I don't pretend to understand economics beyond the most basic basics, and I hate doing the homework. That aside, I'm wringing my hands over the airline industry and what I'm taking to be Delta's adoption of the Walmart business model (see Martha's blog for links, etc. on Walmart, the next superpower).
To be fair, I hate air travel. To me, an airplane really is a big, silver bird, and to board one is to mock the gods. And I'll never get how flying to a destination can be cheaper than walking there (economies of scale, you say - and I say that's exactly the danger).
I'm aware of only two ways of increasing profits: raise prices or reduce costs. In a competitive market, increasing prices cannot work (otherwise, it seems to me, there has to be collusion - which is the opposite of competition). So really, only cost reduction works: not only does it expand a specific margin but also can increase sales. So the Walmart model isn't revolutionary but more a perversion that cannot stand in the long run (over time, how can you sustain consumerism by pressing the consumer into poverty?).
Now it's one thing to underpay and overwork retail workers - the morality notwithstanding - but (and we all know this grim joke) it's another to make airline employees feel worthless.
Posted by Bobby Farouk at January 5, 2005 09:47 AMone of, if not the only, fun things about this blog is reading a new post and, as you scroll down, guessing who wrote it. I never fail to cop Martha Bridegam's from the first line. Ditto Allport's. Hogue might take three. Yours are taking longer Bobby.
Meanwhile, anywone else read DJ Taylor's Orwell book? I'm on it right now, it's very good on bringing Orwell's personality and confusion (ignorance) over politics a bit more into focus.
Bought it a while ago but haven't read it yet -- was a little bit Orwelled out for a while, frankly.
Maybe you should email Parbety to join us. She just loves to hate Taylor. Says he's a venal self-promoter. Anything to it?
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at January 5, 2005 05:19 PMI was Orwelled out too but this book perks all your Orwell interest right up again. On the broad side Taylor makes Orwell's political naivety and volte faces much more vivid. Good on Spain and the extent of that chimp's tea party.
Also makes you realise just exactly how obscure and marginal he was in British literary affairs until well into the war and practically Animal Farm. In general a better impression of how and when his ideas formed and changed. BBC period very good. Also points out that the literary show he devised 'Voice' was basically the Third Programme--now Radio 3--in embryo. Loads of other little bits and bobs that would interest a dyed-in-the-wool Orwell nut, not least his his lubricious side: an account of him being chased by a man on a motorbike whose wife he was pestering; trying it on with Eileen's friends; various affairs and him telling Rayner Heppenstall's wife that when they were in Morocco he became so obsessed with the pubescent prostitutes in Marrakech that 'Eileen let me have one.'
Also very clear-eyed and well informed on the Paris, London and Wigan adventures.
Good also on his balancing his authoritarian side with his liberal side. What a prick Gollancz was--which we knew--and how hidebound the publishing and literary left were with Stalin worship. The whole Orwell personality looked at in depth and how much of an Old Etonian he really was and remained--he wanted his adopted son's name put down for it. The main thing is is that Taylor has a huge enthusiasm for the subject whilst still being clear eyed and incisive. Crick's book is solid and was necessary but this is a very vivid and stimulating read, full of life-breathing detail. I think I'll have to read Bowker's book now.
Thx for the inducement to pick up the book, which has been sitting around here for months. Minor quibbles: the Moroccan prostitute story was known already and I thought he put down Richard's name for Wellington, not Eton. But Taylor does sound worth reading.
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at January 7, 2005 01:09 AMTaylor says Eton but then Taylor is keen to keen to show how much of an Etonian he was and remained. I don't have Crick to hand so didn't know whether the Moroccan tom story was around--i may have heard it but I didn't think I had. The Animal Farm bit is good with even The Queen reading it (the Queen of England I mean, not WH Auden, though he must have as well) and all the wanky left of the day getting annoyed by it in the same way that things annoy them now: Don't Say That, People Might Get The Wrong Idea.
Also interesting how strongly Orwell was into the idea of revolution and how little he was interested in the actual workings of democracy in England at that time.
As for Parbety's 'venal self-promoter' all I can say is that Taylor has written a very good bio and writes well and picks up a lot of reviewing. I realise that that is enough for some people to sling 'venal self-promoter' at him. Parbety would have probably called Orwell the same when things took off for him in 1946.
Posted by: ROBBIE at January 7, 2005 01:37 AMand how little he was interested in the actual workings of democracy in England at that time
Yes, there's a column someplace, probably an "As I Please," where he seems to have just discovered there is a property requirement for voting rights & seems naively indignant about it. Then he drops the subject. Being a lawyer myself, I really notice how his instincts only rarely tended toward lobbying or arguing with authorities on any individual's behalf.
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at January 7, 2005 09:49 AMI finished it last night--with slightly damp eyes I must admit: it was such bad luck to go at that time: he was just getting into gear in every way. Only you can't really call it bad luck because it's quite clear that he really brought it on himself. Ill for years and coughing up blood while at Canonbury Sq he refused doctors and the Jura period finished him: only when things got really bad did he consent to full-on treatment and it just had a hold on him by then.
'I've made all this money and now I'm going to die.' Not just the money, one thinks, but the whole journey and struggle. His little boy going to the zoo with Anthony Powell and Orwell so frustrated that he couldn't go too. Someone should have told him to slow down before but they probably did and he wasn't listening to that sort of thing. He did himself in, the poor mad bastard. Still writing letters to people in '46/'47 saying 'I don't think there's much wrong with me.' Still he comes away with the electro plated nickel silver darts cup marked Most Important Writer of His Generation. One notes with approval that Churchill read Nineteen Eighty Four *twice* and said it was a most important book: you hope and wonder if he saw it as anything beyond Stalin lampoon. 'To write clearly means to think fearlessly and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox' etc. Another twenty years of life and god knows where he would have gone, but I have a feeling that if he had gone the distance, there might have been fewer left wing groupies of his at abg-o...
"He did himself in, the poor mad bastard."
Thx. A nice eulogy there. I don't want to spoil it by re-arguing "if he had lived."
Whenever this comes up I think about the damned soul of a theologian in C.S. Lewis' "The Great Divorce" arguing that Jesus was comparatively young at the time of his death and might in time have come to espouse more moderate and sensible views. I don't know which of us is in the position of the theologian but I think the story captures the foolishness of extrapolating.
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at January 8, 2005 11:01 AMchrist Mab, you must be scraping the barrel, bringing CS !&$*£-ING Lewis into it!! *You* of all people!
I don't think it's foolish at all to discuss what if Orwell had lived. 'What if' conversations on various levels up from the most mundane are a basic and universal part of human conversation. I understand why hardcore lefties--and it's always hardcore lefties--are like dracula at 4am when Orwell speculation comes up. I'm not trying to claim him for the Right because I like him just were he is, but i've often thought it is very convenient for the Left that he died when he did. Things--especially in Britain--would just have got more difficult from then on.