Haves and Have-Nots

It’s dangerous for an American to write about caste in Indian society, but I hope I will be forgiven for taking a stab at it. We all have a stake in India, one-sixth of the world’s population, and one of the most dynamic economies in the world. And for most of us, it’s a mysterious world.

Until my visit in January I thought of caste as a fading relic of India’s past, almost quaint and mostly harmless. No more. On this trip I sought out Dalits, members of the untouchable castes, and heard that caste is alive and well in Indian villages, which comprise two thirds of the population. And even in the cities, among the educated elite, many Indians told me that caste remains a dominant social force. It permeates social relations, it permeates business and politics, and it’s highly oppressive. According to Pavan Varma in Being Indian, caste explains how a democratic country can be largely untroubled by such a stark divide between the fabulously rich and the destitute.

Caste prejudice is unique to India, but it has close relatives elsewhere. There’s ethnic prejudice based on your gene pool, or race prejudice based on the color of your skin. Class prejudice is based on your family’s income, and also the culture associated with manual work.

Caste has elements of all these. The lower castes are often darker in skin and poorer in income, and they do specific kinds of menial work, such as cleaning up crap. (There are few toilets in Indian villages. Dalits form the Indian sewage system.)

But caste is fundamentally metaphysical. It derives its legitimacy, I am told, from some of the oldest Hindu writings. If you are on top, a Brahmin, you did something in a previous life to deserve it; if you are on the bottom, a Dalit, you too deserve your fate. One’s caste always embodies justice, by this Brahminical understanding.

And caste is indelible. You can bleach your skin, get a PhD and make a million dollars as a physicist, but you will always be a Dalit, as will your children. One can ascend in the metaphysical realm of reincarnation, but for life as we observe it on planet Earth, one can neither ascend nor descend. One is what one is, world without end Amen. And so are your grandchildren.

In modern, urban India, even while caste endures (most educated Indians would not marry outside their caste, or let their sister do so) caste is being shaken up hard. People still live by it, but they don’t necessarily believe in it. On my trip I checked out Indian newspapers and magazines every chance I got. I found articles critical of caste in nearly every one. That wasn’t so a few years ago.

Why now? The most barefaced explanation is that global economics enable so many to gain wealth by other means. Varma claims that Indians, far from being naturally otherworldly and simple in lifestyle, are intensely materialistic. The upper castes used caste as a primary way to acquire and retain wealth. Now other ways have trumped caste.

This is the theme of the Booker-Prize-winning The White Tiger. The story is told through a series of letters addressed by a young Bangalore entrepreneur to Chinese premier Wen Jiabao on the occasion of his visit to India. Jiabao wants to learn about Indian entrepreneurship. Balram, aka The White Tiger, offers himself as a primary example. He tells his simple story: how he was a poor orphan boy in the village, destined for poverty, when he managed to get a job as the driver to one of the area’s elite families. From the driver’s seat Balram carefully studied the ways of his masters. Then, when the time was right, he murdered his master in cold blood, taking the satchel of cash that his master was carrying to bribe a government minister. Armed with this cash Balram fled to Bangalore, where he bribed the police to put another taxi service out of business and install him in its place. This, Balram says, is the proud story of Indian entrepreneurship. It is not a story of merit or education or reform. It is not a story of democracy in action. It is a story of simple men using duplicity and murder to replace others who used duplicity and murder to win their positions.

Surely this is a twisted version of success in modern India. The point is, caste has become irrelevant, almost as irrelevant as morality (symbolized in the novel by ubiquitous statues of Gandhi).

According to The White Tiger, India hasn’t necessarily become a better place. It’s just that the old social bonds have been loosened, and things are busting out all over. One change I witnessed, though, seems good to me. In every place I visited, I found people becoming Christians at an unheard of rate. India has had Christian witness for thousands of years, without much penetration.  Now, at least for the time being, change has come. And it seems to relate closely to the breakdown in caste. It’s a new thing to think that an individual can decide what he wants to be. Destiny is not written at birth. You can conceive of other options.

Optimists vs. Pessimists

Chris Blattman, who teaches poli sci and econ at Yale, has a good post on his blog today. He quotes a writer from The Guardian saying that the development paradigm of the 20th century has run out of steam, then refutes him. It’s a good summary of the argument development optimists (mostly economists) make against development pessimists (mostly ecologists or humanitarians). What stands out in this argument, as usual, is that pessimists aren’t familiar with what’s happening from the point of view of macro-economics. The world economy is growing fast, lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty. The percentage, if not the absolute number, of people who go poor and hungry is down. Of course, this could be the giddy feeling one has halfway down from a plunge off a cliff. Pessimists can argue that, especially with the specter of global warming haunting everything. But at least give the optimists their due: life has become better for a lot of people.

Changes in the Culture Wars

Don’t miss Ross Douthat’s column in the New York Times (here) in which he comments on a changing social scene. I’ve written before about the confounding fact that college graduates tend to have lasting, stable marriages, while less educated Americans are frequently foundering. (See The Champions of Marriage, particularly.) Douthat notes the odd way this has fit into the convenient summary of culture wars: white-collar social liberals versus blue-collar cultural conservatives. The paradox was that “highly educated Americans live like Ozzie and Harriet despite being cultural liberals, while middle America hews to traditional values but has trouble living up to them.”

Douthat’s reading of the latest data (particularly from The National Marriage Project) suggests that the class divide is changing. The educated elite are growing more religious and more socially conservative, possibly because evangelicals are  better educated. (He says they are now among the nation’s best-educated sub-groups. That’s a shock.) Culture wars are becoming a battle between two camps in the elite–” pitting Wheaton and Baylor against Brown and Bard, Redeemer Presbyterian Church against the 92nd Street Y, C. S. Lewis devotees against the Philip Pullman fan club.” (If you think Douthat doesn’t know the turf, consider that string of cultural shibboleths.)

But, he says, the less-educated are being left out of the discussion of what marriage means. For those who never made it through college, marriage is increasingly irrelevant. Evangelicals have moved up, but they have not managed to maintain a moral influence among the middle and lower classes in the way that the Catholic church did in the early twentieth century. (And, I would add, the way the Methodist and Baptist churches did in the 19th century.)

I think he’s right, and that’s a terrific challenge to all evangelicals.

The Compassion Industry

Do humanitarian agencies do more harm than good?

Thirty years ago I tried to write a story about international aid, spending considerable time interviewing aid workers I met in Nairobi, Kenya, where I lived at the time. When they saw what I had written some were horrified. I was just quoting their stories about good intentions gone awry and short-term positive impacts that made no lasting difference in the communities where they worked.  None of them argued that I had misrepresented the truth, but nonetheless they felt somehow abused by seeing it in black and white. What was missing in my story, I think, was their good intentions. For them, that was the central reality—not their effectiveness.

The October 11, 2010 issue of The New Yorker has a review by Philip Gourevitch of several books accusing the humanitarian aid industry. It’s a messy indictment that makes little attempt at being even-handed, but there’s substance that requires reflection. In war zones like Sierra Leone or Liberia, aid groups have money, and the fighting groups—government or rebels, it makes little difference—exploit them by demanding fees to operate. Sometimes the aid groups are giving food aid that keeps genocidal fighting groups alive to kill again. Sometimes armies divert food aid to their favorites, starving their enemies and rewarding their friends. In Sierra Leone, according to several accounts, rebels and soldiers deliberately embarked on a campaign of amputations simply because they knew that horrified reactions would draw in aid. Amputations were, by these accounts, a carefully calculated decision to manipulate the compassion industry, rather than an act of madness.

Whether or not that is an accurate account, there’s no question that humanitarian aid groups are major players in conflict zones, and that they get manipulated by other forces there. That’s inevitable. Two questions still remain: do they do more good than harm? And, can we just abandon the suffering people?

Sometimes humanitarian aid is cleaner. The help offered after the Christmas tsunami, for example, seemed neat and tidy. Even in such situations, though, reality is usually far more complex than you would ever guess by looking at the websites or direct-mail pieces from aid groups. If you provide food, you often undermine local farmers and regional markets. If you provide money to buy food and materials locally you get involved in decisions about who should get the help, and why, and for how long—and the local manipulators will have a field day using your money for their good. Whatever you do, and however respectfully, you can undermine local leadership. It’s complicated, always, and very hard to evaluate.

Most aid groups focus on the help given to one individual—one child provided with nourishment or education, one mother protected from abuse, one family given a small loan to start a business. What they rarely do is evaluate the larger scale, longer-term impact of their involvement. Truthfully, it’s very hard to see a positive impact. You can go into a terrible slum like Kibera in Nairobi, where literally hundreds of NGOs work, each with an inspiring story to tell. But after thirty years of work—a generation raised to adulthood—it’s hard to say that the slum is the least bit better off.

Lately we’ve been informed by a hundred sources that small loans (microfinance) are an amazing, transformative intervention in poor communities. I’ve seen a lot of these and know they do good. But don’t ask to see the community that has been raised out of poverty by these loans. Small loans make small differences in a few lives.

If you consider how much aid has been devoted to the eastern Congo over the past generation, you can’t miss the fact that killings and rapes continue unabated. At best they are unaffected by the work of humanitarian groups. At worst they feed off the humanitarians’ resources.

What most gripes Gourevitch and the authors he cites is the blithe lack of accountability by humanitarian groups. “Moving from mess to mess, the aid workers in their white Land Cruisers manage to take credit without accepting blame, as though humanitarianism were its own alibi.”

I don’t find that kind of rhetoric very helpful. Aid orgs make mistakes, and they often get trapped in lose-lose situations. What on earth can anybody do in the Congo, or in the Sudan? Sure, aid workers should stop hugging their good intentions, and think hard before they plunge in with ready-made solutions. But I doubt it would change much if they did. Gourevitch has a more helpful quote from social scientist Craig Calhoun: “Humanitarianism flourishes as an ethical response to emergencies not just because bad things happen in the world, but also because many people have lost faith in both economic development and political struggle as ways of trying to improve the human lot.” Aid is a last-ditch response when political and economic approaches don’t work. It’s messy, inefficient, and often disruptive of the communities it aims to help. It can do more harm than good, and sometimes does. It almost never produces a long-lasting solution. We shouldn’t be naïve about it.  But when people are in desperate need, is it really human to do nothing?

I think humanitarian aid does more good than harm, though perhaps not exactly in the way that the groups claim. Long-term improvements in human conditions are pretty rare, and when they occur they are almost always linked to factors beyond the purview of aid groups—factors like good government and peace settlements and a positive climate for business. I don’t really think humanitarian aid will take the suffering out of the world, or much reduce it. What it can produce, though, is a world in which people try their best to help each other—where somebody cares who doesn’t have to care. That’s an important good.

The Vitality of India

This week’s Economist Magazine features a rough economic comparison between India and China, suggesting that India may be a better bet long term. That’s largely for two reasons: India has a young population, whereas China’s is beginning to turn old. And India is a democracy, able to adapt to changing conditions in a way that is difficult for a dictatorship.

Of all the places in the world I’ve visited, there is no place like India for standing on a street corner and staring. It’s an extraordinarily complex place, and a lot of the complexity is on display in any traffic jam. How can people live cheek by jowl for a thousand years and yet remain so utterly unmixed?

I’m currently planning a trip to India and reading Nine Lives, by one of my favorite writers, William Dalrymple. In it he chronicles individuals who embody the rich, religious, historic sensibilities of India, in a setting that is very rapidly modernizing.

I’ve read about a Jain nun who gently sweeps the path in front of her in order to avoid stepping on any living thing, and who is so dedicated to the via negativa that she takes the decision to starve to death—a common Jain practice.

Quite different are the dancers/performers of the gods, usually lowly Dalit workmen who for a few months of the year are worshiped. They wear extraordinary costumes and speak frankly of being taken over by the gods while they perform in all-night, outdoor festivals.

Then there are the devadasi, women who by an ancient tradition are dedicated to the gods at an early age so that they can become prostitutes. Driven from Hindu temples by 19th century reformers, they still carry on. There’s genuine religious sentiment and ritual, and more than a little pride among the devadasi at their superiority to ordinary women of the night.

Again, troubadors still make their living by performing epic poetry of the gods—reciting from memory (they are often illiterate) thousands and thousands of lines of poetry that may take several all-night sessions to declaim. Bollywood is cutting into their trade but they carry on, like medieval bards reciting Beowulf.

What’s clear is that some very ancient, very strange traditions survive side by side with skyscrapers and heart surgery and call centers. As horrible as some of these traditions seem to me, I can’t help admiring the remarkable survival of difference. Over the past decade we’ve all been told that China is the world’s future, but the future is very difficult to predict. (Ask Japan.) Is it possible that India, with its chaos and unpredictability, has the vitality and flexibility, indeed the creativity, to deal with the future?

The Cost of Health Care

After a year of non-stop mind-numbing partisan rhetoric on health care, it’s been a relief to hear the sweet sounds of silence since the Big Bill passed. However, I got a reminder recently that the issue is still with us.

I turned 60 this year, and as a birthday present my health care insurance company increased my rates.

As a self-employed person, I buy catastrophic insurance from Blue Shield. I’ve had the policy for years. Kaiser would be cheaper, but in terms of pay-for-service, I believe this is the cheapest insurance I can get for two adults. The deductible is $5,000, so most years we pay for all our doctor bills, prescriptions, etc. on top of our insurance premiums.

The annual insurance bill now is $21,168.

Is this sustainable? I don’t think so. According the Census Bureau, the median family income in 2007 was $50,000. Who can afford to pay 40% of their income for health insurance?

I don’t know what the answer is, but I’m pretty sure we don’t have it yet. So brace yourself for more mind-numbing partisan rhetoric.

Conspiracy Theories

“One of the distinguishing features of most conspiracy theories is the tendency to personalize what are, in truth, impersonal forces of unwelcome change.”

This quotation comes from Joseph Ellis’ fascinating American Creation, a book I read while on vacation last week in Seattle. (Just before I went on vacation I had a bike crash and broke my collarbone and several ribs, while puncturing a lung. That’s why I haven’t been posting here lately.)

American Creation is organized around key developments in the founding of America. One of those was the creation of the two-party system. Ellis sees it as crucial to America’s success, because it channeled our differences into a continuing argument rather than trying to impose magisterial solutions. Every one of the founders loudly decried party spirit as a betrayal of American ideals. Yet by the end of Washington’s second term, they were practicing it with a vicious absolutism.

Thomas Jefferson and James Madison became convinced that Alexander Hamilton, John Adams and even George Washington were ready to betray the revolution and opt for a monarchy. Pretty soon they launched covert warfare, which soon became (almost) open warfare.

Differences were inevitable, but what could have convinced Jefferson and Madison that men who had bravely fought at their side in the Revolution were now willing to betray it? Ellis suggests that at an unconscious level it was economics. The economic decline of the Virginians’ tobacco plantations was utterly mysterious to them, as was the rise of a trade-driven economy in the northeast. As sophisticated as they were in political thought, they were ignorant of finance and economics. Even the compound interest on their loans was beyond their comprehension. They became convinced that Hamilton’s Bank of the United States was titanic thievery because they had no idea how banks worked. And so, they imagined a conspiracy to deprive them of their economic and political clout. They thought that if they defeated the conspirators, all would be well. But while they won the 1800 election, and their party dominated politics in the following generation, they died bankrupt. A tobacco economy was undone by quite impersonal forces that they did not grasp.

That seems relevant today. For the right, conspiracies must be behind global warming, because the science is too complex to understand and the impersonal forces of chemistry messing up our lives are too unpleasant to contemplate. For the left, conspiracies must explain worldwide poverty, because global economics is hard to grasp and the impersonal forces of capitalism can be dreadful. And so on. Wherever a conspiracy of “them” is blamed, look for some complicated impersonal reality that is too hard to think about.

Google and the Future of Journalism

For anybody who cares about the future of magazines and newspapers, James Fallows’ cover story in the latest Atlantic (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/06/how-to-save-the-news/8095) is a must read.

Fallows has spent a lot of time at Google, and he’s passing on how they view the situation. Interestingly, Google has been involved with helping many news outlets as they struggle through trying times. And surprisingly, Google is quite optimistic.

Google is looking at the long term, which is quite different from the view trying to meet payroll. Fallows reports a profound lack of interest in the question that fascinates news people—whether anybody will pay for news on the internet.  “Of course people will end up paying in some form—why even talk about it? The important questions involved the details of how they would pay, and for what kind of news.” According to Google’s Neal Mohan, “The audience is there, and the dollars will follow. I would argue that publishers will ultimately do better in the digital world.”

That’s because delivering news over the internet is so much more efficient—no paper, printing presses or delivery trucks—and because the internet offers greater flexibility in the kind of news stories you present.

“One Google employee… mentioned [a] report on journalism’s future and pointed out a section called ‘Focus on the User.’ ‘They just mean, “Get money out of the user,”’ he said. ‘Nowhere do they talk about how to create something people actually want to read and engage with and use.’”

In the long run, bloggers and videographers and a million young entrepreneurs will figure out how to present more compelling content, with more varied approaches that target the interests of individual consumers. Google people spoke of the herd instinct that rules in many news outlets. This may sometimes increase the buzz around an otherwise disinteresting story—if everybody is writing about Michael Jackson, they may even get me to read a story about him. More likely, though, herd journalism represses readership. The more variety, the more likely I am to find something I care about.

In the short run, newspapers and magazines are going through a terrifically difficult transition. Readership is down. Reporters and photographers get laid off because advertising has vanished. There’s nobody left to cover the city council meeting, or the insurance committee of the state Senate.

According to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, “Newspapers don’t have a demand problem; they have a business-model problem.” Newspapers and magazines are in the throat of an erupting volcano, moving from print to internet, from a “bundled” approach that joins news, sports, movie reviews, and Ann Landers, all paid for from a single budget, to some yet unknown way of linking stories and payment.

Fallows details a number of ways Google is trying to help newspapers through this transition. Why? Because Google needs a strong journalism sector. “Google is valuable, by the logic I repeatedly heard, because the information people find through it is valuable. If the information is uninteresting, inaccurate, or untimely, people will not want to search for it.”

It’s encouraging to read this, because the more usual attitude of web-oriented folk is to dance gleefully on the grave of the “old media.” This article doesn’t shed much light on the next five years. But Google’s optimism, and their faith in innovation, inspires hope. If they think journalism has a future, maybe it does.

Got Drugs?

Among the letters this morning to my local paper, The Press Democrat, was this one from a city council representative. I quote it in full:

EDITOR: There will two forums Saturday at the Saturday Afternoon Club in Ukiah to discuss the possibilities and potential economic consequences of statewide legalization of marijuana. I encourage interested citizens on all sides of the issue as well as all supervisorial candidates to join this discussion.

“The Future of Cannabis in Northern California” is scheduled for 1 p.m.-4 p.m., and “What’s After Pot” is schedule for 7 p.m.-10 p.m.

A ballot measure called the “Tax Cannabis Act” has qualified for the November ballot, and polls show that its passage is likely.

How will Mendocino County position itself in the event of state legalization to gain needed tax revenue but to avoid losing the market to large corporate growers in the Central Valley?

Are there opportunities to develop an Emerald Triangle brand that would become known for exceptional quality and ecological superiority?

Our growing region has a multiple-decade head start in the cultivation of this crop. Could this expertise fend off a precipitous fall in the price of marijuana on the open market?

The questions are many, and as a candidate for 3rd District supervisor, I think it is very important that everyone have a seat at the table in this important discussion.

HOLLY MADRIGAL

City councilwoman,

Willits

I think marijuana will be legalized in California this year. Ms. Madrigal is ahead of the curve,  already concerned about the economic implications for her constituents–negative, if Central Valley factory farms seize the market; positive, if Mendocino County can  establish and brand its reputation for a superior product.

As everybody in our part of the world knows, Mendocino County already depends on marijuana cultivation for a large part of its economy. That’s why I think the initiative to legalize marijuana will pass. Dope is already  in the mainstream. Few are seriously trying to fight against it. Legalization will merely certify what already exists,  allow it to be taxed, and (probably) eliminate the role of gangs in growing and and selling it.

Those are short-term benefits, real ones. We don’t know what the long-term effects will be, though. We don’t know whether drug use will increase, and we don’t know the impact on people’s health and welfare. It’s a gamble, frankly, but a gamble that we have already tacitly decided to take in California. It’s very similar to the end of Prohibition: the prohibitors are tired of fighting, and the general population is sick of the waste and abuse and hypocrisy of the war on drugs.

I graduated from high school in 1968. In one year I went from hardly knowing anyone who had smoked marijuana to hardly knowing anyone who hadn’t. Even so I can honestly say: I never dreamed that I would see this day.

My Predictions for the Future of Publishing

I have just finished Birmingham, the novel I have been working on for years. Now the really difficult part begins. I have to find a publisher. It’s always been difficult to publish a novel, but I think this is the most difficult time ever. The whole book publishing world is in turmoil, not as desperately as newspapers, which have lost a major part of their revenue stream, and not as significantly as magazines, which have to compete with free media that offer most of the same services, but still very significantly. The internet is changing everything, and nobody knows where it is going. In an atmosphere of uncertainty people act cautiously. Publishers want to publish sure things, like Stephen King. They are not keen on taking a risk on an unknown.

Yet it’s an extraordinarily exciting time in publishing. What will emerge is unknown, but there’s every reason to hope it will be vastly improved. The internet is removing the most creaky, expensive and inefficient parts of publishing. In the old model (which is probably dying but still very much alive) publishers made educated guesses as to what books they could publish and make a profit on. They made educated guesses on how many to print. They sent out sales people to help bookstores make educated guesses on which books to order, and how many. The books got published, usually by the thousands, and then sat either in warehouses or on bookstore shelves until somebody bought them. Pretty often those educated guesses were off, and those books just sat there until somebody trashed them. (Books are not very price sensitive, compared to detergent or clothes or televisions. If a book doesn’t sell at $20, it probably won’t sell at $2. Better to send it to the dump.)

It’s a wasteful system, which makes books expensive. And books, other than bestsellers, have always been hard to find. Your local bookstore can only stock a few thousand, out of the hundreds of thousands of titles in print. They guess at what you will want to buy, but a lot of their guesses are wrong. Before Amazon, it was often really hard to get your hands on a particular book.

Now, though, books can be printed one at a time, after they are ordered by a reader. Further, they needn’t be printed at all—they can be sent to you for your e-reader, including your iPhone. Readers are no longer dependent on the good guessing of their local bookstore, they can find everything and anything online.

For writers, opportunity has opened up. When I was speaking to a writers’ conference in Berkeley last fall I emphasized the remarkable fact that anybody who wants to write can begin tomorrow to publish, for free, to virtually the entire reading world. That’s the fantastic truth about blogs. I’m not sure those would-be writers felt all that encouraged by it. The obstacles to publishing are gone, but will anybody read you? And is there any way to make money from what you write?

A friend of mine who works as a literary agent told me she has been asking publishers what exactly they have to offer writers. Her point is that many of the functions publishers traditionally filled are actually filled just as well by the authors themselves. I can get my book printed, quite inexpensively. I can sell it on Amazon. I can publicize it myself on the internet. (One of the aggravating questions that publishers ask writers nowadays is, “What is your platform?” If you don’t have a large audience on your website, TV show, radio broadcast, or speaking circuit, their interest diminishes substantially. Which means they really are counting on you to publicize your own book.)

Publishers also edit and copyedit books. However, more and more of them barely do. They job out that function to freelancers, and underpay the freelancers so they barely have time to do what they should do. It’s an important part of publishing but not one that’s done very consistently by publishers. And it isn’t hard for an author to hire somebody competent to do the same job for his or her book.

The most significant thing publishers still offer is an endorsement. “This is a good book because Harvard University Press published it.” That gets readers’ attention, it gets reviewers attention, and it gets the book into bookstores. Publishers screen books. If you read blogs you will understand how valuable this is, because blogs aren’t efficiently screened and reviewed, Most readers just aren’t patient and longsuffering enough to do their own screening, so they just don’t read any of them. I’m so glad you’re not one of those people.

This screening and endorsing remains the single indispensable function that publishers fill. And don’t kid yourself—it’s expensive. It takes considerable resources to peruse manuscripts and meet with agents so that you find those few good books out of the huge amount of trash being written. However, it’s not entirely clear that publishers do this better than some other more democratic institution might. Conceivably the internet will develop efficient facilities for screening and endorsing. Google has figured out how to take us to the websites we want. Netflix predicts with some accuracy what films we’ll enjoy. Might there be some way to take us to the books we want? I think there probably will be, because the astonishing amount of content available demands some way of evaluating and screening it.

It’s all changing. It’s exciting and aggravating—especially to us small-holders who try to make a living from it. For what it’s worth, here are my predictions of the future:

–Paper books will survive, because they are cheap and portable. I reckon we will end up with a mixture of about half paper books and half electronic books. Each kind has advantages, and we’ll probably recognize that particular kinds of books lend themselves to one kind or the other—just as we have already figured out that encyclopedias work best electronically.

–I’m not sure about paper newspapers and magazines. The functions will survive, but the form is very up for grabs. I love my paper newspaper, but it’s getting very expensive, and I notice that none of my kids feels any attachment to it. I suspect it won’t be much longer before we have to pay for news on the internet. Some kind of subscription system will develop. Somebody has to pay those reporters.

–Bookstores as we know them are finished. Those that survive will morph into coffeehouses and community centers. Possibly they might become highly decentralized warehouses for books ordered over the internet, as used bookstores already have. (Interestingly, used bookstores have survived because of the internet, not despite it.)

–Most book publishing will be done by a handful of huge conglomerates dedicated to bestsellers (somebody has to publish Stephen King) and thousands of one or two-person publishing concerns that put out a handful of books, usually in a particular specialty. A lot will function as so-called vanity publishers, offering expertise to writers in how to edit, package and (particularly) publicize a book. And a lot of books will be self-published—probably the majority. Just like blogs.

If I’m right, it will be a different universe. Us old fogeys will feel sad and nostalgic. But our grandchildren won’t know what they’re missing and won’t care.