Annie and Harper are accompanying me to a couple of book related events today. Wish us luck. And by luck, of course, I mean that Harper doesn’t scream her head off for 3 hours. It’s her first big road trip.
Today, I’ll be on Louisville’s State of Affairs NPR radio program from 1-2. I think it’s possible to stream the program live.
Thursday I’ll be at Carmichael’s Books discussing WAIW? from 7-9. Should be loads of fun.
I just learned that the first NPR station I listened to WMUB at Miami University is going belly up. Well, maybe not so much belly up as consumed by its sister station in Cincinnati. Still, this is depressing news.
As someone who takes little nuggets of ideas and turns them into stories from 500 to 70,000 words in length, NPR is one of my most valuable resources. Every day I gain a few little extra nuggets. Here’s what I learned within a few hours the other day:
– Edgar Allen Poe was well respected for his original talent during his lifetime, but not particularly paid well. The main reason was the poor international copyright laws. U.S. newspapers and magazines would snatch stuff that appeared in English newspapers for free.
- 188 million migrant workers headed home for the Chinese New Year, but when they return 2 million of them won’t have a job. I hope Dewan and Zhu Chun aren’t among the unemployed.
- Mao preferred Republicans; the Chinese government didn’t want George Bush to leave; they don’t like Change; don’t like Obama because he’s black
- The color red = no risks, Change is bad; The color blue = creative, willing to take more risk. Is it just coincidence that red also = Republican and Blue = Democrat? We probably could use a bit of each of these qualities. If someone invents a party represented by the color purple, I’m in!
- John Updike was first published in the New Yorker at 22. He prefers the present tense – “less baggage.” Since 1959 there have been only a few years that he didn’t have a book published. He said that it was kind of a relief those years to not be examined.
Who knows what nuggets tomorrow will bring? If you don’t listen to NPR you should. If you listen to NPR and you don’t donate, you should. The closing of WMUB is proof that your local station is not immune to the down economy. I donated $100 last year. I hope to donate at least that much this year.
Scott Ballum was featured on All Things Considered today. He’s a 30-something designer turned “Who-made-my-stuff?” consumer. Since March he won’t buy or eat anything unless he’s met someone along the chain of its production, or as NPR so beautifully put, such as “the butcher, the baker, the tennis shoemaker.”
The parts I enjoyed most about the NPR piece were the interviews with his friends, and how his obsession has imposed on their lives. If there is one thing I’ve learned, it’s that you can’t take on a kooky mission alone. You need the support of family and friends who won’t disown you for being weird.
So a tip o’ my Made in China hat to Scott and his patient friends.
(Thanks to Kristen of Vagablogging and Stan of Harvard for pointing me toward the piece)
This past weekend I had my first two book signings. “Book signing” is a bit of an overstatement in regards to my signature, so let’s call it “book defacing.”
The first was in Greenville, Ohio, one of the small towns I refer to as my hometown. When you grow up in the country you really don’t have a hometown, you have 10 acres surrounded by fields and neighbors a mile or so away. My travel column “Travelin’ Light” once regularly appeared in the local paper, and I still get people who come up to me today and say, “Aren’t you that boy who was always traveling?” Between that, and my family’s deep roots in the area I was busy the whole time.
I think I did more hugging than signing. High school English teacher – hug. Piano teacher – hug. Middle school science teacher – hug. Babysitter – hug. And so on.
Overall, 43 of the 50 books the store bought for the signing walked out the door with my name scrawled in them. I’ve heard that selling one book makes for a successful signing, so I was off to a good start.
Book signing #2 took place on Sunday in my new hometown – Muncie, Indiana. The temperature was hovering around zero, but that didn’t stop the holiday shoppers.
The store had me setup facing the main thoroughfare of the mall. I started out standing behind the table occasionally giving someone a “hello” as they walked into the store. After three or four times being approached by customers who thought I was a store employee and telling them that I wasn’t, I decided to start helping them. In the first hour I sold two books, none of which were mine.
I came up with a (what I thought to be) clever tag line, “I wrote this one,” I’d say pointing to my book, “but I’ll sign any of them,” motioning to the rest of the books in the store.
This was painful. The possibility of selling 0 books on the day was looking greater with each passing minute.
I thought I would get a decent showing. The Muncie paper did a feature on me and a review of the book the week before. (Although, there was some confusion as to what Sunday the signing was.) The local NPR station was even going to make an announcement or two. Still, 0 books sold. Ouch.
Finally, I decided to sit. Hey, if you aren’t selling any books, might as well take a load off and not sell any books.
I stared outside the store at a grown man operating a remote control car that defied gravity and drove on the wall. I saw a slight hurdle in the selling of his product: Mom wouldn’t let me drive my matchboxes on the walls, what mother will allow their sons to do so with remote cars?
I watched as he sold one car and then got back to driving on the 4’ X 4’ piece of plywood propped up against his island store. I wondered if he gets bored, and then I started to speculate the pattern he was driving. “Is it just me, or is he tracing words with his car,” I thought and then speculated what he was writing: Perhaps “Kill Me!” or “Shoot Me!” or “Someday I will rule the world with an army of mini cars with mini nukes strapped beneath them. Then all of you smiling, happy mall-goers will bow before me when I crush your remotes and reveal that tiny little alien-men drive the cars and they hate you.”
I saw people I knew. I’m-a-friend-of-your-dad’s didn’t buy a book, neither did I’m-delivering-your-first-child.
People talked to me. There was the fella who lost his job at GM. The folks who were “very interested in this book” put it down and slunk away when someone else approached and began talking. I lost count of the number of people I talked with for 10 minutes or more. They were good conversations, too, but didn’t result in the first sale.
Finally, an older woman who was once employed as a garment worker bought one, although I think she reconsidered for a moment when I picked her up, gave her a bear hug, spun her around, and told her that I loved her. Still, she bought it.
I think sitting behind the table was key. Standing behind it I looked like an employee or a shifty shoplifter.
Total, I ended up selling 10 books in four hours, or about 9 more than the fella selling the mini remote control cars. I caught him staring at me a time or two, jealous.
I wonder what he was spelling then?
I came across an enlightening piece on slavery today in Foreign Policy. It’s written by E. Benjamin Skinner, author of A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-day Slavery.
The article leads with a description of Skinner negotiating for the purchase of a young girl between the ages of 10-12 for domestic duties and sexual ones. Later while discussing his research he says, “I did not pay for a human life anywhere. And, with one exception, I always withheld action to save any one person, in the hope that my research would later help to save many more. At times, that still feels like an excuse for cowardice.”
I can completely relate to that. Many times during my trip I wanted to single out a worker and lend them a hand. I’m not a rich man, but the few hundred dollars I could afford to donate to one person could have been life changing. I talk about this struggle in a round about way in my most recent contribution to the World Vision Report.
Here are some other bits from the piece I found interesting:
* In the popular consciousness, “slavery” has come to be little more than just a metaphor for undue hardship. Investment bankers routinely refer to themselves as “high-paid wage slaves.” Human rights activists may call $1-an-hour sweatshop laborers slaves, regardless of the fact that they are paid and can often walk away from the job. But the reality of slavery is far different. Slavery exists today on an unprecedented scale.
* As many as 17,500 new slaves continue to enter bondage in the United States every year.
* Many feel that sex slavery is particularly revolting—and it is. I saw it firsthand. In a Bucharest brothel, for instance, I was offered a mentally handicapped, suicidal girl in exchange for a used car. But for every one woman or child enslaved in commercial sex, there are at least 15 men, women, and children enslaved in other fields, such as domestic work or agricultural labor.
Another eye-opening work on modern slavery is Nobodies: Modern American Slavery and the Dark-side of the New Global Economy by John Bowe. Bowe’s book is very readable and I found his accounts of how farmers/businessmen don’t setout to be slave owners but become them anyhow fascinating.
Things aren’t looking too bright in Cambodia.
This story from Alibaba.com is filled with unpromising phrases such as : “…the once vibrant garment industry” and “appealed to workers to call off their strikes to tackle the crisis which was snowballing out of control.”
An excerpt:
The Prime Minister Mr. Sen appealed to the labour unions to call off all the strikes as this was not the right time to strike but to ensure that their kitchen hearths were kept warm and helped companies tackle the crisis and cautioned them by saying that these strikes would lead to a loss of orders and result in possible closure of units they were working at.
The Chairman of the forums Industrial Relation’s Sub-Committee, Mr Sothy said that till date in the current year there have been 95 instances of strikes, a rise of 48 percent compared to the same period of the previous year.
Unemployment in the garment industry is rising due to frequent strikes and the recessionary trends prevailing in the main global markets due to which new orders have been reduced to a trickle.
When I read this I think about the workers I met, Nari and Ai, who support 6-8 people on their wages and wonder how they are fairing. I don’t want them to lose their jobs because the industry’s jobs jump their borders, but I also don’t want them to sacrifice what rights they’ve attained up to this point.
From NPR’s Morning Edition:
So while it’s still early to predict what a slowdown in U.S. consumer spending would mean for Vietnam, workers on the production floor at state-owned garment factory Hanosimex are already worried.
Nguyen Thi Thao is grateful for the $70 a month she makes. The 28-year-old has a husband and a 9-month-old baby.
“I watch the news on TV, and I heard about all the trouble in the U.S.,” she says, “and I know it will affect us, because if the U.S. economy slows down, Americans might reduce orders and spending. And that might mean fewer jobs for people like me.”
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More from Morning Edition: Bosniaks are Obamaniacs.
I caught a bit of Michael Pollan on Fresh Air this afternoon. I love listening to people that tell me how crazy our world is. Some nuggets of info from Pollan:
- We catch Salmon in Alaska, ship it to China to be filleted, and they ship it back for us to eat. What, is there a shortage of American filleters?
- We import tomatoes from Mexico and we export tomatoes to Mexico. I would love to get a picture at the border of tomato trucks passing each other.
Bill Gates thinks so.
Gates in the pages of Time magazine:
As I see it, there are two great forces of human nature: self-interest and caring for others. Capitalism harnesses self-interest in a helpful and sustainable way but only on behalf of those who can pay. Government aid and philanthropy channel our caring for those who can’t pay. And the world will make lasting progress on the big inequities that remain — problems like AIDS, poverty and education — only if governments and nonprofits do their part by giving more aid and more effective aid. But the improvements will happen faster and last longer if we can channel market forces, including innovation that’s tailored to the needs of the poorest, to complement what governments and nonprofits do. We need a system that draws in innovators and businesses in a far better way than we do today.
Naturally, if companies are going to get more involved, they need to earn some kind of return. This is the heart of creative capitalism. It’s not just about doing more corporate philanthropy or asking companies to be more virtuous. It’s about giving them a real incentive to apply their expertise in new ways, making it possible to earn a return while serving the people who have been left out.
A great place to turn for discussions about Creative Capitalism is THIS BLOG. The contributors list is basically a who’s who of authorities on economics and globalization. The posts and discussions from the blog are going to be anthologized in a book by Simon and Schuster in the fall of 2008.
In the most recent post Stephen Landsburg criticizes Gates’s example of fair trade as a form of creative capitalism:
Never mind the fact that “fair trade” seems to be a euphemism for the enforcement of monopsony power (enriching some producers by pricing others out of the marketplace); this isn’t the place to get into that debate. But this much is directly to the point: Lots of people feel a moral obligation to help poor people in general. No sane person feels a moral obligation to help poor coffee farmers in particular. So the “creative capitalism” solution serves a non-existent goal—and this was one of the best two examples the authors could come up with! (KT: the other was the (Red) program)
In fact, the whole fair trade thing is an excellent illustration of creative capitalism gone insane. You can pay an inflated price for your coffee and put a farmer out of work, or you can buy ordinary coffee, contribute to CARE, and feed a starving child. Please oh please don’t trick people into thinking the former is a good deed.
The questions at hand:
1. Is it better for a consumer to NOT pay a premium for products produced under ethical conditions and to take the money they saved and donate it to charity?
2. Is it better for a business to maximize their profits by whatever means possible and then use the maximized profits to do good?
My thoughts:
Bill Gates talking about how capitalism can cure inequities is kind of like the United States, which wasn’t hindered by environmental regulations during its own industrial expansion, telling developing nations to stop polluting. Bill gates got where he did with cutthroat capitalism, not creative capitalism and the Unites States got where it did by burning unclean fossil fuels.
Gates is more of an example of earning boatloads of cash via cutthroat capitalism and then taking all of his money and trying to change the world. And few would argue that there are any individual philanthropists doing more than Gates to help the world’s poor at this time.
Companies doing “good” would be great, but I think that’s shooting a bit high. I would settle for companies “doing no harm” – to the environment and its employees. A company that donates money to a good cause, but has its products manufactured by workers treated unfairly – unpaid overtime, working off the clock, underpaid, overworked, abused, etc – or does unnecessary harm to the environment, more than negates whatever good their philanthropy does.
Before a company tries to do right in the world, they should do right in their own house.
That said, I think marketing fair trade products is a perfectly legitimate niche. There are people that want to buy products made ethically, and they should have the option.
I find the debate very interesting, and hope to check out the Creative Capitalism blog regularly. I’ve added it to my Blogroll on the right.
Prada – Made in Italy by imported Chinese workers (LA Times)
Excerpt:
Thousands of Tuscan factories that produce the region’s fabled leather goods are now operated and staffed by Chinese. Though located in one of Italy’s most picturesque and tourist-frequented regions, many of the factories are nothing more than sweatshops with deplorable conditions and virtually indentured workers.Chinese laborers have become such an integral cog in the high-fashion wheel that large Chinatowns have sprung up here and in Florence. Signs in Chinese, Italian and sometimes English advertise prontomoda (ready-to-wear). At the main public hospital in Prato, the maternity ward on a recent morning was a cacophony of 40 squalling babies, 15 of them Chinese. “Mi chiamo Zhong Ti,” one of the crib tags said — “My name is Zhong Ti.”
My thoughts: Made in USA doesn’t always mean what it says either. Sometimes it means made in Saipan or by imported workers in LA.
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Sweatshop Shrimp Made in Thailand/Bangladesh
Excerpt:
Interviews with workers showed arduous conditions including “long hours, low pay, abusive employers, informal work, unsafe and unhealthy working conditions, and the vulnerability of migrant workers.” (Bangkok Post)
My thoughts: Like the garment industry, but with unpredictable seas.
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Big denim factory opens in Nicaragua
Excerpt:
Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute “forward looking statements” within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements may relate to, among other things, ITG’s future plans, revenue, earnings, outlook, expectations and strategies, and are based on management’s current beliefs. Forward looking statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties, including changes to the facts or assumptions underlying these statements (from Joshua Berman).
My thoughts: The above excerpt concludes the press release. I would prefer the include their “we made most of this crap up” statement at the beginning so I can not waste my time.
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Happiness author writes about servant
Excerpt:
One spring, puberty arrived, and suddenly I was the “father” of a hormonal Indian teenager. Once, while I was out of town, Kailash and a few friends rented porn movies and a VCR. I was appalled but also secretly pleased by his initiative. Whenever I asked Kailash about his aspirations, he demurred. “Whatever you want me to do, sir,” he would say. “As you wish.” (NY TIMES)
My thoughts: I’ve been falling asleep to Eric Weiner’s Geography of Bliss for a few months now. To be fair, it keeps me up on occasion. It’s a worldwide quest to find the happiest place on Earth. It’s worth a read.
hi@kelseytimmerman.com 
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