Tuesday, September 18, 2012
The Honor System
The video was posted by a magician who works under the stage name Gerard Bakardy; his real name is apparently Gerard Dogge. (Bakardy, a fifty-five-year-old Dutch national born in Belgium, is more than a magician; he prefers the title entertainer, because he's a musician, too. Along with his blond partner, Nadia, he was, until recently, part of a lounge act called Los Dos de Amberes, the Two from Antwerp, booked mostly in the resort of Fuerteventura on the Canary Islands off Spain. "A lovely way to spend an evening," they said in online advertisements that have since disappeared.) Leaning into his computer screen, Teller watched Bakardy perform some kind of trick.
Against a crimson curtain, Bakardy had erected an easel with what looked like a large pad of white paper on it. Perhaps six feet in front of the easel sat a small wood table bearing a glass Coke bottle filled with water. That bottle also contained a single rose. A spotlight, outside of the camera's view, cast the rose's shadow on the paper on the easel. Dressed in a dark suit, Bakardy appeared in the frame carrying a large knife in his right hand. He sliced it deep into the rose's shadow. And when he cut into its shadow, something impossible happened: The corresponding part of the rose fell off the stem and onto the table. Petal by petal, Bakardy cut at the rose's shadow until that Coke bottle somehow held only a decapitated stem, which he removed as though to demonstrate the absence of wires. He then lifted up the bottle itself — still no strings attached — and poured out the water. Ta-da.
The video ended with Bakardy's e-mail address and an offer to sell the props necessary for the Rose & Her Shadow for what turned out to be 2,450 euros, or about $3,050 at the time. In bold white type across the bottom of the screen, Bakardy left a final message for his fellow magicians, including a dumbstruck Teller: EASY TO PERFORM.
On or about March 22 of this year, Teller called Gerard Bakardy. They would talk many times on the phone, Teller says, and they would also exchange e-mails. Teller told Bakardy that the Rose & Her Shadow looked a little too much like a trick of his own called Shadows that he conceived when he was a teenager and has performed at nearly every one of his shows since 1975. If you saw Bakardy's version and only it, you would think that it was very good. To paraphrase Penn, it would be like hearing the Byrds play "Mr. Tambourine Man." Watching Teller performing Shadows is like hearing Dylan. (...)
Shadows is the most elusive sort of trick, beautiful and mystifying. It's also particularly ripe for theft, because it's small and self-contained. Penn's solo tricks might involve nail guns or fire eating, and together, Penn & Teller shoot pistols and risk asphyxiating each other inside giant bags of helium. But in Teller's solo tricks, in his silent, lonely tricks, the only props might be a red ball or a single rose in a vase and a knife. When Teller is just Teller — he has legally dropped his given name, Raymond, as needless clutter — his tricks are stripped down to their glowing white cores. (...)
Until Bakardy came along, Teller had never needed his copyright filings to stake a claim. "It's not like good manners and generosity are inappropriate ways to behave in the world," he says. When he has contacted light-fingered magicians in the past, they have always apologized and stopped performing the trick. For instance, he does a trick in which he spills handfuls of coins into a tank filled with water, and they somehow turn into living, breathing goldfish. It's a throat-catching effect, and a magician in Sweden, who had seen Teller performing the trick on TV, studied the tape and finally lifted it. After Teller called him, the magician said sorry, boxed up his props in a crate, minus the fish, and shipped them to Las Vegas.
This time around, Teller offered to pay Gerard Bakardy several thousand dollars for the time he spent working on the Rose & Her Shadow. He had to promise only that he would stop performing and selling the trick. Bakardy, after asking whether Teller might help him bring Los Dos de Amberes to America, countered with a higher price. No one will confirm exactly what that amount was, but it was allegedly more than $100,000. "It really wasn't possible for me to come to any terms," Teller says. "It ended up having certain elements that reminded me of a kidnapping."
Teller, who had already persuaded YouTube to take down the offending video, asked Bakardy whether his demands were firm. Bakardy said they were.
Teller had a decision to make.
by Chris Jones, Esquire | Read more:
Photo: Peter Yang
Storied TV: Cable Is the New Novel
In 1973, Tom Wolfe, nattily dressed ringleader-theoretician of the New Journalism, declared that his uppity oeuvre had bumped off "the novel as the number one literary genre, starting the first new direction in American literature in half a century." Licking his chops over the carcass, he explained that the no-longer-Great American Novel had croaked as a result of complications from congenital self-absorption and straying from the healthy engagement with manners and morals that had been the novel's lifeblood since its birth in the 18th century. "The top rung is up for grabs," he gloated. "The Huns have arrived."
As usual, Wolfe was a little hyperbolic, but he had a point. Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (1966), Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), and his own The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968)—not to mention any issue of Rolling Stone or Esquire—contained more razor-edged prose and narrative propulsion than the dreary cascade of academic-minded fiction dripping from writers' workshops, where the target readership was mainly other writers.
A similar status upheaval may be happening in the realm of screen entertainment. Long top dog in the media hierarchy, the Hollywood feature film—the star-studded best in show that garnered the respectful monographs, the critical cachet, and a secure place on the university curriculum—is being challenged by the lure of long-form, episodic television. Let's call the breed Arc TV, a moniker that underscores the dramatic curvature of the finely crafted, adult-minded serials built around arcs of interconnected action unfolding over the life span of the series. Shows like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Downton Abbey, Homeland, Dexter, Boardwalk Empire, and Game of Thrones—the highest-profile entrees in a gourmet menu of premium programming—are where the talent, the prestige, and the cultural buzz now swirl. Fess up: Are you more jazzed about the release of the new Abraham Lincoln biopic by Steven Spielberg or the season premiere of Homeland (September 30, 10 p.m., on Showtime)? The lineup hasn't quite yet dethroned the theatrical feature film as the preferred canvas for moving-image artistry, but Hollywood moviemakers are watching their backs. (...)
Traditionally, even late into the age of cable, television thrived on two durable genres, the weekly 30-minute sitcom and the hourlong drama. Play the theme song, rack up the signature montage, and a virgin viewer has no trouble following along. Each episode was discrete and self-contained, wrapped up on schedule, with no overarching Ur-plot, designed to be digested full at one sitting, and meant to spiral autonomously ever after in syndication: Gilligan stranded forever on his island, Columbo freeze-framed in his trench coat.
The dramatis personae existed in a realm that was picaresque, a pre-novel mode in which a one-dimensional protagonist is hit by one damn thing after another. A viewer could spend years, maybe decades, with the likes of Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke or Steve McGarrett on Hawaii Five-Oand not know a whit about the hero's psychic interior or personal history. Many of the surviving remnants of network television follow that time-worn template. The repetition compulsion of Homer Simpson—always the same, never learning from experience—is an ironic homage to the picaresque legacy: "D'oh! D'oh! D'oh!"
By contrast, Arc TV is all about back story and evolution. Again like the novel, the aesthetic payoff comes from prolonged, deep involvement in the fictional universe and, like a serious play or film, the stagecraft demands close attention. For the show to cast its magic, the viewer must leap full body into the video slipstream. Watch, hour by hour, the slow-burn descent into the home-cooked hell of the high-school-chemistry-teacher-turned-meth-kingpin Walter White in Breaking Bad, or the unraveling by degrees of the bipolar CIA agent Carrie Mathison, falling off her meds and cracking to pieces in Homeland.
At its best, the world of Arc TV is as exquisitely calibrated as the social matrix of a Henry James novel, where small gestures and table manners reveal the content of a character molded by convention, class, and culture. In an emblematic moment in Mad Men, Don Draper cues up his turntable to the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows," gives the trippy dissonance a fair hearing, and walks away unmoved: He will live and die a Sinatra man. For the viewer who tunes in late, the strands of the intricate plot lines may seem too tangled ever to unthread, but the insular complexities are how the shows pack their punch. One of the nice things about Mad Men is that there is no top-of-the-episode recap for come-latelies: If you can't take the heat, get out of the gestalt.
The Era of the Arc would have been impossible without two blessings of the post-network age: the decline of censorship and the revolutions in television technology. Freed from the corset of the Television Code, the video successor to Hollywood's restrictive Production Code, even basic cable may venture into topics, language, and imagery unthinkable during the zenith of three-network hegemony. The way Game of Thrones flaunts full frontal nudity or The Walking Dead wallows in forensic gross-out are the most naked manifestations of the new license, but the more provocative defiance is in the breaking of generic conventions embedded in the DNA of the medium since the days of kinescope. (...)
The new technologies of reception and delivery may have been even more pivotal than the loosening of censorship in nurturing the growth of the genre. Viewing and reviewing shows on mobile devices, iPads, and computer screens, or via DVR and box sets, not only helps aficionados connect dots and track motifs across a season but encourages artists to more carefully embroider the details of their product. Often consumed in marathon sessions of obsessive binge viewing, the television box set, a season's worth of episodes sans commercials, often with commentary tracks and behind-the-scenes extras, assumes that no less than the big screen, the small screen is worth a second and third look.
by Thomas Doherty, The Chronicle Review | Read more
Photo: AMC
Monday, September 17, 2012
The Best Night $500,000 Can Buy
A series of velvet ropes tranched the guests into classes—extreme VIPs, semi-VIP hot ladies, unrich ladyless dudes who probably wouldn't get in before 2 A.M. I guesstimate the general-admission line was a quarter mile long, stretching past the Cosmopolitan hotel's curated "shopping experience" and into a recessed hallway of Pentagonian proportions.
This was maybe the sixth or seventh night I'd been to Marquee. On other nights I would show up before the club opened, so I could observe the hidden machinery and ascertain how the people who run the place go about manufacturing the communal fun-gasm that made Marquee the highest-grossing nightclub in Las Vegas and very likely the universe. But tonight I was with a bachelor party, and in honor of the occasion we'd decided to avail ourselves of a table reservation. A table reservation requires guests to spend between $1,000 and $10,000, depending on the night, and among its perks is access to a special line. The table line is the line you're supposed to see from other lines and think: Why am I not in that line? Or: Why didn't my boyfriend get me into that line?
A trim woman wearing smart business attire and a clear Secret Service earpiece greeted me as if she had been waiting all night to see me. She had a tiny envelope with my name on it, and into this tiny envelope she deposited my driver's license and credit card. She then passed the envelope to a man in a dark suit, a VIP host, who shook my hand with similar warmth. All the suited functionaries at Marquee that night treated me as if I were an important business partner in a business where important business partners may or may not be bought prostitutes.
An elevator car with glass walls, lit like a lounge, was waiting. The desperate sounds of human beings begging doormen and imploring homeys to hurry up because I'm waiting for you at the entrance, son,were silenced by the shush of the closing doors. A woman in a white short-sleeve shirt, whom you might call an elevator host, pressed a button on the control panel and then began a speech prepared to last precisely the duration of one elevator ride to the fourth floor.
Hello, gentlemen, she said. My name is Laura. When you step out of the elevators, you will find our Boom Box bar, down the stairs. Upstairs is the Library, our exclusive lounge. And just outside, you'll find our main level. There is a bar straight ahead, and to our right the dance floor, where your table is. Benny Benassi will be DJ'ing tonight. We have 60,000 square feet of nightclub. Our outdoor space is open. Roam the club. Find some ladies. Bring them back to your table. The elevator jostled us gently as it stopped. Welcome to Marquee, gentlemen. Your party starts...now.
by Devin Friedman, GQ | Read more:
Photo: Lauren Gtreenfield
In Plain View
How child molesters get away with it.
In a 2001 book, “Identifying Child Molesters,” the psychologist Carla van Dam tells the story of a young Canadian elementary-school teacher she calls Jeffrey Clay. Clay taught physical education. He was well liked by his students, and often he asked boys in his class to stay after school, to do homework and help him with chores. One day, just before winter break, three of the boys made a confession to their parents. Mr. Clay had touched them under their pants.
The parents went to the principal. He confronted Clay, who denied everything. The principal knew Clay and was convinced by him. In his mind, what it boiled down to, van Dam writes, “is some wild imaginations and the three boys being really close.”
The parents were at a loss. Mr. Clay was beloved. He had started a popular gym club at the school. He was married and was a role model to the boys. He would come to their after-school games. Could he really have abused them? Perhaps he was just overly physical in the way that young men often are. He had a habit, for example, of grabbing boys in the hallway and pulling them toward him, placing his arms over their shoulders and chest. At the gym club, he would pick boys up and turn them upside down, holding them by the legs. Lots of people—especially gym teachers—like to engage in a little horseplay with young boys. It wasn’t until the allegations about Clay emerged that it occurred to anyone to wonder whether he might have been trying to look down the boys’ shorts.
“We weren’t really prepared to call the police and make it into a police investigation,” one of the mothers told van Dam. “It was an indiscretion, as far as we were concerned at this point. It was all vague: ‘Well, he put his hands down there.’ And, ‘Well, it was inside the pants, but fingers went to here.’ We were all still trying to protect Mr. Clay’s reputation, and the possibility this was all blown up out of proportion and there was a mistake.”
The families then learned that there had been a previous complaint by a child against Clay, and they took their case to the school superintendent. He, too, advised caution. “If allegations do not clearly indicate sexual abuse, a gray area exists,” he wrote to them. “The very act of overt investigation carries with it a charge, a conviction, and a sentence, a situation which is repugnant to fair-minded people.” He was responsible not just to the children but also to the professional integrity of his teachers. What did they have? Just the story of three young boys, and young boys do, after all, have wild imaginations.
Clay was kept on. Two months later, after prodding from a couple of social workers, the parents asked the police to investigate. One of the mothers recalls an officer interviewing her son: “He was gentle, but to the point, and he wanted to be shown exactly where Mr. Clay had touched him.” The three boys named other boys who they said had been subjected to Mr. Clay’s advances. Those boys, however, denied everything. A new, more specific allegation against Clay surfaced. He resigned, and went to see a therapist. But still the prosecutor’s office didn’t feel that it had enough evidence to press charges. And within the school there were teachers who felt that Clay was innocent. “I was running into my colleagues who were saying, ‘Did you know that some rotten parents trumped up these charges against this poor man?’ ” one teacher told van Dam. The teacher added, “Not just one person. Many teachers said this.” A psychologist working at the school thought that the community was in the grip of hysteria. The allegations against Clay, he thought, were simply the result of the fact that he was “young and energetic.” Clay threatened to sue. The parents dropped their case.
Clay was a man repeatedly accused of putting his hands down the pants of young boys. Parents complained. Superiors investigated. And what happened? The school psychologist called him a victim of hysteria.
When monsters roam free, we assume that people in positions of authority ought to be able to catch them if only they did their jobs. But that might be wishful thinking. A pedophile, van Dam’s story of Mr. Clay reminds us, is someone adept not just at preying on children but at confusing, deceiving, and charming the adults responsible for those children—which is something to keep in mind in the case of the scandal at Penn State and the conviction, earlier this year, of the former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky on child-molestation charges.
by Malcolm Gladwell, New Yorker | Read more:
Illustration: A. J. Frackattack; Photo: Gene J. Puskar/AP
Too Big to Fail and Too Risky to Exist
The crisis is, at its heart, a cultural failure combined with a political collapse. Behavior by bank executives that once was discouraged by a lifted eyebrow created complex structures abetted by an aggressive reading of the statutes—anything not explicitly prohibited was considered permissible. As Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, put it, “There was a cultural tendency to be always on one side and always to be pushing the limits.” The crisis almost immediately destroyed the rule of law. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson told The Washington Post in November 2008: “Even if you don’t have the authorities—and frankly I didn’t have the authorities for anything—if you take charge, people will follow. Someone has to pull it all together.” In 2011, Phil Angelides, chairman of the U.S. Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, summarized the problem: “These banks are too big to fail. They’re too big to manage. They’re too big to regulate. They’re too complex to understand and they’re too risky to exist. And the bottom line is they offer very little benefit.”
Four years after the crisis began, another election is upon us. What have we learned? Where are we now? What are the prospects for meaningful reform of the financial system? Will our debt crush us? Should we let it? Is it legitimate? What comes next? An open discussion of these questions needs to take place now. The health of the financial system, and of our republic, depends on it.
Yet for the bankers, it is still business as usual. In his book, Bailout, Neil Barofsky, the former special inspector general in charge of oversight of TARP (the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program), writes that a major cost of the bailout is the perpetuation of the existing financial system: Paulson and his successor, Timothy Geithner,“hadn’t just saved the banks, they’d also preserved a status quo that was dangerously broken, and in so doing they might have actually increased the danger lurking in our financial architecture.”
Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby, says that when Jay Gatsby tells him their luncheon companion, Meyer Wolfsheim, fixed the World Series in 1919, “the idea staggered me.” Nick says he knew that the Series had been fixed, but he had thought of it as a thing that just happened, the end of some inevitable chain of events. “It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people—with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.”
Like Wolfsheim, the big banks have since 2005 fixed a benchmark thought by millions to be beyond manipulation or reproach—the London interbank offered rate. The LIBOR is an average reported by 16 big banks of what they estimate it would cost them to borrow from another bank. It is used to set rates on mortgages, credit cards, and many other personal and commercial loans. The amount of money affected by the rate, at any given time, is estimated at $800 trillion. The British bank Barclays routinely altered its submitted rates to push the LIBOR high or low to benefit bets it had made on interest rate derivatives. That is, it was fixing the result of its outstanding bets. One Barclays executive was recorded as saying, “We’re clean but we’re dirty-clean, rather than clean-clean.” Barclays derivatives traders made at least 257 requests to the bank’s London rate submitters over a four-year period. The emails between Barclays New York derivatives traders and its London rate submitters are stark: “For Monday we are very long $3 m cash here in NY and would like the setting to be set as low as possible … thanks”; “Always happy to help, leave it to me, Sir”; “Done for you big boy”; and “Dude. I owe you big time! … I’m opening a bottle of Bollinger.” Lord Turner, chair of the British regulator, the Financial Services Authority, expressed disbelief at the blatant behavior on the New York and London trading floors: “One of the shocking things about this,” he said, “is that on some occasions, the derivatives trader is not asking the submitter to change his submission on the basis of a hidden phone call or a note that he believes is hidden, but by shouting it across the trading floor.”
A single bank could not have that much effect on a 16-bank average, and sure enough, the scandal has spread. British regulators found that Barclays colluded with other big banks, among them JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, UBS, Deutsche Bank, and HSBC. The banks seem to have a huge potential liability to those on the losing side of the fixed bets and to those who paid too much interest when the LIBOR was fixed too high. According to the July 7 Economist, “This could well be global finance’s ‘tobacco moment.’ ” Even now, the problems may persist. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told the Senate on July 17 that he “lack[s] full confidence in the rate-setting procedure.” Moreover, “it’s clear beyond these disclosures that the LIBOR structure is structurally flawed.” Andrew Tyrie, chair of the British parliamentary committee investigating the LIBOR, asked Paul Tucker, the deputy governor of the Bank of England, whether he was confident that it was now working normally. Tucker replied, “We can’t be confident of anything after learning of this cesspit.” Lord Turner added, “We would be fooling ourselves” to assume that trading manipulation was limited to trades. “There is a degree of cynicism and greed which is really quite shocking … and that does suggest that there are some very wide cultural issues that need to be strongly addressed.” In June, Barclays agreed to pay $450 million to British and American regulators, and arrests in connection with the LIBOR are thought to be imminent.
by William J. Quirk, American Scholar | Read more:
Photo by Josh Hallett
To Build or Not to Build a Road
Roads open up inimitable vistas and opportunities but, of course, they also have their costs, particularly when they take the form of large-scale highways that often infringe upon agricultural and wildlife communities or exacerbate urban stress
What constitutes a good road? And how do we decide when it is appropriate to build a new road? As urbanist Jane Jacobs puts it, “how to accommodate transportation without destroying the related intricate and concentrated land use?—this is the question.”
Presumably, decision making in such a case ought to be driven by more than mere sentimentality. In the words of the National Research Council, “practical decision making begins by identifying the elements of a responsible and competent decision-making process.”
At the same time, it is important to recognize that complex environmental decisions—from how to tackle global climate change to planning megalopolitan settlements—often must be made in the face of scientific uncertainty. In such cases, judgment calls are made, and, therefore, we need to better understand both the nature and the significance of taken-for-granted values, attitudes, and perceptions.
I begin this paper by identifying some essential elements of what might typically be described as a “rational” process of decision making. I then proceed to describe how such a rational environmental decision procedure must reflect not only narrowly logical reasoning processes but also essential elements of moral virtue, wisdom, and, ultimately, a respect for sense of place.
FROM IDENTIFYING OBJECTIVES TO VIABLE ALTERNATIVES: THE PLACE OF VALUES
From engineering consulting firms to governmental environmental impact assessments, technical models are utilized to ensure that complex problems are addressed in a comprehensive manner. Decision trees, cost-benefit analyses, and decision-making matrices that employ sensitivity analysis or analyze expected monetary value are examples of such tools.
While each model incorporates distinct strategies, it is feasible to draw from these examples six major generic steps that are typically reflected in such models, despite their variations. These include:
- Identify the project objectives, problem, and opportunities.
- Identify constraints that possible solutions must respect.
- Identify viable alternative solutions.
- Select evaluation criteria of alternatives.
- Evaluate alternatives and select the preferred option.
- Monitor and adjust the strategy, as necessary, documenting lessons learned.
Embedded in such apparently “objective” models are personal biases, value judgments, hidden paradigms, and different worldviews. Genuinely rational choices—those that aim for wisdom over mere technical efficiency—are made only if these taken-for-granted values and assumptions are explicitly addressed. The fact is that “value choices are often hidden in the simplifying assumptions of analytic techniques, and the assumed values may not be universally shared.”
It is important to recognize that values and assumptions impact every phase of decision making, no matter how logical, linear, and “objective” that process appears. For instance, value judgments very much shape the first step in the decision-making process, where project objectives, problems, and opportunities are identified and bounded. The fact is, as energy scientist Amory Lovins points out, that “the answers you get depend on the questions you ask.”
So, despite the title of this paper, it is important to note that the problem to be addressed here may not be properly scoped in the form of the engineering question whether to build a road. Rather, the problem may actually be that travel times are currently too long; or perhaps, as in the case of some First Nations communities in Northern Canada, there may be a lack of easy access. Maybe the issue may be as broadly scoped as to ask the question about how to build a healthier, more sustainable community overall. The opportunities identified may certainly include the construction of a road, but, alternatively, a preferred option may consist of improvements to public transport or rail systems instead. After all, in the words of Jane Jacobs, “The more space that is provided for cars in cities, the greater becomes the need for use of cars”—which, in an era of global climate change, is hardly a wise course of action. Unless one scopes the problem sufficiently broadly, productive alternatives may simply be missed.
by Ingrid Leman Stefanovic, Center for Humans and Nature | Read more:
Image via:
On Web, a Fine Line on Free Speech Across the Globe
The White House was not so sure, and it asked Google to reconsider the determination, a request the company rebuffed.
Although the administration’s request was unusual, for Google, it represented the kind of delicate balancing act that Internet companies confront every day.
These companies, which include communications media like Facebook and Twitter, write their own edicts about what kind of expression is allowed, things as diverse as pointed political criticism, nudity and notions as murky as hate speech. And their employees work around the clock to check when users run afoul of their rules.
Google is not the only Internet company to grapple in recent days with questions involving the anti-Islamic video, which appeared on YouTube, which Google owns. Facebook on Friday confirmed that it had blocked links to the video in Pakistan, where it violates the country’s blasphemy law. A spokeswoman said Facebook had also removed a post that contained a threat to a United States ambassador, after receiving a report from the State Department; Facebook has declined to say in which country the ambassador worked.
“Because these speech platforms are so important, the decisions they take become jurisprudence,” said Andrew McLaughlin, who has worked for both Google and the White House. Most vexing among those decisions are ones that involve whether a form of expression is hate speech. Hate speech has no universally accepted definition, legal experts say. And countries, including democratic ones, have widely divergent legal approaches to regulating speech they consider to be offensive or inflammatory. (...)
Every company, in order to do business globally, makes a point of obeying the laws of every country in which it operates. Google has already said that it took down links to the incendiary video in India and Indonesia, because it violates local statutes.
But even as a company sets its own rules, capriciously sometimes and without the due process that binds most countries, legal experts say they must be flexible to strike the right balance between democratic values and law.
“Companies are benevolent rulers trying to approximate the kinds of decisions they think would be respectful of free speech as a value and also human safety,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor at Harvard.
by Somini Sengupta, NY Times | Read more:
Photo: Mohammad Ismail/Reuters
Sunday, September 16, 2012
Why Can't We Sell Charity Like We Sell Perfume?
The early Puritan settlers in the New World were pulled in opposite directions by competing value systems. They were extremely aggressive capitalists, but they were also strict Calvinists, taught that self-interest was a sure path to eternal damnation. How could they negotiate this psychological tension? Charity became a big part of the answer—an economic sanctuary in which they could do penance for their profit-making tendencies, at five cents on the dollar.
Today, Americans are the world's most generous contributors to philanthropic causes. Each year, we give about 2% of our GDP to nonprofit organizations, nearly twice as much as the U.K., the next closest nation, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy. Some 65% of all American households with an income of less than $100,000 donate to some type of charity, according to the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, as does nearly every household with an income greater than $100,000. These contributions average out to about $732 a year for every man, woman and child in America.
Yet we cling to a puritan approach to how those donations are spent: Self-deprivation is our strategy for social change. The dysfunction at the heart of our approach is neatly captured by our narrow, negative label for the charitable sector: "not-for-profit."
It's time to change how society thinks about charity and social reform. The donating public is obsessed with restrictions—nonprofits shouldn't pay executives too much, or spend a lot on overhead or take risks with donated dollars. It should be asking whether these organizations have what they need to actually solve problems. The conventional wisdom is that low costs serve the higher good. But this view is killing the ability of nonprofits to make progress against our most pressing problems. Long-term solutions require investment in things that don't show results in the short term.
We have two separate rule books: one for charity and one for the rest of the economic world. The result is discrimination against charities in five critical areas.
First, we allow the for-profit sector to pay people competitive wages based on the value they produce. But we have a visceral reaction to the idea of anyone making very much money helping other people. Want to pay someone $5 million to develop a blockbuster videogame filled with violence? Go for it. Want to pay someone a half-million dollars to try to find a cure for pediatric leukemia? You're considered a parasite.
Two years ago, a group of senators raised questions about the compensation of the CEO of the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, which totaled $998,591 for 2008, nearly half of which consisted of catch-up obligations for her retirement. The critics ignored the fact that over the previous eight years, the CEO had tripled the Clubs' network-wide revenue to $1.5 billion. Would the Clubs have been better off hiring a less talented CEO for $100,000 and leaving revenue stagnant, at a loss of $1 billion?
We tend to think that policing salaries of charitable groups is an ethical imperative, but for would-be leaders, it results in a mutually exclusive choice between doing well for yourself and doing good for the world—and it causes many of the brightest kids coming out of college to march directly into the corporate world.
Today, Americans are the world's most generous contributors to philanthropic causes. Each year, we give about 2% of our GDP to nonprofit organizations, nearly twice as much as the U.K., the next closest nation, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy. Some 65% of all American households with an income of less than $100,000 donate to some type of charity, according to the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, as does nearly every household with an income greater than $100,000. These contributions average out to about $732 a year for every man, woman and child in America.Yet we cling to a puritan approach to how those donations are spent: Self-deprivation is our strategy for social change. The dysfunction at the heart of our approach is neatly captured by our narrow, negative label for the charitable sector: "not-for-profit."
It's time to change how society thinks about charity and social reform. The donating public is obsessed with restrictions—nonprofits shouldn't pay executives too much, or spend a lot on overhead or take risks with donated dollars. It should be asking whether these organizations have what they need to actually solve problems. The conventional wisdom is that low costs serve the higher good. But this view is killing the ability of nonprofits to make progress against our most pressing problems. Long-term solutions require investment in things that don't show results in the short term.
We have two separate rule books: one for charity and one for the rest of the economic world. The result is discrimination against charities in five critical areas.
First, we allow the for-profit sector to pay people competitive wages based on the value they produce. But we have a visceral reaction to the idea of anyone making very much money helping other people. Want to pay someone $5 million to develop a blockbuster videogame filled with violence? Go for it. Want to pay someone a half-million dollars to try to find a cure for pediatric leukemia? You're considered a parasite.
Two years ago, a group of senators raised questions about the compensation of the CEO of the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, which totaled $998,591 for 2008, nearly half of which consisted of catch-up obligations for her retirement. The critics ignored the fact that over the previous eight years, the CEO had tripled the Clubs' network-wide revenue to $1.5 billion. Would the Clubs have been better off hiring a less talented CEO for $100,000 and leaving revenue stagnant, at a loss of $1 billion?
We tend to think that policing salaries of charitable groups is an ethical imperative, but for would-be leaders, it results in a mutually exclusive choice between doing well for yourself and doing good for the world—and it causes many of the brightest kids coming out of college to march directly into the corporate world.
by Dan Palotta, WSJ | Read more:
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