August 2009 Archives
Mike Winerip has a fine, sad story in the New York Times about a 58-year-old man who went from a highly paid executive position to 18 months of unemployment. Of course billions of people (in war-zones, hospices, etc.) are worse off. But what I found interesting about the piece is that this man's life seems to encapsulate everything that is best and worst in American life.
On the one hand, he enjoyed a level of freedom and affluence that would have been unimaginable to most people not long ago--or to many of the world's people today. On the other hand, he's a strange, free-floating form of being, lost in time-space, a victim of the intense specialization and mobility that modern life fosters. When things were good, he used this freedom to leave his wife. Since he could work from home (at a job he can barely explain), he moved from suburban Washington, DC, to somewhere in Florida. Then his job went away and he moved to suburban New York, where he thought there would be more opportunities. But there are none. Prospective
employers want applications to be submitted electronically, then never respond to them, so that the whole thing seems an exercise in futility, like yoo-hooing frantically into the void. Now he has no job, no apparent community and no particular prospects. He lives alone, of course. I should think his current situation, to many of the world's people, would be terrifying.
Yet he strives to reinvent himself. He's writing genre novels, taking notes on his Blackberry. It's great that he doesn't just sit home, drinking beer and watching TV (like everyone else!), but what a sad pickle. I cannot think of a recent article that captures more effectively both the great opportunities and terrible pitfalls of life in our society.
Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/exalthim/226974610
On the one hand, he enjoyed a level of freedom and affluence that would have been unimaginable to most people not long ago--or to many of the world's people today. On the other hand, he's a strange, free-floating form of being, lost in time-space, a victim of the intense specialization and mobility that modern life fosters. When things were good, he used this freedom to leave his wife. Since he could work from home (at a job he can barely explain), he moved from suburban Washington, DC, to somewhere in Florida. Then his job went away and he moved to suburban New York, where he thought there would be more opportunities. But there are none. Prospective
employers want applications to be submitted electronically, then never respond to them, so that the whole thing seems an exercise in futility, like yoo-hooing frantically into the void. Now he has no job, no apparent community and no particular prospects. He lives alone, of course. I should think his current situation, to many of the world's people, would be terrifying.Yet he strives to reinvent himself. He's writing genre novels, taking notes on his Blackberry. It's great that he doesn't just sit home, drinking beer and watching TV (like everyone else!), but what a sad pickle. I cannot think of a recent article that captures more effectively both the great opportunities and terrible pitfalls of life in our society.
Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/exalthim/226974610
For years Hollywood has peddled crappy, simplistic movies about a heroic little person standing up to greedy corporations, unfeeling bureaucrats and other such stock villains. So it's hard not to feel there's some kind of poetic justice in the attacks leveled at the Motion Picture and Television Fund (and it's many rich and famous trustees) over plans to close the organization's venerable home for the aged.
You can read all about it here. The problem is that the Fund's geriatric center takes care of a tiny number of people at enormous expense. It runs huge deficits. And the costs are borne by the many thousands of other beneficiaries who rely on the Fund for benefits.
But since the people in the geriatric facility are quite old, and since the charity's various boards includes such zillionaires as Jeff Katzenberg and David Geffen, the battle over whether to close the facility is shaping up to be a Hollywood classic complete with plucky victims, cold-hearted tycoons--and a cast of thousands of invisible losers in the form of other Fund beneficiaries who need services and are no less entitled to them than the oldsters who are soaking up millions by their refusal to move. (Like any good picture, this one is rich with social metaphor.)
Never mind. Who cares about all those other people and the justice of their claims? What matters here is finding the cranky but lovable leader of the old-timers. It's Home Alone meets The Sunshine Boys! Let's just hope there's a hot young nurse for our hero to team up with.
You can read all about it here. The problem is that the Fund's geriatric center takes care of a tiny number of people at enormous expense. It runs huge deficits. And the costs are borne by the many thousands of other beneficiaries who rely on the Fund for benefits.
But since the people in the geriatric facility are quite old, and since the charity's various boards includes such zillionaires as Jeff Katzenberg and David Geffen, the battle over whether to close the facility is shaping up to be a Hollywood classic complete with plucky victims, cold-hearted tycoons--and a cast of thousands of invisible losers in the form of other Fund beneficiaries who need services and are no less entitled to them than the oldsters who are soaking up millions by their refusal to move. (Like any good picture, this one is rich with social metaphor.)
Never mind. Who cares about all those other people and the justice of their claims? What matters here is finding the cranky but lovable leader of the old-timers. It's Home Alone meets The Sunshine Boys! Let's just hope there's a hot young nurse for our hero to team up with.
Bedbugs are getting more and more attention lately, which makes me wonder if anyone is ever going to test my pet theory about this -- that the growth of the problem is related to the ability of the Internet to bring together buyers and sellers of used stuff. Craigslist would seem to offer the ideal natural experiment. Some enterprising economics grad students needs to look at the dates on which Craigslist established itself in various locales, and then see if there is any correlation with the rise of bedbugs in those cities. (For those who aren't aware of it, Craigslist is hugely popular for buying and selling used furniture, including beds, futons etc.)
But why stop at bedbugs? Craigslist is also commonly used for sexual hook-ups. I wonder if there is any city-by-city correlation with STDs? More mundanely, Craigslist is draining the lifeblood of newspapers by grabbing their classified ads, which on Craigslist are free. Is there a correlation between the arrival of Clist in a city and the decline of the local paper?
This bedbug business threatens to short-circuit what seemed an economical and environmentally sound trend: buying all kinds of things (furniture and clothes especially) second-hand on Craigslist, eBay or at garage sales. We've done a lot of this at our house, but I suspect a moratorium is about to descend.
(Photo: Wiki Commons)
For awhile now I've been dragging my feet on the task of upgrading our family's cell-phone service. It's the usual story: we want iPhones but we also want Verizon. There are four of us so it costs too much. And in general I have the idea that the cell-phone companies are gouging through their control of the regulatory environment.Having just returned from Europe, I find the shortcomings in American cell service particularly stark. If you too have a sense of being vaguely wronged (I have to marry a company for two years just to get a phone?!), check out this scathing piece on the whole subject, which lays it all out pretty nicely. The executive summary: we are getting royally screwed by anti-competitive practices and regulatory capture. And we pay for it every month.
It would seem to me that some ambitious politician ought to be able to make a lot of hay here. Evidently we can't expect much from Congress, which is largely bought and paid for (all of them? really? well it seems that way anyway). And sadly, Eliot Spitzer didn't get around to taking on these guys before he crashed and burned. Perhaps Andrew Cuomo (NY's current Attorney General) will do something. I can't imagine a more potentially popular crusade.
(Photo: Flickr User masochismtango)
The Associated Press has a fascinating story about an unrepentant man who says he sold a kidney for $20,000, saving the life of a guy on Long Island who allegedly posed as his cousin. Legal questions aside, I can't imagine what's wrong with any of this. I hope black market kidneys will be available if I ever need one. Better yet, I hope we abolish the black market by establishing a sensible, regulated marketplace so that people needn't become criminals to save their own lives.
Yesterday my friend Chris and I drove into the Alps from Vienna, and during the trip I asked him a question that's been puzzling me. Why, given their horrific history during the 20th century, aren't Europeans more wary of the power of the state? After the horrors of WW I, the rise of European fascism, the Nazis, the Second World War, the protracted disaster of Communism etc., it would seem to me that something like paranoia would be the mildest sensible response toward government. Yet instead people chose to give the state pretty much complete power over education (including universities), broadcasting, health care and pensions. The government mostly controls the economy as well, taking and disbursing about half of GDP. Even speech is more regulated (try denying the Holocaust in public).
The only conclusion I can draw is that people were very willing here to trade freedom for security (isn't that what got them into so much trouble in the first place? but never mind). And so far, it doesn't seem a bad trade; I doubt most European voters would even understand what I'm talking about, and would insist that they are the ones who are free (from destitution, for example). The state seems benign, if (to an outsider) pervasive.
I am willing to acknowledge that for the great mass of people this might well be the best way to organize the world, yet I wonder if Americans could ever be happy with the feeling of such limited possibilities. As to my original question, the Anglo-Israeli historian Avner Offer suggests an interesting answer in his paper Why Has the Public Sector Grown So Large?
His argument is essentially that sophisticated voters know they can't use their own money as advantageously as the government can; taxing themselves in exchange for social benefits is a kind of commitment device against their own profligacy and myopia. Even in America, after all, the public sector eats up a third of GDP without even counting a lot of health care spending. And the voters strongly support Social Security, a classic public-sector commitment device.
(Photo: Flickr User aficio2008)
I've been in London for about a week, assuaging my time-zone difficulties, late at night, with the Yanks and Red Sox on ESPN America. Given the upheaval going on in the newspaper business in the States, it's been interesting to read the papers here, because I think they give some sense of where we're going with ours. There are a lot of them, sort of, but they seem largely national rather than local, and beneath their surface vitality the quality of reporting and editing is disappointing.
My very subjective experience is that articles in the papers here tend to be much thinner (a single source, or maybe two, or maybe the sourcing is entirely vague), seem to have a more obvious agenda, and often are hyped out of all proportion to promote newsstand sales.
A good example: The Independent the other day blared, "Secret Deal to Keep Karzai in Power" across page 1. But the lede says Karzai "is trying to cut a secret deal with one of his rivals to knock out his leading contender and ensure a decisive victory." This is right under the giant headline! And there is no real sourcing whatsoever; there is just "officials.
In general, I haven't seen a paper that comes close to the breadth or professionalism of The New York Times, Washington Post or a great regional paper like The Boston Globe. There isn't much local coverage either, although London's many boroughs, which function like an agglomeration of villages and have local politics etc., seem to have weeklies that focus on them. (On the other side of the balance sheet, there is the BBC, to which we have nothing comparable except perhaps on radio with the growing power and reach of NPR.)
I've talked about this in the past with my well-traveled friend Nick Schultz and so raised the subject anew yesterday. Here is what he said:
(Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bchu81/613680775)
My very subjective experience is that articles in the papers here tend to be much thinner (a single source, or maybe two, or maybe the sourcing is entirely vague), seem to have a more obvious agenda, and often are hyped out of all proportion to promote newsstand sales.A good example: The Independent the other day blared, "Secret Deal to Keep Karzai in Power" across page 1. But the lede says Karzai "is trying to cut a secret deal with one of his rivals to knock out his leading contender and ensure a decisive victory." This is right under the giant headline! And there is no real sourcing whatsoever; there is just "officials.
In general, I haven't seen a paper that comes close to the breadth or professionalism of The New York Times, Washington Post or a great regional paper like The Boston Globe. There isn't much local coverage either, although London's many boroughs, which function like an agglomeration of villages and have local politics etc., seem to have weeklies that focus on them. (On the other side of the balance sheet, there is the BBC, to which we have nothing comparable except perhaps on radio with the growing power and reach of NPR.)
I've talked about this in the past with my well-traveled friend Nick Schultz and so raised the subject anew yesterday. Here is what he said:
...it's oh so much worse in other countries. India has a thriving press--lots of papers, lots of competition, huge markets, etc.--but the quality is abysmal there, too. Look, there's lots wrong with American media, but American newspapers are a singular achievement in terms of quality and substance. We will likely lose that over the next ten years or so and it will be a shame. A lot of factors conspired together to make American newspapers really high quality. Those factors are evaporating, and so quality will evaporate. I do not look forward to that time--not as a sentimentalist but as someone who enjoys good news reporting and information gathering and is willing to pay for it. Maybe the market will work something out. Doubtful.That's what made this admittedly casual exercise particularly interesting to me: I believe American papers soon enough will be more like those in Britain, with many fewer ads, smaller staffs doing quicker but perhaps shallower work, a greater reliance on freelancers and a higher ratio of commentary (which is cheaper) to reporting.
(Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bchu81/613680775)
Journalists love anniversaries, but I'm surprised that hardly anyone has noticed a significant one: this month is the centennial of Freud's first and only visit to America.
Sigmund Freud hated America. He couldn't stand being called "Sigmund" by his informal hosts. He believed that Americans had channeled their sexuality into an unhealthy obsession with money. And he seethed at his own need for the dollars that we had in such unseemly abundance. "Is it not sad," he wrote to a German friend after World War I, "that we are materially dependent on these savages, who are not a better class of human beings?"
But while Freud loathed all things American (except its currency), the feeling was anything but mutual. "No nation outside of Germany and Austria was more hospitable to psychoanalysis than America," notes Mark Edmundson in "The Death of Sigmund Freud" (2007). Freud may even have anticipated the eagerness with which Americans would embrace his theories. "We are bringing them the plague," he reportedly told colleagues when disembarking in New York. "And they don't even know it."
Read the rest here.
Daniel Akst
