The other day, for various reasons, I was sent on an errand to find some hard candy – something like sour balls.  So… I went to the WalMart.  Not a single form of hard candy except cinnamon disks, Life-Savers, and lemon drops.  I tried the grocery stores, as well as the convenience stores.  No better luck there.  I did find a range of old-fashioned hard candies – if not sour balls – in the local ranch supply store.

But this search got me to thinking.  When I was younger you could find a range of hard sugar candies in every grocery store… and not just Life-Savers and lemon drops.  Now… it’s as though every form of hard candy except lemon drops is an endangered species of confectionery. WalMart and the supermarkets have an entire double aisle of candies, ranging from a vast array of chocolate in some form or another to an even greater array of “soft” candies, such as “gummi” candies, chewy worms and animals of all sorts, gourmet jelly beans… I couldn’t even begin to describe all the varieties.  What they all have in common is that they’re soft, sweet, if also sometimes sour or hot, and easily chewed and swallowed in large numbers. 

After considering this considerable amplitude of soft confectioneries, I realized that, at least in some ways, the growing emphasis on softness and ease of consumption reflects to a large degree changes in the American life-style… as well as provides a supplementary reason for the increasing percentage of overweight and obese Americans.

Candies aren’t the only area where this has occurred.  When I was a boy, a Coke was a treat, and the small glass bottle was considered more than large enough. Although recently, some soft drink companies are offering small cans and bottles, the majority of soft drinks, both regular and diet, come in at least 12 ounce cans, if not 16 ounce bottles and larger.  The same is true of beer

As for candy, though, consider this.  It takes more time and effort to suck – or crunch – a hard sugar candy.  Sour balls and other hard sugar candies were designed to last. Hard candies are, I fear, a remnant of a time when sweets were not so common, and, for many in economic times that were harder than now [no matter what the media analysts say], they were a small luxury to be savored, not to be gulped down one right after the other in rapid succession.

And like our candies, we’ve gone from being hard and tough to softer and squishier… and a lot larger.

In the past, I’ve commented about the lack of appreciation and gratitude that permeates our society today, but there’s another factor behind that lack of appreciation that, frankly, I hadn’t considered.  What is it?  The magic mouse, of course… and I’m not talking about Disney creations.

The biggest unforeseen and unanticipated aspect of the computer and high-tech society is, I believe, the way in which it conceals the amount of work required to accomplish anything, not to mention the way in which it has shifted work. What exactly am I talking about?  Take a modern animated film, for example.  In the days before computer graphics, artists literally drew each cell, each slightly different from the previous cell, to show motion when filmed at the proper number of cells per minute.  The amount of physical work required was prodigious, even for a short film.  Today, a handful of people do the same amount of creation in a fraction of the time, and everyone takes it for granted, and dismisses it.  Except… there’s still a great deal of work being done, but much of it is behind the scenes, lying in the work in designing and building the computer hardware and software… and this is work that is seldom discussed, understood, or even appreciated. 

Once upon a time, I did economic analysis work, back before computers could crunch the numbers instantly and print out all the data, analyzed and presented under different scenarios.  Yet, more and more I find that too many “analysts” don’t even truly know what the numbers are or what they might portend… because they haven’t “worked” with those numbers.  They have no “feel” for the numbers, and because they don’t, they have no appreciation for those analysts who do… and have worked to understand what the numbers really mean.

Students, as I’ve noted more than once, more and more equate the ability to find information with the ability to understand what it means, and when asked what it means generally simply repeat what someone else, online, says what it means.  This has two negative impacts, first, the denigration of the effort needed to find and present information, because it’s available to them with a few clicks of the magic mouse, and, second, the reluctance/inability to think about that information in any deep way because of the myriad of interpretations already available.  Instead of thinking, they resort to magic mouse multiple choice among the options available on the internet.

Instead of appreciation for all these technological miracles, more and more there’s a range of feeling from acceptance to dissatisfaction, and, more important, it bleeds over into everything else.  There used to be employers who appreciated good work;  now employees are viewed more like computer aps and software – disposable and replaceable with the latest version.  Students and parents used to appreciate teachers; and teachers got notes of appreciation from students and parents.  Now all the teachers get is complaints. 

While there are many factors behind this change, the one that I don’t see being addressed is that of the “magic mouse,”  the idea that anything just takes a click of a mouse or a finger across a smart-phone to get the job done.  When everything is perceived as easy or almost effortless, there’s little reason to appreciate anything – and all too many Americans don’t.

Some time back, I came across an article buried in one of the journals I take.  I don’t even remember the title, but it was an analysis of why women haven’t made the strides that many expected in U.S. business, especially since we’re now entering the third generation since it’s been at least technically possible for a large number of women to be considered for corporate executive positions. The author(s) discovered that, in general, women were superior to their male counterparts in every aspect of business – except one, and that one “lack” made all the difference.  What was that “lack?”  The inability to build and maintain wide-spread and growing networks and alliances.  Further, the authors also noted that this lack was prevalent even when there were enough women in an organization to do exactly that.

In a way, considering the history of the species, none of this should come as a shock.  How else could a bunch of semi-intelligent monkeys end up as the top species in a world that featured, on an individual basis, species that were tougher, stronger, faster, and more deadly?

In more recent history, say the last 6,000 years or so, more than a few examples tend to support the “male groupie” theory.  With the possible exception of Christian Science, virtually every religion that has transcended “local cult” status has been launched and networked into prominence by men.  The vast majority, if not all cultures, feature interlocked male networks, beginning in early adolescence. And failure to go along with the group, especially those groups that function as gangs, can be anything from painful to deadly, as human history has demonstrated.  What seems to get overlooked about these group dynamics, however, is that they remain predominantly if not overwhelmingly male, and that personal and physical power rather than overall ability determines the group dynamics, whether it’s a local gang or an investment bank.  Study after study has shown that tall men get more respect and more money than shorter men who are more able, and even short men get more money than more able women.  The tall guys are also generally able to build and control wider networks.

As far as business goes, there are other trends.  One is setting up structures and office politics where, somehow, especially when there are few women, they almost invariably end up being positioned [by men] in a way that they’re competing against each other, or against the only man who’s on the outs. After more than thirty years in government, business, and academia, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen this scenario.

Here in Utah, we’ve just witnessed another graphic example of what happens, even when you’re male, and you go against the group, or the good ol’ boys.  Late in 2008, the Bush Administration directed the Bureau of Land Management to make 149,000 acres in Utah available for oil and gas leasing, with an auction set on December 18^th, despite wide-spread environmental protests that the land was environmentally protected.  A 29 year old student, Tim DeChistopher, unable to even witness the auction unless he registered as a bidder, did in fact register as a bidder.  As a protest, he bid for parcels of land for which he could not pay, effectively keeping the lands from being auctioned off.  He was charged with fraud and disrupting the auction.  Subsequently, federal judges declared that the Bush Administration’s actions were illegal, and the Secretary of Interior withdrew the land from consideration on environmental grounds.  Even so, for two years, the federal prosecutors pursued the case, and last week the student was convicted of two felony counts for disrupting an auction declared illegal by the courts two years earlier.  Interestingly, enough, since the courts made the auction moot, in effect, Tim DeChristopher defrauded no one.  But he didn’t go along with the good ol’ boys, and he made them look bad.  That means he may go to jail, and he won’t be accompanied by any of the Bush Administration officials who also effectively violated federal law.

My favorite case along these lines was the conviction of Martha Stewart for inside trading.  She went to jail for using inside information in trying to make some extra cash on stock trades of her own stock of her own company paid for with her own money.  Should she have been convicted?  Absolutely – but why should she have gone to prison, when her offense involved mere thousands of dollars and when virtually no men convicted of the same type of offense, often involving far larger dollar sums, got much more than fines, probation, or slaps on the wrist?  And recently, more to the point, not a single man involved in all the offenses that caused the financial melt-down of the economy has been even charged, let alone convicted, or sent to prison.  Have any of the thousands who created fraudulent securities, based on fraudulent mortgages, with fraudulent ratings seen the inside of a courtroom?  No… the good ol’ boys of finance, with their interlocking networks, have sold the world a bill of goods that the financial crash was somehow an act of God [also male, in most theologies].

So Tim DeChristopher and Martha Stewart get convicted, and the executives of Goldman-Sachs get billions in bonuses.

In the end, little has changed in the last thirty years.  Despite the fact that women, according to the study, do everything better than men – except gang-mentality bullying of a slightly more refined nature, charitably called networking – they still only represent three percent of the chief executives of the thousand largest companies in the U.S., despite the fact women-run companies tend to perform better.

As for that study… I haven’t seen a single follow-up, or another mention of it or other studies along that line.  I can’t imagine why.

Over the past month, particularly in Wisconsin and a few other states, and on the federal level, there’s been a surfeit of political rhetoric about the need for fiscal responsibility, affordable public services, and the need to cut back on unnecessary government/public spending.  On the surface, and indeed on the balance sheets of many states and the federal government, this looks to be an accurate picture of the fiscal status of the United States, or at least of the governmental entities of the United States.

But just how accurate is that “picture,” especially if examined in a larger context?  And how did the states get into that predicament?

I can’t speak to all the states, but here in Utah, when times were flush, the state legislature cut tax rates, reducing revenue by more than 10 percent as well as cutting sales taxes rates on food.  Of course, once the economy turned sour, so did tax receipts, but it’s rather duplicitous to blame government for “wasteful” spending, especially when Utah has the lowest per capita spending on education of any state in the union.

Similar patterns seemed to have occurred in other states as well, and yet no one seems to be talking about returning tax rates to previous levels.

According to BLS statistics, the average American household spends about as much on entertainment, tobacco and alcohol as it spends on education [through its share of state and local taxes].  And if you add in fast food, the average household spends 60% more on  entertainment, tobacco, alcohol, and fast food than it does on public education [through state and local taxes].

In general, more than 90% of public primary and secondary education costs are paid through state and local taxes, including sales taxes.  And, on average, these taxes run 8-9% of family income. While much has been made of the fact that 47% of all U.S. households owe no federal income taxes, I’d be among the first to admit that figure is misleading.  The problem is that it’s so misleading that it clouds the issues.  In fact, less than 10% of all households pay no federal taxes, and the average federal tax rate for the “47 percent” runs about 14 percent, taking into account federal payroll taxes, federal gas and excise taxes, and other indirect federal taxes.

The problem here is that the same math applies to those in higher tax brackets as well, so that someone in the 30% federal tax bracket may well be paying 50% in taxes, after one factors in state, local, and sales taxes.  In practice, this tends to suggest that additional funds can’t be obtained easily from trying to hike taxes significantly from supposedly more affluent families who are “undertaxed.”

Yet…less than a one percent increase in state income tax receipts would resolve the budget problems of all but a handful of states [such as California, Arizona, and Nevada], and the monthly increase in state taxes would range from $20- $60 a month for most families, which, by the way, is about 10% of the average family’s monthly fast food bill.

So… is the question really about “affordability”… or is it about politics, and the fact that both politicians and Americans value fast food, entertainment, and other items they view as necessities more than they do education?

Once upon a time, there was an author who wrote a near-future science fiction thriller about a former military officer who had pioneered a technique for evaluating product placement in entertainment.  In case, you haven’t guessed, I was that author, and the book was Flash, which was published in September 2004.  Well… last week, Entertainment Weekly [on EW.com] published a story on the Brandcameo Product Placement Award Winners for 2010.  Yes, there’s actually a series of awards about the effectiveness of product placement in movies.

At the time I wrote Flash, product placement was just taking off, and I thought that, once various devices that let viewers flash past commercials on television become more common, product placement would be the advertising of the future… and it still is, because people are still watching television commercials, and, in fact, commercials are becoming a form of entertainment, at least for some viewers.  Where product placement has really taken off is in the movies.

The movie Iron Man 2 won the award for the most commercial placements, with 64 different placements, while Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps won the dubious award for the worse product placement.  And Apple won an award for the most appearances in hit films, with Apple products showing up in ten (or 30%) of the 33 films that were number one U.S. box office films in 2010, outstripping any other single brand for the year.  Somehow, that doesn’t surprise me.

Obviously, I wasn’t as far ahead of events as I thought I was.  In fact, I was behind the times in some ways, because when I checked into the product placement awards, I discovered that they’ve been awarding them since 2001, three years before Flash was published, and two before I even wrote it – and I’d never even heard of the awards until this year.

On the other hand, I’m still ahead of the times in terms of what I postulated, because product placements haven’t yet replaced commercials on television and… so far, unlike my hero Jonat deVrai, no one has yet figured out the effectiveness of a given product placement.

Still… I’ll take being partly right any day, especially in regard to television and its commercialism.