The other day I read an article in a well-known economic publication about how “talking websites” could empower the illiterate. I’m doubtless in a small minority, but I’ve been concerned for a long time about all this emphasis on “empowerment.”

I do tend to worry about universal suffrage when something like a third of the American electorate doesn’t even know who’s president — but then, again, that percentage has varied between 25% and 35% for at least 20 years, and we haven’t had any more political catastrophes during this period than any other, although those who disparage the previous president tend to forget that we had a few problems with a man named Nixon, and moral and upright as he was personally, a fellow by the name of Carter wasn’t exactly the most effective of chief executives… and even when suffrage wasn’t even close to universal, we managed to elect Warren Harding.

But… as a writer and as an individual who believes in both the written and the spoken word, I have to ask whether we want to grant more power to those who cannot master, even if through no fault of their own, half of whatever language their culture uses to bind that part of civilization together. Writing changes culture, and, based on history, it does so for the better. Exactly why, at a time when written skills are declining, when a smaller and smaller percentage of so-called educated individuals have actually mastered the written word [according to a study released by the Department of Education three years ago, almost 40% of individuals with advanced college degrees do not have the analytical skills to explain the arguments in a standard newspaper article], why do we want to grant more power to those who cannot write and write at all?

We’re already substituting test results for analytical skills in far too many school districts across the country. Newspapers are failing left and right because most people under thirty don’t have either the inclination or the ability to read more than a sentence at a time, let alone a paragraph, and before long those of us who can and would like some detail in our news will be relegated to perusing a relative handful of printed or subscription online sources, because, so far as I can determine, there’s less and less of a market for real news… just for sensationalism or for targeted “in-depth” rationalizations of what various groups of people already believe.

But then again, maybe we should expand the internet and website system so that no one has to master reading and writing — and add an amendment to the Constitution that no one can run for public office without being able to explain in detail and on the spot and in writing what the duties of that office are and why he or she would be qualified to hold that post. We could even return to handwritten paper ballots at the same time.

All you’d have to do to be politically empowered would be able to read, write, and think. Would that be so bad?

All too many years ago, when my brother and I were growing up, my parents, and even my grandmother, piled on the aphoristic practical platitudes, such as… “If it’s too good to be true, it probably isn’t.” “A penny saved is a penny earned.” “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” “A stitch in time saves nine.” “An honest day’s work…” With those platitudes came a no-nonsense attitude. My father insisted that we do the best of which we were capable — in everything from academics to athletics to what he termed “the necessities of life,” matters such as lawn and tree and mechanical maintenance, simple woodworking, basic electrical repairs, house painting… and the need to approach everything in a practical, realistic, and — most important — an honest way. For him, dreams were possible, but only if one prepared and worked hard and long to achieve them. One didn’t achieve success by merely wishing or saying that it would happen. Nor by cutting corners, either practically or ethically. In addition, we were not allowed to be bored. If any word even hinting at boredom even came up, various tasks were immediately assigned, monitored, and the results were inspected. At that time, this approach to raising children was not in the slightest unusual. It was close to the norm, and it led to a generally realistic outlook on life.

So… what happened?

Today, we’re weathering a recession created largely by incredibly unrealistic assessments of how housing and securities prices would perform over time. Never in the history of mankind have the values of real estate and structures continually appreciated upward for more than a few years, if that. So why did so many people buy into the unreality the values would continue upward at high rates indefinitely? Stock and security prices have fluctuated widely over time for as long as there have been such financial instruments. Yet some of the supposedly brightest and best minds in finance not only bought into the idea of continual rising securities’ prices, but they developed instruments that magnified through leverage both gains and losses — and never considered what would happen when the inevitable transpired. And, worse yet, for this lack of competence and foresight, hundreds of them were granted million dollar plus bonuses.

The same unreality permeates state and local politics. Through legislation and referenda, the federal and state governments promise more and more in the way of programs and benefits while the electorate demands — and largely gets — tax levels that are in no way able to pay for the programs people insist are their rights. California, to no one’s surprise, leads the way, and political experts across the spectrum [except, of course, from the far, far right, who are even more unrealistic] have declared the state essentially ungovernable — with a deficit approaching more than $50 billion and a legislature unable and unwilling to act because to do so would indicate to voters just how unrealistic they’ve been. Everyone wants to tax everyone else, but no one wants to pay more taxes, and no one wants his or her program cut or eliminated. And the simple, and unrealistic, answer is to tax the “rich” and to stop waste and fraud, never mind the fact that such a simplistic solution won’t raise enough revenue without grinding the economy to a total halt.

The polar ice caps are dwindling. Meltwater from the Greenland ice cover is at an all-time high and increasing annually. Ice sheets are melting and breaking off the Antarctic icecap in chunks of hundreds of square miles. Most of the glaciers in the Alps have either disappeared or melted back to a fraction of their previous size. The legendary snows of Kilimanjaro have vanished. Over the centuries, goats and overgrazing have turned the Sahara from an arid grassland into a true and total desert. The combination of disease, pollution, and warmer seawater has devastated the world’s coral reefs. Increasing temperatures have resulted in literal transformation of the mountain forests of the southwestern United States into high desert. Cattle and grazing in the previous century destroyed most of the grasslands in the Great Plains all the way from the Dakotas to Texas, changing the climate so much that we’ve experienced one Dust Bowl and are continually fighting against another, while the once massive Ogallala Aquifer is pumped dry. There are huge dead zones in the Caribbean, and areas in the Pacific hundreds of miles across where human floating trash clogs the waters. In less than two centuries, human beings have used up 30%-50% of all the oil created over hundreds of millions of years and raised carbon dioxide and methane levels to heights not seen in hundreds of millions of years, if ever. And yet… tens of millions of Americans, among them highly educated individuals, persist in the illusion that there is no global warming and that human activity has no significant impact upon the planet.

This unreality has infused the younger generation, in particular. Everywhere is the idea that any student, if she or she wishes, can do anything he or she wishes, and that each of them is “wonderful.” This unreality is boosted by: (1) the plethora of television “reality” shows that suggest that success has little to do with anything but ambition, desire, and immorality; (2) educational institutions that punish those teachers who actually assess student performance realistically and who insist on results; (3) the increasing reliance on tests that measure assorted facts and basic intelligence, but not the ability to think and learn; and (4) greater and greater reliance on pleasing parents and students than upon imparting skills and the ability to think. On top of these factors has come the change of education from a social good to a consumer good, where the consumer demands a specific product, and in the case of education, with the advent of student evaluations, eighteen year old students are telling seasoned and experienced professionals what they — the students — need to know when those students, and often their parents, almost always have no knowledge of the field. This is reality?

Now… I’ve seen studies that show the current “collegiate” generation is more “results-oriented,” but the problem is that getting results is difficult, if not impossible, when students have inadequate skills and unrealistic ideas about their own capabilities and about the amount of work it requires to accomplish anything of worth.

Distorting an old aphorism, Rome was not built by wishes and mouse-clicks…

… but it, too, fell when its people lost sight of reality and basic values.

For the past several months, some of the technicians dealing with my website have been having difficulty in updating the graphics on the rotating “carousel.” You may note that the problem has finally been addressed. I kept asking why there was such difficulty… and finally got an answer — a very simple answer, and yet a chilling one. The previous tech, who had worked with the web-designer, had departed for greener pastures… and had left no written documentation. If there happened to be any electronic documentation, no one could find it, and the techs who were trying to update the graphics were, as are many today, overworked and didn’t have the time to reverse engineer the system until recently.

This particular phenomenon isn’t limited to my website. The other day I was trying to install a piece of software for my wife and discovered a rather interesting situation. The directions were on-line. They weren’t simple. They wouldn’t print out. There was no way to keep a window with the directions and install the software. In the end I had to write them out by hand. Then there are the companies who have “solutions” to problems on-line, but seem to forget that those solutions are useless if you have problems with their website, even as you wait in a telephone queue for “technical assistance.”

These are all symptoms of a society that seems to think that electronic storage is permanent and that, because it’s electronic, anyone can access it and figure it out. Neither assumption, of course, is true, widespread as both appear to be.

We have books and records dating back thousands and thousands of years, evidence from other cultures and civilizations, written insights into what they did and how they acted. If we follow the trend — and go “paperless” as all the businesses urge us — what insights will we leave? We can’t even read computer records of thirty years ago.

This is even truer on a personal letter. My father kept letters he thought were memorable, and they’re still available, yellowed paper and all. Somehow, I don’t see much in the way of memorable emails being saved (if there are even such)… and there’s another factor involved as well. Most letter-writers, and possibly most writers whose works are recorded in print form, tend to write more accurately and clearly, almost as if they understood that what they wrote might be scrutinized more than once.

In my mind, all this leads to a number of questions:

Do disposable communications too often equate to disposable thoughts and insights?

Do impermanent and easily changed records lead to greater carelessness? Or greater dishonesty and fraud?

What exactly are we giving up for the sake of going electronic and paperless?

Science fiction has postulated the rise and fall of many civilizations, and the causes of those falls are many: warfare, famine, ecological disaster, energy shortages, internal collapse from overindulgence, conquest, pestilence, plague… and doubtless many others.The one cause I’ve not seen explored much is the collapse of infrastructure, and yet I suspect it’s the most likely reason for the failure and fall of a high-tech civilization. When most people talk about infrastructure, they think of highways and bridges, but infrastructure consists of far more than that.

The more people that live in an area and the greater the population concentration, the greater the infrastructure requirements, even in low-tech societies. In higher-tech societies, the physical infrastructure requirements pyramid. A clean and reliable water system, sewage and waste disposal systems, paved streets, roads, and bridges, dependable electric power and other domestic and commercial utilities are just the beginning. We also need redundant communications links, banking and financial systems, not to mention a system for maintaining law and order and adjudicating disputes.

The more infrastructure a society requires, the more each part of that structure has the potential for conflicting with the requirements of a another part, and the more of a society’s resources and effort that is required to keep all the parts of the infrastructure in good repair and operating properly. Also, the more susceptible each section is to damage and failure. For example, in the United States, the electric power grid is being stressed toward its limits, and electric power outages are already increasing. More powerful transmission lines and more power sources increase the vulnerability of the entire system to a host of problems, from solar storms to extreme weather, to simple wear and tear. Repairs or damage to one system can disable other systems, as when a backhoe used to excavate to repair a water line breaks a fiberoptic cable, or when a broken water main floods a subway tunnel, or…

The other significant problem with infrastructure is those aspects dealing with human interaction require acceptance and trust. Even the income taxation system in the United States is based largely on trust and the fact that the majority of Americans and/or their employers largely voluntarily submit their tax payments to maintain government. Likewise, most people obey the law without being forced to do so at gunpoint. Most civil and personal disputes are settled without recourse to physical force. And this is the norm in most countries. It is, however, not universal. No such trust and agreement exists in Somalia… or in other parts of Africa, nor in much of Afghanistan… and we’ve all seen the results. We’ve also seen the results in the financial sector in the United States, where greedy financiers betrayed the trust of investors on a massive scale.

We all know that physical infrastructure fails when it is not maintained, as in the case of collapsing bridges and deteriorating highways, but few politicians or other leaders consider the need to maintain the underlying trust that supports our society’s human infrastructure.

Right now… we need to shore up both aspects of infrastructure, or the science fiction that hasn’t explored infrastructure might end up being history.

In our fast-paced world, almost everyone praises technology, despite small gripes about occasional glitches. But, as I’ve noted before, technology is never an unmitigated blessing, nor is it nearly so cost-effective as its most enthusiastic supporters maintain.

The one problem that few commentators or analysts account for is the continual cost of the learning curve. Every time a computer program changes, those who employ it need to learn the changes and the additional applications, and seldom do either make the program easier or quicker. Every time a new computer application is developed and implemented, the same thing happens. Now… these are generally comparatively minor problems for the geeks and tech-types, but they’re not necessarily that minor for a large segment of the work force, even for high-level professionals, for whom technology is merely a tool and not an end-all and be-all.

I have a five year old computer. It works quite well and handles high-speed internet and the like. Already, however, I’m beginning to run into problems with other people’s information and applications, because my computer can’t take certain upgrades. If I attempt to install and use them, they freeze the computer. I’m certain that a high-level tech could fix some of these, or that if I wanted to invest a considerable number of hours in learning more about the programs and systems… so could I. Except… why exactly should I be faced with the choice of spending time or money to accommodate continual change? In practical terms, I have no choice… but it’s a cost that rapid technical change places on everyone not in the information systems field. It may place a cost on those people, too, but they’re paid for dealing with it. The rest of us aren’t.

In my professorial wife’s field, students expect more and more of the high-tech glitz in the classroom… and often refuse to study old-style recordings [in which refusal they are supported effectively by the administration’s pusillanimity and enthusiastic support of anonymous student evaluations] despite the fact that much of what the students need to study is not yet available in that high-tech forum… or is available only in formats directly incompatible with classroom technology and equipment, for which the administration does do not have funding to upgrade. So she’s spending much of her summer [totally unpaid] making conversions in order to be able to present material efficiently during the coming school year. She’s not a computer tech, and the learning curve is steep, but those who have the technical knowledge don’t have the musical knowledge, and even if she could find technical support, she’d not only have to pay them out of her own pocket, but would need to talk them through everything step by step.

In essence, the popular demand for only the latest technical offerings also imposes a cost on both business and education, a cost that’s not in the slightest paid by high-tech industry, but imposed willy-nilly on everyone else — and this doesn’t count the not-insignificant costs of applications rushed to market with flaws that cause even greater costs.

Do you suppose just a little bit more of a “slow and steady” philosophy might actually be more cost-effective?

Recently, in several other websites and blogs, there have been comments about too much science fiction being negative, as well as too many reviews being positive. There have also been suggestions, if not recently, that the boom in fantasy is partly due to the negativity and lack of “soaring imagination” of current science fiction.

One of the problems in writing science fiction, especially if one wishes to be somewhat accurate as a writer, is that science fiction is supposed to be based on science. That means that conventional faster-than-light travel is improbable, if not impossible, and certainly not possible without the expenditure of vast amounts of energy. The same is true of such devices as matter-transformers and instant travel portals.

Also, in practical terms, in the future escaping or transcending the various messes that human [or other] civilizations have made is not going to be easy, and writing about doing so will necessarily reflect a certain gritty and sometimes pedestrian reality. Currently, Americans, in particular, even with the latest financial difficulties, now live in a society whose dreams are not based on the “work hard, persevere, and you will eventually succeed Horatio Alger philosophy” of earlier generations, but more upon reality TV and lottery instant wish-fulfillment. In addition, the “mouse-click magic” of computers provides another instant escape mechanism. Given these background factors, any literature or other form of entertainment truly based on science and hard reality is going to appeal to a far smaller audience than one based on magic.

Now… there are different ways of approaching magic, as all widely-read followers of fantasy know, and some fantasy authors, as do I, take a more realistic approach to using magic. I believe that magic, if it did exist in human societies, would be used as everything else humans do — as a tool. In such societies, reality does tend to intrude, because magic usage is subject to economics and all the other nasty implications of human society. And, in general, authors who approach magic in this fashion don’t sell as well as those who are more wish-fulfillment and “isn’t this neat”-oriented do.

As for the business of too many, too favorable reviews… for the most part that’s merely sour grapes on the part of the crew that, in general don’t like anything except that narrow spectrum of books that is their special province or those who prefer nitpicking books to death rather than enjoying them. There are, I’d be the first to admit, a very few reviewers who apparently never ever read a book they didn’t like, but that’s still preferable to the even smaller number that never read one that they couldn’t find something wrong with. Most reviewers are very much aware that, in today’s information explosion, most readers are far more interested in what they might find interesting to read than in what not to read. So… if they find a book really terrible, they don’t waste space on it. I can also tell you, from personal experience, even with books that sell well and get generally favorable reviews, there’s still no lack of reviews incorporating nitpicking, nastiness, lack of understanding, and parochialism… and frankly, for the most part we don’t need them, not when only a fraction of the fiction published, even in the F&SF community, is actually reviewed.

For every J.K. Rowling or Robert Jordan, for every Andrew Wyeth and Thomas Kinkade, there are tens, if not hundreds of thousands of writers and artists with skills far above those of the average educated individual who cannot make a living at their art. For every Pavarotti, there are hundreds of tenors with good, if not great, professional voices whom no one will ever hear except in small opera houses or singing restaurants — if even there. For operatic sopranos, it’s even worse, and how many struggling writers have had their hopes dashed in the past year?

I’m not talking about people who “want” to be writers, singers, composers, and artists, but about people who’ve devoted years to education and training, not to mention more years underpaid or unpaid work in their field.

Now, there’s a feeling among some in these fields that there once was a time when artists were more respected and compensated for their expertise. I’m not certain when this “golden age” happened to be, because in the early 1800s, the print run for a wildly popular book was something like a thousand copies, and most successful writers came from financially secure backgrounds that allowed them to write. Most of those that did not, such as Keats and Poe, struggled with poverty and illness their entire lives, despite a certain amount of popular acclaim. In the late 1960s, Isaac Asimov [as I recall] calculated that there were only about 50 F&SF writers who supported themselves entirely on their writing. Recent figures published by various sources suggest that the number of overall fiction writers in the U.S. who can do so today is somewhere around 900, with a range of 400-2,500 cited.

The market for composers has never been wonderful, and in the eighteenth and nineteenth century only a handful of composers and musicians made more than survival wages — and those only if they had wealthy patrons. Mozart was dogged by financial problems his entire life. Bach supported himself as a church organist, and today almost all modern classical composers are either academics or support themselves in other music-related specialties. Even in the pop music field, songwriters like Willie Nelson and Barry Manilow became singers because they made so little from songs they wrote that made the singers millions.

Van Gogh, whose works now fetch tens of millions of dollars, never sold a painting in his own lifetime, and historically, most painters supported themselves by doing portraits, a practice that dwindled dramatically with the introduction and growth of photography.

In writing, the numbers are fairly clear. Comparatively, very few writers finish and sell more than a book a year. In the F&SF field, standard royalties start at ten percent for a hardcover, but a “successful” hardcover must sell a minimum of 4,000 copies and 30,000 copies subsequently in paperback. According to publishing figures, something like two thirds of all books published are not “successful.” But let’s say the struggling author manages to be successful and sells 5,000 copies at a hardcover price of $24.95, and a year later, 35,000 copies in paperback. That’s $12,475 on the hardcover [not deducting the 10-15% to the agent] and approximately $14,000 on the paperback. If this writer can manage to keep putting out a book a year at the same level he or she might make $25,000 a year out of combined paperback and hardcover sales. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way, because if the writer’s sales don’t increase above the minimally profitable level, the publisher won’t buy the second or third or fourth book. And yet… looking at the comparative numbers, it’s likely that the past thirty years through the present are possibly the best time for writers in history.

A golden age for the arts? Like many myths… it’s just that.

Most people know the Reverend Thomas Malthus as the English clergyman and economist who wrote The Principle of Population, a work that went through six editions between 1798 and 1826 and that made the case that “The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.” In the more than two centuries since the publication of Malthus’s first edition a raft of biological and social scientists have attempted to refute Malthus’s basic theory, pointing out as the enviro-sceptic Bjorn Lomburg did, that food production has always increased faster than population growth.

For the moment, these “skeptics” have been correct. If population growth continues, in the long run, they will all be wrong. Why? Because even if our vaunted technology gets to the point of turning all matter and/or energy into the food and support necessary for human existence, the amount of matter on the planet is indeed finite, although in practical terms, it’s far more likely that other aspects of civilization will collapse first, leading to a reduction in food supply… and population.

The larger mistake in dealing with Malthusian economics, however, lies in the failure of Malthus’s critics to understand why Malthus did not seem to be correct in his own lifetime, or even in ours. Both Darwin and Wallace read The Principle of Population, and both commented to the effect that his work applied directly to the “natural world.” What they meant was that, for example, there are always more prey than predators, because if there aren’t, predator populations crash. The same is true of herbivores. One of the problems the giant panda faces is that it’s a very picky eater and there is only so much of the bamboo it eats within its range, and that range is decreasing because the human population has been encroaching.

In overall terms, what the human species has done for roughly the last 8,000 years is to employ technology to transform the entire world ecology into anything but a “natural” world. Currently, there are between one and one and a half billion cows in the world, 15 billion chickens, 700 million pigs, over 100 million horses, mules, and donkeys, and close to half a billion domesticated turkeys and geese. None of these animal population levels are anything close to what these species could maintain without extensive human effort, and the impact of these animals is anything but insignificant, considering that, as just one example, a single cow produces 250-500 liters of methane every single day, and that methane tends to last in the atmosphere for up to 100 years. Fertilizer run-off from the Mississippi River has created algae blooms and large dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico.

Years ago, when I was working at the EPA, research studies showed that the pesticide toxaphene, used primarily on cotton crops in the southern United States, was appearing in the tissues of northern arctic mammals — not birds who might have flown over or through the USA, and in animals who did not prey on such birds. While its use is now banned in the United States, the world-wide spread and bioaccumulation is indicative of just how much human technology has changed and modified the planet.

This human-created “ecology” is not stable, nor can it be maintained without enormous investments of energy, resources, and effort. So, while the human species has been able to “thwart” Malthusian principles for two hundred years, the real question is not how and why Malthus was wrong, but for how long we will both allow unchecked human population increases and increasingly artificial ecological manipulation… and at what cost.

All too much of what passes for education today consists of curricula and courses designed to create the illusion of learning.

There’s also the difference between skills that are useful for additional learning and additional learning itself. For example, the skill of reading is relatively limited in its application if the “reader” only applies it to signs and labels once he or she leaves high school, but vital to someone who wants to be a high level professional. One might even say that reading skills convey a certain illusion on learning on the sign, label, and headline-only reader.

Likewise, students who are passed on without learning skills, or reading and learning the course material — and there are literally millions of them — are given the illusion of learning. This creates anger when they can’t find or keep jobs because they don’t know enough, or when their employers find that various rules require convoluted and time-consuming processes to fire them.

Another illusion of learning is the idea that the purpose of education consists largely of having the skills to find information. Being able to locate information is not the same as knowing it, or knowing what it means, or the implications behind the facts, or what led to those facts or what may flow logically from them. Merely finding information doesn’t mean that the finder can use such information. In many professions, actual physical or specific mental skills are also required. Reading about a complex medical procedure doesn’t provide the necessary skills for a doctor to operate and accomplish that procedure. Often, even practicing that operation doesn’t provide enough knowledge for a doctor to deal with more complex cases. Being able to look up economic statistics, or sales figures, doesn’t provide the expertise to analyze them and to project likely outcomes for a company or a government.

And in some cases, failure to learn basic and simple skills that seem unnecessary in our computerized and high-tech world can create problems for the individual and those around them. For example, the child who doesn’t learn multiplication and division tables is going to be handicapped all his or her life, because most of those children won’t have the basic tools for mathematical estimation as adults. I can’t even count the number of times someone has entered the wrong number or entry into a cash register or computer and insisted to me that the result is correct — when it wasn’t. Why? Because they couldn’t estimate the range of the probable result. In cases such as medicine or pharmacy, an error such as that can be life-threatening. In business, too many errors of that nature can lead to lost revenues… or lost jobs.

Once upon a time, students had to learn to memorize poetry and passages from plays. This wasn’t thrust upon students as a form of torture, but to provide them with hard-wired, learned passages as examples of proper use of language. In addition, students were required to write far longer papers than they now do, and at earlier ages, and those papers were graded with liberal amounts of red ink. The loss of practice in writing, especially the loss of directed and harshly corrected writing exercises, and the loss of all memorization of good literature for students corresponds rather directly with an increasing loss of writing skills. Merely being able to read individual words does not correspond to being able to understand or to write.

In my wife’s field — vocal music — all too many students fail to grasp the idea that successful singing is the combination of intellectual understanding and trained muscular and musical coordination. They don’t understand that their muscles have to be trained to get results, and that requires practice of specific techniques in specific ways. They also don’t understand the need to recognize the muscular sensations associated with proper singing and to learn to replicate those sensations on a reliable and continuing basis. To sing correctly, one doesn’t just memorize the words and “sort of” follow the melody. A good singer needs to know the rhythm well enough to beat it out without looking at the music, to know the actual meaning of every word, even if the song is written in a foreign language, as well as explain what the song is about, and be able to sing the melody using a single syllable [such as “la”]. Anything less is merely an illusion of having learned the song.

The recent financial crash was due in large part to reliance on the models of a few people without those who were responsible for decision-making learning or understanding the implications of those models, combined, of course, with a large amount of greed that make it easier not to learn. Interestingly enough, most of the regulators responsible for overseeing the market did happen to come from the generation that has been shorted on basic learning. And they didn’t bother to listen to, or learn from those few older heads in an industry dominated by the young.

I could give more examples, but that would be redundant. Every truly skilled occupation requires that type of in-depth learning… and it’s the kind of learning that’s becoming rarer every year because too much education consists of learning facts and where to find them, and too little consists of truly learning and understanding anything in any depth.

The other day, the former vice president made the observation that he would choose Rush Limbaugh over Colin Powell as a better Republican. Now… Colin Powell has served his country faithfully and well, both as a military officer and as secretary of state. Unlike Mr. Limbaugh, there has never been any taint on his behavior or his character. What Mr. Cheney was saying, however, in effect, was that anyone who does not follow the strict beliefs of the far right wing of the Republican party is not a good Republican. By this token, neither Teddy Roosevelt nor Abraham Lincoln would have been a “good” Republican, Roosevelt especially, since he believed in preserving the environment and putting curbs on big business.

Mr. Cheney, along with Karl Rove and the ultra-conservative Republicans, can accurately be described as “true believers.” True believers exist in every organization and every religious faith. They are the ones who hold to a certain set of rigid values and claim that anyone who does not follow those values absolutely is not one of “them.” In the case of Mr. Cheney and Mr. Limbaugh, as is often the case with true believers, the values they espouse are, to put it mildly, hypocritically inconsistent. They proclaim the sanctity of life by opposing abortions, even those that might threaten the life of the mother, while also opposing aid and support of unwanted and abandoned children. So… is life only sacred until birth? Can a newborn be abandoned or left to be malnourished or abused without violating the “sanctity of life?” Ultra-conservatives avoid this inconsistency by taking refuge behind the principle of fiscal conservatism… which says that, yes, such children should be aided, but not by government, even when it has become more than clear that there are too many such children to be helped by private sources. So fiscal conservatism triumphs except when they’re bailing out multi-billion dollar corporations, which leads one to conclude that the sanctity of corporate profits trumps the sanctity of life after birth, and that government can be used for corporate welfare but not human welfare.

Such hypocritical inconsistency isn’t limited to the American ultra-conservatives, unhappily. The environmental movement has had its share of lawbreakers, in part because whenever the laws of the land didn’t seem to protect aspects of the environment they felt should be protected, they broke other laws to make their point. Let me get this straight. You want laws to protect the environment, and you want others to obey them… but you’ll break still other laws in order to make your point?

The same sort of hypocrisy has pervaded religion throughout history. Virtually all Christian-derived faiths preach mercy and forgiveness, and yet various faiths have shed millions of gallons of blood “defending” or attempting to force their version of the “faith” on others. The same is true of Islam, as well. The Taliban want freedom from such ideas as education for women, in order to keep them “pure,” as well as freedom from the pollution of Western comforts and degradation. Of course, when U.S troops first entered Kabul, they discovered a number of rather palatial [at least by Afghan standards] dwellings occupied by the Taliban religious leaders, furnished with more than a few Western comforts. They also discovered more than a few instances where such leaders had been indiscriminate in their efforts to remove purity from young women.

None of this should be surprising to anyone. What is surprising, and what so seldom is recognized publicly, is that in many, many, cases, life does not present us with clear absolutes, but with situations where any decision at all will compromise one set of values or another, where any solution is “gray,” rather than black or white. Yet rather than acknowledge this rather obvious fact, the true believers endorse hypocrisy by sticking to one set of absolutes. In the case of an expectant mother where carrying the fetus to term will likely kill her, the “sanctity of life” can only apply to mother or child. In the case of fiscal conservatism, history has shown, time after time, that raising taxes to balance budgets [always a staple of fiscal conservatives] when economic activity has declined only makes matters worse and results in even less government revenue.

The problem with the true believers is that they insist on forcing people into black or white boxes, often with rifles, bombs, or ostracism, while insisting that theirs is the only way, hypocritical as their values are — because no set of “pure” codified values can be applied wholesale to the world as it is without becoming hypocritical. In fact, the key test for identifying a true believer is that true believers always place their values over everyone else’s and usually over physical reality. After all, those who burned Giordano Bruno and imprisoned Galileo denied that the planets orbited the sun because it conflicted with their beliefs.

According to a recent study, 78% of all the emails received consist of spam. I’d submit that 78% actually understates the problem. That’s recognized spam. What about all the emails that are effectively spam? How much of the email that stacks up in everyone’s email consists of cute little e-cards or forwarded anecdotes or stories, most of it without so much as a line of explanation from the sender? And what about all the invitations to be linked to someone, or to join Facebook or MySpace? Even deleting all of those takes time.

In the “old days,” sending someone a clipping from a newspaper without even a personal note attached wasn’t considered a letter, or any form of true correspondence. Should emails consisting of forwarded cartoons, jokes, or quotes be any different today? Since a forwarded cartoon or joke costs the sender nothing, unlike a clipping sent by mail, one could make the case that such forwarded junk is almost totally impersonal, just like spam.

None of this non-spam spam shows any real recognition of the recipient as an individual, just as an address on someone else’s computer, creating the illusion of contact or caring. It’s an empty meaningless gesture, less than the equivalent of the aspartame or methadone of communications.

For that matter, what about Twitter… twenty-some words, is it? That isn’t about the recipient. It’s a condensed ego-trip for the sender. Why should I, or anyone else, care about what you’re doing in twenty words?

And exactly why should I be interested in being on Facebook or MySpace or any other ego-driven open “personal” forum? I’m not against professional forums. They serve a useful purpose. If people want to find out about my books and thoughts, my website will provide that. Business websites provide 24 hour access, and, if done well, can make life easier for users of those services and products. But why should I set up a Facebook presence? If I provide no personal details on such a site, it’s just a way of saying, “I’m great. Be my ‘friend’.” If I do provide lots of detail, regardless of what the claims are about privacy protection, it’s an invitation to identity theft. And for what? To claim that I have lots of friends among people I really don’t know at all? Isn’t that a bit hypocritical? As for real friends, those are the ones who don’t need an electronic site to know who I am or for me to know who they are.

Even emails, which are supposed to save time, often don’t. Complex personnel issues shouldn’t usually be handled by email because, first, they have emotional overtones that don’t translate well into text, and second, because trying to reduce them to text usually takes far more time than a telephone call will. This can be true of other complex issues as well, not to mention the fact that email carries the burden of expectation of a quick response, and that often leads to even more emails asking why someone hasn’t replied.

I’m not against electronic communications, just against the illusion of communications or personal contact and against those that waste my time. If you’re a friend and send me a personal email that says something, conveys news or a sentiment that’s personal between us, I’m happy to hear it, but I’d still rather have a phone call or a letter or hand-written card.

Is that old-fashioned? I don’t think so. I’d prefer to call it what it is — considerate.

Once upon a time, when students or employees performed competently, they got a grade or their paycheck. If the work happened to be competent, in the case of the student the grade, depending on how many years ago this took place, was either a “C” or a “B.” For the employee, the paycheck didn’t change with competent work. That was what was expected for competent performance.

In recent years, however, students and younger employees alike seem to want more than mere acceptance of competence. College students’ evaluations of teachers are filled with comments with phrases like “didn’t make me feel special” or “expected too much” or “failed to encourage student self-esteem.” In addition, most students seem to think that showing up and presenting merely competent work merits an “A.” An ever-increasing number often fail even to buy and read the required textbooks for their classes. And yet there is still a continuing grade inflation in both high school and in college. In many areas of study, such as in English literature and writing, in general, students know less and write far less capably than did their predecessors. Fewer and fewer business students have any innate sense of estimation, and more and more seem lost without computers and calculators. Part of this is the result of a greater percentage of the student population going on to college, many of them falsely encouraged by too much cheerleading, too little emphasis on competence, and a society that tends to punish teachers who insist on excellence and the mastery of basic skills.

We’ve seen the same thing in the financial community, where so-called excellent performance — that later turned out to be even less than competent — was rewarded with bonuses ranging from the hundreds of thousands of dollars into the millions. The last time I checked, the minimum salary for a professional NFL player was something like $400,000. A recent study just cited in the Wall Street Journal made the observation that, given the structure and requirements of most large public corporations: (1) few CEOs were truly excellent; (2) excellent CEOs could make a slight positive difference greater than merely competent CEOs in a comparative handful of instances; (3) merely competent CEOs were adequate for the job in the majority of cases; and (4) even terrible CEOs took a while to destroy a company, except in a few exceptional cases. Yet corporate boards all presume that their CEO is excellent, and that is seldom the case.

From what I can see, fewer and fewer Americans, especially the younger ones, seem to understand the concept that every job requires basic competence and the fact that doing a job competently shouldn’t have to result in cheerleading, bonuses, and constant positive feedback — and continual promotions. Then again, if that’s what it takes to motivate someone to do a job, maybe that’s not what he or she should be doing. Rather than trying to bribe people like that, maybe their superiors should just fire them. As for the students, a lot more Bs, Cs, or even Fs wouldn’t hurt either.

The other day I read a short news story about the success of the singers at the local university in a regional competition. The story highlighted each of the singers, and the only mention of their background was the name of the university. I said something about that to the head of vocal studies at the university, and she said, with a rueful smile, “They did it all by themselves.” Her unspoken point was, of course, that these students hadn’t gotten there all by themselves. Each had a professor, or several, who spent hours each week with him or her going over diction, tone, phrasing, etc., not to mention the classes in theory, literature, methods… and all the rest of the curriculum. Then, to top matters off, when the subject came up later among another group, someone else said that the Music Department was so fortunate to have such talented students, as if all their professional education meant nothing at all.

While this is just a small example of a problem that’s much larger, it did get me to thinking. Over the years, I’ve watched various sports, and I’ve found it amazing to see how a quarterback, for example, who’s done well with one team, suddenly doesn’t do so well with another, while another who was considered washed up with a former team shines with his second team. A good part of the answer is that he didn’t do it all by himself. You can be the best passer in the world, but it won’t matter if the offensive line can’t or won’t give you the time to throw.

Likewise, in the financial and business world, a great deal of media focus and excessive salary and other compensation goes to the CEO. But just how much of that is really deserved, and how much goes to all those below the CEO who did all the grunt work that make things work out well? Microsoft seems to be doing just as well now that Bill Gates isn’t in charge. Might that not indicate that, while he came up with the initial ideas and entrepreneurship, for the last decade or so, he really didn’t do it all by himself?

As an author, which is one of the more solitary occupations these days, I still can’t do it all by myself. I need an editor to catch any stupidity that might linger in the manuscript, a copy-editor to catch the inevitable typos and stupid little mistakes, someone to publish the book, someone else to provide a cover that conveys the idea/impression of what is between the covers, and a whole lot of bookstores and booksellers to carry and sell the books. And that’s what’s needed for a one-person operation, since, contrary to some popular opinion, books do not just produce themselves, walk off the shelves, and carry themselves to the check-out registers.

Yet… in field after field from collegiate activities to professional sports, to education and business, there’s this myth that people “did it all by themselves.”

Did they really? All of them?

Over the past decade, especially, the advocates of “the market system” have pushed and pressed that free markets are the best and most efficient way of allocating resources and determining social and political priorities. Their rhetoric is true, yet extraordinarily misleading at the same time. Market systems, even malfunctioning ones, do allocate resources far more effectively than any “command and control” system, as the failure and/or transformation of virtually every dictatorial or government-directed system has demonstrated.

Unfortunately, this “efficiency” is only comparatively better than other systems and certainly not nearly as efficient as its advocates claim. Winston Churchill once commented to the effect that democracy was the worst system of government, except for everything else that had been tried. So, too, is the so-called “free market” system one of the worst ways of allocating resources — except for all the alternatives.

So-called “free market” systems have a number of severe systemic problems. Some have become very obvious over the past year or so. One defect is that prices are determined on the margin at the moment. This means, in real terms, that unregulated prices can spike or crash literally in minutes, and that the effects on society can be devastating. Another is that the balance of supply and demand, if not mitigated by society, can result in millions without jobs or incomes, and a high concentration of wealth in the hands of a few.

A third, and largely overlooked, and, I believe, even greater flaw in so-called market pricing is that such pricing is highly inaccurate in assessing the costs of goods and services. This inaccuracy comes from the fact that the prices of goods and services do not reflect the so-called externalities, or as I would term them, more accurately, the hidden costs. The examples of such costs are numerous. Until the creation of environmental laws, factories were allowed to degrade and pollute the environment without restriction, and millions of people either died or had their health permanently injured. Without employment safety laws, employers could, and did, keep costs down by using the cheapest and often the most dangerous equipment and practices and did not have to shoulder any significant fraction of the costs of workplace injuries. These types of externalities have been known now for decades and are commonly recognized, even if the means by which they have been addressed are often deplored by the more conservative advocates of “free markets.”

The problem of hidden costs, however, is far from being completely solved, or even addressed in many cases. In some areas, this is recognized, as on the environmental front, where advocates of the “free markets” continue to oppose measures to deal with global warming and air pollution. In other areas, there’s little or no awareness of such costs.

Take the issue of influenza or swine flu. The causes are known. The means of preventing its spread are also relatively well-known as well, but health authorities are becoming more and more concerned about the danger of pandemics. Why should this be a problem? If sick people just stayed home or in the hospital until the diseases would run their course, how could they infect others? Except all too many people can’t do that. They don’t have health insurance. They won’t get paid if they don’t work. In this time or downsizing and ever greater worker efficiency, there’s often literally no one else to do the work. Take a very simple example. A project/report of some sort is due. Because of downsizing, there’s exactly one expert/analyst left who can do it. If the report isn’t done, all sorts of negative events occur… violations of law, penalty costs, loss of revenue-bearing contracts. The key person has a mild case of the flu, comes to work, works through the illness and gets the job done. In the process, he or she infects three or four other people, one of whom infects an asthmatic colleague or friend who dies. Does that death, or all the other 13,000 flu deaths reported this year so far, ever show up as a negative cost on the business’s or agency’s balance sheet?

How many salmonella deaths have resulted from unsafe food industry practices directly attributable to “cost-minimization”? How many heart-attacks from work pressures caused by too few people doing too much work? There have been scores of lawsuits over the past three decades, in which major corporations were found guilty of manufacturing products that led to user deaths or guilty of practices that created deaths or ill health for thousands of people — and yet the same “free market” cost-minimization pressures persist and the same kinds of practices continue.

So… yes, the so-called free market is better than the alternatives so far tried, but let’s not have any more rhetoric about how wonderful it is and how much better it would be if the government just got out of the regulation business. We’ve already been there, and millions of innocents paid the price… and to some degree, millions still are. There’s definitely room for improvement, because, so far, markets don’t capture all the hidden costs of production and operation, and until they do, so-called free markets won’t be nearly so accurate as adherents claim they are in balancing prices and costs.

I’m convinced that, with regard to innovation, most human beings tend to fall into three groups — those who are fascinated and intrigued with the newest gadget or technology, those who want nothing to do with it, and those who will employ it if it’s not too much bother to learn to use. All too often, though, especially in the United States, each new tool, gadget, or methodology is over-hyped by its proponents to the point that, initially, it tends to get either adopted willy-nilly or rejected out of hand.

As for my own personal preferences, I admit I’m a tool-user. If the new gadget doesn’t take too long to learn and will accomplish something I need done better and faster, I’ll consider it. If it takes a lot of learning for marginal improvement, chances are I won’t adopt it until there’s something better around… or until I’m forced to do so. One reason for my attitude is simply that almost all new technology doesn’t just do the “old stuff” better and faster [and sometimes it doesn’t even do that], it also incorporates all sorts of other capabilities, and those, in effect, require the individual to do more and more, often faster and faster, and usually for less compensation.

Take the internet and high-speed connections. These days, it’s expected that an author will have a website and a blog and answer at least some email [if only from editors and agents]. By its nature, email almost demands a quick response, and if you don’t respond quickly, you get more email. Having email access, even with the best spam filters, means spending some time deleting spam, if only to allow you to continue receiving the emails you need to receive.

Once an author commits to a website and presence, he or she commits to more time spent on something other than writing for actual income, and that time has to come from somewhere, either from previously personal time, from the full-time job, or from writing. From what I’ve seen, while there is some financial return [one hopes] from exposure to new readers, there’s also the “tar-baby” syndrome. That is, you’re stuck with it, because if you retreat from that presence, you’re ungrateful, or you’ve become isolated or all-too-egocentric, or fame has gone to your head, or…

The electronic forum doesn’t replace all the other aspects of writing. An author still has to produce, edit, and revise. If the author attended conventions, he or she still has to, because the tar-baby effect applies there as well. The electronic world just adds another dimension and another requirement for effort and professionalism — and this is true across most professions requiring paperwork and communications.

So why is it that everyone is so enthusiastic about so many devices and innovations that gnaw away at that most precious of personal resources — time?

In today’s world, everyone predicts the future. We don’t think of it in that way, of course, but we do. If you go grocery shopping for special pasta to entertain friends on the coming weekend, you’re essentially predicting the future — that you and they will be there and healthy and will enjoy a pasta dinner. Businesses that plan next year’s product line are making predictions about the future. Making contributions to a retirement plan is another form of prediction. In a way, so even is voting for a political candidate. Science fiction writers try to make a living by predicting the future in a fashion that is, hopefully, both intriguing and enjoyable. Economists make their living by trying to predict economic trends.

Most of this kind of prediction is based on extrapolation, on taking existing knowledge and trends and merely extending these trends into the future. Such past-based extrapolation can at times be not only inaccurate, but extremely dangerous, as has been the case with the business and economic types who predicted that good economic times, ever-rising housing and stock prices, and enormous personal deficit financing could continue indefinitely.

Extrapolation can be very effective, if used cautiously, because technology and semi-basic human social patterns normally do not change that quickly, and it’s usually years, if not decades, before “new” technology is fully deployed and adopted throughout society. In addition, most changes are either incremental or cosmetic. For example, most western men wear trousers of some sort most of the time, and it’s been almost two centuries since trousers replaced breaches and stockings. In industrialized nations, the internal combustion engine powers most surface ground transport and has for almost a century. And in most of the world, women remain largely subject to male control and oversight, and in the rest of it, most men — and some women — are resisting further changes in the balance of power between the genders. For all the claims about human adventurism, on balance, we’re a conservative species, and that makes biological sense… until or unless or environment changes radically.

The problem with this mental conservatism is that, when the future cannot be accurately predicted on the basis of extrapolation from past experience, most people, including experts, tend to get it wrong. Conservatism and experience have combined in most people so that for years, the majority tended to be skeptical of global warming and the possible speed of climate change. Many still are, even though the latest measurements of arctic ice and glacier melting in Greenland and Antarctica indicate that the “radical” estimates of the effects on the oceans were far too conservative. The same thing happened with last year’s financial melt-down. But attempts to predict massive and radical change can be equally wrong. Forty years ago, most “experts” were convinced that space travel would be commonplace — and yet, it’s been something like 37 years since any human being even stood on the Moon. And for all the predictions of an “information singularity” or “spike,” it still hasn’t occurred.

As both a writer and as an economist, I’d love to be able to predict accurately beyond the extrapolated future, and so would many, many others, but few ever have, successfully, and perhaps, in some ways, that’s for the best. Cassandra could prophesy beyond the expected, according to Greek myth and the playwright Aeschylus, but her curse was that no one ever believed her, especially when she warned the Trojans against bringing the wooden horse into Troy.

Perhaps I’m a minority of one, but after almost forty years as a professional writer, I’ve noticed a distinct change in the attitudes expressed by readers… and in the way those attitudes are expressed. On the one hand, the rise of the internet and emails, not to mention instant-messaging, allow readers a far greater range of ways to express their views about books they like and dislike, and those choices have definitely led, at least in my experience, to greater contact with and interaction with readers. I have to say that, for me, the overwhelming majority of such direct contacts have been positive.

On the other hand, the comparative anonymity of the internet, the proliferation of “review” sites, both professional, semi-professional, and non-professional, and the growth of “reader reviews” on the bookseller sites, particularly Amazon and Barnes & Noble, have resulted in what I can only call “the enshrining of the validity of each individual’s opinion.” We all have opinions, and some are more valid than others, usually depending on the expertise of the one proffering the opinion. But this “enshrining” has led to the growth of a sub-class [sub in more ways than one] of opinion-givers who often express their opinions of a book as extremely negative opinions of the author and who express themselves rather vociferously if the book doesn’t meet their expectations… or even if an author doesn’t write the next book quickly enough to suit his or her fans. At times, such as when a book has received glowing reviews from all sorts of standard literary authorities and when the vast majority of readers rate it as good or superior, it’s fairly clear that the reviewer is angry because the book didn’t meet his or her very personal expectations. Ten years ago, as I’ve noted previously, there were precious view of these violently negative opinions. Now, very few popular authors escape them, especially authors who write a range of work that doesn’t fall within a narrowly defined sub-genre.

What concerns me is not that readers don’t enjoy certain books by certain authors, but the anger expressed when an author fails to meet a reader’s expectations, especially when it’s clear that most readers do in fact like, or don’t actively dislike, the book in question. It’s almost as though those violently negative reader-reviewers take it as a personal slight that the author didn’t meet their individual wishes. They don’t seem to want to understand that with thousands or even millions of readers, not every book that an author writes will please everyone, and not even, in all probability, everyone who liked the previous book. In my own case, I know this to be true, because regardless of appearances and readers’ perceptions, I do some things differently in every book. That upsets some readers, and others get upset because they don’t see enough radical difference between the approaches in books.

For an author, that comes with the territory. What comes increasingly with the territory, and shouldn’t, is the growing amount of abusiveness written and directed at authors personally… even if much of it is somewhat subterranean in forums only visited by their faithful. If a reader doesn’t like a book… that happens. If the reader wants to say why, that’s also fine. If the reader doesn’t want to read any more books by that author, that’s also a personal choice. But targeting authors personally and abusively in reviews and forums because they don’t meet expectations… or deadlines — that’s not only bad manners and uncivil, but reveals an incredible degree of anti-social self-centeredness that bodes ill for our society.

Contemporaneous with this type of self-centeredness is another kind — the posting of downloads of e-books on a wholesale scale by individuals. Now… there are all sorts of arguments about whether legal downloads — or even the free-distribution of e-books by some publishers — affect book sales positively or negatively. I suspect that depends largely upon the author, but so far studies are inconclusive. If publishers wish to do that, they do so in the hopes of encouraging other sales, and with the full knowledge of the author. They also seldom release many books by a given author at one time. If a publisher or an author chooses to offer free downloads to encourage sales, that’s their determination and choice. But it’s clearly both unethical and illegal for someone else to make that choice for the author or publisher. What not only bothers me about such “wholesale” postings by individuals is not only the contempt for the author that such download postings represent, but the fact that none of these “downloaders” even seem to recognize that their actions are contemptible as well as illegal. Almost all the authors I know — and after all the years I know a great number — work demanding, sometimes grueling, schedules. Many still hold down full-time jobs in other fields. Contrary to popular belief, most published authors do not make millions. In fact, most can’t support themselves on writing alone. Among those of us who can, only a few handfuls make the “millions” [and, no, while I’m comfortable and not hurting, I’m not even close to being in that class]. So… posting or using such downloads declares in effect that the person who reads them doesn’t value the writer’s work enough to pay for it. Some them claim that they do so because books and e-books are overpriced. That’s a cop-out, not to mention inaccurate. If books are so overpriced and publishing so profitable, why are almost all publishers laying off staff and closing imprints? No… for these downloaders, it’s all about “me.” Yet most of them would be highly offended and more than a little unhappy if their employers suggested that they should work for free, which is effectively what unauthorized downloads are imposing on authors and publishers.

As I said in the beginning, almost all readers are generous, open, and, even when they don’t like what I or other authors write, polite. But I can’t say that the growth and increasing visibility of a self-centered and often verbally/textually vicious and comptemptuous sub-class isn’t disturbing, particularly in these times.

April 15th has come and gone, but the arguments and bitterness remain, even well after the last “tea parties” have disappeared… for this year. We’ve all heard the arguments. The “rich” pay too little in taxes; the rich pay far more than their fair share; the middle class carries the heaviest tax burden; taxes are too heavy for working families… The arguments, points, and counterpoints seem almost endless, and more than a few Americans have asked year after year why Congress can’t come up with a taxation system that is simple and fair.

There are essentially three reasons why that seemingly simple task is in fact impossible. First, the U.S. government spends an incredible amount of money. That requires hefty taxation, and raising large amounts of revenue mitigates against fairness. While everyone thinks spending should be lower, there’s no majority agreement on what particular programs should be cut. Oh… there’s a general agreement that waste should be cut and that perhaps defense spending should be lower, but, as the saying goes, the devil is in the details. One person’s definition of waste, as I’ve discussed earlier, is another’s vital program. And, as for defense cuts… There should be fewer military bases, but don’t eliminate the ones in my state. Fewer troops in uniform? But we don’t want longer tours for those in service, and we don’t want the return of a draft. Less fancy weapons? But that increases casualties.

Similar issues arise in other programs. What about Social Security and healthcare? As it is, millions of Americans have trouble making ends meet in their older years… and you want to cut their benefits? Multiply these kinds of questions by the thousands of programs, and there’s precious little consensus on the details of any major spending reform.

Second, because so many Americans’ income, expense, employment, and life situation differ, a simple system capable of raising adequate revenue will inevitably have very different impacts on different taxpayers, and those differences will be perceived as unfair.

But the biggest reason why a “fair” tax system is impossible is because, as a nation, we cannot agree on what constitutes fairness. It sounds simple, and it’s anything but.

Begin with the reason for taxes. They’re officially levied to pay for services that individuals cannot provide for themselves, matters such as national defense, court systems, interstate and local highways, food safety and environmental standards — the list is long, and while many people complain that it is far too long, every one of those functions or rules was legislated into being because the so-called private sector proved unable or unwilling to deal with such issues. In general, at least in theory, each American has an equal claim to those services. Sam doesn’t get more national defense or environmental protection than Georgette, or less use of the highways or the courts.

So… one “fairness” argument asks why citizens who earn more than others and create jobs, either through the businesses they build or through their spending on goods and services, should pay higher taxes, either in absolute or percentage terms, than other taxpayers, when both receive the same government services. In fact, in percentage terms, many of those with the lowest incomes receive such services without contributing at all, except to Social Security and Medicare, and sometimes, not even to those programs.

A second fairness argument is based on equating fairness to percentage taxation, i.e., the fairest income tax is one that taxes all incomes at the same percentage. Under such a tax, often proposed at around 20%, a family that earned $45,000 [approximately the U.S. average family income] would pay $9,000, while a family that earned $135,000 would pay $27,000. The problem with this, many claim, is that $9,000 represents a far greater burden on the average family than does $27,000 on the better-off family, and this makes a flat tax unfair. On the other hand, does the better-off family receive three times as many benefits as the poorer family? Is that fair?

A third level of fairness argument is advanced by those advocating a “progressive” income tax systems [which, in various varieties, are what most nations actually have in one form or another, again, at least in theory]. This version of fairness states that those who have and earn more should pay a higher rate, often a far higher rate, than those who have less. There are a number of rationales for this, but the one most advocated is that those who are blessed with being successful have a greater obligation to pay back society with by paying higher taxes. Put slightly more cynically, that tends to equate to “it’s your civic obligation, and we need the money, and there aren’t enough of you to stop us from doing it.” I, at least, find it hard to argue that the wealthiest citizens, at least those who do pay taxes, and almost all of them do these days, thanks to the Alternative Minimum Tax, receive substantially more in government benefits than do other citizens, other than perhaps the benefit of the government not enacting even higher taxes. Do they have a moral obligation to pay higher taxes? On what grounds? Is it fair to insist that they do? Opponents of progressive taxation raise the question of why it’s considered fair for the most productive citizens to subsidize the needs of the least productive. Or why people with more children pay less in taxes than those with fewer children, when those with more children require more services?

These certainly aren’t all the arguments about “fairness” in taxation, and there well may be better ones than I’ve mentioned, but, whatever anyone’s position on these questions of “fairness” may be, it is quite clear that among Americans, and probably all populations everywhere, individuals have very different definitions of what constitutes fairness. And that, I submit, is one of the basic reasons why there will never be a tax system considered fair by those across all income levels of a society.

And, then, is it fair for a majority, because those who make less are always the majority in any society, to decide what is fair? Yet… would it be any fairer for one minority or another to decide?

Several months ago, I posted a blog deploring the tendency of all too many businesses to outsource their work to their customers, such as by promoting “paperless” records kept by the consumer, rather than continuing the practice of sending out paper statements. Several readers pointed out that since such “innovations” reduced costs or kept them from increasing, the customers should benefit by not having to pay higher prices required by the old practices. I mentally considered that the point might have validity in some cases, but, overall I have remained somewhat skeptical.

Some recent developments have tended to reinforce that skepticism. The first is the pending decision by the U.S. Postal Service not only to raise first class postal rates in the next month, but also to eliminate Saturday mail deliveries to cut costs, partly on the grounds that revenues have dropped because much former priority/first class mail has decreased because more people are using the internet to pay bills. That may be, but I think that argument is largely a red herring. First, most all the services most Americans and I use still send out paper bills, even if we pay by internet. Second, the volume of advertising and junk mail continues to flood the mailboxes. The Postal Service has claimed for nearly 30 years that they “save” money by letting advertisers do the bulk mail work and that raising bulk mailing rates would drive down revenues. Oh? I do know printing costs, and when multiple catalogues continue to deluge our mailbox, it seems highly likely that any company for whom printing and mailing thousands and thousands of unnecessary catalogues and solicitations is cheaper than cleaning up the mailing lists is getting far too low a rate, especially when the delivery of the first class mail that is far more important to most Americans than bulk junk mail is going to be delayed even more. This is likely to become critical to more Americans in these financial trying times when an ever greater number of companies have also shortened their billing cycles, giving customers far less leeway in paying their bills before slapping them with various fees. The public is already subsidizing advertising and waste through the present pricing system, and now we’re being told that we need to accept poorer service in order to preserve the junk mail bonanza for advertisers.

In another case, users of one of the more popular tax calculation programs became aware of a flaw in the program almost four months ago. The flaw would not allow taxpayers with certain investments, even of a few hundred dollars, to file their taxes electronically, because the software insisted that there were errors in the federal return. More and more users complained. Nothing happened. After several months, one user figured out a fix, and several others improved on it. Less than a month before April 15th, someone at the tax software company cleaned up the user-derived fix and posted it. It’s not really a fix, but a work-around. Exactly why in four months can’t a software company fix its own programs? Why do the users have to find the fix? My own suspicion is that the glitch only affected a few hundred or a few thousand users out of millions, most of whom just gave up in frustration and filed by mail, knowing that the glitch didn’t create an error in their tax returns. That way the company didn’t have to spend thousands or tens of thousands of dollars creating a real fix.

Another set of examples lies with the airline industry. First, most airlines gave up meal service included in the price of tickets. Then many gave up “free” snacks. Some even restricted or eliminated inclusive soft drink services. Checked bags used to be included in ticket prices. Now anyone who needs more than an overnight bag pays a surcharge. That doesn’t just include business travelers whose companies can pick up the tab, but mothers of infants and small children visiting parents, for whom schlepping bags is usually neither possible nor practical. It also makes security screening, as well as loading and unloading an airliner, an increasingly tedious experience, which may be yet another reason why scheduled flight times are growing longer and longer, even though airplanes are not flying any slower [except, of course, in comparison to the discontinued Concord]. The latest “cost-saving” inconveniences are the replacement of boarding cards with flimsy paper boarding slips and the elimination of the airline ticket envelope. If one does check baggage, then the baggage claim notice is unceremoniously stuck to the back of a boarding flimsy, where the chances of its survival through multiple flights are greatly reduced.

I’ve only cited a few such cost-saving inconveniences, but I dare say that there are many, many more out there. Now, I’m the first to admit that anecdotal evidence doesn’t necessarily have any statistical value for the population as a whole, but there are times when it does. I’m beginning to think that we just may have reached that time. The other aspect of this that bothers me, especially as a F&SF writer, is that, while I have tried to retain the optimism that technological and computer advances would reduce the pressures and costs on people, I have the feeling that more and more often technology is being used to optimize ways of separating people from their money, rather than providing new and improved services.

Isn’t there a point where so-called cost-saving is going to be recognized as just another gimmick to preserve profits and, heaven forbid, corporate bonuses — which will doubtless go to the executives who dreamed up the ever-increasing levels of inconvenience foisted upon Americans in all sectors of the economy?

Some time ago I was reading a book [Lies My Teacher Told Me]. I didn’t finish it, not because it wasn’t good, but because it was thoroughly depressing, and I’m usually not the kind to be easily depressed. The author was pointing out case after case where textbooks and teachers were wrong. I got to thinking about his approach and realized that what he was often complaining about wasn’t about lies at all — but that teachers and textbooks all oversimplified everything to the point that those oversimplifications become simplistic and often were not technically correct.

Part of that is understandable — almost nothing is as simple as anyone makes it out to be, and few of us have the time and patience to learn the full story about anything. Life is really like fractals — while we seem to see regular patterns, those events aren’t all that regular, and the deeper one looks the more there is.

Yet, at times, overunderstanding can be counterproductive. I don’t care about impact physics when I’m stapling shingles or hammering in a picture hangar. The problem is that once some things, particularly economics and politics, are oversimplified, they are in fact lies, and those lies change the course of human events, while oversimplifying the impact physics of hammering nails generally has little effect on the ability to hammer in nails — or the rate of housing construction.

But failure to understand can be even more deadly, especially in a representative democracy where voters have to decide on who represents them and when those decisions are based on news so condensed that it’s essentially a lie, even if every fact presented is in fact accurate, because the facts not presented would have changed the entire slant of that news item. Unfortunately, in this day of instant news and instant information, most individuals don’t want to listen to the full story. They have a thirty second — or less — attention span for anything that doesn’t affect them, especially at that moment, and to cater to that, most information providers condense information and news to short snippets of quick and oversimplified material. Almost always, this results in distortion and can change popular opinion or reinforce already existing stereotypes.

Years ago, when I was legislative director for a U.S. Representative, he made the point that in an appropriations hearing there was more debate on a line item for mule barn than on research appropriations for a nuclear collider — because everyone knew what a mule barn was and wanted to voice their opinions. He was exaggerating, but not by much. In another case, the abandoned hazardous waste sites [Superfund sites] ignited a giant controversy during the Reagan administration because the American public had heard about Love Canal and could visualize the problem. The political uproar that followed because people felt that EPA wasn’t enforcing the law vigorously enough essentially resulted in the removal of 33 out of the 35 political appointees at the Agency, and all the top officials. Yet, several years later, studies revealed that there were nine other far more serious environmental problems that were killing far, far more Americans than leakage from abandoned Superfund sites, and that those problems couldn’t be addressed adequately because so much of EPA’s funding, as a result of the Superfund scandal, had gone to the waste site problem.

Virtually every government agency has similar stories, and so do many corporations. While absolutely egregious, the recent payment of bonuses to AIG executives tends to overshadow the far larger and more critical problem of a financial system that institutionalizes and rewards excessive risk and short-term profits and diverts funding and attention from basic reforms of that system, as well as from vital infrastructure, health care reform, and education.

In short, in a condensed, sensation-based news culture, what you hear is usually an oversimplified version that’s all too often a “truthful” lie because of what’s missing. And, more and more, such “truthful lies” lead to bad public policy and worse legislative fixes, which in turn create more problems reported in another set of “truthful lies”… and so it goes.