As many Americans have been, I’ve been following the current housing credit/financial meltdown, and, as someone who was once a practicing economist, I have more of a professional interest than many. But in reading all the business and financial journals I receive, I’ve noticed something startling: almost no one talks about the moral dimensions of the mess. It’s as though the “business model” has subsumed all sense of ethics and morality.

Now… let’s put this in a simplified perspective. Builders were building too many houses for those who could qualify for housing under the “more traditional” standards. So more “innovative” ways of mortgage financing were developed, many of which required no money down and minimal, if any, detailed credit checking. In turn, these marginal and sub-prime loans were bundled into larger mortgage tranches, if you will, which were then securitized and sold to various institutions. In many cases, the “leverage” was close to 65 to 1. In plain English, that meant for every $65 loaned, only one dollar of reserves, or cash on hand backing the loan, was available. Now, leverage works both ways, and when the housing market slowed, and when home-owners began to default on loans, each dollar of default theoretically required the institution holding the securities to come up with an additional $65. That meant that less than a five percent default rate could wipe out the value of the other 95% of the mortgage package. Most financial institutions could not come up with anywhere close to the additional reserves required… and… the rest, as they say, is history, if aided, by another illegal but tolerated practice of the brokerage business — naked short-selling, which the SEC just belatedly announced would no longer be accepted.

Where does morality come in? At all levels.

First, it’s been estimated that something like 30% of the subprime loans were written with terms that effectively made refinancing impossible if the price of the house did not increase dramatically. Not only was this financially unwise, but locking a gullible buyer into such a situation is unethical, to say the least. Then, the higher level junior executives who sold these mortgages to the institutions that securitized them dramatically understated the risks, also not exactly the most ethical of behaviors. The institutions that bought the securitized loans didn’t exactly perform the greatest due diligence, and there are stories, if currently unverified, that some analysts who tried to raise the question were quashed… because, after all, this quarter’s yield is far more important than what will happen a year or two from now. The CEOs of the institutions involved certainly didn’t look beyond the immediate balance sheet, and they were paid and took enormous salaries and other compensation while insisting that their firms were solvent and would remain so, which is a form of either naivete [and one shouldn’t be a CEO with that level of naivete] or misrepresentation, which is a form of fraud. And it doesn’t appear that all the brokers who decided to profit from the market decline by short-selling the stock of companies like AIG, Lehman, and Merrill Lynch, without having the stock to cover the short-sales, were even behaving legally, let alone ethically. Now, because of the intertwined nature of the world financial markets, in some form or another, U.S. and other taxpayers will have to come up with the cash reserves to keep the whole system from crashing, and that cash requirement is nothing more than an enormous theft from the public — an elaborate variation on the Ponzi or pyramid schemes of the past, which have resulted, if only in the past, with their perpetrators going to prison. Here, the executives at all levels of these public companies raked in enormous salaries and bonuses as a result of these unethical and sometimes even illegal practices, and I sincerely doubt that any of them will face criminal charges.

Didn’t anyone of importance say, “These kinds of mortgages are wrong.”? “These appraisals are inflated.”? Didn’t any executive observe that the leverage requirements were so far out of line with banking and securities reserve requirements that they were in effect dangerous and fraudulent? Didn’t any brokerage firm or executive crack down on naked short-selling?

So far as I can tell, none, or very few, did. Instead, they followed the “business model” of “the highest level of short-term profit possible by any means allowable under the law.”

The problem that no one seems willing to face here is that brilliant men can always find a way around the law. Always! Our saving grace as a society in the past has been that there has been a preponderance of men and women who also asked, “Is it honest? Is it right?… instead of asking, “Is it legal and how much can we make?”

And it’s also sad that, so far, very few, if any, of our vaunted media, self-anointed guardians of liberty and discoverers of wrong-doing, have asked the questions posed here.

All the new rules and regulations will mean nothing until we, as a society, stop insisting on “more” at any cost and start asking, “Is it right?”

“We have met the enemy, and he is us.” That’s an old line from the comic strip Pogo, but it’s even truer today than it was when first printed.

I’ve been observing the current presidential campaign and trying not to succumb to terminal nausea as I see the media of the left and the right, and the far left and the far right, all working their damnedest… to do what? To create fights where there are none, and to intensify conflicts and differing opinions into class wars.

Why is this happening? Because conflict is “news,” and the greater the conflict, the greater the news “value,” the higher the ratings, the greater the advertising revenue, and the more exorbitant the profits. And we as a people not only accept this, but we encourage it by insisting that greater profit equates to greater good. I’m certainly not against profit, but when Americans come to believe that a company has somehow “failed” if its profit margins don’t increase year after year, there’s something very wrong.

There are two very conspicuous current disasters showing the absolute folly of insisting on ever-increasing profits. The first is the mortgage/housing/securitization meltdown, whose impact continues to spread and worsen and which I’ve discussed earlier, and which resulted from essentially defrauding financial markets in an effort to pad profits even more… with the strong likelihood that we’ll end up in a deep recession, if not worse, as a result. The second is the vicious and polarizing “Let’s you and him fight” attitude that permeates the media. This attitude is most obvious in the incredible growth of violence in television dramas, in the proliferation of “reality TV” shows, and in the almost-instant media focus on any short-coming of any public figure of any political party.

Thomas Jefferson had slaves and affairs with them. Lincoln’s wife was clinically depressed and possibly worse. Franklin Roosevelt had affairs throughout his life and even during his presidency. So did Kennedy and Johnson. Grover Cleveland had an illegitimate child. Even honest Ike had an affair when he was an Army general. In those days, such matters were seldom brought up by the press, and even when they did, most Americans paid little attention. Did such “dirt” bear upon the conduct, policies, and actions in office of such officials? Apparently not, or very little.

So what’s more important — candidates’ personal and family foibles or their legislative and public record and their stand on the issues? Exactly how does the choice of a pastor or a daughter’s romantic exploits bear on the great economic and military challenges facing the next administration? Why is the number of houses a candidate’s wife owns more important than that candidate’s stance on Constitutional rights? Is whether we’d like to have a drink with a candidate more important than how he or she would lead the country?

For that matter, why do so many Americans let the media use these diversions to determine public discussion on the future of our country? The media isn’t employing such diversions for our good, but to boost their bottom line… and that’s something else to consider in the course of the campaign.

Earlier this year, I was working on a science fiction novel, and I wanted to have a character quote a well-known semi-contemporary poet — except, since this is SF, the poet would have been a historical figure in the future I was writing. I wasn’t going to steal the lines, or pass them off as my own. The whole point was to acknowledge that the poet in question wrote the lines, and to show something about the protagonist by quoting the poet.

When the book comes out, however, you won’t find those lines. Why not? Because, under current copyright law and in the current litigious climate, I would have had to pay a not insignificant sum for each line I quoted, even with full attribution to the poet. I wasn’t passing his work off as mine. I wasn’t trying to make money off using a few lines of another writer’s work. I wanted to show something about the protagonist and perhaps even encourage a few readers to look up other work by that poet.

It won’t happen, partly because of the permission fees required, and partly because I don’t feel that publishing a line or two of poetry in the middle of a novel, verse fully attributed to the author, should be considered a violation of copyright law.

At the same time, if I were back teaching college English, I could have legally copied the entire poem and passed a copy out to the entire class without breaking the law. In both cases, the motives would be similar, to expose readers to something new, and, additionally, in the case of the novel, to show the impact of that verse upon a character.

In another case I came across several years ago, a contemporary composer wanted to set the poem of a relatively recently deceased poet to music to create an art song. The lyrics would have been credited to the poet, and half of any royalties or residuals would have gone to the estate or the heirs. The composer — a classical composer, by the way — requested permission and was denied. Such denial was certainly within the rights of the heirs who owned the copyright, but it doesn’t make a great deal of sense to me… or to society. The art song that would have been created would certainly have exposed more listeners to the poet, and it definitely wouldn’t have hurt the heirs financially. In the meantime, none of the poet’s work has been set to music, and the poet, once well-known, is slowly fading into obscurity. In a century or so, of course, the work will revert to the public domain, but will there be a composer knowledgeable enough to even find the work by then? Or who will have the interest?

I once published verse in small magazines, none of which survived, which may say something about both my verse and the magazines, except other better-known poets were also published there. But who will ever search out the work that appeared there? Could anyone even find it? Yet songs often perpetuate verse far longer than the written word alone.

The whole idea of copyright is to protect the intellectual property of the creator, but often, as in the cases I’ve cited, the application works the other way. For poetry in particular, the intellectual property of the creator is hardly preserved, and often in effect destroyed, if no one knows that it exists, which is the case if the work is relegated to a dusty anthology or small volume printed once or a few times and then forgotten. Even once-famous poets are sliding into obscurity, in part, I believe, because they are taught less and less and because they do not appear in other forms or venues. My work certainly doesn’t sell like Harry Potter, but I can guarantee that any line of verse that appears in one of my books — or those of many other F&SF genre writers — will reach far more readers than would be the case except for all but the most famous of poets.

I certainly would have been more than pleased if, say, a character in The DaVinci Code happened to quote a line from one of my books and named me as the author — and I definitely wouldn’t have demanded payment for a few words.

Now that the conventions of both political parties are over, we’re in the campaign season, filled with all sort of high-sounding political rhetoric designed to appeal to partisan prejudices on both sides. And both candidates will have, if past campaigns are any indication, proposals that seem the heart of common sense… and that are, in fact, both meaningless, irrelevant to the problems at hand, or dangerous, if not all three.

Based on my past experience, I’m going to trot out some of the ones used in the past, along with some commentary. As many of the warnings for products posted here and there state, past history is no guarantee of future performance, but I’m certain some of these will come up somewhere.

I’m going to go over the budget line-by-line and get rid of the waste in government. As an economist, I did just that for various legislators for years. The problem is that the amount of true “waste” is rather small. The number of small programs with comparatively expensive benefits for relatively small constituencies, however, is enormous… but don’t tell small local communities that libraries and community centers that serve a few hundred people at best are a waste. Don’t tell a politician trying to get re-elected that a library or building memorializing a local hero is waste. A bridge serving a thousand people who have to wait for ferries in bad weather isn’t a waste to them, even if it costs the rest of us hundreds of millions. And, of course, someone always brings up the thousand dollar aircraft toilets or the hundred dollar special hammers for the military — and almost always those are required because someone didn’t order enough of them in the original procurement and, in order to keep the scores of aircraft flying past their original design life, the replacement equipment required is far more expensive because of the limited numbers and the one-time production costs.

I’m going to reduce taxes on the hard-working middle class and make the really rich people pay their fair share. This sounds really good, but something like 40 million Americans don’t pay any federal income taxes at all, and the lowest fifty percent of taxpayers pay less than five percent, while the top ten percent pay close to seventy percent. I’m certainly not rich, as anyone who knows the trends in the publishing industry could tell, and I’d certainly like my taxes cut, but how, exactly, is increasing the taxes on those who already pay most of them “fair” when the bulk of the services go to those who aren’t paying the taxes? As a society, we’ve already accepted the idea that those who have more need to help support those who are poor and struggling. It’s necessary so that the less fortunate can gain opportunities and do not live in the grinding poverty and misery that they would otherwise face — and which, unfortunately, some still do. But, please, let’s not dignify income redistribution through taxes as “fair.” Also, practically speaking, as I’ve noted before, there’s a limit on how much one can tax “the rich” and how effective government is in addressing the root causes of poverty.

I’m going to push for a modern and efficient military, and one that will support our men and women in uniform so that they are well-equipped to deal with the challenges that face us. Right. First, an effective military is never “efficient” or “cost-effective.” An effective military needs excesses of equipment and munitions, among other things, because once a war happens, it takes years to catch up to the needs of the military. The job of a military in a representative democracy is to use force to keep other people from doing bad things to others or to us or our interests. That means having lots of a equipment in lots of places, doing lots of training with highly expensive equipment, and then when the time comes, going out and doing the mission, and generally losing and/or breaking or destroying some, if not a great deal, of that most expensive equipment, along with incurring casualties. None of that is cheap, and the missions we seem to place on our military suggest that its role will never be terribly limited… so, if any politician pushes for “efficiency,” he or she is essentially limiting capabilities and increasing the likelihood of higher future casualties — which is what has happened in every conflict we’ve been in since WWII. In practice, that means either continued high and theoretically “wasteful” spending or an overstretched and overstressed military or a much lower foreign policy profile.

We’re going to push for environmentally safe energy independence. NO form of energy is environmentally benign. Every form of energy creates pollution, somewhere along the line, whether in the manufacture of the components, the extraction of resources, the power generation process itself, or the waste products produced. The only question is what form of energy creates the least adverse environmental effect in a given situation and location. Add to that the fact that capital and development costs of such an initiative would dwarf the costs of our adventurism in the Middle East. It’s a wonderful goal, but any politician who pushes it is either ignorant of the financial and technical realities or being deliberately deceptive.

I’m going to ensure that all American children can do anything they put their minds to. This one is sneaky. It’s one thing to posit a goal for every child to achieve to the best of his or her potential, but not all of us have the talents to do everything we can conceive of, and everyone has some limits on their potential and ability, but none on their dreams. All the work and dedication in the world would not allow me to become a professional opera singer — not when I can’t tell when I’m singing on key and not when I have no sense of rhythm. People cannot do all they would like, and they never have been able to do so. Saying that they can only breeds resentment… and we have far too much of that in society today.

I’m going to go to Washington and get things done… or some variation thereof. The Founding Fathers designed our government with checks and balances and procedural delays precisely because they feared that, without them, a popular government would act in far too hasty and dangerous fashion. Our entire federal government structure is designed in a fashion to make change difficult and slow, and any politician who thinks otherwise and that he or she can change that understands neither history nor people.

I’m certain that there are other supposedly common-sense proposals for political change that really aren’t that sensible under examination, but these should do for starters.

In the course of the presidential primary debates, both Barrack Obama and John Edwards made continued references to the growing inequality of income and power in the United States, and in his acceptance speech, Obama singled out the “wealthiest” five percent of Americans for heavier taxes. While I’ve also been concerned about what Edwards called “the two Americas,” the idea of addressing it by increasing taxes on the “wealthy” worries me greatly for a number of reasons.

First, as I noted in an earlier blog post, real “wealth” varies widely by geography and economic setting, and defining who is wealthy by an arbitrary number or percentage is every bit as erroneous as claiming that every member of one ethnic group is money-grubbing or that most young Black inner-city males are gang-members. Claiming that a New York City or San Francisco family [or families in any other number of high-cost cities] where both parents work full time and bring in a combined income of $200,000 are wealthy is absurd. That income can bring a very good life-style in much of America, but in New York and many other cities where tens of millions of Americans live, it’s definitely middle-class and nowhere close to “wealthy.”

Second, using taxation to address income inequality doesn’t work very well, because those who are truly wealthy have the assets and abilities to avoid increased taxation, while those who are merely affluent are the ones who find themselves bearing the burden of lost income. For example, someone who makes, say $5 million a year, and who would face increased taxes of 10%, can pay an accountant $100,000 a year to find away to avoid the taxes, and save $400,000. It makes no sense for family making $200,000 a year and facing $20,000 more in taxes to hire that accountant, nor do they have the financial assets to deploy in alternative strategies, yet for purposes of the politicians, both families are “wealthy.”

According to recently released IRS statistics, less than one half of one percent of Americans are “wealthy,” meaning that they have assets including houses, of more than two million dollars. When a middle-class house in many cities can easily cost over $500,000 for less than 1,500 square feet, having $2 million in assets may make you “affluent,” but it’s far from “wealthy.” Put another way, the “upper five percent” of Americans that Obama wishes to tax more heavily amounts to roughly fifteen million. According to the IRS, only ten percent of those are wealthy.

But the bigger problem with all of this is the assumption that taking money from those who are presumed to have it and putting that money into federal programs will do something to reverse the recent trends in income inequality.

Some claim that greater education will accomplish such a reversal, but during the last three quarters of a century educational opportunities and achievement for the less advantaged have improved, and yet the income gaps between the richest and the poorest have widened. Others suggest that great improvement in reducing barriers to women will help, but while not all of the barriers to women in high positions or in fields historically dominated by men have been removed, women have seen improvements in the opportunities and income available, and the income gap between rich and poor has still widened. The poorest Americans have far better housing than did the poorest Americans of a century ago and far better amenities in those dwellings. Even for the poorest of Americans, life is better than it was a half century ago.

So, with so many improvements, why has the income gap widened?

Have we become a more greedy society? That’s hard to measure, but I find it difficult to believe that people are inherently greedier today than in the time of the Robber Barons.

Is it because of a “winner-take-all” culture that praises and rewards disproportionately those at the top in whatever field? That this has occurred isn’t subject to debate. The pay received by the “average” business CEO is more than 300 times that of the “average” employee, a spread ten times what it was a half-century ago. In my own field of writing, look at the disparity between J.K. Rowling, with income of hundreds of millions, to any starting novelist with an average first-time advance of perhaps $5,000 to $10,000 for a year’s [if not many years] worth of work. Look at the difference between the pay of the average actor [circa $10,000] and the $20 million plus per film for the top names. Or the NFL minimum compensation versus the tens of millions for glamour quarterbacks. Now… the counter is that the superstars “earn” that money; they bring in the readers that buy the books, the fans who fill the seats and purchase the DVDs. But… the superstars always did. It’s just that with the growing purchasing power of Americans and the concentration of exposure through technology, the revenues that the superstars bring in are so much greater than in the past. In a very real sense, the combination of technology and greater disposable income means greater opportunity to make more money.

Add to that a culture where “worth” is measured more and more by money, by compensation, where business professors make twice what music and science professors do, all because they claim they can earn more in business. They doubtless can, but the comparative earning power in another field doesn’t necessarily translate into teaching effectiveness. Nor do high salaries or compensation in one company mean that everyone in every other company is worth that. And when some of the highest paid corporate CEOs in the financial industry have racked up the largest all-time losses for their corporations, it’s pretty clear that high compensation doesn’t always translate into excellence… but it does translate into a significant income gap between those at the top and those in the middle and on the bottom.

Given these factors and a number more, I have real difficulty in seeing how greater taxation of the upper middle class and the affluent to fund government policies and programs is likely to have much impact on the income gap. It might reduce the deficit, but given the habit of politicians always spending more than they have, I have even greater doubts about that as well.

But… it’s a great political issue, and I’m sure we’ll hear a whole lot more about it over the next eight weeks.

Because I’m a glutton for punishment, as some readers know, I do read the reader reviews of my books, and occasionally, those of other writers. The one thing that strikes me consistently is that there is certainly a percentage of reader reviews where I’m left asking, “Did these people even read the same book?”

The answer is: They read the same assemblage of words, but not the same book.

How does this happen? Why does it happen so often when readers see exactly the same words on the page?

In the simplest terms, words on the page evoke not only their meanings, but the emotional connotations that accompany those meanings. But even meanings vary from reader to reader, and that’s scarcely surprising when you consider that most words have more than one dictionary definition. Then add to that the emotional responses that we all have to words and situations, and we’re bound to have different reactions.

As a writer, what bothers me about all this, I have to admit, is not the difference in the range of reaction to a book but the violence of the reaction by those who dislike a book. In more than 35 years as a professional writer, I’ve seldom ever seen a “positive” reaction to my books or those of any other author of the sort that says, “This is the world’s greatest book” But I have seen more than a few books, and many were not mine, with assessments like, “the most tedious book ever” or “the worst book I’ve ever read” or “totally unreadable.”

What I found most intriguing about these sorts of comments was that they usually occurred amid other comments that praised the depth of the book and the skill of the writer. In fact, they were more likely to occur with a book that other readers praised.

This would tend to support my long-time contention that any review [either by readers or critics] reveals at least as much about the reviewer as about the book being reviewed.

And, unhappily, that leaves us writers with yet another question: Did anyone read the books we wrote, or did they just read their interpretation of what we wrote?

The mortgage securitization debacle and the housing market meltdown illustrate a fundamental aspect of modern technological civilization: the loss of direct personal accountability that accompanies increasingly complex social, technical, and industrially-based cultures.

In a low-tech culture, if I purchase a hammer from the local smith, I know who forged it. If something goes wrong with the tool, there are essentially only two people who are accountable. Either the smith forged an inferior tool, or I used an adequate tool improperly. In such a setting, most of the time, it’s a fairly straight-forward process to determine responsibility and accountability. The same is true when cattle are grown and slaughtered in the same local village.

But… once these and almost all others processes become “industrialized,” who’s responsible when things go wrong… and how can any individual hold anyone accountable? The answer is that, without some sort of societal rules and regulations, with penalties, the individual can’t. The incredible abuses of the food processing industry in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century have been studied and documented in detail, and those abuses led to a range of government regulations and agencies… and many experts still feel that the oversight of the industry leaves much to be desired. The same problem led to environmental abuses and cities where the rivers literally caught fire… and even recently to children’s toys coated in lead paint.

Like it or not, human nature being what it is, all too many people who would not dare to shortchange their families or their neighbors face-to-face seem to have no compunctions about doing so in an industrial or technological society where they’re only a part of the process and where they are never personally held directly accountable.

In the mortgage mess, I doubt seriously that many, if any, mortgage lenders would have recommended that their institutions should keep the vast majority of the sub-prime loans that were bundled together and then sold to investors, especially not if their paychecks depended on the performance of those loans. Instead, all too many of the low-level originators were pressed, either directly or indirectly, to make as many loans as possible, because the originators had no sense of accountability, only the pressure to obtain high yields and fees.

For any society to continue to prosper, there has to be a high degree of accountability, and that accountability can either come from a societal tradition of honesty and responsibility, or from regulatory structures that force some accountability, or from a combination of both. In the end, however, regulation alone will fail, because unchecked human ingenuity and duplicity will force more and more regulations, to the point that the entire society becomes bound so tightly in bureaucracy that change and innovation become virtually impossible. On the other hand, with minimal or no regulation, and no cultural insistence on honesty and responsibility, human vices will destroy the trust and cooperation necessary to maintain a viable high-tech society.

So… any time you start complaining about those endless government regulations that seem to invade everything…you might consider why and how they developed.

I have been known to stand and lecture from soapboxes. I have even been known to pile soapbox upon soapbox and reinforce those soapboxes with yet other soapboxes… and I’m certainly going to reinforce that impression with what follows.

Point number one: There are no new plots. Heinlein said this almost forty years ago, and all too many readers, and even some writers, don’t understand this. There are twists on basic plots; there is window-dressing of all sorts; but the basic plots are still limited. They are: (1) the love story [all kinds of love stories]; (2) the man/woman/AI/alien who learned something; (3) the little shot who becomes a big shot [and the reverse is the classical tragedy]; and (4) the mindless adventure story [otherwise known as the video/board game or James Bond plot, although some would claim it isn’t a plot at all]. The first three plots can be combined; the fourth plot cannot be combined with anything except box office or other receipts.

Point number two: Books without plots have a strong tendency not to sell.

Point number three: The majority of readers prefer books with recognizable plots and characters that appeal to their individual tastes. Because individuals do differ in tastes, there are a number of genres, subgenres, and the like in fiction, and different authors often have differing reader bases.

Point number four: The vast majority of readers want to be entertained, and that entertainment is usually based on plot, characters, events, and structure that meet their needs. Some readers prefer their entertainment to be thought-provoking, but usually it’s only thought-provoking if they happen to agree with the author.

Point number five: Entertaining readers is not a crime; it’s not even a sin. Not entertaining them is occupational suicide, because successful writers must appeal to a certain minimum number of readers, or publishers will no longer publish and distribute their books.

There are scores of good and competent authors who are no longer published because their books did not sell. There are even authors who, editors claim, are exceptional and who do not sell commercially. But, exceptional or not, to survive, an author needs an audience.

Behind all these points is a simple overriding one. Taken in terms of a world-wide perspective [or a galactic one], there are not that many different approaches in basic structure in the books written in any given language, nor in plot. The differences lie in the skill of the writer in presenting the story… and in the receptivity of the readers.

So… when a reader or reviewer claims an author used a hackneyed plot, that’s a cop-out. All plots are hackneyed. What they’re trying to say is that they didn’t like the way the writer presented the plot, or perhaps more accurately, that the writer wasn’t successful in creating the illusion of newness or difference, at least for them… or that they really don’t know why they didn’t like the book, and opted for a convenient excuse for a reason.

There is also a certain faction among readers and reviewers that decries the “endless series” and/or “doorstopper” fantasies, yet I certainly don’t see that criticism in the cases of endless sitcoms, endless TV series, or forever dragged-out miniseries… or in other genre fiction. The only real differences are that there’s a lot more money [and special effects] in the television series… and that generally the science or the fantasy in the endless books is better. As for the criticism that “endlessness” shouldn’t apply to F&SF books… why not?

Along this line, there’s essentially no difference between an author who writes an “endless” series and one who writes the same characters, structure, and plot time after time with different character and place names and different settings. In fact, sometimes the “series” author might be the more honest one, because he or she isn’t trying to give an illusion of difference that doesn’t exist.

And… finally… readers and reviewers who complain that books whose plots and characters they have just dissected in detail are “unreadable” are either lying or don’t understand the meaning of “unreadable,” which, in turn, suggests strongly that their comments should not just be taken with a grain of salt, but that they and their comments should be interred in the salt mine.

And now… it’s time to put away the soapboxes… for at least a while.

Depending on whom you consult, the United States is either barely slogging along economically or already in a recession. Joblessness is way up, and housing prices in some areas have fallen more in percentage terms than they did during the great depression. And how did this all come about?

In general terms, it occurred because mortgage lenders and the largest lending and brokerage institutions in the United States, in order to maximize their own short-term profits, colluded in developing various mechanisms to take marginal or even less credit-worthy home loans, bundle them together, and then sell the securitized and combined mortgages to various institutions under the fraudulent presumption that combining lots of risky loans made them somehow less risky.

As a result, ten or the world’s largest financial institutions have lost over $275 billion, just to date, and those losses don’t include the total dismantling/acquisition of Bear-Sterns, or the billions in losses at smaller institutions. But what happened to those in charge? To date, five of those institutions, including Merrill Lynch and Citicorp, have sacked their top executives.

While the departed CEOs were presiding over this debacle, they collectively earned hundreds of millions of dollars, and when they departed, they left with millions more in severance and retirement benefits. In short, they were highly rewarded for misjudgment and incompetence. The other five CEOs also lost billions and yet they still remain in their positions.

The major U.S. automakers have continued to make and sell enormous cars, and not a one really made a significant investment in developing more efficient smaller cars and SUVs. In addition, over the last twenty years, they have paid for and mounted a continuing lobbying effort to keep Congress and EPA from requiring better mileage standards for vehicles sold in the United States. As a result, when gasoline prices soared, sales of enormous vehicles dropped, and the U.S. automakers all lost billions in the last quarter, and will lose more billions of dollars in the next. But their CEO were paid multimillion dollar salaries to preside over this fiasco. In effect, they were rewarded for failure to anticipate and react to the obvious, and worse, to pay lobbyists to mislead Congress.

This is nothing new. The same sorts of excesses and CEO “rewards” occurred during and the bursting of the “dot.com” bubble, or with Enron, or with… [fill in the blank].

I once lost a job because I listened to the people who used a product and reported to my superiors that the new product would flop miserably. Six months after I departed, the new product did indeed flop miserably, and the marketing vice-president who created the disaster retired with a very decent golden parachute. For me, the failure pushed me in the direction of writing, for which I am belatedly grateful, but for those who stayed with the company, it was the beginning of a long downhill slide from market leadership to buy-out after buy-out, until the company was less than an also-ran.

The question that strikes me about all of this is: Why do we continue to reward such mismanagement?

And my answer is that we pay CEOs and others far too much in terms of “present” profits and success and don’t build in compensation — or lack thereof — for future success or failure. Just how much of these failures would have occurred if the CEOs’ salaries were capped at a few measly million and their “rewards” were based on the company’s value and profitability five or ten years after they left or were booted? Certainly, a lot of workers’ futures are tied to the companies they work for. Why not the financial future of those who direct them?

Because I am a writer, not only my present but my future is determined by how well I write… how I do my job. But then, from what I’ve seen, all too much executive compensation, even senior administrator compensation in government and academia, is based on immediate profits, likeability, image, and charisma — and not on long-term competence. Add to that the share-holder, media, and marketplace pressure for quick and unrealistically high profits — or unrealistic “cost-effectiveness” — and you get what we’re now receiving.

Interestingly enough, in most of the futuristic SF I read, seldom do writers target this human obsession with excessive profit. It’s usually always about power and the abuse of power in controlling people, while the greatest abuse of power — seeking what the marketplace and the economy cannot support — seems to be consistently overlooked. But then, institutionalized greed just isn’t sexy enough to sell books… it just sinks economies and destroys futures, even while societies continue to reward and idealize those who practice it.

Two weeks ago, I attended the World Science Fiction Convention in Denver. While I was there, I became aware of a debate, instigated, it appeared, by younger writers and readers, who, if I understand the issues, were concerned about the fact that very little recognition and not many F&SF awards were going to “younger writers,” i.e., those under forty.

Human accomplishments tend to be age-related, and how great they are at what age depends on the field, although there are certainly individual exceptions. Reputedly, very few mathematicians make their greatest mark after age 35, although recognition may lag for years. Certainly, very few athletes are world class past around age forty, Dara Torres excepted, particularly gymnasts. Opera singers tend to peak in their forties, but pop singers usually burn out their voices earlier. Finance analysts seldom remain at the top of that game past forty.

On the other hand, writers usually do not do their best work young — unless it is a single book that they never surpass, and I can only think of a handful of writers who were successful young and continued writing good work into middle age, or older. I suspect this is particularly true in F&SF because great success in the genre not only requires technical skill in writing, but the ability to create and evoke whole worlds and cultures, and usually with a mythos/rationale behind such cultures. These abilities usually require practice and a range of knowledge that spans a number of disciplines. Add to that the fact that English is a highly irregular and complex language, with the largest vocabulary of any language yet developed, and you have a profession where early mastery of skills is going to be comparatively rare.

In terms of awards in F&SF, there are essentially two kinds — those awarded through popularity, such as the Hugo and Locus awards, and those which are judged in some fashion or another, such as the World Fantasy Awards. Because popularity-based awards require that those voting know the author in some fashion, it’s rather unlikely that newer and presumably younger authors will even be nominated for such awards immediately because readers have to be aware of an author before they can vote for them, and building awareness can take years.

Juried awards, of course, are designed to reflect the judgment and experience of those selecting the awards, and they usually do. [Disclosure — I was once a judge for the World Fantasy Awards.] The judges do tend to be widely read, and they don’t tend to reward popularity, but skill in writing, which as noted above, normally does take some time to develop.

Thus, it’s neither discriminatory nor surprising that newer/younger writers are “under-represented” in terms of awards.

On a side note, I was unaware, until I read The Economist last week, that Barrack Obama had written two autobiographies. When I mentioned that to a group of people, one immediately replied, “What has any politician, especially one in his forties, done that merits even one autobiography?”

While the comment was somewhat flippant, it also bears a certain truth, and that truth is, alas, at variance with both perception and human desire. In Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, one of the protagonists is a woman vice-president of a railroad. Years ago, my father noted, acerbically, “No railroad has ever had a 32 year old vice president, let alone a woman.” So far as I’ve been able to ascertain, he was right, both for practical and cultural reasons.

Because of the underlying requirements for accomplishment in the creative, economic, and political worlds, while there will always be a handful of youthful standouts, the majority of solid and lasting achievements will, in fact, be based on experience and expertise developed over time, a fact that those who are young have always chafed against, and, I suspect, always will.

In one of the latest editions of New Scientist, there are something like seven articles which purport to give rationales as to why people don’t like “reason.” While I firmly believe that both “reason” and “logic,” particularly as applied in our society today, are severely flawed, what I found interesting about the New Scientist commentaries was how shallow most of them were.

Over sixty years ago, A.E. VanVogt wrote The World of Null-A, in which he postulated an alternative means of thinking, called “Null-A,” which rejected Aristotelian logic. Van Vogt’s premise was essentially that straight-line Aristotelian logic was inadequate for a complex technological society. Insofar as the book goes, describing his system is largely avoided, except in describing it as something like, as I recall, “multi-valued logic,” which is employed by the protagonist with the equivalent of two brains.

Weak as his written support for his concept may have been, Van Vogt was on to something.

The overriding problem with the use of logic and reason in a modern technological society is that, simply put, they often don’t work. Oh, lawyers, business theoreticians, and all of the practitioners of “applied” logic and reason can prove quite logically why their theories and approaches work. But while that may justify the theories to their developers and implementers, that doesn’t make the “business model” and all the other theories any more accurate.

The problem lies in human beings. We’re complex creatures who take in a vast range of sensory, physical, and intellectual inputs. But not all of those inputs can be quantified in mathematical or logical terms or outputs. That’s why so-called intuition — perhaps better described as conscious/subconscious integration of multiple inputs — often beats the models cold… IF that intuition is from someone who actually has enough data and experience. I suspect this was what Van Vogt was trying to explain or show through his novelizations.

But… even when someone who doesn’t have such a background comes across “cold logic” models, they often reject the conclusions because they don’t feel right.

To my mind, this is the “problem with reason” — that the verbal and mathematical terms used restrict the discussion or argument to those facts or processes which can in fact be reduced to quantification in a meaningful way… and all too often they can’t be.

Yet, surprisingly, not a single one of the distinguished authors seemed to want to touch this aspect of “reason” … although a science fiction author raised the issue sixty-three years ago.

Prosperity in modern industrial society is absolutely and economically linked to “more,” more production of goods, more use of services, higher levels of profits, and so forth. And when “more” is not forthcoming, the problems begin. For example, due to the higher prices of gasoline, Americans have cut back on driving by more than 40 billion miles over the past year, and by almost 4% last May. That meant they bought less gasoline, and lower gasoline sales meant fewer tax revenues, and for the first time ever, tax revenues that go to the Highway Trust Fund will be more than $5 billion less than projected federal spending on construction, maintenance and repairs in the coming year, resulting in either cutbacks in maintenance [already well-behind replacement requirements] or an addition to the already burgeoning federal debt. Consumers are cutting back on purchases, resulting in layoffs in all manner of industrial areas. Even nail salons are seeing less business. Housing sales have dropped to something like a quarter of what they were last year at this time, and it appears likely that more than a million construction workers are no longer working in that area. It’s very likely that these cuts in employment and earnings will also create more of a drain on Social Security revenues.

All the various policy remedies being suggested are variations on getting more funds into the hands of consumers and creating a climate of opinion that will encourage them to spend those funds in order to maintain a demand that will support the production of “more.”

In short, if economic prosperity depends on producing “more,” what happens when we either can’t physically produce more, or when we can’t afford to buy more in order to pay for producing more? Is there any way to maintain economic prosperity without always having to produce more? Or do we as humans instinctively define prosperity in terms of “more?”

Certainly, there’s a general sense of rejection of life as a zero-sum game, where, for everyone who succeeds or exceeds the societal average in terms of income, accumulation of resources, or prestige and power, there are others who fail and fall below the “average.” That rejection, however, is based on the experience of the post-Renaissance era, where, in the industrialized world, at least, the ability to produce goods and services on a scale always exceeding past years created the impression that a continual supply of “more” was not only possible, but a societal right.

But is production of “more” possible on a global and sustained basis? Even if it is, for a time, is it a “right?”

And… since science fiction is supposed to explore the future, why haven’t more novelists taken on this challenge? Or taken it on without falling back on a government-controlled or tradition-bound solution [as in Le Guin’s The Dispossessed]. Is there a practical and politically acceptable economic and technical approach to maintaining prosperity? Or are humans hard-wired into “more” as the definition of prosperity?

What are the implications if one society insists on “more” and another insists on “balance?” Is that the resource equivalent of Heinlein’s observation in Starship Troopers that peace achieved through pacificism is impossible because any culture that practices it will soon be wiped out by those who don’t?

For what seemed the millionth time, I opened a bill and was confronted with the invitation to “go paperless.” Instead of tracking down the idiots and fraudsters who generated the idea and assassinating them, which would prove an endless chore, given how many institutions have bought into this sham, I decided to write this blog. Going “paperless” is NOT cost-saving, space-spacing, or time-saving for most of us; it is cost-saving, space-saving, and time-saving for all of the institutions who promulgate the idea.

Of course, they don’t want to print out monthly statements for hundreds or thousands of customers. Nor do they want to pay to mail them out. Instead, they want to maintain an electronic database that they already have, and they want you and me and all the other customers to spend our time and electricity to access the data and print out what we need. In practice, this is known as “cost-shifting.” “Going paperless” shifts costs and time from them to me and you.

Because writing is my business, I need receipts and documents, both to compile my taxes and to retain as “evidence” should I ever be audited. So when my bank cheerfully informs me that no longer can I get back canceled checks, but only miniature photocopies, which take a microscope to read, this is anything but time-saving or efficient for me, and because they’re printed on both sides of the paper, I end up having to make copies just to be able to sort things into the right folders. Of course, I could purchase some electronic bookkeeping system. But I once had one of those systems and, guess what, it took more time and effort to use and maintain it than to simply keep a set of file folders… and I still need the documentary evidence anyway.

Just the other day my wife received a frantic email from the editor of a scholastic publication to whom she had submitted a report. The editor’s computer had crashed, wiping out everything, and for some reason, so had the back-up. This is far from the first time these sorts of events have occurred, but the frequency is far greater in the electronic age than it ever was in the typewriter age. And that puts a greater burden on the author… in this case, my wife.

In the past three years, I’ve had three credit cards canceled and re-issued by financial institutions, not because I lost a card or had one stolen, but because someone had hacked into or compromised the institution’s systems or databases. Of course, this probability, backed by experience, means we carry more credit cards than we need, which increases our costs and potential exposure.

And as for the vaunted savings and efficiency provided by the electronic age… they’re vastly overstated, and the costs are vastly understated. The internet is highly useful for people and professions who need one discrete piece of information at a time and sometimes for those who belong to corporations and institutions who can afford and pay for access to all the various data-bases extent. But, for the rest of us, trying to find detailed, in depth information on the net without paying a fortune is an exercise in frustration and exasperation. Also, if you have to compare, charts, statistics, and the like, you end up having to print them out because you can’t [not on any system I know] call all of them up and put them side by side on the screen.

For most names, I can find out general information more quickly and with less exasperation by picking up my handy Wordsworth Dictionary of Biography [$2.50 at Half-Price Books] than Googling it. The same is true in a number of other areas… which is why I have a short shelf of quick reference books close to the computer.

But it’s not just in information. Take gasoline stations. When I was very young, and even when I started driving, they were known as service stations. You drove in, and an attendant pumped the gas, washed the windows, even checked the oil. Now… we do it all, and it certainly doesn’t seem to have reduced the costs.

Today the majority of “restaurants” are fast-food based, and the customers wait in line, carry their food to their table, gather their own straws, napkins, and necessary utensils, and presumably dispose of their waste, thereby transferring costs from the provider to the customer. The same principle applies to “big-box” stores as well.

Another example is telephone information. It used to be free. Now, most local service providers charge the customer to find telephone numbers that aren’t listed or are in distant cities. Think about it. We pay for the service, and then we pay again to find the number we’re going to call, for which we’ll be charged a third time.

These changes haven’t come overnight. They’ve crept into society, bit by bit, but they all have one thing in common, they shift time and costs from those providing goods and services to those paying for and receiving them… and Americans wonder why they have less time than ever before?

That’s because, and in the name of so-called convenience, we’ve allowed ourselves to become the unpaid employees of others… and while each little bit of service we do isn’t much, the sum total is anything but insignificant.

Many long years ago, a political science professor educated me to the law he termed the “revolution of rising aspirations.” By that, he meant that once people learned what was possible, they always wanted more. Once they had a bicycle, so to speak, they wanted a motor scooter, and then a car, and then two. The downside of rising aspirations is that, being aspirations, they’re insatiable. No matter how much most people have, they always aspire to more.

This tends to create problems in a modern industrial society, especially when combined with a mass-production society and “economies of scale,” where the more of a good is produced, the lower the unit cost [up to the limit of the equipment], and the more profit per unit [again, up to the limit of the equipment and assuming you can sell that many]. This structure leads to decisions that are often uneconomic for society as a whole as well as inappropriate.

Take hamburgers. A fast food restaurant must pay for the building, the equipment, the insurance, and the staff before it sells a single hamburger. And there’s very little difference in staff time and effort between creating a single patty hamburger and a triple colossal cheeseburger deluxe. Likewise the difference in the costs of ingredients is not nearly so great as the difference in the prices that the restaurant can charge. So… in terms of profits and pricing, the restaurant has every incentive possible to maximize the sale of its most expensive — and most caloric — burgers. Is this to the advantage of the health of the consumer? Is it the best use of resources overall for society? I’d say not, but it does maximize profits, and that’s the bottom line.

Now… apply that same model to automobiles. For years, everyone associated with the automotive field has known that “big” cars and SUVs had sometimes twice the profit of smaller and more efficient automobiles. Americans could get “more car for each dollar” spent on a large vehicle, and so long as fuel prices stayed low, the operational costs didn’t dissuade them, and the automakers made higher profits. As a practical matter, not everyone needs a three-ton SUV to commute one person to work, but the short-term profit motive, low gasoline prices, and production economies of scale resulted in American manufacturers concentrating on “big” cars. Then when the 1970s gasoline crunch and high prices came along, they were anything but prepared… and they lost market share, most of which they never regained even when big cars became popular again. Now, with the latest gas crunch, the gas-guzzlers are sitting on the dealer lots, and Ford has posted a quarterly loss of close to nine billion dollars, and Toyota looks poised to become the largest automobile manufacturer in the world.

Because people aspire to more, they want bigger hamburgers, bigger or more luxurious vehicles, and since bigger is easier and more profitable in an “industrial” economy than truly better or what is appropriate, more and more resources get wasted, because “economies of scale” don’t allow for great diversification. Yes, you can get a car in a range of colors, and trims, and limited and set accessories. Try getting a four-door, four-wheel drive, fuel-efficient, moderate-sized SUV with a stick shift. You can’t, not in the good old USA. That’s because economies of scale aren’t all that economical in meeting anything more than cosmetic ranges of choice. They’re a form of one-size-fits-all with cosmetic cover, and that’s not suitable for the future.

Why? Because over time, one size does not fit all needs and requirements — except maximizing profits. It’s also wasteful and inefficient in terms of resources, and those who espouse the approach are ignoring the growing problems facing the world today created by the unrecognized conflict between “economies of scale,” the revolution of rising aspirations, and the law of appropriateness.

For years, my wife has been irritated with various educational bureaucrats and politicians who mandate broad and sweeping policies and laws that are highly inappropriate to what she does. I’ve seen the same thing occur time and time again in environmental and economic regulations and in corporate planning. And most of it arises from trying to fit everything into the same mold, or as my wife puts it, failing to understand that “one size does not fit all.”

When an educational bureaucrat decrees that all classes taught in a university must have the same cost/credit hour efficiency, he demonstrates that fallacy of assuming one size fits all. Science classes need more equipment, and that’s more costly per credit hour than lecture classes in literature or economics or political science… or business. Many music classes require one-on-one instruction. They can’t be taught effectively any other way, and that’s “inefficient” because it doesn’t fit the old industrial/business model of economies of scale.

In nature, evolution has demonstrated over millions of years that there is an “appropriate” size for every ecological niche. If a predator gets too big for its prey, it becomes extinct. Prey that’s too large or too slow does as well. In nature, one size does not fit all, nor do aspirations that exceed one’s abilities.

Those are lessons that an intelligent species should learn, but will we?

While I may not be the only writer to do so, I’m certainly one of the very few to present the taxation problem from the viewpoint of a ruler in a fantasy novel. For those interested, the character is Creslin, in The Towers of the Sunset. The entire issue of taxation, both in fantasy worlds and in real worlds, seems to be stereotyped in terms of “taxes are bad for the poor and too low for the rich.”

The problem with this viewpoint is that it tends to ignore the entire reason for taxes, which is to raise revenue in order to provide services for the society as a whole that it would be uneconomic or impossible for the majority of individuals to provide for themselves. National defense is often cited as one of those services, perhaps because it’s fairly obvious that very few of us could afford to build or buy even one aircraft or tank or ship. Other obvious “communal” services are road-building, water and sewers, ports, harbors, and canals. And some services, once regarded as best provided privately, are now considered public in most industrialized nations, such as education, old-age income security, banking regulation, food and medical oversight and regulation.

The underlying problem with taxation is that people have differing levels of income, but many of the services provided are the same, regardless of income. Each individual generally gets the “same” amount of national defense, roads built, availability to water and sewer or education as any other. And given socio-economic trends, often certain services are used disproportionately by those who have little or no income and pay little or no taxes. Thus, even with a “flat” percentage tax, in essence a certain amount of redistribution of social assets takes place. With a “so-called” progressive income tax system, where those with greater income pay a higher share of taxes, even more income and asset redistribution takes place. And when one adds in programs to aid the poor and disadvantaged, or direct subsidies to businesses, an even greater amount of redistribution occurs.

Now… even in fantasy novels, when taxes or tariffs are discussed, usually they’re imposed by the evil ruler, and they’re far too high. What’s overlooked in fantasy and reality is that taxes are in essence fees for services provided, and the social question becomes who pays how much for what, and who receives what in return for what.

The United States is running a massive deficit, financed these days primarily by the Chinese, simply because we have voted for more services than we are willing to pay for, including funding an unpopular war and income redistribution through Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and various welfare programs, not to mention farm and other “corporate” subsidies [not to be confused with tax concessions, which are NOT income redistribution, whether they are justifiable or not]. Oh, every American will say, “I don’t mind my taxes going for ‘X,’ but I don’t think we should be spending on ‘Y’ or ‘Z.'”

In The Towers of the Sunset, Creslin is faced with the unenviable problem of needing to raise revenue to build and pay for enough of an armed forces and navy to defend his people against outside attacks. If he taxes too highly, he will destroy his young nation’s economy, and if he taxes too little, he won’t have a nation left. But, at least, as the head of a ruling council, he didn’t have to deal with trying to explain to every citizen why he or she all couldn’t have more in services than they wanted to pay for.

There’s a very personal side to the Red Queen’s Race, and that’s what happens to individuals. For example, to people like my wife. As a professor of music and an opera director, she’s theoretically on a nine month contract — except theory is far different from practice. Admittedly, instead of working the 60-80 hour weeks, and weekends, she works during the school year, she’s only working 40 plus hours pretty much every week of her “vacation,” just to handle all the aspects of her job that don’t fit into the year, as well as: (1) counsel incoming freshmen during the three one-week sessions the university has scheduled in order to compete for students; (2) develop three new courses to help implement the new degrees offered by the University and the Music Department; (3) write the two scholarly papers due before school starts again in August; (4) track and assign incoming students; (5) develop the ground plans, staging, and rehearsal schedules for the coming year’s opera productions… and about ten other things, all during her theoretical vacation. She’s far from the only one at the university. In fact, dozens of them all laugh, and not cheerfully, at what they call “the myth of the nine month contract,” because it really amounts to the equivalent of a 25% pay cut, or 25% more in work for no more pay.

But they’re certainly not the only ones with this kind of problem. There’s a doctor I know well, who’s a surgeon and a researcher, as well as a department head, at a major medical center and who spent the last year carrying not only her job, but that of her non-existent assistant [also a doctor’s position], because budgetary constraints meant holding off filling the position for a year. The director of human resources at a major chemical company has told me that the company is always juggling these issues, because of cost and resource constraints.

Certainly, the effect has also hit the fiction publishing field. Writers whose work has won critical plaudits have been forced to move to small presses… or not have their work published at all because of the ever-increasing pressure for efficiency and profitability. Other writers are told that certain kinds of books can’t be accepted because they’re unlikely to meet expected financial and sales goals.

All across the United States, those in management and professional positions are finding themselves handling both their jobs and those once held by subordinates. Middle management positions have been trimmed everywhere, in the name of efficiency. But the work load hasn’t been cut anywhere close to commensurately. On a other economic levels, everyone has heard about all the renegotiated salaries across industry after industry, from pay cuts for pilots and flight attendants, to bankruptcy-forced pay cuts, to the replacement of full-time employees with part-timers without benefits. In fact, the only area where this hasn’t hit is CEO compensation, which for the moment seems to remain above the effect of the Red Queen’s race.

And the bottom line still remains… run faster, because running as hard as you can only leaves you in the same place.

In Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass, which is, incidentally, a classic tour-de-force, the Red Queen tells Alice that running as fast as she can will not take her anywhere. To get anywhere, she must run even faster. The concept of “the Red Queen’s race” crops up occasionally, and Isaac Asimov even wrote a story with that title.

Today, unfortunately, I see western society developing along lines that make a Red Queen’s race all too likely. What do I mean?

A few examples might help. It’s widely known and often cited that working Americans take much less vacation time than people in any other industrialized nation, and the amount of vacation time taken continues to decrease. Yet, the real earnings of average Americans, after adjustment for inflation [and that adjustment, as I’ve noted earlier, does not take into account the full amount of inflation] have actually decreased in recent years. Now, the easy answer, and the one that the demagogues of the left quickly invoke, is that’s because all the “excess” goes to the “rich.” Some of it does, but one could confiscate the amount of “excess” and redistribute it across the population, and it wouldn’t change the overall picture much, and not for long. Spread across the population, those hundreds of billions of assets of the “truly rich” might increase family income by a few thousand dollars — for all of one year, because you can bet that sort of confiscatory taxation would drive those individuals right out of the country. On the other hand, the demagogues of the right claim that the problem is that the government taxation steals money from the productive and gives it to the unproductive. And while it is indubitably true that the U.S. tax system redistributes income, the United States is far less redistributive than most European countries, and the recipients of that redistributed income generally spend every last cent on buying goods and services from others, often creating more income than is “taken” for society as whole.

Yet “real” wages are tending to decline. Why?

First, we’re in a global economy, and now that technology and education are more wide-spread, other countries can produce many goods more cheaply. How are Americans compensating? They’re working longer and harder, rather than reduce their standard of living. Now that cheap credit is vanishing, and the piggy-bank of home equity has been deflated, they’re dipping more into savings and retirement.

Second, energy costs are rising, and that will squeeze U.S. businesses — and employee compensation — even more.

Even so, the Red Queen problem doesn’t lie mainly in income, but in resources and outlays, and it’s exacerbated by our vaunted technology. For example, two hundred years ago, if you got cancer, there wasn’t anything to be done, and you died. If you had congestive heart failure, not all the doctors in the world could do anything, no matter what your wealth might have been. Today, an “average,” run-of-the-mill cancer treatment can easily exceed $200,000 a year. Already, annual Medicare expenditures alone exceed $200 billion, and health care costs are increasing more than twice the rate of other services, and that doesn’t factor in private health care costs or the ever more expensive drugs and treatments.

Likewise, in the past travel and transport were limited, as were goods. The result of the industrial revolution, technology, and globalization is that more and more of the world has the ability to buy more and more goods and services… but the total of those goods and services is limited. Call it, if you will, Malthusian economics, postponed, delayed, and modified, but Malthusian nonetheless.

The real Red Queen’s race is the one that has been around since the beginning of civilization — and one whose effects have been largely mitigated or delayed in the industrialized west for the past century or so. Simply put, we have now reached the point in the development of our civilization where it will shortly become obvious to all levels of all societies that, technology and ingenuity notwithstanding, we cannot physically provide the very best in health care, commodity goods, services, housing, and food to every individual, or even to a sizable fraction of our populations.

Yes, we will be able to provide health care for most problems for most people, but not the range of life-extending and cancer-controlling and other extensive procedures for everyone — just for a comparative few. Yes, we will be able to provide fuel for transportation, but not fuel for four billion personal vehicles [a rate roughly half the U.S. average applied to the entire world, and if you think I’m being unreasonable, just look at the rate of growth of motor vehicles in China]. Yes, we will be able to provide housing, but not the 2,400 average square footage per house for U.S. new housing. And since the United States will be competing in a world market for energy, food, goods, and services, we won’t be able to isolate ourselves from these effects the way we have in the past.

Welcome back to the Red Queen’s race.

Readers of science fiction and, in particular, fantasy often read about the evils of zealotry in fictional worlds, and how it destroys people. Likewise, we in the “enlightened” and industrialized world, particularly the western world, tend to look down on the Islamic “zealots,” and to ignore anything they say which doesn’t agree with our view of the world. Now… don’t get me wrong. I am not an apologist for the excesses of Islam, nor do I have any desire to live in a culture dominated by any version of Sharia, but we tend to forget that western industrialized culture also has its zealots. In particular I’m referring to the far right-wing, the business-model-is-best, policy wonks, politicians, and bureaucrats.

Earlier, I mentioned how the failures of airline deregulation could be traced to the fact that those structuring the deregulation failed to understand or even consider that the industry doesn’t fit into a free market because there are far too many geographic, economic, and structural barriers to free and open competition. But those facts were brushed aside, and now travelers face the possibility of transportation purgatory every time they enter an airport.

Just the other day I read that some economists were re-thinking the “free-trade” ideal, and the idea that free trade was always a blessing. In fact, this group concluded free trade might not necessarily be good for some developing nations, good as it might be for the rest of the world. Then, there are the educational bureaucrats who have been attempting to restructure education on a “business basis,” which results in institutions competing for students on the basis of popularity, the increasing easiness of courses and majors, and in the watering-down of curricula and the continued pressure to increase class sizes to gain economies of scale. Whole departments have been abolished in institution after institution because enrollments were not economic, all with little consideration about the educational role of a university — supposedly its purpose.

We face a tremendous oil crisis today in the United States because the “free-market” policies of our government continually discouraged investment in alternative fuels and in more efficient automotive transport, and it’s likely that at least one of the Big Three automakers will go under financially because a tacit reliance on the economic assumption that cheap oil would always be available, which encouraged U.S. automakers to concentrate on more profitable gas-guzzling huge SUVs and trucks. Yes, that was economics — short-term economics, because in consumer goods, the marketplace reflects the “now,” not the future. That’s just one of the problems with unfettered “free-marketing.” The readjustments when the economics change can be catastrophic, something the advocates of the “business model” fail to point out.

The problem is really fairly simple to describe: Not all aspects of any society fit the “free-market” mold, because while truly free markets are certainly efficient, first, not all societal actions fit into a free market, and, second, sometimes that vaunted free-market efficiency is brutally inhumane and uncivilized. Yet, anyone who raises those issues seriously and suggests that at times regulation and control of activities on a non-economic basis might just be necessary and justifiable risks an ire and scorn from the high priests of the market not all that much different in tone than non-believers in an Islamic nation risk from their high priests — except that in the United States, the market high priests only want the power to sever people from their jobs and benefits when either is “un-economic,” as opposed to severing people from their heads, which is highly possible in the more theocratic Islamic regimes.

In either case, however, just as in too many fantasy novels, the high priests are far more interested in the purity of their beliefs than in the practical welfare of their people, and in that sense, there’s not all that much difference between in the approach of the free-market zealots and the Islamic zealots.

On Sunday, July 6th, Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer played an incredible tennis match at Wimbledon, but what I found most interesting was that no U.S. men reached even the semi-finals, nor did they at the French Open. I also watched the televised celebration of the fourth of July at the U.S. Capitol and was far less than impressed with the performance of “American Idol” Tyler Hicks. On what might seem an unrelated note, the performance of American stock analysts was woefully inadequate in ferreting out and making public the all-too-obvious weaknesses in the mortgage securitization field, and the greed of all too many institutional investors in seeking “quick and unrealistic profits” was a major factor in creating the circumstances that led to the mortgage meltdown and the current recession. And, in the field of F&SF writing, where are the new “great” young American males? I see women with promise; I see comparatively young British writers like Charles Stross. I see a “great” book here and there, but see comparatively little continued production of consistently good books by more than just a few American male writers under 40, while the shelves are exploding with books by American women.

Admittedly, these are semi-anecdotal examples, but from what I’ve seen, they’re definitely representative. In all these cases, American men don’t seem terribly interested in perfecting the full range of talents necessary to excel. Current “top-level” American male tennis players don’t want to put in the hours and effort to perfect back-court ground strokes and work to obtain the conditioning necessary to scrap for every point in the way John McEnroe and Andre Agassi once did. One noted U.S. tennis coach closed his camp with the statement that young Americans didn’t want to work, because it interfered with their social life. Tyler Hicks is good looking, well-dressed, energetic, and enthusiastic, with good dance moves. Unfortunately, he’s supposed to be a singer, and his singing is definitely second-class, if that. So why are Americans focusing so much on appearance and failing to see that his vocal production is lacking? The failure of U.S. financial analysts to consider the full range of factors behind the credit and mortgage boom… and subsequent bust… reflects the same kind of failure — a focus on what is immediate and easy and profitable, rather than on the core requirements for long-term excellence and financial stability — and the results were just as predictable.

All of this applies to writing as well. In its simplest sense, fiction consists of two components — technical skill in putting words on the page and story-telling. Writers who have great technical skill and write beautifully crafted prose with either limited story-telling or none to speak of [such as in the Ghormenghast Trilogy] aren’t complete writers, and won’t sell much, if anything. Writers who are technically deficient but who tell great stories are like the top American tennis players — they’ll make money, but they’ll never be great.

In any field, to excel requires a mastery of the full range of skills, not just what’s easy, or popular, or what brings in the cash, and right now, it seems to me, the interest in popularity and cash is destroying the desire for greatness in all too many fields in the United States, especially those that take great and sustained effort, and particularly among American men.

The necktie manufacturing trade association has closed its doors, because there are no longer enough necktie manufacturers to support it. While I doubt the demise of the association has caused much mourning outside the fashion industry… it does concern me, and not because I always wear a tie. I don’t, except to conventions and other appropriate business and social occasions. But it does concern me because of what it represents. The decline of the necktie might well be likened to the canary expiring in the social coal mine, so to speak.

Fashion is not just the presentation of one’s self through attire. It’s also a form of acknowledgment that there are duties to society which include appropriate clothing. Or put another way, wearing a tee-shirt to church or to a wedding or a tank-top to a restaurant, even McDonalds, is a form of disrespect to those in either place. It’s an attitude best described as “in your face, I’ll wear what I want.”

Interestingly enough, when Rudy Giuliani was mayor of New York City, he forced a crackdown on minor offenses, which initially was met with ridicule. But… the results of this type of policing in New York and elsewhere, not surprisingly to me, have shown that it also decreases other types of crime. That may well be because it reinforces societal expectations on behavior.

My late father-in-law was a trucker at a time when truckers were expected to wear uniforms of the company for which they drove [imagine that!], and frankly, in those days, truckers were a great deal more polite, both in person and in the way in which they handled their rigs. I can’t prove it, but I believe those uniforms reinforced their image and their sense of responsibility.

Dressing in an inappropriately sloppy fashion and just for one’s self when going out in public is another form of self-indulgence, the visual equivalent of bad manners. Bad manners lead to bad behavior. Bad behavior tends to undermine societies and social structures, because all successful and enduring societies are based on a degree of mutual respect between individuals within a society, and bad manners are a form of direct and personal disrespect.

Throughout human history, there have been periods where manners and standards of attire declined. Almost invariably, thereafter so did the society. So, if as a writer, you want to portray a collapsing society, just show one where personal sloppiness and bad manners are abundant, and you won’t be far wrong.

And that’s why I worry about the demise of the necktie and the necktie manufacturing trade association.