Thursday, December 26, 2019
How Amazon Gains Control & Domination
Amazon takes over the last mile and everything else.
Amazon just gave us an update on how rapidly its own delivery system is replacing UPS, the US Postal Service, FedEx, and other carriers in delivering packages from an Amazon fulfillment center to the door of Amazon’s customer.
The numbers show how big this system is already after practically no time of starting it up, how big the package volume is already, and how many drivers are already working in this system.
This has huge consequences for the US logistics business, the companies that slug it out in it, such as UPS and FedEx, and that keep raising their published rates despite the dynamics of the market, which is facing Amazon’s creation, the mushrooming companies that Amazon is building up to get around the established carriers. Its purpose is twofold:
So, to gain control and bring down costs, it has to become the number 1 gorilla in the logistics business and surround itself by thousands of small logistics companies that it totally controls and that are eating the lunch of today’s giants, UPS and FedEx. And that’s what’s happening at an astounding speed.
Amazon didn’t invent ecommerce. But from day one, it has been pushing the envelope in every direction to make itself the dominant player in just about all related fields, some high-tech, some low-tech, from cloud computing to delivery, to bring down costs and gain control.
To do this, Amazon is helping create thousands of smaller companies. It’s enticing potential entrepreneurs with attractive entry deals. These companies have non-unionized drivers, and they have no fancy corporate headquarters and overhead, and they can operate for less, especially if they can use Amazon’s purchasing power for vehicles and insurance, which Amazon has set up for them to do. (...)
One program was “Amazon Flex”: Amazon billed it as a way to “make $18 to $25 per hour delivering packages with Amazon.” It was app-based and allowed gig workers to choose a block of time during a day in which to pick up and deliver packages. The pick-up location could be an Amazon facility or “a store or even a restaurant,” it said. Gig workers could use their car or bicycle or whatever. And they were contractors, paid by Amazon.
The other program was dubbed Amazon Delivery Providers. “Whether you have one van or a fleet, our volume and your business could be a great match,” Amazon said at the time.
They’d pick up at a local Amazon facility. They’d use Amazon’s routing technology. And off you go, making gobs of money, or so you hope, delivering packages for Amazon. The entrepreneurs, so the owners of these little delivery companies, contracted with Amazon, and received their revenues from Amazon. And they paid their own drivers – like the guy I’d chatted up.
All of them were doing the work that employees of the US Postal Service, FedEx, and UPS used to do.
A year later, in June 2018, Amazon announced a new program, now called, Delivery Service Partners. At the time, Amazon said that this program would help “entrepreneurs build their own companies delivering Amazon packages.”
“Amazon will take an active role in helping interested entrepreneurs start, set up, and manage their own delivery business,” it said in the announcement at the time.
“Successful owners can earn as much as $300,000 in annual profit operating a fleet of up to 40 delivery vehicles,” Amazon said.
“Individual owners can build their business knowing they will have delivery volume from Amazon, access to the company’s sophisticated delivery technology, hands-on training, and discounts on a suite of assets and services, including vehicle leases and comprehensive insurance,” Amazon said.
“Over time, Amazon will empower hundreds of new, small business owners to hire tens of thousands of delivery drivers across the US,” it said.
Start-up costs would be as low as $10,000, Amazon said, given all the support from Amazon – the training, the software technologies, the operational support, the special deals and leases on Amazon-branded customized vans, special deals on branded uniforms, special deals on fuel, comprehensive insurance coverage, etc.
The entrepreneurs would not have to do any marketing – Amazon would be their only customer, and Amazon would give them the volume of packages to support their business. So Amazon said, “individuals with little to no logistics experience have the opportunity to run their own delivery business.”
This has apparently taken off in a massive way. Amazon announced a few days ago that its dedicated last-mile delivery network is on track to deliver 3.5 billion customer packages globally this year. Up from zero a few years ago.
By comparison, UPS delivered 5.2 billion packages and documents globally last year. At the growth rate of Amazon’s delivery system, it will blow past UPS in a couple of years globally.
Amazon said that in the US, its delivery system already handles the largest share of its customers’ orders, ahead of the share of each, the US Postal Service, UPS, and FedEx.
It said it has 150 delivery stations across the United States that employ over 90,000 Amazon “logistics associates,” as it calls them. These are Amazon employees who make a wage of at least $15 an hour plus get some benefits, it said.
They get the packages ready to be picked up by the drivers of the small logistics companies that Amazon has helped set up – namely the Amazon Delivery Service Partners.
It now had over 800 of these Amazon Delivery Service Partners in the last-mile network, it said, and these companies were employing 75,000 drivers in the United States.
So, 75,000 drivers at 800 companies, means that the average delivery company now has 94 drivers. And these companies didn’t even exist a few years ago.
For these 800 companies and their 75,000 drivers that Amazon helped create, Amazon is everything: It controls the business volume, namely the packages to be delivered, and the revenues, via the rates it is paying. It provides special deals on leasing the delivery vans, getting insurance, and even on getting fuel. It provides the app-based technology to design the most efficient routes every day.
In a situation like this, as a delivery business, where you have one giant customer that helped create your business and that controls everything, including your revenues to the last penny, how you run your business, and what services you use, there is one thing to remember: Your business thrives or dies by the grace of Amazon.
And once Amazon has the system up and running to the full extent, the squeeze invariably begins. It will start in small items here and there, paying for services that used to be free, and the special deals will get less special, and the amount Amazon pays for deliveries will get squeezed – because now that it has control, Amazon will proceed with the goal: bringing down delivery costs of ecommerce. And the way to do this is by squeezing the delivery network.
Amazon just gave us an update on how rapidly its own delivery system is replacing UPS, the US Postal Service, FedEx, and other carriers in delivering packages from an Amazon fulfillment center to the door of Amazon’s customer.
The numbers show how big this system is already after practically no time of starting it up, how big the package volume is already, and how many drivers are already working in this system.
This has huge consequences for the US logistics business, the companies that slug it out in it, such as UPS and FedEx, and that keep raising their published rates despite the dynamics of the market, which is facing Amazon’s creation, the mushrooming companies that Amazon is building up to get around the established carriers. Its purpose is twofold:
- One, bring down delivery costs.
- And two, gain control.
So, to gain control and bring down costs, it has to become the number 1 gorilla in the logistics business and surround itself by thousands of small logistics companies that it totally controls and that are eating the lunch of today’s giants, UPS and FedEx. And that’s what’s happening at an astounding speed.Amazon didn’t invent ecommerce. But from day one, it has been pushing the envelope in every direction to make itself the dominant player in just about all related fields, some high-tech, some low-tech, from cloud computing to delivery, to bring down costs and gain control.
To do this, Amazon is helping create thousands of smaller companies. It’s enticing potential entrepreneurs with attractive entry deals. These companies have non-unionized drivers, and they have no fancy corporate headquarters and overhead, and they can operate for less, especially if they can use Amazon’s purchasing power for vehicles and insurance, which Amazon has set up for them to do. (...)
One program was “Amazon Flex”: Amazon billed it as a way to “make $18 to $25 per hour delivering packages with Amazon.” It was app-based and allowed gig workers to choose a block of time during a day in which to pick up and deliver packages. The pick-up location could be an Amazon facility or “a store or even a restaurant,” it said. Gig workers could use their car or bicycle or whatever. And they were contractors, paid by Amazon.
The other program was dubbed Amazon Delivery Providers. “Whether you have one van or a fleet, our volume and your business could be a great match,” Amazon said at the time.
They’d pick up at a local Amazon facility. They’d use Amazon’s routing technology. And off you go, making gobs of money, or so you hope, delivering packages for Amazon. The entrepreneurs, so the owners of these little delivery companies, contracted with Amazon, and received their revenues from Amazon. And they paid their own drivers – like the guy I’d chatted up.
All of them were doing the work that employees of the US Postal Service, FedEx, and UPS used to do.
A year later, in June 2018, Amazon announced a new program, now called, Delivery Service Partners. At the time, Amazon said that this program would help “entrepreneurs build their own companies delivering Amazon packages.”
“Amazon will take an active role in helping interested entrepreneurs start, set up, and manage their own delivery business,” it said in the announcement at the time.
“Successful owners can earn as much as $300,000 in annual profit operating a fleet of up to 40 delivery vehicles,” Amazon said.
“Individual owners can build their business knowing they will have delivery volume from Amazon, access to the company’s sophisticated delivery technology, hands-on training, and discounts on a suite of assets and services, including vehicle leases and comprehensive insurance,” Amazon said.
“Over time, Amazon will empower hundreds of new, small business owners to hire tens of thousands of delivery drivers across the US,” it said.
Start-up costs would be as low as $10,000, Amazon said, given all the support from Amazon – the training, the software technologies, the operational support, the special deals and leases on Amazon-branded customized vans, special deals on branded uniforms, special deals on fuel, comprehensive insurance coverage, etc.
The entrepreneurs would not have to do any marketing – Amazon would be their only customer, and Amazon would give them the volume of packages to support their business. So Amazon said, “individuals with little to no logistics experience have the opportunity to run their own delivery business.”
This has apparently taken off in a massive way. Amazon announced a few days ago that its dedicated last-mile delivery network is on track to deliver 3.5 billion customer packages globally this year. Up from zero a few years ago.
By comparison, UPS delivered 5.2 billion packages and documents globally last year. At the growth rate of Amazon’s delivery system, it will blow past UPS in a couple of years globally.
Amazon said that in the US, its delivery system already handles the largest share of its customers’ orders, ahead of the share of each, the US Postal Service, UPS, and FedEx.
It said it has 150 delivery stations across the United States that employ over 90,000 Amazon “logistics associates,” as it calls them. These are Amazon employees who make a wage of at least $15 an hour plus get some benefits, it said.
They get the packages ready to be picked up by the drivers of the small logistics companies that Amazon has helped set up – namely the Amazon Delivery Service Partners.
It now had over 800 of these Amazon Delivery Service Partners in the last-mile network, it said, and these companies were employing 75,000 drivers in the United States.
So, 75,000 drivers at 800 companies, means that the average delivery company now has 94 drivers. And these companies didn’t even exist a few years ago.
For these 800 companies and their 75,000 drivers that Amazon helped create, Amazon is everything: It controls the business volume, namely the packages to be delivered, and the revenues, via the rates it is paying. It provides special deals on leasing the delivery vans, getting insurance, and even on getting fuel. It provides the app-based technology to design the most efficient routes every day.
In a situation like this, as a delivery business, where you have one giant customer that helped create your business and that controls everything, including your revenues to the last penny, how you run your business, and what services you use, there is one thing to remember: Your business thrives or dies by the grace of Amazon.
And once Amazon has the system up and running to the full extent, the squeeze invariably begins. It will start in small items here and there, paying for services that used to be free, and the special deals will get less special, and the amount Amazon pays for deliveries will get squeezed – because now that it has control, Amazon will proceed with the goal: bringing down delivery costs of ecommerce. And the way to do this is by squeezing the delivery network.
by Wolf Richter, Wolf Street | Read more:
Image: Amazon
[ed. See for yourself, from Amazon's website: Logistics Amazon. So, where is Congress?! Rhetorical question, of course. We all know where they are and what their main order of business is, day in, day out. Still, you'd think somebody might eventually, possibly, one day express a little concern about one company dominating nearly every ecommerce business in the economy (not to mention government itself, through Amazon's AWS cloud computing services).]
Wednesday, December 25, 2019
Planting Trees is Only a Good News Story if it’s Done Right
A few years ago I went to the Kilombero valley in Tanzania to find out why the elephants there had disappeared. It was still beautiful; a long, green plain with red earth, lined by mountains on either side. But, as recently as the 1990s, people kept telling me, it had been a wildlife paradise. One man remembered sitting in the mountains at sunset, watching the elephants cross the valley through the miombo forest, while the lions roared.
On one road there was a teak plantation on one side and a miombo forest on the other. The plantation was quiet, symmetrical, empty: there was no undergrowth because teak leaves kill whatever they fall on. The miombo forest was more familiar to anyone who loves to be out in the woods: the smell of earth, rotting leaves, the hum of bees, dove calls, an abundance of complexity and energy.
The valley is now a patchwork of teak plantations, rice and sugar fields and huge herds of cattle, so the lions and elephants have all but vanished. The most telling remains we saw were the burned stumps, like stripped bones, of the forest.
The same thing is happening everywhere. On the one hand, huge amounts of energy are going into reforesting the world. The amount of tree cover is actually rising. The 2011 Bonn challenge aims to bring 350m hectares (864.5m acres) of degraded land into restoration by 2030, and countries have already signed up 170m hectares. A impressive number of sometimes surprising countries have increased their forest cover by more than 20% over the last 25 years: China, Belarus, Chile, France, Greece, India, Iran, Morocco, the Philippines, Spain, Thailand and Turkey. It can really, at moments, seem like some kind of success story.
But the ancient forests, the original, complex, messy forests, continue to disappear, and some of the most enthusiastic signatories to the Bonn challenge have seen some of the worst losses. Argentina, for example, has committed to planting 1m hectares, but meanwhile the ancient Gran Chaco in the north continues to vanish, replaced by huge fields of soy to feed the farm animals of the world.
Cameroon, which holds part of the precious Congo basin rainforest, is offering to create 12m hectares of tree cover by 2030, but since 1990 more than 20% of Cameroon’s forests have been cut down to make way for subsistence farmers and now, increasingly, for banana and palm oil plantations, to create products that end up in our supermarket shopping baskets. Nigeria may feel better about itself after pledging to plant a million hectares, but the fact is that over the last 25 years it has lost more than 10 times that amount, more than half its forests. For a number of years it even had the highest deforestation rate in the world, but it was overtaken this year by Ghana, where cocoa bean crops for our chocolate are replacing the rainforests.
And let’s not dwell too long on the countries where the rate of loss is just as high and dramatic but are not even bothering to sign up to Bonn such as Bolivia (80,000 square kilometres gone between 1990 and 2015), North Korea (33,000), Paraguay (58,000) and Indonesia (a breathtaking 275,000km – an area larger than New Zealand).
Even the apparently cheering news that global tree cover is growing is less than it seems, explains Tim Rayden of the Oxford Forestry Institute. “There is a big difference between tree cover and forests.” A large number of countries, for example, are planning to fill their commitments with commercial plantations – but plantations, which are harvested every 10 years or more regularly, are very much less effective than tropical forests at capturing carbon. He points to recent research where scientists worked out the carbon capture potential of three different reforestation scenarios under the terms of the Bonn challenge. If the 350m hectares of reforestation are all natural forest, they can capture as much as 42 petagrams of carbon. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change believes that to keep global warming below 1.5C 199 petagrams must be removed from the atmosphere this century, so that is a significant contribution from the world’s forests.
However, if the trajectory of the plans already submitted carries on, at least 45% of that cover will be commercial plantation. If our natural forests are protected under that scenario, the storage potential will be 16 petagrams. But if we continue to chop into them in the same way that we do at present, the storage potential will dwindle to just three petagrams.
We wipe out whatever is complex and other and difficult to manage, and replace it with nice, easy farms and plantations full of monocultures of pigs and corn and wheat and palm oil. We like things nice and simple and symmetrical and easy to control, that’s the problem.
by Bibi van der Zee, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Sophie Tremblay/The Guardian
[ed. From The Overstory, by Richard Powers:
A man just shy of forty hands out silver dollars in the Spar roadhouse, off Route 21, not far from a town aptly named Damascus. Damascus, Oregon. "Celebration, damn it. You have to spend it on a beer".
The request has it's takers. "The hell we celebrating, Rockefeller?"
"My fifty thousandth tree. Nine hours a day, rain or shine, five and a half days a week, through every planting month, for almost four years." (...)
"Who're you planting for?"
"Whoever pays me."
"Lotta new oxygen out there, because of you. Lotta greenhouse gasses put to bed."
"People have no idea. You know they make shampoo with wood? Shatterproof glass? Toothpaste?"
"I did not know that."
"Shoe polish. Ice-cream thickener."
"Buildings, am I right? Books and such. Boats. Furniture."
"People have no idea. Still the Age of Wood. Cheapest priceless stuff that ever has been." (...)
"Fifty thousand trees. Huh."
"It's a start." (...)
"Hate to burst your bubble, friend. But you know that BC alone takes out two million log trucks a year? By itself! You'd have to plant for like four of five centuries just to... (...)
"And those companies you plant for? You realize they got good-citizen credits for every seedling you plant? Every time you stick one in the ground, it lets them raise the annual allowable cut."
"No," Douglas says. "That can't be right."
"Oh, it's right, all right. You're putting in babies so they can kill grandfathers. And when your seedlings grow out, they'll be monocrop blights, man. Drive-through diners for happy insect pests."]
On one road there was a teak plantation on one side and a miombo forest on the other. The plantation was quiet, symmetrical, empty: there was no undergrowth because teak leaves kill whatever they fall on. The miombo forest was more familiar to anyone who loves to be out in the woods: the smell of earth, rotting leaves, the hum of bees, dove calls, an abundance of complexity and energy.
The valley is now a patchwork of teak plantations, rice and sugar fields and huge herds of cattle, so the lions and elephants have all but vanished. The most telling remains we saw were the burned stumps, like stripped bones, of the forest.
The same thing is happening everywhere. On the one hand, huge amounts of energy are going into reforesting the world. The amount of tree cover is actually rising. The 2011 Bonn challenge aims to bring 350m hectares (864.5m acres) of degraded land into restoration by 2030, and countries have already signed up 170m hectares. A impressive number of sometimes surprising countries have increased their forest cover by more than 20% over the last 25 years: China, Belarus, Chile, France, Greece, India, Iran, Morocco, the Philippines, Spain, Thailand and Turkey. It can really, at moments, seem like some kind of success story.But the ancient forests, the original, complex, messy forests, continue to disappear, and some of the most enthusiastic signatories to the Bonn challenge have seen some of the worst losses. Argentina, for example, has committed to planting 1m hectares, but meanwhile the ancient Gran Chaco in the north continues to vanish, replaced by huge fields of soy to feed the farm animals of the world.
Cameroon, which holds part of the precious Congo basin rainforest, is offering to create 12m hectares of tree cover by 2030, but since 1990 more than 20% of Cameroon’s forests have been cut down to make way for subsistence farmers and now, increasingly, for banana and palm oil plantations, to create products that end up in our supermarket shopping baskets. Nigeria may feel better about itself after pledging to plant a million hectares, but the fact is that over the last 25 years it has lost more than 10 times that amount, more than half its forests. For a number of years it even had the highest deforestation rate in the world, but it was overtaken this year by Ghana, where cocoa bean crops for our chocolate are replacing the rainforests.
And let’s not dwell too long on the countries where the rate of loss is just as high and dramatic but are not even bothering to sign up to Bonn such as Bolivia (80,000 square kilometres gone between 1990 and 2015), North Korea (33,000), Paraguay (58,000) and Indonesia (a breathtaking 275,000km – an area larger than New Zealand).
Even the apparently cheering news that global tree cover is growing is less than it seems, explains Tim Rayden of the Oxford Forestry Institute. “There is a big difference between tree cover and forests.” A large number of countries, for example, are planning to fill their commitments with commercial plantations – but plantations, which are harvested every 10 years or more regularly, are very much less effective than tropical forests at capturing carbon. He points to recent research where scientists worked out the carbon capture potential of three different reforestation scenarios under the terms of the Bonn challenge. If the 350m hectares of reforestation are all natural forest, they can capture as much as 42 petagrams of carbon. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change believes that to keep global warming below 1.5C 199 petagrams must be removed from the atmosphere this century, so that is a significant contribution from the world’s forests.
However, if the trajectory of the plans already submitted carries on, at least 45% of that cover will be commercial plantation. If our natural forests are protected under that scenario, the storage potential will be 16 petagrams. But if we continue to chop into them in the same way that we do at present, the storage potential will dwindle to just three petagrams.
We wipe out whatever is complex and other and difficult to manage, and replace it with nice, easy farms and plantations full of monocultures of pigs and corn and wheat and palm oil. We like things nice and simple and symmetrical and easy to control, that’s the problem.
Image: Sophie Tremblay/The Guardian
[ed. From The Overstory, by Richard Powers:
A man just shy of forty hands out silver dollars in the Spar roadhouse, off Route 21, not far from a town aptly named Damascus. Damascus, Oregon. "Celebration, damn it. You have to spend it on a beer".
The request has it's takers. "The hell we celebrating, Rockefeller?"
"My fifty thousandth tree. Nine hours a day, rain or shine, five and a half days a week, through every planting month, for almost four years." (...)
"Who're you planting for?"
"Whoever pays me."
"Lotta new oxygen out there, because of you. Lotta greenhouse gasses put to bed."
"People have no idea. You know they make shampoo with wood? Shatterproof glass? Toothpaste?"
"I did not know that."
"Shoe polish. Ice-cream thickener."
"Buildings, am I right? Books and such. Boats. Furniture."
"People have no idea. Still the Age of Wood. Cheapest priceless stuff that ever has been." (...)
"Fifty thousand trees. Huh."
"It's a start." (...)
"Hate to burst your bubble, friend. But you know that BC alone takes out two million log trucks a year? By itself! You'd have to plant for like four of five centuries just to... (...)
"And those companies you plant for? You realize they got good-citizen credits for every seedling you plant? Every time you stick one in the ground, it lets them raise the annual allowable cut."
"No," Douglas says. "That can't be right."
"Oh, it's right, all right. You're putting in babies so they can kill grandfathers. And when your seedlings grow out, they'll be monocrop blights, man. Drive-through diners for happy insect pests."]
Science Fiction’s Wonderful Mistakes
From the mid-1920s, when Hugo Gernsback coined the term “science fiction,” several fallacies became associated with the increasingly vigorous commercial genre and never entirely went away. The first was the “Taught Me Science Fallacy,” which goes something like this: Isaac Asimov writes about science and particle physics, so if I read the Foundation trilogy, I might learn what a neutrino is. (Kingsley Amis argued in his influential New Maps of Hell in 1960 that, at the very least, the “aim” of sci-fi was to do “justice to the laws of nature.”) But while it is theoretically possible for someone to learn science from a science fiction novel, it would probably be foolish to read the entire Foundation trilogy—concerning a secret tribe of “psycho-historians” who design millions of years of future history before it happens—to learn something. In fact, if you read the Foundation trilogy and put it down thinking, “Ah, a neutrino!” then you very likely missed the point of that ridiculous and absorbing set of novels.
Second, and more annoying, is the “Predictive Fallacy.” This suggests that science fiction might accurately describe what the world will be like 100 years after we’re dead. This argument usually runs along the line of: “Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey, and guess what? A few years later we went to the moon!” Or it cites the various occasions when some story described television sets, microwaves, escalators, and two-way video phone calls and then, voilà , they happened. But of course, sci-fi novels—both good and bad—are littered with gadgets that happened and didn’t happen; what they never foresaw was how (and usually how poorly) those inventions would be implemented. Show me one novel that predicted something like Fox and Friends, or The View. You can’t do it. (Oh, well, maybe C.M. Kornbluth’s “The Marching Morons.” But let’s move on.)
Finally, there’s the “Cautionary Fallacy,” which suggests that science fiction provides urgent warnings about our collective need to prepare for world-hammering comets, nuclear war, climate catastrophe, totalitarian mind-control, and so forth. In support of this fallacy, people say things like: “George Orwell warned us about the Thought Police, and now we’ve got Nancy Pelosi!” (“I don’t want to predict the future—I want to prevent it” was a line often attributed to Ray Bradbury.) The idea that human beings require explicit fictional warnings about their increasingly world-destroying stupidities seems like an exercise in futility, doesn’t it? And by the way, science fiction has long warned readers about things like climate catastrophe—but nothing was done about it. And the imminence of totalitarianism. (Check.) And even the suicidal ridiculousness of mutually assured nuclear destruction—and guess what? We have more bombs than ever.
The science fiction novels of the 1960s—as this two-volume collection of eight very different sci-fi novels testifies—remain enjoyable because they got everything wrong. They didn’t accurately predict the future of space travel, or what a postnuclear landscape would look like, or how to end intergalactic fascism. They didn’t warn us against the roads we shouldn’t travel, since they probably suspected we were going to take those roads anyway. And they definitely didn’t teach us what a neutrino is. But what ’60s science fiction did do was establish one of the wildest, widest, most stylistically and conceptually various commercial spaces for writing (and reading) fiction in the history of fictional genres. Each book is unpredictable in so many ways as to almost constitute its own genre.
Take, for example, Samuel R. Delany’s influential space opera, Nova (presented here in a newly corrected, author-approved text), which takes the concept of the “cybernetic” fusion of human and machine and runs with it. Nova envisions a universe boiling over with star-hopping spaceships, spine-socketed crew members, weirdly mutated sexual and familial relationships, synesthetic video-art instruments, and at least one character raised on another planet who speaks in a verb-delaying syntax several years before Yoda was a gleam in George Lucas’s eye. (“Not too good going to be is. Out of practice am.”) Delany’s prose was stylistically bright, fizzing with ambitious energy (he began publishing novels in his late teens and won several major awards early) and relentlessly inventive, with flashy new visions of the future in one paragraph after another.
Then there’s Jack Vance, who also wrote about incomprehensibly far-off futures that weren’t driven by the splashy intergalactic military conflicts of his Golden Age predecessors, such as E.E. Doc Smith or Robert A. Heinlein. Instead, Vance’s futures are marked by rich, panoramic socioeconomic systems. One of his best is Emphyrio, which charts the coming of age of a young economic adventurer named Ghyl Tarvoke in a galaxy ruled by “lords” and “ladies” who flit from star to star in their luxury space-liners while planet-bound artisans must produce beautiful objects for them to buy and enjoy. People rarely blast each other with laser pistols in a Vance novel; they are more likely to buy one another out or break their distribution chains. (...)
It’s impossible to encapsulate the wide variety of styles and stories contained by these Library of America volumes, but many of the best never even leave Earth. There’s the classic Flowers for Algernon, told through the diary of a mentally limited young man as he is subjected to an intelligence-enhancing drug. Or Way Station, a perfect example of Clifford D. Simak’s often poetic and moving “rural S.F.,” in which a Civil War soldier, enlisted by a galactic federation, maintains a secret travel stop for star-hopping aliens in the Wisconsin woods. (Simak was another of Campbell’s regulars who advocated “plausible” science fiction.) Or Roger Zelazny’s Hugo Award–winning This Immortal (here published under Zelazny’s preferred title, And Call Me Conrad) describing a post–nuclear holocaust Earth populated by both prewar cultures and new, mutant ones. (In the event of an actual nuclear holocaust, we should be so lucky.)
by Scott Bradfield, TNR | Read more:
Image: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
[ed. C.M. Kornbluth’s The Marching Morons (Wikipedia). Full story here.]
Second, and more annoying, is the “Predictive Fallacy.” This suggests that science fiction might accurately describe what the world will be like 100 years after we’re dead. This argument usually runs along the line of: “Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey, and guess what? A few years later we went to the moon!” Or it cites the various occasions when some story described television sets, microwaves, escalators, and two-way video phone calls and then, voilà , they happened. But of course, sci-fi novels—both good and bad—are littered with gadgets that happened and didn’t happen; what they never foresaw was how (and usually how poorly) those inventions would be implemented. Show me one novel that predicted something like Fox and Friends, or The View. You can’t do it. (Oh, well, maybe C.M. Kornbluth’s “The Marching Morons.” But let’s move on.)Finally, there’s the “Cautionary Fallacy,” which suggests that science fiction provides urgent warnings about our collective need to prepare for world-hammering comets, nuclear war, climate catastrophe, totalitarian mind-control, and so forth. In support of this fallacy, people say things like: “George Orwell warned us about the Thought Police, and now we’ve got Nancy Pelosi!” (“I don’t want to predict the future—I want to prevent it” was a line often attributed to Ray Bradbury.) The idea that human beings require explicit fictional warnings about their increasingly world-destroying stupidities seems like an exercise in futility, doesn’t it? And by the way, science fiction has long warned readers about things like climate catastrophe—but nothing was done about it. And the imminence of totalitarianism. (Check.) And even the suicidal ridiculousness of mutually assured nuclear destruction—and guess what? We have more bombs than ever.
The science fiction novels of the 1960s—as this two-volume collection of eight very different sci-fi novels testifies—remain enjoyable because they got everything wrong. They didn’t accurately predict the future of space travel, or what a postnuclear landscape would look like, or how to end intergalactic fascism. They didn’t warn us against the roads we shouldn’t travel, since they probably suspected we were going to take those roads anyway. And they definitely didn’t teach us what a neutrino is. But what ’60s science fiction did do was establish one of the wildest, widest, most stylistically and conceptually various commercial spaces for writing (and reading) fiction in the history of fictional genres. Each book is unpredictable in so many ways as to almost constitute its own genre.
Take, for example, Samuel R. Delany’s influential space opera, Nova (presented here in a newly corrected, author-approved text), which takes the concept of the “cybernetic” fusion of human and machine and runs with it. Nova envisions a universe boiling over with star-hopping spaceships, spine-socketed crew members, weirdly mutated sexual and familial relationships, synesthetic video-art instruments, and at least one character raised on another planet who speaks in a verb-delaying syntax several years before Yoda was a gleam in George Lucas’s eye. (“Not too good going to be is. Out of practice am.”) Delany’s prose was stylistically bright, fizzing with ambitious energy (he began publishing novels in his late teens and won several major awards early) and relentlessly inventive, with flashy new visions of the future in one paragraph after another.
Then there’s Jack Vance, who also wrote about incomprehensibly far-off futures that weren’t driven by the splashy intergalactic military conflicts of his Golden Age predecessors, such as E.E. Doc Smith or Robert A. Heinlein. Instead, Vance’s futures are marked by rich, panoramic socioeconomic systems. One of his best is Emphyrio, which charts the coming of age of a young economic adventurer named Ghyl Tarvoke in a galaxy ruled by “lords” and “ladies” who flit from star to star in their luxury space-liners while planet-bound artisans must produce beautiful objects for them to buy and enjoy. People rarely blast each other with laser pistols in a Vance novel; they are more likely to buy one another out or break their distribution chains. (...)
It’s impossible to encapsulate the wide variety of styles and stories contained by these Library of America volumes, but many of the best never even leave Earth. There’s the classic Flowers for Algernon, told through the diary of a mentally limited young man as he is subjected to an intelligence-enhancing drug. Or Way Station, a perfect example of Clifford D. Simak’s often poetic and moving “rural S.F.,” in which a Civil War soldier, enlisted by a galactic federation, maintains a secret travel stop for star-hopping aliens in the Wisconsin woods. (Simak was another of Campbell’s regulars who advocated “plausible” science fiction.) Or Roger Zelazny’s Hugo Award–winning This Immortal (here published under Zelazny’s preferred title, And Call Me Conrad) describing a post–nuclear holocaust Earth populated by both prewar cultures and new, mutant ones. (In the event of an actual nuclear holocaust, we should be so lucky.)
by Scott Bradfield, TNR | Read more:
[ed. C.M. Kornbluth’s The Marching Morons (Wikipedia). Full story here.]
Time to Nationalize Boeing?
Boeing finally fired its CEO, Dennis Muilenburg. Many where baffled by the fact that he still had the job months after the world grounded 700 of the company's new planes because of serious safety issues. And the more the world looked into these issues, the more it saw a company that was more concerned with meeting the demands of shareholders rather than producing quality planes. Under Muilenburg, the value of Boeing stock rose from around $150 a share (which was already too high) to $440 (it reached this peak 10 days before the crash in Ethiopia). Those billions went to shareholders in the form of buybacks.
The buybacks even continued after the first 737 MAX crash. They stopped after the second. But the company did not discontinue manufacturing the 737 MAX after they were grounded. 400 came out of the plant. Where are they going to go? No one wants them. The value of all 737 MAX planes is around $100 billion. The crisis has so far cost Boeing $9.2 billion. To make matters worse, the company's Starliner spacecraft test mission failed because it went into the wrong orbit. That project was behind schedule, and now its future is unknown.
If we properly appreciated the economic scale of this crisis, then the news of the new CEO would be as valuable as pennies placed on dead eyes. The power of the market is not, as so many Americans are told believe from day one, unlimited. There is a point when the temporal distance between costs and returns is too great for private investment. Since the crisis began in early March, not one day has seen a contraction. Its expansion has only accelerated. What will happen in 2020? What is the fate of the plant workers in the Seattle-area? If we continue to turn to the market for answers, these and other pressing questions will receive no realistic answers. The time for the nationalization of Boeing is now.
Of course, everything will be done to avoid this obvious solution—the state ownership of an enterprise that can no longer afford the crisis it created by cutting costs for shareholders. The indirect solution might be an increase of government contracts, but that will only be a short-term fix. (Please think about and attempt to picture this possibility: Boeing might have made $100 billion worth of worthless of planes.)
Boeing's situation is existential in nature and depth. Meaning, the ontology of the corporation, its mode of being in the market, which is the kind of culture that shapes what the Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang calls institutional memory (the actual value of an enterprise of Boeing's size and complexity), must be replaced if it hopes to live for as long as it has been around.
This radical transformation will not be easy. The resistance to changing the culture that Boeing adopted after it merged with McDonnell Douglas in 1997, a merger which led to its physical separation between management (Chicago) and workers (mostly Seattle-area) in 2001, will be fierce. Why? Because the profits from the production of planes are no match, when it comes to the central but unreal program of the very rich (which is continuous high yields), to those achieved by speculation on the stock market.
And here we really hit the heart of the crisis. Boeing was not the kind of corporation that could turn a quick profit. But everything about shareholder value maximization is about fast returns on placements, which we erroneously call "investments." The SVM time horizon is rarely longer than a year (and sometimes less than a second), and development and distribution of a plane series takes decades. Shareholders leading Boeing is like an elephant tied to, and led by, the impulses of a squirrel. If you can grasp the extent of this asymmetry, if you can face it for what it is, then you will begin to have some idea of the time it will take to undo this mess. Now is not the time of markets; we have entered the time of the state or the public.
And this brings us to the scholarship of the British-based economist Mariana Mazzucato. Her research has shown that government investment (or, put another way, socialism) is really what drives product innovation in the private sector. The more a government directs resources to scientific and technological projects whose marketability is not well understood or known, the richer becomes the nation-level institutional memory (in Chang's sense) that corporations like Boeing, Microsoft, and Amazon heavily draw from for their products and systems of distribution.
Mazzucato calls this the "entrepreneurial state." But what do we find happening in the US today? Right now the Fed is propping up the stock market by injecting billions upon billions in cash (so far a total of $300 billion) into the broken repo market. The value of the institutional memory of this purely financial market is actually next to zero. That IM, gathered by Boeing's largely state-educated engineers over the many years, is inestimable.
The buybacks even continued after the first 737 MAX crash. They stopped after the second. But the company did not discontinue manufacturing the 737 MAX after they were grounded. 400 came out of the plant. Where are they going to go? No one wants them. The value of all 737 MAX planes is around $100 billion. The crisis has so far cost Boeing $9.2 billion. To make matters worse, the company's Starliner spacecraft test mission failed because it went into the wrong orbit. That project was behind schedule, and now its future is unknown.
If we properly appreciated the economic scale of this crisis, then the news of the new CEO would be as valuable as pennies placed on dead eyes. The power of the market is not, as so many Americans are told believe from day one, unlimited. There is a point when the temporal distance between costs and returns is too great for private investment. Since the crisis began in early March, not one day has seen a contraction. Its expansion has only accelerated. What will happen in 2020? What is the fate of the plant workers in the Seattle-area? If we continue to turn to the market for answers, these and other pressing questions will receive no realistic answers. The time for the nationalization of Boeing is now.
Of course, everything will be done to avoid this obvious solution—the state ownership of an enterprise that can no longer afford the crisis it created by cutting costs for shareholders. The indirect solution might be an increase of government contracts, but that will only be a short-term fix. (Please think about and attempt to picture this possibility: Boeing might have made $100 billion worth of worthless of planes.)
Boeing's situation is existential in nature and depth. Meaning, the ontology of the corporation, its mode of being in the market, which is the kind of culture that shapes what the Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang calls institutional memory (the actual value of an enterprise of Boeing's size and complexity), must be replaced if it hopes to live for as long as it has been around.
This radical transformation will not be easy. The resistance to changing the culture that Boeing adopted after it merged with McDonnell Douglas in 1997, a merger which led to its physical separation between management (Chicago) and workers (mostly Seattle-area) in 2001, will be fierce. Why? Because the profits from the production of planes are no match, when it comes to the central but unreal program of the very rich (which is continuous high yields), to those achieved by speculation on the stock market.
And here we really hit the heart of the crisis. Boeing was not the kind of corporation that could turn a quick profit. But everything about shareholder value maximization is about fast returns on placements, which we erroneously call "investments." The SVM time horizon is rarely longer than a year (and sometimes less than a second), and development and distribution of a plane series takes decades. Shareholders leading Boeing is like an elephant tied to, and led by, the impulses of a squirrel. If you can grasp the extent of this asymmetry, if you can face it for what it is, then you will begin to have some idea of the time it will take to undo this mess. Now is not the time of markets; we have entered the time of the state or the public.
And this brings us to the scholarship of the British-based economist Mariana Mazzucato. Her research has shown that government investment (or, put another way, socialism) is really what drives product innovation in the private sector. The more a government directs resources to scientific and technological projects whose marketability is not well understood or known, the richer becomes the nation-level institutional memory (in Chang's sense) that corporations like Boeing, Microsoft, and Amazon heavily draw from for their products and systems of distribution.
Mazzucato calls this the "entrepreneurial state." But what do we find happening in the US today? Right now the Fed is propping up the stock market by injecting billions upon billions in cash (so far a total of $300 billion) into the broken repo market. The value of the institutional memory of this purely financial market is actually next to zero. That IM, gathered by Boeing's largely state-educated engineers over the many years, is inestimable.
by Charles Mudede, The Stranger | Read more:
Image: Earth-Quake/Getty
[ed. Not convinced (yet) on the nationalize argument (saddling taxpayers with unknown costs, despite possible long-term benefits) but, if it's that or some no-fault bail-out like the financial industry got after 2008, we should get something in return (or the 'yet' turns into yes). Corporations, even systemically important ones, need to feel a downside to greed and stupidity. See also: Muilenburg Forced Out of Boeing, But 737 Max No Closer to Flying. What Happens If It Stays Grounded? (Naked Capitalism).]
Tuesday, December 24, 2019
Beast Mode 2.0
Why the Seahawks HAD to bring back Marshawn Lynch (SB Nation)
Image: Rod Mar via
[ed. He's back! Unfortunately, they had to lose Chris Carson for the rest of the season for it to happen.]
‘Clarification’ Ends Protection For Migratory Birds
[ed. Migratory Bird Treaty Act (of 1918) now useless.]
As the state of Virginia prepared for a major bridge and tunnel expansion in the tidewaters of the Chesapeake Bay last year, engineers understood that the nesting grounds of 25,000 gulls, black skimmers, royal terns and other seabirds were about to be plowed under.
To compensate, they considered developing an artificial island as a safe haven. Then in June 2018, the Trump administration stepped in. While the federal government “appreciates” the state’s efforts, new rules in Washington had eliminated criminal penalties for “incidental” migratory bird deaths that came in the course of normal business, administration officials advised. Such conservation measures were now “purely voluntary.”
The state ended its island planning.
The island is one of dozens of bird-preservation efforts that have fallen away in the wake of the policy change in 2017 that was billed merely as a technical clarification to a century-old law protecting migratory birds. Across the country birds have been killed and nests destroyed by oil spills, construction crews and chemical contamination, all with no response from the federal government, according to emails, memos and other documents viewed by The New York Times. Not only has the administration stopped investigating most bird deaths, the documents show, it has discouraged local governments and businesses from taking precautionary measures to protect birds. (...)
The revised policy — part of the administration’s broader effort to encourage business activity — has been a particular favorite of the president, whose selective view of avian welfare has ranged from complaining that wind energy “kills all the birds” to asserting that the oil industry has been subject to “totalitarian tactics” under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918.
Habitat loss and pesticide exposure already have brought on widespread bird-species declines. The number of adult breeding birds in the United States and Canada has plummeted by 2.9 billion since 1970.
Now, said Noah Greenwald, the endangered species director for the Center for Biological Diversity, the Trump administration has engineered “a fundamental shift” in policy that “lets industrial companies, utilities and others completely off the hook.” Even a disaster like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010, which killed or injured about a million birds, would not expose a company to prosecution or fines.
Gavin Shire, a spokesman for the Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency responsible for protecting migratory birds, said in a statement that other federal laws like the Endangered Species Act remain on the books. The Trump administration, he said, “will continue to work cooperatively with our industry partners to minimize impacts on migratory birds.”
The documents tell a different story. In nearly two dozen incidents across 15 states, internal conversations among Fish and Wildlife Service officers indicate that, short of going out to shoot birds, activities in which birds die no longer merit action. In some cases the Trump administration has even discouraged local governments and businesses from taking relatively simple steps to protect birds, like reporting fatalities when they are found.
“You get the sense this policy is not only bad for birds, it’s also cruel,” Mr. Greenwald said.
by Lisa Friedman, NY Times | Read more:
Image:Robert F. Bukaty/Associated Press
[ed. Wouldn't it be nice to wake up in the morning and not have some new outrage coming out of Washington? It's hard to imagine. This administration, with near total Republican support, is systematically trashing everything that makes life worth living (and enjoying it). See also: The Migratory Bird Treaty Act, Explained (Audubon).]
As the state of Virginia prepared for a major bridge and tunnel expansion in the tidewaters of the Chesapeake Bay last year, engineers understood that the nesting grounds of 25,000 gulls, black skimmers, royal terns and other seabirds were about to be plowed under.
To compensate, they considered developing an artificial island as a safe haven. Then in June 2018, the Trump administration stepped in. While the federal government “appreciates” the state’s efforts, new rules in Washington had eliminated criminal penalties for “incidental” migratory bird deaths that came in the course of normal business, administration officials advised. Such conservation measures were now “purely voluntary.”
The state ended its island planning.
The island is one of dozens of bird-preservation efforts that have fallen away in the wake of the policy change in 2017 that was billed merely as a technical clarification to a century-old law protecting migratory birds. Across the country birds have been killed and nests destroyed by oil spills, construction crews and chemical contamination, all with no response from the federal government, according to emails, memos and other documents viewed by The New York Times. Not only has the administration stopped investigating most bird deaths, the documents show, it has discouraged local governments and businesses from taking precautionary measures to protect birds. (...)The revised policy — part of the administration’s broader effort to encourage business activity — has been a particular favorite of the president, whose selective view of avian welfare has ranged from complaining that wind energy “kills all the birds” to asserting that the oil industry has been subject to “totalitarian tactics” under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918.
Habitat loss and pesticide exposure already have brought on widespread bird-species declines. The number of adult breeding birds in the United States and Canada has plummeted by 2.9 billion since 1970.
Now, said Noah Greenwald, the endangered species director for the Center for Biological Diversity, the Trump administration has engineered “a fundamental shift” in policy that “lets industrial companies, utilities and others completely off the hook.” Even a disaster like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010, which killed or injured about a million birds, would not expose a company to prosecution or fines.
Gavin Shire, a spokesman for the Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency responsible for protecting migratory birds, said in a statement that other federal laws like the Endangered Species Act remain on the books. The Trump administration, he said, “will continue to work cooperatively with our industry partners to minimize impacts on migratory birds.”
The documents tell a different story. In nearly two dozen incidents across 15 states, internal conversations among Fish and Wildlife Service officers indicate that, short of going out to shoot birds, activities in which birds die no longer merit action. In some cases the Trump administration has even discouraged local governments and businesses from taking relatively simple steps to protect birds, like reporting fatalities when they are found.
“You get the sense this policy is not only bad for birds, it’s also cruel,” Mr. Greenwald said.
by Lisa Friedman, NY Times | Read more:
Image:Robert F. Bukaty/Associated Press
[ed. Wouldn't it be nice to wake up in the morning and not have some new outrage coming out of Washington? It's hard to imagine. This administration, with near total Republican support, is systematically trashing everything that makes life worth living (and enjoying it). See also: The Migratory Bird Treaty Act, Explained (Audubon).]
Monday, December 23, 2019
Costco Private-Label Wines
Image: Greg Gilbert/The Seattle Times
Higher Ed on Autopilot
What if university executives manage to keep the status quo? Does higher ed stay on an even keel — steadily less loved and less funded, but still generating good volumes of decent credentials for people who will then mostly earn enough money to pay off their loans? The stoic demographer Nathan D. Grawe has written a book with a surprising answer. He takes no policy position, and I can picture him cringing at my impatient shorthanding of the current consensus. But his analysis rings an alarm that will sound very loud even to those with their fingers in their ears.
The consensus among today’s senior academic managers is that the most progressive ideas for universities must be defeated. Large-scale student debt relief? This college president opposes it. Free college at four-year institutions? This president opposes it. Divest the endowment from fossil fuel companies? This president opposes it. Eliminate special admissions for wealthy students? This president opposes it. On the other hand, hide a donation from an influential convicted pedophile? This president allows it. Reject a public university partnership with a for-profit diploma mill? This president created it. But make a trillion-dollar reinvestment in public universities? Where’s the president who has come out in favor of it?
In taking these stands, the presidents are setting themselves against public opinion. When a recent poll asked people if they support proposals to make “two and four year public and tribal colleges and universities tuition-free and debt-free and erase the roughly $1.6 trillion in student loan debt currently owed by close to 45 million Americans,” the answer was yes, 58 to 42 percent. This majority is important because the price tag of $2.2 trillion over 10 years was included in the question, and the policy won anyway. Seventy-two percent of Democrats favored the idea (which is good news for the presidential campaigns of its proposers, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren); so did 58 percent of independents. In another poll, four-fifths of the public want federal and state governments to spend more money on higher education. College presidents are in danger of repeating their predecessors’ opposition to the 1944 GI Bill that built the modern public university system, such as University of Chicago’s president Robert Maynard Hutchins warning about “educational hoboes” who would burden colleges by living and studying at government expense.
Still, major reinvestment won’t happen if it faces opposition from higher-ed leadership en masse. Given the plans of Sanders, Warren, and others, the country might naturally ask the college presidents: if you say we can’t have zero tuition, or at least much lower tuition, or can’t end student debt, or can’t dial way back on private fundraising, or can’t greatly increase public funding, what can we do?
Higher ed’s Plan A is “you can have what you have now.” Meanwhile, its leaders will wait for free college and debt relief to die a political death while supporting more accountability metrics, simpler financial aid forms, higher income-eligibility thresholds, and calls for the next Secretary of Education to go back to prosecuting predatory for-profits. We are to have a set of dull yet virtuous tweaks, which add up, sort of. We would naturally assume that things at least won’t get worse — that graduation rates, debt levels, and racial imbalances would stay pretty much as they are now, which is mediocre by international standards, very unequal by race and income, yet mediocre and unequal in a settled, familiar way.
Enter Nathan Grawe, who has done the work to show us how wrong we are. He has built a Higher Education Demand Index (HEDI) to model the next 10 years, based on existing patterns. He looks at trends by region, by race and ethnicity, and by type of university, among other factors, so that he can avoid the banality of averages that wash out specific, intensive effects. He assumes that current patterns will stay unchanged, which is reasonable given the entrenched policy complacency within the sector itself. This is what he projects:
In addition, the highest population growth “is concentrated in populations that aren’t likely to attend a regional four-year school.” This is in part because the chances of a high school student finishing college are shockingly dependent on having parents that went to college, and regions with high rates of immigration or poverty are likely to have high shares of what would be first-generation college students — except they are less likely to attend. Polls at least in California suggest that Latinx parents have very high expectations for their children’s college attendance (closer to Asian Americans than to the lower white levels), but translating these desires into completion is easier said than done.
A third issue is that colleges aren’t going to get another major boost to enrollment from women entering the workforce or from “knowledge economy” demand for college graduates (driven by “skill-based technical change”). The former boost was a one-time event, though it will continue on the margins; the latter seems to have stalled and may be going into reverse, given the offshoring of so much medium- and even high-skill work — not to mention expanding automation.
Based on the current autopilot, Grawe’s model yields the following. The two-year colleges that both parties present as the hope of the working classes will experience “dramatically reduced enrollments” — down 15 percent over the decade in some places. In Grawe’s graveside deadpan, “the HEDI anticipates that enrollments among-non-Hispanic whites and non-Hispanic blacks will plummet by 20 and 30 percent, respectively, while the number of Hispanic students is expected to grow by 10 percent.”
Regional four-year colleges should benefit from the decline of two-year enrollments, shouldn’t they? Actually, no. After some mid-2020s growth, birth-death contraction will set in, and four-year numbers will also drop everywhere except in the Pacific region, where over 10 years they will grow by less than one percent.
Grawe’s model forecasts widespread under-enrollment that will produce fiscal crises at many colleges in many regions at once. We should expect systemic stress and turmoil, which would include cascading college closures of the kind threatened at Hampshire College and already occurring elsewhere. Closures will be worse in the Snow Belt/Rust Belt but not confined there. Many endangered colleges will struggle to stay open by cutting payrolls, which is likely to mean staff and faculty layoffs. Colleges may try to avoid layoffs with further adjunctification of the teaching force — or may combine layoffs with adjunctification, sometimes with the same professors (“We have to deny you tenure, but we’ll be happy rehire you on a three-year contract”). Grawe projects a loss of 8,000 faculty positions at two-year colleges and a further 9,000 positions lost at regional four-year schools.
It’s hard to imagine this fading higher-ed sector having the power to uplift or transform society. It will keep cutting educational spending to keep some money in the bank. Enrollment and revenue losses will particularly affect the poorer colleges that provide the most social mobility. State government’s core interest, job readiness, will also be hit: “[U]nless something changes, we should not expect to meet goals for a more highly trained workforce.” This will tempt state government to cut again. (...)
Autopilot plus the smaller youth cohort isn’t a falling tide that lowers all boats. Boats will float and sink according to familiar patterns, only more so. Students with college-educated parents and high-income students will know where to apply and what to do to get in, as they do now. But they will be chased by elite colleges with relatively more available slots than they have now. Fewer of these students who can pay full tuition will go to regional public colleges, worsening both their finances and their academic levels. Educational gaps among graduates will increase: students with college-educated parents go to regional colleges at twice the rate of first-generation students, and at six times the rate at “national and elite” schools. In short, Grawe writes, “Overall attendance rates will lag behind projections for our economy’s needs, and large gaps across groups will persist or even grow.” All we need to do to get this less educated and more unequal world is to stay the course.
The consensus among today’s senior academic managers is that the most progressive ideas for universities must be defeated. Large-scale student debt relief? This college president opposes it. Free college at four-year institutions? This president opposes it. Divest the endowment from fossil fuel companies? This president opposes it. Eliminate special admissions for wealthy students? This president opposes it. On the other hand, hide a donation from an influential convicted pedophile? This president allows it. Reject a public university partnership with a for-profit diploma mill? This president created it. But make a trillion-dollar reinvestment in public universities? Where’s the president who has come out in favor of it?
In taking these stands, the presidents are setting themselves against public opinion. When a recent poll asked people if they support proposals to make “two and four year public and tribal colleges and universities tuition-free and debt-free and erase the roughly $1.6 trillion in student loan debt currently owed by close to 45 million Americans,” the answer was yes, 58 to 42 percent. This majority is important because the price tag of $2.2 trillion over 10 years was included in the question, and the policy won anyway. Seventy-two percent of Democrats favored the idea (which is good news for the presidential campaigns of its proposers, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren); so did 58 percent of independents. In another poll, four-fifths of the public want federal and state governments to spend more money on higher education. College presidents are in danger of repeating their predecessors’ opposition to the 1944 GI Bill that built the modern public university system, such as University of Chicago’s president Robert Maynard Hutchins warning about “educational hoboes” who would burden colleges by living and studying at government expense.Still, major reinvestment won’t happen if it faces opposition from higher-ed leadership en masse. Given the plans of Sanders, Warren, and others, the country might naturally ask the college presidents: if you say we can’t have zero tuition, or at least much lower tuition, or can’t end student debt, or can’t dial way back on private fundraising, or can’t greatly increase public funding, what can we do?
Higher ed’s Plan A is “you can have what you have now.” Meanwhile, its leaders will wait for free college and debt relief to die a political death while supporting more accountability metrics, simpler financial aid forms, higher income-eligibility thresholds, and calls for the next Secretary of Education to go back to prosecuting predatory for-profits. We are to have a set of dull yet virtuous tweaks, which add up, sort of. We would naturally assume that things at least won’t get worse — that graduation rates, debt levels, and racial imbalances would stay pretty much as they are now, which is mediocre by international standards, very unequal by race and income, yet mediocre and unequal in a settled, familiar way.
Enter Nathan Grawe, who has done the work to show us how wrong we are. He has built a Higher Education Demand Index (HEDI) to model the next 10 years, based on existing patterns. He looks at trends by region, by race and ethnicity, and by type of university, among other factors, so that he can avoid the banality of averages that wash out specific, intensive effects. He assumes that current patterns will stay unchanged, which is reasonable given the entrenched policy complacency within the sector itself. This is what he projects:
The US population will continue to shift from snowbelt to sunbelt — from Northeast and Midwest to West, Southwest, and South. The populations in the faster-growing areas will also tend to have a higher birth rate than the national average. The shift won’t in itself be a big deal for overall college completion — the students who don’t go to college in Massachusetts would in theory be graduating in Arizona, so there would be no overall loss.But there are complications. “The nation’s total fertility rate has plummeted by more than 12 percent since 2007. And so, beginning in 2026 the number of native-born children reaching college age will begin a rapid decline.” Birth rates hit bottom in 2013, but there has been no meaningful recovery.
In addition, the highest population growth “is concentrated in populations that aren’t likely to attend a regional four-year school.” This is in part because the chances of a high school student finishing college are shockingly dependent on having parents that went to college, and regions with high rates of immigration or poverty are likely to have high shares of what would be first-generation college students — except they are less likely to attend. Polls at least in California suggest that Latinx parents have very high expectations for their children’s college attendance (closer to Asian Americans than to the lower white levels), but translating these desires into completion is easier said than done.
A third issue is that colleges aren’t going to get another major boost to enrollment from women entering the workforce or from “knowledge economy” demand for college graduates (driven by “skill-based technical change”). The former boost was a one-time event, though it will continue on the margins; the latter seems to have stalled and may be going into reverse, given the offshoring of so much medium- and even high-skill work — not to mention expanding automation.
Based on the current autopilot, Grawe’s model yields the following. The two-year colleges that both parties present as the hope of the working classes will experience “dramatically reduced enrollments” — down 15 percent over the decade in some places. In Grawe’s graveside deadpan, “the HEDI anticipates that enrollments among-non-Hispanic whites and non-Hispanic blacks will plummet by 20 and 30 percent, respectively, while the number of Hispanic students is expected to grow by 10 percent.”
Regional four-year colleges should benefit from the decline of two-year enrollments, shouldn’t they? Actually, no. After some mid-2020s growth, birth-death contraction will set in, and four-year numbers will also drop everywhere except in the Pacific region, where over 10 years they will grow by less than one percent.
Grawe’s model forecasts widespread under-enrollment that will produce fiscal crises at many colleges in many regions at once. We should expect systemic stress and turmoil, which would include cascading college closures of the kind threatened at Hampshire College and already occurring elsewhere. Closures will be worse in the Snow Belt/Rust Belt but not confined there. Many endangered colleges will struggle to stay open by cutting payrolls, which is likely to mean staff and faculty layoffs. Colleges may try to avoid layoffs with further adjunctification of the teaching force — or may combine layoffs with adjunctification, sometimes with the same professors (“We have to deny you tenure, but we’ll be happy rehire you on a three-year contract”). Grawe projects a loss of 8,000 faculty positions at two-year colleges and a further 9,000 positions lost at regional four-year schools.
It’s hard to imagine this fading higher-ed sector having the power to uplift or transform society. It will keep cutting educational spending to keep some money in the bank. Enrollment and revenue losses will particularly affect the poorer colleges that provide the most social mobility. State government’s core interest, job readiness, will also be hit: “[U]nless something changes, we should not expect to meet goals for a more highly trained workforce.” This will tempt state government to cut again. (...)
Autopilot plus the smaller youth cohort isn’t a falling tide that lowers all boats. Boats will float and sink according to familiar patterns, only more so. Students with college-educated parents and high-income students will know where to apply and what to do to get in, as they do now. But they will be chased by elite colleges with relatively more available slots than they have now. Fewer of these students who can pay full tuition will go to regional public colleges, worsening both their finances and their academic levels. Educational gaps among graduates will increase: students with college-educated parents go to regional colleges at twice the rate of first-generation students, and at six times the rate at “national and elite” schools. In short, Grawe writes, “Overall attendance rates will lag behind projections for our economy’s needs, and large gaps across groups will persist or even grow.” All we need to do to get this less educated and more unequal world is to stay the course.
Sunday, December 22, 2019
Rewriting the Book of Love
WHY DO WE fall in love?
It’s a tough question. Evolutionary biologists say that it’s due to our hardwired instinct to propagate the species. But that answer, quite aside from its tendentious heteronormativity, fails to address the real question: why do we fall in love with this person, out of all the people in the world? Plato says we fall in love because we perceive beauty in the beloved, which inspires us with a desire for that greater, absolute Beauty of which it is an image. But again, this leaves open the question of why one beautiful person in particular should be the focus of intense love and desire, while others are merely objects of admiration. It also raises what philosophers have come to call the “trading up problem”: if I love you because of some combination of virtues you possess, then, logically, I should transfer my affection if I find someone who possesses the same virtues to an even greater degree. Yet that scenario seems neither ethical nor true to experience; I don’t love another child more than my own, even if I objectively perceive them to be more virtuous. These difficulties have led many philosophers of love to leave out the question of “why” altogether, and focus instead on what happens once the thunderbolt, or Cupid’s arrow, has already struck. As for the source of the emotion, they are willing to throw up their hands and say, with Michel de Montaigne: “If you press me to tell you why I loved him, I feel this cannot be expressed, except by answering: ‘Because it was he, because it was I.’”
That answer doesn’t satisfy Simon May. His new book seeks to define exactly what it is about a person, or a thing, that inspires love. According to May, love is our joyful response to whatever holds out the promise of what he calls “ontological rootedness” — whatever, in other words, seems to offer us “a home in a world that we supremely value.” Whether you love God, your parents, your country, or someone you have just met, you love them for their ability — or potential — to give your life the grounding it innately craves. May specifies four qualities of the beloved that contribute to that sense of rootedness: an origin or heritage with which we can identify; an ethics to which we aspire; a power to intensify (or even, at the limit, to grant or deny) our existence; and a calling toward a new life or destiny. When we meet with the being who encompasses all these things, we experience the unmistakable symptoms of love. (...)
The trouble, as May sees it, is as follows. Our current conception of love is based on the model of Christian agape: love that is disinterested, unchanging, affirming of all aspects of the beloved, and above all unconditional. But there are two problems with that model. First, that understanding of agape is a comparatively recent development, one that is at odds both with Scripture and with most of the history of Christian thought, which has usually viewed God’s love as very much conditional, partial, and judgmental. Second, even to the extent that we do find elements of such idealized, selfless love in early Christian thought, it is only God who is conceived as being able to love in this manner. Gradually, however, theologians began to assert that humans too — with the help of God’s grace — were capable of such love. Eventually, the notion of grace faded away, with the result that human love is now generally conceived, by philosophers and by popular culture alike, in divine terms that it can never possibly realize. May finds this misconception not only frustratingly illogical but deeply pernicious.
In claiming that the common understanding of love today is not just wrong but even slightly insane, May strongly calls to mind the 20th-century Swiss thinker Denis de Rougemont. Like May, de Rougemont traces an errant history of love in which Christianity is the culprit. According to his influential, if controversial, treatise, Love in the Western World (1940), Christianity, including Christian agape, represents an unnatural imposition on Western culture, which well into the Middle Ages remained essentially pagan — specifically Manichaean — in spirit. The result of this incompatibility was the exaltation of passionate love into a religion, begun in the 12th century by Provençal troubadours as a means of reconciling pagan and Christian, body and spirit. But this solution merely papers over a deep, heretical, and irreconcilable division. Love as we currently understand and experience it, therefore, is utterly mistaken, a failed ruse. As de Rougemont puts it in a later essay (with reference to the idea of marrying for love, one of his most frequent objects of criticism): “We are in the act of trying out — and failing miserably at it — one of the most pathological experiments that a civilized society has ever imagined.”
Only occasionally does May indulge in such pointed provocations (such as when he refers to “the disaster that love has suffered in the West for roughly the last two centuries”). But his willingness to expound a thesis that, like de Rougemont’s, really does break with so much received wisdom allows him to provide genuinely new insights into what is, as he notes, an ancient topic. Among other advantages, the idea that love is inspired by the promise of ontological rootedness permits May to group together forms of love that are often treated as distinct or even incompatible: not just love for God, family, lover, and friend, but also love for a great work of art, or for an institution (your alma mater, for instance), or for a natural landscape — all of which can offer the same sense of an exalted home as human relationships. May’s theory extends as well to the love so often felt for tyrants and dictators, which he reads not as perverse, or even misdirected, but as perfectly continuous with other instances of love.
It’s a tough question. Evolutionary biologists say that it’s due to our hardwired instinct to propagate the species. But that answer, quite aside from its tendentious heteronormativity, fails to address the real question: why do we fall in love with this person, out of all the people in the world? Plato says we fall in love because we perceive beauty in the beloved, which inspires us with a desire for that greater, absolute Beauty of which it is an image. But again, this leaves open the question of why one beautiful person in particular should be the focus of intense love and desire, while others are merely objects of admiration. It also raises what philosophers have come to call the “trading up problem”: if I love you because of some combination of virtues you possess, then, logically, I should transfer my affection if I find someone who possesses the same virtues to an even greater degree. Yet that scenario seems neither ethical nor true to experience; I don’t love another child more than my own, even if I objectively perceive them to be more virtuous. These difficulties have led many philosophers of love to leave out the question of “why” altogether, and focus instead on what happens once the thunderbolt, or Cupid’s arrow, has already struck. As for the source of the emotion, they are willing to throw up their hands and say, with Michel de Montaigne: “If you press me to tell you why I loved him, I feel this cannot be expressed, except by answering: ‘Because it was he, because it was I.’”
That answer doesn’t satisfy Simon May. His new book seeks to define exactly what it is about a person, or a thing, that inspires love. According to May, love is our joyful response to whatever holds out the promise of what he calls “ontological rootedness” — whatever, in other words, seems to offer us “a home in a world that we supremely value.” Whether you love God, your parents, your country, or someone you have just met, you love them for their ability — or potential — to give your life the grounding it innately craves. May specifies four qualities of the beloved that contribute to that sense of rootedness: an origin or heritage with which we can identify; an ethics to which we aspire; a power to intensify (or even, at the limit, to grant or deny) our existence; and a calling toward a new life or destiny. When we meet with the being who encompasses all these things, we experience the unmistakable symptoms of love. (...)The trouble, as May sees it, is as follows. Our current conception of love is based on the model of Christian agape: love that is disinterested, unchanging, affirming of all aspects of the beloved, and above all unconditional. But there are two problems with that model. First, that understanding of agape is a comparatively recent development, one that is at odds both with Scripture and with most of the history of Christian thought, which has usually viewed God’s love as very much conditional, partial, and judgmental. Second, even to the extent that we do find elements of such idealized, selfless love in early Christian thought, it is only God who is conceived as being able to love in this manner. Gradually, however, theologians began to assert that humans too — with the help of God’s grace — were capable of such love. Eventually, the notion of grace faded away, with the result that human love is now generally conceived, by philosophers and by popular culture alike, in divine terms that it can never possibly realize. May finds this misconception not only frustratingly illogical but deeply pernicious.
In claiming that the common understanding of love today is not just wrong but even slightly insane, May strongly calls to mind the 20th-century Swiss thinker Denis de Rougemont. Like May, de Rougemont traces an errant history of love in which Christianity is the culprit. According to his influential, if controversial, treatise, Love in the Western World (1940), Christianity, including Christian agape, represents an unnatural imposition on Western culture, which well into the Middle Ages remained essentially pagan — specifically Manichaean — in spirit. The result of this incompatibility was the exaltation of passionate love into a religion, begun in the 12th century by Provençal troubadours as a means of reconciling pagan and Christian, body and spirit. But this solution merely papers over a deep, heretical, and irreconcilable division. Love as we currently understand and experience it, therefore, is utterly mistaken, a failed ruse. As de Rougemont puts it in a later essay (with reference to the idea of marrying for love, one of his most frequent objects of criticism): “We are in the act of trying out — and failing miserably at it — one of the most pathological experiments that a civilized society has ever imagined.”
Only occasionally does May indulge in such pointed provocations (such as when he refers to “the disaster that love has suffered in the West for roughly the last two centuries”). But his willingness to expound a thesis that, like de Rougemont’s, really does break with so much received wisdom allows him to provide genuinely new insights into what is, as he notes, an ancient topic. Among other advantages, the idea that love is inspired by the promise of ontological rootedness permits May to group together forms of love that are often treated as distinct or even incompatible: not just love for God, family, lover, and friend, but also love for a great work of art, or for an institution (your alma mater, for instance), or for a natural landscape — all of which can offer the same sense of an exalted home as human relationships. May’s theory extends as well to the love so often felt for tyrants and dictators, which he reads not as perverse, or even misdirected, but as perfectly continuous with other instances of love.
"Best of 2019" Book Lists
For the twelfth straight year, I am aggregating every online year-end book list I find in this post. As the lists appear online, I will add them to this master list, updating daily.
Please feel free to e-mail me with a blog, magazine, newspaper, or other online list I have missed.
Daily updates to the master list of online "best books of 2019" lists.
Online "Best of 2019" Book Lists:
100 Scope Notes (best children's books)
The A.V. Club (favorite books)
Abby Likes To Read (favorite books)
Adam Rippon (favorite books)
Adventures of Cometgrrl (best books)
The Advocate (favorite books)
Affable Ambitions (top audiobooks)
Air & Space (best aviation- and space-themed books for young readers)
Akala (top books)
Ali Wong (favorite books)
Alliance of Independent Authors (favorite authors)
AllRecipes (cookbooks)
Almost Anthropology (favorite books)
Alta (contributors' favorite books)
AltPress (top music-related books)
Amazon (best biographies and memoirs)
Amazon (best books)
Amazon (best books for babies through age 2)
Amazon (best books for children ages 3-5)
Amazon (best books for children ages 6-8)
Amazon (best books for children ages 9-12)
Amazon (best business and leadership books)
Amazon (best children's books)
Amazon (best children's action and adventure books)
Amazon (best children's activity books)
Amazon (best children's African-American story books)
Amazon (best children's humor books)
Amazon (best children's nonfiction)
Amazon (best cooking, food, and wine books)
Amazon (best history books)
Amazon (best literature and fiction)
Amazon (best mysteries and thrillers)
Amazon (best nonfiction)
Amazon (best romance books)
Amazon (best science books)
Amazon (best science fiction and fantasy)
Amazon (best teen and young adult books)
Amazon (editors' gift picks)
American Indians in Children's Literature (best books)
Andrea Scher (best books)
Ani DiFranco (favorite books)
Antoni Porowski (favorite books)
Anxious Bench (favorite books)
Atlantic (best cookbooks)
The Australian (best books)
Autostraddle (best queer books) (...)
by David Gutowski, Book Post | Read more:
[ed. And that's just the 'A's'.]
Please feel free to e-mail me with a blog, magazine, newspaper, or other online list I have missed.
Daily updates to the master list of online "best books of 2019" lists.
Online "Best of 2019" Book Lists:
100 Scope Notes (best children's books)
The A.V. Club (favorite books)
Abby Likes To Read (favorite books)
Adam Rippon (favorite books)Adventures of Cometgrrl (best books)
The Advocate (favorite books)
Affable Ambitions (top audiobooks)
Air & Space (best aviation- and space-themed books for young readers)
Akala (top books)
Ali Wong (favorite books)
Alliance of Independent Authors (favorite authors)
AllRecipes (cookbooks)
Almost Anthropology (favorite books)
Alta (contributors' favorite books)
AltPress (top music-related books)
Amazon (best biographies and memoirs)
Amazon (best books)
Amazon (best books for babies through age 2)
Amazon (best books for children ages 3-5)
Amazon (best books for children ages 6-8)
Amazon (best books for children ages 9-12)
Amazon (best business and leadership books)
Amazon (best children's books)
Amazon (best children's action and adventure books)
Amazon (best children's activity books)
Amazon (best children's African-American story books)
Amazon (best children's humor books)
Amazon (best children's nonfiction)
Amazon (best cooking, food, and wine books)
Amazon (best history books)
Amazon (best literature and fiction)
Amazon (best mysteries and thrillers)
Amazon (best nonfiction)
Amazon (best romance books)
Amazon (best science books)
Amazon (best science fiction and fantasy)
Amazon (best teen and young adult books)
Amazon (editors' gift picks)
American Indians in Children's Literature (best books)
Andrea Scher (best books)
Ani DiFranco (favorite books)
Antoni Porowski (favorite books)
Anxious Bench (favorite books)
Atlantic (best cookbooks)
The Australian (best books)
Autostraddle (best queer books) (...)
[ed. And that's just the 'A's'.]
Pat Metheny
[ed. Pat's new album From This Place coming out Feb. 2020. Pre-release track (America Undefined here).
Speak My Language
To an almost shocking extent, NFL offenses are homogeneous. Given that every NFL team is in, roughly speaking, the same circumstances in terms of money, resources, practice time, and facilities, this homogeneity makes some sense. After all, “football’s always football,” as newly minted San Diego Chargers head coach Mike McCoy recently said. “Everyone’s running the same plays, and it’s a matter of some running one concept more than another team is. It all boils down to the same thing.”
There are essentially three main offensive “systems” in the NFL: West Coast, Coryell, and Erhardt-Perkins. Given that every NFL team runs basically the same plays, each of these NFL offensive families is differentiated mostly by how those plays are communicated.
To oversimplify, the West Coast offense, made famous by Bill Walsh and still the most popular system in the NFL, uses what is essentially a memory system. On running plays, the same two-digit numbering system as most NFL and college teams is used. Passing plays, however, are typically denoted by the primary receiver’s route, such as Z-In, X-Hook, while the rest of the players are required to memorize their tasks. This system is as old as football itself, which is no surprise given that Walsh’s onetime mentor Paul Brown is credited as much as anyone with inventing the modern conception of huddles, game plans, and play calls. For more than 20 years, this system has been the dominant one in the NFL.
The Coryell system, named after former San Diego Chargers head coach Don Coryell and used by coaches such as Norv Turner, Ernie Zampese, and Mike Martz, is built around the concept of a route tree. Many teams use a route tree (which is the idea that the base route is straight up the field, and the other routes consist of break points off that original path), but the Coryell system uses the tree as the foundation of its play-calling system. For example, the Troy Aikman–era Dallas Cowboys frequently called a play called “896,” which told one outside receiver to run a square-in route (“6”), the tight end to run a seam straight up the field (“9”), and the split end to run a skinny post (“8”). The idea was that, using the route tree, a coach could effectively call any pass combination and all a receiver had to know was the number associated with his route.
In recent years, as offenses and defenses have grown more complex, these systems have started crumbling under their own weight. With multiple formations and personnel groupings, calls that began as “22 Z-In” have gotten unwieldy.
In the Coryell system, the elegance of the three-digit route-tree system has been rendered almost entirely obsolete. Because NFL teams operate predominantly in one-back formations, there are often more than three players running routes, and calling any pass play means having to use both numbers and words (“896 H-Shallow F-Curl”). More critically, the numerical route-tree system gives coaches and players flexibility where they don’t need it and not enough where they do. The “benefit” of a route-tree system is the ability to call any passing concept a coach could dream up, but that option is of very little use. Assuming the route tree has 10 routes (0-9), a three-digit tree gives an offense 59,049 different possible route combinations. That’s absurd. And yet, the route tree by definition only has 10 possible routes, much fewer than any NFL team actually runs. This means that any other route must be called by name, thus defeating the very purpose of having a route tree.
This effectively makes the Coryell system sound a lot like current West Coast offense play calls,1 which have no organizing principle and have morphed into monstrosities like “Scatter-Two Bunch-Right-Zip-Fire 2 Jet Texas Right-F Flat X-Q.” The advantage of a play call like this is that it informs a player of his job better than other systems do. The disadvantage is that it’s excessively clunky, and plays that are conceptually the same can have wildly different calls.
New England’s offense is a member of the NFL’s third offensive family, the Erhardt-Perkins system. The offense was named after the two men, Ron Erhardt and Ray Perkins, who developed it while working for the Patriots under head coach Chuck Fairbanks in the 1970s. According to Perkins, it was assembled in the same way most such systems are developed. “I don’t look at it as us inventing it,” he explained. “I look at it as a bunch of coaches sitting in rooms late at night organizing and getting things together to help players be successful.”
The backbone of the Erhardt-Perkins system is that plays — pass plays in particular — are not organized by a route tree or by calling a single receiver’s route, but by what coaches refer to as “concepts.” Each play has a name, and that name conjures up an image for both the quarterback and the other players on offense. And, most importantly, the concept can be called from almost any formation or set. Who does what changes, but the theory and tactics driving the play do not. “In essence, you’re running the same play,” said Perkins. “You’re just giving them some window-dressing to make it look different.”
The biggest advantage of the concept-based system is that it operates from the perspective of the most critical player on offense: the quarterback. In other systems, even if the underlying principles are the exact same, the play and its name might be very different. Rather than juggling all this information in real time, an Erhardt-Perkins quarterback only has to read a given arrangement of receivers. “You can cut down on the plays and get different looks from your formations and who’s in them. It’s easier for the players to learn. It’s easier for the quarterback to learn,” former Patriots offensive coordinator Charlie Weis said back in 2000. “You get different looks without changing his reads. You don’t need an open-ended number of plays.”
There are essentially three main offensive “systems” in the NFL: West Coast, Coryell, and Erhardt-Perkins. Given that every NFL team runs basically the same plays, each of these NFL offensive families is differentiated mostly by how those plays are communicated.
To oversimplify, the West Coast offense, made famous by Bill Walsh and still the most popular system in the NFL, uses what is essentially a memory system. On running plays, the same two-digit numbering system as most NFL and college teams is used. Passing plays, however, are typically denoted by the primary receiver’s route, such as Z-In, X-Hook, while the rest of the players are required to memorize their tasks. This system is as old as football itself, which is no surprise given that Walsh’s onetime mentor Paul Brown is credited as much as anyone with inventing the modern conception of huddles, game plans, and play calls. For more than 20 years, this system has been the dominant one in the NFL.The Coryell system, named after former San Diego Chargers head coach Don Coryell and used by coaches such as Norv Turner, Ernie Zampese, and Mike Martz, is built around the concept of a route tree. Many teams use a route tree (which is the idea that the base route is straight up the field, and the other routes consist of break points off that original path), but the Coryell system uses the tree as the foundation of its play-calling system. For example, the Troy Aikman–era Dallas Cowboys frequently called a play called “896,” which told one outside receiver to run a square-in route (“6”), the tight end to run a seam straight up the field (“9”), and the split end to run a skinny post (“8”). The idea was that, using the route tree, a coach could effectively call any pass combination and all a receiver had to know was the number associated with his route.
In recent years, as offenses and defenses have grown more complex, these systems have started crumbling under their own weight. With multiple formations and personnel groupings, calls that began as “22 Z-In” have gotten unwieldy.
In the Coryell system, the elegance of the three-digit route-tree system has been rendered almost entirely obsolete. Because NFL teams operate predominantly in one-back formations, there are often more than three players running routes, and calling any pass play means having to use both numbers and words (“896 H-Shallow F-Curl”). More critically, the numerical route-tree system gives coaches and players flexibility where they don’t need it and not enough where they do. The “benefit” of a route-tree system is the ability to call any passing concept a coach could dream up, but that option is of very little use. Assuming the route tree has 10 routes (0-9), a three-digit tree gives an offense 59,049 different possible route combinations. That’s absurd. And yet, the route tree by definition only has 10 possible routes, much fewer than any NFL team actually runs. This means that any other route must be called by name, thus defeating the very purpose of having a route tree.
This effectively makes the Coryell system sound a lot like current West Coast offense play calls,1 which have no organizing principle and have morphed into monstrosities like “Scatter-Two Bunch-Right-Zip-Fire 2 Jet Texas Right-F Flat X-Q.” The advantage of a play call like this is that it informs a player of his job better than other systems do. The disadvantage is that it’s excessively clunky, and plays that are conceptually the same can have wildly different calls.
New England’s offense is a member of the NFL’s third offensive family, the Erhardt-Perkins system. The offense was named after the two men, Ron Erhardt and Ray Perkins, who developed it while working for the Patriots under head coach Chuck Fairbanks in the 1970s. According to Perkins, it was assembled in the same way most such systems are developed. “I don’t look at it as us inventing it,” he explained. “I look at it as a bunch of coaches sitting in rooms late at night organizing and getting things together to help players be successful.”
The backbone of the Erhardt-Perkins system is that plays — pass plays in particular — are not organized by a route tree or by calling a single receiver’s route, but by what coaches refer to as “concepts.” Each play has a name, and that name conjures up an image for both the quarterback and the other players on offense. And, most importantly, the concept can be called from almost any formation or set. Who does what changes, but the theory and tactics driving the play do not. “In essence, you’re running the same play,” said Perkins. “You’re just giving them some window-dressing to make it look different.”
The biggest advantage of the concept-based system is that it operates from the perspective of the most critical player on offense: the quarterback. In other systems, even if the underlying principles are the exact same, the play and its name might be very different. Rather than juggling all this information in real time, an Erhardt-Perkins quarterback only has to read a given arrangement of receivers. “You can cut down on the plays and get different looks from your formations and who’s in them. It’s easier for the players to learn. It’s easier for the quarterback to learn,” former Patriots offensive coordinator Charlie Weis said back in 2000. “You get different looks without changing his reads. You don’t need an open-ended number of plays.”
by Chris B. Brown, Grantland | Read more:
Image: Aaron M. Sprecher
[ed. A little dated (2103) but still relevant.]
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