Why Do Canadians Love Consumer Loyalty Programs?

When I moved here in 2004, one thing I did not anticipate about Life In Canada was the ubiquity of consumer loyalty programs. As Canadians well know, these fall into two categories: there is the Mother Of All Loyalty Programs, the so-called "Air Miles" program, and then there are the zillions of smaller ones, like Canadian Tire Dollars, Shoppers' Drug Mart Optimum cards, and endless coffee punch cards. My university eateries even have a punch card loyalty program for soup.

I generally don't participate in consumer loyalty programs. I'd like to say this for high-minded reasons related to surveillance and resistance, and sure, that's part of it, but the real reason is that I'm trying to get on with my fucking life. I don't know how people have the patience and mental energy to carry around all these cards and fish them out of their wallets at the appropriate moment, never mind waiting for every other patron in front of them to do the same. Am I the only person who wants to die when I'm behind seven people in the LCBO line and the cashier says "Air Miles"? and the customer is like 'Oh ... yeah ... uh ... wait ... I can't ... um ... hold on ... can you do it with my phone number?"

I know there are loyalty programs in the US, and people use them at the grocery store, but somehow the whole thing takes on a different texture here. If you're not Canadian, you might not appreciate the way loyalty programs are such a centrality of life here.

The "Air Miles" program sounds like something to do with frequent flyer miles -- and when I first moved here I kept confusing it with "Aeroplan," which is the actual miles program associated with Air Canada. But AirMiles is everything. You get points on different kinds of purchases and then you spend them on all kinds of things. 

News and controversy about loyalty programs regularly feature on the front news page of the CBC webpage, and in recent years the rewards of Air Miles have been big news. It used to be that Air Miles didn't expire, and then in 2016 it was announced that they would, so people would lose miles received before 2012. People were enraged, and the company backed down. Then the federal government stepped in and said that loyalty programs can't have expiration dates. The Air Miles people were also accused of shenanigans, where you could only see the big rewards if you didn't have enough points for them, and later they disappeared. Then last year people started stealing Optimum points. I don't know how this works, but it's like you're racking up points at home in Sastaktoon and someone goes and spends your points in Quebec.

This corner of Canadian culture gives me mixed feelings. For one thing, seeing news stories like "Thieves steal millions of PC Optimum points" as headline news, I often go through a two-step emotional response. First, I feel a wash of gratitude, that I am lucky enough to live in a country so peaceful and prosperous that "Thieves steal loyalty program points" is big-time, national news. But then, there are newsworthy things happening in Canada, and sometimes I learn about Canadian news related to Indigenous people or foreign policy in The Guardian. So I'm like, Wait, why wasn't this covered at home? Why are we reading about loyalty points?

More fundamentally, I'm ambivalent about the kind of sensible Canadian frugality that seems to motivate the careful, ongoing, attentive use of loyalty programs. Canadian frugality is so different from American profligacy. These are, I think, deeply rooted cultural differences. Go to Buffalo and you'll see block after block of huge, beautiful Victorian houses, made of wood, with high ceilings. Cross into Ontario, and you'll see houses made of brick, with small, cozy living rooms, perfect for keeping warm in a cold climate. Even in the late 1800s, Americans were thinking Go Big Or Go Home.

I admire Canadian frugality -- it is probably linked to all kinds of other wonderful Canadian qualities like generosity and good sense -- but I cannot see myself reflected in it. I know that by punching 12 punches in a card I can get a free cup of coffee, but I just don't care. Sure, at this point I'm lucky to make enough money that I can just pay for the extra cup, but honestly I wasn't frugal in this way when I was a waitress and a grad student and trying to help my poor, widowed mother. I'd rather ratchet down my living standard altogether, or go without the extra cup of coffee, than attend to the ways that I can incrementally make things better by paying careful attention over time.

My reluctance to participate in loyalty programs is a source of ongoing interpersonal awkwardness for me, especially buying coffee on campus. The efficient and helpful people who work in food services here are always like "Coffee card?" and I'm like "No, thank you," and sometimes they ask "Why not?" and I try to explain "I can't handle keeping track of all those cards" -- and then we look at each other with mutual misunderstanding. It always reminds me of when an American colleague came to visit our Department, and went to buy wine at the LCBO, and the cashier said, "Air Miles"? And she, befuddled by what this could mean, answered "Sorry, I don't know what you're talking about. I'm not even from this country."

Retribution, The Limits Of Punishment, And The Question Of Unenlightened Motives

Cells of the prison on Alcatraz Island. Posted to Flickr by marine_perez; used under Creative Commons licence.

In last week's New Yorker, the classicist and political scientist Danielle Allen has a searing personal history essay about her cousin Michael, who enters the criminal justice system as a result of minor crimes at age 15, gets derailed in life, and ends up dead -- murdered at a young age.

You should read the whole piece. It is a heartbreaking personal story and also a commentary on race, culture, and the concept of punishment in the contemporary US. Like many young black children, Michael confronts a series of obstacles. Like many young black men, when he gets into trouble, his crimes are punished in ways that are wildly disproportionate.

As Allen explains, among other things Michael was caught up in a serious of specific criminal justice policy changes, motivated by general societal fears and ideas about what the concept of punishment is for. In 1994, eighteen months before Micheal got into trouble, California's Three Strikes and You're Out law had gone into effect: three felonies means twenty-five years to life or a plea deal. In 1995, panic over rising carjackings had led the state to lower the age at which a teenage can be tried as an adult for that crime to 14 years old. Micheal tried to steal a car; the prosecutors found a way to charge him with four felonies based on what the police said were spontaneous confessions at the hospital after he got shot by the car's owner.

From a philosophical point of view, Allen says that California legislators had not only given up on prison as rehabilitation, they had also given up on the idea of prison as retribution. Retribution, as she says, "limits how much punishment you can impose." "Anger drives retribution," she says. "When the punishment fits the crime, retribution is achieved, and anger is sated; it softens."

The policy on carjacking was not about retribution, it was about deterrence. It was driven by fear, and the crafters of the policy were focused on aggregate crime statistics. As Allen says, "The target of Michael’s sentence was not a bright fifteen-year-old boy with a mild proclivity for theft but the thousands of carjackings that occurred in Los Angeles." This is dehumanizing, and wrongly puts the massive burden of society's problems onto a young man's shoulders.

From a philosophical point of view the question about punishment as deterrence versus punishment as retribution often occurs in the context of the debate over ethical theories that are "consequentialist" -- in which we should aim at the production of the most well-being overall -- versus theories that are "deontological" -- in which we should follow certain rules and respect certain specific values.

It is partly because I agree with Allen's perspective on the problems of "aggregative" moral reasoning that I am not a consequentialist; as I've written about, I believe in justice and other values, and I think these values put constraints on our behavior. One of those constraints would concern the appropriate limits of punishment. 

The theoretical debate between consequentialism and deontology is massively complex, and I can't hope to contribute something to that debate here. But I would like to comment on the mood, tone, or quality of motivations associated with retribution versus deterrence.

In my experience, retribution is sometimes informally regarded as a problematic concept, arising from base and unworthy emotions. It is associated with motives that are thought to be low, unenlightened, and uncivilized.

We evolved to have retributive moral judgments, so the thinking goes, because back in the day, evolutionarily speaking, punishing was needed to keep community members in line. But we thinking people should rise above these base motives. Once we know our aim or goal is to make the world a better place, we don't need base motives like anger or retributive judgements. Instead we can cooly calculate which action will have the best effect, and simply do that. Deterrence is seen as "helping" while retribution is seen as abusive.

I once joined a multi-disciplinary audience listening to a speaker talk about ethics and robots. You want your robots to do good things and not bad things, but what does that mean? There was a general sense that the robot-makers wanted to answer the question with consequentialism: do the things that will bring about well-being overall. Aggregate.

In discussion, I tried to explain what seemed to me the importance of moral responsibility, and the inchoate sense I had that moral responsibility was something we do, and should, ascribe to humans. It matters why things are the way they are and who made them that way. Maybe the choices of robots could be tracked back to creators, so that a person would take responsibility for the choices the robot made.

The other people present really did not agree with me -- especially the computer scientists and engineers. They suggested that "moral responsibility" sounded like I wanted to punish people. And wasn't retributive punishment so barbaric? Who needs it? If you're being constructive and positive, you focus on the future. You want good results. Who cares why things are the way they are, except insofar as it's useful for thinking how they should be?

If we'd had more time, I would have tried to explain how, far from being barbaric and unenlightened,  responsibility and retribution fit into what I see as a human way of interacting, that values and respects people for themselves, for who they are, as individuals -- that aggregating people is more like managing them than caring about them.

I realize this brief foray into the cultural moods of retribution and deterrence does not settle the theoretical issues in debates over moral philosophy. But I was so moved by Allen's way of bringing out the potential humaneness of the retributive point of view -- how, far from being base and uncivilized, that framing encourages us to see individual people as worthy of respect, and forces our attention to the limiting of what counts as an appropriate punishment.

A Few Philosophical Reflections On Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic

I just finished reading Sam Quinones's astonishing book Dreamland. Dreamland tells the story of the story of America's recent opiate epidemic, but it is also about a million other things like modern American culture, the ethics of health care, late capitalism, the role of government, the nature of pain, and the timeless dilemma of human existence: can you make things better for people without also, somehow, making them worse?

This post isn't an overview of important themes from Dreamland. For that you'll have to read the book. And you should read the book. If you're not sure, start by listening to the author talk about it on the WTF podcast or check out more info here.

Anyway, this is just a discussion of a few things I personally found philosophically interesting, relevant, and thought-provoking.

1. Philosophy of science: evidence and social epistemology

One of the central aspects of the epidemic was the sudden rise in prescriptions for opioid pain relievers and particularly Oxycontin. For a long time it was part of health care orthodoxy that opioids are highly addictive and thus dangerous, and so should only be prescribed in special circumstances like after surgery or when someone is near death. But Oxy tried to change all that.

Oxycontin was formulated as a time-release pill made up of the opioid oxycodone intended to eliminate the euphoria and make the drug non-addictive. It is not surprising that Oxycontin was aggressively marketed as non-addictive: in the nature of things, the makers of the drug stood to make more money the more it was prescribed, and this is what companies do.

What is surprising, and indeed utterly shocking, is how many people went along with it -- with a belief that challenged everything they thought they knew -- on the basis of virtually no evidence. Doctors believed it, med school profs started to teach it, massive health care decisions were made on its basis. And, of course, it turned out to be wildly false. So: what the hell?

As with so many things, it turns out that the answers are complex. The drug arrived in the middle of a shift away from thinking of pain as something to be endured no matter how awful and toward thinking of pain as something that ought to treated. That shift probably would have been a good thing, except that at the same time, insurance companies didn't want to pay for the multidimensional treatments known to help with pain. The producers of Oxy spent a fortune conducting huge conferences that trained drug reps and reinforced the message.

These reps were trained to cite, as evidence, a text known as "Porter and Jick." This text, which was refereed to as a study and sometimes described as a large or important study, was supposed to show that opiods aren't so addictive after all. But Porter and Jick isn't a study at all. In fact, it turned out to be a one-paragraph letter to the editor, written in 1980, to the New England Journal of Medicine, in which a doctor with a taste for data wrote out an informal observation of patients at the hospital where he worked. Not only wasn't it a study, it described patients in a highly controlled environment receiving drugs before the rethinking of pain treatment was underway.

No one questioned "Porter and Jick" -- at least for a long time. People shared the info, passed it along. Quinones points out that everyone thought everyone else had read it; before the journal archives were put online in 2010, finding out what Porter and Jick really was would have required going to the library and looking it up -- something doctors just didn't have time to do. Interestingly, when I tried to use PubMed to view Porter and Jick, I saw the image at the top of this post -- no associated abstract even! -- and Google Scholar offers only a citation. It is still not an easy text to find!

Don't you find it profoundly disturbing that people can cite something crucial, and build on it, and teach it, and share it, without really knowing what it is? I do. And yet, I expect that this -- or something like it -- happens a lot. We know that science proceeds in a highly social way, and that scientists trust one another. People appropriately subject some beliefs to much more crucial scrutiny than others, because they are relying on a sense of what is, and isn't, already known and what is, or isn't, important to revisit. You couldn't require everyone to check everything going back all the way at every stage, or nothing would move forward. It's complicated.

Of course, when it comes to actual pharmaceuticals, you could build in specific checks on things. This article points out that the current US scheme -- in which advertising has to be submitted to, but not reviewed by, the FDA before it can be used -- is a big part of the problem.

2. Capitalism and philosophy of economics

The story of the opiate epidemic is, in some ways, the story of capitalism going where capitalism had never gone before. If you leave out the "people dying in droves" problem, the story of Oxy is a story of business success. And Dreamland describes how a guys from one town in Mexico create a kind of pizza-delivery model for black tar heroin, where you call and there's a guy, and there's quality control and customer service and so on.

I'm constantly trying to convince people that economics is not value-free: that our definitional choices affect our conclusions, that this process is not value-neutral, that assumptions about what is and is not important are hidden behind seemingly objective principles.

The opiate situation is a perfect illustration. The story we always hear about capitalist exchange is that when A and B  make a voluntary transaction, overall well-being improves: since A and B are both getting what they prefer, they are both better off.

As Adam Smith well knew, this is true only in certain contexts and against certain backdrops, and ethical questions and economic ones are deeply intertwined. If you allow that people buying Oxy and black tar heroin, becoming addicted, and often dying is a "bad thing," then you immediately face several deep questions: How is this exchange unlike others? What is the theory of "well-being" in which Coca-Cola makes you better off but Oxy doesn't? What is the theory of "voluntary" that makes addiction incompatible with free choice?

In her wonderful 1962 book Economic Philosophy, the economist Joan Robinson uses the example of addiction to showcase the problems with the standard economic view in which the theory of revealed preferences -- whatever the person chose must, tautologically, be what they wanted -- comes together with the theory of well-being as preference-satisfaction -- whatever the person preferred must, tautologically, have been what would improve their well-being.

"But [addicts] should be cured," she writes, "[and] children should go to school. How do we decide which preferences should be respected and what restrained unless we judge the preferences themselves"

Sure, highly addictive drugs are an extreme example. But you can't rule them out without a some thinking about what preferences matter and why, that is, about what is good for people and what isn't. And once you're going down that road, well -- pretty soon you're asking what is a good life and what matters and why. You're far from rational choice theory and revealed preferences, and there's no telling where you'll end up.

3. Is the human experience essentially a pain?

When it comes to the pains of human existence, there are two types of people in the world. There are people who think things are naturally OK and only become fucked up when bad things happen, and there are people who think that the human experience itself is essentially a problem. In case you haven't noticed, I'm the second type.
   
In Dreamland, Quinones talks about the dilemma of all attempts to kill pain: can you have the heaven of pain-killing without the hell of addiction? The thing I'm talking about is related to that but goes beyond pain and pleasure into general human existence questions.

As the opiate crisis deepened, many of the people who got addicted were young privileged white people from well-to-do families -- kids growing up in leafy suburbs, with their own bedrooms and cars and TVs and so on. In some cases they started because of sports injuries, but a lot of them were just looking for a good time.

If you think things are naturally OK and become fucked up only when bad things happen, it seems difficult to explain these kids deciding to take drugs. Why take those risks? For what? But if you think human existence is naturally difficult, exhausting, irritating, and boring, it makes all the sense in the world. People are constantly trying to escape their own consciousness, and they always have.

What this ultimately shows, I think, is that while freedom and autonomy are wonderful things, desires don't just come out of nowhere, and most people aren't going to do very well when left alone to their own devices.

Moralish In America

Is moral bankruptcy on the rise?  I know people have been asking the same question for thousands of years. That doesn't mean the answer is "no."

I'm thinking here especially about self-serving lying and cheating, and especially about my Home Country, the US of A. Maybe it's just that we're paying more attention. Maybe the instances are more outrageous. I don't know. But doesn't it seem there's astonishing amount of really brazen misbehavior in the US these days?

Surely part of the explanation has to do with knowingly evil intent. But I think there's more to it, and I have a theory. OK, let me say right up front that I don't know if this theory is true and I wouldn't know how to test it, and when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail, so maybe my theory says more about my own obsessions than anything else.

But anyway. My theory is that just as truth is being replaced by  "truthiness," the norm of being "moral" is being replaced by a norm of being "moralish." The idea being that morality is a "grey area," where you have to sort of make a lot of fine tuned judgments -- and where if you err on the side of "being too good," you'll be a chump.

Let's look at a little background. For years and years, economists have been telling everyone that the pursuit of self-interest, far from being at odds with virtue, is actually aligned with virtue: when you pursue your own good, in certain particular ways, good things happen. This idea floats around in variants, but I'm guessing a lot of people think that living in a capitalist society means doing what you can for yourself, as long as you're playing by the rules, is not only essential to your own well-being but also good all around.

The problem with this idea isn't that it's false. The problem with this idea is that it sounds simple and universal even though it's actually complicated and limited. So instead of taking it as license to go buy an extra cup of coffee, which would be a correct interpretation, people take it as a license to put fake out Harvard degrees on their resumés, lie about mortgage agreements, and engage in insider trading.

The principle itself is complicated and limited for lots of reasons, but let's just talk about one: what does it mean to play by the rules?

In fact, the production of good consequences from capitalist activity happens only when people tell the truth, refrain from fraud, keep their agreements -- even when doing so isn't directly in their self-interest. So lying and cheating are central forms of NOT playing by the rules, and are not sanctioned by any version of the self-interest principle.

But it's easy and fun, especially when it benefits you, to just sort of forget about that part. Especially when there's no watchdog, or no one's paying attention, and you think you're not going to get caught.

Then you think to yourself that somehow telling the truth, like giving to charity or calling your mother, is somehow Morally Optional. "Oh, yes, I know really GOOD people do those things. But I'm just a regular Joe!"

So then people come to think of the lying and cheating areas of life as sort of grey areas -- even though they're clearly against the rules in some sense, they're part of "morality," and surely anything to do with morality is somehow optional and hazy, right?

And here's the kicker: if you live under conditions of extreme capitalism, you get the feeling that you've got to fine-tune your moralishm just right, because if you're acting "too good," you're losing out. You're a chump. In a society of great inequality and intense suckiness for the socio-economic losers, you cannot let that happen. So there's huge motivation to adjust your moralish grey area commitments -- probably, in a lot of cases, hoping to match those around you.

I picture a lot of people figuring, Hey, if I can talk about it over lunch and the guys think it's cool, then it can't be wrong, can it? 

End result: whole industries full of people completely screwing society and sleeping like babies at night, saying to themselves, "Hey, I'm a moralish kind of guy. You can't blame me!"

Modern Life: Diaspora At Home

Bertha Worms, Homesick for Naples [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

I don't know about you, but I often have a feeling like, "When are we going home from this place?" 

It's not that I have some home I'm thinking about going to. I grew up first in the suburbs of Boston, a regular old East Coast city, and then in the Connecticut commuter suburbs of New York. I have no interest in returning there. The texture of suburban life -- it's always been a problem for me. The houses surrounded by other houses, the driving, the buying a week's worth of groceries all at once -- these things make me feel more alienated, not less.

And it's not because I'm an American living in Canada. I'm not somehow pining for life in the US. It's true that I have an inexplicable and irrational love for my home country, but even when I'm there, I have this same subtle sad feeling of being in exile. But exile from what? 

I've come to think maybe it's part of the modern condition. I mean, I love modernity. A day without miniskirts, shoe-shopping, and cats on the internet is like a day without sunshine. But still, there's this other feeling too.

I wouldn't be the first person to think that living in a modern capitalist society induces, alongside its delights and liberties, a particular kind of alienation. But for me that alienation often feels surprising like homsickness.  Homesickness for a place that never existed, and never will.

It's a lot like the homesickness of people who are actually sick for a home. For example, I recently read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's excellent novel Americanah -- about a young woman who grows up in Nigeria, moves to the US for university, and ultimately returns to Nigeria. I was struck at her description of her homesickness.

Ifemelu has put together a full and complete life, with bachelor's degree, boyfriend, and blog, and yet ...

" ... and yet, ... [i]t had been there for a while, an early morning disease of fatigue a bleakness and borderlessness. It brought with it amorphous longings, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glimpses of other lives she could be living ... "

I've had that feeling -- especially the sense of unsettledness, of glimpses of other lives. For all of modernity's pleasures, the limitless can be destabilizing. You wonder, "Is there some completely different thing I'm supposed to be doing?"

Of course, for Ifemelu there's a treatment -- "Nigeria became where she was supposed to be, the only place she could sink her roots in without the constant urge to tug them out and shake off the soil." 

But what about the rest of us, who are already at home?

Thinking about this problem always reminds me of the incredible scene toward the end of Portnoy's Complaint, where Alexander Portnoy has gone back to Israel and goes out with an Isreali woman of pride, integrity, and maybe smugness. She's disgusted by his ironic detachment, his making a joke of everything, his relentless self-mockery, his refusal to take himself seriously.  She tells him he is what is all that is shameful in "the culture of the diaspora."

In a rage, Portnoy screams to himself in a silent speech that he'll show her -- he'll give her a venereal disease, he'll send her back to the kibbutz defiled, he'll make her see:

"This is what it's like in the Diaspora, you saintly kiddies, this is what it's like in exile. Temptation and disgrace! Corruption and self-mockery! ... Whining, hysteria, compromise, confusion, disease!" 

You don't have to be Jewish to understand this. I wouldn't trade modern life for anything, but it can be really really difficult, and even hateful, and as I've said before, you have to have a certain kind of tough-mindedness to make it even moderately workable. Temptation and disgrace aren't my particular bugbears, but I know irony and self-mockery. I know that once you're in modernity, you're trapped. You can't get out of it, because native, non-ironic attachment isn't something you can just get ahold of if you don't already have it.

"This is what it's like in exile."  Exile indeed. But for most of us this is home, and it's exile from nowhere. 

Why Can't People Do Anything Anymore? Or, The Fall Of The American McEmpire?

The Roman Coliseum

A friend of mine and I were recently talking about the weird feeling of living in End Times.  No, we were not talking about the Mayan calendar.  We were talking about the way that because of climate change, political chaos, and general declining fortunes, things were going to hell in a handbasket. 

We noted that the US seems to have a particularly apocalyptic feel nowadays.  A few weeks ago we were observing one of the many WTF situations of modern American life, and my friend said, "That's what happened at the end of the Roman Empire.  They just stopped being able to do things.  Eventually they had to take apart old buildings, to use the fixtures, because they were unable to build new things properly."

Whoa.  Doesn't that sound creepily like life in modern America?  We're going to war all over the globe, and no one in charge seems to know anything about the culture of history of other people or anything about why they do the things they do, or even about why we're going around killing people.  It's like: oh, learning about stuff, so difficult.  And then some bad things happen, and it's like "oh, we should do something about that."

One of the weird ways we're having trouble doing things is that we're too busy getting organized to do things.  America's becoming a nation of pencil sharpeners.  I was in a Starbucks in the US the other day and I overheard a woman on her cellphone trying to make an airplane reservation.  Her meeting had been moved.  She had to change her flight.  She wanted a specific time.  The flight seemed available, but she feared overbooking and bumping.  She called the airline. She called some office at her workplace.  I would say I was there for about an hour, and all she did was try to arrange this flight.

Honestly, she seemed to be having a fine time, enjoying "talking on the phone" instead of doing whatever job she was getting organized to do when she got wherever she was going.  I was the one going nuts.  I wanted to say, "Excuse me, but haven't you noticed that your time is running out and you are going to die and you're spending all your time getting organized?  Just pick a flight! Get on with it!"

The pencil sharpening is part of the Rise of the Administrative Class.  Workplaces are becoming stuffed full of managers and administrators, and no one's actually doing anything.  It's the job of the managers and administrators to try to ensure that the employees who aren't administrators and managers make as little money as possible for doing as much work as possible.  That's the natural conclusion of a market system, and its end result is predictable:  who could possibly be content being a doer or maker of things in such a system?

The modern inability to do things reached a new height for me in a story about tutors in yesterday's New York Times.  The headline could have been:  Modern People Can't Do Anything; Tutors Step In To Help."  The introductory anecdote describes a student arriving at university, overwhelmed with the tasks of registering for classes, buying books, and finding the classrooms.  She calls her mom, who in turn calls her high school tutor. 

Actual quote from the article:  "[These] tutors make sure the students are awake in the morning, help them with papers and update their parents on their academic progress." 

"Make sure the students are awake"?  Really?  Honestly, I was a very spazzy student in my college days, among the least organized of all the kids I knew.  I was the kind of kid who would skip class on purpose, simply because I thought I had an opportunity to have fun that simply couldn't be missed, or because I found it boring to sit through a lecture.

But even at my heights of spazziness, I found registering for classes and buying books pretty straightforward.  Getting up the morning:  also not a problem.  I remember being up and breakfasted at 8:00 and deciding not to go to my 9:00 linguistics class, because I found it boring and thought I had better things to do.  Spazzy?  yes.  Unable to get up in the morning without a tutor?  No. 

But back then we had special technology -- things you could "set" that would make an "alarm" go off at a preset time of your choosing.  We called it an alarm clock.  I don't know where you'd find something like that nowadays.  

Obama gave a speech yesterday that The Times described as "surprisingly assertive."  In it, he said "these tragedies must end."  If a student wrote something like that in a paper I was grading, I would take them to task:  for being vague, for not dealing with the obvious question of whose responsibility it was to act, and for using grammar that obscures those difficulties. 

In modern America, though, it's considered tough talk.  Strange times indeed. 

Work, Money, Fairness, And The American Way

I'm always surprised at how many people seem to believe both of these two things which seem incompatible to me.

(1)  If you work hard, you should be able to have a decent life.

(2)  When it comes to economic exchanges, people should generally be left alone to do their thing without outside interference.

(1) means something like, "If you work hard, and play by the rules, you should be able to live reasonably well."  In America in 2011, "reasonably well" seems to mean something like being able to have a house, a TV, and a decent car, and to be able to educate your kids. 

I take it that in (1) the "should" is generally not the predictive "should" -- like, "the bank should be open when you get there," but is rather the normative should.  As in, if it doesn't happen, something about that is not right, or not fair.  Not many people would put it this way, maybe, but the idea seems to be a kind of basic social justice or extended social contract.  Like, play by the rules, do your thing, and you won't be screwed.

But then there's (2).  I assume (2) means that if a person or corporation wants to engage in some economic transaction, they should be free to do so on whatever terms they choose and should be free from external interference.  Most people may not draw out the implications of this fully, but I take it (2) means getting rid of regulations and the institutions that set them up, as much as possible. 

It seems to me evident that these are incompatible.  In the absence of a role for some interfering institution or other body doing all those things, in what sense could there possibly be a "should" involved in how successful you are? 

There are a million reasons you might work hard and not benefit very well economically.  What you have might not interest anyone.  What you are able to do might not be the kind of thing anyone wants to pay you to do.  You might have been born with few abilities or talents, or low intelligence, and thus not be able to do anything that is considered valuable by others.  You might have chosen poorly when you got education or training, working for years, say, to become a typewriter repair person at the dawn of the internet. 

If people get to make their own unfettered decisions, to suit themselves, about all economic transactions, then it will certainly would be, in part, a matter of luck and circumstance whether you are able to earn enough to live a decent life.  Indeed, if you happen to live in a time or place of limited resources, it might be a matter of luck or circumstances whether you even have enough to live at all. 

If you're disabled, it could easily happen that, work as hard as you might, you would be unable to earn the -- actually quite substantive -- kind of money that one needs for American housing, cars, gadgets and TVs.  For that matter, you might just be someone people hate.  People hate for all kind of famously irrational reasons:  racism, sexism, homophobia, the list is endless.  If you're hated, you aren't going to be on the receiving end of a lot of opportunities. 

Now some people who are committed to (2) seem to me to acknowledge this incompatibility and accept that  (1) doesn't follow.  Circumstances don't care about justice, and it won't be "unfair" if the way they work out sucks for you.  It will just be, well, Sucks To Be You.  

But a surprising number of people seem to believe both (1) and (2).  I don't know what kind of "should" or "fair" these people are referring to.  The correlation between hard work and a decent life only comes about by either luck or by some interference making the correlation happen.

Family Dynamics Of Some New World Countries

Pretty climate map of North America

I've always thought of the United States as a fundamentally adolescent sort of country.  Think about it:  the things America says are just the things teenagers say.  "I don't need you." "I'm going to do it my own way." "You're not the boss of me" and, of course, "I'm special and not like any other country on earth!"

It's natural to think that if the US is an adolescent, then Europe is a continent full of adults, and there seems to me something to this.  Some European countries have the air of people who have been through a lot of trouble and just want some quiet time to enjoy life.  They're like, OK, enough with the constant fighting and complaining! We've got better things to do.

I moved to Canada a few years ago, and I started to think, Well, if you think of Europe as the parents and the US as a kid, then clearly Canada is a kind of sibling.  Both the US and Canada are kind of like the children of broken homes -- the offspring of parents who don't always get along peacefully and who occasionally use the kids to get back at one another.

The thing is, I think, that where the US is a pain-in-the-ass ungrateful teenager, Canada is like a sensible younger child -- say, an eight or ten year-old.  You know those kids:  they basically have it together; they like doing things with the family; they have excellent senses of humor and mostly, they're annoyed and mystified by the behavior of their adolescent siblings.

Can't you picture it?  The scene:  an afternoon picnic with extended family.  America is texting under the table, rolling her eyes at her great-aunt, and picking a fight with some cousin.  She gets up to leave early, pissing everyone off.  Canada says, "Why do you always have to be so difficult?  Mom says we're going to all play scrabble and then go out for ice cream."

I love the United States, but as everyone knows, dealing with adolescents is exhausting.  In the excellent book White Noise by Don Delillo, there's a boy adolescent, Heinrich, who basically argues with everyone about everything.  There's one moment where his father, Jack, finally says something to which the boy responds "Exactly." Jack says something to himself like "I paused, savoring the rare moment of agreement."

I often travel between Canada and the United States, and I'm always amazed, coming back to Canada, by the absence of anger.  It's like you've been with Heinrich arguing all day and you're mad and worn out and irritable and then you encounter the younger kid, who gives you one of those knowing looks kids have, and says to you, "Hey, you wanna go to the aquarium or something?"

And you're like, "Yeah. Yeah, I do."