The movie "Pretty Woman" ends with the message from HAPPY MAN: "Welcome to Hollywood! What's your dream? Everybody comes here; this is
Hollywood, land of dreams. Some dreams come true, some don't; but keep
on dreamin' - this is Hollywood. Always time to dream, so keep on
dreamin'. "
The historian Ken Starr wrote a series of books on the history of California from its discovery to the 1960's. They provide an introduction to the major topics and events in the state in its short but dramatic history. The first is called "Americans and the California Dream", and the subsequent volumes all carry the dream theme along in their title. I think his intention was to capture the hopes and fantasies of people coming to the state and the continuous quality of dreams in later arrivals. There have been many migrations of dreamers into the state. The first was the Junipero Sera expedition of the Spanish Missionaries that created the chain of missions on the coast. The second was the gold rush of 1849 that created San Francisco and the State as a state of the union. The third major migration of the "pioneers" in covered wagons was an amazing heroic series of journeys, described from a personal perspective by Didion in "Where I was From". The fourth was the dust bowl "Okie" migration of desperate farmers from the mid-West described in "Grapes of Wrath" and numerous films. And there have been many other smaller ones, including Chinese and Japanese settlers coming to help develop the new state. Each group came with their dreams of wealth and happiness, and some were rewarded beyond even their wildest dreams, and others ended in disaster and death, like the "Donner party".
The disparity between dreams and reality is huge. The Okies came
swarming to Southern California imagining it was the Eden of their
dreams, only to find themselves blocked at the borders by the previous
generations of immigrants who were all too aware of how limited the
opportunities were, and did not welcome more competition for the limited
resources. Didion's description of Sacramento echoes the same
impatience with the economic invasion of post war immigrants, who were
not "settlers" and did not understand what the previous generation of
"pioneers" had been through. After living here for a few years, I realize that I am no different from the other migrants to this place. I came with dreams, like being close to family, which have been realized. And others, like being part of the film industry, that have not. It is not an easy place to retire since the housing costs are high, and the scattered development makes car travel a necessity in a place where this can be very frustrating. (Driving in LA is a whole other story!) The weather is often pleasant, though not quite as promoted by the C of C. Some very wealthy people retire to LA and enjoy its charms buoyed up by their affluence, but most come with less, and struggle to find their place in a city which has embodied the extremes of rich and poor much longer than the most of the US. As always, the poor struggle most, the middle class have less coherence
as they try desperately to ascend to the 1% and have more influence, and
even the 1% have little influence in a place where the 0.1% are in
great supply.
The irony is not lost on me. For there is a mental transformation that immigrants to California must go through after they arrive. The "dreams of California" must be replaced by the realities of sustaining daily lives in a difficult environment. At one time, the challenges were a lack of water, and very limited development. Oil, movie, aviation, military and real estate booms brought prosperity, over development, and the challenges of modern California: an overpopulated, economically competitive state the size of most countries. The "old timers" who have managed to survive here all understand: if you have not struggled to survive here, you are not really a Californian, just a "California dreamer".
Sunday, April 30, 2017
Saturday, April 22, 2017
Mar A Lago and Climate Change
Whether Donald Trump will be an effective president is unknown but there is no doubt now that he is an audacious real estate promoter. Suppose you were to buy a run down property with historical interest in Florida in 1985 and invest a bundle of money in renovating it to become an “exclusive club”. The local high society has no interest in joining and you must open the club to whoever is attracted to it. A hurricane in 2005 causes minor damage and the rising sea level makes it clear that the property on a spit on the Florida Palm Beach coast is ultimately going under water. How would you promote the property for a favorable sale?
The president- real estate promoter has options unavailable to the average developer: Spend 25 of your first 100 days there (during the Winter season when it is habitable) identifying it as the “Southern White House” for historical value. Invite world leaders from China and Japan to confer there instead of the actual White House in DC. Since local Florida investors and northeastern US investors are unlikely to be interested, investors from China or Japan are the most likely buyers. But what about the rising sea level? Just declare that “climate change is a myth”, take it out of government websites and assure potential buyers that there is nothing to worry about! What an audacious marketing strategy for an ultimately doomed property. When did President Trump realize that the rising sea level would destroy the value of the property? He started denying climate change in 2012, when the Palm Beach community was increasing funding to protect itself from rising water. So he has been anticipating this for some time. And none of this is illegal! He is entitled to own property and to visit it as other presidents have. He is entitled to entertain foreign visitors there, as Nixon did at San Clemente. And ultimately he is entitled to sell it for whatever price he can accomplish! Brilliant!
The president- real estate promoter has options unavailable to the average developer: Spend 25 of your first 100 days there (during the Winter season when it is habitable) identifying it as the “Southern White House” for historical value. Invite world leaders from China and Japan to confer there instead of the actual White House in DC. Since local Florida investors and northeastern US investors are unlikely to be interested, investors from China or Japan are the most likely buyers. But what about the rising sea level? Just declare that “climate change is a myth”, take it out of government websites and assure potential buyers that there is nothing to worry about! What an audacious marketing strategy for an ultimately doomed property. When did President Trump realize that the rising sea level would destroy the value of the property? He started denying climate change in 2012, when the Palm Beach community was increasing funding to protect itself from rising water. So he has been anticipating this for some time. And none of this is illegal! He is entitled to own property and to visit it as other presidents have. He is entitled to entertain foreign visitors there, as Nixon did at San Clemente. And ultimately he is entitled to sell it for whatever price he can accomplish! Brilliant!
HOW THE DEMOCRATS LOST THE ELECTION AND WHAT IT SAYS ABOUT US
It has been almost 100 days into the Trump presidency, and another 60 or so since the election. The immediate pundit response to “how the Democrats lost” is over, and forgotten. This is unfortunate because the core lessons will have a future impact on the two party system in this country Understanding the Democratic party failure is an important part of re-establishing it in parity in this countervailing process. There are three levels of failure in the process: 1) structural party and system issues 2) specific problems of this election and 3) challenges of the specific candidate.
1) structural party and system issues
The DNC subverted the primary electoral process. From early in the primary, it was clear that the DNC was committed to supporting Hilary Clinton as the next candidate and that they did various things to interfere with the primary process. The relative success of the Sanders campaign should have been an indicator that Clinton was not popular with the electorate but was ignored. The “super delegate” process of lining up delegates not chosen by primary BEFORE the results were understood was especially destructive. In this process the DNC and Clinton herself revealed the fundamentally undemocratic attitude she has about the electoral process. That this information was leaked only made it more obvious to voters.
The geographic and political identity of the democratic party has been shifting. The Democratic party has an urban liberal identity which was intensified during the Obama administration. This includes the majority of the population as the population has shifted, but it does not successfully carry the country by congressional or electoral college tally. Some of this disparity is the result of a concerted effort by Republicans at the state level to gerrymander control of voting state by state in accessible states. This is a slow incremental process begun by Newt Gingrich (!) and Democrats do not seem to have the patience for this task. Also the shift in demographics of the country has been economic but not political. Urban areas are much more likely to be economically advantageous (with certain obvious exceptions in the Rust Belt) but the political distribution of votes and house seats has not adjusted as quickly. (This changes only from census to census.) The Clinton campaign is blamed for the failure to lure rural voters in key states Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania. This is partly a demographic issue and partly a problem in strategy of how to engage these voters. The Obama recovery of the auto industry should have been enough, but the Clinton strategy did not know how.
Does the electoral college invalidate votes of the majority? Or even votes of the minority in some states? Though after the election Trump made the comment that it should be abolished, he would have lost without it! For Liberal Democrats it seems like an obstacle to getting the full public vote for President, but what if a demagogue ran uniting White Supremacist voters across many states? Would Liberals be in a hurry to abandon the Electoral College then? It stands as a method of insuring national participation against the dominant role of certain large states: New York, Florida, Texas, and California. Should those states have an outsized role in picking the President?
There is much recognition by pundits that the Democratic party abandoned the lower middle class white voter. This began with Bill Clinton and his recognition of the need for Wall St and Hollywood money. It was continued by Obama, and then Hilary Clinton. Her statement on the “deplorables” of the Trump campaign sealed the rejection of this group. And there are many women in that group who rejected her candidacy as not representing their values. H Clinton was the “women’s candidate” for only a part of the female electorate and barely a majority. In effect the Democrats and Republicans have been fighting for the same educated, economically stable, middle class and upper middle class voters for more than 8 years, with both parties offering false messages to this other lower social group for support that never comes. Neither party has a track record for this group of voters. Trump capitalized on this with a voice honed out of talk radio, Clinton was clueless. One one critic put it: framing debate about overtime etc was more important than transgender bathrooms and sexual abuse.
There are technically more poor and lower middle class people than middle class and rich people, so demographically Republicans should always be the minority party. This has led to several strategies to attempt to counter this problem including “voter ID laws” and limiting poll access by inconvenience to interfere with worker voting. Democrats have responded with motor-voter and other initiatives, and court fights against ID laws. The irony is that while this struggle has been going on, the Democrats have abandoned positions that would maintain the commitment of these voters, so the importance of all this is now unclear. “the election day should be a national holiday” as it is in some countries so voters could have off to vote, but if they won't vote for your party it doesnt matter!
2) specific problems of this election
The Democrats had a potentially successful candidate: Biden but his recent loss of his son and long career in politics made him decide not to run. He seemed the more suitable candidate and the fact that the DNC did not look for a similar person, but opted for Hilary because she had bowed out in 2004 and it was “her turn” was catastrophically stupid.
The Clinton campaign was run more as a media blitz campaign than by the ground game data of the Obama team. Clinton had a data driven ground game and “game plan” but it was not attuned to local concerns according to all feedback, and assumed that certain states were lost and unimportant, and others were sure. These were core strategic errors in the campaigns tactics and represent the kind of central management Hilary Clinton is famous for, and which has caused her to have problems at other times. Is she unable to delegate effectively?
Terrorism and domestic terrorism were issues facing the country as the result of overseas events. Each candidate was required to define a position regarding this. Trump took the extreme view: exclude the bad guys, I will protect you. Clinton took the conciliatory role: we are all in this together, don’t alienate the loyal members of our country. Both positions are valid and could have been effective but Clinton was not an effective presenter of her position and the exclusionary view is always easier to sell. By calling Trump supporters “deplorable people” she undermined her own position of inclusion and seemed to say “Moslems are ok but loud angry lower class Whites are not”.
Pollsters were consistently wrong, even Trump’s, who believed he was going to lose. This led to Clinton slowing down, and probably mis-allocating resources. But it also revealed the inability of pollsters to capture the energy in the society at rallies for Sanders and Trump and the lack of same for Clinton. She was accused of slowing down and being overconfident at the end of the campaign but seemed tired and lacking the energy to push through. (Or it may indicate that Republicans manipulated the vote in some states.)
Johnson (and Stein) seemed to be marginal 3rd party candidates but took more from Clinton than Trump, perhaps even enough to throw the balance in the few key rust belt states. Clinton et al did not take their impact seriously during the election and did not acquire Sanders followers effectively.
There was a strong racial backlash against Obama that was surfacing in the later years of his presidency in the form of murders by police and a “black lives matter” movement. This was potentially lethal to Democrats splitting these voters and they never came up with a workable strategy and lost turnout from both. This broke the Obama coalition which was essential to offsetting this racist backlash. The talk radio, Fox News, etc media blast against Clinton was fierce and constant and help swing voters in key states away from her or away from turning out for her. (But they did as much to Obama and he was able to reverse and use it. She was not.) Trump played this intensively and there is a surprisingly strong racist element in American society at this time. Who they are and why this has emerged is not entirely clear, but Clinton was unable to reverse the tide.
3) challenges of the specific candidate.
Clinton’s failure to define major issues was a problem. The greatest mystery of the campaign was Hilary’s decision to run against Trump’s sexual behavior not his failures in life and policy. This played to a very narrow PC world of sexually reactive women, and did not even have much traction in the “rainbow” community. (It even back fired in the end when Huma Abadin’s husband came into view.) In effect she was running against her husband’s behavior! And this was noted by many and undermined her position: why didn’t she leave Bill if this is so terrible?
Sexual misbehavior is seen by some as a sign of masculinity and harping on this did not help her with key demographics.
Trump harped on the lost jobs, but in fact the economy was growing. He made the issue the Clinton trade deals which HAD lost jobs. The two key issues were manufacturing jobs, and the failure to recover the middle class. Clinton had ideas about these but could never express them in good sound bite terms. Trump had used the very foreign labor that he railed about for his hotels and could have been skewered on this instead of his sexual attitudes. Clinton could not attack corporations like Sanders did because she was beholden to corporate money. She could never effectively frame the economic debate with Trump. Trump was a “blue collar billionaire” who ran a confused disorganized campaign and shoulds have lost. But he was able to verbalize the frustration of marginalized lower class whites in a way that Clinton could not.
She has been accused of arrogance which is more about entitlement. She thought being the “first female president” would speak for itself as the first black president had, and did not appreciate the complex campaigns that Obama ran. “its my turn” did not resonate with anyone. Her inability to accept responsibility is interesting. It was most obvious after the campaign when she began blaming Comey and the Russians in just the way Trump had threatened to do, if he lost. A loser who blames others is not taking responsibility. But in the broader sense she is just not an appealing candidate: her speeches, her style, her gestures have little charisma, and her record is far from stellar.
Both Clinton and her committee failed to understand the issues of internet security and hacking. Even after she had been discovered to allow classified emails on her insecure server, and was warned by the FBI that the committee servers were hacked, she did not recognize the significance. She is of the generation that cannot deal with the internet which was a striking (apparent) contrast to Trump who had advisors who helped him use social media effectively.
What does this tell us about this time in US history? The most important issue is the weakening of the two party system. This is partly the result of economic changes the democratic party has embraced while ignoring the impact on its traditional supporters. But it is also about the importance of building base and structure at the local level. The most Liberal Democrats have had the least patience for that task, while Conservative Republicans have had the most. Maybe this will change things. Regarding the electoral process, first the Democrats ignored all the processes put into place to ensure a more popular involvement in the primary selection. There was a candidate that might have been stronger. Second, a pure media campaign is no longer effective with voters. Social media, BUZZ, and direct charismatic skill have more impact, some would say too much. And a high tech computerized well managed ground game is important. The role of polling is suspect and was clearly almost worthless in this election. The candidate must be carefully focused toward the key voter issues, and polling does not consistently tell what will create "turnout".
The most difficult message of this campaign was why the United States was saddled with two unappealing candidates as the choice for the highest office of the country. Neither primary process adequately enabled more appealing candidates to come forward and be recognized. But who might they be? There is a worrisome sense that being a political candidate and especially a presidential candidate is a tiring thankless job, only taken on by family dynasties and arrogant billionaires.
If there is a serious message for the country in this election, it is that we have lost the fundamental motivation of individuals for public service.
1) structural party and system issues
The DNC subverted the primary electoral process. From early in the primary, it was clear that the DNC was committed to supporting Hilary Clinton as the next candidate and that they did various things to interfere with the primary process. The relative success of the Sanders campaign should have been an indicator that Clinton was not popular with the electorate but was ignored. The “super delegate” process of lining up delegates not chosen by primary BEFORE the results were understood was especially destructive. In this process the DNC and Clinton herself revealed the fundamentally undemocratic attitude she has about the electoral process. That this information was leaked only made it more obvious to voters.
The geographic and political identity of the democratic party has been shifting. The Democratic party has an urban liberal identity which was intensified during the Obama administration. This includes the majority of the population as the population has shifted, but it does not successfully carry the country by congressional or electoral college tally. Some of this disparity is the result of a concerted effort by Republicans at the state level to gerrymander control of voting state by state in accessible states. This is a slow incremental process begun by Newt Gingrich (!) and Democrats do not seem to have the patience for this task. Also the shift in demographics of the country has been economic but not political. Urban areas are much more likely to be economically advantageous (with certain obvious exceptions in the Rust Belt) but the political distribution of votes and house seats has not adjusted as quickly. (This changes only from census to census.) The Clinton campaign is blamed for the failure to lure rural voters in key states Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania. This is partly a demographic issue and partly a problem in strategy of how to engage these voters. The Obama recovery of the auto industry should have been enough, but the Clinton strategy did not know how.
Does the electoral college invalidate votes of the majority? Or even votes of the minority in some states? Though after the election Trump made the comment that it should be abolished, he would have lost without it! For Liberal Democrats it seems like an obstacle to getting the full public vote for President, but what if a demagogue ran uniting White Supremacist voters across many states? Would Liberals be in a hurry to abandon the Electoral College then? It stands as a method of insuring national participation against the dominant role of certain large states: New York, Florida, Texas, and California. Should those states have an outsized role in picking the President?
There is much recognition by pundits that the Democratic party abandoned the lower middle class white voter. This began with Bill Clinton and his recognition of the need for Wall St and Hollywood money. It was continued by Obama, and then Hilary Clinton. Her statement on the “deplorables” of the Trump campaign sealed the rejection of this group. And there are many women in that group who rejected her candidacy as not representing their values. H Clinton was the “women’s candidate” for only a part of the female electorate and barely a majority. In effect the Democrats and Republicans have been fighting for the same educated, economically stable, middle class and upper middle class voters for more than 8 years, with both parties offering false messages to this other lower social group for support that never comes. Neither party has a track record for this group of voters. Trump capitalized on this with a voice honed out of talk radio, Clinton was clueless. One one critic put it: framing debate about overtime etc was more important than transgender bathrooms and sexual abuse.
There are technically more poor and lower middle class people than middle class and rich people, so demographically Republicans should always be the minority party. This has led to several strategies to attempt to counter this problem including “voter ID laws” and limiting poll access by inconvenience to interfere with worker voting. Democrats have responded with motor-voter and other initiatives, and court fights against ID laws. The irony is that while this struggle has been going on, the Democrats have abandoned positions that would maintain the commitment of these voters, so the importance of all this is now unclear. “the election day should be a national holiday” as it is in some countries so voters could have off to vote, but if they won't vote for your party it doesnt matter!
2) specific problems of this election
The Democrats had a potentially successful candidate: Biden but his recent loss of his son and long career in politics made him decide not to run. He seemed the more suitable candidate and the fact that the DNC did not look for a similar person, but opted for Hilary because she had bowed out in 2004 and it was “her turn” was catastrophically stupid.
The Clinton campaign was run more as a media blitz campaign than by the ground game data of the Obama team. Clinton had a data driven ground game and “game plan” but it was not attuned to local concerns according to all feedback, and assumed that certain states were lost and unimportant, and others were sure. These were core strategic errors in the campaigns tactics and represent the kind of central management Hilary Clinton is famous for, and which has caused her to have problems at other times. Is she unable to delegate effectively?
Terrorism and domestic terrorism were issues facing the country as the result of overseas events. Each candidate was required to define a position regarding this. Trump took the extreme view: exclude the bad guys, I will protect you. Clinton took the conciliatory role: we are all in this together, don’t alienate the loyal members of our country. Both positions are valid and could have been effective but Clinton was not an effective presenter of her position and the exclusionary view is always easier to sell. By calling Trump supporters “deplorable people” she undermined her own position of inclusion and seemed to say “Moslems are ok but loud angry lower class Whites are not”.
Pollsters were consistently wrong, even Trump’s, who believed he was going to lose. This led to Clinton slowing down, and probably mis-allocating resources. But it also revealed the inability of pollsters to capture the energy in the society at rallies for Sanders and Trump and the lack of same for Clinton. She was accused of slowing down and being overconfident at the end of the campaign but seemed tired and lacking the energy to push through. (Or it may indicate that Republicans manipulated the vote in some states.)
Johnson (and Stein) seemed to be marginal 3rd party candidates but took more from Clinton than Trump, perhaps even enough to throw the balance in the few key rust belt states. Clinton et al did not take their impact seriously during the election and did not acquire Sanders followers effectively.
There was a strong racial backlash against Obama that was surfacing in the later years of his presidency in the form of murders by police and a “black lives matter” movement. This was potentially lethal to Democrats splitting these voters and they never came up with a workable strategy and lost turnout from both. This broke the Obama coalition which was essential to offsetting this racist backlash. The talk radio, Fox News, etc media blast against Clinton was fierce and constant and help swing voters in key states away from her or away from turning out for her. (But they did as much to Obama and he was able to reverse and use it. She was not.) Trump played this intensively and there is a surprisingly strong racist element in American society at this time. Who they are and why this has emerged is not entirely clear, but Clinton was unable to reverse the tide.
3) challenges of the specific candidate.
Clinton’s failure to define major issues was a problem. The greatest mystery of the campaign was Hilary’s decision to run against Trump’s sexual behavior not his failures in life and policy. This played to a very narrow PC world of sexually reactive women, and did not even have much traction in the “rainbow” community. (It even back fired in the end when Huma Abadin’s husband came into view.) In effect she was running against her husband’s behavior! And this was noted by many and undermined her position: why didn’t she leave Bill if this is so terrible?
Sexual misbehavior is seen by some as a sign of masculinity and harping on this did not help her with key demographics.
Trump harped on the lost jobs, but in fact the economy was growing. He made the issue the Clinton trade deals which HAD lost jobs. The two key issues were manufacturing jobs, and the failure to recover the middle class. Clinton had ideas about these but could never express them in good sound bite terms. Trump had used the very foreign labor that he railed about for his hotels and could have been skewered on this instead of his sexual attitudes. Clinton could not attack corporations like Sanders did because she was beholden to corporate money. She could never effectively frame the economic debate with Trump. Trump was a “blue collar billionaire” who ran a confused disorganized campaign and shoulds have lost. But he was able to verbalize the frustration of marginalized lower class whites in a way that Clinton could not.
She has been accused of arrogance which is more about entitlement. She thought being the “first female president” would speak for itself as the first black president had, and did not appreciate the complex campaigns that Obama ran. “its my turn” did not resonate with anyone. Her inability to accept responsibility is interesting. It was most obvious after the campaign when she began blaming Comey and the Russians in just the way Trump had threatened to do, if he lost. A loser who blames others is not taking responsibility. But in the broader sense she is just not an appealing candidate: her speeches, her style, her gestures have little charisma, and her record is far from stellar.
Both Clinton and her committee failed to understand the issues of internet security and hacking. Even after she had been discovered to allow classified emails on her insecure server, and was warned by the FBI that the committee servers were hacked, she did not recognize the significance. She is of the generation that cannot deal with the internet which was a striking (apparent) contrast to Trump who had advisors who helped him use social media effectively.
What does this tell us about this time in US history? The most important issue is the weakening of the two party system. This is partly the result of economic changes the democratic party has embraced while ignoring the impact on its traditional supporters. But it is also about the importance of building base and structure at the local level. The most Liberal Democrats have had the least patience for that task, while Conservative Republicans have had the most. Maybe this will change things. Regarding the electoral process, first the Democrats ignored all the processes put into place to ensure a more popular involvement in the primary selection. There was a candidate that might have been stronger. Second, a pure media campaign is no longer effective with voters. Social media, BUZZ, and direct charismatic skill have more impact, some would say too much. And a high tech computerized well managed ground game is important. The role of polling is suspect and was clearly almost worthless in this election. The candidate must be carefully focused toward the key voter issues, and polling does not consistently tell what will create "turnout".
The most difficult message of this campaign was why the United States was saddled with two unappealing candidates as the choice for the highest office of the country. Neither primary process adequately enabled more appealing candidates to come forward and be recognized. But who might they be? There is a worrisome sense that being a political candidate and especially a presidential candidate is a tiring thankless job, only taken on by family dynasties and arrogant billionaires.
If there is a serious message for the country in this election, it is that we have lost the fundamental motivation of individuals for public service.
Friday, December 2, 2016
Appreciating Joan Didion
I have been reading Joan Didion for several weeks now in little dribs and drabs. There is something very powerful and condensed about her writing. Some of this is the careful precise and specific way she uses words. But that is not the most important element. She has the ability to convey her presence in the setting she is writing about, without complex self reflective clauses. She has “beginner’s mind”, the immediate awareness of what she is experiencing, and then the ability to put that experience into words. Whether she is describing the chaos of Haight Ashbury, or her return to the changes of her home town Sacramento, she can present the immediate details that convey her experience with a felt intensity. She collages stories, images, poetry fragments, and factual details into a solid impressive aggregate form, yet each retains it identity as a separate element. I don't know if I would feel that in her screenplays, but “PLAY IT AS IT LAYS” has a remarkable sense of presence for the lead character who is so totally despairing that I struggle to stay connected with her. “Do you want to know about the people of Los Angeles film community?”, she asks. “I’ll tell you about one. This is what she is like. Is that what you want?”
No, of course it is not what we want. We want to know about the deliciously devious stories of the shallow loves and worries of the famous “stars”. We want to know the inside gossip of who is in love with whom, and who is about to have whose baby. We want the soap opera version of the people living here, and instead she gives us the broken glass shards of a damaged human life. It is a dirty trick. Yes, we know there are such people living out here. The people who have not quite made it, who try, and then their lives fall apart. We don’t want to hear about one of them, they are not important. "Why did you pick her instead of someone more interesting?" Perhaps it is her perversity about human beings, her interest in their failings and duplicity. But I don’t think she is a misanthrope. Her “beginner’s mind” sees life as it is, not distracted by the web of illusion we spin around ourselves. As readers we all admire her ability, but as people we resent her destroying the stories “we tell ourselves in order to live”.
She was a certain sort of “new journalist”, present without intruding into the story. She began with the 60s, then the 70s-80s, and then took on the dangers of El Salvador, and the contradictions of Miami. And finally she addressed the contradictions of her birth state, California. Perhaps she is at her best reflecting on the state and places in which she grew up and lived for a time. Her reflections on Sacramento reveal the evolving changes in the largest state and its peculiar history. Does California reflect the future of the whole country? If it does then the changes she describes are part of the process occurring everywhere.
She is not dismissive of the people she is deflating. She does not make herself an important part of the story even when she is telling her own story. There is an innate human reserve, a humility, about her voice which carries over to the people she observes. When they lose that humility and succumb to their illusions, she observes the ironic consequences that often ensue and does not berate them. In Dylan’s words “She knows too much to argue or to judge.”
No, of course it is not what we want. We want to know about the deliciously devious stories of the shallow loves and worries of the famous “stars”. We want to know the inside gossip of who is in love with whom, and who is about to have whose baby. We want the soap opera version of the people living here, and instead she gives us the broken glass shards of a damaged human life. It is a dirty trick. Yes, we know there are such people living out here. The people who have not quite made it, who try, and then their lives fall apart. We don’t want to hear about one of them, they are not important. "Why did you pick her instead of someone more interesting?" Perhaps it is her perversity about human beings, her interest in their failings and duplicity. But I don’t think she is a misanthrope. Her “beginner’s mind” sees life as it is, not distracted by the web of illusion we spin around ourselves. As readers we all admire her ability, but as people we resent her destroying the stories “we tell ourselves in order to live”.
She was a certain sort of “new journalist”, present without intruding into the story. She began with the 60s, then the 70s-80s, and then took on the dangers of El Salvador, and the contradictions of Miami. And finally she addressed the contradictions of her birth state, California. Perhaps she is at her best reflecting on the state and places in which she grew up and lived for a time. Her reflections on Sacramento reveal the evolving changes in the largest state and its peculiar history. Does California reflect the future of the whole country? If it does then the changes she describes are part of the process occurring everywhere.
She is not dismissive of the people she is deflating. She does not make herself an important part of the story even when she is telling her own story. There is an innate human reserve, a humility, about her voice which carries over to the people she observes. When they lose that humility and succumb to their illusions, she observes the ironic consequences that often ensue and does not berate them. In Dylan’s words “She knows too much to argue or to judge.”
Sunday, June 14, 2015
Is "Wildness the preservation of the world"?
One of the early tenets of Thoreau, and then Muir, and then the Sierra Club was that "Wildness is the preservation of the world". There is some special experience that comes from being in Nature that is essential to human nature and survival.
Today's NYT features a discussion on base jumping from Yosemite and other National Parks. The discussion reflects the growing emphasis on extreme sports. Once the province of the motorcycle daredevils and tightrope walkers, it has spread to a wider community of enthusiasts. All these activities seem understandable as personal challenges either for courage or skill, but are they part of the “wilderness experience”? Once there was no “wilderness”: people lived in nature’s world and survived as best they could. Gradually human culture developed methods of surviving more easily in the world around them, and a distinction developed between the “world of man” and “Nature”. Periodic floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, etc remind us that this distinction is temporary and artificial, but it is a useful fiction that helps people feel less anxious about their day to day survival.
Once people stop living daily in the world of predators, exposure to extreme climate, and the hunger of an inconsistent food supply, a yearning for the challenges of that life seems to return. For some this is simply a walk in a local park or on the beach. For others it may involve camping outdoors, or a backpacking trip into a “wilderness” area. These challenges all have in common the desire to test one’s ability to live in the wild for a limited period of time. NOLS and other adventure programs have all developed programs modeled on the Native American “vision quest” to give participants controlled experiences of this challenge. This has become a profitable way of giving people this challenge. For some, there seems to be a natural duality between living a protected urban life and going outside of this safe space periodically to enjoy the experience of Nature more directly.
What does this have to do with outdoor thrill seeking? Another group of people want to use an outdoor experience to prove something about themselves. The obvious examples are the explorers who went to arctic and antarctic to be the first to lay claim to being at these places. The records of their trips show no indication of a peaceful engagement with a harsh natural environment and everything about organizing an adventure to prove that the person can achieve some daunting accomplishment. Often they were not the "first" to reach this location, but the first "Europeans" to report about it. Nature is only the challenge in this version of the story, not a meaningful experience in its own right. This distinction is very clear in mountaineering. Some people arrange complex trips into the mountains, with extended training etc, because they want to have the experience of being in these dramatic landscapes. The trips are not rushed and achieving the summit is only part of the goal. For others, climbing mountains is simply a check box on the bucket list of personal aggrandizement: “I skydived”, “I bungee jumped”, “I climbed this or that peak in one day”, etc. This is the “wham, bam, thank you mam” version of experiencing Nature. The trip preparation is usually brief and focused on personal endurance, not the environment, and tour leaders organize and coordinate the complex details needed to guide the inexperienced climber to a (hopefully) successful outcome. Alpine skiers and snowboarders have also developed this pattern. From the days of the selective joy of skiing down isolated slopes in distant mountains, and staying over in modest quaint lodges, skiing has grown to a world wide billion dollar real estate business in which the skiing is degraded by the crowds and automation of lifts, so that the wild and natural part of the experience is effectively eliminated. Assuring snow conditions with “snow making” equipment is the ultimate denial of the natural experience! Faced with the reality of how they have deteriorated the environment by their activities, skiers rich enough now use helicopters to take them to more isolated places, gradually extending the exploitation of the natural world for their own personal thrills. I am not attacking skiing as an activity and I enjoyed it very much at one time in my life. But skiing is the most clear example of how people start out enjoying some outdoor activity in a relatively natural place and transform it into a commercial activity that obliterates the natural element. Skiers complain about the crowds and lift lines, and poor conditions due to weather and never stop to realize that it is they who have compromised the experience for themselves!
The National Park Service sits squarely in the center of this dilemma. The parks create a boundary around and protect areas of natural beauty and important national historical importance. The parks are the residual of what was, quite recently, a wild expansive natural environment in which humans struggled daily to survive. They are maintained by our taxes, and we as the landholders are entitled to visit them. Yet at the same time, if enough of us visit and stay, the places will be transformed and no longer provide the experience of that natural world! This is most clear in the South Rim of the Grand Canyon where millions of visitors ride up for the day, look out, create parking problems and crowding and then go off leaving their trash etc behind. The contrast to the less accessible North Rim is instructive, because the two sides of the Canyon feel so utterly different, one almost a theme park in places, while the other retains most of its natural beauty. The park service must find a way to restrict the use of these special places which maximizes their access to the public, while minimizing the impact on these treasures. This is not an easy task!
Two obvious principles come to mind:
1) The parks should accommodate the maximum number of visitors possible while arranging the visits to minimize the impact on the natural features of the parks. This involves structuring lodging, roads, trail access, and key vantage points so they are not overwhelmed. The differences between the north and south rims provide examples of both!
2) The parks should not encourage or permit any activities that exploit the parks for personal aggrandizement. Base jumping off the cliffs seems an obvious example. But more subtle are questions about rock climbing. There is a long history of rock climbing the sheer walls of Yosemite. Learning to climb the cliffs to appreciate the experience of these challenging walls IS a valid experience that Yosemite provides to those who will invest the time. But it also creates a culture of personal aggrandizement of some climbers. This has led to “free climbing”, i.e. climbing ascents without protective gear. Such ascents go beyond ordinary challenges of rock climbing, to prove the expertise of the individual climbers. Why is this a function of the park? Shouldn’t all users of the parks concentrate on experiencing and appreciating their beauty? Shouldn't every visitor have the opportunity to enjoy the available natural challenges of the place? Is proving how much risk you can take with your skill and athleticism is NOT about exploring the park, but about exploring yourself, and this can be achieved at less precious sites in other parts of the country. Similarly for base jumping, for acrobatic skiing, etc. There should be places for people who want to test their special skills and athleticism, but not in the National Parks.
Today's NYT features a discussion on base jumping from Yosemite and other National Parks. The discussion reflects the growing emphasis on extreme sports. Once the province of the motorcycle daredevils and tightrope walkers, it has spread to a wider community of enthusiasts. All these activities seem understandable as personal challenges either for courage or skill, but are they part of the “wilderness experience”? Once there was no “wilderness”: people lived in nature’s world and survived as best they could. Gradually human culture developed methods of surviving more easily in the world around them, and a distinction developed between the “world of man” and “Nature”. Periodic floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, etc remind us that this distinction is temporary and artificial, but it is a useful fiction that helps people feel less anxious about their day to day survival.
Once people stop living daily in the world of predators, exposure to extreme climate, and the hunger of an inconsistent food supply, a yearning for the challenges of that life seems to return. For some this is simply a walk in a local park or on the beach. For others it may involve camping outdoors, or a backpacking trip into a “wilderness” area. These challenges all have in common the desire to test one’s ability to live in the wild for a limited period of time. NOLS and other adventure programs have all developed programs modeled on the Native American “vision quest” to give participants controlled experiences of this challenge. This has become a profitable way of giving people this challenge. For some, there seems to be a natural duality between living a protected urban life and going outside of this safe space periodically to enjoy the experience of Nature more directly.
What does this have to do with outdoor thrill seeking? Another group of people want to use an outdoor experience to prove something about themselves. The obvious examples are the explorers who went to arctic and antarctic to be the first to lay claim to being at these places. The records of their trips show no indication of a peaceful engagement with a harsh natural environment and everything about organizing an adventure to prove that the person can achieve some daunting accomplishment. Often they were not the "first" to reach this location, but the first "Europeans" to report about it. Nature is only the challenge in this version of the story, not a meaningful experience in its own right. This distinction is very clear in mountaineering. Some people arrange complex trips into the mountains, with extended training etc, because they want to have the experience of being in these dramatic landscapes. The trips are not rushed and achieving the summit is only part of the goal. For others, climbing mountains is simply a check box on the bucket list of personal aggrandizement: “I skydived”, “I bungee jumped”, “I climbed this or that peak in one day”, etc. This is the “wham, bam, thank you mam” version of experiencing Nature. The trip preparation is usually brief and focused on personal endurance, not the environment, and tour leaders organize and coordinate the complex details needed to guide the inexperienced climber to a (hopefully) successful outcome. Alpine skiers and snowboarders have also developed this pattern. From the days of the selective joy of skiing down isolated slopes in distant mountains, and staying over in modest quaint lodges, skiing has grown to a world wide billion dollar real estate business in which the skiing is degraded by the crowds and automation of lifts, so that the wild and natural part of the experience is effectively eliminated. Assuring snow conditions with “snow making” equipment is the ultimate denial of the natural experience! Faced with the reality of how they have deteriorated the environment by their activities, skiers rich enough now use helicopters to take them to more isolated places, gradually extending the exploitation of the natural world for their own personal thrills. I am not attacking skiing as an activity and I enjoyed it very much at one time in my life. But skiing is the most clear example of how people start out enjoying some outdoor activity in a relatively natural place and transform it into a commercial activity that obliterates the natural element. Skiers complain about the crowds and lift lines, and poor conditions due to weather and never stop to realize that it is they who have compromised the experience for themselves!
The National Park Service sits squarely in the center of this dilemma. The parks create a boundary around and protect areas of natural beauty and important national historical importance. The parks are the residual of what was, quite recently, a wild expansive natural environment in which humans struggled daily to survive. They are maintained by our taxes, and we as the landholders are entitled to visit them. Yet at the same time, if enough of us visit and stay, the places will be transformed and no longer provide the experience of that natural world! This is most clear in the South Rim of the Grand Canyon where millions of visitors ride up for the day, look out, create parking problems and crowding and then go off leaving their trash etc behind. The contrast to the less accessible North Rim is instructive, because the two sides of the Canyon feel so utterly different, one almost a theme park in places, while the other retains most of its natural beauty. The park service must find a way to restrict the use of these special places which maximizes their access to the public, while minimizing the impact on these treasures. This is not an easy task!
Two obvious principles come to mind:
1) The parks should accommodate the maximum number of visitors possible while arranging the visits to minimize the impact on the natural features of the parks. This involves structuring lodging, roads, trail access, and key vantage points so they are not overwhelmed. The differences between the north and south rims provide examples of both!
2) The parks should not encourage or permit any activities that exploit the parks for personal aggrandizement. Base jumping off the cliffs seems an obvious example. But more subtle are questions about rock climbing. There is a long history of rock climbing the sheer walls of Yosemite. Learning to climb the cliffs to appreciate the experience of these challenging walls IS a valid experience that Yosemite provides to those who will invest the time. But it also creates a culture of personal aggrandizement of some climbers. This has led to “free climbing”, i.e. climbing ascents without protective gear. Such ascents go beyond ordinary challenges of rock climbing, to prove the expertise of the individual climbers. Why is this a function of the park? Shouldn’t all users of the parks concentrate on experiencing and appreciating their beauty? Shouldn't every visitor have the opportunity to enjoy the available natural challenges of the place? Is proving how much risk you can take with your skill and athleticism is NOT about exploring the park, but about exploring yourself, and this can be achieved at less precious sites in other parts of the country. Similarly for base jumping, for acrobatic skiing, etc. There should be places for people who want to test their special skills and athleticism, but not in the National Parks.
Is Wisconsin the future of US labor?
The situation in Wisconsin A major confrontation between the governor and labor leaders in the state has generally gone the governor’s way, as the legislature has passed several bills limiting the influence and power of organized labor. How is this possible and does this reflect a growing national trend? A subheading gives the following view:
‘It is only a question of who makes the money — the workers or the owners.’
But it is not that simple. The companies are competing in a world market where workers make much less than in the US, and in which outsourcing and offshoring production is increasingly important in the design of corporate functions.
The balance of workers and managers must be seen in the broader context of the changing nature of corporations, and the changing values of management. When managers actually managed the direct production of workers there was a mutual interdependence which still exists in some areas like the auto industry. Here the production of a complex product with requirements for consumer reliability demands effective worker performance and managers must find a way to ensure worker performance, including managing the complex robotic devices that assist the workers. But in most industries, the production responsibilities are outsourced and the managers are only responsible for seeing that the outsourced work is completed according to spec. With a world full of potential employees, foreign labor production companies are highly motivated to fulfill contracts effectively, (though in reality they don’t, and product reliability usually suffers). The consumer opts for the lowest price and then gets frustrated when the product is partially defective and has few options for remediation.
It is not so much an issue of upper management taking money from workers, but eliminating the direct role of workers in the company entirely! And this has spread to accounting, lawyers, designers, almost every facet of production but finance and marketing. Nike pioneered the model in which companies are effectively shells in which the managers coordinate a series of complex outsourced functions, pushing control of production costs, while designing marketing strategies to increase “brand enhancement” and therefore commanding higher prices for cheaper goods! From the corporate viewpoint this is a logical strategy and to the extent that marketing can convince consumers to buy products of marginal quality the company is successful. The irony of the black market in “knock off” designer labeled products exactly captures the situation: why should the consumer prefer the expensive “real brand” product to the “knock off” with false logo, when there is little difference in the actual product (and may be secretly produced by the same offshore company!). Workers and the quality of production have little role in such a business environment and therefore little leverage to command better share of the profits.
In the recent surge in unemployment, a trend has accelerated that had already begun: the solo worker with special skills who is contracted on a project basis for various technically skilled tasks. This is called the “Hollywood model” in recognition of how films have been independently contracted since the collapse of the studio system in the 50s. Networking, personal skills, reliability, and ability to work well in groups with others all contribute to the value of such employees. Lawyers and engineers have long experienced this sort of employment pattern and it has spread widely through the economy. This pattern of employment is more efficient of the use of time of skilled workers, and puts them on more personal demand to manage their finances and security independently. The role of the large corporation as a lifetime job and basis for retirement is rapidly disappearing for all but a tiny group who reach the highest levels of the organization. (In the discussions about pay differentials of senior executives, little is said about the differential from middle managers, but this is expanding also, and the pyramid to a secure upper level position has become steeper over time as well.)
Seen in this context, Walker is less of a creator of change, but rather someone who capitalized, for his own political agenda, changes already underway. It therefore seems likely that similar losses in the power of organized labor throughout the country will occur over the next administration, whoever it is. Behind the scenes, a process of self career marketing, and aggregating financial services for self employed persons are the tends most likely to be new directions in labor. And there will be a strong emphasis on entrepreneurial skills. All these changes have been underway for some time.
What is not so clear is how these changes impact on the career development process of the individuals. With less need for “middle managers” how do the future “producers = major executives” get trained? What education prepares people to be independent entrepreneurial agents, and do current universities with their giant enrollments and impersonal education foster these skills? To be continued…
‘It is only a question of who makes the money — the workers or the owners.’
But it is not that simple. The companies are competing in a world market where workers make much less than in the US, and in which outsourcing and offshoring production is increasingly important in the design of corporate functions.
The balance of workers and managers must be seen in the broader context of the changing nature of corporations, and the changing values of management. When managers actually managed the direct production of workers there was a mutual interdependence which still exists in some areas like the auto industry. Here the production of a complex product with requirements for consumer reliability demands effective worker performance and managers must find a way to ensure worker performance, including managing the complex robotic devices that assist the workers. But in most industries, the production responsibilities are outsourced and the managers are only responsible for seeing that the outsourced work is completed according to spec. With a world full of potential employees, foreign labor production companies are highly motivated to fulfill contracts effectively, (though in reality they don’t, and product reliability usually suffers). The consumer opts for the lowest price and then gets frustrated when the product is partially defective and has few options for remediation.
It is not so much an issue of upper management taking money from workers, but eliminating the direct role of workers in the company entirely! And this has spread to accounting, lawyers, designers, almost every facet of production but finance and marketing. Nike pioneered the model in which companies are effectively shells in which the managers coordinate a series of complex outsourced functions, pushing control of production costs, while designing marketing strategies to increase “brand enhancement” and therefore commanding higher prices for cheaper goods! From the corporate viewpoint this is a logical strategy and to the extent that marketing can convince consumers to buy products of marginal quality the company is successful. The irony of the black market in “knock off” designer labeled products exactly captures the situation: why should the consumer prefer the expensive “real brand” product to the “knock off” with false logo, when there is little difference in the actual product (and may be secretly produced by the same offshore company!). Workers and the quality of production have little role in such a business environment and therefore little leverage to command better share of the profits.
In the recent surge in unemployment, a trend has accelerated that had already begun: the solo worker with special skills who is contracted on a project basis for various technically skilled tasks. This is called the “Hollywood model” in recognition of how films have been independently contracted since the collapse of the studio system in the 50s. Networking, personal skills, reliability, and ability to work well in groups with others all contribute to the value of such employees. Lawyers and engineers have long experienced this sort of employment pattern and it has spread widely through the economy. This pattern of employment is more efficient of the use of time of skilled workers, and puts them on more personal demand to manage their finances and security independently. The role of the large corporation as a lifetime job and basis for retirement is rapidly disappearing for all but a tiny group who reach the highest levels of the organization. (In the discussions about pay differentials of senior executives, little is said about the differential from middle managers, but this is expanding also, and the pyramid to a secure upper level position has become steeper over time as well.)
Seen in this context, Walker is less of a creator of change, but rather someone who capitalized, for his own political agenda, changes already underway. It therefore seems likely that similar losses in the power of organized labor throughout the country will occur over the next administration, whoever it is. Behind the scenes, a process of self career marketing, and aggregating financial services for self employed persons are the tends most likely to be new directions in labor. And there will be a strong emphasis on entrepreneurial skills. All these changes have been underway for some time.
What is not so clear is how these changes impact on the career development process of the individuals. With less need for “middle managers” how do the future “producers = major executives” get trained? What education prepares people to be independent entrepreneurial agents, and do current universities with their giant enrollments and impersonal education foster these skills? To be continued…
Wednesday, March 19, 2014
The future of globalization
Eduardo Porter(NYT 3/19/14) reviews the issues of globalization. Viewed from the aggregate world perspective, millions of poverty victims have risen to survival status in other countries by becoming marginal workers. While millions of middle class workers in the developed countries have been driven down to lower class or poverty by the collapse of the value of their labor in comparable industries. This is not hypothetical but data. At the same time, the capital wealth has become more concentrated in a fewer number throughout the world. This should not surprise anyone since in a capitalist economy it is the control of capital that determines how things happen or develop. This change was happening slowly after the 60s but accelerated rapidly in the Clinton-Rubin era when Democrats surprisingly aligned themselves with Wall St. (Wall St. is the center for capital manipulation and management and is utterly agnostic about how it is used as long as the returns are good and secure!) Clinton masked the acceleration of the labor market collapse by the “internet bubble”. And after 911 challenged the role of American financial markets, Bush/Greenspan masked the effects again with a “housing bubble” fueled by artificially low government interest rates. The fiery intensity of this bubble and how expertly it was fueled by Wall St made it shorter and more desperate, and more global than probably any other bubble in history, and also more focused on the developed countries and the middle class. Ironically, what was supposed to protect the middle class eroded its financial position even more rapidly.
What is the prospect for the future of workers in the US? It is important to recognize that local solutions may not generalize to the whole economy. England experienced much of this economic collapse at the contraction of the “empire” after WW2 and attempted to become the “financial center” of expertise for Europe. This has not protected the English economy from severe collapse, as it is not possible to pay enough people working in the financial sector to support even a small country like Britain. This is more true in the US economy despite the heyday in the 90’s when the financial industry was a major sector of the economy's growth (and again in the early oughts).
Tech and the internet cannot provide this broad economic support because tech hires too few workers, who are too leveraged in their production impact, and at least at present the industry depends for revenue almost entirely on marketing and advertising returns, and is thus a generalization of the media sector and consumer sectors. There is a potential for the tech-internet sector to provide new business creation solutions over time, but these will not involve large work forces, and as in the cellphone, the hardware component quickly becomes of marginal value as competition sets in. Tech companies, like Apple, follow a model originally developed by Nike, in which the design and marketing expertise are maintained by the core company, while production is outsourced to minimize the low return on material production compared to intellectual production. It would seem that intellectual production is the new key to wealth, but here the digital world provides an odd reversal: digital media erode the ability to sustain unique intellectual products and the value of marketing intellectual property is undermined, and pirated.
Viewed globally, the world economy is evolving toward a pattern in which there is relatively sustainable food, shelter, and clothing at just above a subsistence level for the majority of folks. Agriculture, manufacturing, and marketing-transportation are primary industries, but of marginal value to the participants and only of value to a small handful of stakeholders. (And the ownership through joint stock holding is becoming less and less reliable and more manipulated by large capital aggregates called “hedge funds”.) Above this world wide layer of persons living on the edge of poverty and up toward marginal subsistence. There is a thin layer of middle class service persons with additional skills that allow them a slight advantage over the lowest class, but who are not in control of their work, but part of large corporate aggregates with no job security or stability. With the outsourcing of technical and medical skills, these jobs now include lawyers, doctors, engineers etc. While still middle class they are marginally so. And they do not have the control over their economic stability originally viewed as characteristic of this class. Rising from this group is a class of corporate players: persons who work up through levels of corporate authority so that their compensation distantly reflects the returns of heads of corporations. Such persons appear wealthy even by current standards, but this is an illusion: they have sacrificed many years at lower paying returns and will have only a few high paying years before they are replaced by the next wave. Only a tiny few will retain their role as corporate leaders and earners for a sustained period. This “corporate ladder” group earns above the minimal middle class level but the life style demands of their jobs and lives make them less wealthy than their income suggests, especially as they often live in cities with high costs of living.
There is only one class remaining who are potentially truly wealthy: these are capital entrepreneurs: those persons who risk their own money and time to build successful enterprises by planning and luck and get dramatic returns on their capital. As is fitting in a capital economy, their risk of capital is the controlling variable, and the potential for failure is statistically high. This is in essence, a “lottery economy” and all intelligent entrepreneurs attempt, as J P Morgan did, to get as much control over the risk as possible by eliminating competition and other oligarchic or outright monopolistic practices. The same instincts can be observed in modern tech companies with only minor interference by regulators.
This draws a fundamentally undemocratic picture of society. The control of vast low return workers by a small cadre of successful capitalists is the recipe for “banana republics” or “plantation economies” in the agricultural sphere. The evidence that these financial entities are attempting to control democratic governments and influence their direction to favor this process is obvious in every detail of modern governmental policy in the developed countries, especially the US, and is relatively true in the developing ones. Everyone is willing to give up most everything else for the hope of becoming rich. Globalization did not cause this shift but it accelerated it. (And one wonders how much of the Arab world’s turmoil is due to the frustration of their citizens who had not been able to participate in this transformation to the same extent.)
What will the future look like from here? There will be a vast subsistence consumer economy, in which consumer goods become cheaper and cheaper until they are just barely more than trash. We can see this evolution in the computer and the cell phone, as well as many other basic products. We can see this evolution in the development of “manufactured food” which has less and less complex nutritional value but is adequate for sustenance and cheap to produce, and tasty enough to be consumable. This mass public is entertained by an array of electronic information which fills in the non-working hours and is successful in diverting and managing urges for more complex life experiences. This group of workers produce sufficient low cost consumer goods to sustain the world, and a small amount of more expensive “middle class” and “wealthy” goods for the rest. It is a world in which children are indoctrinated early to become mindless consumers, and as people age they provide economic energy to the “healthcare industry” until they perish at suitable points for recycling. Basic satisfaction is encouraged to avoid rebellion or reaction to the status quo. There is marginal opportunity for rising through the system to ensure that subsequent generations sustain the process. The birth rate falls to sustain a stable population, and education becomes privatized and is highly geared to integrate citizens to their “place” in society and discourage independent thinking. It is, in short, a world very close to the current one. Events like severe unemployment and housing finance manipulation must be controlled to minimize social unrest, and these are the tasks of “hired” “political servants” (not “public servants”). The analysis of Porter, and his sources is essentially correct about the changes occurring in the world, but they do not go far enough in seeing the long term changes in the social order that such a transformation predicts.
This vision of the future is not inevitable. No prediction of the future is. If some other factor is identified as the key source of value: the individual, the capacity for self determination, etc, then the role of capital as the controlling factor in society can be regulated. But if capital and its direction of economy and production is the determining control of the society, and if it is allowed to control the development of civilization, then this looks like a pretty good prediction.
What is the prospect for the future of workers in the US? It is important to recognize that local solutions may not generalize to the whole economy. England experienced much of this economic collapse at the contraction of the “empire” after WW2 and attempted to become the “financial center” of expertise for Europe. This has not protected the English economy from severe collapse, as it is not possible to pay enough people working in the financial sector to support even a small country like Britain. This is more true in the US economy despite the heyday in the 90’s when the financial industry was a major sector of the economy's growth (and again in the early oughts).
Tech and the internet cannot provide this broad economic support because tech hires too few workers, who are too leveraged in their production impact, and at least at present the industry depends for revenue almost entirely on marketing and advertising returns, and is thus a generalization of the media sector and consumer sectors. There is a potential for the tech-internet sector to provide new business creation solutions over time, but these will not involve large work forces, and as in the cellphone, the hardware component quickly becomes of marginal value as competition sets in. Tech companies, like Apple, follow a model originally developed by Nike, in which the design and marketing expertise are maintained by the core company, while production is outsourced to minimize the low return on material production compared to intellectual production. It would seem that intellectual production is the new key to wealth, but here the digital world provides an odd reversal: digital media erode the ability to sustain unique intellectual products and the value of marketing intellectual property is undermined, and pirated.
Viewed globally, the world economy is evolving toward a pattern in which there is relatively sustainable food, shelter, and clothing at just above a subsistence level for the majority of folks. Agriculture, manufacturing, and marketing-transportation are primary industries, but of marginal value to the participants and only of value to a small handful of stakeholders. (And the ownership through joint stock holding is becoming less and less reliable and more manipulated by large capital aggregates called “hedge funds”.) Above this world wide layer of persons living on the edge of poverty and up toward marginal subsistence. There is a thin layer of middle class service persons with additional skills that allow them a slight advantage over the lowest class, but who are not in control of their work, but part of large corporate aggregates with no job security or stability. With the outsourcing of technical and medical skills, these jobs now include lawyers, doctors, engineers etc. While still middle class they are marginally so. And they do not have the control over their economic stability originally viewed as characteristic of this class. Rising from this group is a class of corporate players: persons who work up through levels of corporate authority so that their compensation distantly reflects the returns of heads of corporations. Such persons appear wealthy even by current standards, but this is an illusion: they have sacrificed many years at lower paying returns and will have only a few high paying years before they are replaced by the next wave. Only a tiny few will retain their role as corporate leaders and earners for a sustained period. This “corporate ladder” group earns above the minimal middle class level but the life style demands of their jobs and lives make them less wealthy than their income suggests, especially as they often live in cities with high costs of living.
There is only one class remaining who are potentially truly wealthy: these are capital entrepreneurs: those persons who risk their own money and time to build successful enterprises by planning and luck and get dramatic returns on their capital. As is fitting in a capital economy, their risk of capital is the controlling variable, and the potential for failure is statistically high. This is in essence, a “lottery economy” and all intelligent entrepreneurs attempt, as J P Morgan did, to get as much control over the risk as possible by eliminating competition and other oligarchic or outright monopolistic practices. The same instincts can be observed in modern tech companies with only minor interference by regulators.
This draws a fundamentally undemocratic picture of society. The control of vast low return workers by a small cadre of successful capitalists is the recipe for “banana republics” or “plantation economies” in the agricultural sphere. The evidence that these financial entities are attempting to control democratic governments and influence their direction to favor this process is obvious in every detail of modern governmental policy in the developed countries, especially the US, and is relatively true in the developing ones. Everyone is willing to give up most everything else for the hope of becoming rich. Globalization did not cause this shift but it accelerated it. (And one wonders how much of the Arab world’s turmoil is due to the frustration of their citizens who had not been able to participate in this transformation to the same extent.)
What will the future look like from here? There will be a vast subsistence consumer economy, in which consumer goods become cheaper and cheaper until they are just barely more than trash. We can see this evolution in the computer and the cell phone, as well as many other basic products. We can see this evolution in the development of “manufactured food” which has less and less complex nutritional value but is adequate for sustenance and cheap to produce, and tasty enough to be consumable. This mass public is entertained by an array of electronic information which fills in the non-working hours and is successful in diverting and managing urges for more complex life experiences. This group of workers produce sufficient low cost consumer goods to sustain the world, and a small amount of more expensive “middle class” and “wealthy” goods for the rest. It is a world in which children are indoctrinated early to become mindless consumers, and as people age they provide economic energy to the “healthcare industry” until they perish at suitable points for recycling. Basic satisfaction is encouraged to avoid rebellion or reaction to the status quo. There is marginal opportunity for rising through the system to ensure that subsequent generations sustain the process. The birth rate falls to sustain a stable population, and education becomes privatized and is highly geared to integrate citizens to their “place” in society and discourage independent thinking. It is, in short, a world very close to the current one. Events like severe unemployment and housing finance manipulation must be controlled to minimize social unrest, and these are the tasks of “hired” “political servants” (not “public servants”). The analysis of Porter, and his sources is essentially correct about the changes occurring in the world, but they do not go far enough in seeing the long term changes in the social order that such a transformation predicts.
This vision of the future is not inevitable. No prediction of the future is. If some other factor is identified as the key source of value: the individual, the capacity for self determination, etc, then the role of capital as the controlling factor in society can be regulated. But if capital and its direction of economy and production is the determining control of the society, and if it is allowed to control the development of civilization, then this looks like a pretty good prediction.
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