Mad Men and Old Boys Clubs

As life temporarily without some social pleasures drifts along, we have been spending some evenings watching Mad Men. We are enjoying it, and, like all the best TV, it prompts useful thoughts, notably about what a similar series created in the future and our own times might look like.

 

The long-running series was written from 2005 and covers the 1960’s in New York. I love the writing. It is not sensationalist and is notably patient, letting characters and storylines develop slowly and being ready to divert into all sorts of plot niches. It is a thoughtful commentary on its time. Sadly, I find some of the acting to be unworthy of the material.

 

The overwhelming impression from the series is how everybody’s life choices are circumscribed by the accident of their birth and by stifling societal norms. The executives are nearly all male, white and born to affluence. They are privileged yet largely blind to it, often feeling entitled to even more than they have. They are thoughtlessly lewd towards all women, objectifying the entire gender. To them women are eye candy and sport, until they are married to one, at which point nothing changes in the attitude towards other women but the wife becomes a housekeeper and mother and a source of abuse and resentment. It is galling to see this attitude portrayed in such a naked way.

 

The white women mainly appear happy to go along with the expectations. They strut around the office competing on looks and coyness, hunting a husband to make them secure, after which they become suffocated in the world of child rearing and dull pursuits, in fear of the social opprobrium from divorce while turning a blind eye to their spouse’s serial infidelity.

 

Anybody challenging these norms is in for a tough time. Divorced women are ostracized. Even though contraception is hard to obtain and men demand sex all the time, and woman getting pregnant is ruined. Heaven help you if you happen to be gay or disabled. Promotion for the men comes more from social status than merit. Most couples are unhappy, but keep up appearances relentlessly.

 

These are the included strata. We see glimpses of other strata, be that uneducated men or all blacks. They know their place and had better stick to it or they will soon be on the street and no doubt rejected by their own kind too. To the included, the excluded are barely visible.

 

Part of the story is how one woman challenges the expectations simply by being kind and honest and just a little bit ambitious. She has partial success, but suffers in many ways on her journey, from her family, male and female colleagues and her own doubts.

 

It is also how noticeable how everybody drinks and smokes all the time, even in hospitals or on planes. With sex and gambling, most people will have some form of addiction or other mental illness, but it all swept under the carpet of expectations.

 

I find the picture painted to be quite realistic. New York and the advertising business might be on the extreme end of examples, but most flaws will be evident anywhere and in any vocation.

 

The first takeaway is to challenge any temptation for nostalgia. True, this world was simpler, but it certainly wasn’t fairer or kinder or happier or more productive. Anyone campaigning for a return to this form of society has either been duped or comes from the tiny demographic that the norms were designed to serve.

 

The depiction can help us to be tolerant of older people. Biden may have been overly physical when he started out and far from woke, but we should be careful judging him against standards that were very different then.

 

The show also helps me realize not just how far we have come but how messy the process of change had to be. It is no wonder that entrenched groups have fought every step and also that people have struggled to embrace their new emancipation, because we all lacked education and role models to guide us. It has not helped that lawmakers largely still come from the privileged former world and laws have failed to keep up with modern needs. Employment, schooling, welfare and much besides still assume a model of a dominant male and a child-rearing housewife. I sometimes wonder whether Mitch McConnell and others have ever met anybody that doesn’t have a nanny.

 

We can also reflect how in much of the developing world the norms of 1960’s Americas still apply today, overtly or covertly. This is a source of continuing hardship for many, and a massive development opportunity for humanity.

 

The show brilliantly depicts how most of the glaring flaws are simply invisible to most characters, and I can see how this has been true of myself. I look at my Cambridge matriculation photo of 1979 and wonder why I never noticed how white and privileged it is – heck, we even thought we were progressive when we started admitting women!

 

Taking that thought further might be the most fruitful opportunity from watching Mad Men. Things that are wrong but engrained are often invisible to us unless we work really hard to challenge ourselves. So what is it about the developed world in 2020 that still holds us back or perpetuates inequality and misery? If Mad Men were written in 2050 and set in 2020, what would it reveal?

 

I am sure it would have a lot of fun with the large devices everybody seems wedded to. I suspect equivalent for the smoking would be watching everyone take their life into their hands driving cars, something that by 2050 will seem unconsciously reckless. Guns could see similar treatment: they simply should not be present in a civilized society. As for social changes, I hope that humanity will no longer suffer the blight of homelessness, and I can hope for progress on mental illnesses and addictions.

 

But, just as in Mad Men, I suspect the clearest revelations will be about Old Boys Clubs. In 1960 our lives were proscribed and conformance was almost mandatory. By 2020 conformance has become optional but the constraints from birth have barely loosened.

 

Rich kids, usually white, have more stable homes, better education, inherited wealth, an abundance of second chances, and faces that fit. The upper echelons of most professions are stuffed with these privileged brats. I was one of them. My kids are numbered among them too.

 

Wealth taxes and leveled up education are the two biggest imperatives, but there are still countless other less visible blights that a new Mad Men could reveal. How can we still tolerate freemasons? How unfair are alumni preferences for colleges? How stacked are most recruitment processes? How over-protected are the unionized occupations?

 

Who you know and where you come from still matter far too much. Mad Men helps us to see how we have progresses, but also how far we still have to travel. The slowest change will come in the least visible areas. Sexism, ageism, racism and discrimination against disables and gay people has reduced and will reduce further, but these are just the visible areas.

 

We have only reached series three, so we are about a third of the way through Mad Men. I suspect I’ll stay hooked until the end. And hopefully the show will continue to spark useful thoughts as well as straightforward enjoyment.  

In Praise of Indecisiveness

 Many of us have spent the last four years pondering why anybody would ever consider voting for Donald Trump. The charge sheet is so full and indisputable, the outcomes so tragic, the values so evil, surely everybody must be able to see through the bluster by now.

 

But it hasn’t happened. There was a moment a month or so ago when it felt like the house of cards may be tumbling, but the approval share and voting intentions seem to be trending back into the narrow band they have followed throughout the presidency. The base is still largely loyal despite everything.

 

Johnson in The Economist offered a new twist on the conundrum in his article last week. He or she was discussing how we form spoken sentences. Unless we are reading a script, we are always talking and speaking at the same time. During a sentence, we know what we want to say but sometimes our words take us into a cul de sac. Then we always have to think about the next sentence, so we will often pause, or fill in time with “like” or “you know” or just sounds like “um”.

 

For most of us, the general impression we leave is one of indecision. But this is one of many ways in which Trump is different. His way of filling space while planning the next sentence is to repeat the last one, which serves to emphasise is point. And if he finds himself in a cul de sac, his tendency is to plough right through it. That is how he ends up using nonsense words like “bigly” – he has messed up the sentence construction, needs an adverb to close out, so just invents one. Most of us would pause, um and ah, and backtrack to earlier in the sentence to have another go, but Trump famously has no reverse gear. According to Johnson, these habits, natural or learned, have an effect of appearing decisive. People might laugh at “bigly”, but they take away an impression of somebody who is confident and driven and decisive.

 

Compare this with Joe Biden. His mind does seem to be slowing up a bit, so he ends up in a lot of cul de sacs. And his method of filling space is to ramble. Often his stories and his sentences go off into the weeds and lose clarity of message, not to mention becoming boring. He can deliver a scripted speech, he can also hold an informal crowd, but sound bites are not for him.

 

So Trump is able to come across as strong and decisive, partly because of his manner of speaking, and partly because he simply never backtracks or apologises, just digging himself into deeper and deeper holes of lies, somehow with impunity. Why is it that strong and decisive might be such important attributes to a segment of the electorate?

 

There are some situations where decisiveness is critical. If there is extreme urgency then a decision is required. Also, if there is gridlock or stalemate, then a decision can break the deadlock. Furthermore, simple, clear-cut situations can benefit from clear, aggressive decisions, especially where the decision maker has obvious power and resources.

 

Herein lies the clever part for Trump’s team. They have spent cultivating a climate where a segment of the electorate perceives exactly that environment. Most of the discussion on Fox News is not about Trump or anything he wants to do, it is all about urgent threats. Some threats are external, like caravans of immigrants or plotting Chinese, while most are internal, in the form of the evil Democrats who would destroy everything given even a sniff of power.

 

This narrative creates urgency and it also creates simplicity, in the form of a crusade for good against dangerous enemies. Fox has to do nothing to play up gridlock, for that is there already in congress. And the resources of the US are also obvious – adding to the impatience when a problem can seem intractable.

 

Fox and Trump have even more of a following wind with the core supporters. An important American cultural trait is liberty and a sort of frontier mentality. America is also home to Hollywood, where stories are always simple, where using power pays dividends and where the good guys always win. This is an attractive backdrop for people who may be struggling with complexity in their own lives and may be lashing out for others to blame.

 

I believe that in most situations decisiveness is a positive disadvantage, especially as a core characteristic or a leader. Somebody anxious to show up as decisive as a goal is likely to follow a whole series of damaging strategies.

 

Decisiveness works against collegiality and expertise. It prizes loyalty over competence. A need for decisiveness can oversimplify a challenge and show a lack of flexibility or agility when a situation changes. If a situation is nuanced, or the range of stakeholders is large, if a team is required to decide and then implement, or if there is plenty of uncertainty and negative consequences of poor decisions, then indecision is just what the doctor ordered.

 

Barack Obama was famously indecisive. I once heard him explain that every problem that reached his desk was difficult, precisely because easy problems were already solved by others. Perhaps Obama took his strength of analysis too far, but in somebody carrying around a box with a big red button that is fine by me.

 

I find indecisiveness as a underrated quality in all leaders. If I think of my heroes, a lot of them placed great store on data, teamwork, a willingness to challenge assumptions and to change ones mind, and a dose of humility. Most of the other kind of leader gets caught out in the end, whether it is in politics or business or religion or anywhere else. Simplicity is good when it is not really just an excuse to be slapdash.

 

I have never studied it in depth, but the fourth letter in a Myers Briggs profile measures something akin to decisiveness. J people like to simplify challenges and move forward, while P folk are happier trying to cope with uncertainty. As a proud P, I always found it rather simplistic when J was associated with leaders. The classic business leader is ENTJ – extrovert, intuitive, thinking and judging.

 

I often wondered whether ENTJ really were good leaders, or just the leaders we tend to become landed with. It certainly feels quite a masculine and unforgiving style.

 

Back to Trump, he is a case study of why extreme decisiveness is a fatal flaw in a leader. Administration competence, never high, is now threadbare. And the most important evidence is to look not at decisions but to outcomes.

 

The Coronavirus is an obvious example, but I find China to be a more compelling one. In the case of China, what is sold as decisiveness is in reality little more than bullying and bluster. There has been no consistency, no strategy and no follow through, and the outcome is a China that has done precisely nothing to fix legitimate grievances and which has only become stronger in relation to the US. It did not have to be this way, and, to be fair, Trump and his cronies are not alone in lacking a clear strategy. But the outcome is a new cold war that may linger for generations and make us all poorer in every sense.

 

It is a tempting strategy for the Biden campaign to demonstrate these terrible outcomes to the electorate, but I am not sure it will work. The Fox crowd is not listening and is only interested in simple sound bites, and is anyway convinced that, even if Trump’s outcomes have been less than ideal, the Democrats would do far worse. The decisive aura can overcome many obvious failures.

 

I recommend a more aggressive strategy, focusing on the man not his decisions. Decisive leaders collapse quickly when they are no longer seen as strong personally. He is old, he makes many mistakes, everybody around him hates him and Coronavirus has shown him up as highly fallible. He also is easily bated. I think I would be using Kamala and Michelle to rattle his cage as hard as they can. I think he will self-destruct even in the eyes of his base.        

Fixing Structural Inequality

 With the rekindling of Black Lives Matter, there has been a flurry of articles about structural inequality in the USA. Many quote the statistic of median family wealth for white and black families, with whites up in six figures and blacks essentially at zero. I am also struck by the extent of the historical abuses, not just the well-known Jim Crow ones but more recent restrictions of housing zones and job biases.

 

The debate is eye opening and makes me weep. As a European, I am also reminded of discrimination in my own country, obvious while I was a child but still in existence in much of society. It is past time to fix this.

 

The Economist occasionally tries to defend the policies of the last forty years by demonstrating how inequality in developed countries has been broadly static, as measured by the share of income and wealth of the top 1% or 5%. This may be true, but it is far from acceptable. From before the days of Downton Abbey, inequality of opportunity has been a scourge, and the period from 1945-80 was exceptional in enacting policies to reduce it. The fact that inequality has been static since then shows how policy has been ineffective; anything less than a gradual decline is a calumny.

 

Inequality is often portrayed as a race issue, but I think this is another simplification. It is worse than that. I have not read Casteby Isobel Wilkerson, but her basic premise is that societies remain stratified, with many layers. Yes, most African-Americans are near the bottom, but there are other factors in play, and focusing solely on race may lead to suboptimal remedies.

 

Focus on race also gives an uncomfortable argument to racists. Most Asian Americans and Jews also arrived in America with nothing and were discriminated against, yet these groups have largely escaped poverty. It is a good question as to why, because putting similar conditions in place for groups that have not escaped might be good policy, but the question can drift into racist territory. Thinking of castes can help.

 

There is no doubt that the Trump administration has damaged the cause of equality like few before it, and they fully deserve their comeuppance from the pandemic and race protests, hopefully throwing them out of office soon. But there is a lot of shoddy journalism on this topic like so many others.

 

It is shoddy to equate the equality issue with race. It is shoddy to define equality of outcome as a goal, when equality of opportunity should be the true measure. And many are shoddy in analyzing which neo-liberal nationalistic policies are the worst culprits.

 

A great example was in Time a couple of weeks ago. They tried to come up with a list of the administration’s ten most damaging actions regarding (poorly defined) equality. I can only assume this was delegated to some kids on a Friday afternoon. The list was a perfect example of how The Economist is superior when it comes to rigorous numerical analysis. The list included a decision to outlaw Trans people from the military, but failed to mention the 2018 tax package. The former was indeed a terrible choice, but the impact on equality is surely minimal given the number of people affected. The latter affected everybody, significantly and in a lasting way.

 

So I have tried to make my own list. Arguably I have cheated in that I have included inactions as well as actions. I have also not made big efforts to quantify impacts. Nonetheless, an incoming administration might use the list when defining its policies to restore the necessary trend towards equality of opportunity.

 

The tax package must be number one. Reagan (and Thatcher) rebalanced fiscal policy away from equality. At least in Europe future governments have been more balanced, but in the US Bush 43 added fuel to the fire and Trump’s only legislative accomplishment set things ablaze further. The impact has been to allow the already wealthy to take rent from the economy, embedded inequality, removing resources for a generation from other reforms and even stifling consumption and growth.

 

My number two is also a tax matter, but more specific. The main reason that wealth inequality persists across generations is the effective absence of an estate tax. Bush/Cheney did an impressive job of gutting estate taxes in the US, by reframing them as death taxes. It is true, that is what they are, but surely kids of wealthy people have enough advantages already without allowing them to simply inherit the wealth of their parents. I think I would set estate taxes for inheritances above $1 million at close to 100%, and eliminate foundations and other loopholes too. Use it or lose it.

 

My third item is also an omission and relates to gun control. Every so often an incident, usually a school shooting, offers an opportunity to enact gun reforms, not to eliminate hunting rifles, but to strengthen background checks, eliminate weapons of war and enact an effective register. Trump missed his chance after Parkland, because many of his party remain wedded to the NRA. And we always equate this is issue with white school kids, while the overwhelming majority of victims are from poor black neighbourhoods. Tackling gangs without tackling guns cannot be effective, and reforming the police would be much easier if the streets were not full of guns. It is easier not to be trigger-happy and to avoid unconscious racist profiling if you are not in fear for your life.

 

None of these three items made the list in Time. Criminal justice did, and ironically it is the area of Trump’s greatest achievement, the bill that started to correct the ridiculous levels of incarceration in the US. How can a black community hope to create any wealth while so much of its male population is behind bars?

 

Next on my list comes housing, and once again it is a sin of omission. Eviction Remains one of my favourite books, and 2021 will see a terrible tide of evictions across the US as temporary programs taper off while unemployment continues to rage. Housing support is criminally underfunded by congress while city rents continue to skyrocket and little new public housing is constructed. Minimum wages are creeping up in some cities but are full of loopholes, most notably for tipped workers, whose minimum wage in some states remains around $2 per hour. It is hard indeed to escape poverty in these conditions. More subtly, I believe co-ops are a source of continuing racial bias.

 

There are many candidates to round out the list. Perhaps next would come the relentless prioritisation of capital over labour. Consumer rights have been gutted, and the stock market used as an awful proxy for growth. The stock market makes people with wealth wealthier, at the expense of those without. It should not grow faster than median earnings, but that has almost been a policy of the administration. Listen also to McConnell: his top priority in the next relief package is liability protection for businesses. It is a valid item, but it betrays his priorities – the donors and lobbyists he meets every day, rather than the struggling people he doesn’t.

 

The list must include failure to rebalance school finance per pupil so that poorer areas do not lose out compared to richer ones. The lack of any infrastructure investment harms the poor most, especially public transit and Internet availability.  We must also include allowing the number of people without health insurance to grow and the attempt to link Medicaid with employment.

 

Packing the Supreme court, bloating the military (as opposed to social programs), protecting clannish religions, the trade disaster (harming poorer consumers), linking immigration entitlement to wealth and the general incompetence of the virus response could all the added to the list. And then there is the rhetoric, stoking caste supremacy daily.

 

The list is long and reform will take many generations. But crafting good policy is not helped by poor framing of the issue, misstating the goal or woefully lazy lists.