I love my computers… mostly. But computers aren’t exactly what they seem to be for most people, and the wide-spread proliferation of computers and their omnipresence has had good effects and bad. One of the worst is that the “computer age” has generated a host of illusions that have, in general, had pervasively negative effects.

The first illusion is one I’ve mentioned before — the illusion of choice. The internet and the world-wide web — as well as satellite TV — offer an infinite array of choices, don’t they? No… not exactly. If… and it’s a big IF, often requiring considerable expense to someone, you have access to all the university libraries and research facilities through the web, there’s quite a bit to be found. The problem is that, first, most people don’t have universal access or anything close to it, and, second, even for those that do, the search systems are rudimentary, if not misleading, and often simply cannot find information that’s there. More to the point, for general users, the information resembles the “Top 40” in hundreds of different formats — the same two paragraphs of information in infinite variety of presentation. The same is equally true of the software tools available. And it’s definitely true of all the varieties of TV entertainment. Yes, there’s great choice, and most of it’s in the packaging.

The second illusion is what I’d call the illusion of completeness. Students, in particular, but a huge percentage of those under thirty have the illusion that all the knowledge and information can be had through the internet. Just as an illustration I did a search on Paul Bowles, the composer and writer, and came up with a theoretical 285,000 references, which boiled down to 480 discrete references, which further decreased to 450 after deleting the other “Paul Bowles.” Almost 20% of the references dealt with aspects of his most famous book — The Sheltering Sky. Something like 15% were different versions of the same standard biography. Three other books of his received about 10% each of the references. From what I could determine, more than ten percent of all entries were totally useless, and over 70 percent of the detailed references, which might provide unique information, were either about works for purchase or articles or studies not available online. That’s not to say that such an internet search doesn’t provide a good starting point. It can, but, unfortunately, the internet is exactly where most students and others looking for information stop.

The third is the illusion of accomplishment. Americans, in particular, feel that they’re working harder than ever, and the statistics tend to support it. But what did all that work accomplish? With all the emphasis on reports and accountability, businesses and institutions are generating more reports and data than ever before in history. With email and cellphones, the majority of North Americans and those in the industrialized world are “instantly” available. With this instant access, supervisors, customers, and governments all want answers “now,” and more and more time is spent responding rather than “doing,” and all the need to respond to all the inquiries limits the time available to “do.”

The fourth is the illusion of the “quick and perfect solution.” In the world of the mass media, entertainment, and computers, problems are resolved in an hour or by the judicious application of software [and if you can’t make the software work, that’s your problem, not the software’s]. Combine this with the niche-fragmentation of society, and each group has its own “perfect solution,” if only those “other idiots” would understand why what we’ve laid out is THE answer.

The fifth illusion is that of “reality.” Both the entertainment industry and the computer wizards are working hard to make the unreal look as real as possible and to convince everyone that everything can be handled electronically, and that there’s little difference between “electronic reality” and dirt-under-your-fingernails reality. That bothers me, more than a little, because electronics don’t convey the blood, sweat, striving, and agony that fill all too many people’s lives, and that lack of visceral appeal leads to more and more decisions based on image and profit — exactly exemplified in bankers who make million dollar bonuses while police, firefighters, and teachers have their wages cut and/or frozen whenever the economy dips.

But then, of what use is reality when illusion is so satisfying?

With a military escalation in Afghanistan estimated to cost one million dollars per soldier per year, a health care legislative package that could cost trillions, not to mention escalating costs in dozens of federal programs, both the Administration and the Congress are looking for ways to come up with more funding and/or reduce the cost of existing programs.

The easy target, of course, is to aim at the “undeserving rich,” such as Wall Street hedge fund managers and investment bankers and tax them more heavily. And between the expiration of the Bush tax cuts and various administration and Congressional initiatives, it seems unlikely that the “rich” will escape greater taxation. The problem there, of course, as I’ve noted before, is that most of the “undeserving rich” will escape the majority of the proposed taxes, while the upper middle class will pay for most of it, because, for some strange reason, the political mindset is that anyone who makes over $250,000 is rich. Yet, in practice, most tax avoidance strategies don’t work for couples who make between $250,000 and $400,000. In fact, the more money you make, the better they work. So these tax increases will hit the hardest on those couples in high cost-of-living cities, such as New York and San Francisco, particularly those where both spouses work long hours and who, facing high mortgage and schooling costs for offspring, would laugh bitterly at the idea that they’re rich. Do they really “deserve” to be the most heavily taxed segment of the population? Certainly, they’re anything but poor, but for the most part, the vast majority of their income is earned through long and hard work, and they’re not the ones with the mansions and the yachts and the fabulous vacations.

At the other end of the income spectrum are the “poor.” Like the “rich,” this catch-all definition includes all manner of people, except the poor range from third-generation welfare recipients to hard-working minimum-wage level families, from drug-addicts to disabled individuals who need support services, either to work or just to live, from the able-bodied employable unemployed to the mentally-disabled unemployable. And society has effectively said that all of them are deserving of governmental aid, in some form or another, if not in several forms.

But… exactly who is “deserving,” and of what are they deserving?

Both the Iraqi and Afghan people deserve better governments and lives, and we “deserve” not to be at the mercy of terrorists — but “deserving” or not, does spending all those resources and lives in the Middle East really make sense? On the domestic front, why should middle-class taxpayers subsidize families and single mothers who knowingly have child after child that they cannot support through their own efforts? Why should hedge fund managers who get multimillion dollar bonuses for gaming securities in such a way that it continually threatens our prosperity pay lower effective tax rates than say, primary care doctors or college professors? Why should taxpayers have to fund rehabilitation efforts for teenagers and adults who make bad choices and become addicts?

One answer, of course, that applies to the “poor” is the children. If society doesn’t maintain some living standards for the poor with children, the argument goes, then the cycle of poverty and violence is merely repeated generation after generation, and besides, the children “deserve better.” But with forty percent or more of the American population paying no income taxes at all, virtually all of them, despite the rhetoric, either working-class or poor, and something like 20% of the remainder paying 80% of the taxes, how long before the “needs” of the “deserving” — both internationally and domestically — overwhelm the American mid-middle class and upper-middle class?

Don’t they “deserve” some consideration as well?

A very recent review of Arms-Commander opined that the book was, as expected, essentially Recluce “comfort food.” I think it’s more than that, but as an author I can live with such a commentary. What really bothered me about the review was the opinion that Saryn’s opponents should have learned from others’ mistakes and adapted to her tactics.

The reason I’m bringing this up is because it’s far from the first time this criticism has been aired, both regarding my fantasy and SF, and the critics don’t seem to have learned from their mistakes, either.

There are several points that the “critics” don’t seem to understand. First, there’s a vast difference between “receiving information” and “learning.” Learning requires not only assimilating the information, but responding to it and changing one’s actions and behavior. To learn from someone else’s mistakes, you have to know about them and understand why they were mistakes. In a low-tech society word doesn’t travel fast, and sometimes it doesn’t travel at all. And when it does travel, you have to be able to trust the bearer of that news. You also have to have enough knowledge to be able to understand what went wrong. Now, in the case of Saryn, and Anna and Secca in the Spellsong Cycle, most of their opponents — and officers — who made the mistakes didn’t survive them. Even when a few did, those that did weren’t likely to be trusted, especially in Lornth, where most lord-holders don’t trust any other lord-holders.

Even if knowledge of such defeats reached others, the knowledge of how those defeats occurred didn’t. This isn’t unique to fiction. The conquests of Alexander the Great tend to follow the same pattern. He had a new way of waging war, and yet almost no one seemed to adapt. Even with more modern communications, how many generals in World War I sent hundreds of thousands of men to their deaths, essentially in exercises in futility, seemingly unable to understand that the infantry charges of the past didn’t work against barbed wire, machine guns, and deep trenches? Even the high-tech U.S. armed forces took almost a decade to switch from conventional war techniques to wide-spread counter-guerilla tactics in Vietnam [and some critics contend we never did].

Even if you do understand what happened, to counter it you have to change the way you operate, usually the way you’ve trained your forces and your commanders and subcommanders. Even in the best of cases, this doesn’t happen quickly. I’ve been a teacher and a swimming coach, and my wife is a singer and voice teacher, and we both know it takes years to get most people to change long-held and incorrect techniques. It’s not something that happens overnight or even in weeks or seasons. And sometimes, after a certain age, people simply can’t change their way of dealing with matters.

Finally, even if you think you want to learn, if that learning requires letting go of long-held beliefs and biases, in many, many cases, it simply won’t happen. Instead, you’ll attribute the problem to other factors or ignore it totally because you hold those beliefs so dearly.

Yet the medieval level holders and barons of Lornth, with no communications faster than horses, no understanding of what really happened, no trust in each other [which was what caused many of their problems to begin with], and no desire to change their tactics and way of life, should have understood what Saryn was doing, essentially before they even had word, and revolutionized everything they knew about warfare and fighting in less than a season?

The idea that any significant fraction of people, and particularly institutions, learn, adapt, and respond quickly is more fantastic than anything I’ve ever put in print.

A website [Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist] just posted a quote from Arms-Commander, in which a character notes that “it is better to be a just tyrant who provides freedom than a dead ruler who tried to be fair in an unfair world.” Almost immediately an anonymous commenter observed that “a tyrant, even a just one, can never provide freedom. It’s antithetical to the very nature of the word.”

I was instantly torn between the desire to laugh hysterically, to go postal, or to sigh in despair. After having spent a lifetime studying government and politics, not to mention nearly twenty years in Washington, D.C., in a number of federal positions in both the executive and legislative branch, and after two tours in the U.S. Navy, I think I have a fair understanding of how governments do and don’t work. So…

First… NO government provides “freedom” in the absolute sense. All governments restrict certain practices and behaviors in order to maintain order, because without order, people literally do not have the “freedom” to walk down the streets safely. Even with such restrictions, the order created may not be anywhere close to desirable — except when compared to the state of no effective government at all, as one can currently see in Somalia. The degree of restrictions and how much order is created varies from country to country and system to system, but restrictions on behavior for the safety of others are anything but “freedom” in the ideal sense.

Second, the original meaning of “tyrant” was a ruler who seized power outside of the previous legal system. In that sense, the founding fathers of the United States were tyrants. Now… they justified that rebellion and seizure after the fact by creating a system that was superior to what preceded it. We can call them authors of democracy, founding fathers, and the like, but a significant number were in fact rebelling aristocrats who did in fact sometimes behave like the popular conception of tyrants, and who insisted on enshrining the legality of slaveholding, certainly a local, if not a regional tyranny. Yet they provided more “freedom” than the previous system.

Likewise, “freedom” and even “liberty” have been evolving terms. In the United States, originally “liberty” was effectively limited to white males, and predominantly property owners. Slaves, women, and children had few legal rights. In practice, and in law, “freedom” is the granting of certain rights to certain classes of people, and the less restrictive the conditions circumscribing those rights are, the “freer” those people are judged to be.

Given that, by definition, in practice, there’s no difference in the moral status as a ruler between a “tyrant” and a “legitimate” government. How each attained power may have a moral connotation, but the “morality” or “ethics” of their regimes depend on the acts and laws by which they rule and the results. Franco was a dictator and a tyrant of Spain, yet Spain today is a free and democratic nation that works, as a result of his “tyranny” and reforms. On the other hand, Salazar of Portugal operated a brutal secret police and impoverished that nation.

Tyrants aren’t, by definition, any more antithetical to freedom than any other class of ruler, because all rulers, democratic or otherwise, in order to maintain a civil society, restrict freedoms. Period.

“I couldn’t do it.’ Those are my wife’s words every time I talk about reading though reader reviews of my books. Many authors won’t do it. I’m one who does, grudgingly, very grudgingly, because I’m still a reluctant optimist, but I believe that you can learn something from anything — even reader reviews.

Unfortunately, maybe those other authors are right, because I don’t much care for what I’m learning, and it doesn’t seem to be of much use, not if I want to keep trying to become a better and better writer. At first, I thought that I was imagining things, but then, because I do have a background in economics and analysis, I decided to apply some basic analysis — and I used The Magic of Recluce as the “baseline.” Why? Because it’s been in print continuously since 1991. It’s not a perfect baseline or template, because the reader reviews I used [Amazon’s] don’t begin until 1996, but it gives the longest time-time of any of my books. Over that fourteen year time period almost 35% of readers gave the book a five star rating; 25% gave it a four star rating; 18% gave it three stars; 8% gave it two stars; a little more than 15% gave it a one star rating [and yes, that adds up to 101% because of rounding]. More interesting, however, was the timing of ratings and the content of key words in those ratings.

To begin with, for the first two years or so of ratings, comprising roughly 20% of all ratings, all the ratings were either four or five stars, and not until 1999, eight years after the book was first out, did it receive a one star rating. Not just coincidentally, I suspect, that was the first review that claimed the book was “boring.” More than half the one and two star reviews have been given during the last five years, and virtually all of the one star reviews use terms such as “boring” or “slow.” From the wording of those reviews, I suspect, but cannot firmly prove, most come from comparatively younger readers.

The fact that more and more readers want “faster” books doesn’t surprise me. Given the increasing speed of our culture, the emphasis on “fast-action movies” and faster action video games, it shouldn’t surprise anyone. What does bother me is the equation of “fast” to “good” and the total intolerance that virtually all of these reviews show for anything that takes thought and consideration. The fact that more than twice as many readers find the book good as those who do not, and that a majority still do indicates that there are many readers who still appreciate depth, but the change in the composition of readers, as reflected in the reviews, confirms, at least in my mind, that a growing percentage of fantasy readers want “faster” books. Again… no surprise, but the virulence and impatience expressed is disturbing, because it manifests an incredible sense of self-centeredness, with reader reviews that basically say. “This book is terrible because it didn’t entertain me in the way I wanted.” And terms like “Yech!”, “Yuck!”, “Such Junk?”, “its [sic] horrible”, and “total waste” certainly convey far more about the reader than about the book.

As an author, I understand all too well that not all authors are for all readers, and there are authors, some of whom are quite good, who are not to my taste. But there’s an unconscious arrogance that doesn’t bode well for the future of our society when fifteen percent of readers state that a book is terrible because it doesn’t cater to the reader’s wishes — and throwing the book through a window because it doesn’t [yes, one reviewer claimed to have done so].

I’d say that they need to grow up… but I’m afraid that they already have, and that they’re fast approaching a majority, at least among the under 30 crowd. Two recent articles in other publications highlight the trend. The latest edition of The Atlantic Monthly has one explaining why newspaper articles are too long and basically gives what amounts to a variation on the USA Today format as an answer — quick juicy facts with little support or explanation. And what’s really frightening was the conclusion of an article in the “Week in Review” section of The New York Times last Sunday — that youngsters who are now 4-10 will make today’s young people seem like paragons of patience.

Newspeak, here we come.

On the Locus online site, there’s a discussion about who might be considered a worthy successor to the “grand old man” of science fiction — the late Robert A. Heinlein. A number of names are mentioned, and those contributing all give reasons for their selections. Something about this bothered me when the discussion was launched weeks ago, and, slow as I can sometimes be about the obvious, “it” — or several “its” — finally struck me.

What’s the point of the discussion? For all his accomplishments and faults, and he had both, Heinlein was unique to his time and place. Many of those involved in the discussion acknowledge this, but what isn’t brought up is that the same is true of most writers with any degree of accomplishment and originality.

Although few have noted it, Heinlein’s greatest claim to fame was that he combined originality, ideas that were usually less than jaded, and solid writing with popularity. According to one of the most senior editors in the F&SF field, the number of his individual titles that approached or exceeded million-seller status is “remarkable.” As a new biography to be published by Tor indicates, he was a complex man, with an equally complex and involved personal life.

So… why is anyone looking for his “successor”? Can’t the man be appreciated, or attacked, or analyzed, or whatever, for what he was? Has “sequel-itis” so permeated the critical F&SF community that some writer or writers must be jammed into a designed place?

Everywhere I look these days in entertainment — whether in cinema, music, books, and even games — there’s a tremendous pressure to fit. If an author or a musician does something different, there’s usually far more negative pressure and comment than positive. Much of that pressure is financial. I’ve noted on more than one occasion that any one of my “series” fantasies earns far more than one of my few critically acclaimed SF books — and this is not by any means exclusive to me.

In this light, even the discussion about successors to Heinlein nags at me, because I see it, perhaps unfairly, as another aspect of trying to come up with easy categorization in a field where such categorization is anything but easy and where labels create false expectation after false expectation. For example, it’s fair to say that a “Recluce” book should be a “Recluce” book, taking place in that world and adhering to the rules of that world, with a similar style, but is it fair for readers and marketers to insist that every book I write follow that style?

Certainly, that is the pressure. Some authors actually have a different pen name for each “style” of book they write, but what does that say about readers? Are so many so rigid in their habits and mindsets that they can’t look at anything different by the same author? Or have the marketing mavens conditioned them that way?

How about accepting/rejecting Heinlein for what he is, and doing the same for the writers that have followed him, instead of looking for quickly identified niches and tropes? When reviewers and critics who are supposedly analytical and thoughtful do this, that, frankly, bothers me even more. They should know better, but, then, maybe I’m just expecting too much.

Or does looking at each writer and book for what they are require too much thinking and depress the bottom lines of the industry?

The Economist reported that the U.S. Air Force has put in a request to procure 2,300 Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3) consoles — not for personnel entertainment, but to hook together to build a supercomputer for ten percent of the cost of ordering one. This isn’t a one-time fluke, either. The USAF has already built and is operating a computer constructed from 336 PS3s. U.S. troops are using slightly modified off-the-shelf electronics for everything from calculating firing trajectories to controlling drone RPVs.

While I’m perfectly happy as a taxpayer to see cost-effective procurement, examples such as these give me a very uneasy feeling… for a number of reasons. First is the obvious fact that anything that is commercial and open can eventually be cracked, hacked, snooped, and sabotaged. Granted, for some applications that’s unlikely or doesn’t matter, but controlling drones? Second, even the example of the USAF procurement gives the “bad guys” new ideas and capabilities. And third, somehow the thought of our supposedly high-tech military having to rely on the gaming industry for the latest technology — and they are beginning to do so, thanks in part to complicated and Byzantine U.S. military procurement regulations — suggests that there’s something a bit askew in our national priorities, especially when a Nigerian national paying with cash, carrying no luggage, traveling alone, and already on the terrorist watch list can get to the point of almost detonating an incendiary device on an aircraft about to land in Detroit.

We don’t seem to be able to carry through on relatively routine security measures; we rely on gamers for high technology; we haven’t been able or willing to build a supersonic replacement for the Concorde; we’re behind the entire rest of the world in implementing high-speed ground/rail transport; and our most profitable industries are financial manipulation and litigation.

Now… it also turns out that some of these gaming devices provide essentially the guts of supercomputers… and that they have far-reaching medical implications.

For all this, I must say that I have to salute the gaming industry… but what exactly does that say about the state of American drive, initiative, and technology in every other area?

Are we so into video gaming that the rest of our high-tech industry needs to subsist on the fruits and scraps of electronic entertainment?

We live in a world that has become on a daily basis increasingly more complex because of its ever advancing technology and still rapidly increasing population. One of the most obvious effects of both is that we have come to live in a world defined by, restricted by, and described by numbers.

For example, for most people, the date today is January 1, 2010. That’s effectively an arbitrary denotation of the passage of time since the attributed date of birth of the founder of a major religious belief system. Research, however, suggests that that birth date is off by six or so years and that the time of year was later manipulated for theo-political reasons to coincide roughly with the winter solstice. Because much of the world has based its chronology — and dates and chronologies are important for many political, economic, and social reasons — societies in general have accepted the modified Gregorian calendar for practical reasons and have resisted major changes for exactly those reasons. But most people never consider the background or the implications, and those who do quickly move on to more pressing issues, and ones about which they can do something.

Unhappily, the same lack of understanding lies behind so many of the numbers we use in society today, and the numbers tend to become “reality,” with little understanding of what actually lies behind them — until something goes wrong, and the blame is assessed everywhere but where it should be — and that’s at a lack of understanding of what the numbers really mean… or, in many cases, what they do not mean or represent.

For example, everyone takes “for granted” that if someone runs a temperature over 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit consistently for several hours, that person is sick. Not necessarily. In some cases, subnormal temperatures signal severe illnesses as well. Also, the 98.6 degree number is an average across large populations. It doesn’t hold for everyone, as I well know, because my wife’s “normal” temperature is consistently a degree and a half below “normal.” What that means for her is that what would be a mild or moderate fever for someone else is a severe fever for her. Yet the failure to understand the difference between “normal” for her and for the population as a whole could make a considerable difference to her in the case of a severe infection.

I’ve made the point earlier about numbers in regard to the side-effects with regard to vaccinations. Because some parents do not understand statistics, because they fear side-effects that occur in one in a million cases, they will avoid vaccinations for “childhood” diseases, where the side effects of the disease are often hundreds of times more prevalent than the side-effects of vaccination.

Failure to understand what the economic numbers meant in the several years before the last financial meltdown contributed mightily to the disaster. No matter what any “guru” preaches, you cannot have massive societal and even world-wide price run-ups in securities and real estate prices on a wide-scale basis when real overall economic growth is slow or moderate — not without generating a “bubble” and a subsequent collapse.

Nor can every company realistically aim at 10-40% annual profit targets, and when large numbers of companies are posting such profits at a time when nominal inflation is low… something is wrong, either the way those profits are calculated, or the way inflation is measured… or the reporting of other data… or the business practices of the companies involved.

Likewise, when more than forty percent of the grades given at universities in the United States are “As,” anyone with a modicum of understanding should realize the implications behind those numbers. In three generations, human beings don’t change from 10-15% of the collegiate population being brilliant to 40% plus being brilliant, especially when far larger numbers of less advantaged students are attending college. What it does mean, among other things, is that pursuit of “the almighty grade” has become as rampant as the pursuit of “the almighty dollar,” and that excellence in both academia and business has become secondary to numerical targets of dubious worth in assessing performance.

When “reader reviews” flood Amazon.com, what do they mean? Do they really judge excellence? While some may be accurate in that regard, in practice what those numbers reflect is popularity, not quality. There’s nothing wrong with that… so long as people understand that, but unfortunately, many don’t. More than a few readers have contacted me in surprise after reading one of my “less popular” SF novels to say that they thought a book was far better than the reader reviews. That shouldn’t really be surprising. Often excellent books do not make a quick and easy read, and for some readers, who seek ease of escape and entertainment, an excellent book may not be a good read. That doesn’t mean the book is “bad,” only that it’s not suited to them, but handing out “stars” for popularity doesn’t reflect quality. In fact, one reader made the point that he looks for “bad” ratings among authors he knows are good writers to find the excellent books.

The same problem exists with the travesty of “student evaluations.” I’m sorry, but 18-20 year old students do not know what they need to learn. Studies have shown that high student evaluations correlate directly to high grades given by the professor. There are always exceptions, but across thousands of professors that observation holds true. Thus, the numbers reflected in student evaluations do not reflect the quality of teaching, but the degree of grade inflation. Yet university administrations routinely use these evaluations as a proxy for good teaching. What their use reflects is not excellence, but the need for “popular” teachers to fill classrooms, regardless of excellence.

I could go on and on, but my opening thought for another numbered year is that, with more and more numbers flooding us, day after day… try, please try, to understand what they really mean and not what everyone else tells you they mean.

For more than a decade, at least some of the more “realistic” or “mundane” among the science fiction crowd — including various proportions of readers, writers, and critics — have been suggesting that the idea of interstellar travel is somewhere between unlikely and totally impossible in a practical sense. So I happened to be very pleased when I read in the November 26^th edition of New Scientist that two new approaches to interstellar travel had been trotted out — one of which essentially revisits the idea of the Bussard interstellar ramjet… except the propellant would be dark matter, which is far more plentiful in interstellar space than the comparatively few atoms of hydrogen that made the original Bussard concept unlikely to be successful in significantly reducing travel time to even nearby stars. The other involves the creation of an artificial black hole that radiates Hawking radiation for propulsion.

Coming up with a theoretical model for either approach is, of course, a far cry from even an engineering design, let alone a prototype, especially when the composition of dark matter has not even been determined and when we don’t yet have the engineering know-how to create anything close to a black hole, but these theoretical approaches do bring some hope to the idea that we humans may yet escape the confines of a single solar system in some fashion other than massive asteroid-sized generation ships that no government or corporate entity will ever commit the resources to build.

One of the aspects of interstellar travel that fascinates me, and more than a few others, is the hope that it might at least give a jolt to the political and cultural emphasis on limitations and upon the glorification of the small — from ever-smaller and ever more necessary electronic gadgets that tie people into self-selected and socially and culturally limited peer groups to a lack of understanding about just how immense, wide, wonderful — and awful — the universe is… and how unlikely what lies out there can be conveniently catalogued into neat and small packages designed just for human use and understanding.

Will we ever understand it all?

Who knows? But we certainly won’t if we don’t keep looking outward and striving for more than a way to use science and new knowledge for a quick buck in the next fiscal year… or quarter.

I’d certainly rather have either a black hole starship or a dark-matter-ramjet than the new and improved pocket iPhone and its sure-to-be innumerable successors.

In the last few days, several stories have popped up in various newspapers about the Barnes & Noble decision to close its B. Dalton outlet in Laredo, Texas, leaving the small city [population 220,000] with no bookstore at all, neither a chain store, nor an independent. That will make Laredo the largest town or city in the United States without a full-service bookstore, an absolutely “wonderful” Christmas present for the book-lovers of Laredo.

In past blogs I’ve pointed out the rather numerous short-comings of Borders. Now it’s the turn of Barnes & Noble. The B&N decision comes as part of its strategy to close all the remaining B. Dalton outlets in 2010, a decision from on corporate high to close high-cost, low-profit small mall outlet stores. Frankly, in the case of B&N, it makes far more sense than it did for Borders to downsize the number of Waldenbooks outlets, since from my industry sources, the word has always been that Waldenbooks was profitable until Borders started fiddling with their operations, while the Dalton outlets were, as a whole, marginal.

Even so, the B&N decision in the case of Laredo, and perhaps in other individual cases as well, is stupid. They have a local monopoly that is in the black, if not necessarily highly profitable, and B&N has been quoted as saying that Laredo will support a small but full-sized B&N — but that B&N won’t be able to open such a store for at least 18 months. Generally speaking, a city with a population of over 100,000 is profitable for the chain bookstores, and even with Laredo’s high level of Spanish-speakers, a store there should be profitable, especially with no competition.

Let’s get this straight. For bookkeeping and corporate decision-making reasons, B&N will close a profitable local outlet well before a successor B&N can be opened. In other words, they’ll destroy or at least erode their customer base…and then have to rebuild it, if they can, a year later.

All right, they have to close all the B. Daltons for whatever reasons. Then why not simply re-label the Dalton store in Laredo as a B&N Express or some such with signs saying that there will be a full-sized B&N coming before long, and add the Laredo store to the B&N supply system. Surely, it can’t be that hard. Then B&N can still claim it’s closed down all the Daltons in order to keep the stockholders or creditors or whoever happy and not anger an entire reading community.

Unfortunately, this is just another example of where pre-determined decisions are trading short-term profit considerations for longer-term profitability — and undermining the future customer base by literally chasing away readers. Exactly how much sense does this make in terms of future operations? Not to mention that it makes little sense at all from a societal point of view when reading levels among younger Americans are dropping.

We’ve all met them, the seemingly well-intentioned people who raise questions about this and that in the workplace. “Why is George doing it that way?” “Why do you think Suzanne changed the production schedule without telling accounting… or advertising?”

And if you’ve noticed, or watched carefully, you’ll have discovered that each of these seemingly innocent questions is asked in a public forum from which George or Suzanne is absent. Further, if you just happen to ask the questioner why they raised the question, the answer is almost invariably a variant of “I was just thinking of the good of… [fill in the blank with the appropriate word, such as “the staff,” “the customers,” “the students”].

Just as Lenin and Stalin, Hitler. Mussolini, and all-too-many tyrants in modern times have justified their actions on the basis of being for “the good of the people,” so too are these work-place questioners not at all interested in the good of whomever they cite. They seldom bring up their questions in any situation where the “accused” has a chance to explain; they almost never go to the accused and ask for an explanation. And the bottom line is that they’re not really interesting in solving the “problem.” They’re interested in causing trouble for another individual, preferably without leaving too obvious a set of fingerprints and without ever confronting the individual in question, always looking innocent and professing their altruism in raising such questions.

So… when you hear one of these kinds of questions, and especially if you get an explanation that the questioner is “only looking out for everyone’s good,” start asking exactly what the questioner really has in mind. Does he or she want to discredit the subject of the questions, or covet their job, or get back at the other person?

History and experience suggest that people who are interested in doing good do just that. They do; they accomplish; they work at make things better. Trouble-makers ask questions that stir everyone up without ever pointing toward a solution. There’s a very fine line between an honest question and one designed to incite trouble, but asking who benefits personally from a question and who is harmed is a good start to sorting out one from the other.

Even so… be on your guard when anyone cites “for the good of…”

Last Friday, students at the University of California staged a protest and pelted the house of the university chancellor with rocks and other projectiles, breaking windows and causing not-insignificant damage. According to various reports, the students were protesting teacher layoffs and furloughs, canceled classes, and high tuition and fees. The latest protest followed earlier occupations of halls on the Berkeley campus designed to call attention to the student grievances.

While I happen to agree with the anger and concern about the cutbacks in higher education, these protests, as with so many student protests over the years, are aimed at the wrong people. No state college or university administration has that much control over the rising costs of education. Nationally, over the past three decades, the percentage of college costs at state institutions of higher education paid for by state governments has dropped, often precipitously, from a national average of around 40% to far, far, less — in some states dropping below ten percent. During the same period, various additional requirements and mandates have been imposed on state institutions by both federal and state governments, and governments at all levels have pressed for more and more students to attend college. In general, the increased costs do not come from significantly higher faculty and staff salaries. While the salaries of football coaches have soared, so have administration salaries and costs, largely in response to all the mandates and administrative paperwork and “accountability.” On the other hand, faculty and staff salaries, in general, have not kept pace. Over the last 15 years, for example, faculty salaries at my wife’s university have been frozen four times, and the average raise in the years when they were not frozen has been around three percent. Similar figures apply to other state universities in the region. With the contribution from state governments dropping yearly, and legislative mandates to “do more,” the only way state institutions can meet their budgets is by increasing tuition and fees — or by cutting faculty and part-time or student instructors.

Blaming the administration, whatever the faults of those administrators may be, doesn’t get to the heart of the problem. Those students would be better served by asking their parents and their friends’ parents, “Why don’t you support more state taxes to fund higher education?” Or… they could accept the fact that, if they don’t want to pay for education through taxes, they’ll have to pay higher tuition and fees… or allow the universities and colleges to raise the bar for admission and reduce the number of students.

Destructive rioting in front of a chancellor’s house isn’t going to do anything except make already intransigent legislators even less willing to grant funds to a state university… and all too many of them don’t like finding higher education anyway.

The other day, I went to the store to buy some hundred watt light-bulbs. Guess what? I found I had a choice of either 90 watt standard soft-whites, or reduced “natural” illumination 100 watt bulbs. I’d been hearing about the future phase-out of incandescent light bulbs, but this isn’t “future.” It’s now, and there’s clearly a great push to replace the once-standard 100 watt bulb with compact fluorescents or, apparently, with lower wattage bulbs.

It doesn’t stop there, either. I have track lights in my kitchen. We installed the track lighting some ten years ago to replace the fluorescent lights that always seemed dim, and never directed enough light to specific areas. The track lights solved the problems. Except now… I can’t find the 75 watt halogen bulbs the track lighting was designed for. All I can find are 70 watt bulbs that seem to produce less light than 60 watt bulbs, and the kitchen is getting noticeably dimmer as the 75 watt halogen bulbs expire. Some people may find cooking and eating in dimness romantic, but we’d prefer that it be a choice and not a requirement.

Then, too, we have ceiling lights in several hallways and rooms, and the fixtures were designed to provide adequate light based on incandescent bulb sizes, and they don’t take compact fluorescents. Oh… and by the way, the “natural light” incandescents burn out in a couple of days in ceiling fixtures.

I’m presuming that all of these dimming down light bulb initiatives are in the service of energy efficiency and designed to “replace” the inefficiency of the incandescent light bulb. I don’t have a problem with replacing less efficient lights with more energy-efficient and environmentally friendly lights, but I have a huge problem with a forced reduction in light levels. Frankly, even with glasses that correct my once-perfect vision back to theoretically perfect vision, I have trouble reading fine print in dim light. So do millions of other Americans, most of us past 50.

I have a lower level office [i.e., walkout basement] which has overhead fluorescents. With them alone, the office light level is that of a medieval monastery in midwinter. So I have a desk lamp that has a three way bulb, and it does make everything light enough in the work area — but it’s getting harder and harder to find the three-ways with the 250 watt bulbs.

Now… I suppose I could install more lighting with lower wattage compact fluorescents and modified incandescent bulbs… and the way things are going I may have to… but why should I have to? If compact fluorescents are so good, and so efficient, why can’t someone manufacture one that delivers the lumen levels I need? So far as I can see, all these initiatives and changes are merely semi-mandatory light-reduction measures, not a replacement of current light levels attained with inefficient technology with the same lighting levels obtained more efficiently.

Or am I missing something? Is this another part of the sinister plot to do away with reading? Is it a way to make seniors stumble and fall and increase their mortality to reduce Medicare outlays? Or is it another form of age-discrimination against those of us who don’t operate by the light of blackberries or palm pilots or the like? Perhaps it’s a way to keep light from shining into the way government operates? Or is it a hidden subsidy to the lighting manufacturers as we all have to buy new and redesigned lighting in order to be able to see in our own homes?

Whatever it is… it’s not efficiency.

Just last week, one reader made the observation that, in the case of “instant communications,” people were the ones who decided the use of tools in the fashion I decried, and that it wasn’t the question of the tools, but that the problem lay with people, “as usual.” I have to say that, while I’ve always been a supporter of “not blaming the tools,” something about this view bothered me, and I think the issue boils down to a question.

Are there “tools” or institutions that influence people toward “bad” or “uncivil” or “unethical” or even “unproductive” behavior, by their superficial attractiveness or other attributes?

Moreover, do we tend to minimize the negative impacts of these tools because their other attributes overshadow in our minds –or emotions — their true costs to both individuals and society?

I’d certainly submit that this may well be the case with modern communications technology. Psychologists have already determined that computer/games/cellphone type equipment is highly addictive to certain personalities, and, as I noted earlier, instant communications seem to foster a rather wide range of behaviors that are either impolite, unethical, counter-productive, or just plain illegal. Obviously, the technology, as that reader noted, is not at fault, but, nonetheless, with the wide-spread use of that technology, we’re seeing problems we didn’t see before, or at least not on the wide-scale scope and severity as at present.

Another tool that has engendered incivility and an extremely high number of fatalities is the automobile. Because of its convenience, its utility, and its versatility, we don’t want to do without them, and certainly there’s nothing inherently “evil” about cars, except perhaps in the eyes of greenhouse extremists. Yet… what is there about a car that provokes human behavior that ranges from merely stupid to downright lethal? Vehicle deaths in the United States are something like three times homicides, and for the last 60 years have totaled two and half times the wartime combat deaths of U.S. service members. What persuades theoretically rational adults to drive a car when they’re so intoxicated or high that they can barely walk, or to cruise the highways at speeds more suited to the Indianapolis 500? Why do normally sane individuals become maniacs when cut off by another vehicle in rush-hour or other traffic? Why, when studies show that cellphone use, and especially texting, while driving impairs drivers more than drinking, do so many people persist in combining these lethal behaviors? Certainly, the car didn’t beg them to do it.

Firearms are another case in point. Like it or not, they’re implicated in nearly 30,000 deaths a year, roughly 47% being suicides and 48% being homicides. While guns don’t pull their own triggers, a prevalence of firearms does result in higher death rates. This may be simply because they’re more effective than other weapons, but that effectiveness combines with human nature to result in a rather high body count… particularly in the U.S.

Another area is electronic music. While seldom fatal, the ability of amplified music to penetrate thick walls and sealed vehicles is resulting in increasing hearing losses among listeners, usually younger people. And, of course, hearing losses must be compensated for by higher volume levels… causing greater hearing loss… and none of them ever seem to consider turning down the volume.

Likewise, the institution of ubiquitous fast food and other forms of “instant nourishment” has resulted in an epidemic of obesity in the United States. Again… the food didn’t drag people into McDonald’s or whatever instant cuisine establishment might be an individual’s choice, but the prevalence of such establishments clearly biases people toward eating habits that mitigate against good health.

So… while such tools and institutions do not in themselves require unfortunate results, does their presence and ease of utilization result in an influence that is biased toward less than optimal human behavior? If so, can and should we ignore that influence by arguing that such less than optimal human behaviors are solely personal decisions?

No… it’s not the tools, not exactly, but… I have to wonder whether the tools are somehow stronger than some people’s common sense and willpower…or whether an awful lot of people are “intelligence impaired.”

The other day, my wife had a local singing engagement for a community event, one of those things she and other members of the university community do gratis. Before she started teaching for the day, she checked her email and saw nothing urgent. Because she teaches straight through for eight hours on Tuesdays, as she does on most days, she did not have a chance to check her email again until after five o’clock. At that point, she discovered that the community event organizer had now asked her to sing an additional song — one not even mentioned previously — that was printed in the program… and she was singing that evening. Fortunately, my wife knew the song, but she never had a chance even to rehearse the song with her accompanist. Needless to say, she wasn’t pleased about the situation, because it’s hard to perform as well as one can without some advance preparation, and refusing to sing doesn’t set well with the audience or the local organizers. She said nothing, sang well, and everyone seemed pleased… but it still bothered her… and me.

The day before, she had a senior student email her a request for a faculty recommendation for a graduate school application — less than a day before the application and recommendation deadline. Routinely, incoming freshmen think nothing of putting off doing assignments until hours, if not minutes, before they are due — and many keep doing this for weeks and months. While this has historically always been an academic problem for some students, it’s now endemic with the vast, vast majority of incoming college students. Some never learn, and usually flunk out, despite test scores and grades that indicate that they have the intellectual ability to do the work. Every year, students applying for jobs or graduate schools wait longer and longer before they contact faculty, clearly never thinking that, first, the faculty member may have other commitments, even other recommendations to write, or, second, that it does take time to write a decent recommendation.

More than infrequently — and with distressingly increasing frequency over the past year — I’ve had people request information, wanting it “now,” for deadlines, etc., even when they’ve known of the need for weeks or months. I’ve checked with offspring who are in various positions in business, and they report the same phenomenon. Almost no one seems able to: (1) plan ahead and (2) realize that accurate information and/or work products can’t be reliably produced “instantly.”

Yet with “instant” communications, from email to Twitter to cellphones, more and more people are equating instant access to instant results. There seems to be a subconscious process whereby people think, “If I can get to you instantly, why can’t you get back to me instantly, and with what I want/need?” The additional problem with all the instant access is that if you don’t reply, you get more emails and messages wanting to know why you haven’t replied to the point that less and less real work tends to get done, or people have to work longer to get the same amount of work done, because they have to keep responding. Now… it’s easy for someone like me to say, “Just ignore them until you have time to get to them.” The problem is that too many of the instant communications come from superiors, and ignoring insistent superiors is a quick way to end up where you don’t have to respond because you no longer have a job. Even if you can quickly delete the non-important messages, that takes additional time. In my wife’s case, despite a spam filter, she routinely receives two hundred plus emails daily. Most are junk, but she still has to wade through them and delete them, or her system starts rejecting all email because her inbox is too full, and then she misses the important ones.

More telling is that this instant access mindset ignores the fact that most requests or orders or requirements that are conveyed can’t be addressed instantly — and especially not accurately. This pressure for providing things now is already leading to inaccuracies in everything from news reports to the information on which business and political decisions are being made. It also ends up delaying production and creating unnecessary stress from education to the work-place.

Then, to top it all off, electronic media are perfect for exhibiting passive-aggressive tendencies. When you really need information, especially from someone who doesn’t report to you, the failure to reply, even after days, or weeks, can be incredibly irritating… and non-productive.

Now… tell me again why instant communications are so wonderful.

A number of pundits have talked about the need for accountability in our society, but in practice most of this talk has led nowhere.

Despite years of rhetoric, testing, and all sorts of initiatives in education, all the way from primary schooling through universities, the actual outcomes of American education have declined. I’m not talking test scores. I’m talking about the ability of American students to read, write logical and coherent paragraphs and papers without coaching, and to be able to think and make and understand logical arguments. Initiative after initiative has demanded greater accountability on the part of teachers. I’m not against teacher accountability, but it’s only half the accountability problem in education. Like it or not, students have to be held accountable for their learning — and they’re not. Instead, teachers must spoon feed, must inspire, must somehow get the students to learn. Why doesn’t anyone want to admit that, until students are also held accountable, the “education situation” won’t ever be improved?

Our financial system offers other cases in point. Little more than a year after the melt-down of the financial system and the near-collapse of the stock market, the investment banks and hedge funds and all-too-many of the other high fliers are at it again, paying enormous bonuses to executives, generally for those who can multiply profits to an obscene degree. Simply put, there is a risk-reward trade-off. The riskier the venture, the higher the reward, but the greater the probability of failure. The problem here is that the individual trader, hedge fund manager, etc., doesn’t face personally the magnitude of the downside. I have great doubts if many of them would be quite so interested in such jobs if they — and their CEOs and superiors — had to repay the money and then spend the rest of their life either in jail or working at a minimum wage job to repay what they’d already spent because they lost billions for other people. While the corporate structure was initially designed to limit liability, so that corporate failures didn’t destroy individuals, what everyone who designed the structure failed to foresee was that the structure effectively destroys accountability, and the larger the corporation, the greater the destruction of personal accountability. When a trader can walk away with hundreds of millions, does it really matter that much if he or she will never work in the field again?

The banks have jacked up consumer credit card rates, on average, to over 20%, partly because the federal government is trying to take away some of their least ethical and most profitable “charges,” such as $35 fees for $3 dollar ATM overdrafts. A major reason for the higher interest rates is because, first, the banks never priced their ATM/credit card services at their cost level and were using fees to cover costs and profits, and, second, because far too many consumers were less than accountable for paying when they ran up huge credit card bills — prompted by media advertising that further undermined accountability by encouraging people to buy, buy, buy…

Politics offers another lesson in accountability, if from the other side. Because of the intense media scrutiny of politicians, virtually all officials elected on a federal level are indeed held accountable — but they’re held accountable for what their constituents want… not for wise decisions. That was one of the reasons why the founding fathers designed a different system with various checks and balances that we’ve destroyed in the name of greater democracy… and that has led to less real accountability.

Our electronic communications and purchasing systems further undermine accountability. A thug who mugs someone for $50 has a far greater chance of being arrested and imprisoned than does a scammer or a phisher who uses the internet to con hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars — and we’ve set up the system in such a way that it’s effectively impossible to find such con artists, let alone to hold them accountable.

Given the way in which we’ve undermined accountability, the real wonder is not that the instances I’ve mentioned have occurred, but that there haven’t been far, far more than what we’ve experienced.

Recently, there have been a number of articles about the failure of economics and its metrics in predicting and reflecting on the “health” of the United States. Much of the criticism has focused on the use of GDP [Gross Domestic Product] as a leading indicator. Unfortunately, such criticisms, while having statistical and economic validity, have the result, whether intended or not, of shifting debate from the larger problem.

The larger debate has been around for a very long time, but with the growth and power of the “market economy” and those who benefit directly, and often excessively, from it, those earlier misgivings tend to be buried in the detritus of history. There was a reason why William Jennings Bryan rallied millions behind his presidential campaign in 1896 when he campaigned against what he saw as the Republican plutocrats with his slogan that “you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold” Although technically a speech for bimetallism, the slogan reverberated though the west, the laboring class, and poor farmers. In his poem “The Gods of the Copybook Headings,” Rudyard Kipling pointed out exactly what happens when the “gods of the marketplace” become paramount. The Russian revolution, while it might have been directed by goons and disaffected intellectuals, was paid for by the blood of the poor and disadvantaged, as was the more recent Cuban revolution and the rise of Fidel Castro. The current American rage against investment bankers and the “market” also reflects a gut-level feeling on the part of most Americans that valuing everything in dollar terms is somehow wrong, even as we react to commercial after commercial that insists happiness and success come from acquiring this and that, and more in general.

Yet the reaction of the financial, economic, and political leaders has been to address the shortcomings of the “market system.” Too many of these leaders and too many of both the critics and those who feel that the “GDP Problem” is resolvable are ignoring the critical assumptions that lie behind the use of economic statistics to define, for want of a better term, “national prosperity.” The first assumption is simply that, given modern methods, anything of value is commercial and can and should be able to be valued and quantified accurately. The second is that, in economic terms, those things that cannot be valued and quantified in hard and measurable terms are of lesser or no value. Now, I’m well aware that my statement of the second assumption will scarcely go unchallenged, but in economic and public policy terms, there shouldn’t be any dispute. For example, almost no business or corporation put an economic value on their acts that degraded the environment until governments stepped in and assigned values, essentially by fiat, in the form of fines and regulations. At that point, and only at that point, did the environment become valued in economic terms. The same sort of reaction occurred with regulations on child labor and wages.

Before going on, for those who may think that I am being excessively “liberal,” I want to make several basic points. First, like it or not, every working nation or region needs to maintain over time a viable market-based economy. You cannot trade, purchase, or sell goods or services without a societal mechanism for doing so, although there are many variations on “market economies,” some better and some worse. Second, market systems work best for goods and services that can be easily quantified and valued, and the harder and more removed such quantification and valuation are from the day-to-day ebb and flow of commerce, the less accurate and the less reliable any valuation is. Third, because market systems are imperfect, large systems need various restraints or rules. Too few restrictions, and one has the worst excesses of the American robber barons or the current Russian commercial oligarchs. Too many restrictions, and one eventually has no market system at all, but a government-run and badly administered [because it cannot be administered well by anyone, given the complexity involved] command-and-control system, which usually results in a black market, if not several.

The rush to find better quantification of everything in life effectively presupposes that everything can be quantified absolutely. But can everything of value and worth really be quantified in economic terms? By adopting a market-based approach to everything in society, as we seem well on the way to doing, we seem to have forgotten, at least in terms of laws and national policy, that when we try to place a dollar [or euro or yuan or yen] value on everything, that which cannot be quantified accurately, or quantified at all, tends to be undervalued or not valued at all.

Recently, I’ve been seeing ads on television citing the fact that the United States has one hundred years worth of undeveloped natural gas — with the implication that this is some vast enormous reserve that should be immediately exploited. The question that comes to my mind is: “And then what?” What energy sources will be available to my children’s grandchildren? This ad points out, effectively by example, that there is little or no value to preserving resources for future generations. It ignores the costs to future generations of having to use more expensive fuel sources — or perhaps having none at all.

What few policy-makers seem willing to admit is that there are whole sectors of life and the world that the market system cannot value accurately, nor will ever be able to do so in cold economic terms. Some of these are: the value of an individual life; the value of the survival of the human species; the value of an integrated and functioning world eco-system; the good health of an individual; the pursuit of happiness; freedom; freedom from hunger… That list is far longer than any policy-maker wants to consider in realistic political or legal terms — and none of them can be valued accurately in economic terms.

For example, how does one value a human life? Some economists will say that we have established a de facto value for human life by the terms of either life insurance or the health and safety regulations we have put in place over the past century or so. But consider the terms of those regulations, or of life insurance. In life insurance, the death benefit is based strictly on the level of premium one is willing to pay. In government regulations, the value of a human life is determined by comparing the cost of implementing the regulation and dividing those costs by the total estimate of “lives saved” by the regulation. In addition to the very real difficulty in estimating the number of people who might have died, there is also the problem of, if you will, quality control. Are all lives the same? Are all lives of people of the same age even the same? Will a child grow up to be a drug addict who is a drain on society or a Nobel prize-winning scientist? If all lives are valued the same, then the process says that human accomplishment means nothing. If they are not, how does one determine what makes one life more valuable than another?

Geology and science suggest rather emphatically that at some time in the future, a rather large or moderate chunk of rock or other cosmic debris will slam into our lovely planet, and millions, or billions, or all of our species will die. It’s not a question of if, but only of when, or whether we do ourselves in before that occurs. We have yet to come up with the comparatively few millions of dollars necessary to scan our solar system to see everything that might be headed our way. And why is the value of species survival quantified at less than the cost of a few bridges to nowhere?

As a culture, we seem unable not only to grasp, but to act in realization of the fact that there are real values, perhaps greater values, to aspects of life that cannot be quantified than to those to which a dollar value can be firmly pinned. Yet dollar certitude remains what we as a society hold to. Is that because Madison Avenue has told us so… or because the majority of us are unable to say that some things are more important than the no-longer-so-mighty dollar?

Have you noticed that very few teenagers actually “date” any more? Instead, they just “hang-out” with their friends. From what I can tell, the “consensus” is that this is more “natural.” Well… it’s more in line with the patterns of our simian relations and ancestors, but “natural,” contrary to current pop culture, isn’t always better. Dating, as practiced by previous generations, required the male to request that a particular female accompany him to a predetermined event, such as a movie or a dance or dinner, for a limited period of time. This required advance planning, preparation by both parties, conversation between both, or an attempt by both, and an expenditure of time by both parties, as well as resources on the part of the male. While some women contend that the expenditure of resources by the male was an attempt to gain sexual favors, that attempt did cost the male resources. “Hanging out” achieves the same results, perhaps even more easily for males, from what I can see, without any commitment of anything on the part of the male. It also dispenses with advance thought, planning, and similar other activities required of adults in society.

Along a similar line, the “consensus” appears to be, in general, that the single-sex college dorms of the past are outmoded, and that college students are better prepared for life by co-ed dorms. While this view has not been universally adopted by all universities, most appear to have given in to providing at least some co-ed dorms. Yet a study published last week indicates that co-ed dorms result in nearly twice the rate of binge drinking among their inhabitants.

Then, there’s clothing. The teen-aged consensus, in recent years, appears to have been to minimize personal appeal and maximize bad features. Low-slung pants too tight above exposed midsections create an impression of corpulence for all but the anorexic woman. Baggy trousers drooping to the back of the knees give even the most trim of young men the impression of bad personal sanitation and slovenliness. Backwards baseball caps not only don’t shade the face, but they also heighten the vacantness of expression in the eyes of all too many young men. Watching the results of teen-aged girls’ consensus decisions on what to wear is frightening, because so very few of them ever choose clothing that is either attractive and tasteful or maximizes their attributes and features. Yet… they talk about what “looks good” when they really mean that they want to wear what everyone else is wearing, no matter how awful it appears on them. It reminds me of an ancient SF story where the men come out of the latest “fashion show” green and nauseated, unable to even approach the women wearing the latest “high fashion” — later revealed to have been designed by aliens to stop human reproduction.

Bad consensus-driven decisions aren’t limited to teenagers, by any means. Wall Street exemplified that with its thoughtless consensus agreements to leverage capital to the hilt through excessive reliance on financial derivatives and similar Ponzi-like devices, and the heads of all too many firms embraced devices they didn’t understand because everyone else on Wall Street was doing the same thing, another form of consensus.

Another consensus is the American idea that every teenager should get a college education. The problem is that possibly as many as half of those young adults either aren’t capable of doing true college level work or aren’t interested enough to do so. Rather than debunk this “consensus” idea, American society has pressured public institutions to water down higher education, although they don’t call it that. The terms that are used include making education “more accessible” or “more relevant” or “more appealing” or “adapted to individual learning styles,” etc. The result is that something like half of entering college freshmen cannot write a coherent and logical essay totally on their own and that to obtain a true higher education now requires additional years of post-graduate study. The other result is that society wastes an incredible amount of resources on individuals who benefit little — except in getting a paper credential that has become increasingly devalued.

The consensus problem isn’t new to society, although it’s more pervasive in the U.S. today. There is a famous line in Handel’s Messiah — “we, like sheep, are gone astray.” Those words were penned in 1741, but they’re even truer today because consensus is based on comfort and agreement, just as in a herd of sheep, and in difficult times, the best decisions are seldom developed through consensus. There’s a tremendous difference between forging consensus and deciding through consensus. The consensus of the British people in 1938 was that appeasement was the best way to handle Hitler and that Winston Churchill was a warmongering firebrand. The consensus of the American people in 1940 was that the United States could avoid war. The consensus in the U.S. in 2006 was that prosperity would continue indefinitely.

In these cases, consensus was wrong, with disastrous results.

Obviously, every society needs to reach consensus on its laws, customs, and political practices and decisions, but that doesn’t mean that sheep-like group-think is the way to reach that consensus. In the past, hard issues were debated, legislated, modified, to a large degree by those who had some considerable knowledge of the subject. Today, in all too many groups and organizations, for all the talk of innovation, ideas that are unpopular are too often dismissed as unworkable.

The problem here is a failure to distinguish between workable ideas, which are unpopular because they have a cost to those of the group, and popular ideas that are technically unworkable. “Taxing the rich” is always popular because few in any society or group are rich; it’s also generally less effective in practice because the truly rich have enough resources to avoid taxation or leave the society, and the practice is almost always detrimental to society because the tax burden falls most heavily on the productive upper middle class or lower upper class [depending on definition] who are the group that determines the course and success of a society. Taxing everyone at a lower rate works better in raising revenue and in allocating resources, and is actually “fairer” because taxes fund general services used more intensively by the non-rich. Unfortunately, flatter tax rates are highly unpopular, and so the general compromise consensus is to keep tax rates at a point where the upper middle class doesn’t scream too much, while not taxing the majority of the populace enough to adequately support the services that they demand. The result is that government barely squeaks by in times of prosperity and faces either ruinous deficits or drastically reduced services, if not both, in economically hard times.

Then, add in our modern communications technology, as I’ve previously discussed, with niche marketing and self-identification, and we’re getting massive societal polarization as various group consensuses harden into total intractability, in effect creating social and political group anarchy without even the benefit of individual creativity.

All those for “natural” consensus…?

Recently, I was asked, as part of a profile article that will appear in a “genre” magazine in February, to name my five favorite F&SF books. Usually, I resist the “top five” syndrome, but the article writer and her editor insisted that they weren’t asking for my rating as to the “best” five books, but my favorite five books. So I gave them a list, but when I looked at the list a day later, I discovered that the “newest” book was something like ten years old. However, in my defense, I must add that I didn’t read it until three years ago. So it’s not just that I’m stuck in the past, or not entirely. And no, I’m not going to reveal the list, at least not until the article is published, out of courtesy to the publication, but I will discuss the entire business of favorites.

Are “favorites” something that strike us when we’re younger and more impressionable and never let go? That’s a simple and easy answer… and like all simple and easy answers, I don’t think it’s accurate, although there may be a tiny grain of partial truth buried there. Why do I think that? Well… first off, I’m not one of the younger readers or writers in this field. Without totally giving away my age, I will point out that I read my first “real” SF book, at least the first I remember reading, in 1955 [and for those who want to know, the book was A.E. Van Vogt’s Slan and it wasn’t one of my listed “favorites” because it has too many impossibilities and improbabilities]. After that, I read science fiction and then fantasy fairly voraciously for the next 20-25 years, not that I didn’t also read mysteries, history, poetry, and other works avidly as well. Now, while three of my F&SF favorites were published in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I didn’t read them then, because I happened to be occupied in other endeavors in Southeast Asia, until a good ten years later, when I was a political staffer in Washington. D.C., already cynical, and anything but an impressionable young reader.

Still… I don’t find that many books published in recent years resonate the way those favorites do. Occasionally, one does, as did the “newest” one on my list, and as do others that I find good and enjoyable, but not quite in the top five. Part of that is clearly that I’m a curmudgeon of sorts who doesn’t much care for action for the sake of action, shock for the sake of shock, newness for the sake of newness, but part of it is that, in my personal opinion, for too many current writers in the field story-telling trumps writing. By that, I mean, for me, a truly memorable book is one where the style and the story-telling are both good — and seamless. That’s certainly what I strive for as a writer, and what I look for as a reader. But it’s also clear to me, particularly in reading the reader reviews thrown up [and I use that term advisedly] by many younger people, anything that resembles grace, style, and depth is unwanted if it slows down the action or the sex or the bloodshed. This viewpoint reflects a society that values degrees, credentials, prestige, and money over education, actual accomplishment, and understanding, and while I certainly can’t change a changing society, except perhaps through my writing, which reaches only a comparatively limited number of readers, and generally the more educated ones at that, I don’t find the superficial values rewarding, and there are comparatively fewer books written that exemplify the values I do find rewarding.

So… I’m left to conclude that favorites reflect values, and that’s often why the favorite books, movies, and the like of older people are reflected in a disproportionate weighting of older works, and not merely because they read or saw them when they were young and “impressionable.”

The divisive debate over the health care bill reveals a certain culturally inherited and continually propagated commonality that most Americans refuse to acknowledge.

What exactly is that “commonality”? Nothing other than a burning desire for “more.”

To begin with, in the current American culture, “better health care” really translates into “more health care,” but the way in which the partisans on both sides of the debate are arguing sheds an unpleasant light on a certain aspect of our “national character,” in so far as any country has a “national character.”

From what I can discern, those who might be characterized as “haves” are attacking the recently unveiled versions of the health care bill as adding to the national deficit, reducing individual choice of doctors, penalizing those who don’t buy adequate insurance, failing to rein in the depredations of the ambulance-chasing trial lawyers, raising taxes on those who already pay the vast majority of federal and state income taxes, and in general penalizing those who’ve been successful through hard work. All this amounts to a statement that government is going to “take” from them, or, if you will, reduce their share of “more.”

On the other hand, those who would not generally consider themselves as “haves,” and their supporters, are insisting that health insurance is essentially a “right” for all Americans, that every American should have affordable [i.e., cheap] health insurance, that the insurance companies have padded their profits by practices that disenfranchise tens of millions of working Americans from health care through denial of care and coverage by every legal [and sometimes not so legal] means possible, that the cost of health insurance and medical procedures should not drive people into bankruptcy, and that doctors and health care providers reap enormous profits while failing to improve the overall health care systems.

All of these points on both sides have some degree of validity, and I’m not about to assess the comparative merits of each point. I will note, however, that almost all of them bear on the issue of who gets “more.”

Now… whether Americans like it or not, the current nation is based on immigrants who traveled here in order to get more, whether they were failed aristocrats or second or third sons of old world nobility, crafters who saw no hope of advancement, Irish and other ethnic immigrants fleeing starvation or worse, debtors, or those leaving behind a myriad of other problems, the vast majority came seeking “more,” whether it was more freedom, greater prosperity, more land, better opportunities for children…

The endless and continual striving for more has its good and its not-so-good sides. The good that has resulted from this drive for “more” is considerable, including a political system that over time has managed to offer a wide range of political freedoms and to transfer power with less disruption than most advanced nations, a level of technology and prosperity for the majority of Americans that is unprecedented in world history, an openness to social and technological change, and a culture that allows those with great abilities to prosper, usually without regard to their social and economic position at birth.

Unfortunately, the evil is also significant, if less obvious, and less talked about, even by so-called liberals. We have spawned a culture of consumption that equates well-being with possession and use of an ever-higher level of goods, possessions, services, and personal space in housing. We have come to measure success almost entirely in terms of the material. We have increasingly come to devalue those who are less able or less fortunate, to the point where we have the greatest discrepancy in income between the poor and the wealthy of any industrialized and technically advanced nation on the planet. We have increased the debt that must be paid by our children and their children to unbelievable levels. We have equated excellence with popularity and material prosperity.

But… the furor over the current health legislation underscores what might be called a sea change for the culture of “more.” In the past, the culture of “more” was based largely on “undeveloped” and cheap land, advances in technology, in means of production, and in the greater and greater use of energy, almost exclusively of fossil fuels. All of these are now running into the inexorable law of diminishing returns. For example, we communicate instantly; and there’s nothing faster than instantly. The energy and technology costs of traveling faster seem to preclude much improvement in current speed of transport. Production efficiencies result in fewer jobs required for reach unit of output, and this has certainly contributed to an economy that economists claim is recovering, even as unemployment increases.

As for the health care issue, we now possess the technology and knowledge to allow “more” in terms of health — more procedures to extend and improve life, but what we lack is the resources, under our current socio-political customs and procedures, to apply those procedures to a population of over 300 million people.

For the first time in U.S. history, it appears that we have reached a point where we can’t have “more” of everything, where technology and energy cannot meet all the needs and wants we as a society demand be fulfilled — and the health care legislation represents the first political presentation of this conflict… or the first one that clearly impacts every single American in some way… and almost none of us like the options.

So… which “more” will prevail — that of better health care and life-style or that of bigger and better consumerism? Will we find some sort of compromise? Or will the struggle deteriorate into an undeclared conflict between the haves and have-nots? Or will the result be a stand-off that amounts to a collective burying of heads in the sand?