With all the publicity about the greed in the financial and auto industries, everyone’s asking how it all happened, and pointing the finger… but very few are pointing it in the right direction. I’d like to suggest where the finger belongs can be determined by looking at a few numbers and what they represent… and what they don’t.

To begin with, the “real” U.S growth rate over the past half century has seldom exceeded 3.5% annually. Over the past 20 years or so, productivity growth has generally been around or slightly below 10%. Over the 1900-2005 period, corporate profits averaged around 5%., yet since 2002, corporate profits were running more than 50% above that average, and in 2007, they were almost 60% above that average, yet inflation was reported as “nominal.” How could this possibly be? Productivity wasn’t up that much, nor were costs down. In fact, until 6 months ago, energy costs were skyrocketing. What caused the reported profit increases was leveraged liquidity, since the costs of all those derivative-based funds weren’t shown as costs on anyone’s books, and even turned up as assets on many companies’ accounting ledgers.

Yet, the stock market kept climbing, largely because the analysts kept pointing out that the P/E ratios [price/earnings ratio] of stocks were far below historic highs and at a 10 year low. The only problem with that was that the earnings were in all too many cases deceptively inflated.

Housing prices continued to inflate, based on demand-fueled, statistically flawed lending models that resulted in far too many people being given loans that could never be repaid.

Add to that the feeling that inflation was low and under control, based on government statistics. According to those figures, except for a period in the 1970s, inflation has been below 4.0%… except… the measurements for inflation, as I noted in an earlier blog post, have been changed to eliminate such key aspects of daily living as housing, food, and energy, and including those would increase the number by as much as 40%, and be far more realistic. What this meant was that Americans on the lower side of the income scale were getting squeezed, because so many of their benefits, from Medicare to Social Security, weren’t keeping up with real price increases, since those benefits were indexed to the “core” inflation numbers. Then, just before everything turned sour, consumer debt peaked at an all-time high.

Throughout this entire situation, I doubt that any number produced by anyone was essentially accurate, or that, no matter how hard any analyst tried, any statistical assessment could be more than an approximation.

For various reasons, ranging from out-and-out greed to misguided altruism, we’ve created a system where few if any of the metrics industries and government use are accurate, and some are so far from such accuracy as to be laughable… if the results weren’t so tragic. Yet, in case after case, when those few analysts who did understand and had the nerve to speak out tried to point this out, they were ignored, if not pushed out, because the deception was so much more comfortable to so many people. Just look at the analyst who tried for years to get the SEC to investigate Bernard Madoff. He couldn’t “prove” through evidence; he only knew that such reported returns were impossible in practical terms, just as the returns on all the derivatives turned out to be.

No one can save us from our own self-deceptions… except us.

A recent edition of The Economist graphed popular belief in the theory of evolution on a country by country basis and noted that, with one exception, belief in evolution tended to follow prosperity. The exception to this finding was, of course, the United States. While the Scandinavian nations were listed as those with the greatest percentage of the population [75% and over] believing in evolution, believers in evolution in all of the western European nations surveyed exceeded 60%, while only 38% of Americans believed in evolution as a true description, and over 45% of Americans surveyed believe in Biblical versions of human creation, as opposed to evolution.

I looked at the numbers slightly differently. To me, it appeared that, in those nations where belief in evolution was highest, the social and political infrastructures were more “socialistic,” in that health care and income security were near-universal, whereas in the United States, there is greater variation in both income and in health-care security than in all the other industrialized nations surveyed. Put more bluntly, this suggests that people turn to religion when they perceive their lives as less certain or economically secure.

This correlation might well suggest that the more “free-market oriented” and less economically regulated a nation’s economy is, the more religious its population tends to be. This might well lead to other disturbing corollaries. Do the arbitrary nature of most deities and the rules of their faith come from a culture’s economic inequality and social uncertainty? Or does the arbitrariness of religion essentially justify income inequality? Certainly, there seems to be a correlation, because the nations where the people have democratically rejected gross income inequality also seem to be the ones who have turned most from religion.

Could it be that religion is really a covert apologist for inequality? And that Marx just might have had it right?

Many years ago I spent two years as a Congressional staffer who, among with my other duties, followed the deliberations of the House Appropriations subcommittee dealing with the U.S. Post Office [yes, that long ago]. I tried to get my boss to push for a change in the way the Post Office calculated costs, because from what I figured then, and what I still figure with the U.S. Postal Service, the cost model they used and continue to use undercharges for bulk and pre-sorted mail because it doesn’t take fully into account the need for extra capacity created by lower rates on huge volumes, but priced the costs of bulk mail on the marginal costs. I never had a problem with magazine rates, but I’ve always had a problem with catalogues and advertising or “junk” mail, which has a far greater volume than do magazines. That Postal Service model doesn’t take into account the additional capital and equipment investment required for all that bulk. Now, as a result of current and projected deficits, the Postal Service is recommending that mail deliveries be reduced to five days a week, yet the bulk advertising mail rate is low enough that all too many mail order operations can still afford to send my household multiple copies of their junk rather than clean up their mailing lists. Anytime it’s cheaper to print and send excess copies than to streamline internal mailing lists, the “distribution costs” are too low.

I may be unusual, but I’m more than willing to pay more for a paper copy of the periodicals I value, and if their prices go up, I still pay for them [so far, at least] because the paper copies allow me more efficient time-allocation in a crowded day.

Now… over the past week, it has come to light that Anderson News unilaterally decreed a seven cent a copy surcharge on magazines and books it distributed. Since Anderson serves as the wholesale distributor for something like half the magazines distributed in the United States, as well as half the paperback books that aren’t sold to the bookstore chains directly by the publishers and book wholesalers such as Ingram, this surcharge represents an enormous additional cost to the publishing industry, and some publishing companies, notably Time, Inc., reportedly refused to pay the surcharge. As a result, Anderson “temporarily suspended” its entire distribution business and informed the bulk of those employees that they were on personal or vacation time… if they had any.

While I confess that I don’t know all the details of the Anderson finances, I do know that some twenty years ago, the wholesale magazine and book distribution business imploded from more than 1,000 local and regional distributors into an increasingly consolidated distribution system that now essentially consists of less than a handful of national distributors and leaves most of the country with no effective choice of distributors. This system has also resulted in an increasing restriction of choice for those accounts serviced by the major distributors, while generating a surfeit of waste paper in terms of magazines and paperback books being pulped, rather than being returned.

So, with Anderson, we have a service that, over the years, has gotten more and more centralized, with less and less competition, offers less and less choice, and creates significant wastage because consumers do have less choice. Yet, I’m told by those in the business that the magazine side, which has even more wastage than pulped paperback books, is the most profitable, and that any attempt to create greater choice on the book side is highly resisted.

In the case of both Anderson and the Postal Service, effectively, those who depend on their services are faced with monopolies. In the case of the Postal Service, first class users, no matter what the economists claim [and having been one, I don’t buy their number crunching], pay more than they should while advertising usage pays too little. In the case of Anderson, there’s effectively no alternative.

Economic history has shown, time and time again, that monopolies have serious drawbacks… as these two cases illustrate. So… why are all the banking bailout plans concentrating so much on reducing the number of banks?

From the time I was very small, when the opportunity arose, I built sand castles, and always just above the wave line of the ocean. And always, eventually, they succumbed to the tides and the water… as I knew they would, even as I built them to attempt to withstand the oncoming water as well as possible. Occasionally, I just happened to build one at high tide and above the high water mark, yet, invariably, if I came back to look at it the next morning, someone had always stomped it flat. Over all the years… and on all the beaches, those that the water didn’t get, humans did.

Then there are the hunters, and there are essentially two kinds, those who like or need the meat and hides and use most or all of the animal and those who trophy hunt. I understand and respect the first type, but I don’t respect or really understand trophy hunting. It’s a form of destruction to prove that the hunter can do it. To me, that’s a lose-lose game. After a million years of evolution and sophisticated tool-making, if you can’t eventually kill an animal that has no high-powered weapons, no clothing to conceal itself better than natural camouflage, and no concentrated food-stuffs to allow itself to hunt [or evade hunters] continuously, you’ve wasted your evolution. And if you do kill the animal, it’s dead, and you really don’t have any use for it, except to prove that you’re not a failure. Destruction to prove you’re not a failure? But isn’t that failing?

One of the latest aspects of destruction to prove one isn’t a failure seems to be the hackers, or whatever the latest term is for individuals who go to great lengths to invade and destroy other people’s computers and networks. Exactly what’s the point? Destruction is far, far easier than construction. Look at all the effort it takes to develop the hardware and software for computers and networks, and with a bit of skill and cleverness, or theft of codes and ideas, millions of computers get crashed. Again… for what? To prove that you can destroy something? To ruin people’s work and lives? To cost them time and money?

I’ve always wondered why so many human beings have such a fascination with destruction. Is it instinctual on some primal level to want to destroy anything anyone else built? Is it an instinct to prove one is stronger by destroying someone else or their creation?

One could argue that destruction forces greater achievement by the doers. It does, but so much of that “achievement” is wasteful. How much in resources do societies spend on security? On multiple levels of computer systems? On home-security systems? On guards and police?

To me, willful destruction is the mark of the second-rater, or of the failure. Those who can’t build, or who don’t respect those who do, resort to destruction, character-assassination, back-biting, and all the lesser forms of destruction.

Compared to creation and building, destruction is easy… and, one way or another, all the rest of us pay for it.

While movies often are inspired by a book, and once in a great while a book is written based on a movie, they’re very different creatures. Now this is clearly obvious on the surface, but the implications go far beyond the easily apparent.

For one thing, there are far fewer movies released each year than books. I won’t even try to get into all the figures, but some comparisons are indicative. There might be twenty F&SF-related movies released in one year, and less than a handful in an off year, but according to the latest Locus survey, over 1,600 new F&SF titles were released in 2008, and that total was down slightly from 2007. Major studios release somewhere between a hundred and a hundred-fifty “significant” pictures, those with production and marketing budgets over $100 million, and perhaps another three hundred “lesser” films every year, compared to 50,000 new fiction book titles released every year.

Then there’s the complexity. Most movies have a plot line that’s the equivalent of either a short story or a very simple graphic novel. Books range from age-two cardboard picture books to the incredibly complex multi-volume series.

Movies, obviously, are visual, and that means that no visualization or imagination is required of the audience, unlike a book, which requires far more effort on the part of the reader. What’s more interesting is that the growth of CGI and other special effects has further reduced the “imagination quotient” of movies. In turn, this tends to reduce subtlety and/or to replace it with easily recognized visual hooks that tie into easily recognized cultural tropes and references.

One of the greatest differences lies in the marketing. The average major studio picture costs around $110 million, and approximately a third of that is marketing and advertising. In effect the marketing budget for two week’s worth of new film releases is most likely more than the total annual marketing budget for the entire fiction publishing industry. The vast majority of books receive essentially no publicity, except in the publisher’s catalogue and in a few targeted “trade” publications, if that. That’s why so many writers not only do, but must, resort to self-publicizing, going to conventions, blogging, etc.

There is one similarity. Reviews, either of movies or of books, play a minimal role in determining the success of either a film or a book. Movie-makers aren’t interested in the views of 50 year-old critics when most movies are emotionally targeted at the under-25 audience. On the book side, however, I suspect that reviews play a small part because there are so few compared to the number of titles published every year and the diversity of the reading audience, and the number of “official” review outlets is dwindling, although online reviews, by pros, semi-pros, and everyone else are increasing rapidly.

Another interesting comparison is market segmentation. Essentially, cinema marketers see their market in four quadrants plus one: men under 25, women under 25, women over 25, and men over 25… and children. I suspect those quadrants refer more to emotional ages than chronological ages, but that’s still the targeting. Needless to say, in general, males under 25 prefer action and more action, neat gadgets, and sex, while women prefer romance and only hints of sex. A movie needs to appeal to at least two quadrants to be guaranteed of a chance at profitability, but… men over 25 don’t go to nearly as many movies as the viewers in other three quadrants, and women over 25 tend to be much more choosy about what they see. So… guess what audiences most movies are designed to attract? By comparison, books have a wide range of genres, which in turn have great numbers of subgenres.

In summary… we have in books thousands and thousands of titles on every subject for every taste at every level of literacy, but in a form that requires a certain amount of thought, concentration, and imagination and with numbers of individual titles that preclude wide-scale and intensive marketing and result in overall low profit margins, while movies are a high profile, exceedingly heavily advertised and marketed, visually in-your-face medium released in limited numbers and largely marketed to the least sophisticated under-25s.

And people ask, why are movies profitable and books struggling?

More than 200 years after the birth of Charles Darwin, most people, even some very intelligent individuals, don’t fully understand “natural selection” or evolution. Now… I’m not about to try to explain all the fallacies inherent in most popularized misconceptions, but there’s one that’s so blatantly misunderstood that I just can’t help myself.

Most people equate the term “survival of the fittest” to survival of the strongest individuals, or occasionally, the survival of the most intelligent. The problem with this equation is that individual survival and success don’t necessarily translate into species survival. One of the most fearsome predators of our time is the tiger, and it’s endangered and may not survive. The equally well-equipped polar bear faces similar problems. Recent studies indicate that Neanderthals had every bit as much brain power as homo sapiens, perhaps more, and they were physically stronger to boot. The most muscular and intelligent human being, stripped down to a loin-cloth, wouldn’t last more than a few minutes against most large predators.

But humans have brains and tools, and we no longer have to face predators bare-handed or with crude tools that one person could make. That’s absolutely true, but that also points out a corollary. What makes us deadly as a species is not that we are stronger, which we are not, nor that we are more intelligent, which we generally are, but that we cooperate. No human, no matter how brilliant, has the ability to make the sophisticated tools and weapons we possess by himself or herself. Even an individual placed in a Robinson Crusoe situation who creates tools and survives does not do that by himself or herself, because the knowledge required to create such tools is a product of the human culture that has facilitated cooperative learning.

We tend to pride ourselves on our species’ accomplishments, but we’re newcomers to the world. The world has been around some four billion years, and human beings are lucky to be pushing a million years as a species. Cockroaches aren’t particularly strong on an absolute scale, nor are they particularly bright as individuals, but they’ve been around for over 200 million years. Virtually all other species on the planet have been around longer than humans, and dinosaurs lasted for hundreds of millions of years.

Yet, day after day, in forum after forum, people extol the “survival of the fittest” to justify oppression of those weaker, less intelligent, or less fortunate by individuals who are stronger, brighter, and more fortunate. This overlooks the fact that the fittest aren’t those who are the best predators; they’re the ones who are best at dealing with the predators… and that’s another reason why we developed customs, rules and laws, because not all predators are from other species.

That brings up another corollary. In all times in human history, the most successful cultures have been those who have been most successful in dealing with both external and internal predators. Over time, there’s close to a direct negative correlation between the percentage of a culture that dies violently and its degree of “civilization” and success. That is, the percentage of violent deaths always goes down, again, measured over time, as the culture is more successful. Some anthropologists suggest that prosperity reduces violence. I doubt it strongly. Reducing violence increases prosperity, but only by the application of cooperation and social and sometimes physical force, but with minimal violence. One doesn’t reduce violence by relying strictly on violence to do so.

So… let’s have a little less rhetoric and indirect glorification of the abuse of power disguised as “survival of the fittest.”

Over the years I’ve been bothered by the fact that, in so many areas, from job interviews to popular entertainment, western culture, particularly in the United States, has moved more and more to making judgments and decisions based essentially on image. This trend, unfortunately, despite more and more “popular,” as well as detailed and statistical evidence that illustrates the faults of such an approach, seems to be accelerating, in large part, I suspect, because of the excessive intrusiveness of the media in all aspects of our lives.

The complement to “image” is “ego-stroking” or flattery. We all like to feel good about ourselves, and most of us respond positively to those who seem to go out of their way to bolster our self-images.

The financial crisis that has besieged the United States and threatened to swamp the entire world financial system was generated primarily by the interplay of image and ego-stroking. “Everyone deserves a home of their own” — whether they can afford to pay for it or not. “You can have it all” — with a home-equity line of credit to use inflated real estate as a personal piggy bank… at least until the bottom drops out. “Of course, you can trust the derivatives of Lehman [or Merrill Lynch, AIG, CITI Group, or any other well-known investment bank of insurance conglomerate]” — even though we can’t even explain them accurately to our own CEO. “We’ve figured out the stock market, and there’s no way the Dow won’t hit 36,000” — just ignore the fact that such a gain would require either tripling the US GDP or 400% inflation. “Bernard Madoff has an impeccable reputation, and pays incredibly good returns” — with new investors’ money, just like every other Ponzi scheme.

Even the McDonald’s commercials get into the act with “you deserve a break today.” Perhaps you do, but that doesn’t have much to do with whether you really should, given the state of your finances. More to the point, it creates an atmosphere and attitude that what you “deserve” is far more important than what you can afford. It’s blatant ego-stroking, and it’s so obvious and prevalent that very few people even consider the society-wide implications.

But… as is often the case, there’s an even darker side to image and ego-stroking, and that’s a societal turn away from the recognition of and appreciation for ability and competence — unless those qualities also come with a great image. Unfortunately, and in real life, they usually don’t. The accountant or product analyst who tells the CEO that the product isn’t that good, despite the image, is more likely to be fired than praised. The critic who suggests that the singers on American Idol are less than fifth rate will be pilloried or ignored. The job-seeker who’s shy or tongue-tied under interrogation, but who’s brilliant in analyzing or writing or developing new products, usually loses out to the candidate who’s better-looking and glib, even if the substantive skills of the good-looker are weaker or non-existent — which is another cause of the financial meltdown, because the CEOs of the big brokerages and investment banks all had great images and lousy understanding of what they approved…or a lack of ethics, if they did understand.

Put another way, as a culture we’ve come more and more to reward flash over substance, to demand ego-stroking over honest evaluation, and to value the shallowness of quick rewards over long-term substantive accomplishments.

And now we’re paying for it… and most people still don’t understand why. American Idol and all the ego-stroking wish-fulfillment shows still top the popularity charts, and Toyota just became the biggest car manufacturer in the world by spending years building better cars, even as the well-groomed Detroit auto executives in their ego-stroking private jets beg for more federal handouts while trying to keep producing gas-guzzling behemoths that most users buy for their own-ego-stroking reasons. How many drivers really need 400 plus horsepower — except to make themselves feel better?

A hundred years ago, the popular fable was Horatio Alger and how hard work led to success. Today, the most popular books are Harry Potter, and how magic.. and wishing… can make things better.

Doesn’t that say something?

What’s the difference between obtaining timely information, products and services and an obsession with instant gratification? Or between being able to obtain a hot meal quickly and suffering fast-food frenzy? Or being able to get in touch with family or job quickly and having an unseen cellphone umbilical cord that’s really a communications chain that leaves you at the mercy of everyone else?

For that matter, what’s the difference between a “reasonable” editorial and an editorial rant? Or a good book and a great one?

For a traffic cop, is it reasonable to ticket a driver going three miles an hour over the speed limit… or is the dividing line five or seven… or where the possible violation takes place? How many school assessment tests for pupils are too many? Or too few? Is it reasonable to apply the same standards for achievement to immigrant children as to upper middle class students?

For tax policy… who’s rich? Where are the dividing lines on income when lawmakers decide to increase or decrease taxes on the wealthy? How can they be fair when the cost of living differs so markedly from one part of the country to another?

For a publisher, how many copies of a first novel must be sold in order to consider buying an author’s second book? If the book is right on the edge of profitability, what tips the decision one way or the other?

All these questions aren’t meant to be examples of the unsolvable, but examples of the daily judgments people in all areas of life must make, one way or another… and what I’ve written touches the barest minimum of the complexity of human society and life. I’m doing this because, again, I tend to get tired of the proliferation of rules and laws that try to answer every single injustice or odd situation.

In the United States, in particular, we seem to have this idea that when there’s a wrong, another rule is just the thing to right it. Except… it doesn’t seem to work that way. The USA probably has more rules dealing with regulation of the financial sector than any nation on the face of the earth… and we’ve just created the biggest misuse of funds in human history by most likely the most corrupt [I didn’t say illegal, just corrupt, although some did break various laws] group of executives ever, at least in dollar terms, all of them trying to find “legal” ways to accomplish the unethical, and from what I can tell, not a single one ever asked whether what they were doing was “right.”

We have among the strictest laws against bribery of public officials, and yet during the past session, Congress enacted the greatest number of payoffs ever in U.S. history with public funds — through the entirely legal process of “earmarking” — often in response to perfectly legal, if significant, campaign contributions.

Recently, in a number of locations across the industrialized world, various cities have taken the step of removing speed limits, traffic lights, stop signs, and in some cases even sidewalks from streets. At first thought, this seems like a recipe for disaster… except average automobile speeds have dropped, as have fatalities and accidents. Apparently, when people have to use their judgment, rather than rely on rules blindly, they behave better.Part of that also might be that the “rebels” have nothing against which to rebel.

I bring this up because it’s an illustration, at least to me, of how the proliferation of laws and rules causes people to focus on legality rather than upon ethicality, and what can happen when people have to rely on their individual judgment. What if the law just declared that misrepresentation of facts to obtain funds constituted fraud, and the greater the misrepresentation and the greater the funds obtained, and the harm created, the greater the crime… and left the sentencing in cases where guilt was proven to the judge and jury?

Ah… but that wouldn’t work. We really can’t trust human judgment, and we need all those hundreds of thousands of pages of regulations and laws… don’t we?

One of the phrases often ascribed to the Christian God, and quite possibly to other deities as well is goes as follows: “is, was, and ever shall be.” But what if that phrase refers to the universe as well? A group of scientists has come up with a new theory, whose mathematical details I’m not about to try to even vaguely describe, suggesting that it is quite possible that the universe cycles from big bang to expansion to contraction to big bang, etc. Yes, I know, there’s an older theory, now discredited, which proposed the same thing, but this is the newest and latest version.

Whether it’s the new theory or the old one, or some other version that has yet to be proposed, the idea of an eternal universe has very definite theological implications, the first of which is that there’s no need for a deity, since the universe always existed. But if it always existed, what created it? Did it even need a creator?

According to human thought, of course it did. Human beings believe most passionately in causality. Everything must have a cause, and from every cause flows an effect, which causes something else. In turn, belief in causality requires a prime cause, and almost all religion is based on trying to explain in one way or another the prime cause. What if there happens to be no prime cause? What if the universe is merely an endless infinite loop of energy that oscillates from concentrated energy to diffuse entropy? Admittedly, that is a cause, but it’s not a “cause” that’s particularly satisfying to the individual or collective human ego.

We want a cause — for everything, not just the universe — and preferably one that places us in a position of some self-importance. After all, isn’t the search for God, the belief in a Deity, the quest for a prime mover or cause, isn’t all of that really just a way of reassuring ourselves that we’re special enough to have been created, guided, and led, rather than the result of chemistry, physics, and natural selection?

Yet, even from our limited searches of our own solar system, it’s clear that, in percentage terms, very few locations in any galaxy can harbor complex and intelligent life forms. Given the size of the universe, however, there are most likely millions of other solar systems where life could develop. Even though such are likely to be hundreds, if not hundreds of thousands of light years away, that doesn’t mean that we’re all that special in terms of the universe, especially if intelligent beings could arise in each re-birth of an endless and infinite universe.

For that reason alone, I suspect that any “endless universe” theory will face very tough criticism, not that any of the critics will ever suggest that anthropomorphism might fuel their doubts or opposition.

After all, who doesn’t want to be special… or at least a part of something special?

The other day I read the notice in the Wall Street Journal that Borders had ousted its management team and had picked a new CEO, Ron Marshall, who apparently has impeccable credentials as a corporate finance type. After I finished choking… and fuming… I just shook my head. Every author and every editor who’s been at all aware of the book marketplace knows about Borders’ problems, and all of us have worried greatly, not in the least because the loss of Borders, problem-laden and weak as the chain has been, would deal a severe financial blow to the entire publishing industry… and to every author.

So why was I dumbfounded and furious at the appointment of a new CEO, especially when the performance of the previous leadership had clearly been lacking? Because Borders’ basic problem, based on my years of observing the chain’s stores firsthand, isn’t primarily its financial management. Not only that, but all too often, finance types, even those are supposed to know the industry well, usually immediately undertake cost-cutting measures that undermine sales revenues far more than the savings created by the reduced overhead.

Now… what are my observations worth? Since I’m offering them free, no reader has to pay for them, but I will note that over the last ten years, I’ve personally visited 180 of the 500 U.S. superstores and close to 100 of the Waldenbooks/Borders Express stores. In all of them I’ve talked to the staff, usually managers or assistant managers. Based on those visits and observations, my conclusion is really very simple: Borders’ upper management doesn’t know all that much about selling books, and they don’t appear to pay much attention to those who do, even those in their own organization.

The first thing to understand about bookselling is that it’s far better to have too many copies of desirable and saleable books than too few. After all, you can always return the excess to the publisher. The second is that no bookstore or chain ever consistently guesses right on the numbers of books that will sell. The third is that you cannot sell what you do not have. Even if you can order it, most customers want that book now, and they’d rather go to a competitor than come back a week later. This means that keeping inventory down to reduce costs is a very dangerous gamble. The fourth is that a store never sells all of what it orders of best-selling authors’ new books. So cutting orders on new releases, merely because the last order didn’t sell out, only ends up ensuring that the next one will definitely sell fewer copies. And finally, having only one paperback copy of newer paperback releases will result in lost sales.

Now… for some specifics. From talking to Borders and Waldenbooks managers coast to coast, I’ve discovered that Borders managers, in general, have far less discretion than Barnes & Noble managers in ordering books that don’t fit the predetermined sales model for their stores.

Possibly because of financial problems, they’ve understaffed their customer assistance sections, often relying on computer terminals. Terminals don’t sell books; at best they allow a customer to find and buy a book — if the customer doesn’t get frustrated first.

For years, the vast majority of Borders’ book carrels were designed so that they would only hold paperback books, and many, many, Borders stores still retain that pattern. That means the hardcovers are elsewhere, well away from the paperbacks. Again, cost-effective and space-effective as that might have been, it was and is lousy marketing. Readers shouldn’t have to go to two different locations to find books by the same author. Also, putting the new or recent hardcover next to the paperback does occasionally tempt readers into buying the hardcover, and there are a lot more dollars in a hardcover sale than in a paperback purchase.

I’ve also collected stories across the miles and years, almost none of which are particularly flattering to Borders corporate management. One case in point was the Waldenbooks in a large urban mall, which for something like fifteen years racked up the largest sales of fantasy and science fiction of any Borders outlet in more than 500 miles in any direction and sold well in other areas as well. Borders opened a superstore across the street from the mall, and the Waldenbooks still outsold the superstore on a sales per square foot basis. Then Borders closed the Waldenbooks, and from what I could determine, essentially forced out the Waldenbooks manager responsible for its success, and there was no change in the sales of the Borders superstore. In another case, Borders fired a regional community relations manager on the grounds that he wasn’t as effective as he should have been… and replaced him with someone who was far less effective.

Last year, I visited a relatively large Waldenbooks in a university town more than a thousand miles from my home town, a town where there was no Borders, either, and where I discovered huge gaps and empty bookshelves. I asked why, and the manager told me that they’d been mandated to return a significant portion of their inventory, presumably to raise cash. In looking over the F&SF shelves, there was a very clear pattern. All that was left were the most recent paperback releases of name authors. There’s a real problem with this because it offers no choice to the reader. Readers won’t pick up the latest release of an author they haven’t read before. The stores that are the most successful, particularly with F&SF, are those who carry at least one copy of the backlist titles of successful authors, and a wide range, if few numbers of each title, of newer authors.

F&SF, romance, mystery, and thriller readers tend to like series and to follow authors. Once such readers discover a “new” author they like, they go through all the titles. But they can’t do it if the titles aren’t on the shelf, and this has been an on and off historic problem at far too many Waldenbooks and Borders stores.

I realize that smaller mall stores can’t carry everything, but they ought to carry at least the first book of on-going series, whether that series is my Recluce series or the Wheel of Time, or the Malazon series.

Then, there’s what I heard from an experienced editor, who, years ago, told me, in all seriousness, that his company was having trouble with the F&SF buyer for Borders because he didn’t understand book-buying. I asked why and was told that the buyer had no publishing sales experience, but had been a very successful buyer of hardware items, such as hammers and screwdrivers.

Now… I’m not against Borders. I’m really not. My living depends on bookstores, and there are many good and hard-working people in all those stores. I am against policies and procedures that are based more on the idea that tight finance controls are more important than selling the product. I have run across a number of very good, very effective Borders and Waldenbooks store managers, and they do an excellent job… but what seems to distinguish most of them is their ability to work around various corporate policies that seem designed to hamstring them at every turn.

In the end, all the “finance” management won’t save Borders. All that will save it is an emphasis on selling books better and more effectively, and over the years that’s not something that appears to have been understood at the corporate level… and the selection of a “finance” CEO doesn’t exactly reassure me that matters are going to change any time soon.

I have subscribed to The Christian Science Monitor for something like fifteen years, but when my current subscription expires, I won’t be renewing it. That’s not because I don’t like the content; I do. It’s simply because the Monitor is going largely online. One of the virtues of the Monitor was that I could read it away from the computer. The same is true of most of my periodicals. If I have to read material online, all that does is reduce the computer time available to write… and that costs me time and money. For several years now, the Wall Street Journal has been pressing me to pay extra to get their online issue in addition to the print issue. I wouldn’t take the online edition, even if it were free. Ah… say the techno-gurus, you should get a Blackberry or I-phone. Why? So I can spend more money looking at a smaller screen carrying around a gadget that I don’t need.

I have to admit that I’m not a technophile. Neither am I a technophobe. I do have an office full of equipment, and I’ve had a cell phone for years, but I only use or carry it when I’m traveling away from my home town. It’s not necessary otherwise, and, as more and more recent studies show, using one inappropriately, as when driving or at the controls of a train, can be exceedingly dangerous. And for that matter, even the simplest phone has far too many bells and whistles. Mine is the simplest offered by my wireless carrier, with no picture/camera features, and it still takes almost fifteen minutes just to scan through all the options and features offered, but it’s so badly designed that about half the time when I open it to receive a call, I end up turning on the speaker and broadcasting the caller to anyone nearby… yet the procedure for turning off the speaker is anything but easy.

For me, technology is technology. Useful technological developments allow me to maximize time usage and productivity, but loads of additional gadgets and features waste time, add to the costs, and complicate the procedure for using the device. I trend to get horribly irritated when a tech company loads up a useful product with all sorts of non-useful add-ons. For example, I need a good color copier, for a number of reasons, but I can’t get just a copier that is relatively high speed, has high quality, reduces/enlarges, collates, and is moderately priced. At least, I can’t find one in Staples, Office Depot, Office Max, HP, Epson, etc. No, I have to purchase a copier that is a combination scanner, fax machine, printer, and duplicator — and none of the extra features are ever used. I don’t want, nor do I need, a multi-function machine, but that’s what I end up paying for. As a one person office, I want a separate printer that serves my computers, a separate fax machine, and a separate copier — that way, as it happens often enough, one task isn’t delayed because everything would hit the super-duper multifunction machine at the same time. Also, there’s the issue of reliability. The more gadget functions there are on a machine, the more likely something is to go wrong… and sooner, rather than later, sooner being roughly one month after the warranty expires. And, with separate machines, if one crashes, usually late at night, the others still work.

So what’s wrong with wanting products that do what I need, rather than having to purchase equipment that does what the technogeeks think is so wonderful? Am I so unusual? Or doesn’t anyone else want to say anything about this form of technological pollution?

In a recent article in The Christian Science Monitor, Alan Dershowitz takes aim at Hamas for “its unlawful and immoral policy of using its own civilians as human shields, behind whom they fire rockets at Israeli civilians.” While I share Dershowitz’s repugnance at the Hamas tactics, the good professor really should be careful in using the terms “unlawful” and “immoral,” especially since he is both a lawyer and a law professor.

Why?

Because both terms are culture-centric. Laws are enacted by societies, and societies can enact laws based on very differing values, reflecting different “morals” and resulting in codification and sanctioned behaviors that would be illegal and immoral in other societies… or in other times. Less than a century and a half ago, slavery was legal and considered moral in half the United States, and depriving women of most legal rights was the practice in most western nations. Little more than a half-century ago, the German Reich legally removed civil rights from Jews and other “undesirables” as part of a declared public policy to return ethnic purity and “morality” to Germany.

In fact, Dershowitz’s words highlight exactly the problem the industriocratic western nations face in dealing with other cultures, particularly alien cultures. Make no mistake about it. Regardless of historical background, the vast majority of Islamic cultures and subcultures are in fact alien to the west, particularly to “liberal” Anglo-Americans.

Because such Islamic cultures in effect enshrine what might loosely be called male honor, other values become secondary, or even non-existent. Regardless of rhetoric or “explanations,” in reality, women exist largely as possessions to serve and service men. Children, except the males, and only the eldest, are largely expendable or valued only so far as they earn some form of upkeep. Any act, particularly by women, that can be seen to tarnish or diminish male honor must be punished. Since land ownership is a reflection of such honor, any nation or individual who takes land is an enemy of not only the individual, but of the culture, and no sacrifice — including the deaths of innocent women and children — is too great to make in the name of reclaiming that honor.

Needless to say, most westerners find these values disturbing, if they even acknowledge the presence and predominance of such values, and all too many scramble to find a common ground that does not exist. I obviously believe that current western law and accepted morality, even with all its considerable shortcomings, are superior to what I see in Islamic cultures, both in practice and in terms of their effects on those who are powerless or who have less power. By the same token, however, it’s very clear that the Islamic fundamentalists earnestly believe that their laws and morals are superior, and that they are acting in accord with what they believe.

Although we’re seeing a similar polarization on “moral” issues in the United States, on such issues as abortion, gay rights, gun control, etc., the differences between our factions are not nearly so great as between the “west” and “Islam.” Under these circumstances, arguing who is “right” is not only useless, but senseless, because the true believers, especially the Islamic ones, are not going to change their beliefs. They’d rather die first — or have others die first — and they’re doing both. And that means the only way to end the conflict, like it or not, is by destroying one culture or the other. They understand this; we apparently still have a hard time grasping it.

Destruction, I might add, does not necessarily require massive military might alone. It can be accomplished in a number of ways, but all, whether economic, political, educational, military, or some combination of all four, require the application of force. The Israelis understand this, but they’re hampered by a lack of resources and by the lack of understanding on the part of most Western cultures.

And claiming that what Hamas does is immoral and unlawful is almost beside the point. The real issue is how high a price a culture is allowed to put on male honor… and how long the rest of the world is willing to pay for it.

Last week I was reading about Barbe-Nicole Cliquot Ponsardin, the woman who created the modern champagne industry at the time when all the other winemakers were still trying to remove those pesky bubbles. Although Dom Perignon, the “mythical” creator of champagne, did make many contributions to the wine industry, developing and commercializing champagne didn’t happen to be one of them. That was the doing of the Widow Cliquot more than a century later. In addition to developing the riddling rack necessary for modern champagne, as well as a number of other innovations, she was also a master of commercial tactics, including finding ways to break the British blockade of the continent in order to ship 10,000 bottles of the 1811 cuvee Veuve Cliquot to Konigsburg. Yet the myth of Dom Perignon remains, almost untouched.

Mankind, and I’m using that term advisedly, has always had cherished myths. For example, there is the myth of man the great hunter, and perhaps this is linked to the myth of the lion as the king of beasts. Of course, the real hunting is done by the lionesses, and the only prodigious feats of the lion are his ability to mate with incredible frequency and to kill off cubs he hasn’t sired. Likewise, for all the myths about man as the hunter, studies have shown that the vast majority of food in hunter-gatherer societies comes from the “gathering” efforts of the women. Nonetheless, every year tens of thousands of men in the USA pay homage to the myth of the hunter by going out and trying to kill something most of them won’t even eat.

This male mythmaking goes beyond that. For example, most of the world knows Emilie du Chatelet, if they’ve even heard of her at all, as the mistress of Voltaire, yet this brilliant woman not only translated Newton’s Principia into French, clarifying and expanding it, but also provided the first detailed prose explanation of Newton’s mathematics, as well as converting the work into continental algebra. She also wrote Foundations of Physics, which integrated the work of Newton, Leibniz, and Descartes. Voltaire himself wrote that her intellect far exceeded his, and yet the world remembers him, not du Chatelet. History also records the intellect of Archimedes, but who besides historians knows about Hypatia?

Women don’t fare much better in the myths surrounding writing, either. Although “writing” has been largely an almost exclusively male-dominated field until comparatively recently in historical terms, it is interesting to note that what many scholars consider the first “great novel” [The Tale of Genji, @1007 A.D.] was written by a woman, Murasaki Shikibu — and that was seven hundred years before Richardson got around to writing Pamela. Historically, more than a few people seem to regard such writers as Poe, Verne, and H.G. Wells as the seminal figures in science fiction, but it’s far more accurate to cite Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as the first true S.F. novel. Of course, like Norton and even Austen, Shelley couldn’t even publish under her own name.

In the F&SF field, the current “grand old man” and mythical figure is always Robert A. Heinlein, who wrote forty-some novels and a dozen or so collections of short stories, and sold over 40 million books. Yet Andre Norton [Alice Mary Norton] wrote over 130 novels and had the first SF novel to sell over 1 million copies, and might have sold as many books as Heinlein, except that the sales records of her publishers are so fragmented erroneous that there’s no way to tell. And, then again, in sheer numbers, the books by another woman — J.K. Rowling — have sold over 400 million copies and dwarf Heinlien’s sales numbers.

So… why is it that so many mythical figures and accomplishments are male? Could it just be because most men, especially those who aren’t the ones doing the accomplishing, are obsessed with image… and women with results?

On Christmas Eve day, my wife and I watched It’s a Wonderful Life. After it was over, she turned to me and said, “The world needs more George Baileys and a lot fewer Potters.” She wasn’t talking just about their differing outlooks on life, and her words got me to thinking. She was right, of course, because she usually is, but especially in the deeper sense.

George Bailey spends his entire life in the small town of Bedford Falls, running the building and loan society, making loans to the working people, occasionally giving them a month or day of grace in making their house payments. He judges people on their character, not on their balance sheets. He never makes enough money for a high standard of living, and he and his wife live in a drafty old house that she, largely, has fixed up. Mr. Potter, of course, is the banker and businessman for whom success is measured strictly by the dollars earned, the return on investment, the overall profitability. Potter won’t hesitate to foreclose, to call for a bank examiner, or even keep money inadvertently left on his premises by Uncle Billy. He will unhesitatingly employ any tactic to boost his profitability, even those marginally legal. Like so many of the recent Wall Street CEOs whose ill-considered pursuit of maximum profit at any cost led to the current financial and economic crisis, and who walked away with ill-gotten gains without either guilt or punishment, so does Potter. He almost destroys the better man, and he still gets to keep the money and is never punished. All along the way, George Bailey builds a better Bedford Falls, even using his honeymoon savings. Potter is a parasite upon the town, yet he represents himself as a financially responsible pillar of the community.

Critics of the film have called it “Capra-corn,” a pun on the name of the director, but Frank Capra produced a film that was not only feel-good and sentimental, but one that encapsulated an economic truth that has tended to be overshadowed by the holiday sentiment generated by the plot and actors. One of the sad things about the film is that, while we have accepted it as a “holiday classic,” so to speak, we’ve ignored the deeper meaning behind that sentiment. When we haven’t been watching the film, we’ve forgotten the George Baileys of the world, and idolized the Potters.

And now we’re paying for that ill-considered idolization.

Congressional committees have revealed that executives of various banking and financial firms who ran them into financial disasters have already received over one billion dollars in bonuses and “expenses.” It appears likely that the various bailout plans will cost well over a trillion dollars, and it’s not even certain how effective they’ll be. In the meantime, states and local governments are cutting budgets right and left, because most states have constitutions that prohibit deficit spending, and most state politicians have an incredible aversion to maintaining reserves for hard times when state revenues are solid. They’d rather splurge or offer tax reductions. This idiocy, of course, means that when the national economy turns bad, matters get even worse on the state level, because the states don’t generally have recourse to deficit spending, and increasing taxes during economic bad times usually only decreases total revenues.

Here in the great state of Utah, for example, the legislature is talking about slashing the budget by over 20%, five percent since October, and fifteen percent next year. The single largest cuts will be in education, needless to say, despite the fact that Utah is dead last in per pupil spending on the elementary and secondary level, despite the fact that 13,500 new pupils are expected to enroll in school next year, and despite the fact that close to half of all public school funding comes from the state. In addition, the state junior colleges, colleges, and universities are projected to be required to cut close to a thousand positions, as well as eliminate a large percentage of part-time faculty. Needless to say, it doesn’t appear that the legislature has actually looked at the situation at most institutions, or at the findings of the state board of regents who noted that in times of economic down-turn, enrollments in college and post-graduate work go up. Nor does anyone seem to be noting that most state institutions already have full classrooms and faculty working overtime and beyond, so that, in many cases, there are neither enough teachers, classroom spaces, and time slots to accommodate existing students, let alone those who will be flooding the institutions next year because of a high birth rate and a lack of jobs for those without more education. At the same time, the universities are offering early retirement incentives, but the problem with these is that it encourages the loss of those professors with the most experience to offer, and, frankly, from what I’ve seen, most [but not all] work harder and longer than their younger “replacements” do. The same problems are occurring with police and fire departments throughout the state, which are freezing hires, and with prisons, which have already laid off employees. Likewise, the state is eliminating most spending on infrastructure improvements, which isn’t exactly reassuring, given the sad state of all too many highways, bridges, and mass transit systems.

From what I can tell and from recent news reports, similar problems are occurring across the nation. Given this trend, what I want to ask is: Why can we easily spend hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out reckless banks and brokerage firms, to rescue mismanaged auto manufacturers, but ignore education, public safety, and local infrastructure? Even under “trickle-down” economics, very little of the revenues generated by the various bailout proposals will flow to support these basic areas of our society.

One of the greatest difficulties in assessing quality in the arts, particularly in fields such as writing, singing, and painting, lies in two related problems. First, a truly “objective” way of assessing excellence doesn’t exist. Second, because anyone with a basic ability in grammar can write, because anyone with a voice can sing, because anyone can pick up pencils or oils and paint, all too many otherwise intelligent individuals feel that they can accurately judge excellence in these areas and that their opinion has equal value in assessing excellence with the view of someone with great experience and expertise in the field.

My wife is a professional singer and a professor of opera, but she has gotten out of the habit of discussing her true evaluations of musical performances, except with other professional colleagues… or me. Instead, she makes generic comments. Why? Because most people think they can evaluate singing and will rave about a singer because he or she is attractive, charismatic, and has great stage presence, even while a good fraction of the notes sung are off-key, off-tempo, or even the wrong words. It may be good “entertainment,” but it’s not good singing. In the past, she’s tried to explain why performances weren’t good, or why a given work isn’t as good as another, but her evaluation is almost invariably dismissed as “a matter of opinion,” especially by those who have the least knowledge of music.

As I noted in Part I, the good professor was absolutely convinced that his views were superior to those of four different review sources and those of several hundred thousand readers. He may not like the books, and that’s his privilege. He even admitted he was not an expert in the field, but still asserted that his likes and dislikes were more accurate, as a measure of the overall quality of the books, than a considerable weight of well-informed and educated evaluation from editors to reviewers.

By comparison, very few people, or at least not without advanced degrees in physics, would even consider telling top physicists that their theories on wave states or quantum mechanics were wrong, but an amazing number of individuals without any real grounding beyond basic courses in literature, music, or arts have no problem in pronouncing their opinions, which isn’t a problem, and giving them equal value with experts in a given field, which is. This could be described as the “if I like it, it’s good, and if I don’t, it’s not” approach.

In fiction, in particular, this can be a significant problem. Authors always run the risk of alienating readers because of the subject matter they choose or the way in which they present it, and the emotional reaction overrides any sense of judgment on the part of readers who are offended, usually because the author’s presentation jolts the reader’s preconceived view of propriety or reality. This can also be true in music. There were actually riots after the premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, and more than a few books, later acclaimed as excellent, have been banned in one locale or another.

Now, obviously, in a field where only subjective evaluation of excellence is possible, there are times where even a consensus of experts on what is excellent may not be totally accurate. There will also be questions, at times, about the degree of excellence, and I’ve certainly raised such questions myself, but, almost always, the judgment of long-time knowledgeable scholars and practitioners in a field in assessing excellence, not popularity, is superior to the opinions of those who do not possess such experience.

But… in the end, the fact is: Not all opinions are of equal value in assessing excellence.

Recently, I had an on-line “discussion” with a professor who didn’t care much for the Spellsong Cycle. While I respect his opinion that the books did not impress him, I was less than enthused about his views that his assessment was far superior to other time-tested means of assessing quality for novels. Four of the five books received starred reviews from review sources such as Kirkus, Booklist, and even Romantic Times, which also gave the last book an award. The series also sold well, if not so well as the Saga of Recluce, and all the books are still in print ten years later. His counter to the issue of reviews was that he was amazed that any F&SF book received a negative review. This led me to thinking about the issue of quality or excellence.

Now… as many of you who have followed my thoughts for a time know, I’m not the greatest champion of reviews. I suppose my assessment of them is along the lines of Churchill’s view on democracy; they’re the worst way of assessing excellence, except for anything else that’s ever been tried.

Every year more than 1,000 new titles are published in the F&SF field. Kirkus reviews less than fifty of these each year and might award 10 starred reviews. Publishers Weekly reviews perhaps a hundred, Booklist, and Library Journal far less. Given the overlap, since some books may get reviews in more than one publication, it’s unlikely than more than 150 new titles get reviews. That’s fifteen percent. Of that number less than twenty percent get starred reviews or the equivalent, and again, some of those will overlap. So…something like 30 titles might get starred reviews. That’s less than three percent, which is a far cry from the idea that all reviews are raves. Almost all reviews are a mixed bag, where the reviewer likes some things and dislikes others.

Now… in the interests of fairness, it is also true that publicists do have the habit of excerpting the best lines from reviews for cover blurbs. Take a review that stated, “After a dull and pedantic beginning, the author finally reaches an exciting conclusion.” We all know what part of that review will appear on the cover, but that doesn’t invalidate the entire review.

As for the issue of negative reviews, in general, what’s the point? Readers usually want to know what to read, not what not to read. I’ve observed that most negative reviews are about books by best-selling authors or authors who have had past works critically acclaimed, where the reviewer is suggesting that the book being reviewed isn’t up to the author’s standards. Sometimes, I have disagreed with such assessments, but I think it’s fair to say that most reviewers don’t provide negative reviews just for the sake of trashing a book.

But…in the end, the plain fact is that the vast majority of titles published each year get no reviews from the major review sources, and only a few more get reviews from smaller specialized online genre reviewers.

Reviews, of course, are really the last step in assessing quality. The first, and most important step, occurs with the editor. The editor picks out what will be published and works with the author to improve it. It’s analogous to the peer review process in academia. Contrary to popular opinion, editors aren’t just interested in what sells, although what they buy for a publisher obviously has to sell. For example, my editor has been involved in the publishing field for some forty years, but also has a Ph.D. in Comparative Medieval Literature and has taught as a visiting professor at a number of universities, including Harvard. He’s edited several authoritative and widely acclaimed texts on the field, as well as a number of acclaimed anthologies. And it’s not just my editor. Virtually all editors who have any length of service have great ability to assess both quality and saleability, because it’s a competitive field. After the editor and author finish revisions, copy-editors enter the process, nit-picking punctuation, definitions, missing referents and the like. Then, of course, after publication, reviewers take their turn.

In addition, readers do “vote” on quality, or at least on appeal, and, if they don’t like a book, they won’t buy it… and that includes my books. Even after the success of The Magic of Recluce, when The Green Progression came out, it didn’t sell, despite favorable reviews. In fact, it may have been the worst-selling hardcover published by Tor in the 1990s. [To be continued]

This past weekend, I went to two musical performances, a “Best of Broadway” touring show, featuring four singers who had performed a number of lead roles of well-known musicals on Broadway, and a fund-raising dinner performance by local university undergraduate music students. The Best of Broadway show received a standing ovation at the local city theatre. The student concert, to a limited and intimate audience, raised several thousand dollars.

Which was better? In terms of musical quality, there was no comparison, according to the experts who attended both concerts. I am NOT an expert, and those who are included two former orchestral concertmasters, a former music department chair, a former Ted Mack Amateur Hour winner — for those of you who are younger, think “American Idol” of the 1950s, a professional percussionist who has played with a number of first class symphonies, and, of course, in the spirit of full disclosure, my wife. The “Broadway” performers had better costumes and slightly better stage presence and charisma, but their actual singing and their arrangements left something to be desired, and were far inferior to that of the college students. Now… this is nothing new. I, and the professionals, have seen this time and time again. The vast majority of audiences key in on costumes, appearances, physical beauty, and presence… as well as the theatre setting itself. Alex Ross, the music critic of The New Yorker, has also commented on this, albeit dealing with comparing first class regional musical performances to New York performances that received great applause and were inferior, as well as noting the rise of standing ovations for performances that deserved tepid applause at best.

If these instances were limited to entertainment, we would merely have a problem of uneducated taste… but, alas… they’re not. From the experiences of the recent financial melt-down, it’s fairly obvious that all too many corporate decisions haven’t been made on the best of financial or economic grounds, but in terms of short-term profits. Likewise, it’s clear that far too many corporate CEOs are being selected on the basis of personality and charisma, image, if you will, rather than decision-making expertise. For example, the Board of Directors of General Motors has expressed confidence in the current CEO, despite the fact that the CEO has been in charge for years and that GM is in such financial trouble that it will require more than $20 billion to weather little more than a year. The same situation has afflicted a score or more of other companies.

In the educational area, again, scholarships and awards are largely awarded on the basis of grade-point-averages, regardless of the difficulty of the classes taken by the students, a slightly different form of image, but often image, nonetheless.

Recent sociological research indicates that younger women tend to be attracted to tall, dark, and “dangerous” men, and that men judge women’s attractiveness and appeal, across all cultures, largely by an unconscious relationship between waist and hip size and an equally unconscious evaluation of facial regularity.

All of these are examples of judging by inappropriate, largely inaccurate, or misrepresentative guidelines, and most of those guidelines come from evolutionary pressures. In the hunter-gatherer societies which comprise the vast majority of human experience and evolution, failure to make largely accurate instantaneous decisions generally resulted in adverse, if not fatal results. The problem today is that those kinds of judgments often don’t work, and certainly not well, in higher-tech societies. Just because a man is tall, charismatic, and friendly doesn’t mean he’ll make good judgments dealing with long-term complex situations. It may even mean that a man isn’t the best person for the position. Maximizing this year’s harvest makes great survival sense if you’re in a borderline food stock situation, as most early human cultures were, but it’s a lousy strategy for both corporations and agriculture in a world where corporate and societal survival depends on longer term social and economic stability. And evaluating ability by near-blind reliance on numbers is nothing more than a crude adaptation of seeing who’s taller and can run faster.

The question of whether our world can survive and prosper may well depend on whether we can adapt away from unconscious and sometimes blind following of our evolutionarily-derived decision-making processes before the cumulative results of recent bad decisions foreclose our options as a species.

If one reads about the younger generation, those in the last stages of education or in the first stages of their working life, there are a fair amount of observations. There are those who believe that generation to be the brightest and most hard-working ever and those who deplore it as shallow and filled with self-indulgence… as well as a range of comments in between. Is there any way to reconcile that divergence?

I think so. I’d claim that this generation has perfected the “reflecting mind.” They are supremely able to reflect back simple facts and known applications, as well as deal with uncomplicated or routine or mundane tasks with speed — often only with the help of technology, however. Their reflexes and hand-to-eye coordination in general surpass earlier generations.

What they don’t do well, if at all, in many cases [Warning! This is a generalization that does not apply to a small and distinguished minority] is think and analyze. Nor are most of them able to learn from the experiences of others or from aural/oral communications.

More than a few educators — far more than those in my family — have noted that listening comprehension among students is markedly down. A doctor who teaches medical school has observed that even med-school students have trouble retaining material presented orally unless they take notes.

It’s not just listening retention. I’ve noticed something else as well, as have others in various fields, but one set of examples comes to mind. Although I’m required to proof-read the galleys of my books, they also go to proofreaders as well, and I’ve noted in the past few years, more and more proofreaders are asking me to clarify references unnecessarily. For example, in a forthcoming book, a pilot refers to a vessel by name. The proofreader requested that there be more identification, and that I show that the name referred to a class of ship. That would be fine if it had been 100 or 200 pages since the name was used, but I’d given that very description in some detail a page and a half before. Another proofreader wanted clarification of a point, requesting specific information — despite the fact that that same information ended one of the key chapters. My wife the professor has noted that even “good” students often cannot remember material presented in class lectures, discussed in workshops, and included in reading assignments.

Another example comes up in the Internet Database Forum, where readers ask me questions about books. All too often the younger readers ask questions about books of mine that they have read, when the answers were already in the books. Most of the time, older readers supply the answers even before I do; so it’s not as though the material is that obscure.

This non-thinking reflexivity shows up in other parts of society as well, such as in the stock market. Recently, crude oil prices have plunged, and consequently so have the prices of energy stocks — regardless of whether the company in question is even affected by the price of crude oil. Natural gas companies have seen their prices fall, even though natural gas prices have effectively stabilized and reserve stocks are declining. Pipelines, who get paid the same for transporting petroleum products regardless of crude oil prices, have also suffered stock price declines of roughly the same magnitude as oil producers. None of that makes any economic sense, but the computers and the techies react in nanoseconds.

It does make reflexive market sense, as noted by Henry Blodgett in an article just published in The Atlantic Monthly, where he notes that (1) the vast majority of stock trading is handled by younger people, well below 40, who have no historical memory and who react quickly, pragmatically, and instantly and (2) the greatest short term profits come from reflexively following the herd. He points out that the same kind of thinking was what triggered the real estate boom and bust. This is similar to jockeying for position among the lemmings as they rush to the ocean. You do just fine until everyone goes over the cliff.

In short, brilliantly reflecting answers back in a test-taking educational system prepares our students for quick answers and short-term decision-making. But it’s not doing them — or us — much good in the long run, because planning beyond the now requires an understanding of more than the present and the surface of the past, not to mention analytical and considered decision-making. Especially when such “brilliant” short-term decisions more often than not lead to long-term disasters.

Certainly, times are tough in publishing. Editors and staff are being laid off. Some publishing houses have instituted acquisition freezes or slowed down acquiring new titles. Apparently, the majority of publishing firms have indicated that raises will be either minimal or non-existent. Overall, in recent months, book sales are down, and Borders Books is teetering on the edge on whether it will even survive.

Does the publishing industry need saving? Does it deserve it?

Obviously, as an author, my views tend to be influenced, if not outright biased, by my experiences and observations over the years, but I think that we do need a publishing industry, even if many of those in the industry have not looked to the future as wisely as they should have… as is clearly the case with many other industries as well.

The industry as a whole does have flaws, and these flaws have certainly contributed to the difficulties in which it finds itself, but not all the blame, or possibly even the majority of it, lies within the industry. First, however, the flaws I’ve observed within the industry.

Most editors I’ve observed over the years have great difficulty in balancing the demands of the marketplace with their own tastes, and often have even more difficulty in understanding that an excellent work that is not to their taste can exist and can in fact be published and be successful. And most editors who read that sentence will insist that it’s not true. It is. From what I’ve observed, the number of either critically acclaimed or best-selling books from first-time or unknown authors rejected by editors is far greater than those accepted by the first editor to whom they were submitted. In partial support of my observation, I would also note that the largest publisher of F&SF in the world started out as the smallest when it was founded more than twenty years ago, but has editors with by far the widest and most differing tastes of any F&SF publisher and is also one of the few houses to accept un-agented manuscripts. While agents do provide a valuable service, one aspect of that service is knowing what is acceptable to what editor, and this effectively simply extends the “taste restrictions” or various editors to the agents who are trying to sell new titles.

As I’ve noted previously, the major bookstore chains, facing pressure to increase/maintain profitability, have cut back drastically on smaller stores and outlets, particularly mall stores, and especially on mall stores in less affluent areas. This has increased short-term profits, but it has reduced book “impulse” buying and also reduced the exposure to potential new readers. Likewise, the growth of smaller “generic” genre sections in large wholesale-supplied outlets, such as WalMart and Costco, has restricted choices… and thus sales. The consolidation of the book wholesaling industry has reinforced this lack of selection — just think about all the airport “bookstores” that have the same display of books you’ve already read or don’t want to read.

There are a number of other factors, however, well beyond the control of the industry. One factor, once noted, but apparently forgotten, is the tax treatment of books in inventory in publishers’ warehouses, which effectively punishes publishers who hold larger inventories. This means that slow but steady selling books don’t remain in stock long and that even books that sell well over the years get reprinted more often and at a higher cost.

Another factor is that a lower percentage of Americans read fiction for pleasure, and many of those who do read fewer books, at least in part because Americans actually work longer hours than do people in any other advanced industrialized society. A related factor is that younger Americans read less and their reading comprehension, all the tests notwithstanding, is lower.

Yet another factor has been the inexorable and steady rise in the price of paper, leading to increased costs of production, and since paper is in fact the largest single cost factor in costs, it can’t be factored away by reductions in other costs.

And, of course, there is the obvious and large problem that, at the moment, people are worried about money and are spending less on many things, including books.

In the end, publishing will survive, but it will change. I have my doubts that ebooks or Kindles or the like will dominate the field, or not for a long time, and I don’t think self-publishing will ever be more than a small percentage of actual titles sold, simply because publishing does provide a decent service [but not outstanding, as noted above] of determining what is readable and popular enough to appeal to millions of Americans.

At the same time, it wouldn’t be such a bad idea if more leaders in the publishing field didn’t ask themselves more questions about how they could improve the quality of their offerings and not just their bottom line.