Last week I watched a political talk show which included a pair of “liberals” and a pair of “conservatives.”  Among other things, for some reason, the subject of evolution came up, possibly because the moderator wanted to show the conservatives as either not excessively bright or not excessively consistent, and out of nowhere one of the liberals [non-American] made the statement, “You’ve seen the evidence that bacteria grow and change in response to exposure to antibiotics, how their descendants become resistant?” Then came the follow-up question, “If you can accept evolution on the bacterial level, why can’t you accept it on a higher level, as in the case of humans?”

One of the conservatives immediately made the point that there wasn’t enough evidence to prove human evolution, just “scattered” fossils.  The other one had no response. In point of fact, there’s a great preponderance of evidence, and the volume of that evidence grows every year.  But… no matter how great the evidence becomes, it won’t ever be enough to convince individuals such as those whom I observed, neither of whom, I might add, could be considered stupid or unintelligent.

So why do intelligent and thinking individuals, often those who have been incredibly successful in various fields, find it so hard to accept a mounting stack of evidence that reinforces the accuracy of the theory of evolution?

The simple answer, and the one most often offered, is that they truly believe that the theory is not correct – but not one of those people, including scientists, can offer evidence to the contrary.  The best that they can offer are various reasons along the lines of:  there isn’t enough evidence; the theory doesn’t explain “X” [and there are several different Xs]; there’s no way evolution could result in a being as complex as a human; etc.  None of these reasons refute evolution; they’re merely reasons for insisting that, until the theory is perfect and airtight, evolution can’t possibly explain the development of life on Earth.  They’re all rationalized forms of denial.

The real reason, it appears to me, for most unbelief in evolution, as illustrated by the exchange dealing with bacteria, is that most who reject evolution want to believe that human beings are truly special, and that, being special, we’re different from all the other species that have ever existed, even when DNA analyses show that over 99% of our DNA is the same as that of chimpanzees. 

This feeling of being special and different can inspire someone to great accomplishments, but it’s also dangerous.  It’s the same sort of rationalization that supported slave-holding.  It’s the same sort of mindset that allows financiers to think they’re so much superior to the “little people” their schemes fleece, the same sort of mindset that’s behind every ethnic-cleansing movement in history.  Yes, each of us is indeed different in some degree from anyone else, even from an identical twin… but that difference, held up against the universe, pales in comparison to our similarities.

Denial of evolution is more of a scream of protest that humans, especially the screamers, are truly different and special, and that’s more than ironic, because all too many of the monsters of human history have said exactly the same thing, in one way or another, even creating massive monuments to prove their difference and specialness.

In 1967, Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase, “The medium is the massage,” often as not corrupted to “the medium is the message.”  What he meant was that the medium had become so all-embracing as to massage the receiver and to affect the meaning of the message.  In the years since, particularly in the last decade, Americans and, indeed, most of the technological world embraced the corrupted version of his philosophy with a vengeance, despite the fact that, in fact, the medium is NOT the message, because all form has to have some sort of content.

The problem is and has always been that the obsession with form [the medium] tends to dilute the content to the point where it’s so vapid at times that the information content and value is insignificant, trivial, or irrelevant.  Even when it’s not, that content is often overpowered by the form of the message… or in the case of Twitter, e-mail, texting, etc., the existence of so many competing message-forms. As I’ve noted before, the amount of “real” information I receive, either in paper or electronic form, is less than one percent of the total information sent to me.  I’m fortunate; I can read quickly and dismiss the junk without missing much.  I’ve learned that most people can’t, and, because they can’t, or won’t spend the time to sift logically though all those “communications,” many just prioritize by the flash of what hits them, by, if you will, the effectiveness of the massage created by the form of the message.

Do all those tweets, texts, voice-mails, and even cellphone calls really carry any meaning?  Aren’t most of them merely reaching out so that their senders and receivers can be reassured and “massaged” in some way?  All this massaging is having an effect, and much of it is anything but good.  Mayors in several cities, and legislators across the USA, are calling for restrictions on cellphones, ear buds, and other devices being used, not just by drivers, but by pedestrians as well, as the number of fatalities caused by both distracted drivers and walkers/runners has begun to increase markedly. 

This wide-spread need for instant reassurance and instant information is also reducing the attention span of students and younger Americans, and recently a large number of professionals have begun to publish books and studies on the deleterious effects of too much instant communication.  Interesting enough, several of these have been called “attacks on the information age.”  Yet, none of the critics are attacking the technology; they’re attacking the way in which people are using it and the growing dangers posed both to individuals and society by such uses. 

Another impact of the growing impact of the “medium massage” is the dumbing down of mass media to make it “more reassuring.”  One example is in cinema. My wife is a movie buff, and over the years I’ve been exposed to movies I never knew existed, but one thing that’s become very clear to me is that many third-rate movies from fifty years ago have better writing [not necessarily better plots] and more clever dialogue than most first rate movies today.  Why?  There may be a number of reasons, but I think the bottom line is simply that there was more emphasis on message and meaning than on medium.  Special effects and brilliant cinematography are now what draw the most viewers, not provoking and insightful dramas.

I’m not attacking the media or the technology, but I am attacking the glorification of the gadgets and the use of technology to swathe users in continuously-communicating social reassurance.  A social massage once in a while is fine; continuous social massaging is like any other addiction – destructive, and it’s well past time to call it what it is.

The other day I read a report on studies that tend to confirm the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis – the idea that language affects the very fashion in which we think and even how we think. In turn, that got me to thinking about theories and the controversies which surround them.  While what Whorf postulated almost seventy years ago certainly made sense to him, and the idea behind the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis made sense to me when I read Jack Vance’s The Languages of Pao years and years ago, long before I even knew that Whorf and Sapir even existed, much less that Whorf had postulated what Vance wrote about more than thirty years before the book, at the time Whorf offered their theory there was no proof… and no real way to offer such proof.  The same was also initially true about the theory of continental drift and the idea of plate tectonics, and even, if for a shorter time, that of Einstein’s theories of relativity.

The lack of proof didn’t mean that the theories were right – or wrong – but merely that they could neither be proved nor disproved at the time they were first offered.  In the cases I’ve mentioned, the preponderance of evidence suggests the theories were correct, or at least largely so.

But… how can you tell the difference between a theory which might be true, if proof existed, and one that is absurd because no proof can ever be developed?  Can you?

And what about the cases where the “proof” itself is not accepted, as was certainly partly true in the case of continental drift?

Human beings want certainty in their science, but the more we learn the more we discover, in essence, that there are exceptions, i.e., modifications, complications, refinements, etc.  Just as the human genome is finally sequenced, research discovers that genes are not even the genetic end-all and be all, because there’s an epigenetic mechanism that can modify and even override genes. 

Unfortunately, the all too understandable reaction of many people is to claim that scientists don’t know what they’re talking about, or that they’re always changing their minds.  Part of this reaction, I suspect, is based on the human arrogance that we should be able to know everything, and that if our supposedly best scientific minds don’t, then they’re not the best… or they’re not good for anything. Another reaction is that mankind was never meant to know everything, and we should just look to our favorite deity for explanations – which are, of course, simple and comforting… and explain very little.

Of course, a little humility in the search for answers and explanations wouldn’t hurt, either, along with the understanding that in a universe that’s taken over fourteen billion years to develop, it might just take a bit more time than the few hundred years humans have had the technology to seek the answers to the complexity of the universe.

But then, that means you can’t get the answer on Google instant.

Over at Tor.com, a blogger under the nom de plume of “Stubby the Rocket” recently conducted a poll, asking readers to vote on the best fantasy and science fiction novels of the past decade. Fortunately or unfortunately, the readers aren’t.  They’re voting for their favorite books, and, apparently, reading between the lines, they’re even voting for their favorite authors, almost without regard for the comparative excellence or lack thereof of some authors’ works. What is also interesting is that when one internet-popular author made an on-line appeal, his readers immediately flooded the voting thread, and pushed his book to the top.

I have no problem with readers pushing their favorites. I’d love to have my readers push all my books – but I’m not making an appeal, because that isn’t the point of this blog, and besides the voting closed several days ago. The point is, as one commenter on the Tor.com main site observed, that most of the voters aren’t voting for what they believe to be the best, but for their favorites. So why didn’t Tor.com and Stubby the Rocket just ask for the books readers liked the most? Then they could publish, more or less honestly, “Reader Favorites for the Decade.”

As I’ve discussed recently and not-so-recently, there’s a great deal of subjectivity and ignorance involved in determining what comprises a good book, and while I believe that the majority of readers, if pressed, would make a distinction, the poll-takers didn’t emphasize that there’s a difference between “favorite” and “best.” Another weakness with all of these polls, and that includes such awards as the Hugos [the World Science Fiction awards, for those readers not familiar with such], is that a comparatively small number of voters are represented, usually from a distinct sub-set of readers, and are usually self-selecting, which means that they don’t represent the majority of readers.

Years and years ago, Betty Ballantine, one of the great ladies of F&SF publishing, made the observation that there are two kinds of awards in publishing, those awarded by various organizations with varying memberships and agendas and those represented by the sales figures.  A number of years ago, many of those involved with the World Science Fiction convention were truly horrified when the winner of the best novel award went to a Harry Potter book.  Was it the best book of the year, technically?  I doubt it, but it was at least an honest “favorite,” one whose sales figures also declared that it was truly a favorite.

I honestly doubt that there’s any fair or accurate way to determine a “best” book.  So why don’t all the pollsters ask for favorites or books that are best-liked?  That way, at least, we wouldn’t have the charade of popularity being mistaken for excellence or the equally misleading charade of self-selecting groups foisting off their favorites as the “best of the decade” when they really mean the “favorite books of this group for the decade.”  But then, who wants to publish a list of “favorites” when “best books” sounds so much better and more “official” in print?

Well… it’s now “bonus season,” I understand, for high-level executives among the banks, investment banks, brokerage houses, and the like.  At a time when even supposedly well-off working professionals aren’t doing all that well, early reports are that the financial institutions are set to pay near-record bonuses once again.  Why?

Oh, I know the official reason.  Profits are up, and therefore these executives are to be compensated for playing a part in obtaining those profits.  But then again, the entire country played a part, last year and the year before, in rescuing the financial community from the results of its excessively reckless pursuit of profit at any cost.

At the same time, unemployment is hovering close to ten percent nationally, and it’s likely in excess of fifteen percent if you count in the people who aren’t included because they’ve been out of work so long they’ve given up looking.  Those figures don’t really include people who are working part-time because they can’t get full-time jobs, and the unemployment rate for minorities is close to twice the overall rate.  Even once-secure high-paying professions are feeling the pinch.  Law firms are booting out partners and aren’t hiring.  Thousands upon thousands of law school graduates have no jobs and student loans that can amount to $100,000 and more.  The fees paid to primary care doctors – you know, the ones who actually see you – are essentially frozen, while insurance and other costs continue to rise.  And unlike specialists, primary care physicians don’t rake in the big bucks.  Middle management jobs are continuing to shrink, as are positions for teachers all across the country.  And, as for us authors, paperback book sales are down, and ebook sales haven’t yet, if they ever do, made up the difference in royalties.

And the finance community is going to pay record bonuses?

For what?  Are banking services improving?  Not when banks are automating everything and trying to use as few real bodies as possible.  Not when they’ve grown ever more adept at finding fees for everything and reducing the billing cycle.  And now, my wife has discovered yet another indication of just how little the banks care about you and me.

The other day, she was trying to balance her account – and it wouldn’t balance.  The reason it wouldn’t balance was because the bank deducted $253 from her account for a check she wrote for $153.  Even the bank’s photocopied records showed that the check was for $153 – but they still deducted $253.  When she finally got a real person on the line, after a ten minute hold because “we are experiencing unusually high call volume,” and explained the situation, it took five minutes more to verify that the bank had goofed, and then the customer service [this is service?] representative explained that it would take 3-5 business days to rectify the error in my wife’s account.  Three to five days in this era of instant electronic banking?  When they made the error in the first place?  Oh… and when this isn’t your local bank but a large regional bank?

Would they have rescinded all the fees they would have collected if their error had caused her to overdraw her account?  I have my doubts.

So… tell me again how all those finance types deserve record bonuses?  They’re either totally out of touch with the rest of the United States… or they’re so contemptuous that they don’t care.  Either way, they don’t deserve those bonuses.

I just read a review of a recently released movie, and since I haven’t seen the film, and may not, I can’t say how accurate the review is, but one line of the review struck me as particularly relevant, especially in view of my previous blog.  That line said approximately, “You can’t tell whose movie this is, the star’s, the co-star’s, or the supporting actors’.”  From the rest of the review it was quite obvious that there was no confusion about the story lines or who was doing what to whom or why.  What the reviewer was stating was that he wanted the movie to emphasize without a doubt which story was the predominant one, and to make every one else subservient.

My question to the reviewer is:  “Why?”  Have viewers become so simple-minded that they can’t enjoy intersecting story lines, and the fact that at one time one part of a story becomes more dominant and that at another time another character and part do?

Certainly, life is like that, and much as we’d all like to be the center of attention and action, no one always is, not even the most powerful and most famous among us. Or is it that we feel our own lives are so complicated that we can only enjoy a movie when it’s straightforward and simple.

Or is it that, while many of us enjoy complex movies, more and more the media pundits and critics want to oversimplify matters for us.  That’s definitely been the case among the political analysts and the media talking heads who report on national politics.  It’s become the case with the economic “analysts” who present such data in the national general media.

As I’ve noted more than a few times before, we live in a highly technological society, and such societies are anything but simple.  And, in a riff on that theme, perhaps that’s really the gulf between the United States and many of the fundamentalist Mid-East cultures.  They want to hang on to the comforting simplicity and clarity of their traditional past, and can see all too well that such clarity vanishes in the conflicts of a modern technological society.  For that matter, even within the United States, that conflict exists, although so far, despite the horrible events in Arizona earlier this month, the violence around political events has been largely confined to verbal outbursts, despite the growing [until last week]intemperance of both media and political types.

And this movie’s review may well have bothered me because it’s yet another symptom of the conflict between “comforting” and clear traditional simplicity and modern complexity.  The problem with those old traditional clarities is that they cover up a multitude of injustices and prejudices under the guise of morality, rather than striving for a better ethical code, and one more suited to a technological society. Like it or not, until we can juggle those complexities better, and in an overall improved ethical fashion, we’re going to have problems, and all the entertainment that regales us with comforting simplicities won’t help in the slightest, just as the majority of the “popular” literature at the end of the 19^th century did little to prepare Americans for the need for the changes required in a developing technological society.

A week or so ago, I received the worst review of a book of mine in thirty years.  Not surprisingly, it was the Publishers Weekly review of Empress of Eternity.  The only good thing I can say about the review was that it appeared almost two months after the book was released.  Now… I’ve had good reviews and not so good reviews, and questionable reviews throughout my career, but never a review that so thoroughly trashed a book, especially a book that had received numerous rave and favorable reviews elsewhere.  I’ve already been the first to admit that Empress of Eternity, like Haze, is not a book to appeal to everyone, and I certainly wouldn’t object to a review that said just that… and said why.  What bothers me about this particular review is that it exemplifies a trend in both books and movies that is both deplorable and, I believe, culturally dangerous.

By its very approach, the review essentially states that, if something isn’t immediately obvious and clear, it’s trash.  If it’s not simple and direct, then it’s worthless.  That’s like saying a one pound hamburger with American cheese is far superior to a custom-broiled filet mignon with cordon bleu béarnaise sauce.  Obviously, tastes differ, and there are times when a hamburger just hits the spot… but please don’t tell me the hamburger is superior in culinary terms.

It’s becoming so that too many reviewers and readers can’t tell the difference between a book that has no characterization to speak of and one in which the characterization is nuanced and subtle.  If the writer doesn’t effectively come out and say, “Joseph was devastated,” these readers and reviewers don’t pick up the other clues.  The same is true of foreshadowing.  The author practically has to post signposts that state “this is important,” or it goes over their heads.  This tendency isn’t new.  There have been readers with such problems since there have been books.  What is new is that, in this “new” era of “everything in your face,” there are more and more of them, and they’re infiltrating the ranks of the reviewers and critics.

The same trends have already occurred in movie-making, and it’s to the point where almost any movie trailer will tell me if it’s an “in your face” movie.  In fact, almost all the block-buster movies are these days, and it’s getting harder and harder to find movies with depth, subtlety and nuance.  Once upon a time, the banana peel humor was largely limited to the Saturday morning movie serials, and the scatological humor to pornography.  No more. Once upon a time, many movies [certainly not all, or even a majority, but enough that one didn’t have to search through a haystack of dross] actually presented brilliant dialogue and depth.  No more.

This cheapening and over-simplification of societal entertainment bleeds over into everything else, from supersizing fast foods to the Sarah Palinization of politics, where “in your face” direct simple solutions are the answer.  And because everyone has a “simple” solution, no one can understand that big simple solutions don’t work… and never have, not without an extraordinary cost to people. Unfortunately, this past weekend we’ve had what appears to be a reminder of those costs with the shooting of a moderate Congresswoman in Arizona, who, from all accounts was popular with the majority of her district, and unpopular with the extremists in both parties.

So I’ll say it again.  Big, simple, extreme solutions aren’t the answer, and never have been. After all, the Russian Revolution of 1917 was certainly a big and simple solution.  So were Hitler’s Third Reich, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and Castro’s Cuban Revolution… as well as all the ethnic cleansing movements throughout the globe.  By contrast, from the beginning the American Revolution embodied compromise, a fact conveniently overlooked by the Tea Partiers. Interestingly enough, what it created lasted… so far, but will it survive the “in your face” era?

As a result of the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords last week, there has been an outpouring of rhetoric and petitions along the lines that Americans need to turn away from appeals to hatred and violence.  I certainly agree with the sentiment, but this movement in a large degree begs the question.  The first question is why in recent years Americans have turned to more and more violent rhetoric and why the political climate has turned uglier and uglier.  The second question is whether “debate” is the answer.

I don’t think so, at least not given the way debate is being approached today.  It all reminds me of a woman I know, who divorced her husband when no one could understand why, since he was such a rational and logical fellow. Her answer, which almost no one accepted or understood, was that his logical and rational approach was the problem.  Whenever she disagreed with him and tried to explain her views, he was so busy thinking up arguments to undermine her position that he never listened to what she was saying or what lay behind what she was saying.  And that is the problem with political and social debate and problems today – on all sides of the political spectrum.

Everyone’s talking, and no one is listening.  The Republicans are determined to repeal the health bill.  Is anyone there listening to the more than forty million who don’t have and can’t get health care in a time when healthcare costs are spiraling out of control.  The Democrats refuse to consider limitations on legal claims and windfalls for attorneys proposed by the Republicans, which certainly add to health care costs.  The Democrats demand tax increases on the “wealthy,” but insist the wealthy include the upper middle class and small businesses that have always generated the majority of “new” jobs in the economy, while the Republicans want the uber-rich, those who make millions, to get the same tax cuts as everyone else, when the corporate fat cats are the ones who are making millions by cutting jobs. Citizens in border states face huge problems with illegal immigrants, and Congress has done nothing.  On the other hand, there are hundreds of thousands of young people brought to this country illegally as children who know no other homeland, and Congress isn’t listening to them, either, and yet deporting or allowing them no legal status punishes them not for what they did, but for the sins of their parents.  The Democratic Party ignores the problems illegal immigration has created, and the Republican rhetoric ignores the suffering of too many innocents.  The Republican rhetoric, if followed literally, would create an American version of the Berlin Wall, but not doing anything isn’t working, either, and not allowing a path to citizenship for children of illegal immigrants who’ve lived here for years and who had no choice in the matter, isn’t exactly in keeping with the American tradition.  The list of polarized issues goes on and on… and everyone’s talking, and no one is listening… and the anger continues to build.

What we need is more listening… and some compromise… so that Americans can get a sense that something is being done.  Try splitting the difference.  Let each side get something, and I don’t mean the past political compromise of spending more money and splitting the spoils. And it might not hurt to ask another question when facing yet another “simple” solution: How will this benefit or affect everyone? 

Debate isn’t an answer.  We’ve had years of it. Without more listening, more debate will only create more hate.

In 1865, an Englishman named William Stanley Jevons published a book entitled The Coal Question, as I discovered in an article entitled “The Efficiency Dilemma,” in the December 20^th issue of The New Yorker.  What was striking about the book was its “proof” that energy efficiency leads not to less energy use, but more.  Over the years, economists have debated this proof, and others that followed, but the conclusions noted in the article seem indisputable:  Energy usage for any given application of the same task and scope tends to decline, but overall energy usage increases.  Cars become more efficient… so they become larger with more capabilities, and their overall worldwide usage increases markedly.  The same is true of refrigerators and air conditioners, computers, cell phones, etc.

And the result?  Overall energy usage continues to climb… and it will continue to grow even as energy efficiency increases as well.  In short, we can’t “efficiency” our way out of the energy problem.  Does that mean we shouldn’t continue the efforts toward greater efficiency?  No… we need all the efficiency we can squeeze out of our technology. 

The problem is economic… and political.  When goods or services are less expensive, we humans use more of them.  We also have a “good idea” [whether we do or not] of what those goods and services “should” cost.  An example of how this perception can be skewed was the furor over ebook prices in mid-2010.  Many readers insisted ebooks should be cheaper because electronic downloads and copies cost almost nothing, and blank discs are cheap.  They really didn’t consider all the other expenses going into producing a book.  In essence, they were insisting that ebooks be priced at the marginal cost of production, rather than factoring in any of the sunk costs, or the lost revenues coming from the decline in hardcover and paperbook sales.

In the case of energy, however, governments and societies face a different problem.  Energy is cheaper, in real terms, than it used to be, and people are using more.  The only way to cut back on energy usage is to make it more expensive, or to ration its usage.  And since technology is making it currently less expensive overall, and since people don’t want to pay more for “cleaner” energy such as wind and solar power, the only way to increase costs is either to mandate greater use of cleaner energy or to increase the taxes on energy.  This, needless to say, is politically unpopular, even if government made such energy taxes “progressive,” with higher tax rates on larger energy consumers.  People would create a political backlash, and others would opt for their own generators and solar panels once the taxes got too high.

Energy rationing would effectively be a non-starter in most democratic nations.

And, as a result, it appears that the energy “problem” will simply be pushed farther into the future, until true costs can no longer be denied, and prices inevitably rise, along with the costs of goods and services requiring energy inputs – and that’s almost everything.

Scientific findings in two areas seem almost in conflict, at least with regard to the question of whether there’s other intelligent life in the universe and how frequent it might be.  The first set of findings reports that life exists across a far greater spectrum of temperatures and pressures than most biologists dared to hope.  The second set of findings comes from astronomers, who are finding that, at least so far, other solar systems appear far more bizarre than ours, with planets in odd orbits, planets circling their suns in retrograde orbits, massive gas giants in tight solar orbits, all creating conditions that appear less favorable to life, or to complex cellular life, than in our solar system.

At this point, it’s clear that we are far from knowing enough to speculate knowledgeably about the frequency of life in the universe, let alone intelligent life… and yet…

Could it just be that life, of all sorts and kinds, arises under all ranges of conditions and under strange suns and stars?  Given the billions and billions of planets in the universe, and given the range of conditions under which life has evolved on earth, how could there not be life elsewhere?

But… given the immensity of the universe, and the distance between stars, will we ever know for certain?  And does it matter?

I’m afraid it does.  It matters because too many people in too many cultures have come to believe that somehow “we” – homo sapiens – are special merely because we exist, that some deity created the entire universe and put us at the center of it.

Yet… how special are we?  In almost every decade over the past century, archeologists and paleontologists have discovered yet another variety of human forebear – homo neanderthalensis, homo floresiensis, homo africanus, homo erectus, etc., and many of these were not our ancestors, but cousins.  And all of them are extinct, with the exception of the Neanderthals, who live on in the genes of much of the world’s population.

Recently, a team of archeologists discovered a big-brained dinosaur, one they believe was on the way to what we would call true intelligence – except it ran out of time when the climate changed.  Perhaps it, too, thought it was special, merely through the fact of existing.

Will it take the discovery of alien artifacts and signals to prove that we’re not that unique in the grand scheme of the universe?  Or would that discovery just trigger xenophobia and racial paranoia?

I don’t know, and I doubt anyone does, but what I do find intriguing as a science fiction writer is that the majority of novels written in the genre and dealing with such subjects tend to deal with humans trying to prove they’re special or acting as if we are.  All that, of course, raises the question of whether, if there are aliens out there, they’d even want to deal with us at present.

Certainly, there were many changes in the world, and in the United States, in 2010, but in many areas things seemed to stay the same.  Yet, which of the changes were “real,” and which of those things that seemed unchanged truly did change?

In the book field, an area obviously of concern to me, it’s fair to say that ebooks “arrived,” not that they haven’t been available to some degree for years, but 2010 marked the first year in which they accounted for a truly significant fraction of total book sales, although the analysts will likely be trying to ascertain exactly what that fraction was for months to come.  With ebooks has also come the rise of publishers who are essentially ebook only, and who rely on print-on-demand trade paperbacks, if pressed for a physical product.  Whether such publishers will become a larger part of the market or fade away is uncertain, as of the moment.

In science, one of the “biggest” announcements, although it received comparatively little media attention, was that astronomers have determined that the universe contains more than three times as many stars as previously thought because the number of so-called red dwarf stars had been grossly undercounted, largely because optical telescopes on Earth could not pick many of them up, even in stellar areas comparatively closer to Earth.  This also increases the chances for alien life because red dwarf stars have a much longer and more stable lifespan than do brighter stars.  Will this change anything here on Earth?  Hardly likely. 

In U.S. politics, of course, the balance of power in the legislative branch shifted considerably with the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives and the Democratic loss of a “gridlock-proof” [not that it always was] Senate.  That shift will likely result in very little being accomplished in 2011 or 2012 because the Republicans don’t want to accomplish anything but to roll back what the Democrats did, and the Democrats have enough votes – and the President – to stop such efforts, and neither side has either the initiative, intelligence, nor the will to work out compromise solutions.  So there really wasn’t much change there, either.

The war in Afghanistan continued in 2010, with escalating U.S. casualties, and is now the longest military conflict in U.S. history.  While the media continues to report, in small stories and back pages, various events, the majority of the American people remained content to pay lip service to the military, to allow private contractor profiteering, and in general only complained about it in terms of siphoning off funding for their desired social programs.  In short, no real change – except, of course, to the families and lovers of the increased numbers of dead and wounded.

2010 has been established as one of the three warmest years on record, at least in technological times, despite unseasonably cold winters in the northeast U.S. and in Europe, and that apparent paradox will continue to fuel opposition to dealing with the real issue of global warming, resulting in no real change in actions or positions.

The other real social change heralded in 2010, especially in western Europe and the United States, memorialized in part by the movie – The Social Network [because all momentous social movements need cinematic commemoration] – was the verification that the only forms of social contact that matter are those created and maintained by electronic means.  This is indeed a significant change, marked by the decline and possible demise of:  first meetings with significant others conducted with physical presence; actual conversations without overt and covert electronic interruptions and/or additions; efficient work habits and sustained mental concentration; and, of course, social niceties such as written paper thank-you notes.

In the end, did much really change?

I just returned from visiting family over Christmas, and, as a result of twelve hours spent in transit (and that was with NO delays), I got to thinking about “speed” in our modern society. We’re always told that technology is better and faster, but I have my doubts about such speed in the real world. It doesn’t matter how potentially or theoretically “fast” something is.  What matters is how fast it does what it does in the real world.

Because airports are ever more crowded, and over scheduled, and because commercial aircraft don’t fly any faster than they did thirty years ago, flight times are longer than they were thirty years ago – and that doesn’t count all the extra minutes, and occasionally hours, spent in security lines and screening.  Train travel isn’t any better, either. The Acela is supposedly capable of traveling between Boston and New York at 150 mph.  It doesn’t even approach 60% of its capabilities, of course, because the tracks it travels won’t handle that speed… and because it doesn’t have a dedicated rail system, but must share the rails with much slower freight trains.  All that may be one reason why, except in bumper-to-bumper rush hours in cities, most drivers exceed the speed limits on freeways and interstates whenever physically possible.  But because freeways everywhere are getting more and more crowded, they aren’t getting to their destinations any faster.

Even spacecraft aren’t flying any faster than they did in the 1960s, not markedly, anyway, and we certainly haven’t been able to get human beings any farther from Earth than we did a generation ago.

But aren’t we in the age of electronic superspeed?  Not from what I can tell.  Because of all the bells and whistles, firewalls, and electronic security, even my brand-new laptop loaded with one of the fastest processors, and more memory of more types than I’ll ever come close to using, takes longer to boot up and load than my ancient 1996 laptop.  Email doesn’t get there any faster, and the whole process effectively takes longer because, even with all those electronic devices and systems, I still have more and more spam that results in my having to take more time than I used to… and any way you look at it, that means slower.

My wife reminded me that not only is the mail slower, but deliveries are fewer than when we were children.  It also costs almost 1500% more per ounce than then.  This is progress?

As far as I can figure, about the only thing that, in practice, goes faster than it did a generation ago is the money, because, regardless of the “official” statistics, everything that most people need costs more every year.  Now… if we could just get everything else moving that fast…

In fiction, a great deal has been written on the theme of the “other,” the outsider, the stranger, the one who doesn’t fit, and what has been written ranges from horror to the romantic, from the impossible to the trite, from Camus’s L’Etranger, the man who looks and acts normal, but isn’t, to Alien, a creature so different that it screams of otherness, even to the vampires of Twilight, who apparently seek sameness and try to conceal their otherness… and the list and examples go on and on.

But to me, there’s another “other” that is far more socially, politically, and economically horrifying. Or in political terms, as the late senator Russell Long proclaimed, “Don’t tax you; don’t tax me; go tax that fellow under the tree.”  Unhappily, this practice of singling out the “other” for responsibility, whether it be for taxes, political change, educational blame, immigration problems, etc., has gotten so far out of hand that no one seems to even recognize what’s happening.

Take education.  This morning I just read an article about the problems a local, open- enrollment university has in getting students to actually complete their degree programs and graduate, and, once again, the “other” singled out for responsibility was essentially the faculty – the faculty has the sole responsibility for inspiring these students, for making sure they’re “interested” enough to attend classes, to choose their curriculum responsibly, to study, to learn the material.  On top of that, the state is pushing the idea that raising the percentage of college graduates will effectively solve a various assorted problems, from high unemployment to creating “better” jobs.  The target is something like 50% of all high school graduates graduating from college.  Duh… has anyone looked at the jobs required to maintain a civilization, including highly skilled ones that don’t require a college degree?  Electricians, plumbers, heating and air conditioning contractors, computer technicians, sheet metal workers, machinists, the list goes on for pages.  People need skills, but thinking that 50% of them should come through college degrees is insanity.  And, as I’ve noted before,  rather than deal with the problems of lack of student initiative and responsibility, lack of resources, lack of work ethics, failing parental responsibilities, it’s so much easier to focus on the teachers.

Then there’s the responsibility for paying for federal government services.  While I’ll concede that those who make more should pay more, the exact formula being far more questionable, why exactly should close to 40% of the population bear no responsibility for those services at all – and insist that a smaller and smaller minority of the population bear a greater and greater share – that the so-called rich become the “other.”

Immigration falls into the same category.  Massive numbers of Hispanics have flooded and are flooding into the United States, if at a lesser rate in the last year or so, and most of them are looking for a better life – why are they to blame for that, when ALL of our forebears did exactly the same thing?  Why are they to blame for fleeing the drug-trade induced violence that permeates Latin America when the high demand for those illegal drugs in the United States is what has caused that violence?  Especially when we seem powerless to stop the trade through criminalization and by imprisoning millions of users… and unwilling to control it by legalizing it?  Rather than looking at the root causes of the immigration problem, it’s so much easier to single out the stranger, the immigrant as the cause, when they’re only the symptom.

The problem of teenage pregnancies follows a similar pattern.  Because of the “benefits” of modern civilization, young people are becoming sexually mature at younger and younger ages, yet the complexity of a technological society is such that the economic maturity comes later and later.  Human beings are not built biologically to abstain from sex for the ten to fifteen year gap between physical maturity and social-economic maturity – and the vast majority can’t and don’t.  Yet religious fundamentalists of all stripes and varieties preach “abstinence” and “morality” – and blame sexual “immorality” on everything from culture to the media [not that they both don’t contribute], while pumping billions into purchasing the offerings of the media and ignoring the root causes and addressing them in a meaningful way.

Whatever the problem, there’s always an “other,” whom all too many of us find convenient to blame… and I find that “other-seeking” mentality far more horrifying than the “others” of cinema and fiction.  More than thirty years ago, the cartoonist Al Capp, in his Pogo strip made the observation, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

The problem is that it’s so much easier to blame the “other.”

That’s the question my wife asked me the other day as she reflected on the semester she’d just completed.  As director of the university opera theatre program, she produces and directs at least one student production every semester, and she has done so for more than twenty years.  What she noted was that even ten years ago, students would offer cards or notes, or even small tokens of gratitude, for the efforts she made in producing and directing these programs – a gratitude, if you will, for the funds she expended that were not reimbursed by the university, the hours and hours of extra time provided in rehearsing and providing additional personal instruction to performers who needed it.

This year, for the first time ever, she received not a single card, even though she is teaching more students than ever before.  Paradoxically, this was also a year in which her student evaluations were among the best ever; so the lack of cards or tokens of appreciation weren’t likely due to student unhappiness.  It’s also not something that happened this year.  Fifteen years ago, it wasn’t unusual for her to receive thank-you notes from students who successfully completed senior recitals, or from those she helped into graduate programs. Over the last few years, those notes have dwindled away to nothing as well, again, even though she is even more successful in getting more and more students to perform at a higher level.  And this is not something limited to my wife, but a change in social climate that her colleagues both in her university and elsewhere have noted.

There’s also an increasing interest in grades and less interest in mastering the techniques of singing and performing. Along with this increased emphasis on grades and “credentials” and the decline in expressed gratitude, or perhaps because of it, she and others have noted a growing attitude among students – and among younger faculty and professionals in the field – that these younger people have “done it all by themselves.”

There’s little or no awareness or recognition that no one “does it by himself or herself.”  Virtually all of us have had mentors, teachers, or benefactors somewhere along the way, who made a difference, whether or not we wish to recognize them or not.  Along with this, I’ve also overheard more and more young professionals ask, when requested to do something professional, “What’s in it for me?”

To me, this growing focus on self, both in academia and in business, is a disturbing trend, and one that is mirrored by the trends in the financial community, where the focus seems to remain on how much compensation individuals can build up, rather than upon what they are accomplishing.  In the political area, the focus is on getting re-elected, no matter what the cost to the community or nation.  And in all areas, there’s less and less gratitude for what we’ve received and more and more complaints about what we haven’t… and yet, at the same time, more and more people are less and less willing to go out of their way for others.

Might it just be… just perhaps… that so much of the polarization in society is fueled by anger that others don’t appreciate what we’ve done, even as we fail to appreciate what others have done?

A federal judge in Virginia has declared a section of the recently passed healthcare law unconstitutional.  That section, which would not have taken effect until 2014, is the one that requires individuals to purchase health insurance or to pay various tax penalties.  While there’s little doubt that the question will go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, I would not be surprised to see this ruling upheld, because there’s a vast difference in law, and in practice, between requiring individuals NOT to do something “bad,” and in requiring them to take an affirmative action at their own expense – or pay a penalty for not spending money as required by the federal government.

This distinction can be a very fine line, but it still exists.  For example, car manufacturers are required to incorporate costly safety features in their new cars, but no consumer is required to buy a new car.  Manufacturing companies are required to meet standards for safety and emissions, but no corporation is mandated to build a new plant to produce widgets, etc.

The problem with a democratic system is that our freedoms often exact costs, and often those costs fall on others in one way or another.  One example of this in health care hits fairly close to home – my home.  My wife is a professor of voice, and she teaches college students.  Over the last 18 years, never has she had a year when she has not been confronted with sick and contagious students, as well as some with severe throat, sinus, or lung problems, who have no health insurance because neither they nor their parents have such insurance.  Not only do these students often infect others, but at times, their lack of insurance threatens their own permanent well-being.  More times than I want to count, my wife has paid for visits to doctors, and she has negotiated special rates with specialists for certain tests and procedures for her students. In the vast majority of cases, these students or their parents, and it is usually their parents’ doing, have made the choice of not paying for health insurance.  But there is a cost, either in time lost from work or studies [and lower grades, possibly even resulting in the loss of a scholarship], in overall health, and in the costs imposed or assumed by others.  One of the largest costs in the health care area is that of emergency room costs.

The health care area is just one example. Another is our presumption of innocence.  Under our system of justice, someone arrested or charged with a crime is presumed innocent.  That presumption results in literally billions of dollars being spent to prove guilt and convict presumed criminals, many of whom escape punishment not because they are innocent, but because they had better lawyers.

Another area is child welfare.  Because we choose not to send poor families to poorhouses and debtors’ prisons, but to allow them freedom, we end up paying significant sums to welfare mothers and others, and subsidizing food – largely in the hope that at least some of it will get to children – rather than taking the children and letting their parents fend for themselves.

Yet another is the freedom of movement.  We allow people great freedom to own vehicles, to operate them at high rates of speed, and even presume that they will do so sensibly.  We also combine that freedom with that of drinking.  This “combination” of freedoms costs more than 40,000 lives annually, and billions in damages and destruction.

The last freedom we provide in the United States is simple.  In allowing people the freedom to innovate and to be successful, we also allow most people the freedom to make enough bad choices to hurt, if not destroy, themselves.

Am I suggesting a more totalitarian approach and an adoption of the Napoleonic Legal Code?  Heavens, no!  But what I am suggesting is that there are real and measurable costs to “freedom,” restricted as some think it now is, and that it is anything but “free,” and part of those costs are included in our taxes, in our insurance bills, and in the costs of the goods we buy… as well in human suffering and tragedy.

More than a few commentators on the left and elsewhere – as well as a host of Democratic legislators – are deploring the idea that families who earn more than $250,000 will be allowed to share in the continued lower tax rates of the so-called Bush tax cuts, and more than a few letters have graced the pages of various publications declaring that the rich and super-rich shouldn’t get such benefits.

Were the people who made $25,000 in the mid-1950s “rich?”  Certainly, no one I knew thought they were rich.  Well-off perhaps, even affluent, but certainly not anywhere close to rich.  Yet an income of $250,000 today is worth about what $25,000 was 60 years ago, perhaps even less, adjusted for inflation.  In real terms, even gasoline prices aren’t that much higher than then, and they’re certainly far lower, in terms of the purchasing power of the dollar, than they were during the “gas crisis” of the early 1970s.

To be fair about this, I’m just as appalled by those on the right who declare that increasing the taxes on those making more than $250,000 will bankrupt small businesses.  If a business making, say, $500,000 annually can’t afford an additional $10,000-$30,000 in taxes, then that business is in trouble already.  If the business is making enough to worry about increased taxes in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, it’s not a small business, besides which, at that level it should be incorporated and passing on those taxes to its customers, the way all the other U.S. corporations do – which is part of the reason why the whole idea of taxing corporate profits doesn’t make economic sense in a world economy… not that most politically motivated tax policies make economic sense.

I’d be among the first to admit that the United States government faces a fiscal crisis, but the reason why isn’t because the rich are greedy, or too many of the “poor” are undeserving, or that immigrants are “milking” the system, all of which are overblown stereotypes based on true anecdotes that are statistically a small proportion of what has caused our unbalanced budgets and deficits. The reason is that the American people, as a group, really have no understanding of numbers or what those numbers mean, and, unfortunately resist anyone or any institution that wants to enlighten them.  Nor is there any serious questioning of the basis of the whole idea of taxation as now practiced.  Admittedly, if we want government services, they have to be paid for.  But why do we continue with a system that isn’t raising the revenue necessary to cover the services we demand and yet reject either reducing demand or changing the basis of taxation?

If I walk into a McDonald’s and order a Big Mac, the cashier doesn’t ask me how much I make and price the sandwich accordingly.  The same is true at every retailer in the U.S. and for the majority of commercial services.  In fact, larger commercial customers usually get discounts for their larger orders. Yet all the services that the U.S. government supplies are essentially based on income and “cost” more the more someone makes.  Someone in the upper fifth of income in the U.S. pays a great deal more for his or her share of national defense, national parks, etc., than does someone in the lowest fifth, who often pays nothing at all.

Now… the rationale for higher individual costs of government [i.e., taxes] rests on the assumption that wealthier people benefit more from government and upon the idea that poorer people cannot afford to pay taxes.  Moreover, there is a feeling that it is somehow “unfair” to tax a well-off person and a poor person the same percentage of their income.  Yet, if one taxes someone who makes $100,000 at a ten percent rate, and someone who makes $20,000 at that same ten percent rate, the person who is better-off is paying $8,000 more than the poorer person for the same government services. That’s 400% more. If one then adds in the “progressive” tax structure, the person who is well-off may be paying tax rates of more than 20%, which works out to 900% more. Does that person who is well-off get nine times more government services?  No.

In fact, it’s likely that the poorer individuals get more government benefits than wealthier individuals.  I emphasize the word individuals because once one factors in corporations, that picture changes.  Various organizations, from foundations to industries, do in fact get large benefits, and because, in effect, as I’ve discussed many times before, corporations essentially pay no taxes because they pass those costs on to the customers and consumers,  they have often have no real costs, or reduced costs, for the government services they receive.

Larger homes on larger lots pay more property taxes just about everywhere.  But do the owners of such homes actually require more municipal services?  The odds are that they don’t.  In fact, they may require fewer.

All of this brings up a larger question: Why do we tax people and their property on their income and the value of their property for government services?  Why don’t we just tax them on the basis of services?

The simple answer is that it’s politically unwise.  A recent example occurred in a Utah county that imposed a fee for police services for those areas of the county not belonging to the municipalities that paid for police services.  More than a few people simply refused to pay – and that could lead to the situation that occurred in another state, where firefighters refused to fight a fire where the homeowner had not paid a $75 firefighting fee, and the homeowner watched his home burn to the ground.

The second answer is that a significant fraction of the population cannot pay such fees, and failing to provide such government and municipal services would endanger those who can pay even more than those who cannot.  Allowing crime to go unchecked in neighborhoods that cannot pay for police services would only result in crime spreading, and in the end, those who can pay would pay even more to protect themselves.  A similar practicality applies to a number of services, from roads to sanitation, to regulation of food and highway safety, and so on.

Any community requires a baseline of services to survive.  So do nations, although that baseline varies by culture and the times.  The problem the United States faces today is that, as a nation, we’re asking for more in government programs and services than the majority of people wish to pay.  It’s no secret that 10 % of the population pays more than seventy percent of the taxes… and that, essentially, they pay for the privilege of being successful.  The plain fact is that those who are well-off pay more in taxes comparatively, percentage-wise, and in absolute terms because they’re a minority and because society as a whole insists on it, not because it’s fair.

Today, the majority of Americans don’t and won’t pay for the bulk of services that they think government should provide. That same majority thinks that it’s wrong for the richer minority to object to paying the bulk of those costs.  Why exactly is it wrong for the “rich” to object to paying a disproportionate share, and why is it right for the majority to demand services it won’t support through taxes, especially when 30% of the population pays no federal income tax at all?  McDonald’s doesn’t give free food to thirty percent of its customers, and no one thinks that’s unfair, but government certainly gives free or reduced price services to more than thirty percent of its citizens.

Apparently, the latest “fad” to enter the education reform arena is an intense focus on “subject mastery,” unfortunately to the exclusion of other skills necessary for student success. There’s nothing wrong with the idea that students need to master the subject matter that they’re supposed to be studying.  Such mastery is absolutely necessary, but again, the reformers, at least all those mentioned in The New York Times article on it on November 28^th, are throwing the baby out with the bath water.

They have observed, wonder of wonders, that many students with terrible grades actually know the material, and that many other students with good grades don’t.  They have rightly identified a real problem in many American schools – that appearance and behavior and apparent attitude often result in inflated grades for students who really don’t learn what they should.  Unfortunately, from there, a number have gone to the assumption, and even implemented revamped curricula and standards, that very little besides subject mastery matters.  Homework is downgraded to counting not at all, as are attendance and behavior.

This idiocy – and it is idiocy – ignores so many factors I almost don’t know where to begin.  However… first, homework.  If homework is designed properly, it should both require learning and skills mastery. It should also teach students research skills and get the point across that you just can’t find answers in one place.  Admittedly, all too much homework is indeed busywork, but that’s not a problem with the idea of homework;  it’s a problem with how teachers use homework.  Second, if homework isn’t graded, in our society, unfortunately, it doesn’t get done, because we’ve taught children, by example, that the only things that are important are those that “count,” either in dollars or grades.  If homework doesn’t get done, then skills mastery suffers for most students.  In addition, both higher education and jobs requiring that higher education also require “homework,” doing projects and presentations, research, etc., and removing that facet of education or downplaying it into insignificance does students a great disservice.

Second, attendance.  Like it or not, most jobs require attendance.  It doesn’t matter how smart you are, because, if you’re not at work, sooner or later you’re going to get fired.  Discounting attendance because there are a few students bright enough to learn matters without being there – and those students are indeed a minority – sends a societal message that encourages a self-centered and eventually self-destructive attitude.  The same is true about behavior.  Employees who continually misbehave get fired.  College graduates who do the same seldom ever make it in either professional or executive positions.

Students not only have to master skills, but they have to learn how to learn, how to apply that learning in society, and put all three together.  Yes, skills mastery is vital… but without the other factors, it’s also useless.

When will we as a society ever get away from the “one-big-simple-fix” attitude?

The kind folks at Goodreads featured two of my books, one fantasy and one science fiction, as their November choices for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Club members to read and comment on, if they wished.  The books were The Magic of Recluce and Haze.  As I suspected, I took a certain amount of flak on one aspect of The Magic of Recluce, and that was my “creative” use of textual sound effects.  This was something I’ve known for years, especially since Dave Langford’s “poem” created solely from the sound effects in the first few Recluce books.  Needless to say, the later Recluce books have far, far, fewer sound effects.  And some Goodreads readers also noted that I was a bit too elliptical in areas, a tendency I think I’ve largely corrected in later fantasy books [after all, The Magic of Recluce was my very first fantasy book, written over twenty years ago, and I have learned a few things more about writing in the years since].

The negative comments about Haze, however, bothered me more, not because a number of readers didn’t like the book, because that’s to be expected.  Any book by any author will find some readers who don’t like it.  What bothered me was why these readers didn’t like the book.  Almost all of those who posted negative comments made the observation that they couldn’t connect with Keir Roget, the main character, because he showed no emotion.  In point of fact, that is not true.  He shows no overt emotion beyond politeness and tactfulness, or a quiet reserve, even when his life is threatened. It’s not that he has no emotions; it’s that they’re kept under tight rein, because in both his culture and his profession [security agent] revealing emotions can be dangerous, if not fatal, particularly when you’re already under suspicion, as Roget is.  The safest way not to reveal emotions is to repress them so that you don’t feel them strongly yourself, and this is exactly what Roget does.  There are numerous clues in Roget’s small actions as to what he feels in his actions, but these are subtle.

From a reader’s point of view, this clearly presented a challenge, and that difficulty was magnified because the “culture” is future Earth, and future southwestern Utah in one series of events.  That’s a future where at least some U.S. readers “expect” a certain emotional pattern from the character, and Roget didn’t deliver.  Of course, if he had, he wouldn’t have survived even to the point where the book actually begins. I suspect that, had I made the entire culture more Sinese and the main character had been identified as of Chinese heritage and genetics, readers would have had less difficulty, but perhaps not.

But what all the comments underline is that at least a certain percentage of readers are so isolated in their own culture that they have great difficulty in getting “outside” their own cultural and personal expectations, in particular when the setting “looks” familiar.  Yet that was actually one of the basic points of the book, shown in many ways – that what looks familiar may not be at all and that our own future may be far more alien to us than many could possibly imagine.  The problem of course, was that, for some readers, I succeeded in making that seemingly familiar future so alien that they could neither accept nor identify with it… and that doesn’t help sales a great deal.

What I’ve experienced with Haze may also reflect why comparatively few SF books, especially those with high sales levels, depict heroes or heroines with emotional complexions more than slightly different from those in current western society.  Emotional differences are far more alien than physical differences, it would seem, at least in current SF, and that’s why so many aliens are really just humans in disguise.

The   November 20^th edition of The Economist features an observation on the growth of data surrounding purchases of bonds, stocks, derivatives, etc. The article notes that since the founding of the Centre for Research in Security Prices at the University of Chicago in 1960, initially funded by Merrill Lynch, the number of academic economic journals dealing with, analyzing, or providing such data has grown from 80 then to over 800 today.

Yet some economists, such as Robert Shiller of Yale University, according to The Economist, dispute the value of such information, noting that even with all the proliferation of data, no one can explain the market melt-down of two years ago.  Others dispute Shiller, pointing out that the market demand for such information proves its value.

In my view, they’re both right, because each is talking about a different aspect of the information.  Shiller is talking about understanding how the securities markets actually work, especially in times when markets perform “abnormally,” while all those who want more and more data are talking about how valuable they find it in making money through trading.

Combine all that data with sophisticated trend analysis and you get knowledge that can make a great deal of money, generally always in short-run situations, but what all that data won’t tell you is when something basic is going to change, and change abruptly.  And those who mine the data are more than happy to be able to use that data 99% of the time to make piles of money. As for the one percent of the time that they’re wrong… well… everything they’ve made the rest of the time covers that – for them.  What their profits don’t do is remedy the vast economic damage that ripples through the economy when one of those unforeseen market meltdowns occurs.

The problem with the computerized use of all this securities market data is that, because it works so well so much of the time for those with the resources to exploit it, there’s little incentive to fund or look into basic research in the field.  In addition, the economists who do all the short-term analysis are, according to Professor Shiller, “idiot savants, who get a sense of authority from work that contains lots of data.”   Again, the problem is that the focus on daily market economics stresses immediate returns to the detriment of long-term understanding… or wisdom, if you will.

And what else is new?

Today is “black Friday,” the day after Thanksgiving when supposedly the Christmas shopping madness seizes the American people and drives them into a frenzy of buying for themselves and others.  While the term “Black Friday” was used at least as far back as 1869, it originally referred to financial crises, but at some point in the mid-1970s, newspapers and media began referring to the day after Thanksgiving as an indicator of what merchants were likely to be “in the black,” or profitable, because of the Christmas buying season. After a time, and particularly in the last decade, this meaning of “black Friday” has usurped all others.

Unfortunately, there are a number of problems with this usage, and especially with the implications behind it.  Because everyone seems to want to concentrate on the economic side, I’ll begin there.  First, the idea of “black Friday” emphasizes consumer buying and consumption as the primary measure of U.S. economic power and success, at a time when the majority of the goods consumed come from other countries.  Second, it ties expectations to a given day of the year. In addition, it creates a mindset that suggests, if a retail business’s holiday revenues are not substantial, then there’s something wrong.  While that may be true for seasonal goods, not all consumer products are seasonal.

Beyond those reasons are the ethical ones.  Do we really want to continue to push the idea of consumer spending as the only – or even the principal – way to keep the economy going, particularly at a time when our entire societal infrastructure, from roads to bridges, to financial structures, to the electrical grid, among others, need rebuilding or total re-structuring?  At a time when Americans, with something like five percent of the world’s population, already consume 25% of its annual output?  Do we want to create a mindset that emphasizes consumption at a time when so many people are struggling to make ends meet?

Then there’s the purely practical question of whether it’s a good idea to emphasize consumption – most of it temporary in nature – when those goods are largely produced overseas, while neglecting building and using capital goods that will generate jobs in the United States.

Black Friday – an economic success or a societal disaster?