Fungible Convictions

Just a quick thought to make explicit from a New York Times op-ed about the pitfalls of large bonuses in banking.

Bonuses do indeed exist to keep executives loyal and hard-working, as the article says. Bonuses can and should get larger when companies have to compete for talented executives.

But bonuses also have the effect of making stars of those executives. Bonuses are often used as the measure of talent. In the abstract, they cause executives to lose humility—if I’m making a $50 million bonus, I must be seriously awesome. And in practical terms, bonuses signal to others that particular executives are worth inviting to be on boards, to speak at conferences, to represent business interests to foreign governments.

That is, by making stars of some executives, bonuses can take the focus off the actual goal: motivating people to do quality work for the company.

The Times article hints at all that. But it’s worth saying it explicitly: when it comes to loyalty and success, bonuses follow the law of diminishing returns.

Timothy Egan has my sympathies when he writes in today’s New York Times that “the idea that someone [Joe the Plumber] who stumbled into a sound bite can be published, and charge $24.95 for said words, makes so many real writers think the world is unfair.”

But throughout his article, he makes no mention of readers’ preferences—that is, consumer demand. He comes close when he writes this:

I know: publishers say they print garbage so that real literature, which seldom makes any money, can find its way into print. True, to a point. But some of them print garbage so they can buy more garbage.

But the real issue is that publishers print what sells. And bad writing by itself isn’t market poison. So long as people are willing to buy books, like the forthcoming Joe the Plumber autobiography, publishers will keep printing them.

Is the world unfair to good writers, as Egan argues? I don’t think so. There are so many good writers, those who, if we paid them the attention that they may very well deserve, we would probably die. We’ve all skipped meals and missed subway stops and lost sleep because of good writers. With only good writers to read, we’d be changed and challenged, radically, every day.

Thank god for a little drivel.

…is its ability to convince citizens to vote beyond—and sometimes against—their own self-interest.

The New York Times published an editorial today enumerating the poor defenses by the executive branch of its own economic policies.

Mr. Bush boasted about 52 consecutive months of job growth during his presidency. What matters is the magnitude of growth, not ticks on a calendar. The economic expansion under Mr. Bush — which it is safe to assume is now over — produced job growth of 4.2 percent. That is the worst performance over a business cycle since the government started keeping track in 1945.

Mr. Bush also talked approvingly of the recent unemployment rate of 4.8 percent. A low rate is good news when it indicates a robust job market. The unemployment rate ticked down last month because hundreds of thousands of people dropped out of the work force altogether. Worse, long-term unemployment, of six months or more, hit 17.5 percent. We’d expect that in the depths of a recession. It is unprecedented at the onset of one.

What struck me while reading the editorial was that access to accurate statistics has consistently convinced me to vote beyond my own self-interest. This November will be my tenth trip to the polls, and in every one, my decision has been based on issues that have little to nothing to do with my everyday life. I’m financially stable, know only two people deployed to Iraq—and in support positions at that—have excellent private health insurance, and take the bus to work. But on those issues (the economy, the war, health care, and dependence on foreign oil), I have strong opinions on what the next President should do. It must sound pedantic, but there’s no possible way for me to have those opinions, and have them based somewhat on reality, without access to good information. It’s the one thing that achieves the major (stated) goals of both contemporary liberals and contemporary conservatives: to hold those in power accountable for their promises and actions, and to let people make decisions for themselves.

That’s why I’ve considered President Johnson’s signing of the Freedom of Information Act in 1966 to be as important as his signing of the Civil Rights Act two years earlier, and why suppression of documents—whether by someone fearful of being charged with spying on their fellow citizens or by a candidate afraid of what their previously undisclosed financial ties will reveal—is inevitably harmful in a society whose power, ultimately, even if only every four or eight years, rests with voters.

Tucked away on page 12 of today’s Sunday New York Times, just below the detailed article she was researching at the time, is a first-person account from reporter Carlotta Gall:

Rough Treatment for 2 Journalists in Pakistan

By CARLOTTA GALL
Published: January 21, 2007

My photographer, Akhtar Soomro, and I were followed over several days of reporting in Quetta by plainclothes intelligence officials who were posted at our respective hotels. That is not unusual in Pakistan, where accredited journalists are free to travel and report, but their movements, phone calls and interviews are often monitored.

On our fifth and last day in Quetta, Dec. 19, four plainclothesmen detained Mr. Soomro at his hotel downtown and seized his computer and photo equipment.

They raided my hotel room that evening, using a key card to open the door and then breaking through the chain that I had locked from the inside. They seized a computer, notebooks and a cellphone.

One agent punched me twice in the face and head and knocked me to the floor. I was left with bruises on my arms, temple and cheekbone, swelling on my eye and a sprained knee.

One of the men told me that I was not permitted to visit Pashtunabad, a neighborhood in Quetta, and that it was forbidden to interview members of the Taliban.

The men did not reveal their identity but said we could apply to the Special Branch of the Interior Ministry for our belongings the next day.

After the intervention of the minister of state for information and broadcasting, Tariq Azim Khan, my belongings were returned several hours later. Mr. Soomro was released after more than five hours in detention.

Since then it has become clear that intelligence agents copied data from our computers, notebooks and cellphones and have tracked down contacts and acquaintances in Quetta.

All the people I interviewed were subsequently visited by intelligence agents, and local journalists who helped me were later questioned by Pakistan’s intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence.

Mr. Soomro has been warned not to work for The New York Times or any other foreign news organization.

Carlotta Gall, along with the Times’ John F. Burns, is the finest international affairs journalist—well, war reporter—working today. I’ve followed her stories for years, going back to her reportage on the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

It’s terrifying that in the course of a few months, Gall has been attacked by a government ministry (of a country ostensibly allied with the U.S.), an editor, Hrant Dink, has been murdered for publishing a pro-Armenian newspaper in Turkey (today’s Times announced the capture of a 17-year-old suspect in the case, turned in to authorities by his father), a Russian reporter, Anna Politkovskaya, who was critical of her govenment’s military operations in Chechnya was also murdered, as was the best-known TV journalist in Iraq, Atwar Bahjat. And one can’t forget Jill Carroll’s ordeal as a hostage in Iraq while on assignment for the Christian Science Monitor.

Altogether, in 2006 nearly sixty journalists lost their lives to violence while doing their job.

Heightening the dangers, apparently, is that notoriety as a reporter is no longer a deterrent, undermining decades-old tools such as Amnesty International’s letter-writing campaigns. To the contrary, in covering a beat populated by extremists fame may now be a liability. “The whole world is watching” might no longer be a phrase spoken by people defending journalists’ rights. It’s could just as easily be the cry of crazies getting just what they want.

If you’d like to help, consider donating to or becoming a member of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

The Times is reporting that Judith Regan, the HarperCollins imprint publisher, was fired in part for anti-Semitic remarks made on a heated phone call with a HarperCollins lawyer.

“‘Of all people, the Jews should know about ganging up, finding common enemies and telling the big lie,’” Ms. Regan said, according to a transcript of Mr. Jackson’s notes provided by Gary Ginsberg, an executive vice president of the News Corporation.

According to the transcript, Ms. Regan went on to say that the literary agent Esther Newberg; HarperCollins’s executive editor, David Hirshey; HarperCollins’s president, Jane Friedman, and Mr. Jackson “constitute a Jewish cabal against her.”

I won’t defend a publisher like Regan. Her plan to have O.J. Simpson “confess” in a fictionalized tell-all made me ashamed to be part of the same species. But I also won’t defend HarperCollins and News Corp., its corporate owner. First of all, people who make a company gobs of money, however ill-gotten, don’t get fired for being anti-Semetic on an in-house phone call. They get fired, as Regan did, for publicly-visible bad judgment. Second, even if Regan said what she did in the context the HarperCollins lawyer describes, the two corporations come out looking terribly vindictive and hypocritical.

HarperCollins and News Corp. were in the clear, weren’t they? They had the public’s goodwill after at long last firing the shrewdly cynical Regan. Why then release notes of this phone call, particularly after tolerating and profiting from Regan for the past decade? It’s rubbing salt in a self-inflicted wound.

UPDATE: Could a potential lawsuit by the family of Ron Goldman—a lawsuit that could force News Corp. to reveal its decision-making in bringing the Simpson book to market—be the reason the corporation so very badly wants to distance itself from Judith Regan?

Bill Coyle and his wife and their puppy are good friends of mine, so it puts a big smile on my face—let alone Bill’s—to see this brief but positive New York Times review of Bill’s debut book of poems:

THE GOD OF THIS WORLD TO HIS PROPHET: Poems. By Bill Coyle. (Ivan R. Dee, $22.50.) Reading “Aubade,” the tiny poem that concludes Coyle’s debut collection, is like witnessing a hole-in-one. It’s a single, flawless stroke: “On a dead street / in a high wall / a wooden gate / I don’t recall / ever seeing open / is today / and I who happen / to pass this way / in passing glimpse / a garden lit / by dark lamps / at the heart of it.” That final period (the cup, so to speak, into which the poem disappears) is the only punctuation. Coyle makes commas unnecessary by breaking the sentence so skillfully across dimeter lines. He also makes those clever alternating full- and off-rhymes seem perfectly inevitable. What ices it, though, is the bracing strangeness of that last image: “lit / by dark lamps.” One suspects that even Coyle, for all his formal control, didn’t see that one coming. If some of the poems that precede “Aubade” seem, by contrast, a little too much under his control, offering the mastery without the mystery, well, there’s a lot to be said for mastery.

You can buy The God of This World to His Prophet: Poems by clicking the ad in the sidebar at right.

Bill Coyle’s website is www.billcoyle.com.

Just what readers will make of Mr. Mailer’s bibliography remains to be seen. But readers of, say, William T. Vollmann’s “Europe Central” have every reason to be grateful for his lengthy bibliography — not as a talisman against plagiarism or a sign of his own learning but as a guide to further reading. In fact, the only real risk we see in a bibliography for a novel is that it will come to be a kind of obligatory disclosure. As far as we’re concerned, novelists are obliged to disclose nothing besides the art of the stories they have to tell.

What once might have been seen as pomposity is now, largely due to the Internet and hyperlinking, simply being a helpful citizen, yeah?

[At the End of the Book---New York Times]

As any cell phone user, home buyer, college-bound high school senior can tell you, things can get complicated. The Times is reporting that advertisers have seized on that frustration by positioning their clients’ products as “simple.”

In one television commercial, a woman seated on an ING bench presses a button to get a cup of coffee, which is made for her by a rococo machine reminiscent of the confounding contraptions created by the artist Rube Goldberg.

“The world can be a complicated place,” a voiceover declares, “but when it comes to your money, ING is making it easier.”

ING tries to back up their claims with simpler financial planning:

Among the examples she listed were a variable annuity under the ING Simplicity name, which “streamlines a complicated financial product,” Ms. Conahan said; a diversified mutual fund, which “works almost like an index fund”; and a technology platform that helps financial advisers manage customers’ portfolios.

I’m disappointed, though. I don’t want advertisers and their clients to filter out options and still make me choose among the many still remaining. I want a company like ING to earn my trust, look over my portfolio, and come back to say, “Here, you’re all set. We picked the best plan for you.” I want them to do their jobs well.

It’s like picking a book to read. I get book reviews in my e-mail, personalized recommendations when I sign on to Amazon, and suggested readings from blogs and literary journals. But which books do I read first, even though those other ways are simple? The ones put in my hands by people I trust.

You know, rereading this stuff, Dave Eggers and Neal Pollack are actually quite genteel, given that Pollack made up a quote attributed to Eggers.

Here’s the exchange as published on McSweeney’s.net.

And here’s the Pollack essay, as brought to us by FC reader Jordon.

(If you don’t have a Times registration . . . well, what do you do at work?)

I hope folks realize how often non-reporters make up quotes. 95% of the time, though, the made-up quote captures what the speaker said generally, meant, intended, etc. But I suppose people—I do—think quotations in the New York Times go through some sort of fact-checking scrim. (Don’t you remember the scene from Almost Famous when the Rolling Stone fact-checker phones up the band to confirm the whole story? You mean that isn’t true?!) To the Times, the Eggers quote probably looked harmless. But in the context of the McSweeney’s goals, it’s anti-snarking campaign along with the Believer, and its apparently less-ironic-than-at-first-blush taste, it really is an incredible quotation to assign to Eggers.