Now that it’s the season for college graduation, once more the articles and commentaries are popping up everywhere – and most of them either tout certain undergraduate majors as “good” because employment in that field is up or bad because immediate job prospects aren’t as good.  What’s even worse is that politicians are getting into the act, some of them going so far as to suggest that students shouldn’t major in fields that don’t pay as well or where employment prospects are aren’t so good, with hints that government and universities shouldn’t offer aid to students interested in such fields.

There are enormous problems with the whole idea of over-emphasizing undergraduate collegiate majors, the first of which is that many students entering college don’t have the faintest idea what their true talents are or whether their interests match their abilities. This problem has worsened in the past several generations as the general academic rigor of high schools has declined and as more students enter colleges and universities without ever having been truly tested to the limits of their abilities.

The second problem is that the emphasis on a “profitable” major is also a growing emphasis on turning college into what amounts to a white-collar vocational school, rather than on an institution devoted to teaching students how to think and to learn on a life-long basis. Colleges themselves are buying into this by pushing departments into “accountability” and insisting that departments determine how many graduates are successful and employed in that field years after graduating.  But does that really measure success?

In addition, the emphasis on selecting a major based on future projected employability neglects two incredibly important factors.  The first is the student’s aptitudes.  A student who is weak in mathematics is highly unlikely to be particularly successful in fields that require that ability, no matter how many jobs exist.  Second, most students take four years or more to finish college.  Projecting what occupations will be hiring the most in four years is chancy.

As for the subjects students choose for their major, the “employability” measurements used are generally employment in the first year after graduation, and the differences in various fields aren’t that significant.  For example, in a recent Georgetown University study, there was only about a 10% difference in employment between the “worst” and “best” undergraduate majors. Such measurements strongly suggest that a student who likes a field and works hard to excel is more likely to land a job, even in a field where employment is not as robust, than a student who tries to game the employment field and who picks a major based on projected employment and earnings rather than on picking a field suited to his or her abilities. In short, it’s far better for students to be at the top of a field they like than at the bottom of one that they don’t.

More than a few studies have shown and projected that today’s educated workers will have changed fields of work three to four times between entering the workforce and retiring – and that today’s students will face even more need to change their field of work.  Such changes place a premium on the ability to think and to learn throughout life, not on a single set of skills tailored to one field or profession.  Yes, there are some fields where dedicated and directed learning is required from the beginning of college, but those fields are a minority and call for initial dedication.  They seldom attract students who are unsure of what they want to do in life or students with wide interests.

In the end, all the political and media concern about “appropriate” majors, despite protests to the contrary, ignores much of what is best about college and for the students by emphasizing short-term economic goals that cannot possibly benefit the majority of students.

When we first got satellite television some fifteen years ago, in the infrequent times we watched television, our tastes ran to channels like Bravo, A&E, History, and Biography. Now we almost never tune in those channels, or many others of the hundred available.  Why not?  Because over the last decade, those once-independent channels have been purchased by major networks, who changed the programming that made them attractive to us.

Where are the biographies of the Founding Fathers, the great industrialists, great painters, poets, revolutionaries, thinkers, architects, authors – or the other notables of the past and present?  They’re gone, replaced by hour after hour of “Notorious,” each hour devoted to some heinous criminal or another, or other uplifting shows like “Outlaw Bikers.”

As for the History Channel, where are the great events or pivotal points in history?  Also gone, replaced by documentaries on the history of plumbing and endless hours of “Swamp People” or “Pawn Stars.”

A&E used to provide a wide range of material, from architectural/history gems like “America’s Castles” to docudramas like “Catherine the Great” (starring Catherine Zeta-Jones, no less). Now what is there?  Six straight hours of “Storage Wars!”

I love science… but I can’t watch most science shows anymore, not when they’re presented at a third-grade level and when, after a commercial break, the narrator repeats the last minute before the break, as if the viewing audience were developmentally disabled.

And the commercials, endless minutes, each one ending, I suspect, with the immortal words, “But wait!  There’s more.  If you order now…”

The movie channels aren’t much better, except for TCM, because each channel takes its turn with the same movie.  How many times do you want to see “Secretariat”… and I liked that one a lot?  But most aren’t that good…

Now… if I wanted, I could subscribe to every sports event offered in the United States and hundreds more from across the world… but March Madness is enough sports for us for the entire year.

Yes… satellite/cable television once was a good thing… until the media titans took over and turned it into a true triumph of capitalism… dollars over quality, and while the dollars are rolling in and the quality degrades further, the politicians in Washington are trying to gut public television, which is about all that’s left with offerings that aren’t dealing in endless moronic variations on pop culture, sex, violence, or sports.  But then, public media channels, supposedly regulated by the FCC for the people, are only about the dollars, aren’t they?

With just a bit less than six months before the fall elections, in one sense, I can’t wait for the elections to be over, if only to get a respite from political news and sensationalism… but even that respite isn’t likely to be very long, because politics has become not only continuing news, but something resembling a spectator sport.  And like all spectator sports, the political arena is filled with commentary.  Unlike athletic spectator sports, where the acts of the players and the results can be seen immediately, in politics the results of political actions, laws, and policies, in the vast majority of cases, can’t be discerned clearly for years, if ever.

This allows everyone to comment with “equal validity,” because very few members of the public have the knowledge of economics and politics, as well as the patience, to wait and see how things actually worked out.  Nor do most people remember what did happen accurately.  So they tend to trust the commentator whose views most nearly mirror those, not necessarily the commentator or expert who’s most likely to be right.

One of the things that appalls me the most is how both parties distort not only each others’ positions, but also employ the most inaccurate comparisons, and truly inapplicable facts and comparisons.  What makes it worse is that very few commentators or talk show hosts, or columnists, have either the ability or the nerve to suggest that such distortions are doing extreme violence to accuracy [I won’t say “the truth,” because that’s become a pseudo-religious term] and relevance.

Some of the worse offenses to such accuracy lie in the fallacious ignoring of well-known and proven facts.  For one thing, economies react slowly, often ponderously, to changes in law and policy. So like it or not, Bill Clinton got a tremendous boost from policies enacted by the first President Bush, and in turn, the first President Bush was forced to raise taxes by the policies of his predecessor, a fact gloriously ignored by those who cite the great Reagan prosperity. Admittedly, in Clinton’s case, he had enough sense to continue them when he was under pressure to change them, but the conditions for his highly praised period of expansion lay in his predecessor’s actions.  Likewise, to blame President Obama for current high unemployment and recession when those conditions were created by policies created well before his election, and when the U.S. also has to absorb economic fall-out from all across the world, is politically easy, but factually inaccurate, especially when political gridlock in Congress has restricted his ability to attack the problem in the way he would like.  But few of his critics will admit that they’re judging him as much, if not more, by Congressional inaction than by his own acts.

Comparing one economic recovery, or non-recovery, to another is not only inaccurate, but disingenuous, because the underlying factors differ greatly, yet such comparisons are a staple in the political arena, because politicians and their aides have an addiction to the simple and superficially relevant.

In addition, some factors are beyond any President, or any Congress’s, ability to change.  Oil is a fungible global economic good, and, in the short run, no change in U.S. environmental, energy, economic, or tax policy is going to measurably lower the price of crude oil in the months ahead, although the Saudi actions to flood the market with cheaper oil will likely cause a temporary respite, at least until world economic activity picks up.  Unwise government action can, as Richard Nixon proved with his ill-fated experiment with price controls, cause gasoline and heating oil shortages and increase prices in the long term.

Another problem in assessing government/political actions is determining how effective preventative actions are… or accepting the benefits while disavowing the means.  We know that the U.S. safety net for the poor has in fact historically reduced overall poverty in the United States – but which programs really work the best?  Which are failures?  Which work, but are so inefficient that they should be replaced?  How many of all the Homeland Security measures are truly necessary?   Most Americans seem to have forgotten that before the enactment of the Clean Water Act, the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland actually caught fire, or that the Potomac River was actually toxic.  Or that before the enactment of the Clean Air Act, office workers in Pittsburgh often took a second white shirt to work because the first got so soot-filled by midday that it looked black and gray?  Instead of the debate being about drinkable water and breathable air, it’s become about whether environmental protection costs too much and slows or hinders job creation, and almost no commentator questions the terms of the debate.

As I’ve pointed out all too many times, there has not yet been any determination of personal accountability for the latest economic meltdown – and now we’ve had a reminder, in the recent Citibank derivatives loss/scandal, that neither Congress nor the President [either Bush or Obama] ever truly addressed the problem, but merely papered it over.  But I’ve never heard any commentator mentioning that – or attacking the corrupt culture of the financial world and those who lead it.

Instead, we get media and political emphasis on the irrelevant, the inaccurate, the inappropriate, and the inapplicable… and the worst part of it all is that it’s only going to get worse over the next six months.

I grew up in a time and a place where blatant self-promotion was deeply frowned upon.  My father made a number of observations on the subject, such as “Don’t go blowing your own horn; let your work speak for you” or “The big promoters all lived fast lives with big mansions and died broke and forgotten.”  As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned that promotion and self-promotion have always been with us, dating back at least as far as Ramses II, who, at the very least, gilded if not falsified, in stone, no less, his achievements in battle.  And to this day most people who know American history [a vanishing group, I fear] still think that Paul Revere was the one who warned the American colonists about the coming British attack on Concord – largely because of the poem written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, which promoted Paul Revere, possibly because Longfellow couldn’t find enough words to rhyme with Samuel Prescott, the young doctor who actually did the warning after Revere was detained by the British.

Still… in previous times, i.e., before the internet age, blatant self-promotion was limited by economics, technology, and ethics, and there were more than a few derogatory terms for self-promotion.  And who remembers when the code of ethics of the American Bar Association banned advertising by attorneys?  Lawyers who tried to promote themselves publicly were termed ambulance chasers and worse… and disbarred from the profession. The same ethics applied to doctors and pharmaceutical companies.  Of course, there were never many restrictions on politicians, and now, unsurprisingly, there are less.

Unhappily, in field after field, excellence in accomplishment alone is seldom enough for success any more.  For more than modest success, excellence also requires massive promotion and/or self-promotion, even among authors. Some of us try relatively tasteful self-promotion, by attempting enlightening and hopefully entertaining websites, such as this.  Others go for a more sensational approach, and for some, no excess is too much.  From what I’ve observed lately, massive promotion and mere marginal competence in writing, along with cheap wares, results in sales that far outshine good entertainment or excellent writing that does not enjoy such promotion. One of the associated problems is that promotion or self-promotion takes time, effort, and money — and all detract from time, effort, and resources an an author can devote to the actual writing

Several years ago, Amazon embarked on a campaign to persuade people rating books to use their real names, rather than pseudonyms, because authors [yes, authors] were using aliases or the aliases of friends to blatantly praise their own work, and in some cases, to trash competing works. I have no doubts that the practice continues, if slightly less blatantly.

In today’s society especially, my father’s advice about not blowing your own horn leaves one at a huge disadvantage, because amid the storm of promotion and self-promotion  all too few people can either finds one’s unpromoted work or have the time or expertise to evaluate it… and if someone else blows a horn for you, it’s likely to be off-key and playing a different tune.

The local university just announced a merit pay bonus incentive for faculty members, and the majority of the Music Department greeted the plan with great skepticism, not because they opposed recognition of superior accomplishment… but because the proposed structure was essentially flawed.  In fact, for many university departments, and for most schools, as well as many businesses and corporations, such “merit” awards will always be fatally flawed.

Why?  Because all too many organizations regard their employees and even their executives as homogenous and interchangeable parts, even when duties, skills, responsibilities, work hours, and achievements vary widely, and those variances are even greater in the academic community and yet paradoxically, in terms of administration and pay, they’re even less recognized than in the  corporate world.

Take a music department, for example, with instrumentalists, pianists, vocalists, composers, music educators, and musicologists.  How, with any sense of fairness, do you compare expertise across disciplines?  Or across time?  Is the female opera director who built a voice program from nothing over 15 years, who has sung on low-level national stages intermittently, who is a noted reviewer in a top journal in her field, and who serves as a national officer in a professional organization more to be rewarded than the renowned pianist who won several prestigious international competitions and performs nationally, but who limits his teaching to the bare minimum?  Or what about the woodwind player who was voted educator of the year for both the university and the state, who is known regionally but not nationally  as a devoted and excellent teacher? Or the percussionist who revitalized the percussion program and performs on the side with a group twice nominated for Grammies? Or the soprano who sings in an elite choral group also nominated for a Grammy?

Then add the fact that all of them are underpaid by any comparative standard with other universities [which also indicates just how hard music faculty jobs are to find and hold]…and with other departments, even though the music faculty work longer hours as well as evenings and weekends, and the fact that the annual “merit pay” award would be a one-time annual payment of $1,000-$2,000 to only one faculty member.  In essence, the administration is attempting to address systemic underpayment and continued inequalities with a very small band-aid, not that the administrators have much choice, given that the legislature won’t fund higher education adequately and tuition increases are limited.

In primary and secondary schools, merit pay has become a huge issue, along with evaluating teachers.  Everyone, even teachers, agrees on the fact that good teachers should be rewarded and bad ones removed.  But determining who is good or average, and who gets paid what is far, far, harder than it looks, which is why most teachers have historically opposed the concept of merit pay, because in all too many cases where it has been actually implemented it’s gone to administration or parent “favorites,” who are not always the best teachers.  A competent teacher in an upper-middle-class school where parents are involved and concerned should be able to boast of solid student achievement on tests, evaluations, etc.  A brilliant, dedicated, and effective teacher in some inner city schools may well be accomplishing miracles to keep or lift a bare majority of students to grade level, while a competent teacher may only have a few students on grade level.  Yet relying on student test scores would suggest that the first teacher of these three deserved “merit pay.”  And in “real life,” the complications are even greater.  How do you compare a special education teacher with standard classroom teachers, even in the same school, let alone across schools with different demographics?

In addition, when teachers feel overworked and underpaid, and many, but not all, are, offering merit pay tends to turn people into competing for the money — or rejecting the entire idea.  I’ve seen both happen, and neither outcome is good.   Yet the underlying principle of ratings and “merit pay” is that such comparisons are possible and valid.  So far, I’ve yet to see any such workable and valid plan… and neither have most teachers. And when merit pay is added in with all the other problems with the educational system that I’ve discussed in other posts, all merit pay usually does is make the situation worse.  It’s an overly simplistic solution to a complex series of problems that few really want to address.  But then, what else is new?

Last year, a voice professor listened, aghast, as a talented, but still far from top soprano vocal student announced she was going to forgo getting the more demanding Bachelor of Music degree and settle for a straight B.A., because she really didn’t need the extra work to get into the graduate school of music that was her choice. Needless to say, this spring the voice student received both her B.A. and an unequivocal rejection from graduate school. This particular scenario is becoming more and more common, according to the professor, who has been teaching at the collegiate level for over 30 years, is also a national officer of the National Opera Association, and, incidentally, is my wife.  She didn’t mean the rejection from graduate school, although that is also becoming more common in the field of music, particularly for women, because more women want graduate degrees and the competition is becoming more and more intense, but the growing tendency of students to make plans based on what they want, with no consideration of their abilities and no real understanding of the fields that they wish to enter.

In voice, for example, as my wife puts it, “good sopranos are a dime a dozen.”  For a soprano to get into a top-flight graduate school, she must not only have an outstanding voice, but excellent grades, performing experience, and a demonstrated work ethic.  On the other hand, the requirements for a bass, baritone, or tenor, while stiffer than they used to be, are not so demanding, for at least two reasons.  First, all operas and most musical theatre pieces have more male roles.  Second, not nearly so many men are interested in vocal performance, and many of those who do simply lack a work ethic.  So a hard-working male voice student with a decent voice and good grades may well have a better chance at both graduate school and a career than an outstanding soprano, because there are so many outstanding sopranos and fewer roles for them, not to mention the fact that there are also more tenured and tenure track university voice positions for tenors, basses, and baritones than for sopranos and mezzo-sopranos.

This tendency for young people to ignore reality is far from limited to the fields of performance. I’ve certainly seen it in the field of writing.  Every year I run across dozens of young would-be writers convinced that they’ll be published, if only they can get an “in” with an agent or an editor… or that, once they finish their epic, they’ll self-publish it as a e-book, and the world will reward them by purchasing tens or hundreds of thousands of copies. And I’ve read enough of what they’ve written to see why most of them can’t find an editor or agent.  But, I have to admit, occasionally, an author will make the big time through self-promotion and self-publishing –  and those authors were usually rejected by editors or publishers not because what such authors have written was poorly written, but because what they wrote was outside the boundaries of what “conventional” wisdom believed was popular. Such successes will happen… in perhaps in one in a thousand cases. I can name several cases where it has…at most a handful over thirty years.

I’m not knocking either ambition or dreams, but I am knocking the misleading idea that students can do anything they want, if they only work hard enough.  As I’ve said before, there’s a huge difference between “be all you can be” and “you can do anything you want.”  We all have both talents and skills… and limitations.  And willing yourself to be successful in areas where those skills don’t exist or are modest at best is usually an exercise in futility.

You can’t simply “will” something to happen because you want it badly enough.  Wanting it badly enough is merely desire.  Beyond desire, to reach a goal requires talent and polished skill in the field, knowledge of the field, and a willingness to work one’s way up through long and grinding work. A noted chef declared a few weeks ago that almost none of the young people seeking to become chefs in his restaurants ever wanted to start at the bottom.

If you don’t have the basic tools and mental or physical abilities required in the field, all the work in the world won’t help.  If you have the talent, but not the work ethic, you won’t make it, either.  And even if you have all of that, sometimes you might not, either, not because you aren’t capable, but because there are only so many openings at the top of any field… and sometimes it just takes luck and timing to go from being near the top to the very top.

In the field of classical music, for the past decade, professional performers and experienced music professors have been telling students just these points – and yet, very few of them, or their parents… or the politicians, appear to be listening. In the area of writing, I’ve witnessed many of my colleagues making the same points, and, frankly, I imagine this has occurred in other professions as well… so why aren’t the students listening?  Is it a media culture that shouts louder that anyone can be anything? Or is it a national epidemic of wishful – or willful – thinking? I have to wonder.

This past Wednesday, the lead story on the front page of the Salt Lake Tribune was entitled [unsurprisingly] “Multiplying Mormons expand into new turf.”   The story was based on the latest once-a-decade U.S. Religion Census.  According to the Religion Census, the fastest growing religions in the United States are Islam, the LDS Church, and Evangelical Protestant churches.  The single largest Christian faith is still the Catholic Church.  I find this combination rather unsettling, because, despite their theological and sectarian differences, all of these faiths share one commonality.  Despite all protests to the contrary, all are highly patriarchal/paternalistic and sexually chauvinistic and effectively place men in a higher socio-theologic position.

In addition, the three nominally Christian faiths [I’m including the Mormons, because they consider themselves Christians, even as some Christian faiths do not] have a large and growing presence on the political front, particularly within the Republican party. No matter what people do or don’t claim, in the end what people and what the politicians who represent them believe tends to find expression in the political dialogue, in proposed legislation, and, eventually, in law.

Once upon a time, the vast majority of the United States was more highly religious than it is today, and there were considerable sectarian differences and beliefs.  Because of those fierce differences, in effect, the founding fathers created a system that attempted to keep religion out of government… and it worked for quite some time.  I’d submit that it worked because religion was a key issue for a great many people, possibly a massive majority, and no one wanted any other faith to gain an advantage through government.  But times have changed, and although 80% of Americans claim to be “Christian,” only about 50% of Americans actually actively belong to any type of Christian congregation, and another 16% are professed or practicing atheists.

This suggests that close to half the population doesn’t possess the same burning concern about religion as it once did… but the first political problem is that these more “moderate believers” and non-believers are in the position of attacking religion or “morality” when they oppose the attempts of the “true believers” to enact religious-based standards as part of government policies and law, even when those standards effectively discriminate against women. The second problem is that the entire movement of true equal rights for women is essentially a secular movement.  It has to be, because with the exception of a few faiths with very small followings [such as Christian Science or the Wiccans], the vast, vast majority of all organized religions have a paternalistic and chauvinistic tradition, and only a few of those faiths have made much effort to change those traditions.

While there are exceptions, in those countries dominated by paternalistic religions, in general, women have fewer, and in many cases no rights.  Yet here in the United States, those religious faiths showing the greatest gains in adherents are those that are fundamentalist and patriarchal. But whenever women raise the issue, such as in the recent Democratic Party effort to point out that Republican legislative initiatives are a “War on Women,” the general reaction is that women are over-reacting. And some Republican partisans have even suggested that the current administration’s efforts to strengthen women’s access to birth control and contraception were a war on freedom of religion.

But, of course, that does raise the question of whether freedom of religion extends to using legislation to reinforce the historical patriarchal male domination of women has any place in a nation that supposedly prides itself on equality.

I recently read an interview with the noted biologist E. O. Wilson, who is rather eloquent on the need for a far more environmentally conscious public, and I was agreeing with much of what he said – until I got to the part of the interview where he essentially said that human space travel was a dangerous delusion that should be scrapped, and that, if treated properly, the earth can provide for humanity for as long it needs s place to live.  Now… I understand what he was saying in one sense, because there is no physical way that we could ever move even a significant minority of human beings off Earth to another locale.  The earth is likely to be habitable for far longer than the existence of any previous species in the history of the planet, but without greater environmental awareness and action, that habitability for humans will be threatened, if not destroyed.

Am I an unrealistic dreamer in wanting humanity to reach beyond one planet – even if only a tiny minority of men and women do so?  Or am I a realist, considering that at least once a large space object struck earth and the resulting ecological and physical disasters wiped out thousands of species, among them the dinosaurs?

One of the better traits of human beings is to reach beyond the here and now, to dream of what might be.  A second trait is that we tend to do better when we’re pursuing dreams, even impossible or impractical dreams.  We certainly made far greater strides in many fields, including technology, when we were engaged in the space race with the USSR – regardless of the motivations behind that gigantic effort.  Is it mere coincidence that the ancient Egyptian civilization that pursued its dreams of immortality, however flawed the basis of those dreams, was also the longest lasting?

We also have a tendency to become insulated and self-seeking when we don’t pursue dreams, as at present, when political and social conflict after conflict is taking place in the United States, and elsewhere, over who gets control over what.  The entire debate over healthcare is an example.  Rather than finding ways to expand healthcare coverage to those who don’t have it, all the powerful political factions are arguing over why this group and that group shouldn’t have to pay for it – an argument along the lines of “I’ve got mine; you get your own.”  The anti-immigrant debate follows the same logic, ignoring the fact that the nation made massive strides in the past based on immigrant contributions.

The science budgets of almost all major nations, except the Chinese, are dwindling, and certainly U.S. politicians have turned a blind eye and a deaf ear on all but modest scientific studies.

And what are the dreams of today? A better tiny gadget for introspection [the I-phone], video games with super graphics, the establishment of a theo-political state, the amassing of great concentrations of wealth, the celebritization of society?

No thank you, I’d prefer the dreams of endless space, and the wonders of the stars. What about you?

A week or so ago, I was making airlines reservations online – rather I was attempting to do so, but found I couldn’t because my computer wouldn’t let me get  beyond the first screen or so at the Delta website, claiming that the Delta website’s security certificate had expired or was not valid.  This had happened to me once before, because the date on my computer was wrong.  So I checked my computer.  No problems that I could find.  Then I tried the other computer.  Same results.  I called my wife at her office.  She tried on her work network.  The same results.  I called Delta. The first representative insisted it was my computer, and then I got disconnected. I tried Delta’s technical support line, waited, and got disconnected.

I waited an hour and tried Delta again.  This time the representative actually knew about the problem and informed me that the tech team was working on it – and agreed to ticket me at the online price.

But my question is: How on earth could the IT staff at one of the world’s largest airline systems, a system that depends heavily on website bookings, EVER let their website security certificate get close to expiring?  Or was this just the result of hacking?  I don’t know that I’ll ever know, but when I talked to one of my daughters, who used to run the IT division of a major chemical company, she informed me that all too many companies have IT divisions that often tend to ignore or postpone the routine “necessities” – until they become a crisis. Of course, one of the reasons she was successful was because she didn’t allow that sort of thing to happen.

I’m certain that tracking security certificates is not the most exciting of IT tasks.  Nor is the business of methodically checking to see what holes may have developed in a website’s security, but both are vital.  Just last month, the state of Utah discovered that its Medicaid/Health database had been hacked, and the hackers had access to the addresses of 800,000 people and the Social Secuirty numbers of more than 150,000… and the initial investigation concluded that “laxity” and failure to follow procedures for handling data were the principal causes.

I also find it interesting that my readers often get upset over a handful of typos in a 400-500 page book, which is annoying, and which I wish didn’t happen, but does, despite my best efforts and those of editors and proofreaders.  But those errors don’t have anywhere near the potentially disastrous impact of software glitches in an economy that has become increasingly dependent upon computers.

In the end, it boils down to one thing.  Failure to do what is required, whether what is required is routine, dull, or boring, amounts to incompetence, no matter how skilled the technicians and engineers may theoretically be, and such incompetence leads to huge problems, if not disasters.

Boredom and uninterestedness aren’t a valid excuse.  Neither is management failure to recognize the problem, regardless of the “costs.”  In the case of books, costs are a valid concern, but when lives and livelihoods are at stake, costs shouldn’t be the primary focus.

Over the years, even centuries, people, and even learned scholars, have offered various rationales about “race,” either saying essentially that all generalizations about race and racial traits are false, or at the other extreme, claiming that racial heritage is a significant determinant of such individual traits as intelligence, muscular ability or lack thereof, industriousness… and the list is sometimes endless. In the course of finishing my latest SF novel [The One-Eyed Man, which I just turned in and my editor hasn’t even begun to read], I thought a great deal about why people are the way they are, and what factors influence them.

On Earth, civilizations have risen, and they’ve fallen, and there have been pretty impressive civilizations raised by peoples of various colors. Ancient Egypt boasted one of the largest and most long-lasting of the early civilizations, indeed of any civilization to date.  The Nubians of the eighth century B.C. were strong enough to topple the Egyptians and ruled all the way from the southern Sudan to the sea and much of the southeastern Mediterranean.  There are massive ruins in central eastern African embodying huge palatial complexes that had to represent a large organized state.  The various Mayan civilizations not only represented an intricate and complex civilization but one with a mathematics involved enough to create a calendar that would be largely accurate for tens of thousands of years. The Aztecs and the Incas created significant empires despite lack of critical resources (such as beasts of burden and transportation).  Archeologists have now discovered traces of ancient large cities in the United States, along with significant earthworks and plazas.   At one time, the Chinese empire was without peer anywhere.  The most advanced sciences in the world at one time were Islamic. Rome controlled the entire Mediterranean basin for hundreds of years.

All of these civilizations had differing “racial” backgrounds, but all were great and advanced in their time. If one looks at modern industrial nations, the vast majority have individuals of virtually every racial background who have great accomplishments. Yet the Mayan civilizations of 1500 years ago vanished without a trace.  The great African civilizations are long gone.  So is the Roman Empire. Egypt has been an impoverished backwater for hundreds of years.

Historians will give many answers, and all too often the most common answer among most people is that “they got conquered.”  That’s true in some cases, as in the instance of the Aztecs and the Incas, but it most instances, the civilization collapsed from within, sometimes under pressure, sometimes not.  One of the most interesting and, I believe, revealing cases is that of the Mayan city-states in the northern Yucatan area. Although they had developed sophisticated water gathering and use systems and weathered extreme droughts in the past, another drought finished them off.  The people dispersed, from not a few cities and towns, but from thousands… and they never returned, leaving the magnificent ruins we see today.  While there is some evidence of battle and brutality… in most cases, that doesn’t appear.

What I found intriguing was that the final decline of the Maya coincided with the rise of a new, and more brutal, and perhaps even more fundamentalist religion, the worship of the serpent god Quetzalcoatl.  I’m not about to blame the decline on just that, but I do think it points out that the decline of almost every past great civilization is linked to a change in the “culture” of that civilization.  One can date the decline of the great Chinese empire to the time when a new emperor burned the entire fleet – the greatest in the world, that had explored the Pacific and all the way to east Africa.  Did that emperor change culture?  It’s more likely he reflected that change, but with that change from outward-looking to inward-looking, the decline proceeded.  At one time, the greatest scientists in the world were Islamic, and the western European world learned from them.  Then… over a few decades, that intellectually open culture closed, and the Islamic world went into a long and slow decline.

Too often, it seems to me, those people who profile “race” aren’t profiling race at all.  They’re profiling culture.  Like it or not, all too few blacks coming from U.S. inner city backgrounds, especially young males, are all that successful, and the murder rate is astounding. Is that racial? I doubt it.  Is it just poverty?  I doubt that as well. It can’t be racial, because very few black males who are raised outside the inner city culture demonstrate the traits of inner city black males, and one can also see similar traits of violence and anti-social behaviors in other impoverished groups, but they’re not identical because poor white culture isn’t the same as poor black culture… but it’s the culture that makes the difference, not the racial background.

And, like it or not, some cultures are toxic. The Ku Klux Klan is a toxic culture.  So, frankly is the current inner city black culture.  So is the pure white Fundamentalist Latter Day Saint culture.  So was the Nazi culture, and there are certainly others that could be named.  Not all cultures or subcultures are worthy of preservation or veneration, regardless of the diversity movements that are so popular among certain groups…  but I think it’s well past time time to make the clear distinction between culture/subculture and race.

In late March, the U. S. Supreme Court held its hearings on the Affordable Care Act [ACA], otherwise known as Obamacare by its opponents.  At that time, polls were taken, and while a clear majority of Americans oppose the Act, a majority happens to like most of the major provisions of the law. Seventy percent of the respondents approved of the provision that forbids insurance companies from refusing to cover people with preexisting medical conditions.  A majority approves of expansion of certain Medicare coverages and the coverage of adult children of policyholders to age 26.  What a sizable majority opposes is the mandate for all Americans to obtain insurance coverage, one way or another, or to pay significant federal fines and penalties.

Exactly what will happen, however, if the Supreme Court strikes down the individual insurance mandate, but upholds the remainder of the Act?

If that occurs, and it is indeed possible, healthcare insurance costs will continue to rise, and to do so at rates as fast as regulatory authorities allow.  That won’t be because the insurance companies are greedy, but because they’ll need those increased premiums to pay the healthcare costs of their policyholders.

Why?  Because the cost-savings projected with the ACA were based on increasing the pool of those insured and because all the features everyone likes will increase costs in ways that the opponents of the Act aren’t facing.  The most notable problem that strikes me is what will happen if people who aren’t insured, and who won’t be required to purchase health insurance, come down with serious health care problems.  As the prohibition against not covering preexisting conditions kicks in, those with problems may very well be able to purchase insurance only after they get sick – and still get coverage.  Then, given the high cost of insurance, more people will opt out of health insurance, until or unless they need major medical treatment.  This could easily undermine the entire healthcare system. And most of those involved with the pending court decision have already noted that this would be a problem and that if the individual mandate is declared unconstitutional, the wider coverage and prohibition of denial of coverage for preexisting medical conditions would also have to be struck down or repealed.

As it is, there are more and more doctors who refuse to treat patients covered by Medicaid because they literally lose money on each patient, and some doctors every year who are caught “overbilling” Medicare insurance, many of whom claim to do so to cover costs. All insurance is based on spreading risk across the population and across a lifetime.  Wisely or unwisely, the ACA attempted to extend benefits by mandating extended coverage.  Without that mandate, regardless of all the rhetoric, the current economics of American medical care will require both higher insurance rates in some form and more denials of expensive medical procedures.

If the universal mandate is struck down, the only ways out of this mess, in general terms, are to:  (1) totally reform the entire health care system [which is impossible in the current climate]; (2) deny more and more care to a wider number of people [possible and likely, but politically unpalatable]; or (3) continue on the course of raising prices in some form or another [higher deductibles and co-payments, higher premiums, etc.].

Once again, we have the conflict between what the public demands and what that same public is unwilling to pay for… or wants someone else to fund.

The other day I came across a commentary in the Libertarian e-zine Prometheus Unbound, in which the commenter declared that while writers, maybe, should be paid for their work, they had no right to be paid, essentially because ideas should not be able to be copyrighted. After I got over my disbelief, and swallowed my anger, I got to thinking about the question… and decided that the commenter was not only misguided, but an idiot.

While I’d be the first to admit that ideas are central and crucial to my work, frankly, that’s not why most people buy books.  Nor are ideas the difficult part of writing, as most authors, if they’re honest, will admit.  What takes work is the process of creating a work of entertainment than embodies those ideas in a way that draws in readers.  Readers buy works of fiction to be entertained, and it takes me, and every author I know, months, if not longer, to create and provide that entertainment in novel form. By the fallacious logic suggested by this Libertarian idiot, no one in any field has the right to be paid for their work.

Why?  Because the vast majority of occupations in a modern society require the combination of ideas and knowledge with the physical effort required to put those ideas into practice, whether in providing a service or a physical product.  Just how long would any society last if doctors, dentists, teachers, plumbers, electricians, salespeople, and almost any occupation [except perhaps politicians] did not have to be paid, except at the whim of those who used their skills and services?  Not very long.

No one is forced to buy books, mine or anyone else’s, but if they do want to read something produced by an author, why shouldn’t they pay for it?  It’s one thing to question the marketing of books, and the prices that various publishers, distributors, and booksellers charge… or even to question how authors should be paid and how much.  But to claim that a creator doesn’t have a right to be paid if someone uses something that took months to produce, that’s not Libertarian, as I understood it.  Except… I looked into it and discovered that there are actually two forms of Libertarianism, one which recognizes private property of the individual as basis of societal order and one which believes in community property, i.e., socialist communalism. Obviously, the commentator belongs to the second group, because he is saying that a novel, which as a physical form of entertainment [not an idea], belongs without cost to the community. I may be a bit old-fashioned, but that doesn’t strike me as Libertarian, but as confiscatory socialism.

All professional authors know full well that there are no original plots and very few truly original ideas in fiction, but to say that authors have no right to be paid for what they produce out of those ideas because these plots and ideas aren’t original is about as valid as saying that a doctor shouldn’t be paid because all doctors know the same medical knowledge.

Knowledge without application is useless and worthless; it’s the application of knowledge that takes work, and for that work the worker has a right to compensation. One can argue and bargain about the amount and the method of payment, but the principle of pay for honest work is fundamental to any functional society.

As I’ve noted before, the idea that information wants to be free is little more than saying people want as much as they can get from other people without paying, and that’s being an intellectual freeloader, not a what I’d call a true Libertarian… but what do I know?

Most people know that the U.S. Department of Justice has sued Apple and five publishing companies for “price fixing.”  One of those companies is Macmillan, the parent company of Tor, which is my publisher.  The DOJ suit focuses on the use of the “agency model” as a way to keep e-book prices higher than the prices that Amazon was charging consumers for e-books. Obviously, the entire lawsuit bothers me, but one of the principal reasons why it why it bothers me is that the Department of Justice lawsuit is, in effect, a lawsuit in support of price fixing and predatory pricing by Amazon. I’ve seen comment after comment about how Apple and the publishers were ripping off readers.

And I’ll admit that, in the short run, allowing Amazon to continue to sell e-books at a price below their cost, which is what Amazon was doing, would have resulted in temporarily lower prices for e-books.  There’s absolutely no question about that.

But… doesn’t anyone think about the longer term?  At the time that Macmillan insisted on the “agency model,” Amazon was selling 91% of all e-books.  That’s a far, far, greater market share than Standard Oil had a century ago when the federal government insisted on breaking the Rockefeller Standard Oil trust as a monopoly.  In addition, Amazon was subsiding its losses on e-books not just from its book-selling business, but from its other more profitable online businesses.  None of the independent booksellers nor Barnes and Noble, nor Borders, nor Books-a-Million had such a source of cash. Amazon’s practices, which the DOJ lawsuit effectively supports, were the very definition of both monopoly and predatory pricing… and DOJ did nothing to stop Amazon.

Does anyone in his or her right mind really believe that once Amazon consolidated a true monopoly that Amazon would continue to lose millions of dollars on e-books?  No, two things would have happened.  First, Amazon would have pressed the publishers to lower prices for e-books… and once Amazon had control of the market most of them would have been hard-pressed to resist.  The publishers’ costs, like it or not, wouldn’t have gone down, and that would have pushed many more authors out of publication.  That would limit just how much prices could be reduced, and prices would have crept back up, but with Amazon having a larger share, and in the end, readers wouldn’t end up paying much less for e-books, and there would have been no competition at all… and fewer authors.

As for the DOJ claim of collusion, as far as I can see, Macmillan colluded with no one.  In fact, Macmillan insisted on the agency model alone for weeks.  I know, because Amazon retaliated by refusing to sell ANY Macmillan books for those weeks, not just e-books, but all titles, and I and all the other Macmillan authors took hits, as did Macmillan.  Now… the other publishers did finally join the push for the agency model, but they joined Macmillan. And I think it’s rather interesting that most of the other publishers immediately settled with DOJ.  To me, that suggests that, if there was any collusion, they were doing the colluding. So in the end, DOJ is prosecuting the one publisher, it seems to me, that was NOT colluding.  Now… I could be wrong, and if this goes to trial, we’ll see what actually happened.

What I do find interesting is that, now, something like two years later, Borders has gone bankrupt and vanished, but Amazon only sells a little over 60% of all e-books, rather than more than 90%… and DOJ is targeting the companies and the model that resulted in increased competition and more e-book outlets.

Could it just be that the administration is pandering to the “I want it cheap now” mentality in an election year?  I also find this deplorable in that publishing is a very low margin business, and the administration is taking on a struggling industry when DOJ has done very little in terms of dealing with extensive and real corruption in the investment banking and financial sector… which had a far more devastating impact on the economy and the consumer.

Politics and more hypocrisy, anyone?

Last week various news outlets ran a story on the “most religious” states.  I wasn’t exactly surprised by the rankings, but then I noticed that the two “most religious” states [Mississippi and Utah] are the two with the lowest per pupil spending on public primary and secondary education and that there appears to be a huge correlation between low spending on public education and a high degree of “religiosity” and a fairly strong correlation between more spending on education and less professed faith among the population.

In addition, states with populations that profess higher degrees of faith, in general, have state legislatures that tend to pass legislation imposing “faith-oriented” restrictions on school curricula.

While at least several science fiction authors, such as Rob Sawyer in Calculating God, have written books about cultures and civilizations based on faith that welcome education and knowledge, and strive to expand knowledge, it appears that, all too often here on earth, faith continues to be the opponent of greater knowledge and education, as witness Senator Santorum’s allegations that college education destroys faith, although that is but one example among many.

But does education destroy faith… or does it erode simplistic faiths and beliefs?  And who set up the structures of those simplistic beliefs?  Despite faith in such items as the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments or the golden plates of the “original” book of Mormon, there’s no real proof of their existence or of even of their original meaning, if they did in fact exist.  No… all faiths have been revealed by human beings, interpreted by human beings, and proselytized by human beings.  No deity has ever written across the sky – “I am God. Here are my tenets.”

So why do so many people cling to beliefs that have little root in proved reality or that have real world tenets that been proven to be false and/or unworkable?  Why can they not believe in a higher power that does not require simplistic faith? And most critically, why do they try to restrict the development of greater knowledge and the education of children in that knowledge?

Perhaps I’m missing something, but if there is a Deity, why on earth would that Deity want human beings to believe in what is not true?  Or to exalt ignorance above knowledge?

“Magic Thinking” is the idea that belief can change the physical world.  Now, I’d be the first to admit that someone’s beliefs can motivate them to accomplish great things, but in the end it is the accomplishments that can change the world, not the beliefs.  Belief is the first step, and at least in my experience, often the easiest.

Yet today, all over the United States, we’ve had a resurgence of “magic thinking” totally divorced from reality.

How can a culture that promotes Viagra, movies and television with intense sexual content, that supplies its young people with private transportation and funds, and that now has the largest gap between the age of physical maturity and financial and social maturity honestly believe that abstinence is going to be practiced for ten years or more by a significant fraction of the young population?  It isn’t; and the facts show it, but legislators across the country continue to push abstinence as the solution and to reject any form of realistic sex education.

Here in Utah, as well as in other states, legislators are busy passing laws that are clearly unconstitutional, laws that their own legal counsels have advised them against.  The latest here is a proposal to “reclaim” all federal lands and declare them state lands.  And at a time when state finances are is short supply, they’ve even declared themselves willing to spend $3 million on a futile lawsuit – while “boasting” the worst-funded primary and secondary education system in the state.  They’re going to send a message to Washington – and to anyone who doesn’t believe as they do – and they believe such messages will change things, even as they reject the messages of others who don’t share their beliefs.

We even see magic thinking in sports, with the recent episodes of Tim Tebow and the Denver Broncos [although Tebow is now a New York Jet], the feeling that belief will overcome a less than stellar passing capability – and for a time, given the impact of belief on performance, it did, but belief has a tendency to fall short over time when confronted with superior abilities and equal determination.

When manifested in international relations, magic thinking can be deadly.  Too many American politicians have shown this over the past fifty years by actions supporting their belief that all that’s needed in the Middle East and elsewhere is “democratic government.”  But they tend to ignore the practical fact that democracy doesn’t work well in cultures that have enshrined bribery and corruption as social necessities, or that continue to regard women as property, or the possibility that people in other cultures, even with more representative and honest governments, may still oppose U.S. policies and aims both politically and militarily.

In the end, there’s a simple fact that all too many “magic thinkers” don’t understand:  The strength of one’s beliefs does not make something so. All the denying in the world isn’t going to stop global warming.  All the religion in the world isn’t going to overturn the fact of evolution, and all the belief in abstinence isn’t going to stop hot-blooded young people from having sex.  Nor is all the belief in the supremacy of American “ideals” unsupported by a massive commitment of physical power going to ensure that American policies and beliefs spread and triumph, although it’s likely to get thousands more American soldiers killed.

Recent news reports have noted that as gasoline prices have risen, the President’s popularity has declined commensurately. From a practical point of view this makes no sense, because the President has absolutely no control over energy prices.  He can’t even reduce or increase taxes on gasoline unless the Congress passes legislation, and he certainly can’t set gasoline prices.

In economic terms, crude oil and gasoline are what are known as fungible commodities, that is, there’s no price distinction between light crude from the United States, Saudi Arabia, or elsewhere.  The only price differential in the marketplace is the transport cost from the point of production, and since Middle East oil has a lower cost of production, in most cases, transportation costs don’t affect the price of crude, only the price of refined gasoline. What that means, among other things, is that “Drill, Baby, drill!” isn’t going to make a measurable difference in gasoline prices. In fact, as U.S. production of oil has increased over the last few years, it’s made no appreciable impact on gasoline prices because world-wide demand has increased and will continue to increase as countries such as India and China build and use more cars and trucks.

The only time in the last 60 years when a President attempted to control gasoline prices was during the Nixon administration when Nixon imposed price controls [through legislation he requested and Congress passed].  The result was a disaster.  Because oil companies could not pass on the costs of higher-priced crude oil, they stopped buying and producing it because to do so meant losing money on every barrel of higher-priced oil.  The result was gasoline lines blocks long all over the nation and fuel shortages.

On the other hand, North America is literally awash in natural gas at present.  Interestingly enough, even though natural gas prices are close to all-time lows, which means that most homes heated by natural gas have seen real heating costs decline, this doesn’t seem to translate into greater political approval for the President or anyone else.

What continues to be overlooked in the debate over Romneycare/Obamacare [The Affordable Health Care Act] is the issue of “transferred costs.”  Because hospitals are essentially required to provide health care for those who need it, the costs involved in providing such care to those unable to pay have to be “transferred” to someone else – or the hospitals would go broke. Because doctors can refuse to provide services to those who cannot pay, the uninsured overuse hospital health care, especially at hospital emergency rooms, and that drives up health care costs. Because they cannot pay, the hospitals transfer costs to other paying patients, or their insurance companies, or governments. There are two classes of uninsured – those who could afford insurance and choose not to pay for it and those who either cannot get it or cannot afford it.  The thought behind the Affordable Health Care Act was to provide insurance to those who could not afford it and require those who could to purchase insurance or pay penalties, thus addressing the cost issue and theoretically redistributing health care away from overuse of expensive hospital facilities.  Regardless of whether one agrees with the Act or not, the driving force was the accelerating cost of health care and the economics behind it – and, so far as I can see, none of the opponents of the Act have come up with a viable and workable way of addressing those economics.  They don’t want to require universal insurance; they don’t want a single payer system; they oppose any cost-cutting measures that will make a real difference; and they don’t want to deny health care to anyone. Under those parameters, health care costs in the U.S. will continue to rise, even though they’re the highest of any developed nation… and our health is below average.  The issue is economics, and no one wants to confront that reality.

Whether it’s gasoline or health care prices…it’s so much easier to cast stones… especially at politicians, and especially when they deserve blame for other things.  But right now, on too many economic issues, people are blaming politicians, and politicians are trying to blame anyone else… and none of them want to look at the economics.

The “Money Report” section of the April issue of The Atlantic Monthly contains a fascinating comparison between what Americans spent as a society in 1967 and what we spent in 2007.  The facts are sometimes in agreement with popular perception… and sometimes rather wildly at variance with them.

The area where spending has gone up the most is, unsurprisingly, that of health care, and few would dispute that.  In constant dollars, adjusted for inflation, health care costs have gone from 8.1% of spending to 18.0% – more than doubling.  Likewise, the percentage we spend on business services, things like advertising, accounting, legal services, insurance other than for health care, real estate fees, and consulting, has also more than doubled (this is also where those billions in financiers’ bonuses fit in, as well as the  additional costs of such services as tax preparation, various attorney’s fees, and all the money management fees).  Recreation and entertainment spending have also increased by 80%, so whether we want to admit it or not, we’re either pampering ourselves more than we did forty years ago or the entertainment and recreation moguls are charging more for the same things.

In some areas, such as education, housing, and transportation, there’s been little change in the proportion of income we spend.  With the high increase in the cost of higher education, that suggests that spending on primary and secondary education, in real dollar terms, has dropped, and from what I’ve seen in state and local education budgets that’s definitely been the case.

On the other hand, the percentage of our spending going to food and drink has dropped by 40%, even though proportion spent at restaurants has increased by 75%. And the percentage we spend on clothing has dropped by more than 35%, no surprise to me, given the way most people look in public.

But, most surprising to me were the numbers spent on government/taxes.  In 1967, over 18% of income went to government through fees and taxes.  By 2007, that had dropped to 13.2% – a decrease of over 25%.  So… in real dollar terms, government is costing us less of our income today than it did forty years ago.  Somehow… this message hasn’t gotten across to anyone.

Admittedly, most people just look at the dollars, and in nominal dollars, the figures show that government budgets increase every year, but over time, those budgets haven’t increased as much as inflation.  Of course, neither have the earnings of the middle class, but even their earnings have only declined, in real dollars, very slightly – not the 25% real decrease we’ve seen in government spending. Is it any wonder we’re facing a crumbling infrastructure in areas such as highways and bridges, especially when a larger fraction of declining real federal revenues has been devoted to fighting overseas wars?

Of course, I doubt that these numbers, or anything resembling them, will ever show up in the political arena. But I thought some of you ought to know.

A recent internet review of  Empress of Eternity claimed that it was “the least inspiring” of any of my recent books.  I cringed when I read those words, not because the reviewer didn’t like the book – Empress tends to polarize readers; they either like it or hate it, and I understand that – by what the “reviewer” wrote wasn’t what he meant to sat.  The book was inspired.  I had to be inspired to write such an intricate and involved weaving of timelines across millions of years and make it all come together. But what the reviewer meant was that he didn’t find it inspiring.  He wasn’t inspired.

In a nutshell, this is a small example of one problem with the whole gamut of internet publishing, reviewing, and commentary.  Too many people are using words and grammatical constructions, not to mention facts, that they don’t understand… and setting themselves up as authorities.  All it takes is some eye-catching graphics, a catchy and/or pretentious title and… voila!  Another sage is born.

And if no publisher will take on a book?  Then e-publish it!  List it for sale on Amazon, and Jeff Bezos will be happy to try to sell it and take his cut.  It costs him next to nothing.  List it for $1.99 or even $.99, and maybe it will become a Kindle bestseller.  But does that tell any reader whether it’s any good?  Over the years, I’ve had reader after reader tell me that they buy books from certain publishers because they know exactly what they’re getting and what the quality is.

Established publishing firms – and magazines – tend to have standards, although I will admit that sometimes those standards and procedures do keep a good book from being published, but after 40 years in the field I can say that, for every good work that didn’t get published by a major publisher, there were thousands they didn’t publish that never should have been published… not because of censorship or anything so sinister, but because those unpublished books were just plain bad.  Such standards don’t exist on the internet, and I have doubts that they ever will.

That is what publishing firms have been for – to find, refine, and publisher works of a minimum acceptable literary quality (and hopefully much better) that appeal to the tastes of readers.  Especially in today’s fast-paced world, very few people have the time or the inclination to sift through manuscript after manuscript (or self-published e-book after e-book) in hopes of finding passable, or quality or thought-provoking entertainment.  Yet the combination of e-publishing and Amazon may very well create a huge gulf in writing/literature, with, on the one hand, the mainstream publishers only able to publish “super-titles” and a handful of other “literature” titles, while leaving readers to struggle through a sprawling mish-mash of e-novels, ranging from a comparatively few well-edited and coherent works at the top down through a vast plethora of sub-mediocrity to an even vaster array of abysmal attempts at fiction.

Welcome to the post-literate e-world!

Over the past several months, I’ve had blog comments, emails, and questions at appearances about why my publisher insists on demanding a higher price for an ebook than a hardcover. The simple answer is that my publisher doesn’t, no matter what it may seem to readers, but… obviously some explanation is in order.

So… I’ll give some examples, but please note that the prices I’m giving are those in force as I’m writing this… and they could change.

My last two published books are currently Scholar and Lady-Protector.  The book immediately published before Lady-Protector was Empress of Eternity.  At present, the hardcover of Scholar on Amazon or Barnes and Noble costs more than the Kindle or Nook version.

The hardcover version of Lady-Protector sells for $.32 less on Amazon than does the Kindle, although the Kindle price will drop on March 27th, when the paperback is released.  The hardcover price of Lady-Protector at Barnes & Noble remains above the Nook price.

The hardcover version of Empress of Eternity currently sells on Amazon at something like $6.67, less than the Kindle version, as an irate reader noted.  Amazon purchased that book from Tor for around $12.00 and has chosen to sell it at the discounted price, in all probability, in order to unload it, because the hardcover was published roughly 16 months ago, and very few hardcovers of any book sell that long after publication. Barnes and Noble has kept the hardcover price at the original level.

The reason for these disparate prices is that hardcover books are sold at wholesale to Amazon and other retailers or distributors, usually at slightly more than 50% of the cover price, and retailers and/or distributors can sell them at any price they wish.  The prices on electronic books, on the other hand, are set by the publishers, as a result of the nasty fight between all the publishers and Amazon several years ago, when Amazon insisted on selling all ebooks at a loss, subsidized by its profits in other areas, thus attempting to fix prices at a lower level and gain control of the market.

Some readers have claimed that ebooks should be far cheaper than either hardcovers or paperbacks because the ebook does not require paper, ink, printing, and physical distribution.  That’s true, but an ebook does require all the other costs of production, and at present, the “difference in cost” between ebooks and hardcovers, on average, it runs from about $2.50 to $4.00 per hardcover, depending on the number of pages and the print run, which is roughly the price differential between the price Amazon or B&N initially charges for a hardcover and the initial Kindle/Nook price.

The bottom line is that, at present, subject to an on-going legal battle and a Department of Justice proceeding, the publishers have control over the retail ebook price, but not over the retail hardcover price, and Amazon has a practice of playing games with hardcover prices as part of their on-going fight with traditional publishing… and letting readers place the blame for the “high” ebook price on the publishers, which, in fact, is half-true.  The publishers do set those prices, but selective use of low hardcover prices is totally under the control of the retailer.  Macmillan, the parent company of Tor, has a policy of dropping the ebook price to match the paperback price on the day the paperback is released.  Amazon is usually reliable in doing so… but not always, but, again, failure to drop the ebook price is not necessarily the fault of the publisher and has to be assessed, unhappily, on a case by case basis.

As an author, fortunately or unfortunately, I have no control over any of the retail prices charged for my books that are published by Tor. Nor does any author whose books are issued by a major publisher.

The other day I was going over sales figures with my editor, and we got to talking about where the publishing market is going.  I knew that paperback sales had taken a huge hit, but just how huge I didn’t realize, although I was certainly aware that my own paperback sales had taken hits. According to my editor, on average, once you get below the huge best-sellers, like A Game of Thrones, Twilight, The Hunger Games, etc., on average paperback sales are now running at 20-30% of what they did fifteen years ago, if not lower in some cases. Authors who could count on selling 100,000 copies or more in paperback are now selling 20,000 -30,000, and the same is true of newer authors whose hardcover sales are at the low New York Times bestseller levels.  In more and more cases, publishers aren’t even issuing some books in paperback, but only in hardcover or trade paperback and then ebook format.  It’s not just a matter of price, either, no matter what readers claim, since, in real dollar terms paperbacks are either lower or only slightly higher in price [depending on which measure of inflation is used] than they were fifteen years ago.

What’s happened?

The immediate suspicion is that the “lost” paperback sales have been replaced by ebook sales, but the sales numbers don’t support that in the case of paperback books, although there’s a fairly good correlation in the sale of hardcovers, that is, for a number of authors, hardcover and initial ebook sales [at the higher price] are fairly close to former hardcover sales alone, although this results in lower author royalties.

There are a lot of other explanations for the paperback book sales decline out there.  Many cite piracy and ebooks as the reason, and just as many claim that “pirated” editions actually increase sales, although I’m skeptical of the latter argument on this. Here’s why. Over the past year or so, I’ve received more than a few emails and comments along the lines of “I first read one of your books as a pirated download.”  All of those who contacted me with that line went on to say that they now purchase my works, for which I’m grateful.

BUT… this raises several another questions.  Just how many readers out there are there who read one of those pirated editions and said, “Forget it!  This just isn’t for me.”?  And how many others read a few pages and turned away?  And how many people in that reading and interest bracket would have bought and tried a paperback twenty years ago?

These questions are very relevant, especially in the case of the decline of paperback sales.  Before the advent of ebooks and the subsequent widespread piracy – and it’s everywhere – a reader had to get a hold of a physical book, and that physical book had to be paid for, and that counted in sales. Even if the reader didn’t like it, and threw it in the trash or gave it to a friend, a copy of the book was sold, and someone had to make an effort to do something with the book.  In addition, after having invested in buying the book, a great percentage of readers would struggle through the book. In my case, this is particularly relevant, because many of my books are so complex that they develop slowly.  All you have to do is look at all the reviews to see that. In the “old” days, I suspect I hooked more readers because they didn’t want to “waste” their money.  Today, when readers scan a pirated ebook, they’ve invested nothing, and there’s no cost to them, and many, I believe, just turn away from something that doesn’t provide immediate gratification.

Add to this something I’ve also heard and read a lot about in the last year, and that is an attitude of entitlement – that readers “deserve” to know whether they’ll like a book before they pay for it.  What?  If you go to a movie, or rent one, or purchase a DVD, you don’t get to see it and make a decision to pay for it after the fact.  Even if you see in on cable or satellite, you’re essentially paying for it.  You can read up on restaurants, but you don’t get to eat the meal and then refuse to pay for it because you didn’t like it, at least not for long, and not without a great deal of unpleasantness.

Then… there’s simply the vast number of websites offering free downloads of books.  There are literally scores offering my books.  Would they all be doing this if there weren’t a demand?  I don’t think so.

I’ve been fortunate, in that, while I’ve taken some considerable hits in the pocketbook from this so-called market shift, I still sell enough that my publisher continues to publish my books in hardcover, mass market paperback, and ebook format. There are all too many good writers who have not been that fortunate and who are not good web-and-internet promoters… and their books no longer see print… or much in the way of new readers even when e-published.  In essence, they’ve been pushed out by cheap and usually inferior works by writers who aren’t as good in writing but who are far more effective at promotion… by a class of works that might be called “internet penny dreadfuls” [mixing anachronism and technology, so to speak].  That’s not to say that there are not some good authors who are e-publishing their own works, but they’re a very small minority among the flood of self-published ebooks.

Publishers can’t compete with this new class of “penny dreadfuls” – and they won’t.  To stay in business, they’ll have to chase the popular best-seller market, as is already happening with the proliferation of books about vampires, werewolves, zombies, or those which glorify violence of all kinds [yes, I do mean The Game of Thrones] while retaining those authors who have a dedicated following and discarding those whose sales drop off, while Amazon pushes for cheaper and cheaper ebooks [with the unwitting help of the U.S. Department of Justice].  The old model of publishers developing authors has almost vanished, and current trends will likely finish it off.

Technology changes things, including popular attitudes, and most of them won’t change back, and that means that the publishing field is changing and will continue to do so.  But…please don’t make the argument that pirated ebooks are good for authors, books, good writing, or literature.  They’re only good for the ultra-popular writers and the great self-promoters… and that narrows the range of available books in a very practical sense.