I’ve learned the hard way that movies are not a great teaching medium. . . . People don’t go to the movies to be preached at. That’s the bottom line. The more you preach, the fewer you reach.
Phil Vischer
Todd Hertz, “Platform agnostic: A Conversation with Phil Vischer,” Books and Culture, July/August 2009
Which reminds me of the great line from Montaigne:
I do not teach, I relate.
St. Iggy said it first: No pain, no gain.
“There are no Gains without Pains,” runs just one of a thousand aphorisms in his 1758 essay, “The Way to Wealth.”
And Ben pinched it from seventeenth century poet Robert Herrick: “If little labour, little are our gains/Man’s fortunes are according to his pains” (Hesperides 752).
Did Herrick filch it from even further back?
This from St. Ignatius’ letter to Polycarp, written around the turn of the first century: “Where there is more toil, there is great gain” (Polycarp, 1.1). That’s from the Loeb edition. Other translations give it this way: “where the labour is great, the gain is all the more.”
It’s interesting that while Ignatius’ point was spiritual, his toil-and-gain notion extends from a sports analogy. Just before he mentions it, he invokes the idea of “a perfect athlete.”
Jane would have been happy.
Little known fact: American Patriot Paul Revere got a whipping for attending Rev. Mayhew's sermons.
Paul Revere was more than a decade his junior, but they became friends in Revere’s later teens. Mayhew married the daughter of Revere’s landlord. Paul’s family was mostly Puritan. His dad was a Huguenot refugee (hence his French surname), and Dad took his doctrine pretty seriously—certainly Trinitarian, definitely Calvinist. In fact when Revere was caught sneaking sermons at Mayhew’s church, Dad gave Paul a whipping to discourage his consumption of heretical preaching.
Mayhew was also an ardent and celebrated defender of liberty in the colonies. He opposed the Stamp Act and resisted imposition of anything that smacked of British officialdom—including Anglican bishops. He was a Congregationalist and fought a very pitched public battle against the establishment of the episcopate in America.
So against that backdrop, read the following from Charles Akers’ bio of Mayhew (my comments in brackets). It turns out that Mayhew’s grandson
entered the Anglican priesthood in 1817 [Mayhew died in 1766] and returned briefly to Boston in 1834 as rector of Trinity Episcopal Church [in granddad’s old stomping grounds]. With all his grandfather’s temerity [he was famously strident] the grandson proclaimed that “there cannot be a church without a bishop.” By the time of his death in 1854, Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright, perhaps America’s most distinguished Episcopalian, had become Bishop of New York.
And I bet he recited the Athanasian Creed as often as his grandfather complained about it.
You just never know how things are going to shake out, do you?
The book business isn’t doing too well in America right now. Sales are down. Returns are up. And foot traffic in bookstores is in double-digit decline compared to a year ago.
But that’s not the case everywhere. From its lofty seat in the lap of America’s publishing culture, the New York Times recently reported that things are different in Europe, where book sales are actually up. Not that everyone’s celebrating. Despite growth in sales, publishers there are cautious. Even nervous. They’re looking back to events unfolding after 1929. Several French publishers failed during the Great Depression. Perhaps America’s slump portends what’s to come.
“Now we are asking ourselves, will it be like that again?” said one French editor quoted in the story. “There is still a sense of fragility.”
She says what we all know, what we all fear. There is little certainty about the future. No one has visibility. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Listen to what economist Israel M. Kirzner says in Competition and Entrepreneurship:
Because the participants in this market are less than omniscient, there are likely to exist, at any given time, a multitude of opportunities that have not yet been taken advantage of.
Uncertainty means opportunity. Anyone can take the available knowledge and arrange his options A, B, and C. That’s what happens now when we conduct business as usual or spend our moments worried about what’s going to happen next. The entrepreneurial function is to put aside A, B, and C and discover D, G, and Q instead.
The Times mentions just such as case:
Penguin was founded in 1935, during the Great Depression, by the publisher Allen Lane, who wanted to sell quality books for roughly the price of a pack of cigarettes.
It worked. In less than a year the company had already printed over a million books. Penguin’s success was as then unpredictable as it is now legendary. While his colleagues were failing, Allen Lane figured out one way to serve his customers and grow a business.
Penguin: Innovation in troubled times.
Omniscience sounds great. Certainty would be wonderful. But maybe not. The unequal dispersion of knowledge creates opportunity and space for growth. Allen Lane had an edge. So did Thomas Nelson. Working in uncertainty means using it to our advantage.
I think the message of Penguin and Nelson is that while our environment has an impact on us we are not utterly dependent upon its externalities. We have unique internal energies that can be directed outward to serve customers in creative, as-yet-unforeseen ways and thereby overcome the environment. Put another way, it is because we don’t know what will happen in the future that we have power to steer the present.
What are some of the ways you think publishers can innovate in the current environment?
To succeed in business you need to “meet the needs of consumers,” right? It’s so hackneyed it must be true. It’s so true it must be wrong.
To get what I mean, see how this strikes you. It’s from the jacket copy of Paul Nunes and Brian Johnson’s book Mass Affluence: Seven New Rules of Marketing to Today’s Consumer (Harvard Business School Press):
Millions of consumers can now afford to pay more for everything—from household cleaning products to clothing to automobiles. Yet these “moneyed masses” are not spending nearly what their disposable incomes allow. This lack of spending translates into a huge, unspoken-for portion of affluent customers’ paychecks—a bounty waiting to be won by today’s marketers.
Mass Affluence: For when your just not spending yourself into an early grave
What Jeffries saw anecdotally is borne out by the numbers. As a percentage of disposable income consumer and mortgage debt rose from 77% in 1990 to 127% in 2008, according to the Economist.
When Nunes and Johnson published, it was well over 100%. People are shoveling deeper and deeper holes and somehow these guys miss all the dirt flying through the air? It wasn’t just them. It has to do with how the wider culture pictures people engaged in buying and selling.
Words like consumer or customer have deeper meanings than our offhanded ways of tossing them about might indicate. Those deeper meanings affect how we think. In the blockquoted graf above these mythic people with gobs of money are not customers. They’re targets, opportunities. The term customer is used, but it’s an editorial choice. Mr. Roget was given breath precisely to prevent copywriters from having to repeat themselves.
The trouble is this. Use of the word consumer tends to debase, even dehumanize, the business relationship. It reduces people to the lowest level of identification in the transaction. Look at the etymology; the root means to take. Taking is certainly occurring. But it’s the most basic thing. There is nothing elevated about it. There is nothing that assumes value beyond what the person is doing in the transaction. There’s nothing transcendent or reflective of human dignity. People are what we can sell them.
Customer gets at something richer and fuller. It implies ongoing, interpersonal relationship, not merely a transaction. A customer is accustomed to your business. The word’s Latin parent means to make one’s own. Your business becomes the customer’s concern, and vice versa. There’s something personal and relational built into the concept.
The difference for business is this. You can use a consumer. You can think of them as a mere target for your wares and services, an opportunity for a sale. Not so with a customer. There is a relational responsibility inherent to treating people like customers, something more fulfilling, more affirming of the other’s humanity, and ultimately better for business. Such a picture of people strengthens social bonds (and the trust that trade depends upon) rather than looking for yet more inventive ways to extract their financial worth with no regard for social consequence.
Perhaps another way to think of it is this: Consumers are means to an end. Customers are ends in themselves.
Yesterday the stock market surged. The Dow shot up 380 points, the Nasdaq nearly 90. But while I was rifling through my bedside drawers for some Dramamine, I heard this: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wants to keep the federal coffers open for additional stimulus packages. I got nauseous for a whole different reason. Didn’t we just float an $800 billion note last month? Slow it down, sister.
After conferring behind closed doors with practitioners of the dismal science, Speaker Pelosi emerged to say that it was the task of Congress to boost the mood of businesspeople. “The word of the day is confidence,” said Pelosi. “Confidence in our markets, confidence in lending, confidence in our financial institutions.”
Here’s a free Latin lesson. The root of the word confidence is fide—faith. And given what history has to say about the effectiveness of government spending to spur economies, crossing Speaker Pelosi’s bridge over these troubled currents requires a big leap of the stuff.
Veronique de Rugy is an economist at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center. She has an article in the April 2009 issue of Reason (unfortunately not yet webbed) that should give people pause about the effectiveness of stimulus packages.
She mentions, for instance, Japan’s trouble in the 1990s with (sound familiar?) housing and stock markets in the tank. The response: “Between 1992 and 1999, Japan passed eight stimulus packages totaling roughly $840 billion in today’s dollars. During that time, the debt-to-GDP ratio skyrocketed, the country was rocked by massive corruption scandals, and the economy never did recover.”
Another related assumption is that federal wartime spending helps sluggish economies. De Rugy marshals evidence by several researchers that not only disprove this assumption but indicate the that the opposite might be true. She cites, for example, the finding by Harvard economist Robert Barro that for every buck in wartime spending, we get back three quarters and a nickel.
What about the Great Depression? Surprisingly, government spending didn’t help there either. De Rugy cites a paper in the 1992 Journal of Economic History:
“A simple calculation indicates that nearly all of the observed recovery in the U.S. economy prior to 1942 was due to monetary expansion,” which is to say, not federal spending.
So what did it? “Huge gold inflows in the mid- and late-1930s swelled the U.S. money stock and appear to have stimulated the economy by lowering real interest rates and encouraging investment spending and purchases of durable goods.”
The paper’s authorship is interesting. It’s by Christina and David Romer. The former currently chairs the president’s Council of Economic Advisers. She’s evidently having a tough go at making the transition.
Speaker Pelosi should stop worrying so much about confidence and start reading some history. She should also take a second to consider these words from Dorothy Sayers’ book Creed or Chaos: “A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste, and such a society is a house built upon sand.”
America’s businesspeople will again have confidence when they can see authentic and genuine growth. What we’re seeing right now is just an ignorance of the past and blind hope for the future.
A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste, and such a society is a house built upon sand.Dorothy Sayers
Creed or Chaos? (Sophia Inst. Press, 1974), 64
We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness: it is always urgent, “here and now” without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank.José Ortega y Gasset
Mission of the University (Transaction, 1992), 63