Last week, a reader made the comment that “Most literature professors would dismiss Mr. Modesitt’s novels with the same contempt he probably reserves for Harlequin romances.” While I can’t argue with his evaluation of “most literature professors,” even though I spent several years teaching literature at the undergraduate level, I can and do dispute the assessment of my views on romances, Harlequin or otherwise. Having survived the adolescence and maturing of six daughters, who now tend to prefer F&SF, I have seen more than a handful of romances around the house over the years. I’ve even read a few of them, and I’m no stranger to including romance in at least some of my books.

Because of my own contempt for those literary types, whether professors or writers, who sniff down their noses at all forms of “genre” fiction, I’m not about to do the same to romances… or thrillers, or mysteries. I do allow myself some disgust at splatter-punk, and the pornography of violence and/or human plumbing, otherwise known as ultra-graphic sex, but that doesn’t mean some of it might not be technically well-written. Snobbery and blanket exclusion under the guise of “excellence” or “literary value” is just another form of bias, usually on the part of people who haven’t bothered to look deeply into genres or forms.

While more than a few “sophisticates” and others dismiss romances as formulaic, that’s just a cop-out. Just about every novel ever published is formulaic. If novels weren’t, they’d be unreadable. The only “formulaic” question about a work of fiction is which formula it follows.

Romances happen to have some redeeming features, features often lacking in mainstream “literary” fiction, such as a belief in love and romance, and optimistic endings, and often retribution of some sort for evil. There’s often a theme of self-improvement as well. Are these “realistic” in our world today? No, unhappily, they’re probably not, but paraphrasing one of the grumpy old uncles in Secondhand Lions, there are some things, which may not even be true, that people are better off for believing in, such as love, honor, duty… And if romances get readers to believe in the value of such traits, they’re doing a lot more for the readers and society than “realistic” novels about the greed on Wall Street or the narcissism of the wealthy or the depths of violence and degradation among the drug and criminal cultures.

From a practical point of view as an author, I also can’t help but note that romances are the largest selling category of fiction by a wide-selling margin. Nothing else comes close. As in every other form of writing, there are exceedingly well written and even “literary quality” romances, and there are abysmal examples of fiction, but as Theodore Sturgeon said decades ago, “ninety percent of everything written is crap.” That includes F&SF, romances, and even, or especially, mainstream “literary” fiction.

So… no, I don’t dismiss romances. Far from it. And I just write my romances as part of my science fiction and fantasy.

Newspapers are dying. The drum-beat goes on. Some readers are worried; others think their time has already passed. Yet another major city is threatened with the loss of all newspapers. Another newspaper cuts staff and sections to the bone. Book reviews are cut; business news is shortened; advertising revenues are plummeting.

In the meantime, I keep reading my local newspaper and the major daily paper in the state, and I notice things. The local paper trumpets its awards, and it has won a great number. So why does scarcely a day go by without a misspelled headline? In fact, the lead headline last Saturday read: “Mountain of Dept Faces US.” If this is an award-winning local daily paper, I shudder to think about those that aren’t. And why are all the “national” and “state” stories a day behind the large state newspaper? Why do all the major local scandals never make the local paper, but appear in the state paper?

As for the major paper, it’s scarcely much better. Almost never does the weather section appear without errors. On Sunday, the weather temperatures predicted for the next two days — by town statewide — were listed as Thursday and Friday. On Saturday, the next two days were Monday and Tuesday. The lead headline the other day began “An State Issue…” Oh?

In both papers, syntax and grammar errors appear regularly, yet I can remember when it was rare to find these kinds of errors in newspapers, as opposed to being so common that any issue offers plenty of examples. These problems don’t even take into account the quality of reporting and the choice of stories. The lieutenant governor of the state — soon to become governor — appeared at a national meeting of governors and made comments that indicated that he knew nothing about the global warming issue — right after listening to [or at least sitting through] a speech on the issue by Dr. Stephen Chu, the U.S. Secretary of Energy… and the only story that appeared was days later in a political commentary story. One Utah author won a Newberry medal, and while it merited a TV news story, it never appeared in the paper, while a story about an author who wrote a novel about a platonic affair between a married Mormon woman and a British actor was a feature article. Unhappily, what I’ve seen here in Utah seems also to be happening in other locales, if perhaps not so egregiously.

Might a certain lack of quality have something to do with the decline of newpapers… or is it that the decline of advertising revenue means that newspapers are both understaffed and with fewer and fewer true professionals? Either way, it’s a sad situation.

My latest novel — Haze — has been out for about a month now, and sales are respectable, but not outstanding, and that’s not surprising, because Haze is a science fiction novel, and my fantasy novels have always sold better than my SF. Interestingly enough, though, in general, the major review sources, particularly those published outside the genre, have been far more favorable to my SF than to the fantasy.

Characterization is key to the success of most books, and one of the things I’ve observed over the years is the wide variation in reader and reviewer assessments of my ability to characterize — even when they’re talking about the same book;

For example, in looking at reviews of my novel Flash, I found the following from three different sources:

“…nonstop action, which, however, never sidelines good world-building and characterization…”

“…the relationships are wooden.”

“…tells of the close relationships between deVrai and his sister’s family…”

One of the reader reviews of Haze includes the following phrases… “agent/assassin has no depth… we learn Haze is honest/open…” Except that neither is the case. The protagonist, Keir Roget, reveals little emotionally in an overt sense, because he is aware that he lives in a world where every motion, every indication of feeling, is observed. There are many subtle indications of character and motivation, but few that are grand and overt, not if Roget wishes to survive. As for the planet Haze… this “open” society conceals a considerable amount, some of it rather enormous in scope, implication, and eventual consequences, through its apparent openness. In fact, what is “open,” both in Roget and in all the cultures depicted, is a misrepresentation because what is obvious overshadows what is not readily apparent.

From observations such as these, it seems fairly clear to me that people have a very different idea of what characterization is. My own belief is that any character reveals who he or she is through acts, words, and self-observations (which may be accurate or self-deluding, if not both). The issue of acts would seem to be self-evident, but it’s not, for several reasons. First, what a character does not do may be as revealing as what he does, but many readers key on acts, rather than on the omission of acts. Second, small acts may be more revealing than “large” acts. Third, the consistency of acts — or the lack thereof — also reveals character. The same three aspects also apply to what is said, or not said. In addition, character can be revealed by how others speak of and to them and how others interact with them… or fail to do so.

What this leads me to believe is that when I see a series of reviews, and different reviewers either praise or trash “characterization” in the same book, it’s often likely that those who are negative about a writer’s ability to characterize are either unwilling or unable to look at anything other than large acts and obvious statements. In addition, a significant percentage of such negative reader reviews tend to contain factual and technical errors, including citing the incorrect names of characters, suggesting a rapid and superficial reading. These factors suggest that obvious and broad-brush characterization is necessary to reach the widest possible audience. That doesn’t do much for nuance and subtlety, not that they’re exactly a priority for more than a few readers.

Everyone is entitled to his or her opinion, particularly about individual likes and dislikes. But not all opinions are of equal value. A doctor’s opinion about medical matters is far more likely to be correct than that of someone with a limited or no medical background. An environmental scientist’s views on global warming, by the same token, are far more likely to be correct than those of medical profession. The opinions of a professional singer with advanced studies and a professional career about music are more likely to be correct than that of someone with no formal musical training. Likewise, the collective and peer-reviewed views of the professionals in any given field are almost always going to be more accurate than those of non-professionals in those fields. This is one of the principal reasons why doctors, engineers, pilots, and many other professionals are licensed and regulated… because we don’t want unqualified people handling life and death measures, regardless of their personal convictions and opinions.

Now… we all have opinions, particularly in areas such as politics, music, theatre, art, the weather, as to what we like… and that’s fine. What’s not so fine is the ever-growing assumption that all opinions are of equal value, or that “likes” equate to validity or correctness. All opinions are not of equal value, and whether one likes something or believes it to be so does not translate automatically into excellence or validity. Add to that the assumption, particularly by “educated” individuals, that one’s opinions and beliefs outside one’s field or fields of expertise are equally valid or superior to the professionals in another field, and a society risks sewing the seeds of its own collapse, particularly in cases involving elected officials, such as Congress, who too often defer to popular opinion or their own unfounded biases.

And yet, no one seems to see it. The doctor who can see so clearly how the “everyone is wonderful” philosophy undermines medical excellence cheerfully and vociferously disputes years of research by thousands of climate scientists because he cannot believe what they report, yet he’d be outraged if those climate experts disputed key aspects of his medical practice. The engineer who understands the importance of accuracy and perfection in structure would be furious if a group of professional musicians pointed out non-existent weaknesses in his engineering, but sees nothing wrong with making blatant and incorrect assessments about professional musicians and singers. And of course, all the readers who make the thousands and thousands of misguided and incorrect statements about books — largely because they don’t like what the author did, rather than because the book was technically bad [not that there aren’t many, many, technically bad books, but those aren’t generally the ones these “reader reviewers” pan] — would be outraged if people made the same petty comments about their work.

The problem is that, in a society that has become almost totally consumer-oriented, such opinions guide politics and public policy. Education is no longer based on what works, but upon making students and parents feel good and upon the widely held opinion that “anyone can be anything he or she wants to be” [which is almost never true, rhetoric to the contrary]. Government has become more and more widely based on the opinion that someone else should pay for the programs, despite years of recommendations by economists and other professionals that a nation cannot continue to expand government programs without increasing taxation or cutting other programs. Even within fields such as the investment banking and securities business, executives with no expertise in complex financial systems, such as derivatives, thought they were experts and made decisions based on the popularity of short-term profits… leading to the resulting disaster.

Entertainment has become based more and more on strict popularity — what the majority wants — and factors such as the skill or performers, the excellence of scripts or music, have almost entirely vanished, although everyone cites excellence as the basis for their views, and that “excellence” is based on what they like, usually superficial appearance and/or crudity, and seldom are such likes based on an in-depth and studied expertise in the field. The same is true in athletics. Never in our history have there ever been so many Monday morning quarterbacks, and almost none of them have any experience on the professional level in the sports they criticize.

Everyone’s an expert, and fewer and fewer Americans are listening to those who truly are the experts — and yet they wonder why the problems are multiplying?

A while ago, I was talking to my editor, and I mentioned a book that he had edited for a new author — one for which I’d offered a blurb. My editor sighed, and informed me that he wouldn’t be able to publish another book by the writer, although the first book had received a considerable number of favorable comments and reviews, because it hadn’t sold well enough for the publisher to risk a second book. At present, this is scarcely news to any author in the field, because the same thing is happening all over publishing. Sales of a majority of established published authors are down, and while they’re not down enough to hurt the really big names, the decline tends to affect newer and less established authors much more. And it makes sense, unfortunately.

In a time when readers, along with everyone else, are watching their purchases more carefully, fewer are going to risk their entertainment dollars on an author they don’t know, unless someone they know personally and trust recommends that author. But… with new authors very few, if any, readers know the author — unless the publishing house pours a ton of money into publicity, and that is happening less and less.

Now, in this time of economic downturn, this is relatively self-evident. What isn’t quite so evident is that it’s merely the continuation of an on-going trend. At a time when blockbuster sales — such as the Twilight books, the Wheel of Time, Nora Roberts, etc. — are dwarfing best-seller numbers of previous decades, the sales numbers of mid-list and low best-selling authors at major publishing houses tend to be flattening, if not declining, especially mass-market sales, although there are some exceptions. These exceptions are always cited as contrary examples, of course, rather than the anomalies that they are.

The reaction of many authors is to aim for that “popular” audience, to the point that F&SF aficionados can cite example after example of imitation, subtle or blatant, and that the media and series tie-in section of the F&SF section at many chain stories is almost as large as the “regular” section.

One reaction in the F&SF field has been the growth of small presses, some of which stretch the definition of “small,” but these presses are limited in what they can do, although they often publish novels of high quality. This has had another off-shoot, as well, in that it appears a number of “professional” and “semi-professional” F&SF reviewers tend to concentrate on such works, almost as if assuming that most of what is published by a large publisher is “merely commercial,” and seldom worthy of comment.

Writers who have the ability to write excellent books are placed in an unenviable position, because books which tend to be technically outstanding usually have lower sales. As one of the responders to this blog has pointed out, outstanding books also get fewer and “less favorable” reader reviews, and those reduce sales. Since most professionals do write in hopes of making a living, there is a not-so-subtle and continuing pressure to “write popular,” even if an editor never says a thing to a writer.

More than a few readers have pointed out that these trends could very well lead to more self-publishing, more web publishing, and more electronic alternatives to getting stories and novels out. It probably will, but it won’t solve the “popularity” problem, because for those stories and novels to reach more readers requires word about them to reach readers, and successful “word-passing” on the web requires the support of widely-read and popular websites. Thus… the web-publishing option merely transports the popularity problem from one form of publishing to another — and does so without nearly the same degree of quality control as is exercised by the old-line print publishing business. This shift also results, in most cases, to a reduction in the income of writers, along with the problem that readers are left having to spend far more time sifting through web and other less conventional forums to find books they like that fall outside “popular” parameters. Again… there are exceptions, such as Baen’s Universe magazine, but they’re few indeed.

In the end, it all boils down to the fact that readers, as a whole, get what they’re willing to pay for, and if most readers flock to the “popular,” before long, that will represent most of what’s available — and that will be the case whether the source is “conventional” publishing or the web.

The other day I read an article in a well-known economic publication about how “talking websites” could empower the illiterate. I’m doubtless in a small minority, but I’ve been concerned for a long time about all this emphasis on “empowerment.”

I do tend to worry about universal suffrage when something like a third of the American electorate doesn’t even know who’s president — but then, again, that percentage has varied between 25% and 35% for at least 20 years, and we haven’t had any more political catastrophes during this period than any other, although those who disparage the previous president tend to forget that we had a few problems with a man named Nixon, and moral and upright as he was personally, a fellow by the name of Carter wasn’t exactly the most effective of chief executives… and even when suffrage wasn’t even close to universal, we managed to elect Warren Harding.

But… as a writer and as an individual who believes in both the written and the spoken word, I have to ask whether we want to grant more power to those who cannot master, even if through no fault of their own, half of whatever language their culture uses to bind that part of civilization together. Writing changes culture, and, based on history, it does so for the better. Exactly why, at a time when written skills are declining, when a smaller and smaller percentage of so-called educated individuals have actually mastered the written word [according to a study released by the Department of Education three years ago, almost 40% of individuals with advanced college degrees do not have the analytical skills to explain the arguments in a standard newspaper article], why do we want to grant more power to those who cannot write and write at all?

We’re already substituting test results for analytical skills in far too many school districts across the country. Newspapers are failing left and right because most people under thirty don’t have either the inclination or the ability to read more than a sentence at a time, let alone a paragraph, and before long those of us who can and would like some detail in our news will be relegated to perusing a relative handful of printed or subscription online sources, because, so far as I can determine, there’s less and less of a market for real news… just for sensationalism or for targeted “in-depth” rationalizations of what various groups of people already believe.

But then again, maybe we should expand the internet and website system so that no one has to master reading and writing — and add an amendment to the Constitution that no one can run for public office without being able to explain in detail and on the spot and in writing what the duties of that office are and why he or she would be qualified to hold that post. We could even return to handwritten paper ballots at the same time.

All you’d have to do to be politically empowered would be able to read, write, and think. Would that be so bad?

All too many years ago, when my brother and I were growing up, my parents, and even my grandmother, piled on the aphoristic practical platitudes, such as… “If it’s too good to be true, it probably isn’t.” “A penny saved is a penny earned.” “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” “A stitch in time saves nine.” “An honest day’s work…” With those platitudes came a no-nonsense attitude. My father insisted that we do the best of which we were capable — in everything from academics to athletics to what he termed “the necessities of life,” matters such as lawn and tree and mechanical maintenance, simple woodworking, basic electrical repairs, house painting… and the need to approach everything in a practical, realistic, and — most important — an honest way. For him, dreams were possible, but only if one prepared and worked hard and long to achieve them. One didn’t achieve success by merely wishing or saying that it would happen. Nor by cutting corners, either practically or ethically. In addition, we were not allowed to be bored. If any word even hinting at boredom even came up, various tasks were immediately assigned, monitored, and the results were inspected. At that time, this approach to raising children was not in the slightest unusual. It was close to the norm, and it led to a generally realistic outlook on life.

So… what happened?

Today, we’re weathering a recession created largely by incredibly unrealistic assessments of how housing and securities prices would perform over time. Never in the history of mankind have the values of real estate and structures continually appreciated upward for more than a few years, if that. So why did so many people buy into the unreality the values would continue upward at high rates indefinitely? Stock and security prices have fluctuated widely over time for as long as there have been such financial instruments. Yet some of the supposedly brightest and best minds in finance not only bought into the idea of continual rising securities’ prices, but they developed instruments that magnified through leverage both gains and losses — and never considered what would happen when the inevitable transpired. And, worse yet, for this lack of competence and foresight, hundreds of them were granted million dollar plus bonuses.

The same unreality permeates state and local politics. Through legislation and referenda, the federal and state governments promise more and more in the way of programs and benefits while the electorate demands — and largely gets — tax levels that are in no way able to pay for the programs people insist are their rights. California, to no one’s surprise, leads the way, and political experts across the spectrum [except, of course, from the far, far right, who are even more unrealistic] have declared the state essentially ungovernable — with a deficit approaching more than $50 billion and a legislature unable and unwilling to act because to do so would indicate to voters just how unrealistic they’ve been. Everyone wants to tax everyone else, but no one wants to pay more taxes, and no one wants his or her program cut or eliminated. And the simple, and unrealistic, answer is to tax the “rich” and to stop waste and fraud, never mind the fact that such a simplistic solution won’t raise enough revenue without grinding the economy to a total halt.

The polar ice caps are dwindling. Meltwater from the Greenland ice cover is at an all-time high and increasing annually. Ice sheets are melting and breaking off the Antarctic icecap in chunks of hundreds of square miles. Most of the glaciers in the Alps have either disappeared or melted back to a fraction of their previous size. The legendary snows of Kilimanjaro have vanished. Over the centuries, goats and overgrazing have turned the Sahara from an arid grassland into a true and total desert. The combination of disease, pollution, and warmer seawater has devastated the world’s coral reefs. Increasing temperatures have resulted in literal transformation of the mountain forests of the southwestern United States into high desert. Cattle and grazing in the previous century destroyed most of the grasslands in the Great Plains all the way from the Dakotas to Texas, changing the climate so much that we’ve experienced one Dust Bowl and are continually fighting against another, while the once massive Ogallala Aquifer is pumped dry. There are huge dead zones in the Caribbean, and areas in the Pacific hundreds of miles across where human floating trash clogs the waters. In less than two centuries, human beings have used up 30%-50% of all the oil created over hundreds of millions of years and raised carbon dioxide and methane levels to heights not seen in hundreds of millions of years, if ever. And yet… tens of millions of Americans, among them highly educated individuals, persist in the illusion that there is no global warming and that human activity has no significant impact upon the planet.

This unreality has infused the younger generation, in particular. Everywhere is the idea that any student, if she or she wishes, can do anything he or she wishes, and that each of them is “wonderful.” This unreality is boosted by: (1) the plethora of television “reality” shows that suggest that success has little to do with anything but ambition, desire, and immorality; (2) educational institutions that punish those teachers who actually assess student performance realistically and who insist on results; (3) the increasing reliance on tests that measure assorted facts and basic intelligence, but not the ability to think and learn; and (4) greater and greater reliance on pleasing parents and students than upon imparting skills and the ability to think. On top of these factors has come the change of education from a social good to a consumer good, where the consumer demands a specific product, and in the case of education, with the advent of student evaluations, eighteen year old students are telling seasoned and experienced professionals what they — the students — need to know when those students, and often their parents, almost always have no knowledge of the field. This is reality?

Now… I’ve seen studies that show the current “collegiate” generation is more “results-oriented,” but the problem is that getting results is difficult, if not impossible, when students have inadequate skills and unrealistic ideas about their own capabilities and about the amount of work it requires to accomplish anything of worth.

Distorting an old aphorism, Rome was not built by wishes and mouse-clicks…

… but it, too, fell when its people lost sight of reality and basic values.

For the past several months, some of the technicians dealing with my website have been having difficulty in updating the graphics on the rotating “carousel.” You may note that the problem has finally been addressed. I kept asking why there was such difficulty… and finally got an answer — a very simple answer, and yet a chilling one. The previous tech, who had worked with the web-designer, had departed for greener pastures… and had left no written documentation. If there happened to be any electronic documentation, no one could find it, and the techs who were trying to update the graphics were, as are many today, overworked and didn’t have the time to reverse engineer the system until recently.

This particular phenomenon isn’t limited to my website. The other day I was trying to install a piece of software for my wife and discovered a rather interesting situation. The directions were on-line. They weren’t simple. They wouldn’t print out. There was no way to keep a window with the directions and install the software. In the end I had to write them out by hand. Then there are the companies who have “solutions” to problems on-line, but seem to forget that those solutions are useless if you have problems with their website, even as you wait in a telephone queue for “technical assistance.”

These are all symptoms of a society that seems to think that electronic storage is permanent and that, because it’s electronic, anyone can access it and figure it out. Neither assumption, of course, is true, widespread as both appear to be.

We have books and records dating back thousands and thousands of years, evidence from other cultures and civilizations, written insights into what they did and how they acted. If we follow the trend — and go “paperless” as all the businesses urge us — what insights will we leave? We can’t even read computer records of thirty years ago.

This is even truer on a personal letter. My father kept letters he thought were memorable, and they’re still available, yellowed paper and all. Somehow, I don’t see much in the way of memorable emails being saved (if there are even such)… and there’s another factor involved as well. Most letter-writers, and possibly most writers whose works are recorded in print form, tend to write more accurately and clearly, almost as if they understood that what they wrote might be scrutinized more than once.

In my mind, all this leads to a number of questions:

Do disposable communications too often equate to disposable thoughts and insights?

Do impermanent and easily changed records lead to greater carelessness? Or greater dishonesty and fraud?

What exactly are we giving up for the sake of going electronic and paperless?

Science fiction has postulated the rise and fall of many civilizations, and the causes of those falls are many: warfare, famine, ecological disaster, energy shortages, internal collapse from overindulgence, conquest, pestilence, plague… and doubtless many others.The one cause I’ve not seen explored much is the collapse of infrastructure, and yet I suspect it’s the most likely reason for the failure and fall of a high-tech civilization. When most people talk about infrastructure, they think of highways and bridges, but infrastructure consists of far more than that.

The more people that live in an area and the greater the population concentration, the greater the infrastructure requirements, even in low-tech societies. In higher-tech societies, the physical infrastructure requirements pyramid. A clean and reliable water system, sewage and waste disposal systems, paved streets, roads, and bridges, dependable electric power and other domestic and commercial utilities are just the beginning. We also need redundant communications links, banking and financial systems, not to mention a system for maintaining law and order and adjudicating disputes.

The more infrastructure a society requires, the more each part of that structure has the potential for conflicting with the requirements of a another part, and the more of a society’s resources and effort that is required to keep all the parts of the infrastructure in good repair and operating properly. Also, the more susceptible each section is to damage and failure. For example, in the United States, the electric power grid is being stressed toward its limits, and electric power outages are already increasing. More powerful transmission lines and more power sources increase the vulnerability of the entire system to a host of problems, from solar storms to extreme weather, to simple wear and tear. Repairs or damage to one system can disable other systems, as when a backhoe used to excavate to repair a water line breaks a fiberoptic cable, or when a broken water main floods a subway tunnel, or…

The other significant problem with infrastructure is those aspects dealing with human interaction require acceptance and trust. Even the income taxation system in the United States is based largely on trust and the fact that the majority of Americans and/or their employers largely voluntarily submit their tax payments to maintain government. Likewise, most people obey the law without being forced to do so at gunpoint. Most civil and personal disputes are settled without recourse to physical force. And this is the norm in most countries. It is, however, not universal. No such trust and agreement exists in Somalia… or in other parts of Africa, nor in much of Afghanistan… and we’ve all seen the results. We’ve also seen the results in the financial sector in the United States, where greedy financiers betrayed the trust of investors on a massive scale.

We all know that physical infrastructure fails when it is not maintained, as in the case of collapsing bridges and deteriorating highways, but few politicians or other leaders consider the need to maintain the underlying trust that supports our society’s human infrastructure.

Right now… we need to shore up both aspects of infrastructure, or the science fiction that hasn’t explored infrastructure might end up being history.

In our fast-paced world, almost everyone praises technology, despite small gripes about occasional glitches. But, as I’ve noted before, technology is never an unmitigated blessing, nor is it nearly so cost-effective as its most enthusiastic supporters maintain.

The one problem that few commentators or analysts account for is the continual cost of the learning curve. Every time a computer program changes, those who employ it need to learn the changes and the additional applications, and seldom do either make the program easier or quicker. Every time a new computer application is developed and implemented, the same thing happens. Now… these are generally comparatively minor problems for the geeks and tech-types, but they’re not necessarily that minor for a large segment of the work force, even for high-level professionals, for whom technology is merely a tool and not an end-all and be-all.

I have a five year old computer. It works quite well and handles high-speed internet and the like. Already, however, I’m beginning to run into problems with other people’s information and applications, because my computer can’t take certain upgrades. If I attempt to install and use them, they freeze the computer. I’m certain that a high-level tech could fix some of these, or that if I wanted to invest a considerable number of hours in learning more about the programs and systems… so could I. Except… why exactly should I be faced with the choice of spending time or money to accommodate continual change? In practical terms, I have no choice… but it’s a cost that rapid technical change places on everyone not in the information systems field. It may place a cost on those people, too, but they’re paid for dealing with it. The rest of us aren’t.

In my professorial wife’s field, students expect more and more of the high-tech glitz in the classroom… and often refuse to study old-style recordings [in which refusal they are supported effectively by the administration’s pusillanimity and enthusiastic support of anonymous student evaluations] despite the fact that much of what the students need to study is not yet available in that high-tech forum… or is available only in formats directly incompatible with classroom technology and equipment, for which the administration does do not have funding to upgrade. So she’s spending much of her summer [totally unpaid] making conversions in order to be able to present material efficiently during the coming school year. She’s not a computer tech, and the learning curve is steep, but those who have the technical knowledge don’t have the musical knowledge, and even if she could find technical support, she’d not only have to pay them out of her own pocket, but would need to talk them through everything step by step.

In essence, the popular demand for only the latest technical offerings also imposes a cost on both business and education, a cost that’s not in the slightest paid by high-tech industry, but imposed willy-nilly on everyone else — and this doesn’t count the not-insignificant costs of applications rushed to market with flaws that cause even greater costs.

Do you suppose just a little bit more of a “slow and steady” philosophy might actually be more cost-effective?

Recently, in several other websites and blogs, there have been comments about too much science fiction being negative, as well as too many reviews being positive. There have also been suggestions, if not recently, that the boom in fantasy is partly due to the negativity and lack of “soaring imagination” of current science fiction.

One of the problems in writing science fiction, especially if one wishes to be somewhat accurate as a writer, is that science fiction is supposed to be based on science. That means that conventional faster-than-light travel is improbable, if not impossible, and certainly not possible without the expenditure of vast amounts of energy. The same is true of such devices as matter-transformers and instant travel portals.

Also, in practical terms, in the future escaping or transcending the various messes that human [or other] civilizations have made is not going to be easy, and writing about doing so will necessarily reflect a certain gritty and sometimes pedestrian reality. Currently, Americans, in particular, even with the latest financial difficulties, now live in a society whose dreams are not based on the “work hard, persevere, and you will eventually succeed Horatio Alger philosophy” of earlier generations, but more upon reality TV and lottery instant wish-fulfillment. In addition, the “mouse-click magic” of computers provides another instant escape mechanism. Given these background factors, any literature or other form of entertainment truly based on science and hard reality is going to appeal to a far smaller audience than one based on magic.

Now… there are different ways of approaching magic, as all widely-read followers of fantasy know, and some fantasy authors, as do I, take a more realistic approach to using magic. I believe that magic, if it did exist in human societies, would be used as everything else humans do — as a tool. In such societies, reality does tend to intrude, because magic usage is subject to economics and all the other nasty implications of human society. And, in general, authors who approach magic in this fashion don’t sell as well as those who are more wish-fulfillment and “isn’t this neat”-oriented do.

As for the business of too many, too favorable reviews… for the most part that’s merely sour grapes on the part of the crew that, in general don’t like anything except that narrow spectrum of books that is their special province or those who prefer nitpicking books to death rather than enjoying them. There are, I’d be the first to admit, a very few reviewers who apparently never ever read a book they didn’t like, but that’s still preferable to the even smaller number that never read one that they couldn’t find something wrong with. Most reviewers are very much aware that, in today’s information explosion, most readers are far more interested in what they might find interesting to read than in what not to read. So… if they find a book really terrible, they don’t waste space on it. I can also tell you, from personal experience, even with books that sell well and get generally favorable reviews, there’s still no lack of reviews incorporating nitpicking, nastiness, lack of understanding, and parochialism… and frankly, for the most part we don’t need them, not when only a fraction of the fiction published, even in the F&SF community, is actually reviewed.

For every J.K. Rowling or Robert Jordan, for every Andrew Wyeth and Thomas Kinkade, there are tens, if not hundreds of thousands of writers and artists with skills far above those of the average educated individual who cannot make a living at their art. For every Pavarotti, there are hundreds of tenors with good, if not great, professional voices whom no one will ever hear except in small opera houses or singing restaurants — if even there. For operatic sopranos, it’s even worse, and how many struggling writers have had their hopes dashed in the past year?

I’m not talking about people who “want” to be writers, singers, composers, and artists, but about people who’ve devoted years to education and training, not to mention more years underpaid or unpaid work in their field.

Now, there’s a feeling among some in these fields that there once was a time when artists were more respected and compensated for their expertise. I’m not certain when this “golden age” happened to be, because in the early 1800s, the print run for a wildly popular book was something like a thousand copies, and most successful writers came from financially secure backgrounds that allowed them to write. Most of those that did not, such as Keats and Poe, struggled with poverty and illness their entire lives, despite a certain amount of popular acclaim. In the late 1960s, Isaac Asimov [as I recall] calculated that there were only about 50 F&SF writers who supported themselves entirely on their writing. Recent figures published by various sources suggest that the number of overall fiction writers in the U.S. who can do so today is somewhere around 900, with a range of 400-2,500 cited.

The market for composers has never been wonderful, and in the eighteenth and nineteenth century only a handful of composers and musicians made more than survival wages — and those only if they had wealthy patrons. Mozart was dogged by financial problems his entire life. Bach supported himself as a church organist, and today almost all modern classical composers are either academics or support themselves in other music-related specialties. Even in the pop music field, songwriters like Willie Nelson and Barry Manilow became singers because they made so little from songs they wrote that made the singers millions.

Van Gogh, whose works now fetch tens of millions of dollars, never sold a painting in his own lifetime, and historically, most painters supported themselves by doing portraits, a practice that dwindled dramatically with the introduction and growth of photography.

In writing, the numbers are fairly clear. Comparatively, very few writers finish and sell more than a book a year. In the F&SF field, standard royalties start at ten percent for a hardcover, but a “successful” hardcover must sell a minimum of 4,000 copies and 30,000 copies subsequently in paperback. According to publishing figures, something like two thirds of all books published are not “successful.” But let’s say the struggling author manages to be successful and sells 5,000 copies at a hardcover price of $24.95, and a year later, 35,000 copies in paperback. That’s $12,475 on the hardcover [not deducting the 10-15% to the agent] and approximately $14,000 on the paperback. If this writer can manage to keep putting out a book a year at the same level he or she might make $25,000 a year out of combined paperback and hardcover sales. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way, because if the writer’s sales don’t increase above the minimally profitable level, the publisher won’t buy the second or third or fourth book. And yet… looking at the comparative numbers, it’s likely that the past thirty years through the present are possibly the best time for writers in history.

A golden age for the arts? Like many myths… it’s just that.

Most people know the Reverend Thomas Malthus as the English clergyman and economist who wrote The Principle of Population, a work that went through six editions between 1798 and 1826 and that made the case that “The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.” In the more than two centuries since the publication of Malthus’s first edition a raft of biological and social scientists have attempted to refute Malthus’s basic theory, pointing out as the enviro-sceptic Bjorn Lomburg did, that food production has always increased faster than population growth.

For the moment, these “skeptics” have been correct. If population growth continues, in the long run, they will all be wrong. Why? Because even if our vaunted technology gets to the point of turning all matter and/or energy into the food and support necessary for human existence, the amount of matter on the planet is indeed finite, although in practical terms, it’s far more likely that other aspects of civilization will collapse first, leading to a reduction in food supply… and population.

The larger mistake in dealing with Malthusian economics, however, lies in the failure of Malthus’s critics to understand why Malthus did not seem to be correct in his own lifetime, or even in ours. Both Darwin and Wallace read The Principle of Population, and both commented to the effect that his work applied directly to the “natural world.” What they meant was that, for example, there are always more prey than predators, because if there aren’t, predator populations crash. The same is true of herbivores. One of the problems the giant panda faces is that it’s a very picky eater and there is only so much of the bamboo it eats within its range, and that range is decreasing because the human population has been encroaching.

In overall terms, what the human species has done for roughly the last 8,000 years is to employ technology to transform the entire world ecology into anything but a “natural” world. Currently, there are between one and one and a half billion cows in the world, 15 billion chickens, 700 million pigs, over 100 million horses, mules, and donkeys, and close to half a billion domesticated turkeys and geese. None of these animal population levels are anything close to what these species could maintain without extensive human effort, and the impact of these animals is anything but insignificant, considering that, as just one example, a single cow produces 250-500 liters of methane every single day, and that methane tends to last in the atmosphere for up to 100 years. Fertilizer run-off from the Mississippi River has created algae blooms and large dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico.

Years ago, when I was working at the EPA, research studies showed that the pesticide toxaphene, used primarily on cotton crops in the southern United States, was appearing in the tissues of northern arctic mammals — not birds who might have flown over or through the USA, and in animals who did not prey on such birds. While its use is now banned in the United States, the world-wide spread and bioaccumulation is indicative of just how much human technology has changed and modified the planet.

This human-created “ecology” is not stable, nor can it be maintained without enormous investments of energy, resources, and effort. So, while the human species has been able to “thwart” Malthusian principles for two hundred years, the real question is not how and why Malthus was wrong, but for how long we will both allow unchecked human population increases and increasingly artificial ecological manipulation… and at what cost.

All too much of what passes for education today consists of curricula and courses designed to create the illusion of learning.

There’s also the difference between skills that are useful for additional learning and additional learning itself. For example, the skill of reading is relatively limited in its application if the “reader” only applies it to signs and labels once he or she leaves high school, but vital to someone who wants to be a high level professional. One might even say that reading skills convey a certain illusion on learning on the sign, label, and headline-only reader.

Likewise, students who are passed on without learning skills, or reading and learning the course material — and there are literally millions of them — are given the illusion of learning. This creates anger when they can’t find or keep jobs because they don’t know enough, or when their employers find that various rules require convoluted and time-consuming processes to fire them.

Another illusion of learning is the idea that the purpose of education consists largely of having the skills to find information. Being able to locate information is not the same as knowing it, or knowing what it means, or the implications behind the facts, or what led to those facts or what may flow logically from them. Merely finding information doesn’t mean that the finder can use such information. In many professions, actual physical or specific mental skills are also required. Reading about a complex medical procedure doesn’t provide the necessary skills for a doctor to operate and accomplish that procedure. Often, even practicing that operation doesn’t provide enough knowledge for a doctor to deal with more complex cases. Being able to look up economic statistics, or sales figures, doesn’t provide the expertise to analyze them and to project likely outcomes for a company or a government.

And in some cases, failure to learn basic and simple skills that seem unnecessary in our computerized and high-tech world can create problems for the individual and those around them. For example, the child who doesn’t learn multiplication and division tables is going to be handicapped all his or her life, because most of those children won’t have the basic tools for mathematical estimation as adults. I can’t even count the number of times someone has entered the wrong number or entry into a cash register or computer and insisted to me that the result is correct — when it wasn’t. Why? Because they couldn’t estimate the range of the probable result. In cases such as medicine or pharmacy, an error such as that can be life-threatening. In business, too many errors of that nature can lead to lost revenues… or lost jobs.

Once upon a time, students had to learn to memorize poetry and passages from plays. This wasn’t thrust upon students as a form of torture, but to provide them with hard-wired, learned passages as examples of proper use of language. In addition, students were required to write far longer papers than they now do, and at earlier ages, and those papers were graded with liberal amounts of red ink. The loss of practice in writing, especially the loss of directed and harshly corrected writing exercises, and the loss of all memorization of good literature for students corresponds rather directly with an increasing loss of writing skills. Merely being able to read individual words does not correspond to being able to understand or to write.

In my wife’s field — vocal music — all too many students fail to grasp the idea that successful singing is the combination of intellectual understanding and trained muscular and musical coordination. They don’t understand that their muscles have to be trained to get results, and that requires practice of specific techniques in specific ways. They also don’t understand the need to recognize the muscular sensations associated with proper singing and to learn to replicate those sensations on a reliable and continuing basis. To sing correctly, one doesn’t just memorize the words and “sort of” follow the melody. A good singer needs to know the rhythm well enough to beat it out without looking at the music, to know the actual meaning of every word, even if the song is written in a foreign language, as well as explain what the song is about, and be able to sing the melody using a single syllable [such as “la”]. Anything less is merely an illusion of having learned the song.

The recent financial crash was due in large part to reliance on the models of a few people without those who were responsible for decision-making learning or understanding the implications of those models, combined, of course, with a large amount of greed that make it easier not to learn. Interestingly enough, most of the regulators responsible for overseeing the market did happen to come from the generation that has been shorted on basic learning. And they didn’t bother to listen to, or learn from those few older heads in an industry dominated by the young.

I could give more examples, but that would be redundant. Every truly skilled occupation requires that type of in-depth learning… and it’s the kind of learning that’s becoming rarer every year because too much education consists of learning facts and where to find them, and too little consists of truly learning and understanding anything in any depth.

The other day, the former vice president made the observation that he would choose Rush Limbaugh over Colin Powell as a better Republican. Now… Colin Powell has served his country faithfully and well, both as a military officer and as secretary of state. Unlike Mr. Limbaugh, there has never been any taint on his behavior or his character. What Mr. Cheney was saying, however, in effect, was that anyone who does not follow the strict beliefs of the far right wing of the Republican party is not a good Republican. By this token, neither Teddy Roosevelt nor Abraham Lincoln would have been a “good” Republican, Roosevelt especially, since he believed in preserving the environment and putting curbs on big business.

Mr. Cheney, along with Karl Rove and the ultra-conservative Republicans, can accurately be described as “true believers.” True believers exist in every organization and every religious faith. They are the ones who hold to a certain set of rigid values and claim that anyone who does not follow those values absolutely is not one of “them.” In the case of Mr. Cheney and Mr. Limbaugh, as is often the case with true believers, the values they espouse are, to put it mildly, hypocritically inconsistent. They proclaim the sanctity of life by opposing abortions, even those that might threaten the life of the mother, while also opposing aid and support of unwanted and abandoned children. So… is life only sacred until birth? Can a newborn be abandoned or left to be malnourished or abused without violating the “sanctity of life?” Ultra-conservatives avoid this inconsistency by taking refuge behind the principle of fiscal conservatism… which says that, yes, such children should be aided, but not by government, even when it has become more than clear that there are too many such children to be helped by private sources. So fiscal conservatism triumphs except when they’re bailing out multi-billion dollar corporations, which leads one to conclude that the sanctity of corporate profits trumps the sanctity of life after birth, and that government can be used for corporate welfare but not human welfare.

Such hypocritical inconsistency isn’t limited to the American ultra-conservatives, unhappily. The environmental movement has had its share of lawbreakers, in part because whenever the laws of the land didn’t seem to protect aspects of the environment they felt should be protected, they broke other laws to make their point. Let me get this straight. You want laws to protect the environment, and you want others to obey them… but you’ll break still other laws in order to make your point?

The same sort of hypocrisy has pervaded religion throughout history. Virtually all Christian-derived faiths preach mercy and forgiveness, and yet various faiths have shed millions of gallons of blood “defending” or attempting to force their version of the “faith” on others. The same is true of Islam, as well. The Taliban want freedom from such ideas as education for women, in order to keep them “pure,” as well as freedom from the pollution of Western comforts and degradation. Of course, when U.S troops first entered Kabul, they discovered a number of rather palatial [at least by Afghan standards] dwellings occupied by the Taliban religious leaders, furnished with more than a few Western comforts. They also discovered more than a few instances where such leaders had been indiscriminate in their efforts to remove purity from young women.

None of this should be surprising to anyone. What is surprising, and what so seldom is recognized publicly, is that in many, many, cases, life does not present us with clear absolutes, but with situations where any decision at all will compromise one set of values or another, where any solution is “gray,” rather than black or white. Yet rather than acknowledge this rather obvious fact, the true believers endorse hypocrisy by sticking to one set of absolutes. In the case of an expectant mother where carrying the fetus to term will likely kill her, the “sanctity of life” can only apply to mother or child. In the case of fiscal conservatism, history has shown, time after time, that raising taxes to balance budgets [always a staple of fiscal conservatives] when economic activity has declined only makes matters worse and results in even less government revenue.

The problem with the true believers is that they insist on forcing people into black or white boxes, often with rifles, bombs, or ostracism, while insisting that theirs is the only way, hypocritical as their values are — because no set of “pure” codified values can be applied wholesale to the world as it is without becoming hypocritical. In fact, the key test for identifying a true believer is that true believers always place their values over everyone else’s and usually over physical reality. After all, those who burned Giordano Bruno and imprisoned Galileo denied that the planets orbited the sun because it conflicted with their beliefs.

According to a recent study, 78% of all the emails received consist of spam. I’d submit that 78% actually understates the problem. That’s recognized spam. What about all the emails that are effectively spam? How much of the email that stacks up in everyone’s email consists of cute little e-cards or forwarded anecdotes or stories, most of it without so much as a line of explanation from the sender? And what about all the invitations to be linked to someone, or to join Facebook or MySpace? Even deleting all of those takes time.

In the “old days,” sending someone a clipping from a newspaper without even a personal note attached wasn’t considered a letter, or any form of true correspondence. Should emails consisting of forwarded cartoons, jokes, or quotes be any different today? Since a forwarded cartoon or joke costs the sender nothing, unlike a clipping sent by mail, one could make the case that such forwarded junk is almost totally impersonal, just like spam.

None of this non-spam spam shows any real recognition of the recipient as an individual, just as an address on someone else’s computer, creating the illusion of contact or caring. It’s an empty meaningless gesture, less than the equivalent of the aspartame or methadone of communications.

For that matter, what about Twitter… twenty-some words, is it? That isn’t about the recipient. It’s a condensed ego-trip for the sender. Why should I, or anyone else, care about what you’re doing in twenty words?

And exactly why should I be interested in being on Facebook or MySpace or any other ego-driven open “personal” forum? I’m not against professional forums. They serve a useful purpose. If people want to find out about my books and thoughts, my website will provide that. Business websites provide 24 hour access, and, if done well, can make life easier for users of those services and products. But why should I set up a Facebook presence? If I provide no personal details on such a site, it’s just a way of saying, “I’m great. Be my ‘friend’.” If I do provide lots of detail, regardless of what the claims are about privacy protection, it’s an invitation to identity theft. And for what? To claim that I have lots of friends among people I really don’t know at all? Isn’t that a bit hypocritical? As for real friends, those are the ones who don’t need an electronic site to know who I am or for me to know who they are.

Even emails, which are supposed to save time, often don’t. Complex personnel issues shouldn’t usually be handled by email because, first, they have emotional overtones that don’t translate well into text, and second, because trying to reduce them to text usually takes far more time than a telephone call will. This can be true of other complex issues as well, not to mention the fact that email carries the burden of expectation of a quick response, and that often leads to even more emails asking why someone hasn’t replied.

I’m not against electronic communications, just against the illusion of communications or personal contact and against those that waste my time. If you’re a friend and send me a personal email that says something, conveys news or a sentiment that’s personal between us, I’m happy to hear it, but I’d still rather have a phone call or a letter or hand-written card.

Is that old-fashioned? I don’t think so. I’d prefer to call it what it is — considerate.

Once upon a time, when students or employees performed competently, they got a grade or their paycheck. If the work happened to be competent, in the case of the student the grade, depending on how many years ago this took place, was either a “C” or a “B.” For the employee, the paycheck didn’t change with competent work. That was what was expected for competent performance.

In recent years, however, students and younger employees alike seem to want more than mere acceptance of competence. College students’ evaluations of teachers are filled with comments with phrases like “didn’t make me feel special” or “expected too much” or “failed to encourage student self-esteem.” In addition, most students seem to think that showing up and presenting merely competent work merits an “A.” An ever-increasing number often fail even to buy and read the required textbooks for their classes. And yet there is still a continuing grade inflation in both high school and in college. In many areas of study, such as in English literature and writing, in general, students know less and write far less capably than did their predecessors. Fewer and fewer business students have any innate sense of estimation, and more and more seem lost without computers and calculators. Part of this is the result of a greater percentage of the student population going on to college, many of them falsely encouraged by too much cheerleading, too little emphasis on competence, and a society that tends to punish teachers who insist on excellence and the mastery of basic skills.

We’ve seen the same thing in the financial community, where so-called excellent performance — that later turned out to be even less than competent — was rewarded with bonuses ranging from the hundreds of thousands of dollars into the millions. The last time I checked, the minimum salary for a professional NFL player was something like $400,000. A recent study just cited in the Wall Street Journal made the observation that, given the structure and requirements of most large public corporations: (1) few CEOs were truly excellent; (2) excellent CEOs could make a slight positive difference greater than merely competent CEOs in a comparative handful of instances; (3) merely competent CEOs were adequate for the job in the majority of cases; and (4) even terrible CEOs took a while to destroy a company, except in a few exceptional cases. Yet corporate boards all presume that their CEO is excellent, and that is seldom the case.

From what I can see, fewer and fewer Americans, especially the younger ones, seem to understand the concept that every job requires basic competence and the fact that doing a job competently shouldn’t have to result in cheerleading, bonuses, and constant positive feedback — and continual promotions. Then again, if that’s what it takes to motivate someone to do a job, maybe that’s not what he or she should be doing. Rather than trying to bribe people like that, maybe their superiors should just fire them. As for the students, a lot more Bs, Cs, or even Fs wouldn’t hurt either.

The other day I read a short news story about the success of the singers at the local university in a regional competition. The story highlighted each of the singers, and the only mention of their background was the name of the university. I said something about that to the head of vocal studies at the university, and she said, with a rueful smile, “They did it all by themselves.” Her unspoken point was, of course, that these students hadn’t gotten there all by themselves. Each had a professor, or several, who spent hours each week with him or her going over diction, tone, phrasing, etc., not to mention the classes in theory, literature, methods… and all the rest of the curriculum. Then, to top matters off, when the subject came up later among another group, someone else said that the Music Department was so fortunate to have such talented students, as if all their professional education meant nothing at all.

While this is just a small example of a problem that’s much larger, it did get me to thinking. Over the years, I’ve watched various sports, and I’ve found it amazing to see how a quarterback, for example, who’s done well with one team, suddenly doesn’t do so well with another, while another who was considered washed up with a former team shines with his second team. A good part of the answer is that he didn’t do it all by himself. You can be the best passer in the world, but it won’t matter if the offensive line can’t or won’t give you the time to throw.

Likewise, in the financial and business world, a great deal of media focus and excessive salary and other compensation goes to the CEO. But just how much of that is really deserved, and how much goes to all those below the CEO who did all the grunt work that make things work out well? Microsoft seems to be doing just as well now that Bill Gates isn’t in charge. Might that not indicate that, while he came up with the initial ideas and entrepreneurship, for the last decade or so, he really didn’t do it all by himself?

As an author, which is one of the more solitary occupations these days, I still can’t do it all by myself. I need an editor to catch any stupidity that might linger in the manuscript, a copy-editor to catch the inevitable typos and stupid little mistakes, someone to publish the book, someone else to provide a cover that conveys the idea/impression of what is between the covers, and a whole lot of bookstores and booksellers to carry and sell the books. And that’s what’s needed for a one-person operation, since, contrary to some popular opinion, books do not just produce themselves, walk off the shelves, and carry themselves to the check-out registers.

Yet… in field after field from collegiate activities to professional sports, to education and business, there’s this myth that people “did it all by themselves.”

Did they really? All of them?

Over the past decade, especially, the advocates of “the market system” have pushed and pressed that free markets are the best and most efficient way of allocating resources and determining social and political priorities. Their rhetoric is true, yet extraordinarily misleading at the same time. Market systems, even malfunctioning ones, do allocate resources far more effectively than any “command and control” system, as the failure and/or transformation of virtually every dictatorial or government-directed system has demonstrated.

Unfortunately, this “efficiency” is only comparatively better than other systems and certainly not nearly as efficient as its advocates claim. Winston Churchill once commented to the effect that democracy was the worst system of government, except for everything else that had been tried. So, too, is the so-called “free market” system one of the worst ways of allocating resources — except for all the alternatives.

So-called “free market” systems have a number of severe systemic problems. Some have become very obvious over the past year or so. One defect is that prices are determined on the margin at the moment. This means, in real terms, that unregulated prices can spike or crash literally in minutes, and that the effects on society can be devastating. Another is that the balance of supply and demand, if not mitigated by society, can result in millions without jobs or incomes, and a high concentration of wealth in the hands of a few.

A third, and largely overlooked, and, I believe, even greater flaw in so-called market pricing is that such pricing is highly inaccurate in assessing the costs of goods and services. This inaccuracy comes from the fact that the prices of goods and services do not reflect the so-called externalities, or as I would term them, more accurately, the hidden costs. The examples of such costs are numerous. Until the creation of environmental laws, factories were allowed to degrade and pollute the environment without restriction, and millions of people either died or had their health permanently injured. Without employment safety laws, employers could, and did, keep costs down by using the cheapest and often the most dangerous equipment and practices and did not have to shoulder any significant fraction of the costs of workplace injuries. These types of externalities have been known now for decades and are commonly recognized, even if the means by which they have been addressed are often deplored by the more conservative advocates of “free markets.”

The problem of hidden costs, however, is far from being completely solved, or even addressed in many cases. In some areas, this is recognized, as on the environmental front, where advocates of the “free markets” continue to oppose measures to deal with global warming and air pollution. In other areas, there’s little or no awareness of such costs.

Take the issue of influenza or swine flu. The causes are known. The means of preventing its spread are also relatively well-known as well, but health authorities are becoming more and more concerned about the danger of pandemics. Why should this be a problem? If sick people just stayed home or in the hospital until the diseases would run their course, how could they infect others? Except all too many people can’t do that. They don’t have health insurance. They won’t get paid if they don’t work. In this time or downsizing and ever greater worker efficiency, there’s often literally no one else to do the work. Take a very simple example. A project/report of some sort is due. Because of downsizing, there’s exactly one expert/analyst left who can do it. If the report isn’t done, all sorts of negative events occur… violations of law, penalty costs, loss of revenue-bearing contracts. The key person has a mild case of the flu, comes to work, works through the illness and gets the job done. In the process, he or she infects three or four other people, one of whom infects an asthmatic colleague or friend who dies. Does that death, or all the other 13,000 flu deaths reported this year so far, ever show up as a negative cost on the business’s or agency’s balance sheet?

How many salmonella deaths have resulted from unsafe food industry practices directly attributable to “cost-minimization”? How many heart-attacks from work pressures caused by too few people doing too much work? There have been scores of lawsuits over the past three decades, in which major corporations were found guilty of manufacturing products that led to user deaths or guilty of practices that created deaths or ill health for thousands of people — and yet the same “free market” cost-minimization pressures persist and the same kinds of practices continue.

So… yes, the so-called free market is better than the alternatives so far tried, but let’s not have any more rhetoric about how wonderful it is and how much better it would be if the government just got out of the regulation business. We’ve already been there, and millions of innocents paid the price… and to some degree, millions still are. There’s definitely room for improvement, because, so far, markets don’t capture all the hidden costs of production and operation, and until they do, so-called free markets won’t be nearly so accurate as adherents claim they are in balancing prices and costs.

I’m convinced that, with regard to innovation, most human beings tend to fall into three groups — those who are fascinated and intrigued with the newest gadget or technology, those who want nothing to do with it, and those who will employ it if it’s not too much bother to learn to use. All too often, though, especially in the United States, each new tool, gadget, or methodology is over-hyped by its proponents to the point that, initially, it tends to get either adopted willy-nilly or rejected out of hand.

As for my own personal preferences, I admit I’m a tool-user. If the new gadget doesn’t take too long to learn and will accomplish something I need done better and faster, I’ll consider it. If it takes a lot of learning for marginal improvement, chances are I won’t adopt it until there’s something better around… or until I’m forced to do so. One reason for my attitude is simply that almost all new technology doesn’t just do the “old stuff” better and faster [and sometimes it doesn’t even do that], it also incorporates all sorts of other capabilities, and those, in effect, require the individual to do more and more, often faster and faster, and usually for less compensation.

Take the internet and high-speed connections. These days, it’s expected that an author will have a website and a blog and answer at least some email [if only from editors and agents]. By its nature, email almost demands a quick response, and if you don’t respond quickly, you get more email. Having email access, even with the best spam filters, means spending some time deleting spam, if only to allow you to continue receiving the emails you need to receive.

Once an author commits to a website and presence, he or she commits to more time spent on something other than writing for actual income, and that time has to come from somewhere, either from previously personal time, from the full-time job, or from writing. From what I’ve seen, while there is some financial return [one hopes] from exposure to new readers, there’s also the “tar-baby” syndrome. That is, you’re stuck with it, because if you retreat from that presence, you’re ungrateful, or you’ve become isolated or all-too-egocentric, or fame has gone to your head, or…

The electronic forum doesn’t replace all the other aspects of writing. An author still has to produce, edit, and revise. If the author attended conventions, he or she still has to, because the tar-baby effect applies there as well. The electronic world just adds another dimension and another requirement for effort and professionalism — and this is true across most professions requiring paperwork and communications.

So why is it that everyone is so enthusiastic about so many devices and innovations that gnaw away at that most precious of personal resources — time?