Because It's Art, I Guess

So I was down at the Seattle Convention Center one day, earlier this year, and I encountered an art installation that was composed of a number of small LED boards, spread out over a couple of walls, across which words would scroll.

Some examples:

Words tend to be inadequate
Private property created crime
Automation is deadly
Torture is barbaric
Most people are not fit to rule themselves
It's better to study the living fact than analyze history
When something terrible happens, people wake up
Believing in rebirth is the same as admitting defect

The phrases scrolled across the screens in a seemingly random pattern. Sometime, all of the screens would display the same passage, while other times, each screen carried its own message. Sometimes they simply rolled along, while other times they flashed brightly. They were attention grabbing, but this didn't rescue them from being, at heart, banal, trivial, pseudo anarcho-socialist platitudes masquerading as profound commentary on modern Western society and some of its more visible institutions.

What makes it all the worse is that I think that it is possible to make short, profound statements.

Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand.
Mark Twain

Okay, so profound is overdoing it. But it's thought provoking and intelligently worded, while still being short enough to be a Tweet. And it's not overtly critical, just somehow off or based on dubious logic.

P.S.: This is in the Guggenheim? Really?

P.P.S.: "[...] a new height of subversive social engagement"? You've got to be kidding me. (Or, maybe I just don't get it.)

Around and Around

Three not entirely related points, concerning something that we should be seriously dealing with, yet is quickly becoming lost in a teapot tempest.

Point One

The public dialog surrounding (but rarely actually touching) the arrest of Professor Henry Gates is essentially broken. The cause of its near total dysfunction is a simple idea that is deeply ingrained in the American psyche - that issues like this are, if you'll excuse the expression, black and white. Unlike other areas of our lives where we are better able to recognize that things break down because of failures and faults that build upon each other until the system collapses, when high-profile interpersonal conflicts like this one (and, let's face it, this was little more than a highly public pissing match between two aggrieved Alpha males) break out, we tend to see one person as the sole aggressor, and the other as a victim. I live near Seattle, and although we here are literally a continent away from the events in question, people have determined that their understanding of events is perfect enough that they may safely choose the person they most wish to identify with and make them a saint, while the other becomes an egregious sinner. This sort of willful oversimplification, more than being starkly inaccurate, is actively toxic, doing little more than harden hearts and minds.

Both sides of the story are actively shaping the narrative to suit their purposes, and cover their own contributions to the poor outcome. Pretending that either of them is above such things does a disservice all around.

Point Two

Many people have commented on the fact that it’s unwise to be visibly angry in the presence of a police officer. It’s not uncommon to hear people say that it’s sometimes not enough to even be respectful – an irritated police officer will often find grounds to arrest those they perceive as merely insufficiently deferential. Or that officers will arrest those they fear may lodge complaints against them, hoping to proactively tarnish their credibility.

The answer, we are told, is a simple one – be sufficiently deferential. But this is unsatisfying to many, and it smacks of a tendency that is common to many oppressed people: the idea that injustice is far preferable to injury. Had this tolerance for injustice been with Americans from that start, “Let freedom ring” would never have replaced “God save the Queen.” Sometimes we forget that the American Revolution was sparked over what today we would consider fairly minor grievances, and that a lot of people died for it.

Point Three

It is easy to gloss over the fact that Gates is African-American, and nearly sixty years old. While this may not matter to some, for a very large part of their history, African-Americans tolerated quite a lot of what we now consider heinous injustice. It was hardly a rousing success. And people of Gates’ generation are much closer to the history of lynching than younger people are. For many of us the dragging death of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas, was a throwback to ancient history. For those in Gates’ cohort it was a reminder of a time that they lived through when being murdered for the color of one’s skin was a very real, if very remote, possibility. Gates is also old enough to have lived through the civil rights movement, where simply being arrested for being insufficiently deferential to police officers was often an outcome to be prayed for.

We too readily accept that things that didn’t happen in a time and place that makes them matter for us shouldn’t matter to anyone else, either.

More Straws

The government meddling in the automakers has already started, to fairly little attention. The House of Representatives is crafting legislation to force General Motors and Chrysler to reinstate the franchises of as many as 3,200 dealers that the companies had been planning to cut as part of their bankruptcies. The Senate seems to be working along the same lines.

The message that Congress seems to be sending is that the automakers got themselves into trouble mainly by paying out too much at the top of the pay scale. They seem to be poised to vet, and sometimes block, cost-cutting measures that would result in "injury to the little guy," and in doing so, they are announcing a de facto rejection of the automobile manufacturers claims that their overall labor cost structure and their incentives to dealers are part of the problem. And by forcing the automakers to retain dealerships to obtain federal funds, Congress can cast the companies as middlemen in a public bailout, rather than the recipients of a corporate one.

It's a gamble, but a relatively safe one. The public's memory is short, and selling out potential long-term prospects for tangible immediate gain is almost always a political winner. If you were going to boil this down to a pithy saying, it might be: "Government always has enough money to buy constituents a free lunch." As long as General Motors and Chrysler can keep afloat for a few years more, if they do go under, Congress will be able to deflect criticism that they played a role in it.

Balancing Act

I was listening to Marketplace Money this weekend, and heard a commentary from their Economics Editor, Chris Farrell. He was critical of former General Electric CEO Jack Welch's comments that "there is no such thing as work-life balance; there are work-life choices," and that women who choose to spend significant amounts of time with their children do so at the expense of advancement prospects. One thing that struck me was that that Mr. Farrell equates having "a family" (in its form as a euphemism for "children"), as in simply having children in the home, with being an active and engaged parent. If people could simply hand over the responsibility of day-to-day child care to others who would do the job well, through "high-quality day care and good after-school programs," there would be no need to make trade-offs.

You could, if you chose, boil Jack Welch's comments down to a simple truism: "There are so many hours in day, and people who are willing to spend more of those hours advancing the interests of their businesses are likely to do better than people who spend fewer hours. Choose which is more important to you." You could then boil Mr. Farrell's comments down to: "Children are important, so business should make it easier to choose to have children by reducing the amount of time that parents need to directly spend with them, allowing parents more time to compete for promotions with their childless co-workers, while still thinking themselves responsible parents."

Okay, all well and good. But Mr. Farrell never satisfactorily answers one important question: Why should business be in the habit of choosing which of its employees' outside choices to support?

The impact of family friendly policies like these would be dramatic. We'd end up with more competition from women for the leadership ranks of society. We'd also have better family values.

The more I think about this, the more I come to conclude that Mr. Farrell actually hates children. Maybe what we need isn't more competition from women, but less from men. To the degree that women are in this situation because it's considered okay for working fathers to prioritize their careers above their families (spouses and children alike) I don't think that the answer is empowering working mothers to also routinely work long hours. It seems that if we're going to change social structures and rewards to change behaviors, we're better off prompting fathers to spend more with their wives and children, and pushing the childless to get the hell out of the office and go take a vacation someplace where power lunches and laptops are considered capital offenses. Since when does better family values come from the freedom of parents to pass their children off to others so that we can tell them that they shouldn't feel guilty about seeing their offspring as impediments to climbing the power structure?

I suspect that the issue with career versus family isn't that family isn't important enough. It's that career is too important - after all, Mr. Farrell tells us, it's doing well in the business world that counts.

The Trade-Off

Say you're a businessperson. A pretty successful one, and you've got the phat loot to prove it - you know, the house, the car, clothes, the private plane, the nookie on the side - everything that makes it known that you're money. You have all of this because you happen to be in control of a fairly substantial enterprise. So... you make it known that you're not happy with the present location of your little empire. What happens?

Well, city, county, state and (depending on just how big your business is, and where it is located) maybe even national governments start booking space on you calendar to pitch the advantages of their little corner of the world (usually including, it should be said, the government(s) whose jurisdiction you're planning on leaving). So far, so good. That's one of the things that government types are supposed to do - drum up opportunities.

The representatives of the governments will woo you with all kinds of present and future gifts. The present gifts will be small - little things like a free dinner or maybe they'll pick up the tab for you to come to their place and have a short vacation, so you can see it in person. The future gifts are where the money is at - maybe they'll give you the land for your new headquarters for free, promise not to charge you property taxes on your new factory or shell out for the infrastructure that you'll need to get everything set up.

Of course, all of these things cost money, and that money's got to come from somewhere, right?

Gary Lawrence, who heads the Economic Development Alliance of the city of Lubbock, in the Texas panhandle, explains that one electronics investment he backed cost the city $4.7m in revenue forgone over ten years. But in return the company undertook to create 165 well-paid jobs, creating a demand for houses that is increasing income from property taxes as well as sales taxes. The $4.7m should be written off in as little as three years.
Tex-Mix. The Economist. July 11th, 2009

It's a common bargain. In return for low or non-existent tax burdens, businesses supply states, counties and municipalities with people who will pay taxes, and higher ones than they would have otherwise, to get jobs. It's not about lower taxes - it's about shifting taxes from businesses to individuals. And there's nothing inherently wrong with the plan. But it has to be realized that it can't go on forever. And when it ends, there's always another place ready and willing to take businesses that are looking for a better deal, and the citizens who'll be the ones to subsidize it.

Secure in an ironclad understanding of their own powerlessness, or maybe just because they don't do the math, citizens seem to always be willing to pay someone to bring them an opportunity. Of course, not everyone will like it. While the common refrain is that a rising tide floats all boats, some of them are, in reality, just washed away. Poorer people who don't see any benefit in the coming of a new business, may be pushed out by the higher property taxes that increased assessments of their homes will bring. Or perhaps the inflationary pressure that more money in the community sparks will do the trick.

It's not, in the end, that this is always a bad trade off. Far from it. A boost in income can, and many times does, more than make up for the boost in taxes and overall cost of living that shifting the burden away from businesses entails. But, despite the promises of politicians, it's not an unmitigated good. It has its downsides. And if you don't understand them, you can't make an informed decision about what's in your best interests.

You the successful businessperson would never go along with a deal without understanding what it entails, good, bad and indifferent. Why should you do so as an everyday citizen?