“And Wall Street’s argument that it has this mysterious power, that you have to trust it that it’s using it for good, and that if you take it away, the world will end, is obviously obnoxious—but it’s a hugely successful debating point.  Congressmen are afraid of it.  They’re afraid that they don’t understand what’s going on, and they’re hearing these lobbyists say that if you push too hard on the banking industry, the world will end.”

He notes that while Germany (his main focus within Europe) has high wages and strong unions, it is also a leading exporter. With one-third the population of the US, Germany still manages to export more than we do. Thus the claim that America can only be competitive with low wages and weak unions is belied by Germany’s success.

He also takes on the GDP statistics that seem to indicate that America is much wealthier than Europe. He notes that GDP doesn’t measure things like leisure time, or a free college education, or liberal parental leave rules:

“One day we’ll get beyond that and see that the European standard of living is rising. You can pull out these GDP per capita statistics and say that people in Mississippi are vastly wealthier than people in Frankfurt and Hamburg. That can’t be true. Just spend two months in Hamburg and spend two months in Tupelo, Mississippi. There’s something wrong if the statistics are telling you that the people in Tupelo are three times wealthier than the people in Germany…..So much of the American economy is based on GDP that comes from waste, environmental pillage, urban sprawl, bad planning, people going farther and farther with no land use planning whatsoever and leading more miserable lives. That GDP is thrown on top of all the GDP that comes from gambling and fraud of one kind or another. It’s a more straightforward description of what Kenneth Rogoff and the Economist would call the financialization of the American economy.”

That quote makes me wonder: if you took out all the casino components of real estate and wall street speculation, what would the US GDP statistics look like then? I’m sure that someone has done this analysis, but I couldn’t find it online.

Geoghegan makes clear that he is an American and that he loves America and loves living here. He merely notes that when we discuss, as we are in the current election, those great American values of individualism and free markets and the heroic capitalist, we should remember that there are benefits to other systems. Germans work, on average, nine weeks less per year than we do (two months!), and yet they seem to have a pretty nice standard of living. I’m not saying I want to move to Frankfurt tomorrow, because I don’t. I too love living in America. But there is no reason we shouldn’t learn from other countries and from what they do well.

As Applebaum puts it:

“The South contains all those countries whose political classes have not been able to balance their national budgets, whose bureaucrats have not been able to reduce their numbers, whose voters have not learned to approve of austerity….The North contains the budget hawks”

After reading the Slate article, I read Michael Lewis’ article in Vanity Fair about the Greek financial crisis. Lewis describes Greece as less of a country than a national pool of corruption in which the entire populace knowingly plunders the government treasury.

Pairing these two articles really made me think about this dichotomy between governance and chaos, between bureaucrats who do their jobs and those whose job is merely a path to a bribe. And it’s really just a small leap from governance vs. corruption to civic good vs. selfishness and then to democracy vs. despotism. But once I started expanding Applebaum’s dichotomy into a broader range of behaviors, I started to wonder whether her north vs. south division could be expanded beyond Europe. I think it can be.

After all, the northern hemisphere is generally a lot better managed than the southern: Canada vs. Venezuela, Estonia vs. Syria. Of course, Russia is really far north, but it acts south. And North Korea vs. South Korea reverses the pattern. But I think if you were to average across the hemispheres, Applebaum’s north vs. south dichotomy holds. Germany is to Greece as Greece is to Zimbabwe? Even within the US, the southern states tend to be far more profligate than the northern, as in this awesome blog entry, or this table showing which states spend more federal dollars than they pay in taxes.

Now, lo and behold, a former Gartner analyst comes out with an article about how Silicon Valley is too focused on consumer internet, on “the glitz and the superficial,” rather than on solving big problems, like medical and environmental ones. He notes that the new innovators in those areas are big companies, who are focusing their R&D budgets on these big problems with big markets, rather than entrepreneurs, who are focusing their energies on figuring out the best way to get you to “check in” at your local bar.

Peter Sims wrote a piece about why he thinks Google is potentially past its prime, on the way to becoming the next Microsoft. I don’t know if he’s right about that; I suspect he is, but I hope not, since I have friends who work at Google. But in the course of his article, he talks about Google’s corporate culture and how it might be hindering current success:

“Product manager candidates, for example, are told they must have computer science degrees from top universities. But while Google’s core algorithm was a brilliant feat of engineering innovation, a growing chorus of voices question whether it can be sustained. That cookie-cutter approach to people misses important opportunities for diversity and creates glass ceilings for non-engineers, both of which stifle innovation. Cultural hubris, another pattern Jim Collins in particular raises, is of foremost concern. It is often said that at Google the engineers lead engineering, product, and even marketing decisions. But when the company has failed, such as with Google Wave or Google Radio , critics have questioned whether the company really understands people.”

Google has been incredibly successful, and folks at Google will say “our culture must be right; look how successful we’ve been.” But maybe Google wasn’t successful because of its engineering-led culture. They launched with a great search solution right at the time the market was ripe for contextual advertising. So maybe their success was due to luck. Or maybe the engineering culture was important early, but not now. After all, it’s not like Google has been spewing out successful new products (hello Orkut). In fact, Google still makes the vast majority of its revenue from the same search business it’s been running since launch.

In the same way, people at Microsoft used to say about their culture: “It must be right; look how successful we’ve been.” But Microsoft was successful mostly because it had a monopoly on operating systems, which it brilliantly leveraged into applications success. Perhaps it was successful despite its culture, not because of it. In fact, I would argue that Microsoft’s historic corporate culture of aggression was in fact counter-productive, leading directly to the antitrust actions that have hampered the company ever since.

The point is that companies, and the employees therein, should recognize that there may not be a causative relationship between the corporate culture and success, or if there was once such a causative relationship, it may have been severed as the strategic landscape changed. Companies would thus do well to avoid resting on their laurels and to instead constantly examine practices and cultures and see if they need revision based on current conditions.

A number of theories exists as to why soccer isn’t more popular in America — no timeouts for commercial breaks, not enough scoring, ridiculous faking of injuries, generally boring*, too European, etc. — all of which are probably true (I am drinking my own explanation Kool-Aid here). And there are, I’m sure, plenty of other good reasons, including my personal uber-theory of sports, which I will save for a later post, after I have trademarked its awesome parts.

But watching this World Cup I came up with a new idea. Relative to the big American sports, soccer is way more random; players don’t have as much control as they do in our sports. The players thus lack agency, which I use here in the philosophical sense: “human agency is the capacity for human beings to make choices and to impose those choices on the world.” Americans like sports with heroes, and heroes require agency. All the great American sports narratives are abut players who took control (Babe Ruth calling his homer, Michael Jordan in the clutch) of their game. Randomness gets in the way of this control.

When I say that soccer players are not in control, I don’t mean this as a criticism. The guys in the World Cup are the best at what they do. But using your feet to move a ball is simply less precise than using your hands, as you do in football, basketball and baseball. Shots and passes regularly go awry in soccer; this is the randomness of which I speak.

For example, in Sunday’s game between England and Germany, at around 59 minutes a German player was breaking away. Although English defenders were closing in fast, the German had an open shot at the goal. He took the shot from not far outside the penalty area (ie. from 54 feet…pretty close) and yet he missed the goal by three feet. Why? Because kicking is not hugely accurate. Compare that to an NFL quarterback, who, even with giant players rushing in to clobber him, will rarely miss a 19 yard pass by three feet. Why? Because throwing is accurate. Note: I am watching the Uruguay vs. Netherlands game as I post this, and the same thing just happened.

True soccer fans probably like this randomness. And over time, the randomness will be evened out: even if players only make a fraction of their shots, the better team will likely take more shots, and thus score more by the end of the game. But Americans are far more Newtonian. We want action, then result. We prefer a narrative of consistent forward progress, not random fits and starts. We want our action heroes not to follow the flow of Brownian motion but to seize the day and execute, whether they are Peyton Manning or John McLane.

* I tried to find the brilliant bit from the Simpsons where the ball just gets kicked back and forth for about two minutes, fully encapsulating the American view of soccer, but the internet failed me.

THIS JUST IN: Check out this set of Get Fuzzy comics for a classic take on the American view of soccer as boring.

For example, in this Atlantic article about obesity in America, the discussion tends to fall in one of two camps: either X) the obese are weak-willed, or Y) the obese are victims of the US system of cheap corn subsidies and for-profit food companies with their manipulative marketing and clever chemists.

Or in this NY Times article about why the military is awarding fewer Medals of Honor, the reasons given are: either X) the nature of current war doesn’t create as much of the close-in combat that tends to lead to Medals of Honor, or Y) the military system that awards medals has become so risk averse and bureaucratic that someone in the chain rejects even worthy Medal of Honor recommendations.

I understand why authors do this; it’s easier to bundle complex systems into single narratives, and creating oppositional tension makes an article more interesting. But rarely in real life are there two mutually exclusive and oppositional reasons for something. It’s not either/or; it’s both.

Life is complicated, and in virtually all situations there are multitudinous reasons for any phenomenon. Take obesity: of course some people simply won’t restrain their appetites. But it’s equally obvious that the nexus of policies and food companies greatly increases the likelihood of people eating fattening food. X and Y. And there are plenty of other likely causes too.

This shouldn’t be a great revelation to anyone – “oh, you mean there usually isn’t one simple cause for everything?” – yet journalists and pundits continue to employ the binary analysis. Does this matter? I think it does, because popular dialogue ends up framing the debate. If all people ever hear about is either/or, then they will look for a single solution, which will inevitably be insufficient. If the public instead hears about both, then they will look for more complex solutions that can address the multiple causes, and which will be far more likely to succeed.

For example, take the ballooning federal deficit, please. Pundits and politicians would like you to believe that the cause is either too much government spending or tax rates that are too low. If the public buys into that dichotomy, then the public will assume that simply cutting spending or raising taxes will solve the problem. But it won’t. The problem involves both federal spending and insufficient taxes, and it will only be solved by addressing both causes.

Discussion matters because it ends up circumscribing actual policy. So let’s make sure our discussions are accurate, even if complicated, because life is complicated.

Spitzer talks mostly about taxes and energy, discussing for example how reading the Gettysburg Address makes  investment bankers arguing for millions in additional compensation seem petty. But I would go further than Spitzer; the need for all of us to sacrifice to solve some pretty big problems could be extended from investment bankers to union members. Shared sacrifice should apply to those who sue for millions when they trip in the grocery store, those who are always looking for a government handout, those who hate sharing. During World War II women stopped wearing stockings because the silk was needed for the war effort. My guess is that we all have a metaphoric stocking we can give up for the good of the country.