John Scalzi @scalzi Aug 30
Today's appallingly stupid take on the Hugos: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/08/30/mutiny_at_the_hugo_awards_127934.html … Cathy Young apparently doesn't know the Hugos are not given by SFWA.
While I’m squealing a bit that Steve likes something I wrote he’s got to the center of the whole issues with the current state of science fiction. I’ve heard variations of that sentiment many times from people who’ve more or less given up on traditional science fiction. Watching the Hugo Awards last night, it’s not hard to understand why. The pettiness of the in crowd even when they win is incredible. Even when they are supposed to be having fun they aren’t unless they are poking at people.
What they can’t see is what they are doing. The don’t talk to real people outside their clique and they don’t even see what they have done to themselves. They’ve managed to take a genre that was once colorful, diverse and innovative and turn into something that is dull, bland and rather sordid.
The big problem in SFF is not the Sad Puppies, or the Chorfs. Both of those groups are symptom of a bigger problem. The big problem is monoculture. This guy explains some of the reasons why.
http://www.contrapositivediary.com/?p=3361
http://www.contrapositivediary.com/?p=3364
http://www.contrapositivediary.com/?p=3367
http://www.contrapositivediary.com/?p=3371
http://www.contrapositivediary.com/?p=3432
We’ve come to an era of corporatism with professional managers from the Ivy Covered Snob Factories moving people around in bureaucratic companies marching in lockstep with the administrative state. This Adam Smith quote sums it up perfectly.
The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it.
He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.” — Adam Smith
Human beings are not chess pieces and in order for the bureaucracy to do it’s job it needs to whip them into the correct forms through coercive measures. The most important thing the bureaucracy must prevent is an great upwelling of creativity and innovation. Creativity and innovation create chaos and gets people to act outside the moves they are supposed to have.
The problem is that in an entertainment industry white bread is death. Human being require fresh stimuli and If one venue can’t deliver it, well they will go somewhere else. That can become a real problem if your media is suddenly losing all it’s sales. That’s what’s happening in SFF. Along with most of the media. Instead of diversity to meet a bunch of different interests the big five are pushing stuff that meets their interests. And getting hammered for blandness.
Every single word Hillary has said about her email system has turned out to be likely false, demonstrably false, or ridiculous spin:
She complied with all regulations – false.
She wasn’t subject to a subpoena for documents when she unilaterally disposed of over half of her e-mail as private — false.
She didn’t send or receive classified information – false.
The information in her e-mails wasn’t classified at the time it was sent – false.
She didn’t send the classified information stored on her server, someone else did – meaningless.
The information was not marked classified – meaningless.
I’ve compiled a time line, below, and these facts tell the tale. Regardless of why Hillary set up a private server, there is no question that she used it to hide from lawful subpoenas and FOIA requests. She didn’t turn over a single document until it became clear that Trey Gowdy was being so persistent in forcing the issue that she had to. She had no right, under State Dept. regulations, to unilaterally decide what was and was not a government record, nor could she destroy records knowing that they would be part of an ongoing investigation. We know that some emails she received from Sydney Blumenthal were not provided in the documents she submitted to the State Department in December, 2014 claiming that they were a comprehensive production of all government records on her private server. Thus it is reasonable to assume that she in fact destroyed government records relevant to a subpoena.
Hillary’s conduct amounts to obstruction of justice (18 USC 1519) and comes with a jail term of up to 20 years. To put this in perspective, the accounting firm of Arthur Anderson was put out of business by the DOJ in 1992 for obstruction of justice when it destroyed records relating to its accounting of ENRON.
I would imagine that, criminally, the Obama DOJ, which is perhaps the most politicized in our nation’s history, would simply ignore Hillary’s obstruction if that is all there was. And given the complexity of the facts, most people would just tune it out. Clinton would do one of her well-practiced shameless squeals of victimized outrage, complain of a vast right wing conspiracy, and her minions would do the rest in the press and the Sunday morning shows. Obama’s DOJ certainly showed no rush to intercede in this matter, just as it already has countenanced obstruction of justice and destruction of government records from the IRS and Lois Lerner without any sort of criminal investigation.
But obstructing justice is far from all. Hillary’s email scandal reached critical mass when the Inspector General for the Intelligence Community found classified information in four of forty documents Hillary Clinton produced from her private server. That is when this private e-mail travesty went from obstruction of justice to a threat to national security. And what we are seeing is the tip of the iceberg.
The government takes little more seriously – among the peons at least – than maintaining the security of our classified information. People are prosecuted all of the time for mishandling classified information (18 USC 1924). By mishandling, that means that the defendant took control of and secured classified information in a place or manner that was not authorized. Notably, both David Petraeus and Sandy Berger were prosecuted for that offense. Hillary Clinton’s private server was not an authorized conduit or receptacle for any classified information. The presence of classified information on her private server would seem a clear violation of the applicable statute.
A far more serious offense comes when you take classified information and destroy it or transfer it to other people not authorized to see it (18 USC 793). That carries a jail sentence of up to ten years per act and the standard of conduct is gross negligence. Under the Obama administration, Bradley Manning was convicted for violating this statute and jailed for 35 years. State Dept. contractor Stephen Kim was given 13 months for discussing arguably non-classified information with Fox News’ James Risen. Former CIA officer Jefferey Sterling was recently sentenced to 42 months in prison while former CIA officer John Kiriakou served 30 months, both for providing classified information to a party not entitled to see it.
The IT company Hillary hired to control her server beginning in 2013, River Platte, has no security clearance. Neither do any of the attorneys Hillary tasked with reviewing all of her e-mails and selecting those that she was willing to produce to the State Dept. on December 5, 2014. Those would appear to be clear violations of the statute at issue.
So what remains to be answered:
- How many more of the 30,490 emails contain classified information? We are at four out of forty at this point. At some point, these documents will be evaluated by the IG for the Intelligence Community.
- Who precisely has had access to Hillary’s server and e-mails because of her “gross negligence?” What are their security clearances, if any?
- Are the 31,000 “personal” documents Hillary claims to have wiped clean from her server backed up on any other medium. This is very unclear. River Platte claims that it transferred all data on Hillary’s server to one or more servers in 2013, then wiped her original server clean. The FBI has taken control of the original server. Where did River Platte transfer the data and where is it today? What about backups and archives?
- If Hillary’s emails were sanitized and 31,000 emails wiped clean, who precisely did the document review and what criteria were they instructed to follow? When did they do it?
- What are the actual contents of the 31,000 emails Hillary erased?
- How much damage has Hillary done to our national security?
What were the Puppies after? That depends on who you ask. Detractors say the groups were both reactionary movements, driven by conservative white males angry about recent Hugo awards going to stories by and about a more diverse group of individuals. Last year’s Best Novel winner, for example, was Ann Leckie’s book Ancillary Justice, a space opera revenge story set in a colonialist society that does not distinguish between genders and uses only female pronouns; the winning short story was about a Chinese man who reveals to his family that he’s gay. Puppy opponents argue that these sorts of stories are praiseworthy, necessary, and valuable if science fiction is to expand its audience beyond the educated white male cohort that has traditionally dominated science fiction readership.
The two groups of Puppies see themselves differently. The Sad Puppies tend to argue that their aim is not really political at all—that instead they generally prefer stories without intensely political messages, and want to see the Hugos award fiction that emphasizes science and adventure and reader enjoyment, rather than a more literary emphasis on social and political themes. In an interview with Wired, Correia said that the group’s name comes from the joke that “at the leading cause of puppy-related sadness was boring message-fic winning awards.” He and Torgerson have argued that too much focus on diversity becomes a goal unto itself, and can distract from the true quality of a work.
....
The Rabid Puppies take a more aggressive approach, one that is openly hostile to the idea of diversity, and which is often laden with sexist, misogynist, and homophobic over- and undertones. As Wired’s story makes clear, Vox Day’s approach is intentionally designed to be outrageous; he says that he that wants to offend people, to stir up trouble, to cause chaos and destruction. He also admits that some of his followers are not really science fiction fans, but people who agree with his political agenda and want to help him wreck the awards system. “I wanted to leave a big smoking hole where the Hugo Awards were,” he told Wired before the awards were announced.
Given Vox Day’s obnoxious character and stated intent, it is not surprising that many viewed the Puppies as a threat to the Hugos and even to the wider world of science fiction and fandom. And while the aims of the two groups differ, they were, in the minds of most opponents, essentially the same.
That’s unfair in some ways, but not entirely unreasonable either. While Torgersen and Correia did attempt to separate themselves from the Rabid Puppies movement, they also at times seemed to suggest that they were fighting a common battle. And there was definitely overlap between supporters of the two Puppies groups; outside of the group’s leaders, it could be hard to distinguish between the two. Most any of the Sad Puppies could have been Rabid, and some acted as though they were.
And so the response from their opponents was to reject the Puppies—both of them—entirely, via the unprecedented number of No Awards. Since Saturday night, Puppies supporters have argued that the No Awards themselves constitute a threat to sci-fi, a radical and destructive action that essentially declares it’s preferable to have no awards at all than to let the Puppies have their way.
But it seems to me that the response from the Hugo voters was not really different in kind than what the Puppies did themselves. The Puppies have stressed, in the face of arguments that they cheated or took advantage of a loophole, that their block voting tactic was allowed by the rules. It was—but it was also a violation of Hugo norms. The same can be said about the No Award votes. Viewing the Puppies as a threat, the Hugo voters responded in kind.
There a few things in this world that truly make me mad. I'm not talking the things in life that can make us spark. There are lots of things in this world that can make me spark, and there is a reason that my nickname in early high school was "Spark Plug" and "Sparky." Those who truly knew me, however, knew that the problem was not when I sparked, which was soon over, but when I got very quiet and coldly precise.
This morning, I awoke to very unsurprising news about the Hugo awards. I am disappointed, but honestly expected nothing less from the Social Justice Bullies and related ilk. Indeed, I'm more surprised that one or two categories more didn't get no award -- the equivalent of destroying the village to save it. That was their plan almost from the start, since those labeled "Wrong Fan" dared to get more fans involved in a dying award that represented the thoughts of less than 600 "Right Fans" who bought supporting or full memberships to the World Science Fiction Conventions -- which is where and how the Hugo awards are decided. For those truly interested, note the attendance figures for the WorldCon over the last 30 years, note the numbers of people who actually voted in the Hugo process, and then note the size of conventions like DragonCon, the various ComicCons, and such.
....
Where I'm not sparking is with how things were handled. First, there was the biased and childish panel that preceded the Hugos. Second, was the awards ceremony itself. That one or more Hugo nominees walked out early (along with other professionals) says it all. The deliberate and willful disrespect, and bias, shown says it all for me.
So, for me, it's on. For those of you ignorant enough to buy into the Social Justice Bullies lie that the Puppies were all angry white men, I simply point out that the Puppies were far more diverse than those that opposed them. For a group of "neo-nazis" as an employee of Tor books called them (us, honestly), there sure are a lot of mutts in the group, and a lot females too. In fact, one author attacked in this manner actually fought real neo-nazis and injustice, and has the wounds to show it. Another author also schooled the idiots with the real deal. I further note that only one, repeat ONE, reporter writing on the subject of the Puppies had the courage and integrity to actually interview the wonderful Sarah A. Hoyt, who is not a white male. That Larry Correia is far more a mutt than I am, and hardly a lily-white male (unlike most of those attacking him). That strawman Larry is not just a jerk, but an asshole and I want at least ten of the ribbons saying he is a jerk. I could go on, but it is easy to pick apart the slanders, libels, and lies heaped upon them, Brad Torgersen, and others -- for those with interest in the truth that is.
The blatant disrespect and insult offered to Toni last night is the final straw. You attacked a friend.
So, I'm in on Sad Puppies 4. If you want to destroy WorldCon and the Hugo awards, you will have your chance and you will own the results. My hope, faint though it is, remains to make the awards truly relevant again as a means of promoting good writing, editing, and other efforts regardless of the message.
Meantime, my limited funds will be my vote and those funds will not be spent at Tor (or Forge), or probably with MacMillan as a whole. Tom Doherty: I doubt you remember me, but we have met and I found you to be a likable person who seemed to have integrity and honor. I am sorry to do this, but your employees have engaged in what I believe to be slander, libel, and more -- and, yes, I use those terms advisedly and with full knowledge of the difference between them. That they have also sought to harm some of your own writers... WorldCon, your bias is showing. For my author friends with Tor or MacMillan, sorry, but I will not support them as much as I want to support you.
I plan to spend with publishers who put out good books/stories first, and message second. I plan to buy from Baen; I plan to buy from other publishers and those who also publish independently, such as Sarah A. Hoyt, Kate Paulk, Cedar Sanderson, Amanda S. Green, Dave Freer, Jim Butcher, Tom Kratman, John Ringo, John C. Wright, and Michael Z. Williamson. With traditional publishing tanking, voting with my money has a far larger effect.
Now, I've wasted enough time on an award that most likely can't be saved. This is time that could have seen a couple thousand words written on the new novel I'm frantically trying to write, revise, and submit. It likely would be a far better use of my time, but I will not let stand the attacks on Toni, Sarah, and other friends. Choose as you will, my money vote is cast.
I can never again go to a ‘literary’ con and feel safe. These are the people who have spent months dragging people I know and respect through the mud, and my name with them. Calling me a token woman, and the other women who were on the ballot with me. Because we didn’t fit their narrative. I have no power, they have it all, and they revel in it. They have no qualms about punching down, making sure unwanted fans don’t get their noses into the establishment.Theoretically, convention committee members should be subject to the kind of discipline they prescribe in the harassment policies they advocate. However, my theory is that those who demand such policies never intend that they, themselves, would ever be subject to them. Rules are for other people.
Today, they dance and celebrate, because they won. They won by voting no award as a bloc, while accusing the Sad Puppies of having done so.
....
Now? I’d be afraid to go to WorldCon. They have shown how they feel, and they will treat any threats to their position with… theft, suppression of free speech, mockery, and more. There are people who will never again be able to publish traditionally because of this. And not everyone has the options to be an independent, to have the freedom I so cherish.
I can’t be involved any longer.
What’s the difference between ISIS and social justice warriors? Well, one recruits its members from the most pathetic, disaffected, pathological members of society, claims to stand against shadowy conspiracies and bullying by the West, and destroys revered cultural institutions in fits of fanaticism.
The others are unhinged terrorists in the Middle East?
Over the past year, the social justice movement, which at one point had set itself up as an insurmountable cultural juggernaut, bent on remaking every art form or subculture in its own image, has degenerated into a farce. That farce reached new heights this past Saturday night, when the voters of the prestigious Hugo Awards, in a fit of ideologically-motivated pique, refused to give any awards at all in no less than five different categories – including Best Short Story and Best Novella. As context, the Hugos had only refused to offer an award in any category five times in the award’s 60 year history.
How The “Sad Puppies” Got Their Name
The reason was that a group of disaffected science fiction fans calling themselves collectively the “Sad Puppies” (along with a more radical submovement calling itself the “Rabid Puppies”) had actually forced the Hugos to include works on the voting ballot that were popular with fans, rather than simply works by authors with acceptable politics, or connections to the right publishing house.
To put this in perspective, imagine that the Academy Awards voters had refused to pick a winner for “Best Director” or “Best Picture” at all because none of the films were about gay rights or personally endorsed by Harvey Weinstein. And imagine a very flummoxed presenter standing onstage at the Academy Awards having to say, “And the award goes to…no one?”
In the interest of evenhandedness, I should note that the Sad Puppies employed controversial tactics in trying to force consideration of authors and works they saw as underappreciated. Many claimed that the sort of organized voter drive employed by the Puppies ran contrary to the spirit of how the Hugo Awards were supposed to work. Game of Thrones creator George R. R. Martin was particularly vocal about this complaint:
If the Sad Puppies wanted to start their own award… for Best Conservative SF, or Best Space Opera, or Best Military SF, or Best Old-Fashioned SF the Way It Used to Be… whatever it is they are actually looking for… hey, I don’t think anyone would have any objections to that. I certainly wouldn’t. More power to them.But that’s not what they are doing here, it seems to me. Instead they seem to want to take the Hugos and turn them into their own awards. Hey, anyone is welcome to join worldcon, to become part of worldcon fandom… but judging by the comments on the Torgesen and Correia sites, a lot of the Puppies seem to actively hate worldcon and the people who attend it and want nothing to do with us. They want to determine who gets the Ditmars, but they don’t want to be Australians.
Martin is absolutely right to be concerned that ideologically driven actors might seek to invade and colonize communities whose values, interests, and members they hold in contempt. Ask any video game fan familiar with the developers of the video game Sunset, who openly tweeted their disgust and contempt for gamers when their game failed to sell.
Why A ‘No Award’ Sweep Will Kill The Hugos
However, whatever Martin’s reasonable concerns about ideological entryism into a community he loved, he also wasn’t shy about denouncing the idea of refusing to give out awards at all. In fact, his blog post on that topic makes him sound a bit like the canary in the intergalactic spice mine:
I’ve been voting on the Hugos since the 1970s, and I use NO AWARD every year, usually in about a third of the categories. However, I have seldom (not NEVER, just seldom) placed it first. I rank the finalists that I think worthy of the rocket above NO AWARD, and the ones I think unworthy below it. That’s the way I intend to use the option this year as well, in spite of the slatemaking campaigns that buggered the nomination process to the seven hells and back.
NO AWARD is a scalpel, not a bludgeon. Voting NO AWARD on everything down the line… or even (the lesser option) on everything that appeared on either Puppy slate… well, I don’t think it is smart, I don’t think it is fair, and I know damned well that a NO AWARD sweep will kill the Hugos.
Whatever one thinks of Martin’s (very liberal) politics, it’s hard to deny that his thoughts are at least consistent with the principles of free discussion and free association inherent in modern liberalism. While they disagreed about tactics, these are principles that Martin held in common with the Sad Puppies.
After all, when it came to free discussion, the Puppies’ main complaint was less that ideological disagreement decreased a work’s quality, and more that their own ideologies were being unfairly considered a strike against their work, even when their work did nothing to reflect those ideologies. And as for free association, their objection to the dominance of publishing houses like TOR books seems to have boiled down to a concern that cliquishness was preventing even people who actually did want to be part of the community from joining it.
Where’s The Beef?
Had this fight been had on Martin and the Puppies’ terms it would’ve been nothing more than a family quarrel between Sci-Fi nerds. Indeed, Martin himself refused to believe it was anything else and thought the Puppies were blowing it out of proportion. “Where’s the beef?” he asked incredulously in response to their complaints.
Then came the actual Hugo Awards, and the beef was served up on a silver platter, slow-roasted in the mulish anger of social justice commissars, and garnished with absurd, self-immolating tweets and blog posts. Witness the “Puppy-Free Hugo Award Voter’s Guide” put out by Leftist Sci-Fi author Deirdre Saoirse Moen. Unsurprisingly, it includes many categories where Moen suggests simply voting “No Award,” including the aforementioned “Best Novella” and “Best Short Story” categories.
Freelance writer Phil Sandifer, meanwhile, seems to have been the most honest exponent of what the anti-Puppy voters were thinking, since he openly professed to support voting “No Award” for every category. Witness these quotes of his from Twitter:
Phil Sandifer @PhilSandifer So hey, SJWs, we just made history, doubling the total number of No Awards ever in a stunning anti-fascist victory. Go us. #HugoAwardsI think it’s fair to say that if people like Sandifer are the people in charge of picking who gets to be the heir of Robert Heinlein or Ursula K. LeGuin, then the Sad Puppies had every reason to be concerned that quality had been eclipsed by politics. Sandifer, for his part, didn’t bother denying this, saying only that “Politics is a form of quality” before calling his critics “effing morons.”
Phil Sandifer @PhilSandifer Let's be clear: circumstances like this are why the No Award mechanism exists. #HugoAwards
Phil Sandifer @PhilSandifer Right, so, on to the next battle: keeping dogshit off the ballot entirely next year. #HugoAwards
Phil Sandifer @PhilSandifer One more year of holding the line against fascist entryists, and then we all get to go back to being fans. #HugoAwards #EPH
Phil Sandifer @PhilSandifer I admit to voting exclusively authors whose politics do not utterly repel me. #HugoAwards https://twitter.com/CraigMcDickles/status/635352940992073728 …
Excluding Authors Because Of Their Personal Political Beliefs Is A Bad Idea Except, of course, that Sandifer was talking about voting, not based on the political messages in books, but based on what the authors believed. As any Sci-Fi fan knows, excluding authors with right wing or even openly racist politics would exclude some of the greatest authors in the history of the genre, including Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, and even an author whose 125th birthday was (ironically) being celebrated just this past week – H.P. Lovecraft. When your standard for who deserves to be awarded by the Sci-Fi community actively writes out some of that community’s idols, you may want to consider that you’re not engaged in art criticism so much as McCarthyist blacklisting. Ironic behavior from a self-avowed Marxist, but then, irony is not a strong suit of people like Sandifer.
Sad Puppy sympathizers have since excoriated Sandifer over Twitter for these sentiments. However, there is an overlooked tweet from him that shows just how little this fight actually revolves around fighting entryism:
Phil Sandifer @PhilSandifer Also, @femfreq would have gotten on the ballot if not for the Puppies.If you don’t know, @femfreq is the Twitter handle of the aforementioned feminist game critic Anita Sarkeesian, a woman who not only openly professed contempt for video games before trying to rebrand herself as a lifelong gamer, but actively discredited herself among much of the games media with her hysterical outbursts about the level of violence in the forthcoming “DOOM” game. In short, Sarkeesian is the definition of an ideologically motivated entryist. Hers is the bloody shirt that Sandifer waves to justify the very act that even an ideological fellow traveler said would “kill the Hugos.”
The Social Justice Left Is A Schoolyard Bully
In the past, I have written extensively about the degree to which the Social Justice Left, rather like a schoolyard bully, began its fanatical crusade by targeting art forms and subcultures most often enjoyed by nerds, seeing them as a low status, easy target. If nerds are the “sad puppies,” then the Left saw them as proverbial Chihuahuas. Unfortunately, as the rise of the actual Sad Puppies and the year-long counter-crusade known as #Gamergate shows, these “puppies” are more like abused Dobermans that have been backed into a corner, and who are now mauling their tormentors. The Left’s #WaronNerds was supposed to be a blitzkrieg. It has become an overwhelming rout for those who instigated it.
However, perhaps due to war weariness or simple desire to avoid politics, many members of the gaming or Sci-Fi communities have tried to adopt a “why can’t we all just get along?” approach. They’ve tried to argue that the best solution is for their communities to have room for both social justice warriors and old school nerd traditionalists.
The Hugo Awards have shown us that this is impossible. The Social Justice Left will not be satisfied unless it has complete control over the spaces it infiltrates. If it cannot control a space, it will burn it down and salt the earth. If they could, they would probably torch every script of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew for being anti-feminist, every score of Mozart’s The Magic Flute for its unflattering depiction of its one mulatto character, every print of Apelles’ Venus Anadyomene for catering to the male gaze, and every other work that portrays, or was written by, someone with objectionable politics. This book burning bonfire of the vacuous would be large enough to be seen from space, if the satellites weren’t taken down for being too phallic.
What Nerds Can Teach The Rest Of Us
Nerd communities have seen proof that social justice politics cannot be tolerated, because it will sooner immolate the very institutions it inhabits than tolerate the existence of disparate elements. The utter destruction of the Hugo Awards is a warning not just to nerds, but to Western Civilization that social justice is anti-social, anti-justice, and anti-just about everything else. It is to the body politic what an autoimmune disease is to the human body.
Thanks to the Hugo Awards, the nerds now know that you cannot make a treaty with a cancer. You can only treat it by stopping its spread. When will the rest of us figure it out?
Photo Hugo Awards 2015. Via livestream: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/60734276
Mytheos Holt is a contributor to The Federalist and a senior fellow at the Institute for Liberty. Yes, Mytheos is his real name.
There is controversy surrounding this year’s Hugo Awards, the prestigious science fiction prize which will be handed out this Saturday and whose previous winners have included Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick and Robert Heinlein. This year’s ballot has many names on it that liberals and the media have denounced as racist and reactionary white men.
The group in question counter that they are not reactionary, racist, or even white, and that the reporting on the entire episode has been atrocious.
The group of writers, calling themselves the “Sad Puppies” – a satire on liberalism’s penchant for appealing to emotion over logic – successfully got themselves on the Hugo ballot, and then nominated, by appealing to the fans who vote for the award. The Sad Puppies unofficial leader is Brad Torgerson, author of “The Chaplain’s War” and other works and a U.S. Army Reserve Warrant Officer. Torgerson, who has been nominated for both the Hugo and the Nebula, another prestigious sci-fi prize, told one interviewer, “It became plainly obvious, especially after 2010, that a lot of the classic works of the old days - there's no way they could possibly make it in the current climate because the current climate was all about affirmative action.”
“Message was eating story,” John C. Wright, who got on the ballot via the Puppies’ campaign and is nominated for five Hugos this year, told CNS News. “It’s about that and not political correctness. It’s not that there are certain themes explored in science fiction, it’s that the authors of many of works are being rewarded for advancing an agenda while the craftsmanship of the work is lacking. The question should not be about politics, the question should simply be, are your stories good or bad? People were getting prizes and the craftsmanship just wasn't there.”
Wright notes that the media coverage of the Sad Puppies controversy has been riddled with errors. One of the most egregious cases appeared in Entertainment Weekly, which had to issue a lengthy correction:
CORRECTION: After misinterpreting reports in other news publications, EW published an unfair and inaccurate depiction of the Sad Puppies voting slate, which does, in fact, include many women and writers of color. As Sad Puppies’ Brad Torgerson explained to EW, the slate includes both women and non-caucasian writers, including Rajnar Vajra, Larry Correia, Annie Bellet, Kary English, Toni Weisskopf, Ann Sowards, Megan Gray, Sheila Gilbert, Jennifer Brozek, Cedar Sanderson, and Amanda Green.
Despite the corrections, argues Wright, the media continues to report that the Sad Puppies is an attack on women and minorities.
The Hugo is given out Saturday in a ceremony at the INB Performing Arts Center in Spokane, Washington.
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whoCOLOR creates an on-demand color-markup of the original authors of the text of any article on the (english) wikipedia.
whoVIS (alpha).
whoVIS is a graph visualization of editor disagreements in articles over time, based on the accurate authorship mining of WikiWho.
Restaurants are running out of chefs. The work is astonishingly unglamorous: hot, manual labor performed in a tiny space. It also pays abysmally; the median hourly wage is just $11 an hour, and the 90th percentile, the elite of the profession, makes a princely $15.35. As student loan burdens have gotten more burdensome and urban real estate prices have soared, restaurants in pricey areas are finding it harder to attract workers willing to endure a long commute in order to spend hours getting hot and dirty.
Why don't they just pay more, demands Kevin Drum? "Offer them, say, $15 per hour, and who knows? Maybe there are plenty of good entry-level cooks available. This would raise your total cost of running the restaurant by, oh, 2 percent or so, but it's not like restaurants are competing with China. They're competing with other restaurants nearby that have the same problem. If the price of a good cook is going up, it's going to affect everyone."
This is a frequent question from the left when manufacturers and others complain about labor shortages, and it's fair enough. A 2012 Atlantic article from Adam Davidson pointed out that when it comes to machinists and others, manufacturers often can't afford to raise wages, because they'll lose business overseas. But no one is going to stroll over to Bangladesh for their anniversary dinner, so why can't restaurants just raise wages a bit and add it to the check?
Well, the first thing to note is that Kevin's math seems a little off. As the Bureau of Labor Statistics figures suggest, probably 60 to 70 percent of the kitchen workers in America are making $12 an hour or less. The rule of thumb for restaurants is that labor should be about a third of your total sales, and about two-thirds of the labor cost typically goes to the "back of house" staff, i.e. the people who make the food and wash the dishes. (Waiters and bartenders get paid less because most of their income comes from tips.) So we're looking at spending more like 20 percent of income on the kitchen. And under Kevin's plan, most of those workers are going to be getting a substantial raise of somewhere between 25 and 50 percent of their current salary. In fact, you'll have to raise the rest of the staff's salary by something approaching 25 percent as well, or else they'll get upset and your best people will leave, as one entrepreneur recently discovered when he raised everyone's salary to the same high level.
Okay, but maybe you won't have to raise the dishwashers' pay. And anyway, 20 percent of an average increase of 35 percent (the amount needed to take the median to $15 an hour) would only be a 7 percent increase in costs. Would people really stop going to restaurants over a measly 7 percent of the check?
Well, yes. But not all people, and not all the time. Many people would eat fewer meals outside the home. There's a restaurant near my house that I'd say is 20 percent overpriced for the neighborhood and the quality of the food it serves. It had no competition nearby but still opened empty, and remains mostly that way a year later. The food is good -- not stellar, but I'd be happy enough to eat there, if it weren't for the fact that everything costs too much. If prices at the pub that opened nearby went up by the same amount, I wouldn't simply start splitting my time between the two; I'd eat out less.
Americans spend a phenomenal amount of money consuming food outside their homes, and a major reason is that with restaurant labor so cheap, the convenience and price are attractive to people who don't feel like cooking. If the wages go up, that calculus shifts. And unfortunately those "rich bosses" can't just take it out of their profits, because margins in the industry are under 5 percent, and the difference between making that profit and closing up shop can be surprisingly thin. Empty seats don't just cost you rent; they make it hard to get good servers, because empty seats mean lost tip income. You can end up in a vicious spiral where your service gets worse, so your restaurant loses more customers, so the service gets even worse . . . and it's time to call the bank and tell them you won't be paying off that loan.
This is not to say that every restaurant will fold if kitchen workers earn $15 an hour. Most will. But most were going to fail anyway, because that's what restaurants do. The higher wage would push a few more into failure. The labor supply would be greater, but the labor demand would be lower.
This is, in fact, pretty much what I'd expect to see if the shortage of cooks continues; the market will find a new equilibrium employing somewhat fewer cooks at somewhat higher wages. Some of this would be driven by restaurants going out of business; some of it would be achieved by using more preprocessed ingredients like shredded cheese, or switching to less labor intensive menus, which sacrifices some quality but slashes your wage bill.
That will be good for the cooks, who do very challenging work for very little money. But I do wonder what it will do to the food culture in urban areas. I'd like to think that this would just put the bad restaurants out of business. Unfortunately, markets don't deliver cosmic justice, nor do they regularly conform to my personal tastes. Those most affected may be the restaurants in more economically marginal areas, or those with a special commitment to serving higher-quality, labor-intensive food.
That's not to say that restaurants shouldn't pay their cooks more. Leaving aside the question of economic justice, it's simple economics: They're going to have to if they can't find the people they need at the current wages. It's a return to an old theme of mine: To a very large extent, your labor model is your business model. When you change what you pay, you don't just hold everything else equal; you change your business, or your industry, to match the new wages. So seemingly modest changes can have a big impact not just on the workers, but on entire communities. Those changes can be either good or bad. All that's assured is that raising wages has a wider effect.
1) Two percent is what he got from a back-of-the envelope calculation assuming that 15 percent of your costs are kitchen staff, and a third of them are entry level
If something seems too good to be true, it probably is. Unfortunately, many journalists did not remember that when covering a new report claiming $15-an-hour wages would raise fast-food prices only 4 percent.
A closer look shows that the study underlying the report had major methodological errors. More serious analysis shows that $15-an-hour wages would raise fast-food prices by over a third — at least until stores automate work currently done by humans.
The study, by Purdue University economists Richard Ghiselli and Jing Ma, has made quite a splash. The Washington Post covered it extensively, concluding that the higher wages for fast-food workers would add just 17 cents to the cost of a Big Mac. Local papers have covered it too. ThinkProgress argued that the study undercuts arguments against $15-an-hour fast-food wages. If the study were accurate, it would be hard to argue with them.
However, Purdue’s report offers a case study in why journalists should consult multiple sources before going to press. Simple back-of-the-envelope calculations show that the Purdue results are impossible.
Labor accounts for a quarter to a third of the average fast-food restaurant’s costs. Currently, wages in the fast-food industry run around $9 an hour. Going to $15 an hour means increasing pay by over 50 percent. Prices would have to rise by at least one-sixth (50 percent multiplied by one third) to cover the base-wage increases. Of course, those price increases would drive some customers away, so restaurants would need to raise prices again. But as a baseline, prices would have to rise by at least one-sixth. The Purdue study finds price increases an order of magnitude smaller. It does so by making a basic math error.
The Purdue researchers got their data from the National Restaurant Association’s (NRA) 2014 operations report. The report surveys restaurants and shows how much the median restaurant spends on various expenses, such as payroll, food, marketing, etc. The Purdue researchers added those figures to derive the balance sheet of the typical fast-food restaurant.
Mathematically, however, medians do not work that way. Average values will add to the overall sum, but medians typically do not. The preface of the NRA Operations Report emphasizes in highlighted text that researchers cannot add median values to get overall expenses. Nonetheless the Purdue researchers did exactly that.
Consequently, their derived restaurant-balance-sheet profits and costs sum to 92 percent of total sales. Fully 8 percent of fast-food restaurant expenses disappear.
The Purdue study proceeds to calculate how much wages would have to rise to pay $15 an hour and adds that amount (and a constant profit margin) to the undercounted expenses. They then compare this new (undercounted) figure to the sales of the typical restaurant. The missing expenses absorb two-thirds of the higher labor costs.
The Purdue study makes two other errors. The economists estimated fast-food workers make about $10.60 an hour — somewhat more than the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. As a result, they underestimate how much restaurants’ labor costs — and hence prices — would need to rise.
They also ignored fast-food customers’ price sensitivity. Most Americans eat fast food because it is fast and cheap. When prices rise, sales fall — a lot. Studies find a 10 percent increase in fast-food prices cuts sales by 9.5 percent. So fast-food restaurants will need further price increases to cover fixed costs such as rent. In equilibrium, prices rise by about double the amount needed to initially cover the higher wages.
Last year, the Heritage Foundation estimated how a $15-an-hour minimum wage would affect fast-food prices — accounting for all these factors. That report used data on average fast-food balance sheets, relied on BLS wage estimates, and accounted for customers’ price sensitivity. This model found very different results: Prices would have to rise 38 percent to cover the higher wages, while sales and employment would both fall by over a third.
In particular, McAfee and Brynjolfsson worry about automation eliminating the jobs of unskilled and middle-skill employees. They agree technological progress creates opportunities for highly skilled employees who build and operate machines, but they fear that the economy will hold far fewer opportunities for less-skilled employees. As Brynjolfsson puts it:
There are lots of examples of routine, middle-skilled jobs that involve relatively structured tasks and those are the jobs that are being eliminated the fastest. Those kinds of jobs are easier for our friends in the artificial intelligence community to design robots to handle them.… [Technological advances are] always destroying jobs. But right now the pace is accelerating. It’s faster we think than ever before in history. So as a consequence, we are not creating jobs at the same pace that we need to.[15]
Labor market statistics do not support this concern. Productivity data show that the pace of automation has actually slowed in recent years. Over the past generation the earnings of less-skilled Americans have risen faster than the economy-wide average.
Slow Productivity Growth. Businesses do not appear to be automating human tasks at a faster rate than before. If they were, this would increase measured labor productivity growth. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates productivity by dividing U.S. economic output by the total hours worked in the economy. A substantial increase in the pace of automation would allow businesses to produce as many or more goods with fewer hours of human labor. This would appear in the labor statistics as faster productivity growth.
This has not happened. Chart 2 shows the year-over-year percent change in labor productivity for the non-farm business sector over the past four decades, as well as a four-year moving average that smooths annual fluctuations. Productivity growth increased noticeably in the late 1990s and the early 2000s. From 2003 onward, however, productivity growth trended downward. Average productivity jumped in 2009 as businesses going through layoffs tried to lay off their least productive employees. That surge immediately subsided. Since 2010, productivity has grown at an abnormally slow rate. In the most recent year of data, labor productivity actually fell 0.1 percent. Although employees are more productive now than in the past, overall productivity is increasing more slowly.
Concerns about rapidly accelerating computing power increasing productivity so much it reduces total employment are fears about a future possibility. Over the past decade, productivity growth has slowed even as computer power has increased exponentially.
The Earnings of Less-Skilled Employees Increase. Concerns about automation eliminating employment opportunities for less-skilled employees also do not show up in the data. Over the past generation their total compensation has increased rapidly.
The Congressional Budget Office measures total labor market compensation—cash wages, salaries, and non-cash benefits, such as health care and retirement contributions—for each quintile of the income distribution.[16] Chart 3 shows the percent growth in total inflation-adjusted labor compensation for non-elderly childless households between 1979 and 2011 (the most recent data available).[17]
The Scandinavian countries are regularly praised for their income equality, quality of life, gender equality, maternal care and many other traits, not just by leftist politicians and activists, but also by left-leaning economists like Paul Krugman. The Scandinavian model, they believe, is the ultimate proof that you can combine a high-growth economy with a generous welfare state.
The problem is that much of the praise is wrong.
True, the Scandinavian nations are very successful in many ways. Quality of life is considerably higher there than in most other parts of the world, and equality is a strong social norm. But despite what many in the American left who idealizes Scandinavia might wish, the success was not achieved thanks to the welfare state model, but perhaps despite its existence.
In the new book Scandinavian Unexceptionalism, Swedish author Nima Sanandaji dispels many of the popular conceptions about the Nordic countries. Scandinavia’s success came before the welfare state, not after it. Between 1936 and 2008, when much of the welfare expansion occurred, Sweden’s growth rate dropped to being the 13th highest out of 28 industrialized countries.
During the decades before, between 1870 and 1936, Sweden had enjoyed the highest economic growth in the entire industrialized world. Moreover, in the most intense period of “third-way” policies of market socialism, between the 1970s and 1990s, Sweden’s economic performance was exceptionally low. This period, however, was an exception: for most of its modern history, Sweden has been anything but a socialist mecca. The government has usually pursued free-market policies and free trade. If anything, high taxes and extensive social policies have hindered Scandinavian economic performance, which would most likely have been much higher without them.
Instead, Sanandaji shows, the root of Scandinavian success can largely be found in culture. These countries, and Sweden in particular, have historically had remarkably high levels of social trust, family values, a strong sense of work ethic, and social cohesion. The notion of the “Protestant work ethic” goes back far longer than the modern welfare state. Scholars like Max Weber, Sanandaji shows, long ago noted that the Protestant countries of northern Europe had an overall higher living standard and economic success than most. The often-celebrated equality of Scandinavian countries, too, began well before the welfare state was developed.
Again, these traditions and values by no means came with the welfare state. Sanandaji shows that these Scandinavian values follow people as they move abroad, even for generations: Americans of Scandinavian descent, whose ancestors left way before modern welfare states were established, tend to carry many of their norms with them. The median incomes of Americans with Scandinavian heritage is 20 percent higher than average income in the U.S. as a whole, and poverty rates in this group is roughly half of that of average Americans.
The Scandinavian utopia of many leftist Americans, as Sanandaji shows, primarily exists in their own fantasies. In many ways, holding up the Scandinavian welfare state as an example has become a way of arguing that there doesn’t have to be a choice between growth and prosperity on the one hand, and high taxes and social transfers on the other.
But that tradeoff still stands. If anything, the Scandinavian countries are good examples of how important it is to uphold social values and virtues that work. When Swedes voted a center-right coalition into government in 2006, they did so based on a platform that emphasized hard work and individual responsibility in a society where all too many healthy people of working age were living on welfare. This tradition of individual responsibility goes back all the way to the time when Sweden was largely a rural, farming-based country with individual tillers, Sanandaji points out.
The lesson isn’t only that the Scandinavian model is difficult to copy, but that it would even be outright unwise of a country like America to do so. What left-leaning people in America and other countries should ultimately learn from the Scandinavian model is that for redistribution of wealth to be possible, there must first and foremost be enough wealth to distribute.
