Shop Class as Soulcraft: a Book Report, Sort Of

That Other Blog Over There piqued my interest in Matthew Crawford’s SCAS some months back, but apparently someone or something did the same for many other Chicago readers, with the result that the public library didn’t have a copy available until last week. Sometimes that kind of situation makes me desperate enough to actually go out and buy the book, without even waiting until it comes out in paperback (which usually happens at roughly the same time that the Chicago Public Library acquires it.) Fortunately, this time, my current difficult finances enabled/required me to hold out a bit longer and finally read the library’s copy. I don’t mean to sound curmudgeonly, because SCAS was a reasonably good read. But it was not the wellspring of original thought that That Other Blogger led me to expect. It was, in fact, warmed-over Paul Goodman and David Riesman, without a single attribution to either of them.

Well, okay. See: The More Things Change… for more grousing about the same thing, and for a mode of reconciling oneself to it. Those who have not read Goodman and Riesman, as Santayana might have said, may have to rewrite it. With, admittedly, an interesting overlay of speculation about the financial crisis of the last couple of years, drawing a nice parallel between the alienation of labor and the commoditization of mortgages. These are still worthwhile ideas, and if books by Goodman and Riesman have become hard to find, Crawford is no doubt entitled to reintroduce their thinking to this generation, which probably needs it more than mine did.

And, like Goodman and Riesman, Crawford talks almost entirely about how our alienation from the world of physical work affects men. Which is a serious batch of issues, well worth discussing. But how about the way that alienation affects women, if in fact it does so at all, or even as much as it affects men? I think women are in better touch with the physical world, and physical work, than men, these days. We still, by and large, do the cooking and the cleaning and the housework. Admittedly, the portion of it that men agree to do is usually the least alienated and most interesting part of it, such as fancy cooking. But women do the day-to-day plain cooking, and take as many shortcuts in the process as they can afford, since they are under the same time pressures from the paid workplace as their menfolk. As a result, there are probably a lot fewer women around than in my mother’s generation who can tell you how to make a good non-lumpy gravy without buying it in a jar. Last night, for the first time in a couple of years, I made such a gravy. It took maybe ten minutes longer than the kind that comes in a jar, and that ten minutes was already tied up with various other tasks involving preparation of a pair of turkey drumsticks, so the total process didn’t take any longer. It felt like an accomplishment, even though nobody except Mr. Wired would ever have noticed.

Also, the other night, while working on a blog about the effect of third-party payment on the economy, I got so absorbed in this mind work that I forgot about the very material teakettle under which I had lighted the burner, until I discovered that the water had boiled away and the kettle had been ruined. Or rather (from Crawford’s point of view) its ruin, initiated by an inadequately performing whistle, was completed. So much for intellectual work versus physical work.

Generally, every night, I clean up the kitchen (having made the momentous discovery that the Elves will not do it for me, no matter how long I leave it, and that it really does feel nicer to make breakfast in a clean kitchen) and find the task quite satisfying. I proofread and copyedit my text as I type, and take pride in producing final text with minimal numbers of typos and fluffs. (It took me a while to understand that most people do not proofread their emails before hitting send, and that it is considered rude to call their attention to typos.) I don’t like messy text going out over any of my signatures. All of these activities are interactions with the physical world that lack the homespun glamor of Crawford’s conduit-bending and motorcycle repair work. So they lack even the narrow “public” of such predominantly male activities. They are mostly what industrial psychologist Frederick Herzberg calls “hygienic factors”—things, the presence of which does not noticeably please the person who benefits from them, but the absence of which seriously displeases him/her. A lot of women’s work fits into this category.

The other thing Crawford ignores, perhaps because he is a white male, is that the kinds of material immediate-feedback work he finds least alienated are also the kinds that attract many really intelligent “minority” workers and women. Rosabeth Moss Kanter discusses this phenomenon at some length. She feels that choosing “staff” rather then “line” positions within the corporation limits the upward mobility of women and minority workers, and generally advises against it. But “staff”—such as engineers, computer analysts, medics, and janitors—perform work that can be quickly evaluated, with little room for the evaluator’s prejudice. A good engineer builds bridges that don’t fall down, even if her boss doesn’t like her because she is “too shrill” or “too quiet,” or even if he is Jewish or Asian or Hispanic and doesn’t quite “fit in” in the lunchroom. Crawford draws on Dilbert and “The Office” to ridicule personality-based evaluations, but it seems not to occur to him that this style of evaluation encourages not only groupthink and stupidity, but discrimination. And Kanter does not, evidently, realize that taking a staff position may limit one’s upward mobility, but also limits the likelihood of suffering discrimination for not being the “right sort of person.” (For a lot more information on this phenomenon in the history of the American legal profession, see Jerold Auerbach’s Unequal Justice.)

So anyway, read SCAS, but don’t buy it unless you have never read Paul Goodman or David Riesman and can’t get hold of any of their stuff now. And while reading them, listen for the bloody teakettle. Or just heat the water for your tea in a self-limiting microwave (something Crawford would no doubt appreciate.)

CynThesis

What’s So Bad About Doing Good?

Or, for that matter, about feeling good? Or even doing good in order to feel good? These questions, of course, are directed at the authors and devotees of “Stuff White People Like.” Admittedly, I’ve only read bits and pieces of SWPL itself, mostly as quoted in other people’s blogs. But SWPL is only the most coherent popularization of a strain of thought that has afflicted our culture for nearly a century now. It has its origins in a kind of pop Calvinism that has by now forgotten its origins, but is still basic to the American psyche.

Jean Calvin (no relation to the tiger’s pal), who brought us the Pilgrims and the Presbyterian Church, believed that people are inherently sinful, and can’t “save” themselves by doing good works. We are “saved” if and only if God chooses to save us. We have no way of knowing who is saved and who is damned, and we shouldn’t care. We should, of course, do good, but not to save ourselves from damnation. We should do good purely because that’s what God wants. We must do everything possible to guard against ulterior motives. Doing the right thing for the wrong reason is no better than not doing it at all.

There are, Calvin tells us, lots of wrong reasons. Earthly rewards, like money and status and power. Heavenly rewards, like not going to hell. And psychological rewards, like feeling good about ourselves. Ideally, we should do good as secretly as possible*, and in ever-present uncertainty about our eternal destination. Calvin didn’t, so far as I know, have any helpful advice on how to keep from feeling good about having done good. Presumably, if we are all sinners, awareness of that fact should be enough.

Well, these days, it isn’t. Unlike Calvin and his ideological descendants, today’s Americans believe deeply in their inalienable right to feel good about themselves. We bump up our self-esteem for our skills, our temperaments, and our sheer lovability. As Senator Franken, in his earlier incarnation as Stuart Smalley, used to say, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and—doggone it!—the Minnesota Supreme Court likes me.” Or something like that.

We are entitled to feel good about every aspect of our selves except—oddly enough—our attempts to improve the world we live in and the lot of its inhabitants. Not only are we not allowed to feel good about doing good, we are not allowed to feel good about being good, except in the sense denoting excellence of worldly skills. We still believe we are all sinners. But we also believe that, as Smalley would say, “that’s o-kay.” We don’t need to feel bad about being sinners, we just shouldn’t feel good about being do-gooders. That would imply that we do good for ulterior motives—namely, in order to feel good.

This at least provides us with a solution to the eternal conundrum of how to bad-mouth people we don’t like but about whom we don’t actually know anything discrediting—just say they’re only buying Fair Trade coffee/living in integrated neighborhoods/going to church regularly/sending their children to public schools/buying hybrid cars/etc. to feel good. It’s even neater than calling them hypocrites, which was the ploy before we discovered feelgood.

Admittedly, I come from the Jewish tradition, which is mostly profoundly behaviorist. With some rather esoteric exceptions, we don’t much mind if you do the right thing for the wrong reason—even reasons a lot wronger than mere self-esteem, like looking good to the neighbors, improving the image of your business, impressing eligible members of the opposite sex, or even intimidating potential opponents—so long as you do it. We figure the world will still be a better place than if you don’t do it.

For the same reason, we aren’t keen on doing good secretly. If your neighbors don’t know you donate to charity, they may feel they live in a world in which most people don’t donate. This may lead them to stop donating. It may also lead them not to bother asking for help when they really need it, because they don’t know anybody to ask. At the very least, it is likely to lead them to depression and even despair.

Moreover, as St. Augustine figured out a long time ago, it is just about impossible to delete selfish motives from our actions. Either we deceive ourselves about our motives, or we get paralyzed into not acting at all. This is not worth the trouble.

So, please, spare me the Stuff White Liberals Who Aspire to a Moral Code Loftier Than Al Capone’s Like. Nice people feel good about nice things. Nasty people feel good about nasty things. Pat yourself on the back and go on your way. Make the world a better place.

*This was the whole point of Magnificent Obsession, a very popular edifying novel of the 1950s.

Red Emma

“And Such Small Portions…”

Obama wants to lengthen the school year and the school day. Probably the school week is the next target. Like the educational experts who have been suggesting all this extra time for the last twenty years, he has several different rationales. First, of course, the original school year was set up for an agrarian society in which the kids had to be home during the summer to tend to the crops. That’s quite true, and makes the classic June-through-August vacation an anachronism. Moreover, the data are pretty clear that such a long time out between school terms really does cause most kids to lose some of the learning they had accomplished the previous spring by the time they come back in the fall. So the longer school year has some solid facts behind it.

But, as the AP article points out (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090927/ap_on_re_us/us_mor), a longer school year doesn’t have to mean a longer school day: “Kids in the U.S. spend more hours in school (1,146 instructional hours per year) than do kids in the Asian countries that persistently outscore the U.S. on math and science tests — Singapore (903), Taiwan (1,050), Japan (1,005) and Hong Kong (1,013). That is despite the fact that Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong have longer school years (190 to 201 days) than does the U.S. (180 days).” And AP isn’t even looking at European nations that start kids in school later (in Denmark and Sweden, as late as age 7), or with shorter school days than ours (in France, 8:30 AM to 2:30 PM with a 2-hour lunch break until age 11), that still have better literacy and graduation rates than we do. Whatever it is that American schools are doing in the classroom, it is not at all clear that more of it would be helpful to the students. It sounds too much like the irate restaurant patron who complains that the food is terrible and the portions are too small.

In fact, anyone who has worked with adult literacy programs can verify that it shouldn’t and usually doesn’t take anywhere near 12 years—even with current summer vacation and school day schedules–to teach what most high school graduates come out knowing. Note also that summer vacation has already suffered considerable abbreviation in many school districts. The whole idea of Labor Day as the last long weekend of summer (meaning, presumably, children’s summer vacation) now makes no sense at all. Almost all public schools start up around the middle of August these days, and many don’t shut down for the summer until nearly the end of June. (Which is a good argument for moving Memorial Day into late June and Labor Day into early August, but I digress.)
Compressing the school year even more than we are already doing may make sense, but lengthening the school day really doesn’t.

In fact, the justifications for a longer school day are entirely different, and a lot less plausible, than those for a longer school year. Obama (and most of the other people one hears declaiming on the subject) are mostly concerned, not about education, but about safety. “Those hours from 3 o’clock to 7 o’clock are times of high anxiety for parents,” [Secretary of Education Arne] Duncan sa[ys]. “They want their children safe. Families are working one and two and three jobs now to make ends meet and to keep food on the table.”

Yes, those safety concerns are valid. But what do they have to do with school? Why should professionally-educated adults who should be home grading today’s papers and preparing tomorrow’s lessons have to function as baby-sitters to keep Johnny from getting shot? That’s the job of recreation directors and supervisors, or at worst, of cops. And even more to the point, why should kids have to be on task and programmed for 8 hours a day, just because their parents are? At that point, the arguments against child labor start to fade into insignificance. When do the kids get to just “chill with their friends”? Or have we already accepted the premise that an unsupervised, unprogrammed child is a child at risk of crime, sex, drugs, or obesity, and that the only way to save our children from these dread fates is to subject them to the same scheduling that has already shredded the emotional and physical health of their parents and destroyed the family life that used to keep the children safe?

But, now that we have decided that all more or less able-bodied adults must spend at least 40 hours a week being paid to work for somebody else, we have also decided that anybody who looks after children has to be paid. For more recent data, see:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5intayNnUex0u2p2aPfl95SZitE9QD9B15QLO0 and

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8277378.stm

And, no, none of this has anything to do with feminism. It is mainly connected to stagnant wages and rising fixed living costs such as housing, health care, transportation, and education. Most stay-at-home mothers don’t view themselves as having chosen to stay home. See: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-census-momsoct02,0,3742466.story for why most stay-at-home mothers are younger, less educated, and have more children than the rest of the female population, so that their prospective earnings are lower and their child care costs would be higher.

I mention these stories because they have all hit the Web in the last 24 hours. But they do a lot to prove my point that the main reason we really want our kids to spend more time in school is that it’s the cheapest way to free parents to put in 40+ hours a week earning money. Once cryogenics has been perfected, we can keep our kids in a deep freeze until a couple of years before they are old enough to work. We can spend the intervening time teaching them what today’s high school graduates know, and go on from there. O brave new world, that hath such people in it!

CynThesis

It All Started With the Witch Doctor

Since our Fearless Leader wants more stuff on health care, I’m contributing an abbreviated version of my first lecture in a course I occasionally teach, called “Professional Standards for Mental Health Workers.”  It has a heavily historical/anthropological slant, since my students, though highly competent and hard-working, generally have a lousy background in history, which I feel puts them at a serious disadvantage.

Let’s start with the premise that all professions are priesthoods, and all originate with healing the sick.  Terms like “witch doctor” and “medicine man” point clearly in this direction.”  “Medicine”, in Native American religious tradition is a synonym for “religious ritual/power.”  Like most pre-industrial medical traditions, it is based on the assumption that “sickness” can arise from or affect the body, the intellect, the emotions, and the spirit, in varying combinations.  Among the Navaho, for instance, many illnesses are believed to result from “sleeping with kinfolk,” contamination from proximity to corpses, or witchcraft–that is, the improper behavior of the patient or somebody else.

So the “medicine man” has to know things about the patient that the patient would  never want to become public knowledge. The patient will submit to treatment (and pay the doctor) only if the confidentiality of that information can be guaranteed.

Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer, says that any technology we don’t understand is for all practical purposes magic. Healing the sick has always been one of the major attributes of divinities and their priests/shamans—a much more useful form of miracle than making water flow uphill or rods flower or whatever.  The ability to heal implies POWER, which is scary to those who lack it.  It implies, specifically, four kinds of power:
 power to heal
 power to withhold healing (“I don’t like you, or your brother killed my brother, so I won’t set your broken leg, nyah nyah nyah”)
 power to kill (anybody familiar with herbs knows poisons and abortifacients as   well as healing herbs)
 power derived from knowledge (about the natural world and about the patient–unavoidable access to confidential info) (imagine a delirious patient raving about a passionate interlude with a person to whom s/he is not married, for starters.)

So most cultures generate some kind of code for their priests and healers, to restrain this power and keep it channeled in paths likely to be useful for the culture as a whole. In this lecture, I assign the students to ask any professional or skilled craft person they meet during the week about the professional ethics of that craft, and get written documentation if possible.  I have gotten some fascinating samples: taxi drivers, sexual surrogates, veterinarians, child care workers, chefs—a long way from the Hippocratic Oath, which I generally see as the Ur-Document of its kind.  But they all have pretty much the same restrictions in common:
 Restrictions on use of knowledge and information
 first, do no harm:  for instance
 no poisons;
 in some cultures, no abortifacients
 no exposure of patients’ secrets (no blackmail)
 No favoritism in use of skills and knowledge, which must be made available to all, regardless of personality, affiliation, or resources
 No “overreaching”–using rare and necessary skills to extort undue recompense (pecuniary, or, for instance, sexual favors) (The course, naturally, has a whole lecture devoted exclusively to the issue of sex with patients/clients, which seems to be a problem for every profession with the possible exception of accountants, engineers, and veterinarians.  We’ve been blogging about Fountainhead lately, so you know it’s an issue for architects.)

The lecture then goes into a wildly condensed and popularized history of medicine, which I figure the various docs here are perfectly capable of providing us far beyond my poor amateurish power to add or detract.  The point of it, however, is not what technology and information has become available at various points in our history, but how we use it. Thus, it’s important to keep in mind that there is a big difference between:
(1) what we can conceive  of doing
(2) what we can actually do
(3) what we are  actually doing
(4) what most people actually have done.

These days we pretty much presume that we can develop any technology we decide we want to develop. The areas of cosmetic medicine, infertility treatment  and organ transplantation seem to be where we have actually decided we want to develop technology.  Economics is probably the driving force behind these choices.  Doing things people want is almost always more profitable than doing things people need.  It took medicine a while to come up with serious work in the former area, but now medical science has clearly taken that ball and run with it.  More about this later.
At the same time, mental health issues, which seem to be more and more salient as a source of real social problems, are being offered less and less attention from everybody except the drug companies.  This is probably economically driven too.  Drug companies can make lots of money in large gobs, while the more labor-intensive methods of treating mental illness dribble out the money in tiny drips to lots of people. .  The things psychotherapy can do–usually over long periods with close attention–are miles away from what most psychiatric patients actually get.
All of the chapters of the history of medicine exist in the US today, side by side, like the rings on a tree.  There is a ring in which sickness is still believed to result from the patient’s improper behavior (these days, we have given up on policing health in the bedroom, and taken up jackbooted thuggery in the dining room instead, but the results are the same.)  There is another ring in which the most drastic intervention is the most highly regarded (especially in the treatment  of cancer, where chemotherapy does a lot of the same thing that purges and bleeding used to do–the Ben Tre “destroy the village to save it” theory of medicine.)   There is a ring in which the doctor’s job is to keep the patient comfortable until nature takes its course (that’s what hospice care is all about.)  There is a ring in which medicine actually works, like a well-run car repair shop.  And finally, the local “wise woman” is still around (herbal shops and healers in Chinatown, Hispanic neighborhoods, and New Age enclaves, etc.)

The economics of medicine work differently in each of these rings.  Undoubtedly, whatever finally comes out of Congress (if anything) will not be fine-tuned to these distinctions.  Probably we should be looking for a minimalist and mostly-preventive approach: make sure everybody, regardless of ability to pay, gets vaccinations, wellness counseling, treatment for infectious diseases, mental health care, and palliative end-of-life care, and let the Almighty Free Market do everything else. Mental health care, BTW, should be required to include some treatment for whatever DSM-V calls the compulsion to scream and shout disruptively at public meetings.  Without it, our democracy cannot survive.

CynThesis

Dear Sir or Madman

Yesterday’s Yahoo news carried a piece on avoiding typos in one’s resume and cover letter to prospective employers, pointing out that the recipient would probably dump the offending documents in the nearest recycle bin upon catching the first such typo.  As a former English teacher, I can certainly sympathize with that response.  On the other hand, I suspect that most prospective employers are themselves ignorant of alot of such typo’s, and mere HR staffers would be even moreso.  Indeed, between you and I, many such solecisms were originally the fault of misguided English teachers to begin with (such as my son-in-law’s 4th grade teacher, whom he swears taught him never to use “and me”) and are therefore much more likely to be committed by people who really care about proper usage.

Of course, the corrolary to this rule is that many job applications may land in the circular file, not because of they’re poor grasp of English usage, but because of the recipients.

Jane Grey

The More Things Change…

Mr. Wired and I are spending a lazy summer Sunday afternoon listening to NPR, while Krista Tippett interviews an expert on children’s play, who tells us, wonder of wonders, that play is good for children.  Mr. Wired finds it annoying that Stuart Brown, the expert in question, is claiming credit for this discovery, when it was a commonplace while we were growing up.

Actually, it was a commonplace long before that. Froebel, the first official child psychologist, coined the phrase “Play is the child’s work” in the early 1800s.  Two hundred years earlier, John Commenius said some of the same things.  And Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, which quotes both of them, was published when Mr. Wired and I were in grade school.

That bothers Mr. Wired more than it bothers me.  Yes, it’s true that academic scholarship is supposed to be dedicated to giving credit where credit is due, rather than claiming three-hundred-year-old ideas as one’s own.  The rabbinic tradition says, BTW, that teaching something in the name of the person from whom one learned it hastens the redemption of the world.  I take this seriously, to the point where I publish all my blogging under Talmudic copyright—use my stuff as much as you like, just mention my name (or at least one of my pseudonyms) when you do.

But these days, we don’t want to know where good ideas came from originally.  The people who promulgate good ideas now want to be able to claim credit for them, at least if the only other contenders are safely dead or in the public domain and therefore not likely to sue.  If a scholar can’t take credit for passing on somebody else’s good idea, s/he won’t bother publishing it in the first place.  [In the case of the value of children’s play, that means a lot of young first-time parents won’t have access to that useful information and their children will be stuck in preschool 8 hours a day, without recess, learning their letters and colors and shapes beginning at age 3 and then popped in front of a TV set for the rest of the day.]  Scholarly ego, in short, serves the same sort of evolutionary purpose as the peacock’s display plumage, or the self-interest of Adam Smith’s pin manufacturer.  By allowing the scholar to promote himself, we allow him to promote ideas we all need to hear about.  Okay, we have a copy of Homo Ludens somewhere on our shelves, left over from my grad school years.  Our neighbors upstairs, raising a four-year-old and a toddler, don’t.  They need to hear these ideas somewhere. Their kids need them to hear those ideas even more.  Feeding a pseudo-scholar’s fraudulent ego is a small price to pay for that.

Jane Grey

Space Control: a Thought Experiment

This is an exercise I like to think of as “womanthink,” even though I know there are men who do it very well, and lots of women who don’t do it at all.  It asks three questions: What do we have lots of?  What do we need more of? How do we turn what we have into what we need?

For instance, the foreclosure crisis.  What it actually means is that we now have lots of unoccupied houses. At the same time, there is a shortage of rental housing, especially affordable rental housing.  How do we turn unoccupied houses into affordable rental housing?

In fact, this one is easy compared to, say, spinning flax into gold, or turning dog manure into transportation fuel.  Why don’t the banks, who own these unoccupied houses, get together with realtors, who at the moment have almost nothing to do with their time and no way to make a living, and have them rent out the houses, preferably on one- or two-year leases, so the tenants would stick around a while and take care of the property?

Yes, of course, most of those houses will have to be rehabbed before they are rentable.  Unless, of course, you want to take the thought experiment a bit further and rent them to people who are willing to invest some sweat equity into making them livable in order to live in them.  Say, in exchange for a waiver of the first month’s rent.

Which brings us to the next question: why isn’t it already happening?  Mr. Wired thinks it is because the banks, having been conglomerated to within an inch of their lives (and sometimes beyond) have absolutely no sense of local demand, because they no longer have any location.  So they simply don’t see any relationship between their “toxic assets” and real houses in which real people could be living and paying rent, if only somebody had the wit to see it.

You heard it here first.

CynThesis

The Rising Price of Freedom

and Other Oddities

Just heard that Drew Peterson, alleged Bluebeard of the western Chicago suburbs, has been arrested and is being held on twenty million dollars bail.  I think that’s a record. At any rate, I googled “bail set at” and got nothing higher than a million.  Talk about inflation!

Re: language degeneration—the latest stage is the re-nouning of nouned verbs.  Like “de-accessioning,” which is what a lot of art museums are doing with stuff that’s worth more to some private collector than to the museum that owns it.  And one I just heard today—a “decisioning table.”  Many years ago, BTW, a friend of mine who worked in the IT section of some department store’s charge card division told us about doing “bonification runs,” presumably to ascertain whether charge card applications had been “bonified.” And now a major chicken perveyor (sorry, that’s purveyor) claims to be producing “bona fide” chicken tenders.  I’m just waiting for K*C to start advertising Bona Fried Chicken.

O tempura, o mori, as my favorite Asian restaurant would say.

Cynthesis

Where Does Superman Change?

In one of the more recent Superman films, there is a lovely scene in which Clark Kent becomes aware of a pressing emergency requiring the services of Superman. He looks around, sees a couple of the phones-on-a-stick, but nothing remotely resembling a booth, looks bewildered, and finally ducks into the far end of an alley, from which Superman almost immediately emerges.

For the last 20 years, phone companies have been trying to get rid of pay phones, on the premise that they are expensive to maintain and collect from. Often, the neighborhoods in which those phones are placed collude with them and actually demand that pay phones be removed, on the premise that pay phones are mostly used by, and therefore tend to attract, drug dealers and other criminals.

The first public phones, patented in 1891, were in actual walk-in closets, equipped with a desk, seat, paper, and pen. This was fairly quickly downgraded to a confessional-style bench and ledge, but still with a door and a flat surface suitable for taking notes on. More recently that was downgraded to a 3-sided, or 2-sided triangular, cubicle, with no door, in which privacy could be preserved only by facing into the corner. Flat horizontal surfaces were removed, leaving only the top of the telephone itself, which however was acutely slanted, apparently to discourage using it for taking notes. Now even the open-sided cubicle is gone, to be replaced, as noted above, by the phone-on-a-stick, or, more often, by absolutely nothing.

Well, not exactly nothing. First, there are still a few pay phones in public places, mostly for emergency use or calling a cab. They are mostly set up and maintained by small local companies, rather than any of the Baby Bells and their offspring, and they are virtually unregulated. As a result, a friend of mine, a couple of years back, had occasion to be stranded at her hair stylist’s in a bad storm, so she used the pay phone on the premises to call home to ask for a ride. Not having any quarters available, she charged the call to her home phone. Later that month, she got the bill: nine dollars for a two-minute phone call to her home, four blocks away. “It would have been cheaper to take a cab,” she wailed.

The public phone has now mostly been replaced by the mobile phone. We presume that everybody has one. Indeed, an increasing proportion of the population has only a cell phone. Some of the younger generation may never even have used a “land line,” as the regular home-and-office phone is now retronymically called. It has even been replaced, for the purposes of anonymous and untraceable criminal communications, by the disposable prepaid cell phone, often used once or twice and then discarded and replaced by yet another. Sooner or later, no doubt, someone will pass a law requiring photo identification for purchasers of all such phones, but it hasn’t happened yet. So closing down phone booths did not solve the crime problem, it only made it harder for impecunious citizens to call the police, and gave the police a different criminal communication problem.

Well, now I’m noticing yet another area in which a public sector benefit is being privatized, at the expense of poor people—water. It was inevitable. First the great fascist-capitalist conspiracy convinced people that tap water, since it is provided by government, can’t possibly be good for you. Then they started bottling water (often, BTW, tap water) and selling it. The bottles are mostly plastic, and non-biodegradable. The water often comes from places that really can’t afford to export it, and is often sold in places that have more than enough of their own. ( See Holy Hydration, Batman! Florida’s Exporting Water!)

We have moved on to step #4. Public water fountains, in most public places, are no longer being maintained, and are often being removed altogether. Many otherwise cheap eateries are no longer serving water with meals, except when purchased in the bottle. Often, the excuse is given that water fountains attract homeless people. That is, people who cannot afford to buy water often quench their thirst at a sanitary public fountain, rather than waiting until it rains and then drinking out of the gutter. The nerve of some people!

Once again, this is the sin of Sodom. (See Panhandlers and the Jewish Tradition.) It is also the sin of the unhygienic late 19^th century. Public water fountains were first installed around that time, to prevent the spread of disease from less sanitary water sources, such as mud puddles. We are likely to find out, fairly soon, why our ancestors made this decision, just as we are about to find out (due to the spread of antibiotic-resistant TB) why they made laws forbidding spitting on the sidewalk. Sometimes I think we should all just read a book about the Reformers of that period, since we are in the process of undoing most of their work.

What’s next? We have not yet figured out how to privatize air. And despite a great deal of work on the project, we have not yet made the Internet a completely pay-per-use resource. We haven’t figured out how to charge for the use of escalators and elevators, much less sidewalks. The Wired family welcomes any other bright ideas about public resources which can easily be privatized. Watch this space.

Red Emma

Sentence First, Verdict Afterward

Or, Crime Doesn’t Pay

(at least not like it used to)

Having a lawyer on your blog means occasionally being subjected to Long Lawyer Stories, or Long Lawyer Rants on the state of the system. Today, you get a rant on the state of the criminal law system.

First of all, real life is not Perry Mason. Back when I was an academic for a couple of years, I did a paper on Perry Mason. The research was fascinating. For one thing, the sun never sets on Perry Mason. Somewhere in the world, in some language, at any given moment, Perry Mason is being broadcast or cablecast. Among the results are some profound changes in other people’s legal systems, most notably that of the Italians.

The Italians, like most of continental Europe and Latin America and Japan, have what is known as a civil law system, rather than the common law system that rules in the English-speaking countries. In a civil law system, criminal cases are prosecutor-driven, but the judge does his own investigating, and the defense attorney is a minor player. In a common law system, cases are supposed to be judge-driven, but the prosecutor and the defense do their own investigating and use the results to try to persuade the judge of their respective accuracy. What Perry Mason did for the Italians was push the defense attorney into a position of greater prominence and activity.

But what reality, over the same period, has done to the American legal system is turn it into a marketplace, in which the leading role is taken by the prosecutor. You guys may already have known this, but most Americans don’t—90+% of all criminal cases are resolved by plea bargain. No trials, no Perry Mason. When a criminal case does go to trial, that’s usually a sign that the plea bargain market has broken down, often due to inadequate information on one or both sides.

The market metaphor is not meant to imply that anybody is taking money under the table. So far as I know, that’s rare, and certainly not a necessary component of the system. But plea bargaining is just that—a bargaining process. One side (usually the prosecutor) makes an offer, the other side makes a counter-offer. Each side may introduce bits and pieces of information to weight the bargain to one side or the other. Eventually, the parties meet somewhere in the middle.

Another parallel to the economic marketplace is the defendant’s position on all this. If the defendant is in jail pending trial (because of inability to post bail, either because the bail is too high, or because he simply has no money at all), he is not only enduring the discomforts and dangers of the jail system, he is also making metaphorical deposits into a virtual account. That is, from any sentence he ends up being given, the time he has already served in pretrial confinement will be subtracted. (The old hands know this from the start; the newbies find it out quickly from the old hands.)

Which brings us to the major insanity of the system, which is taken for granted by both defendants and attorneys on both sides: if you plead guilty, you go free (immediately or pretty soon.) If you maintain your innocence, you can stay locked up for a very long time. Got that? If you’re guilty, you get out. If you’re innocent, you stay in.

Apparently the movie “American Violet” (“now playing in selected theaters,” according to its website) talks about this issue in some detail, and is also supposed to be a good movie.

This insanity in turn is based on an assumption which is pretty much universal in the law enforcement system, among cops and lawyers alike: if a suspect didn’t do whatever he has been arrested for doing, he has probably gotten away with something as bad or worse. This is a statistical approach to law enforcement, which is still in its developing phases. Eventually, I suspect, it will turn into a calculation that, since 75% (or whatever) of all criminal suspects are in fact guilty of the offense in question or something just as bad, a Bayesian system of justice will convict all suspects and cut all maximum sentences by 25%. As I think I’ve said in previous comments, what matters to cops and prosecutors is not necessarily that the right person be punished, but that the right kind of person be locked up.

Anyway, the impact of this system on habitual offenders is probably not what those who set it up had in mind. The average defendant is overjoyed to plead guilty to something slightly less heinous than the original charge, and “get off” with “time served” plus a few months. He considers this a “good deal.” His lawyer has told him it was a good deal. So has the prosecutor.

The judge’s role in this scenario is minimal, but in some ways the most heinous element of the whole thing. Because the judge is the one who asks the defendant to assert on the record that “no one has promised you anything in exchange for this plea.”

Mr. Wired once went through a legal proceeding in another state in which he was advised by his attorney to assert something in the trial, on the record, under oath, which everybody involved knew to be untrue. He was barely 20 at the time, and under a lot of pressure, so he did it. He still feels like a perjurer for having done so. Okay, maybe his conscience is more acute than most people’s, but isn’t that what the legal system is supposed to want?

In fact, most people (certainly including most of my clients) at one time or another get advised by various functionaries of The System to lie about something significant, in order not to gum up the works. The criminal courts are not even the most egregious instance. What these coerced falsehoods accomplish, aside from smoothing out the administrative process, is leave The System in a position to renege on any deal based on such lies, just by blowing the whistle. “Uh, gee, we didn’t know that Recruiter Sergeant Slick was going to tell the recruit to lie about his flat feet. We’ll court-martial both of them for recruiter fraud.” In short, infinite possibilities for blackmail.

A couple of peripheral notes about Perry Mason: good trial lawyers don’t do Perry Mason, they do Colombo (“help me out here, I’m confused. How is it that….?”) A trial lawyer who did Perry Mason would probably get successfully sued for malpractice.

CynThesis