Some suggestions for Can I… 1. have your number 2. has cheesburger 3. tap that 4. be pregnant and still have a period

Suggestions for “May I…” 1. be frank 2. have this dance

Not quite as entertaining as others, but then I guess folks aren’t generally asking Google for permission. I find the larger take away to be what an associate of Ben Casnocha said: we don’t lie to Google. The search box is the confessional of the 21st century.

“It’s too expensive.”

“But sir, did you know we will never charge you more than bla bla bla…”

I had some actuary tables from a project I worked on a while back and I did some back-of-the-napkin calculations and I figured that the probability of me losing my job or getting injured or the probability of my death is currently at about 3.645%¹ I called and I waited and the operator came on and after the initial exchange the inevitable question occurred “Would you like to tell us why you are canceling the service?”

Yeah, I’ll tell you why.

I responded, “You charge $1.35 / $100 in credit per month, correct?”

::Looks some stuff up:: “Yes that is correct, but only if you have a balance on your credit card.”

“Well, let’s say I often do. Let’s say it’s $100 a month in fact. That means you would charge me $16.00 annually. And if I, for some reason, ran my card up to the max and tried to pay it down, you might charge me $300 and up annually.”

::Long silence::

“The thing is, I’ve calculated the probability of my injury, loss of employment and death and that only comes out to be a 3.645% chance per year.”

“Did you really–is that–?”

“It can be done.”

“What we do is cover your payments and bill in case of–”

“Oh, I understand what you do; that’s why I calculated the probability. You see, you’re asking me to place a bet for a $1.35 per $100 per month per twelve months that I won’t die or get injured, etc. And the percentage of losing my money on this bet are roughly 96%. Does that sound like a good bet to you?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“It’s a little bit more tricky but essentially at your lowest rate, you would be charging me an additional 16% interest per year on my credit card.”

“So I will get your cancellation confirmation…”

I have to admit that doing this in the interest of saving time was obviously a red herring. I just relish the opportunity to harass corporations. However, I did figure out some interesting stuff about interest and credit protection and mortality statistics and corporations. And here’s the real value of working out the calculations: a credit card protection program like this is a scam, plain and simple. A credit protection program will only help you if you don’t pay off your balance every month, but then, if you pay off your balance every month, why would you need protection? It is better in the long run to put the money you would otherwise put toward protection, toward the bottom line of the credit card, especially because in the long run we are all dead.

The other thing that occurred to me was that this girl (fairly obviously a girl, fairly obviously Indian) that I was harassing had done nothing to deserve the harassment—I also wasn’t that harassing; technically I was just being factual. But even so, we have to stop thinking of corporations as monoliths and the “poor” people working for them as innocent drones. We all have a choice in this. Like so many things in post-postmodern life, it’s like the Matrix. Those who are in the system are part of the system and you can’t pretend that they are not the enemy.

But I don’t like saying things like that either—that she’s the enemy. It’s just that all the metaphors for economics and business that we use that stem from concepts of war aren’t appropriate anymore. They’re just the leftover detritus of the testosterone-filled suits of the 1980s who couldn’t stop reading “The Art of War.” You’re competitor shouldn’t be your enemy, you shouldn’t talk about your customers’ loyalty. People should give loyalty to hearth and home, not financial products and cars and soap. The customer support woman was not my enemy, but she was in my way. I wanted to cancel the account and move on with my day. They want to use the opportunity to up-sell me—at my inconvenience. Business shouldn’t be about war; it should be about quality of life. Corporations that deliberately take action to cut their bottom line while keeping you on hold or, even worse, to keep you on the phone so they can trick you out of your money are not the kinds of corporations that US consumers should be supporting. It’s our support of these corporations that is going make the phrase “Where’s my bailout?” the most popular phrase of 2009.

Some mortality statistics: * http://www99.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=car+accidents * http://www53.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=heart+disease+risk+33yo+male

“A new regulatory regime that puts the secretive central bank in charge of everything would sanctify the policy of “too big to fail” that Fed officials have long followed but never honestly acknowledged. It would also revive the Wall Street club, albeit smaller than before, with which the Fed has been so cozy. If the largest bank holding companies are given privileged proximity to the source of government protection, then everyone in finance and commerce will want to become a bank holding company, too. We are already seeing this happening as former investment houses like Goldman Sachs and non-bank financial firms decide to join the system. Why not General Electric and Microsoft? Where does this end? What does it mean for smaller enterprises that lack the scale and influence?”

The idea of a corporate state like the kind Greider is driving at is damn frightening. Regulation might bandage the wound today and in the near future, but the real problem is a market structure that persistently creates oligopolies. It stifles innovation and drives prices up. We need corporate reform.

-Noam Chomsky

I have found that a common error in the critiques that economists proffer (especially those of the Chicago school of thought) is to hone in on small portions of concepts (tiny in fact), analyze that single point, and then dismiss the whole of an argument. Call it particularism or maybe just throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I feel that way about Paul Krugman’s review of John Gray’s False Dawn.

To summarize Krugman’s review, his take if twofold: one, John Gray has not done a good enough job substantiating his arguments with facts, and two, John Gray has pointed to a problem that does not actually exist while offering no solution to the problem within the bounds of the text. To Krugman’s first point, I will largely concede. Gray’s work is hardly an economic text technically and has a lot to do with law. But in so far as an examination of the history of regulation with regard to lazzez-faire style government non-intervention, Gray offers a substantial and eye-opening history that is considered such a standard and known history of western industrialization it hardly needs to be plagued with a rash of footnotes.

Gray’s work is a diatribe, a long introduction to an idea that not many people are talking (still). To that end, look at how this article in Time speaks of capitalism as some kind of homogeneous entity or concept. Gray’s overall point is that there are many different species of capitalism, and that not all of them resemble the Western concept. Moreover, to quote my previous explanation “Social market economies (socialist regimes) are driven “out of business” by world markets that allow for corporations to seek and find cheap labor, areas where regulations are lax. Here again, the problem of these social market economies is now exacerbated by the fact that have fewer Keynesian remedies with which to protect their laboring populations. Impose too much protection and the capital just goes somewhere else.” I think this same point has begun to appear in other texts, such as Robert Reich’s “Supercapitalism.” And some real world examples exist as well, such as when Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulson, was pretty much forced to change his stance on capitalizing banks, not by the Congress, but by the British. In short, so many of the large financial firms that took a hit here in the US were so widely spread globally that this crisis spread quickly to other shores. What all the governments did together mattered more than what any in particular did. And now, many of the governments of the European Union are looking to establish global regulation–a kind of Bretton Woods 2.0.

Despite his support for regulation—even global financial regulation—Krugman doesn’t address this point in Gray’s book, the major point of the book, once in his review. Should anyone look past the labor practices of companies like Nike in Vietnam to not see the intuitive persuasiveness of an argument like this?¹ Yes, it is more essay than academic paper, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a valid point in saying that handing over the legal reins to global corporations is a bad idea. Krugman does not once in his article address the key term “species of capitalism,” and this to me, implies that he missed the point.