More conversations and emails.
I say the wrong thing.
Life is unfair.
People who work very hard and do the right thing sometimes go under: the systems that are in place don't always ensure that people who have done the right thing will survive. We can then decide to try to do something about it or look the other way. If we do something about it we may ourselves end up in the position of going under: the cost to an individual of rectifying an injustice is often prohibitive.
Life is unfair.
Back in late 2001 my publishers made a terrifying $150,000 accounting error in their own favour on my royalties statement. I had just had a meeting with an agent who had said she would introduce me to new editors. My publishers had offered $500,000+ for a new 2-book deal including world rights; this terrifying royalties snafu was one of the reasons this was non-negotiable. I hired the agent and when the dust had settled I had met no new editors and also had no deal and it was pretty messy. I managed to get the royalties mistake sorted out so I did have money in the bank. I was doped up on anti-depressants.
I got an email saying one of my cousins was dying of lung cancer. I did not know him well; I was not sure whether it was sentimental to go and see him, but my cousin's family said they thought it would be a good thing. So I went out to California to see him.
This would have been, I think, early 2002 (anti-depressants not so good for the memory). My mind was in a a dull, quiet state where it was impossible to read. I think the flight was 22 hours; I sat in the seat looking quietly at the seat ahead. I wasn't bored, or restless, or impatient; it felt good to sit quietly.
Kelly had been a surfer when young. After too many arrests for DUI he lost his licence and I think was made to go to AA. He stayed sober for 20 years; we discovered after his death that he had been a popular, charismatic speaker within AA. In one recording he talked about discovering that he had a brain tumour as well as lung cancer. He had been staying at my uncle's house and had no transportation. He said he sat on the steps outside, saying: How can I get to AA. How can I get to AA. I've got to get to AA. After a while he decided to go back to the beginning and go through the 12 Steps. He worked through to Step 3 and resolved to leave everything in the hands of a Higher Power.
When I got there he was staying with his twin sister and her boyfriend, a vet, who had a house on the side of a mountain in an avocado grove. They had set up a hospital bed on the ground floor with an oxygen mask and a TV with a 24-hour golf channel.
If you've ever been very very sick you know what it's like to be very weak: you don't actually have enough energy to lie in bed, it's just that lying in bed takes less energy than anything else, so you lie in bed, exhausted by the effort of lying in bed. That was the state he had reached. He had no health insurance. Robin and John were looking after him; he was now increasingly weak and confused because of the brain tumour, so he could not be left alone. John was an overworked, debtridden vet; the twin, Robin, worked in the practice; they were both overextended, but they were also looking after Kelly. Everyone was worried and exhausted.
A problem had come up. John's partner wanted to retire, so he wanted to be bought out of the practice. Under California state law, the value of the practice was assessed on gross rather than net income. The practice showed no profits - they had taken on a lot of debt to invest in new equipment - but that did not, of course, affect the value of the practice under law. So John needed to come up with a lot of money he did not have to buy out his partner, and it looked as though they would simply need to sell out and John would lose his business and have to start from scratch.
I did not really want to do another deal with my publishers, who had been so bad to work with in the past, but in the circumstances this seemed self-indulgent: $525,000 had been their opening offer. So I said I would be happy to help if necessary. I went back to Berlin, and then to London. Since things had gone badly wrong with the last agent I was nervous of bringing in a new one; I asked a friend connected with Miramax, someone I knew my editor liked, to talk to my editor, and I told her what to say. (I was worried about handling this myself because I was doped up on anti-depressants and barely able to talk.)
My cousin died shortly after I returned to England. I was still in talks with my friend when I got an emergency email from John. His partner had kept such bad records that the practice was not in a position to get financing from a bank, so John would in fact need to find funding elsewhere. The CPA handling the transaction now said that it would fall through if the money was not on hand by the end of the week. John's uncle had offered to put up half the money; John asked if I could put up the other $100,000.
I would, of course, rather have waited until my deal was solidly in place, but I had been told this was an emergency. So I sent John a cheque for $100,000, which left me with a few thousand. Meanwhile my friend talked to my editor.
For reasons that remain unclear, my friend decided to replace the things I had asked her to say with something completely different. (She told me this after the meeting, when it was too late to do anything about it.) There were all sorts of misunderstandings which I won't go into, the deal fell through again, and everyone was outraged.
This was very bad news, because tax had not been paid on the money I had sent John and there was no way of knowing when more money would come in. In the long run this would turn out to be a professional disaster from which (as it looks now) I would never recover. I talked to an agent about the books I wanted to write and what I needed for them and he said No Publisher Will Allow, I would have to self-publish. The Inland Revenue started demanding taxes and threatening legal action and insisting that if there was a problem I must come in and talk to someone. I was not able to talk. I sent my accountant an email explaining that I was clinically depressed and at risk of suicide and he said he did not think the Inland Revenue would be sympathetic. I made enquiries about getting committed to a mental institution and was told it was difficult to get committed to a residential facility.
It seemed to me that the best plan might be to commit a crime, some sort of crime that would entail a prison sentence, as one does not generally need to go through a lot of red tape to go to jail. This struck me as an absolutely brilliant idea (presumably the Inland Revenue would not pursue me in jail), but at the same time I could not help being aware that many people would see this as insane, and I could not help feeling that the very fact that the idea struck me as absolutely brilliant, the solution to all my problems, might in itself be a mark of insanity. Barclaycard sent me some credit card cheques with 6 months interest-free credit; I called them and got them to raise my credit card limit and sent Inland Revenue a cheque. (I could not quite see why Inland Revenue could not just charge me 29.4% APR or some such thing.) I came off the anti-depressants and went back to secretarial work. So it was rather unfortunate that my friend had felt unable to say what I had asked her to say.
I did, as I've said, end up negotiating a new deal with my editor in 2003, he promised a designer, I moved to New York, he refused to honour the contract. Bad news.
Now, sending John a cheque for $100,000 would have been generous, but not insanely generous, if my deal had gone through. It would was an act of hypererogatory virtue - but he himself had done something much harder, much more generous, which was to look after someone dying of lung cancer. Kelly was a close friend of John's, but this was still an act of extraordinary generosity. The burden would not have been so heavy if the US had a proper healthcare system; John stepped in to fill that gap, and he now stood to lose everything he had worked for. He was an absolutely amazing guy, and I did not want to see that happen.
Talking to my editor, on the other hand, and relaying accurately the things I wanted in the deal, do not strike me as particularly taxing, let alone examples of exceptional generosity. It was not complicated; it came at no cost to the person concerned; had my friend felt able to do as she was asked, I would have had to work with people who were hard to work with, but I would not have faced financial disaster. So, you know, life is unfair.
Honouring the terms of a contract, again, is not an example of hypererogatory virtue. This is not an example of my editor doing me a favour, or showing exceptional generosity: this is an example of my editor complying with terms that are legally binding. Breaking the contract is an example of my editor being not just an unmitigated little shit but grossly dishonest. Life is unfair.
Paying royalties on sales of hardback books, again, is not an example of hypererogatory virtue. The publishers had made a profit on the book before it was published; they had sold 20,000 or so copies in hardback and owed me money. Paying it is not an example of doing me a favour, let alone exceptional generosity: this is an example of someone in the bowels of the royalties department accurately inputting data in a spreadsheet (which is what people in royalties are paid to do), rather than making a complete cock-up of it, so that a cheque in the appropriate amount is generated when the statement is sent out. Thereby obviating the need to hire an agent just to get paid. Life is unfair.
Life is really unfair, because we have before us an example of a much better career move.
Comparisons are odious.
Invidious comparisons are especially odious.
Let's not be odious.
The problem is.
There are forms of generosity I am able to recognise as improbable.
It would astound me if a reader were to write and offer me $100,000.
It would astound me if a reader were to offer me a year's accommodation, rent-free, in a second home that's unoccupied.
I am able to recognise these as offers that are wildly unlikely to come my way.
There are other forms of assistance that strike me as well within the realm of possibility.
If a reader recommends an agent, it seems straightforward for the reader to provide all information known to the reader. This looks like something that would take 10 minutes of the reader's time.
This turns out to be as wildly improbable as making me a gift of $100,000. I didn't know that.
Suppose I have, on the one hand, readers blundering into my life with unhelpful suggestions and, on the other hand, readers making me a gift of $100,000. The blunderers are not a problem.
But suppose I have a string of blunderers and no gifts of $100,000. Each blunderer wipes out a couple of years.
It's hard to be sane.
This is, without a doubt, unspeakably dull. I apologise. There's the faint hope, I'm afraid there really is the faint hope, not that a reader will give me $100,000, but that the blunderers might, with a rare glimmer of compassion, refrain.
Showing posts with label AA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label AA. Show all posts
Sunday, August 1, 2010
Sunday, January 13, 2008
17:59
1. The Serenity Prayer as used in AA:
God, grant me the patience to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change those I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
Taking, as He did, this sinful world
as it is, not as I would have it;
Trusting that He will make all things right
if I surrender to His Will;
That I may be reasonably happy in this life
and supremely happy with Him
Forever in the next.
Amen.
2. Virtues of a programmer, according to Larry Wall, Randall L. Schwartz and Tom Christiansen in the second edition of Programming Perl.
Axxel is open 24 hours a day 361 days a year (362 in leap years). On Christmas Eve it closes at 3 pm, opening again at 11am Christmas Day. On New Year's Eve it closes at 3 pm, opening again at 11am New Year's Day. It offers some 250 classes a week.
A few days before Christmas I was working out on a crosstrainer when one of the trainers came up and asked if I would like to join a half-hour Power Circle on weights machines. Ääääähm... My legs are very strong, but my arms are pitifully weak, result of never really understanding the weights machines. I go along for this class, in which one puts in one minute on a machine, changes machines in 30 seconds, puts in a minute, changes machines, and so on, for two circuits of 10 machines. The instructor explains various machines which I have never used before.
Although I have never been back for the class, I do use most of the machines almost every day now that I know how to use them. In fact, knowing how to use them increases the likelihood that I will go to the gym; I had a very nasty flu at the beginning of the year, when I was really not up to an hour of aerobic exercise, but half an hour did not look too bad and doing half an hour on the weights gave me something else to do afterwards.
The gym costs something like 450 euros a year. The classes come free with the membership. It is available, as I've said, for all but 40 hours in any given year.
4. My knowledge of German is rather like my level of physical fitness. It is very good for reading newspapers, books and so on, not so good for bureaucratic forms; it is reasonably good for listening (I can understand the radio, am easily lost in colloquial conversation), feeble for speaking and writing. Spoken and written sentences come out like flea-infested pets, crawling with grammatical mistakes that must be combed out.
5. My German course operates on the basis of a convenient fiction - that a language can be divided up into Beginner 1, Beginner 2, Intermediate 1, Intermediate 2 and so on. If you can read Adorno you should know the declensions of definite and indefinite articles like the back of your hand. The course runs for a month, 3 hours a day, 5 days a week, 198 euros. As far as I know there is no language-learning facility comparable to my gym, where you can go in at any time day or night, day after day, and work on your weaknesses.
6. My stepmother, who is Brazilian, has lived in the US for 17 years and still does not speak English fluently; she keeps making the same mistakes, just as I keep making the same mistakes in German. My 12-year-old half-brother understands only a little Portuguese and doesn't speak it.
7. A New Year has begun, a time when people often try to break bad habits and form good ones. As anyone knows who has tried, it is certainly within our power to change habits; doing so requires not courage but patience. If one has fallen into the habit of muddling by in a language, one can change this by performing a simple task on a daily basis: one can go over the principle parts of irregular verbs every day for a month, for instance, until one knows them by heart. One can go over verbs with fixed prepositions on a daily basis. One can learn three nouns and their plurals every day for a year.
8. My father has been in AA for some 20 years, and he has succeeded in the only goal required by AA: he has refrained from drinking every day for 20 years. The principles as formulated by AA, however, have not been conducive to producing a situation that would have made life much easier for my father, stepmother and brother. My stepmother was once a senior civil servant in Brazil; she attended a language course upon coming to the US, and it was an -- I will not say an exceptionally bad one. It was, like most language courses offered by universities, not remotely on a par with the language training given my father by the State Department, training whose purpose was to enable Foreign Service officers to use the target language at a professional level.
Attending the course produced in my stepmother the conviction that she could not master English, that she did not have a gift for languages. The language courses of the Foreign Service Institute, however, routinely produced competent speakers of the languages of the countries to which officers were posted; the courses were a sort of linguistic boot camp, in which students were required to memorise dialogues and repeat these until they were automatic. The level of tedium which both teachers and students were required to endure has no equivalent in most language schools. And yet, had she had access to a first-class language programme, she could ultimately have found employment in the US at a level suitable to her professional qualifications. Which is to say, in the absence of government-sponsored language training, the patience required to master a simple task on a daily basis may make the difference between social marginalisation and full participation.
9. The prevalence of New Year's Resolutions and their high rate of failure remind us that it is exceptionally difficult for individuals to alter their habits one day at a time. The impatience of the computer programmer may be what's needed to create structures in which it is easy to change habits.
Both my gym and my language school are commercial organisations. The former operates by aggressively selling memberships. Its machines represent a very high capital investment (it has 5 Woodway treadmills, for instance, which sell for about $10,000 apiece); the teachers of its classes come at a cost; it makes a profit because all members do not make use of its facilities 365 days a year.
The language school operates by compelling students to pay for the time they use, pulling students into the system and pushing them out again a month or two later.
Both physical training and language learning rely on repetition over a long period of time. The business model of the typical gym is one in which the delinquency of the many subsidises the assiduity of the few - and in which most reps are performed on machines, not sentient human beings. It is well suited to the requirements of physical training, in that it offers all members the opportunity to train effectively at a low price. Generally speaking, when gyms get overcrowded they do not raise their membership fees, they open another branch; the potential subsidisers always outnumber the determined users.
The language school, on the other hand, is set up in a way that precludes the first requirement of language learning, namely repetition on a daily basis over a long period of time.
The gym offers classes at fixed times which may be attended ad hoc, as well as equipment which members may use at any time at their own convenience.
The language school caters for a wide range of nationalities - in my class of 12 are students from 12 different countries. It has pragmatic reasons for adhering to the purism so common in language instruction, that is to the practice of providing all instruction in the language to be taught. Use of German as meta-language leads to all sorts of problems: students whose native language does not feature a particular grammatical concept must grasp the concept through an explanation in a language often imperfectly understood. Exercises are immensely time-consuming for those whose vocabulary is limited, since each involves the looking up of several words. It is consequently not possible to focus on the specific grammatical point to be mastered. This does not present problems for me, but there, is course, something counter-intuitive about a method of instruction which depends on a student possessing an extensive vocabulary.
The gym, unsurprisingly, permits one to focus on specific muscle groups, specific forms of training (cardio-vascular, strengthening, stretching and so on). It is much easier to see rapid improvement at the gym if one bothers to go at all.
10. Both America and Germany sometimes find that the issue of immigrants who do not master the language of the host country is a contentious one. Unfortunately the structure of the institutions which provide language instruction is not conducive to producing fluency. The issue of preserving the linguistic heritage of the children of immigrants is, of course, not on anyone's political agenda.
My brother has only one living grandparent, a grandmother who lives in Brazil; he is unable to speak either with her or with any of his mother's other Brazilian family unless they speak English. I like hearing my stepmother speak Portuguese, which I can generally understand pretty well, but I can barely put a sentence together. All very American. All very Australian (my colleague, Ilya Gridneff, is the son of a Russian father but grew up speaking no Russian.) One way and another, there is an immense loss of cultural capital. On a personal level, this causes many problems for my family; on a national level, well, I wonder whether there is any country in the world that can afford to squander talent in the way that is now the norm.
11. TBC. I talked a while back to Johanna about German on Demand. Then I talked to Rose who was going to have a meeting with Nadja of the Exberliner. Then Nadja had flu. Rose is meeting Nadja today. Yesterday I went over to Another Country, the English-language bookshop in Kreuzberg, to talk to Alan before the Planning Meeting about whether AC might be willing to keep materials of a sadistic grammatical nature in stock for commitment-shy transients. I think what's needed is not a politician, but the sort of person who has the kind of genius that makes for a good gay bar.
12. NB. Re resolutions. It is easier to rectify sins of omission than sins of commission, easier to acquire virtues of commission than those of omission.
God, grant me the patience to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change those I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
Taking, as He did, this sinful world
as it is, not as I would have it;
Trusting that He will make all things right
if I surrender to His Will;
That I may be reasonably happy in this life
and supremely happy with Him
Forever in the next.
Amen.
2. Virtues of a programmer, according to Larry Wall, Randall L. Schwartz and Tom Christiansen in the second edition of Programming Perl.
- Laziness - The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful, and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it. Hence, the first great virtue of a programmer. Also hence, this book. See also impatience and hubris.
- Impatience - The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy. This makes you write programs that don't just react to your needs, but actually anticipate them. Or at least pretend to. Hence, the second great virtue of a programmer. See also laziness and hubris.
- Hubris - Excessive pride, the sort of thing Zeus zaps you for. Also the quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won't want to say bad things about. Hence, the third great virtue of a programmer. See also laziness and impatience.
Axxel is open 24 hours a day 361 days a year (362 in leap years). On Christmas Eve it closes at 3 pm, opening again at 11am Christmas Day. On New Year's Eve it closes at 3 pm, opening again at 11am New Year's Day. It offers some 250 classes a week.
A few days before Christmas I was working out on a crosstrainer when one of the trainers came up and asked if I would like to join a half-hour Power Circle on weights machines. Ääääähm... My legs are very strong, but my arms are pitifully weak, result of never really understanding the weights machines. I go along for this class, in which one puts in one minute on a machine, changes machines in 30 seconds, puts in a minute, changes machines, and so on, for two circuits of 10 machines. The instructor explains various machines which I have never used before.
Although I have never been back for the class, I do use most of the machines almost every day now that I know how to use them. In fact, knowing how to use them increases the likelihood that I will go to the gym; I had a very nasty flu at the beginning of the year, when I was really not up to an hour of aerobic exercise, but half an hour did not look too bad and doing half an hour on the weights gave me something else to do afterwards.
The gym costs something like 450 euros a year. The classes come free with the membership. It is available, as I've said, for all but 40 hours in any given year.
4. My knowledge of German is rather like my level of physical fitness. It is very good for reading newspapers, books and so on, not so good for bureaucratic forms; it is reasonably good for listening (I can understand the radio, am easily lost in colloquial conversation), feeble for speaking and writing. Spoken and written sentences come out like flea-infested pets, crawling with grammatical mistakes that must be combed out.
5. My German course operates on the basis of a convenient fiction - that a language can be divided up into Beginner 1, Beginner 2, Intermediate 1, Intermediate 2 and so on. If you can read Adorno you should know the declensions of definite and indefinite articles like the back of your hand. The course runs for a month, 3 hours a day, 5 days a week, 198 euros. As far as I know there is no language-learning facility comparable to my gym, where you can go in at any time day or night, day after day, and work on your weaknesses.
6. My stepmother, who is Brazilian, has lived in the US for 17 years and still does not speak English fluently; she keeps making the same mistakes, just as I keep making the same mistakes in German. My 12-year-old half-brother understands only a little Portuguese and doesn't speak it.
7. A New Year has begun, a time when people often try to break bad habits and form good ones. As anyone knows who has tried, it is certainly within our power to change habits; doing so requires not courage but patience. If one has fallen into the habit of muddling by in a language, one can change this by performing a simple task on a daily basis: one can go over the principle parts of irregular verbs every day for a month, for instance, until one knows them by heart. One can go over verbs with fixed prepositions on a daily basis. One can learn three nouns and their plurals every day for a year.
8. My father has been in AA for some 20 years, and he has succeeded in the only goal required by AA: he has refrained from drinking every day for 20 years. The principles as formulated by AA, however, have not been conducive to producing a situation that would have made life much easier for my father, stepmother and brother. My stepmother was once a senior civil servant in Brazil; she attended a language course upon coming to the US, and it was an -- I will not say an exceptionally bad one. It was, like most language courses offered by universities, not remotely on a par with the language training given my father by the State Department, training whose purpose was to enable Foreign Service officers to use the target language at a professional level.
Attending the course produced in my stepmother the conviction that she could not master English, that she did not have a gift for languages. The language courses of the Foreign Service Institute, however, routinely produced competent speakers of the languages of the countries to which officers were posted; the courses were a sort of linguistic boot camp, in which students were required to memorise dialogues and repeat these until they were automatic. The level of tedium which both teachers and students were required to endure has no equivalent in most language schools. And yet, had she had access to a first-class language programme, she could ultimately have found employment in the US at a level suitable to her professional qualifications. Which is to say, in the absence of government-sponsored language training, the patience required to master a simple task on a daily basis may make the difference between social marginalisation and full participation.
9. The prevalence of New Year's Resolutions and their high rate of failure remind us that it is exceptionally difficult for individuals to alter their habits one day at a time. The impatience of the computer programmer may be what's needed to create structures in which it is easy to change habits.
Both my gym and my language school are commercial organisations. The former operates by aggressively selling memberships. Its machines represent a very high capital investment (it has 5 Woodway treadmills, for instance, which sell for about $10,000 apiece); the teachers of its classes come at a cost; it makes a profit because all members do not make use of its facilities 365 days a year.
The language school operates by compelling students to pay for the time they use, pulling students into the system and pushing them out again a month or two later.
Both physical training and language learning rely on repetition over a long period of time. The business model of the typical gym is one in which the delinquency of the many subsidises the assiduity of the few - and in which most reps are performed on machines, not sentient human beings. It is well suited to the requirements of physical training, in that it offers all members the opportunity to train effectively at a low price. Generally speaking, when gyms get overcrowded they do not raise their membership fees, they open another branch; the potential subsidisers always outnumber the determined users.
The language school, on the other hand, is set up in a way that precludes the first requirement of language learning, namely repetition on a daily basis over a long period of time.
The gym offers classes at fixed times which may be attended ad hoc, as well as equipment which members may use at any time at their own convenience.
The language school caters for a wide range of nationalities - in my class of 12 are students from 12 different countries. It has pragmatic reasons for adhering to the purism so common in language instruction, that is to the practice of providing all instruction in the language to be taught. Use of German as meta-language leads to all sorts of problems: students whose native language does not feature a particular grammatical concept must grasp the concept through an explanation in a language often imperfectly understood. Exercises are immensely time-consuming for those whose vocabulary is limited, since each involves the looking up of several words. It is consequently not possible to focus on the specific grammatical point to be mastered. This does not present problems for me, but there, is course, something counter-intuitive about a method of instruction which depends on a student possessing an extensive vocabulary.
The gym, unsurprisingly, permits one to focus on specific muscle groups, specific forms of training (cardio-vascular, strengthening, stretching and so on). It is much easier to see rapid improvement at the gym if one bothers to go at all.
10. Both America and Germany sometimes find that the issue of immigrants who do not master the language of the host country is a contentious one. Unfortunately the structure of the institutions which provide language instruction is not conducive to producing fluency. The issue of preserving the linguistic heritage of the children of immigrants is, of course, not on anyone's political agenda.
My brother has only one living grandparent, a grandmother who lives in Brazil; he is unable to speak either with her or with any of his mother's other Brazilian family unless they speak English. I like hearing my stepmother speak Portuguese, which I can generally understand pretty well, but I can barely put a sentence together. All very American. All very Australian (my colleague, Ilya Gridneff, is the son of a Russian father but grew up speaking no Russian.) One way and another, there is an immense loss of cultural capital. On a personal level, this causes many problems for my family; on a national level, well, I wonder whether there is any country in the world that can afford to squander talent in the way that is now the norm.
11. TBC. I talked a while back to Johanna about German on Demand. Then I talked to Rose who was going to have a meeting with Nadja of the Exberliner. Then Nadja had flu. Rose is meeting Nadja today. Yesterday I went over to Another Country, the English-language bookshop in Kreuzberg, to talk to Alan before the Planning Meeting about whether AC might be willing to keep materials of a sadistic grammatical nature in stock for commitment-shy transients. I think what's needed is not a politician, but the sort of person who has the kind of genius that makes for a good gay bar.
12. NB. Re resolutions. It is easier to rectify sins of omission than sins of commission, easier to acquire virtues of commission than those of omission.
Sunday, September 23, 2007
Just the one
Christopher Caldwell has a review of Philip Cook's Paying the Tab in the Financial Times:
The rest of the article is available here (though unfortunately only to FT subscribers or those willing to take out a 15-day free trial subscription). The book (going by a quick Look Inside on Amazon) looks extremely interesting, though at $35 it does have me wondering whether I should set up my own book rental scheme.
As laws against smoking and drugs become more draconian, the relative regulatory neglect of alcohol appears a mystery. Much of this mystery -- at least in the US context -- has recently been dispelled in Paying the Tab (Princeton University Press), a gem of social science by the Duke University economist Philip Cook. Today's regulation of alcohol has its roots not in the reaction against the Prohibition years (1920-1933), Mr Cook shows, but in a more recent development: the spread of the "disease theory" of alcoholism over the past half century. Promoted by researchers at Yale and by Alcoholics Anonymous, the disease theory held that alcohol was a selectively addictive drug. Alcoholism describd a small group of people congenitally unable to "handle" it.
The disease concept was socially useful. It removed the stigma for problem drinkers seeking treatment. It made addiction counsellors look less like bluenoses and more like experts. And it was a godsend to liquor companies, which could now maximise sales with a clean conscience.
Paradoxically, the more Americans worried about alcoholism, the more readily available alcohol became. Regulating alcohol's harms at the level of the product, through taxes and licensing, looked like an unnecessary imposition on the undiseased. Instead alcohol policy involved stigmatising identifiable classes of lawbreakers -- primarily drunk drivers and teenagers.
...
Mr Cook considers the work of the French demographer Sully Ledermann, who showed in 1956 that the distribution of alcohol consumption in any large population follows roughly the same distribution curve. Alcohol abuse is a dependent variable. If you want to cut down on alcoholic drinking one effective way to do so is to reduce general consumption -- average drinking. In fact, because of the steepness of Ledermann's curve (a third of Americans do not drink; 10 per cent drink three-quarters of the booze) small decreases in average drinking will bring relatively large decreases in pathological drinking.
The rest of the article is available here (though unfortunately only to FT subscribers or those willing to take out a 15-day free trial subscription). The book (going by a quick Look Inside on Amazon) looks extremely interesting, though at $35 it does have me wondering whether I should set up my own book rental scheme.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)