With the Presidential nomination sweepstakes and popularity contest already opening up, we’re all going to be treated to another year of claims and counterclaims, and, if the President’s recent remarks and the Republican candidates’ counter-claims are any indication, a good proportion of the rhetoric is likely to center around taxes.

As I understand the respective positions, the Democrats feel that, because wealth has become more and more concentrated, particularly in the last decade, the “wealthy” [however they’re defined] should pay a greater share in taxes, and that would be determined by closing various “loopholes” and creating a higher tax rate for the top income categories, roughly above $250,000.  The Republicans counter by saying that higher rates are counterproductive economically and that those who are above the “middle class” already pay a disproportionate amount of federal income tax.

While statistics need to be viewed with care, and I know, having spent many years as an economist, I decided to take yet another look at the IRS statistics in light of the present and likely the coming campaign charges, even though I know that few are likely to change their minds based on mere statistics.

According to IRS statistics, during the period from 1951 to 1980, the percentage of Americans who paid no federal income taxes essentially remained stable at between 21-22%.  Beginning in the 1980s, the percentage of taxpayers who paid no federal income tax began to rise, hitting 32% in 2004, 47% in 2009, and an estimated 53% in 2010.

At the same time, the percentage of tax revenues paid by the “middle class” also declined, with the percentage of total income taxes paid by the “middle class’ [defined as those taxpayers comprising those making more than the median wage, but less than the top 10%] declining from almost 40% of all income tax revenues to about one quarter of all tax revenues.  At the same time, the top ten percent of taxpayers went from paying roughly 45% of all income taxes to paying 70% of all income taxes.

Put another way, 53% of all taxpayers, largely those in the bottom fifty percent of taxpayers in income terms, paid no taxes.  The next third [37%, if we’re being more precise] paid 30% of all income tax revenue, and the top 10% [those with taxable incomes above $115,000] paid 70% of all federal income tax revenues.

At present, the current federal deficit is running close to one and a half trillion dollars annually, and federal income tax revenues are bringing in around $850 billon. The most obvious, and most bandied about, solution is to increase taxes on the rich, but there are a number of problems with this solution.

First, the reformers on the left confuse is “wealth” with “income,” and unless the Congress changes the tax law, the IRS and the Congress can only tax income, not wealth.  According to the latest IRS statistics, the eight thousand wealthiest Americans earned a combined total of $239 billion in 2009.  Assuming that Congress sees fit [which they won’t] to increase the marginal tax rate on millionaires and billionaires to 90%, and also assuming that they’re smart enough to get rid of all the deductions for these individuals, the total federal income tax revenues would total a little over $215 billion.  Given that this year’s federal deficit will be roughly $1.4 trillion, taxing those less wealthy would also be necessary to get rid of the deficit by taxing the “rich.” The 14,000 odd taxpayers who earned between five and ten million dollars a year had a total income of $95 billion, and a 90% cut of their income would raise $85 billion.  But since these taxpayers already pay close to $100 billion, the additional tax revenues would only be $200 billion. That’s still not enough.  In fact, if a 90% rate were applied to all taxpayers with an income above 1 million dollars, the total additional revenue raised would amount to $300 billion.  That leaves a short-fall of well over a trillion dollars… and the only people left to tax are those who are complaining the most about being overtaxed.  For the 81 million people who aren’t millionaires, to cover the remaining deficit through income taxes would require an average tax increase of over $12,000 a tax return.

Again, if one only wishes to tax the remaining “rich,” i.e., those making over $200,000 a year, that won’t work either, because taking all their taxable income would just barely cover that remaining trillion dollar deficit.

So… in essence, even a 90% tax rate on everyone earning over $200,000 won’t cover the current federal deficit. And, of course that would raise other problems, because, since most state income taxes run around 6% for those making over $200,000, a 90% federal income tax would bankrupt all but those millionaires making more than $5 million annually.

Given a $1.4 trillion annual deficit, and the lowest tax rates in more than 70 years, the Republican alternative of continuing lower taxes and slashing federal programs doesn’t seem terribly workable, either, since to balance the federal budget would require cutting roughly 30% of all federal programs…which would translate into cutting more than a million jobs at a time of high unemployment… and given the fact that many of those programs can’t be cut without a massive overhaul in government, either way, neither side makes much sense.

The other day I engaged in an activity that my wife deplores – I read another review of one my books, of Arms-Commander – and came across yet another common mistake made by both professional and amateur reviewers all too often.  The reviewer in question made the statement that, because of her abilities, Saryn was never in any real danger.  Outside of the fact that she gets rather banged up and almost dies upon several occasions, this reviewer and others – and not just in reviewing my books, by the way – fail to understand that great ability does not guarantee surviving inherently dangerous combat and occupational situations.

Since I do happen to know a bit about flying, I’ll begin with an example from that field.

The greatest combat pilot in the world is still partly at the mercy of mechanical failure, the elements, his/her own failures in judgment, unforeseen circumstances, and luck on the part of an opposing pilot.  As a matter of fact, in World War II, roughly half of all aircraft fatalities occurred in non-combat situations.  The same sets of factors occur anytime anyone of ability is involved in a dangerous situation.  Even the best mountain climbers get killed, and that’s without anyone shooting at them.  In a sword fight, blades can shatter, get caught on something for a moment at an inappropriate time, or the superior fighter can slip on sand or oil – or be distracted in some fashion or another.

Those who are best will also attempt to set up situations where their exposure to the unpredictable is minimized… as does Saryn, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not in danger every time they go into a battle or combat.  Then think about the fact that, as a matter of fact, even everyday life in the good old USA has a significant element of danger, when you consider that over 40,000 people die annually in auto-related accidents, and that there are something like 15,000 homicides a year.

In the case of someone like Saryn, whose forces are outnumbered, the best strategy is always to divide and conquer, to attack in ways and with methods that maximize her strengths and neutralize the enemy’s.  She does so… but that doesn’t mean she’s not in danger, as her various injuries and wounds prove… as do the deaths of hundreds of her supporters and allies also prove.

Well… perhaps the reviewer didn’t get the sense that she could be killed. If injuries, wounds, near-death, the deaths of those closer to her, and lots of close calls won’t convince a reader, then the only thing that will is her own death.  But that creates a bit of a problem, because most readers want the hero or heroine to prevail against great odds.  Like it or not, that means that most protagonists will survive, especially in, frankly, commercially successful books, and, as an author, I really can’t afford to write commercially unsuccessful books.  The only question is how badly the protagonists are injured and under what circumstances.  As one of my offspring once observed, “You need to abuse your characters a lot.”  But abuse doesn’t mean that an author has to slaughter 90% of the characters to prove danger.  Even 5-10% death rates suggest dangerous situations.

So… any reviewer who claims that a protagonist who survives trials and tribulations and almost dies along the way is never really in danger is not only an idiot, but hasn’t had much real world experience… because, for any character, death can be just around the corner, just as it is in real life.

Recently, in an ABC television interview with Christiane Amanpour, Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google and its current executive chairman, made the observation that the young people graduating from colleges and university today were brighter than their predecessors and noted that he’d worked with some of the brightest minds of his generation.  Given Schmidt’s background in electronics and communications technology, I have no doubts that he has indeed worked with some of the brightest minds in his field.

But what exactly have these brilliant minds, especially at organizations like Google and Facebook, given to society and civilization?  They’ve certainly perfected the technological aspects of introspection, fame-seeking, ego-satisfaction, and instant communications over subjects largely meaningless in the larger scope of the problems facing society. They created a massive search engine that’s most useful for finding the general and trivial… and possibly one of their endeavors, through the Google book settlement, may have undermined the entire literary copyright process. Oh…and they’ve created some jobs and a form of bubble wealth.

I don’t see that these brilliant [and exceedingly well compensated] minds have been terribly successful at stabilizing our financial system.  In fact, in the quest for wealth, their algorithms and quant models have been highly destabilizing and have likely destroyed more companies and wealth than they’ve created.  Nor have the younger generations of bright minds made significant contributions, from what I can tell, to environmental improvement [those were made largely by pre-baby-boomers and early baby-boomers].  And that brilliance has been incredibly successful in revolutionizing the political system, in that the application of technology, money, and data to campaigns has made the results of most elections a foregone conclusion – and resulted in the greatest polarization in American history and potentially the most disastrous political deadlock since the Civil War.

From these observations, I have to ask at just what are these younger college graduates so brilliant?  Developing technologies and systems that make billions of dollars out of the trivial?  Or improving the economic and political and technology infrastructure of the nation?  Or finding new approaches to our health care and energy problems?  Or… [fill in scores of different questions dealing with fundamental improvements to society and the world]?

To my way of thinking, antiquated as it may be, brilliant is as brilliant does, and brilliance in pursuit of the trivial, no matter how remunerative, is merely brilliance in pursuit of mediocrity… and yet, no one seems to point this out.

The other day one of the blog comments cited a preference for even a “fake rugged individualist over some ‘it takes a village’ idiot,” and while I initially appreciated the sentiment, the comment got me to thinking, and the more I thought, the more I decided that the choice represented by the two alternatives was a false representation… and another example of the “either/or” polarization that infects our society today.

Why? By way of a slight digression, I’ll explain.

The recent history and culture of the United States as a European outshoot, short as it is, is strongly colored by the myth of the rugged individualist, the pioneer, the superiority of the individual entrepreneur, and a number of other idealized depictions of individual superiority over the group or the masses or the village.

But let’s look at a few aspects of those myths.  First of which, the majority of the conquest of the “new world” wasn’t accomplished by Europeans and their culture and tools, but by disease.  Second, individuals didn’t create all those superior weapons and tools that led to an industrial and military power by themselves.  The frontiersman with his trusty rifle, his saddle, etc., all the equipment that allowed the “conquest” of the Americas was in fact the product of the village, if you will, and the crafts and skills of those villages.  And many of the great inventions attributed to single individuals, such as the steamboat to Fulton, the steam engine to Watt, the airplane to the Wright brothers, electricity to Edison, and so forth, all could have been – and were in fact – accomplished by others at close to the same time.

The fact is that such developments are an outgrowth of the existing culture, and while it may take a bright individualist to make an advance, first, there must always be more than one such individual for the advance to be successful [more about this in a moment], and the culture must need and/or accept that advance.  Progress and success, if you will, require both the individualists and the culture or village.

In Ptolemaic Egypt, Hero [Heron] built what appears to haven been the first steam engine, as well as employed magnetism in a technical way and built a jet-like pump for fighting fires.  Yet the steam engine vanished from history and did not reappear for more than 1600 years. Similar advances occurred in early China, and, effectively, the culture turned its back on them. Being a genius with proven products wasn’t enough, and it never has been.

The term “rugged individualist” conjures the idea of the man or woman living apart from and independent of society, yet human beings cannot survive above the most primitive level without the support of and the products of society.  Likewise societies tend to languish, stagnate, and eventually collapse if they crush individuality and creativity.

A vital culture needs to support both genius and individuality and cooperative effort.  Without both, it has no future… and yet, today, all too many on the left denigrate the contribution of the outstanding individuals and all too many on the right denigrate the role of a productive and cooperative society.

Early in August, the author Neal Gabler wrote an article in The New York Times, in which he observed that “we are living in an increasingly post-idea world – a world in which big, thought-provoking ideas that can’t be instantly monetized are of so little intrinsic value that fewer people are generating them and fewer outlets are disseminating them, the Internet notwithstanding.”  He contends that this is largely so because we are drowning in information and that the informational version of Gresham’s Law is at work, in that the mass of trivial information pushes out significant information, and because, within that mass of trivia, there is so much that confirms what we think is so that most people do not look or quest beyond their conformational biases, each of us is actually living in a smaller universe than did previous generations, even though the amount of information is infinitely larger.  He concludes by pointing out that society has historically been changed by “big ideas,” such as those of Einstein, Keynes, Freud, and Darwin, and that while there are currently thinkers who offer equally “large” and provocative ideas, those ideas are being lost in the ocean of trivia… and that society is already suffering and will continue to do so.

I don’t dispute any of Gabler’s points, and, in fact, find his observations and assessments, if anything, far too moderate, but I also believe that he minimizes two other aspects of the problem – the fact that the total mass of information acts as insulation to keep people from having to come to grips with ideas and facts at variance with their beliefs and the equation of “profitable ideas” with great ones.

Because the mass of information is so great, its very volume encompasses a range of correct data, generalizations, beliefs, anecdotes, examples, falsehoods, misrepresentations, and inaccuracies, the sum total of which creates the impression that all points of view and all ideas on a subject have equal value… or that the individual has every right to pick that information with which he or she is comfortable.  In the past, when information channels and sources were much narrower, there was a far higher percentage of “new” ideas and information that challenged existing beliefs reaching the average person.  While, in many cases, even “correct” new information or ideas were initially rejected, out of those challenges and questions emerged new perspectives and often new ways of looking and society and even the universe. Now… the new ideas are still out there… more often than not, adrift in a sea of trivia and indifference.

And… there is indeed one new “great” idea in American society, although it’s actually anything but new, but has rather undergone a re-birth, and that is the thought that no idea is of great worth unless it can be monetized profitably.  This is a central theme of the right wing of American politics today, that the profitability of government and business are paramount. Unhappily, it’s also an idea that is at the core of the left wing as well, even as the liberal left denies it.  But when the liberals make the argument that the wars in the Middle East should be stopped on monetary grounds, they’re essentially agreeing with the conservatives, in that they’re stating that social programs should be monetized, and that their worth lies in the amount of money applied to such programs.  In underlying principles, that’s no different from saying that no product is good unless it’s profitable.

Yet Galileo certainly wasn’t wealthy, nor Copernicus, nor Socrates, nor Freud, nor Einstein, nor Darwin… nor the majority of great thinkers in history.  Very, very few of the great artists were wealthy, either.  Few of the founding fathers of the United States died wealthy, either, for all their great ideas… So why do we spend so much time today idolizing the rich and famous?

Have we forgotten what greatness and great ideas are?  Or have we just reached the point where we as a society either fear them or can comfortably ignore them?

In 1768, the composer Franz Joseph Haydn wrote Lo speziale, an opera that depicted a Jewish apothecary, a work that was later revived by Mahler and Hirschfeld at the end of the nineteenth century as Der Apotheker [The Apothecary].

In the opera, non-Jews rail against the immigrant Jews for taking the jobs of the locals, and blaming them for all the misery that befalls them. Of course, in the 1930s in Germany, Hitler used the same theme, and that led to the Holocaust. Today, in the United States, a similar chorus is once more rising, as it did in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, first against the Germans, then the Irish, and finally the Italians, citing each immigrant group as the source of crime and social woe – just as many people and politicians are doing today with the U.S. Latino population. Of course, the Jews are scarcely blameless, either, historically regarding the Moabites and the Samaritans rather disfavorably

It appears to be an all-too-human trait to blame the “outsider” when matters aren’t going well in a society, and because the United States is facing the highest unemployment since the Great Depression, everyone is looking to blame someone or something else. Despite this chorus against immigrants, recent studies indicate that manufacturing employment in the U.S., the economic area where the job loss over the past two generations has been the greatest, is now and has been relatively stable for the past several years.  Because the U.S. population is growing, of course, the percentage of manufacturing jobs compared to total employment continues to decline, and because jobs have been cut in all areas of the economy manufacturing jobs have been cut as well, but such cuts are different from those resulting from basic structural changes.

The structural reasons for the losses in manufacturing employment are various, ranging from the ability to produce goods more cheaply overseas to a growing reliance on automation and robotics.  Regardless of the reasons, however, those seeking to immigrate to the U.S., either legally or illegally, did not cause the problems.  They were caused by U.S. citizens operating in response to those great American ideals – the profit motive and the bargain.  Those job losses were caused because Americans want the best good at the cheapest price, and all too many goods can be manufactured more cheaply – and more profitably — either through automation or through overseas outsourcing.

Yet all over the country, more and more blame is laid upon the immigrants, both for crimes and lack of jobs.  More than a few studies have shown that crime rates are far more related to poverty than ethnic origin and that crime rates in poor white communities are little different from crime rates in poor areas of other ethnicities. Poverty and crime go together. Yet blaming immigrants continues, despite the fact that in many areas, non-immigrants won’t take the lower-paid and often physically more demanding jobs that immigrants will and the even more important factor that the U.S. economy requires fewer and fewer unskilled and semi-skilled jobs and more and more jobs requiring education or additional training.  The days when a semi-skilled auto worker could make more than $100,000 are vanishing… if not gone, but, rather than recognizing these facts, once again, we have politicians and demagogues seeking to blame those who aren’t the cause, but who only want what everyone else wants.

Over the past few years, especially among book lovers, there’s been a continual undercurrent of dissatisfaction with chain bookstores, and I’d be the first to admit that I have my problems with the big box bookstores.  Certainly, those who’ve followed this site for several years know that I felt from way back that Borders was badly managed, but what I find interesting is that I’ve seen very little on what led to the rise of the mega-bookstore… and it wasn’t just corporate greed. Because I’m an author and because I’ve been to well over a thousand bookstores of all sizes and shapes in almost every state in the United States [excepting five], however, I may have a slightly different perspective from others.

Over the last thirty years especially, the book business has changed dramatically, the most significant factors, in my opinion, being the collapse/centralization of the wholesale distribution network and the closure of more than 2,000 smaller mall stores. The closure of the mall stores resulted from a failure of Borders, in particular, to realize exactly what those stores did, which was to increase the reader base while providing a very modest profit.  That modest profit wasn’t enough for the corporate types, unfortunately, and they thought large destination stores would provide higher margins, which they do [if run well, which Borders was not], but almost everyone who goes to a big chain store is a dedicated buyer… and the closure of the mall stores left entire areas of major cities with no convenient bookstore. With the centralization of the wholesale distribution networks, most of the bookracks in drugstores and elsewhere vanished, as did the local expertise on what sold where. These factors have reduced the number of readers and buyers, as well as led to the growth of the large book chains, including WalMart’s book sections, and, in turn, to aggressive price discounting on best-sellers. That aggressive pricing made the economics unworkable for many small independent booksellers.

Yet for all the woe and hand-wringing by some authors and others, I have very mixed feelings about smaller bookstores.  I love their passion and their love of books, and their dedication to literacy and reading, but… having visited scores of them, one thing stands out in my mind.  Except for a comparative few specialty F&SF stores [less than thirty nationwide in 1990, and less than a handful today], very few of the small independents carried much fantasy and science fiction.  I’m fortunate if I see more than three or four of my titles in any small independent bookstore, and generally there is only one copy of each. This is true of even F&SF top best-sellers as well, if with a few more copies of each title. Now… there are exceptions, such as the small store in my home town, but they’re rare.  On the other hand, the big box chains carry almost all my fantasy titles, and if they didn’t, I’d be looking for a day job or eking it out on what I’ve saved over the years.  The plain fact is that big-box stores have supported genre fiction far more than have the small independents, and that’s especially true for fantasy and science fiction.  What’s also true is that the old dispersed wholesale rack system also supported genre fiction more than the independents did.  So now, the only real outlet for a broad range of genre fiction, especially F&SF, appears to be the big box stores.

Some authors in the field are optimistic that the internet will provide another outlet, besides Amazon and B&N.com, but I have my doubts, simply because most readers don’t want to search author sites and the like – at least not until they know the author and his or her works.

So… like it or not, for now those of us in the F&SF field are pretty much tied to the big box boys and Amazon… because for all of the concern about the independents, much as I like them and their devoted people, the independents alone can’t come close to supporting the field… although that’s something that far too many authors won’t admit publicly.

The other day, my brother sent me a copy of the final column of a retiring columnist [Charlie Reese of the Orlando Sentinal].  If the column is representative of Mr. Reese’s views, I’m glad to see him no longer in print and wish him a very happy retirement.  His view was that all of our ills as a society can be laid to 545 people – the Congress, the President, and the Supreme Court, because not one of the taxes, not one of the federal budgets, not one of the federal regulations, not one of the deficits, and not one of the federal court decisions that have led to the mess we’re in could have taken place without the acts of those individuals… and that each and every one of them could have said “no.”

And, in the strictest and most simplistic sense of the word, he’s absolutely right.  But in the larger sense, he’s absolutely wrong… because we live in a representative democratic republic, and we, as voters or non-voters, decide who represents us every two years. As some of you may know, I spent some 18 years in Washington, D.C., first as the legislative director for a congressman, then as the staff director for his successor, then as the head of legislation and congressional relations for the U.S. EPA, and finally as a consultant, i.e., beltway bandit, representing corporations before the Congress and the Executive Branch.  Given that I’ve also worked in private industry and as a small businessman, not to mention as a Navy pilot, I’ve seen how government works and doesn’t work pretty much from all sides.  And it’s anything but simple.

I’ve known personally dozens of representative and senators, and professionally dealt with hundreds of them… and well over 90% of them faithfully and diligently represented the views of the majority of the voters who elected them.  It’s all well and good to extol the “good old days” when the USA was the economic power of the world with balanced budgets and prosperity… but that often wasn’t the case.  Even before the Great Depression, there were other brutal depressions and financial collapses, and certainly in World War II, the budget was far from balanced.  By the time of the Great Depression, the majority of Americans were ready to move away from unrestrained laissez-faire capitalism, and they showed it in their support of Franklin Roosevelt and whom they elected to Congress.  With unemployment over 25%, and breadlines everywhere, with older people in poverty, who could blame them?  They voted for what they thought they wanted, as they did before, and as they have ever since.

Since I left Washington, have my representatives and senators represented my views?  Hell no!  But my views aren’t in the majority where I live.  And because only a little more than half the eligible voters actually vote, especially in off-year elections, it may well be that many senators and representatives do not represent the views of the majority of their constituents, but only the views of the majority of those who vote… but that’s not the fault of the Congress.  It’s the fault of those who fail to vote.

To blame the problems in Washington on a Congress and a President that reflect the views of the majority of voters is not only simplistic, but it’s also taking the easy way out.  Recent elections have shown, more than ever, that any representative or senator who goes against the wishes of the majority of voters in his or district or state usually gets tossed out.  The plain fact of the matter is that the majority of voters, for better or worse, really don’t want fiscal discipline.  They don’t want cuts in the federal programs that benefit them, only in those that benefit someone else, and they don’t want to pay more taxes, although it might be all right if someone else did.  And Congress has continued to listen to them and reflect their wishes.

Would any of us want a government that didn’t?  That would be even worse than what we have… and what we have isn’t all that wonderful at the moment, but it’s still better than the alternatives.  The problem isn’t the structure, and it isn’t the Congress.  As Pogo said many years ago, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

Although most Americans would deny it, a great number are actual employ one aspect of fantasy in their day to day lives, at least when it comes to their relationship with politicians and government.  They employ “magic thinking” – the belief that one particular single “magic wand” will resolve the problems with government.  For those on the left, in general, their magic wand is more government programs and more comprehensive government programs.  For those on the right, their magic wand is lower taxes and less government.

Both sides, of course, are living in a fantasy world stranger than anything I’ve ever written, but any attempt to inject a strong dose of reality into their magic thinking results in violent rejection, and, with that sort of rejection, it shouldn’t be any surprise that those who represent them in Congress offer equally strong reactions to any legislative proposal that conflicts with their fantasy view of the world.

Those on the right continue to insist that all will be well if government just unleashes the power of “free enterprise,” but to which free enterprise are they referring?  The free enterprise of the banking system that accepted something like a trillion dollars in government funding while using it primarily to build reserves while also finding ways to invest in anything except rebuilding jobs in the United States?  Or the corporate free enterprise system that continues to automate and outsource jobs while reducing jobs to increase profits to record levels?  Or the government free enterprise system that has implemented massive cuts in education and modified our tax system so that corporate farmers get subsidized and hedge fund managers pay a smaller percentage of taxes than do police, firefighters, and teachers?

On the left, those “magic thinkers” continue to insist that greater and greater deficit spending will create jobs through massive income subsidies when a huge amount of that spending is used to buy imported goods and foreign oil.  They continue to insist that more spending on education will improve the system when they undermine it continually in a myriad of ways, ranging from blaming the teachers for everything to insisting that college-oriented education is the only way for every student.  At the same time, they drive all too many good teachers out of the field through low salaries and outrage at those who insist on high standards for students.  They want more government programs, but only if those programs are paid for by someone else, which has resulted in more than half the population paying no federal income taxes at all.

And all too many of them would believe [if they read my books, which most won’t] that my works, which shows costs for dreams and change, are just too fantastic to believe.  And, come to think of it, in today’s United States… maybe they’re right.

For a society seemingly governed by the bottom line, we Americans have always had difficulty in recognizing and accurately assessing any cost that isn’t expressed in dollars. We’ll cost-compare the price of any good at each place where it’s available and generally travel extra distances to get the “best” deal, while ignoring the costs of time expended, the extra gasoline, or the impact on the environment… or the cost to the community as a whole.  That’s the principal reason why such retailers as WalMart, Costco, Best Buy, Home Depot, Lowes, and other big box retailers have come to dominate local economies… and why Amazon is squeezing out many bookstores.  [It’s far from the only reason why chain bookstores came to dominate the bookselling industry, and that’s something I’ll address in a later blog].

But there are other costs to a society dominated by the bottom line, and one of them is a growing societal inability to assess and appreciate quality in any way except as a trade-off between price and “quantity,” which includes the number of features and capabilities a good has, regardless of their applicability and usefulness.  The “more” something has, the better it is.  With this societal tendency has come a change in language usage as well, call it linguistic inflation [and that inflation has been pressed into service in aiding and abetting the excessive use of praise].

Whatever happened to the praise “good job,” which meant just what the words signified? These days, especially among the young, telling someone that their accomplishment was “merely” good is taken as faint praise indeed, if not as an actual insult.  For praise to be worth anything, the words used must go far beyond good.  The accomplishment must be great, wonderful, awesome, most excellent, or even greater superlatives must be employed in service of description.

The same is true of products or people… or anything being evaluated or described.  We’ve become the society of superlatives, where a simple adjective or adverb will not suffice… and in turn, all such superlatives have become largely worthless, because everything is being described in superlatives.  If you will, comparative terms have become so supersized that there’s no meaningful comparison possible.

It doesn’t end there, unfortunately, because these linguistic excesses bleed over into other aspects of society, such as the media and politics, where such terms as “death panels” and other exaggerations are routinely bandied about with little concern for accuracy, either in degree of scope or degree.  It used to be that inflation referred only to the currency and meant that the money was worth less and less because it took more and more of the currency to buy less and less in real goods. But now, it seems, not only is the currency inflated, but so are the linguistic terms on which we rely to convey worth and value, with the result that, with all the exaggeration and hyperbole, very few Americans really have any true measure of much of anything these days… but then, perhaps I’m deluding myself, and they never did.

Still… it would be nice if we could call a spade a spade, rather than either a superannuated digging implement.  

 Recently, I’ve been spending more time among college professors, that is, in addition to my wife, and their observations on students have confirmed certain trends among younger Americans, trends that I, perhaps curmudgeonly, find disturbing, including a certainly behavior that can only be described as addictive.

To what am I referring?  The almost insatiable desire for endless praise.  The craving by students to be told over and over how wonderful they are.  The desire to be praised, if only for effort, even when their achievements merit neither praise nor acknowledgement.

Now… we all desire praise.  I know I certainly do, but praise  based on inadequate accomplishment is like junk food  – without much spiritual nutrition –and that leaves those who receive such empty praise hungry for more.  Yet our educational system is so concerned with not hurting young people [and not upsetting their parents] and motivating them solely through “positive” means that the message that comes through is that everything that they do – or even try – is “wonderful.”  Subconsciously, I suspect, in many, many cases, these young people know that their acts and accomplishments are not that stupendous, but it’s hard to protest being praised.  Unfortunately, this societal behavior has several ramifications that are anything but good.

The first is a form of “praise inflation.”  Such evaluations as “a solid job,” “competently done,” or “good job” – or a grade of “C” or even “B,” are regarded as failure.  The second is that most young people fail to understand that in most of the world, solid accomplishment is not a cause for praise – it’s what is expected.  The third is that they become ever more hungry for praise, like addicts for their next fix.

They become “praise junkies.”

 And, as praise junkies, they resent accurate assessment of their performance and manifest anger, or at least resentment, at those who won’t provide their next fix.  Teachers and professors who attempt to provide accurate and constructive assessment are regarded either as teachers who “hate”“ them or as bad”  teachers who cannot teach or who are trying to keep them from becoming successful, when, in fact, in most cases, those teachers are trying to prepare them for the real world, or at least for the reality of occupational competition that exists outside of the growing empty praise culture of the United States.

The symptoms of this excessive praise culture are everywhere, from little leagues where everyone gets a trophy or a ribbon, in schools where effort is considered as equivalent to actual achievement and rewarded as such and where every student gets As and Bs, and even by legislation such as No Child Left Behind, which fails to recognize that the only way no child can be left behind is when there are no real standards of actual achievement… because there are always those who cannot and/or will not meet real standards of academic achievement, and it’s a societal delusion to think otherwise.

But… after all, if you praise children, that’s all it takes to get real achievement.

There’s a well-known retailer whose advertising features “the easy button.”  Needless to say, I hate the ads.  Even more to the point, I hate the implication behind them, the suggestion that everything will be easy if only you go to the “right” retailer.  Yet this preconception appears everywhere in American culture, sometimes as overtly as in the “easy button” ads and sometimes only by implication – but it’s there.

If everything is so “easy,” why does the United States have the highest unemployment rates since the Great Depression?  If it’s so easy, and there’s only one right and easy way that should be obvious to everyone, why are society and politics so polarized?  [Except… I forgot, my “easy” way is the right one; yours is wrong] If everything is easy, why does the U.S. government have huge annual deficits?  Why is the housing market first overbuilt and then in the dumps?  Why does the stock market go down as well as up?  Why do we still pay the Wall Streeters who caused much of the economic mess millions, and lay off teachers, FAA employees, police officers, and the like?

The fact is that, from the first human being who figured out something new, and even well before that, life has never been easy.  It’s definitely not as difficult today as it was for early humans or for those who lived in times of plagues, famines, and pestilence [except we still have those in places], but life has always presented challenges and difficulties… and always will.

What seems to go unrecognized is that as technology improves the quality of life for its beneficiaries, first, the gap between the beneficiaries and those who do not benefit or even benefit partially increases and, second, the consequences of system failures, bad judgments, greed, tunnel vision, and other human and technical failures become greater and greater.  Technology is essentially an even-handed amoral force multiplier.  It magnifies the capability to do good or evil.

In that sense, the people who believe in the easy button are correct.  It is indeed easier to do anything.  It’s far easier to be stupid and make a careless mistake that will hurt scores, if not millions of people.  Unfortunately, the laws of probability work against “good” easy mistakes, because most mistakes are not beneficial.  System designers know this, and that’s why, as a number of readers reminded me, the amount of computer code has multiplied drastically, largely to keep bad things from happening, both inadvertently and deliberately.

Technology also multiplies complexity, and sorting out the best solutions is anything but easy. Just look at the governmental policy chaos across the globe.  Contrary to popular belief, the majority of the politicians involved are anything but stupid.  They may be self-interested, selfish, beholden to special interests, ideologues, demagogues… and the like… but stupid?  Only a small percentage, and those individuals tend to weed themselves out [often it seems, recently, through the “easy” solution of texting inappropriately].

In the end, the bottom line remains the same.  While getting goods and gadgets has gotten much, much easier, the damage one can do with them and the complexity involved in determining how to use them has made acting wisely even more difficult… and anything but “easy.”

Last year, because of my travel schedule, I finally replaced the old laptop I hadn’t used as a laptop for almost a decade with a new one.  Since my travel and appearance schedule is irregular [to say the least], there are times I don’t use the laptop for days at a time, but for various reasons, I didn’t even open the laptop for the last three weeks of July.  When I did, I was faced with “urgent warnings,” necessary updates, and priority downloads.  Now, when I was using the laptop every few days, I didn’t quite grasp how much time was required to keep the device “updated.”  I knew I was always updating the tower computer in my office, but never paid much attention to exactly how long it took, because I could just work on the writing computer [which is not connected to the internet] while all the updating and installing took place.

This time I kept track.  The required updates for the laptop took almost four hours      when I first signed on, and another two hours after I signed off. Add to that another hour   after I signed back on after all the updating.   Seven hours required in a little more than half a month less than a month.  Oh… and the computer informed me that it has been required to make 16,060 update operations.

Now… so far as I can tell, with the exception of virus and security protection, which, interestingly enough, took almost no time at all, almost none of these updates measurably improve my computers’ operation and speed.  In fact, it’s likely that each one marginally degrades their performance, and each one marginally pushes the software toward greater and greater problems because every change affects the operating system in some way or another.  Yet, if I don’t upgrade, before long I can’t use other data, can’t open documents produced by “upgraded” systems, etc.  So I, and every other user, am effectively being blackmailed to continually upgrade.

Why?

As I’ve noted before, and more than once, a great majority of “upgrades” are nothing of the sort, but consist of either patches or fixes or represent the grafting of more and more features onto existing programs, making them harder and harder to use for all but the geeks who never found a new feature they didn’t love and adding more time to my workload to learn the impact of the changes.  This all reminds me of “the Red Queen’s race” in Alice through the Looking Glass, where the Red Queen announces to Alice that running as fast as she can is only sufficient to stay in the same place and that to get anywhere she must run even faster.

What ever happened to the idea of “getting it right” in the first place?  Is the tech marketplace so fixed on being first that it’s required to come out with a new product before it’s ready… and then dribble out the fixes until it’s time to issue another new product that’s not ready?

To paraphrase Billy Joel, “if this is moving up, then I want to move out” … except, like everyone else who relies on computers… I can’t.

In some ways, the current definitions or interpretation of literacy in the United States, and, for all I know, elsewhere can be misleading.  Literacy is currently assessed by: first, whether an individual can look at a section of printed language and decode the symbols in order to recognize and identify the words; second, understand the mean of those words; and third, respond appropriately to the words, whether by describing what has been read or answering the question posed by those words.

Various measures of U.S. literacy range from 65% to 97% of the population being “literate.”   Effectively, the 97% figure refers to the basic ability to decode letters and form words, while the sixty-five percent figure comes from an assessment from the U.S. Department of Education which measures the ability to locate information in a text, make low-level inferences using printed materials, and to integrate easily identifiable pieces of information.  Other studies have shown that less than 40% of those recently granted post-graduate degrees possess the ability to accurately analyze moderately sophisticated essays written at the level of newspaper editorials, and for those with “mere” four year college degrees, the level of success is below 30%.

A similar range of figures appears to apply with regard to the mathematical and computational skills of Americans as well, although there have been far fewer studies of “innumeracy.”  Department of Education studies do indicate that American innumeracy rates show that about 40% of American adults have severe deficiencies in handling day to day computational skills, and for calculations more complex, the lack of ability is even higher.

All of this may help to explain at least some of the reasons for the current political debacle over the debt crisis… and why I periodically find myself asking why various readers and reviewers who claim to have read my books clearly seemed not to have understood even the basics of what was on the page.

Functional reading and numeracy require the ability not only to read the words and add or subtract the numbers, but to understand the implications of what the information conveyed by the words and numbers happens to mean.  Too many Americans don’t understand those meanings, with the result that, among other things, over half of all Americans pay no federal income taxes, yet feel that they are overtaxed, while those with incomes over a million dollars pay less in percentage terms than do the majority of middle class and upper middle class professionals – and also claim to be overtaxed – while the federal deficit is roughly 40% of the budget. Oh… and they don’t understand that the solutions proposed by neither the Tea Partiers nor the far left are workable.

All too many political pundits have decried the growing polarization of the U.S. electorate, and many have blamed the media, the politicians, but what about the fact that 70% of the population just doesn’t really understand?  They know what they want, but they don’t understand the numbers and the logic that show why what the body politic, i.e., the United States, demands from government can’t be funded by what people are willing and able to pay, and so one side insists that the solution is simply cutting spending, without considering the economic death spiral created by the abrupt cessation of federal programs, and the other side insists that taxes have to be raised, almost entirely on the people who are already paying all the taxes that support federal spending, without understanding the difference between wealth and income or the economic implications of what tax impacts what.

Most people talk about the future of federal spending being a choice between alternatives, and it is, but the real alternatives aren’t those presented by the left and the right, but between a rational discussion based on understanding and an irrational decision based on emotion supported by ignorance created by lack of understanding.

Last week in Utah, Tim DeChristopher was sentenced to two years in federal prison and fined $10,000 for trying to defraud the government.  It was not, as I noted in an earlier blog, exactly the normal case of fraud. DeChristopher is an environmental activist who bid on federal oil and gas leases on federal property without having the funds to pay for those leases.  He made the bids because he felt that the BLM had illegally opened the lands for bidding.  A federal judge later ruled that the process was illegal and voided the leases awarded, but the federal government still decided to prosecute DeChristopher, and in March he was convicted.

The judge who issued the sentence indicated that DeChristopher might well have avoided jail time if he had not been so publicly outspoken, even though DeChristopher was always polite in his statements and did not incite anyone to violence or public protests, but merely tried to explain why he had acted as he did.  So the judge punished him for exercising his first amendment rights as well.

Now… if I understand all this, DeChristopher got no money or gain from his acts, and the government didn’t lose any, either, because a federal judge had already declared the lease sale void.  But, if DeChristopher loses his appeal, he’ll go to jail for two years for trying to stop something that the courts eclared illegal, if many months after DeChristopher’s illegal protest bid.

At the same time, roughly, not a single one of the Wall Street bankers and real estate securitization wizards has been charged with a single crime.  These were the “wizards” who created bundled securitized high risk mortgages and fraudulently sold them as prime low-risk securities… and created the largest financial meltdown in U.S. history.

Obviously, Tim DeChristopher broke the law, and some penalty should be exacted, but it ought to be more on the line of 30 days in jail or time served or the like, especially compared to the “justice” [or lack thereof] meted out on those upstanding investment bankers… who, by the way, are still using practices that have been declared less than perfectly legal to foreclose on mortgages of delinquent homeowners.

What amazes me is the depth of public support for the politicians who not only bailed out the bankers and their overpaid managers, but who refuse to change the tax laws on compensation so that hedge fund managers and the like pay, by law, only 15% in federal income taxes on the bonuses they received for effectively defrauding the government and the American people.  [And no, as an author, I don’t get that kind of favorable tax treatment, and in fact, as a self-employed one, I end up paying both halves of Social Security taxes.]

All this suggests to me, and likely not just to me, that the legal structure we’ve built in recent years has strayed far from justice and is more a question of creating a form of legal financial and taxation discrimination in favor of the obscenely wealthy… and to a lesser degree, to those who are not truly poor, but who manage to exploit the “safety-net” of programs designed for the truly needy.

Meanwhile, a man who protested an illegal lease sale, if his appeal is refused, will serve more time in jail than those who destroyed billions of dollars in savings and investments, as well as millions of jobs.

One of the unspoken functions of parents and teachers with regard to their children and students is to guide them in ways that keep them from making huge mistakes that will forever blight their lives and their futures.  Despite the prevalence of laws and devices [such as seatbelts, automobile airbags, campaigns against drugs and underage drinking], both parents and teachers are at best losing ground slowly, and at worse losing it far faster.

Teenage pregnancies continue to abound; drug and alcohol abuse remain high; high school drop-out rates remain high; actual educational achievement is far lower than test scores indicate… the list of continuing and growing problems is far longer.

How did this all happen in a nation with the resources and wealth of the United States?

I’d be the first to admit that there’s no single “cause,” but I’ll also submit a causal factor that I don’t see any social or political entity addressing in a meaningful way or on a national scope.

It’s very basic.  In a national effort to motivate young people, our culture has either ignored or forgotten to teach them one fundamental truth: all actions have consequences, and the consequences of many actions are irreversible.

Oh… we tell them that all the time, but we undo the effect of the words by giving them “second chances,”  extra credit, do-overs, and the like.  Even our day-to-day technology undermines the law of consequences for young people.  Back a generation or so, if I made a typographic error on a paper, I either had to fiddle with White-Out or retype the entire page from scratch, if the error was bad enough.  And if you were using carbon paper to make copies, there was no choice.  You re-typed the entire page.  If there’s an error now, just back-space, or use the mouse or the appropriate key-strokes to click “undo.”

Intellectual property theft or misappropriation [otherwise known as plagiarism] used to be automatic grounds for academic dismissal.  Now, in many institutions, the punishment is failure on that paper, if that, and a do-over.

My wife the professor sees college student after college student who, after getting a bad grade – or missing a test – wants to know what they can do to make things up or get a better grade, looking for an “undo” button in life.  She can’t count the number of students who ignore their advisor’s advice about the classes they need to take to graduate… and then complain that they’ll have to spend another year or two to get their degree [because in our higher educational system, faculty can’t insist on a student taking a particular course, even required ones; they can only keep them from taking higher level courses or withhold degrees for failing to meet requirements].  The thought that there are consequences for failure is almost beyond many students.  And, then, when this does happen, they all want an exception because their situation is “special.”

Back in the bad old days, when I was in college, if you were an able-bodied male, there was a definite consequence for failure – being drafted and sent to Southeast Asia – and almost no one was “special.”

This failure to understand consequences goes far beyond classes.  There are consequences to using a cell phone or texting while driving.  Despite the fact that thousands of teens are injured or killed as a result of inappropriate cellphone and IPod use, the deaths go on. And that, to me, is entirely understandable, because we as a society have inadvertently taught them that everything bad can be “undone.”

And most of them believe that, at least on a subconscious level, until they’re confronted with a situation that can’t be undone… and by then it’s usually too late.

A number of recent comments on my blog have taken issue with and exception to my statements suggesting that comics and graphic novels cannot achieve great intellectual depth of text, especially of the depth possible in books.  Some commenters have even insisted that comics and graphic novels are the equal of books in this regard.

No.  They’re not.   They never will be, and there are structural reasons for this having nothing to do with opinion, mine or anyone else’s.

Contrary to the perception of some, I do not “hate” comics.  And there are some things a comic and a graphic novel can do that even the best book cannot, but those attributes do not lie in the area of intellectual depth and complexity.

Art, even the best abstract and/or illustrative art, cannot set forth abstract ideas, i.e., those ideas which are conceptual and which do not have a basis in the physical world.  A single word concept, such as “peace” or “harmony” or “stasis” or…. [fill in the blank with any number of such concepts] can’t be easily depicted artistically, nor can art itself discuss or describe it adequately – especially without a great number of words [which tends to defeat the idea of a graphic novel].

Nor can art depict highly intellectual or complex feelings or conversations, again, except with the use of text-dense balloons, which, once more, would seem to defeat the whole idea of a graphic novel.

Art is also limited in depicting and/or explaining and describing the deeper psychological interplay within a character or between characters.  As a result, graphic novels are necessity confined to a shallower and a less nuanced interpretation/exposition of character and motivation.

Does that make the graphic novel “less entertaining”?  Not necessarily.  Entertainment value depends on the reader/viewer as much as on the media by which the story is presented.  A graphic presentation, because human visual channels predominate, is likely to be more appealing to those who are less interested in or less capable of absorbing straight text rapidly.  A graphic novel or comic is also likely to be more appealing to those with shorter concentration spans… and thus, for them, more entertaining.

But… should entertainment value be the only standard by which the excellence of presentation of a story is judged?  A three-minute rock song may be more enjoyable to many listeners than a five minute opera aria, but the aria is far more complex and requires far greater expertise to perform – and to appreciate – than the pop song.  A four-hundred page novel, if written competently, will have far greater depth than a graphic novel of the same length, if only because words are far more compact in conveying complexity.

I’m not against art, especially since, once upon a time, I aspired to be an artist and spent several years painting.  Much great art is far, far, superior to a great array of competently written novels – but great art and great writing are two very different fields, with different objectives. As a result, using art to tell stories tends to water down the potential greatness of both art and prose or poetry, and like all compromises, the result is less than either… even if the result is entertaining and “popular.”

In southernTurkey lies an ancient temple or religious site – Gobekli Tepe – dating to 9000 B.C., by far the oldest human structure discovered to date that was not a dwelling of some sort.  It predatesStonehengeby some 6,000 years. Limestone pillars, including megaliths up to ten tons, shaped with flint tools, set in circular patterns range from plain slab-like posts to more elaborate pillars, some with finely carved sculptures of all sorts of creatures, including lions, snakes, spiders, and scorpions, each sculpted as an integral but protruding part of a different pillar.  Although archeologists have only uncovered an estimated five percent of the site, they’ve found no evidence that the site was used as a dwelling place or where any cooking or food preparation was done.

So far, there’s little evidence to tell what people or culture created it, or for what exact purpose, except that it had to have had some overarching significance to those people, because it’s highly unlikely that a people would undertake such a massive effort to shape such stone with only flint tools without a purpose that lasted generations, if not longer.

 When I think of past human creations that have lasted hundreds, if not thousands, of years, I can’t help but contrast such creations as Gobekli Tepe, the pyramids, Stonehenge, the Acropolis, even the great cathedrals of Europe, or the vast complex at Angkor Wat with our current American culture, where even tangible goods can be obsolete in months, and where houses are often now being built to last only 30 to 40 years. 

The eras in which those incredible ancient structures were built were harsher times, and I have no doubt that the sense of purpose behind their creation was enforced by either applied strength or rigid cultural norms, so rigid that they would be totally alien to the vast majority of Americans, and yet… I have to wonder… what of wonder and permanence will we pass on to future generations?

 Much of what we have done of a permanent nature is less than constructive.  We’ve leveled mountains to pull out coal.  We’ve cut through cliffs and mountains to create roads so that we can travel between places with greater speed.  Even great engineering works, such as thePanama Canal, would fail in a few handfuls of years without constant maintenance.  The stone structures of the Incas have endured earthquakes that have flattened new buildings and homes.

 Nations in these modern times rise and fall in the blink of an eye.  It’s been said that theUnited Statesis the second oldest government in the same form in the world today – and the Constitution that created our government is little more than two hundred twenty years old.  The ancient Egyptian governments lasted thousands of years with little change.

 More than a few social scientists have theorized that technology enables, indeed requires, more rapid cultural, social, and even physical change in the world… but there has to be a limit on how fast that change can take place, if only because the physical and economic realities mean that we are limited in how vast we can built and create.  Of course, we’ve compensated by creating goods and structures that are ever more quickly built and then destroyed or discarded.  Am I totally out of date, or does it seem to anyone else that creating and buying a new cellphone every six to nine months is a bit excessive, especially if we’re talking hundreds of millions, if not billions, of discarded electronic devices every year?

 But maybe that will be the wonder we leave behind, mountains and mountains of discarded electronic corpses, leaching toxic metals and chemicals back into the earth.

This week in San Diego, Comic Con is taking place, where thousands upon thousands of people will flock to, at least ostensibly, pay their respects or show interest in comics and graphic novels – and no, I’m not there. The San Diego Comic Con (SDCC) is certainly not the only comic-based convention, but if past attendance figures are any indication, it’s the largest one in the world, with attendance well over 120,000 fans.  Of course, it’s not entirely about comics, and more than a few media types have billed it as a celebration of geeks and pop culture, but the heart of the convention remains the comic book [and its upscale step-sibling, the graphic novel], along with the big and small screen media spin-offs.

For all the hype, and even considering that there are more than a few well-known fantasy novelists there, the whole operation gives me pause… and that pause is not because the comic con celebrates pop culture, but because, first, it shows where pop culture is and where it is headed and, second, because both pop culture and this celebration of that “culture” are based on the exaggeration of image… and the fact that so many millions of Americans are so poor in imagination that they cannot or will not create images in their own mind.

Back in the dark ages, when I was a boy, there were comic books everywhere.  Even Isaac Asimov read them as a boy, but for the most part, comic books were for the young and those who lacked the mental and intellectual ability to read the printed word and visualize a world evoked by those words.

From what I can tell from sketchy statistics, attendance at the World Science Fiction Convention, while fluctuating by location, has been dropping, and has been as low as 4,000 participants in recent years. By comparison the first California Comic Con was held in San Diego in 1970… and drew all of 300 attendees.  Now SDCC tops 120,000, and some have claimed there are far, far more attendees.  To me, this trend is symptomatic  of the fact that the percentage of serious readers, even among college graduates, continues to drop, but media and comics are booming!

The problem, as I see it, with media and comics as popular culture – besides the fact that, for a time, books were once considered popular culture and now are not – is that the proliferation and consumption of prefabricated images dulls imagination and creativity.  Even among F&SF writers, there are more and more books about narrower and narrower subjects.  When the F&SF field publishes books like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies [a best-seller, no less] or Twilight and all its clones, and every possible permutation on vampires, zombies, and werewolves, including, believe it or not, My Life as a White Trash Zombie, how much room is there for something different from such narrow sensationalism?  Even if there is, how many writers have the background and imagination to write something different?

For well over two decades, experienced F&SF authors have been deploring the dearth of good readable science fiction. But you can’t write science fiction if you don’t know more than a little about science, and readers who don’t understand science – and there are more and more of those – won’t read it because they can’t understand it. The same, unhappily, is becoming truer and truer of any once-popular genre fiction with any depth, and I fear that those writers who attempt to combine substance and depth with a story outside the bounds of the sensational will become rarer and rarer.

But… long live the comic con.

The seemingly inevitable collapse of Borders has occurred, and according to news reports, sales of various individual stores could begin within a week. This unfortunate event, and it is unfortunate for the 11,000 employees who will lose their jobs, for the authors, the publishers, and the entire book and publishing industry, not to mention millions of readers, is the result of years of bad management, mismanagement, and, at times, apparently no real management.  And had anyone at Borders listened ten years ago, it wouldn’t have had to happen.

There are two aspects to the bookselling business that Borders repeatedly ignored, despite advice to the contrary from professionals at all levels in the field [including my comments in the past here, for all the good they did].  The first maxim applies to most retailing, and that is that to be successful, you have to expand or at least maintain sales levels at every outlet – not necessarily in every line of merchandise, but at each and every store. Sales drive success.  Period.  That also means you can’t sell what you don’t have, yet for the past five years or so, Borders has continued to reduce the range and the inventory of books carried, while expanding or maintaining non-book items [and taking a huge bath in recorded music].  For a bookseller, that’s idiocy.

Second, you have to understand your product and your customers. Yet, so far as I can determine, every CEO Borders has had over at least the past ten years has either been an accounting type or an executive from a field totally unrelated to bookselling.  At one time, according to my industry contacts, the head buyer at Borders for F&SF had been a hardware buyer specializing in hammers, with no experience in books.  By comparison, one of the most successful book publishing firms in the past generation has been Tor/Forge, which grew from a start-up to an industry giant in two decades – and it was founded and remains controlled by Tom Doherty, who began as a junior book salesman.  Although Tom is a highly literate man who can also line edit a book with the best, he understood sales… and it’s more than clear that the Borders CEOs didn’t.

Unlike almost any other commodity sold in large numbers in the industrialized world, books are unique in that each novel, even novels in a series by best-selling novelists, is different from any other novel.  The differences may range from rather minor to enormous, and the range between different books by the same author also differs greatly from author to author.  Successful booksellers know this.  Successful chain booksellers design systems that at least try to take this into account.  Borders’ systems were never as successful in this regard, and they often underbought, and then had to re-order, losing sales in the process because, simple as it sounds, they didn’t seem to understand that basic point that you can’t sell what you don’t have… or the fact that, on average for most authors, more than 50% of a new hardcover’s sales occur in something like the first eight weeks.

Borders also acquired Waldenbooks, at the time a successful and profitable mall store operation of some 1,800 outlets… and promptly began to try to run Waldenbooks on the big-box model.  When that didn’t work, they cut inventory, and did so in ways that were counter-productive.  For example, because a large percentage of mall store customers are impulse buyers, someone who enters the fiction section will generally look for the latest release by a favorite author or the first book in a series [or a stand-alone novel] if that reader doesn’t see the latest “favorite” book.  The “new” policy at Waldenbooks, forced by the accountants, was to carry the latest novel in a series and not much else, leaving the impulse buyers, particularly in romance, thrillers, and F&SF even more limited choices… and reducing sales.

Now… why should you believe my observations?  Because over the last fifteen years, I’ve physically visited almost 40% of all the B&N stores, more than 35% of the Borders stores [based on their largest number], and over 20% of the initial number of Waldenbooks.  I’ve walked the aisles and talked to the booksellers and customers… and still do… and I’d be astonished if any member of senior management at Borders has been in as many stores over as many years as I have been – and it was their business. There was essentially no difference between the store personnel in Borders stores and those in B&N stores, at least until the end, but there were enormous differences in corporate management.

It’s also fair to say that Borders was hampered from the beginning by a number of very bad policies.  First, although this changed somewhat in the last five to ten years, when it was a case of too little, too late, the initial store layouts of the Border’s stores resembled larger versions of small cozy bookstores.  That is fine for small cozy bookstores, but the larger the early Borders stores got, the harder it became to find books [and wayward children].  Then the initial Borders policy of separating hardcovers and paperbacks effectively depressed sales and irritated many readers. Borders locations were, generally, somewhat harder to find – and I know, because I was trying to find many of them with a rental car, a map, and telephone directions in city after city.

For all of that, I’ll miss Borders, and so will millions of readers, because there are all too many places in the United States where the Borders was the only bookstore with a wide selection, and the loss of such stores will become another factor chipping away at American literacy.  The loss of sales will likely cut short the careers of a number of low midlist authors whose sales were borderline, and it will certainly hurt the revenues of traditional publishers, but in the short run it will impact most all those hard-working booksellers who loved books and will now face a far grimmer economic future.