debate. The pay received by the “average” business CEO is more than 300 times that of the “average” employee, a spread ten times what it was a half-century ago. In my own field of writing, look at the disparity between J.K. Rowling, with income of hundreds of millions, to any starting novelist with an average first-time advance of perhaps $5,000 to $10,000 for a year’s [if not many years] worth of work. Look at the difference between the pay of the average actor [circa $10,000] and the $20 million plus per film for the top names. Or the NFL minimum compensation versus the tens of millions for glamour quarterbacks. Now… the counter is that the superstars “earn” that money; they bring in the readers that buy the books, the fans who fill the seats and purchase the DVDs. But… the superstars always did. It’s just that with the growing purchasing power of Americans and the concentration of exposure through technology, the revenues that the superstars bring in are so much greater than in the past. In a very real sense, the combination of technology and greater disposable income means greater opportunity to make more money.

Add to that a culture where “worth” is measured more and more by money, by compensation, where business professors make twice what music and science professors do, all because they claim they can earn more in business. They doubtless can, but the comparative earning power in another field doesn’t necessarily translate into teaching effectiveness. Nor do high salaries or compensation in one company mean that everyone in every other company is worth that. And when some of the highest paid corporate CEOs in the financial industry have racked up the largest all-time losses for their corporations, it’s pretty clear that high compensation doesn’t always translate into excellence… but it does translate into a significant income gap between those at the top and those in the middle and on the bottom.

Given these factors and a number more, I have real difficulty in seeing how greater taxation of the upper middle class and the affluent to fund government policies and programs is likely to have much impact on the income gap. It might reduce the deficit, but given the habit of politicians always spending more than they have, I have even greater doubts about that as well.

But… it’s a great political issue, and I’m sure we’ll hear a whole lot more about it over the next eight weeks.

Because I’m a glutton for punishment, as some readers know, I do read the reader reviews of my books, and occasionally, those of other writers. The one thing that strikes me consistently is that there is certainly a percentage of reader reviews where I’m left asking, “Did these people even read the same book?”

The answer is: They read the same assemblage of words, but not the same book.

How does this happen? Why does it happen so often when readers see exactly the same words on the page?

In the simplest terms, words on the page evoke not only their meanings, but the emotional connotations that accompany those meanings. But even meanings vary from reader to reader, and that’s scarcely surprising when you consider that most words have more than one dictionary definition. Then add to that the emotional responses that we all have to words and situations, and we’re bound to have different reactions.

As a writer, what bothers me about all this, I have to admit, is not the difference in the range of reaction to a book but the violence of the reaction by those who dislike a book. In more than 35 years as a professional writer, I’ve seldom ever seen a “positive” reaction to my books or those of any other author of the sort that says, “This is the world’s greatest book” But I have seen more than a few books, and many were not mine, with assessments like, “the most tedious book ever” or “the worst book I’ve ever read” or “totally unreadable.”

What I found most intriguing about these sorts of comments was that they usually occurred amid other comments that praised the depth of the book and the skill of the writer. In fact, they were more likely to occur with a book that other readers praised.

This would tend to support my long-time contention that any review [either by readers or critics] reveals at least as much about the reviewer as about the book being reviewed.

And, unhappily, that leaves us writers with yet another question: Did anyone read the books we wrote, or did they just read their interpretation of what we wrote?

The mortgage securitization debacle and the housing market meltdown illustrate a fundamental aspect of modern technological civilization: the loss of direct personal accountability that accompanies increasingly complex social, technical, and industrially-based cultures.

In a low-tech culture, if I purchase a hammer from the local smith, I know who forged it. If something goes wrong with the tool, there are essentially only two people who are accountable. Either the smith forged an inferior tool, or I used an adequate tool improperly. In such a setting, most of the time, it’s a fairly straight-forward process to determine responsibility and accountability. The same is true when cattle are grown and slaughtered in the same local village.

But… once these and almost all others processes become “industrialized,” who’s responsible when things go wrong… and how can any individual hold anyone accountable? The answer is that, without some sort of societal rules and regulations, with penalties, the individual can’t. The incredible abuses of the food processing industry in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century have been studied and documented in detail, and those abuses led to a range of government regulations and agencies… and many experts still feel that the oversight of the industry leaves much to be desired. The same problem led to environmental abuses and cities where the rivers literally caught fire… and even recently to children’s toys coated in lead paint.

Like it or not, human nature being what it is, all too many people who would not dare to shortchange their families or their neighbors face-to-face seem to have no compunctions about doing so in an industrial or technological society where they’re only a part of the process and where they are never personally held directly accountable.

In the mortgage mess, I doubt seriously that many, if any, mortgage lenders would have recommended that their institutions should keep the vast majority of the sub-prime loans that were bundled together and then sold to investors, especially not if their paychecks depended on the performance of those loans. Instead, all too many of the low-level originators were pressed, either directly or indirectly, to make as many loans as possible, because the originators had no sense of accountability, only the pressure to obtain high yields and fees.

For any society to continue to prosper, there has to be a high degree of accountability, and that accountability can either come from a societal tradition of honesty and responsibility, or from regulatory structures that force some accountability, or from a combination of both. In the end, however, regulation alone will fail, because unchecked human ingenuity and duplicity will force more and more regulations, to the point that the entire society becomes bound so tightly in bureaucracy that change and innovation become virtually impossible. On the other hand, with minimal or no regulation, and no cultural insistence on honesty and responsibility, human vices will destroy the trust and cooperation necessary to maintain a viable high-tech society.

So… any time you start complaining about those endless government regulations that seem to invade everything…you might consider why and how they developed.

I have been known to stand and lecture from soapboxes. I have even been known to pile soapbox upon soapbox and reinforce those soapboxes with yet other soapboxes… and I’m certainly going to reinforce that impression with what follows.

Point number one: There are no new plots. Heinlein said this almost forty years ago, and all too many readers, and even some writers, don’t understand this. There are twists on basic plots; there is window-dressing of all sorts; but the basic plots are still limited. They are: (1) the love story [all kinds of love stories]; (2) the man/woman/AI/alien who learned something; (3) the little shot who becomes a big shot [and the reverse is the classical tragedy]; and (4) the mindless adventure story [otherwise known as the video/board game or James Bond plot, although some would claim it isn’t a plot at all]. The first three plots can be combined; the fourth plot cannot be combined with anything except box office or other receipts.

Point number two: Books without plots have a strong tendency not to sell.

Point number three: The majority of readers prefer books with recognizable plots and characters that appeal to their individual tastes. Because individuals do differ in tastes, there are a number of genres, subgenres, and the like in fiction, and different authors often have differing reader bases.

Point number four: The vast majority of readers want to be entertained, and that entertainment is usually based on plot, characters, events, and structure that meet their needs. Some readers prefer their entertainment to be thought-provoking, but usually it’s only thought-provoking if they happen to agree with the author.

Point number five: Entertaining readers is not a crime; it’s not even a sin. Not entertaining them is occupational suicide, because successful writers must appeal to a certain minimum number of readers, or publishers will no longer publish and distribute their books.

There are scores of good and competent authors who are no longer published because their books did not sell. There are even authors who, editors claim, are exceptional and who do not sell commercially. But, exceptional or not, to survive, an author needs an audience.

Behind all these points is a simple overriding one. Taken in terms of a world-wide perspective [or a galactic one], there are not that many different approaches in basic structure in the books written in any given language, nor in plot. The differences lie in the skill of the writer in presenting the story… and in the receptivity of the readers.

So… when a reader or reviewer claims an author used a hackneyed plot, that’s a cop-out. All plots are hackneyed. What they’re trying to say is that they didn’t like the way the writer presented the plot, or perhaps more accurately, that the writer wasn’t successful in creating the illusion of newness or difference, at least for them… or that they really don’t know why they didn’t like the book, and opted for a convenient excuse for a reason.

There is also a certain faction among readers and reviewers that decries the “endless series” and/or “doorstopper” fantasies, yet I certainly don’t see that criticism in the cases of endless sitcoms, endless TV series, or forever dragged-out miniseries… or in other genre fiction. The only real differences are that there’s a lot more money [and special effects] in the television series… and that generally the science or the fantasy in the endless books is better. As for the criticism that “endlessness” shouldn’t apply to F&SF books… why not?

Along this line, there’s essentially no difference between an author who writes an “endless” series and one who writes the same characters, structure, and plot time after time with different character and place names and different settings. In fact, sometimes the “series” author might be the more honest one, because he or she isn’t trying to give an illusion of difference that doesn’t exist.

And… finally… readers and reviewers who complain that books whose plots and characters they have just dissected in detail are “unreadable” are either lying or don’t understand the meaning of “unreadable,” which, in turn, suggests strongly that their comments should not just be taken with a grain of salt, but that they and their comments should be interred in the salt mine.

And now… it’s time to put away the soapboxes… for at least a while.

Depending on whom you consult, the United States is either barely slogging along economically or already in a recession. Joblessness is way up, and housing prices in some areas have fallen more in percentage terms than they did during the great depression. And how did this all come about?

In general terms, it occurred because mortgage lenders and the largest lending and brokerage institutions in the United States, in order to maximize their own short-term profits, colluded in developing various mechanisms to take marginal or even less credit-worthy home loans, bundle them together, and then sell the securitized and combined mortgages to various institutions under the fraudulent presumption that combining lots of risky loans made them somehow less risky.

As a result, ten or the world’s largest financial institutions have lost over $275 billion, just to date, and those losses don’t include the total dismantling/acquisition of Bear-Sterns, or the billions in losses at smaller institutions. But what happened to those in charge? To date, five of those institutions, including Merrill Lynch and Citicorp, have sacked their top executives.

While the departed CEOs were presiding over this debacle, they collectively earned hundreds of millions of dollars, and when they departed, they left with millions more in severance and retirement benefits. In short, they were highly rewarded for misjudgment and incompetence. The other five CEOs also lost billions and yet they still remain in their positions.

The major U.S. automakers have continued to make and sell enormous cars, and not a one really made a significant investment in developing more efficient smaller cars and SUVs. In addition, over the last twenty years, they have paid for and mounted a continuing lobbying effort to keep Congress and EPA from requiring better mileage standards for vehicles sold in the United States. As a result, when gasoline prices soared, sales of enormous vehicles dropped, and the U.S. automakers all lost billions in the last quarter, and will lose more billions of dollars in the next. But their CEO were paid multimillion dollar salaries to preside over this fiasco. In effect, they were rewarded for failure to anticipate and react to the obvious, and worse, to pay lobbyists to mislead Congress.

This is nothing new. The same sorts of excesses and CEO “rewards” occurred during and the bursting of the “dot.com” bubble, or with Enron, or with… [fill in the blank].

I once lost a job because I listened to the people who used a product and reported to my superiors that the new product would flop miserably. Six months after I departed, the new product did indeed flop miserably, and the marketing vice-president who created the disaster retired with a very decent golden parachute. For me, the failure pushed me in the direction of writing, for which I am belatedly grateful, but for those who stayed with the company, it was the beginning of a long downhill slide from market leadership to buy-out after buy-out, until the company was less than an also-ran.

The question that strikes me about all of this is: Why do we continue to reward such mismanagement?

And my answer is that we pay CEOs and others far too much in terms of “present” profits and success and don’t build in compensation — or lack thereof — for future success or failure. Just how much of these failures would have occurred if the CEOs’ salaries were capped at a few measly million and their “rewards” were based on the company’s value and profitability five or ten years after they left or were booted? Certainly, a lot of workers’ futures are tied to the companies they work for. Why not the financial future of those who direct them?

Because I am a writer, not only my present but my future is determined by how well I write… how I do my job. But then, from what I’ve seen, all too much executive compensation, even senior administrator compensation in government and academia, is based on immediate profits, likeability, image, and charisma — and not on long-term competence. Add to that the share-holder, media, and marketplace pressure for quick and unrealistically high profits — or unrealistic “cost-effectiveness” — and you get what we’re now receiving.

Interestingly enough, in most of the futuristic SF I read, seldom do writers target this human obsession with excessive profit. It’s usually always about power and the abuse of power in controlling people, while the greatest abuse of power — seeking what the marketplace and the economy cannot support — seems to be consistently overlooked. But then, institutionalized greed just isn’t sexy enough to sell books… it just sinks economies and destroys futures, even while societies continue to reward and idealize those who practice it.