In the United States, as Warren Buffett put it, we live in a country where valor on the battlefield is rewarded by a medal, and the best teachers get thank-you notes [except now teachers are more likely not to get thank-you notes, but blame for their failure to overcome all the obstacles placed in their way by permissive parenting, excessive and counterproductive regulations, and the need to teach to the tests in order to keep their jobs], while speculators and financial executives get millions.  And similar levels and types of rewards exist in most other industrialized countries.  As most readers know, my wife is a university professor, and this year, after several years of no increases in salary, or token raises of one percent, the faculty at the university received another one percent raise that wasn’t one.

Why not?  Because the university took it all back – and more — in other ways.  Health insurance premiums weren’t raised [that happened last year with a massive increase], but the cost to faculty still went up because the co-pay for prescription drugs was doubled; the co-pay for physician visits was increased; and the procedures covered and the amounts covered were decreased.  Faculty parking charges were instituted.  Departmental budgets were cut by another 15%.  On the other hand, the new university president will get a 15% higher salary than the departing president.

These sorts of “rewards” are far from limited to education. Despite the fact that those Americans who are working happen to be working longer hours than they were thirty years ago, family income, in real dollar terms, has decreased over the past decade for all but the top ten percent, and that decrease doesn’t include increased costs of various sorts passed on to employees in a myriad of ways.  But Goldman Sachs senior employees get hefty bonuses for figuring out how to double the price of aluminum so that the company gets a larger profit while passing the costs on to everyone else.

I don’t mind “rewards” that recognize true efficiency, where the costs for everyone go down, and profits go up without screwing someone else, but these days, all too many executive rewards are awarded for “efficiency” that results in essentially lower pay and longer hours for underlings and often even increased costs to everyone else.  That’s not efficiency, but passing the buck to those who can’t pass it to someone else.

 The last time this sort of business behavior was rampant, over a century ago, it resulted in trust-busting and corporate dismemberment.  That’s one of the very few parts of the not-so-good-old days that we ought to bring back… because it’s all too clear that American business and even large non-profits and state governments aren’t about to reform themselves on their own.  And that in itself is a shame.

The other day I almost committed vehicular manslaughter.  It was anything but my fault, and I’m still fuming about it.

I was driving back from the post office, approaching a light.  The light was green, and I was in the right lane, slowing and signaling for a right turn into the rightmost lane of a four-lane street.  Just as I got around the corner, a skateboarder whizzed off a sidewalk and straight down the middle of my lane going the wrong way and directly at me. I barely managed to get into the inner lane, fortunately empty at the time, to avoid hitting him. The skateboarder was no child, but a long-bearded young man, wearing earbuds and a bemused expression, easily traveling at fifteen miles an hour plus. Had I struck the distracted skateboarder, the results would have been exceedingly painful, if not fatal, for him, and possibly financially, morally, emotionally, and legally wrenching for me. 

The young man who almost hit me head-on was traveling quickly, going the wrong way, wearing earbuds and presumably distracted, and not wearing a helmet. That combination made him a perfect candidate for the Darwin Awards[ a satiric award recognizing individuals who have contributed to human evolution by self-selecting themselves out of the human gene pool by their own unnecessarily foolish actions], as did his apparent lack of awareness of just how dangerous what he was doing happened to be.

Looking at the statistics, this was anything but a freak occurrence. While in recent years, automobile fatalities have been decreasing, and overall pedestrian fatalities have decreased, injuries and fatalities have steadily increased among distracted walkers… and among skateboarders on streets and roads, rather than at skateboard parks. The number of pedestrians injured and killed while on cell phones has prompted several cities to propose penalties and citations for distracted walking, and many schools, universities, and other institutions have imposed restrictions on skateboards because of repeated occurrences of behavior dangerous to both skateboarders and others.

Part of this is because the electronics are clearly so addictive that their users lose touch with the everyday and seemingly mundane world around them, and part of the problem is that far too many young people have been given the message that they are the center of the world.  As a result, they don’t fully appreciate that if they walk or skateboard into the path of a 2,000-5,000 pound vehicle, they run a high probability of being immediately and painfully removed from both the real world and their personal illusory world… not to mention the fact that everyone else will also pay a high price.

But then… that lack of understanding may be why they’re candidates for the Darwin Award.

Almost all thinking people, and more than a few who couldn’t be considered the most pensive of individuals on the planet, bridle at the thought of being stereotyped. Stereotyping is decried, particularly by individuals in groups that are most subject to negative stereotypes, and stereotyping is considered by many as merely another form of bias or prejudice, leading to one form of discrimination or another. 

Yet stereotypes continue to persist, whether publicly acknowledged, and even if decried.  They persist, as I’ve noted earlier, because people believe in them.  They are two reasons for such belief, first, because belief in the stereotype fulfills some personal or cultural need, and second, because there is a significant percentage of individuals within a given group that suggests the stereotype has some validity.  And sometimes they do, often happily, but more often, unhappily.

We have some very dear Greek friends, who have a large and very vociferously vocal family passionate in expressing their views on pretty much everything – and all of them take pride in that characteristic, insisting that it is a feature of most Greek families. I have yet to meet a shy and retiring Greek, although it is certain there must be more than a few.  This is a case of fairly innocuous stereotyping, but other stereotypes can and have been brutal and fatal, as Hitler’s “final solution” for the Jewish people of Europe demonstrated.

Yet… what if a stereotype has a basis in fact, in cold and statistics, if you will?  What if, for example, “white collar crime” is indeed indicative of the overwhelming prevalence of Caucasians engaging in it [which does seem in fact to be the case]? 

Under these circumstances, when should we ignore the stereotype?  Go out of our way to make certain we don’t “prejudice” our actions or attitudes?  In some cases, probably we should.  I certainly shouldn’t be surprised or astounded to find a quiet Greek.  But in other cases… ignoring stereotypes can in fact be dangerous.  Walking down dark alleys in inner cities, stereotyped as dangerous, is indeed dangerous, and because it is, one might be better off in heeding the stereotype. 

In short, like everything else, stereotypes arise for a reason, sometimes useful, sometimes not, and sometimes very deadly, and we, as individuals, have to decide where a given stereotype fits… which requires thinking, and that, unhappily, is where most of us fail, because stereotypes are a mental shortcut, and blindly accepting or rejecting shortcuts can too often lead to unexpected and, too often, unfortunate results.

As human beings, we’re quick to react to sudden and immediate dangers, from the mythical snapping twig that suggests an approaching predator to sirens or an ominous-looking individual. Often, we react too quickly and at times totally incorrectly.  But we react… to those kinds of dangers.  We also react to perceived threats on our “rights,” not so quickly, but at times even more violently.

What we don’t react well to, and slowly, and usually less than perfectly, are to those changes in our world that have turned perceived “good things” into indicators of dangers.  And the recent Department of Justice “victory” over Apple and the major publishers on ebook pricing is just one recent example of this.  Now… I’m not exactly an Apple fan.  I own no Apple products whatsoever, and I think that the I-Phone and its clones are harbingers of disaster [although in the interest of full disclosure, I will note that my wife does own a single IPad and that I am indeed an author whose income depends very much on the health of the book market.].  As I noted much earlier, the DOJ case against Apple and the publishers was based on the case that Amazon’s dominance of the ebook market [over 90% at the time] was essentially irrelevant because Amazon was charging lower prices than those Apple and the publishers were charging under the “agency model.”  And the letter of the anti-trust laws supported DOJ, as did the courts. 

The problem/danger here is the failure of Congress, the Judiciary, and the American people to recognize that “lower prices” aren’t always better, and in fact, they can be a symptom of great danger.  Lower prices are great, assuming that your income is stable or increasing.  But are lower prices so good if they cause the actual standard of living of the majority of Americans to decline?  Certainly, homebuilders and construction workers might well argue that the oversupply and cheap prices of existing housing was anything but good for them or the economy. What is important is the relationship between wages and prices, not just how low prices are.  If prices are down twenty percent, but your income is cut in half, you lose… maybe everything.  This tends to be overlooked in today’s economy and consumer culture.

And what is the relevance to law and the Apple decision?  Simply this – old style monopoly was the restriction of trade to raise prices and increase corporate profits.  Under the old-style [and current definition] of monopoly, lower prices are not a danger but a good thing.  The problem is that today we have a new kind of monopolist, as embodied in Amazon and Walmart.  These “new” monopolists use low prices to gain a dominant market share, and once they have that share, they use their power to force their suppliers to provide goods and services at lower prices, outsourcing overseas, doing whatever it takes.  This means those suppliers must cut their costs to stay in business, and that means lower wages.  It also means that manufacturing here in the United States either automates or outsources to lower wage areas.  In the end, the new monopolist still has large-scale profits which are not so high in percentage terms, but so much larger in scale that the percentage decline is acceptable.  This kind of “new” monopoly has taken over especially in consumer goods and retail industries, but it’s also appearing, if more slowly, in everything from finance to automaking…and, at the same time, Americans keep scrambling for bargains… without realizing exactly what the long-term cost of those “low prices” happens to be.

Happy shopping!

My wife the opera singer and university professor has been involved in pretty much all levels of public performance and voice and opera teaching, production, and administration over more than three decades…and one of the most appalling changes she [and I as well] has noticed is the shift from a standing ovation being an infrequent occurrence after a performance to it becoming apparently almost obligatory. She is certainly not the only one in the field who has noted this. Alex Ross, the music critic for The New Yorker, made the same observation, especially in regard to Broadway plays, several years ago.

There are doubtless numerous reasons for this shift, one certainly being the aging of generations taught to believe that everyone is “wonderful,” but there are two others that likely play an equal part in this decline of apparent ability, or unwillingness, to judge quality, particularly in the arts. The first is a growing belief that, in areas of society where qualitative excellence cannot be quantified or measured “objectively,” everyone’s opinion is equal, and that what one likes is always excellent, and that anyone who suggests otherwise is simply out of step.

The other contributing factor is an almost inchoate belief within current society that suggests that any judgment embodying negativity, or even a belief that competence is not excellence, is somehow “bad.”  This is evidenced implicitly by the shift in the word “discrimination” over the past fifty years.  At one time, to show discrimination meant the ability to distinguish between good and bad, to be able to distinguish between what was good, very good, or excellent.  Now, to discriminate means to show bias or prejudice, a totally negative meaning with unfavorable connotations as well.  At present, there does not exist a single word in the English language that conveys approvingly the idea of being able to make such judgments.  Because simple and direct words are the strongest, this lack effectively, if you will, denigrates the entire concept of constructive judgment or criticism.  By the same token, critical judgment now carries the connotation, if not the denotation, of severity or negativity.

Since when is NOT giving a standing ovation a measure of negativity?  Yet it appears that audiences have come to feel that “mere” applause is not enough. 

Then again, perhaps I’ve missed it all, and standing ovations are merely the supersized version of applause, the symptom of a society that always wants more, whether it’s useful or healthy.