Shades of Grey

Maybe it’s a failure on my part, but it occurred to me the other day while watching an episode of “Reilly, Ace of Spies” that I see the actors in two different ways.

For the lead characters, played by actors I recognize and am familiar with in other roles, I marvel at the skill that allows them to portray the character they are playing. However, because I know the actor, while they can, on occasion, come vanishingly close to being the person they are portraying, they are still an actor.

In contrast around them are the real people who occupy the small parts of the story. Of course they are all actors too, but because I don’t know them my belief in them as real people is complete. From time to time I will remember that the girl who the hero had a brief affair with isn’t a real person, she too is an actor, and the father protecting his daughter’s virtue as a side plot in the story is just acting, and in many ways doing it better than the star.

Is this just my gullibility or do we all have this tendency to be utterly convinced by the hundreds of wonderful bit part players that there are out there?

The other day we were at a local car dealership going through the buyback process for our emissions cheating VW diesel.

As usually happens with us and our British accents, the discussion turned to “where do you come from”. The young man was from Louisiana, a very “southern” US state, so some talk of differences in upbringing ensued. Now to give you some background, we are old enough to remember the days when small local banks in the US competed for new customers by offering a gift for opening an account with them. The classic gift, and one often lampooned in comedy routines, was a toaster. However, in Louisiana, when he opened his first account the bank gave this young man a shotgun! We thought that he might be joking, but no, that is what he got, and he considered that quite reasonable as “Everyone has guns. They need them to protect themselves”.

This I think should help us to try and understand the huge difference in perception between gun people and the rest of the US. If you live in the UK, then the gulf in experience is even wider. For people like our young man, life is still like the Wild West. Properties are so widely scattered that Law Enforcement is seen as a distant chimera and there is a persuasive perception of the need to defend oneself.

Interestingly I find the rationale behind the perception somewhat self serving. If as the young man said, the need for a gun came from having to be able to defend yourself if your house was broken into at night, and the police were so distant and uninterested, then why would this not equally apply to a town dweller in any US or UK city? The police will still be, at best, several minutes away. And, as the classic movie line goes “help will be here in five minutes” which engenders the reply “but we’ll be dead in two”. In reality the police don’t stop you having your house broken into wherever you live, they are always going to arrive after the event. So is there really a difference in the need for self protection between Louisiana and England?

Better to have a toaster!

On both sides of the Atlantic, privatization (or even privatisation!) is seen by many as a solution to the problems in many sectors of the economy. It seems to me that we could adopt a fairly simple test to decide if, on its face, a transfer from public operation would be a good idea.

Before looking at the test, we need to face the problem raised by the use of “good” in the preceding sentence. This of course implies a value judgment. If you think that government should not run anything at all, then you are likely to consider any privatization a good thing. However, maybe we can all agree on two objectives for any operation, deliver the best service/product at the lowest cost. Undoubtedly these objectives may be mutually exclusive, and there will be another set of value judgements about how to balance the two, but the objectives themselves should be acceptable to everyone.

So here is the test.

“Is the operation/service open to free competition?”

If it is, then it is a candidate for privatization, if not, then it should remain under public control.

Some examples :-

Prisons.
Using the test, prisons should certainly not be being privatized. The consumers of the product have zero ability to exercise the choice of establishment that would provide an incentive for quality in the delivery of the service. The only incentive a provider in this sector has is to minimize expenditure so as to maximize profits within a low bid price. True there are rules and regulations that are supposed to maintain standards, but reliance on those to constrain the actions of a monopolistic business has historically not been successful. There are reasons that there are laws that severely limit the monopolistic tendencies of businesses!

Hospitals
Within the cities where there are multiple hospitals, often right next to one another, the American example of privatization passes the test. In those places, private hospitals compete with one another to attract patients because they are their paying customers, and those customers can easily choose based on the relative performance of the hospitals.
However, in small towns where there will in all likelihood be only a single hospital, competition is severely limited by the patient’s inability, or at least extreme difficulty, in electing to go to a distant hospital. Interestingly, given the general absence of government or community hospitals in the US, those small town monopolistic hospitals that do not self regulate can reach a point of poor performance at which the delta between them and a more distant facility is so great that many patients will accept the inconvenience and risk of traveling to a larger city. Sadly, this level of competition is on such an uneven playing field that the local hospital can persist at a very low level of performance.

More examples where privatization fails the test.

FAA – Privatizing a national monopoly with zero competition makes no sense. Which is not to say that there may be many improvements that could be made in the way it is currently run.

Schools – While it may appear that privatizing schools passes the test because parents do have the ability to make a choice of school for their children, that choice can be severely limited by their economic and social situation. If you don’t have the ability to take time off work, or the access to the transportation that would be required to get your children to a school the other side of town, do you really have a choice? There may be situations where privatizing a school passes the test, but it would need reviewing on a case by case basis.

Competition can have a Time Dimension

The city/town where we live has privatized the collection of household waste, an action that would initially seem to fail the competition test since, as as an individual householder, I have no choice but to use the chosen provider. There are of course other ways I could dispose of our trash, but they would be totally non-competitive either in cost or level of inconvenience. What makes for the competition in this scenario is the time dimension. The privatization is of a service for only the limited length of a contract term. The cost of entry to compete for the next contract period is not high, and there are sufficient other companies within the geographical area to ensure that the current operator knows that they will not obtain an unchallenged renewal of their contract. Add to this, the immediate personal involvement of all of the relevant voters, and in particular the councilors representing them in the decision making bodies, with the performance of the company and you certainly have the required degree of competition for this privatization to work.

In contrast the prison decision still fails the test as even if there is a contract renewal requirement, those making the decision are not dependent on the performance of the operator and if the operator is also the facility builder/owner, the cost of entry for a competitor is very high.

Sometimes, in the middle of the most ordinary of events, we have one of those special moments that remind us of why we are working to create a decent future for our children and grand children.

This afternoon we made a trip to the local park to burn some energy off the grand kids before they began their two day road trip back home with their mother. Towards the end of the play time, I was scaling a sloping climbing wall behind my three year old grand daughter, making sure that she wouldn’t tumble down, when she stopped and turned to me.

“Granddad, I’ll miss you when we get to our hotel tonight”

By itself this would have been enough to make my day, but the follow up ..

“But I’ll dream of you”

brought a lump to my throat, and strengthened my hope that, despite all that divides us, the love of our children and grand children remains a force that motivates us to work to ensure that we leave them a world in which they can grow and flourish, a world that, for the joy they give us, is certainly the very least they deserve.

We may think that we are a nation of laws, and that it is those laws that govern the society we live in.  In actuality, the laws exist only as a backdrop to what really rules our day to day existence, societal norms.

If you think that it is a law against robbery and a police force to enforce that law, that keeps you from worrying about someone smashing in your front door and robbing you, think again. Your security comes from the fact that the norm of behavior within our society is to refrain from such behavior.  This is an extreme example, but in every aspect of our lives we are living according to a set of norms, on the road, at work, in the store, at school, even within our own homes.

Maintaining these norms is critical to the ongoing functionality of our society.  Sadly we seem to be in the process of destroying many of the most critical ones, and some of the ones that it will be most difficult to rebuild.

In many areas of behavior, norms simply work to create a more workable environment, but don’t conflict with any basic human trait.  Traffic rules would be a good example.  As such rebuilding a damaged norm or creating a new one may be time consuming but is not difficult. The wearing of seat belts would be an example; a behavior which is now a norm, a behavior maintained through the norm rather than the existence of a law, although of course there is one.

In contrast some norms have developed to curtail innate human tendencies that threaten societal cohesiveness.  Here the prime example would be racism.  As an animal, we are inherently predisposed to create and belong to a group.  The group can be defined in a multitude of ways.  Take the test; write down a description of yourself and you’ll immediately see the primary groups that you feel you belong to. (Old, white, anglo-saxon, male)  Over time we have succeeded in creating a norm that we subjugate our racial grouping in dealing with other races, so as to be able to coexist.  That is not to say that everyone adopted the norm as their behavioral standard, but society as a whole adopted it.  Now, thanks to the actions of a few politicians using the potential of the innate racial grouping to rise to power, that societal norm is in danger of being destroyed.  And, once it is destroyed or even seriously damaged, the effort required to resurrect it when doing so requires overcoming the evolutionary driven racist pressure may be too great for it to be revived in a generation.

The need then is to fight to maintain the norms that hold us together, to avoid the slide into a less civilized world.  This means speaking out against breaches of the norms, whenever and by whomever committed.  Calling out racist acts and speech, condemning lying, demanding consideration of the needs of those least able to defend themselves, are not promotion of divisiveness.  They are the effort we need to make to protect the norms that hold our society together.

After swiping my new credit card at the Post Office this morning, the clerk asked me for the last four digits of the card.  This dramatically brought to my attention that this new card unlike every other credit card I have received over many years, has no embossed numbers on it face!

For those of you too young to remember; credit card transactions were initially recorded by placing the card face up in a small hand-operated machine, laying a multi-part carbon-paper interlaced voucher over the top of it and then dragging a handle across the sandwich forcing a spring loaded roller to transfer the embossed numbers to the voucher.

I haven’t seen one of those machines for a while, but for sure, if I am presented with one in future, my new credit card isn’t going to work for making the payment.  Fortunately, I do have other cards with the “old fashioned” embossed numbers, but for how much longer?

Goodbye to another relic of ones past.  The end of an era.