During the discussion and issues raised by the issues surrounding copyright over the last two blogs, I realized that literally for years I have been pointing out that piracy is decimating the ranks of the midlist authors, but without explaining how this works in practice. I’ve heard all too many readers say words to the effect that, “my reading a pirate copy here and there won’t make any difference.” Unhappily, when thousands of readers take the same view, the results can be rather dramatic.

The example I’m going to give is based on the experiences of several midlist writers who are no longer midlist writers because no publisher will now publish their new books [unless they’re doing it under a pseudonym, which I know is not so in any of the cases I know].

Let us say that a midlist author named Aubrey [and if there is an author named Aubrey in this situation, I apologize, but I’m picking the name because I don’t know one] has sold five books. The first book lost money, but not a lot, and got good reviews. Based on that, Aubrey’s editor convinces the publisher to buy the next book, with an advance of $15,000. That book sells just over 6,000 copies in hardcover, and 15,000 in paperback, so that Aubrey receives slightly over $23,000 over essentially two years. But Aubrey works hard and can manage writing a book and a half a year… just enough to scrape by after paying her agent 10% (he’s cheap; most cost 15%). The sales on the next two books go up a bit, but only slightly, to perhaps 6,500 hardcovers, but the paperback sales drop off to around 12,000 copies on the third book (which is exactly what has been happening over the past 10 years), leaving Aubrey with about the same income, and to 10,000 copies on the fourth, which drops the income from the fourth book to less than the second book. At this point, the publisher is getting worried, because his break-even point is based on selling 5,000 hardcovers and 15,000 paperbacks. But since Aubrey’s hardcover numbers are above the break-even point, and the publisher and editor like Aubrey’s books, Aubrey gets a contract for book five. By now, ebooks have really come into play, and Aubrey’s fifth book only sells 4,500 hardcovers, and 1,000 ebooks at the initial price. From the publisher’s cost point of point of view, that’s close to the equivalent of 5,500 hardcovers, but the paperback sales drop to 6,000 copies plus another 1,000 ebooks at the paperback price. The 6,000 paperbacks are below a cost-effective number to print. That drops Aubrey’s income for that book to around $18,000. Unfortunately, Aubrey’s sales trend is down, and the publisher has lost money on the last book. Given those trends, much as he and the editor like the books, Aubrey doesn’t get a contract for the next book.

The result is that the publisher’s revenues drop some 20% on Aubrey’s books, and Aubrey’s income drops to zero. The readers who have switched from hardcovers or paperbacks to pirated editions of those books can say that the publisher’s revenues didn’t go down that much and the authors and publishers are still making plenty. No… the best-selling authors are, but the reduction in less popular midlist titles means a greater reliance on the best-sellers and the generic look-alikes.

This isn’t fantasy, or even science fiction. I could name at least five authors who have gone through similar scenarios over the past several years. In general, hardcover/’initial ebook sales have not declined that much, and, in fact for the big-name authors, those hardcover sales may have held steady or increased, but the farther an author is from the first few spots on the best-seller list, and the more unique a little-known author is, in general, the greater the decline. This also explains the rise of generic look-alike books, such as urban fantasy chick-lit, vampires, action-thrillers, etc. For mass-market paperbacks, pretty much everyone’s sales are significantly down, and some big-name best-sellers, while hitting new highs in hardcovers, are seeing sales losses in the millions in paperbacks.

For the struggling midlist author, the near-stable hardcover sales just aren’t enough to cover the huge decline in mass market paperback sales. Of course, there are always new authors, but, frankly, most of them follow Aubrey’s pattern, except more quickly these days.

Paperbacks used to be where readers picked up “new” authors, or those they had not read, that and the libraries, but library budgets and acquisitions have been drastically slashed, so that all too many only acquire the best-sellers, and not enough paperbacks of midlist authors are being printed these days to filter into used bookstores or to be widely traded by friends. The ebook situation doesn’t allow for easy browsing – except through pirating – and the result is, in general, the domination of the market by the established and popular, and their imitators, leavened by the occasional pop-flash writer, while the talented midlist writers, the ones who produced good books, or unpopular great books, are slowly vanishing. Some keep writing on the side, for small presses or self-publish, but because they must make a living doing something else, their output drops even farther… and they continue to lose readers until every wonders, “What happened to Aubrey [or whoever]?”

If pirated ebooks only resulted in a turnover of authors, one could say that it’s a matter of taste and the market should prevail… and, of course, in one way or another, the marketplace will. But the problem is that the turnover in “new” authors is accelerating because it’s more and more difficult for new authors to distinguish themselves and establish a presence, and a growing percentage of those who do aren’t necessarily the best writers – they’re the best self-promoters and the best at imitating whatever’s popular… and, as I’ve said before, even excellent imitation is never as good as good original work.

But then, given how little time so many people have to read anymore, maybe a lot fewer people really want to read good original work that makes them think.

Comments over my last post show just how personal perceptions can color views of matters, especially of law. So… let’s talk about law. In general terms, criminal law is the codification of those offenses which society has termed unacceptable and which the governing authority has codified and promulgated, defining the offense and prescribing the penalties or range of penalties for violating that law. Law is not an “ideal”; it is a code. Nor does that code always agree with what many citizens feel it should be, or even what many people thinks its provisions mean. That’s one reason for courts, and why the U.S. Supreme Court has the power to review laws passed by Congress, or by state and local governments.

Initially, copyright infringement was strictly a matter of civil law, but copyright violations became so egregious in the late nineteenth century that in 1897 Congress enacted the first very narrow criminal penalties for copyright infringement, but in less than a decade it became clear that a more comprehensive approach was required, and the first broad law criminalizing a range of copyright infringements was enacted in 1909. Since then, various provisions have been added to criminal copyright law, including the No Electronic Theft (NET) act in 1997, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998.

As is noted by most good property law scholars, “property” is not legally limited to tangible objects, but much of the controversy over copyright infringement or theft of intellectual property lies in the fact that the vast majority of people do not place the same emotional value on the copying of an ebook or a music download as they would on someone taking a physical copy of the same book or a music CD from a store without paying for it. Yet current law places the same value on theft of a digital book or an authorized digital copy of a song as of a physical book or music CD. And it should, because for the bookstore, the wholesaler, and the author, that “free” copy represents a very real loss. It is a foregone sale, just as the theft of a physical book or CD represents a foregone sale. Admittedly, in the case of the book, the physical book costs somewhat more to produce, but the bulk of the production costs do not lie in the printing and binding of even the physical book, and the ebook is priced lower because the physical costs have been deducted.

In the case involving Aaron Swartz, what seems to have been overlooked in many of these comments is the law itself. In 1997, Congress passed the No Electronic Theft (NET) act. Those provisions, as codified in 17 USC § 506 (2)(2000) provide criminal punishment for reproducing or distributing, “including by electronic means, “during any 180-day period, of one or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works having a value of more than $1,000”. What is often overlooked or ignored is that while looking at or reading a copyrighted work electronically is not a violation, actually downloading a work is, under law, the reproduction of that work.

Like it or not, the physical facts in the case are not in dispute. Whether or not Aaron Swartz intended or did not intend to further distribute the more than four million articles he downloaded, it is absolutely clear that he electronically reproduced at least one copy of each of those articles and that those millions of articles had a sum total value of more than $1,000. He also did this under “guest” privileges used fraudulently, because, at the time, he was neither a student, nor did he register honestly when using the MIT system. Under the U.S. Code, that is against the law.

Whether the law is “right” or not is a totally separate question. If one wishes to live in a nation of laws, then there is the obligation to live by those laws, although, at least in the United States, there is certainly the possibility of changing that law. If one violates those laws, however, there is always the risk of being prosecuted. Aaron Swartz did not believe in the laws, as written for information, and violated them. He was prosecuted.

Should he have been prosecuted in the way the government did? How could the government ignore the illegal copying and downloading of more than four million files once it was brought to the attention of the Justice Department? Not to prosecute would have been an invitation to others to indulge wide-spread downloading and hacking/copying. Just as clearly, no one at MIT understood the significance of the case when they reported it.

Nor do the legal scholars who write articles and briefs attempting to distinguish between “minimal” incremental harm created by personal copying and larger harm created by “commercial” pirating. Admittedly, any individual’s personal copying of electronic articles or books represents minimal economic harm to the copyright holder, but when thousands of individuals, or tens of thousands, download torrent e-book editions, or journal articles, or anything in mass, that individual minimal harm becomes a significant collective harm to the copyright holders… and as I’ve noted repeatedly, that harm is reflected already in sales figures.

But… the Justice Department cannot very well go after tens of thousands of individuals… if it could even locate them. All government prosecutors can do is to go after large instances of illegal copying and downloading… and Aaron Swartz was one of the largest.

In this case, if there is any party responsible for Swartz’s suicide beside Swartz himself, it is not the federal government [and I’m no fan of the Justice Department], but MIT. MIT already had a trial program for open reading access to most of the files, one that, ironically, MIT made permanent after Swartz’s death. If they wanted to punish Swartz, they could have revoked Swartz’s access and any other privileges. They could have filed a civil suit against him or sought damages. From what I can tell, they did none of those. Instead, acting as so many university bureaucrats do, they passed the buck to the Justice Department. Then… when they realized what might happen, they begged and pleaded that DOJ not prosecute. What would have happened if DOJ had dropped all charges or only given Swartz a slap on the wrist? I can just see the headlines – “DOJ Caves to MIT” or “Feds Ignore Reddit Exec’s Piracy.” Obviously, DOJ could see them as well.

There are stories that suggest Swartz had attempted to get a plea bargain, but that DOJ refused any plea bargain that didn’t involve jail time for Swartz, and that Swartz didn’t believe he should serve time for something he didn’t see as wrong. What Swartz – and some commenters here – didn’t understand was that the law is the law, and that following personal feelings of right and wrong which conflict with the law often has a very high price… as it should, because, otherwise, everyone’s personal feelings would be above the law… and that is a recipe for anarchy.

It’s one thing to use those feelings – and those of others who share those views – to change the laws, and that can be constructive, but to flaunt the law and believe that there should be no significant consequences…?

In the end, however, given the outcry over cases such as that of Swartz, and the political pressures, those who want intellectual property cheaply, or for free, will likely win out in any venue where the product can be duplicated almost effortlessly and cheaply. The result will be that “popular” culture will sink even below mediocrity and that the vast majority of work of originality and quality will either be drowned out or lost in the flood of cheap presentations, or funded by wealthy patrons, as music and novels were in the late eighteenth century, or offered in some involved high-technology way that cannot be easily copied, thus making billions for a handful of media empires. Research will dwindle and be limited to the corporate sector in those areas where corporate security and “trade secrets” can offer some modicum of protection. All this cannot help but have a negative impact, both in terms of national productivity and creativity, because “free” does not pay for either productivity or creativity — or the support services they require — and very few people or organizations can afford to produce or create for free.

This past weekend, this site was hijacked by a shady payday loan outfit. It’s the second time this has happened in the last six months, which I suppose, by internet standards, isn’t too bad.

In a related development, Aaron Swartz, who was the co-founder of the information-sharing website Reddit, committed suicide last Friday at age 26. He was considered an Interrnet folk hero for his efforts to make online content “free.” The definitive reason for his suicide is unknown, but he had a history of depression and was facing 13 felony charges, including wire fraud, computer fraud and unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, as a result of illegally downloading nearly five million articles from MIT computer archives with intent to distribute the articles on file-sharing websites. His family and friends have issued a statement to the effect that Swartz was trying to make the Internet a better and fairer place.

Also last week, a number of those of us who are science fiction writers received an email invitation to speak at Bexley College in London, offering transport, publicity, and an honorarium. Of course, Bexley is a technical school and unlikely to support a seminar on “The Mystery of Life and Death,” not to mention that the “professor” listed on the invitation doesn’t exist. Needless to say, word spread quickly about this scam.

What I would like to know is exactly how stealing five million articles or hijacking my website for potential gain for a payday loan site has anything to do with making the Internet a better or fairer place. Or for that matter, just how ethical is the cry that “information wants to be free”? How does the epidemic of internet plagiarism do anything to teach students the value of information… or about intellectual honesty?

With the growth of the Internet, the amount of confidence schemes has increased exponentially, and so has the number and breadth of scams, a huge percentage of them targeted at the most vulnerable individuals in society – the less educated [not that some very highly educated people have not fallen for them], the elderly, those in financial trouble, or those who are simply too trusting. While the few big-time information thefts make headlines, even many of those are never resolved, and the perpetrators remain unknown, and it’s just about impossible to make more than the tiniest dent in the volume of successful internet scams and swindles… and, as for piracy… forget it.

No matter what anyone says about pirated and torrent-downloaded books increasing sales… I’m sorry, but the overall figures in the book industry [at least in the field of fiction] give that the lie. Sales are down, and in some areas, such as mass market paperbacks, they’re down at lot, and as I’ve noted previously, ebook sales are far from making up the difference.

Pirated copies of books, movies, and music are theft, pure and simple. Just because someone thinks that the price of a movie, book, or music CD is too high doesn’t justify theft. We don’t justify theft of any other good on the grounds that the price is too high, and we don’t say that other goods that are not essential for physical survival can be stolen because the prices are too high. Moreover, allowing or exalting the theft of information or other intellectual property effectively states that those who create it don’t deserve the same protection as those who produce other goods. Now… some will say that information/entertainment isn’t as vital. Oh… when our society is based on information? And don’t tell me that a Coach handbag, or a Rolex watch or any other counterfeit luxury product knock-off is more important than information or entertainment.

All this brings up the questions: Is the Internet really a force for good? Do its advantages outweigh the drawbacks? And even if it does have a net benefit to society, does it, in its current form, excessively [a matter of judgment, I know] enable dishonest behavior and acts? More important, what, if anything, are we going to do about it?

Over the past year or so, I’ve noted a disturbing trend in newspapers and other media, and that’s the reduction, if not the disappearance, of coverage of books in local media. Oh, The New York Times still has its weekly book section, and the Washington Post still covers books, but coverage has virtually disappeared from many other city newspapers.

Likewise, bookstores continue to vanish. We lost the only “new book” general bookstore in Cedar City this past year, poor as its selection was, and we’re left with a decent used book store and a religious bookstore that carries no non-fiction or general fiction [except for a few “approved” religiously-themed fiction books]. Neighboring St. George lost its only general new independent bookstore, leaving only a single Barnes & Noble, despite the fact that the area has tripled in size over the past fifteen years and has something like 150,000 people. The Salt Lake City area has lost close to ten bookstores in the last five years, and that’s a pattern replicated in most major cities. Sales to Amazon and Barnes & Noble online don’t come close to making up the difference.

Even more to the point, impulse book buying has been decreasing, and will continue to do so, simply because there are fewer and fewer locations that offer that opportunity, and most of those that do tend to cater to existing book buyers anyway. As I’ve noted previously, every shopping mall once had at least one mall bookstore, often two, and I knew a few that had three. Now, it’s more like every third mall – usually the ones located in or near high-income housing – has a large Barnes and Noble… or sometimes a nearby Books-A-Million… and no other book outlets.

John Picacio – the award-winning F&SF artist – has made an interesting observation about this – that the lack of places to browse books – even for people who will buy print books online or e-books – is reducing the number and variety of book titles sold, and that every brick-and-mortar bookstore that closes reduces the variety and availability of titles sold.

Manga, anime, and series “lite” books are taking over a larger section of existing bookstores. Low-cost [i.e., “cheap”] e-books are becoming the new “penny dreadfuls.” And in F&SF, so-called critical readers and publications tend to ignore books that have wide readership, regardless of quality, and focus on books that explore narrow themes in “innovative” ways, again, regardless of quality.

More than one editor has commented to me that, at least for F&SF, it’s getting harder and harder for mainstream F&SF publishers to get even their leading titles reviewed in Publishers Weekly. Part of that may well be that PW cut the rates it paid reviewers and those who now review, for less money, are more interested in their choices than in what’s actually being read. And Locus, which bills itself as “the magazine of the science fiction and fantasy field” routinely ignores “popular” authors in the field and, for years, ignored the very top F&SF best-sellers until, rumor has it, one author’s publisher threatened to pull all advertising. That’s been denied, I understand, but I have my doubts about the accuracy of the denial.

What all this is creating is, to my way of thinking, not only the well-observed shrinkage of the book market, but also a continuing and growing fragmentation of the book-reading market. And please don’t prate on about e-books and self-marketing. Only comparative handfuls of such books ever achieve significant sales. More importantly, they don’t maintain or expand the number of book-readers.

In fact, already the rates of e-book sales are beginning to decline, and e-books, even including pirated editions, are not replacing the sales lost in the paperback market. Moreover, while Americans – and presumably, the rest of the world – are reading more on electronic devices, early research is indicating that they’re reading a larger and larger percentage of shorter prose, e.g., magazines and newspapers. Of course, that goes along with the other impact of the great electronic age – the shorter attention span of the younger generation and the quicker onset of “boredom.”

For all that, I’m certain that at least some good authors will continue to appear and be published… that some technically good authors will be best-sellers…and that lots of shallow adventure and sex-driven will continue to sell in every genre and field. What I’m not so certain about is whether being truly well-read will really mean as much as it once did, or that those people who think they are well-read will actually be that – or perhaps being “well-read” will become synonymous with “reading the well-written obscure and irrelevant.”

As in all things, time will tell.

There are more than a few myths about Social Security, and I’ve seen very few analyses of the program based on facts relating to individuals, as opposed to the program as a whole. Since I’m actually past the age where I could take benefits, I decided to look into some of the assertions made about the program.

One is the claim that Social Security will go broke soon. That’s a total myth. In 2012, the program did pay out more in benefits than it collected in FICA taxes, but given the present surplus in the trust fund, even with no changes, the program will be able to pay current and projected benefits until approximately 2030. That means that some changes need to be made, but that a crisis is nowhere near imminent.

Second is the claim that beneficiaries get more than they paid in through taxes. Some beneficiaries do – those that live a long time. But Social Security, despite assertions to the contrary, is in fact based on fairly sound actuarial principles. For example, the life expectancy at birth of men in my age group was/is roughly 67 years. That means that about half the men have died before they can collect full benefits. If they have surviving spouses, the spouse can collect a survivor’s benefit, or take any benefit she has in her own name, but not both. In effect, that results in a significant amount of benefits not being paid, roughly 25% less for survivors than for the man, plus the effective forfeiture of the spouse’s own benefits. If the woman is the major breadwinner, the math is essentially still the same.

Then there’s the issue of what is meant by “taxes paid,” because a dollar in taxes 45 years ago was worth, according to the BLS inflation calculator, roughly seven times what a dollar is worth today. As an exercise, I went through my own Social Security records and recalculated what I paid in taxes in terms of current dollars. That means that the current value of my FICA taxes is 71% higher than the dollar amount recorded by the Social Security administration. It’s not 700% obviously, because the closer to the present time that the taxes were collected the less the total inflation of the value. While figures will vary for each beneficiary, the value of FICA taxes in current dollars (which are the ones in which benefits are paid) is going to be much higher than the official statement of taxes paid. Even so, more than half of Social Security beneficiaries who retire at the age for full benefits will likely receive more than they paid in, but that only amounts to 25-30% of all those who have contributed, because 70-75% (roughly) will die either before receiving benefits or before the amount they collect exceeds the amount they paid into Social Security.

The idea behind Social Security was not absolute financial fairness, but to insure that those Americans who did live past a physically useful working age would not live in poverty after they stopped working. This is, of course, why some politicians are pushing for means testing of those who receive benefits as a way to reduce the “cost” of benefits. The problem with this is that it’s based on inaccurate assumptions, not to mention totally punitive. One proponent of means testing cites the fact that a significant percentage of the elderly have incomes over $40,000, and should therefore receive either no benefits or reduced benefits. The average Social Security benefit is approximately $15,000 annually. On average, about 40% of an elderly couple’s income comes from Social Security. Roughly 20% of individuals/couples over age 65 could be considered “financially comfortable” [making more than average family income], but about half of those would drop below that level without Social Security benefits.

Means testing, if done accurately, will also have a minimal effect on the current funds balance. Why? Because less than 5% of the population has incomes high enough that they could live comfortably without benefits and without working. Considering that 13% of Americans are over the age of 65, and less than half of one percent of them are wealthy, amounting to less than 300,000 individuals, the “savings” from confiscating their Social Security benefits would only reduce annual Social Security outlays by about one percent. Any real savings would have to come from people who are “financially comfortable,” but far from wealthy, and why should those people get absolutely nothing after having paid into the fund for a lifetime? It’s one thing to tax their payments; it’s another to deny benefits… and it might even be unconstitutional under “equal protection.”

All this means, as usual, is that any adjustment in Social Security is going to have to fall on all beneficiaries… and can’t be foisted off on one small group.

Apparently, the last minute legislation that the Congress approved contains a few special interest goodies, mainly for the financial industry, including one that defers any income earned overseas from corporate taxation so long as the money remains outside the USA and one that benefits Goldman Sachs especially. So, at a time when everyone’s Social Security payroll tax deductions go up two percent, a good $1000 a year for the average family, financial America gets a continued tax break.

Not that this surprises me in the least, because we have the very best Congress money can buy, and we have it because the reformers of the past century were successful. It’s an excellent example of how the best intentions can have the worst results, a real-life political example of the road to Hell being paved with good intentions. It’s also an example of what can happen when good ideas are carried to extremes.

Many years ago, when I was a young and more idealistic Congressional staffer, political parties really mattered. They were more than affiliation labels, which is what they’ve largely become today; they were a source of political power. They were significant funding sources, especially compared to today, and there weren’t that many other organizations, except perhaps unions, that had that kind of influence over members of Congress, although technically both unions and corporations were prohibited from direct and indirect contributions to candidates.

Because enforcing these prohibitions and other campaign laws was difficult, in 1971, Congress passed the Federal Election Campaign Act, requiring stringent disclosure requirements. Then following Watergate and reports of serious financial abuses in the 1972 Presidential campaign, Congress amended FECA in 1974 and set limits on contributions by individuals, political parties and PACs. One of the more important provisions was that which limited national party contributions to $5,000 per election to candidates for the House of Representatives and $43,000 to Senatorial candidates.

With the reduction in funds from national and local political parties and the prohibition and increasing scrutiny of moneys that had formerly still passed under the table, and with the aid of the development of computerization, most candidates and federal elected officials began to build independent fundraising and electoral support organizations, and, in effect, corporations turned a blind eye to scores of their executives contributing, technically in a legal fashion, to campaigns of those who favored corporate interests.

Then in 2010, two court decisions, Citizens United and SpeechNow, changed everything. Together, the two decisions, essentially on free speech grounds, removed the limits on the ability of organizations that accepted corporate or union money from running electioneering communications and held that Congress could not limit donations to organizations that only made independent expenditures, that is, expenditures that were “uncoordinated” with a candidate’s campaign. As a result, anyone could spend any amount of money on advertising for or against any political issue and against any candidate, or for any candidate, provided there was no communication or coordination with the candidate. Add to that the fact that, of “regular” contributions to candidates, roughly 50% of campaign contributions come from large individual donors, and it’s difficult not to see why the financial community has a disproportionate influence on legislation… and gets special tax breaks.

What’s overlooked, however, with all the money issues, is a second issue – that of carrying good ideas to extremes. The Citizens United and SpeechNow decisions essentially rested on the premise that restricting expression of opinion through restricting campaign-related advertising was unconstitutional because it restricted free speech under the First Amendment. No one wants free speech restricted, but what about the problem of my free speech – or yours – being drowned out by hundreds of millions of dollars of corporate paid advertising? Isn’t that a de facto restriction of free speech?

The same issue is raised by the question of restriction of assault weapons. Does the right to bear arms under the Second Amendment allow others to cut short my pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness – or that of innocent school children?

As we are seeing – and some seem to refuse to see – carrying principles to extremes can have unintended, and dangerous, consequences. But then, that’s true of carrying anything to extremes, a fact of which tea party members and ultra-leftists remain blissfully unaware.

This semester my wife’s university “upgraded” its computer system. The email speed and storage is improved. Pretty much everything is un-improved… or worse. As the head of the voice and opera program, my wife has to keep tabs on the schedules of a good hundred or more students. The former system allowed her to access multiple class schedules at once, allowing her to assure that students were registered in the right sections, which is always a problem, because the section numbers refer to the professors and the levels, and the registrar’s office seems to think that any professor can teach any student individual voice lessons and has a habit of assigning some students randomly – even when the students know and present the right section numbers. The new system only allows access to one section at a time, which more than doubles the time it takes her to make sure students are assigned where they belong. The old system allowed her to see whether an email had been opened, very useful in determining whether students and colleagues actually read what had been sent. The new system does not. In addition, the new system is different enough that it takes time to learn all the differences in necessary features. The verdict? A lot of lost time for everyone for little improvement overall, and significant drawbacks for people with administrative duties.

This isn’t limited to academia. At least every month, if not more often, when I’m talking with my editor and ask for information, it takes longer, because the computer system has been changed or “up-graded.” I asked other editors at the publisher… and they all rolled their eyes, not at my editor, but because they have noticed the same thing. Now… none of them can describe any aspect of the changes that makes their lives easier, but the changes go on and on.

I’ve noted, in past blogs, the continual changes in the Microsoft Word program, the vast majority of which merely add complexity for the sake of adding features… and some of which, such as the grammar checker, are so much worse than previous versions that using it will actually make bad prose awful and good prose far worse. And to top it off, you can’t turn off the grammar checker without turning off the spellchecker. Now… I understand that the latest version of Windows is going to smartphone icons, which will make using Windows easier for all the people who really don’t use it for anything particularly serious and add time and frustration to those of us who are tied, for occupational reasons, to Word and Windows. Another example of the hideous combination of American industry’s “one-size-fits-all” attitude and the need for a continuous illusion of progress.

I don’t mind true improvements in technology… but new “upgraded” features that do the same thing as older versions and new interfaces that don’t improve function, but still have to be learned, are a waste… and they’re anything but progress. In fact, they’re worse, because they present the illusion of progress. They also impose unnecessary costs on business and users because updating is required in order for “my” computer to read “your” files and documents, and the updates make lots of money for Microsoft and other vendors, but usually don’t generate commensurate income for most computer users.

Yet almost anyone who complains about these illusions of progress is considered a dinosaur or a troglodyte.

John Boehner has now passed, if that is the appropriate term, Nancy Pelosi, in public opinion as the most ineffective and least well-liked member of either Congressional or Administration political leaders. Although Speaker Boehner is far from my most favorite politician – the term “favorite politician” being an oxymoron for me – the current disfavor with his actions and behavior is not entirely of his own making. It is, in fact, the result of a Republican party that seems to have forgotten – or wishes to ignore – both the role of government and the role of the Congress in making government work.

Again, I’m not going to blame the Republican party entirely, because the same attitude exists, if to somewhat lesser degree, among the Democratic Party. The fact that the attitude is less virulent among Democrats has nothing to do with virtue, but because, at this point in history, the Democrats embrace a wider constituency and have to look at a slightly wider range of alternatives in order to maintain what power they have, while the Republican Party has essentially divested itself of all who are fiscal and structural conservatives but who oppose the more fanatic aspects of the GOP true believers and certainly all moderates.

The result is that the GOP has become the “party of NO” – no tax increases, no abortion, no immigration, no gun control, no health care for the working poor, no corporate taxes, no unions, no equal economic rights for minorities and women, no gay marriage, not to mention denial of global warming and evolution. At the same time, much of the Democratic Party believes that almost any new government program is a good idea, particularly where the disadvantaged are concerned. Neither outlook is viable.

No matter how many poor and disadvantaged there are, even if we confiscated all the wealth and income of the top two percent, as I’ve pointed out before, it wouldn’t support government for a year. Government programs can’t expand, not unless other government programs are eliminated or curtailed. Right now, we can’t even fund the ones we have, but that’s because, in the past, both parties have agreed on taxes that were too low to support the programs that Congress had already created. Likewise, the mindset of denying reality that underlies much of the GOP agenda won’t work.

But Boehner is in an impossible position. The GOP essentially won’t compromise on taxes, and no compromise is possible without that. Obama has offered some compromise, but the GOP wouldn’t even accept Boehner’s alternative tax increase just on families making over one million dollars a year, let alone Obama’s compromise of $400,000 [incidentally, that’s just about the cut-off for the top one percent]. The fact that Boehner won’t even call the House into session unless the Senate acts, despite the fact that the House could take up an already Senate-passed bill and amend it, is another indication of his inability to pass anything remotely resembling a compromise and his unwillingness to admit it.

So… unless Obama caves in to the GOP, which looks unlikely, or the GOP looks at reality, which is equally unlikely in the next few days, going over the fiscal cliff looks most probable, although I, and most Americans, I suspect, would prefer less excitement.

Last Sunday, The New York Times had a front-page story on the problems faced by students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. While the story highlighted the specific problems of three minority females, my wife the university professor sees the same problems played out by white students in a state university with a very small minority population. Despite an apparent proliferation of loan and aid programs for students of modest means or less, the graduation gap between economically poor students and those of more affluent means is now wider than it was thirty years ago. Although the graduation rates of most ethnic/economic subgroups have improved, the rates for those of means have improved far more than that of those from poorer backgrounds.

Why has this happened? There are a number of reasons, and the Times article, frankly, didn’t emphasize nearly enough some of the root causes. The principal reason, from what my wife and I see, is that the growth of tuition has outstripped the growth of available grants and scholarships. The reason for the growth of tuition at state universities is not, contrary to popular opinion, because of high salaries for full-time faculty, not at a time when most state institutions have been freezing salaries or holding raises to one or two percent, or reducing full-time professors and replacing them with part-time adjunct faculty, but because for almost a generation, state legislatures have been reducing the funding of their public institutions at the same time as enrollments have continued to increase. Higher enrollments require more buildings and larger classes, or more classes taught by less qualified instructors… and, most important, higher tuition.

At my wife’s university, and at all the public institutions in the state, funds for scholarships and grants, even federal grants, have not kept up with the cost of tuition. If colleges and universities offer full-tuition and room-and-board scholarships, then the number of available scholarships goes down as tuition rises. If they offer the same number of scholarships, then those scholarships no longer cover tuition and room-and-board. Either way, that means that economically disadvantaged students must either borrow funds or find part-time or full-time work. My wife has watched student after student become swamped with debt or spending so much time working that they cannot spend the time to study and to succeed academically. In addition, all too many have other problems created by their past, such as poor study habits and even worse judgment. More affluent students also have these problems, but they often have personal safety nets, such as parents who can support them while they waste too much time learning with bad study habits and behavior that detracts from academic success.

In addition, in many fields, merely taking classroom courses isn’t enough for future success. For example, in the hard sciences, students need to take laboratory courses, and those are invariably later in the day – and often students who work find themselves in an impossible situation. If they try to follow an educational path that would pay more in the future, they can’t work the hours they need to pay for that education, yet taking a more “standard” curricula ends up giving them a degree with a major in a field that is already glutted. The majority of students who succeed in music and the performing arts – and many do, despite the rhetoric – are those who not only take the classes, but who do all the extra activities, which include performing and rehearsing long hours, often without credit. This becomes almost impossible for students who are entirely self-supporting, except for the one or two that come along every few years who are truly brilliant and gifted, and even for them, it is close to impossible.

But each year the situation has become worse as the legislature funds less and less, and tuition climbs, and professors’ incomes are frozen, and more adjuncts are hired, and poorer students work longer and longer hours and get deeper and deeper in debt.

All of this doesn’t even take into account the fact that primary and secondary schools are failing to instill certain basic skills required for both academic and occupational success. When more than a third of all students graduating from secondary schools do not have the writing skills to compose – without electronic aids – a single coherent paragraph, and when the majority lack any semblance of analytical skills, it’s no wonder that students who are preoccupied with finding the money to even attend college are dropping out or failing in huge numbers.

But the great debate remains about how federal and state taxes are too high.

Years and years ago, back when I was actively involved in national politics, a scholar of politics made the observation that, “Where you stand on anything depends on where you sit.” The converse is also true, in that the positions one takes reveal the true nature of one’s views.

The “negotiations” surrounding the “fiscal cliff” illustrate the above point fairly clearly. The positions taken by each side do indeed reveal where each side sits, so to speak, and whom they represent, regardless of the window dressing of the rhetoric thrown out by each side. The Democrats are demanding that the “rich” pay more in taxes. Interestingly enough, their definition of “rich” includes all of what has historically called the upper middle class and even a fraction of the mid-middle class, i.e., moderately salaried two-earner families in high-cost-of-living cities. The definition of “rich” has been muddied over time by inflation, but consider that a family income of $42,000 in 1970 is equivalent to more than $250,000 today, yet in 1970, forty percent of all families made more than $42,000. Today, only 2% make more than $250,000. President Obama classifies those in the top 2% as the rich, but those in the ninety-ninth percentile have family incomes of between $250,000 and $350,000, and that one percent pays ten percent of all federal income taxes. Well-off certainly, but rich? All this does suggest that Obama and the Democrats, rhetoric aside, are out not only to soak the rich, but also to soak the upper middle class.

The Republicans, of course, aren’t exactly blameless. For all their rhetoric about controlling spending, they haven’t. In fact, they’ve more than helped it along, and then they’ve coped with the erosive power of inflation by simply pushing for lower tax rates. After all, in the end, what matters isn’t what you make, but what you keep. So, as inflation has decreased the purchasing power of the dollar, so that the real income of most families is only some 60% of what it would have been without inflation, federal income tax levels on the top ten percent, and especially on the top one percent, have been more than halved since the 1950s. The result? Although all income levels have suffered in loss of comparative purchasing power, the greatest burden has fallen on those in the middle two quintiles of income, what generally might be referred to as the working class, because their tax rates have not decreased as much as those with higher incomes, and because federal programs have tended to cover most of the impact on the very poorest. The Republicans’ “Plan B” was even more deceptive in that, while it would have protected the upper middle class from a tax increase, it not only did that, but it would have removed the few limitations that do exist on restricting tax exemptions for the very wealthy… and Boehner couldn’t even get the enough Republicans to support that.

When all the math and tax policies are considered, the politicians have been paying for federal programs through deficit spending that has reduced the purchasing power of all incomes, although, like it or not, those families in the lower 50% of income only pay 3% or so of federal income tax. The Democrats have done their best to shield the very poor, because programs such as food stamps are essentially indexed against inflation, and the Republicans have done their best to shield the very richest one percent, and continue to do so, even with the fiscal cliff looming, and everyone in between has taken a hit of some degree… and both Obama and Boehner are holding out in the fiscal cliff negotiations for the best deal they can get for the very rich and the very poor – and if they do come to an agreement, they’ll call it a benefit for the middle class.

According to not only a study cited in The World 2013 [published by The Economist], but to an array of other sources, there’s a growing gulf between what employers need in the way of skills and what the schools are producing. And contrary to popular and political opinion, or the latest pop/political fix of STEM [science, technology, and mathematics] education emphasis, the greatest problem is that students don’t have an adequate grasp of problem-solving skills or other basic skills [like an adequate command and understanding of their own language]… yet 70% of the students believe they do, and something like 70% of employers believe they don’t.

Based on what my wife the college professor has observed in recent years, and on studies in the field, over 80% of the students cannot take information presented to them and use that information to solve problems or come up with the answer requiring very basic reasoning. And according to their SAT/ACT test scores, these are bright students. Furthermore, most of them cannot retain information that they have heard, or read, even when told that retention of that information will be necessary. They have a slightly higher retention rate when the information is presented in visual/video format, but not a significantly higher retention rate. Their attention span is generally less than ten minutes for any given subject.

The percentage of undergraduate students with these difficulties varies, generally with the selectivity of the college or university, but between 25% and 40% [depending on the methodology used] of all those who receive an undergraduate degree are effectively functionally unable to communicate or receive written/text communication effectively.

Is this a totally new phenomenon? Unhappily, it’s not. Older college professors can recall students with these problems dating back at least thirty years. The problem is that, back then, there were fewer of them, because the more rigid secondary schools basically pushed a significant number of them away from higher education, and of those who did enter college, far fewer of them got degrees and graduated, simply because they couldn’t recall enough information to pass difficult courses.

There are several aspects of the problem that tend to get ignored in this era of “I can look anything up.” First is the fact that in order to be able to look up relevant information, one has to have enough of a knowledge base to know what to look up. Second, one has to have the underlying skills to know what to do with that information. Having the fastest thumbs on the planet and the greatest screen/eye-to-hand coordination equates to incredibly fast reaction times, but doesn’t equate to problem-solving skills.

As I have noted in the past, more than once, basic problem-solving and language/communication skills MUST be learned young. By the time students are 18 or so, their brain patterns are set. Second, no matter what anyone wants to believe, not every student can or can be motivated to learn these skills. Effective teaching on the primary level in particular can maximize the number who can, but not all can learn such skills. The idea behind No Child Left Behind is a politically popular delusion that is destroying effective education. People have different basic intelligence levels, and while some of that innate intelligence can be enhanced or depressed by environmental and social factors, only a small percentage of the population will ever function at the highest – or lowest – levels.

Trying to craft an educational system that “prepares” all students in the same fashion is an exercise in frustration, ineffectiveness, and wastefulness. But there is also an immense accompanying socio-political problem, and that is that, particularly in the United States, people tend to respect only a handful of skills – those of professional athletes, those of popular entertainers, and those who are rich and famous. These three groups amount to less than 1/10 of one percent of the population, and the chances of success in any of these areas are incredibly slender. There is little real respect, for all the lip service paid, for teachers, police officers, and others who hold society together, because lip service pales alongside the financial negligence. The professors at my wife’s university, for example, and for that matter at all the state universities in our state, have been frozen something like six times out of the last 18 years, and the few cost-of-living allowances have been on the nature of 1% to 2%. The salary levels for beginning teachers in our area, and likely in other areas as well, are less than $1,000 a year above the poverty level for a family of four… and most young teachers here are married. Very few doctors can afford either to be general practitioners or to practice in rural areas or many inner city areas because what they can earn won’t cover the cost of their educational loans… and their malpractice insurance.

Yet, in many areas, good-paying positions are unfilled… because young people can’t be bothered to be electricians, plumbers, air-conditioning technicians, high-tech welders… the list is significant… and all too many of the “schools” that profess to teach such trades are inadequate, and charge far too much.

Do I have a simple answer? No… I don’t, and I don’t believe that there is one… and because there isn’t, and because no one really wants to tackle complex issues any more in a culture where information, such as it is, is only one mouse-click away, I worry that it will be some time before the situation changes.

On the economic front, the Unites States faces a double problem – a huge continuing federal deficit and a weak economy, not to mention the fact that taxes will jump considerably in less than three weeks, and a number of federal income support payments will be cut off, unless the President and the Congress can work out something.

From what I see, almost no one is looking at the overall problem. They’re all concentrating on the symptoms, and each group is focusing on its particular interests and wants.

One of the questions that’s been raised is how can the economy be so weak when business and corporate profits are so high. Although industrial profit margins vary considerably from year to year, on average, regardless of how profit is calculated (on equity, sales, revenue etc.),the profit margins of the S&P 500 have more than doubled over the past thirty years, rising from around five percent to between eleven and fourteen percent. In 2012, corporate profits as a percentage of sales hit an all-time high, while the percentage of Americans working dropped to the lowest level in 30 years. Wages and salaries are now at the lowest percentage of gross domestic income (GDI) since statistics have been kept, and have dropped from the historic range of around 55% of GDI to just over 44%. That amounts to a massive shift in income away from workers to owners and businesses, roughly $1.5 trillion annually – and that’s money that’s not being taxed or spent at near the rate it would be if it went to workers.

Not only that, but the additional corporate profits aren’t funneling back into the economy, either through increased dividends or increased employment. All this results in significant loss [more accurately, a lack of growth] in federal tax revenue at the time when federal spending is increasing. Those who demand a corresponding decrease in federal spending seem to fail to understand that the vast majority of the increased federal spending has gone to prop up the economy in one way or another, either through increased joblessness benefits, food stamps, or the financial community bailouts. Without that additional federal spending we would be, not in a great recession, but in another great depression.

What the large corporations fail to acknowledge, as noted in the previous blog, is that their cost-cutting and “efficient” personnel management techniques, are contributing significantly to the problem. Since the United States is essentially at best a self-contained economic system, because we are not a net exporter of goods and services, but a net importer, we cannot sell massive amounts of goods abroad to compensate for domestic economic weaknesses. That means that when wages and salaries go down – or stagnate with a growing population – so does domestic demand for goods and services. That means companies strive for greater efficiencies, and those efficiencies come largely from “employee efficiencies.”

One of the fastest rising employee costs is health benefits, and the larger corporations have addressed this through automation, fewer employees per unit of output, and greater use of part-time employees who are not paid benefits. The Affordable Health Care Act attempted to address the growing number of Americans without health benefits, but the way in which it was finally passed appears to impact disproportionately, as many Republicans have noted, smaller businesses. In effect, large corporations, through their management practices, have effectively shifted their past health care costs onto small business and government (i.e., all taxpayers). This, unhappily, isn’t anything new. Business has always attempted to shift costs onto someone else, whether environmental, infrastructure, or social costs, and always trumpets “jobs” and “free enterprise” as a rationale for not paying for the costs it imposes on society.

At the same time, U.S. tax policies, particularly corporate tax policies, have only made the situation worse. Although the United States has the highest “official” statutory tax rate of any OECD/industrialized nation in the world at 35%, the effective corporate tax rate for U.S. corporations averaged 12.1% in 2011 – and that was lower than all but one nation out of the top 34 industrial nations. That 12.1% rate is the lowest effective rate for U.S. corporations in the last 40 years. How does this happen? Tax breaks, subsidies, and a tax structure that does not tax overseas profits until or unless those profits are transferred back to the U.S. – where they’ll likely face the 35% rate [since they’d already have been transferred if the corporations had any way to tax shelter them]. Well… if you can’t or won’t transfer those billions, if not trillions, of dollars in overseas profits back to the good old USA, what can you do with them? Build more facilities overseas, of course. Since business tax breaks and subsidies are largely legislated on a political basis, this also results in economic inefficiencies. All this doesn’t exactly help the U.S. economy… or American taxpayers.

Then there’s the financial sector, whose indiscretions, greed, and mass speculation created the economic crisis, and whose major players are still reaping multi-million and multi-billion dollar bonuses… and a significant portion of whose income is taxed at a lower rate than that of most middle-class wage earners.

So… what can be done?

Knowing that no policy-maker will ever have the nerve to suggest anything along the lines of what follows, I’ll still suggest a general framework that I believe would work, not that workability has a damned thing to do with political feasibility… but who knows… someone might actually get desperate enough to try some of these.

First, stop tying tax increases to political rhetoric. Instead of demanding a 4% increase on higher earners, just ask for 1%… and cap their personal deductions in the range of $35,000-$40,000, while eliminating the alternative minimum tax. What no one mentions is that these folks are already going to pay a 4% additional tax on all their investment income beginning in 2013, as required by the Affordable Health Care Act. Second, drop the statutory corporate tax rate to 13-15% — and repeal every single exemption and subsidy. Then allow them to send profits back to the US – but credit them with a dollar for dollar reduction in tax liability for every dollar paid to another country in income/profit taxes. Third, impose a sliding-scale part-time employee surtax on every corporation with more than 100 employees, that surtax being based on the number of part-time employees not receiving health benefits. Couple that with a sliding scale tax credit for small businesses [20 or fewer employees], allowing a credit of some additional percentage of health care insurance costs per employee. Fourth, and this is an idea floated by Eliot Spitzer, impose a transaction tax of between ¼ and ½ of one percent of the value of every financial transaction in the securities and commodities markets. This would raise at least $200 billion annually, and might actually recoup some of the costs that the financial sector dropped on everyone else. It also might reduce the millions of computerized speculative trades made to try to profit on second-to-second price changes. Fifth, tax all dividend, interest, bonuses, and carried interest income [and any other “preferred” income] at the statutory rates, but allow the current lower tax rate for dividend and interest income to remain for the first $50,000-$100,000 [indexed to inflation]. That way, those middle-class individuals who scrimped and saved for retirement wouldn’t be penalized for their thrift, but multi-millionaires wouldn’t be paying absurdly low rates on massive income.

Anyway… those are my suggestions, not, as I said, that anyone in Washington is likely to listen.

A number of our friends, acquaintances, and even at least one relative are victims of the new discrimination.  They include a university lecturer, a Walmart employee, a professional classical pianist, and a daughter who works with the disabled… and there are millions of Americans like them.  Who are they?  They’re the part-timers, the nearly thirty million plus Americans who work less than full-time, the majority of whom do not receive benefits, particularly health benefits. And the number of part-time employees in American business rises every year, so that part-timers are approaching twenty percent of the workforce.

More disturbing than this is the fact that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), almost all the increase in part-time employment since 1969 has been involuntary, in that employers have only offered those additional jobs as part-time, and in the majority of cases, employers are creating multiple part-time jobs rather than fewer full-time positions. There’s an economic rationale behind this, as shown by a 2012 BLS study that indicates full-time employees’ average hourly pay is some 60% higher than that of part-timers.

Over the past ten years the number of part-time jobs has doubled, while the number of full-time jobs has decreased by around nine million positions.  Even the current “positive” numbers in the decline of joblessness mask the fact that full-time jobs are continuing to decline, while part-time jobs are increasing at a rate faster than the decline of full-time positions.

Much of this change in the composition of employment is the result of computerization and statistical managing, because better data and software allow employers to use only the staff they think they need, and with the emphasis on profitability and the cutthroat nature of retailing in particular, the costs of fluctuating demand fall almost entirely on the part-time employees, rather than on management or permanent full-time employees.

In addition to financial costs, the increasing reliance on part-time employment creates stress and uncertainty among the part-timers. For example, a 2011 study of retail establishments in New York City showed that fifty percent of employees were part-time, and only about ten percent of the part-timers had fixed schedules on a week-to-week basis. The other problem with this increasing “management efficiency” in managing labor costs is that it makes it harder and harder for part-timers to cobble together two part-time positions in order to make ends meet because there’s less and less certainty in when they will work and for how long. This impacts everything from what they can afford to dealing with children and childcare.

While there’s a perception that temporary and part-time employment is largely confined to the retail and service industries, and to people without advanced training and education, that’s a complete misconception. Despite the growth of colleges and universities, and the increasing number of students graduating, the faculty composition over the last generation has shifted from being roughly 70% full-time to almost 70% part-time (or adjunct faculty), and with the passage of the Affordable Health Care Act, most state colleges and universities will have to either reduce the hours that existing part-time faculty teach and hire more, and likely less qualified adjuncts, if they can find them because the total compensation will decline, or add more full-time faculty, which the states cannot afford to fund.  This same problem will also affect hundreds of thousands of businesses as well.

Temporary employment in jobs requiring technology, business, computer, and other higher education skills has almost tripled in the last 30 years, and the temporary staffing and employment field was the largest growing employer segment in the United States over the last three years.   More and more businesses are laying off full-time skilled people, but hiring them, or others, back part-time as consultants.

The bottom-line?  American business – and higher education — will do anything to minimize labor costs, and that means – unless government gets more involved in labor policy and regulation – that more and more American families are going to see either a stagnation or a reduction in their real standard of living.  This has enormous implications for everyone, not just for those part-time employees.

What business and the politicians don’t seem to realize is that, as they move to a more “efficient” part-time workforce, there will be fewer and fewer full-time employees, and given the cost –pressures, and the threat of replacement by part-timers, even the full-time employees will be, and are, except for top management, compensated at a lower “real” level.  Both full-time employees and especially the growing ranks of part-time employees will have less and less money to spend on the goods and services that they provide.  Consumer demand over the past five years has been supported by a level of government borrowing that cannot continue indefinitely, or even for more than a few years. The only people immune to or insulated from this down-sizing of real income will be a comparatively small number of individuals with skills or positions of power.

Yet, the process of each business maximizing its labor “efficiency” results in a diminution of overall baseline purchasing power… and, unless the question is addressed on a society-wide basis, could result in an economic death spiral… if the social unrest created by the results of such headlong pursuit of “employee efficiency” doesn’t result in violent political upheaval first.  We’re already seeing signs of this in the growing support for Obama’s position on taxing the top two percent, because what most people don’t realize is that this is the first time ever in American history that a majority of the people have been in favor of tax increases on the well-off.

Will anyone in power really read the handwriting on the wall?

The other day, I came across a reader review of one of my books, which described it as formulaic.  And I’d agree… and I’d also call the reader who wrote the review either lazy or an idiot, if not both.  All books are formulaic, at least all books that more than a handful of people want to read.  Books require the formula of passable style and grammar, although better style and grammar are definitely a plus.  They require the formula of a plot of some sort.  They require the formula of some sort of resolution. In short, a book is an organized formula for providing entertainment or information, and possibly a great deal more.

So what do lazy idiots who use the term “formulaic” really mean?  According to A Handbook to Literature, “formulaic” is a term “applied to a work that relies excessively on set patterns of plot, character, sentiment, and language.”  The problem with this definition is that all fiction relies on patterns of plot, character, sentiment, and language, and that there is no standard for defining “excessively,” except in the mind of the reader or reviewer.

As a writer, once I’ve set the parameters of a story, I try to make the systems and the characters true to themselves, if you will.  The magic systems or technology are consistent throughout.  The characters develop more as the story progresses, but those developments are a result of who they are and what happens to them. This, frankly, creates a problem for some readers, because people behave like people.  They seldom do strange things, and when they do, it’s for very good and logical reasons, at least to the character in question, and much of what shock there is in what I write comes from characters taking situations and abilities to their logical ends in order to accomplish what they feel is necessary. Formulaic?  I don’t think so, because I don’t find it “excessive,” and most of my readers don’t seem to… or if they do, they like that kind of order and organization.

Part of determining what is “excessive” is strictly a matter of personal taste.  While technically I think George R. R. Martin is a good writer, I find his use of violence and brutality excessive, and I could claim that his best-selling series is “formulaic” on those grounds.  The same could be said of Piers Anthony and his Xanth books, given the incredible overuse of puns.  And I, or any other well-informed reader, could make a similar case for any number of well-known and even critically acclaimed writers.

As in the case in many instances of comments about books, the use of the term “formulaic” may reveal far more about the reader or reviewer who uses the term than about the book being reviewed because, as I said at the beginning of  this commentary, in the broadest sense of the word, all books are formulaic.

Last week the Utah congressional delegation all affirmed that they would be true to their principles and oppose any tax increase for anyone, rich or poor. That got me to thinking, as such sweeping generalizations often do.  Over the years, there’s been a current of approval, in commentary and even in popular song, for people who have insisted on being true to their principles.  I have a problem with this.

In 1861, the leaders of the Confederacy decided to be true to their principles, those of states’ rights embodying the idea that states had the right to hold people of color in slavery and to buy and sell them as property. Following those principles, they led their states into secession.  Earlier, the Catholic Church held to the principle that torturing and killing people to “redeem their souls,” and then officials of the Anglican Church retaliated in various ways based on various principles. Then there was this fellow by the name of Adolf Hitler, whose principles included the idea that people who weren’t of Ayran genetic heritage were inferior, especially Semitic peoples, particularly the Jews, and that ethnic cleansing and mass extermination were principled.  He was certainly true to his principles to the end, even using railroads and troops to continue killing Jews when they could have been used to fight against the allies invading the lands he had earlier conquered.

I may just be an iconoclast, but I guess I just don’t see much virtue in being true to principles that are either suspect – or wrong.  Now… I know, “wrong” is a judgment on my part, but we do have to make judgments in life.  The problem, of course, is determining a moral basis for such judgments, and that gets into a detailed discussion that has consumed much time and effort, both on this blog and throughout human history.  Still, there are some areas of consensus, such as the fact that human slavery is wrong and that killing people solely because of their religious beliefs is as well… and there are certainly others. Likewise, there are the cases where valid moral values clash – which is what makes the abortion debate so thorny [if human life is sacred, and the mother will die without having an abortion, how does one choose without destroying one “sacred life”?].

In the pending “fiscal cliff” political situation, one side’s principles state that “rich” people should pay more – or at least they shouldn’t pay lower effective tax rates – than poor and middle class families because the society in which they live has allowed them to receive more.  The other side’s principles state that, in effect, that tax rates shouldn’t be increased on just those who make more.  Both sides are insisting on being true to their principles while the country faces a possible return of recession if the issue isn’t resolved and long-term financial crises if the overhanging issue of excessive deficit spending isn’t resolved.

Perhaps I’m just being a curmudgeon, but I don’t see much moral value in either side “being true to their principles,” particularly since both sets of principles being touted are flawed.

Why do people vote the way they do… and believe what they do?  A growing number of studies show a link between attitudes linked to heredity and political beliefs.  The issue has gotten hot enough that one U.S. congressman spearheaded an amendment to the National Science Foundation budget last May to cut a billion dollars. While the amendment failed, Congressman Jeff Flake’s second amendment to the NSF budget – one that banned any NSF funding of political science research – did pass, because Flake did not want the NSF funding research into the biological roots of political behavior.

According to a recent article in the British New Scientist, “there is a substantial body of data suggesting that conservatives and liberals really are different tribes, divided not by opinions so much as by temperament and even basic biology.”  Also interesting is the fact that the article and research were written by Americans and published in a British science magazine.  The article itself is comparatively even-handed, pointing out correctly that most research in the field is conducted by liberals and that there are difficulties with some studies.  But one of the underlying problems is that, by temperament and biology, the majority of scientists in most fields, excepting those involving engineering and directly related fields, tend to be “liberal” in outlook and politics.

All that said, more than 25 years of study indicate that political attitudes have a high degree of inheritability, and such studies include identical twins raised in totally different environments, who are far more likely to share political attitudes than do fraternal twins or genetically unrelated family members.  As a rule, but not invariably, conservatives are more likely to prefer people of their own ethnic background, straight people, and high-status groups.  Liberals are more comfortable than conservatives with those of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, as well as with members of ethnic or sexual minorities. Liberals tend to be more morally offended by inequality, while conservatives tend to be more morally offended by betrayals of the in-group, by disrespect for authority, and by signs of sexual or spiritual weakness or impurity.  These characteristics have been linked to anatomical differences in the size of various brain structures.  Conservatives have a higher need for certainty, while liberals tend to revel in mental challenges.

In this regard, I’ve always had the feeling that conservatives can’t find the truth because they’ve known it all along, whether it’s true or not, and liberals will never recognize it because they’re so involved in looking for the next thing that they’ll look right past it.

What is clear about all this research is that all of us are biologically inclined in a certain direction in what might be called our social outlook, some more so than others, whether that direction be conservative or liberal.  What is also true is that each of us does have the ability to examine those predilections… and to decide whether blindly following our feelings makes sense in any given situation or whether we need to examine what we feel more closely. Obviously, both outlooks are necessary in human society… or those with one inclination or the other would have been weeded out or marginalized, and given the near equal polarization in political outlooks in the United States, that hasn’t happened… and that means, again, blind insistence on doing either just the “conservative” thing or the “liberal” thing is counterproductive.  Working out a compromise is necessary.

Unfortunately, I don’t see many signs of this happening in our political situation here in the United States at the moment… and it’s something that needs to occur.  As a society, we can’t afford to follow blindly just one of the genetic predilections that evolved to make us successful hunter-gatherers. Nor can we turn our back on what science is revealing about who and what we are. Those are recipes for disaster in a high-tech complex world.

The “business model” has triumphed again.  Last Thursday was Thanksgiving, a holiday first officially celebrated in the entire United States on the last Thursday of November as a result of a Presidential proclamation of Abraham Lincoln in 1863, and then moved to the fourth Thursday of the month by Franklin Roosevelt, in order to give the country an economic lift. Little did Roosevelt know what he started.

This year, from Wal-Mart on – or up – retailers across the United States invaded Thanksgiving with “Black Friday” specials on Thanksgiving Day itself.  Oh, there were Wal-Mart employees protesting at hundreds of stores, but the shoppers largely ignored them and surged into stores, greedily grabbing whatever specials they could find.  From my antediluvian viewpoint, the invasion of Thanksgiving by rampant commercialism signifies, in both a metaphorical and practical sense, that the majority of Americans have become totally unaware of how fortunate we are as a society.  Can we not set aside a single day out of the entire year in which to consider and reflect on those aspects of life for which we are grateful?

Last year, at this time, I cited a short story by Frederick Pohl called “Happy Birthday, Dear Jesus,” published in 1956 and set in a future where the “Christmas season” begins in September, and I wondered how long it would be before Halloween and Christmas squeezed out Thanksgiving.  Based on the blizzard of ads in my newspapers – more than fifty separate ad sections – on Thanksgiving day itself and the media hype of Black Friday beginning on Thanksgiving, it appears as though the original purpose of Thanksgiving has already been all but lost to the “ecstasy of unbridled avarice,” to steal a quote from another Christmas staple.

Then again, perhaps people who cannot maintain a Thanksgiving tradition deserve exactly what they are getting from the businesses who push Black Friday – lots of cheap goods produced all too often in third world sweatshops by people who have little to thank anyone for, fewer and fewer good American jobs…and more than a few business leaders who insist that paying lower tax rates than their underpaid employees is necessary for jobs creation.

With the so-called fiscal financial cliff facing the United States government after December 31^st, there are likely to be those in the public calling for cuts in “non-productive” federal spending, and one of the perennial candidates is federal spending on basic research in any number of fields, particularly in areas such as solar power and expensive physics research. Some advocates of such cuts claim that the private sector, and in particular, the corporate world, can take up the slack, and some cite the failures in federal research choices, such as Solyndra, the solar power company that received a $535-million federal loan guarantee as part of the $787 billion economic stimulus package… and then went bankrupt.

In point of fact, there is a real distinction between basic scientific research and the follow-on development of a new scientific breakthrough into a practical product.  While the private sector can develop new products far more effectively than government can, the private sector is seldom willing to undertake the basic research necessary to make the breakthroughs from which such developments can be made… and the reason is simple.  The vast majority of basic research fails to make such a breakthrough.  Estimates of the failure rate range from 80% to 99.99%.

What is also overlooked is that negative results of research are positive.  They show approaches that will not work and often point the way to those that will.

Thomas Edison tried over 1,000 different substances before he was able to find one that would serve as the filament for a light bulb… and some sources claim it was closer to ten thousand.  Edison is quoted as saying, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”  Octave Chanute, the forgotten mentor of the Wright Brothers, listed hundreds of failed attempts to developed powered flying machines, as well as almost 60 detailed illustrations of different major serious attempts that failed before the Wright Brothers flew. More recently, Bill Gates pointed out that funding basic research naturally has a high failure rate, and that more than 90% of the Energy Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency’s projects will likely fail.  Gates went on to note that the U.S. government’s investment in energy research was woefully underfunded and called for a government investment of $16 billion per year into basic research to deliver energy innovation.

Even the one of the most profitable areas in return on research – the pharmaceutical industry – has staggering costs. According to Francis Collins, the Director of the National Institutes of Health, “The average length of time from target discovery to approval of a new drug currently averages about 13 years, the failure rate exceeds 95 percent, and the cost per successful drug exceeds $1 billion, after adjusting for all of the failures.”

The truth of the matter is that, first, the future economic health and physical well-being of the United States depend on continued extensive scientific research, research that a private sector dependent on short-term profitability largely cannot and will not make, and that, if government does not fund such research [and the education of those who will make the such breakthroughs, from whatever part of the globe they come from to be educated in the United States], scientific breakthroughs will be made in countries whose governments do fund that research… or not made at all.

Yet too many penny-wise and pound foolish politicians fail to see the difference between basic research and the subsequent development and exploitation.

Because I’m a writer, I do tend to judge people, to at least a certain extent, by the way in which they employ words, either spoken or written. And because my wife is a university professor, as is another professor temporarily residing with us, the subject does come up occasionally.  In addition, because Cedar City is a university town, we all know other professors and instructors. And… given all that, there is one subject about which all those we know in this field agree:  the vast majority of students matriculating at the university in the past few years are incapable of writing an essay test – about anything.  And most aren’t that much better at writing anything of any length, even with their computer and the internet to help, although some are adept at plagiarism, which they think of as cut and paste.

In the past, while there were some students who had problems with this kind of writing, most students could at least make an attempt that resembled an essay.  In the last two to three years, however, the situation has reversed itself, to the point that, in my wife’s current class, at least so far this semester, not a single student appears capable of writing a coherent essay test… or even a three-sentence short answer.

Mind you, this is despite the fact that the university has become more selective in admitting students, and that scores on the ACT and SAT are higher than ever. Of course, that might suggest that the ACT and the SAT have been dumbed down, but I don’t believe that.  I’ve talked to many of these students, and they’re intelligent.  They just can’t organize their thoughts in written form if they don’t have access to electronic aids, and even when they do, the results are usually pathetic.

Needless to say, this scares me… more than a little.

One of the great benefits of learning to write an essay on a test, or under pressure without computer back-up, is that to be successful, a writer has to organize words, facts, and concepts into a coherent and persuasive form with an underlying structure and logic… and these young people don’t seem to be able to do that.

Part of this is that they also have either great difficulty in remembering facts or no interest in doing so — or perhaps both – and it is difficult to write anything factual that is meaningful without a mental knowledge base.  The ramifications go far beyond writing, because without such a knowledge base, individuals have no factual internal framework by which they can judge the world around them, and their judgments and decisions become governed more and more by their emotional responses to what others have said or done most recently.  This phenomenon isn’t limited to the young, of course, but it appears to be more prevalent there.  How else can one explain the wide-spread lack of understanding about the number of political candidates who flip-flopped on their positions over the course of the last year – and how many people there were who claim that the “media” made it all up?

We’ve already forgotten that electronic books can be re-written without the knowledge of their users, and with a generation that is reading fewer and fewer print sources, and doesn’t seem to want to learn facts in a permanent way, how long will it be before whatever appears in their personal-media-electronica at the moment is the only reality there is to most people?

Or… have we already reached that point?

The day after the elections, Robert Murray, the owner and CEO of Murray Energy, the largest privately owned coal company in the United States, laid off  156 employees, claiming that the Obama administration was waging a “war on coal.” Murray offered a prayer with his announcement, part of which stated:

“The American people have made their choice. They have decided that America must change its course, away from the principals [sic] of our Founders. And, away from the idea of individual freedom and individual responsibility. Away from capitalism, economic responsibility, and personal acceptance.”

What makes this statement both ironic and hypocritical is that Murray Energy is hardly a pillar of responsibility. Since 2000, the Ohio EPA has cited Murray’s American Century and Powhatan coal mines for coal slurry leaks on seven occasions, twice for leaks that lasted days and turned more than 20 miles of Captina Creek black. Murray Energy also owns the Crandall Canyon Mine in Emery County, Utah, which the U.S. Department of Labor’s Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) fined $1.8 million for violations that directly contributed to the death of six miners in 2007.  What is worse is that the company ignored MSHA warnings that the operating conditions were unsafe.

All this shouldn’t be surprising, given that Murray Energy and its subsidiaries have one of the worst safety and environmental records in the mining industry. It also shouldn’t be terribly surprising that Robert Murray has been criticized widely for coercing employees and miners to attend a Romney fundraiser – without pay – and has spent years attacking EPA, OSHA, and MSHA for “overregulating” the coal industry.

What bothers me about Murray, and the Koch Brothers, and a number of other Republican industrialists who trumpet the need for free enterprise and less federal regulation is that they’re not talking about reducing bureaucratic nit-picking and regulations that don’t make sense, of which there are more than a few, but about basic environmental and safety regulations.  Murray clearly wants to build cheap slurry ponds, despite repeated failures of those ponds that have polluted streams and sent toxic wastes into water supplies.  He opposes regulations on dangerous forms of mining as a restriction on “free enterprise.”  He’s opposed dust control measures in mines, despite the fact that coal dust causes black lung disease.

In practice, “free enterprise” advocates like Murray want to be free to make money, regardless of the health and environmental costs they impose on others.  That’s not really “free enterprise,” because taxpayers shoulder much of the burden of cleaning up waste spills; other businesses suffer; the families of dead miners suffer greatly; and the government/taxpayers end up paying Social Security disability and Medicaid costs for workers whose health is destroyed by poor working conditions.  And of all of this, Murray and others like him seem to be unaware – or they feel that imposing such costs on others is their right in a “free enterprise” society.

So-called “free enterprise” isn’t.  No business enterprise is without costs, both internal and external, and the question is who pays those costs. Murray’s lay-off of employees is just another example of an egotistical and self-centered businessman who has no understanding of the costs his actions impose on others – nor does he care, except for his profitability, for all of his pious rhetoric [and poor grammar].

So… when you cite the need for free enterprise, think carefully about how free you want it to be… and who really pays for that “freedom.”