American individualism and entitlement is certainly at its height these days (though, I don’t agree that partisanship is).  “What’s in it for me” has become the mantra of the American taxpayer.  We’ve managed to create a culture in which pundits on both ends of the political horseshoe simultaneously decry the loss of “self-reliance” or “personal responsibility” while demanding that government do more to boost the economy, support small businesses, “fix” healthcare, protect doctors from malpractice suits, stop global warming, et cetera ad infinitum.

For instance, in Vermont, nearly forty percent of kids ages 8–12 have had alcohol in the last month.  That, to me, is pretty insane.  What’s scarier, however, is that the Department of Public Health recognized a need to include the following paragraph in its “Solutions” tab:

Our job as parents is to set clear boundaries and monitor our children—where they go, what they do, how they act and more. This kind of monitoring is not a violation of trust. It should be a regular and expected part of parenting throughout the pre-teen and teen years.

Really?  Parents need to be told this?  By the government?  Well, the statistics certainly bear out that they do.  Talk about a loss of responsibility!  That’s just one example, of course, and I hope it doesn’t lead the comments down too much of a digressive path.

My point is that the government, whether it be local, state, or federal, is our government.  Our Constitution starts “We the People, of the United States of America.”  At the time those words were written, “the People” – at least, those with the right to vote – consisted of white landowners.  Now, the power of “the People” lies in the hands of everyone over the age of 18.

How many times, however, have you heard it said, “Those bums in Washington” or “Politicians: you just can’t trust ‘em”?  As if to say we don’t have the power to get rid of them.

Or, how about, “Well!  Our government is controlled by Big Money, Big Corporations, the Lobbyists.  The little guy doesn’t have a say anymore.”  I’ve got news for you: the little guy doesn’t vote.  There are a number of reasons for that, to be sure.  On the other hand, I would venture that while the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre makes nearly $1 million a year, most of its membership is lower-middle class.  In other words, the little guy is relying on Big Money and Lobbyists to represent his interests, why shouldn’t the rich do the same but without the middleman?  (Don’t think this is limited to the reactionary Right: just look at the Global-Warming Left’s Al Gore.)

I return to my point: 220 years ago, in the words of Lincoln, “[O]ur fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.… It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work … so nobly carried on. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us … that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom; and that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

And that, my friends, is done through community, not individualism.

No related posts.

U.S. researchers estimate that an 18 percent tax on pizza and soda can push down U.S. adults’ calorie intake enough to lower their average weight by 5 pounds (2 kg) per year.

The researchers, writing in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine on Monday, suggested taxing could be used as a weapon in the fight against obesity, which costs the United States an estimated $147 billion a year in health costs.

“While such policies will not solve the obesity epidemic in its entirety and may face considerable opposition from food manufacturers and sellers, they could prove an important strategy to address overconsumption, help reduce energy intake and potentially aid in weight loss and reduced rates of diabetes among U.S. adults,” wrote the team led by Kiyah Duffey of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In economics terms, the price-elasticity of a product measures how the demand for a product changes (or not) when the price changes. Or, in other terms: how much will an increase in price lower sales?

Items that are inelastic are not generally affected by changes in price. According to Wikipedia, the consumption of items like beef, legal gambling, and movie-theater tickets does not fluctuate when the price changes. However,  soft drinks like Coca-Cola and Sprite, for example, are elastic goods whose sales decline significantly when the price increases.

(I had expected some of the data to be different — I would have thought that movie-theater tickets would be very elastic since people now have options including cable, Netflix, and TiVo as well as a result of the fact that the price of movie tickets has risen 66% since 1929 and the price of popcorn has skyrocketed an evil 666%! Moreover, I’m not sure I believe that people concern themselves with the cost of soft drinks, especially since consumers drink so much soda and pop.)

Well, a tax on soft drinks may discourage soda consumption. But what about cigarettes? The addiction to cigarettes laden with nicotine is far stronger than a desire for sweet syrup. Here are some statistics:

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control:

Research shows that tax increases on tobacco products are an effective policy intervention designed to prevent initiation of adolescents and young adults, reduce cigarette consumption, and increase the number of smokers who quit. A 10% increase in the price of cigarettes is estimated to reduce consumption by 4%.

From a U.S. National Institute of Health study on Taiwan:

The model predicts that sustained tax increases have the potential to substantially reduce the number of smokers and the number of premature deaths, with the effects growing over time. Indexing taxes to inflation stems erosion of the tax effect. In our model, when the tax increases by 10 times (NT$50) over the recent tax increase (NT$5) and taxes are indexed to inflation, the smoking prevalence rate falls by over 15% soon after the tax increase, and by about 30% in relative terms by the year 2040, resulting in 4500 lives saved per year.

According to the government of China and the University of California:

…if China’s cigarette tax rate was raised to 51 percent of the retail price, an increase of 11 percentage points from the current level, 13.7 million smokers would therefore quit smoking and 3.4 million lives would be saved. The tax rate increase could also generate 64.9 billion yuan ($9.5 billion) in additional revenue for the government every year.

Interestingly enough, higher taxes reduce smoking but increase illegal sales of cigarettes in lower-income communities:

According to a study conducted by researchers at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, a dramatic rise in illegal street sales of untaxed cigarettes was reported among minority low-income persons immediately after the price increase that reinforced smoking and undermined cessation efforts.

But does the data support these conclusions? Items with a price-elasticity of greater than one is viewed as elastic (prices matter more); those less than one are inelastic (prices matter less). According to the same Wikipedia page, the price-elasticity of cigarettes is:

• –0.3 to –0.6 — US population
• –0.6 to –0.7 — US children

So, the picture is somewhat complicated. No item is infinitely inelastic — if the price of tap water (which is considered inelastic) would surge to $100 per liter, people would drink a lot less. So, a rise in prices always cuts demand at least a little. But as the price-elasticity of cigarettes shows, the addiction to nicotine is stronger than the U.S. researchers probably realize. Smoking would decline — but not as much as one might expect. (This is why other measures — like early education and active parenting — are also important.)

But what about pizza? An eighteen-percent tax would increase the price of a pie from $10 to $11.80. It’s not that much of an additional burden for someone who orders delivery once a week. (Hopefully, it is not a daily meal similar to smokers who purchase at least a pack each day!) Foods that are desires (like pizza) are indeed more susceptible to price increases than those that are needs (like milk and bread), but pizza could be considered a luxury item — at least in this economy — that people choose to enjoy once in a while regardless of price.

Moreover, it may be difficult for legislatures who would write such a law (or for the executive-level bureaucrats who would enforce it) to define “pizza” accurately. Since the intent of a tax would be to encourage healthy lifestyles, would pizzas using low-fat cheese and having only vegetarian toppings be exempt? Is a calzone a pizza? How about the frozen pizza-bagels that one can microwave? What if someone puts tomato sauce and cheese on a toasted bagel? What about the raw materials — dough, tomatoes, and cheese — that one can use to make a pizza at home — would they be taxed if purchased together? (Soft drinks, I imagine, are a legal classification of consumer goods, but I cannot confirm that.)

The proposal to tax pizza is likely a hypothesis argued by academics that would likely never see the light of a legislature’s day, but the probable economic and taxation implications are interesting to consider.

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In the olden days of marketing — say, before 2000 — most marketers and public-relations professionals used some type of a “push” strategy. They would send press-releases en masse (through something called a fax, and perhaps even through e-mail in later years) and then call reporters and editors to beg them — politely, of course — to cover their story. People needed to convince the media gatekeepers that their story worth covering. Journalists — always a cynical-and-skeptical bunch — made the rules and held the power.

When I was a journalism major at Boston University, I worked for six months as a full-time editorial assistant for the Metro desk of the Boston Globe in 2000. I was the person who, among other tasks, took the calls and faxes from local public-relations firms. My editorial-assistant colleagues and I would receive hundreds of press releases every day, and we would quickly sort through them by giving less than a half-second thought to each one. We would rip through the pile like a robotic sorting-machine, chucking ninety percent of them into the trash without a second thought. (What a waste of paper!) We looked only at the headline (and sometimes the first line as well).

We placed the few that may have been newsworthy in a bin on the city editor’s desk. In theory, he would have taken it from there. But he rarely did. Most of the releases that we put on his desk also went into the trash. After all, as the city editor, he already knew the news of the day from his assistant editors who each covered specific subjects like crime, politics, and the courts; from radio and television-news updates; and from his own sources as well. The city editor did not need the press releases.

Those marketers who were slightly more savvy would call people like me directly. The public-relations flunkies would try to sweet-talk us (especially if it were a woman talking to a male editorial-assistant) into passing the call to the city editor, but we never did. (The often-repeated lie: “Sorry, he’s in a meeting right now.”)

The city editor once joked — to a tour group visiting the Globe, no less — that people could tell when he was in the newsroom because there would be a black cloud following him. Years later, when I was a Boston journalist and then editor and publisher of Spare Change News, I understood what he had meant. Newspaper, magazine, and television journalists simply do not have time to listen to PR pitch after PR pitch. I cannot find the exact scene from my favorite movie — “The Paper” — that demonstrates the hectic lives of reporters, but here is the trailer:

In case you have not been paying attention, the world of public-relations professionals pushing their stories onto journalists effectively disappeared long ago. David Meerman Scott (no relation) first brought this new reality to the general public with “The New Rules of Marketing and PR,” and now, “Inbound Marketing” takes it one step further.

The book — authored by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah (pictured), co-founders of the Boston, high-tech-marketing firm HubSpot — starts where the general, philosophical overview of Scott’s “The New Rules of Marketing and PR” left off and goes into more detail. Whereas Scott’s book — the author wrote the forward to “Inbound Marketing” — introduces the reader to the new world on online marketing, Halligan and Dharmesh’s tome provides the nuts-and-bolts to implementing an Internet-marketing strategy. The latter book is surprisingly short for its depth, but it is still a dense, quick read.

“The New Rules of Marketing and PR” drove a single point home: Marketers no longer need to go to journalists and customers; instead, reporters and clients come to them through blogs, websites, social media, Internet advertising, online video, podcasts, white papers, and search engines. “Inbound Marketing” tells companies — and individuals — how to make that happen. (Disclosure: I received a review copy of the second book from the publisher.)

“Inbound Marketing” discusses the practical steps that marketers can take with regards to optimizing websites for search engines, using social-network websites effectively, developing videos, airing podcasts, and gaining website visitors and sales leads through using natural, “pull” strategies rather than “push” ones that interrupt (and annoy) journalists and consumers. The beauty of inbound marketing is indeed that reporters and people in general are already using search engines, social media, and blogs to find that content that interests them. If you use online marketing well, then there is little additional effort required on your part to attract them.

However, there are many websites and books that offer the same advice. “Inbound Marketing” surpasses the competition by containing:

• A to-do list at the end of each chapter that inspires direct action
• A section focusing on optimizing conversion pages specifically (a frequently-ignored topic)
• Another chapter with numerous charts and graphics showing readers how to analyze website metrics and make better marketing decisions
• An appendix with links to online tools — located, of course, at Hubspot — that can help marketers rate and improve their websites; and
• A section offering tips on hiring PR agencies and marketing staff in the age of inbound marketing

Now, many people — especially those who already understand this paradigm shift — will read this book and say, “Duh.” But the fact remains that there are marketers who are stuck in the old rules and do not understand the new world. (“Inbound Marketing” seems to be meant for them.)

Since I was a Boston journalist, my biography and blog still appear in Google searches and online databases for Boston journalists. As a result, I still receive spam from Boston that is irrelevant since I now live in Israel. After the death of Senator Ted Kennedy, I was placed on e-mail lists for the press releases coming from the campaigns of several candidates in the Democratic primary before the special election to replace him. Because I was going to cover the campaign from 12,000 miles away, of course.

The campaign volunteer or intern who compiled the PR database was stuck in the old mentality, and his efforts were likely wasted. As I described above, the rate of return on mass press-release distribution is extremely low. If there is a single benefit to marketers using inbound marketing techniques rather outbound ones, it will be that we all receive less spam.

Still, there is just a minor problem with the book. Halligan and Shah focus primarily on the need to create quality content rather than placing the marketing of that content on an equal footing as well.

Based on my experience, I learned that content by itself rarely brings significant traffic — at least within a relatively quick length of time. I started blogging on a whim in 2006 when I was editor of Spare Change News in Boston, and I discussed the same subjects I discuss now. It took me four years to reach 1,000 hits a day on my prior Wordpress blog. Even though I had changed careers from journalism to online marketing after moving to Israel and working in the high-tech sector here, I did not apply any of the strategies I had learned to the blog since it was only a hobby. In short, it took four years to build a decent audience by relying only on what the authors of “Inbound Marketing” call “remarkable content.”

How many companies want to wait four years for their sites to draw reasonable traffic?

In January, I changed the blog to the current URL and lost a lot of traffic, but I am hoping to rebuild it quickly through the use of effective online-marketing as well as producing interesting content. I wish Halligan and Shah had added at least a chapter on items including the building of backlinks through places like online directories, Yahoo! Answers, and blog-aggregating websites as well as the basics of optimizing HTML code and organizing a website’s structure for search engines. But this is a small point.

“The New Rules of Marketing and PR” and “Inbound Marketing” will undoubtedly open the eyes of many veteran marketers who are struggling to adapt to the digital world, and they are good refreshers for anyone who already knows about online marketing. Both books together are an effective introduction to Online Marketing 101.

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1. Journalism Versus Marketing
2. Book Review: Schmoozing With Terrorists
3. Book Review: “The Kuzari,” An Introduction

There are many articles on how to be a good boss, but now I think it boils down to one thing: When you pay your employees, do you grimace and think about the payroll cost — or do you smile and think about how you’re helping them to make a living and provide for their families (especially in a bad economy)? Much of your behavior towards your employees — and potential ones — likely stems from how you answer this question.

I hope that my consultants think that the second answer reflects my attitude, and I also hope that I never lose that mentality.

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2. Men Living at Home
3. Modern Unemployment

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Although no one knows exactly how many Yiddish speakers there are today, estimates range from a very realistic minimum of 1 million to a more fanciful 3 million. At the core of this population are the Hasidic and strictly orthodox Jews in New York, Israel, London, Paris, Antwerp and elsewhere for whom Yiddish is their first language. In the UK alone, where the strictly orthodox are growing in number, there are probably as many as 30,000 Yiddish speakers. The vast majority of these Jews live in relatively closed communities, but there is always some “leakage” into the wider Jewish world.

Beyond the very religious, Yiddish has been undergoing a marked revival, especially among young people, for more than 20 years. There are reportedly more than 100 colleges and universities around the world teaching Yiddish, although courses and posts are vulnerable in straightened times. The Zionist drive to stigmatise Yiddish has collapsed and the revival has spread to Israel.

There are many variants of English — American, British, Australian, southern American, South African — and there are two main dialects of Hebrew as well: Ashkenazi and Sephardi. As best as linguists can determine, the ancient Israelites (and later Judeans) spoke a Hebrew at religious services that would be considered Sephardi today. (However, the common, everyday language at the time of the Second Temple was Aramaic.)

After the destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman Empire in 70 C.E. and the expulsion of most of the Jews in Judea, many eventually relocated to eastern Europe and Russia after the newly-created kingdoms in western Europe expelled the Jews and the localities in the east offered protection in exchange for access to their trading connections in the Arab world. Over the centuries in eastern Europe, the Hebrew language eventually fused with German to create the hybrid known as Yiddish. It became the common language of everyday Jews. When European Jews emigrated to the United States, they brought Yiddish culture — and Yiddish-accented English, as this famous joke from “Coming to America” showed in 1988:

The differences are Ashkenazi and Sephardi Hebrew are mainly in emphasis, vocabulary, and pronunciation. Sephardi Hebrew, which was based on the Hebrew Bible, adheres to that form, and the last syllable of each word is emphasized. The standard greeting on Friday evenings is “ShaBAT shaLOM! (Peaceful Sabbath!)”

In Yiddish, however, the phrase is “GUT SHAbbes.” The first syllable is emphasized, “gut” is German for “good,” and the “t” sound at the end of the word “Shabbat” becomes an “s.” In Hebrew, “Shabbat ends with the letter “ת,” tav, but in Yiddish it becomes an “s.” Other words ending in “ת” also change to end in “s” like “Succos (rather then Succot)” and “beis (rather than beit).”

Although I grew up in the United States, I learned Hebrew first at Temple Israel in Boston — and the synagogue used Sephardi Hebrew. When I moved to Israel and studied more Hebrew in a language school, the form everyone learned was Sephardi Hebrew. Ashkenazi Hebrew was always foreign to me. It still sounds funny.

The reasons for the adoption of Sephardi Hebrew were political and religious in nature. A friend of mine, a Danish Jew who moved to Israel, told me that synagogues there had used Ashkenazi Hebrew but then switched after the State of Israel was founded in 1948. Israel itself adopted Sephardi Hebrew partly because Zionism rejected the idea that Jews could have a future in Europe after the Holocaust. Moreover, the flood of Mizrahi Jews to Israel from Middle Eastern countries after 1948 increased the prevalence of Sephardi Hebrew — after all, they were completely unfamiliar with Ashkenazi Hebrew for hundreds of years. In addition, Sephardi Hebrew is much closer to biblical Hebrew.

In Israel, most of the people who speak Yiddish or Ashkenazi Hebrew are ultra-Orthodox Jews who refuse to leave the European mindset. The reasons are complex. Some want to keep the old traditions — the great, European yeshivas — alive after they were destroyed by the Holocaust. Some think Ashkenazi culture is superior to other forms. Some are stuck in tradition and refuse to change — no matter how ludicrous it seems to speak Yiddish, wear furry hats, and wear clothes resembling eighteenth-century, Polish nobility in the middle of a steaming desert in the Middle East. Some refuse to recognize the State of Israel — and everything, like language, associated with the place — because the country was founded by men, not God Himself. A fringe group even actively works against Israel and sides with the Palestinians and countries like Iran.

The perseverance of Yiddish and Ashkenazi Hebrew is enraging because it symbolizes a major problem with Israeli society — the power and influence of fringe groups of ultra-Orthodox Jews. They refuse to accept that European Jewry has been on its deathbed since World War II and that the future of Judaism is in Israel. (Europe turned on its Jews, and many European countries and European people today are hostile to Israel and Judaism.) They refuse to integrate into general, Israeli society. They refuse to adapt to the times. They insist that other forms of Judaism — like that of traditional, Mizrahi Jews — is inferior at best or sinful at worst. (And many are extremely racists towards Ethiopian Jews.) Language is an important facet of culture, and a refusal to adopt to your country’s language is ignorant at best and insulting at worst.

I will never understand it — when a word ends with a “t,” why would someone pronounce it with an “s”?

Related posts:

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2. Israel: Asia, Not Europe
3. Hebrew

Bradley Burston, a local columnist, puts it another way: “Living in Israel is both vastly more rewarding and vastly uglier than we paint it here in Haaretz.”

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Above the Law informs us that some guy put his law degree up for sale on e-Bay.  The comments he’s received are pretty funny, at least to wannabe lawyers like me.

And, someone has figured out that social change needs marketing.

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Regardless, I have a few thoughts on health care:

• private insurance companies seek to maximize profits at employers’ expense;
• employers seek to maximize profits at employees’ expense;
• doctors seek to maximize profits at everyone’s expense;
• government is going broke trying to maximize health care for people who will not or cannot provide insurance for themselves;
• even by a truly conservative estimate, 20 million American citizens cannot afford health insurance, and for between 8 and 14 million American citizens, that is a chronic situation.

I’m reminded of the words of the Gospel (it’s Lent, after all):

I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.

Those words may not mean a lot to most of the looney left, but a good chunk of the neoconservative Christian right who so vehemently oppose anything legislation that might help a brother out will certainly get it.

And to my Jewish friends, a belated Happy Purim.

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The knuckleball not needing speed but relying rather on unpredictability, I really think this girl has a chance.  Maybe she’ll replace Wake when he retires?

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BANGALORE, India — While I was traveling to the Silicon Valley of the East in December 2006 with my Suffolk University M.B.A. class in Boston to study business there for a week, I popped into a local tourist trap to look at some Indian trinkets I had wanted to buy for my family.

As it turned out, the owners (above) were Indian Muslims from the disputed area of Kashmir. And they could not have been nicer. Part of the reason, I’m sure, was the fact that, to them, I was a “rich” American wanting to spend money. But the other half was the fact they were genuinely pleasant since India has a history of tolerance and civility rooted both in thousands of years of culture and also in British politeness from the colonial era. Moreover, at least in terms of Hindus and Buddhists, polytheistic religions tend to be more tolerant than monotheistic ones. (Still, I sometimes found Indian people to be infuriatingly polite — even for someone with American background who is also an Anglophile and Israeli.)

Between haggling on the prices — in retrospect, I was not very good since I had not yet moved to Israel and learned the art — we discussed India and religion over coffee. Their family, so I was told, made rugs and clothing in Kashmir and then sold the products in Bangalore to Westerners like me.

During the trip, I usually hid the fact that I was Jewish — even though we were there over Chanukah — since India has 161 million Muslims, a few of whom would later attack the Chabad house in India in 2008. I only lit a hanukkia (menorah) in my hotel room, though it was probably against regulations.

(I did wear a kippah — a yarmulke — on the first night of the holiday, which the class spent in a restaurant, and I received only a few curious looks in response. India has always had a small Jewish population, but most moved to Israel in modern times.)

But since I was comfortable with the shop owners, I eventually told them on a second visit that I was Jewish because I was fascinated during our discussion of religion in India. (You can take the journalist out of a newspaper, but you can never take the journalist out of him.) The chief owner, the man, seemed merely bemused — probably because he had likely never met a Jew before. (I also told an Egyptian doctor on a boat cruise on the Nile River that I was American, Jewish, and Israeli when I had traveled to Cairo in July 2008, and she was extremely cordial about it. But she added that I should not tell too many people in Egypt about the last two parts.)

So, as I walked with the owner to process my order after finalizing the purchase, we sat at a desk in a back room. (Many places in India, of course, do not have the same rapid-technology in regards to credit-card processing.) Out of politeness and small-talk, I told him that both he and his wife had been extremely nice.

The owner responded, “She’s not my wife; she is my sister.” I apologized for making an incorrect assumption. And then he said something — in all seriousness — that made me dumbstruck, especially since he knew that I was Jewish: “You know, she is not married.” (I was 26 at the time, and I think she was roughly the same age.)

Several of my friends from Boston joined the U.S. Peace Corps after college, and I later heard stories of local men in remote countries offering vast amounts of livestock to the male volunteers in exchange for marrying their daughters. But this was the first time I had ever encountered anything personally. (A few years later, an Israeli girl offered me NIS 20,000 — roughly $5,000 — to marry her so she could obtain a Green Card. I declined.) I was shocked at the implicit offer and did not know how to respond. After a few seconds, I laughed nervously and changed the subject. And that was that.

I had not thought about this story in a long time, but it came mind as I have been observing how the dating world differs between the West (as well as secular Israelis) and Orthodox Jews in general. In essence, it may come down to the head versus the heart.

Modern marriage — the view that two people love each other emotionally (and, if you believe, spiritually) and then decide to build a life and family together — is a relatively new concept that seems to have begun in medieval Europe. Prior to that time, women — at least those in the upper classes — were viewed as property that were a part of business negotiations, familial alliances, and international politics.

In ancient Greece, women were essentially slaves that were viewed as inferior to men. (This is why Greece was not exactly the prototype of a free democracy.) In fact, the highest level of love was viewed at the time as only possibly existing between two men — or even a man and a boy. (This is something they do not teach in high school.) Women were simply a biological necessity with whom it was required to sire offspring.

In medieval Europe, daughters of the upper class were essentially sold to cement alliances between countries and increase the wealth of the family that “sold” the woman to her future husband. (If your daughter was hot, she could be worth 1,000 acres of land!)

However, women were understandably dissatisfied with these arrangements. As a result, the idea of romantic love originated in the medieval West with suitors who attempted to woo wives while their husbands — whom they rarely loved — were away. When husbands were out fighting in the Crusades or charging into battles for months at a time, a troubadour would visit a castle, sing under the window, and hopefully engage in liaisons dangereuses — under the threat of death if he was ever caught.

And this is where the modern construct of marriage — marrying for love — began. (Poor women — those in the Middle Ages who, in the immortal words of Monty Python, “didn’t have sh-t all over them” — were more free to marry those whom they wanted because they had no chance to increase their family’s wealth unless they were exceptionally beautiful. But the attitude of the upper class eventually filtered down the social ladder over decades and centuries.) And as the feminist revolution rightly emancipated women and made them completely equal under the law — at least in Western countries — in the last century, they were finally able to have their own say in whom they marry.

But today, traditional attitudes still remain in certain communities and countries. In places with endemic poverty — and especially where women are still viewed as having lower status, if even unofficially — family members still want their daughters, sisters, and nieces to marry someone with money simply because they want them to have a better life. And for all the headlines proclaiming India’s high-tech revolution, the vast majority of people there are still destitute.

My M.B.A. class toured the facilities of companies like Intel in India, and nearby there was a tent city full of impoverished, unemployed people right next door to a glossy building with shiny windows and full of suit-wearing businessmen. The contrast was striking. I snapped the above picture of a beggar after giving her money, asking if I could take a photo, and then thanking her with the traditional, Indian pose of clasping hands with a slight bow from the waist. I was still in my journalist-mindset, and I thought that the documentation of the poverty was worth any exploitation that she may have felt. I have her 500 rupees — a lot of money for India but worth $11 to me.

Look closely — she has no hands. Her attempt at a smile still haunts me. Most Americans who consider themselves poor are not really poor.

The female shopkeeper was not as poor — most likely, she and her brother were part of India’s merchant middle-class. But I am sure that she would have married me in a heartbeat if I had been interested. It would have been a logical thing to do. In theory, we would have learned to love each other.

In a different way, marriage in Orthodox Judaism is also viewed from a logical standpoint. People consider potential partners first from a rational standpoint — similarity in religious practice, personal goals, future plans, financial security, the number of desired children, and so on. (And as I wrote before, Orthodox Jews are officially shomer negiah as well — no touching before marriage, not even a handshake — even though it’s a not-so-secret reality that few adhere to the practice.)

After they narrow the field down to people who would work rationally, most Orthodox Jews then see with which of those people they have a “connection.” (Still, ultra-Orthodox Jews do not do the second part — they become engaged after two or three dates.) And then, usually within six months or less, they agree to get married. This practice contrasts to that in the Western world — and secular Israel — in which people first decide with whom they have a “connection” and then try to make it work rationally with that person.

From India to Israel to the United States, the dating paradigm seems to consist of two, general approaches:

• first head, then heart (if even the heart)
• first heart, then head

I see benefits and drawbacks to each:

• Head before heart: Running a household is akin to running a small business — every “manager” needs to be on the same page. Love and emotion cannot eliminate conflicts over concrete issues like money, children, religion, money, sex life, and jobs. The initial rush of emotion always dissipates over time and is (hopefully) replaced by a deeper, more-meaningful feeling anyway.

• Heart before head: No one wants to end up in a loveless, sexless marriage. Everyone wants the energetic connection to last forever. Two people can be compatible in every logical way, but sometimes the connection just never appears — imagine a marriage in which both people move to the “friend zone” at best. It is important that such a feeling is present before even considering marriage.

Relations between men and women have always been complicated ever since we evolved into primates, and it is a luxury and issue that someone fortunate and lucky enough to have my life — unlike, say, the destitute in India — can afford to have and analyze. But the issue still exists.

As I reflect on the dating lives of myself and my friends, it becomes evident that men, of course, tend to be more logical while women are generally more emotional. Men make value judgments on a woman’s attractiveness — after all, the definition of beauty is fairly uniform across cultures — and evaluate whether a woman is, to be blunt, crazy. Women, at least when they are younger, put more emphasis on the interpersonal chemistry. (Dates have told my male friends that they just do not “feel” anything — but this is a statement that a man would rarely say.) Females, however, do begin to assign greater emphasis on rational issues like money and security when they begin looking for marriage rather than a so-called hook-up.

Everyone, of course, wants a perfect combination of the head and heart. But unless a person rates, say, eight or higher on the proverbial dating-scale, he or she must become more realistic and make a choice. So, the question still stands: what paradigm, in terms of marriage, should take priority — the head or the heart?

In contrast to places like India, people in the West have the luxury to ponder these issues. But that does not mean it is still simple.

Prior essay: Moving to Israel. Related essay: The Battle of the Sexes.

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2. Men and Marriage
3. Marriage in Modern Times

Add this to my “Only in Israel” file. I can only presume it’s a response to the controversial assassination of a Hamas operative in Dubai in which Mossad may (or may not) have been involved.

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I think Miss Beverly Hills’ response – or lack thereof – exemplifies the  unthoughtful approach of those who would, in the words of Jesus, cast stones.  Perhaps if there were a little less condemnation of others, a little more introspection, and a lot more positive action, Christianity wouldn’t be “under attack” in this country, as so many of my coreligionists would have us believe.

(And, yeah, I know, I’m casting stones, too.)

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I’m not sure what to think, but I have to give credit to Smith & Wollensky’s ad agency for coming up with this one.

A sign of the times, to be sure.  Citibank stock is worth 1/2 portion of creamed spinach.

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Al Gore may not be everyone’s favorite person (he certainly isn’t mine), but he’s got a point when he says We Can’t Wish Away Climate Change. Still, even if you don’t believe in climate change, why would you want to pollute the very air you must breathe with chemicals that are proven to kill you?

Same with our water supply. In our zeal for deregulation of industry, we have allowed corporations to pollute the waters we drink.

In our love of over-packaged, shelf-stable food, we’re making food toxic.

The list, of course, goes on. And, yes, I am perhaps prone to neo-luddism. But the fact remains:

You shouldn’t defecate where you eat.

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Why do I think it is likely true? 

Two reasons.

1. Witness the Senate confirmation hearings of Sonia Sotomayor and John Roberts before her.

Senators obsessed about how the prospective Supreme Court justices would treat precedent in deciding politically charged cases involving gun rights, abortion, etc.

John Roberts called himself “an umpire” – something he’s proven to be far from in his Supreme Court jurisprudence.  Sonia Sotomayor repeatedly invoked respect for precedent: the vaunted but hardly rigid principle of stare decisis. As prospective justices, they had no choice but to claim that they would not depart from precedent.  It’s the only answer that would simultaneously get them confirmed while allowing them to avoid revealing their personal views on controversial subjects.

Any judge in a lower federal court is likely to take the same tack even while sitting on a circuit or district court bench.  Nor is this a bad thing: Lower federal courts are likely to narrowly interpret the law so as to avoid overreaching.  After all, who wants to be the judge that gets overturned by the Supreme Court?

2. The Court itself may be leaning towards more mechanical approaches.

This is hard to tell, as the Supreme Court has seen thousands of cases since the inception of our country.  Further, dissents tend to point out the mechanical application of the law, regardless of the faction of the court that is in the majority.

Call this a gut feeling, as it would be a pretty big (if interesting) research project to discover, but it seems that an “ideologically conservative” (and I use that term with caution) court as we supposedly have now is more likely to favor mechanical tests than an “ideologically liberal” court.

If that were true, it would reinforce the caution of the lower courts.

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Of course, I have complete freedom to write what I want, so I encourage my readers here to follow my thoughts (and those of the other bloggers) on that site as well. There is a second co-writer that will discuss U.S. economics as well. Anyone interested in the subject should find the site to be interesting.

My first post: "How Israel Beat the Recession."

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On the one-year anniversary of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Fox & Friends purported to analyze the results of the bill and repeatedly shed doubt on the impact of the stimulus on the employment situation. But Fox & Friends ignored independent analyses of the stimulus, including those conducted by Moody’s Economy.com and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, that said the measure raised employment by 1 to 2.4 million jobs by the end of 2009.

First, I’m not going to comment directly on the various economic-stimulus bills. I have not learned enough about them to comment fairly. My point here is to discuss how business affects media, which then affects politics and society.

But as Dan Shelley, a former news-director in radio, noted in 2008, conservative media-outlets have succeeded in playing to their market:

To succeed, a talk show host must perpetuate the notion that his or her listeners are victims, and the host is the vehicle by which they can become empowered. The host frames virtually every issue in us-versus-them terms. There has to be a bad guy against whom the host will emphatically defend those loyal listeners.

This enemy can be a politician — either a Democratic officeholder or, in rare cases where no Democrat is convenient to blame, it can be a “RINO” (a “Republican In Name Only,” who is deemed not conservative enough). It can be the cold, cruel government bureaucracy. More often than not, however, the enemy is the “mainstream media” — local or national, print or broadcast.

With all due apologies to my idealistic, eighteen-year-old self when I was a journalism major at Boston University, the media — as I learned in my later, newspaper career in Beantown (see here for one example)  — is neither objective nor a non-profit business.

And Rupert Murdoch is a business genius.

Fox News was launched in 1996, in the middle of Bill Clinton’s two terms as U.S. president. Conservatives had always hated the president — often personally as well as politically, and many viewed the mainstream media as supporting Clinton as well as Democrats and liberals in general. The growing partisanship and animosity only grew through the contested 2000 presidential election; the following one in 2004; the two, polarizing terms of President George W. Bush; the 2008 election; and the current antagonism towards Barack Obama.

Over these years, Murdoch saw an opportunity, and he pursued it relentlessly. Roughly half of the market of media consumers were dissatisfied with the product (rightly or wrongly), and he hoped to provide them with a substitute product that would reinforce their views and cement their media allegiance. And he was successful. Today, it is fairly easy to predict someone’s political views based on whether he watches Fox News or CNN.

In marketing terms, Murdoch implemented both “push” and “pull” strategies. A “pull” strategy identifies a pre-existing need or demand in the market and tries to attract consumers to a product or service that fulfills that desire. A “push” strategy — often used in companies that invent or innovate something entirely new — provides a new product or service and then tries to create a new market and demand for it. (Who needs something called an iPod?)

A dissatisfaction with the mainstream media had already existed, so Fox News initially pulled those viewers into the network. And once they had taken the emotional bait, Fox News pushed more and more conservative rhetoric, talking points, and ideology onto them to keep them watching. And it worked.

But there were larger issues at play. As technology and the Internet shortened the public’s attention span, Fox News adapted by hiring bubble-blond anchors in miniskirts and replacing a half-hour of reading headlines and talking to reporters with ten minutes of news summaries and twenty minutes of talking heads shouting about the issues at hand. This was the natural result of shows like CNN’s “Crossfire,” and the phenomenon later evolved into news-as-comedy (or vice-versa) on “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report.” After all, young people would no longer watch current events if there were not a joke every thirty seconds.

Still, the central significance of Fox News is its recognition of the segmentation of the marketplace in modern times. One of the first things I learned in my MBA classes was to identify which specific markets would be interested in a product and then create a different marketing strategy for each one accordingly. After all, a mass-market no longer exists.

Think about it. How many different brands of toothpaste exist? Do people really need one for whitening, another for tartar control, another for plaque, another for cavities, and another for bad breath? How many different breakfast cereals exist on a supermarket shelf? How many cable or satellite channels are on television? The world has become segmented and individualized. In journalistic terms, Fox News was the first to capitalize on this trend. Then, MSNBC followed by focusing on liberals.

But, in the end, society suffers. Decades ago, the desires to attract a mass market and report objectively (or at least fairly) on current events complemented and helped each other. For example: The New York Times wants to generate as much advertising revenue as possible. Therefore, the newspaper wants to attract as many readers as possible. To do that, the Times avoids alienating any readers, and, therefore, chooses to give only facts and analysis.

Today, however, the segmented, individualized, niche-driven market rewards those who target a chosen demographic intensely rather than a general market as a whole. In journalistic (and business) terms, how does one combat this trend?

(Hat tip: Crooks and Liars)

Related posts:

1. Journalism Versus Marketing
2. Neo-Yellow Journalism
3. Fox News’ Agenda for the Middle East

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