On Christmas Eve day, my wife and I watched It’s a Wonderful Life. After it was over, she turned to me and said, “The world needs more George Baileys and a lot fewer Potters.” She wasn’t talking just about their differing outlooks on life, and her words got me to thinking. She was right, of course, because she usually is, but especially in the deeper sense.

George Bailey spends his entire life in the small town of Bedford Falls, running the building and loan society, making loans to the working people, occasionally giving them a month or day of grace in making their house payments. He judges people on their character, not on their balance sheets. He never makes enough money for a high standard of living, and he and his wife live in a drafty old house that she, largely, has fixed up. Mr. Potter, of course, is the banker and businessman for whom success is measured strictly by the dollars earned, the return on investment, the overall profitability. Potter won’t hesitate to foreclose, to call for a bank examiner, or even keep money inadvertently left on his premises by Uncle Billy. He will unhesitatingly employ any tactic to boost his profitability, even those marginally legal. Like so many of the recent Wall Street CEOs whose ill-considered pursuit of maximum profit at any cost led to the current financial and economic crisis, and who walked away with ill-gotten gains without either guilt or punishment, so does Potter. He almost destroys the better man, and he still gets to keep the money and is never punished. All along the way, George Bailey builds a better Bedford Falls, even using his honeymoon savings. Potter is a parasite upon the town, yet he represents himself as a financially responsible pillar of the community.

Critics of the film have called it “Capra-corn,” a pun on the name of the director, but Frank Capra produced a film that was not only feel-good and sentimental, but one that encapsulated an economic truth that has tended to be overshadowed by the holiday sentiment generated by the plot and actors. One of the sad things about the film is that, while we have accepted it as a “holiday classic,” so to speak, we’ve ignored the deeper meaning behind that sentiment. When we haven’t been watching the film, we’ve forgotten the George Baileys of the world, and idolized the Potters.

And now we’re paying for that ill-considered idolization.

Congressional committees have revealed that executives of various banking and financial firms who ran them into financial disasters have already received over one billion dollars in bonuses and “expenses.” It appears likely that the various bailout plans will cost well over a trillion dollars, and it’s not even certain how effective they’ll be. In the meantime, states and local governments are cutting budgets right and left, because most states have constitutions that prohibit deficit spending, and most state politicians have an incredible aversion to maintaining reserves for hard times when state revenues are solid. They’d rather splurge or offer tax reductions. This idiocy, of course, means that when the national economy turns bad, matters get even worse on the state level, because the states don’t generally have recourse to deficit spending, and increasing taxes during economic bad times usually only decreases total revenues.

Here in the great state of Utah, for example, the legislature is talking about slashing the budget by over 20%, five percent since October, and fifteen percent next year. The single largest cuts will be in education, needless to say, despite the fact that Utah is dead last in per pupil spending on the elementary and secondary level, despite the fact that 13,500 new pupils are expected to enroll in school next year, and despite the fact that close to half of all public school funding comes from the state. In addition, the state junior colleges, colleges, and universities are projected to be required to cut close to a thousand positions, as well as eliminate a large percentage of part-time faculty. Needless to say, it doesn’t appear that the legislature has actually looked at the situation at most institutions, or at the findings of the state board of regents who noted that in times of economic down-turn, enrollments in college and post-graduate work go up. Nor does anyone seem to be noting that most state institutions already have full classrooms and faculty working overtime and beyond, so that, in many cases, there are neither enough teachers, classroom spaces, and time slots to accommodate existing students, let alone those who will be flooding the institutions next year because of a high birth rate and a lack of jobs for those without more education. At the same time, the universities are offering early retirement incentives, but the problem with these is that it encourages the loss of those professors with the most experience to offer, and, frankly, from what I’ve seen, most [but not all] work harder and longer than their younger “replacements” do. The same problems are occurring with police and fire departments throughout the state, which are freezing hires, and with prisons, which have already laid off employees. Likewise, the state is eliminating most spending on infrastructure improvements, which isn’t exactly reassuring, given the sad state of all too many highways, bridges, and mass transit systems.

From what I can tell and from recent news reports, similar problems are occurring across the nation. Given this trend, what I want to ask is: Why can we easily spend hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out reckless banks and brokerage firms, to rescue mismanaged auto manufacturers, but ignore education, public safety, and local infrastructure? Even under “trickle-down” economics, very little of the revenues generated by the various bailout proposals will flow to support these basic areas of our society.

One of the greatest difficulties in assessing quality in the arts, particularly in fields such as writing, singing, and painting, lies in two related problems. First, a truly “objective” way of assessing excellence doesn’t exist. Second, because anyone with a basic ability in grammar can write, because anyone with a voice can sing, because anyone can pick up pencils or oils and paint, all too many otherwise intelligent individuals feel that they can accurately judge excellence in these areas and that their opinion has equal value in assessing excellence with the view of someone with great experience and expertise in the field.

My wife is a professional singer and a professor of opera, but she has gotten out of the habit of discussing her true evaluations of musical performances, except with other professional colleagues… or me. Instead, she makes generic comments. Why? Because most people think they can evaluate singing and will rave about a singer because he or she is attractive, charismatic, and has great stage presence, even while a good fraction of the notes sung are off-key, off-tempo, or even the wrong words. It may be good “entertainment,” but it’s not good singing. In the past, she’s tried to explain why performances weren’t good, or why a given work isn’t as good as another, but her evaluation is almost invariably dismissed as “a matter of opinion,” especially by those who have the least knowledge of music.

As I noted in Part I, the good professor was absolutely convinced that his views were superior to those of four different review sources and those of several hundred thousand readers. He may not like the books, and that’s his privilege. He even admitted he was not an expert in the field, but still asserted that his likes and dislikes were more accurate, as a measure of the overall quality of the books, than a considerable weight of well-informed and educated evaluation from editors to reviewers.

By comparison, very few people, or at least not without advanced degrees in physics, would even consider telling top physicists that their theories on wave states or quantum mechanics were wrong, but an amazing number of individuals without any real grounding beyond basic courses in literature, music, or arts have no problem in pronouncing their opinions, which isn’t a problem, and giving them equal value with experts in a given field, which is. This could be described as the “if I like it, it’s good, and if I don’t, it’s not” approach.

In fiction, in particular, this can be a significant problem. Authors always run the risk of alienating readers because of the subject matter they choose or the way in which they present it, and the emotional reaction overrides any sense of judgment on the part of readers who are offended, usually because the author’s presentation jolts the reader’s preconceived view of propriety or reality. This can also be true in music. There were actually riots after the premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, and more than a few books, later acclaimed as excellent, have been banned in one locale or another.

Now, obviously, in a field where only subjective evaluation of excellence is possible, there are times where even a consensus of experts on what is excellent may not be totally accurate. There will also be questions, at times, about the degree of excellence, and I’ve certainly raised such questions myself, but, almost always, the judgment of long-time knowledgeable scholars and practitioners in a field in assessing excellence, not popularity, is superior to the opinions of those who do not possess such experience.

But… in the end, the fact is: Not all opinions are of equal value in assessing excellence.

Recently, I had an on-line “discussion” with a professor who didn’t care much for the Spellsong Cycle. While I respect his opinion that the books did not impress him, I was less than enthused about his views that his assessment was far superior to other time-tested means of assessing quality for novels. Four of the five books received starred reviews from review sources such as Kirkus, Booklist, and even Romantic Times, which also gave the last book an award. The series also sold well, if not so well as the Saga of Recluce, and all the books are still in print ten years later. His counter to the issue of reviews was that he was amazed that any F&SF book received a negative review. This led me to thinking about the issue of quality or excellence.

Now… as many of you who have followed my thoughts for a time know, I’m not the greatest champion of reviews. I suppose my assessment of them is along the lines of Churchill’s view on democracy; they’re the worst way of assessing excellence, except for anything else that’s ever been tried.

Every year more than 1,000 new titles are published in the F&SF field. Kirkus reviews less than fifty of these each year and might award 10 starred reviews. Publishers Weekly reviews perhaps a hundred, Booklist, and Library Journal far less. Given the overlap, since some books may get reviews in more than one publication, it’s unlikely than more than 150 new titles get reviews. That’s fifteen percent. Of that number less than twenty percent get starred reviews or the equivalent, and again, some of those will overlap. So…something like 30 titles might get starred reviews. That’s less than three percent, which is a far cry from the idea that all reviews are raves. Almost all reviews are a mixed bag, where the reviewer likes some things and dislikes others.

Now… in the interests of fairness, it is also true that publicists do have the habit of excerpting the best lines from reviews for cover blurbs. Take a review that stated, “After a dull and pedantic beginning, the author finally reaches an exciting conclusion.” We all know what part of that review will appear on the cover, but that doesn’t invalidate the entire review.

As for the issue of negative reviews, in general, what’s the point? Readers usually want to know what to read, not what not to read. I’ve observed that most negative reviews are about books by best-selling authors or authors who have had past works critically acclaimed, where the reviewer is suggesting that the book being reviewed isn’t up to the author’s standards. Sometimes, I have disagreed with such assessments, but I think it’s fair to say that most reviewers don’t provide negative reviews just for the sake of trashing a book.

But…in the end, the plain fact is that the vast majority of titles published each year get no reviews from the major review sources, and only a few more get reviews from smaller specialized online genre reviewers.

Reviews, of course, are really the last step in assessing quality. The first, and most important step, occurs with the editor. The editor picks out what will be published and works with the author to improve it. It’s analogous to the peer review process in academia. Contrary to popular opinion, editors aren’t just interested in what sells, although what they buy for a publisher obviously has to sell. For example, my editor has been involved in the publishing field for some forty years, but also has a Ph.D. in Comparative Medieval Literature and has taught as a visiting professor at a number of universities, including Harvard. He’s edited several authoritative and widely acclaimed texts on the field, as well as a number of acclaimed anthologies. And it’s not just my editor. Virtually all editors who have any length of service have great ability to assess both quality and saleability, because it’s a competitive field. After the editor and author finish revisions, copy-editors enter the process, nit-picking punctuation, definitions, missing referents and the like. Then, of course, after publication, reviewers take their turn.

In addition, readers do “vote” on quality, or at least on appeal, and, if they don’t like a book, they won’t buy it… and that includes my books. Even after the success of The Magic of Recluce, when The Green Progression came out, it didn’t sell, despite favorable reviews. In fact, it may have been the worst-selling hardcover published by Tor in the 1990s. [To be continued]

This past weekend, I went to two musical performances, a “Best of Broadway” touring show, featuring four singers who had performed a number of lead roles of well-known musicals on Broadway, and a fund-raising dinner performance by local university undergraduate music students. The Best of Broadway show received a standing ovation at the local city theatre. The student concert, to a limited and intimate audience, raised several thousand dollars.

Which was better? In terms of musical quality, there was no comparison, according to the experts who attended both concerts. I am NOT an expert, and those who are included two former orchestral concertmasters, a former music department chair, a former Ted Mack Amateur Hour winner — for those of you who are younger, think “American Idol” of the 1950s, a professional percussionist who has played with a number of first class symphonies, and, of course, in the spirit of full disclosure, my wife. The “Broadway” performers had better costumes and slightly better stage presence and charisma, but their actual singing and their arrangements left something to be desired, and were far inferior to that of the college students. Now… this is nothing new. I, and the professionals, have seen this time and time again. The vast majority of audiences key in on costumes, appearances, physical beauty, and presence… as well as the theatre setting itself. Alex Ross, the music critic of The New Yorker, has also commented on this, albeit dealing with comparing first class regional musical performances to New York performances that received great applause and were inferior, as well as noting the rise of standing ovations for performances that deserved tepid applause at best.

If these instances were limited to entertainment, we would merely have a problem of uneducated taste… but, alas… they’re not. From the experiences of the recent financial melt-down, it’s fairly obvious that all too many corporate decisions haven’t been made on the best of financial or economic grounds, but in terms of short-term profits. Likewise, it’s clear that far too many corporate CEOs are being selected on the basis of personality and charisma, image, if you will, rather than decision-making expertise. For example, the Board of Directors of General Motors has expressed confidence in the current CEO, despite the fact that the CEO has been in charge for years and that GM is in such financial trouble that it will require more than $20 billion to weather little more than a year. The same situation has afflicted a score or more of other companies.

In the educational area, again, scholarships and awards are largely awarded on the basis of grade-point-averages, regardless of the difficulty of the classes taken by the students, a slightly different form of image, but often image, nonetheless.

Recent sociological research indicates that younger women tend to be attracted to tall, dark, and “dangerous” men, and that men judge women’s attractiveness and appeal, across all cultures, largely by an unconscious relationship between waist and hip size and an equally unconscious evaluation of facial regularity.

All of these are examples of judging by inappropriate, largely inaccurate, or misrepresentative guidelines, and most of those guidelines come from evolutionary pressures. In the hunter-gatherer societies which comprise the vast majority of human experience and evolution, failure to make largely accurate instantaneous decisions generally resulted in adverse, if not fatal results. The problem today is that those kinds of judgments often don’t work, and certainly not well, in higher-tech societies. Just because a man is tall, charismatic, and friendly doesn’t mean he’ll make good judgments dealing with long-term complex situations. It may even mean that a man isn’t the best person for the position. Maximizing this year’s harvest makes great survival sense if you’re in a borderline food stock situation, as most early human cultures were, but it’s a lousy strategy for both corporations and agriculture in a world where corporate and societal survival depends on longer term social and economic stability. And evaluating ability by near-blind reliance on numbers is nothing more than a crude adaptation of seeing who’s taller and can run faster.

The question of whether our world can survive and prosper may well depend on whether we can adapt away from unconscious and sometimes blind following of our evolutionarily-derived decision-making processes before the cumulative results of recent bad decisions foreclose our options as a species.