One Day

I was listening to the radio during a very short drive yesterday, and heard a snippet of a story about serious problems that some military families were having with their housing. It was a fairly bog-standard "government-corporate complex" piece, with accusations of corporate negligence and government opacity in the face of "shameful" treatment of the families of active-duty military. On the one hand, it was unsurprising that the story ran on Memorial Day. But the story felt serious enough that it could have run at any time, and so it did seem sort of surprising that it ran that particular day; it didn't seem like something that one would hold on to.

There are a few holidays during the year that are military themed, and many news outlets tend to devote a greater percentage of their airtime to stories about the military during those times. Which lends them an air of being the appointed time to think about the military. Just as there's a day to think about one's mother, a day to remember the founding ideals of the nation et cetera. And these then seem to become topics that the public doesn't put much thought into for the remainder of the year. And in this way, holidays become a sort of scaffolding that the populace as a whole can use to organize thoughts and remembrances.

It's understandable that people might need that. The modern world is full of things that demand attention; I wonder if people would have the bandwidth to place these things top-of-mind if these various holidays didn't come along to remind them.

All In

Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, posted on Twitter last year: "The solution to our winners-take-all economy is an economy in which the winners take less." Which is a nice sentiment, but I suspect that it's about as likely to happen as an economy in which the broad masses of people put less into the pot for the winners to scoop up.

For Mr. Giridharadas, the solution is "vigorous reform of law and policy," but I'm dubious about that as the answer. Legislating social good is rarely viable. Especially in situations where many high-ranking corporate executives earn modest cash wages, but large equity stakes in their businesses. But more to the point for me, it lets the rest of us off the hook.

As much as its fashionable on the American Left to complain about corporations "reaping unfair profits," instances in which businesses pad their bottom lines with openly dubious practices are about as rare as they are newsworthy. (And many of those are side effects of intellectual property law, which many people I've spoken to about the subject are in favor of, despite the ease with which government-enforce monopoly power tends to break things.) A lot of corporate profitability comes down to sheer volume of sales. When a business moves enough merchandise, they don't need to make a high margin on the individual items to make a killing. And large businesses consolidate, their volume grows. And this is in no small part due to the fact that people understand economies of scale to be good for them. While, like a lot of recent business success stories (or would-be success stories), Amazon was able to manage some of their cost savings over their brick-and-mortar competition by flouting sales tax laws (I'm always impressed at the degree to which people view tax evasion as no different from any other discount or promotional price), online retailing simply doesn't come with the same level of overhead that in-person selling does. And people's willingness to go to a physical store, where they can handle the merchandise and ask questions, to shop for goods, and then turn around and buy online also drives the problem.

It's in many people's interests to pay $9.50 for an item online, rather than $10.00 at a local store, and then demand that the shareholders and executives of the online store share their profits. But being willing to spend more to spread money around would get us neatly past at least some of the problems of winner-take-all. Smaller pots, more evenly distributed, would likely result in fewer super-wealthy and super-poor people, which, in turn, would reduce the need to request charity.

But an efficient society with a sophisticated division of labor is always going to have some reliance on charity. Spending that extra 50¢ to shop locally is, basically, a charitable action. So the case can be made that it doesn't much matter where, precisely, the charity occurs. In the end, a lot of this comes down to: "If you want something done right..." for that reason. Still, I do think that if we want a more equitable society, directly funding it is worthwhile.

Patriotism in Miniature

Chronicles of Banality

Nobody in Particular is banal. I, as its author, understand this. I'm not a particularly insightful or artistic person, and so there's not much here for the person who's really looking for a different take on the world. And in that sense, I wonder if it will ever really be useful beyond the exercise in writing and/or discipline that it provides me.

I don't know that it will be, but I would like to think that it will have some use to someone at some point in the future. History is made by great people, art is made by creative people and so on, but perhaps the day-to-day understandings (or misunderstandings) history and artistry will provide a context for people to make sense of them.

For nearly all of the events of the present, and every event of the past, I only have second-hand knowledge. I was not present to see them myself. (For instance, I didn't go out for lunch today, and so missed the abortion-rights protest that was taking place across the street from the building I was in.) The only way I can know anything about these events is to receive information from some other party. Who may or may not actually have been present themselves. And so much of what I know about the world is due to someone deciding that it is important enough to tell me. But the important things that happen when I am present for them are few and far between.

And so I write about things that are everyday and humdrum, and I'm likely an everyday and humdrum writer. Hopefully, that is okay.

Drumming For Peace

I stopped by Lake Forest Park today, and checked in on the weekly protest. It's still going, but the members are ageing. I was somewhat disappointed that their numbers aren't being filled out with younger people. Not that I believe that younger people aren't invested in the cause of ending the conflicts that the United States is currently engaged in. But they have their own protests.

This is always the way of things. Merely having the same goals doesn't necessarily make people allies.