Urbane Sprawl

In an earlier post I talked about the impending demise of print media and offered a probably not-incredibly-useful proposal for improving the quality of new hires into the industry.

Here’s another idea, which I’m convinced could actually add a revenue stream for circulation-lacking papers like The New York Times. And with the demise of The New York Sun this week just another in a long line of portents, it’s time for them to listen.

During a car ride to the city the other day, my cousin Jarema was talking about how she wished she could read the newspaper every day, but she didn’t have the time. And she described how, in addition to listening to music, she loves using her iPod to listen to audiobooks while she works (as a painter for an art collective). If only she could listen to the newspaper on her iPod!

Well, why can’t she?

The Times needs subscription revenue, but readers are flocking to the website instead. The paper tried a pay-for-view scheme for some web content, but with the abundance of free news online there’s no reason to pay.

Meanwhile, many people (like me) love the content from the Times but just can’t read every article. We like the actual paper for the variety, depth, and quality of its coverage. In contrast, the local and even national TV news and news radio lack this quality and depth, and lack the user-side control of clicking around on the Times Online.

Add to that the efficiency of using iPods for purposes other than music. For instance, I download History Channel documentaries and listen to them while I walk around.

So what’s the prescription? The Times should team up with Apple to offer a daily download of the paper, divided into tracks for each article. It shouldn’t be too difficult to have a few voice artists record the articles every night; use one artist for the dozen or so articles in each section — a Diane Sawyer type for International News; a Ray Romano sound-alike for Sports; for the Metro Section, Fran Drescher (she might be available for this, right?).

I don’t subscribe to the print version of the paper because I move around too much, it’s too bulky, and there’s not enough value added over the online version. But I’d subscribe to the audio downloadable paper for sure. Just as I get an email whenever there’s a new Mad Men episode available for download, I’d have an email in my inbox every morning with a one-click link to the audio of the day’s paper. A minute later, I’d have my iPod earbuds in, on my way to the elevator, hearing the day’s headline article read to me.

Maybe I’d skip articles on telecom mergers or soccer matches, but I’d get a much wider variety of news than when I click around the articles that pop out on me on the website.

Another benefit: people love to dissociate payment from their purchases — it adds utility. It’s why we convert money into chips when we go into a casino: we suffer the expense once and then we don’t have to think about it. Paying for a subscription to the Times on iTunes would be quick and painless, making us more likely to expend money we wouldn’t in increments of $1.50 over 365 days.

Bottom line: with minimal effort and expense, the paper can make a whole new generation into Times subscribers. By making our currently unproductive time productive — letting us hear the Times while walking the streets — they’ll add value to their reporting that makes it worthwhile for us to spend money on the news. New revenue abounds.

Update (10/1/08): So it turns out that a company called Audible, bought by Amazon in January for $300 million, offers an “Audio Digest” version of the Times for like $13/mo. So someone over at the Times is recording an abridged version of the paper every night. They’re just not making it easily available — nor marketing it aggressively — to the iPod generation. To get it, one has to go to audible.com and find it, then create an account, download it, and import to iTunes. And let’s face it: nothing with the word “Digest” in its name is being marketed to millennials. This Digest should be made a lot sexier and be made easily available through the iTunes Store. Of course, it’s also worth noting that you can subscribe to some New York Times podcasts, but nothing akin to what I describe above.

A train is barreling down the tracks at full speed, having lost control of its breaks. It will crash, killing all aboard, unless you, an onlooker, decide to push a nearby fat man onto the tracks. Defying physics, and perhaps political correctness, the fat man will stop the train in its path: only he will die, and the passengers will survive. Do you push him?

How about this: you are a pregnant movie star. The public demands the details of your baby’s delivery, naming, and appearance. They’ll hound you like hyenas till they have his or her image, which they’ll auction to the highest-bidding glossy. Do you beat them to punch, performing the auction yourself and donating the proceeds to charity, perhaps commodifying your child (thrusting them into, rather than protecting them from, the piranha-like public) but perhaps making some sort of good come out of the insatiable appetite for famous flesh?

The July 28 Slate cover story analyzed the optimal sales strategies of celebrities looking to sell snapshots of their infants, delving into the economics of celebrity baby photo deals. But what about the ethics of these deals?

There is an unexplored tension beneath the surface of the press about Shiloh and Suri, Knox and Vivienne: the ethical quandary of selling baby photos, even when giving the proceeds to charity.

The conundrum is reminiscent of most introductory ethics class thought experiments about pushing a fat man in front of a train to save the passengers on board. On the one hand is the Kantian view that some things — like selling photos of your child or pushing a man in front of a train — are simply wrong in themselves, and should not be done no matter the upside. On the other is the utilitarian view that what matters is the net good done by an action — saving a trainload of people with the loss of just one man, saving African children with the loss of just one child’s privacy.

Views about celebrity baby photo deals line up along these lines:

The utilitarian side gets support from the Freakanomics blog on the New York Times website, which called the Jolie-Pitts’ approach to Shiloh’s photos a “creative application in incentives” in their “distributing the pictures themselves and donating the proceeds to charity, thereby thwarting the paparazzi free market and potentially setting a new model for future celebrity photo ops.”

On the Kantian side, there are the reports from the Syndney Morning Herald that Nicole Kidman and husband Keith Urban said, after the July birth of their baby Sunday Rose, “They don’t think it’s appropriate to make deals. They are still deciding how they feel about [it] — if and when they will release a photo at all.”

And, Gawker compiled a list in praise of the “Sort of Heroes” who “wouldn’t sell pictures of their kids”:

Babies! Famous people have been having them! And then they also sell photographs of the babies because, in some twisted Dina Lohanian world of logic, selling the photos of the babies somehow mitigates the other paparazzi attention the little squirming things would inevitably receive. It’s a highwire act of faux inferential reasoning, but it seems to be popular.

What stands out most, though, is the lack of certainty in the voices that — like students taking sides in Ethics 101 — frame their points of view with qualifications like “still deciding” and “sort of.” Is selling celebrity baby photos and giving the money to charity a praiseworthy way to turn paparazzi photolust into a moral good? Or is it an unethical commodification of one’s baby, inexcusable no matter the good ends that come out of it? The answer’s as muddy as the question of pushing the fat man in front of the train.

Meanwhile, these questions offer a clear path to punching up Ethics 101: instead of asking students to place themselves in the bodies of bystanders to a runaway train, let’s ask them to imagine themselves in the bodies of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.

An exciting potential natural experiment for the the Too Many Suitors Problem:

The current financial crisis is going to drastically affect the preferences of college seniors looking to go into investment banking and hedge funds. As those companies fail, these prospective workers will likely flock to consulting — a more stable and still incredibly lucrative area — in droves.

There is already evidence for this shift: a friend of mine who works at the Boston Consulting Group was at Harvard last week to do recruiting amongst the class of 2009. Not only did BCG see an incredible spike in attendance at their first recruiting event, but Bain (another firm with better student name-recognition) saw 700 people at their first event! (Remember that Harvard’s class size is about 1600.)

So, with extrinsic factors pushing many, many more applicants into the consulting labor pool, what will happen? Will, as conventional wisdom might lead us to predict, the consulting firms enjoy the much broader pool as giving them more great applicants to choose from?

Or, will the flood of applicants put a strain on recruiting, making companies like Bain more reliant on mechanisms like GPA cut-offs and shorter interviews to pick their incoming class — potentially working against the firms’ abilities to choose the best applicants?

Simply, will the tremendous increase in applicants lead to a worse incoming class of consultants, supporting the Too Many Suitors hypothesis? Time will tell.

Over the last few years, most mainstream doubt about the existence of climate change has been quelled — just think about Al Gore, Nobel Prize Laureate — and only the most strident of zealots resist the coalescing consensus that the activities of man are adversely affecting our environment.

As a result, I was surprised and intrigued to hear from a friend over dinner recently that her boyfriend — a Harvard business school student who holds numerous science degrees, including a master’s from Cambridge — is resistant to the forecasting that appears in major scientific publications like Science and Nature.

No one’s accusing these publications of being anything less than rigorously peer-reviewed bastions of scientific research, so why disbelieve them?

My friend said her boyfriend felt that lots of good, legitimate research is done on climate change, but the publications — and the media at large — focus on the extreme, the provocative, and so it’s the most pessimistic views that end up in their pages.

This makes perfect sense: the research on the rate and reach of climate change, even if it’s all done by good scientists using sound data-collection and analysis, is likely to result in findings that fall along a distribution. But while the truth of the matter is likely found in considering the distribution as a whole, the findings on the ends are going to be the ones that stick out to journal editors as the most interesting to prospective readers.

It’s a case of the classic economic phenomenon known as The Winner’s Curse.

Let’s say there’s an auction of a good with an objective but unknown value (think fields for oil drilling, not a painting that each prospective buyer will value differently). Each buyer will estimate the value differently. Maybe they’ll each hire someone to professionally survey and appraise the good. The real value is probably around the mean estimate, but it’s the buyer with the high estimate who will buy the good, thinking the others suckers for passing on such a valuable purchase. But that buyer will almost certainly have over-valued the good. In an auction like this, you don’t want to be the winner.

Similarly, science journals are buying the articles that most highly estimate the costs of climate change — but they might be overpaying.

Last week, New York ran a story by Boris Kachka about the impending demise of book publishing. It was called, depressingly, “The End.”

Lips are abuzz within the industry about the myriad forces that, like so many tribes looking to sack Rome, will weaken the centuries-old industry enough to banish print to the history books:

So what’s causing this, exactly—this inchoate dread that’s suddenly turned “choate,” as one insider puts it? The anxiety would be endurable if it was just a function of the late-Bush economy: Sales at the five big publishers were up 0.5 percent in the first half of this year, bookstore sales tanked in June, and a full-year decline is expected. But pretty much every aspect of the business seems to be in turmoil. There’s the floundering of the few remaining semi-independent midsize publishers; the ouster of two powerful CEOs—one who inspired editors and one who at least let them be; the desperate race to evolve into e-book producers; the dire state of Borders, the only real competitor to Barnes & Noble; the feeling that outrageous money is being wasted on mediocre books; and Amazon .com, which many publishers look upon as a power-hungry monster bent on cornering the whole business.

One by one, these would be difficult problems to solve. But as a series of interrelated challenges, they constitute a full-blown crisis—a climate change as unpredictable as it is inevitable. And like global warming, it elicits reactions ranging from denial to Darwinian survivalism to determined stabs at warding off disaster—attempts not to recapture some long-lost era but to harness new, untapped sources of power. That is, if it’s not too late.

The article got me thinking about one force that I think has been overlooked. And even if it has nothing to do with the end of print, it’s an idea that’s led to a broader pseudo-economic theory that I call The Too Many Suitors Problem.

The print media is an industry that enjoys a large surplus of aspirant labor. Even while book publishers and newspapers shrink, the number of doe-eyed Ivy League graduates who want to board those sinking ships is growing. We need only look to reports-cum-cautionary-tales like Doree Shafrir’s in the Observer, “Ivy League Slaves of New York,” to understand how competitive entry-level jobs are in this industry.

But while it may seem like a boon to have the best and the brightest at the disposal of Human Resources departments everywhere, I’d argue that this large surplus of labor is actually a detriment to the quality of the young blood coming into the industry — the young men and women who could conceivably bring print into this, our new millennium.

At first blush, this probably makes no sense: the quality of the new class of media types should be better if the hiring companies have a bigger pool to choose from. But let’s take a step back.

Imagine you are a heroine in a Jane Austen novel. You have two suitors to choose from, and a finite amount of resources (in this case, time before you become un-marriageable) to make your choice. At first you think one is an asshole and one is charming, but, after a little more time and a few stalled marriage proposals, you realize that the charming one is immoral and the asshole is actually the man of your dreams. (Spoiler: your name is Elizabeth Bennet.)

Now imagine the same scenario, but you have 200 suitors instead of two, and you still have the same few years before you’re labeled spinster. The mechanism you’d have to develop to choose between the suitors would be much cruder than originally — instead of getting to really know each suitor, you’d have to do thirty-second interviews with each one (like they do on the first episode of the Bachelorette each season). With the same amount of time, but with a surplus of 199 suitors instead of a surplus of 1, you might completely miss Darcy in the pack. Especially since he’d give a bad first impression.

And that’s the crux of my Too Many Suitors theory: at a certain point, a surplus of labor supply (for skilled labor) will lead to a diminishing quality of the group ultimately selected. And this is because, as the surplus increases, the mechanisms for measuring quality become necessarily more crude.

Imagine you have a play with five characters to cast. You want more than five people to come audition, because if only five come and a few suck you’ll have a lousy cast. So maybe you want ten or twenty people to audition. But at a certain point, more auditionees will be detrimental: you’ll have to give each actor just a minute or two to read, and instead of gathering the amount of data necessary to see whether they are truly good actors fit for the roles, you’ll instead gather a smaller, much more chance-influenced amount of data; you’ll only know whether they happened to have a good reading of a one-paragraph monologue.

Here’s a concrete real world example about the cruder mechanisms that come along with too many suitors: Harvard gets a little more than half the number of applicants as the University of Michigan. Harvard, though it has to rely perhaps too much on SAT scores and class rank, gets to have an admissions officer carefully consider each applicant. UMich doesn’t have that privilege, since it gets nearly 30,000 applicants. Instead, it relies largely on a points system.

Obviously there is self-selection in the pools of applicants. But, I’d assert that if the 27,000-person pool applying to UMich were randomly cut down to the size of the pool applying to Harvard (16,000ish) and then the Harvard admissions office got to choose UMich’s freshman class, that class might be of an overall higher quality than the one they would get with their usual system and their bigger applicant pool.

We could do the same thought experiment for Harvard: cut the applicant pool in half and use the extra time and resources to let the admissions officers spend more time with the applications, get more essays and interviews, and ignore SAT scores. You might get a better freshmen class.

The Too Many Suitors Problem is, in some way, an application of the Tyranny of Choice (which asserts that having more options to choose between won’t necessarily make us happier) to the market for skilled labor, with Schumpeterian, i.e. self-undermining, consequences.

In print media, the sheer number of aspirants combined with the limited resources of the struggling companies means that the mechanisms used to filter people into the industry are crude and less meritocratic than they might be if the applicant pool were smaller. Job listings are posted on Mediabistro.com and on company websites as a formality; they’re filled instead through nepotistic connections and aggressive networking.

This isn’t sour-grapes complaining, though it’s true that during my junior year of college I applied to summer internships at the big publishing companies and never heard back. I promise I’m not bitter.

Instead, I understand the industry reality: this system is in the short-term interest of the companies. It’s simply easier and faster to fill positions this way — the alternative, filtering through the hundreds of summer internship and job applications and really trying to find the best candidates, would take far too much time and energy.

But perhaps it’s not in their long-term interest: because they can’t employ a truly meritocratic system, they are often scaring away the bright minds and high achievers who instead look to the clear(er) meritocracies of law school applications and i-bank recruiting. Those areas have large applicant pools but also have lots of seats to fill, so the proportionate size of the surplus is smaller than for the pressed-but-prestigious world of print, and so they’re equipped to handle the rush of prospective analysts and paralegals.

If newspapers and book publishers employed a truly energetic on-campus recruiting program at top-tier colleges, the short-term resource expenditure might pay back big time by getting the best applicants into the company walls — young minds who might be able to help fortify the industry’s walls against Kachka’s bogeymen and who might help figure out how to build print into a city for the future rather than a relic of the past.

What do infomercials and many political attack ads have in common?

They both change the way we think even though they employ words and imagery we all know to be blatantly false.

Last week, Saturday Night Live did a fake commercial based on my favorite infomercial convention: making simple everyday tasks, from peeling a potato to doing a sit-up, look Sisyphean. In the SNL commercial, Kristen Wiig just CANNOT get a jar open! In trying, she ends up accidentally killing her husband, burying him, lying to the cops, getting arrested, being convicted, then getting chased by dogs after breaking out of jail. “There’s got to be a better way!” she cries. Then in a clear color shot, she uses the “jar glove” to easily remove the lid. “Jar glove. The better way!”

Infomercials all seem to use this tactic: in black and white dramatizations, we watch unfortunate people with contorted faces flail this way and that in a desperate attempt to get the knife to move straight or to get their chests to meet their knees. We all know that these tasks are not this hard. We know these dramatizations are absurd. And yet they do seem to make those Tater Mitts and Ab Lounges more attractive.

George Orwell described the “schizophrenia” of “holding simultaneously two beliefs which cancel out.” And though we’re not schizophrenic when we watch infomercials, we do seem to inhabit a double consciousness, knowing that our lives are not the black and white ordeals we see onscreen but still feeling that they could be easier.

And we inhabit this same double consciousness when seeing, hearing, or reading malicious political attacks.

Two months ago, John McCain said that Barack Obama would “rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign.” This is a statement that no reasonable person, even a McCain supporter, would believe. Add to this other scurrilous rumors — Obama is secretly a practicing Muslim; he was childhood friends with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — that are either conspiratorially unbelievable or quickly, easily falsified. Yet these clearly false attacks persist — probably because they are effective. We’ll likely see even more attacks like this in next six weeks; Fact Check is a good place to keep track.

Why are they effective? As John Bullock writes in his article “The enduring importance of false political beliefs”:

Much work on political persuasion maintains that people are influenced by information that they believe and not by information that they don’t. By this view, false beliefs have no power if they are known to be false…But findings from social psychology suggest that this view requires modification: sometimes, false beliefs influence people’s attitudes even after they are understood to be false.

Negative associations change our attitudes, even if these associations are as transparent as false rumors or impossible sit-ups.

The producers of infomercials know it’s true. Clearly, so do politicians.

It’s intriguing that simple lying might be as effective as aggressively spinning the truth. The conventional wisdom is that bullshit is much more invidious than bold-faced lies, being harder to refute. The manipulation of words and images, subtly misleading statements (like President Bush mentioning Iraq and 9/11 together, giving the impression that Iraq was somehow involved in the terrorist attacks), the framing of issues, etc., are supposed to be the most dangerous form of political maneuvering. But maybe the conventional wisdom is wrong.

By the time my grandfather was my age, he had already long finished fighting in World War II — flying dozens of missions in Italy, saving a younger man’s life, and parachuting into enemy territory after being shot down. Before that, he’d worked as a welder and a soda jerk to help his parents support his six younger siblings while still graduating from high school. After returning to the US, he’d started a successful business, married my grandmother, and had a child.

By the time my mother was my age, she had protested the Vietnam War, lived in Italy for two years, hitchhiked through Europe — spending one night in jail and another at the decade’s largest rock concert on the Isle of Wight. She’d been proposed to by half-a-dozen men, she’d had a near-affair with a famous writer (who I’ll leave unnamed), and she’d moved into an abandoned church where she started her own art gallery.

Yesterday, I woke up at 2 PM, watched Law & Order and The People’s Court, went to dinner with friends, and finished up the night with a new episode of Gossip Girl. While I writhed on my brother’s futon wishing that Vanessa would just stay out of Blair’s way, my friend gently reminded me that I was almost 23, and that when my grandfather was my age, etc…

The “greatest generation” fought World War II, came back, got married, had kids in a baby boom, and drove America to prosperity and peace; their boomer kids led sexual and civil rights revolutions, countered their culture, and protested for peace; their children are now adults, swimming through their “odyssey years” of extended adolescence, faced with crises of apathy and irony and the most challenging political problems in memory — global terrorism and global warming.

These generational differences are not new. What is notable, though, is that we are not just facing unique challenges. We are facing unique challenges while living, paralyzed, in the long shadows of our parents’ and grandparents’ generations.

We are the third child generation.

Like young children in big families, we are constantly measured against our predecessors — in our case, the generations of our grandparents and parents. When they were our age, they were drafted and sent to war; they were sitting in and standing up.

Sibling order psychology has had a few small moments over the last few years, first surrounding the publication of NYU sociologist Dalton Conley’s book, “The Pecking Order,” then around the release of a study about inter-family IQ differences. Overall, though, it’s a field without much luster. But I think the insights of sibling order psychology could help us understand the particular conundrum faced by we “millennials.”

We are enjoying the fruits of our boomer parents’ prosperity, taking our 20s to really figure out what we want to get out of life. David Brooks’s article is key to understanding this phenomenon:

The odyssey years are not about slacking off. There are intense competitive pressures as a result of the vast numbers of people chasing relatively few opportunities. Moreover, surveys show that people living through these years have highly traditional aspirations (they rate parenthood more highly than their own parents did) even as they lead improvising lives.

But this odyssey is constantly interrupted and jarred by our awareness of past generations’ productivity. Imagine if the gods kept telling Odysseus that his older brothers had gotten back to Ithaca in just five years — why is it taking him ten?

“Third child syndrome” is a vicious circle, with our odyssey-term pursuit of self-actualization thwarted by our self-awareness. I’m not sure what birth order experts would say, but I would guess that this actually happens in families: if the oldest is doing her medical residency, and the second is touring with his band, it might take the third child longer to figure out her way — and, as she takes time to figure it out, I can see her unsettled by seeing her siblings settle into their lives.

Beyond the mind games, our country is expending resources on these older generations — through the Social Security we will have to pay for, for instance — in the same way that large families are prone to favor older children with their own limited resources. For all the talk of marketers and the media focusing their efforts on capturing the 18-34 demographic, or teens and tweens and pre-tweens, the federal government is spending $608 billion this year on Social Security, $386 billion on Medicare, $209 billion on Medicaid — and just $56 billion on education. (Though of course, as my economist brother points out, local and state governments are primarily responsible for education spending.)

Maybe this is just an overextended metaphor, but perhaps we can better understand our generational identity crisis with the help of sibling order psychology.

From The Times:

“Younger siblings are more likely to take chances,” Dr. Sulloway added, and to challenge the status quo in creative ways.

Maybe we, as a generation, are taking big chances — using the odyssey years to take risks towards achieving meaning or fulfillment — and maybe our third child status will help us challenge the status quo.

(Sidenote: I’m convinced that third child syndrome is unique to our generation and not simply a timeless theme that I’m egoistically complaining about. Before the industrial revolution, generational narratives were cyclical rather than linear: children hit life milestones around the same ages as their parents and spent their lives in similar ways. Not until the twentieth century was the concept of adolescence invented. Add to intense progress the distinct generational identities that came with WWII and the baby boom, and we have three very clear children — the first two successful and well-defined, the third struggling for an identity.)

Hi, potential readers! 

Welcome to my brand new blog, “Urbane Sprawl.” The blog takes its name from a column I wrote for The Harvard Crimson while I was an undergraduate, and the spirit is the same: taking a provocative look at social and cultural phenomena. 

The column, whose archives you can read here, was particularly interested in using popular culture as a lens to better understand phenomena that at first blush (and perhaps second and third) seem to have nothing to do with pop culture. But, as I argued, America’s Next Top Model really can help us understand Erving Goffman, and Saturday Night Live might be the key to collective action problems.

Here, I won’t be restricting myself to the pop culture angle; but, given my interests and expertise (if obsessive TV-watching and blog-reading can be considered expertise — and I think it can), pop culture will surely rear its beautiful head often.

Many blogs follow the model described by Jason Kottke (see third item on the right), of Wunderkammers, cabinets of interesting things. Bloggers gather links to articles and videos that they find particularly meaningful, developing collections of curiosities to share with the world.

I want this blog to be purposefully about creating new ideas rather than collecting old ones. The model I’ll follow instead is Edith Wharton’s donnée book — her book of thoughts, where she scribbled down musings and meditations that later became the bases of books and stories. These posts will, I hope, present thoughts that could conceivably be the bases for essays and articles, most of which will likely never be written. 

But that’s the point: to share these ideas and, potentially, insights, which somewhere, someone might find interesting.