May 2009 Archives
I see that some Harvard MBA students are signing onto an MBA oath in which they pledge to be good scouts and maybe even sprout wings before they sally forth into the grubby world of work.
I hope they will excuse the rest of us if we engage in enough eye-rolling to warrant an ophthalmological exam. I'd like to think that Harvard students already know its wrong to lie, cheat and steal, and certainly any who don't won't be signing onto this oath. (Unless of course they're really devious, in which they case they'll sign, the better to disguise their perfidy.) I'm reminded of the uselessness of parenting books, which are bought and read only by adults so conscientious they don't need any parenting books. (How often do you think some drunken child-abuser is deterred by T. Berry Brazelton?)
I'm not even sure the oath is all that ethical. Here's the lofty beginning (the whole thing is similarly elevated in tone):
Anyway, you can't seriously be claiming you enrolled at Harvard Business School to serve the greater good. A cock-and-bull story like that surely violates the oath.
I hope they will excuse the rest of us if we engage in enough eye-rolling to warrant an ophthalmological exam. I'd like to think that Harvard students already know its wrong to lie, cheat and steal, and certainly any who don't won't be signing onto this oath. (Unless of course they're really devious, in which they case they'll sign, the better to disguise their perfidy.) I'm reminded of the uselessness of parenting books, which are bought and read only by adults so conscientious they don't need any parenting books. (How often do you think some drunken child-abuser is deterred by T. Berry Brazelton?)
I'm not even sure the oath is all that ethical. Here's the lofty beginning (the whole thing is similarly elevated in tone):
As a manager, my purpose is to serve the greater good by bringing people and resources together to create value that no single individual can create alone. Therefore I will seek a course that enhances the value my enterprise can create for society over the long term."Serve the greater good?" That's funny, I thought the job was to make as much money as possible for the owners consistent with law and human decency. The "greater good" part is supposed to be gravy; otherwise things are going to get pretty confused. Does serving the greater good mean not beating the competition to a pulp because that would result in suffering for its workers, shareholders and community? Should you send jobs overseas to employ starving Third World peasants, or keep them at home to maintain middle-class families? Sooner or later, won't the exigencies of business make this decision for you, with or without the oath?
Anyway, you can't seriously be claiming you enrolled at Harvard Business School to serve the greater good. A cock-and-bull story like that surely violates the oath.
Mike Morgan, a Florida real estate broker specializing in helping lenders dispose of foreclosed homes, has a strong piece in Barron's arguing that signs of hope in the housing market are masking more trouble to come. Basically he says that foreclosures have mostly stopped for awhile, but will start up again soon. Here's the guts of it:
PS--David Sokol, one of Warren Buffett's top people, seems to be in accord with Morgan, at least in this Reuters story. He says more foreclosures are coming and theres' a huge "shadow backlog" of homes whose owners would like to sell but don't want to get lost in the forest of for-sale signs already on their street.
It could be that his perspective is warped by the seriousness of the problem in Florida. Or, it might just be that there's considerable additional trouble ahead for all of us.The asset managers we work with have warned us to expect a flood of properties, beginning in early June. This will hit as the number of potential buyers continues to dwindle. Builders, traditional sellers and investors who entered too early are already loaded with REO properties.
. . . Potential buyers can't purchase homes when they are losing their jobs, regardless of how attractive the credits and mortgages are. The price of homes will continue to fall until the properties are affordable for potential buyers.
. . . There's no light at the end of the tunnel yet. We're still supporting builders through misguided programs that are only adding to the inventory woes. California decided to offer a $10,000 credit to buyers of new homes, on top of the $8,000 federal credit. But California made the $10,000 available only for new homes purchased directly from builders. That shows the power of the builders' lobby, but it only adds to California's housing-industry problem. It encourages builders to construct dwellings we don't need, and it penalizes anyone else trying to sell a home.
Housing inventory soon will flood a market in which more than 500,000 homes are being built each year, even though the annual sales pace for new homes is closer to 300,000. We must also deal with a system clogged with impossible short sales, a surge of second and vacation homes being dumped, and third-wave flippers realizing that they entered the market too soon.
PS--David Sokol, one of Warren Buffett's top people, seems to be in accord with Morgan, at least in this Reuters story. He says more foreclosures are coming and theres' a huge "shadow backlog" of homes whose owners would like to sell but don't want to get lost in the forest of for-sale signs already on their street.
That's been the charm of Craigslist for awhile now: except for employment ads in two or three cities (and lately some erotic services), advertising has been free and easy. Which may be why the computer listings on Craigslist New York are now a wasteland of spam. This is an ominous sign for their business model, and perhaps another indicator that in the long run, for at least some important things, the "free" model on the Internet is not sustainable or perhaps even desirable.
If Craigslist had to charge for ads in order to deter spammers, that might erode the competitive advantage it has enjoyed over local news sites. The same would be true if Craiglist had to employ a lot of people to screen ads (and advertisers). But take a look, it's all spam, and I'm not sure why the same couldn't happen to other Craigslist categories and cities as well.
If Craigslist had to charge for ads in order to deter spammers, that might erode the competitive advantage it has enjoyed over local news sites. The same would be true if Craiglist had to employ a lot of people to screen ads (and advertisers). But take a look, it's all spam, and I'm not sure why the same couldn't happen to other Craigslist categories and cities as well.
Yesterday was a momentous day--the day my sons started shaving. This was of course a rare opportunity for Dad to impart some ancient tribal wisdom, now that we no longer need to practice bringing down a mastodon with a spear. It was striking how utterly mysterious the whole process was to them. More striking still is how much easier shaving is today than when I got going, back before the invention of soap.
In my day, I said in my best fatherly baritone, men all over the world began each morning by shedding their own blood. Shaving almost always meant cutting yourself. Guys sometimes came to work with bits of toilet paper stuck to their faces. There were styptic pencils.
All that's changed. Electric razors appear to be just as useless as they always were, but the improvement in razors and blades is astounding. I can go weeks without the slightest nick, and those pivot-headed multi-blade systems (so easy to mock in theory) are actually completely wonderful.
There is probably ample fodder here for a disquisition on evolving technologies, social customs, the difficulties of making hedonic adjustments in the measure of inflation etc. I leave that to others; i just want to focus for a minute on how much better the world is in so many ways that we hardly even think about.
In my day, I said in my best fatherly baritone, men all over the world began each morning by shedding their own blood. Shaving almost always meant cutting yourself. Guys sometimes came to work with bits of toilet paper stuck to their faces. There were styptic pencils.
All that's changed. Electric razors appear to be just as useless as they always were, but the improvement in razors and blades is astounding. I can go weeks without the slightest nick, and those pivot-headed multi-blade systems (so easy to mock in theory) are actually completely wonderful.
There is probably ample fodder here for a disquisition on evolving technologies, social customs, the difficulties of making hedonic adjustments in the measure of inflation etc. I leave that to others; i just want to focus for a minute on how much better the world is in so many ways that we hardly even think about.
Tyler Cowen, the worldliest of worldly philosophers, over at marginalrevolution links to a fascinating article in The New Yorker about the apparent futility of high levels of health care utilization. A great excerpt:
In recent years, we doctors have markedly increased the number of operations we do, for instance. In 2006, doctors performed at least sixty million surgical procedures, one for every five Americans. No other country does anything like as many operations on its citizens. Are we better off for it? No one knows for sure, but it seems highly unlikely. After all, some hundred thousand people die each year from complications of surgery--far more than die in car crashes.
For some reason I never got around to reading George Gissing's marvelous New Grub Street until now. If you make your living with your keyboard or only hope to do so (the second category is unfortunately much larger than the first), this is a must-read. Dialogue in this 1891 novel could have been taken from my very own kitchen, and then (as now) there was a revolution of sorts underway in the market for the literary arts. In those days universal literacy, faster/cheaper printing, a rising urban middle class and the lack of entertaining alternatives created an appetite for what people nowadays call middlebrow reading material--and a class of people called "writers." Despite the growing demand, these scribes were no less threadbare than they are today, when another revolution has vastly expanded outlets for writing. The catch is there's less and less prospect of getting paid.
These thoughts are prompted this morning by the report from Borders of its first-quarter results. It was a great report. Sure they lost money, and yes, revenue was sharply lower. But under the circumstances--a savage recession, a culture in which books are declining in significance, the challenge of the Internet, Amazon, Costco etc--the failure of Borders to a) lose way more or b) go out of business is well-nigh miraculous. The stock accordingly went up.
But what can be the prospects for such a business over the long run? It's hard to believe Barnes & Noble can survive the digital revolution, never mind Borders. It seems clear that any cultural product--music, movies, news, books--which can be delivered and consumed digitally will be. What will prevent bookstores (and possibly traditional publishers as well) from following record stores into the sunset? It's difficult for me to say--and I am not one of those who attack companies like Borders for having the temerity to bring a large selection of reading material to suburbia. I wish them every success, I really do.
Nor am i pessimistic about the future of reading, or even of book-length works. There will be digital books, as well as the welcome prospect that we'll be spared a lot of needlessly long works (so much nonfiction unfortunately falls into this category) because digital delivery and consumption will revive the monograph, a length that falls between a magazine article and a full-blown book and is therefore unmarketable the way the business is structured today. But I think of Warren Buffet's recent comment about newspaper companies (not worthy buying at any price) and wonder why this should not apply to many of the players in the book business. Enlightening suggestions are of course welcome.
These thoughts are prompted this morning by the report from Borders of its first-quarter results. It was a great report. Sure they lost money, and yes, revenue was sharply lower. But under the circumstances--a savage recession, a culture in which books are declining in significance, the challenge of the Internet, Amazon, Costco etc--the failure of Borders to a) lose way more or b) go out of business is well-nigh miraculous. The stock accordingly went up.
But what can be the prospects for such a business over the long run? It's hard to believe Barnes & Noble can survive the digital revolution, never mind Borders. It seems clear that any cultural product--music, movies, news, books--which can be delivered and consumed digitally will be. What will prevent bookstores (and possibly traditional publishers as well) from following record stores into the sunset? It's difficult for me to say--and I am not one of those who attack companies like Borders for having the temerity to bring a large selection of reading material to suburbia. I wish them every success, I really do.
Nor am i pessimistic about the future of reading, or even of book-length works. There will be digital books, as well as the welcome prospect that we'll be spared a lot of needlessly long works (so much nonfiction unfortunately falls into this category) because digital delivery and consumption will revive the monograph, a length that falls between a magazine article and a full-blown book and is therefore unmarketable the way the business is structured today. But I think of Warren Buffet's recent comment about newspaper companies (not worthy buying at any price) and wonder why this should not apply to many of the players in the book business. Enlightening suggestions are of course welcome.
Don't look now but the shopping mall, those air conditioned nowheres that have supplanted downtowns all over America for the past half century, may well be dead. The Wall Street Journal has a story this morning about the large numbers of them likely to succumb to the recession, and the piece contains this remarkable paragraph:
Developers, in fact, have been moving away from the enclosed-mall format in favor of big-box centers anchored by free-standing giants such as Wal-Mart or open-air shopping centers with tiny parks and outdoor cafes sprinkled among fashion stores. Only one enclosed mall has opened in the U.S. since 2006: The Mall at Turtle Creek in Jonesboro, Ark.It's a big change, although the alternative--a big box in a sea of asphalt--isn't anything to write home about. You can read more here, although you may need to be a subscriber.
If you're a new grad or unhappy in your job, or if you just like to read a satisfying extended argument about how we should live, I recommend Matthew Crawford 's brief and powerful Shop Class as Soulcraft: an Inquiry Into the Value of Work, about which you can read here.
Basically, Crawford argues for working with your hands at some craft. But an aspect of his book we shouldn't overlook is that, when he abandoned his pointless exertions at a Washington think tank in order to fix motorcycles, he went into business for himself. In fixing cycles, he does something tangible and he accommodates himself usefully to the demands of the world: customers, the laws of physics etc. But I think it matters a great deal that he's his own boss. And as I emphasized in an earlier post, there's a great deal to be said for that.
Basically, Crawford argues for working with your hands at some craft. But an aspect of his book we shouldn't overlook is that, when he abandoned his pointless exertions at a Washington think tank in order to fix motorcycles, he went into business for himself. In fixing cycles, he does something tangible and he accommodates himself usefully to the demands of the world: customers, the laws of physics etc. But I think it matters a great deal that he's his own boss. And as I emphasized in an earlier post, there's a great deal to be said for that.
It's graduation season again and since I've been out of school for awhile (I understand they no longer use quill pens), I'm no less qualified than anyone else to offer advice. Mine is that, in whatever you do, you should aim to become your own boss.
I mean this in every possible sense in which it can be interpreted, but especially with respect to work. What I'm telling you is that your life will go much better if you subject yourself and your appetites to your own command, which I hope is obvious by now. But you especially want to be your own boss in the arena of employment, which should be avoided except for some initial exposure for the sake of experience. Since jobs are scarce anyway, this message makes me the bearer of good tidings. My claim is that the recession is doing you a favor by pushing you along the path of self-employment.
What's so bad about a job? While these are much more remunerative than people realize (they never properly value benefits, paid vacation and employer Social Security contributions), there's a good chance you'd be unhappy, your career will be subject to the whims of people you despise, and eventually you'll get laid off--very possibly when its too late to get anything else paying half as much. In the future, moreover, national health insurance, global competition and other changes will make jobs even less attractive than they are now in relation to entrepreneurship. And working for yourself means the boss will never discriminate, demand sexual favors, pass you over in favor of some ass-kissing jerk or claim credit for your hard work.
Another option, of course, is joining a guild--by becoming a public school teacher, for example, or a university professor. Clawing your way into a guild will offer a measure of the security increasingly absent from the rest of the job market, but involves trade-offs (low pay, bureaucracy, groupthink) that many of you will find intolerable.
I will admit that self-employment is not for everybody. Yet it may well be in your future whether you like it or not. I'm here to tell you that it's not so bad.
PS--Awhile back i offered this advice to grads, and I still haven't gotten an honorary degree.
I mean this in every possible sense in which it can be interpreted, but especially with respect to work. What I'm telling you is that your life will go much better if you subject yourself and your appetites to your own command, which I hope is obvious by now. But you especially want to be your own boss in the arena of employment, which should be avoided except for some initial exposure for the sake of experience. Since jobs are scarce anyway, this message makes me the bearer of good tidings. My claim is that the recession is doing you a favor by pushing you along the path of self-employment.
What's so bad about a job? While these are much more remunerative than people realize (they never properly value benefits, paid vacation and employer Social Security contributions), there's a good chance you'd be unhappy, your career will be subject to the whims of people you despise, and eventually you'll get laid off--very possibly when its too late to get anything else paying half as much. In the future, moreover, national health insurance, global competition and other changes will make jobs even less attractive than they are now in relation to entrepreneurship. And working for yourself means the boss will never discriminate, demand sexual favors, pass you over in favor of some ass-kissing jerk or claim credit for your hard work.
Another option, of course, is joining a guild--by becoming a public school teacher, for example, or a university professor. Clawing your way into a guild will offer a measure of the security increasingly absent from the rest of the job market, but involves trade-offs (low pay, bureaucracy, groupthink) that many of you will find intolerable.
I will admit that self-employment is not for everybody. Yet it may well be in your future whether you like it or not. I'm here to tell you that it's not so bad.
PS--Awhile back i offered this advice to grads, and I still haven't gotten an honorary degree.
In the Nation, there's an allegation that newspapers have always sucked, so we should just shut up already about their protracted death throes. And I see from the jeering comments on one of my earlier posts that some people agree.
This argument seems to depend on the failure of newspapers to conform to the political perspective of their criticizers. It also seems to depend on the papers' coverage of Washington. If only these newspapers weren't so damned politically correct, or so blind to the perfidy of Republicans, or so timid, or so reckless or--well, you name it.
But Washington isn't my main worry, because shocking as it may seem, there is life elsewhere. I'm worried about who will cover the city government of Peoria, or keep an eye on the courts in Kalamazoo. Who will write up the prep sports and the local controversies? Who will cover the schools and the centenarians? In our small town the local weekly (and yes, it stank up the joint) folded. We get news now by word of mouth, if we get it at all. It's kind of medieval. Never mind the near-invisibility of our state legislators or our representative in Congress.
Of course there's plenty to worry about in Washington too. How long do you think the Washington Post and the NY Times can sustain the burden of this coverage? Or do we really believe we'd all be better off without it?
05/15/09 1:38 PM
The Death of Newspapers (cont'd)
The good news is that auto dealers still advertise in newspapers. The bad news is that a lot of dealers are closing.
The NY Times (still clinging to life) says that GM and Chrysler plan to shut down 3,158 dealers between them, which has got to be yet another bad blow on the advertising front. Not that this dealer advertising would have lasted forever; already, I suspect, people do most of their car shopping on the Internet rather than in the Sunday paper. So sooner or later these ads would have followed help wanted, real estate, clothing and so forth into a new medium.
Yes, it's another nail in the coffin, and not a minute too soon. Once we no longer have newspapers to make us so dumb, we can rest assured that America will launch no further misguided foreign military adventures, that the president will never lie, and that corruption at City Hall in South Succotash, Neb. will cease. We'll be pretty safe from other sources of news as well, since most of the rest of the media relies on newspaper and wire service reporters (paid for by newspapers) to find out what the hell is going on. Then we can all just go on believing what we prefer, untroubled by inconvenient facts to the contrary. Like the song says: what a wonderful world it will be.
The NY Times (still clinging to life) says that GM and Chrysler plan to shut down 3,158 dealers between them, which has got to be yet another bad blow on the advertising front. Not that this dealer advertising would have lasted forever; already, I suspect, people do most of their car shopping on the Internet rather than in the Sunday paper. So sooner or later these ads would have followed help wanted, real estate, clothing and so forth into a new medium.
Yes, it's another nail in the coffin, and not a minute too soon. Once we no longer have newspapers to make us so dumb, we can rest assured that America will launch no further misguided foreign military adventures, that the president will never lie, and that corruption at City Hall in South Succotash, Neb. will cease. We'll be pretty safe from other sources of news as well, since most of the rest of the media relies on newspaper and wire service reporters (paid for by newspapers) to find out what the hell is going on. Then we can all just go on believing what we prefer, untroubled by inconvenient facts to the contrary. Like the song says: what a wonderful world it will be.
Some crank has a piece in the Wall Street Journal this morning about the amazing number of deaths that result every year from smoking, overeating and other risky behaviors. The key grafs:
Dr. Majid Ezzati, a Harvard School of Public Health professor who co-authored the report, estimates that if you net out the double-counting, somewhat more than a million people die annually from the 12 behavioral risk factors, which include the obvious (immoderate alcohol consumption) and the less so (eating too little fish, which provides omega-3 fatty acids).Put more starkly: Of the 2.5 million deaths that occur annually in America, something approaching half could be prevented if people simply led healthier lives.
Compare this to the number of lives (18,000) it's been estimated would be saved annually by universal health insurance--which I'm favor of anyway, and so is Ezzati. Still, the numbers are sobering. An awful lot of deaths are essentially voluntary--so many that, as a group, the American people appear to be committing slow-motion suicide.
(You can read the full study here, and by the way, it doesn't take account of fast-motion suicide, which claims around 33,000 lives annually, or roughly twice the number claimed by homicide. The person most likely to murder you is you!)
Size suddenly matters again, and bigness is taking its lumps across the political spectrum. Conservatives who hate bigness (in government) are joined in this by liberals who hate bigness (in firms). But people have always liked to think that small is beautiful, as E. F. Schumacher put it. Perhaps there is even an evolutionary basis for this, since humans no doubt developed in clannish little groups very different from the vast anonymity of modern society.
Big things make big targets, and now that bewildered taxpayers find themselves in the position of bailing out the nation's largest financial institutions (and these are very large indeed), it's been suggested that if an institution is too big to fail, it's too big to exist.
It's not a bad sentiment, but we might as well face the fact that bigness is here to stay, fueled by things conservatives like (competition, efficiency) as well as things liberals like (universal affluence, regulation). The increasingly global nature of commerce practically mandates it, as does the scale of modern life. Organizational size has made possible the amazing affluence that defines 21st century life in advanced countries, and as affluence grows elsewhere so too will the scale of institutions. Regulations can constrain size, sometimes detrimentally, but people often overlook how effective regulations can be at promoting bigness. From an essay about cheap food in history:
Big things make big targets, and now that bewildered taxpayers find themselves in the position of bailing out the nation's largest financial institutions (and these are very large indeed), it's been suggested that if an institution is too big to fail, it's too big to exist.
It's not a bad sentiment, but we might as well face the fact that bigness is here to stay, fueled by things conservatives like (competition, efficiency) as well as things liberals like (universal affluence, regulation). The increasingly global nature of commerce practically mandates it, as does the scale of modern life. Organizational size has made possible the amazing affluence that defines 21st century life in advanced countries, and as affluence grows elsewhere so too will the scale of institutions. Regulations can constrain size, sometimes detrimentally, but people often overlook how effective regulations can be at promoting bigness. From an essay about cheap food in history:
...mandatory meat inspection, pure food laws, and food safety regulations had the unintended consequences of encouraging bigness and elevating barriers to new firms. The historian Harvey Levenstein notes, for instance, that pasteurization laws led to a rapid consolidation in the milk business: "In Detroit there were 158 milk dealers when the pasteurization law was passed. Within three months the number declined to 68."This is not to say that small isn't beautiful. I love living in a small town. Small businesses are vital, creative and flexible. In short, small can do lots of things big can't, and there will always be room for it, especially since the digital revolution. Just don't pin your hopes on doing away with bigness any time soon, in finance or anything else (wait'll we get national health insurance). It's the next big thing, and in the modern world it always will be.
05/12/09 12:24 PM
But How about Martinis and Tiramisu?
Now comes word (sigh) that vitamins may be harmful to exercisers. Key quote:
Ed, by the way, elucidates his revenge theory of technology in an excellent book, Why Things Bite Back.)
"If you exercise to promote health, you shouldn't take large amounts of antioxidants," Dr. Ristow said. A second message of the study, he said, "is that antioxidants in general cause certain effects that inhibit otherwise positive effects of exercise, dieting and other interventions."This is a classic example of what my friend and fellow Atlantic blogger Ed Tenner calls a revenge effect--an attempt to make things better that ends up making things in some way worse. I believe there's a term in Yiddish for this syndrome, but because bloggers are legislatively prohibited from finding anything out for themselves, perhaps someone out there will enlighten us in the comments.
Ed, by the way, elucidates his revenge theory of technology in an excellent book, Why Things Bite Back.)
A couple of posts down I joked about steroids in Little League, but now this: more and more kids are being held out of kindergarten for an extra year, so that they start school at six rather than five. The reasons are mostly bad, as are the consequences, according to a pretty interesting study from scholars at Harvard's Kennedy School. Some kids gain an advantage by being bigger and older than their peers, but there's a large social cost (not least the lost year of earnings for Social Security). Here's the abstract:
Hat tip to The Wilson Quarterly, which covered this awhile ago.
Forty years ago, 96 percent of six-year-old children were enrolled in first grade or above. As of 2005, the figure was just 84 percent. The school attendance rate of six-year-olds has not decreased; rather, they are increasingly likely to be enrolled in kindergarten rather than first grade. This paper documents this historical shift. We show that only about a quarter of the change can be proximately explained by changes in school entry laws; the rest reflects "academic redshirting," the practice of enrolling a child in a grade lower than the one for which he is eligible. We show that the decreased grade attainment of six-year-olds reverberates well beyond the kindergarten classroom. Recent stagnation in the high school and college completion rates of young people is partly explained by their later start in primary school. The relatively late start of boys in primary school explains a small but significant portion of the rising gender gaps in high school graduation and college completion. Increases in the age of legal school entry intensify socioeconomic differences in educational attainment, since lower-income children are at greater risk of dropping out of school when they reach the legal age of school exit. Read more...
Hat tip to The Wilson Quarterly, which covered this awhile ago.
Walter Pincus, a veteran newspaper guy (and therefore in my book eligible for beatification) has a long essay about how the many failings of these tragic beasts are leading them to extinction. He cites indifference to readers, excessive prize-seeking, government spin doctors, corporate ownership etc. If only they had foreseen the subprime crisis!
Unfortunately, the essay suffers from the self-importance it ascribes to its subject. The real problem is simply that readers and advertisers for various reasons prefer to use the Internet, which is showing no signs of being able to support the elaborate news-gathering operations once underwritten by print ads for women's clothing and used cars.
The truth is that it hardly matters what you put in newspapers these days, and their owners have cottoned to this fact. Good newspapers are losing readers and advertisers just as fast as bad ones, if not faster. I could easily argue that Pincus has it exactly backwards; the problem isn't that newspapers aren't good enough, it's that they aren't bad enough to thrive in a culture that won't pay for quality and finds voyeurism much more compelling than solid news and analysis.
But I don't really believe this. People are reading plenty, and they want news. They just intend to get it online, and we'll all have to adjust to this. As to who will pay for someone to cover City Hall, dig into corruption and in general find things out (as opposed to just pontificating on the Internet), that's what they used to call the $64,000 question, in the days when $64,000 was a lot of money. And everybody read the newspapers.
Unfortunately, the essay suffers from the self-importance it ascribes to its subject. The real problem is simply that readers and advertisers for various reasons prefer to use the Internet, which is showing no signs of being able to support the elaborate news-gathering operations once underwritten by print ads for women's clothing and used cars.
The truth is that it hardly matters what you put in newspapers these days, and their owners have cottoned to this fact. Good newspapers are losing readers and advertisers just as fast as bad ones, if not faster. I could easily argue that Pincus has it exactly backwards; the problem isn't that newspapers aren't good enough, it's that they aren't bad enough to thrive in a culture that won't pay for quality and finds voyeurism much more compelling than solid news and analysis.
But I don't really believe this. People are reading plenty, and they want news. They just intend to get it online, and we'll all have to adjust to this. As to who will pay for someone to cover City Hall, dig into corruption and in general find things out (as opposed to just pontificating on the Internet), that's what they used to call the $64,000 question, in the days when $64,000 was a lot of money. And everybody read the newspapers.
I see that Manny Ramirez is the latest slugger caught up in the steroids scandal. Inevitably, testing will become more widespread; one of my sons is precociously adept at hitting a 60 mph fastball, and while he's out I plan to scour his room for signs of performance enhancing substances (his bamboo bat doesn't count; it says "Little League Approved" right on it).
This 60 mph business is yet another of those things, piling up like the fateful bricks in the Cask of Amontillado, that my kids can do but I can't. Each is a bittersweet reminder--well, never mind all that solemn hooey, we were talking about baseball.
Did you ever see a game from maybe 25 years ago on ESPN classics? Probably there are snippets on YouTube. Anyway in those days ballplayers were built more or less like the rest of us, before the Herman Munster look became so widespread. Testing can help, but in the long run it may be difficult to stem the rising tide of technology in this arena. Consider the impact it's had on the literary world, where performance-enhancing substances are little noted but widely used--as this testimony makes clear.
I struggle with this every day. Can I really earn my keep here at the Atlantic without pharmacological assistance? If I suddenly start hitting the ball out of the park on this blog, you'll know I found something in my young slugger's room.
This 60 mph business is yet another of those things, piling up like the fateful bricks in the Cask of Amontillado, that my kids can do but I can't. Each is a bittersweet reminder--well, never mind all that solemn hooey, we were talking about baseball.
Did you ever see a game from maybe 25 years ago on ESPN classics? Probably there are snippets on YouTube. Anyway in those days ballplayers were built more or less like the rest of us, before the Herman Munster look became so widespread. Testing can help, but in the long run it may be difficult to stem the rising tide of technology in this arena. Consider the impact it's had on the literary world, where performance-enhancing substances are little noted but widely used--as this testimony makes clear.
I struggle with this every day. Can I really earn my keep here at the Atlantic without pharmacological assistance? If I suddenly start hitting the ball out of the park on this blog, you'll know I found something in my young slugger's room.
Everyone knows that we're all dying. But would you really want to know that death was imminent?
There was a time when news of this kind was kept from patients by doctors and even spouses. Recently someone we know, discussing a terminally ill friend, expressed the wish that she herself might be spared the knowledge (when her time comes) that medicine has nothing more to offer, so she could go on with normal life.
Of course the dying have always known, many of them, despite efforts to hide their fate. I believe that Chick Austin, the museum impresario who helped bring modernism to America, knew that the end was near even though the fact was kept from him by everyone. Perhaps he kept up the charade as much for the others as they did for him.
Today, in the face of some potentially fatal disease, it's hard not to know, and patients seem to do better when they take control of their own medical destiny by studying up and making informed decisions. Yet I began to wonder if there was not a mechanism whereby our friend could be granted her wish if ever she gets into such a situation.
Many of us have a health-care proxy and durable power of attorney in case we should become seriously ill. Might it not also be possible to dictate in advance how much we want to be told about a dismal medical prognosis? Perhaps we could designate a spouse to receive the full skinny, while we are allowed to remain in the comforting shadows of self-deception. This would give our friend the chance to have the end of life she seems to want when her time comes (may it be a long way away).
We all use techniques to constrain our future choices, much as Odysseus did by having his men tie him to the mast so he could hear the Sirens but not succumb to their lethal song. And we sometimes use these "precommitment" tactics to insulate ourselves from knowledge we don't want. (There's a pretty interesting book called Forbidden Knowledge on this very subject, by Roger Shattuck, in which the Sirens' song is described in just these terms: Odysseus might be said to want the truth but not the consequences.) Who knows, maybe a lot of what we do every day has this larger purpose: to fend off the knowledge we'll soon die.
There was a time when news of this kind was kept from patients by doctors and even spouses. Recently someone we know, discussing a terminally ill friend, expressed the wish that she herself might be spared the knowledge (when her time comes) that medicine has nothing more to offer, so she could go on with normal life.
Of course the dying have always known, many of them, despite efforts to hide their fate. I believe that Chick Austin, the museum impresario who helped bring modernism to America, knew that the end was near even though the fact was kept from him by everyone. Perhaps he kept up the charade as much for the others as they did for him.
Today, in the face of some potentially fatal disease, it's hard not to know, and patients seem to do better when they take control of their own medical destiny by studying up and making informed decisions. Yet I began to wonder if there was not a mechanism whereby our friend could be granted her wish if ever she gets into such a situation.
Many of us have a health-care proxy and durable power of attorney in case we should become seriously ill. Might it not also be possible to dictate in advance how much we want to be told about a dismal medical prognosis? Perhaps we could designate a spouse to receive the full skinny, while we are allowed to remain in the comforting shadows of self-deception. This would give our friend the chance to have the end of life she seems to want when her time comes (may it be a long way away).
We all use techniques to constrain our future choices, much as Odysseus did by having his men tie him to the mast so he could hear the Sirens but not succumb to their lethal song. And we sometimes use these "precommitment" tactics to insulate ourselves from knowledge we don't want. (There's a pretty interesting book called Forbidden Knowledge on this very subject, by Roger Shattuck, in which the Sirens' song is described in just these terms: Odysseus might be said to want the truth but not the consequences.) Who knows, maybe a lot of what we do every day has this larger purpose: to fend off the knowledge we'll soon die.
Everybody knows that the investment decisions of the average doofus like me are a reliable contrarian indicator, so start shopping for stocks, because the point of this particular post is, as the headline has it, that I'm not buyin'. I say this from the cool penumbra of my last big investment decision, which was to sell every goddamned thing we had, short of the kids and the cats, last spring. It's silly to expect that i'll get so lucky a second time, so I ought to just resume the usual pious agnosticism about not being able to time markets, indexing, etc.
Nonetheless, I'm not buying. I can't figure out what's going on, I don't understand how all these banks could be simultaneously so broke and so profitable, I'm not impressed that the *rate* of deterioration has slowed (I was absent the day they did second-order derivatives in school) and anyway a hard-core unemployable like your correspondent has no business taking on much risk. TIPS and hi-grade corporates and CDs have been very very good to me. I'm especially flummoxed by the REIT run-up. I always liked REITs but commercial real estate looks ugly. Insiders, i might add, are selling with both hands in a variety of sectors.
As I said, make up a shopping list. People like me point reliably in the wrong direction.
Nonetheless, I'm not buying. I can't figure out what's going on, I don't understand how all these banks could be simultaneously so broke and so profitable, I'm not impressed that the *rate* of deterioration has slowed (I was absent the day they did second-order derivatives in school) and anyway a hard-core unemployable like your correspondent has no business taking on much risk. TIPS and hi-grade corporates and CDs have been very very good to me. I'm especially flummoxed by the REIT run-up. I always liked REITs but commercial real estate looks ugly. Insiders, i might add, are selling with both hands in a variety of sectors.
As I said, make up a shopping list. People like me point reliably in the wrong direction.
This morning I made a mental note to have my kids call a physician's office when they get home so they can hear something they've never heard before: a busy signal.
Yes, modern medicine is a marvel. They can remove your large intestine through your left nostril, but they can't get a telephone system that kicks a call over to voicemail when all the lines are in use. You can't get a busy signal calling our house, or anybody else's that I know of, because regular American families have call-waiting, auto-forwarding etc. But medical offices remain museums of hoary communications technology, with all the potential for waste, error and frustration that this implies.
I have one doctor with whom I communicate only by fax because his line is chronically busy. What--you didn't think they'd have email, did you? Doctor's offices never have email. Ok, a few have email--but they're careful never to check it.
Prescriptions of course are scribbled on paper. Awhile back I had one the pharmacist couldn't read. Why on earth are there paper prescriptions? Written by hand? Then again, why are there pharmacists? Couldn't I just insert my credit card into a pill-dispensing machine, the way I do for a pre-ordered Amtrak ticket? Wouldn't this reduce the possibility of errors? Especially if the instructions that came with the pills weren't printed in four-point type with columns a foot wide. Another time I had a scrip for a medical test that the lab tech couldn't read. If I croak I fully expect penmanship to be listed as the cause of death.
There's a lot of talk lately about the billions of dollars it will take to launch online medical records. Maybe we should walk before we run and just get all the doctors gmail accounts. Imagine the salutary effect on the nation's blood pressure when patients no longer have to dial and dial and dial...
Yes, modern medicine is a marvel. They can remove your large intestine through your left nostril, but they can't get a telephone system that kicks a call over to voicemail when all the lines are in use. You can't get a busy signal calling our house, or anybody else's that I know of, because regular American families have call-waiting, auto-forwarding etc. But medical offices remain museums of hoary communications technology, with all the potential for waste, error and frustration that this implies.
I have one doctor with whom I communicate only by fax because his line is chronically busy. What--you didn't think they'd have email, did you? Doctor's offices never have email. Ok, a few have email--but they're careful never to check it.
Prescriptions of course are scribbled on paper. Awhile back I had one the pharmacist couldn't read. Why on earth are there paper prescriptions? Written by hand? Then again, why are there pharmacists? Couldn't I just insert my credit card into a pill-dispensing machine, the way I do for a pre-ordered Amtrak ticket? Wouldn't this reduce the possibility of errors? Especially if the instructions that came with the pills weren't printed in four-point type with columns a foot wide. Another time I had a scrip for a medical test that the lab tech couldn't read. If I croak I fully expect penmanship to be listed as the cause of death.
There's a lot of talk lately about the billions of dollars it will take to launch online medical records. Maybe we should walk before we run and just get all the doctors gmail accounts. Imagine the salutary effect on the nation's blood pressure when patients no longer have to dial and dial and dial...
Daniel Akst
